Deitch Projects, NYC, Wednesday, May 15, 2002
I saw Fischerspooner perform last fall during the Electro-Clash
festival, so I had an idea what was in store for me as I entered Deitch
Projects in Soho for the first of six Fischerspooner shows this past
week—lip syncing, a lot of dancing, outrageous costumes,
in-between-song 'backstage' banter, false starts. Electro-Clash,
however, was held in Exit, a ridiculously huge cheesy dance club, and
Deitch Projects, normally a white-walled art gallery, was completely
retooled specifically for Fischerspooner and turned into a
theater-techie's dream (or nightmare). There were stages on three of
the four walls connected by a series of catwalks, two different levels
and a set of bleachers for the audience, and an enormous skeletal rig
of light and smoke machines. Clearly Fischerspooner wants to make an
impression with their shows, and the hype must have worked because the
place was beyond packed (the shows were free but incredibly hard to get
reservations for—how I got in remains a mystery). There were a lot of
industry types lurking about, and supposedly a lot of celebrities too,
though the only one I spotted was Jim Jarmusch, but he's hard to miss.
A Fischerspooner show is not really about the music—if you've heard the
CD, then you know what the music will sound like live, since they
pretty much just play the CD (if you don't know, breifly: it's
Euro/Detroit-influenced electro, and very well-crafted in my opinion).
Live, Fischerspooner is an amalgam of the extremes of dance, theater,
cabaret, comedy, costumes, lights, smoke, video and film (and the
music, of course); a glam-rock show to end all glam-rock shows. Maybe
it's the concentration of so many mediums in one act that's made them
darlings of the art world, but my reaction to a Fischerspooner show is
more along the lines of "Wow, this is fun!" than it is "Ah, what
geniuses they are!" The elaborate set-up at Deitch turned out to be
very well thought out in that no matter where you were in the audience,
at some point you were going to be right near the action; at any given
point the 15 or so dancers/performers could be on one or all of the
three stages or somewhere in-between. Generally, the numbers weren't
too different from what I saw at Exit, but being in the middle of the
action made it much more impressive, especially with frontman Casey
Spooner's elaborate costume changes. Particularly notable was Casey
posing in the wind machine, pictured here (that's how close we were to
the stage—that was taken by my date without zoom), which I remember
from Electro-Clash but enjoyed more now that I could basically touch
the guy working the wind machine. What really makes a Fischerspooner
show stand out is what goes on between songs. Casey and the other
dancers all had headset mics or lapel mics so that when they talked to
each other about the next number, everyone in the audience could hear
too, breaking the barrier between performer and audience down. Most of
this banter was pretty obviously scripted, giving the show more of a
theatrical feel, but some of it was obviously ad-libbed, and Casey and
the rest were pretty clever given the circumstances, and it definitely
made the entire experience a little less pretentious. At one point
Casey pointed to a cameraman whose wires were in his path and said
jokingly, "You're interrupting my craft!" Part of this intentional
behind-the-scenes act were false mistakes - Casey pretending to trip at
the beginning of a song and cutting the music off to start over, and,
in the case of the closer, "Emerge," having someone miss a cue in the
last 30 seconds, prompting a re-do of the entire song. By the time the
show ended, the temperature in Deitch had risen about 25 degrees and I
was sweating in a T-shirt, even though I'd barely moved, and we were
all herded out the doors so Fischerspooner could get ready for the 10
PM show; to me that's an impressive physical commitment as a performer.
Like I mentioned earlier, the show was a lot of fun and there's no
denying that, but I'm not going to say that Fischerspooner are the
Genius Art Gods
that some people have been making them out to be. I'd be very
interested, though, to see where their live shows go from here; if I
see Fischerspooner perform in six months or a year, will it be more of
the same, or will there be something new up their elaborately costumed
sleeve?
