Review: Degenerate Art Ensemble's 'Sonic Tales' is weird, wild, surreal — perfect for Halloween

"It seems like a bit much, don't you think?"

That's how one player sums up the goings-on in "Sonic Tales," Degenerate Art Ensemble's new show at the Moore Theatre.

Actually, "a bit much" is an understatement.

DAE's "Sonic Tales" uses every means at its disposal — movement, music, sound collage, video projection, shapeshifting sets, fantastical costumes — to take its audience deep into the realms of the unconscious.

We're not just talking content pushed to the edge of narrative logic. What we have here is dream imagery free-floating on a sea of surreality.

While the show ostensibly takes its inspiration from Japanese ghost tales, its "story" seems to spring more from the mental breakdown of "The Protagonist," as Trinidad Martinez, an angular, elegant dancer, is identified.

Clad in a sheer, white gauze top and voile-like blue skirt, Martinez is a fragile yet charismatic Everywoman disturbed by unseen powers. She's pushed, pulled, raised up and flung down in time to the ghostly cues of Jeffrey Huston and Joshua Kohl's electronic score. Like a wraith with no will of her own, she seems vulnerable to forces that make the dividing line between bliss and terror razor-thin.

As she moves, the bare stage she occupies is encroached upon by disembodied doors, windows, fragments of wall, as though some deranged architect were trying to reconstruct someone's shattered psyche. When mysterious personages start passing and exiting through those doors, the dramas inside Martinez's head emerge for all to see.

Those personages include a "Slug Princess" and an "Appetite Girl" (Marissa Rae Niederhauser) and a nymph in red (DAE artistic director Haruko Nishimura) who does fierce battle with two black-clad ninjas (Huston and Kohl). Martinez often watches, fascinated by the action and sometimes moving in fear of or in sympathy with it.

Nishimura and Niederhauser are as mercurial in their performances as Martinez. They smile frighteningly, grimace absurdly, ripple through whole constellations of mood in a matter of moments.

If Nishimura's stylized confrontations and collapses were all there were to "Sonic Tales," it might grow tiresome. But while it could use some editing, it keeps delivering technical tour de forces that work like giddy shocks to the nervous system. Nishimura's round-bottomed, steel-framed "weeble wobble dress" (built by Colin Ernst) is one of them, lending her some real pivot-and-lunge power in her battle with those ninjas. Another is a humorous use of video projection too good to give away.

And then there are the costumes: tattered ghost garments and ornate bustles on Nishimura and Niederhauser, an open-sided skirt on Martinez that seems to leave her both nakedly vital and vulnerable. The whole costuming team deserves naming here: Christine Tschirgi, Mandy Greer, Anna Lange, Jenifer Falldine, Candace Frank; and Jennifer Zeyl (set design), Rainier Gröenhagen (lighting), Leo Mayberry (video) and Adam Michard (technical direction) merit special mention, too.

Still, there are a few issues in the show that could use ironing out. The "rock concert" portion of it stops it dead for a while. Maybe if Nishimura's vocals were more intelligible it would work better. And the stagehands are sometimes too visible as they move the fragments of the house around. Those moving doors and walls have an eerier effect when they seem to be gliding on and offstage of their own accord.

Some parts of "Sonic Tales" have been seen in fragmentary form in the past year, suggesting it may still be a work in progress. DAE has perfected most of its special effects and otherworldly imagery. But there's still some tweaking and tightening to do.

Note: Tonight's performance is followed by a party ($20 admission) featuring "Awesome" and DJ Tamara.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com