Stefanie Nelson’s Oddball Zebra is an eccentric work fixated on the denotations and connotations of stripes. Stripes--do they define, protect, guide or trap us? Must we be tightrope walkers balancing precariously on a narrow strip(e) of floor? Who is on the outside, and who is on the inside of the lines we create? Nelson is eager that we consider these questions and their implications; so, she throws them out at us in a surreal jumble of choreography.
Presented in many episodes, each with a different sound score, mood, and movement approach, this performance resembles a trip to a carnival funhouse. We meet theatrical misfits: jugglers, madmen (and women), a cackling clown, a magician, maybe some prisoners, maybe cat burglars, maybe murder victims and yes, there is at least one dancing superhero.
Charming film animations designed by Jeremy Weichsel call attention to the nature of stripes. A “zebra man” falls through black and white rods, which rapidly break, and then so does he. Weichsel’s cartoon stripes become hefty enclosures, winding roads, then change to mushy paints squeezed out of toothpaste tubes. Whether rigid, or soft and swirly (like the designs on our fingerprints) stripes never disappear altogether.
In one section of her performance, Nelson takes on The New York Times quoting random text gathered from Alastair Macaulay’s dance reviews. Here Nelson reminds us that words, too, draw lines. She presents cards labeled,” boring, insincere, irrelevant and predictable.” It is no secret that the contemporary dance community in New York City feels certain critics draw a line in the sand about what can be considered “relevant” art. That particular stripe leaves many feeling invisible.
At the start of Oddball Zebra we are introduced to a white-faced clown who merrily dances with and around the other characters on stage. She silently narrates, comments, and translates the stage world for those of us on the outside. By the end of the piece almost everyone in the stage world has transformed into a sad sack Punchinello -- white-faced, wearing stripes, and staring out blankly.
Are striations our eventual doom?
In her program notes, Nelson points out that there was a time in the Middle Ages when entertainers were required to wear an identifying stripe. Aren’t all artists oddball zebras, outcasts who don’t exactly fit in and prefer to draw outside the lines? One hopes that, unlike Parr’s artist/magician, and the rest of the evening’s cast, the other “oddballs” we may meet, will conjure more fulfilling spells - not letting the stripes and lines of life get the better of them.