13th Floor Dance Theater’s Bloomsbury/It’s not Real is Real, but Not Bloomsbury

By Emma Krasov

Bloomsbury/It’s Not Real, written by Kim Green, Jenny McAllister, and the play performers – and directed and choreographed by Jenny McAllister – is a hybrid of word/movement/dance brought together by the concerted effort of Thirteenth Floor Dance Theater’s team.
The barefoot actors/dancers participate in parlor games with sinister “punishments” in-between talking, dancing, and turning somersaults on stage, but mostly convey the notion of groping each other with some repetitive moves.
Things get better when they use the primary sources and engage in a poetry competition – thanks to direct quotes from the title characters.
By placing the Bloomsbury Group’s artists and intellectuals from the beginning of the 20th century into the realm of today’s reality television, the show creators made the difference between the two time periods and their respective celebrities only too obvious.
While Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell left their traces in history through their philosophical quests, intellectual pursuits, and significant published works, our contemporaries achieve celebrity status with lesser means and for shorter periods of time.
An attempt to impose trite similarities upon the higher-level celebs, based on the fact that they, too, cheated on their spouses, might seem like an easy way to draw parallels, but it brings into focus a stark difference between the two worlds.
The thought that persists after viewing the play is that Bloomsbury Group members might have fallen as low as modern-day reality TV stars, but the modern-day reality TV stars would never soar as high as the Bloomsbury Group members.
While working splendidly together, the theatre collective could’ve called this play any other name with a very similar result. With the exception of some abovementioned direct textual quotes there is not much to refer to the Bloomsbury Group in this production.
Performers in the Bloomsbury Group/It's Not Real include: Blane Ashby, Caity Beard, Patric Cashman, Kathryn Cole, Juan De La Rosa, Eric Garcia, Nicole Nastari, Rowena Ritchie, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, and Jennifer Wright. 13th Floor Dance Theater’s company members include visual designers Michael Oesch and Delayne Medoff.
ODC Theater is located at 3153 Seventeenth Street, San Francisco.
More information: www.odctheater.org, http://www.13thfloordance.org/
Image: Pak Han. Juan de la Rosa as Roger Fry and Jennifer Wright as Lady Ottoline Morrell.