So maybe two years ago Yoshiko Chuma told me about the project she was working on. She’d be invited (or somehow put in touch with) the Palestinian Dance Troupe El-Funoun from Ramallah and wanted to go work with them, make a piece and bring it back. She couldn’t find funding – as far as I know – but went ahead anyway. Over the past few years she has been there, working with the company and making material, experiencing life in Ramallah and building relationships.

From May 9-12, 2012, for 5 performances, she will present that work at LaMama FOR FREE.

From the release:

Intentionally confusing documentation with history, Chuma tasks El-Funoun members Sari Husseini and Ana Abu Oun and NYC-based talents Miriam Parker, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Saori Tsukada-—three performers who have never been to Palestine—with re-creating segments from her own documented works and experiences in Ramallah, Palestine. Chuma assembles a mosaic of images and interviews which pertain to pain and longing, as if framing theater with barbed wire. Traditional dance is juxtaposed with contemporary movement, video projection and spoken text in a borderless environment constantly reshaped by sculptural objects. Yoshiko Chuma herself performs on the backdrop of Robert Flynt’s photography.

I’ve long been a fan of Chuma’s work – it is a mix of highly structured and totally chaotic, a frenzy of media and dance, always challenging the audience to engage in an overwhelm of information and imagery. I imagine this will be a very compelling project.

All performances are free, but require reservations which you can make here.

SHOW INFO:

Love Story, Palestine
Concept, Design, and Choreography by Yoshiko Chuma

May 9-12, 2012
Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Ave and Bowery)
Part of La MaMa Moves! Festival/ 50th Anniversary Season

Featuring members of Palestinian Dance Troupe El-Funoun from Ramallah
In association with ROOT CULTURE in Kamakura, Japan.

Dance by Miriam Parker, Saori Tsukada, Tatyana Tenenbaum,
Ryuji Yamaguchi, Sari Husseini, Anas Abu Oun and Yoshiko Chuma
Music by Sizzle Ohtaka, Aska Kaneko with Robert Black
Photography by Robert Flynt

Text excerpts from “Sayonara, Gangsters” by Genichiro Takahashi
Sound Design excerpts from “6 Seconds in Ramallah” by Koji Setoh
‘Dabke’ Choreography by El-Funoun Dance Troupe
5 monitors perform video documentation
5 moveable panels and 30′x30′ tarps fill the space

Popularity: 3% [?]

How many dance companies have websites in English, Spanish, Italian and Magyar? Not many. Well, at least one – the BLOOM! Dance Collective. This international ensemble with artists from Hungary, Spain, and Italy will perform its award-winning work CITY, a “bold and politically charged dance-theater piece” at The Abrons Arts Center on April 27–28, 2012 at 8PM.

From the press release:

Founded in 2009 and acclaimed for its sharp wit, BLOOM! draws on the diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds of its members to build thought-provoking collaborative performance pieces. Conceived as a “political pamphlet entwined with movement,” CITY grapples with the dynamics of power, fear, manipulation, and faith, and the consequences of social conformity. Wittily playing with conventions of individual versus group behavior, CITY was created and is performed by Viktória Dányi, Csaba Molnár, Tímea Sebestyén, Moreno Solinas, and Igor Urzelai.

Looks interesting! And if Jay Wegman says it’s good, we’ll trust him.

Following the New York premiere, BLOOM! will perform CITY in Philadelphia (May 3–4), presented by Thirdbird at Arts Bank, and in Pittsburgh (May 10–13) at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, as part of the fourth annual newMoves Contemporary Dance Festival

Popularity: 3% [?]

As part of Exit Art’s Collective / Performative group exhibit, Culturebot will present a group project called Ephemeral Evidence.

Ephemeral Evidence consists of a series of collaborative explorations between writers and performing artists to investigate the relationship between practice and skill in performance-making, object-making and context. We propose an experiment in which objects are created directly from the result of the performing artist’s practice – their skilled application of learned techniques. Does the object, existing as residue of the ephemeral event, gain meaning as document or value object in itself? Both? How does the critical dialogue around the performance process and object inform our perception and valuation of the art?

The writer/artist pairs are Aretha Aoki with Maura Donohue, Rebecca Davis with Aaron Mattocks, Arturo Vidich with Jeremy M. Barker and Sarah Rosner & the AO Movement Collective with Alyssa Alpine.

The installations will be durational throughout the day with culminating performances at 5PM.

Saturday, April 21st, the closing day of the exhibit, will feature an all-day display of the created objects, a special performance by Dan Safer and Mike Mikos of Witness Relocation and conclude with COME OVER TO OUR PLACE (5PM) hosted by Andy Horwitz and Chloë Bass which re-creates the post-show hang-out as performance event, bringing together the artists and writers of EPHEMERAL EVIDENCE with other artists, writers, critics and passers-by to discuss the ideas around the exhibit and what it means to be making it at Exit Art, now. Guests are invited to participate, watch, or both. Food and booze will be served.

Ephemeral Evidence will occur on the following schedule:

Tuesday April 17

THE SOLO PROJECT
Aretha Aoki with Maura Donohue

THE SOLO PROJECT is a personal story that attempts to reach beyond the personality of the solo dancer, and will continue Aretha’s interest in the formation of narrative through choreographic structure. Can the dance act as language? Can a visual or literary text be movement?

By bringing together movement, text, sound and video, Aoki’s work allows for the formation of spaces where the unexpected can emerge. She is interested in layering and juxtaposing visual, written and embodied forms to both generate and disturb a sense of character, place and narrative, and often engage in collaboration with artists—dancers, writers and composers–to allow these tensions to surface. Along with this collaborative process, her practice explores disciplinary limits and the ways that dance can interact with other forms without prioritizing one over another, and rather, informing and extending the possibilities each.

Wednesday April 18

NEWS
Rebecca Davis with Aaron Mattocks

NEWS (working title) is a durational performance that yields a large-scale drawing. Wearing shoes constructed from newspaper, performers walk continuously in a circle on a large sheet of white paper throughout the day until the gallery closes. Over time, the newspaper ink rubs into the white paper, leaving a visual presence of the path walked by the performers.

The work creates a simultaneous physical construction and deconstruction (walking destroys the shoes but creates the drawing) and also a symbolic one—as the drawing underfoot becomes increasingly dark, the headlines from which it was created fade in our collective memories.

Thursday April 19

NOBODY IS PERFECT BUT YOU COME CLOSE
Arturo Vidich with Jeremy M. Barker

The best listener is one who never talks back. As a statement both for and against the uncollectible nature of performance, Vidich will address the septic time bomb of a roadkill victim as a live art object, and fellow performer. The roadkill will absorb the emotions and thoughts of the performer, like a morbid piggy bank, as well as stand in for other objects and people. The event will be thoroughly captured on video, with emphasis on collapsing the hierarchy of live performance, documentation of performance, and performance made for video. During the day, the public will be able to contribute to the performance by teaching something to the performer, or through conversation. Sonic, tactile, and video elements will be prepared on-site, as well as creating the performance score, which will be enacted at 5pm.

Friday April 20

barrish: the scores
Sarah Rosner & the AO Movement Collective with Alyssa Alpine

This installation manifests itself as an open rehearsal, followed by a series of workshops in which participants are invited into the AOMC’s current work in process, barrish, to embody and digest select movement-based improvisational scores central to the work’s logic and aesthetic.

Participants are invited to wrestle with unleashing hysteria and becoming “skinless”, navigating the intimacy of being sewn to another performer for “the string score”, queering notions of masculine certainty and female acquiescence by “glaciering”, or to simply bear witness to the practice and discussion surrounding these scores as they are translated by new bodies.

This exploring/embodying/digestion process both artifacts the score (via the collected/created images, words, and visual intake of the work) and displaces the work’s ephemerality outside of its former boundaries into/onto the performative bodies of those participating. Does teaching a score make performative work less ephemeral? What about verbalizing the concrete ideas, logic, and rules behind the more abstract movements? What parts stick and what parts evaporate? Are these potentially viable strategies for making ephemeral art last?

Taught/Rehearsed by performers Lillie De, Leah Ives, and Emily Skillings, and choreographer/artistic director Sarah A.O. Rosner, with additional credit to performer Anna Adams Stark (not present).

Saturday April 21

Giant Yves Klein All Out Attack (3PM)
Witness Relocation

In an homage to Yves Klein’s Anthropométries, action painting, and the monster battle films of Godzilla, Dan Safer and Mike Mikos of Witness Relocation will drink around 6 shots of whiskey, cover themselves in paint, and wrestle on a giant canvas. The canvas will then be displayed on a wall as evidence of the physical action that transpired on it, next to a video of the event, the bottle of whiskey, and the paint splattered wrestling costumes.

Performed by Dan Safer and Mike Mikos. Video by Kaz Phillips Safer.

COME OVER TO OUR PLACE (5PM)
hosted by Andy Horwitz and Chloë Bass

COME OVER TO OUR PLACE re-creates the post-show hang-out as performance event, bringing together the artists and writers of EPHEMERAL EVIDENCE with other artists, writers, critics and passers-by for food and conversation. Inspired by Lois Weaver’s THE LONG TABLE, a formalized performance-discussion as an “experiment in participation and public engagement,” this event contextualizes a meal (Chloë Bass’ performance PROCESS DINNER) as a public forum, encouraging informal conversations on serious topics. PROCESS DINNER invites guests to enjoy a dish as its recipe’s component parts: a reminder of the constant making that goes into every art world moment, even the farewell. Guests are invited to participate, watch, or both: as a shared social experience, all guests become observed performers.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Heavens To Betsy what a week!! Things have been crazy busy here at Culturebot HQ as we get ready for our show at Exit Art, our trip to Austin and, you know, seeing shows, writing essays and doing all those other things we do.

The week started off on Tuesday at St. Ann’s Warehouse with Elephant Room. Back in January 2009 I wrote up a workshop of this show that was presented at HERE when it was called Amazingland. In September 2011 Culturebot’s own Mashinka Firunts wrote it up when it was at Philly Live Arts and now, finally, I got to see the full-fledged version with own two eyes. Totally worth the wait!  Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford (together known as rainpan 43) have been making imaginative and surprising physical theater work together since 2003 when they rocked NYC with all wear bowlers. Steve Cuiffo – magician, actor, Lenny Bruce channeler – has been a downtown fave for years, but I kind of mark his big breakout moment to the Foundry Theater’s production of Kirk Lynn’s Major Bang at St. Ann’s (also directed by Paul Lazar). So here you’ve got a veritable supergroup of creators working together to make magic.  And the magic is pretty amazing. There is levitation and sleight of hand, there is mental trickery and illusion, a new variation on sawing a woman in half and much more.

Intertwined in the magic is a vague outline of a story of three misfit magicians in Paterson, NJ – overblown egos and delusional dreams of worldwide acclaim, we are here in the Elephant Room, a basement room, probably in a mall, somewhere undistinguished and undistinguishable, where prestidigitation provides a window into what might be possible somewhere else, anywhere else, but here.

It is a great collaboration – Cuiffo brings the magic chops and glitzy showmanship, the illusionist in-jokes that put every trick in postmodern quotes; Sobelle and Lyford bring the clever choreography, stagecraft and banter. Together under Paul Lazar’s steady direction they dodge and weave, allude to pasts only half-remembered and even less willingly acknowledged, they are a trio of amateur superheros, like a much funnier and smarter Mystery Men.

I’m not going to give anything away, you should see it for yourself. But I will give you a few hints of hilarity to come: a skilsaw, a trucker hat,  a late night phone call with the Dalai Lama, a drunken epic tale of magical temptation, a name transmitted telepathically from the audience and maybe, just maybe, an elephant.

Wednesday night I had to work.

Thursday night my folks were in town and took me to see Macbeth at The Met. Orchestra seats, row P. Awesome!! Believe it or not, in all my years of going to the performing arts (and nearly 17 years in NYC) I had never been to a big, fancy opera, much less The Met. Sure I’ve been to downtown, avant-garde, experimental opera – lots of them, actually. But this Met thing, it is a whole other kettle of vichyssoise and I must now do penance for all my years of mockery and disdain. It was incredible! It is like Broadway for smart people. I was sitting there just being overwhelmed and delighted by the luxurious surroundings and the big moon with the cool lighting effects that was suspended in front of the curtain pre-show, when the lights go down, the curtain goes up and there was a chorus of, like, 100 women acting as the Witches! Wow. Throughout the show I kept being blown away by the grandeur of the whole thing. Huge crowds of people, beautiful booming voices, gorgeous sets: it snows, it rains, a jeep drives on stage accompanied by a platoon of soldiers. A jeep! Crazy. And the music is really wonderful. I guess there’s a reason that everyone talks about Verdi when they talk about opera.

As for the show itself, I think it was good that this was my intro to opera as I already knew the Macbeth story and could layer my previous knowledge on top of what I was seeing. The libretto, by Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei, uses snippets of the original Shakespeare as signifiers to establish a specific scene or interaction, but mostly they use Shakespeare’s story and text as a starting point. In this rendition it is not just about the temptation and downfall of Macbeth himself, but about the impact of his actions on the people. Act IV, Scene 1 in particular was breathtaking – the curtain goes up on a sea of refugees making their way downstage as Macduff (played with wonderful emotion and stunning voice by Dimitri Pittas) wanders through them, lost, his family destroyed by Macbeth. So powerful.

I’m told that Verdi was an important figure in the Risorgimento and Macbeth, among many of his works, were very political. It brings about a certain cognitive dissonance that opera was once a popular, money-making form of entertainment that could spread deeply populist messages and now, well, its pretty expensive and definitely not popular in the current sense of the word. But if you’re going to blow big money on a show and you have to choose between Broadway and The Met – I choose the Met. Plus the show is 3 hours long so on a dollar-per-minute ratio it is probably cheaper. I will definitely be trying to add this to my culture palate on a regular basis.

Consistent with the inconsistency that is my life, I went from a three-hour high-production value 19th-century opera on Thursday to an almost-three-hour, low-production value, late 20th century avant-garde theater piece on Friday, Daniel Fish’s A (RADICALLY CONDENSED AND EXPANDED) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN (AFTER DAVID FOSTER WALLACE) at The Chocolate Factory. Jeremy saw it earlier in the week and I think we’re going to do some kind of a group iChat discussion thing about it this week, so I’ll keep my comments to a minimum for now.

I’m a big fan of Daniel Fish. I think he’s a very talented and idiosyncratic director. We also went to Northwestern together, he was a Performance Studies major a year ahead of me, so I kind of know a bit about where he started out aesthetically. Watching A Supposedly Fun Thing… I definitely remembered why we used to jokingly call Performance Studies “The Department of Reading Out Loud”. Fish has five actors all wearing headphones and (I have to check this) it appears that he is mixing their text live. A sort of mash-up of the book, interviews with DFW and people who knew him, over the course of the 2.5 hours we are given the experience of being inundated with his words, thoughts and world. Fish has his actors dressed really casually, and there is something about the big headphones that conjures suburban living rooms. The actors are in the room together but they are in their own worlds, they are unable to get out of their heads but desperate to connect. They are overwhelmed by information and words, desperate to get them out, to make sense of them; they are in thrall to the words and at the same time being ground down and destroyed.

The first half hour was fascinating, then it got boring, then it got frustrating, then we had a two minute pause to stretch while Big Star’s awesome song Thirteen played, I think possibly in a version by Elliot Smith. Never heard it? Listen here:

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After the break we came back and it was fascinating again, Jenny Seastone Stern starts a story about a boy on a diving board. There’s a story about 9/11 in Bloomington, Indiana. This is it, this is America, this is who we are, this is who he was. DFW had too many words, too many ideas, too much sensitivity and awareness and was probably, also, from time to time, a major asshole, aware enough of his own dick-hood to be pained by it yet unable to stop. The actors trade lines, trade stories, trade movement, the dialogue mixes and re-mixes across them, the room starts filled with tennis balls, at the end they are shoved into a corner, it is a desolate post-modern suburban rec room, it is us, it is who we are, it what we are trying to escape and who we might become.

I liked it, though I’m not sure I’d be up for the 5 hour version they’re planning on doing this Friday, starting at 7PM.

Saturday night, after a day of mostly sleeping and writing to try and recover/catch-up from the week before, I headed out to [the end] in Greenpoint to check out Sarah Cameron Sunde’s new outfit Lydian Junction and their experiment in immersive, environmental performance, “UNTITLED #4”.

Sarah and I hung out a few months ago and she was talking about how this project grew out of her desire to break from the assembly line of mainstream play production and explore something interdisciplinary, non-narrative and different. In the show she used source materials ranging from the Persephone myth to Knut Hamsun’s novel “Hunger” combined with elaborate multimedia elements – video, audio, projection, live-mixed –  choreography and visual art to create an experience. She’s got an interesting and talented group of collaborators and while this first experiment seemed a little unstable, there’s definitely something there. The collaborative model of creation is very interesting, and the live-mixing of sound/video in multiple spaces is very promising.

There seems to be a burgeoning field opening up here of theater artists working in immersive, environmental ways and it merits further examination. It is more than site-specificity (that is a whole big conversation unto itself, for another time), it is negotiating narrative, negotiating how much structure is required, how much presentation, how much guidance. On the one hand you have the meticulously designed and lavishly produced Sleep No More, that builds an environment that you explore entirely at your own pace without any guidance whatsoever, on the other hand you have promenade or alternately-sited projects like Hotel Savoy or Elective Affinities that adhere more closely to a guided form.

UNTITLED #4 is still in development, so it is not really appropriate to comment in too much detail. I think it is kind of hovering between worlds, between directing the audience and giving the audience agency to engage at their own pace, on their own terms. You could wander through it casually, but then a cast or crew member would come along and direct everyone to go to a specific room or place to watch the action. It got a bit confusing. Also, the performativity of the actors varied. Early in the evening I saw a very young, attractive, girl with blonde Botticelli ringlets huddled in conspiratorial confidence with a much older man on a couch. I was hoping it was her father but it looked like something else. Were they actors? It turns out they were – but I’m not sure if this incidental scene I witnessed was planned or by accident. When the “performance” started it became very clear who was an actor and who wasn’t, and something of the mystery blurring fiction and reality was lost.

A few weeks (months?) ago I saw Theresa Buchheister’s Gradient Haircuts at Housing Works and she employed some really interesting staging and strategies. When the show started it was really, really hard to tell who was just browsing for books and who were performers. Little scenes and dialogues erupted all over and it was disorienting and cool. Eventually all the “environmental” actors gravitated towards the chairs in the cafe and it became very clear. They then led us down the stairs and into the basement for a clearly guided promenade show. Gradient Haircuts was super low-tech. UNTITLED #4 was very high tech. Both had thoughtful staging and engaging performative interventions. It’ll be interesting to see, as this field evolves, how artists negotiate these challenges and balance performance with environment, the audience’s desire for autonomy with the desire to be led through a surreal and mysterious experience.

Which leads, tangentially, to my closing thought. Of late we’ve been hearing a lot about audiences wanting to “curate their own experience”. This is bullshit. Making your own playlist of music you know and love is completely different than curating a new experience from material of which you have no prior knowledge. There’s a difference between wandering independently through the carefully curated environment of a museum or a show like Sleep No More and being asked to “choose your own adventure”.

The internet and its tools  - facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc – are different from dance and theater, with different strengths and weaknesses. I think the question is less about how to integrate these tools into performance – or migrate performance into these media – then it is about what the sociological, psychological, linguistic and semiotic implications are of horizontality. As performance makers we need to be thinking more about context and presentational aesthetics working with the tools we already have than trying to integrate these tools into our work. At least in the short term.

Like I said, I could be wrong and I put it out there for you to discuss.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The past few months have been really pivotal here at Culturebot and it feels like we’re moving into a new era. A lot of the things we’ve done casually or sporadically over the years are being formalized and, for the first, time, I’ve been able to articulate some of the ideas around what we’ve been practicing for more than eight years. I thought I’d take this opportunity to share with you, our  audience and community, where we came from, what we’re thinking about and what we’re working on over the next twelve months and into the future.

CULTUREBOT HISTORY

When I first started thinking about Culturebot in late 2002, I had already been online for a while. I started a personal website back in 1998. I remember working at an ad agency in 1999 and pitching my co-workers on a website that would help people who met online and had similar interests to meet off-line and have social gatherings. They laughed and said that no-one would want to do that. If I only had understood what VC was at the time!

Technically I began “blogging” in late 2000 or early 2001, shortly after Blogger first became available.  In the early days of blogging there weren’t so many of us in NYC – or anywhere – and I remember when we’d all get together and drink and socialize – Choire, Jonno, Blaise, Ultrasparky, Uffish – where it was not uncommon to ask someone “What’s your URL?” before you knew their name. Eventually Nick Denton swept into town and scooped up the most popular bloggers to be his editors and help launch his empire. But I saw firsthand the power of blogging to build communities both of interest and of practice, before the money and the book deals came to town.

I have the dubious distinction of being the first person (or among the first, anyway) to blog 9/11.  That moment amplified, for me, what blogging could mean and could become. As someone who provided a first-hand, eyewitness account of the events of the day, in real time, on the internet, and who received comments, e-mails and responses from around the world instantaneously, I realized that things were very different than before, that the world was smaller and people more connected, that the internet had changed what was possible. It was amazing that we could really, truly share our experiences quickly and personally without intermediation; and that communities could come into existence and vanish in moments.

Shortly after founding Culturebot, I was at a PS122 party with my friend Chris Hampton, complaining about the impending doom of Valentine’s Day. We decided to hold the first-ever all-blogger reading/performance event  - “Worst.Sex.Ever” at PS122. The event attracted about 250 people, we had to turn people away, and it became an ongoing series called The WYSIWYG Talent Show, where over the course of three years we presented (and frequently debuted) a lot of people who went on to be quite well-known including (but not limited to) Emily Gould, Paul Ford, Todd Levin, Jessy Delfino, Faustus, M.D., Choire Sicha, Mike Daisey, Chelsea Peretti, Ron Mwangaguhunga and Ned Vizzini. We also presented the first video blogger film fest, to my knowledge.

I started working at PS122 in the spring of 2002 and over the first six months I made two key observations. First, general audiences didn’t seem to have much knowledge of or context for the work being presented. They knew the solo shows – the Danny Hoch/John Leguizamo stuff – but the more difficult or esoteric work – Yasuko Yukoshi, Richard Maxwell, dance in general, etc. – had a very small audience of downtown denizens and not much else. At the same time, there was almost no public space for dialogue around “downtown” or “contemporary” performing arts, nowhere to share ideas or trace histories, lineages and connections. Artists and audiences alike frequently came to the New York – and PS122 – with only the vaguest sense of what they were seeing and how to engage with it.  I had been in NYC since 1995, originally as a writer/performer who frequented PS122 as an audience member, and I still had only the vaguest notion of how the Ontological was connected to the Wooster Group was connected to PS122, what Judson was, what DTW was and how all these pieces fit together. I knew that there was a need and an opportunity to share information and knowledge, to build awareness and also create an ongoing, evolving, real-time document of performance in NYC. Thus Culturebot was developed as a collaborative, community-oriented web resource providing critical insight and conversation to practitioners, administrators and audiences at one. Our goal then, as now, was to be deeply informed and thoughtful while remaining accessible to a wide readership.

Initially I wanted Culturebot to be a group endeavor and I invited the marketing directors of all the major contemporary presenting institutions to a meeting at PS122 where I pitched them on participating. I said here was a chance to build community and at the same time provide a counterbalance to the hegemony of the NY Times. Apart from Aaron Rosenblum, who was working at DTW at the time, they all looked at me like I had three heads and said it was unnecessary and besides, who had the time to write for a website? They were already so busy designing postcards and printed brochures and organizing bulk mailings and print ad campaigns. So I took a deep breath and soldiered on, launching the site in December 2003.

When Culturebot first launched it was meant to exist in contrast to the “reviewer-oriented” model of mainstream news outlets like the New York Times. At first we only published previews, interviews and points-of-view, intending to serve the community and the field at large in an informational and dramaturgical capacity, creating space for conversation and dialogue, meeting the work at its own level, not from a place of judgement. However, early-career artists, existing under the radar of mainstream outlets, often requested to be reviewed. Culturebot responded, becoming an advocate for emerging artists by providing early reviews and critical feedback. Many artists who are now more well-known got their first write-ups here and we still try and cover early-career artists as best we can.

In October of 2007 I left PS122 and brought the site with me. Although Culturebot was initially funded by an NPN grant to PS122 for community outreach, we never received ongoing financial support from the institution and this was a big moment, for the first time Culturebot was its own thing, separate from a respected organization, and we had to sink or swim. We’re still swimming!

NEW MODELS AND NEW VOICES IN ARTS WRITING

When I was at PS122 Mark Russell always made a big deal about not putting work into categories. He strongly believed in the idea that dance, theater, performance art, music and time-based performative events, etc., all exist in this universe that is performance. He drilled that into me and over time I’ve come to adhere to that philosophy ever more strongly. I dislike putting labels on the work and most of the artists I’m interested are creating outside the boundaries of traditional discipline structures. This previously unarticulated perspective has finally become the norm, as reflected in the curatorial statement from Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, from the Whitney Biennial:

“…artists are functioning as researchers and curators, drawing on the histories of art, design, dance, music, and technology. Artists are bringing other artists into their work—a form of free collage or reinvention that borrows from the culture at large as a way of rewriting the standard narratives and exposing more relevant hybrids. There is also the radical production of new forms, fabrication on a more modest scale. Artists are constantly redefining what an artist can be at this moment ….”

This, however, highlights the unique challenge of this moment, which is that of context. As museums rediscover performance, dance and to a lesser extent theater,  incorporating it into their programming,  performing arts spaces are being left out of the conversation entirely. Years of knowledge, dramaturgy, theory and practical expertise are being consigned to the dustbins as visual arts curators apply a different set of critical criteria to the evaluation and interpretation of the performed art. Still heavily reliant on the critical theories of performance from the 60′s, visual art tends to reject craft in favor “authenticity” and be wary of mimesis and theatricality. So when they look at dance and theater, they are not, generally, critically equipped to make knowledgeable evaluations. They also don’t have any production infrastructure or knowledge, nor do the curators have experience working with performing artists to develop projects over time. I’ve already talked about this at great length and won’t rehash here. Suffice it to say that never before has the conversation about “The Black Box versus the White Cube” been more important.

Having spent my formative years outside the visual arts world, I was mostly unaware of the conversation and  discovered it when I was curating PRELUDE 2008, and that topic became the focus of the festival. During the curatorial process a colleague brought to my attention Harold Skramstad’s seminal 1999 article “An Agenda for American Museums In the 21st Century” (online here, downloadable 10MB PDF here). It is an incredibly thoughtful and powerful article and, I think, possibly responsible for the current trends in museum curating and the rediscovery of performance. In the conclusion of his essay Skramstad writes:

 The great age of collection building in museums is over. Now is the time for the next great agenda of museum development in America. This agenda needs to take as its mission nothing less than to engage actively in the design and delivery of experiences that have the power to inspire and change the way people see both the world and the possibility of their own lives. We have many practical institutions to help us work through our day-to-day problems. We have enough educational institutions that focus on training us to master the skills we need to graduate from school and get a job. Yet we have too few institutions that have as their goal to inspire and change us. American museums need to take this up as their new challenge. Up to now much of their time has been devoted to building their collections and sharing them through “outreach” to the larger world. Now they must help us create the new world of “inreach,” in which people, young and old alike, can “reach in” to museums though experiences that will help give value and meaning to their own lives and at the same time stretch and enlarge their perceptions of the world.

So what we have, then, is a wholesale re-imagining of the purpose and function of the art museum. Performing arts spaces should probably do a similar re-evaluation, but that is another essay for another time. But what this means, and in fact demands, is that as artists work increasingly across and outside traditional boundaries of discipline and as institutions adapt to create boundary-less contexts for the work artists are making, it is necessary to cultivate a critical voice and style of writing that meets the work on its own terms. As the lines between dance, theater, music, performance art, video and visual art are becoming less and less defined, we need new critics who can travel with the work and the imagination of the artist. At the same time we need a community of writers who can share their skills and expertise, who bring a collective pool of knowledge to bear on this ever-expanding and evolving cultural landscape. We need to bring visual arts, performing arts, music, film and new/emerging media writers together to develop a new criticism that reflects this cultural landscape and  the environment in which this discourse increasingly occurs – online.

As mentioned earlier, Culturebot was always meant to exist in contrast – even in opposition – to the “reviewer-oriented” model of mainstream news outlets like the New York Times. The traditional “reviewer-oriented” model of newspaper-based arts writing is predicated on advising the potential consumer whether a given performance is worth the investment of time and money. We reject that. We propose to distinguish the performing arts from corporately manufactured consumer-focused entertainment product and apply a different framework for analysis and dialogue.

At the same time that we distinguish between a consumer-oriented “reviewer” and a critic, so too do we distinguish between an old-model critic and The New Criticism. The traditional critical model proposes a “subject/object” relationship between writer and performance where the critic “objectively” judges the merits of a given performance. Culturebot proposes a new framework for arts criticism that we refer to as “critical horizontalism”. In this framework criticism is a creative practice unto itself and the writer exists in subjective relation to the work of the artist. The writer’s response is the continuation of a dialogue initiated by the artist. If this response is then published on the Internet, this creates a horizontal field of discourse with the work. This model resists the commodification of the performing arts as “entertainment” but rather situates it as time-based art. The performance itself is an ephemeral nexus where audience, artist and ideas converge. The critic supports the continued investigation of the art event across multiple platforms.

This theoretical framework is expressed in practical terms as well. As a primarily web-based endeavor, Culturebot’s aesthetics have been informed by our environment. We started as a blog and have evolved with the web as it has changed. We are influenced by the evolving and interconnected world of social media and strive to continue developing the voice we are known for – intelligent but familiar, rigorous but accessible, frequently informal and conversational. It is not that we can’t write like academics, it is that we choose not to. We choose not to employ jargon when plainer language will suffice. When possible and appropriate, we provide links to the work of our academic colleagues for our readers’ reference if they choose to investigate.

Culturebot’s mission it to be deeply informed and generally accessible, to provide a platform for dialogue and the resources for deeper, more thoughtful investigation. Our hope is to continue providing a platform for artists, administrators, curators and audiences to hold conversations, to establish relationships with other arts writers online, continue to develop new critical voices that reflect the aesthetics of the Information Age. We plan to work with professional journalists and new media innovators to identify a writing style and practice that reflects and engages with the new cultural landscape. This is writing intended for the Internet, criticism from a networked perspective.

LIVE CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS

In January 2012 Meiyin Wang invited Culturebot to work with Under The Radar to curate, produce and moderate two panel discussions as part of the festival.  Around the same time, in response to the essay “Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance”, Culturebot was invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Exit Art Gallery in New York City. That project, Ephemeral Evidence, will be happening from April 17-21, 2012 and more details will be announced shortly.

The convergence of these two things led us to start thinking about Criticism As Creative Practice and Culturebot’s dramaturgical role in our community. In Ephemeral Evidence we have paired Culturebot writers with performing artists to create durational performances that will leave objects as evidence of the ephemeral event. The writers are responsible for creating the contextual writing in collaboration with the artists and being a part of the creative process. We believe that the New Criticism means that writer/critics should engage more deeply and over time with artists, so that they can provide meaningful dialogue in public space.

Developing Ephemeral Evidence informed our thinking about “Live Critical Intervention”. After the success at Under The Radar we were invited by Ron Berry to do an “as-yet-undefined-something” at the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX. We really weren’t interested in replicating the same old model of panel discussions and artist talkbacks that everyone always does, so we started thinking about how we could re-structure these important critical conversations in more interesting, performative ways. Thus Live Critical Interventions are our attempt to put “critical horizontalism” into practice. We started researching, analyzing the intellectual structures and presentational aesthetics of panels and talkbacks and identifying ways to subvert and undermine them. We are using existing techniques such as Lois Weaver’s “Long Table” and Everybodys Toolbox’s “Impersonation Game” as source material, while creating new interventions as a scalable framework to support the democratization of criticism and the idea of criticism as social practice. We will be at Fusebox from May 3-6, 2012 and will be presenting three “interventions” – more info on that to come. We have received a commission to  develop this project over the next twelve months and will debut the project in March 2013. We can’t announce where yet, but we will soon.

ONWARD AND UPWARD, BROTHERS AND SISTERS

Here at Culturebot HQ we’re incredibly excited to continue pioneering new landscapes in art, culture and ideas. We are leading the charge for a new way of engaging with performance and criticism and are looking forward to creating public platforms for conversation and dialogue. The next twelve months will bring significant change and growth,  we look forward to evolving from our humble blog origins into a new, multi-platform content creating networked robot of the future, replicating memes and busting rhymes like nobody’s business.

If you want to get on board, now’s the time. You know where to find us.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Back when performance artists roamed the streets of the East Village making magic and mayhem out of nothing but imagination and duct tape, there came a puppet wielding wild man named James Godwin. He and his group of merry prankster puppeteers, The Elementals, made delightful shows of object theater illusionary goodness. At some point this evolved into the very first Puppet Rock ensemble, Uncle Jimmy’s Dirty Basement, that brought filth and mayhem to the stage with a hand up its butt. Then they vanished. Or I vanished. Or something.

But if you want to know the truth, or some half-made-up story reconstructed from foggy memories of what passes for truth, then get thee on down to Dixon Place for James Godwin’s Lunatic Cunning, starting on Friday, April 6.

From the press release:

Lunatic Cunning is an original, new work by James Godwin, puppetry and performance art pioneer and founder of puppet comedy troupe, The Elementals, whose creations have been described by The Village Voice as –gorgeously wrought mutants who look like they evolved downstream from a nuclear waste dump and talk like vulgar barflies”. Lunatic Cunning is a solo, semi-autobiographical ‘mockumentary’, mixing experiences from Godwin’s own life – such as work with Julie Taymor on Across the Universe, as well as appearances on Saturday Night Live, Chappelle’s Show, PBS and with the Muppets–with a humorous examination of the occult roots of puppetry and performance art. The plot of Lunatic Cunning focuses on a shaman who is asked to cure a tribal elder who is dying of old age by using a language and puppet channeled to him by the spirit of the shaman. Structured as a lecture, the piece uses several puppet techniques such as tabletop, marionette, hand, shadow, mask and object. Highlighting the multiple techniques will be live drawing, ritual, lights and sound which make the connections between the various episodes and vignettes. The action of the show revolves around several stories from the artist’s personal experiences and others that relay theory and parables.

I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve got a good feeling about this one. And if you’ve never had a chance to see Godwin’s puppet work, you should definitely check it out.

James Godwin’s Lunatic Cunning
Fridays and Saturdays- April 6,7,13,14,20,21 at 7:30pm
Where: Dixon Place / 161A Chrystie Street / New York, NY 10002
www.dixonplace.org /212-219-0736
Tickets: $15 (advance), $18 / $12 stu/sen or TDF

Popularity: 2% [?]

I T I N E R A N T
Performance Art Festival

March 30th, 2012, 8 – 11 PM

@

GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE

840 Broadway, 2nd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11206

QMAD, Queens Media Arts Development, launches ITINERANT, a citywide festival for Contemporary Performance Art to be hosted at various venues in the five boroughs of New York City. ITINERANT starts its five week program at GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE in Brooklyn on Friday, March 30th, featuring the work of local, national and international performance artists.

ITINERANT 2012 focuses on live performative works that treat notions of intimacy, self-reflection, and introspection. Artists working in Contemporary Performance Art were selected to participate from an open call that attracted more than 175 local, national and international submissions. Forty five artists will be featuring new and existing works that explore the program’s theme over a period of 5 weeks starting on March 30th through May 5th.

Participating artists at GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE are: Jessica Bonenfant, Camila Cañeque, Amy Finkbeiner, Carlos Gonzalez, Whitney V. Hunter, Rosalind Murray, Alex Nathanson and Dylan Neely, Negin Moss, Alaina Stamatis, Chris Udemezue, and Genevieve White.

ITINERANT 2012 will be presented in New York City on the following dates and in collaboration with the following venues: Friday, March 30th, 8 – 11 PM at Grace Exhibition Space, 840 Broadway, 2nd Floor, Brooklyn; Saturday, April 21st, 6 – 9 PM at Crossing Art Gallery, 136-17 39th Avenue, Flushing, Queens; Saturday, April 28th, 7 – 10 PM at Floor 4 Art, 2136 Frederick Douglass Blvd, 2nd Floor, Manhattan; Sunday, April 29th, 6 – 9 PM at Bronx Art Space, 305 East 140th Street, Bronx; and Saturday, May 5th, 6 – 8 PM at Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art – Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island.

In addition, ITINERANT will present Public Performances at the new 37th Road Pedestrian Plaza (between 74th and 73rd Streets) in Jackson Heights, Queens. The program includes the presentation of “Worlds Together, Worlds Apart,” a durational performance collaboration between Camila Cañeque and Hector Canonge, every Friday, April 6th – May 4th, 3 – 6 PM, and the public performances by Chloe Bass, John Cichon, Lizzie Scott, and Priscila Stadler on Saturday, May 12th, 3 – 6 PM.

QMAD, Queens Media Arts Development, is under the direction of artist, Hector Canonge, who launched ITINERANT in Queens in 2011. Canonge explains that ITINERANT is “the first program for performance art in this borough,” and that he “wants to introduce audiences to this art form as well as to create dialogue and exchange among artists coming from all over to the festival. ITINERANT started as a mini-festival with handful of local artists presenting their live performances at Crossing Art Gallery, I wanted to create the same in larger scale in NYC.” Canonge adds that the experience has been an incredible challenge. “To be able to collaborate with organizations and galleries in the five boroughs, to have their support and trust that I could carry such enterprise has been a major incentive in organizing the event.” QMAD, under the leadership of Canonge, presents the monthly LGBT film series CINEMAROSA, the annual program Framing AIDS, and the monthly art series A-Lab Forum.

Directions:

GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE (840 Broadway – 2nd Floor) is located on Flushing Avenue Stop on J-Z Trains. Walk 3 blocks east on Broadway, btwn. Ellery St. & Park Ave.

More information: www.qmad.org/itinerant or email: [email protected]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Hi everyone, Andy here. Hope you’ve been well. We here at Culturebot have been super-busy seeing shows, writing, planning, etc. It has been an action-packed year so far and there’s a lot going on over the next 12 months. So be sure to keep checking back for more news.

Personally, my day job is getting pretty hectic as we do our Access Restricted discussion series and gear up for this year’s awesome edition of the River To River Festival (be a part of it! Dance with Sylvain Emard) – so my writing contributions may be a little more sporadic.

So okay, enough of that. Let’s talk about art.

Friday night took us to Exit Art for their final opening. After 30 years they are closing up shop with two exhibits Every Exit is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art and Collective / Performative. It just so happens that Culturebot was invited to be a part of the Collective/Performative exhibit and we’re totally honored and kind of in awe. When we went to the opening and saw, in one place, all the amazing artists that Exit Art has supported and nurtured over the past 30 years, it was kind of crazy to think that we would be a part of it. It as a great party where art stars who were young kids in the 1980s were hanging with young artists of today and you could really feel the energy, connection and creativity. Unlike other fancy gallery openings I’ve been too, this felt like the real deal, not just a “see and be seen” for big money types. More on that later as we finalize Culturebot’s program at Exit Art for the week of April 17-21.

Saturday night we went to NYLA to see David Neumann’s new work with Advanced Beginner Group, Restless Eye. I will always have a soft spot for David Neumann’s work. His show Sentence was one of the first dance pieces that I really, truly enjoyed. I was working at PS122 at the time, where it was presented, so I got to actually see the work develop a bit and then see it multiple times over a few weeks. The humor, the text by Will Eno, the pedestrian movement, all gave me access to new ways of looking at dance and was pretty pivotal in my understanding of the form. From that work I could go out into all the different dance directions.

In Restless Eye Neumann is working with a different writer, Sybil Kempson, who seems to be everywhere this spring, and his collaborators in Advanced Beginner Group – Kennis Hawkins, Neal Medlyn, Andrew Dinwiddie, Jeremy Olson and Victoria Roberts-Wierzbowski – to create an atmospheric riff on the intersection of human experience as enhanced or mitigated by technology. Interpolating Chekhov and other sources, Restless Eye seems to create a tense juxtaposition between a more rustic, pre-digital way of life with the disconnectedness and information overload of the Internet age. There isn’t a whole lot of text, actually, but Kempson’s voice is ever-present – her fascination with New Jersey, with the mysteries of the road, with a vaguely threatening suburbia, a suggestion of existential unease in every moment.

Neumann’s choreography has gotten (it seems) a little more lyrical and expansive and he uses long, tall performers like Kennis Hawkins and Neal Medlyn to create elongated poses and gestures that exist in neat contrast to the more confined movements, focused on the arms, of other dancers.

There was a beautiful house, essentially a video screen, that changed from scene to scene and the sound design was enjoyable – moving from a spacey/digital soundscape to fractured language to something approaching music from time to time – a warbled “This Much Is True” playing as if from a house across the lake, etc.

Overall, though I enjoyed the piece, I frequently lost the thread and couldn’t always draw connections between one sequence and another. They flowed quite nicely into each other, but I was often disoriented and I didn’t feel that there was necessarily a cumulative effect. My eye was, in fact, restless – and maybe that was part of what I was meant to take away.

So in the interest of time travel let’s rewind to March 4 at PS1 where we went to check out Marten Spangberg do his thing. Spangberg is a Swedish choreographer and art star who leverages his outsize personality and keen intellect to propose scenarios around performance, visual art, choreography and dance. At PS1 he gave a performance/lecture based on his “book” Spangbergianism. Ostensibly the book came out of his deep and ongoing despair around his work as a choreographer, so he sat down and blogged for 60 days in a row then took the 60 posts and compiled them into a book. He called the blogging “choreography” and the book “dance” and went from there, critiquing dance, choreography, politics and the current visual arts/museum fetish for performance. Anybody who reads Culturebot regularly knows my basic thoughts on that, so I’m not going to re-hash it all here. I quite enjoyed the lecture, though some of my peers, apparently, did not. Raising, to my mind, the question: when is critique performance and when is it not?

But anyway – I did have a few thoughts on reflection after Spangberg’s lecture:

Dance is only one possible outcome of choreography. Choreography as an organizing principle or set of theories around the possibilities of bodies existing in time and space; much as architecture is a set of tactics and theories around the possibilities of the built (or unbuilt) environment.

Spangberg talked about the moment – though he didn’t use the term – of aesthetic arrest. And I thought of this wonderful poem:

- Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Subsequently Spangberg referenced this idea of choreography/art as a squid and/or monster that is simultaneously two things and nothing, that is incomprehensible and demands to be apprehended on its own terms. In an email to him (I have not received a response) I wrote:

Re “squid” and the monster idea….. I’m not a religious/spiritual person but in Jewish theology (in the Hebrew) the word that is translated as “God” or “Yahweh” is in fact what is known as an “ineffable tetragrammaton” (יהוה) – it is unpronounceable and incomprehensible, pointing to the indivisible one-ness of the divine – which of course suffuses all Being. The subjective confrontation with the unknowable (and inseparable) One is the aspiration of mystics, etc. etc. Moving along those lines, I think of the idea of “afflatus” or inspiration, from Cicero, according to Wikipedia: “…”inspiration” came to mean simply the gathering of a new idea, Cicero reiterated the idea of a rush of unexpected breath, a powerful force that would render the poet helpless and unaware of its origin.”

I’m having trouble closing the circle on this one – something about how art, being inspired by the ineffable, is in and of itself ineffable and beyond form, existing outside of time and space, coming into embodiment for a brief moment and then vanishing again. We defy commodification because we are only playing with that which will vanish and return to the nothingness from which it came, performance is the brief temporal and physical manifestation of ideas and entities that are always extant in the ether: dancers, musicians, performers, writers, bring them into being briefly, long enough for us to observe and try to fix in memory, before they disincorporate and vanish yet again….

Dude. I totally used to drop acid, like, a lot.

Okay so after Spangberg I had a bunch of work commitments until March 8 when I got to see Jodi Melnick at NYLA for her double-bill of One of Sixty Five Thousand Gestures and Solo, Deluxe Version. What an amazing evening! One of Sixty Five Thousand Gestures was co-choreographed with Trisha Brown and Jodi just has Brown’s choreography deep in her body. It was transfixing to watch, just beautiful. The composition by Hahn Rowe was ethereal and evocative and Melnick moves with precision, elegance, grace and subtle emotion.

That was followed by Solo, Deluxe Version where she worked with dancers Jon Kinzel, Hristoula Harakas and Stuart Shugg on a series of pieces linked together. Once again, just great movement, top-notch dancers, evocative, subtle, surprising, elegant. But the extra added bonus was live, original music from Steven Reker and his band, People GetReady (Luke Fasano, James Rickman and Jen Goma). They were fantastic, veering from rock-type riffs to spaceier, almost raga-like repeated figures, to atmoshperic sound to sections that almost sounded like songs. Great night, glad I got to see it.

The next night. Friday March 9, took us to The Kitchen to see Pam Tanowitz’ Untitled (The Blue Ballet). The piece was set to the FLUX Quartet’s interpretation of avant-garde composer Morton Feldman’s challenging String Quartet #1. Feldman is very minimal and sparse and the choreography took that as a starting point, using ballet – and ballet dancers – as source material and then stripping away all the frills down to some very sparse, select, precise movements. The piece was alternately fascinating and frustrating – less because of the intentional exploration of absence, time and emptiness, but because it just felt, to me, somewhat cold and analytical. That being said, perception is everything. I was frequently riveted by Ashley Tuttle who seemed to verily radiate. My colleague seated next to me found her to be conventional and mechanical. Go figure. But it is always, always a delight to see incredibly well-trained dancers re-purpose their skills into a contemporary context.

Saturday March 10 took us to The Joyce for Stephen Petronio’s The Architecture of Loss. The evening began with Petronio coming onstage and doing a five minute intro to his staging of Steve Paxton’s “Intravenous Lecture”. This was probably my favorite part of the whole evening, as he started talking about the time he saw Nureyev dance and then, within a few months, met Paxton and then Trisha Brown. In five minutes Petronio explained in the most succinct and personal way, the evolution of dance from Ballet to Modern to Post-Modern to Contemporary. And he did it with words AND his body. He physically demonstrated the transition from Nureyev’s rigid spine to Paxton’s flexible spine, from being oriented towards the audience to existing in 365-Degree space. It was beautiful. Then he started “Intravenous Lecture” which was kind of cool – he’s a great dancer – but I wasn’t so in love with the text.

Also on the bill was Wendy Whelan doing a short solo called “Ethersketch I” which was amazing. In some way this seemed to draw a line from Melnick on Thursday, to Tanowitz on Friday through to Petronio on Saturday. Something about the evolution of dance, the influence of ballet, of Trisha Brown… something about the way embodied movement can, ideally, comment on what it means to us, as non-dancers, to exist in the embodied world. Hm.Food for thought. I pass this on to you, dear reader, to expand and comment.

Monday night I had some family in from Mississippi and was at a loss as to what to do with them. Broadway being dark and so forth. Luckily I remembered that Rinde Eckert’s show And God Created Great Whales was playing at 45 Bleecker, produced by The Culture Project. My uncle and his wife are both mental health professionals, so it seemed like a show about a man losing his memory to Alzheimer’s (or some related if unnamed disorder) would be interesting. I think they liked it. I know I did. It has been many years since I first saw it but it held up in the new version. Rinde Eckert is just one of those artists who has incredible presence and a unique, fascinating creative sensibility. I’ve rarely been disappointed by his work and this is a great example of blending music/opera with poetic writing and imaginative, dream-like staging to create a kind of memory play, a sad, moving and intimate portrait of a man trying to hold on to his identity as it slowly erodes. Universal and tragic, powerful stuff.

Thursday, March 15 took me to the Gene Frankel Theater to see Lost & Found Project’s Doroga. ДOROGA, is a play that explores personal family stories about the Russian-Jewish immigrant experience from the current generation of 20-somethings, intertwining with the history of Jews in the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU).

Not normally my kind of thing, but Culturebot’s office is frequently located at the back tables at Shoolbred’s, because they have a great two-for-one happy hour, a fireplace in winter and no televisions. And one of our favorite bartenders is Mariya King, and she’s part of this company and, well, you know, you gotta support your bartender, am I right? Also, I used to work in Jewish Culture so I kind of feel like I want to check in on things from time to time. Also, when I worked in that world I gave a lecture on “Envisioning Contemporary Jewish Theater and Performance” and I keep hoping that someone will actually do it, rather than replicate the same sort of conventional, narrative-based, work that confines identity to this very narrow slice of reality. Here’s that lecture, which is about 20 minutes long so you can just watch it some other time:

Envisioning Contemporary Jewish Theatre Lecture from Andy Horwitz on Vimeo.

ANYWAY – ДOROGA aroused in me the same feelings I often have about earnest, culturally-specific work. It feels cruel to criticize because it obviously means a lot to everyone involved and it definitely means a lot to the audiences that come and see it. It is validating and gratifying to see one’s “story” on stage, but at some point you have to make work that matches the critical and aesthetic standards of a general audience. That comes over time and I certainly hope that the young, enthusiastic and energetic team involved with this production continues to develop their craft, maybe gets exposed to performance makers who are doing more innovative work around culturally-specific performance and evolve into something more rigorous.

Friday March 16 took me to HERE Arts Center to see 64, written by Culturebot’s own Austin, TX correspondent Timothy Braun and presented by Surf Reality. I used to go to Surf Reality back in the day (it is now a “hot yoga” studio) when it was a teeming pit of cheap beer, cigarettes and weird LES performance art depravity. Glad to see that Rob Pritchard and Co. have not grown up too much! The technical elements – laptops, videos, sound design, etc.- have gotten a lot more sophisticated, the scenarios make a little more sense and there is a lot less in the way of bodily fluids and on-stage nastiness, but that same kind of DIY. rough and ready, a view from underground aesthetic still applies.

Timothy Braun was at an artist retreat when he met Jennilie Brewster who was in the midst of creating 4 paintings, often using NY Times images as source material. Braun was inspired to write 64 one page plays, and Pritchard then reimagined the plays as a kind of multimedia collage. Images come and go, soundscapes are mixed live, people meet, interact and vanish. Sometimes stories seem to reflect on each other and connect, sometimes they just appear and then drift off into the ether. 64 is a fluid, floating nightmare dreamscape of America going down in flames.

Speaking of which, if only tangentially, Saturday the 17th took us out to Bushwick Starr for Karma Kharms directed by Eliza Bent as part of Target Margin’s Last Futurist Lab. It was fun and crazy and silly movement-based, ensemble work with live origami-folding. It was based on the writing of Daniil Kharms an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. I don’t know exactly how this all fits into Futurism (someone send me a press kit, pronto!) but I do think that there is probably a darker, more dangerous component to all of this. I’d surmise that so much of art in the early 20th Century was an attempt to assimilate the startling velocity of change that as much as it will sometimes appear frivolous to us, there is a kind of manic, nervous laughter attached, floating above a deep, ontological terror about the death of God and the dawn of essential meaninglessness. And the onrush of a new century birthing unprecedented genocide enabled by previously unimaginable weapons of mass destruction. But Karma Kharms was fun.

Sunday the 18th took us to Abrons Arts Center for a concert by Alarm Will Sound, part of the American Mavericks Festival presented by Carnegie Hall. The concert featured work by Cage, Varese and three others (I lost my program) and it was really great. It was free and the place was packed, even at 3PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Alarm Will Sound, led by Brooklyn Philharmonic’s Alan Pierson, is a diverse and dynamic 20-person ensemble who are always presenting new and imaginative interpretations of iconic material, supporting the work of early career composers and arrangers and just generally breaking down barriers left and right. You should definitely check them out.

Then more work then Friday and we’re back to Exit Art which brings us back to today. Sunday. Which I’ve now spent writing this column. SO MANY SHOWS SO LITTLE TIME!!!

Okay, hope you’ve all been having an art-tastic month and we look forward to seeing you out and about!!

Popularity: 3% [?]

This summer the River To River Festival, together with The Joyce Theater, will present Montréal-based choreographer Sylvain Émard’s Le Grand Continental – a festive 30-minute contemporary line dance adventure that assembles 200+ participants to show off the diversity, creativity and talent that makes New York City the greatest city in the world! If you are a dancer — professional, amateur, or just for fun — WE WANT YOU!

+ Perform in a River To River show!
+ Work with internationally renowned choreographer Sylvain Émard
+ Free and fun (skip that dance class or gym membership)
+ Meet great people from all over the city!

TIME COMMITMENT

Rehearsals:

Two nights a week from April 25^th  – June 19^th (17 total rehearsals)
Performances:
June 22 and 23 at 7PM, June 24 at 2PM on Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport.
RECRUITMENT SESSIONS:

You must attend one of the sessions below if interested in participating.

Wednesday April 4 from 7:00PM – 8:30PM
Wednesday April 4 from 8:30PM – 10:00PM
Thursday April 5 from 7:00PM – 8:30PM
Thursday April 5 from 8:30PM – 10:00PM

Learn 1 minute of the dance with a group. Wear comfortable clothes and shoes.

Ages 10 and up are welcome to attend.

Where: TBA

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO AND TO SIGN UP

Can’t decide if you’re ready for your debut? Just watch this amazing video of the work presented at the Festival TransAmériques in Montréal!:

Popularity: 2% [?]

Friday night took us out to The Bushwick Starr for Nellie Tinder‘s new project Evelyn, written and directed by Julia May Jonas. This is Jonas’ most ambitious and fully-developed project to date and it marks a real turning point, I think.

On the most straightforward level, Evelyn is the story of a group of women in a mental institution/recovery facility who are trying to rebuild themselves after a variety of traumas and breakdowns. In that sense it brings to mind a number of other works in a similar vein like Girl, Interrupted or, at times, Todd Haynes’ Safe, which has been described as “a horror movie of the soul.” By the show’s conclusion it has morphed into something more akin to Euripides’ The Bacchae. (I thought I was all clever and original on that, until I saw that Jacob Gallagher-Ross draws the same parallel in his review over at The Village Voice. Anyway, if both of us agree, then there’s probably something to it.)

The show begins with Holly (Kate Schroeder) and Nicky (Lisa Clair) sitting downstage and complaining about fellow resident Tiffany (Jocelyn Kuritsky was cast, on Friday she was replaced due to injury by Julia May Jonas). Becky (Kate Benson) and Elisa (Zoe Geltman) are stage left, walking stiffly upstage and down. From the outset the dialogue is stylized and funny, but definitely rings true to the situation. Holly says:

“She’s got to change. We can’t be expected to lead her to safe harbor when she just wants to drown. We have to take care of ourselves. We’re here for us, not her! No matter how leaderly we become, we have to remember we’re here for us.”

In just a few lines Jonas paints the scene at the institution quite clearly – the insecurities and neuroses, the internecine warfare and petty squabbles of unbalanced people in close confinement, the way minutia are amplified under the microscope of psychology. Later we will learn that they have breakout sessions after every meal to discuss how they feel and group sessions every evening before bed. Every thought, every feeling, every interaction is surgically parsed and evaluated, in search of the root of their dysfunction, in a desperate quest for a cure to make them whole and return them to normalcy. Holly is the ambiguously unstable, possibly slutty one. Nicky is the victim of sexual abuse from her uncle, Becky is the oldest, the school principal and mother who just cracked under the pressure, Elisa the misfit artsy teenager who writes dark Broadway musicals about Tesla and the Ancient Egyptians, Tiffany is the “bad” one – the antisocial one who rejects therapy, who will probably be a lifer. Later we meet Brooke (Nikki Calonge) who can only speak in howls and murmurs, though the audience privy to her thoughts by way of inner monologue.

Watching over all of them is the spectral Gertie (Richard Saudek, in drag) who is the enforcer and observer, the minion of Dr. Katie Doctors (Lucy Kaminsky) – the benevolent but fearsome head of the institution. She insists that the patients refer to her as Katie, and her nurturing, caring surface just barely hints at the menace beneath. She is no Nurse Ratched, but her compassion and placidity suggest the possibility that the whole enterprise is an exercise in futility and ineffectuality, she is dangerous because she is benign.

Into this tinderbox enters Evelyn Henries (Hannah Heller) who, for unknown reasons, has been sent to the institution to recover her mental health. From the beginning, when Henries enters in mini-skirt and heels, unable to sit down on the floor to join in group therapy, circling the ladies like a lioness circling prey, we know this won’t end well. Evelyn will not break down, she will not be common like everyone else, she will not join in and she will not “recover”. The only question is what she will do and who she will destroy to get what she wants.

What happens from there is a fascinating study in manipulation. I’m trying to think of another female character that is so spectacularly amoral and chameleonic. Evelyn has a talent for honing in on other’s weaknesses and desires, seducing them with kindness and promises while exploiting them for her own ends. She brings a halo of glamour and shines it on the mortals around her, the women compete for her affections which she doles out, discreetly, to each. Even Katie falls under Evelyn’s spell and ends up kissing her passionately at the conclusion of one of their therapy sessions.

Of course this is where things go horribly, horribly wrong, as the destruction that Evelyn has sown boils over. The Woods – a mysterious area away from The Castle where the women live – has been a site for Tiffany’s magickal ceremonies and incantations. She shared this with Evelyn and now Evelyn intends to lead all the women into the woods to be destroyed, or destroy each other. But the destructive energy she has unleashed turns on her instead and she is destroyed in a frenzied, unspeakable bacchanal.

So okay, that’s the plot, basically. It really spurred a lot of thought about many things – but mostly about the feminine voice, presentational aesthetic and the prejudices against that voice in a male-dominated culture.

First I think of the set-up as a whole. If a man wrote a piece about a mental health institution (say, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) the group dynamic would merely be the backdrop for the arc of the heroic lead, which culminates in escape, death or destruction. In Evelyn, the group dynamic is the focus of the plot. I know it sounds stereotypical, but I think of Fefu And Her Friends and this sort of shift into exploring multiple interactions and group dynamics, how they accumulate to create an outcome. The arc is not predicated entirely on the actions of one individual, but a collection of actions and a confluence of circumstances. This seems like part of the “feminine gaze” if you will.

I also wonder if a man had written such an evil character as Evelyn Henries, would it have been dismissed as unacceptable sexism? Jonas writes very deftly and does such a good job of delineating the world of the institution and the individuality of each character, that Evelyn seems to draw on a uniquely feminine, Mean Girls-type sensibility and archetype. This show is universal, but it is also about women, about how they interact in confinement and out of sight of society. In that way it references years and years of misogynist psychotherapy, from diagnoses of hysteria to penis envy.

So then I think about aesthetics. The show opens – and is threaded throughout – by songs and musical interludes performed by the actors. Lucy Kaminsky plays flute, one of the characters plays violin, there are scenes of the women drawing, doing art projects, knitting. The style of the music is home-made and simple, the women’s voices are on-tune but somewhat weak. They are not Broadway Belters, they are real girls. These things make me think of Karinne Keithley’s Montgomery Park, her instinct for framing the domestic, framing the things that women do – or are conventionally attributed with doing – as artful, generative acts that resist glorification. Symbolically – if not actually – girls in high school play flute, take art, knit, they grown into women who either hold onto these things or reject them, but these things retain resonance.

Along those lines, Jonas’ poetic language and phrasing call to mind Keithley, but also, obliquely, Tina Satter. Jonas, from time to time, embraces the kind of slang-y uptalk that one hears in Satter’s writing, but while Satter and Half Straddle embrace an aesthetic of intentional informality suggesting amateurishness, Jonas employs a more formal and disciplined approach. The lines are delivered more tautly, the actors are more actor-ly, the staging is, generally, more precise and more formal. In fact, the only times that Evelyn seems to lose momentum are some of the movement sequences that seem a little undisciplined and wobbly. My experience of the work was that some of the movement-based interludes and the climactic closing sequence seemed a bit drawn out and overtly literal. I think I understand, kind of, what Jonas was going for, but I don’t think she quite achieved it.

Despite a few weak spots, Evelyn is a really compelling, entertaining and insightful show that keeps you engaged and thinking throughout. The actors are uniformly excellent and the production elements – set, lights, sound – are not only aesthetically successful but professionally executed. There were several moments when I sat there and thought – why couldn’t this be at The Atlantic or Second Stage or Playwrights? And I thought of Claudia LaRocco’s essay on Theresa Rebeck and gender stereotypes on Broadway and realized that, sadly, this kind of work is still, unbelievably, only to be seen downtown (or in Brooklyn as the case may be).

In writing this article it really hit home that we have a wonderful variety of talented women writers working in “downtown” theater at the moment. Many of them are, in their own way, exploring language, aesthetics and ideas that are related but very different. They are articulating a kind of post-post-post feminism that embraces history while struggling to articulate a vision of the future. It is not about reaction to male-dominated society, nor, like Untitled Feminist Show, predicated on imagining some kind of feminine Utopia, but rather it is about integration and agency. It is about voice – precisely what UFS avoided – and about self-definition.

Anyway – I’ve rambled enough. Go see Evelyn!
It is playing at The Bushwick Starr until March 10th, 2012.

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