Paul Besaw’s New Work ‘Buzz & Hum’ Reimagines Altered States of Consciousness

What happens in the mind of someone who’s dying? Where do one’s thoughts go when experiencing dementia, hallucinations, a coma or insomnia?

A few years ago, Paul Besaw visited a dear friend who was dying from brain tumors. As he sat by her hospital bed, surrounded by buzzing, humming machinery, he wondered what she was thinking or imagining and whether she was suffering. In response to this moment, he began to create a performance piece that would reframe how he conceived of her experience and that of anyone in an altered state not of their choosing.

The work he created “was a really intentional rescripting of what we tend to think about suffering or dying,” Besaw said. “It became a way for me to imagine a beautiful and wondrous world that is inaccessible to us.”

The professor and interim chair of the University of Vermont’s Department of Theatre and Dance directs Buzz & Hum this Friday and Saturday, April 22 and 23, at Black Box Theater at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center in Burlington. Presented by a group of dance, music and theater artists called Dance Tramp, the piece is billed as “two sound-movement-text-light experiments in action.”

Buzz & Hum consists of two parts: “The Otologists” and “The Mesmerists.” In the real world, an otologist is a scientist of the ear and its diseases, and a mesmerist is one who hypnotizes people. In the world of Buzz & Hum, however, these professionals navigate a quirky, sad, curious and sometimes hilarious world of altered states — their own and others’.

“If you think of these pieces as character studies, they are very strange characters — especially the otologists,” Besaw explained.

The piece is performed by Julian Barnett, an assistant professor and resident choreographer in the UVM dance program; Rep. Selene Colburn (P-Burlington), a UVM associate library professor and dancer/choreographer; and Jason Lambert, a professional actor who teaches in New Hampshire’s Contoocook Valley School District.

While rehearsing a few weeks ago — clad in pajamas, rolling about on the floor and sticking their fingers in each other’s ears — the performers portrayed characters who seemed captive in their own world, struggling with how to communicate.

“We’re getting someone else’s attention through gestures, then waiting for the consequence,” Barnett said. At one point in the choreographed piece, a dancer draws lovingly on another, who grimaces in agony. “You’re trying to gauge the person, measuring comfort or what their thresholds are,” he explained.

While testing, observing and assessing, the dancers deftly pull viewers into a state of curiosity and even confusion: Are they scientists doing research, patients in a psychiatric ward, dreamers sleepwalking? Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?

Besaw and the performers began creating the work last year, using stylized movements from a devised theater piece Besaw had worked on in 2012. It’s based on Thomas Bernhard’s The Lime Works, a “very bizarre, really dark novel,” Besaw noted, about a man who does sound experiments on his wife. The complexity of the source material for “The Otologists” is palpable in the piece, to fascinating effect.

“The Mesmerists,” the second work in Buzz & Hum, deepens the journey into another world. Its genesis came in a 2018 performance Besaw directed in which a scored improvisation allowed three artists expansive freedom.

Clare Byrne, a musician and former UVM dance instructor now based in Guilford, Conn.; Chong Ho Kim, a UVM lecturer in dance and theater and Besaw’s wife; and Randal Pierce, an educator, music director and composer, performed in the former Maglianero Café space in Burlington. The score required that Pierce have his eyes open but that Byrne and Kim have theirs closed, relying only on hearing and touch to navigate the intimate space.

The new work is composed of three duets: a central one that builds on Byrne and Kim’s 2018 experience; a second by dancer, bodyworker and homesteader Avi Waring with dancer/choreographer Willow Wonder; and a third by composer and UVM music lecturer Matt LaRocca with composer/performer/educator Kyle Saulnier. The duets often happen simultaneously onstage, and they include choreographed and improvised dance, scored and improvised music, theater, and monologues.

The artists, all Vermonters but for Byrne, began working on the piece in the summer of 2019; performances scheduled in 2020 and 2021 were canceled due to the pandemic.

The artists in each duet have long collaborated with each other, Byrne noted: “Paul is bringing these existing intensities and exploiting them in a good way.”

“He built a very well-constructed and specific sandbox for us to play in,” LaRocca added, “to bring out that world that he wanted to create.”

Even more than “The Otologists,” “The Mesmerists” reflects Besaw’s desire to rewrite his friend’s experience of dying as “something completely beautiful and otherworldly,” he said.

Byrne feels that the work has a persuasive quality. “We’re trying to engage the audience as characters and bringing them into … a world that may happen in a sleep state or … a hypnotized state,” she said. “Things do not make sense, and things aren’t explained. It’s like a dream: Oh, it makes sense that I’m wearing just my underwear into the bank.”

LaRocca called it “a fantastical world” in which strange things seem normal. The music segues from “scored pieces to complete improvisations to 1950s doo-wop to a bit of almost noise,” he said. He plays electric viola and guitar, Saulnier plays upright bass and baritone saxophone, and all of the performers sing. The leaps from genre to genre are “somehow cohesive,” LaRocca observed, “because it’s a world that allows us freedom to do things that we might not do otherwise.”

It’s also a world that invites the performers to draw on their own experiences of loss and disorientation. Byrne and Kim each deliver long monologues that Besaw wrote — “weird recitations on kinds of experiences or communication,” he said. He drew in part from witnessing his late father’s dementia and his mother-in-law’s current dementia.

Kim’s mother lost a lot of her memory during a nine-month period of the pandemic when she couldn’t see her family. She no longer recognizes Kim, which raises questions for Kim about their relationship and her mother’s experience. Kim finds elements of the monologues mysterious and very sad. “Is this where she’s at, if she could describe things?” she wonders.

But partaking in “The Mesmerists” has helped Kim process her mother’s condition; she even finds the monologues funny at times.

Byrne agreed: “There’s a lot of lightness. Things are coming out of left field, so it tickles your funny bone.”

A conversation Besaw had with his daughter, Lily, inspired one of the monologues. Lily wondered whether her grandmother could talk to aliens, and it got him thinking about everything that people lose to dementia — and all that they might gain, unbeknownst to us.

“I needed to get myself out of a perpetual dark imagining of these states,” Besaw said. “I think it’s healthy for us to imagine other possibilities.”

This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2022.

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