During Under The Radar in January we got to talking with Fusebox‘s Ron Berry and told him some of the ideas we were working on. Ever-enthusiastic and up for new things, he invited us down to Austin to try some stuff out as part of the festival’s “Hybrid Arts Summit”. We just got back and boy, howdy, did we have a good time! We did three programs: a panel on performance and context, a community conversation based on the “Long Table” idea and a re-imagination of the artist talkback called “The Impersonation Game”. Not only did all three programs o better than we could have hoped, but we got to meet lots of cool folks, see some shows, eat, drink and just generally have a grand time! We hope we can come back next year for some more…and if you’ve never been, schedule your vacation now for Fusebox 2013! It is hard to beat the combination of laid-back hospitality and good energy with a creative community and a diverse and a thoughtful, well-balanced program of cutting-edge performance.

We arrived in Austin Thursday evening and headed over to sometime-Culturebot contributor Tim Braun‘s place, who was kind enough to put us up and play host for the weekend. I met Tim back when he was in NYC working at HERE Arts Center and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. He has been living, teaching and writing in Austin and now heads up the Fusebox writing/blogging/social media efforts. Every bit the man-about-town, he kept us busy and introduced us to tons of wonderful people and places. Thanks Tim!!

We put our stuff in Tim’s apartment, met is dog Dusty and headed over to the Fusebox Festival Hub, which would serve as homebase for the next few days. There we met up with Ron and the rest of his team – Elle, Natalie, Brad and more – to get oriented. The Hub was in the TOPS building, a former office supply warehouse. They tricked it out with a nice stage set-up, a bar and a gallery space, including a big red swing. Outside at the Hub they had a beer garden/hang out area, with these sustainable eco-chair thingies:

And really cool inflatable seating modules designed by San Francisco’s Rebar Studio. Here’s a pic from a different installation of the same furniture:

This furniture and other production aspects of the festival were being included in a parallel investigation of sustainability conducted by Ian Garrett of the Center for Sustainable Practice In The Arts. Not sure when they’re going to post their findings/research, stay tuned for more information.

After getting the lay of the land we headed over to the Buenos Aires Cafe Este for a delicious Argentine-inflected dinner before heading off to the Salvage Vanguard Theater to see Phil Soltanoff’s new show “An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk”. Working from a thoughtful script by Joe Diebes and in collaboration with designer/programmer Rob Ramirez, Soltanoff has staged a lecture performed by a digital William Shatner puppet. Taking snippets of dialogue from classic Star Trek footage and editing them together, Captain Kirk delivers a speech on art, science and the binaries that we have come to accept as defining experience. The monitor from which Kirk speaks is moved around stage by an actor, in this case a Japanese woman, who at one point breaks the flow by delivering a monologue, in Japanese, about moving to Austin and becoming fascinated by drag culture.

The show raises some interesting questions, the script is thoughtful and entertaining. At one point the Shatner puppet starts talking about “phenomenon” and I went into an internal loop of contemplation about the limitations of language, the residue and transformation of meaning over time, modes of cognition, embodied vs. virtual presence, etc. The night I saw it there were a few technical glitches – surprisingly not in the software but in the connection between input cables – that broke up the flow. In general the Shatner dialogue is very choppy and there’s something at once hypnotic and distancing about a voice constructed entirely of one-word snippets. It reinforces the falsity and computerized construction of the character, while also opening the question of what this would be like if it were smoothed out to appear more “natural”. Still, very cool stuff and a good start to things.

After Phil’s show we headed back to the Festival Hub to hang out, drink and mingle while chowing down on a late night snack of delicious sandwiches from Lucky’s Puccias. (Hey Lucky! Bring your truck to NYC!!). We saw lots of pals from NYC (Hey Eliza Bent!) and met new folks from Austin (Hey Graham Schmidt!) and from other places as well. Good times, good times.

Friday morning we managed to rally from a late night and make it over to The Hub a little after 11AM to catch the second half of a conversation between Wayne Ashley and Ron Berry. Wayne has been curating and producing high-tech performance for years and is partnering with Fusebox on an ongoing basis to bring work to Austin. They talked about some of the projects Wayne has going (Verdensteatret, ERS/Ben Rubin collaboration “Shuffle”, Kurt Hentschlager’s Zee, etc.) and talked a bit about what is to come.

After that was the first Culturebot program – I led a panel on “Performance and Context”. Originally this was going to revisit the conversation that we did at Under The Radar, but between then and now, even in a few short months, it seemed like the conversation has shifted. Especially in a town like Austin and the way Ron has curated his festival, the “binary” if you will, of visual art vs. performance seemed less pressing than a wider discussion of how context relates to creative practice and how that informs the work. So I invited Austin-based artists Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Michael Smith, Phil Soltanoff and curator Hilary Graves from Austin’s Lora Reynolds Gallery to talk. It was a wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation. It was streamed on NewPlayTv but they missed the first half. Here’s what they captured:

Next we went outside and joined Meredith Powell from Art Alliance Austin and Shea Little from Big Medium for an open discussion on collaboration and community-building in the arts. It was a very engaged conversation with a number of representatives of different parts of Austin’s arts scene. I got to bring in some of my experience from my other job and share thoughts/ideas around artist engagement with urban planning and development, cross-disciplinary (and cross-sector) collaboration, introducing the artist’s voice into community engagement strategies, etc. It was also really helpful in that this discussion set the stage for the next day’s “Hair of the Dog Performance Potlatch” long-table discussion on creativity, community and place.

With a few hours open and no specific plans on a hot, beautiful sunshine-y day, we headed down to the Yellow Jacket Social Club for some conversation y cervezas. There was a whole contingent of kids from Minneapolis who had road-tripped down and they joined Jeremy, Tim, Meredith and myself and we whiled away the afternoon talking art until finally it was time to take our leave and see a show.

Jeremy and I headed over to The Long Center to see the Dutch company Wunderbaum’s Songs At The End Of The World. I first saw Wunderbaum back in March 2006 when I flew out to REDCAT to see their show Lost Chord Radio and have thought about them a lot over the past few years. They are one of the few theater groups that really integrate music seamlessly into performance; they have a quirky sense of humor that balances well with their musical aesthetic and are all quite talented performers. Songs At The End Of The World is a series of vignettes loosely based around the idea of a group of people in Antarctica, a kind of last stop on the road to nowhere, a place where people go to think about what might have been if only, if only… I really enjoyed the show, it wasn’t quite as evocative as I remember Lost Chord Radio being, the stories are more personal and less mythic/fantastic, but it is fun and well-done, also in a music town like Austin, this is definitely the kind of crossover work that will attract new audiences that might not normally go to theater/performance. If you find yourself in the same place as Wunderbaum, don’t miss the chance to check them out!

After Songs At The End Of The World we headed over to Lucky Lady Bingo to see 600 Highwaymen‘s new show This Great Country, a re-constructed staging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. 600 Highwaymen’s Abby and Michael are based in Brooklyn, but the piece was built over the course of several months in residence in Austin. Set in a sad Bingo Parlor that reeks of ancient cigarette smoke, futility and desperation, you couldn’t find a more evocative site for Death of Salesman than perhaps a rundown casino on seedy end of The Strip in Vegas. Using a combination of Big Dance Theater-style movement theater with Richard Maxwell-style affectless acting, the 600 Highwaymen production strips away all the fake pathos of method acting and “naturalism” to let the words and the situation stand out in stark relief. It seems like Miller over-wrote the original and this version is strategically edited. While still long (clocking in at about two hours with no intermission) it still clips along faster than the original.

One of the real innovations of this production is cross-casting, having multiple actors play multiple roles across age, race and gender. The cast was all local and ranged in age from 7-70 with a wide variety of experience levels. The scene where Howard, Willy’s boss, fires him was played entirely by kids – a young boy playing Howard, fired a teenage/early 20′s (boyish) girl in a suit. It was effective and affecting. Willy’s wife Linda was played alternately by an age-appropriate older actress with a physical handicap and a girl who must have been no older than 12 years old, but who acted with a professionalism, grace and focus you rarely see in actors twice, three times her age.

Ashley Kaye Johnson - photo by Will Hollis Photography

Abby and Michael used a variety of “post-modern” techniques to open up the text and the story in powerful ways. At the end of the show when Linda is sitting in the empty bingo hall after Willy’s funeral talking to herself she refers to the fact that she just made the last payment on their house and says, “We’re free” and it just feels like a knife in the gut. It is an indictment of our times – we think we’re free but we’re not, we give over our lives to an American Dream predicated on material wealth, on the meaningless social interactions of buying and selling, we deceive ourselves into thinking that these interpersonal transactions have meaning and connection, we delude ourselves and in the end of the day we’re not free at all, we have played a rigged game in which there are no winners. Here we are in a bingo parlor with a bunch of losing cards and an empty wallet, kids vanished into their own unrealizable dreams, in a house we spent a lifetime trying to hold onto through mortgages and threat of repossession, a dream all too quickly fading from view.

Apart from appreciating the work in and of itself, I was also thinking about this show in light of earlier discussion about visual arts, community, collaboration and sustainability.

From a visual arts perspective I think you can look at how 600 Highwaymen built this show as using the methodologies of social practice to construct the performance. They embedded themselves as artists in the community, chose a text/idea that would be resonant, they locally sourced the performers, doing outreach over time (more than 6 weeks) to identify participants and engage them in the creative process. They built a community and leveraged its resources to implement the project in an affordable, sustainable way. It is a great arts production model that touches on so many relevant issues of the moment. If it wasn’t so late and I wasn’t so tired I would investigate further. Maybe at some point in the near future. But I think this show, like Aaron Landsman’s City Council Meeting, is pointing to an exciting direction for theater/performance.

This Great Country ran pretty late and by the time we got back to The Hub we had already missed a performance by Christeene, which was supposed to be both shocking and enthralling. We managed to stay there talking and chatting til nigh on 2:30AM when we headed back to Tim’s for some rest before returning to The Hub the next day at 10AM.

Saturday started with the Culturebot Hair of the Dog Performance Potlatch where we used the “Long Table” format as the basis for a conversation around art and place. Some of the folks at the table besides me and Jeremy included Caroline Reck of Glass Half Full Theatre and Graham Schmidt of Breaking String, Brian Osborne, Abby and Michael from 600 Highwaymen and a bunch of other folks:

The conversation picked up on a lot of topics we had started the day before: collaboration, community engagement, tour-ability, scalability, sustainable practices.  What really characterized the conversation was a sense of possibility and “can-do” attitude, as opposed to the normal, defeatist, “There’s no money, there’s no audience” litany of complaints so many arts conversations devolve into. We talked about the role art can play in urban development and planning, about the need to be involved in the community at large and be an engaged citizen, about how traditional “marketing” doesn’t really seem to be relevant so much anymore, and a lot more. There seems to be a confluence between artistic practices for creating work and other social/political values.

One thing we talked about is an idea that’s been around for awhile but seems really viable now.  We were talking about the challenges of creating work in places like Austin, Seattle, Portland and Philadelphia -  touring them and also building awareness of that work in bigger cities like NYC, Chicago and Los Angeles. Some of the Austinites were talking about how, since there was a large student population, people would engage deeply for 4-8 years and then move on to other places. We started trying to flesh out the idea of what it would look like if we put some intentionality behind that, thinking about “incubator cities” and leveraging the unique resources of a given city to develop projects. Maybe some cities have a lot of space, others have a certain focus on technology or a certain population… how can we create a development network that lowers creation costs by building a project in the most fertile place? And then having a mechanism to tour. Or how do we build shows that are shows that are designed to tour. This also kind of tapped into idea of cultural biodiversity and how does work  reflect the region in which it is made but retain relevance on a national/international level?

We talked about resource and information sharing – what if there was a web-based clearing house for information on, say, how to build a raft that floats down a river and doesn’t fall apart? Or best practices for community engagement? Some way for artists to share experience and creative practice?

We also had a lively discussion about changing the framework around how we talk about our work, trying to move away from the entertainment/commodity model and associated language and move into something more meaningful. One big thing we talked about for a while was growing audiences and how do we make the case for what we do? It was suggested that what live performance does, ideally, is to provoke not just emotions but thought and critical evaluation of self and society. It opens us up to possibility. In a culture where that is not necessarily highly valued, how do we advocate for mindfulness and thoughtfulness as a cultural value and propose the arts as an agent of that change?

I wish we had recorded the conversation because it was really great – I think people had a good time. I know that we sparked ideas because as we walked away from the table people gathered together in small groups to keep the conversation going. Next time we’ll take better notes and aim to make this an iterative process!

After the Hair of the Dog Performance Potlatch we went into the Hub to see Jaime Salvador Castillo interview Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz about her work, particularly her “Ask Chuleta” project. See below:

It was a really fun conversation with an artist I previously hadn’t known about.

Immediately after that was Culturebot’s final public program of the festival, The Impersonation Game. This is a concept we got from the European collective Everybodys and we were excited to try it out. Basically the idea is simple – you invite Artist A to see the work of Artist B without any pre-knowledge or relationship. Then you do an artist talkback where Artist A pretends to be Artist B. The idea is to open up the possibility for new interpretations of the work and also to give the audience a bit of distance from the artist, hopefully to liberate them to ask questions they might not otherwise broach.

In this case we got three Austin artists – Allison Orr, Graham Schmidt and Kirk Lynn – to pretend to be Gob Squad and answer questions about Super Night Shot. This would have been awesome in and of itself BUT was made even better by the fact that, unbeknownst to us, Kirk Lynn had actually sent his friend Aron to pretend to be him. So Aron pretended to be Kirk pretending to be Gob Squad. Even better than that was that three of the members of Gob Squad were in the audience and even asked their impersonators questions! Jeremy started out interviewing them all and then turned it over to the audience for Q&A. It was very funny but it was also very revealing. We were a little nervous about it at first, but everyone had a great time and thought the conversation was not just fun and funny, but relevant. New Play TV livestreamed it but apparently without audio. Bummer! But here’s a picture of Gob Squad and Impersonators after the fact:

Oh boy oh boy! On the heels of our triumph Team Culturebot went and grabbed some beers and BBQ to pass the time ’til dinner, when we met Tim Braun and Mark (?) and went to Contigo where we stumbled on a crawfish boil:

And then over to some other restaurant for spicy margaritas and delicious melt-y queso.

Thoroughly stuffed and maybe a little bit tipsy, we headed over to The Off Center to check out Brian Osborne’s The WORD: A House Party For Jesus. Brian portrays a down-on-his-luck preacher who got the call as a young boy and knows no other life. Dogged by his past and struggling to keep solvent or at least marginally above abject poverty (both spiritual and material) he wrestles with himself, his God and you. The show really does travel light – a tent, a suitcase and a few props – and it seemed to speak to so many of the ideas and issues we had been discussing all weekend. Osborne was funny even as he inspired pathos as the all-too-human preacher, getting us caught up in the action and singing along to Jesus. Good times! Hallelujah!

Not yet ready to let the good times end, we headed from The Off Center back to the Hub in time to catch the last few songs of Holcombe Waller‘s set. More hanging out, drinking, joking & mingling… and then a crack and a crash and the skies opened up and by gum if it wasn’t a downpour like we hadn’t seen in ages! Everyone headed from the beer garden into the Hub proper just in time for a funky festive freak-out with Foot Patrol, a band led by TJ Wade – a blind singer and keyboard virtuoso who happens to have a strong attraction to feet. Think I’m kidding? Oh no, check it out:

Finally around 3AM it was time to call it a night. We bid adieu to all our friends old and new and braved the downpour to drive pack to Tim’s house for a quick bit of sleep before heading to the airport the next day and back to NYC. Team Culturebot took it to Fusebox and rocked it. Big shout-out to Ron for having us, Tim for hosting us and all the artists, audiences and Austinites for making our trip such a resounding success and funky good time!!

Until next year – stay classy Austin!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Ibrahim El-Husseini’s Comedy of Sorrows (Komedia el Ahzaan) is one of the first theatrical responses to Egypt’s 2011 revolution. It received a reading at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center at CUNY on April 2, 2012, Rebekah Maggor was the director.  It will have another reading at the Consulate General of Egypt in Chicago on May 15, presented by the International Voices Project. The following essay was submitted to Culturebot by Hani Omar Khalil, a lawyer, writer, and photographer based in Manhattan.

Ibrahim El-Husseini; credit: CUNY Graduate Center

In a recent Q&A for the reading of his play, Comedy of Sorrows (Komedia el Ahzaan), playwright Ibrahim El-Husseini offered a simple explanation for why he felt compelled to create a play about the Egyptian Revolution so soon after it had come to pass: “I didn’t,” he remarked.

Developed over the course of the past year, after sixty staged performances in Egypt, and now currently being read in translation in the U.S., it has indeed been a remarkably quick trajectory for a theatrical work based on events that occurred barely a year ago. But when first approached about writing the play, El-Husseini was himself resistant. He believed, like many Egyptians, that it was simply too soon to begin offering his own dramatic account of the meaning of the events of January 2011. Like many Egyptians, he believed that the Revolution had still to continue, that its goals of a democratic, accountable, and transparent Egypt–one grounded in fairness, equality, and the rule of law, out from under the thumb of military rule and big power politics–were still far from being accomplished, even with the resignation and eventual trial of former President Hosni Mubarak and members of his family.

The year that followed Mubarak’s resignation–which marked the temporal, if not the substantive, end of the revolution–has been one permeated with uncertainty, frustration, and the occasional flickers of hope. The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has cracked down on a continually restive protest movement through increasingly draconian military diktats, while the remaining civic space has been monopolized by dueling Islamist groups vying for power with the support of the urban poor. Egypt is, in a number of ways, an irreversibly changed society from a year ago, but the political drama being played out on its streets and in its corridors of power is one presently without denouement. Not surprisingly then, it is an air of uncertainty–of the revolution unrealized- that is most apparent in Comedy of Sorrows, and El-Husseini harnesses this uncertainty by treating the revolution not as an historical fact, but as an existential condition.

The play opens in Cairo’s City of the Dead, a vast, ancient labyrinth of mausoleums and crypts that was long ago re-purposed as informal housing for the poor. Uncle Hafiz (read in New York by Arthur French), an old cemetery guard, opens with the admonishment, “Hide your ideas and your dreams; behind every dreaming prophet lies a thief.” Confined to the slum, and speaking only in homilies grounded in his own past, Hafiz acts as a kind of central intelligence for the story, bringing with it a point of view of authoritative weariness. Uncle Hafiz is soon joined by Yusuf and Niqrazan (read in New York by Ariel Shafir and Mikéah Ernest Jennings, respectively) two unemployed, university-educated men now living in squalor. Yusuf is without work, while Niqrazan has practically devolved into the character of a dog, up to the point of preparing to defecate in public.

All the characters on stage employ Classical Arabic when speaking internally, but communicate with others in the Egyptian dialect. This is a critical linguistic attribute of the Arabic language that often gets lost in translation, but is nevertheless maintained steadily throughout the story thanks to expert casting. French himself reads Hafiz with a preacherly cadence that is alien to Egypt but, whether intentionally or not, evokes the same folkloric rhythms as the Delta culture from which his character is drawn. Jennings portrays an excitable and absurdly ignorant Niqrazan, in a manner oddly of a piece with the slapstick performances of Egyptian screen legends Ismail Yasin and Adel Imam. The effect is a drama of voices, as opposed to events, and with it an interplay of the considered against the direct.

While foraging for food and clothing, they come across the discarded signs of protest collected from Tahrir Square across town. Eventually, they unearth from the trash Doha (read in New York by Najla Said), an educated, upper class woman, who had hid in a garbage truck to evade police capture on Tahrir. The Revolution is already afoot at the outset of El-Husseini’s play, and is only alluded to as a background event incidental to the setting of every scene. Yusuf recognizes Doha as a former flame from college, but Doha has no recollection of him. She flees the slums in bewilderment leaving behind only a cell phone, setting the spine of the story in place. The inciting event of Comedy of Sorrows is not the events unfolding on Tahrir, nor Doha’s involvement in them, but the sudden reminder of an unremembered past between herself and Yusuf, which Yusuf still pines for but which Doha has long since forgotten. For the remainder of the play, Yusuf continues to pursue her throughout the city, but Doha remains elusive. Along the way, she encounters different individuals caught in the crosshairs of revolution: Nada (Lisette Silva in New York) a young villager recently widowed by an officer’s bullet, Mansur (Bill Barclay), a police sergeant’s son who has disobeyed his father (Steve Mellor) to take to the streets, and a dead man, who in eternal silence provides Doha her only willing audience.

All throughout, the audience is presented with an Egypt brought together under duress, but seemingly at odds with itself and its own fundamental character. In Doha, the audience finds an updated representation of Egypt as feminized ideal, but presented this time not as a steadfast mother figure but as a cosseted bourgeoise reacting to events as they unfold. In Hafiz, it hears the fading authority of long decayed grandeur on a society that no longer has any use for them. Through Yusuf, we are exposed to the desperation and frustration of the urban poor treated as non-persons in their own country. In Nada, we see reverent self-sacrifice give way to atavistic panic once the revolution is complete. The familiar refrain of the “The People Brought Down the Regime” is voiced here not in celebration but in wan, self-doubting apprehension. “The walls of fear have fallen”, Hafiz warns, “but scores of others remain.” “Hide the light . . . hide your dreams . . . hide your revolutions. We are still waiting for the dawn.”

El-Husseini has said he never intended his material for Western consumption which, ironically, has helped make translations of his work more accessible to these audiences. In an introduction to the play by translators Mohammed Albakry and Rebekah Maggor, he describes his approach as a desire to “provide my audience with the Arab reality . . . and the ways that the theatre in particular is able to absorb that reality.” In many ways, this approach is uniquely suited to dramatic portrayals of what is referred to in the West as the “Arab Spring”. Absent any exoticizing or orientalizing adornment, Comedy of Sorrows is identifiably a work about resistance and hope, and how the nature of one can very often lead to the subversion of the other.

If the major takeaway of the Arab revolutions is the power of grass roots resistance in the face of even the most entrenched tyrannies, then they can be placed among the likes of countless protest movements throughout history. For whatever the ensuing complications, there was indeed something recognizably universal at work in the streets of Cairo in 2011, just as in Tunis, Benghazi, and into today across Syria and Yemen. Revolutions happen everywhere for broadly the same reasons, and the Arab World certainly does not have a monopoly over them. Rather than celebrating the Egyptian Revolution as historical moment–with a focus on why it happened, and what it was intended to accomplish–El-Husseini instead calls the audience to a less obvious and much more vexing inquiry: who was the revolution for? And whatever happened to them?

Hani Omar Khalil is a lawyer, writer, and photographer based in Manhattan.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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.

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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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Still from Micrea Cantor's "Tracing Happiness" at the Museum of the Moving Image

Last night I found myself in the opulence of the French Embassy, designed in an earlier era by Stanford White (for the Whitneys, if I understand correctly), for a talk with Franco-Romanian visual artist Mircea Cantor, co-presented by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the Romanian Cultural Institute. It was…well, it was kinda awful, though not because of Cantor’s art, a show of whose work just opened at the Museum of the Moving Image, the reason for the entire affair.

Rather, the fault lay mainly in art critic Steven Henry Madoff’s interview questioning of Cantor. Added to the inevitably banal audience talk-back component, by the end I had the distinct impression that Cantor had spent the better part of 90 minutes being told what he thought and what his art meant.

Still, today I find myself wondering if wasn’t just Madoff’s pomposity that I found so off-putting, and whether he may not have had a decent point. I’m honestly not sure. It was often a yawn inducing affair.

Essentially, the discussion, following a brief introduction to his own key works by Cantor, centered on how best to see and understand Cantor’s work. Or at least that was what Madoff decided was most important. Cantor’s work (he provides fine documentation on his website) falls broadly into the conceptual vein: hiring a match factory to make double-ended matches, producing a protest with a crowd carrying mirrored placards, or, most provocatively, filming what happens when you install a live wolf and a live deer in a gallery. Without offering a specific response to any of these works, I’ll just say that to my mind, the difference between a success and a failed conceptual artwork is the degree to which the work is literal. Cheap provocations resorting to symbolism may want to position themselves as “conceptual art,” but are really blunt jokes that are less funny every time you see them (see: Maurizio Catellan). Cantor, I think, is sophisticated enough to be taken quite seriously.

Madoff though was irritatingly interested on speaking with the artist about metaphor, signification, and whether he really saw his own work as a “closed system” (Cantor: “yes”; Madoff: “no”). There are a couple problems with this, the first and most substantive of which is that ultimately, the artist’s intent is pretty unimportant to how we sure understand or experience his work, and, trailing a close second, having an interviewer essentially demand an artist explain himself only to disagree and demand the artist agree with his critic-interlocutor’s interpretation all makes for a really, really shitty discussion to have to watch. Substantively, there was no difference between Madoff’s interrogation of Cantor and what followed: the audience taking turns saying exactly only vaguely formulated as questions to which they expect the artist to basically respond “Yes.”

But at heart, I think there was something interesting to be gleaned from Madoff and Cantor’s dialogue. Successful conceptual art in essence depends on its ability to achieve a state of aporia in signification–the failure of something’s metaphorical value to signify itself to a reader. It must at once present the viewer with something to be read, while at the same time resisting full signification or interpretation. Thus the audience members who proposed their own interpretations at the end of the talk were met with a sort of weary half-agreement by Cantor, who essentially repeated, “Well, yes, that’s your experience and that’s fine,” which utterly failed to appease the audience members’ desire to impose a fixed meaning.

With a little while to mull it over though, I can’t help but want to give Madoff a bit more credit for what he was trying to say, which was in essence that the work, whether Cantor intends it or no, has some sort of metaphorical value in the sense that even if the signification process is being interrupted (ostensibly through conscious artistic act, but that’s really neither here nor there except insofar as he was asking the creator), that still, there is a clear intent for the images to provoke. I think Madoff was somewhat too interested in forcing Cantor’s work to conform to his own interpretation–leading Cantor at one point to note how distrustful he was of words to describe his work–but I think that was (hopefully) Madoff’s point. In which case the two may well have been arguing essentially the same point.

For me, the one take-away I had was how the entire affair intersected with a talk I went to on Sunday at MoMA PS1, where Marten Spangberg–at the tail end of a series of people who invited someone else to do something else leading penultimately to Maria Hassabi–presented a lecture about his “book” Spangbergianism.

Spangberg is a Swedish choreographer and–in journo-speak, I guess–an intellectual provocateur. Spangbergianism began as a blog structured as a performance development project. Essentially, Spangberg spent some sixty days developing a work, except instead of “dance” or “choreography,” he posted blog posts, only slightly reduced and edited (for reasons I do not fully understand, but I do know the blog is longer) to be printed as a book. Then, he toured the work, giving performance/lectures (but not, I would imagine “performance lectures” as we’d understand that term as a genre) at dance festivals, giving away the book for free.

I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve read part and saw Spangberg’s talk and it is quite lovingly provocative. Written from a state of “despair” over his artistic practice as a choreographer, the book is less an argument or critique as it is an explosion of response presented as a record of a generative process. A deep (and apt) skepticism (to use a polite term) regarding the extant system of public funding, curated festivals, commissions, and so on is expressed passionately throughout.

But what struck me about seeing the Cantor talk a day later, was how each artist in his own practice seemed to be responding to the way his work was being contextualized within a system. And what struck me was that while I, the performance critic, saw Cantor’s work through the lens of experiential art–that it opened itself up to diverse interpretations based on the spectator’s biases upon seeing it–Spangberg was, at least in his talk, arguing for the objectification of performance.

I can certainly see the point: whereas conceptualism sought to create the space for resistance by creating a sort of cognitive dissonance through the inability to assign fixed meaning to the work, performance today seeks to objectify itself in order to defend itself against the imposition of contextualization. The critics, curators, festivals, funders, the whole system that exists to select and support the creation of, say, contemporary dance, asks the audience to experience it only as a live event. The artists likewise accept this proposition in order to make themselves available to audiences (and thereby appealing to the system) even though it would seem to deny their voices as artists. The idea that art as an object–something with a meaning and value inherent to the thing itself, demanding understanding and the completion of the process of signification–is interesting and, I have to say, kind of provocative to me. I’m still not sure what to think of it (nor whether Spangberg would ever cop to having said anything of the sort).

Anyway, check out Spangberg yourselves: he’s at CAGE at 83 Hester St. in the LES tomorrow, Weds., March 7, at 7 pm. Claudia La Rocco also has a response to him up at P-Club, and finally, if you can’t get there for a free copy of the book–read it online at Scribd or just Google for the PDF.

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Setting: Pacific Standard, Park Slope Brooklyn, Friday after work. I’m sitting at the bar, hunched over my laptop, and drinking a pint of Green Flash IPA while “Rock the Casbah” plays. A three-year-old is sitting next to me, oddly enough. I don’t know her name but she’s a regular. I like this place. It’s the “West Coast bar” in Brooklyn. Northern California, more specifically, with memorabilia (see above)–California being, for an Oregonian like me, my “United States” (pace Stephen Colbert). But I’ll live. The West Coast has great beer. This place even had my favorite stout on tap a couple months ago, North Coast’s Old Rasputin Imperial Stout, a rare find on the East Coast. I don’t normally like dark beers, so that was kind of a treat. Though I guess I did drink a lot of Guinness when I was Dublin, but that’s just what you do in Dublin. Hell, the Guinness Brewery was a block from where I stayed. I also drank a lot of Irish whiskey. Which, combined with the mistake of having taken up with the most charming no-goodnik in the place, is how I got tossed from the Oliver St. John Gogarty in Temple Bar. Which I take special pride in, because St. John Gogarty was nothing but a bloody anti-Semite, who helped chase Samuel Beckett out of Ireland as a result of his slander trial. But I digress.

I haven’t written anything in too long (writer’s block), so I’ve come to write something. Three things actually, three separate pieces I meant to write but for some reason never got around to, or at least never finished. So here goes: three stories combined lazily into one, not entirely well-thought-out narrative jaunt, with no single subject, no rhyme or reason to its organization. Enjoy!

Aborted Article: On Watching Bones & Criticizing Plays, or, Downtown Has a Different Discourse

I have no idea why, aside from my writer’s block and a general January hang-over, but over the last month I watched every episode of the first six seasons of TV show Bones on Netflix. It’s not very good, and to be honest, it gets worse the further you get into it. It stars Emily “No Quirkitude” Deschanel and David Boreanaz, best known as Angel, the broody, Botox-y, and repeatedly-slain vampire love interest from Buffy. Why this is important to the story I don’t remember, but a few weeks ago I was going to write this big thing in response to the theater blogger shit-storm that wasn’t-quite, regarding Claudia La Rocco’s take down of Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, and Bones had something to do with it.

Read Claudia’s original story in the Times. Done? Good. A lot of theater bloggers I know had at least a little bit of a problem with Claudia’s article. Rob Weinert-Kendt accused her of the p.i.e. (portraying is endorsing) fallacy by accusing Rebeck of sexism. TONY‘s David Cote, on Rob’s blog, commented further:

I find it interesting that Claudia, who normally reviews more experimental, interdisciplinary work for the Times, should hold a new mainstream play up to such standards of social-ethics role-modeling. It’s a satirical comedy, not a position paper on feminism. Characters might say sexist or piggish things; does that make the play sexist? The men are not glorified; they are just as flawed as the women.

Claudia responded, as did Isaac Butler (mainly approvingly, later in the discussion with a caveat). Just read them, I’m too lazy to paraphrase. I just want to get this part done. The reason I didn’t finish the post on the subject is that the subject of my response, I fear, is tedious. But here goes: the problem all has to do with discourse, and the way various sectors of the performing arts world consider their practice.

Around the same time, I was talking to a friend who’s worked in both commercial theater uptown and Downtown, where said artist is more at home, who was telling me how awkward it was to go to Broadway or Off-Broadway theater parties because they just plain speak a different language. The way the mainstream theater thinks about its practice is very different from the way contemporary performance does. We could argue endlessly about whether Claudia was right or wrong (I haven’t seen the play myself), but what’s interesting to me is how people are arguing. Essentially, the theater bloggers and critics responding to Claudia are arguing that she’s conflating Rebeck’s own beliefs and political values with Rebeck’s representation of a character’s behavior. Surely this is wrong, right? Surely not every sexist asshole must get his comeuppance in the realm of art?

Well, no. Of course not. Art needn’t be just or righteous. But it’s not that simple. Back in college, my insufferable intro to theater course encouraged us to see theater as falling into one of two realms, the “representational,” which showed us a depiction of reality, or the “presentational,” which allowed the artist to actively manipulate their aesthetic presentation. Ibsen, Chekhov, Wilson, etc., are “representational” playwrights; everyone from Beckett to Brecht are “presentational” playwrights. Get it?

I call b.s. on that whole false dichotomy. “Realism” as an aesthetic practice has no more special a claim to depicting “reality” than any other aesthetic. To pretend that capital-R “Realism” is anything but an aesthetic in its own right is to accept, a priori, its own materialist philosophical interpretation of the world. Which is fine, but (a) we needn’t agree with its interpretation, and (b) it remains an interpretation, achieved through aesthetic verisimilitude and mimesis. It is not the thing itself. “Realism” is therefore not really an accurate representation of reality, it’s just another aesthetic presentation of it. A false distinction, but one that mainstream theater practice is highly dependent upon.

My preferred base-line critique of mainstream realist theater practice is Mac Wellman’s essay “The Theater of Good Intentions.” In it, he lays out a detailed critique of mainstream American theater practice, from O’Neill to Miller to Mamet and so on till today. His arguments are worth considering in their own right, but at a basic level what’s important to note is his central thesis that realist play writing as practiced by American dramatists is not so much an accurate representation of contemporary reality as it is a constructed moral universe, in which a cheap form of pop psychology informs our understanding of basic human behavior (the “Geometric Character”).

This is, I would argue, the core of the critical dispute between Claudia and her detractors. I don’t want to speak for her, but I think Claudia approaches any work of art–regardless of where it plays–as a consciously constructed work, and her criticism of Rebeck’s work is informed by her sense not that Rebeck is herself a conscious or active misogynist, but rather that the world she creates within her play allows for misogyny as casually practiced by her characters to go unchallenged, and furthermore that it is understood as a component of masculine artistic behavior. Claudia sees that Rebeck has geometrically constructed her male artist as an inherent philanderer, misogynist, and general jackass, and takes her to task for it. In contrast, those who give Rebeck credit for how she presents “reality” argue, in essence, that because there are jackasses in real life, she’s just doing her best to tell it like it is.

So make of it what you will. I certainly operate from the perspective that Realism has no special claim to representing reality. Mainstream theater practice, in contrast, operates under the assumption that verisimilitude makes something true. Which is kind of silly if you think about it. We could all imagine countless totally irrational and impossible stories being told in a realist manner, but we certainly wouldn’t label them “Realist.” That’s what Cote gets backward–realists are the ones obsessed with how things should be, since they have to imagine a believable reality to put onstage. It’s not Claudia who’s engaging in “social-ethics role-modeling” (if I can infer what that’s intended to mean), it’s actually Rebeck. Claudia’s just trying to make sense of what she’s done and finds fault with it.

What this has to do with Bones, I don’t know. I think I was going to use it as a demonstration of how realism develops characters in a geometric, predictable fashion through the example of Deschanel’s character, Temperance Brennan. Initially, she’s a smart, highly rational, and impersonal individual. She seems disconnected but repeatedly and credibly presents herself as a nevertheless emotionally engaged and present individual who just doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. Predictably, the show quickly pathologizes her (bringing on no less than two psychologist characters to actively analyze her behavior) to make her rational dispassion a “defense mechanism” to protect her against emotional hurt. Because of course we couldn’t have a strong woman or a person who simply approaches the world hyper-rationally due to intelligence; she’s got to be an emotional wreck underneath.

But that’s a super extended metaphor for something and I’m feeling lazy and unwilling to do the legwork to bring this back around. I will however admit that I was inspired to watch Deschanel’s more adorkable sister Zooey’s show New Girl, which is even worse. So now I’m off TV.

Seven o’clock is approaching and this place is getting busy while my battery is getting low. I really need to get a new MacBook. This one’s old and slow and the palm rest is cracking. Plus it doesn’t even support the newest version of iTunes, so I can’t sync my iPhone with it. #FirstWorldProblems right? Also, this pint of Sixpoint Pale Ale isn’t half as good as the Green Flash. I have no idea what to do with myself tonight. A friend lent me Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie like two months ago and is threatening me if I don’t watch it and give it back, and I have one of my favorite horror movies, [REC] on DVD at home that I really need to watch and send back and cancel my Netflix DVD subscription, because it’s really just wasting $10 a month, but I’m probably not going to do either.

I’m pretty sure now they’re playing Cage the Elephant. Catchy but overrated.

A Conversation Unsuccessfully Dodged at Radiohole’s Fundraiser, or, My Top 5 Live Performance Experiences

A couple weeks ago I went to Radiohole‘s fundraiser/gala/performance/whatever for their new show, Frankenstein, that’s set to debut in January 2013. As these things are wont to do (particularly if they involve Eric Dyer & co.), there was an after-party and as midnight rolled around, I found myself drinking in someone’s SoHo loft and talking with a long-time Wooster Group associate about Radiohole. She was kind (and specific) enough to credit Radiohole with providing three of her top-10 live performance moments ever, which I was duly impressed by. I mean, being able to name off the top of your head not just your top-10 live performances, but your favorite performance moments, is kind of impressive. But since I’m a critic…or whatever…it was quickly turned around on me, and I got asked for my top moments. Which I immediately got self-conscious about and refused to do. But I figure, what the hell? You wanna know what experiences inform my background? Here goes:

1. Community Theater (No really.) Fall 1997, maybe spring 1998. Freshman year of college. I had a crisis of confidence a few weeks before class starts, and I dropped out of university before I ever went and spent a very formative year working at a bookstore and going to community college while living at home in suburban Portland, Oregon. Two close friends are in the same boat as me, and one of them is working with a community theater in nearby Hillsboro, called Hillsboro Actors Repertory Theater, or HART. Anyway, HART’s benefit time rolls around and I’m roped in to going, where I spend like $10 or $15 to have the opportunity to watch a mix of show tunes performed by loving amateurs for a couple hours. (Oh teenage gay kid hamming up How to Succeed in Business…, I hope to God you got out of Hillsboro!) I was being a friend, and being supportive, but it did drag most of the way through, until the very end.

I have no idea what his name was, but my friend told me he was a former Broadway actor, clearly long since retired, who’d been very generous in supporting their little theater, all in exchange for the chance to perform in their benefit show. (He was also a bit of flirt with the young ladies, I hear.) Anyway, surprising as it was, this man’s closing of their benefit show was one of those electric performances that just stick with you. A 20-minute lounge-style performance, where, in a slightly gaudy suit, he just wandered the stage, told a few anecdotes, and sang three songs. None of them were noteworthy as I recall, but I’ll never forget the (possibly made-up) story he told about the last song he sang.

Taken from a mostly forgotten musical, the song was an older man’s lament. The musical’s story focused on a woman who had two suitors: one old, one young. She of course goes with the young man in the end, and the old man sings this lament. Except that–here’s the anecdote–this song was so powerful, the audience booed the ingenue for choosing the young guy, the show closed its preview run, and was re-written so the older man gets the girl.

Too perfect to believe? Probably. But that’s not the point. I’ve seen hundreds–I suspect more than a thousand, actually–of live performances in my life to this point, and this is one of the absolute most charismatic, charming, and unforgettable ones. I remember it vividly all these years later. As I like to say, “All performance is local.” It’s always about what happens when a group of people get together to watch others do something on stage for them. This didn’t change the world or anything–hell, I’m probably the only person who even remembers it–but it made a deep impression on me. It remains, for me, the base-line definition of what live performance can do.

2. The First Taste of “Experimental” Performance It was 1998, and I was off to college. For real this time. I’d spent a year in slacker purgatory, but finally made peace with my desire to study theater. I discovered Samuel Beckett–and Ionesco and Genet and Weiss and Brecht and all that great stuff, but it was Beckett first and foremost that convinced me that the theater could do something truly unique and might be worth engaging with. I’d finished my freshman year wandering the aisles of the theater section at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland, purportedly the world’s largest bookstore, compulsively grabbing old Grove Press editions off the shelf. I discovered Rozewicz and Mrozek and tons of other great playwrights (and seminal works like Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double) purely by virtue of that line-drawing of an evergreen tree they used as a colophon. And those old Roy Kuhlman covers still remind me of that eager first (and only) year at Southern Oregon University, in the comfy, crappy old armchair I bought from a second-hand store, compulsively reading and smoking cigarettes in my dorm room while coffee brewed.

I don’t remember exactly when, but it was around this time that I saw what was probably my first exposure to what I now call “contemporary performance,” when I went to see the initial run of Portland’s Imago Theater‘s version of Sartre’s No Exit.

Imago was founded by a pair of Ecole Jacques Lecoq-trained artists, Jerry Mouawad and Carol Triffle. Their original claim to fame was a family-friendly physical theater piece called Frogs Slinkies Lizards and Orbs (now shortened to Frogz), which toured widely and made them enough money to acquire their own space. I knew nothing about Lecoq, but I was still in my tedious Existentialist phase, and thought Sartre was the shit and that No Exit was a great play. Anyway, Sartre led me to Imago, and I was blown away.

Starring Mouawad as Garcin, the show was staged in the company’s warehouse space. The audience was seated in arrangeable bleachers in front of a platform raised perhaps four feet off the ground. The stage formed the hotel room that Sartre situates his hell in, and as the show opens, the bellhop leads Mouawad in, past the audience, and up into the “room,” delineated only by the edges of the platform. What made the show mind-blowing to me, though, was the concept.

The platform was pivoted in the center. As Garcin and the other two characters (a woman and a transsexual in Imago’s production, a straight woman and a lesbian in Sartre’s original) enter, the stage literally bows under their weight. At the open, blocks were placed under each corner, permitting only maybe two feet of arc up or down (which still gives you like four-feet of swing from top to bottom of the arc if you’re on the very edge of the stage). After Garcin and the others make their pact, to ignore one another to avoid tormenting one another, the bellhop wanders around and completely blocks off the corners, so the stage is stable and level and doesn’t move at all. And then, as the characters’ arrangement breaks down and they’re subjected to the hell of other people, the blocks are dramatically cast away, letting the corners of the platform plummet the full four feet to the floor, giving a shocking eight (or so) feet of arc movement at the edges.

It was a completely abstract, slightly gimmicky, and inspired way to realize Sartre’s otherwise didactic, pedagogic explication of the “Gaze of the Other.” A couple years later, during the first revival (there have been several over the last decade and some), I went to see it again, and was a little less blown away by the performances, but still impressed by the concept. That performance was the first time I really saw the potential for non-textual live performance, and it sticks with me. The last time I was in Imago’s space, it was to see Maria Hassabi perform there during the 2010 TBA Festival, and it was an emotional experience returning. When I interviewed Jos Houben before his appearance in Peter Brook’s production of Beckett’s short plays last fall, our private conversation was all about Lecoq and my Imago experience. That brought it all back around–talking to a founding member of Complicité about Lecoq and Imago (he knew of them).

3. Discovering the Joy of Dance Here’s the story of how I fell in love with contemporary dance. It was 2009, and for a few years I’d been writing about performing arts for Seattlest.com, the Seattle outpost of Gothamist.com’s one-time empire of municipal blogs. I’d moved to Seattle in 2003 with little or no direction other than to work in the theater and become a writer. I spent a couple years working in the theater and pursuing an erstwhile and ultimately failed career as a journalist, and by 2009 I was safely ensconced in a corporate gig at Amazon.com, my only creative outlet writing for Seattlest, originally about music and city desk stuff, just to keep my hand in the game.

In 2009, we lost two founding editors and I got bumped up to Performing Arts Editor in the re-shuffle (not that any of these roles were all that formal, or compensated), and I tackled it aggressively. I don’t know why. Before that I’d settled on being a dilettante, in it for the comps and scapegracing-by through sheer knowledgeability, but I guess because theater had been my preferred vocation, I didn’t want to disappoint and approached it editorially, with a mind to do it right and give the field the coverage it deserved.

I’d always seen more dance than the average person–it was just part of what I did–but I wasn’t knowledgeable or a fan, per se. Rather, I did it and appreciated it as best I could. I knew theater, and I knew visual art and music (the indie rock type, anyway) and that gave me an in. But really, Seattle wasn’t the best place to learn contemporary dance on the fly. There are some good companies, a couple truly notable choreographers, a strong scene, but a lot of mediocrity.

But there was one thing I was already deeply invested in, and that was On the Boards.

I don’t remember my first show at OtB, but I remember feeling immediately at home. A contemporary arts center that grew out of an artist-generated space some 30 years before, OtB is today one of the tour stops on the North American circuit for contemporary performance. I saw Radiohole there for the first time, Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci. It’s a great place. I’d fallen in love with it before I ever became an contemporary performance person.

The first time I met the current artistic director, Lane Czaplinski, was at a “Shit Storm,” a very occasional meeting of Seattle theater people. It had been in hibernation for several years, but an article in The Stranger, the local, hipper Village Voice-esque paper, about how to save theater, generated a huge outpouring of interest, so a new Shit Storm was organized, and hosted by Seattle Rep, the mainstay of Seattle’s LORT houses. So on a Wednesday night (or thereabouts), me and every other stakeholder in Seattle theater made our way to a rehearsal room in Seattle Rep’s space, dropped our $1 bills in a bucket in exchange for cans of PBR, and argued for a while in a semi-organized public forum.

The host and organizer was a man named Matthew Richter. Richter was a long-time Seattle performance person. As a sign of just how small our little world is, he moved to Seattle in the early 1990s, fresh out of Northwestern University, with a group of friends that included Culturebot’s founder Andy Horwitz. They spent a few years living the Singles dream, trying to form a theater company. Richter eventually organized a small performance space called Room 608, and later became performance editor at The Stranger, the paper founded by one of the Onion‘s originators and the birthplace of Dan Savage’s career. When I moved to Seattle in 2003, my first paid writing gig (the check never actually came through) was interviewing Richter for Vodka magazine, a short-lived “West Coast urban lifestyle” glossy, about his almost as short-lived arts center, Consolidated Works.

Anyway, I was an OtB convert but knew no one there other than my press contact, in passing, when I showed up for the Shit Storm. I had a few beers, said my piece, then let the conversation de-evolve into the typical ridiculousness of theater people trying to justify their existence through doing mainstream work fewer and fewer people care about. I was done and in need of a smoke, and wandered out to the courtyard.

I don’t recall exactly how Lane and I met. Maybe he came up to me and asked what I thought of this entire exercise, maybe I drunkenly “Hey man, what’s up?” at him. Whatever the case, I distinctly remembering him complaining about the local theater scene, noting, “They don’t even think my theater does theater.” Which led me to ask exactly what his theater was, at which point I effusively gushed about how much I loved what OtB did.

Anyway, right around then, I went to OtB to see Tanja Liedtke’s construct. I knew little more than the press release told me, but I was religiously seeing shows at OtB and went and, well, I guess the result is that these days I’m more known as a dance critic than a theater critic. Which I owe to Lane, OtB, and, above all, Tanja Liedtke.

Like I said, I’d seen a fair bit of dance before–something on the order of a dozen shows a year, ranging from ballet to modern–but Liedtke was the first artist I’d seen where it just clicked. Her hour-long romp through metaphors of construction was the first time I remember seeing contemporary dance where the artistic voice of the choreographer so clearly trumped the academic considerations of the movement. This was dance I could experience. I still remember one sequence in the show so distinctly, where the dancers re-enact a prior danced phrase as a shadow puppet performance, with the fingers done with their fingers.

Two random Liedtke coincidences. First, Liedtke is a strange name, made all the stranger by the fact that I grew up with my paternal aunt and uncle whose last name was, in fact, Liedtke. They were the only Liedtkes any of us had ever heard of. Weirdly, their oldest daughter–my cousin–is also named Tanya.

But second, and less fortuitously, construct was one of the first pieces OtB filmed as part of OntheBoards.tv, an ambitious project to create high quality film documents of live performance. Which means that I’ve been able to go back and re-watch it. And predictably, my more nuanced understanding of dance, with a couple years’ engagement, finds faults with it that I never would have identified at the time. Today I find it a bit too gimmicky, its episodic structure cute but a bit too in search of artistic profundity. Still good, still a document of a great choreographer sadly stolen from us too soon. But to acknowledge that weakness affects a precious memory.

Liedtke, for the uninitiated, was an incredible German movement artist who spent her early career with London’s DV8 Physical Theatre, before being appointed artistic director of a Melbourne dance company, a position she’d barely taken up when she was tragically struck by a car and killed one insomniacal night in 2007; construct at OtB was one of the only North American opportunities to see her work as performed under her original direction before her company dissolved. She also performed one of my sentimental favorite dance sequences on film in DV8′s Cost of Living (2004)–you can watch it here. It’s an incredibly beautiful duet. In another strange sign of how small our little contemporary performance world is, the other lead from Cost of Living, Eddie Kay (not the one she dances with in the clip), is dating a friend of mine, and last year we had a drunken evening in an East Village bar chatting about Tanja Liedtke.

4. Just Plain Good Ilkhom Theater of Tashkent’s The Ecstasy of the Pomegranate. At this point, I think I’ve set the precedent that each example I’m giving is deeply personal, but this one isn’t. This was just an amazing show. (The only connection I have on a personal level is that a friend of mine from Seattle, a Russian born in Tashkent and raised in Vilnius–her parents, rocket scientists, knew Ilkhom’s director when they lived in Tashkent, but more on that in a minute.)

In 2008, the Ilkhom Theater of Tashkent, Uzbekistan came to Seattle through a partnership with ACT Theater. They presented two shows, White White Black Stork and, for one week only,  Ecstasy with the Pomegranate. There are a lot of reasons they made it to the States, but their Seattle visit was, I think, owed mainly to the sister-city relationship it has with Tashkent. Strange as it may sound, during the late Soviet period, before Uzbekistan achieved independence, Tashkent was a vibrant intellectual and artistic center for independent-minded people exiled from the metropoles of Moscow and St. Petersburg. One such man was Mark Weil, who founded the company in 1976. Over the years, it became known as an internationally important theater company with many tours to major festivals. But in the post-Soviet era, the likes of Weil–born to Ukrainian Jewish parents who made their way to Tashkent in the 1930s–fared poorly. Ilkhom pushed significant boundaries in the increasingly Islamic state with shows like White White Black Stork, with its frank depiction of homosexuality, and 2007, Weil was assassinated outside his apartment. By then, his family was already living in exile in Seattle.

White White Black Stork–a cute, innovative in terms of mise-en-scene, queer Romeo & Juliet story set in Uzbekistan–is an highly tourable and utterly forgettable hour-long festival circuit show. I almost didn’t go to Ecstasy with the Pomegranate. Thank God I did. Four hours long and epic in terms of its story and conceptualization, it’s probably the single finest piece of theater I’ve seen.

Based on the story of Aleksandr Nikolaev, a Russian painter who studied with the likes of Wassily Kandinsky before heading to the Far East with the Imperial army in the late 1910s, where he settled in Tashkent and took the name Usto Mumin, the play explores sexuality, culture, imperialism, tradition, modernity, the whole complex trajectory of the Twentieth Century. It’s amazing. Mumin’s artistic obsession centers on the bochi boys, hyper-sexualized pre-pubescent male dancers and essentially courtesans in the anti-female world of traditional Uzbek society. The story follows their political radicalization and emancipation in the wake of the October Revolution even as it problematizes the legacy of the imposition of Western values on a non-Western society.

The only work that has a bigger hold on my theatrical imagination is Eimuntas Nekrošius’s Hamlet, which I only ever saw on bootlegged, low-quality video.

5. Why I Quit And back we go to my final foundational experience, one that’s not really even a performance. Fall 1998–the first quarter of my first year away at college, at Southern Oregon University. I was still busily consuming those books (and coffee and cigarettes and booze in my totally spacious dorm room). My first quarter away at university, I took Acting 1, your basic Meisner class, and it really did change me.

My teacher was adjunct faculty, an extremely fit physical performer with a background in Lecoq, roped into teaching idealistic youngsters Method. There was a lot of reading and exercises, as I recall, but essentially the class was structured to lead us through two core exercises: a monologue, for auditions, and a short two- or three-person scene. Anyway, the essential memory I have of it was the monologue, about halfway through the term.

We were disastrous at approaching the task. Our first assignment was to choose our monologues, and it was such a wreck (I, for instance, wanted to do Kushner’s brief, lyric “Oranges” monologue from A Bright Room Called Day) that the teacher wound up assigning them to us. We spent a couple weeks doing exercises to prepare, and then had to perform them in front on the class.

I still distinctly recall the structure. We were in the well-equipped blackbox theater in the theater complex (Southern Oregon, with its links to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival down the road, is actually a quite good professional program with a strong BFA). We were to applaud everyone’s effort, but not ecstatically. It was a safe environment.

Of course we were all awful. But what I definitely wasn’t prepared for was being led through the process of “finding our character” in front of the class by the professor. As each of us in turn failed to achieve sufficient emotional verisimilitude in our performance, the teacher would stop us, walk us through a process of emotional connection, leading us to an extremely vulnerable and often painful place.

The monologue I recall most vividly was by a classmate named Summer. I think. Maybe it was Autumn. Some season. Anyway, what made it so distinctive was that she was a trained dancer who shortly thereafter left to attend the Ailey Company school. She had immaculate posture, which, for slackerish Americans like me, is unusual and the sort of thing you notice. Inexplicably, she’d been given a monologue from the perspective of an inner-city urban youth of some sort, Hispanic or African-American, written in dialect. Summer, so it be said, was a very white girl from a very white town on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, and it was a wreck, a just plain grating mismatch that, I think, she literally drew out of a hat.

Anyway, the monologue was so emotionally fraught that the teacher walked on stage, pulled down a folded floor mat, and had Summer attack it while reciting. And this is what I remember so distinctly: The teacher standing, holding the folded stack while wearing her sleeveless top (she had very powerful, muscular shoulders for a woman), and demanding Summer punch it as she saw fit. They ran through the monologue maybe three times. The first time Summer was smacking it limp-wristed, very girlishly. And the teacher was almost taunting her, pushing her to find her character’s emotional space.

And then Summer snapped. It was like a record player’s needle finding its groove. I can still, all these years later, see her dancer’s posture drop, her shoulder sag as she sucker-punched that pile of floor mat with everything her hundred-some pounds of weeping (she was freely weeping by this point) eighteen-year-old could muster. And they shuddered with the force of the blow. All of a sudden, the odd cadences of some playwright’s imitation of urban speech fit her voice like a glove, and what came out with an emotional deluge of uninhibited rage.

In terms of its raw emotion and my own connection to it, that moment is still the most powerful “performance” I’ve ever seen. Except for maybe what happened to me a few minutes later, which of course I did not see but had to suffer through. I won’t recount that story. It’s still too painful. That was the day I gave up any desire to ever perform again. And I resent the entire thing, because what we were being taught was nonsense. Meisner, Method, psychological realism..it’s the most painfully literal-minded approach to live performance I can imagine. It insults audiences’ intelligence by assuming that audiences have no empathy, and that their only ability to connect with experience is pornographically, on a visceral level of animal response to something happening in front of them.

I also knew I was incapable of taking myself to that sort place on my own. Sadly, something as basic as Viewpoints was not part of the theater department’s curriculum, and that was that–I had no idea there was anywhere else to go as a performer. I never returned to performance, and aside from a few courses in directing and a brief career as a designer and technician, I’ve never been a “theater artist” since.

Ten o’clock is rolling around. I’ve long since abandoned Pacific Standard, overrun with a Friday night crowd, and the battery in my MacBook was gasping its last. I’m back at my still-new Park Slop apartment, dodging inside just as heavy, cold raindrops start to fall. I’m on my second cup of coffee–espresso, really, I guess. I’ve been introduced to a new brewing method by my roommate, who learned it from an Italian immigrant some years ago: a small pot with a boiler in the bottom that imitates an espresso machine pump as the water percolates up through a tube into the carafe above. It’s good, but the coffee isn’t so much–I miss my quality beans (Pacific Northwesterner, remember) and would prefer a French press, but that’s still at my old place in Bensonhurst (weekend plans!). I’m cranking a mix of Sleigh Bells‘ two albums off of Spotify. Drum machine and guitar. The gearhead in me is curious about how he’s getting that sound–old Boss fuzz pedal and compressor?–and missing my guitar. I never brought my Jaguar with me to New York, it remains in Seattle with my friend Michael Lee, the singer-guitarist of Mal de Mer and bassist for The Young Evils. If I had it here, I’d have something to do besides write….

Where Culturebot Makes Announcements & Talks Intellectual Stuff

This isn’t another story. This is the what’s-what with your good friends at Culturebot, and those readers intrepid (or bored) enough to reach this point are indeed our core audience.

Things have indeed been exciting here at Culturebot HQ (which, for the record, exists solely in cyberspace, or, at best, on the bar in front of where Andy Horwitz, I, and our little band of intrepid contributors choose to make our occasional meeting). Hopefully, some of you got to see the “Culturebot Conversations” we had this last January, presented as part of Under the Radar. Well, we’ve been granted the chance to continue that sort of conversation with an invitation from the good people at Exit Art.

After 30 years, the Hell’s Kitchen art gallery will be closing its doors June 1. Later this month a retrospective, “Every Exit Is an Entrance,” covering the space’s history–featuring artists from Cindy Sherman to David Wojnarowicz–opens. Opposite the retrospective, the gallery is hosting a performance art presentation called “Collective/Performative,” featuring both a series of video interviews with notable performance artists as well as series of week-long residences. Culturebot has been invited to curate/present a series the week of April 17. Entitled “Ephemeral Evidence,” the presentation–details to follow–will expand upon issues identified in Andy Horwitz’s essay “Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance,” and other discussions.

And that’s just the beginning. Over the coming year expect more–a lot more–from us here at Culturebot. For almost ten years, we’ve been one of the only resources devoted to performance outside the framework of traditional theater and dance, and we intend to expand that significantly through expanding both our coverage as well as developing new platforms to further discussion of performance as a live, vibrant, and essential practice. It promises to be a hell of a ride, and we invite you to join us in kicking off Exit Art’s final show, at the official opening Friday, March 24, 7 p.m.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I never thought sewing could be sexy until I saw A.O. Movement Collective’s thread duet (an excerpt from barrish) this weekend at CPR as part of “Object as Performer.” Two women deliberately sew the fronts of their shirts together with red string, and then struggle with the bond this makes between them.

Curated by Sarah Dahnke, the premise for “Object as Performer” was a little more tantalizing than it turned out to be. Two digital video projects were screened in the entrance gallery, and the performance portion consisted of four pieces in various stages of work-in-progress: barrish (A.O. Movement Collective); Restless Nest (Rebecca Davis); Under (Juri Onuki); and Backshore (Abigail Levine). As promised, all four works integrated an object; apparently this mandate also carried an unspoken correlation to nudity, following the long-established relationship between stripping down and perceiving the human body as an object.

The evening, however, got me thinking: what is the difference between an object as a prop or scenic element, and what makes it really a performer? What pushes it from the background or sidelines to center stage? Not surprisingly, in movement-based work, it seems to be physically connected to movement. In The A.O. Movement Collective’s barrish, the sewed together shirts are a driving force in the action, and become a powerful third party in what is ostensibly a duet; Davis’ Restless Nest begins in darkness with a mysterious swishing sound, which turns out to be the props being dragged along the floor. Instead of playing a passive role, inanimate objects can become animate, and that—to me—is the essence of the possibilities of performance.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Cassie Peterson

Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show (at Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of PS122′s COIL Festival, through Feb. 4; tickets $25-$35) is an exquisitely exaggerated performance about the performance of gender which we all negotiate every moment of every day. We live in a world where one rarely has the opportunity to become legible or understood outside of the conscriptions of one’s gender identity. Thus, we always and inevitably perform ourselves as gendered beings in the ways that we move, behave, speak, and relate to the world. Gendered norms intrinsically shape our experiences of “self” and “other” and operate in a way that privileges some expressions of gender while subjugating and silencing others. Untitled Feminist Show works to both acknowledge and disrupt these compulsory gender identifications.

Untitled Feminist Show is a visceral in-your-face clash of varying feminist paradigms. It is a 75-minute non-stop kinesthetic adventure where every archetype, stereotype, caricature, and construction of “woman” is performed in a chaotic First-, Second-, and Third-Wave Feminist Mash-Up. All of the tensions and conflicts embedded in feminist discourses are present and embodied by six fearlessly naked performers (Becca Blackwell, Amelia Zirin-Brown (Lady Rizo), Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle, Regina Rocke, and World Famous *BOB*. This theatrical dancedrama was conceived and directed by Young Jean Lee in collaboration with Faye Driscoll, Morgan Gould, and these six powerhouse performers. The end result of what has obviously been a rigorous choreographic process is an unforgettable performance that works to simultaneously create and undo gendered realities.

In each of the show’s vignettes, the performers temporarily position themselves in a context that feels familiar; existing in historical narratives and power arrangements that momentarily render them as feminized caricatures of themselves. These familiar gender tropes allow audience members to locate themselves and feel known. After all, identity is a relational exchange. I am this to your that. But as each vignette progresses, the performers become unwieldy, unpredictable, boundless versions of themselves, seeping out into the margins and sliding outside the lines of normative gender expectations. In this way, the show becomes an ecstatic celebration of choice–both as a reclamation of the power in historical “female” gender roles and as a pioneering vision into futuristic, feminist utopias. The age-old currents of sexism, misogyny, able-ism, size-ism and transphobia are revealed in this dramatic vacillation and our collective notions of “womanhood” and “feminism” are shattered into a million pieces.

In one vignette, the performers are in a thumping, pulsating dance club. They dance provocatively as if in a typical MTV music video. As the scene unfolds, the dancers begin to incorporate pantomimes of mundane, traditionally feminized tasks, like rocking an infant or cooking dinner. This humorous, physicalized juxtaposition forces us to engage the dominant—and often conflicting—narratives and expectations perpetually imposed on women. Later in the show, Lady Rizo pantomimes sex acts with an invisible phallus. It starts in a familiar way and reads like the clichéd opening shot of any porn. We know this. But she quickly takes us to another place, laced with an aggression and rage that manifests as violence against the phallus. Her message is: I am pleasuring you and destroying you. This is what this show does, time and time again–it pleasures and destroys, destroys and pleasures.

Untitled Feminist Show unapologetically challenges and subverts the limits imposed by the dominant (and always male) gaze and fiercely explores and celebrates the complex, dissonant realities of female and gender-variant bodies and experiences. Young Jean Lee has cast a diverse array of bodies that confront us with our conditioned—and compulsory—impulse to impose essentialized gender assignments onto naked bodies in space. This show interrogates our constructions of woman, female, femininity, and works to destabilize fixed notions of what a woman “is” and what a woman should be. What is a woman? What is a woman’s body? How are women’s bodies exploited? How are they emboldened? What is agency and how do we see it? What is coercion and where is this line? These are bodies that follow the rules. These are bodies that break the rules. These are bodies that know no rules. In this way, the female body is both a site of oppression and a site of critical and creative resistance. Untitled Feminist Show is a high energy meditation on this dialectic.

So the ultimate inquiry becomes: Is this a feminist piece? And the answer is, Yes. This show is willing to explore the multifarious representations and possibilities of gender and feminism. Young Jean Lee and Company resist the temptation to represent one, monolithic, prescriptive version of Feminism. Rather, this show is an invitation to undo our compulsive need to rely on fixed gender identifications or to elevate one version of “Feminism.” There are endless ways to be gendered. There are countless ways to embody feminism(s). It is as if Young Jean Lee has written the word “WOMAN” across the stage and then struck a line through it. It is there. We can see it. But we are also asked to take it apart and examine it. What, if anything, could be a more feminist exploration than that? And yes, these deeply political explorations do not answer to patriarchal demands for reaching some kind of ultimate knowing or singular understanding. Can you handle it?

Cassie Peterson is New York based writer, thinker, activist, healer, & lavender menace.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I suppose that one of the advantages of being terminally ill is that people come to appreciate you more while you are still alive.  In this way, our heroes have the opportunity to go out like champs, to settle scores, make the most of their celebrity and bully pulpits respective to the medium in which they chose to do battle.  Christopher Hitchens leaves behind a large body of writing as well as podcasts, panel discussions, interview sand some stints as a TV pundit.  As a result of theater being a temporal medium, this is far less true for the directors Garland Wright and Reza Abdoh.  By virtue of Reza making more experimental theater that incorporated video in his productions, there were capable people on hand to document his work.  Garland has virtually no internet presence, reduced to a regional footnote in spite of being one of the great American directors of his generation.  All three men burned bright while alive and perhaps even brighter as a result of their battles against dread disease and their causes.  The lifestyles they maintained were connected to their illnesses and their supersized output—the triumvirate of art, life and sickness unto death formed a hypnotic golden triangle—as if the combination created a metabolic steroid who’s side effects are lethal.  In so doing they showed us how to die with brilliance and honor but give little assistance in navigating the vicissitudes of actually living.

British-born aesthete journalist and political gadfly, Christopher Hitchens died the day before yesterday on Thursday, December 14th of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the esophagus.  Like many of his readers who never met him in person, I feel as if I have lost a friend nonetheless.   If you don’t know of him afore to now, you have the luxury of Google, YouTube or, if you are feeling old-fashion, you can hop on Amazon.com and download one of his books to your Kindle. (I prefer the Spalding Gray mode of literary consumption by way of audiobooks.  The memoir Hitch-22 being a favorite of mine as the author himself narrates.) To read the Wikipedia entry for the recently late Mr. Hitchens is to immediately be sucked into his polemics.  His vacillating screed on the War in Iraq, Mother Teresa and women not being innately funny are all irksome but bulletproof in their caustic erudition.

Unsettling still is that his prolific output was generated frequently under the influence of alcohol and always while smoking cigarettes.  In what can be only described as an Advance Memorial or Literary Viking Funeral, his lifelong friend and erstwhile target, Martin Amis said recently, “You could have a long lunch with Hitch which would turn into a long dinner.  And then you went to bed at four o’clock in the morning reconciled to a hangover that would last half a week.  You’d wake with a groan 12 hours later to find that Hitch had written two 3000-word pieces about John Locke and John Stuart Mill.  This is one of the most galling things about him.  He could hold his drink, stay up all night and then go on some TV program….”  Galling indeed as I struggle to churn out my meager 1,500 words against time, financial ruin and a nasty chest cold­—pitiless in comparison to spinal taps, chemotherapy and Nucleotide Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors—but I digress.

In his tremendously insightful book On Writing, the sci-fi author, Stephen King summed up the perilous dance of tobacco and art making quite nicely. “I think it was quitting smoking that slowed me down; nicotine is a great synapse enhancer. The problem, of course, is that it’s killing you at the same time it’s helping you compose.” I believe Hitchens’ own father also died of throat cancer.  My body has some sort of safety mechanism that is now in full tilt as I careen into damnéd middle-age. (Blurg!) If I myself smoke and drink with any consistency I will inevitably induce a debilitating case of bronchitis, as I presently and moronically maintain.  My paramour was in the shower and thought I had brought a dog home.  With the water running she mistook my coughing for barking.  You would think coughing up meaty, yellow and green lung cookies let well alone the death of a parent would be a great inspiration for substance cessation.  Some of the smartest people behave in the stupidest ways, present company excluded, of course. ::sigh:: If only the converse were true….

Garland Wright was not above a Drambuie or seven after rehearsal in addition to being  an unabashedly heavy smoker.  Back when Bartlett Sher was Bart the one-time mentee at the Guthrie, he told me how the floor of Garland’s car was lined with empty Winston cartons and how the unluckier interns chased after him with ashtrays.  I remember in a workshop of “Edward II” at Lincoln Center, Resident Dramaturge, Anne Cattaneo gave him special permission to smoke in the back stairway—this in a highly anally retentive institution and from diminutive but no-nonsense Anne, who did not carve a foothold at LCT for 20+ years being a pushover.   Like Hitch and Reza, Garland was effusive and charming to the point where you felt smarter for having interacted with him.  Exactly like the culture, the British Theater is very tough to crack as a foreigner.  As soon as you open your mouth in the UK, uttering anything but the Queen’s English, they say you automatically go down a class.  The converse was true when one interacted with one of the three lost greats of whom we currently are speaking.  I miss the hand up and the panoramic view from that elevation.

After unceremoniously stepping down from a ten-year tenure as Artistic Director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Garland became co-chair with JoAnne Akalaitis of the Julliard Directing Program of which I was a member of the flagship class.  In spite of valiant effort to keep it afloat, the Program essentially died with him as he had the map of it in his mind.  Explaining this to people who don’t know of Garland’s career or the Juilliard School beyond mere name recognition (“Oh you went to Juilliard? What instrument do you play?”) feels like describing the Twin Towers to someone from Billings, Montana who never saw them in the 35 years for which they stood.  Garland was short, charismatic and slightly affected much in the way I’ve seen Hitch carry himself on television and the internet.  While still in school I remember sitting on the couch outside Michael Kahn’s office with Garland as he complained of having a rigorous colonoscopy that was part of his cancer treatment. “That’s private stock,” he said ruefully and then laughed as we riffed on notions of who has “keys to the cellar” and “access to the cave” (pronounced ‘kāv‘). Garland died in 1998 at age 52, ten years younger than Hitch.  Had they ever met, I like to think they would have gotten along famously.

Three years earlier, Iranian avant-garde theater artist, Reza Abdoh died of AIDS at age 32.  Admittedly, I did not know him so well as a person but was more of a groupie for his work.  I once traveled 17 hours by train and boat to see one of his shows in Hamburg, Germany.  After the performance I introduced myself in stammering Persian of which I ashamedly only speak a few words.  Then I turned around went back from whence I came before the summer school I was attending noticed I was AWOL.  Another show of his I saw over 20 times.  When I first encountered his multisensory, nonlinear, cacophonous pieces he had already contracted full-blown AIDS and was mainlining the rage against his fast approaching death directly into his work.  Being a hardcore ADHD-dyslexic growing up, seeing a Reza Abdoh production was like coming home, like someone finally found a way to communicate with me where I could not help but listen with rapt attention.  Some audience members described these very same experiences as theatrical hell occurring on a nightmare landscape.  But in Reza’s world where you were totally complicit, you were also completely free.  God was literally a Puerto Rican drag queen and there was no crime you could have committed that would deny you her love.   When I heard of his passing I was devastated, wandering around my apartment for days, fending off bouts of sobbing and depression.

Reza has been on my mind because there is a symposium on his work this coming Monday — The Legacy of Reza Abdoh at CUNY’s Martin E. Segal Theatre.  (FYI there are massive student rallies to protest tuition hikes and their mistreatment by CUNY public safety officers being formed as of late. This is a sidebar but of potential interest or concern depending on which side of the barricade you find yourself in the next couple of days.) There will be videos of his work show and panel discussions with former collaborators, all free and open to the public. To the experimental theater neophyte it might be very worthwhile.  But I am torn unto whether or not to attend myself… I mean what will I gain by going? Solace? Inspiration?  Or will it just be a painful reminder of what is irrevocably lost?

My title for this piece of writing was the first thing that popped into my head yesterday morning when my sleeping companion told me of Christopher Hitchens’ death.  I felt it then (or, at least mean it now) as a tolling church bell sounded in mourning more than a bunch of Umpalumpas celebrating the melting of Elphaba Thropp.  Yet the contradictory subtext remains… in addition to plain old sadness, there is anger and confusion.  Would Reza’s work have touched me as deeply if it was not paid for with the diseased fire in his blood?  Would Garland’s theater and Hitch’s writing be as brilliant if they did not have the synaptic fuel of nicotine to amplify their already brilliant minds?  Or the balm of booze to quell their restless souls?  One can’t ever say one way or the other.  It is impossible to judge, rendering closure just as untenable.  Irregardless these questions burn in perpetuity with the added luster of guilt in having entertained them at all.

The savage limbo of losing the paradox that was these great men (all queer as the day is long, by the bisexual) spills over into my own humble biography.  On the whole, I have no idea what to do with myself.  Most of the freelance theater jobs that kept me afloat have dried up with our shitty economy.  Do I go back to school (again!) and get my PhD in some esoteric field of study like Avant-Garde Theater of the 90’s?  Do I go get some menial job in film or TV where my double-sided theater c/v can’t even be used as scrap paper?  Or perhaps I should just chuck it all and volunteer for OWS while working as a Barista at Starbucks who I hear offer health benefits and stock options (the latter, sadly not the former… not yet any way >:-)

For now I am going curl up with some theraflu and a nice audiobook, maybe Letters to A Young Contrarian or Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone.  If you have any thoughts or suggestions unto how to live please post them below…

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