At the q-staff Theatre

June 6 - 14


by Kristen Loree
A One Person Acapella Opera in Twenty-Four Personalities
Based on a true story

Sol Arts is back! VIXIN, Kristen Loree's one-woman show, is Sol Arts' first venture into co-producing with other venues around town, after the close of the Sol Arts Performance Space in December 2007. Sol Arts' home for VIXIN is q-Staff, the perfect intimate setting for what creator and performer Kristen Loree describes as "A One Person Acapella Opera in twenty-four personalities. Based on a true story." Incorporating masks, dance, and unbelievable vocal aerobatics, VIXIN lets the audience witness Loree's amazing transformations from one character to another. Seven years in the making, VIXIN is reborn, exploring sexuality, gender and above all - love!

Kristen Loree is a native New Mexican who has been studying creativity, performance and vocology her entire life. She has performed locally and nationally on stage, in concert halls and in film. She directs plays for children and adults and spends her free time writing songs. Kristen has been teaching voice and performance techniques at UNM and privately for the past 13 years. She also works with the Santa Fe Opera in their Student Produced Opera Program. She is a founding member and Artistic Coordinator of Sol Arts.

Sunday, June 8, 2008
Albuquerque Journal

'Vixin' is Engaging Post-Modern Theater
By Marissa Greenberg

"Vixin," a SolArts Production at the q-Staff Theatre, opens with infancy and concludes with the word "dead." But this one-person show, created and performed by Kristen Loree, is not a straightforward presentation of life. In this sense, "Vixin" does not disappoint as a compact and engaging example of postmodern theater.

Whereas traditional drama presents a logical narrative that unfolds through the interaction of identifiable persons, postmodern theater tends to present neither a linear storyline nor everyday characters.

"Vixin" offers abstract glimpses of many stages of life: adolescent alienation, soul-searching young adulthood, the liberation of maturity.

In "Vixin," Loree welcomes the audience into her consciousness. She shares her thoughts and experiences as fragments that challenge the audience to determine their relationship with one another and with reality. The audience may giggle in amusement or discomfort, but it cannot look away or disengage.

Like much postmodern theater, "Vixin" is based in ambiguity and exchange. It is not drama for the intellectually lazy.

Loree creates 24 personalities to depict dominant events and themes from her life. "Vixin" is touted as "based on a true story."

These impersonations range from a baby to a French femme, from a frog to the eponymous Vixin, and each is vivid and engrossing.

Take Vixin, for example. A drama queen in all senses of the phrase, Vixin speaks in a soft, almost girlish voice and moves gracefully in 8-inch red heels.

She elicits laughter when she brings audience members onto the stage and attempts to seduce them. Yet she also delivers lines that, like maxims, are pithy and unflinching assessments of life: "a moment is not a monument," "the erotic is banal" and repeatedly, "the ideal is not real."

"Vixin" takes the form of a one-act acapella opera. Loree has an impressive vocal range and a resonant voice.

One of the show's most memorable episodes is a song about suicide that Loree, recoiling upstage and clad only a nude leotard, performs in a beautiful yet harrowing voice.

How should we, the audience, interpret such an expression of beauty and pain? In a traditional play, the answer is relatively simple: we feel compassion; maybe we weep. But "Vixin" forestalls such responses.

Loree's performance is pointedly not about us, except in its intent to confront our ideas about gender, sexuality and love.

As director Laira Morgan explains, like other experimental performances put on by SolArts, "Vixin" pushes boundaries.

It is perhaps to signal this estrangement from conventional thought that the performance ends with Loree exiting and shutting the stage doors behind her. Or perhaps it indicates her efforts to move forward in life. As the ambiguity of this ending shows, "Vixin" invites the audience to question and offers no simple answers.

VIXIN has four performances only
June 6, 7, 13, 14 at 8 pm.

Saturday, June 7th is a special "Maintain the Afterglow" reception with the artist and other members of Sol Arts. There will be refreshments, live entertainment from The Dolls, and a chance to catch up with the Sol Arts' folks and find out what is next for them. This is an opportunity to show your support for Sol Arts by purchasing a $20 ticket that includes the price of the 8 pm performance.

Tickets for the performance alone are $12 on all four nights.
Available at the q-Staff box office, 4819 Central Ave. NE.