A Ghost Ride // Best Aug Films!
One of the coolest experiences I've had on a bike, playing in Philly through Sept
I have often stated, controversially, that I didn’t like theater (besides Brecht, Beckett, and Shakespeare). I once had a playwright friend who dragged me to so many awful works-in-progress that it left a really awful taste in my mouth. Since I was such an opinionated nerd about all of the other arts, I let theater fall by the wayside. Of course, it wasn’t really true. I didn’t really hate theater. My secret-theater-kid best friend dragged me to plays and musicals since we were both 18 and then almost monthly when we both lived in New York, and I always had a great time. What I hated about theater was the (wrong) idea that it was pretentious and overwrought— somehow both inaccessible and melodramatic (ironic, I know, for a Beckett stan).
The idea that I just didn’t “get” theater completely dissipated this weekend, when I saw two incredible plays at Philly Fringe— Ulysses by the Elevator Repair Service, and Ghost Ride by Agile Rascal. I’ll talk a little bit more about Ulysses during my favorite things monthly roundup, but since Ghost Ride has tickets available in Philly for the remainder of the month (!!) I wanted to spend some time discussing this fantastic experience and showing some photos of the event to entice the would-be audience member.
Agile Rascal Bike Theatre is what it sounds like: a company that crafts plays in a variety of different cities, all on bikes. Ghost Ride is its Philadelphia iteration, and I was very touched by the local nature of the performance. Without revealing too much, the play is a retelling of the life (and death) of an actual Philadelphia bike delivery worker, a leftist Latino man who just loves riding bikes. The play was thoughtful and incredibly emotional— I had never cried during a theatrical performance before but was moved to tears. As the program notes, “The piece is a love song to the bicycle that addresses issues of bicycle safety and transportation justice, as well as being a meditation on life and loss.” Anyone who has ever grieved would resonate profoundly with the story, which is much more tastefully and abstractly delivered than melodramatic. I have never seen a more creative representation of death, especially not in theater.
As a person who has been riding bikes religiously since the age of 5— and for whom the bicycle served as a primary mode of transport for 15 years— I was also deeply moved by Agile Rascal’s clear love of the bicycle. These, I could tell, were folks like me, for whom the bike served as an escape from the general craziness or overwhelm of life. As a teen and 20-something I would bike the Chicago Lake Shore from Hollywood to Oak Beach, resting halfway and meditating on the blue water, my Craigslist-acquired Schwinn Cruiser at my feet. During the pandemic I biked to the exact same spot on the Schuylkill, resting on my favorite bench before looping around MLK drive. Although my position is one of considerable more privilege than the protagonist of the play, I think the bike-as-freedom narrative was shared by many of the audience members and all of the actors and crew.
Most touching, perhaps, was the fact that the play included a crew member who drove a pedicab, patronized by relatives of the actual late protagonist. Seeing the family members of the actual person memorialized by the play brought it to a completely other level. Theater was no longer something I considered abstract or even pretentious but something entirely immediate— more so than film. The play then became a kind of ceremony and ritual, a memorial to a single person, both individual and symbolic of bike-riding as a whole.
The play included headlamps (turned on at specific times) and headphones that allowed the transmission of sound, both live and pre-recorded. This created a fully immersive experience that prevented the need for the actors to shout, while also allowing the use of music. A bit of static is inevitable, with some minor tech snafus. But generally the alignment of pre- and live-recorded material was quite impressive. I am normally much, much too safety-conscious to ever ride my bike with headphones on (don’t do this!!), and it was such a pleasure to listen to the same sounds or soft music alongside 20 or so other people. Biking through my beloved tree-canopied path on MLK drive in the lush dark, I kept getting flashbacks to scenes from Donnie Darko, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Jena Malone biking to the sounds of Echo and the Bunnymen. It was eerie and wondrous, made more so by the incredible rainbow and Lisa-Frank-pink sky of Philadelphia, it having just stopped raining mere minutes before the play began.
I’m attaching some photos here, but if you live in the Philly area and can ride a bike with moderate-to-expert confidence, please don’t skip this!
And, briefly, here are my favorite (mostly) new-to-me films from the past month:
(The first several I described in an earlier post on the Blackstar Film Fest, so check it out for more info on these)
You Don’t Have to Go Home, But… by Aidan Un (2024)
Songs from the Hole by Contessa Gayles (2024) (Philly folks: mark your calendars for Nov 12, a week after the election, when I’m bringing Gayles to Penn for a screening at Public Trust! 12-3 PM)
A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde by Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson (1995)
The Strike by JoeBill Muñoz & Lucas Guilkey (2024)
Bye Bye Tiberias by Lina Soualem (2024)
I also saw these two great films at the Community of Images exhibit, which I described two weeks ago:
Jinsei (Life) by Donald Richie (1964)
A sweet, playful, weird little short made and set in Japan, by Donald Richie, film scholar and unapologetic Japanophile. Richie cavorted with some of the greatest names in the Japanese avant-garde of the 1960s, and the influence of Tokyo counterculture is definitely felt. I touch upon Richie very briefly in my forthcoming book’s final chapter, on the queer Japanese late 1960s! Although, interestingly, this short is actually a perfect representation of my third chapter on 1964 Japan because of its critique of humdrum consumerist everyday life during Japan’s “great economic miracle” (largely funded by American imperialism)
Great Society by Oe Masanori and Marvin Fishman (1967)
A six-screen projector piece showcasing and lambasting American life in the late 1960s. Would pair beautifully with literally any work of counterculture from around 1968. American flags, Nixon, LBJ, JFK, Vietnam, and images of consumer culture abound. I could watch this all day.
And now for the miscellany:
Kneecap by Rich Peppiat (2024), a quasi-documentary re-enactment of the eponymous Gaelic rap group (touring in Philly later this month)! Starring all of the members, plus a stunning (and my forever problematic fave) Michael Fassbender in an important supporting role. Sensorial, fun, playful, political. Interestingly, like Songs from the Hole above, also a film largely composed of music videos. Maybe I just really like music videos, or maybe this is a new trend or tendency in contemporary independent film?
Party Girl by Daisy von Scherler Mayer (1995), also described in my two-weeks-ago post. I hadn’t seen this film in about 15 years and I appreciated its time capsule of 90s NYC club culture even more. Parker Posey is a goddess and I will always adore this film, despite the heavily problematic elements, and the sticky slightly cringe-y 90s-ness of it all.
The Second Awakening of Christa Klages by Margarethe von Trotta (1978). Margarethe von Trotta is my favorite German filmmaker of all time— certainly my favorite of the New German Cinema (yes, even better in my book than Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and Rainer Fassbinder). Von Trotta’s films tend to spotlight problematic but strong and charismatic women in history, either real (Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, Hildegard von Bingen, Ulrike Marie Meinhof) or imagined. This— her first (!!!) solo directed film— is no exception, focusing on a woman who robs a bank with her friend to fund her socialist daycare center. I truly don’t understand how a debut film can be so strong. Von Trotta’s film on Hildegard von Bingen, Vision, is probably still my favorite of hers, but this is a strong #2 or #3 in my book.
Gagarine by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh (2020). Embarrassingly, I resisted seeing this film for several years after I found out that it wasn’t “actually” about Yuri Gagarin, first man in space. In fact the film is, beautifully, both about the idea of space/space travel alongside the real-life (!) experiences of people living in the real-life (!) Gagarin Towers in the impoverished Paris banlieu (unlike in the US, in France, the suburbs are largely for the migrant poor). The protagonist, a Black teen and science savant named Yuri, befriends a Roma girl, and together they attempt to thwart the demolition of the housing projects— left by the state to crumble without repair, but, like so many across the world, created by and representative of the utopian midcentury and its socialist idealism. Like many of my absolute favorite recent films, it blends documentary and magic realism in a powerfully affective way. This is a new favorite for sure.
Until next time!