THEATER REVIEW

By Lewis Segal, Times Dance Critic

If you're afraid you'll never afford tickets to the Walt Disney Concert Hall unless you mortgage the house and sell your firstborn into slavery, why not try the back door?

There, underneath the concert hall — with its own gallery space and bar — lies the domain of the REDCAT, an intimate, modular basement theater (160 to 300 seats) dedicated to low-cost and sometimes free contemporary performances and films.

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REDCAT. Say it loud and there's music playing. Say it soft and it's almost like saying "the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater at the Walt Disney Concert Hall," without wasting so much breath. And you'll definitely need that breath climbing in and out of the steeply raked seats for the venue's opening (or preview) attraction: the Japanese multimedia performance collective dumb type, which began its run Tuesday.

Appropriating ideas that have been circulating in the European avant-garde for years, dumb type's "Memorandum" defines itself primarily through an amazing arsenal of high-tech projection and sound effects, along with its focus on key pop culture priorities. The work's sense of design comes directly from advertising art. Its visual rhythms and volume levels are those of an action movie, and its expressive content reaches us primarily via surveillance cameras.

Early on, we watch a man writing on a notepad and read what he's writing projected onto on a screen behind him. His words are about memory, but they're not dramatized or spoken for us, as in conventional theater. No, rather, video technology allows us to spy on them, like security cops, and later this voyeurism grows surreal in a sequence with four different projections of a man moving in a small room — only one of them synchronized with the action onstage.

Every so often there's a studiously banal dance procession to backdated pop music à la Pina Bausch. But, unlike Bausch's company, the performers on view never seem especially compelling or even notably skillful. Ultimately, we come to understand that nearly all the indispensable dumb type personnel are backstage: in the videotape editing booth, the computer animation booth, the sound booth, the light booth, the projection booth.

Creatively, dumb type cannot depict a world of sensory overload without adding more sensory overload to that world, cannot come up with anything memorable in a work about memory — except for all the things that money can buy, the things that can be plugged into the wall and rock us.

The collective comes from Kyoto, but the group's voluntary enslavement to hardware — its prevailing sense that an artist is defined by the price of his toys — makes it belong to Tokyo's Ginza, body and soul. At the REDCAT, it provides a spectacular test run of some 500 lighting circuits, two sound systems, six technical booths and 7,140 square feet of performance space before the facility's official inauguration gala on Nov. 15 and 16. And that demonstration is occasionally thrilling.

Obviously, an official, built-in home at the L.A. Music Center for a wide range of contemporary and even experimental performance experiences represents a major change on the artistic landscape — a redefinition of the term "alternative space" to include prime cultural real estate. But after such visionary home-grown creations as Terry Beeman's "Bound" and such state-of-the-art imports as Angelin Preljocaj's "Helicopter," it'll take more than dumb type's overwrought sound and light show to bring the wave of the future as far inland as 2nd and Hope.