"The piece is literally the tail end and the front end of a sort of collision of these two art forms that we've been working with for the last 13 years, and the middle of it is fucking insane," a weary Joshua Kohl tells me about the Degenerate Art Ensemble's new work, Cuckoo Crow, to be staged at the Moore Theatre. The two art forms to which Kohl refers are avant-garde rock and modern dance, an unlikely pairing that the Seattle group have been quietly fusing for the last decade. And it's no wonder Kohl is tired, as DAE have been rehearsing Cuckoo Crow late into the night at ConWorks for the last several weeks, with most of the band's six members playing multiple instruments and performing as characters in the physically demanding staging of the show.
Consisting of what DAE dancer, vocalist, and choreographer Haruko Nishimura calls "live-action cartoon characters," the performance is a sort of surreally dark, modern fairy tale revolving around the intrigue of a forest rife with anthropomorphized animals. Kohl explains further: "The piece is inspired by parasite birds like the cuckoo. They lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and so we started with that and we made a fable about [how] they kick the [crow] eggs out of the nest and they fall out... but there's one egg that gets pushed out of the nest and doesn't break and it hatches in the forest."
The rest of the tale has the cuckoos dabbling in prosthetic sales, ice cream, and creating a kind of Frankenstein-eaque super bird from the ominous 20-foot-high tree above the stage. To match this strange narrative, DAE provide Cuckoo Crow's music using homemade instruments, pitched junk percussion, and tap dancing while interacting with projected animations by Stefan Gruber of interactive comics troupe the Slide Rule. If it's anything like DAE's 2003 polemic dance work Dreams from Wounded Mouth, Cuckoo Crow will have the detailed costume and set design to match the odd wonder of its loosely interpreted storyline.
In the past, the DAE have sounded like a Latin funk band tinged with elements of jazz and Melt Banana–like spazz-rock, while at other performances they've employed dance elements that fuse both butoh and concepts from Theater of Cruelty proponent Antonin Artaud. Over the last five years, the group have played venues such as CoCA, On the Boards, JEM Studios, and CHAC, usually unleashing a mélange of modern classical and rock with an often unsettling but enjoyable high theatricality.
But DAE work at perhaps a more rapid rate of change than your standard rock group. A show a few months ago at ConWorks featured a pared-down crew doing some admirably dexterous multitasking, playing both bass guitar and bass drum at the same time, for instance. Stripped down yet still compelling, the music resembled less the big band of the last few years than it did a well-oiled machine producing a variety of unusual sounds still grounded in rock or jazz rhythms.
Last year saw the first Degenerate production at the Moore, with a 45-piece orchestra show composed of works written by the ensemble's members as well as friends Eyvind Kang, Lori Goldston, and Seattle School. For a group who've spent so much time subsisting on the occasional grant or irregular club gig, the success of the orchestra show was unprecedented, which partially informs the ambitious nature of this year's concert. Kohl and Nishimura cringe when explaining the group have but two days in the Moore for producing the show, but they see the challenge as an opportunity for growth. "[The Moore and Seattle Theater Group are] an amazing group of people," says Kohl, "and when they're behind something, it opens a lot of doors in terms of catching people's attention and bringing audiences in because they have such a high power in the community."
And some of the promise and excitement of Cuckoo Crow hinges on its more visible profile. It's a feat alone when any experimental art in Seattle makes it out of the city's few out-of-pocket, fringe spaces and galleries and into a larger local arena. By fusing the various disciplines and talents of their members over their 13-year existence, the Degenerate Art Ensemble prove that imaginative, sprawling works don't have to remain obscure by design.
editor@thestranger.com