ZEN CABARET

ZEN CABARET
Ba-a-a-a-a. It’ s the first sound in this quite magical mystery tour of Eastern philosophy and New Age mores conducted by Nina Rolle and her band of Rogue Elements. The Elements, a motley, disco-esque update of Shakespeare’s Rude Mechanicals, can keep a beat and carry a tune, though the harmonies are edgy, and the singers' commitment to them suspect. They leave you with the impression that at any moment any one of them, with little or no provocation could march happily and definitively offstage to their own drummer, never to be seen again.

Nevertheless, in they file, dazed and blinking in the light, the youngest kneeling in a wagon, a tiny piano perched on her furry ‘sheep’ back. Rolle, in sartorial silk, is playing a ludicrously repetitive ditty on the piano with one hand. Ludicrous, yet oddly beautiful. The piano is switched out for an accordian in a cheerful, deliberately clumsy exchange. And the bits of seemingly disconnected songs and gestures and colors and images begin weaving together to form a shimmery tapestry … that never quite tells a story or makes any particular sense, but always intrigues.

I’m not sure how to describe it. It is a surrealist painting in a pawn shop. It’s a paean to whimsy and sisterhood. It’s Dharma Bums on the road to nowhere. It’s “a contemplative burlesque”. That’s what Rolle has named it. That’s good enough for me.

This is a tongue in cheek send-up of meditation, therapy, and ritual scored to harmonically evocative melodies. Taking the piss out of dogma and the sheep who buy it, The Elements and Rolle make sure you’re don’t linger long in sentiment or meaning. “Don’t believe everything you hear” they caution early on. It’s a lesson we don’t have to worry about in this show.

“Here you can get your “consciousness raised to its upright and locked position.“ We sign on for the ride, and hope we’re being elevated to some higher plane.

This is a creation of Nina Rolle’s. She is talented and uncompromising, and her wistful “I think too much therefore I am too much’ probably says it all. This is a thinker with the soul of a poet and the spirit of a Buddha , the face of a Gibson Girl, the voice of a Siren, the heart of a woman. “Money wants love; Money wants to be asked nicely” That’s funny. And startling. So’s she.

“There are days when nothing escapes my critical eye. Nothing.” We laugh at the intoned delivery. And shiver at the relevance to our own lives .. as Seer’s and the Seen. Nina knows Buddhism and New Age psychology .. and her audience .. and she’ll have of it what she wants.