Yamantaka//Sonic Titan have a standalone debut album to their name and an impressively faithful live show to back it up but they still consider themselves more an “art collective” than a band.
“Right now we’re touring and supporting this album, and that means we need to have a solid full time band that can play the record and go around and perform it,” drummer/co-leader Alaska B tells NOW.
“But that doesn’t mean that our art activities stop there.”
They’ll show what they’re capable of outside of their more traditional “rock band” format at this week’s Rhubarb Festival in their original “Noh Wave” rock opera performance, 33. Written and performed by the Yamantaka//Sonic Titan crew, the play will run every day from Wednesday until Sunday (February 8 to 12) at 9:30 in Buddies in Bad Times theatre.
In their early performances, YT//ST went all out every time, spending all of their time and energy (not to mention money) on elaborate one-off spectacles featuring intricate set designs, artwork, costumes and makeup, often in unusual venues and with unusual instrumentation.
They’ve scaled that back for the touring version of their live show, which still implements many of the theatrical aspects of their grand, maximalist aesthetic, but it still mostly focuses on representing their recorded material in a relatively faithful way.
33, on the other hand, let the group indulge its more eccentric impulses and pack it with themes hinted at on the recordings: performance, identity politics, pop cultural constructions and cross-cultural mythology. That’s a tough thing to nutshell, but director/actor Ange Loft gives it a shot.
“It’s a short 33 minute musical in three acts,” she explains. “Every act is exactly eleven minutes long. Every act also runs at exactly 120 BPM. And there’s one minute of text per act. There’s visuals, projections, incredibly rapped and sung dialogue and multiple ritualized murder attempts.”
Alaska B jumps in to fill in the plot:
“Basically it’s the story of two drag queens,” she begins. “The first act is about the 27 Club rock and roll myth. There’s a 27-year-old successful drag queen who runs her own club, and she’s thinking ‘I’m 27 – do I die here at my peak or do I move onto something else?’ And her 21-year-old protégé is impatient and wants to kill her off to take her place. So every act as a Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner structure.”
“They age by three years between each act. In the second act, the older drag queen is 33, which is the year that Jesus started to prosthelytize. The younger character is 24, which is considered the perfect age in some interpretations of the Chinese Zodiac. 33 is also the age that Jesus dies.”
“So we take the story of Jesus and Judas and the story of Buddha and Devadetta and put them together in a single monomyth of one person on the path to achieving enlightenment and the person that’s close to them trying to stop them because they’re jealous.”
That’s a lot to fit into a 33-minute play, but Yamantaka//Sonic Titan attempt to do so using the tools of Indian mythic opera, Japanese Noh theatre and Christian pageantry.
“Those forms of theatre express huge scopes of myth that you could never play as a whole,” says lead singer/co-writer Ruby Kato Attwood. “Otherwise you’d be sitting there for days. So we just do little sections and motifs that are all related, and they express the greater scope that the audience will be familiar with if they know Yamantaka//Sonic Titan.”
Unfortunately, Kato Attwood will have to miss the performances of 33 since she lives and works in Montreal, but she still plays a major role as a pseudo-religious pop idol only seen on television. She also pre-recorded vocals, which will be lip-synched by Ange Loft, another manifestation of drag performance. Meanwhile, the sets and costumes will be designed in the style of their concert and album artwork.
It sounds heady to say the least, but if it comes together in the same immediate, approachable way as their music then it should be more accessible than it seems. Either way, it will be interesting to see if they can pull it off.
