Last of My Species: Redmoon returns to outdoor spectacle

For the last few years, perhaps, it could be said that Redmoon Theatre was dabbling in narrative. The company that built its reputation in the mid-to-late-’90s on community-based spectacles, notably its annual All Hallows' Eve events in Logan Square and its movable Winter Pageants, took up residence a while back in a West Town industrial space dubbed Redmoon Central, where it applied its movement-based, puppet-infused, found-materials steampunk aesthetic to metatheatrical but story-centered works like The Cabinet, Hunchback and Boneyard Prayer, while its site-specific installations seemed to take a backseat.

Redmoon's presence in unexpected places has been ramping back up over the last year, starting with a revamped Winter Pageant last year and continuing through multiple appearances of its "Momentary Opera" over the summer. But the company's outdoor spectacle is back in a big way with Last of My Species: The Fearless Songs of Laarna Cortaan, which opened last night on Belmont Harbor and continues through next Sunday.

Cortaan is a Norwegian musician whom Redmoon encountered on a project in Holland last year; she's heavily influenced by European folk traditions and doesn't record her own music, though she encourages her fans to record live performances and expand upon them. The impression I got of her music in this production, which Redmoon bills as its first "concert," is that it's as if Björk had gone to the Old Town School.

The show itself, in fact, conceived and directed by Jim Lasko, Frank Maugeri and Vanessa Stalling, feels rather like a live-action version of a Michel Gondry-helmed Björk video. Shu Shubat serves as Cortaan's stand-in, while Alex Balestrieri acts as conductor for an army of ostensible musicians playing fake instruments and brandishing oversized masks.

Not everything in Last of My Species works. Though I liked the way the interjections of Seth Bockley, who portrays a Norwegian manager-type, allowed Redmoon to poke fun at its own whimsical tendencies (he says through a bullhorn at one particularly sentimental moment, "I hope you're not buying this"), I heard other audience members saying they found his interruptions annoying. But don't leave early, as some did last night: The best set piece comes near the end, when Tony Hernandez and Rani Waterman perform an astounding pas de deux on the end of a hydraulic fireman's ladder. I know these two performers' skills well enough to trust their abilities with aerial stunts. But the gasps from audience members around me had me on the edge of my seat all over again. If Cortaan's music isn't your bag—and I'll admit it didn't do much for me—this extended sequence is worth the very reasonable price of admission.