Shimmy Shimmy: Kerrilee’s Goal is Exaltation
The decorous sunken lawn in front of Pierre Lafond is ordinarily a still point of shade-dappled peace, the calming eye of any given day’s hurricane. The trees lean in with leafy solicitude, birdsong seasons the scented air, and the good people of Montecito engage in lively conversation, gesturing and gabbing. Into this bucolic set piece we drop the improbable Kerrilee Gore, a loquacious, gamma-flinging dynamo.
“You’ll see the lost, but you will somehow feel found,” she says excitedly, and her intensity charges the air. Gore – a playwright, dancer, and argonaut – is in the throes. It’s a lovely thing. “You’ll be turned on to parts of your mind you may not have known existed. Your heart may pound with a strange, haunting charm. You’ll dig deep and find the forgotten part of you – but you will feel…” In the grassy background a couple of caffeinated terriers have stopped their manic tail-chasing and are momentarily staring this way. If our pets really can perceive our auras, Kerrilee’s seems to be of the terrier-stunning variety. I’m picturing her energy field as a Roy Lichtenstein KAPOW! in pulsating midnight blue.
Kerrilee Gore is an Artist, yes – but may be better understood as a solar flare in human form. A fiercely creative polymorph who fled her Massachusetts hometown at 18 to wholly reinvent herself, Gore the artist has long been beholden to one idea: throwing fuel on the fire of human exaltation. There are few performance avenues she hasn’t explored in pursuit of this talisman. Her themes sing the oblique, twilit corners of the human pageant.
“Everyone always views me as this bright, cheery, blonde girl,” Gore says cheerily, with suitably furrowed brow. “But I’ve always loved dark and sexy.” She quickly reconnoiters. “I like sexy, not racy. And I don’t like raunchy. I gravitate to haunting, strange, dark… outlier things – it’s in the way I dress, it’s in the music I prefer.” Like many a Montecito mom (yeah), Kerrilee Gore loves Throbbing Gristle, for instance. This is not a culinary reference.
When the Lights Go Out (the virtues of freefall)
A Kerrilee Gore/Shimmy Shimmy production bends the metronome of daily life, the mesmerizing timekeeper under whose spell we check the mail, tie our shoes, and placidly make endless egg salad sandwiches. Strange and gorgeous truths burble just under the neatly polished Formica® surface of things, and this is Gore’s artistic landscape. “It can be about making people feel uncomfortable – in a good way,” Gore says. “Everybody needs that. It makes you think about a friend, it makes you think about yourself, about what we’re all going through.”
Under Gore’s proscenium things happen. Unpredictable things. Her stage productions can be like the towering thrill ride your friend cajoled you into boarding – an interval of corkscrewing, gasping, plunging rocket sled panic followed by Oh my G*d!! LET’S GO AGAIN! The spirit-tweaking virtues of freefall can’t be overstated.
Gore’s signature piece is an unclassifiable multimedia stage extravaganza called When the Lights Go Out. Created, Written, and Directed by Gore – with Choreography & Dance Direction by Jason and Valeree Young of 8 & 1 Creative – and born once upon a time of Gore’s fraught artistic journey, the show is a sort of living emblem of the artist’s willful rebirth. As an elaborately staged performance piece, When the Lights Go Out may be best described as a Cabaret of the Id.
“I just want people to feel, and feel BIG,” Gore says. She’s not kidding. The piece has a linear narrative, but one subsumed in and colorized by otherworldly stage effects, graceful aerialists, heart-seizing choreography (some of it nearly Fosse-adjacent), additive film clips, dramatically pointed vignettes, eyebrow arching humor, and – yeah – a hair hang artist.
When the Lights Go Out runs October 3 – October 6. Where, you ask? In a “…Secret Underground Location in downtown Santa Barbara. Details to follow upon purchasing ticket.” Okay? Some of this madness surely prompts the reasonable query; “Who is this Kerrilee Gore, and what on Earth is going on?”
Indeed.
Miami Dice (born artist reaches teens, quits town)
“I was a gymnast. I grew up in a really small town in Massachusetts and literally dreamed about getting out of there the second I could. And I did, at 18. Two weeks out of high school I drove myself to Miami.” Gore had traded gymnastics for dance at 13 and had thrown herself at the new discipline, paying for her own lessons and absolutely killing it as hour after hour she twirled around her parent’s basement before thousands of appreciative, wholly imaginary attendees. A dervish of determination, Kerrilee would shortly find her actual audience, herself, and her love. But why Miami?
“It’s a big city. It didn’t feel like America. It felt like another world loaded with Haitians, Argentinians, European expats people, such a mix of friends! South Beach was a melting pot of cultures. I danced – and then I moved to New York City and I studied theater.”
Taking a bite of the Big Apple seems almost a rite of passage for the earnest performer, whatever the genre. “I’m a horrible actress,” Gore promptly offers with a rueful grin. Only the enviably centered launch this sort of clay pigeon with the express purpose of laughingly shooting it down. “Then I moved to L.A. and started dancing in various places and joined Zen Arts.” In short order she became Zen Arts’ Dance Director.
When she received a job offer in Santa Barbara it seemed too good to be true. New owners of the perennially confused Savoy Hotel on lower State St. hired Kerrilee to put something together there as Entertainment Director. “I created ‘Gypzy Suite,’ Gore says avidly, with a touch of foreboding. An aerialist, a burlesque ninja, a miracle guy on stilts, the 40 Deuce Jazz Quartet, a famous Argentine Dancer – Gore ideated and wrote and laboriously constructed a seamless entertainment literally like no other, a dazzling cirque of talent, and in the perfect venue; the 19th century Italianate jewel in the crown of State Street’s club district. The owners, though, weren’t sure what they had on their hands, perhaps understandably. The show tanked in spectacular fashion, starved of publicity. Never mind. Kerrilee would soon fall head over heels in love with another artist – and come up with a new mission statement.
Everything Counts
“I’d stopped dancing,” Kerrilee says of a corner-turning moment now ten years past. Marital bliss had rechanneled her creative impulse and her old energies were madly waving hands for attention. “I’d never not worked. I’ve never not been in a world where you’re hustling jobs and dancing and creating.” Gore is one half of “an art couple” (in my own awkward parlance) – two creatives dedicated to each other, to family, and to the crucible of art; an enviable union. Gore’s husband is a successful songwriter whose tune “People are People” was an epochal hit for his band at a time when modern music was reaching a chimeric, melodic zenith. To be crystal clear, “People are People” is not the Streisand hit from Funny Girl.
“Watching him perform night after night,” Gore recounts of the decade-old epiphany in the wings of her dear pal’s rock show. “… I was like, oh, this is so beautiful and so amazing. I need to get back to my own work! So I kind of put all that energy towards writing When the Lights Go Out, so that when we got home from the tour I could pour myself into that.” What began as a writing experiment would become Gore’s north star. Performed and retooled at various brave venues for a decade (Carr Winery, the Lobero), it is coming to a Black Box near you.
Kerrilee Gore has written and directed Stand by Mother, Random Acts of Madness, and has been busily rebuilding her formative work for a new debut at her very own Black Box theater… somewhere in Santa Barbara. There’s more. From 2015 to 2018, Gore was certified court appointed special advocate for local nonprofit, CASA. She was talent director for Teen Dance Star, and sat on the board of the Arts Mentorship Program for five years, serving as President in 2020. She is presently Board Co-President of teen-burnishing nonprofit AHA! Busy? Yuh huh.Shimmy Shimmy is the production company that will frame and formalize Gore’s creative oeuvre going forward. Her work would not be mistaken for anyone else’s. Nor her directorial chit-chat.
“This is the last time people will ever see this version of When the Lights Go Out. It’s been playing for a decade, building and building and building. Last time the girl was hung 20 feet from her hair. This time I have 12-foot ceilings, so it’s going to be a little more intimate…”
When the Lights Go Out
October 3-6, 2024
Doors 7:00 pm
Show 7:30 pm
Please Uber or street park
Secret Underground Location in downtown Santa Barbara details to follow upon purchasing ticket
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