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There's nothing wrong with that, because Hoch deserves the attention. At least he's a lot better than Dice. Hoch has a detailed understanding of hip-hop culture, and he can follow the wrinkles and ironies of its evolution from a black urban folk movement to a corporate-fueled image machine. He can flawlessly mimic characters from a Cuban street vendor to a hopped-up, pissed-off jailbird ranting about race. The skit that gives the show its title imagines a David Letterman interview with a rich rap star. The setup alone is an act of satire, since Letterman almost never interviews rap stars; but "M.C. Enough" is a bonehead. He wears a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a silver cap on one front tooth. He talks about the "evolution" of his work from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s -- really he's just been following trends -- and he contradicts himself as he builds his media image. "Now I'm kind of large," he says, so he's been going back to his neighborhood to encourage kids to stay in school: "I mean, I dropped out of junior high and now I'm a multimillionaire, but what I'm sayin' is -- well, I don't really know what the fuck I'm sayin', Dave."
Another skit has a Puerto Rican kid on crutches trying to chat up a pretty student in a waiting room. He's recovering from cop-inflicted gunshot wounds. Hoch mimes his movement on crutches with absolute conviction and talks in a Puerto Rican voice gentled by romance. "What do you study?" he says, then nods. "That's good, we need more business people." He tells her earnestly that he's proud of the United States. "Here, it's not like in other countries, where you get shot by the government." He thinks the woman's Puerto Rican but she turns out to be Czechoslovakian, and when she moves away, uninterested, the effect is poignant without being sentimental. Hoch's writing relies on the natural suspense of getting to know somebody: He's not finished until his characters drop some vital clue about themselves, and the ones who do it naively are his funniest.
See? He's better than Dice. And there's no reason the hip-hop nation should be avoiding his show.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Dances With Cars
Ice/Car/Cage. Choreographed and performed by Keith Hennessy, Jules Beckman, and Jess Curtis. Presented by the Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival at the Brady Street Dance Center, 60 Brady (at Market), Oct. 24-26. Call 558-9355.
Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. But in the high-octane dream world of Car and Driver, Road and Track, and Motor Trend, a car is never just a car. Showcased in exhilarated, popping prose, each car is like no other: A suave, sleek 424-HP Porsche 911 Turbo S doesn't run in the same circles as a "Fresh-Faced, Bad-Boy Firebird." And even when two cars -- both of them "speed freaks" -- do ride together, they don't hang. They're rivals! Ferocious and at each other's throats! These auto-macho magazines, overrun with lovingly detailed profiles of every new model, exist to persuade you that each car is a finely tuned individual -- and, as its proud owner, that you will be, too. Ice/Car/Cage is about people and cars, too. Created and performed by Jules Beckman, Jess Curtis, and Keith Hennessy, all from the local experimental performance group Core, the work was one of several commissioned for the second annual Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival last month. In the dance, the men are drawn to the car in their landscape the way any wheel-loving, car-mag-toting gearhead would be. But what draws them is not the car's "personality" -- in this case, it's a poky, dirty little white thing -- but the possibility of merging with blank, automatic power.
A large block of ice, a ladder, a cage, a blaster-radio, the men, and a car litter the dance's surface -- a square parking lot, off Market and west of Van Ness, bordered by squat warehouses. The elements in Ice/Car/Cage -- a dancing still-life -- remind us that cars and ice and radios and other useful blocks are the fruit and flowers of our millennial age.
The car at the center of the work's canvas sets the men in motion. Early on, someone gets in, drives it in a circle, then gets out. The car keeps going. Around and around and around the parking lot it rumbles while the men follow, somersaulting backward over its roof and rolling, with a thud, off its back. They spin along the car's sides, leapfrog over its hood, and let the rolling tires graze their heads as the car, oblivious, keeps to its circular course. The dancers are caught in the car's monotonous rhythm, as if it were driving them.
The dance with the car -- it setting the terms and the dancers becoming its extension -- is the model for other interactions in the work, both between people and objects and, in one section, between the dancers themselves. A 4-foot block of ice determines this scene's shape. In a perfect fit, Hennessy lies, face-to-face and hip-to-hip, on top of Curtis, who slips gently back and forth on the ice. Later, Hennessy becomes a childlike mechanic, and Curtis a mechanism. Curtis is still belly-up on the block of ice -- his legs now bent like a bug. Hennessy spins Curtis by the foot, as if it were the handle on an ice cream maker. Like a kid scrutinizing the springs of a clock, Hennessy watches Curtis go: How does this man run? Like another driverless car -- give him a little push and he'll spin on his own.
