Review: Soul Siren Playhouse's Immersive DEATH JAM Challenges the Senses with a Provocative Original Work

What is one’s stream of consciousness when transitioning from life to death? Do visions of past life flash before the eyes? Cameron Jamarr Davis’ multi-sensory Death Jam sits in that altered state between life and death. Death Jam defies traditional theatrical storytelling. It is hypnotic, experiential, and experimental performance art that is equal parts dramatic oration and poetic reading.

Davis penned and performs the 80-minute cerebral self-examination. The production opens with the lead character, known only as Teller, celebrating his birthday in dance club. The pounding beats and pulsating rhythms are interrupted by a gunshot. The Teller experiences trauma and finds themself lost, examining thoughts and memories, in a surreal space.

The existential Death Jam challenges senses of Sight, Sound, and smell. Cinematic images flash on an expansive movie theater size screen through a foggy haze of theatrical smoke. Concert and club like lightning flashes and dances to beat of hip-hop, pop, and African rhythms. The faint smell of incense lingers in the theatre.

The sole set piece, standing above stairstep-like square risers, is an Asian-inspired Butsudan, Bàn thò, or Cítáng. The ancestral altar holds pictures and artifacts from the Teller’s life. As the Teller contemplates mortality, the altar’s artifacts invoke memories of family members and friends, who transitioned from life to death, in the presence of the protagonist.

The Teller is visited by a ghost-like masculine shadow, played by Stephan Griffin, in a black body suit. The expressionless Shadow, fully cloaked, retrieves items from the ancestral altar resurrecting the Teller’s memories. Griffin uses only physicality to take the audiences to the deepest recesses of the Teller’s mind.

Death Jam is more a theatrical experience than storytelling. It is poetry and dramatic reading supported by modernistic lighting, sound, and video projections. Davis impresses with his command of the text and his vocal and physical interpretation. Bradford Lewis Rolen’s direction and set design, Bryant Powell’s transformative lighting design, and Davis’s sound and projection design engulf the audience into the Teller’s unearthly and dreamlike state.

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