Culturebot is thrilled and honored that Meiyin and Mark at Under The Radar have graciously invited us to collaborate on and organize two discussions on contemporary performance during the festival. We will be engaging with some of the ideas that have garnered the most attention and discussion on CBOT lately: our article on Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance and the issue of Citizen Criticism and the Arts.

Full details below (updates to come as panelists are finalized and bios come in). Hope you will join us!

Can’t be there? Conversations will be livestreamed at http://www.livestream.com/newplay

Under The Radar presents
CULTUREBOT CONVERSATIONS ON CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

Performance and Context: The Black Box and The White Cube
Sunday, January 8 at 1PM
LuEsther Lounge
@ The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street

In today’s cultural landscape, contemporary artists are continuously blurring the lines between theater, dance, installation, performance art, visual art and live art. The work’s context comes from who curates it, where it happens, who writes about it and who is its intended audience. Performance is perceived and evaluated differently when presented in a gallery or museum as opposed to a theater. Why is that? What does it mean? And how can we move beyond the Black Box vs. the White Cube and devise new frameworks for genre-defying performance?

Participants:
Philip Bither (Senior Curator of Performing Arts, Walker Art Center)
RoseLee Goldberg (Founding Director and Curator, Performa)
Liz Magic Laser (Artist)
David Levine (Artist)

RECOMMENDED READING:
Claire Bishop, “Unhappy Days In The Art World” (Brooklyn Rail)
Andrew Horwitz, “Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance” (Culturebot)

Everyone’s A Critic! Exploring the Changing Landscape of Arts Writing
Sunday, January 15 at 1PM
LuEsther Lounge
@ The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street

As the mainstream media continues to cut its arts coverage, an increasingly diverse field of citizen journalists has filled in the gap. Some decry this as a disaster, proclaiming the death of criticism. Others characterize this as a long-overdue democratization of critical conversation. The truth is probably somewhere in between. What is the role of the arts writer in today’s society – either “professional” or “amateur”, what is the difference between a reviewer, a critic and a crank, and what does the future hold?

Participants:
Randy Gener (U.S. editor of CriticalStages.org)
George Hunka (Superfluities Redux)
Margo Jefferson (critic, author, professor)
Tom Sellar (Theater magazine (Yale) & Village Voice)

RECOMMENDED READING:
Michael Kaiser, “The Death of Criticism” (Huffington Post)
George Hunka, “Criticism dies, again” (Superfluities Redux)
Jeremy Barker, “Why Aren’t Audiences Stupid?” (Culturebot)
Andrew Horwitz, “Why Aren’t Audiences Stupid?(Andy Version)” (Culturebot)

PARTICIPANT BIOS:

Philip Bither has been Walker Art Center’s Senior Curator of Performing Arts since April 1997, overseeing one of the country’s leading contemporary performing arts programs. He has overseen significant expansion of the Performing Arts program, including the building of the McGuire Theater, an acclaimed new theatrical space within the Walker expansion (2005), the raising of the program’s first commissioning/programming endowment, the commissioning of more than 100 new works in dance, music and performance, and the annual presentation/residency support of dozens of contemporary performing arts creators, established and emerging. Prior to this, he served as Director of Programming/Artistic Director for the Flynn Center, later becoming Associate Director/Music Curator at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). He received the Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award in 2009. He sits on numerous federal, state, local, and national foundation arts panels and he speaks and writes about the contemporary performing arts nationally.

Randy Gener is the Nathan Award-winning editor, writer, critic and artist in New York City.  He began as a theater critic and staff contributor at The Village Voice from 1991 to 2001, as well as an entertainment writer for The Daily News and The Star Ledger.  A dramaturg at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, Gener is the U.S. editor of Critical Stages(criticalstages.org), an international journal; the Broadway editor of the New York Theatre Wire (nytheatre-wire.org), which he co-founded in 1996; and a contributing writer of American Theatre magazine. As a curator, producer and consultant of international festivals, Gener creatively collaborates with U.S. and European arts organizations, foreign institutes, consulate offices and NGOs to build, design and create artistic programs, strategic alliances, international tours in Europe, conferences and seminars, foreign-media partnerships and editorial content. Gener most recently served for four years as the curatorial adviser and co-creator of “From the Edge,” USITT’s USA National Exposition at the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. A 2003 New York Times critic fellow, Gener contributes critical essays and scholarly articles to books and anthologies, most recently in ”Cambridge Guide to the American Theater” (Cambridge University Press), ”The World of Theater” (International Theatre Institutes in Paris and Bangladesh), and “About the Phenomenon of Theater” (Namayesh in Tehran, Iran).  For his editorial work and critical essays for American Theatre, Gener has received, among other awards, grants and honors, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the Deadline Club Award for Best Arts Reporting from the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists; and the NLGJA Journalist of the Year. Last year, Gener was among five artists from around the world conferred by His Excellency President Benigno S. Aquino III with the Presidential Award as “Pamana ng Pilipino (Legacy of the Filipino Nation).” Gener’s website is theaterofOneWorld.org.

RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator of Performa, is an art historian, critic, and curator whose book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, pioneered the study of performance art. Former Director of the Royal College of Art Gallery in London and Curator at The Kitchen in New York, she is also the author of Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (1998) and Laurie Anderson (2000), and is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications. Recent awards and grants include two awards from the International Association of Art Critics (2011), the Agnes Gund Curatorial Award from Independent Curators International (2010), Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Warhol Foundation (2008), and Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Government (2006). In 2004, she founded Performa, a non-profit arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists from around the world, and launched New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05 (2005), followed by Performa 07 (2007), and Performa 09 (2009). In 2011, Performa presented its fourth biennial, Performa 11 (November 1–21, 2011). Since 1987, Goldberg has taught at New York University.

George Hunka launched the first version of his blog Superfluities Redux, under the title Superfluities, on 1 October 2003. An Albee Foundation fellow, he has written several plays and essays, as well as reviews, theory and feature stories about theatre for the New York Times, the Guardian (UK), Yale University’s Theater, Contemporary Theatre Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and other publications. His first book, Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros and Contemporary Tragic Drama, was published by EyeCorner Press in March 2011.

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson (Vintage). She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 12 years, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Nation, and MS. She has been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Norton); Best African American Essays, 2010, (Ballantine/One World); Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness (Counterpoint) and The Mrs. Dalloway Reader (Harcourt) and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia). She also wrote and performed a solo theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane and The Culture Project. Currently, she teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.

New York-based artist Liz Magic Laser (b. 1981, New York City) is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program. Laser has been a resident at the LMCC Workspace Program, the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited internationally including The Pace Gallery, New York (2011); Casey Kaplan, New York (2011); Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2010); MoMA PS 1, New York (2010); the Prague Biennale 4, Czech Republic (2009); Galeria Horach Moya, Mallorca, Spain (2011) and the Ljubljana Biennale, Slovenia (2011). Her recent public performance project, Flight (2011), took place in Times Square with support from Franklin Furnace and the Times Square Alliance. In November 2011, Laser presented the Performa Commission, I Feel Your Pain at the School of Visual Art Silas Theatre, a former cinema in New York City. Recent articles discussing her work have appeared in publications including, Modern Painters, Frieze, ArtReview, Artforum.com, Art In America and The New York Times.

David Levine‘s work encompasses performance, theater, photography, installation, and video. Dividing his time between NYC and Berlin, where he is Director of the Studio Program at the European College of Liberal Arts, Levine has presented performance projects and other work at such international art spaces and surveys as MoMA, Documenta XII, Mass MoCA, Town House Gallery/Cairo, HAU2/Berlin, PS122/NYC, the Luminato Festival and the Watermill Center, and has directed at Atlantic Theater Company, the Vineyard Theater/NYC, and Primary Stages/NYC. David’s work has been featured in Mousse, The New York Times, Artforum, Theater, Art in America, Bomb, Cabinet, Theater Heute, Art Review, Die Zeit, TDR, The Village Voice, Time Out, and the Believer, and his own writing has appeared in Cabinet, Theater, and Triple Canopy. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Kulturstiftung Des Bundes, and Etants Donnés/French Fund for Performance. He is currently working with composer Joe Diebes, poet Christian Hawkey, and the Watermill Center/NYTW on an opera about Milli Vanilli. David will be presenting Anger at the Movies, a performance seminar, as part of PS122′s COIL Festival starting on Jan 10.

Tom Sellar is Editor of Theater magazine, a journal of criticism, plays and reportage published by Yale School of Drama (www.theatermagazine.org). His criticism and reporting appear regularly in national publications including the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and American Theatre, and he has been a frequent contributor to the Village Voice since 2000. Sellar received his doctorate in 2003 from Yale University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Toshiki Okada, the Japanese playwright and director of the company chelfitsch, is already recognized as one of the most exciting artists of his generation. His 2004 play Five Days in March, which explored the links between the day-to-day life of young Tokyo hipsters and the US invasion of Iraq using a combination of anti-performative techniques, movement, and richly colloquial dialogue, established Okada internationally. The show toured widely and built bridges for the artist with presenters in the US and Europe.  This January, chelfitsch brings a triptych, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech, to the Japan Society as part of Under the Radar (Jan. 5-14; tickets $22).

The following interview was conducted by and translated from the Japanese for Culturebot by the Japan Society. For scholars and Japanese speaking readers, the original, including Okada’s responses in Japanese, is available here as a PDF.

Your company’s name “chelfitsch.” I know it’s a childish version of the English word “selfish,” but I’m curious where it came from, and what it means to you, if anything?

It meant myself when I named it.  Because I thought myself childish and selfish.  I was twenty three years old.  But it changed its meaning after the company’s name got to be known.  When a critic said “chelfitsch” describes the social situation of our time in Japan, especially Tokyo, I was somehow convinced of it. Then I got to like using this explanation.

What were the ideas you set out to explore in Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech and what influenced the script? I understand it’s a triptych—is it three separate plays or are they interconnected somehow?

I created this piece when the “non-full-time employees” issue [Editor's and translator's note: temporary employment is a rising issue in Japan as companies have been able to hire more and more employees on temp contracts; this has created a two-tiered society in which younger workers have been denied access to the security and benefits their parents enoyed as Japan's Fordist model is transformed; see here for an NPR article] became a serious problem in Japan. That is, my play was influenced by this ongoing issue.  At the same time, I wanted to address the universal issue of unemployment through the portrayal of Japan’s local situation, which I believed that non-Japanese audiences could sympathize with.  I think that audiences can enjoy each of the three parts of this triptych even if each one is presented independently.  However, because the three parts have become so closely connected to one another (from Japan Society: “Air Conditioner” was written originally as a stand-alone play and the two other parts were added three years later), I now believe that the three parts should be presented in sequence as one evening-length piece.

What is the creative process like working with your actors? Do you bring in a finished script or does the text change through collaboration? Do you provide them parts of the movement, like a choreographer, or do the actors generate the movement through improvisation?

My text changes constantly–it even changes daily throughout the rehearsal period. Especially for this piece, subtle changes took place often, because I tried to sync up the music with the performance. There are various ways of creating movement.  Since I am not a choreographer, I am not capable of creating movement from scratch. Instead, I ask my actors to extract natural movements from each of their lines and I simply pick up these moves, or manipulate them. For example, I instruct the actors to “exaggerate their movements” or “repeat the same movement over again.” Sometimes their particular movement inspires me to come up with another and I suggest that the actors try out these new movements.  Basically, improvisation is the starting point of setting my choreography, but improvisation takes places even during the performance.

You’ve said in other interviews that since the success of Five Days in March that you’ve been thinking more about how you want to affect your audience, citing Bertolt Brecht. What are you trying to accomplish in Hot Pepper…? What do you hope to convey?

There was a time when I began to think about a method of linking text and body movement, different from the method that my company developed during Five Days in March. One of the ideas was to widen the apparent lag or gap between the text and body movement and to exaggerate the performance into something like dance.  I tried to materialize this idea in a few shorter pieces.  Hot Pepper was the first full length piece based on this idea.

Your writing is hyper-colloquial, but now you’re creating work with the expectation that non-Japanese speakers will see it. Does this affect writing in any way? What has been your experience touring and performing for non-speakers? I saw both your version of Five Days in March, as well as Witness Relocation’s English version, and the experience of the text was very different.

I believe spoken language in theatre is important, but at the same time it is only part of theatre.  And I think also language must affect the body that speaks it.  Language affects not only speech but also the whole performance.

With all the touring, you’ve been exposed to many other artists and their practices. Has this affected how you create work? Have you responded or been inspired by others?

When I sit in a café of a theater where my work is being performed, I really feel what type of function the performing arts play in the lives of the local people living in the city.  I have experienced this feeling in each of the different cities where my work has been performed.  These experiences have influenced me greatly and I have begun to hope that theater will have more of a “public function” in Japan’s society.

Since your work seems to deal with the experiences you or your friends or your collaborators have in their daily lives, I’m curious what’s happening for you now, and where you may be going in your new work. I know it’s been a tumultuous time in Japan, with political shifts and economic issues and of course the Fukushima incident. Are these things you’ll be responding to in future works?

Currently, I have a strong interest in writing fictional works.  You might say that everything that I’ve written/created has been fiction, however, when I was creating my past works, I wasn’t consciously creating ‘fictional’ plays.  Since the earthquake hit Japan, I’ve strongly felt the need to write fictional stories.  I have started to consider “fiction” as not an “unreal fabrication” but rather an “alternative” to reality.  I think the current society in Japan should change to this alternative reality.  That is why I have started to think that “fictional stories are needed.”  I will make my next new work with this idea in mind.

For more information, PerformingArts.jp has two extensive interviews with Okada, from 2005 and 2010. For all of Culturebot’s coverage of Under the Radar 2012 see here, and for all related APAP 2012 events, see here.

Popularity: 3% [?]

With so many known commodities invading the festivals this January, lesser-known and emerging artists can get lost in the shuffle. San Francisco-based choreographer Laura Arrington is one such artist. I first caught wind of her work a year or two ago and she’s one of the people coming in with a strong bit of buzz–Big Art Group’s Caden Manso, for instance, told me just a couple days ago not to miss her work. Hot Wings, the 2010 piece for four dancers she’s bringing to American Realness, is an exploration of gender, the body as animal, and violence. Funny and maybe a bit discomfiting, it earned plenty of praise in SF last year, and you have only two chances to catch it: 7 p.m. Thurs., Jan. 5 and 4 p.m. Sat., Jan. 7 at Abrons Arts Center (tickets $15).

Hot Wings seems to have a very interesting genesis; you’ve said it was an extension of some of the ideas you worked with in your prior piece Fingerbird, which is a response or taking off from the famous ballet The Firebird. What was Fingerbird like and what specifically continued to interest you that you took from that experience?

What was Fingerbird like…? Well, I listened to a lot of R Kelly while we made it.  No, Fingerbird was very artificial. Firebird was a source, but so were a lot of other stories of fancy symbolic birds. Kosinski’s The Painted Bird is one of my favorite books, and as an image it’s a favorite…it sort of takes the metaphor of the bird as transcendent and flips it on its head. Also, In a sort of silly way, R Kelly’s song “I believe I can fly,” this song that borrows a trite kind of plastic sentiment, sung by a complicated pop star, but that ultimately gets me…maybe I’m an idiot. But I like those silly intersections between what’s funny, meaningful, and stupid. When you know better…but, still…you still love the metaphor of flight, the image of the bird, the voice of R Kellly… I sort of likened the bird to a trite or conventional representational imagining of a broken woman.

Photo by Robbie Sweeny

You’ve said two things in relation to this piece that fascinate me: one is the idea of a woman (either gender really, but this is an exploration of gender) as an animal, the body versus the brain perhaps, and you’ve also suggested you’re interested in violence within the piece. Yet it’s pretty funny at many moments. Can you sort of elaborate on the animal and violence concepts and how they related/how you explored them in the piece?

I think the intersection btw humor and violence is a pretty high-traffic intersection. Anything that is as real as aggression or violence has the capacity to be received as funny. I mean humor is often camouflage for something darker and more real.
The animals are integral in the trio of pieces in this series. My most recent was about and starred my dog. It was called wag. A deer features prominently on Hot Wings, and Fingerbird was all birds. I love animals. That’s not super interesting but it’s true true true. There’s a lot to say about the animals, but it’s better to not…

I think even you’ve suggested that this piece is somewhat aggressive in terms of its relationship to the audience; what can the audience expect coming into the theater and why make a choice like that?

I wouldnt say aggressive, or maybe I did… It does ask the audience to be involved in ways other pieces may not. I don’t want to say too much though. Audience participation is such a dirty word to folks, so best not to say it!

Given the ways the audience interacts with the performance, and what you’re trying to do with them, did anything happen during the original run that surprised you? Did you see anyone have a sort of memorable response? Did anyone respond negatively?

It’s always a surprise to see how people respond to instructions. It’s always a surprise to see how groups of people create their own identities and personalities. I’m always so so curious to see how my work gets read by people. A lot of people think Hot Wings is hilarious, other folks it made them cry, other folks thought it was stupid, other folks clever… You never know, or at least I never know. I’m always so curious to see how the group identity of the audience can kind of take the piece on. The end of Hot Wings had vastly different responses. Again, I dont want to say too much as I dont want to give too much away.

What it’s like creating work in San Francisco? What opportunities exist there for you as an artist and what are the biggest challenges you face?

Man, I really love SF. Its a special spot, and it feels very homey. I have a really tight knit group of collaborators/friends. The Off Center/Ernesto Sopprani, Jesse Hewit, Keith Hennessy, and a lot of other folks make it a fantastic place to make work. It’s easy to do shit there. It’s in a pretty vibrant little moment. More and more outside folks are coming in, which is great, because my biggest critique of SF is that it’s a bit isolated.

For the entire line-up of the ambitious 2012 American Realness Festival, see here, and be sure not to miss one of January’s hottest parties, American Pussy Faggot! Realness on Sat. Jan. 7, with downtown impresario Earl Dax’s Pussy Faggot!. For all Culturebot’s coverage of APAP 2012 related events, see here.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Heather Anderson in "Small Incision" at the Bushwick Starr (2010), photo by Shameel Arafin

Witness Relocation, the dance theater company led by Dan Safer, is a perennial favorite on the downtown scene. This January, they’re reprising I’m Going to Make a Small Incision Behind Your Ear to Check and See If You’re Actually Human, which debuted in 2010 at the Bushwick Starr (see here for our review), at DNA for two weekends (Jan. 5-6 and 12-14; tickets $17). The show is a series of vignettes including music, dance, games, and scenes from the sci-fi show V (from which the work takes its title), where the order is determined through a lottery at the beginning. Director/choreographer Dan Safer recently responded to questions via email.

What was the process of generating the material like? You use movement, text, music (if I recall correctly)–how did you try to balance these diverse creative processes with ensuring that in the end, it still formed a singular piece?

A lot of this piece comes from techniques we’ve been working on for a few years–task based and endurance based games, and methods of getting people to really do things on stage, as opposed to act like they’re doing things. All of the sections of the show could be construed as “Learn To Be Human: 101 Lessons for an Invading Alien Race”–the unifying theme stems from that idea, how could they all be hypothetically utilized to do that (with varying degrees of absurdism).

How improvisational or chance-based are the scenes themselves?

The scenes with dialogue from the TV show V are always with the same people. The choreographed “dance numbers” are set. Besides that, everything is up to the performers. We’ve developed a technique called “co-opetition” (I think Kourtney Rutherord came up with the name), where you fight to do the scenes you want to do when they come up, but don’t hog it all. Basically, nobody knows who is doing what until each scene is starting–whoever gets up there does it. It’s an orchestrated catastrophe.

Having already performed a run of the show, what surprised you about it? Were there any orderings that seemed to work better or worse? Any particular performance that revealed something to you that you hadn’t expected?

I love it when the curtain call is really early in the show; conversely, we had a run once where the final scene was “Curtain Call”, so we did that, then the show ended, and we did the actual curtain call. A centerpiece of the show is an extended scene called “Faster/ Slower” that is a development of a game from This Ring of Fire, a duet I co-created and performed with Ishmael Huston-Jones. That scene almost always goes really deep and exposes the performers in a fantastic, hysterical, disturbing way. I like when that scene happens towards the middle of the show.

Will there be any substantial differences between this run and the original at the Bushwick Starr?

We’ve added a scene, revamped some scenes, reworked some of the scenes from V. The show is constantly evolving every time we do it, so as we learn more, it keeps getting sharper/darker/funnier.

Witness Relocation tends to be a very busy company, and I know you work with others. What’s next for you/Witness Relo?

I’m teaching at NYU and Princeton in the Spring, choreographing Alec Duffy’s show at Incubator, and WR is working up to the next show Chuck Mee has written for us (at La MaMa in April 2013). Plus, I’m choreographing The Rite of Spring for the Philadelphia Orchestra with Ridge Theater in Feb of 2013. And a few other projects are bubbling up…

For more on Witness Relocation, see our reviews of Vicious Dogs in Summer (2008), Haggadah (2009), Five Days in March (2010) and Heaven on Earth (2011). For all our coverage of events related to APAP 2012, see here.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hideki Noda Interview from Jeremy Barker on Vimeo.

Many thanks to our friends at the Japan Society for facilitating and producing this video interview–conducted by Mark Russell (see our interview with him here)–for us, with legendary Japanese theater artist Hideki Noda. Originally a co-production between the Tokyo Metropolitan Theater and London’s Soho Theater, Noda’s 2006 work, The Bee, is one of two shows the Japan Society is helping bring to New York this January as part of Under the Radar (the other is by Toshiki Okada and chelfitsch).

My knowledge of Japanese theater history is, sadly, limited, but from what I understand, Mr. Noda was a leading light of the last wave of what’s known as Shôgekijô, or “Small Theater.” Somewhat akin to the Off-Broadway (or even Off-off-Broadway) movement, Small Theater was the term applied to the alternative experimental companies that began emerging in the 1960s. These companies were responding to the dominant realist approach favored by the Japanese regional theater establishment. Noda emerged as one of the foremost Japanese directors (though he also wears hats as writer and performer) during the 1980s, bringing the alternative into the mainstream with a company he founded while still in college, before abruptly disbanding it at the height of its popularity to spend a while learning new techniques in London.

On the face of it, The Bee is a fairly straightforward story about the fine line between victim and victimizer. A man comes home one day for his kid’s birthday to find a violent madman holding his family hostage. In retaliation, he in turn takes the hostage-taker’s family hostage, and quickly proves himself capable of equal, if not greater, acts of violence. Written by Noda in English and further developed by Irish playwright Colin Teevan, the show features the noted British actress Kathryn Hunter in a gender-bending lead role (along with Noda himself). Hunter was recently seen in New York in Peter Brook’s collection of Beckett shorts Fragments, along with fellow Complicite members Jos Houben and Marcello Magni (the latter of whom will be appearing in The Bee when it plays Hong Kong and Tokyo in 2012). For a little more perspective, we invite you to check out our interview with Houben about Fragments and Complicite.

For a broader interview with Noda, you can see this one in the English language Japan Times. I’ve also discovered this site, from the Japan Foundation, which is an excellent resource on Japanese performing arts; sadly, they don’t have interviews with Noda, but they do have coverage of most of his work as well as features on many of his collaborators. The Bee plays Jan. 5-15 at the Japan Society; tickets $25.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Mariano Pensotti is a Buenos Aires-based artist whose 2010 piece El pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal) is playing this January as a joint presentation of the Public’s Under the Radar and PS 122′s COIL Festival. NYC is the first stop on a North American junket for El pasado, that will see it hit the Wexner (Columbus, Jan. 19-22) , the Walker (Minneapolis, Jan. 28-30), the PuSH Festival (Vancouver, B.C., Feb. 3-5), On the Boards (Seattle, Feb. 9-12), Yerba Buena (SF, Feb. 17-19), and REDCAT (LA, Feb. 24-26). For more information, see the PuSH Festival’s interview with Pensotti from 2010, about his large site-specific performance La Mareo, which turned an entire street into a fragmentary jaunt through trauma and memory.

Tickets to El pasado are available either through PS 122 as part of the COIL pass (ten for $100), or through UTR either individually ($20) or as part of a Festival Pack ($75 for five shows).

What is the attraction of live performance for you? In interviews and on your website, you talk about how your work is influenced by literature and visual art and film. This work is inspired both by photographs you collected and the novelistic approach of Balzac. So why a live performance rather than a video or film project, other mediums you work in?

Well, I’m usually interested in creating works that might be a crossover between literature, film and visual arts but always including some live performance aspect. In El pasado es un animal grotesco I was specifically interested in how the past could be retold in the present and how something “ephemeral” such as the past or our memories could be made present in another ephemeral media as the live performance is. Another key point of the project is how to tell epic, ambitious stories that might contain fiction, our personal experiences and socio-political events with minimal resources: just four actors, some old props and a revolving stage… In that context the experience itself of making the performance becomes epic. Our play also deals with the subject of time and the times that go by and I cannot think about another medium where you can have that so strongly present such as in a live performance. Ultimately the play tells the story of four characters during ten years and I had the impression that to see these four actors performing live, nonstop, fighting to make present the past during two hours, to see them tired at the end is like seeing them aging ten years.

In the description of the piece on your website, you wrote of the images that inspired the piece, that “Many seemed to be people from my own generation: A faulty chronicle of a decade.” The past decade has been a challenging one in Argentina. What sorts of experiences do the characters’ stories touch on? Is there a concrete example that you could perhaps share of how something in one of the images inspired the text you developed for the character?

I think the use of the broken pictures was the result of a mixed perception. On one hand there’s a fact that as a young generation in Argentina, a country with perpetual economic and political crises, we had to struggle against a lot of difficulties in our ordinary life. But of course that’s not something that you can relate just to Argentina. On the other hand what interested me more was to discover some common feeling in people from my generation, which is the desire of being someone else, the belief that our lives might be better if we lived somewhere else or that we should become another person different from who we are. Besides the economic crises it probably has some relation to that as a generation we’re the sons of the people who fought to change the society during the ‘70s and who were brutally repressed by the military dictatorship, so in comparison with them we usually feel weak, pointless, without social compromise… as a broken or unclear picture. In that sense my collection of blurred and broken pictures seemed to be a clear metaphor of all that.

In the play I was interested in working with that feeling, which at the end I have the impression is quite universal, and also to place some fiction into a real background to see how social events may affect or not private lives. For example during one of our most terrible recent economic crises, in 2001 and 2002, one of the characters loses his job, his flat and his life change a lot; as opposed to other characters, the same event almost affects him. I had the feeling that at least in Argentine theater there was a lack of relation with political events in recent years, we were much too focused on small family issues, so as a challenge I was interested in dealing with our most recent history, not just in Argentina but also using events such as 9/11 or the Iraq invasion to invent stories. It was much more appealing to work with that in a fiction context rather than to take a distant decade, probably more studied and fictionalized already.

This piece makes use of a rotating set. Where did that idea come from and how does it relate the content of the piece?

In my plays I always try to have sets that work not just as a decoration but rather as a narrative mechanism. I’m also interested in setting a play in a context that might affect the body of the performer as well as the perception of the viewer. In the case of the rotating set conceptually it has clearly to do with the idea of passing time, time that never stops, and the actors go from one small space to the next one while the disc turns around all the time. Narratively speaking, as the play is composed of a lot of small scenes, more than sixty, it helped us to set each of them in a different place making small changes on each space when it is not visible to the audience. Additionally, it creates the visual impression of a long dolly shot from a movie.

The soundtrack and title come from Of Montreal. It’s an interesting choice for a work that explores a uniquely Argentine experience. What appealed to you–beyond the lyrics that provided the title–about their work? And out of curiosity, have any of them seen the piece?

Even if the play is focused on the life of four middle class Argentinians I don’t really have the impression that it explores a uniquely Argentine experience but rather something wider. Anyway, in the globalized world it doesn’t seem so strange that an indie band from the States influences an Argentine author or that a Mexican visual artist gave inspiration to some narrator in Sweden… But it’s true that Of Montreal is not the first band that comes to your mind in Latin America. I really love their records and especially the title song was so related to my intentions with this play. The image of the past as some grotesque animal that changes shape every time you think about it is so close to what happens with the past and the lived experiences when you try to remember them or retell them in the present. The past is always changing. And then the first lines of the song say something like, “The sun is out and melt the snow that felt yesterday, makes you wonder why it bothered”… And it’s a narratively ambitious song, with intense lyrics going on for almost 11 minutes, quite rare for a rock song… I really felt it was close to my intentions for the structure of the play, and I was listening to it a lot while writing the text.

I don’t think any of them have seen the piece so far. We’ve been touring a lot in Europe and Latin America but this is going to be our first time in the United States, so hopefully.

What’s it like creating work like this in Buenos Aires? I’ve been told by other artists that one of the challenges is a lack of infrastructure for supporting ambitious work. Is that your experience? Are there many younger artists–your students at the National University perhaps–who are creating work in Buenos Aires? Other artists whose work you find inspiring or important you’d like a broader audience to know about?

It’s really difficult to develop this kind of work. In Buenos Aires there’s a huge independent theater community and a lot of small venues all around the city, which are part of a long tradition of theater as part of the cultural life. But the state and city support for theater is almost symbolic or it’s just focused on conventional performances for public theaters. From time to time, we can have a co-production with a state theater that allows us to do some more ambitious work, but we usually depend basically on ourselves and in recent times on some international festivals from abroad. The good thing is that there are a lot of people going to theater in Buenos Aires no matter if it’s a big state theater or a tiny independent venue. Right now there are several very interesting artists, and among the people from my generation I feel very inspired by the work of Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Grupo Krapp, and Guillermo Arengo.

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Wojciech Niemczyk and Tomasz Nosinski with the Natural Born Chillers in “In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields.” By Maciek Zórawiecki.

“I’ve been thinking of this play for a long time, because this play of Koltès’s is considered very difficult to stage. And it also rhymed in with the stage of my life I found myself in, that I was going through and the way that I felt at this moment,” Polish director Radosław Rychcik told me. “Because to me it’s a play about the fear of meeting someone else, another person. The dread of intimacy.”

This was back in September 2010, and Rychcik and I were sitting in the mezzanine lounge of the Ace Hotel in Portland, Oregon, near where Rychcik, and the company behind his production of Barnard-Marie Koltès’s In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields, were staying during their appearance at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts‘s TBA Festival. Rychcik first came to the attention of American audiences when his production/adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Versus: In the Jungle of Cities played the 2010 Under the Radar Festival to mixed reviews. But it’s In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields that’s really established him as an important new voice on the international scene, and it’s already hit most of the major North American destinations, playing REDCAT, Vancouver, B.C.’s PuSH Festival, and at Seattle’s On the Boards, before finally making it to New York as part of the Public’s 2012 Under the Radar Festival (Jan. 5-14 at La Mama; tickets $20).

It was one of the stranger interviews I’ve done. I’d met Rychcik a day or two before and we’d chatted quite a bit, but due to the early hour of the interview and, perhaps, his being overly exuberant at what I’m pretty sure he said was a Scissor Sisters concert the night before, Rychcik requested to answer questions in Polish, translated by Dorota Sobstel, his assistant. So I dutifully posed them to him directly in English, and waited for her to translate his answers for me, unless he disagreed with her or wanted to clarify, in which case he’d pipe in in English himself. I’d also invited along Jonathan Walters, the artistic director of Portland’s Hand2Mouth Theatre, who knew more than me about contemporary Polish theater, having spent several years in the late Nineties working in Poland.

Only 30, Rychcik is a young Polish director whose international reputation has essentially skyrocketed over the course of only a couple years. Originally a student of Polish literature at Warsaw University, Rychcik changed course after experiencing Polish avant-garde theatre in college. He went on to study directing and worked with the likes of Krystian Lupa, perhaps Poland’s most famous director, serving as an assistant on Lupa’s internationally celebrated Factory 2, a seven-plus-hour theatrical spectacle about Warhol’s milieu.

Director Radoslaw Rychcik. Photo by Julia Hil.

The backstory of the show is actually somewhat amusing. In the Solitude… was originally produced at Teatr Stefana Zeromskiego (Stefan Zeromski Theatre), a Polish regional theatre in Kielce. Seeking to offer something more substantive to young audiences, company member Wojciech Niemczyk had helped arrange for Rychcik, his former classmate, to come direct a show. Along with Tomasz Nosinski, another former university classmate who also appeared in Versus, the three spent only three weeks rehearsing In the Solitude before it opened. The band the Natural Born Chillers—little known in Poland before Rychcik discovered them playing a club gig—were invited in for only the last five days, during which they composed the entire live score for the piece.

“I just heard them play in a nightclub and I thought they were just amazing and excellent,” Rychcik explained of the band, “and that their music itself created this space for this play to take place, because it already implied where the actors could stand, and where the action could go on.”

That a play with such a cobbled together production schedule and history has now gone on to tour the world to acclaim is all the more surprising given its source text. Bernard-Marie Koltès was a respected experimental dramatist in France before he died in 1991. But if he’s rarely produced in America, it’s because frankly, his work is so very French: abstract, lyrical, obscure. In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields, for instance, is just an extended dialogue between two men known only as the “Dealer” and the “Client,” taking place in a nondescript alley. What is actually being sought is never made explicit (though the title contains a pretty clear allusion to drugs).

It’s the sort of thing that blew my mind when I was an undergrad and would greedily buy stacks of used avant-garde European literature to consume in late=night cigarette-and-caffeine fueled reading sessions, but which now usually strikes me as needlessly opaque, and pretentious. Rychcik’s genius lies in having seen in such a script something very interesting, and having the creativity to actually realize it onstage in a compelling and powerful way.

His production doesn’t unfold as a “play” so much as a spoken word rock concert. Nosinski (the Dealer) and Niemczyk (the Client) deliver their lines directly to the audience as though dueling front-men for the band, dressed in plain dark suits reminiscent of Tarantino goons (though, given the scenario and staging, I have to admit that they also look quite a bit like the Blues Brothers, sans shades and hats). Backed by the rock quartet and abstracted from a dialogue, the text becomes a series of monologues of ferocious intensity.

“Koltès’s play is written for two actors and it has a lot of hints of where it takes place,” Rychcik said. “So the setting is night, a desolate place—a back street, a totally isolated spot. But what I was trying to do is totally get rid of this literal translation of the place, get rid of literalism [altogether]. My idea for the adaptation of the text was adding the music into it, because with the music, this kind of talking about a meeting of, in this situation, a dealer and a client, is always very performative. Because it’s always a performance of my fear of solitude, my fear of proximity to the other human being, and I think this kind of dialogue is very accelerated and enriched by the music that was added.”

What’s so surprising about Rychcik’s In the Solitude, though, isn’t the concept, no matter how novel or effective: it’s the performances and characterizations that Rychcik gets out of his actors. His subtle understanding of the nuances of the script, and how it reveals the fears, self-loathing, paranoia, and combativeness occurring during the transaction, causes him to take his actors in completely the opposite direction from what you might expect. The Dealer’s monologues about the offense he takes at the impudence of his would-be client aren’t played as self-reflective threats, à la The Godfather; instead, they become frightened, wounded expressions of desperation (the dealer, like the client, is an addict to the transaction), while the Client’s very desperation, the sense that he knows he has to purchase from the Dealer, empowers him. A game with a fixed outcome is only worth playing to deny to the other his sense of victory.

Transformed through Rychcik’s production, the needlessly obscure language becomes a poetic evocation of the emotional state of the characters. Songs, in other words.

“Actually, it was very interesting to find out later that Koltès himself thought of this dialogue between the two people in the play as a kind of two blues singers,” he added, “people who are singing their ballads to each other. So actually the whole text was considered by him as a song.”

An earlier version of this article appeared on TheSunBreak.com in January 2011. See here for all of Culturebot’s coverage of Under the Radar 2012.

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A scene from GOODBAR, running January 4-15 at The Public Theater as part of the Under the Radar Festival. Photo by Hassan E. Hussein.

“There were a lot of conversations between funders and the field about why these companies, like the Wooster Group, were not getting brought into the major regional theaters. They were working in an almost underground system with these presenters,” Mark Russell explained. This was late last week, and we were sitting in a large empty conference room in the Public Theater’s offices, discussing the origins of the Under the Radar Festival, which opens January 4.

Now in its eighth year, UTR was Russell’s brainchild. The long-time and first artistic director of PS 122 (where, technically, he helped initiate the project that became Culturebot as part of a new media outreach campaign), Russell had become engaged in conversations about how to raise the profile of what, for lack of a better term, we’ll call “contemporary performance.” (“Ten years ago it was ‘experimental theater.’ This year it’s ‘devised theater,’” he says. “I got news for you, all theater is devised.”) Around the end of his tenure at PS 122, the Texas-born and raised Russell was invited by the University of Texas to program a festival of new work, called Fresh Terrain, at their Austin campus, which became a prototype for UTR. After a turn as the largely remote curator of Portland, Oregon’s TBA Festival–”I really believe a presenter has to be in this community,” he told me–Russell received substantial support from major funders, led by the Duke Foundation, to establish a two-part program of American and international performance, in an attempt to raise awareness of the work and get in front of reluctant, traditional theater programmers and artistic directors.

Such was the birth of Under the Radar. Presented since its second year as a program of the Public Theater, UTR is an associate program of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, whose annual conference every January in New York brings in programmers and curators from around the globe.

“Even when I was at PS 122,” Russell told me, “I always held the slots in January for artists I wanted to introduce, the young artists I thought had international touring promise. For instance, that’s when I did, I believe, Danny Hoch and Richard Maxwell.”

At PS 122 it was an extremely practical choice. Not only did January artists get exposed to global presenters, but given that the rest of the theater scene was in the midst of the winter doldrums, there was less competition for attention, and otherwise reluctant critics were easier to get in the theater. But when Russell approached UTR, he had different concerns in mind. A component of APAP is and has always been dozens of showcase performances of work intended mainly for programmers, with choreographers and dance companies and other sorts of artists competing for touring and residency opportunities by renting space and showing thirty minutes or so of a given piece. But theater is less amenable than dance to the “showcase” setting, so Russell set out to create a destination festival, bringing in a mix of the best artists nationally and internationally, putting their work in front of their global peers, and seeking to generate dialogue.

This year the program features a variety of both known commodities and relatively fresh faces. Asked if there was anyone in particular that really exciting him to present, he immediately responded: “I really threw down early for Toshiki Okada and chelfitsch,” whose Air Conditioner, Hot Pepper and the Farewell Speech is one of two co-presentations between UTR and the Japan Society this year.

“I thought he’s a real visionary artist and I want him to be seen,” Russell told me. “I wanted him to be part of the program in this building,” he told me, gesturing to the Public around us, “but the resources that Japan Society has are so much better. So we made sort of a satellite venue for that. And they’ve brought him before, and I sort of wanted to de-ghettoize that,” he said, meaning that he wanted to offer a larger profile and a longer run than they’d previously received.

Continuing to glance through the festival’s program, Russell described some of the other pieces. “Waterwell is a sharp, sharp company. A punk-glam concert version of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. It has this great video component where actally Ira Glass plays a character and Moby pops up and Bobby Cannavale solos. So all this sort of weird back and forth between the music and video.”

Pointing to the listing for Sontag: Reborn, based on Susan Sontag’s diaries, he explained: “The Builders always do things for BAM, that are really big, and very technological. So this is their attempt to make a pocket piece that could maybe reach different audiences.”

Asked about what guided his choices, and whether there was any sort of theme to the programming, Russell laughed. “I wish I was that smart,” he said self-effacingly.

“The themes arise,” from the work presented, he explained. “It’s more interesting for me to see them come out. And this year it’s resistance and revolution and a sort of political identity. And it’s only a few shows that really that do that. The one that sort of helped click it was Alexis. A Greek Tragedy by Motus. And then they’ve been working with Judith Malina since their show last year,” he said of the company’s second piece in this year’s festival. Last year, Motus brought their version of Antigone to UTR, which was based on the Living Theater’s work from years before. Malina, one of the Living Theater’s co-founders, saw it and the two began collaborating to present a mash-up of the two, The Plot is the Revolution.

“I normally try not to bring people back the next year again, but in this case I’m doing that,” Russell said. “I think the time is right, their work is right on it.”

UTR has grown substantially over the last eight years, with a satellite operation, Radar LA, launched in 2010 with co-presenters in Los Angeles, that was originally time to coincide with the annual TCG Conference. But the festival is growing legs of its own and a new edition will be presented in 2013. And then there’s the festivals relationship to the Public proper. This January, Gob Squad–the Anglo-German company whose Kitchen: you never had it so good, was the hit of the 2011 festival–will be part of the Public’s main season (Jan. 19-Feb. 5).

“I have a long relationship with Oskar Eustis,” Russell told me. “We were both young bucks here back in the Seventies. We didn’t really know each other that well, but I knew him when he was doing experimental work back in ’77. So I can blackmail him a lot!” he added with a laugh, before continuing.

“This is a really big one for us, with Gob Squad, in taking one that Oskar has actually not seen! He’s seen it on videotape, he’s heard us talk about it…” he was explaining before I interrupted, pointing out that a work that live-mixes video doesn’t seem like something that work well as a record. “It doesn’t work on video!” he agreed. “It’s huge risk, so if it does fail, well, I won’t have access to the season.” He added the last bit with a grin.

As the interview closed, I asked Russell for some thoughts about the state of the arts world, and the January madness in general. Although its a singular opportunity for audiences to get to sample amazing theater and dance from all over the place, it has a lot of downsides. Many of the works by New York artists have been remounts for the benefit of presenters, often done with little or no support. And with the growth that’s occurred in public-facing festivals since UTR was founded–PS122′s COIL is in its sixth and most ambitious year, and American Realness at Abrons has exploded as it enters its third year, in addition to HERE’s Culturemart, which has actually moved its programming to later in the month, out of the APAP window–it’s getting harder and harder for the artists to stand out.

“I’m happy that these other festivals have grown up,” Russell said. “And at one point I though, well, let’s make a really big festival. But since then…well, this is–” he pointed to the program on the table in front of us “–less than we did last year. And we started that way, before even we knew we’d have budget cuts. To focus more, to make these things really special, so when get a gig at Under the Radar, it’s a good gig. And it’s getting dangerous at this point, because you have all these presenters descended at this time, and they have so many shows to see at all these festivals.”

“I’m just hoping that Under the Radar doesn’t become too predictable,” he said. “That’s the major thing–each year is a new one.”

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