For his fresh theatre explain,Greg Wohead plays the King at his peak – only there’s no quiff and no hip-swivelling. Its more seance than rock’n’roll concertElvis Presley’s 1968 NBC TV explain Elvis is better known by its unofficial title: the Comeback Special, bestowed because it rehabilitated the singer’s image after nearly a decade in which he had been making cheesy movies to the exclusion of all live performance. The King was back, and dressed top-to-toe in black leather,exuding a seductiveness and power that repositioned him as a legitimate musical force. He performed four one-hour live sets in the round in front of a studio audience, shooting the breeze with his bandmates between numbers; this was edited and cut together with prerecorded segments, and then the whole package went out as an hour-long TV spectacular. His misguided Hollywood excursion was nearly at an end,while his bloated, diamond-encrusted, and white-jumpsuit-wearing Vegas incarnation was still some years off. This was pure Elvis. It’s precisely that comforting conception of authenticity that the performance artist Greg Wohead sets out to destabilise in his playful and haunting fresh explain Comeback Special. The conceit is that we are watching a restaging of that Elvis programme. The set is precisely the same – a square stage with the audience seated on all four sides. But from the moment Wohead steps on to it and grabs a microphone that dangles from the ceiling,boxing MC-style, we know something is awry. He tells us that he is dressed entirely in black, or though this is patently not the case; he asks us to marvel at his hip-swivelling abilities,then stands stock still.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com