Jonesboro Overpass Exit Number Twelve

Feminist dada absurdity personified. Each band member subverts gender roles by enduring hours of in the makeup chair before the show, an effect that leaves the audience confused as to the sex and actual identity of each of them. Entire songs sometimes consist of free-form stream-of-conscious poetry readings layered over very involved bass guitar riffs or group chanting to a blinding chorus of fifty tambourines shaking simultaneously. Songs rarely make coherent sense in any literal construct, but when the whole point is to be deliberately challenging in order to represent the complexities of the gender binary, that's kind of the point.

Sea Shaman

Conceptual performance art is, by its very nature, a bit bizarre. Those who practice it demand unique, distinct, and frequently weird sounds to compliment the equally strange goings on that occur on stage. The emphasis is not on competence or even on talent, instead the desired backing music should be obnoxious, dissonant, and grating. There is no shortage of so-called musicians eager to fill this peculiar need.

Sea Shaman certainly is up to the challenge. A five minute section in which the actors are writhing about on the floor as though inflicted with a kind of extreme motion sickness is punctuated by the sound produced when jingling car keys are scraped across cello strings. Another lengthy section of the performance which requires the cast to cluck like a chicken in sequence is backed by the amplified sound of a pair of scissors cutting through cheap canvass. The jarringly unnerving result of this effect in tandem with what's happening on stage could not be any more incongruous.