JOHN JESURUN’S FIREFALL AT DTW

FEBRUARY 4-7 AT 7:30

POST SHOW TALK WITH JULIETTE MAPP ON FEB. 4

“Jesurun’s visionary new theater swoops into your mind violently…and vanishes leaving you dazed and tingling. A pleasure to watch.” – The Village Voice

John Jesurun’s groundbreaking pieces challenge perception through an intense integration of language, media, and space. A MacArthur Fellowship recipient, John’s new work FIREFALL confronts the intersection between harmony, uncertainty, and belief. Performers interact within a governing website structure that is antithetical to an agreed upon script. Unintentional “drama” materializes as they resist being absorbed by their own growing multi-dimensionality.

WITH: ALEX ANFANGER,RACHEL BELL,CLAIRE BUCKINGHAM,STEPHANIE AUSTIN GREEN,KYLE GRIFFITHS,RAY ROY,CHRIS WENDELKEN,BEN FORSTER/LIGHTING- JEFF NASH,TECH DESIGN- RAY ROY/PHOTO: PAULA COURT

JOHN JESURUN’S FIREFALL

TICKETS $26 (DISCOUNT $15)

at

DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP

219 WEST 19TH ST. NYC

212-924-0077 

dancetheaterworkshop.org

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Please just fucking kill me.

In the New Yorker review of Young Jean’s show at the Kitchen Hilton Als leads with:

One generally hesitates before identifying a new trend in the American theatre, largely because language has a tendency to fix and limit the joy one feels at witnessing the stops and starts, the moments of grace, and the moments of awkwardness in the work of a fledgling director, performer, or playwright. One senses, however, that the thirty-four-year-old playwright and director Young Jean Lee wouldn’t be content with inchoate praise for her work—work that is both explicitly political in content and often mundane in tone. Like her contemporaries the up-and-coming playwrights David Adjmi and Thomas Bradshaw (Bradshaw performed in one of Lee’s early pieces), Lee is a facetious provocateur; that is, she does whatever she can to get under our skin—with laughs and with raw, brutal talk that at times feels gratuitous, and is meant to.

Its not that I disagree. I don’t. Its just that this is so “after-the-fact”!

Young Jean Lee & Thomas Bradshaw both studied with Mac Wellman at Brooklyn College. She did a show at the Ontological and Mark Russell booked her at PS122. Mark had left by the time Young Jean’s show was being developed (Pullman, WA) and during that time I got to know both of them. And when  Young Jean brought Thomas by the office to talk about his work I pushed it through and supported it and advocated for it with Vallejo who went on to promote and foster both of these artists.  During my brief tenure at IRT I gave both Thomas and Young Jean residencies to develop the shows that Als ultimately wrote about in the New Yorker. Not to forget Soho Rep, Little Theater, The Brick, The Flea, BAX and all the other places that have supported these writers along the way and informed the discussions in and around the work.

The larger issue is that these artists, this idea, this “new trend” does not arise in a vacuum. There is a huge, rich, diverse, complicated, underfunded ecosystem where these “trends” are nurtured, explored, devised, discussed and refined. And it is NOT part of the mainstream theater world.  I started Culturebot to cover THAT world – and thus I’ve been writing – and talking –  about this “new trend in American theatre” for a long time.

Not to mention that both of these writers have been, at different times, featured in PRELUDE and that this past year we also featured Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and others who are totally cutting edge on this.

So okay, first off, Mr. Als – how about doing an article on PRELUDE this year? We would love to discuss current trends in American theater with you. Or how about an article on the ecology of downtown theater/performance where ALL the innovation comes from? How about helping downtown out a little bit by more by enlightening your readership about the essential role that “downtown” plays in the cultivation of new voices and investigation? 

Oh and Hey!! David Remnick! I know I didn’t go to an Ivy League school and I don’t have a master’s degree but if you’d like someone to cover the arts from the trenches and not the Ivory Tower, I’d be glad to help out.

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So now that I’ve discovered flyover i’m starting to get addicted. my original vision for Culturebot was to have this site be a portal/aggregator for a series of regional blogs (like the Gothamist family of blogs) but I’ve never been able to get the funding to make it happen. If any out of work MBAs with connections to VCs wanna meet with me, I’ve got a helluva business plan just looking for capital. It starts with the Culturebot web presence and builds out from there. Seriously. Even though the economy is in the crapper, this would be low-cost to implement and hugely scalable. Build it now for cheap and be in position when things get better. Seriously.

but anyway – i like the  flyover blog b/c it talks about arts in the flyover regions which most of the arts/culture establishment only hears from every so often. but with the increased costs of culture production in major metropolitan regions i think its important to increase regional presence in the national (and international) dialogue around the arts. in this day and age provincialism vs. cosmopolitanism should be moot.  we are all reassessing the limitations of place and physical presence in the creation of arts and culture – we should be having these discussions more often and more comprehensively.

So – on that note there are two posts on flyover I wanted to comment on. The first is called The Partisan Imagination: Does Being An Artist Make You Liberal? I have posted about that on Cbot numerous times – we hear that question a lot. I used to argue the point with colleagues frequently. But with the 100th Anniversary of Futurism rapidly approaching I think its time to really examine this. (Which is what RoseLee Goldberg will be doing in PERFORMA09 next fall!). But very briefly I will point out that Futurism, Modernist Nationalism and Fascism were deeply interconnected. 

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Italian nationalist movements, from the national radicalism of “La Voce” to futurist nationalism and fascism, fostered one of the strongest waves of European right-wing radicalism. The confrontation between nationalism and modernity is one of the main keys to understanding to the permutations of Italian radical nationalism from modernist avant-gardes up to the fascist regime.

I found the above quote in the precis of a book called “The Struggle for Modernity” and there’s an interesting article in the Harvard Crimson that analyzes the role of the arts at the “flaming motor” of Fascism and Nazism. Ezra Pound, Ayn Rand, Richard Wagner, Knut Hamsun, Leni Riefenstahl…. there are countless examples throughout history of deeply conservative, right wing and reactionary artists. Just because there don’t appear to be so many these days doesn’t mean that there isn’t precedent. Or that, by definition, artists must be liberal.

Its a good discussion – one that should be held on a more public stage and in a more meaningful way then just “empathy” or “democrat vs. republican”. At the end of the day the most salient point is that the arts mean something. it is not frivolity or luxury, the arts are how we express our visions of the world, they are kind of like a collective process of “creative visualization” (a shallow idea, i know, but apt) where we represent ourselves to ourselves and imagine what the world might become. 

The other post I wanted to comment on is called “Obama, Millenials and the ideals of Web 2.0“. Part of me is thrilled to see this discussion happening in the press outside of a big city. The little green monster of envy in me is shouting out because I have written so extensively about this and I’m just vain enough to feel that I, Culturebot, should be a talking head about this stuff in the MSM. Say it with me now, “Book Deal! Book Deal! Book Deal!” Maybe some creative visualization will manifest it for me. Oh and I’ve revised the essay referenced above but I need to revise it again – and tweak it for a more general audience. I know – I should really be publishing finished content on the blog … but there should be enough raw material in the five years of doing this to merit a small advance and an editor! Dude. The stories I could tell of a life in the downtown arts world! Sex! Drugs! Feuds! Debauchery! Jealousy! Genius! Its good stuff, people.

And now for something completely different… I saw an advert for the movie Underworld, Rise of the Lycans. I saw the first one and all of these movies baffle me. The kids, the millennials, they can access this stuff, but me, its just an incomprehensible clutter of images and loud noises. Not being a gamer I don’t understand video game logic and I either can’t follow the convoluted plot twists or there is a whole bunch of backstory that I’m not privy to.  I point this out because it freaks me out – I am actually old enough to “not get it”, to have almost no access point into this particular form of entertainment. I like werewolves and vampires, I like sci-fi and monster stuff, I like trashy movies and its not that I can’t enjoy the movies in some kind of A.D.D. way but I’m not going to suggest that I can make heads or tails out of what I’m watching.

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Downtown darling Ain Gordon got a commission from LexArts in Kentucky to create a show about Lexington. His research led him to discover the fascinating story of Samuel and Daphney Oldham who, in 1830, were the first free African-Americans to build their own home in Lexington, KY. Five years later, they disappeared, never to be heard from again. The house still stands – a mystery, a monument to the lost histories of the South and the subtle shifting sands of collective memory.

Gordon has crafted an eloquent, haunting and poetic monologue that imagines the Oldham’s story as told by Daphney, returned from the great beyond. This powerful new one-woman play with video is performed by Brooklyn’s own Michelle Hurst, presented by 651 Arts at the Irondale Center.

There’s a nice, in-depth article on the show at flyover (an artsjournal blog) and there are some MP3 interviews on the Kentucky-based arts blog of writer Rich Copely.

Mark your calendar and be sure to check it out!

651 ARTS and The Irondale Ensemble Project present

a Pick Up Performance Co(S.) production

in collaboration with LexArts

In This Place

Written and directed by Ain Gordon

Starring Michelle Hurst

January 29- 31 | February 6 & 7 | 7:30pm

at

The Irondale Center

85 South Oxford (between Lafayette & Fulton)

Brooklyn

Tickets: $20 | $15 students, seniors

www.651arts.org

www.irondale.org

www.theatermania.com

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From our pals at The Foundry:

OUT OF THE GLOBAL CITY LAUNCHES THIS SATURDAY

Over the past decades, New York City – alongside London, Tokyo and an increasing number of urban centers around the world – has emerged as a global city – a geographic node where global finance is organized, concentrated, re-dispersed, and circulated. Decisions made in these metropolitan centers impact the lives of countless people across the world. As the recent economic upheaval illustrates, this is simultaneously a powerful and vulnerable reality. In New York, we bear witness to the ways in which the basic elements of our livelihood – from work to housing to education to health care – are increasingly shaped by the needs of global finance that put profits before people.

Join us as we explore what living in the global city of New York means. Through this series, we hope to nurture deeper engagement between the arts and social justice sectors to imagine and work toward a more just city (and world).

WORK AND LABOR

SATURDAY, JANUARY 24TH

4-6PM

Spanish-English Interpretation

Childcare provided

Parish Hall at St. Mark’s Church

131 E. 10TH Street at the corner or 2ND Avenue.

RSVP TO: [email protected]

OR CALL: 212.777.1444

January’s launch will focus on how Work and Labor is organized in the global city – highlighting the dynamic work of immigrant workers centers alongside that of academics and media makers, including DAVID HARVEY, DOMESTIC WORKERS UNITED, ESTHER KAPLAN, MAX FRASER, RESTAURANT OPPORTUNITIES CENTER OF NEW YORK,AND VAMOS UNIDOS.

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From the University of Chicago/Obama Arts Team:

If you are a teaching artist in any discipline (visual arts, music, dance, theater, writing, etc) or manage teaching artists, register for the First National Teaching Artist Research Project at http://teachingartists.uchicago.edu/

The Obama campaign pledged to advance arts education and to create an Artists Corps, and that means the coming years will be important for teaching artists. What we learn through this study will help assure that new policies and practices create meaningful opportunities and real support for artists who do extraordinary work but who have rarely been recognized.  Whether you teach in a school or a community site (a church, a prison, a community art center, a youth or social service agency or a street corner), whatever your art form, whether you teach adults or childre n, we want to learn about your experience. The more artists we include in this research, the more inclusive, accurate, and helpful the study will be.

This study focuses on teaching artists who live or work in the metro areas of Boston, Providence, or Seattle, in Chicago, and in these California communities — the Bay Area (Alameda and San Francisco Counties), Los Angeles, San Diego, San Bernardino, Santa Cruz, Salinas, Bakersfield, and Humboldt County. So, if you’re a teaching artist, or if you run a program that hires teaching artists, and live or work in one of our study site areas, please use the above link to sign up!

Even if you are not a teaching artist, everyone can help us by forwarding this email to all of your contacts who are. Please feel free to contact NICK RABKIN if you have any questions or ideas of ways that we can reach out to more teaching artists.  All those who complete the survey will be given a free CD of two amazing stories about teaching artists from Ira Glass’ radio program ‘This American Life’.

About Nick Rabkin:  Nick was a member of the Obama campaign’s National Arts Policy Committee.  He wrote a terrific book on arts education, “Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century”.  Now he’s now overseeing the first national study of teaching artists and he needs your help.

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If you haven’t been out to Montclair’s PEAK PERFORMANCES series yet (shame on you!) but if you haven’t, this is a good reason to go. Auteur and Provocateur Jan Fabre is bringing the world premiere of his new work ORGY OF TOLERANCE.

It is surprisingly easy to get out to Montclair, the tickets are affordable, the theater space is fantastic and the programming is exciting and cutting-edge. 

I’ve been hearing a lot of good early word for this piece – go check it out!

Orgy of Tolerance

Jan Fabre

Troubleyn (Belgium)

Concept, direction, choreography and scenography: Jan Fabre

Dramaturgy: Miet Martens

Music, lyrics: Dag Taeldeman

Jan. 22nd & 23rd • 7:30PM

Jan. 24th • 8:00PM

Jan. 25th • 3:00PM

Alexander Kasser Theater

Jan Fabre returns to Peak Performances @ Montclair with a brand new work! Two years ago on the Alexander Kasser Theater stage, Fabre presented two premieres that received critical acclaim: Je Suis Sang and Quando L’Uomo Principale e Una Donna (based on the provocative work of Yves Klein where a single dancer goes from being male to female before your very eyes!). 

 

Reacting to the alarming growth of neo-fascism worldwide and particularly in Europe, Belgian artist Jan Fabre takes a provocative stand with his newest work: Orgy of Tolerance. With the numbing realization that he lives in an age of normalcy and neo-fascists – where nothing is forbidden anymore – his navel is knotted with the extremism of tolerance and like Monty Python, his new show pricks the bubble of instant gratification. 

 

Not suitable for children under 18 years of age. Please note that this performance contains nudity, profanity and adult subject matters.

 

“Truly surprising provocative imagery.”

- The New York Times

 

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says the Times.

The good news: they’ve signed a one-year lease with a mutual opt-out clause in June.

The bad: AD Robert Lyons is juggling a lot of balls in the air – the possibility that a long-term agreement can be reached with new owners Zar Property NY, the opportunity to move to another space, and the possibility of closing for good.

Want to help? Donate, or just go see the current Ohio piece, Target Margin’s Ten Blocks on the Camino Real. Runs through Jan 31.

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Another interesting thing to add to the calendar from Light Industry – I’ve never heard of them before but it sounds promising. From the press release:

Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project has begun as a series of events at Industry City in Sunset Park, each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually, Light Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings, performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the

presentation of time-based media and foster an ongoing dialogue amongst a wide range of artists and audiences within the city.

Rites of Return

Presented by Liza Johnson, Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, and Michael Rakowitz

Sunday, February 15, 2009 at 7:30pm

220 36th Street, 5th Floor – NEW SPACE

Brooklyn, New York

“Whether it is the bones immured in the Syrian fortifications, a word whose form or use reveals a custom, a narrative written by the witness of some scene, ancient or modern, what do we really mean by document, if it is not a ‘track,’ as it were – the mark, perceptible to the senses, which some phenomenon, in itself inaccessible, has left behind?”

 - Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft

“Little by little, belief became polluted, like the air and the water. The motive energy, always resistant but manipulable, finally begins to run out. People notice at the same time that no one knows what it is.”

 - Michel de Certeau, “Believing and Making People Believe”

This evening features three artists whose work is linked by its situation on the ever-shifting border between documentary investigation, aesthetic contemplation, and critical play. Formed by travels in war-torn and storm-ravaged sites beyond the ken of CNN, the film, video, and visual art of Liza Johnson, Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, and Michael Rakowitz offers a compelling vision of contemporary history between dreamworld and catastrophe. The recent and in-progress work presented tonight retrieves real and imagined artifacts from these ruins, creating, in the process, gestural and memorial ruins of another kind. And they testify to the enduing power, in a secular age, of the rituals of “believing and making people believe,” a power that haunts and inspires the work of documentary art in the age of mechanical destruction.

more info after the jump….

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if you’re in London – this look s cool:

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