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.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tuesday night took us to St. Ann’s Warehouse to see Early Plays, a collaboration between Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players and The Wooster Group. Early Plays is a collection of three of Eugene O’Neill’s “Glencairn” plays, woven together with songs by Maxwell, who also directs. In these plays O’Neill is drawing on his own experience as a merchant seaman, following a group of shipmates on the British tramp steamer Glencairn from port to sea and back to port.

The show is staged on the same set that The Wooster Group used for their productions of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape – so there’s an interesting continuity here, not only in the way Early Plays is constructed, but in tracing the history and evolution of The Wooster Group’s engagement with O’Neill. I haven’t seen their production of The Hairy Ape, but I still remember being blown away by the revival of The Emperor Jones at St Ann’s a few years back. Kate Valk was a powerhouse in that show, projecting size, power and intensity completely out of proportion to her diminutive frame. She’s just one of those actresses who can fill a stadium with her presence and performance.

Early Plays stands in contrast to the heightened theatrics of The Emperor Jones. With nary a Wooster Group device in sight – no over the top theatrics, no video, no meta-meta-commentary – Maxwell, the master of affectless acting and textual precision, brings his style and vision to O’Neill’s work to wonderful effect.

O’Neill wrote the script in dialect, essaying to replicate the poetry of the veritable Babel of tongues and accents on the ship. The Glencairn’s crew, drawn from seaman from all parts of the world, was a melange of scalawags – British, Irish, Dutch, Swedish, West Indian, Russian and more. Each character brings their own accent, vernacular and individual quirks to the group. We are left with the impression of a group of rough men from different backgrounds who share some common traits – a feeling of outsiderness, discomfort on land, restlessness and a taste for adventure – commingled with a sense of yearning for the normal life they could have lived but for some intangible personality trait or quirk of fate that has doomed them to a life of roaming the seas.

One can imagine a more traditional production of these plays where a dialect coach was hired and they tried to use the written text merely as a jumping off point to some kind of linguistic verisimilitude. But here Maxwell uses his signature simplistic approach to language to open up O’Neill’s writing and imagination in a richer way than “realism” could ever achieve. By having the actors stay absolutely faithful to the words as written on the page and deliver the lines in the affectless, declamatory style that is Maxwell’s hallmark, we really hear what O’Neill has written. And though at times the flat delivery of the archaic language can bring unintended comedy, mostly it works – and the laughs that do come are rarely disruptive or jarring. We are not thrown out of the world of the play by some kind of cognitive dissonance, but rather we share a subtle, joyful moment of awareness. It is eery, really, that these men, so far removed from us in time and experience, and O’Neill’s affection for them, his attempt to render them vividly real, still resonates with a modern audience. Not in a traditional realistic way, of course, but in a metaphoric way.

Essentially what Maxwell has done is transform O’Neill into Beckett. Slightly more naturalistic – the events that befall the sailors are tangible and recognizable but still resonate with an existential undertone. We are, all of us, lowly sailors on a ship of fools: prey to our ignorance and base desires, to our futile daydreams and the relentless wearying strain of the day-to-day. There are moments of distraction and interludes of joy, we strain again and again to connect to each other and find a wider meaning, but in the end we are vanquished by nature and time.

All of the actors are fantastic – the cast is made up almost entirely of NYCP/Wooster Group regulars, and it is always a pleasure to see Jim Fletcher, Ari Fliakos, Brian Mendes and the rest of the gang on stage together. Over the years they have developed an ease and rapport that translates well to the audience. The ladies – Kate Valk and Kaneza Schaal – do a lot with the little they have to work with. O’Neill’s worlds – and to some extent Maxwell’s – are male-dominated and the women aren’t given a lot to say or do.

The adaptable set – really not much more than a scaffold with pulleys – is used to good effect, as is a smoke machine and the lighting. Though abstract, we get the sense of life on (and off) the sea, the cramped quarters, the bad food, the instability and harshness of a life exposed to the elements and subject to Acts Of God.

On a mostly-unrelated tangent, I think back to a production of Mourning Becomes Electra that I saw in Seattle in the early 90′s, directed by Dan Savage and produced by his theater company, Greek Active. Like every good theater major, I studied O’Neill in college and he was firmly situated in the world of “realism”. While we were taught that he aspired to create great American Tragedies in the spirt of the Greeks, it was difficult to imagine how this stilted, wooden prose and these melodramatic scenarios could possibly be construed as great tragedy. I still will, on occasion, jokingly pull out a line from Desire Under The Elms – “Right purty fahm, eh, Eben?” (I totally know that I’ve misremembered the line, but I have this image in my head of Anthony Perkins, who I think played in it back in the day, doing a New England accent…).

Anyway – Greek Active’s Mourning Becomes Electra was performed, of course, in drag. I don’t remember who played the Clytemnestra character, but I think the Electra character was played by Seattle stalwart Charles Smith (memory is fuzzy, corrections welcome). The staging blew my mind. Clytemnestra was in huge platform shoes (think: cothurni) with flowing gowns. They were all heavily made-up so as to appear masked, and all the actors delivered their lines, in the grand tradition of drag theater, in over the top histrionic tones. The emotions were, of course, completely unrealistic, as was the entire production, and somehow the heightened theatricality and irreverence cut through O’Neill’s pretensions to get to the heart of the tragedy underneath. It was the first time that I could see -and feel- the direct connection from O’Neill to Aeschylus and access what the play was trying to convey.

The connection between this and Early Plays, I suppose, is that Maxwell and TWG, by stripping O’Neill’s work of its realism, are able to penetrate to the core, to the underlying truth of the story and break through to offer up O’Neill as he aspired to be, a poet of grand tragedy.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM's "The You Show," at BAC this Thurs. & Fri.

“As the evening goes along, the pieces become more and more dramatic, and more and more epic,” Crystal Pite explained of the four pieces that make up The You Show. “I was interested in the idea that even though these stories of heartbreak and love loss arevery intimate stories, that are small in scale, to the person to they’re happening to they’re huge and epic and massive. They’re like earthquakes. They’re these huge shifts. And I was interested in trying to physicalize that. To make things bigger than us, superhuman, to make them as epic as they feel to the individual.”

Mid last week I was on the phone with the Victoria-born, Vancouver, B.C.-based choreographer Pite, conducting an interview over a crackling line courtesy of her hotel in Budapest, where her company was performing their 2009 piece Dark Matters at the Trafó. Starting tonight, her company Kidd Pivot brings one of their 2010 work The You Show to the Baryshnikov Arts Center for a brief run that is apparently nearly sold out.

Somewhat surprisingly, this is the company’s first New York presentation, despite Pite being a rising star on the international dance scene (admittedly, Dark Matters was at the Peak Performance Series at Montclair last year). After starting her career as a dancer with a BC ballet company, Pite joined the Ballet Frankfurt, where she worked with William Forsythe from 1996 to 2001. (“He’s also really great at destroying his work,” she told me. “I learned a lot watching how he would edit and remove things. There was as much for me to learn from that as from what he created.”). After Ballet Frankfurt, she returned to Canada and started her company around 2002. By 2006, she was producing works like Lost Action, which toured widely and generated further co-commissions, leading to the company’s current engagement as the resident company of the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt. All of which places New York a bit behind the curve when it comes to Pite’s work–it’s been everywhere else, why not here?

As we were talking, she was also spending time with her son, who’d occasionally intrude with a brief wail. “We’ve been on tour off and on since he was seven weeks old,” she said, “and now he’s almost 14 months. He’s a great little traveler. He’s a really good sport.”

I first caught her work in 2008, with Lost Action, and was duly impressed. In the extremely technical parlance of the contemporary dance world, Pite’s work falls into the “dance-y dance” category: her work is deeply informed by her background in ballet, relying on a rich and intense physical vocabulary, emotionally resonant imagery, and even narrative, as compared to the often conceptual work that leans toward natural and somatic movement we see in New York. But while I can’t comment on her choreography for companies like Cedar Lake Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theater, the Kidd Pivot work I’ve seen is extremely contemporary and completely lacking in the academic dryness one might expect from that description. Pite’s vocabulary is several steps beyond traditional ballet, very rich and idiosyncratic. There’s also often a surprisingly mechanical component to it, with dancers pushing, pulling, and shaping other dancers’ movement, which has provocative intersections with the content of her shows–Dark Matters, for instance, explore the idea of the puppet and puppeteer.

“It always comes back down to the content, the subject I’m working with,” Pite said of her approach to creating dance. In Dark Matters, for instance, “[T]here’s a lot of imagery of the body collapsing and unfolding. It looks like a lot of manipulation done to the body from the outside, as if you’re a puppet and there’s an invisible puppeteer moving you. The joints are folding and unfolding accordingly. There’s a real sense of not being control. So we developed a lot of movement around that idea because I was interested in the unknown, I was interested in the unseen forces at work on the mind and the body, and doing a dance with the unknown and being in a state of not-knowing. And so that was the concept of that piece, so my work was to encourage the body to feel that, the sense of the body being danced as opposed to dancing.”

The You Show, though, is a completely different animal. Dark Matters, its immediate predecessor, functioned as a sort of diptych, the first part given over to a straight narrative component featuring a puppet show on a stunning scale, which follows the trajectory of the Pygmalion myth and ends the first half with the entire set destroyed. In the second part, the company does a more abstract dance performance informed by–and informing–the themes and ideas raised by the first. By contrast, The You Show scales back the spectacle substantially, serving up instead a quartet of duets of sorts (the final one, for instance, features the entire company).

“My first impulse was to work with duets. I have nine dancers in the company, and I wanted to do an evening of duets, so I was thinking of relationships, and what were some of the different things I wanted to explore between two people,” Pite told me, adding also: “I was interested also in narrative, I was interested in story, and I always have been. And I’m more and more interested in it as I go along, but I was interested in not necessarily telling a new story, but telling a story everyone knows. Familiar story-lines of love and conflict and loss, and heartbreak, because I was curious about working with themes the audience already has within them. That they could inhabit the performance. These are all stories we share together. I was really hoping with The You Show–even in the title–to make a piece about the viewer, so that the viewer would really feel that the show was about them.”

“I have a favorite proverb, and it is, ‘Talk to a man about himself, and he will listen for hours.’ And I was thinking this might be really good advice for theater-making, that if the audience really feels the show is about them, that they are inhabiting the work, that it’s them represented on stage, that maybe they’re that much more engaged.”

In order to achieve the effect, The You Show starts (in the piece “A Picture of You Falling”) with a form of direct audience address, asking the audience to see themselves as a dancer. As the piece unfolds, this identification leads the audience members on a gender- and identity-bending journey that proceeds through the subsequent pieces, including “The Other You,” which explores the conflict between Self and Other, “Das Glashaus,” about the experience of personal disaster, and finally “A Picture of You Flying.”

“They’re kind of climbing on one another, they alternate being the climber and being the climbed,” she explained of the final piece. “And so that imagery is quite rich, in terms of the relationship between these two people, and seeing that sense of support and then seeing that striving and climbing and pushing down, I guess overcoming each other.”

Sadly, the engagement at Baryshnikov is only two nights, and ticket availability is limited to on-call at best. But hopefully it’s only the first opportunity for New York audiences to catch Kidd Pivot’s work, which is ever more in-demand. When I asked Pite about what it was like to be a resident company, allowing for maintaining a full company during the residency, she praised the opportunity to explore a deeper engagement with her dancers, even as she noted with a laugh: “Of course what’s happened is because of that we have more activity than we’ve ever had before, we have more tours and therefore we have more exposure, more interest in the company because of our visibility. And so now we’re getting incredibly busy so we still feel like we’re very rushed and have little time to prepare.”

Popularity: 5% [?]

Botanica photographs from Jim Findlay on Vimeo.

Tonight is the first of the last three performances of Jim Findlay’s Botanica (tickets $20 advance, $25 door), a darkly comic exploration of sexuality, consciousness and the natural world, at 3LD. It’s received wide praise for its innovative set design (by Peter Ksander), conceptual largesse (by Findlay with collaborators), and performances (by Ilan Bachrach, Chet Mazur, and Liz Sargent). For more reviews, see here, and check out our interview with Findlay, where he discusses the French Surrealist porn inspiration for the story.

Popularity: 2% [?]

By Cassie Peterson

“Dear Mom, I hate the world so much it’s making me queer…”
(Jen Rosenblit’s informal artist statement during the making of In Mouth)

On Wednesday, February 15th, Vanessa Anspaugh’s Armed Guard Garden and Jen Rosenblit’s In Mouth will premiere at New York Live Arts. In addition to being a frothing-at-the-mouth fanatic of these two dance-makers, I have also been working as a conceptual collaborator on Vanessa’s piece and I will be hosting the pre-show conversation on opening night. In preparation, I’ve been exploring, with both of them, ways to speak about their work without reducing their visions or spoon-feeding audiences. What has ensued is an on-going dialogue and investigation into the ways that Jen and Vanessa identify as young, queer artists and how their relationships to queer inform and shape their respective works.

Before I dive headlong into the details of their art practice/process/production, let me take a moment to try to contextualize queer…

Ultimately, queer is an elusive and indefinable Poststructural paradox because its task is to actually deconstruct definitions and identifications. It sort of folds in on its self and reveals the shortcomings of our current language practices. To queer something is to both expose and disrupt the ways in which heterosexual norms achieve a naturalized, unquestioned, and privileged position in society at large.

Queer has had an interesting semiotic evolution. It derives from the German word, quer, which means across or diagonal. It entered the English language in the 16th century and was used as an adjective that meant odd or strange or suspicious. Historically, queer has referred to something being out of normative alignment and it became a derogatory and oppressive slang-term that was used to identify and describe “homosexuals.” But since these early, hateful deployments of the term, queer has also been linguistically re-appropriated by many sexual minorities as a source of great power and pride. The term was initially reclaimed by members of Queer Nation and ACT-UP, during the height of the American AIDS crisis. Since that time Queer Theory/Queer Studies has become a very well-known and legitimate theoretical framework within the Academy and supports critical thinker and writers like Judith Butler, Judith “Jack” Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz, just to name a few.

When reclaimed, the word queer represents a kind of pluralistic (un)identity that works to undo the oppressive limitations of fixed, binary sexual and gender identifications. Instead of adhering to stringent and essentializing social categories, queer embraces its ambiguous “otherness” and opts for a discursive home on the fringes and in the margins. Thus, queer rejects a legacy of dominance and (hetero)normativity, and works to protect alterity in all of its multiple, irreducible manifestations. In this way, queer is an anti-normative consciousness that is a very purposeful departure from a more mainstream, assimilationist gay and lesbian agenda.

Queering… In Mouth

Jen Rosenblit is intense. Complex and multiple. And hilarious. I can’t help but laugh at every thing she says and love everything she puts in front of an audience. Both she and performer, Addys Gonzalez, agree to meet me at Yale University on a Friday evening. They are performing a sneak preview of their new show for eager graduate students in a small theater on campus. We meet before the show in the Yale bookstore, which is actually Barnes and Noble, which is actually Starbucks. Every part of the Ivy League campus is locked, creating a distinct separation between Yale and the rest of New Haven. We feel strangely like criminals even though we’ve technically been invited here.

One of Jen’s primary characteristics as a dance maker is her rigorous investigation and her ability to thoughtfully challenge some of the basic principles of performance and dance. Specifically, in the making of In Mouth, her desire was to challenge the expectation that dance always have some kind of underlying “Structure.”

Jen: Choreographers that I respect are always talking about the “structure” of their pieces. Well, I wanted to know… “Can a piece be structure-less and if so, how? What does it look like? Feel like?”

Throughout the process, Jen experimented with different ways to subvert arising structural realities. For instance, she and Addys spent many hours in unorthodox kinds of “rehearsal” spaces. Their task was often simply to share the space of their regular, domestic lives and to call it “rehearsal.”

Jen: My primary intention was to find ways to make a dance without rehearsing.
It was like domesticity for art-making purposes. We would sweep the floors and say, “Okay, this is what I am thinking now.” Or we would do the dishes and report back our “findings.” We drank wine and watched bad television, all the while thinking, “This is what I’m doing and this is what it’s making me think and feel.” All year long, we were just trying to find new ways to activate parts of ourselves that had already been activated.

What came up for both Jen and Addys in this domestic rehearsal (anti)structure were the ways in which they are conditioned to think of themselves as the “makers” of work. Within this dominant construction of the “artist,” art making exists as a labor and a responsibility that resides inside of a singular self. In an effort to deconstruct this notion of the self-owned creative act, Jen and Addys would imagine that masses of people where in “rehearsal” with them, pushing their bodies and the work forward. Jen envisioned ways to make the (anti)structure of the piece more about allowing one’s self to be moved by the material, rather than having to produce it.

Jen: We tried to think of the work as carrying us, instead of us carrying the work. We were inspired by the Occupy Movement and this idea of a mass of bodies taking up space in resistance. This was completely exciting and inspiring to me.

Addys: There was a kind of hidden collaboration in the work. We were constantly, internally calling upon all the people in our lives and in the Occupy Movement to help us in rehearsal. Our intention was to feel as though there is a whole community, an entire mass of people behind us and behind every movement choice. Your body has to do less when there is a mob of people behind you. A singular body has to do so much, internally and externally. It has to carry all the responsibility.

Queering Bodies & Relationships…

Though it formally and “structurally” appears to be a duet, In Mouth is simultaneously working to disrupt dominant notions of duet, in multiple ways. Jen’s body of work is renowned for being consciously engaged with the politics of the body and the relationships between them. She identifies as a non-conforming body in multiple ways and understands the complex reactions that arise when she puts her queer body next to Addys’s queer body, in front of an audience — a strange juxtaposition of two very different bodies, intimately relating in space, in a way that is not easily identifiable or familiar for many audiences.

Jen: People will always say,” That’s a really beautiful duet except that Jen is…. too fat… or gay…. Or Addys is black and you are white…” or “They look so strange together”… or whatever it is. There is always something that seems to put us “outside” of what people expect from the duet form. Its as if people always put a weird asterisk next to our work, like “**It would be a beautiful dance if it weren’t for these things…” These “things” of course, being our actual bodies.

At the beginning of the creative process, Jen played with people’s perceptions of their bodies by having she and Addys performing a kind of exaggerated, beastly dumbness. They clunkily lumbered around in space, inviting people to attach clichéd characteristics to their bodies. But then, somewhere in their process, Jen decided that she also wanted to give them permission to embody beautiful and sexy and elegant because a queer body knows no bounds.

In Mouth is a beautifully moving piece. It embodies a kind of austere and precise intensity…

In addition to the overt queerness of their actual physical bodies, In Mouth is also a challenge to the conceptual expectations embedded in duet forms. There are implicit expectations of duet as a kind of energetic intertwining – an ebbing in and out of the space of self and into a unification with the other. In fact, “duet” often becomes a metaphor for “relationship,” as if it is the only way to relate – both in dance and in society. In this dominant idea of the duet, the duo becomes the dance’s focal point and every other kind of relationship becomes peripheral or even illegible. But Jen was determined to disrupt duet. She accomplished this by exposing the realities of “back-stage” and incorporating the tech and production crew right into the real-time realm of the performance. She also involved objects and audience into the sphere of primary and legitimate relationships.

Jen: What about our relationship to the audience? What about our relationship to the objects in the piece? And what about our relationship to ourselves? I think its funny that we see two bodies moving together and we automatically call it duet and then from there, we have certain expectations connected to it.

There is a section in Jen’s piece where she and Addys perform a kind an internal strip tease/peep show for one another. They take turns watching one another. And the audience watches each of them watching the other’s solo. In this, they are exploring the multiple ways to relate to each other, to the audience, and to all the objects on the ground. Every time they touch or use an object, they give it the same attention that they have generously been offering to each other. Thus, there is no privileging of certain “kinds” of relating in this piece. There is unequivocal regard for the cloth on the floor, the production crew, and for the people sitting in the audience. We are all asked to relate in a way that de-centers the primacy of the duet and of the “couple.”

I’m struck by how these disruptions of the duet mimic alternative, queer kinship patterns. Queer kinship patterns maneuver outside of the normative expectations of the married, romantic couple and the corresponding nuclear family arrangement. Queer kinship models do not subscribe to the same markers of social appropriateness. They are often bloodless and lawless relationships that redefine lover/friend/family/community. They privilege love and pleasure over power and position. Queer desires cannot be regulated. Queer affections cannot be legislated. I feel this relational multiplicity when I watch In Mouth.

Addys: Yes, exactly. To me it’s the multiplicity and possibility of relating that makes it queer… Can objects be in a duet? Are the fabrics in relationship to each other? Are we in relationship to the object? We’ve investigated multiple ways to access relationship with ourselves, with each other, with the audience, and with “other” things.

In this deconstruction of the duet, Jen and Addys successfully re-arrange kinship and reconstitute notions of belonging. They do this while also making subtle and abstract, visual references to the marriage institution. At one point in the performance, Jen is standing next to Addys. They are arm-in-arm and she is wearing a veil-like fabric over her face. Later in the piece, Addys puts on a wedding dress-like train and walks across the stage. He is perhaps the most beautiful bride I have ever seen.

Jen (laughing): Yeah, this was not an overt commentary or a concerted effort to politicize the work or make it topical, but “Gay Marriage” images would organically arise. It’s just a singular reading on what was happening.

But In Mouth does, in some indirect way call into question Marriage and comment on it as a heteronormative ideology. Marriage is a container that makes a request for a particular relational outcome. And when people fail at it, these failures are not embraced or celebrated. Jen Rosenblit wants to embrace the failure to arrive at specific situational outcomes. Queer celebrates failure.

Queer makes failure look so good.

Jen: Sure, let’s pass that law so that we can actually start talking about how fucking weird marriage is….

Amen sister. Amen.

Queering… Armed Guard Garden

Being perpetually locked in/out of Yale University reminds me of Vanessa’s piece, Armed Guard Garden because of the ways in which the piece explores our compulsive need to create and protect borders, boundaries, and territories. We organize ourselves around lines carved out in material and psychic spaces that work to include and exclude, depending on what side you find yourself on. A locked gate on a college campus or a beautiful garden in a gated community construct simultaneous realities – the promises the inside vs. the fate of the outside.

Queering Ways of (Un)Knowing…

Working on Armed Guard Garden means that I occasionally step into the rehearsal process and tell Vanessa what I think I’m seeing. We eat a lot of meals together and try to make sense of whatever it she is making. Vanessa is a very intuitive investigator and movement maker — making choices first and then finding ways to name and understand them much later in the process. Vanessa’s art practice is an example of a queer epistemology – an alternative process from which to “know” the world. Throughout her process, Vanessa resists conditioned ways to “know” or understand the world(s) that we create and inhabit.

Vanessa: I am a queer human in the world. Anything I shape is going to be molded by a queer way of knowing. The work doesn’t have to be about “queer” things to be queer. It’s less of an identity and more of a process. To me, queer is an identity-less identity. I like to play with identity-less-ness in my work.

The relationship between her and her work is happening on a different register — a different line of latitude that is not legible through a normative lens.

Vanessa: I like to think of queer as a religion of sorts — not in a repressive, normalizing way, but rather as a guidepost. It’s the willingness to entertain a radical and expansive consciousness and to have enough faith to let my work originate from these places. That’s how I try to approach my creative process – with an open, unknowing stance. I don’t want my work to be essentialized as one kind of experience. I want to facilitate multiple realities — a welcoming rather than a singular or controlled entry point.

Perhaps queer is the method to Armed Guard Garden’s madness.

Queering Borders…

If Jen’s piece is sparing and severe, Vanessa’s piece is busting at the seams with a kind of bizarrely wild, Technicolored melo-drama. Armed Guard Garden is a different world entirely. Utopian. Extraterrestrial. It houses unfamiliar sounds and beast-like human forms moving in grotesquely violent and erotic ways. There are protagonists and antagonists and they are constantly exchanging positions and purpose.

Vanessa constructs “the garden” and the “guard,” rendering a dual reality – each part made from shared material and only coming into being through its contrast to the other. In this way, Vanessa’s piece is a commentary on the ways that we violently put boundaries around the world in order to make sense of it.

Armed Guard Garden works to construct and then disregard these insidious binary identifications and dual notions of reality.

At the beginning of the piece, five badass performers – Aretha Aoki, Niall Noel Jones, Molly Leiber, Lydia Okrent, and Mary Read – mark up the theater in grid-like gestures. They produce literal lines and divisions on the walls and the floor. They create these divisions with chalk and flour and then spend the rest of the performance skewing the lines in the most exquisite and grandiose fashion. They roll around in their own ephemeral boundaries — disrupting them, blurring them with a total abandon and taking unabashed pleasure in their demise. The dancers queer the lines that they themselves have drawn, making a beautifully depraved mess of themselves and the space. It’s an ecstatic refusal to be bound — and a celebration of the parts of self & other that can only exist in the queer, in-between spaces that arise when The Known crumbles.

Queer Politic(s)

Armed Guard Garden resonates both on a sociopolitical scale and delves deep into the micro-politics of the interpersonal moment. AGG explores the dehumanizing effects of a militaristic society and is an embodied commentary on War as a dominant, normative practice. Interpersonal power relations mimic and mirror international relations. We learn how to relate to each other from the world we live in. Thus, how does war live inside of us? Between us? Vanessa positions bodies in opposition to one another and then in a moment, has them join and unify in a kind of inexplicable tenderness. It’s a meditation on the desire to connect and the desire to destroy. It’s a meditation on the instability of power — oppression becomes resistance and loops back again.

Vanessa: It reminds me of being at Wall Street protests and being faced by walls of police with cameras recording every face they could for their surveillance purposes. Simultaneously the protesters were filming the cops filming them, creating a feedback loop. The video screen was also split in half to show a live feed of the protestors watching the trial –watching themselves – watching themselves being watched. How does power move through this loop? Who has it? Who loses it? Gains it? And how does it shift?

Vanessa does most of her movement research through collaborative improvisational practices between she and her dancers. In this process, the performers translate the realties of the external world into the microcosmic world of her dance. She works to create a political “container of now” as a way to gather and metabolize the external world. It’s a kinetic transmission.

Vanessa: The language of improvisation is political. It’s not didactic but it’s always politically relevant. The performers act as filters – bringing the world into the work through improv. Rehearsal space is alive and active and connected to the larger context of the world. Armed Guard Garden is interdependently situated within everything that happened this year. We would all go to rehearsal after being at the protests and the power of that massive movement translated into our own singular movements in the studio.

A queer politic is not topical per say. It, like the Occupy Movement cannot be distilled to a singular demand. Rather, it is an investigation and an interrogation of the entire system and its inexcusable power arrangements and discrepancies.

Queer – movement out of stasis. Out of status quo.

Both Armed Guard Garden and In Mouth hold the tension between what is expected and what is really happening. Each piece incites a sense of a traversing and transgressing something. Everything.

For Vanessa and Jen, it is clear that queer is a kind of embodied resistance. Queer is a reference to process and practice, more than explicit content. These artists accept and employ this constellation of principles and make work that transmits it. Queer is kinetic. A queer body is a body in motion.

Vanessa: Making art with body, bodies unedited — this is queer. Bodies are always bleeding outside their own form. They get dirty and sad. They bleed and shit all over the place. They are never what you expect them to be. Bodies in motion is a radical queer politic.

Jen: Maybe modern dance is already a queer act? Modern dance is very political. In its historical context, it is a very young form of a hyper-political movement, based in radical resistance.

Addys: The performing body is a political ground. Everything we experience as people, as queers, is present in the body. You don’t have to make a piece topical to be deeply political or queer because it’s all there anyway. So in a sense, we made everyone queer with this dance… if you’re moving, dancing, you’re already embodying a queer politic.

There is no essential queer object or subject. Queer is not an objectifiable identity, domain, or dwelling, but is rather produced as a contrast against which normalcy is produced and codified. Hence, queer never is, it never fully arrives. It is always, disrupting, refusing, and resisting the ever-shifting power of (hetero)normativity and dominance, in an effort to carve out more psychic and material space for everybody.

Jen: I really wanted the ending of In Mouth to be a tangent. I don’t want it to be understood. No certainty or conventional conclusion. I want to acknowledge that it’s confusing that things end.

Cassie: Yes, it is confusing. How should we end this?

Queerly.

But what does that mean?

I don’t know….

Exactly.

Cassie Peterson is a New York-based writer, thinker, activist, healer, & lavender menace. She works as a psychotherapist by day, and moonlights as a dance/performance conversationalist, consultant, and critic. Her extemporaneous musings and inqueeries can be found on her blog, Self & Other.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Alfredo Narciso & Lisa Joyce in "The Ugly One". Photo: Julieta Cervantes

An attractive face is a form of social currency, a fact attested to in fairy tales and regularly touted by modern-day scientific studies. German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One, playing at SoHo Rep through February 26, mines the correlation between good looks and power, making the implicit explicit in an absurd drama that focuses—unconventionally, but refreshingly—on a man instead of a woman.

This bitter comedy, rife with social commentary, follows the fortunes of an unspeakably ugly man (Lette) who undergoes cosmetic surgery to get a new face. His new, extraordinarily handsome visage transforms his life: he is immediately successful at his work, and at conferences, queues of women fight to offer companionship after his presentations. Not all of the effects of this seismic change, however, are positive. Lette’s behavior shifts towards condescending entitlement, and as he becomes a poster child for the wonders of plastic surgery, his face is mass-produced, prompting all kinds of identity confusion.

There are lots of layers here, as many as the gauze bandages sported by patients post-surgery. The staging is spare, with an almost clinical feel, yet highly theatrical. Under the direction of Daniel Aukin, each of the four cast members deftly rotates between several roles, and the split-second flips between characters (youthful wife to aging mistress, boss to plastic surgeon) add a frisson to the action. The fishbowl, “I’m sizing you up” mentality is reflected in the audience/stage configuration, which places the stage between parallel sets of risers; I found myself periodically assessing the faces across from me.

By taking cosmetic surgery to fantastical extremes, Mayenburg teases the link between the external and internal, the impact of outward appearance on behavior, and the malleable understanding of “identity.” You laugh while you’re in the theater, but you walk out the door thinking.

[Postscript: Last week’s New Yorker includes a fascinating article on facial transplants as an extreme form of reconstructive surgery. In short, a victim of a terrible accident gets a new face. Eerily familiar.]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Beth Griffith, Mike Mikos, Joshua Modney and Kate Soper in You, My Mother (Photo by Prudence Katze)

Saturday afternoon took us to LaMama to see Two-Headed Calf‘s You, My Mother, the new opera project directed by Brooke O’Harra. The project explores the relationship between children (daughters) and their mothers, featuring two distinct halves – the first a collaboration between writer Kristen Kosmas and composer Rick Burkhardt, the second a collaboration between writer Karinne Keithley Syers and composer Brendan Connelly – both performed by acclaimed new music ensemble yarn|wire and a very talented cast of actor/singers.

I’m going to start by saying that, while I love LaMama dearly and You, My Mother is dedicated to its legendary spiritual and artistic mother, Ellen Stewart, I found myself wishing that this show was at The Kitchen, Issue Project Room or Roulette, if for no other reason than context.

I recently saw a workshop of Joe Diebes’ Botch at HERE and had similar thoughts – not that Botch should have been in another venue, but about context. Botch was a complex, multilayered sound piece with actors and objects that has been generally positioned as theater – but I thought back to Robert Ashley‘s opera That Morning Thing presented at The Kitchen as part of Performa11, and realized that Diebes’ piece would benefit by situating itself as opera. What it is investigating in terms of sound, staging and effect references the traditions of opera more than text-based theater, and while it fits comfortably in either world, an adventurous new music audience might have more access points. And the frame of “opera” might allow the piece to be heard in a different way, rather than being constrained by a theater-goer’s instinct to seek textual meaning or familiar modes of interpersonal interaction.

You, My Mother is clearly opera and The Ellen Stewart Theater at LaMama imbued the piece with a certain emotional and aesthetic resonance. The theater is spacious and grand and fairly emanates its history. The musicians and performers were arranged on the stage in such a way that the show felt both intimate and spectacular. The single nod towards multimedia – slide projectors – worked really well with the staging, music and lighting to create an atmosphere conducive to the dreamlike unfolding of fractured and disputed memories that comprised the performance. But I found myself wondering if this piece would benefit from being in a space more known for contemporary music and experimental literature. I felt simultaneously thrilled that I was seeing what I think is really important work, while feeling worried/frustrated that because it is happening in the context of “downtown theater” it is not going to be seen or appreciated by a wider audience. I may be – and hope – I’m wrong, because You, My Mother is a really wonderful and rewarding work.

This is an auspicious moment for new music in New York City – there is almost a glut of cutting-edge contemporary opera and art music that builds on modern music of the 20th century while embracing tonality and pop music tropes. There are collaborations between composers and video artists and musicians and performers that are causing quite a stir – from Nico Muhly to Merrill Garbus to Judd Greenstein’s New Amsterdam label and Ecstatic Music Festival, etc. etc. On any given night at LPR alone you can listen to amazing, groundbreaking new music. But, in my limited experience, the text is frequently subpar, or at least not as good as the music. Also, in my limited experience, I haven’t found so much new music that was emotionally complex and evocative – perhaps because of the limitations of the text, perhaps because of an infatuation with technology and overwhelming video, perhaps because. It might also be related to that certain aloofness that comes from being “avant-garde” in New York, that we’ve inherited from the now-legendary groundbreaking downtown artists for the 60′s through the 80′s.

You, My Mother inhabits an interesting place in the arc of avant-garde NYC. It feels both new and old, both contemporary and historical. The construction of the work itself feels handmade. As far as I can tell, the yarn|wire ensemble works almost exclusively with actual instruments and found objects, not a synthesizer, laptop or sampler in sight. And the use of archaic technology such as the slide projectors established a feeling of unearthed histories, of memories discovered in a shoebox in the back of a closet in your childhood home.

Both Kosmas and Syers are extraordinary writers who share a common fascination with the magic immanent in the mundane, domestic and vernacular. They possess a similar gaze, but each approaches the material differently way, with their own distinct voice. Kosmas is the interrogator of small moments; she finds casual phrases, tossed off words and brief glances, casts a light on them, frames them, makes them resonate with extraordinary profundity.  She is a poet of notes left behind on scraps of paper; of impenetrable, heartbreaking miscommunications, a collector of the overlooked.

Syers, too, excavates small, easily-overlooked moments, but her voice is at once more interior and expansive, seemingly drawing from the unconscious and making connections between disparate and unlike things. She brings in animals and dreams, takes us into imaginary, frequently playful landscapes, though her words are the last of the show and she leaves us with the haunting sentiment, “I wanted to say so much more, but thinking of you makes me quiet.” [that is how I wrote it in my notes, it may not be the exact quote].

Rick Burkhardt is a fascinating composer, I first saw his work when the Nonsense Company debuted in New York with Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm, where he used prepared instruments, found objects and spoken text to great effect. In You, My Mother, Burkhardt’s composition is similarly percussive and yarn|wire performs with energy and precision. The voices of the actors, alternating between sung and spoken text, hover over and between the instrumentation, creating phrases, punctuation and scenes that support and reveal Kosmas’ text. The overarching device is the slide show, most of which consists not of images but of descriptions: “a relative’s birthday party”, “a wedding”, “a child’s shoulder blades”. The slides are evocative in their absence of discrete representation, they are the idea of a slide show, conveying a kind of sadness while acknowledging the simultaneous singularity of family memory and the universality of those same pictures.

Kosmas focuses very much on the process of individuation and deconstruction – what does it mean to become an adult? Who are we searching for when the iconic Mother no longer holds up and we seek to see her as she is, flaws and all? How do we forgive our mothers for being human, flawed and messy when we would have them be perfect, ever-loving and constant? A funny scene occurs when the daughter, Helen, tries to tell her mother that she is sad, depressed, alone, confused. She speaks, elliptically, of her mother pressing buttons, and we soon realize that they are talking to each other through an intercom from separate sides of the house. Helen tries to instruct her mother on how to use the intercom, until the mother finally asks her to come. A slide flashes on the screen, “Helen walks three miles”  [once again, faulty memory on my part, this may not be an accurate quote] and the musicians clomp a pair of shoes on a board for a full minute or more as Helen sullenly walks. The mother says, “There’s something about the way your father built this house”. She is referring to the physical house but it is obvious that there is something wrong with the family’s psychological house, the absent father, the inability to communicate.

The interplay between Burkhardt’s score and Kosmas’ words is intricate and skillful – they have complementary senses of rhythm, spacing and tone. And just as Kosmas seeks meaning in the everyday, Burkhardt relies not only on musical instruments but quotidian objects – a mixing bowl, a pair of shoes, a handcrank.

Brendan Connelly, along with Brooke O’Harra, is a founder of Two Headed Calf and his composition is a hallmark of the company’s work. Over the years he has accessed a remarkable range of styles, instrumentation and ideas; each production has its own unique score that frequently reflects the subject matter, but maintains a certain voice that is distinctly his own. In this show, Connelly’s score seems a bit more overtly musical, somewhat less percussive and dissonant than in previous work. Once again, the music is deeply integrated with the words, they set them off and frame them, provide support and elucidation, drama and emotion. Syers’ divides the piece into five sequences, each named after an animal but for the final one, entitled “dawn”. Connelly and Syers strike a tone that is sometimes wistful and sometimes amused, even moving from playful to poignant within the same sequence.

I don’t know the exact nature of Two Headed Calf’s collaborative process, but I am assuming that it was very close for both pairs of creators. Holding the whole thing together is O’Harra’s deft direction. She recently became a mother and I can only imagine that this influenced the process in some way. I’ve seen a number of Brooke’s shows over the years and they are often characterized by a certain frenzied energy and over-the-top theatricality. While You, My Mother is still very theatrical – there are animal masks and surreal costumes – the show comes across as a bit more measured and mature. The staging is simple and thoughtful, the actors move with energy and precision but never wander near the chaos and spectacle of earlier works. The performances are bigger than life but still nuanced and very controlled, there is a lot of room, not just space on the stage but within the work itself. Room for the actors to really inhabit the roles and room for the audience to both receive the staged work and project their personal experience into it.

The ensemble - Beth Griffith, Laryssa Husiak, Mike Mikos and Kate Soper – give strong performances across the board. Even though not all of them are trained singers, the music seems to work to each of their strengths. They managed to balance the singing duties (with some pretty challenging music) with intricate choreography and solid acting. The same ensemble of actors and musicians performs both pieces and that continuity works in the favor of the project overall. It feels whole, a two-part reflection, a diptych if you will, on the universal mother and the mother in particular, singular and human.

Simply put, I really enjoyed and appreciated the show. I found it very moving, insightful and emotionally rich while still being aesthetically and artistically adventurous and challenging. Kosmas and Syers are not darlings of the experimental literature set – I’m not sure who is – but they are doing important work that merits more visibility. So too with Connelly and Burkhardt. I know a lot less about the world of new music, but I know yarn|wire a bit, and know that they are well-regarded and work with really talented people. I’m not sure how Burkhardt and Connelly position themselves in relationship to the wider new music scene in New York, but I hope that this work is recognized by other artists and composers exploring the genre.

You, My Mother continues at LaMama through February 20th – catch it while you can.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Culturebot doesn’t write about music a whole lot – not because of lack of interest, but mostly due to lack of time and expertise. But right now NYC is abuzz with an adventurous and vital group of young contemporary classical musicians who are reinvigorating and re-imagining the canon while creating new and original work. I’m told by people much more knowledgeable than myself that this is really an exciting moment, and I’ve been trying to see/hear as much as I can (in addition to my already-full schedule of dance and theater).

One of the groups I’ve really enjoyed getting to know is Brooklyn Rider, a kind of indie-classical string quartet out of, obviously, Brooklyn. Comprised of Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen on violin; Nicholas Cords on viola and Eric Jacobsen on cello, these four young musicians bring an incredible energy and originality to their music, blending genres, influences and aesthetics to bring classical music to life in unexpected ways. They’ve been a big hit with both the establishment and the more upstart younger crowd.

On February 21st Brooklyn Rider will release (digitally) their fourth album, Seven Steps. It will also be available in a limited edition vinyl pressing! Yay vinyl!!

The album is inspired by Beethoven’s op. 131, which makes up the bulk of the record. In addition to their expert rendering of Beethoven’s iconic work, they are debuting a new work by composer Christopher Tignor and their first-ever collaborative composition, Seven Steps. I’m not a music critic, but as a neophyte, I find the juxtaposition of the new work next to the Beethoven really exciting and interesting. It provides a certain kind of aesthetic consonance and framework, drawing a connection between the past and the present, convincingly making the argument for the form (and the string quartet) as a vital, dynamic, contemporary medium.

Brooklyn Rider gave me access to the digital recording last week and I have been listening to it on my iPod ever since. It is really great! The music is dramatic and engaging, and the recording is exceptional. You can almost hear them breathing – it feels so close to live and they are all such dramatic, expressive, powerful musicians. For the first time in ages I just put on my headphones, closed my eyes and gave myself over to truly listening. You just want to take the time to pay close attention and get into every nuance, very shift in tone, every emotion. Admittedly, as I’ve said, I’m not a music critic, but it feels like I’m discovering a whole new genre of music – even though it is one of the most well-known genres in the world.

Seven Steps, the collaboratively devised composition, veritably vibrates with intensity, bringing an almost jazz-like feel of improvisation to the classical vernacular. Together Into This Unknowable Night, the commissioned piece from composer Christopher Tignor, opens with a lush, expansive and suspenseful sound bed, segueing into a more overtly lyrical section and continuously evolving in complexity before gently bringing the listener back to a place of meditative contemplation.

I try to avoid cutting and pasting from press releases, but in this case I feel that they have said it better than I could. From the press release:

The programming of Seven Steps was partially born out of the need to define a place where the labyrinth of Beethoven’s colossal String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131 could work itself out guided by a spirit of free play rather than the heavy weight of the great composer’s pen. This idea, along with the ensemble’s ongoing desire to follow the lead of popular music and endeavor to create music collaboratively rather than relying on the singular voice of the composer, lead to creation of the title track, Seven Steps. Half-sketched, half improvised, the piece is the first work by Brooklyn Rider, and a first in the world of the classical string quartet.

Christopher Tignor, NYC-based composer/band leader by night and software engineer by day, wrote Together Into This Unknowable Night in 2008 for Brooklyn Rider. Tignor’s music, informed as much by the vast possibilities of the electronic music universe as it is by his tactile experience as a violinist, seemed to be a natural fit for this album. His vivid description felt like it shared a kinship with Brooklyn Rider’s view of Beethoven:

“In Together Into This Unknowable Night, I wanted something that took the quartet somewhere overwrought, something they could lean into with heart as much as bow. Big vertical stacks that would take that centuries-old quartet resonance and let you live inside it. Music that is as much noun as verb, as much a story as a place for your story. And I want it to feel like we’re sorting it all out together.”

The intersection between the improvisatory spirit of Seven Steps, the luminescent sound world of Together Into This Unknowable Night, and the transcendent world of late Beethoven aptly represents the multi-faceted passions of Brooklyn Rider.

Whether you are a tried and true fan of classical music, or just a casual listener on the lookout for great new music, Brooklyn Rider’s Seven Steps is a great addition to your playlist.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I don’t remember when I first saw Julia May Jonas’s company Nellie Tinder, but I do remember one evening at University Settlement where she presented an excerpt of a dance-theater piece with a live guitarist that was a wonderful blend of humor, choreography and theater. Ever since I’ve tried to make an effort to see what she’s doing and the upcoming Evelyn at Bushwick Starr looks to be a real milestone for this talented writer/director. For this outing she is working with some great collaborators, a veritable “who’s who” of downtown talent, in different capacities – Jon Lundbom, Ryan Holsopple, Jennie MaryTai Liu, Normandy Raven Sherwood, Jess Barbagallo and Andrew Dinwiddie. Looks to be good!

The show is described as “a musical fever-dream” and “…an idiosyncratic genre mash-up and a haunting yet humorously parodic love letter to things past.”

There’s a good preview article on the show over at The Brooklyn Rail.

and here’s a preview video:

Evelyn Trailer from Julia May Jonas on Vimeo.

NELLIE TINDER
EVELYN
FEBRUARY 22-MARCH 10
Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8pm
at the Bushwick Starr
Preview Feb. 21 ($10)
$15

Popularity: 3% [?]

I apologize for the lateness of this write-up, I have been horribly remiss in posting.  Lots of work and a week-long sojourn to Montreal have put me way behind schedule!

But I have been thinking about BLESSED, created by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and EIRA that debuted at NYLA for quite some time. We’re always fortunate when Meg Stuart comes to town, and in this case, given the recent discussions about visual art performance and performing arts, it seemed especially timely and fortunate.

BLESSED is one of those pieces that is so exceptionally well-wrought and expertly executed that you kind of end up gasping in amazement. A single performer/dancer, Francisco Camacho, is on the stage in a crisp white outfit and shower shoes, amidst a landscape comprised of a small house, a palm tree and a swan, all meticulously fashioned out of cardboard. Designed by Doris Dziersk,  they are beautiful art objects unto themselves. Camacho moves in tight, contained bursts, moving robotically around the space. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, it starts to rain and the palm tree starts to crumble, eventually falling to the ground. The swan, too, crumbles and sags and the house (more like a bus shelter really) starts to fall in from the middle of the roof.

I talked to Carla Peterson on the bus to Montclair for the Bill T. Jones show and she told me that the cardboard was scored (cut) to fall in particular ways and that all the pieces were fashioned in Europe and shipped over, in parts, to be assembled anew for each performance. Even the flow of water in the rainfall is carefully calibrated and timed to create the exact effect desired.

Camacho makes his way back to the crumbling hut and spray paints graffiti on the walls that reads  ”You are a beast”, “You don’t feel” and “Why do you sob?”, only to have the structure fall down more. He changes clothes from the white outfit into jeans, a scarf, flower hat, shoes and a fake beard, wearing a camouflage t-shirt that reads “Exercito de Jesus” or “Army of Jesus”. The rain subsides, briefly, as the score, by Hahn Rowe, moves to more tranquil and whimsical sounds, like chimes or birdsong. But this is only a brief reprieve as the rain returns and demolishes all that remains of the hut, the swan and the tree. Finally, Camacho tears it all down and assembles heaps of cardboard, fashioning them into makeshift blankets and inadequate shelter. He ends up twitching on the ground in a scene of drizzle and twilight, he rises again as rain subsides and puts some kind of stretching thing in his mouth to create a disturbing rictus of a smile and starts to makes weird singsong noises. Just then the lights go up super-bright and Katomi Nishiwaki, dressed like a Vegas showgirl, enters the stage and preens like a Phoenix. The music sounded like B.B. King, but I’m not sure. But she rocks it, incongruously, in an iridescent jump suit and platform white patent leather boots. She preens, he crawls.

After she exits, Camacho moves downstages center and strikes an iconic Jesus Christ pose, where Abraham Hurtado steps out of the audience and dresses Camacho in a variety of outfits that I interpreted as “Raver Christ”, “Sports Fan Christ”, “Fashion Christ” and “Beach Bum Christ” until finally settling on a pair of white underwear with a see-through raincoat.

Camacho wanders around some more, desolate in a wasted landscape, elliptically revisiting the movement vocabulary from the opening moments until the the rain begins yet again and the scene fades to black.

One of the things that really struck me about BLESSED was that it kept arriving at places from which it seemed there was no way forward, and somehow found a way to keep going, evolving, changing, surprising. “We can’t go on, we must go on.”

And here’s where I go back to the whole “art” argument. While Camacho is definitely a trained dancer, and Stuart a choreographer, what unfolded on the stage was something other than pure “dance”. It truly was time-based art. The sculptural elements of the set, the visual composition of the lighting and the atmospheric shifts of the score worked together with the embodied presence of the performer(s) to create a seamless, integrated, living work of art. It would be hard, I think, to judge the work purely on the merits of the movement – it was about creating a durational experience where  the compositional elements brought together onstage served as a locus for ideas, where we as an audience were not dictated to, but invited in, a conversation around ecology, around disaster, faith, and the human condition.

BLESSED was really quite moving and incredibly well-done. I look forward to Meg Stuart’s next NYC engagement.

Popularity: 3% [?]