VB Previz #48 - Rock the Casbah - I Rez, Therefore I Am

Can you believe that 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Joe Strummer?

In one of the great ironies of human not-paying-attentionfulness, his band The Clash, you know the band that so vocally critiqued militarism, has had their song Rock the Casbah, a song about fighter pilots refusing to follow the order to drop bombs and playing rock music in their cockpits instead, both heralded as one of the greatest “conservative rock songs” of all time, and had “Rock the Casbah” painted on a bomb the United States dropped on Iraq?!

In the VB/Company performance work Rock the Casbah, we celebrate the sexy paramilitary elegance that is geopolitics in the 21st century.

Grab your beret and your security clearance, forget about Bradley Manning, let’s clash!

PERFORMANCE:
[5] squads of [6] uniformed personnel are positioned 2012 meters above a ground level star. The runway at Booville would be great. At performance time the squads, one-by-one, parachute down and stand at attention in the outer vertexes of the star. They stand for a long time. They look great. Eventually, timers unseen by the audience, suddenly call one of the teams to action. By random selection the team may be called on to:

• shoot the other teams with Squirt Guns
• hit the other teams in a 1-sided Pillow Fight
• Throw Cheese at the other teams
• Dance, Freestyle
• Dance, Partner (cross color!)
They’ll do this activity with great intensity for 120 seconds… then freeze where they are… until the next time they or others are called to action.

LOCATION / WARDROBE
Many locations will work well. A return visit to our friends at the Booville Skydiving Sim where, two years ago, we performed VB17 – Dark Side of the Moon, would be really nice.

It would also be nice to finally create the project that Jackie Graves and I discussed just about this time last summer and was, in fact, inspired by her deliciously wicked Poison outfit.

Women: Graves Poison
Men: Graves Escape
Everyone: Graves Beret!