Art-Full Life

Where in Charm City can you find vampires residing happily in a church? 2640, of course! That’s 2640 Saint Paul Street, Saint John’s Church, a regular venue for everything from vampires to great food, compelling music and performances, or themes of social justice.

On Friday, January 15, the lofty-but-crumbling interior of this church became the set for Collinsport: Onward Phlebotomogical Vempiricism: An Epistemological Collapse in the Dark Shadows performed by Geodesic Gnome, a local super group that specializes in extraordinary, out-of-the-box work. The play, John Berndt’s directorial debut, was written by four of Baltimore’s most talented artists—Stephanie Barber, Berndt, Connor Kizer, and Ric Royer.  From both the visual and the auditory perspective, this performance was a remarkably immersive experience. 

Collinsport is a 21st-century interpretation of Dark Shadows, the late 1960s Gothic soap opera. A campy chronicle of the mysterious Collins family, Dark Shadows wove supernatural elements into its plot, reaching the apex of its popularity with the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins. This vampire remained a lead character in Friday’s performance despite his physical absence from the stage.

The play began with playwright Berndt’s hilarious portrayal of a pretentious JHU professor of philosophy lecturing on “paradox paradox.”  He then introduced “a different medium to travel in,” a convoluted play-within-the-play, which opened with a dream sequence clip from Dark Shadows. 

The young Victoria Winters rode a train to her future as a nanny for the peculiar Collins family. As her thoughts were projected on a screen and the Geodesic Gnome actors moved on stage, three screens simultaneously played dizzying loops of black-and-white interior vignettes from the vintage soap opera. The actors cast huge silhouettes over the moving images behind them, literally becoming dark shadows themselves. 

“An unexplained Man in the Iron Mask (Connor Kizer)
huddled in the background or intruded on dialogue
with a loud vacuum.”

The words the actors spoke also moved in loops, often beginning and ending with the same impenetrable patterns of words. Jason McGuire (Ric Royer) explained: “And just when we all thought that we thought it couldn’t get any stranger in Collinsport, yes, a strangely familiar stranger arrived to Collinsport and introduced himself as Barnabas Collins, a long lost relative who now just wants to live in the old house, the old house, the old house, the old house, the old house.”

For ambiance, there was eerie music, the howling of wolves, and disconcerting sounds (my favorite was the anxiety-provoking rumblings of sheet metal flexed by actors whose faces were concealed by mirrors). An unexplained Man in the Iron Mask (Connor Kizer) huddled in the background or intruded on dialogue with a loud vacuum. And mimicking the awkward soap-opera-a-day production value of Dark Shadows, a videographer accompanied by a gaffer (Peter Blasser, absent his tuba) were constantly tripping through scenes and interrupting our view, a suggestion that this performance, like the original soap opera, was really less about us as an audience and more about being filmed for daily television consumption.

Until it was far too late, the Collinses and their odd friends never seemed to realize that Barnabas was a vampire, this despite his inadequately explained origins, his strange behavior, and the prominent display of his terrifying black-and-white vampire portrait. Victoria Winters (Stephanie Barber) explained ruefully after the entire cast joined the undead: “We were unwilling to admit that a vampire might have gotten past our constant vampire vigilance. Realize the immense illusion of credit that we lived under and proceed to an unending and total collapse of all our systems and all our customs.” This government-speak felt like a page out of the national reaction to our 2008 financial implosion or the recent near miss with airborne terrorism in Detroit.

This evening epitomized Baltimore’s vibrant art scene—its creativity, innovation, and highly collaborative spirit. Most of the performers with Geodesic Gnome have and will reconfigure fluidly with other groups—John Berndt as a visual artist and musician with THUS, The Multiphonic Choir, Baltimore Afrobeat Society, the Red Room and the experimental music festival High Zero; Ric Royer, as poet, creator of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and until recently,  impresario of The Lof/t at the Load of Fun; Connor Kizer as a part of Wham City, Whartscape, and Santa Dads; Peter Blasser as an experimental musician and installation artist at High Zero and elsewhere; and Alexandra Macchias a performer with the a cappella group Lexie Mountain Boys.  

And I am just on the sidelines of this scene—I am sure every single participant in Collinsport leads an art-full life, with continuous, constantly morphing performances!

• If you missed this one-time play, on February 5 catch an installment of the Los Solos Series, a monthly performance highlighting the ground-breaking work of female artists. Curated by Jackie Milad and Bonnie Jones, best known for the Transmodern Festival, this performance at the 5^th Dimension in the H & H Building will feature Baltimore’s Ayako Kataoka, a musician and movement artist, and Asima Chremos, a Chicago-based dancer.