Fix + Foxy’s Dark Noon (June 7 - July 7, 2024) took the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe by storm. In it, South African artists including co-director and choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and seven South African actors join forces with acclaimed Danish director Tue Biering and create an exhilarating theatrical experience. Dark Noon turns the myth of the American Wild West, as endlessly glorified by Hollywood westerns of the 1950s, on its head. This time, rather than history being told by the victors, it is told by the vanquished. On a vast bare stage, the skeleton film set of a Western town emerges in real time. The extraordinary actors embody the distinctive characters of America’s past: cowboys, gold seekers, missionaries, enslaved Africans, Chinese workers, Native Americans, prostitutes, Bluecoats, and Confederates. Through playful interpretation, the performers scrutinize the presumptions and misconceptions of the American Frontier. “Dripping with energy, irony and anger,” this “savage and gripping” work “tells the 300-year history of the American west in 100 uproarious minutes” (The Guardian).
What impressed me about the hyperkinetic piece — written and directed by the Danish Tue Biering, co-directed and choreographed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu — is its recognizing the marked difference between the lessons learned by American youth of the DuMont days and the takeaways that the South Africans reaped at a later date. Put succinctly, stateside viewers were indulged in visions of what could be distilled to a Cowboys-and-Indians ethic. They (we?) were shown partial truths indelibly integrated, a template for games played in local schoolyards. In contrast, South Africans were exposed to an up-close-and-personal look at white dominance of a country where other immigrants — slaves and the Chinese imported as cheap labor to lay the cross-country railroad — were seen as second-class citizens, or worse. (Is there any need to note it’s a cock-eyed assessment too often enduring today?)
The audience is seated on three-sides of a bare stage, but Johan Kølkjær’s setting won’t remain empty for long. Representing America, the sets are gradually built upon a dirty tarp as the performance progresses. A church will be constructed, as well as a merchant store, a bank, a politician’s office, a pioneer home, a Chinese restaurant, a bar and whorehouse, a jail, and an outdoor holding pen. Oh, and a railroad track runs down the center of the stage ending at the mines. Plus, the endless props by Marie Rosendahl Chemnitz, cameras displaying live filming of scenes as they take place (video designer Rasmus Kreiner), and microphones (sound designer Ditlev Brinth). By the end, there’s so much scenery that other spectators disappear from view. Stage Manager Svante Huniche Corell and his crew notably uphold the challenging staging, allowing the pandemonium to unfold with perfection
2024 | Off-Broadway |
St. Ann's Warehouse Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
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