It was chilling, and not because bricks of dry ice were being pulled from a family sized cooler.
The scene was dark and the room was quiet—in the beginning. Tetsuya Umeda walked across a wide room effortlessly navigating a collection of what seemed to be miscellaneous items gathered from someone’s uncle’s garage and strewn across the floor. He wore black latex gloves and his hair dangled in front of his eyes. A spark of confusion, tension and eagerness enveloped me. What was he going to do with all this stuff? I knew he was an artist whose medium was sound, but why was there a water bottle dangling from the ceiling?
Tetsuya approached the bottle and shone a light past it onto a projection screen in the distance. Then he gave it a whirl. Such a simple and peculiar act was funny at first, but then the oscillating and fumbling bottle, accompanied by it’s larger and more ominous shadow, began to resemble a corpse hanging from a noose; lifeless and unable to take control of its course. Tetsuya approached a ladder on the other side of the room and placed a slab of dry ice on a step. An incredible shriek punctuated the silence. I glanced back over to the spinning shadow—still lifeless. Another torturous shriek escaped from the ice as a metal weight was placed upon it. Then a monsterous grinding screech shattered my heart as Tetsuya dragged a metal pole across several pieces of ice. He was torturing them. Finally resting the pole on top of their icy remains, he allowed their screams to slowly, and painfully die. I looked to the right—the dangling corpse continued to be tormented by that uncontrollable sway.
The black gloves, the shrieking, the corpse—all of a sudden I was witnessing the highly particular and premeditated acts of a pathological murderer. Only I wasn’t, it just felt like I was. This is the power that Tetsuya had over me. It was only 5 minutes into the performance and I had already been transported somewhere that I could never have anticipated.
The rest of his performance was spectacular, and thankfully a tad less frightening. He brought in soothing sounds reminiscent of the ocean by heating rice in tubes of varying sizes. Lamps—that had rested for the first half of the performance in a wide circle around the room—flickered on and off to the tune of water droplets escaping from hanging bottles. How did he do it? Not many knew. The room was full of faces contorted simultaneously by confusion and delight. How did he do it? With an impeccable understanding of basic scientific principles, and quite possibly an uncle who encouraged him to tinker with electricity and water when his parents weren’t home.
The experience of “Ringo” left a scar in my mind that has kept me uncomfortably curious and a little off-kilter—and this, I believe, describes an utterly pure PuSH Festival experience.
“Ringo” was a one time performance but you can buy tickets to more PuSH shows here!
– Katherine Moore