Concert Review: Talkshow at Roulette

When I sat down in my second-row seat at Roulette for Talk Show, a performance piece by artists Steph Richards and Qasim Naqvi, featuring Steven Wendt, I was first struck by the perfect ambiguity before me. The stage was outfitted as one might expect for a musical performance, with a few exceptions. At stage right sat a timpani, a snare, an assortment of horns, a baking sheet, and what appeared to be a bowl of water; at stage left, a drum kit and a synthesizer with its various colorful patches. Wendt, dressed in a royal blue-collar jumpsuit, wore the look of a mechanic, of a stagehand tasked with setting up cameras and audio-visual equipment who would retreat backstage before the real performers entered. He maneuvered his equipment with humorous mastery, pointing his camera at audience members and beaming them up on the screen behind the stage, superimposed upon a compilation of muted talk show clips, catching real-time reactions not unlike the jumbotron at a basketball game. The audience members—those who noticed they were being filmed—responded with amusement, waving to the camera and thereby the rest of the audience, but those who weren’t paying attention, looking the other way, were spied on by Wendt’s eye and the rest of us by proxy. With this, I wondered if by purchasing tickets and attending the event we implicitly consented to be recorded, and, in a way, objectified for the purpose of the show. 

The pre-show atmosphere, the makeup of the stage, and Wendt’s work at once ran conventional and mischievous—ambiguous in that the performance, based on first looks, could have gone in a number of ways. Where I initially wondered whether Wendt was part of the performance or just a clever, hired cameraman, his involvement was confirmed when Richards and Naqvi walked onstage wearing matching royal blue chore coats. I thought then of the Blue Man Group, the avant-garde performance art company which combines non-traditional musical performance, comedy, and theatrics to create a distinctly strange show—and whose mute members paint themselves a similar shade of royal blue. With what little I knew of Talk Show, I could tell from the moment Richards and Naqvi walked on stage that we were in for something similarly strange.

Richards entered first, walking directly into a beam of light cast by Wendt. Trumpet in one hand, she used the other to shield her face, in effect creating a large hand-shaped shadow on the wall behind her. When she assumed her station at stage right, she turned on the snare, aimed the bell of her trumpet directly at its head, and blew directly into it a short blare, its rattling reverberation the first sound of the performance. As she continued, Naqvi entered, took his seat at the drum kit, planted his face on his own snare, and blew on it. 

For the remainder of the performance, Richards and Naqvi played their respective instruments in some expected and many irreverent ways. Naqvi seemed to play his seat and the legs of his drum kit as if they were standard percussion instruments; Richards played with water, pouring it into her trumpet, submerging its bell in the bowl. What began to crystallize for me was how the fragmentation of their playing mirrored the hollow chatter of the American talk show. In the hands of Richards and Naqvi, sound did not unfold in melodic arcs, but in interruptions: blasts cut short, rhythms abandoned mid-pattern, manic, urgent gestures collapsed into noise. Their performance offered bursts of intensity that never quite resolved into a larger narrative, but hung in the air like abandoned trains of thought; yet, it also offered moments of vulnerability. At times, silence permeated the room, and through her horns Richards mimicked the sound of crying, of the frustration that comes with blowing all of the air in one's lungs out in service of music, only to be let down by a missing valve and the sound of air coursing through an empty chamber—a hot, disheartened breathlessness.

Against this sonic disjointedness, Wendt’s camera took on a different directive. Once the audience disappeared from the feed, the performers were cropped, magnified, and mirrored in what I can only describe as a kaleidoscopic celestial event: at once beautiful and disturbing in its insistence on the individual. The camera seemed to surveil rather than document, exemplified by Richards doing a series of theatrical double takes, as if checking to see if she was still being watched. 

In this way, the piece began to mirror the darker logic of the talk show: the commodification of private gestures for the sake of spectacle. On daytime television shows like Maury, when non-celebrities are invited onstage to share their story, their heartbreak, betrayal, addiction, and humiliation are edited, repackaged, and broadcast for public consumption and corporate profit. The purpose of talk shows is not resolution, but exposure. The disjointedness of Richards’ and Naqvi’s music, combined with Wendt’s fractalized, almost intrusive camera work, creates a non-traditional shadowcast, where the performers play out the spectacle of the American talk show through sound and image that at once mirrors the intensity and vulnerability of bearing one’s secrets on public television. 

What makes Talk Show so effective is that it recreates discomfort without anesthetizing it. Broadcast talk shows are so normalized and embedded within American media culture that the viewer rarely pauses to consider the ethical tension at their core. The empathic disturbance is smoothed over by commercial breaks and studio applause. At Roulette, however, the discomfort lingered. The audience seemed at a loss for how to respond, and it is from this discomfort that Talk Show derives its strength.