Tyler Eschendal’s ACTIONS
This past weekend, composer / percussionist / videographer / music technologist Tyler Eschendal (together with director Diana Wyenn) presented ACTIONS, a multimedia one-man show with five primary sections named after “actions” – Arguing, Acting, Singing, Ordering, and Explaining (which can be viewed as a video series here). These movements and their corresponding actions relate to Tyler’s stutter, about which he says:
“For many years, I chose not to make music around my stutter because I didn’t understand it. I was concerned about sharing it with others because alongside harmful tropes often portrayed in media, I primarily identified as a covert stutterer: someone who purposely omits or substitutes words to avoid stuttering. I felt disconnected from the biggest constant in my world. Although the original goal of the short film series was simply to better understand my stutter, this live adaptation presents the opportunity to connect to other people who stutter across Southern California and rebuild the narrative around stuttering.”
Throughout the work, “what does it feel like to stutter” recurs as a motive; in between movements, pre-recorded video excerpts describe situations in which Tyler’s stutter interfere with his daily life, some that had never occurred to me (ever get annoyed at a robot phone operator because they can’t understand you?). Some of the “actions” describe situations that might inspire terror in a person with a stutter; “Ordering” combines the fear of stuttering and the terrors of not knowing what you want to order into a collection of nervous tics, in a work reminiscent of Thierry de Mey or Tom Johnson. Other sections describe the mechanisms one might use to circumvent their stutter, like rhythmicizing their speech to the covert drumming of their fingers. But ultimately, the 50-minute show ends with a cautiously optimistic acceptance of self, and of the stutter as part of one’s self.
There’s a lot that can go wrong in live performance. Your Max patch could fail, your spike marks on the ground goes missing, or your wireless mic pack’s batteries die after a long dress rehearsal, and not to mention all the ways in which you could fail as a performer. Lines misremembered, mallets dropped, cues missed, notes gone; I was happy to see that this performance was as smooth and well calibrated as it could have been, especially one of this size and scope. Each movement performed without a hitch, nearly all memorized, and which involved a dizzying number of the “things that could go wrong;” an overhead projector, live audio processing, live video processing, looping, percussion on ceramic tiles. All pulled together to form not only a musically variegated composition, but also a giant feat of coordination and memorization.
I thought about Tyler’s stutter as he moved away from his first percussion setup and began monologuing. I wondered how his stutter could affect his monologue, then wondered if I should be thinking about that at all. I thought about “fluency” and its hegemony, which must mean that anything else is a failure, right? I thought about all the times I instinctively “helped” when it really wasn’t the right thing to do. In the final movement of ACTIONS, a Tyler drenched in vocoder delivers a final monologue, conflating speaking with a stutter as a “performance” and any action as “performing as yourself;” this was the gut punch that racked everything into focus. It informed the preceding 40 minutes, gave it new meaning, and extrapolated existence itself as a performance. Tyler’s understanding of self turns a technically perfect performance into an emotionally virtuosic one. Not only does ACTIONS answer “what does it feel like to stutter,” it challenges us to think on what it means to be human.
Presented by Synchromy, Music and Theater tell the story of life with a stutter in the premiere of Tyler Eschendal’s solo show ACTIONS.
Tyler Eschendal, Percussion and vocals
Diana Wyenn, Director