Boom Bat Gesture

image courtesy Boom Bat Gesture

Cthulhu’s House of Z, Snowballs and HERE Arts, 2012
Screen Eyed Baby Ice, Snowballs 2013
Blankland!, Triskelion Arts 2016

There was a very particular era of my twenties that I will always associate with the late, lamented Snowballs Theater Festival. Snowballs was a one-day, all-day fest that took place in one venue, with multiple pieces happening simultaneously in multiple studios, and (of course) a bar. Truly the place to see and be seen for the twentysomething downtown/BK theater glitterati of the early 2010s! It was, actually, a genuinely delightful performance-party that provided a space for young, often resource-starved artists to try out works in progress for a supportive group of peers. But though I did show some work there myself, I am most grateful to Snowballs for introducing me to the weirdos of Boom Bat Gesture.

To be honest, BBG breaks my critical apparatus a bit. Their work hits me in a place that’s far more visceral than analytical, and so being called upon (by, uh, myself) to explain exactly why it’s on this list feels strangely challenging. Is it because bits of bizarre dialogue from their performances have taken up permanent residence in my brain (my Brian)? Maybe it’s that I have memories of being genuinely freaked out by moments in Cthulhu’s House of Z (2012), a kind of freaked out I typically only associate with David Lynch movies and certainly never experience in live performance. Or it could be that, in a truly “fuck it” moment of my NYC dating life, I invited a prospective match to BBG’s 2016 Blankland! as a first date, and he not only said yes, not only claimed to “enjoy” the show, but continued to date me for quite some time!

Really, though, BBG is one of my answers to the question: “Who do you think should be a much bigger deal?” (No one has asked me this, but here we are.) These bonkers people—Jon Burklund, Ilana Stuelpner, Niko Tsocanos, and sound design collaborator Anastasia Clarke—are tapping into something scary and real and I do not know how they are doing it, or what exactly “it” even is. I will say, though, that I am struck by the fact that all of the BBG work I’ve seen dated from before the 2016 election; this makes it feel prescient, a manic horror show presaging our manic, horrible times. This is not at all to say they make Tr*mp art—we’re not in AHS: Cult territory here. But the formal and affective elements they are working with feel entirely of a piece with where we’ve landed culturally: fragmentation, repetition, dark clowning, vaudeville, complicity, desperate improvisation, charisma barely masking darkness, darkness dissolving into absurd hilarity. 

The BBG ensemble’s commitment to teasing out the uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous links between comedy and horror was most explicit in Blankland!, which uses the sunny structure of a children’s show to dig deeply into violence and cruelty (example: a game called “What Makes You Die?”). But I felt its presence even in the formalist experimentation of Screen Eyed Baby Ice, and in my first encounter with the company during Snowballs. In that case, they provoked a hysterical and inexplicable dread in a tiny studio with nothing more than Stuelpner’s blank face, some pitch-shifted vocals, and a donut. Kill. With. Donut.

I don’t know, y’all, just watch this and maybe you’ll get half a clue of what I’m trying to talk about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFmPD_9acd4&feature=emb_title