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

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

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

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

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

Ephemeral Evidence will occur on the following schedule:

Tuesday April 17

THE SOLO PROJECT
Aretha Aoki with Maura Donohue

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

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

Wednesday April 18

NEWS
Rebecca Davis with Aaron Mattocks

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

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

Thursday April 19

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

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

Friday April 20

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday April 21

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 4% [?]

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

CULTUREBOT HISTORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW MODELS AND NEW VOICES IN ARTS WRITING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVE CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS

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

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

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

ONWARD AND UPWARD, BROTHERS AND SISTERS

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

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

Popularity: 4% [?]

The show that’s starting little theatre-student walkouts in Chicago these days is Camino Real (through April 8th: tickets $21-65) an adaptation of the original, dark and dreamlike play by Tennessee Williams at the Goodman Theatre. We’ve talked recently about plays a lot here on Culturebot, but let’s not let that word dominate here. This is not a play for a fake living room,  or even a fake-stone plaza. In fact, a realistic set is an oft-cited reason for the failure of Camino’s original production, directed by Elia Kazan. This is an adaptation in the postmodern sense, to the point where one of the scripts’ chief co-creators often refers to his work as “cut and paste.” As in, cut from Tennessee Williams’ life and paste into the script. Raw, violent butt-fucking included.

That creator would be Marc Rosich, a Spanish playwright who has worked often with controversial director Calixto Bieito, the director of this piece for the Goodman. “This time we needed some extreme editing,” he said when I sat down with him in the lobby of the theater. “This play has never been successful in a way, there have been so few productions of it, and they have always been misunderstood.”

“In the 50s Tennessee Williams was writing for a tradition, it was really difficult to break, but now, 70 years later, so much has happened . .”  says Rosich. “We trusted his first intuitions– doing poetic theatre. We decided to throw out all these realistic scenes, and going to the core of the poetry.”

The set for the Goodman production is dark, a black stage with a cage wall looming over it upstage. In this cold landscape, designed by Rebbecca Ringst, the characters of Camino stride and stumble, moving from one scene to the next with a simple step. Lighting invades to transform the space– a billowing of neon signs and lightbulbs flies in with the fiesta, a lonely series of globes float above lonely light lines below. A blast of light blows in from the side to cast even the cage lines in dark shadow. James F. Ingalls’ lighting works with the scenography to carve emotional hollows into the blackness.

The origins of Williams’ characters are gone from this adaptation, and Williams himself is put onstage as a character, reciting lines original to both Quixote and the Dreamer, swilling liquor and puking. He sits on the edge of the stage and strums the guitar, underscoring the action. Some roles are combined in this Goodman production: one actor plays several “officer” or official roles. Camino Real is a no-man’s land in which these characters are trapped, battling each other for survival and some semblance of pleasure while still grasping at the real and sweet parts of life. Says Rosich, “I’m not interested in plots at all, but in characters. For the character itself to be the most important ingredient in a play.”

Rosich acknowledges the specificity of this adaptation. “I’m doing an adaptation for Calixto  . . . He thinks operatically in a way, not psychologically.” The adaptation is developed in the rehearsal room, along with the scenography and lighting design. As a result, the piece develops a language unto itself: a pacing unique to its dream-landscape. There are points that can only be described as awkward, where it’s clear a kind of scene is being set, but we as audience don’t get the context until a few lines in. There are moments when a turn of the head denotes an entirely different time, place, moment. It’s confusing, like a dream, and scary, like a dream.

While ambiguity is scary, what’s more disturbing is the violence– graphically mimed sex, a heart ripped from the chest, murders, robberies, simple derogatory and demeaning acts. “Sexuality, brutality and violence is part of our world, ” says Rosich.  “[Here] you are sharing it with an audience. It’s not 3-D cinema, it’s real 3D.” Still, says the writer, the brutality of Camino Real comes as much from the life of Tennessee Williams as the tradition of Calixto Bieito. In Williams’ memoir, for instance, there are “So many descripton of cruel sexuality. There is one chapter where he explains, he and a friend they met these sailors or whatever, and they ended up doing an orgy, in his apartment, but these sailors ended up beating them both after fucking him.” So the violent butt-fucking we get in the first 40 minutes of the play comes not from nowhere.

“The skeleton of the piece is there,” says Rosich, referring to the dialogue of several central characters in the original play, and foremost, the arc of the main character Kilroy, a naive failed boxer who has stumbled unwillingly into this purgatory.  He enters in a procession of tiny American flags. In this particular show, it’s almost as if Kilroy were a metaphor for “puritanical” American culture in a world of violence and loss.  And that dimension is pretty brutal itself. Says Rosich,  “We tried to recreate the allegories and the metaphors that was proposing [sic] Tennessee Williams.” For a guy who had to spend his whole life hiding his homosexuality, some brutal criticisms might have been necessary. Rosich’s task has been to negotiate both the landscape created by Williams and the mind of the artist himself.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Louie Magic, Dennis Diamond and Daryl Hannah. Photo by Scott Suchman

“I’ve know Daryl and Dennis for maybe twenty years now, just through the magic community, but we have very different styles,” Louie Magic was explaining to me on conference call interview with the trio last week. “Like, I do mostly comedy magic–I’m based out of Patterson, New Jersey, I work at a club called Dazzles out there regularly. And I do ‘Louie Magic–the Ladies Man Magic’ that’s my stand up comedy act thing. That’s my bread and butter, I’ve been doin’ that for years. Very different style from like Dennis who does serious, serious mentalism, I’d say. And Daryl has his history with birds, so we have three very distinct styles of the type of magic we do. So I think it’s pretty clever for those guys to put us together.”

Dennis Diamond, Louie Magic and Daryl Hannah are the magicians enlisted by theater artists Steve Cuiffo, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle for Elephant Room, the magic-based theatrical spectacular that opened this week at St. Ann’s Warehouse and runs through April 8 (tickets $25+). Directed by Paul Lazar, the show incorporates the trio’s backstories to construct a plot for a mind-bending show that Culturebot’s Mashinka Firunts, who covered it during its premiere last fall at Philly Live Arts, described thusly:

Had Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge been furnished in 1970s nostalgia baroque and inhabited by a trio of dotty illusionists swathed in velour, the resulting spectacle would have borne remarkable similarity to the Elephant Room.

I admit, it was one of the more difficult interviews I’ve had to conduct (to say nothing about transcribe; I sincerely apologize should any quote be attributed to the wrong speaker). Forthright and genuine though they were, they seemed somewhat confused about details of their own project. So confused, in fact, that I began to suspect that the show’s creators were potentially exploiting their performers for the sake of making a show–a harsh but perhaps not unjust judgment against otherwise respected performers like Cuiffo (well known for his impersonation of Lenny Bruce) and Sobelle (of Philadelphia’s lauded Pig Iron Theater).

Asked about the genesis of the show, Diamond explained: “We’ve been touring around as individual magicians since for years, and we were up competing in Buffalo at the Society of American Magicians–it’s called the SAM convention–a couple years back, and these three theater guys kind of approached us after one of the competition rounds, and they said, ‘Hey, check this out man! We’re working on this new show about magicians, and we really need some people who have skills! We’ve been trying to figure out how to do this thing.’ And so Jeff, Steve and, oh shit, what’s his name? Trey! The three of them kind of approached us and said hey, we’ve got this grant, we’re working on this show about magic. So it was their idea to put us together. We wouldn’t normally–it’s kinda rare for magicians to work together.”

“For me, why I wanted to work on this project?” added . “It’s kinda wild. And it’s also a gig. You know, like, I’ll take it, you know? They said we were gonna be playing arenas and stuff like that. I was kinda psyched you know, because the first show I ever saw was Warrant at the Meadowlands. And they were like, ‘Well, we’re gonna do an arena, the Arena Washington, DC.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, dude!’ And we go down there and it’s like a little…it’s not an arena at all! It’s a little theater or something. So that was kinda disappointing but it was still fun.”

Suppressing a guffaw, I suggested that perhaps they’d been misled by Cuiffo, Lyford, and Sobelle.

“I will tell you this, Jeremy,” Diamond said gravely, “there was definitely some subterfuge in the way they handled the whole situation. We didn’t realize, for instance, that they were actually developing a theatrical production. We knew it would be a theatrical production, of course, we didn’t know it would actually be a play, like, a community theater project. Which is cool–there are some amazing community theaters where we’ve gotten to do this. So the Arena is just a fantastic outfit, they’ve got a wonderful program going on. And now, as you know, we’re going to Stan’s Warehouse in the Brooklyn area.”

“Listen brother, it’s not ‘Stan’s’ Warehouse,” Daryl Hannah interjected, “it’s ‘Satan’s’ Warehouse, man. It’s Satan’s Warehouse not Stan’s Warehouse, brother.”

“Well whatever it is, it’s a little off the beaten path,” Diamond said. “It’s a little unusual for us, but–we’re not that usual.”

Trying to find out back-stories on the three was often a failing endeavor, as a variety of tangents readily taken led us astray. Diamond, for instance, introduced Daryl Hannah as “Master of Birds, from Tucson, Arizona,” though I remain uncertain what, exactly, Hannah’s relationship to birds is (we can only hope the show, which incorporates their life stories, will illuminate this point). Asked how Hannah got into magic, he told me, “I’m actually a little bit going against the grain, like I usually do, because magic is something I came to later in life.”

“Listen, there’s all kinds of paths we go on,” he continued, philosophically. “You start off being…I don’t know, you start off being in the school band or whatever. You do this, you do that. I was lost. I was searching for something and magic came into my life right at the right time. I was 26 years old or something, I found my way into it as a kind of saving grace if you know what I mean. In particular, I was volunteering out at the Chippewa reservation outside of Tucson, and doing stuff with kids, doing little magic stuff for the kids, and they introduced me to the medicine man of their tribe. And he opened my eyes to a whole new world, a whole new world of magic. Not just little tricks with fingers and scarves, I’m talking about spiritual opening, you know?”

Curious what effect sharing a name with a noted Hollywood actress had on his career, Daryl Hannah became near irate.

“It certainly has not helped my career,” he said flatly. “That’s the first misunderstanding that happens. A lot of people will go ‘ha-ha’ like it’s a joke. But my name is not a joke. But it becomes a joke to people and that can be frustrating. Because my mother named me Daryl Hannah, and the biggest thing I try do through my magic is be true to myself. And my mother gave me that name so I feel it’s important to keep it, even though this other lady has this name–I’ve never even seen any of her films.”

“There did occur at one point a misunderstanding with many of my cohorts in the magic community,” he continued, “and also some friends of mine through rehab, but…they thought I had been arrested at the White House. ‘Cause I was in rehearsals for the show [in Washington, DC], and I guess she was there protesting beaver skins or something like that, I don’t even know what she was protesting. And they read a thing on Twitter, and they thought it was me. So I started getting all these phone calls, my sister starts getting all these phone calls, people were thinking I was in jail, and they were trying to figure out how to break me out.”

“I feel bad for Daryl though, because you know, Dustin Diamond and Louie Magic, those aren’t our actual real last names,” Louie Magic said. “Those are our stage names, and Daryl doesn’t even have a stage name, but everyone thinks oh, Louie Magic can’t be real–well, I did make it my legal name, now–but…”

“Thanks, brother,” Hannah told him.

Asked about the challenges of doing such an ambitious live show, Diamond recalled a recent hairy moment.

“They really are a wild-card, you just never know what you’re gonna get,” he said of audiences. “Recently we were doing the show in Washington, DC, and we brought a woman up onstage, and she just seemed darling. But it turned out that she just did not speak a lick of English. And this particular bit that Daryl takes care of, it’s pretty verbal. She really needs to understand what’s going on. She’s Japanese, just lovely, sweet as can be. Luckily Daryl spoke a little Japanese and muddled his way through it. But boy, there was a real communication problem.”

Several minutes were then given over the story of how Hannah came to learn Japanese, the details of which I can’t hope to summarize in digestible fashion.

The current moment hasn’t exactly been kind to magic acts. While Las Vegas still hosts well-regarded acts (the three agreed that Penn & Teller remain the benchmark), in the mainstream, magic acts only enjoy brief periods of popular attention (witness the 15 minutes of Criss Angel). I’ve seen a lot of performance in my life, but I hadto admit that I’ve never seen a professional magic act, so for own benefit, I tried to sort out how to tell a quality act from a bad one.

“How do you tell the difference between a good Hamlet and a bad Hamlet?” Magic asked sarcastically, before Hannah piped up in my defense: “How do you tell if one Hamlet sucks versus another Hamlet when you’ve never seen Hamlet before?”

“I can tell you,” Diamond offered. “If you go and sit in that theater and you are transported to another place in your mind, if the walls in that theater seem to elongate and change around completely so that you’re on the opposite side of the room, and if you see the cosmos in the eyes of those performers, you’ve seen a good magic trick. If you sit on the seat, and your feet never leave the floor, and you’re just watching and you see it all through the cracks, then it’s maybe not a good magic trick. Did it transport you? Did it move you? Was your mind turned to cheese? If you’ve answered ‘yes’ to the above questions, you’ve seen something of value. Can you deny it? No, you can’t.”

___

Editor’s Note–We have received as-yet unconfirmed reports that the show’s creators and performers may be the same persons. Due to budget cuts, the Culturebot fact-checking department is currently understaffed, and, at the moment, drunk at our East Village office, which is in fact a bar, and thus unable to determine the accuracy of this story. We regret the confusion.

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ICanHazKritikalDiskorz

As far as invitations go, this was a quite polite one to a beheading, which from the outset I suspected was intended to be my own. Late last week, I received a message from George Hunka (of Superfluities Redux and other critical and artistic ventures) that read simply: “Certainly worth a look from the both of you, I think” (the message was also addressed to Andy Horwitz) and containing a link to an article recently translated by Theater magazine. Entitled “Post-Dramatic Theater and the Bleeding Heart of the Seventies,” by Berlin-based critic and artist Robin Detje, the piece is…well…I want to call it a jeremiad (the author refers to it as an “essay provocation” in the article and as a “manifesto” in comments on SR, so something strong) against the continued dominance of “Post-Dramatic Theater.” In Berlin, I guess, because postdram (I’ll explain below…) feels like a pretty slim slice of the pie here in New York and even smaller elsewhere in the US.

Thus was the gauntlet thrown down. Post-Dramatic Theater, I suppose, is our bailiwick here at Culturebot, and Detje’s provocation, via George, was a challenge to defend all the things we regularly praise (as well as our occasionally snarky–mainly due to this author–critiques of other practices). I remain somewhat ambivalent even as I write this. Culturebot certainly doesn’t define itself as devoted to “Post-Dramatic Theater,” and I daresay you can find plenty of non-postdram (it’s like I’m back in college rolling my eyes at references to the “Po-Mod Squad,” but I’m lazy and have no intern to do global find-and-replaces) coverage in these digital pages, most self-evidently in the case of dance and choreographic works, which make no claim to the theatrical tradition whatsoever.

As I explained in comments on Superfluities Redux, our attachment to the concept of “performance” here at Culturebot (we normally refer to the blandly neutral concept of “contemporary performance”) is not an ideological statement endorsing Hans-Thies Lehmann (the guy who wrote the book on Post-Dramatic Theater) or any other theorist. Our approach is far more fundamental: we’re talking about live performances. We’re not literary critics (well, that’s what I started out as, but anyway…). We have better things to do than quibble with how well one production or another deals with a play-text. It’s a fun game, I grant you, and one I’ve played before, but at a certain point, we’d just seem like snobbish twats if we devoted all our time talking about whose interpretation of A Streetcar Named Desire was fuller or more apt or most adequately realized the nuances of the text. Whether it’s text-based or not, it’s a fucking play. It needs to be dealt with as a live event, the sum total of the material aspects of its realization, and dealt with on that level. We’re more than happy to apply the same critical standards we employ looking at the Wooster Group or Sarah Michelson to a quality Off-Broadway play. The problem is that from our perspective, the average Off-Broadway play readily submits itself to a whole series of ideologies in terms of how it’s performed. The psychological-realist acting, the way the sets are envisioned, etc., etc.

Idealistic playwrights who take issue with our occasional anti-playwright attitude should perhaps take note of the fact our issue is less with the fact you wrote something as it is the fact you wrote something un-questioningly for mainstream theater production, the same beast so many playwrights find fault with, while never stepping back to think critically about whether the very faults they find with the production model (NPD hell, anyone?) are not informed by a set of ideological assumptions that likewise inform the very aesthetic practices they present onstage.

But with that said, it’s probably true that Culturebot is primarily concerned, at least insofar as we’re speaking of “theater,” with the Post-Dramatic variety. Which I guess is a fine way to define us. Contemporary performance embraces performativity as the fundamental aspect of a live performance; Lehmann’s book–which I must embarrassingly admit to not having read yet, another part of my ambivalence about being drawn into this argument–is seen by most members of this community (if that’s the right word) as essentially arguing that for various reasons we need to embrace the performativity of live performance. All well and good and I guess I can accept the term if that’s what we mean by it. That said, Lehmann’s book is also a history, concerned with certain socio-historical circumstances and making various arguments about them.

Now I get a little more ambivalent. Reading Detje or George’s lengthier essay on Detje, I think these two may both be more narrowly defining theatrical “performance” than I would, in order to make a point. Both are artists, too, neither of whose work I’ve ever seen, but in George’s case, I know that the theater tradition he’s influenced by includes Beckett, Robert Wilson, Heiner Muller, Sarah Kane, and Howard Barker. Which isn’t exactly what I’d call “mainstream theater,” nor outside of the tradition I see myself in. Certainly all those playwrights (and George, I think, identifies himself as a playwright) challenge what I’d define as the mainstream performance ideologies. I may find them more or less revelatory or inspiring, but we’re not in O’Neill-Miller-Wilson territory here.

So, suspecting we might be splitting hairs, I also bothered to go and read one of Detje’s sources–Bernd Stegemann’s essay “After Postdramatic Theater,” published in Theater Heute in 2009, exploring the legacy of Lehmann’s book ten years on (sadly it’s not available online; it was published in English in Theater magazine 39:3, 2009). In it, Stegemann lays out a far more detailed critique. I find it more compelling but ultimately unsatisfying.

Stegemann begins with Muller, writing:

Heiner Muller’s famous saying–”My drama is no longer pertinent” (“mein Drama findet nicht mehr statt”)–is a statement on societal mood, ideological stance, and aesthetic position all in one and could  be viewed as a starting point for this new art of the theater. But here the first difficulty in confronting the term postdramatic becomes apparent. For Muller’s statement refers to a crisis of drama, which consists of its apparent inability to convey the complexity of the modern world: the problems of the present exceed the the representational capacity of the situational dramatic art.

Well hell, I’ve never read Lehmann, but no. No, that’s not the issue. In fact, after reading Detje and Stegemann three or four times each, I remain impressed at their willingness to pretend to be painfully ignorant of cultural production beyond the stage. Stegemann at least mentions Kafka, but film–let along TV or video or the Internet–are apparently completely alien concepts to these critics, except insofar as postdram’s engagement with–however fleeting–these rather historically important means of production can be used to label postdram “bourgeois.”

(A side note: I do love the degree to which critical discourse about art–situated squarely within a semi-scholarly or academic context–consists of polysyllabic name-calling, in which the true point of any argument is to prove that someone else is “bourgeois.” It gets my latent Maoist blood boiling. I’ve long felt that our moralistic vision of the brutality of the Soviet Terror, particularly vis-a-vis its treatment of avant-garde artists, has obscured the very real critique that an actually revolutionary society produced of such artists. We pathologize so we don’t have to deal with its conclusions. Mayakovsky may have been an early supporter, but once the Soviets were in power, they quick realized people needed cookbooks that, you know, helped people cook, and furthermore that radical artists whose work was focused on offending bourgeois mores were rather dependent on the bourgeoisie to provide an object to revolt against. Our liberal moralizing about Stalinism obscures the fact that such is likely the fate of provocative/transgressive artists in any revolutionary society.)

The point is that Post-Dramatic Theater could also be seen as just another evolutionary response to new technology. If photography precipitated Modernism in the visual arts and socio-economic Modernity precipitated late Romanticism, we could just acknowledge that Post-Dramatic Theater, with its focus on performativity, is just another response by the non-playwright producers of live performance to adjust to a world in which in the core principles of drama–in Stegemann’s analysis: character and conflict, and, implicitly, narrative–can be better presented through non-theatrical means. This failure of analysis is doubly shocking because in Stegemann’s conclusion, he introduces the concept of “believability” into his critique, writing:

[W]hat makes theater such a gripping event for the audience members that their attention is worthy and rewarded? A concept may help here, even though at first glance it may appear to be an outdated one: when it is believable, theater earns the devotion of its audience.

With all due respect to Stegemann, this strikes me as not so much outdated as hopelessly naive. Note first that by its own logic, it assumes that an audience could–nay, should–find a drama that takes place in a theater, on a stage dressed to be a remarkably huge living room, featuring actors who have to almost yell every line just to be heard, more “believable” than a video of people in an actual living room, speaking at actual living-room volumes. Second, and somewhat more complexly, it assumes that “believable” is essentially the same thing as “verisimilitude”–the photo-realistic presentation of external “life” onstage. A self-aware performance mimicking the style of, say, a sitcom (I’m thinking of David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones here, a decidedly non-postdram work) is apparently not believable, even though anyone in the audience would recognize–and find “believable”–the aesthetic as that of a sitcom. In his attempt to defend drama from the travesties of Post-Dramatic Theater, Stegemann has apparently rejected the possibility of satire and parody as well, which is why he hangs his hat on the completely un-quantifiable concept of “believability” rather than something even vaguely more specific, like “verisimilitude.”

Is this unfair? Maybe. Again, Stegemann–like Detje–locates his definition of Post-Dramatic Theater as a rather narrow band. In fact, in his conclusion, Stegemann’s central complaint is that, within Germany, the wholehearted acceptance of Post-Dramatic Theater as a model has excluded dissenting artists from support in their artistic endeavors. Apparently, according to his logic, by supporting postdram at all I’m endorsing the continued support of Jan Lauwers, Jan Fabre, no doubt some other Belgian “Jan,” a bunch of Germans, and the Wooster Group–all to the exclusion of others. I’m doing no such thing, and the practical issues of state funding in Germany are utterly beyond me, aside from the general sense that attacking a broadly defined artistic practice for the sake of arguing, in essence, that young artists deserve support, seems rather extreme, misdirected, and likely ineffective. (And for the record, Culturebot remains committed to the advancement of form and providing a solid critique of the current funding models in the US–and elsewhere, should a knowledgeable commentator want to offer an elsewhere-perspective.)

But let me turn back to Detje, in order to try to make sense of that essay’s critique of postdram. Detje is also an artist, a practitioner, who positioned the essay as a “manifesto.” What can we make of Detje’s vision for a post-Post-Dramatic Theater?

Well, within Detje’s critique, there’s a willingness to accept the radical impetus of the early practitioners, like the Living Theater, followed only by despair later at the continued acceptance of the particular set of practices ascribed to postdram:

What we’re dealing with here is post-dramatic theater. Its proponents have prescribed a kind of high-tech medicine for the stage: there is a beeping machine producing discourse, which will be live-streamed onto the stage, and a beeping machine for theory that prohibits all forms of immediacy. Each beeping machine proves that we are in the now. Invariably, post-dramatic theatre can be spotted squatting on stage behind a mess of Macbooks and tangled cables. In this world, the artist is the epitome of the tragic, hyper-networked but lonely monad, flung into a world of technology. And on his hard-drive, there is the musty smell of a thousand seminars.

For Detje, postdram is essentially the hangover of a radical experiment of the Sixties and Seventies, when entered “the shamans of revolution (and masturbation).”

Artists wanted to prove they could stand the erotic – and autoerotic – demands of the revolution. Radicalization permits the revolutionaries of theatre and life to do something great: in a self-induced fever, they equate the struggle for liberation with the struggle for satisfaction. The un-erogenous body is a victim of structural violence – and, conversely, the erogenous body is a weapon in the revolutionary battle. Being totally into yourself suddenly passes as a political act. For a short, historical moment, politics and therapy are united under the vague slogan of “liberation”. For the duration of a batted eyelid, theater’s narcissism and its political aims converge.

And now we’ve reached the polysyllabic insult just barely less common than some quasi-Marxist formulation of calling someone else “bourgeois”: accusing them of mental masturbation. Again, I’ll just assume I’m given some credit for being able to detect the difference between self-congratulatory onanistic art and something more important or meaningful or, at least, ambitious. I don’t pretend to defend every work ever conceived that could be labeled “Post-Dramatic.” With that said, I have to express my continued sense that dramatic theater, at least as practiced today, is more often than not guilty of onanistic indulgence.

To stick with our masturbation metaphor, a number of years ago, I was working on an article about pornography and got into a long conversation about cum-shots with a pornographer. For the polite sake of assuming ignorance, I’ll explain: in the world of straight porn, a video tends to end with male ejaculation, most commonly on–rather than in–the actress, with a particular emphasis on facial cum-shots. All on the same page? So, what we got to talking about were the particulars of the facial cum-shot: namely, the obsessive focus on making the actress look at the camera–POV style–eyes open during, or at least following, being ejaculated upon.

My subject had a novel interpretation: for him, this need to see the actress looking at the avatar for the onanist was essentially a moment of empathy, in which the consumer of porn could empathize with the actress. This struck me in many ways as bullshit. For my part, it seemed a classic example of the “Gaze of the Other” (pace Sartre): The reason one would want the object of one’s erotic fantasy to “look” at back at the objectifier is all about power. If you’re quite literally turning another person into an object of sexual fantasy, part of completing that dialectical interaction is having them look back at you, and in that gaze understand yourself to be the erotic actor.

The fascination with the male orgasmic moment as pertaining to theater is actually pretty common. Writing in “From Elements of Style,” collected in The America Play and Other Works, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks uses the male climax-arc as a metaphor for traditional narrative, writing “we all want to get to the CLIMAX,” and side-noting:

in X-vids the cum-shot is the money shot. Yeah but it’s not a question of the way girls cum vs. the way boys cum. I’m not looking at a single sexual encounter but something larger, say, in this context, the history of all sexual encounters all over the globe, all animals included.

In this context, Parks–who’s a sort of liminal figure between dramatic and postdram theater, particularly where her early work is concerned–is setting out her vision of the almost mythic components of works like The America Play. Regardless of whether the narrative occurs on the realist, gender- and temporally-specific orgasmic level, or the mythic, I suppose meta-orgasmic level, the structure of the dramatic endeavor remains committed to some process of sexual satisfaction. The audience will go to the theater, sit, experience a theatrical presentation in which conflict occurs, ultimately resolving in a climactic moment.

But I’m interested particularly in the epistemology of the cum-shot (possibly the least sexy thing I’ve ever said) the audience is proffered at the end. Seen from the perspective I laid out above, dramatic theater exists to create the straight-porno cum-shot: a power moment exists at the end in which the audience is asked to identify with either the objectifying-agent or the object of erotic satisfaction. This moment–much as in pornography–is highly scripted, contrived, and clearly disinterested in the satisfaction of the object of it. Drama, like porn, gives the audience a perspective to identify with and asks them to be identified as such. Within this erotic dynamic, in other words, the play makes its “point”–the resolution of its conflict is designed consciously by the playwright to present the audience with a choice: agree with me, or get a facial.

I know most playwrights aim for something higher, with vague appeals to some hard-to-define sense of “asking or provoking a question” rather than “providing an answer.” They don’t intend–or see themselves–as arbiters of a vaguely sub-dom porno script. And I’ll maybe grant that, at its best, dramatic theater can achieve this, both in terms of its literature as well as its material production. But I’m not much of a dogmatist, either. I remain skeptical that–even accepting the potential for meaningful achievement–dramatic theater, with its characters and conflict and narrative, is somehow inherently superior or more essential an art-form than what gets lumped under the “Post-Dramatic Theater” label.

In fact, I’d argue it’s naive to draw the distinction. To even do so is to ignore that dramatic theater is also a form of performance–one, to repeat myself, with a set of ideological assumptions behind it. These may differ between dramatic forms. Surely we can all accept that there is a difference between the Festival Dionysus in Athens, what happened at the Globe Theater in Shakespeare’s time, and what we could see today at Playwrights Horizons, Signature, or whatever. But the defenders of dramatic theater want to elide these differences, apparently, based mainly on purely mechanical distinctions (and ignoring the inherent Eurocentrism of their argument at the same time, which only further problematizes their argument) regarding the idea of conflict, character, and narrative.

All three are often present in Post-Dramatic Theater, of course. Just not in the same way, or playing the same role within the theatrical presentation. The defenders of dramatic theater imagine their practice is somehow essential–ignoring the realities of film and television and, well, pretty much any other form that can present people having some story happen to them (and another elision I’m also making: the fact that film and video and television all quickly developed a self-referential skepticism despite their efficiency at verisimilitude, further diluting the argument for dramatic essentialism). Post-Dramatic Theater, to make a rather banal point, often takes these stories or representations as a starting point for an exploration, interrogation or–to use an oft-misused term–deconstruction of such a form. One might even be tempted to argue that Post-Dramatic Theater is often animated by a desire to respond to the overwhelmingly vast array of representations contemporary society provides us through diverse media, including dramatic theater.

But that would not, apparently, be Detje’s point (or Stegemann’s). For them, starting from an obsession with identity/character, discourse/conflict, and experience/narrative, Post-Dramatic Theater is apparently nothing more than a celebration of identity and Self, an autoerotic fantasy enacted onstage. From the narrow confines of their critiques, I can admit: yes, sometimes that’s the product, but not inherently a facet of the material process of Post-Dramatic Theater. Reading Detje, with all the references to “heart” (which George finds problematic as well), accusing Post-Dramatic Theater of “emotional anaemia” and an “absence of euphoria,” I get the distinct feeling Detje’s arguing for a sort of nouvelle-Artaudian theater, with all the crucial viscera: the blood and sweat, piss and shit, tears and cum. Detje concludes:

The theatre of the 1970s was still able to play with a bourgeois body wanting ecstatic de-bourgeoisification, and able to romanticize the act of ecstasy as a political act of liberation, a revolutionary deed. Post-dramatic theatre is bodiless: if we prick it, it doesn’t bleed. Its narcissism is all in its concept, in the desire to prove its own modernity—which is all too easily done. It simulates just enough dissidence for us not to run away in fear. But above all, post-dramatic theatre hums the tune we want to hear – the great song of compliance.

What a remarkably backwards–and condescending–argument. Contemporary society–which Detje laments earlier in this same section–is replete with representations, sentimental narratives, emotional excitements, porn. And Detje’s solution is…trying to take these same forms further? The cum-shot is no longer enough to satisfy the complacent contemporary bourgeois consumer; theater must go a step further and start producing German bukkake, I guess.

Can I be forgiven for calling the entire argument nonsense? An anachronistic attachment to visceral experience–which Detje explicitly invokes by writing, “[W]hoever wants a better theatre shouldn’t demand a more traditional theatre but better times. Or worse ones”? That’s not a revolutionary logic, nor even one of resistance, but rather the logic of capitulation in the face of a mass of representations and sign-valuation–the whole apparatus of (I guess I’m a Marxist now) Late Capitalism–thoroughly ignored in an effort to formulate a critique based entirely on the idea that audiences are so stupid that they can only accept–and should only be offered–theater they find dramatically–in terms of character, conflict, and narrative–”believable.”

* * *

The “No Symbols Where None Inteded” Stuff, or, Things That Would Have Been Incorporated (Time and Patience Permitting)

• The story of how Benno Ohnesorg’s assassination was just an extraordinarily successful Stasi plot to destabilize West Germany, thus problematizing Detje’s analysis
• Something about Jacques Ranciere would have been good somewhere…
• A defense of “cheap” sentimentalist (e.g., Hollywood) in dramatic presentation against the pretensions of “High Art”
• A quip about the dependency on “McLuhan” as a modifier of “cool”
• A proper Frankfurtian analysis of of cultural production vis-a-vis contemporary dramatic and post-dramatic theater
• Proper citation of other discussions informing my thought, including an email exchange which read, in part:

I partly think he just regrets the current moment – he doesn’t like that we live in a more and more disembodied social/economic/political world culture – well, too bad. This is the one we’ve got – one where just to try to understand something about how sneakers get made is fucking complicated, and has something to do with the derivatives market and Greek debt and sex trafficking and guerrilla marketing in West Philly playgrounds. I guess we can all be nostalgic for Fordism now? When an Artaudian response to “mechanized man” made sense?

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Photo by Sarah Jenkins

In the pantheon of New York artist collectives of the 1970s and 80s, the inimitable DISBAND represents the all-singing, all-dancing, all-girl contingent. The “conceptual art punk band of women artists who can’t play any instruments” joined the fray in 1978 with melodies proclaiming “the end of art, the end of my career and yours, the end of articles.” Its roster of seminal art and performance icons appeared at venues throughout New York from 1978 to 1982, going on to tour Italy with Laurie Anderson, Paul McCarthy, and Chris Burden. In 2008, the group reunited for MoMA PS1’s exhibition WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution. Their first audio CD was released in 2009 by Primary Information and features once long-lost early recordings. On March 14th, core members Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, and Martha Wilson rejoin forces for a not-to-be-missed evening at AUX Performance Space in Philadelphia’s Vox Populi gallery. Culturebot correspondent Mashinka Firunts speaks with them about their upcoming performance and why their project remains uncannily timely thirty years after its original inception.

For more information about their AUX performance, visit the Vox Populi event page, or to view footage of early performances, visit PrimaryInformation.org. DISBAND is currently working on an official website set to feature photographic and video documentation of their early work.

Mashinka Firunts: The broad spectrum of issues addressed in DISBAND’s early work ranges from gender identity to the distribution of power in the art world. Needless to say, these concerns are no less pressing than they were three decades ago. I’m curious, what are the specific circumstances surrounding the decision to reunite in 2008 and continue performing in 2012?

Martha Wilson: We were invited.

Donna Henes: Well, it was thirty years later. Literally. Actually, this corresponded to a bad accident at the time [in 2008], so I was on the cane. But I figured why not, and I did it on my cane.

MW: And she brought the house down by doing the song that she used to do while jumping the jump rope until she missed called “I Want to Be Rich, I Want to Be Famous, I Want to Have Fun” in a disco silvery outfit.  So she did the same song thirty years later using a walker and it was hysterically funny to see a lady north of sixty banging around and shaking her walker.

MF: You were recently in residence at the MacDowell Colony. During your time there, what were some differences in your approach to strategizing your current performances as compared with those in the 70s and 80s — whether in response to shifts in your own personal/professional lives or the shifting cultural climate?

Ilona Granet: We’d written a grant for the MacDowell Colony and for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency in Italy. So we’d already started thinking about how we as middle-aged women would approach and would take seriously what our experiences meant. If anything, the climate is more shrill and intense now, so we thought, ‘we’re just going to write new songs that respond to the reality of our current situation.’ For example, one of our new songs is about the religious right’s misinterpretation of the founding principles of the country. The song is called “The Age of Enlightenment.” We did the research on what the founding fathers believed and how those Enlightenment beliefs have been turned around to bring us back to the Middle Ages (making the earth flat.)

We did a lot of research and read a lot of philosophers. We made songs about that, Dr. Kevorkian, the rapture. They’re a little didactic, and also funny and beautiful, with melodies and costumes.

We did a song about menopause and masturbation, it’s a charming number. It becomes a rollicking free-for-all at the end that people start singing and dancing to…I hadn’t had a child, so I ended up making a song about abortion and my rights and my imaginary children, and it’s a sweet lullaby.

DH: I think that a lot of our older songs were based on a protesting against how women were seen and perceived and treated and used. And I think, and hope, that we’re in a stage now where we’re proposing new alternatives and positive possibilities. We’re all in that midlife period and we’re all living and acting and making art based from our own sense of power in the world, whereas thirty years ago I think we were struggling to find that power and to define that power, and struggling against what we perceived was holding us down. And now, speaking for myself, I feel that nobody can hold me down because I know what I know and I know who I am. And I think that’s what’s starting to happen in general, that women are starting to speak from a point of power and not from a point of victimization or struggling against who they think has power over them.

In the process of rehearsing for Philadelphia, it has become brutally clear how prescient our older songs were and are. Some of those that we’ll be repeating have a different tone to them; they’re in a way more exasperated. They’re still ironic, but they’re angrier in some way. One of our songs is called “Every Day Same Old Way” and I do a kind of chant through that saying “It’s the same old thing.” It was funny, but now when I think about doing it, it’s much more exasperated. You know, enough already.

MW: I think it’s actually terrifying because they’re now discussing whether Israel will blow up Iran, because they’re now trying to build missiles and their nuclear material is down underneath all these pools and houses and businesses. And during “Every Day Same Old Way” we’re wearing nuclear cooler hats and then banging them into the audience, so it becomes terrifying.

IG: There was a woman commentator on Fox News the other day speaking about women being raped in the military, saying that there was a greater chance of a woman being raped by a fellow soldier than for her to be injured in battle, and this woman commentator actually said, “Well, what do they expect?”

MF: There are so many contemporary feminist performance artists addressing these questions through somber, anti-spectacular strategies. One of the defining characteristics of DISBAND, in my view, is its cheeky, tongue-in-cheek approach to heavily politicized content. In that regard, DISBAND can’t be positioned within that reductive binary of spectacular performance versus ‘serious’ socially engaged practice. I wonder if you could speak to that?

MW: Humor is more effective at getting people to change their minds than anything else. At least, in getting them to look at the problem. Whether they change their minds is an open question. For example, the Guerilla Girls in 1985 figured out that the strategies of the 70s — earnest bra burning in front of the Whitney — did not work, so fine, they dressed in gorilla suits and started pointing the finger but doing it with a sense of absurdity. We’re trying to change the world knowing full well we can’t actually change the world, but we’re going to die trying anyway.

DH: Oh, no, I disagree! My entire life, and my entire work, is based on the concept of transformation, at least the possibility of transformation. So I never will say never. And I do believe that things can and will change. And you know, it’s a game. It’s a game to play.

MF: The old adage that entertainment is the most effective educational tool.

IG: That’s how you get students to stay in a class. You have to sneak in your information, and you’ve got to entertain them. Nobody wants to listen to somebody when they’re falling asleep.

MF: I doubt anyone could manage sleep during a DISBAND performance.

IG: Well we’ll bring blankets next time and do all of our lullabies, and maybe while they’re asleep we’ll be changing their minds!

DH: And we can all do little chants. You know, we’ll change them one way or the other.

DISBAND will be performing one night only, March 14th at 9PM at AUX Performance Space/Vox Populi Gallery. 319 N. 11th St, Philadelphia PA. Admission is free and no advance reservations are required.

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"Sarah Michelson Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer" at 2012 Whitney Biennial, Photograph © Paula Court.

Dance is its own kind of religion. My first ballet teacher spent 15 years as a nun before returning to the dance world, and she always told the story of her conversion from ballerina to nun in terms of single-minded dedication. The object of the devotion was different, but the discipline and focus required were the same.

This memory returned to me while at Sarah Michelson’s marathon Devotion Study #1: The American Dancer, part of the Whitney Museum’s Biennial 2012 (thru March 11). One of two dance artists selected to be in residence for this year’s exhibition—Michael Clark is the other—Michelson has turned the fourth floor of the Whitney into a meditative performance space. With white walls, risers and chairs, the space is quite traditionalist, giving a nod to both performance and museum conventions: viewers get the pristine white expanse associated with visual art, but also a good, seated view of the action with the theatrical fourth wall intact. The dance floor itself is a scaled drawing of the floor plan of the Whitney’s iconic building. It’s an extraordinary detailed entity, in keeping with the spare setting, but the relationship of this to the work overall remained opaque.

Devotion Study #1 opens with a supposed dialogue between Michelson and theater director Richard Maxwell, who wrote the text. Their conversation circles around why they each create work, with the focus on Maxwell, and is a deliberate mix of the glib and the profound. The first performer, Nicole Mannarino enters during this dialogue, and begins striding backwards in circles on the balls of her feet with her arms outstretched wide in a cross-like position.  In time to the relentless ticking of a metronome, overlaid by a soundscore by Jason Lo that is vaguely reminiscent of organ chords, Mannarino describes various circles—small, large, serpentine—while maintaining a serene, but concentrated presence.  Over the course of the next 85 minutes, other dancers gradually join her and leave in reverse order, maintaining the tempo, circular structure and patterns with drill-like precision. Eleanor Hullihan briefly jumps forward(!) near the end, but other than a lengthy pause where the entire cast of six stands in a line, this is the only break from backwards locomotion.  The work concludes with an oblique narrative about the female child God fathered at the same time as Jesus, the “angel of ambivalence,” who ultimately surrenders.

There are some quietly beautiful moments here, but they are unequal to the task of sustaining the full 90 minutes of this performance marathon. Dance is about more than endurance, on either the part of the performer or the audience, but we see only one facet. The movement Michelson demands of her dancers physically recalls high heels and ballet’s pointe work—gendered, visually seductive but restrictive—and given the non-stop, repetitive backwards motion, can only be described as grueling.

As for the audience, we had it relatively easy in comparison, although there were a couple of walk-outs, plus that pause in the middle was heavily used to handle emails and texts. Did we benefit from sitting captive for 90 minutes? My reaction might have been more positive if Devotion Study #1 were half as long, or it was staged as an installation, where the audience could move around the space at will. Instead, the “devotion” was forced: the dancers were obliged to execute the relentless choreography, and we the audience sat stationary, obediently following performance conventions.

The Whitney Museum’s materials state that the Biennial “provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America.” In this framework, as one of two dance artists selected for the 2012 Biennial, Michelson disproportionately represents the entire field. Repetition and minimalism had their heyday in the dance and performance world 25+ years ago, and I presume it was a conscious choice to tap these structures for Devotion Study #1. Here, Michelson has taken walking, a pedestrian movement emblematic of the Judson Dance Theater’s explorations of the 1960s, and made it both highly physical and stylized by moving backwards on half-toe.

If Devotion Study #1 is a way of refiltering dance’s recent history through a contemporary lens, as the notes on Michelson’s residency imply, what is the larger take-away? Is the dance field looking backwards, revisiting its past in a circular fashion? Arguably yes, although the same could be said for the current state of other art forms, and Devotion Study #1 doesn’t tackle the issue in a particularly illuminating way.

Secondly, Devotion Study #1 throws into sharp relief the long-standing, problematic relationship between physical sacrifice (repetition and endurance in this context) and a murky notion of Beauty or High Art. Dance requires a lot of the human body, and that cost or effort is usually hidden from the audience. By putting the dancer’s physical effort center stage, Michelson’s choreography exposes the exertion required at the same time it exploits it: two of the women are onstage and constantly moving the duration of the piece, and are quickly drenched in sweat, yet they persevere. Do we find the work more beautiful or awe-inspiring because of the physical struggle on display? For the audience, there is something discomfiting about complacently sitting and watching this strenuous, yet mind-numbing effort. While my calves gave a sympathetic twinge, I remained emotionally unmoved by Devotion Study #1: although it touches on ideas of substance, it retreads familiar territory with little resolution.

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Photo by Ryan Jensen

“I’m finding that with a lot of the Hoi Polloi original pieces, they’ve each kind of been an exploration of how we, as Americans, stage community,” said Alec Duffy. “How we come together extra-curricularly. That is, outside of work, outside of our family. What are the ways we meet and gather with other people, and how do we get along? So for example, there was the piece about a choir [The Less We Talk], in this kind of endless rehearsal, a sort of No Exit situation. Dysphoria was about members of a Buddhist community, trying to come together to find enlightenment. And this is an exploration of people who, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in towns across America, come together and do these rituals, and have this path and do these initiation rites, and go the next day to their dentistry practice.”

Last week, after a brief trot through the rain, I was sitting in moist socks at the production table in Duffy’s apartment-cum-rehearsal space in Prospect Heights, to talk with him about All Hands, the new Hoi Polloi show that opens this week at the Incubator Arts Project (through March 31; tickets $18).

Best known as one of the creators and performers in the Obie-winning Three Pianos, the Massachusetts-born Duffy has been creating original work in New York since he completed his degree at Duke. Though he got started in generative work as an actor and director in college, it was originally a lack of connection to the playwright community that led Duffy to devising original theater. Following a series of workshops in directing and ensemble-driven work from the likes of Lee Breuer, Charles Mee, and SITI Company, Duffy went to study at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris. After returning to New York, he began creating work under the company name Hoi Polloi around 2007, starting with a contribution to Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Days/365 Plays.

Even as Three Pianos–which Duffy created with fellow theater artist/composers Dave Malloy and Rick Burkhardt, and was directed by The TEAM’s Rachel Chavkin–was making its journey from the Ontological to New York Theater Workshop and, just this last December, to the American Repertory Theater, Duffy and Hoi Polloi were continuing to create work more closely tied to his vision (“I’m finding that Hoi Polloi really means ‘directed by me,’” he told me, with no slight intended). Just this last November, they produced a thoroughly enjoyable staging of the 1959 John Cassavettes film Shadows at the Collapsable Hole in Brooklyn, even as they were already deeply involved in the creation of All Hands.

In Shadows, Duffy saw a sort of artistic synergy with his own work. “In general I feel drawn to material that explores hyper-realism,” he told me. “So Cassavettes, when I saw Shadows–it was like no other film that I’d seen. Just in the way the characters talked, and talked over each other. It seemed so real and complicated and messy. I really enjoyed that and thought it could work really well onstage.” That sort of energetic messiness animates Duffy’s own approach to creating work that’s “not as interested in narrative as in behavior.”

For All Hands, Duffy has continued his exploration of social interaction in contemporary American society by tackling secret societies. Not the sort that conspire to control the world in the paranoid minds of political reactionaries, but rather the occasionally bizarre but more often banal organizations that, for one reason or another, enforce discretion and secrecy on their members.

“I started with the idea that I wanted to investigate secret societies because they’re really woven through the fabric of American society: Masons, the Elks Lodge, occult societies, whatnot. They’re everywhere,” Duffy explained. “So I gathered a group of people together, we tried to do a lot of research, we visited these secret societies–some more successfully than others–and then also visited meetings of less secret societies but still closed meetings, Lions Club or Rotary Club or Kiwanis.”

If the idea of visiting a secret society for the purpose of researching a play seems like a bit of a contradiction in terms, that’s likely because the mythology of secret societies has been built up so much. One can attend at least some Masons meetings, for instance, though doing so constitutes an agreement to protect their secrets on pain of death, an agreement Duffy felt would be inappropriate to so pointedly violate for the purpose of his play. But as he made clear, once there was a very practical reason for the secrecy: 400 years ago, the Masons were a radical organization opposed to church and monarchy throughout Europe on the basis of Enlightenment philosophy. (Umberto Eco’s recently translated novel The Prague Cemetery is a fascinating and mostly true account of this era and political phenomenon.) Today, the reasons for maintaining extensive discretion are far complex.

“They have a path, almost like any religion would. And their path to enlightenment is filled with ritual and symbols that have been maligned by more traditional elements, like the Catholic church and whatnot,” he explained. “So maybe it’s something like, if people just started going out on the streets saying, ‘Oh, we did this ritual with this crazy Egyptian headdress and whatnot,’ then maybe they fear for the reputation of the Masons.”

Other organizations were more open. “There were some groups that were semi-secret” the company could visit and engage with. Duffy himself went to a meeting based on the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley.

“You can go to a meeting” of the group, he told me. “There are some that are public and some that are closed. You can go to a public mass, but you have to fill out an essay form, and send it to them, expressing why you’re interested in attending a meeting. And they send you directions such as, well, go to this basketball court in Queens, and stand there. Someone will come and get you at this point in time. And then they lead you to a basement of a residential building, through all these, and then you enter into the actual sanctuary that’s been set up in this basement. And then you see this weird, wild ritual, and then people just hang out afterwards. Kind of take off the costumes and hang out, talking about the new Thor movie or something like that.”

But after several months of research and investigations by Duffy and his collaborators, “we just weren’t coming up with material that seemed to lead anywhere” in the improvisation sessions, he told me. So Duffy turned to playwright Robert Quillen Camp, the first time Hoi Polloi had relied on a playwright to generate an original script.

“We basically did a brain-dump” with Quillen Camp, Duffy told me. And as of some three months ago, the company has a text to work from. That said, it’s not an entirely standard playscript; Quillen Camp’s work is being re-touched and altered through Hoi Polloi’s ensemble process, and the playwright–who’s based in California–is only generating the text to be spoken, independent of the entire visual concept.

“What I like about Quill’s writing”–(“everyone calls him ‘Quill’”)–”is that it really strikes a great balance between abstract and narrative, so that really this play–if it can be called a play–is more of an experience, I’d say,” Duffy explained. “You get a glimpse into the inner-workings of this secret society. So you see their rituals, you see their initiation of a new member, which really takes twists and turns. Very disorienting play, the  ground keeps getting taken from underneath your feet” Quillen Camp provided the text, but the rest–the design, symbols, practices, rituals, remains the work of the group’s generative process.

For All Hands, the company has re-structured the space at Incubator Arts Project to serve as the temple or ritual space of an invented secret society, in which the audience can watch and explore the way in which average people engage in such a society’s practices. In addition to working with a playwright’s script, for the first time Duffy has also engaged a choreographer–Witness Relocation’s Dan Safer–to work with a core group of Hoi Polloi regulars, including composer Dave Malloy. The show also features the largest ensemble of performers–twenty–Duffy has yet assembled.

“It’s really just a different palette, for a director, having so many people onstage,” he told me. “You’re able to do such weird things, just in terms of having so many people in the space. What I’m really enjoying is having those moments when I don’t try to spot-light something, just letting the actors have a minute talking to each other onstage where there’s no actual dialogue that needs to be heard. Like at a meeting where there’d be break-time, people just milling around talking with each other. Just being able to spend a moment with that in a play, as an audience member, is really exciting to watch, to get to pick and choose.”

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pictured: Ashley Tuttle / photo (c) steven schreiber

It’s totally fitting that Pam Tanowitz, a choreographer with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a day job at City Center, should be drawn to the music of Morton Feldman in her new work Untitled (The Blue Ballet) at the Kitchen March 8-10 (tickets $15). His String Quartet No. 1–a sparse meditative crawl with seemingly no rhythmic entry points, clocking in at 80 minutes–is a slow-motion landscape that both demands and deters. A New York Times review by Steve Smith called it “something like tilting at windmills while mounted on tortoises and armed with feather dusters.” With the cerebral formalist Tanowitz in charge, we are sure to be given a spectacular and deeply satisfying treatment of both movement and music, simultaneously working with and against our ideas of what each should and could be.

Feldman and Tanowitz are equally fascinated with deeply conscious self examination. Tanowitz’s devotion to movement is paramount, regardless of music or circumstance. In contemporary dance, few equal her kind of rigor and experimentation. This is coupled with an affinity for ballet and music, using a very specific, reverential and often cinematic approach. She begins by choosing a score, listens to it intently, then lets it go, returning to movement by itself, only allowing the music to reappear later in the process.

When Tanowitz decided on Feldman, she went straight to the Flux Quartet. “I knew they were Feldman specialists. They were totally into. They gave me their own recording of it, which is great. You can hear them breathing, and it actually changes the feeling of the music. This is what I learned from Viola [Farber], the idea of a living, breathing dancer with a living, breathing musician, performing together–that’s what it should be.”

Farber was a protege of Merce Cunningham, and Tanowitz’s graduate school mentor. “She was amazing. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” However, to call Tanowitz a descendant of the Cunningham tradition is reductive–her influences are far and wide. Ballet, certainly, “I love ballet,” she emphasizes. “There’s things in this new piece, like I took a little bit of Giselle and we reversed it”–and Mark Morris, too–“I was in Marble Halls at Ohio State. I learned more about choreography, being in that dance, than maybe a couple months of composition class.” Tanowitz is drawn to an aesthetic of the body that is highly skilled and virtuosic, but also richly minimal. It is a constant search for the simplicity and beauty of formalism. It’s both Bach and Steve Reich.

The new piece is borne from an artist challenging herself every moment, continuing to ask questions rather than make dances about answers. As a friend recently said to me, if you have a question about something, curate a show about it. It makes perfect sense. Looking to the unknown for inspiration sets art apart from the mainstream, and it most certainly sets some artists like Tanowitz apart from her own peers. When I asked where she sees herself as a dance maker, she told me, “For a while I was trying to figure out where I fit in. Should I be making ballets, should I be making modern, and then I just forgot about it, and started making the dance that I want to make, and thinking about the problems that I want to solve, like asking myself why am I making dances with pointed feet? Is that relevant? But when I said, ‘Ok, well I’m not even going to ask, I’m just going to make them’…much easier.”

With a cast that includes dancers associated with some of the biggest companies and choreographers in the field (Ballet Frankfurt, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris), she’s specifically surrounding herself with the most intimidating of creative forces.

“This piece is about scaring myself,” she explains. “I’m scaring myself with music and with people. Those two things were the starting point, giving myself these challenges. It’s about no gimmicks–no bringing in a curtain or introducing a new dancer thirty minutes into the piece. I love all that stuff, but I’m really trying to not do that, see what happens, see if I can.”

In Untitled (The Blue Ballet), Tanowitz is attempting to pare her work down even further–perhaps towards almost complete purity and abstraction – all the while retaining a strong sense of the past. “I think about what my contribution is, in a wide way. It’s not so much about me, it’s more the field of dance that I care about. The way I see value in what I do is that I look at it as the field of dance, my contribution, where do I fit on the continuum, knowing what has come before me, how many people. If I know that, then I’m ok.”

——-
Special thanks to Ryan Wenzel (www.bodiesneverlie.com)

Popularity: 3% [?]

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.”

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