Evocative performances on off-Strip stages

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Thursday, March 26, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Photo by Antonia Kao

Kristina Wong will perform her “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which addresses the high rate of suicide among Asian-American women in the United States, next week in Las Vegas.

Kristina Wong’s “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is a humorous, educational and gut-wrenching performance about the high rate of suicide among Asian-American women living in the United States. The artist interacts with the audience, takes on several personas and through various forms of storytelling has you completely absorbed.

Her performance next week at the Aruba Showroom is in stark contrast to the video style of Cindy Rehm, whose installation videos reach the viewer using a far more abstract and sensory process, where sounds evoke emotional and physical responses, and suspense, dark imagery and repetitive scenes intensify that experience.

Both artists are part of “Off the Strip: Two Weeks of Performance and Video Art,” which takes place at four different locations. Presented by downtown’s Contemporary Arts Center, the event is designed to broaden the 20-year-old organization’s artistic mission and reach out to audiences in Las Vegas and elsewhere.

About 20 artists from various cities — including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Berlin — were selected from 50 responses to a call to artists on the Internet. Because it’s the first year, organizers chose not to dictate a theme, instead waiting to see what came in.

Storytelling monologues, body-focused performances and new media are all in the mix.

Some works will be site specific — such as a karaoke-themed performance at Dino’s, which seemed a most suitable setting when the artist requested a dive bar. Others will be continuously looping videos on display at the Contemporary Arts Center at Main Street and Charleston Boulevard. Performances also will be held at the Onyx Theatre.

Aside from a few isolated incidents, performance art has been absent in Las Vegas and organizers are trying to offer diversity to audiences new to the art form.

“Even though it has this long history in other cities, it’s still fairly new as a concept in Las Vegas so we wanted to present the audience with an introduction to this kind of range of work,” event coordinator Wendy Kveck said.

Some videos and performances are funny. Some are angry or hostile in tone. Some are both, depending on the audience. Dominic Gagnon’s video “Rip in Pieces America,” which puts together slices of homemade videos that were posted on the Internet but flagged for content into one layered anti-establishment rant, was shown to laughter in Canada but to complete silence in Paris.

Lynn Lou’s “happily ever after” is a fun and light video detailing public response to a dog’s tail wagging out of a precise little hole in a wall of a house-shaped shed set up outside the Singapore Art Museum.

Laura Napier’s video work “Project for a Street Corner” manipulates crowd formations and patterns on a sidewalk outside the World Trade Center, and videotapes the situation from above so viewers can watch how it changes the behavior of passers-by, whether they know it or not.

Organizers matched similar-themed works or styles of presentation for each of the seven days of the event. Wong is presenting the same night as local artist Danielle Kelly, whose storytelling will be augmented with images, and Gregory Barnett’s interactive edgy and animated monologue.

Ernest Hemmings’ Test Market, which once operated out of SEAT Theatre in the Arts Factory, will present “R33L ON” at the Onyx Theater.

A performance by artist Justin Hoover, who will create erotic drawings in a hotel room for “The Erotic Hotel Project,” won’t be open to the public, but the drawings will be installed at the Contemporary Arts Center April 6-11.