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IMPRESSIONS: Soomi Kim's "Testing2" at The Tank with Laura Peterson
By Catherine Tharin
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Published on January 17, 2025
L. Peterson in Soomi Kim's Testing2. Photo: Mari Eimas-Dietrich
Testing2
Created and Directed by Soomi Kim
Choreography by Laura Peterson
Performed by Laura Peterson and Soomi Kim
Lighting Design by Lucrecia Briceno and Emmanuel Delgado
Original Music by Adam Rogers
Sound Design by Soomi Kim and Adam Rogers
December 5-15, 2024
The Tank 56
A Tank Core Production
Soomi Kim, a theater and movement artist known for her incisive autobiographical and biographical hybrid dramas, brought Testing2 to The Tank last month. With her good friend Laura Peterson, a noted choreographer who presents her own multi-disciplinary dances, the two accomplished performers explored the bloopers, vain rantings and anxious thoughts of 10 music celebrities, their words captured on vintage outtakes, albums, and bootleg tapes. This engaging show accompanied by colored projections cleverly comments on the celebrities’ supposedly private moments with trusted collaborators.
The Tank, an off-off Broadway venue located on the first floor of an undistinguished building on West 36th Street, presented the third iteration of Testing2, in its black-box space, “56” (instead of the normal 56 seats, at these performances there were 41). In this postage-stamp-sized space, the audience sits inches from the performers, and gets “a close-up treat” (Kim).
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As the audience enters, Soomi, sits perched on a ledge of the sunken stage, wearing a black flapper dress, and draped from head to toe in shiny, black mylar strips resembling reel-to-reel tape. Her face and body are hidden. The mylar strips are used inventively as set design and audio. They change and illustrate scenes, crinkle, conform to shapes, and pile high.
Once the audience is in place, the lights brighten as Laura, carrying scissors and wearing a silver flapper dress, comes into view. Soomi and Laura use birdsong to call to one another. (Are birds authentic beings compared to celebrities who are constructed?) Laura lip-synchs Yoko Ono’s lines, “John, I had a dream...never cross the street without the other” over the recorded track of a beating heart. Laura snips away Soomi’s mylar strips to reveal her black-haired head.
The brutality of famous musicians excoriating their bands and crews in extended temper tantrums wears down the viewer. We hear Paul Anka (“I’m the only important one on that stage. I don’t care if it’s Jesus Christ. If you don’t do it my way, it’s the highway.”), while Soomi and Laura shuffle on stage, streamers wrapped around their ankles. Casey Kasem explodes (“This is the last goddamn fucking time. I want somebody to use his fucking brain.”), as Soomi, covered in mylar, falls over and writhes wildly in an escalating dance with Laura shining a spotlight on her. Buddy Rich threatens (“You try one fuck up the next day when you get back to NY you’ll need another fucking job. COUNT ON IT! Get outta my fucking bus.”) to recorded percussion.
Sounding like ninnies, Barbra Streisand and JLo in contrast to the men musicians, apologize to their collaborators for multiple musical redos and for wrong notes. Laura, wrapped in silver mylar strands, turns slowly in place, and the rustling of the mylar obscures recorded birdsong. In a deep pulsing lunge, she extends her chest upward as if she were a bird contemplating flight.
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The exchanges of wheedling Paul Simon and wet-noodle Art Garfunkel, voiced-over by both Soomi and Laura, weave throughout, set to the strains of The Sound of Silence.
Later, John responds to Yoko while Soomi and Laura rhythmically hop to pulsing lights. “Love. I mean ya gotta work on it. Like uh- it is a precious gift and it’s a plant and you gotta look after it and water it.” When Soomi as John falls dead, Laura wraps the body in a mylar death shroud. The final striking image is a sun design constructed from lengthened mylar strands that are walked counterclockwise like a waterwheel.
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Celebrities are rarely unobserved, and, in truth, they can never let down their guard, unless they want to hear their juvenility exposed on secret recordings. These rarely heard outtakes are old-school, dating from a time when celebrities preferred to salvage their reputations, rather than display their inanity unabashedly as we see in some quarters today.
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