stage What is it about Charlottesville and art? Whence springs the rich, organic, artistic funkiness that pervades this place and its people? After a night of Shentai, I have decided that perhaps the nine Muses, in a wild, ululating, naked race to strew creativity across the earth, lingered here longer than other places. It’s in the air, in the dirt, and lord knows it’s in the Ix building—that rambling, seductive, industrial castle of gorgeous decay and subtle renewal.
 A bunch of characters: The mysterious provocateurs of Shentai transformed the Ix Building into an otherworldly carnival. |
On foot you enter the Ix gates for Shentai, where the world falls away and a dream-state ensues. Guided by carnies, you walk into a vast space, forested with columns and spiked with twinkle lights and Chinese lanterns in the distance, glowing like planets. You run into a friend who says, “I got a gumball from the Toy Monkey. A blue one.”
The waiting crowd mills behind fences of found objects—logs, metal, string, a sequinned pen. A lovely girl in tulle stands still, holding red curtains closed. Sullen ladies sell beer and dancers cavort in a domed enclosure, egged on by the Toy Monkey. Far across the space, the sound of the sea echoes and a woman in white (Sarah White) sings a high, strange song and, carved by side light, washes her arms in a tin bucket of water. You could watch this for some time, or until a four-legged stilt-walker creeps mantis-like from behind a paneled installation and gazes towards you before slowly retreating.
Soon you are loosed into a grand space neither interior nor exterior, with green trees visible beyond gaping walls and the cool June air swirling through the cavernous ceiling. The Accordion Death Squad regales the crowd with expert fiddle, accordion, piano, banjo and more, and Pepin Schmetterling (Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell) and Sigga Valsdotter (Bree Luck) lay down the rules of the evening. A drunken stilt-walker (Johnny Fogg) staggers past. A beautiful woman (Spiral) wields a spinning hoop around herself and through the air. Two dancers (Rachael Shaw and Bruna Longo) slither slowly through a rope net suspended above your head.
Soon it becomes difficult to resist the absurd dangers of the Ix 50 Bicycle Rodeo & Dignity Stripper Game Show, emceed by Christian Breeden. Then, the linguistic labyrinth of Tidwell’s short play, Dido vs. The Squid Monster, captivates with the maniacally lovely Sian Richards and Kara McLane Burke, unmissable in flippers and tentacles.
The evening marches on, with A Dead Whale or A Stove Boat! by Nimrod Shentai (Jude Silveira), who may call upon you to act the whale using a pink flamingo; or the strange Natural History Peep Show, directed by Dinah Gray. Pity any foolish business who turned down a chance for the Vampirates (Good Foot Dance Company) to concoct a sponsorship skit for them, embedded in a fabulous tap dance.
The Kindled Flame—a culminating fire dance created by Kelly East with 15 performers—hypnotizes. For a moment you might wish to watch the spinning sticks and batons, the swinging candles and flaming angels, from far across the Ix compound where the fire would flicker and illumine and confuse through transparent walls of brick and metal. But up close you sit near the heat, glimpsing the smudged faces of the dancers as they spin the bright flames, catching the dense whoosh of fire rushing through air until the bright orange fades to blue flame and the evening draws to a gorgeous, satisfying close. You may, perhaps, have to come back again.