In case you haven’t been paying attention, Vice Media and Intel have quietly (or not so quietly) revolutionizing the artistic landscape with their ground-breaking partnership The Creators Project. From their website:

The Creators Project is a global network dedicated to the celebration of creativity, culture and technology. At a time in the history of the arts where digital technology has revolutionized distribution, democratized access, and re-imagined the scope and scale with which an artist can create a vision and reach an audience, The Creators Project is a new kind of arts and culture channel for a new kind of world.

Well now they’re going to have a big-ass festival in Brooklyn on October 15-16 with Karen O’s new opera (directed by Adam Rapp) Stop The Virgens as a centerpiece.

For more information on the festival – which is FREE!!! with RSVP – click here.

This IS the arts funding model of the future, by the way. This partnership is putting new technology in the hands of cutting edge artists and giving them resources to create really cool stuff.

And if you check the artist roster you’ll notice there are no artists for whom theater, dance or performance is their primary medium (that I noticed) – which says WAY more about the state of contemporary performing arts than it does about the CP curatorial process.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Culturebot loves PRELUDE! Yes, okay, I curated for three years, but I loved it even before that. Created by the indefatigable and inspiring Frank Hentschker, PRELUDE has established itself as the best way to see new work from all your favorite emerging and established NYC-based artists. This year PRELUDE.11 takes as its starting point the dialogue between recent tendencies in theater, dance and visual art performance. For the first time in PRELUDE’s history, it will use the James Gallery at the Graduate Center as well as the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center so that this interdisciplinary festival can continue to investigate the resonances between the “white cube” and the “black box.” Invitees include Jay Scheib, Temporary Distortion, Sibyl Kempson and Big Dance Theater, Donelle Woolford, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Mac Wellman, Suzanne Bocanegra and Paul Lazar, Half Straddle, Daniel Fish, lumberob, Jake Hooker, Otso Huopaniemi, Elevator Repair Service, Young Jean Lee, Rob Fitterman, Will Holder, Nina Beier, and a host of others, including a new commission from Jackson Pollock Bar. Events occur daily from 4pm-10pm, with selected performances loosely based around the following themes:

· We Present A Presentation: performative lectures, theory-installations, and performances within performances.
· Repurposing: taking preexisting works, events or texts as the basis for new performances
· Text As Texture: creating a musical or performative experience from the materiality of language.

THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME!!! DON’T MISS IT!!!

PRELUDE.11
The Eighth Annual PRELUDE Festival

Wednesday Oct 12 – Friday, Oct 14, 2011
FREE and open to the public. First come, first served.
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street) NYC
WWW.PRELUDENYC.ORG

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY is pleased to present PRELUDE.11, the eighth annual PRELUDE festival dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance and visual art performance. PRELUDE will offer over 20 short performances, readings, and open rehearsals—a completely free sneak-peek into the work being prepared for the 2011/12 season, as well as new commissions and daily panel discussions with artists and performers.

PRELUDE is the annual three-day festival organized by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at CUNY Graduate Center. It was established in 2003 with the remit of showing the best in New York-based theater and performance. Each year Frank Hentschker, director of the Martin E.Segal Theater Center, assembles a curatorial team to select and organize the program. This year’s PRELUDE has been selected by Claire Bishop (Associate Professor, PhD Program in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center), Rob Marcato (Artistic Line Producer, Signature Theatre Company, NY) and Helen Shaw (Theater critic, Time Out New York). PRELUDE.11’s Producer is Caleb Hammons (Producer, Soho Rep., NY).

All presentations will be held in the James Gallery and the Segal Center at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street. A closing night party will be held on Friday 14 October at The Gershwin Hotel, 7 East 27th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. All programs are subject to change.

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Sunday, Sept. 18, the eighth installment of Dimanche Rouge goes down at Petit Bain, a floating concert hall and art space on the Seine. A mini-festival of experimental performance founded in Paris, France by Opie Boero Imwinkelried and others Dimanche Rouge exists to offer a consistent opportunity for artists to present their work. Though less than a year old, Dimanche Rouge has a variety of ambitious projects underway, including (launching just this month) a Saturday laboratories component that, through a network of local sponsors, will connect artists globally via Livestream the day before monthly performance. In order to learn more, I spoke with curator and director Imwinkelried via email. For details, please visit their website.

1. So I gather you’re not French. Can you help fill in some of your background and how you wound up organizing and curating Dimanche Rouge?

I am not French! In many ways, home for me is Buffalo, NY, even if I was born in Argentina, lived in Cuba, and presently live in France. Buffalo and its experimental art scene put its signature on my life and career. I graduated from the Media Study Department, SUNY, Buffalo, the pioneer school in experimental video. I have studied several other disciplines and have done many different things in my life. Besides being an artist, I am a also a pilot and a snow caver–a snow caver from Buffalo, NY.

I started Dimanche Rouge because, from my own experience as an experimental performance artist, I learned that it was almost impossible to find a space in Paris to perform regularly. You had to either rent a venue from your own pocket or draw a fairly large public willing to pay to see your performance. Now, there is a space for experimental artists to perform in Paris every third Sunday of the month!

2. Based on the description, it sounds like Dimanche Rouge is basically a big monthly art party–free to the public, who are invited to bring food and drink–with a nearly day-long line-up of performances, visual art installations, and so on. Where did the idea come from? How was it realized?

I wouldn’t define Dimanche Rouge as an art party but rather as an art festival with the emphasis on the creative perfomative elements and the party atmosphere is secondary to that. Dimanche Rouge is a space to promote and develop experimental performances. Every third Sunday of the month we have a festival; the rest of the month, we work on other projects, including workshops, interview series, and much research on how we can better promote experimental performances and expand the Dimanche Rouge project. We have launched an interviews series. We interview our artists to further promote their work. We publish these interviews on our blog and also submit them to other sites for publication. For the moment, we do written interviews outside the event and video interviews during the event. We will have our first DVD compilation of our sixth edition released very soon. We will expand the written interview series to video and audio interviews using Livestream. Dimanche Rouge will have a Kiev edition in Ukraine at the beginning of 2012. We have two team members, one Chinese and on Russian, who are researching and networking to organize Dimanche Rouge in Russia and China. Our presentation catalog has 100 pages and it is written in English, French, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. We are preparing our bilingual catalog with all the performances held at Dimanche Rouge. This will be about 300 pages.

Dimanche Rouge #8 on September 18 will showcase the work of forty artists from fifteen different countries in almost nine hours of programming. Food and drinks will be sold in September, though, as requested by the venue.

3. Where did the idea come from? How was it realized?

Working with my collective of artists on an experimental performance, I realized how difficult it was to get a venue to perform in Paris. I decided to start Dimanche Rouge to provide a space for experimental performers. Dimanche Rouge is proving that this sort of space was highly needed. We went from two performances in February 2011 to over forty artists from fifteen different countries in September 2011.

The idea was realized with conviction and love for our project. We do not have any sort of funding for the moment. We have organized Dimanche Rouge with money from our own pockets, helped by very kind people who have lent us spaces and believed in us, and certainly with all the help and support of our artists, interns, volunteers and friends. We are working very hard to obtain funding, but since our event is growing so quickly, it has been almost impossible to put together a catalog that depicts an up-to-date image of our event.

4. In addition to more traditional forms of performance and art, the website says that “experimental performers whose work is not generally seen in art venues, such as masseurs, coiffures, cooks, knitters, tatoo designers, and jewelry makers” are also part of the event. Can you talk about that a little more? Are these artists who are doing these acts as performances, or is this re-contextualizing work like this as performance?

We re-contextualize work in an attempt to challenge the concept of art but also with the aim of providing a space for exchanges between different disciplines. We have been calling for atypical performances or, what we also call performances usually not seen at art venues, from the very beginning of Dimanche Rouge. Yet we have not been very successful getting experimental masseurs, coiffures, and chefs to perform. I guess this proves how disconnected we are from each other. We have had three masseurs. We gave them the main stage as every other performer. They, then, stayed for a few hours to give free massages to the public. In September, we wanted to have an army of masseurs, the brigade antistress Moufftardus Contrescarpus which would offer a unique performance involving the public. Since Petit Bain is on the Seine, we have to be cautious with the Paris Port Authorities, so we decided to have a smaller version of their “massage geant” in September–maybe we will have a “massage geant” in next editions. In October, we will have a coiffure/actress and a masseur/actor performing at our 9th edition.

5. You mentioned in an email that you’re launching something called “Saturday Streaming Labs” with satellites all over the world–what is that and how will it work?

One of our main aims is to create spaces. On September 17, Dimanche Rouge will be launching a new project called Saturday Streaming Labs. The Sorbonne University will host our project in Paris. Other institutions and artists studios participating in our project are located in NYC, Los Angeles, Merlbourne, Brisbane, Rome, Santiago de Chile, and a few other cities to be confirmed.

Saturday Streaming Labs will provide a real as well as virtual space to debate, present, perform, teach, and create multi-site collaborative performances using internet video streaming technologies. An artist in Paris may dance to the music a musician from Brooklyn plays; a scholar in Santiago may co-host a debate with an art critic in Melbourne engaging participants from different locations in a virtual conversation via streaming.

The Saturday Streaming Labs sessions will focus on experimental performances. Artists, curators, scholars, critics, students, and the general public are invited to participate as a real or virtual audience as well as to propose activities to be shared with the world.
The Saturday Streaming Labs were inspired by the success of our special seventh edition of Dimanche Rouge that took place simultaneously in several international cities with streamed performances from Paris, Kiev, Zaporizhya, Sofia, Berlin, Brooklyn, Utah, Santiago de Chile, Wenzhou in China, and Brisbane and Castelmaine in Australia. For instance, in Zaporizhya, Ukraine, we had over 300 people participating in our performance. The people of Zaporizhya took our event into their own hands. They decided to hold it in Zaporizhya’s main square and to frame our program with a variety of local performers including the very traditional Cossacks dancers. We said, “mission accomplie!” We had generated a space that people occupied and appropriated.

6. What’s the curatorial process like for Dimanche Rouge? I know you have open proposal submissions–when you program the event, what are you looking for?

We look for experimental work that takes a maximum of risk! We care little about the discipline or the format artists work with. People are invited to submit their projects filling in a form on our website. It is primarily myself who processes the applications and puts together the program.

I review all submitted material and use the internet to obtain further information about the artists assisted by our Production Manager.
We tend to reject work only on the basis of it not being experimental, but it is becoming harder as the volume of applications we receive increases.

7. I imagine with such a diverse program taking place in diverse spaces, Dimanche Rouge has a lot of room for surprising or unexpected things to happen. Are there any performances that really surprised you or that have stuck with you?

I don’t think I can answer that. All performances have their magic and are unique to me. Seeing 300 people in Zaporizya, Ukraine performing a script written by the Dimanche Rouge team is the one performance that I will never forget.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Catherine Sluser in Swim Pony's "Lady M". Photo by Mark Valenzuela.

Coming up this weekend, Philadelphia Live Arts kicks off (Sept. 2-17), the contemporary performance showcase that unfolds opposite the Philly Fringe. The line-up features a variety of artists, some familiar to New York, some less so, with a selection of Philadelphia’s top theater and dance companies.

One of the most unique events of the festival will most likely be Play (Sept. 15-17), a new dance commissioned by Live Arts in its only US appearance. Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and French choreographer Shantala Shivalingappa come at dance from differing perspectives: Cherkaoui is a trained contemporary dancer, while Shivalingappa is a classically trained Indian Kuchipudi dancer. In Play, the two essentially riff off of each other’s distinctive styles and approaches, producing a transcultural experiment in form and content. Both artists will also be presenting work separately, with Shivalingappa showing the traditional piece Namasya (Sept. 11-12), while Cherkaoui, along with Gilles Delmas, have brought in an installation piece called Zon-Mai (throughout the entire run), which presents video of dancers from around the world performing in their own homes.

On the theater front, one of the most interesting shows promises to be The Devil and Mr. Punch (Sept. 8-16), a world premiere from London’s Improbable, the same company behind Shockheaded Peter, the pulpy, prurient operetta based on a 19th century pop-up book satirizing moralistic children’s lit. The Devil and Mr. Punch likewise shows an interest in the intersection of violence and children’s art, taking Punch and Judy shows as its subject.

Improbable's "The Devil and Mister Punch."

Philadelphia’s arts community is represented through several pieces. Headlong Dance debuts a new work, Red Rovers (Sept. 2-10), an interactive piece on the intersection of art and science, which explores robotic investigations of Mars. Swim Pony Performing Arts is premiering Lady M (Sept. 1-9), an adaptation of Macbeth. Pig Iron, Philadelphia’s most accomplished devising company, return with Twelfth Night, or What You Will (Sept. 1-17), a chaotic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. And finally New Paradise Laboratories, the people who brought us Freedom Club last year, return with Extremely Public Displays of Privacy (throughout), a performance that occurs both in reality and online.

Otherwise, Live Arts features a roster of top artists from the US who are currently on tour. Austin’s Rude Mechs are bringing the incredible The Method Gun to town (Sept. 2-4). And New York dance is represented by both John Jasperse with Canyon (Sept. 9-11), appearing later this fall at BAM, and Kyle Abraham’s in town The Radio Show (Sept. 16-17), which will also be at Portland’s TBA Festival this month, and is part of On the Boards’ season in Seattle. International artists include Austrian choreographer Willi Dorner, French choreographer Xavier Le Roy (who brings the piece to New York for Crossing the Line in September), and Montreal-based circus company 7 Fingers.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Brazilian artist Michel Groisman, part of PS 122's fall line-up.

FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival: In September, the French Institute Alliance Française‘s Cross the Line Festival kicks off, featuring literary, music, art, and performance from nos amis across the pond. The entire line-up is online, so I’m going to concentrate on the big performance events. First up is polymath choreographer Xavier Le Roy, with two pieces two days in a row. On Monday, Sept. 19 brings us More Mouvements für Lachenmann, Le Roy’s deconstruction of a chamber opera, by choreographing movement onto the musicians. As odd as it does sound, I’ve seen artists work wonders by taking musicians out of their comfort zones–Heiner Goebbels’s Songs of Wars I Have Seen is one of my top 10 performances, and I expect Le Roy could be just as compelling. Then on Tuesday, Sept. 20, he follows it up with Product of Circumstances, a lecture-performance on his transition from molecular biologist to choreographer. The lecture-performance is, likewise, a promising if odd and under-utilized form. But hey–it’s Xavier Le Roy. The guy can apparently do, like, anything.

Performance-lecture is, in fact, one of the curatorial programs FIAF built into Crossing the Line, and Le Roy finds himself in good company. Similarly diverse choreographer/performer Ralph Lemon offers up A Paradance: The inherent protest and émigré nature of performance (and how it could belong nowhere) (Oct. 6), the title being pretty much all we have to go on; Gérald Kurdian brings us 1999 (Oct. 12), an installation/musical composition based on the British sci-fi series 1999; and Jos Houben gives us the Art of Laughter (Sept. 27), an explanation of what’s funny. That last one I’ve heard tons of praise of, so be sure to check it out.

Performance Space 122: Poor PS 122 has begun its homeless period while the actual PS 122 is being renovated, so this fall they’re only presenting two shows, one of which–choreographer Cuqui Jerez’s The Rehearsal (Oct. 12-15, at the Performing Garage)–is co-presented with Crossing the Line. There’s an old Polish expression that roughly translated is, “The lights go down, and the world disappears,” referring to the experience of being in a theater. The Rehearsal, it appears, is roughly working the opposite way. Jerez uses your average studio rehearsal process to re-engage the audience with the experience of a dance performance. And before that, Brazilian artist Michel Groisman is bringing a variety of pieces to the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn (Sept. 21-25). Groisman’s work, often featuring body-based sculptural elements, is all about exploring the limits of the human body. Just check out the pic–how can you miss this?

Anyway, if that feels a wee bit sparse, don’t worry–the line-up for the 2012 COIL Festival in January is already up, and it’s amazing: Young Jean Lee‘s Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show, The TEAM‘s Mission Drift, which has been killing in Edinburgh, Temporary Distortion‘s Newyorkland, Every House Has a Door‘s long-delayed Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never, and a re-staging of Heather Kravas’s fantastic The Green Surround, which we reviewed last spring. So just hold tight. And head over to defile Gawker’s rooftop on Sept. 13 for their season launch party, where you can get epically debauched all up in Nick Denton’s shit with downtown’s finest performance folk.

Ruth Zaporah. Photo by Kate Russell.

Danspace Project: Much like the good folk at PS 122, Danspace Project is also co-producing a show that’s part of Crossing the Line, so let’s kick off from there. It’s Sept. 22-24, it’s by Kimberly Bartosik, and it’s called I Like Penises: A Little Something in 24 Acts. I assume the title alone is intriguing enough to sell tickets.

Other stand-outs in the season include new works by the aforementioned Heather Kravass (with Jeremy Wade; Oct. 6-8) , the marvelous Tere O’Conner (with Cover Boy, Dec. 8-15), and Culturebot’s own Maura Donahue (with Vanessa Anspaugh; Oct. 13-15). On top of that, Danspace is also co-presenting with Performa 11, with a series of duets from Jonathon Burrows and Matteo Fargion (Nov. 3-5).

And then there’s a pair of very special one-night-only pieces: Ruth Zaporah, one of the founders of Action Theater (Oct. 27), and Deborah Hay (Dec. 17), the both of them icons of presence-based performance.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Leaving for work this morning, I was shocked to give just a little bit of a shiver as I stepped outside into the courtyard of my building. For the first time in what felt like ages, it could be reasonably described as “cool,” if not downright chilly in the shadow of my apartment building. And that can only mean one thing: fall is right around the corner.

Not that I’m sure we won’t have a good six to eight weeks of summery warmth left, but it’s true: we’re in the last full week of August, and next month is September, when the kids go back to school, the nights get cool and long, and finally, at long last, the fall performing arts seasons kick off.

For the next couple weeks, we’ll be profiling the upcoming seasons here, but it only made sense to start with BAM’s Next Wave Festival, for all intents and purposes the pinnacle of contemporary performance in the US. Beginning in mid-September though the holidays, BAM plays host to not only the standard set of globally noteworthy artists, but this year, also a couple very unique shows, once in a lifetime opportunities that shouldn’t be missed.

The performance series itself kicks off on Sept. 21, with Kronos Quartet‘s “Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11″ (through Sept. 24). So yes, it’ll be cheery. The performance features twelve compositions, ranging from an Iranian lullaby to a new arrangement of Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Armenia,” to Kronos commissions from composers like Michael Gordon, John Oswald, and Terry Riley. In proper Kronos fashion, it’s a global musicological response to inexpressible tragedy. Interestingly, though, it does not feature any of Steve Reich’s compositions from WTC 9/11, the album, recorded by Kronos, that recently caused a stir over its cover art.

Also notable in the series this year is the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on its farewell tour. Dec. 7-10, they present three separate programs of work spanning the iconic choreographer’s career, from 1968′s RainForest to 2003′s Split Sides. The shows demonstrate Cunningham’s breadth of collaborators, ranging from John Cage to Radiohead, Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol. It’s the third to last stop on the legacy tour, with the company heading across the pond to Paris before returning to New York for the final blow-out at New Year’s in the Park Avenue Armory.

But aside from that pair of truly unique events, the Next Wave program features plenty of amazing dance and theater. In October, the Berliner Ensemble brings Robert Wilson’s version of Kurt Weil/Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera to town (BE’s website, in German), which certainly counts as a can’t-miss, Robert Wilson and the Berliner Ensemble each being something any self-respecting performing arts lover has to see in his or her life (and, considering I’ve never been convinced Wilson is actually worth all the praise, it kills two birds with one stone–though final judgment has to wait until next year, for the re-staging of Einstein on the Beach, in the 2012 Next Wave Festival).

Big Dance Theater is presenting Supernatural Wife (Nov. 29-Dec. 3), an adaptation of Euripides’ Alkestis. Choreographer John Jasperse is back with Canyon (Nov. 16-19), a show that “plays with engineered disorientation, sensory overload, spaciousness, fractured connectivity, and rapture.” I can count two or three dance pieces I’ve seen in just the last year on the same (or similar) topics, so it’ll be interesting to see how the always imaginative Jasperse tackles it. But the really exciting dance presentation (aside from the obligatory Cunningham) is William Forsythe, who will be bringing I don’t believe in outer space (Oct. 16-29), an exploration of “absence made present,” if the description is to be believed. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, honestly, but Forsythe is, well, Forsythe. Love him or hate him, he’s one of the most distinctive choreographic voices on the planet, and I don’t believe in outer space promises to be a stunner.

Finally, I can’t help but end this little (and certainly incomplete–see here for the whole line-up; I didn’t even get to the Bergman or Ivo van Hove pieces) wrap-up by calling out what is personally my most anticipated show: the Gate Theatre (Dublin) presenting Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, with John Hurt (Dec. 1-17). Yes, it’s giving Beckett the Masterpiece Theater treatment, to be sure, but Krapp is still an amazing show, Hurt a strong actor, and hell, I love Beckett.

Anyway, discounts are still available on season packages for Next Wave through the 29th, when the ticket prices jack up, so be sure to check it out by this weekend.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The New Stage of the Czech National Theatre is green. It is leather green, worn carpet green and veiny stone green. I was at the New Stage as a visitor to the Prague Quadrennial, watching Jakub Hejna christen a new documentary about Josef Svoboda, his grandfather, from my green chair in this massive Soviet space. The New Stage is Svoboda’s stage, and like the stage itself, Svoboda’s influence is grand but fraying at the edges.

Historically, the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) has been a unique event in the world of theater. Countries from all over the world would set up pavilions in Prague showcasing the spirit and methodology of their stage design. It began largely as a result of Svoboda’s work. In 1967, when the PQ began, he was redefining what it means to visually realize the landscape of a play onstage. Movement and projection played a key role in many of his designs, but he also developed new lights and materials to serve the text and his vision. A member of the Communist Party, he was allowed to travel outside of the Soviet Union, working with theaters all over Europe and, indirectly, serving as proof of Soviet cultural might. So profound was his effect on the field that “If Svoboda had not existed we would have to invent him,” insists an Italian cultural worker in Hejna’s documentary, “Theatre Svoboda.”

The Danish Pavilion at the National Gallery in Prague, PQ 2011

Svoboda is also credited with perpetuating the modern use of the term “scenography,” a word commonly used outside the states. In the simplest of terms, it’s the visual element onstage, a kind of fellow performer. The word is associated with a redefinition of the craft of stage design, expanded beyond mere decoration, and highly influenced by the ideas of Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia. This year’s PQ, however, has abandoned the term “scenography,” instead calling itself an exhibition of “Performance Design and Space.”

The change has been creeping in for years. In 2003 the PQ create a dynamic architectural performance space called “The Heart of PQ.” Each section of the space’s layered platforms showcased events designed to attack a particular sense: sight, smell, touch. Workshop lectures took place on one level as butoh dancers slowly waggled past below. The student design competition required the use of a site-specific location—students submitted models for staging Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in tennis courts, abandoned buildings, and 9/11’s ground zero rubble.

The definition of scenography expands and changes as theater is taken out-of-the-theater. In 2007, PQ began hosting site-specific performances in earnest, directing visitors to happenings and moments throughout the old town, and using the central exhibition space to create even more crossover between design and performance.

A performance by CalArts students in a small square in Prague

But that crossover pales in comparison to the level of activity in this 2011 PQ: performances along the river, in the courtyards of museums, along bridges. Performances in the PQ cafe, in the pavilions themselves, performances so everywhere and underfoot you forget that the whole world is not simply staged for your convenience. Seriously. I saw a woman on the ground with a crowd around her and my first thought was not “How did she fall?” but “I wonder which country this performance is produced by?” It wasn’t a performance. A woman had fallen.

The national pavilions for each country still stand prominently, and some of them still exhibit the stage models, drawings and photographs we understand to be the archival materials of scenography. But more and more the pavilions represent a kind of art-space ethos, an assertion of what each country regards as the most pressing issue or methodology in scenographic thinking. New Zealand created a fly-space into which they drop projection surfaces, models and performances. Iceland made a cold-white house into which a mysterious blonde would occasionally wander and have tea. Latvia created an installation of self-playing traditional instruments inside a wooden cabin behind a series of traditional models—based on the scenography of a previous Latvian show.

Self-playing instruments (and jugs) in the Latvian Pavilion, PQ 2011

Hejna‘s documentary of his grandfather’s work is not altogether glowing. We see interviews with his mistress, learn the nicknames he earned based on his egotistical personality, and hear the conditions under which he became a recognized “spy,” trading banal information in exchange for the opportunity to travel abroad. We hear about his unique level of material wealth—fancy cars, central heating, a nice house—in contrast to other struggling Czechs in his field. It hurts a little. It’s a little bit of an idol falling—especially since Hejna spends much of the film lugging around a bust of his grandfather, shoving it in people’s faces, touring it around Svoboda’s old places of prominence. But that pain is likely necessary, as the whole field is experiencing awkward growth. The lines between disciplines are blurring, and the Prague Quadrennial has embraced the fuzziness. It remains to be seen what work will be running underfoot in another four years.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Last year, Culturebot dutifully trotted off to Portland to visit family and catch nearly the entire run of the two-week Time-Based Art (TB:A) Festival run by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts. It was an incredible experience, with a great late-night performance space and bar in a converted high school (a very Portland sorta thing), with amazing shows by the likes of Jerome Bel, Radoslaw Rychcik, and more.

Well, this year’s line-up is mostly trickled out, even if all the details aren’t yet on their website. New York is (predictably) well represented with the likes of Andrew Dinwiddie (with his Jimmy Swaggart show), Taylor Mac with Comparison is Violence, and Kyle Abraham, who’s taking both The Radio Show as well as presenting a viewing of his WIP Live! The Realest MC. Monologist Mike Daisey is back again with his latest, an ambitious 24-hour-long solo performance (to be performed only once); looks like Nature Theater of Oklahoma needs to hurry up with the rest of Life and Times before the idea’s stale.

Otherwise, there are three shows that I would definitely put into the can’t-miss category: Portland’s tEEth Performance are presenting their last work, Home Made, which recently played Fusebox in Austin (see here for my former intern’s interview with the company). I can’t say enough good things about tEEth–Angelle Hebert is a choreographer whose work demonstrates a subtle and complex understanding of the human body, and there’s a profound dignity to the work she presents with her husband, composer Phillip Kraft.

Then there’s zoe | juniper, the company led by choreographer/dancer Zoe Scofield and artist/designer Juniper Shuey. Similar to Crystal Pite, Scofield (who, full disclosure, I know and like and respect) makes movement that’s extremely technically complex, distilling or maybe even deconstructing balletic and classical dance into a physically compelling contemporary form, which occurs in a visually stunning atmosphere provided by her collaborator Shuey. A Crack in Everything, her newest, has its debut shortly at Jacob’s Pillow before beginning a two-year tour that takes it to Portland, her hometown of Seattle, and beyond.

And lastly, there’s Austin’s Rude Mechs with The Method Gun. I’m not even going to bother describing it–I’ve gushed plenty before, so check the record–other than to say that if you have the chance to see this piece of theater, don’t miss it. This is the sort of show that gets poor dumb kids hooked on theater in the first place, and the sort that embittered, desensitized critics like me are always jonesing for, those all-too-rare kids of energy that really remind you why you’re in this game in the first place.

Also worth noting is the fact that, if I’m not mistaken, this is the last TBA Fest with Cathy Edwards at the helm (see our interview with her here). In the cloistered little world of contemporary performance, where gigs as a curator are few and far between in North America (there’s less than 20, I think), everyone’s been all atwitter with gossip over who’s going to be taking over for Edwards and under what circumstances. Again, if I’m not mistaken, PICA seems to finally be interested in having a full-time, permanent curator, rather than the current revolving door of three-year contracts. I know of a couple people in the running, and I have no idea when the announcement will be made, but it’s overall worth noting: whoever takes that job will be assuming a transformational role in the commissioning/touring circuit in North America, and all the artists who want those opportunities (particularly the ones who feel currently excluded or neglected) will be very interested to see who assumes the helm.

Popularity: 9% [?]

The Edinburgh Fringe Fest‘s catalogue came out last week, and amidst its hundreds of pages of cabaret, comedy, dance, and theater that runs the gamut from ridiculously amateur to best-forgotten to instant-classic, there are more than a few companies and artists well familiar to Culturebot’s regular readers. Irish Modern Dance Theater, Belarus Free Theater, and Belgium’s Ontroerend Goed will all be there, along with playwright Tim Crouch’s newest I, Malvolio, as well as Banana Bag and Bodice‘s much-loved Beowulf, and The TEAM‘s long-awaited Mission Drift.

Popularity: 9% [?]

From Jessica Jobaris's (center) piece at NWNW

I may live in NYC now, but I have a special place in my heart for Seattle’s contemporary performance community, where I learned the ropes, and in particular for the NW New Works Festival at On the Boards. A two-week festival of new dance, theater, and music, from Seattle and the larger Pacific NW’s performance community, NWNW is one of OtB’s oldest and most beloved programs. The vast majority of new experimental work coming out of the region is first seen in 20-minute form at the festival; what audiences see from 16 companies over two weeks will be filling out the next couple years’ seasons of original, challenging work. I sat on the festival selection panel for the 2010 fest (an awesome and humbling experience), and this is the first time in five or six years I won’t be there for it. The trailer only does it partial justice, so check the OtB blog for reviews and more info. Also, for all the Portland readers we (hopefully) have, some of the artists, like Jessica Jobaris, will be headed south to Portlandia two weeks from now for Risk/Reward, the local performance festival produced by our good pals Hand2Mouth Theater, who understand that the key to healthy arts in a city is building institutions to showcase and support the diversity of work happening there, so please, support their efforts.

Popularity: 3% [?]