M/NM | No Hay Banda : Red Dada Theatre

Last night, the Théâtre Plaza was transformed into a timeless and disconcerting space, somewhere between ‘early twentieth century’ Dadaism and ‘early twenty-first century’ avant-garde, for the premiere of No Hay Banda’s multidisciplinary show, Il Teatro Rosso. To put it into context, watch my interview with Noam Bierstone, of No Hay Banda : 

Il teatro rosso, a tribute to Montreal’s Red Light

While the primary inspiration for the work, by Steven Kazuo Takasugi (music) and Huei Lin (direction and videography), was the old theatres of the early 20th century, often filled with heady red (seats, curtains, walls, etc.), the music had nothing to do with this retro-kitsch universe. 

For an hour or so, an ultra-pointillist score, performed with precision by the members of No Hay Banda and accompanied by tape and video, teased the audience with varying degrees of intensity. Waves followed waves in crescendo-decrescendo, oscillating between almost naked passages and moments of almost unbearable sound saturation. As they churned out tons of notes, none lasting more than a second at most, the artists on stage (as far as possible) assumed poses that responded to or contradicted those projected on screen (pre-recorded with the same instrumentalists, playing the same score). There was a kind of discrepancy, both sonically and visually, between the live and the recorded performances (on stage, the musicians were dressed in vaguely Seventies attire, while the video was more 1920-1930s, but not stereotypical). 

The music, which is totally abstract, is certainly not ‘easy’, but its reliance on staging and the relationship between the body language of the musicians on stage versus their doubles in the video creates a dramatic dynamic, a theatricality, that captures and holds attention. 

And does this theatricality tell a story? More or less. The programme shows a division into two acts, Il Teatro Rosso and The Drowning. These are divided into three and four scenes respectively (The Spasms of Trapped Animals, Tar Pits, Grumpy Old Man, etc.), which are themselves further subdivided. What exactly do these titles mean? Everyone will find their bearings, more or less explicit. But having said that, the gestures of the artists and the dynamic nature of the music made it possible to follow the sequence more or less precisely. There was something reminiscent of Tristan Tzara’s creative fires at Cabaret Voltaire, accompanied by noise music and post-modern sets by Arp and Janco. The spirits of Cocteau, Picabia, Schwitters, and Duchamp were probably present in the Montreal venue. 

In the end, this homage to the old red theatres of the interwar decades of the 20th century is also, in truth, a symbolic connection between two avant-gardes separated by a hundred years. On the one hand, one of the sources of all the experimental movements of the 20th and 21st centuries: Dadaism in the 1920s, and on the other, a young, hyper-active and inventive Montreal avant-garde (well represented in the audience that packed the Théâtre Plaza) of the 2020s.

No Hay Banda : 

Sarah Albu, voice; Adrianne Munden-Dixon, violin; Émilie Girard-Charest, cello; Lori Freedman, bass clarinet; Felix Del Tredici, bass trombone; Daniel Áñez, piano; Noam Bierstone, percussion; Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière, sound engineering.