It starts with taxi dancers, those paid dance partners, in this case reminiscent of the 1930s — although it should be considered timeless says Brian Jucha who is getting ready to world premiere his fifth work with Catastrophic Theatre this month.
Creator Jucha (he says calling him a playwright is a misnomer) combines all sorts of artistic approaches to put his ideas on stage. In the one-act musical Love Bomb, he uses music, dance, text and contributions from the ensemble of actors to present a different approach to story telling.
“I am a theater artist that creates interdisciplinary works where dance, theater, text and song all have equal value,” Jucha says. “Unlike a playwright who creates a play, generally spoken word is the primary thing that everything else revolves around. What I do is much more interdisciplinary. It’s probably slightly more performance art oriented.”
Songs have been written by Melanie who had hits in the early ’70s with “Brand New Key” aka The Roller Skates song. and “Lay Down” (Candles in The Rain.) Melanie who sometimes went as Melanie Safka died in January of this year at age 76. Jucha says they were drawn to her because a lot of her early work was influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny opera music.
“This is taking place in a dancehall where performers are acting as taxi dancers. Back in the ’30s and ’40s a taxi dancer was a place where people could go to to pay people to dance with them. That’s the world that we’re creating,” says Jucha who is also directing. .
“The main premise is that these individuals are all looking for love, have found love or have lost love. We are adding to that, that in this particular dance hall, the performers also work as cabaret performers,” he says..
“I’m interested in audience members having different experiences from one another so generally there’s a lot of sensory overload and things happening simultaneously.”
Jucha attended the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU which according to its website, welcomes “students whose work might not neatly fit within conventional disciplinary boundaries.”
From there he got a job with Dance Theater Workshop in New York.” Which was the premier dance theater venue on West 19th Street where I was exposed to a lot of dance and a lot of theater artists, a lot of choreographers.” He also was heavily influenced by Pina Bausch, a German dancer and choreographer.
Other shows he’s done with Catastrophic and its predecessor Infernal Bridegroom include They Do
Not Move, Toast, Last Rites and We Have Some Planes.
The company at Catastrophic is so amazing,” he says. Love Bomb’s cast includes: Noel Bowers, Amy Bruce, Tamarie Cooper, Bryan Kaplún, Karina Pal Montaño-Bowers, Miika Stewart, and Kyle Sturdivant. At first they considered having company members speak their words to the songs rather than sing, but discarded that idea.
(In fact, Jucha says he loves Catastrophic Theatre and the talents of its artists so much that he moved to Houston this year. (He had planned to do so earlier but COVID delayed that.)
Audience members will experience the 80-minute production differently for a number of reasons, Jucha says. “They’re bringing in their own experiences. There’s a lot going on . If you’re sitting on one side of the stage you can have a different experience than someone sitting on the other side because of what’s happening right in front of you.
“I believe what we are doing is incredibly entertaining, it’s incredibly funny. The musical songs are extraordinary. Some of Melanie’s early songs that she wrote in the late ’60s, early ’70s are pure gems that a lot of people don’t know whether because they’re younger or they only know her from her major hit in 1971. I think what the company is doing is astounding.
“We did a workshop in July and we have been in rehearsal for three, four weeks now. And creating it from scratch. We started off by doing a lot of composition work. This piece that we are creating, I bring all of the themes and ideas of what we are dong. But the company members of Catastrophic, they bring it to life. They create the characters and the people that the audience is meeting and experiencing. It is in every true sense of the word a collaboration.”
Performances are scheduled for November 15 through December 7 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. Sundays at Midtown Arts & Theatre Center, 3400 Main. Recommended for audiences 12 and older. For more information, call 713-521-4533. Pay-what-you-can. $35 suggested.
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This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
