'Operation Theater': A performance that dissects the surgical experience
Joan Laage's "Operation Theater" draws audiences with illuminating intensity into issues raised by surgical procedures.
Seattle Times arts writer
'Operation Theater: Body Under the Knife'
Directed by Joan Laage, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. today and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., Seattle; $8-$12 (206-729-2054 or e-mail davidthornbrugh@ hotmail.com).
What's so theatrical about medical surgery?
Plenty, according to Joan Laage, director of an ambitious new multimedia production, "Operation Theater: Body Under the Knife," at Richard Hugo House.
If a rehearsal is anything to go by, the show may be one of the most extraordinary movement-theater pieces to play Seattle in quite a while.
It incorporates excerpts from interviews with two surgeons, an anesthesiologist, a medical student and a patient that are fascinating. It uses Butoh-inspired dance that, in tandem with the spoken text, draws audiences with illuminating intensity into issues raised by surgical procedure.
The costuming — lab coats, hospital gowns, scrubs — has a potent theatricality. A hypnotic electronic score (by Eli Huntington) and artfully incorporated video work enhance the stage magic.
Plus, there's humor: The show opens with a request that audience members turn off their cellphones "in order to enhance the learning process."
Mostly there's a sense of deep immersion in a world that most of us have entered directly or vicariously: a world where bodies, thanks to an expertly wielded but still invasive knife, can be remade and renewed.
The tone of the piece is both factual and philosophical, earthbound and otherworldly.
"Operation Theater" is the latest in a string of projects Seattle-based Laage has staged since she came across an article and photograph exhibition about operating theaters in Prague some years ago.
Since then, she has mounted one earlier production of "Operation Theater" in London (in 2006), along with three of a parallel project, "Anatomical Theater," in Sweden and Poland.
This incarnation of "Operation Theater," Laage says, incorporates a lot more text than earlier productions (the interviews with medical personnel were conducted in Seattle).
The dance work has been elaborated, and the dancers — including performers from Danse Perdue and Daipan Performance Collective — are gifted improvisers working within close patterns set by Laage.
Don't be misled by the word "improvisation." The way that Sheri Brown, Alex Ruhe and others in Laage's company move has a slow-motion, razorlike precision that is captivating.
Razor-sharpness is apt because, as Laage explains, Butoh dance is sometimes described as "walking on the edge of a knife."
With "Operation Theater," Laage also has in mind the surgeon's knife and the sharp threshold between life and death approached in surgery performed under full anesthesia.
"Even when you don't die," Laage says, "you're going to some other world. What is that world?"
Blending anecdote, lecture and shadowy exploration, "Operation Theater" promises to be stagework of a most challenging and enlightening variety.