photo by Bethanie Hines

The set design for red, black and GREEN: a blues, at MCA Chicago has a name. It’s called The Colored Museum, and it exists in its own right as an installation, set on view at the MCA while the multimedia performance it was created for ran in the evenings this weekend. It’s a series of layered, patchwork clapboard rooms, each representative of one of four cities: Chicago, New York, Oakland, Houston, with built-in video installations and musical elements– that is, good things to hit and create a beat. It’s the work of Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, and it is available to up-close inspection during the first act of the show, also called The Colored Museum, in when the audience is invited onstage.

The layered rhythm of the show closely resembles the structure of the rooms themselves. At the start, the set is boxed into a shotgun-house shape at the center of the stage, the audience wandering around and watching action thought the windows. Marc Bamuthi Joseph hands out slices of watermelon while Traci Tolmaire moves like liquid through the house. The chimes, steel poles and wooden boxes get a musical beatdown, with rhythms created by performer Tommy Shepherd, as the rooms pull apart and the cast throw themselves into full body-swinging tribal dance. Theaster Gates delivers a kind of Social Practice Manifesto (Art without Ethics is Bad Art) to the encircled crowd. It’s clear that what we’re negotiating here is complex, involving not just issues of black identity in America, environmental justice, and mixed media, but the basic struggle to do good in the world while staying true to yourself.

That struggle is beautifully and honestly evident in the monologues delivered by Marc Bamuthi Joseph in the second act of the show, Colors and Muses, in which we return to our usual auditorium seating. The text is based on Joseph’s experiences producing eco-festivals in the four featured cities, and includes re-performed interviews with local residents encountered en route (stunning work by Tolmaire), as well as Joseph’s attempts to, for instance, explain what the Black Panthers were to his nine-year-old son. Joseph confesses that his “ghetto pass” expired some seven years ago, and his words reveal an activist caught between the tofu-praying hyper-green Bay Area culture, the “czar of everything green in Harlem” (fuck Starbucks!), a wino turned Flower Man, and a Sudanese woman living on American soil who unselfconsciously offers him watermelon.

The show offers no easy answers, concluding that its own activists, like the Black Panthers, might just not be around as much in 40 years, and that the world will inevitably change. But it gets there through a striking blend of musicality, dance, narrative and documentation. It seeks to explore the results of its own research in a phenomenally honest way, a way that is not overly concerned with the blurring of disciplines in its work, the danger of racial stereotypes, or the portrayal of  its artists as anything other than (aesthetically skilled) humans. The piece concludes with Back Talk, when each of the performers takes up residence in a room onstage and invites the public back up to chat, ask questions and engage in dialogue. The energized public, not your usual somber modern-art crowd,  lingered, and filled the house with excited chatter.

Popularity: 2% [?]

photo by Jim Gavenus

Louisville, Kentucky seems like an unusual home for live art. I don’t know about you, but when I picture the form I tend to imagine it in one of the world’s major cities, in a very modern venue, and covering the higher brow of contemporary performance. I picture us, the audience, as generally polite; we engage in some knowledgeable head-nodding, we sip our glasses of wine.

Reader, I ask you to consider one rollicking evening of the Motherlodge Live Arts Exchange, in which live art is what happens in a crowded bar in Kentucky: durational performance art by the bar, a band created when an indie star had a meet-cute with a local jazz ensemble, an improv comedy three-on-three slam in the back room, all surrounded by a pop-up gallery of contemporary art.  There’s local bourbon, and beer that tastes like bourbon.

artist and University of Kentucky professor Rae Goodwin, mid-performance at The Bard's Town

Now that you’ve got your mental image sorted (and may I suggest a Four Roses as your hypothetical bourbon of choice), let’s start with the art.

I spoke with Teresa Koester Mills, Louisville artist and Bellarmine University art faculty, the co-curator of the visual art portion of the ‘lodge, on the opening night of one of two pop-up galleries. This year’s theme was “Thresholds,” and the galleries featured work from over twenty local and national artists.

Something Koester Mills said really struck a chord with me, as a director who brings theater to non-theater settings for my company SUPERWOLF.  I asked her why she thought bars and music venues were good locations for Motherlodge’s art shows. “We want to offer art democratically – less than 1% of the population frequent galleries. We want to put art where people go.” Great point. Can you picture the art revolution? All the local bars, restaurants, hotels and doctor’s offices of America featuring local artists rather than anodyne paintings of generic landscapes?

the festival's co-curator for visual art, Teresa Koester Mills, at the opening of a pop-up gallery

I spoke with several of the young local artists featured in the gallery at The Bard’s Town, and they described a healthy art scene in Louisville, with a mix of privately owned galleries, contemporary art festivals, and lots of newly commissioned outdoor pieces throughout the city. They were appreciative of the chance to participate in Motherlodge for quite a few reasons- including having their work hang alongside more respected national artists, and also the fact that they get to keep 100% of the profits, unlike a gallery. “The venues don’t charge us,” noted Koester Mills, enabling her to give the artists all the proceeds from work sold.

Gather Round the Table

A new addition to Motherlodge’s programming this year was the Long Table. For the unfamiliar, “The Long Table is an experimental public forum originally developed by performance artist Lois Weaver. The Long Table experiments with participation and public engagement by re-appropriating a dinner table atmosphere as a public forum, and encouraging informal conversations on serious topics. It is literally a very long table set up with chairs and refreshments where anyone and everyone is welcome to come to the table, ask questions, make statements, leave comments, or simply sit, listen and watch.” (From Weaver’s own description.)

Festival founder Rizzo sat in on a Long Table in New York this fall, during PS122’s production of Cuqui Jerez’ The Rehearsal.  He realized that a gathering of performers, academics and audiences, all sharing space around a table, fit perfectly with his festival’s mash-up vibe. He planned three discussion events across the week, each with a separate topic, facilitator and location.

The first, at the Haymarket Whiskey Bar, an intimate new music venue, was a welcoming gathering. Rizzo proferred the topic for the event, a broad and suitable one for the kick-off evening: “the drive towards creative, or transformative, performance, and the idea of the live arts exchange.”

Ray Rizzo describes how the Long Table work, with his wife Traci Timmons

The group included college professors, a jazz singer, a clown and a chef, a playwright and the venue’s hospitable owner, among others; the group was raring to go. The conversation ranged from the spontaneous moment of creative light striking, to the harnessing of collective energies of a disparate group of practitioners, into the practicalities of creating spaces where new performance modalities can occur. There was debate as to whether the culture of live events was being washed away by the larger trend of experiencing art (and life, generally) via digital formats, and the increasing tendency for audiences to self-segregate into ever smaller subcultures.

In typical ‘lodge fashion, the evening then continued with an Improv Film Scoring Explosion, a selection of recent films accompanied by musicians from New York, Louisville and Australia. Audience members did their part, several of the more gregarious improvising live vocals.

The second Long Table of the week was led by musician Jesse Elliot of These United States, a New York based rock band in the midst of a national tour, and curator Teresa Koester Mills. They held a dialogue on the “thresholds” theme between Motherlodge artists, performers, and audience members.

The final Long Table of the lodge was inspired by another “threshold” – that between life and death. A featured visual artist this year was acclaimed documentary photographer, Jim Gavenus. Gavenus offered a series of powerful and poignant images documenting the final weeks of life of terminally ill and elderly individuals.

the Long Table on the stage of the Rudyard Kipling

Members of the Ernest Becker Foundation, an organization that fosters conversations leading to a deeper understanding of human mortality, helped present Gavenus’ work. Bill Bornschein of the Becker foundation led a powerful Long Table inspired by Becker’s book The Denial of Death, and those seated at the table included local journalists, two drummers, a poet, and perhaps most touchingly, two men who volunteer to lead services in the local cemetery for those who cannot afford funerals. Topics ranged from green burial, to whether it is desirable to prolong life via medical advances, to various participants’ interactions with their seriously ill relatives, to varying views on the idea of life after death, and the concept of the soul.

This sounds heavy, and indeed some of us did come and go from the stage, preferring to sit privately with our thoughts in the audience area below. However, the striking setting- gathered around an old table at the rustic Rudyard Kipling – a warm, worn wooden building that has been a farmhouse, and a brothel, and then a performance venue for over thirty years–with the Louisville late-afternoon light streaming in–and Becker’s powerful photos on display in the room beside us- made for quite a beautiful moment in time. “How odd and wonderful to share a spiritual dialogue with strangers in the midst of performing arts festival,” I wrote in my notebook after the event.

But How Were the Shows?

Inspiring, hilarious, joyful. In post 3, I’ll highlight Motherlodge’s “live” arts, including a Hamlet adaptation featuring musical performance by Bonnie Prince Billy, Lady Rizo finding her ‘rockabilly boyfriend’, Oscar-winner Michael Shannon playing Steely Dan – plus a glimpse of the Humana Festival of New American Plays, including the feisty Future of Arts Criticism panel. Stay tuned!

Popularity: 2% [?]

On the Beach (Baryshnikov Arts Center, April 5-7) is like a waking dream, replete with hypnotic aural and visual landscapes bound together by elements inspired by Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour opera in four acts. For this production, Robert Wilson selected five teams of emerging artists to re-interpret sections from the seminal work, which originally premiered on July 25, 1976 at the Avignon Festival in France and was performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble and dancer/choreographer Lucinda Childs. Due to limited revivals and performances, few people, including myself, have actually experienced Einstein on the Beach live. This year, the work will be revived by Wilson, Glass, and Childs to embark upon an international tour that comprises nine stops on three continents. BAM will once again be home to the production September 14-23 during the Next Wave Festival, having presented the 1984 and 1992 iterations.

Einstein on the Beach was the first collaboration between Wilson and Glass, and the work breaks all of the rules of conventional opera. Wilson devised the structure and design while Glass composed the music. Non-narrative in form, the work uses a series of powerful recurrent images as its main dramatic device shown in radical juxtaposition with abstract dance sequences created by Lucinda Childs. The opera also includes spoken text by Childs, Christopher Knowles, and Samuel M. Johnson. Instead of a traditional orchestral arrangement, Glass chose to compose the work for the synthesizers, woodwinds and voices of The Philip Glass ensemble.

Although Glass and Childs are very much minimalist artists, Wilson is regarded as a master of the postmodern aesthetics in theater, or a theater of mixed means and images. Einstein… was considered to be a response to the technological revolution, highlighting trends such as mediated communication or not looking at someone while communicating. Such themes are even more relevant today as everyone seems to be plugged in to the almighty computer at every waking moment of the day. Wilson was also interested in expanding our sense of time and Einstein… plays with temporal elements such as making a scene repeat for 20 minutes to make the audience reflect on what is going on.

Further, elements that traditionally do not work well together are presented in tandem, like repetition and association as well as an opera without a story. Wilson has long worked with sounds, gesture, movement, light and time, to produce theatre pieces, which are often epic and concerned with the symbols and poetics of our century. In a similar vein, Einstein on the Beach sets out to re-interpret our preoccupations and ourselves. Wilson’s work is often long, visually simple, and full of contradictions that force the spectator to notice and question.

For On the Beach, Wilson sets out to “celebrate a new generation of artists and their reactions to the opera” by assigning various artists to four scenes and The Knee Plays (short pieces presented between and connecting the four acts of Einstein on the Beach) as the sources of inspiration for these new works. The artists, all of whom have been in residence at Wilson’s Watermill Center performance laboratory, are from around the world and work in a variety of disciplines. They are: Jonah Bokaer (choreographer, dancer, NYC) and Davide Balliano (visual and performance artist, Italy); Degenerate Art Ensemble (performance company, Seattle); Manuela Infante (theater director, Chile) and Santiago Taccetti (visual artist, Argentina); Steven Reker & People Get Ready (choreographer, dancer, and musician, NYC); Egil Saebjornsson (visual artist, Iceland) and Marcia Moraes (theater director, choreographer, and performer, Brazil).

While each group re-contextualizes an already abstract postmodern collection of images and sounds, certain themes and elements are prominent throughout: repetition vs. variation, technology, time, numbers, perception (sound and visual) and fragmented communication. In Metro Repetition, Jonah Bokaer’s dancers maintain their own independent pace, some painfully, yet beautifully slow and others, much faster and precise. Haruko Nishimura and Joshua Kohl’s Letter from the Atomic Shores, layers an ensemble of string players with two butoh-like, expressionist performers who sing enchanting arrhythmic hymns while beating out syncopated percussions on a set prop. Meanwhile, an Einstein-like figure seems to be in a continual search for something out of reach. Egill Seabjornsson and Marcia Moraes connect the disparate scenes into a seamless production with their opera singers who dance, act, speak and interact with projected images such as an animated, talking rock. On the Beach was a welcome distillation of its source material. I personally look forward to experiencing the epic proportions of Einstein on the Beach at BAM in the fall.

Popularity: 2% [?]

“cool”

“amazing!”

“did you see that guy’s ass?”

These were the conversation snippets I overheard as the audience filed out of Michael Clark Company’s WHO’S ZOO?, part of the Whitney Biennial 2012. Clocking in at 45 minutes, set to rock music, and packed with extremely physical movement performed by dancers sporting flame-colored unitards, this was a crowd-pleaser, and a decided contrast to Sarah Michelson’s meditative, minimalist Devotion Study #1–The American Dancer, which preceded Clark’s residency on the 4^th floor of the Whitney building.

For Clark’s performance, the space was arranged as a dance floor spanning the width of the room, with the audience seated on the floor or standing in the front. Clark’s company came off a two-year residence at The Tate Modern, and from info available online, he has continued the idea of mixing untrained people with his professional dancers. For WHO’S ZOO?, three separate hordes of untrained performers (a total of 44 by my count) repeated a basic stepping pattern that slowly advanced across the stage during several sections of the work. Their function remained a mystery to me, as it wasn’t necessary to underscore the virtuosity of the dancers: the dancers more then held their own with the complex, virtuosic choreography, which even included double-split jumps. On the whole, the movement was largely linear, with a vocabulary rooted in ballet and clearly in debt to Cunningham, punctuated by a few pelvic and head rolls, and sprinkled liberally with crotch shots.

I was struck, however, by Charles Atlas’ projections and lighting, which are a time-based work of art in their own right. Atlas has been collaborating with Clark since 1984, and his contributions to WHO’S ZOO? add a layer of continuity and sophistication to the piece.

I appreciated that WHO’S ZOO? wasn’t something conceived by a choreographer for a visual art space under the auspices of post-modernism, and notions of what is supposed to happen in a museum versus a performance setting. This was if anything, a wholesale rejection of the rejection of performance conventions.

Michael Clark Company has been an Artistic Associate of the Barbican Centre in London since 2005 and primarily works in Britain, so without intending to sound like a redneck Republican (keep those foreigners out, they’re taking away opportunities from hard-working Americans!), I have a difficult time understanding why he was selected for this survey of contemporary American art. Clark earned a reputation as the enfant terrible of punk ballet in the mid-1980s and has cultivated a slew of connections in the visual art world, but little I saw here seemed distinctive or indicative of the furor he created 25 years ago–on either side of the pond.

Popularity: 3% [?]

So maybe two years ago Yoshiko Chuma told me about the project she was working on. She’d be invited (or somehow put in touch with) the Palestinian Dance Troupe El-Funoun from Ramallah and wanted to go work with them, make a piece and bring it back. She couldn’t find funding – as far as I know – but went ahead anyway. Over the past few years she has been there, working with the company and making material, experiencing life in Ramallah and building relationships.

From May 9-12, 2012, for 5 performances, she will present that work at LaMama FOR FREE.

From the release:

Intentionally confusing documentation with history, Chuma tasks El-Funoun members Sari Husseini and Ana Abu Oun and NYC-based talents Miriam Parker, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Saori Tsukada-—three performers who have never been to Palestine—with re-creating segments from her own documented works and experiences in Ramallah, Palestine. Chuma assembles a mosaic of images and interviews which pertain to pain and longing, as if framing theater with barbed wire. Traditional dance is juxtaposed with contemporary movement, video projection and spoken text in a borderless environment constantly reshaped by sculptural objects. Yoshiko Chuma herself performs on the backdrop of Robert Flynt’s photography.

I’ve long been a fan of Chuma’s work – it is a mix of highly structured and totally chaotic, a frenzy of media and dance, always challenging the audience to engage in an overwhelm of information and imagery. I imagine this will be a very compelling project.

All performances are free, but require reservations which you can make here.

SHOW INFO:

Love Story, Palestine
Concept, Design, and Choreography by Yoshiko Chuma

May 9-12, 2012
Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Ave and Bowery)
Part of La MaMa Moves! Festival/ 50th Anniversary Season

Featuring members of Palestinian Dance Troupe El-Funoun from Ramallah
In association with ROOT CULTURE in Kamakura, Japan.

Dance by Miriam Parker, Saori Tsukada, Tatyana Tenenbaum,
Ryuji Yamaguchi, Sari Husseini, Anas Abu Oun and Yoshiko Chuma
Music by Sizzle Ohtaka, Aska Kaneko with Robert Black
Photography by Robert Flynt

Text excerpts from “Sayonara, Gangsters” by Genichiro Takahashi
Sound Design excerpts from “6 Seconds in Ramallah” by Koji Setoh
‘Dabke’ Choreography by El-Funoun Dance Troupe
5 monitors perform video documentation
5 moveable panels and 30′x30′ tarps fill the space

Popularity: 3% [?]

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% [?]

I T I N E R A N T
Performance Art Festival

March 30th, 2012, 8 – 11 PM

@

GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE

840 Broadway, 2nd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11206

QMAD, Queens Media Arts Development, launches ITINERANT, a citywide festival for Contemporary Performance Art to be hosted at various venues in the five boroughs of New York City. ITINERANT starts its five week program at GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE in Brooklyn on Friday, March 30th, featuring the work of local, national and international performance artists.

ITINERANT 2012 focuses on live performative works that treat notions of intimacy, self-reflection, and introspection. Artists working in Contemporary Performance Art were selected to participate from an open call that attracted more than 175 local, national and international submissions. Forty five artists will be featuring new and existing works that explore the program’s theme over a period of 5 weeks starting on March 30th through May 5th.

Participating artists at GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE are: Jessica Bonenfant, Camila Cañeque, Amy Finkbeiner, Carlos Gonzalez, Whitney V. Hunter, Rosalind Murray, Alex Nathanson and Dylan Neely, Negin Moss, Alaina Stamatis, Chris Udemezue, and Genevieve White.

ITINERANT 2012 will be presented in New York City on the following dates and in collaboration with the following venues: Friday, March 30th, 8 – 11 PM at Grace Exhibition Space, 840 Broadway, 2nd Floor, Brooklyn; Saturday, April 21st, 6 – 9 PM at Crossing Art Gallery, 136-17 39th Avenue, Flushing, Queens; Saturday, April 28th, 7 – 10 PM at Floor 4 Art, 2136 Frederick Douglass Blvd, 2nd Floor, Manhattan; Sunday, April 29th, 6 – 9 PM at Bronx Art Space, 305 East 140th Street, Bronx; and Saturday, May 5th, 6 – 8 PM at Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art – Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island.

In addition, ITINERANT will present Public Performances at the new 37th Road Pedestrian Plaza (between 74th and 73rd Streets) in Jackson Heights, Queens. The program includes the presentation of “Worlds Together, Worlds Apart,” a durational performance collaboration between Camila Cañeque and Hector Canonge, every Friday, April 6th – May 4th, 3 – 6 PM, and the public performances by Chloe Bass, John Cichon, Lizzie Scott, and Priscila Stadler on Saturday, May 12th, 3 – 6 PM.

QMAD, Queens Media Arts Development, is under the direction of artist, Hector Canonge, who launched ITINERANT in Queens in 2011. Canonge explains that ITINERANT is “the first program for performance art in this borough,” and that he “wants to introduce audiences to this art form as well as to create dialogue and exchange among artists coming from all over to the festival. ITINERANT started as a mini-festival with handful of local artists presenting their live performances at Crossing Art Gallery, I wanted to create the same in larger scale in NYC.” Canonge adds that the experience has been an incredible challenge. “To be able to collaborate with organizations and galleries in the five boroughs, to have their support and trust that I could carry such enterprise has been a major incentive in organizing the event.” QMAD, under the leadership of Canonge, presents the monthly LGBT film series CINEMAROSA, the annual program Framing AIDS, and the monthly art series A-Lab Forum.

Directions:

GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE (840 Broadway – 2nd Floor) is located on Flushing Avenue Stop on J-Z Trains. Walk 3 blocks east on Broadway, btwn. Ellery St. & Park Ave.

More information: www.qmad.org/itinerant or email: [email protected]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Teatr ZAR from piece "Gospels of Childhood The Triptych" (part 3). Photo: Irena Lipinska

Teatr ZAR’s  The Gospels of Childhood Triptych (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, March 29-April 1, tickets $28) is about sound– ‘zar,’ meaning either bell, or a song of lament. Its work delves deeply into the ancient vocal traditions of the Caucuses: pre-christian songs with words so old no one understands them any more. Back when casting a spell just meant having some strong words in the right tone.

The group comes straight out of the Grotowski Institute, where it is resident company. It developed as a project over the course of four years, as Grotowski apprentices took yearly research trips out to the Caucasus to  learn and collaborate with the communities in the mountains of Georgia, where these songs are still used in funeral traditions. Every year at the Prague Quadrennial, the Polish pavilion has some flavor  of Grotowski, and ZAR is evidence of Polish work that is still steeped in his influence. “The Gospels exemplifies a trend in contemporary Polish theatre, described as ‘theatre out of the spirit of music.’,” writes MCA.

The Gospels of Childhood Triptych will bring the audience onto the MCA stage for two of its three acts– the second act will take place on MCA’s second-floor atrium. Each of the acts draws upon a melange of ancient singing traditions– from Chechen, Bulgarian, Geogian, Greek and beyond– to tell a series of ancient stories about ancient human experiences: youth, death, pain. The story sources range from the apocryphal gospels to a Polish romantic poet. Culturebot will be there on Thursday, curious to witness the movement that accompanies this sound: dance, ritual, experiment. We’ll let you know what flickers in the candlelight.

“Zar sung during Gospels of Childhood performance is, in fact, one endless cry of humanity; a column of breath for us, as well as for past and future generations,” writes MCA. The event is co-produced by MCA Stage and the Goodman Theatre.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hi everyone, Andy here. Hope you’ve been well. We here at Culturebot have been super-busy seeing shows, writing, planning, etc. It has been an action-packed year so far and there’s a lot going on over the next 12 months. So be sure to keep checking back for more news.

Personally, my day job is getting pretty hectic as we do our Access Restricted discussion series and gear up for this year’s awesome edition of the River To River Festival (be a part of it! Dance with Sylvain Emard) – so my writing contributions may be a little more sporadic.

So okay, enough of that. Let’s talk about art.

Friday night took us to Exit Art for their final opening. After 30 years they are closing up shop with two exhibits Every Exit is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art and Collective / Performative. It just so happens that Culturebot was invited to be a part of the Collective/Performative exhibit and we’re totally honored and kind of in awe. When we went to the opening and saw, in one place, all the amazing artists that Exit Art has supported and nurtured over the past 30 years, it was kind of crazy to think that we would be a part of it. It as a great party where art stars who were young kids in the 1980s were hanging with young artists of today and you could really feel the energy, connection and creativity. Unlike other fancy gallery openings I’ve been too, this felt like the real deal, not just a “see and be seen” for big money types. More on that later as we finalize Culturebot’s program at Exit Art for the week of April 17-21.

Saturday night we went to NYLA to see David Neumann’s new work with Advanced Beginner Group, Restless Eye. I will always have a soft spot for David Neumann’s work. His show Sentence was one of the first dance pieces that I really, truly enjoyed. I was working at PS122 at the time, where it was presented, so I got to actually see the work develop a bit and then see it multiple times over a few weeks. The humor, the text by Will Eno, the pedestrian movement, all gave me access to new ways of looking at dance and was pretty pivotal in my understanding of the form. From that work I could go out into all the different dance directions.

In Restless Eye Neumann is working with a different writer, Sybil Kempson, who seems to be everywhere this spring, and his collaborators in Advanced Beginner Group – Kennis Hawkins, Neal Medlyn, Andrew Dinwiddie, Jeremy Olson and Victoria Roberts-Wierzbowski – to create an atmospheric riff on the intersection of human experience as enhanced or mitigated by technology. Interpolating Chekhov and other sources, Restless Eye seems to create a tense juxtaposition between a more rustic, pre-digital way of life with the disconnectedness and information overload of the Internet age. There isn’t a whole lot of text, actually, but Kempson’s voice is ever-present – her fascination with New Jersey, with the mysteries of the road, with a vaguely threatening suburbia, a suggestion of existential unease in every moment.

Neumann’s choreography has gotten (it seems) a little more lyrical and expansive and he uses long, tall performers like Kennis Hawkins and Neal Medlyn to create elongated poses and gestures that exist in neat contrast to the more confined movements, focused on the arms, of other dancers.

There was a beautiful house, essentially a video screen, that changed from scene to scene and the sound design was enjoyable – moving from a spacey/digital soundscape to fractured language to something approaching music from time to time – a warbled “This Much Is True” playing as if from a house across the lake, etc.

Overall, though I enjoyed the piece, I frequently lost the thread and couldn’t always draw connections between one sequence and another. They flowed quite nicely into each other, but I was often disoriented and I didn’t feel that there was necessarily a cumulative effect. My eye was, in fact, restless – and maybe that was part of what I was meant to take away.

So in the interest of time travel let’s rewind to March 4 at PS1 where we went to check out Marten Spangberg do his thing. Spangberg is a Swedish choreographer and art star who leverages his outsize personality and keen intellect to propose scenarios around performance, visual art, choreography and dance. At PS1 he gave a performance/lecture based on his “book” Spangbergianism. Ostensibly the book came out of his deep and ongoing despair around his work as a choreographer, so he sat down and blogged for 60 days in a row then took the 60 posts and compiled them into a book. He called the blogging “choreography” and the book “dance” and went from there, critiquing dance, choreography, politics and the current visual arts/museum fetish for performance. Anybody who reads Culturebot regularly knows my basic thoughts on that, so I’m not going to re-hash it all here. I quite enjoyed the lecture, though some of my peers, apparently, did not. Raising, to my mind, the question: when is critique performance and when is it not?

But anyway – I did have a few thoughts on reflection after Spangberg’s lecture:

Dance is only one possible outcome of choreography. Choreography as an organizing principle or set of theories around the possibilities of bodies existing in time and space; much as architecture is a set of tactics and theories around the possibilities of the built (or unbuilt) environment.

Spangberg talked about the moment – though he didn’t use the term – of aesthetic arrest. And I thought of this wonderful poem:

- Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Subsequently Spangberg referenced this idea of choreography/art as a squid and/or monster that is simultaneously two things and nothing, that is incomprehensible and demands to be apprehended on its own terms. In an email to him (I have not received a response) I wrote:

Re “squid” and the monster idea….. I’m not a religious/spiritual person but in Jewish theology (in the Hebrew) the word that is translated as “God” or “Yahweh” is in fact what is known as an “ineffable tetragrammaton” (יהוה) – it is unpronounceable and incomprehensible, pointing to the indivisible one-ness of the divine – which of course suffuses all Being. The subjective confrontation with the unknowable (and inseparable) One is the aspiration of mystics, etc. etc. Moving along those lines, I think of the idea of “afflatus” or inspiration, from Cicero, according to Wikipedia: “…”inspiration” came to mean simply the gathering of a new idea, Cicero reiterated the idea of a rush of unexpected breath, a powerful force that would render the poet helpless and unaware of its origin.”

I’m having trouble closing the circle on this one – something about how art, being inspired by the ineffable, is in and of itself ineffable and beyond form, existing outside of time and space, coming into embodiment for a brief moment and then vanishing again. We defy commodification because we are only playing with that which will vanish and return to the nothingness from which it came, performance is the brief temporal and physical manifestation of ideas and entities that are always extant in the ether: dancers, musicians, performers, writers, bring them into being briefly, long enough for us to observe and try to fix in memory, before they disincorporate and vanish yet again….

Dude. I totally used to drop acid, like, a lot.

Okay so after Spangberg I had a bunch of work commitments until March 8 when I got to see Jodi Melnick at NYLA for her double-bill of One of Sixty Five Thousand Gestures and Solo, Deluxe Version. What an amazing evening! One of Sixty Five Thousand Gestures was co-choreographed with Trisha Brown and Jodi just has Brown’s choreography deep in her body. It was transfixing to watch, just beautiful. The composition by Hahn Rowe was ethereal and evocative and Melnick moves with precision, elegance, grace and subtle emotion.

That was followed by Solo, Deluxe Version where she worked with dancers Jon Kinzel, Hristoula Harakas and Stuart Shugg on a series of pieces linked together. Once again, just great movement, top-notch dancers, evocative, subtle, surprising, elegant. But the extra added bonus was live, original music from Steven Reker and his band, People GetReady (Luke Fasano, James Rickman and Jen Goma). They were fantastic, veering from rock-type riffs to spaceier, almost raga-like repeated figures, to atmoshperic sound to sections that almost sounded like songs. Great night, glad I got to see it.

The next night. Friday March 9, took us to The Kitchen to see Pam Tanowitz’ Untitled (The Blue Ballet). The piece was set to the FLUX Quartet’s interpretation of avant-garde composer Morton Feldman’s challenging String Quartet #1. Feldman is very minimal and sparse and the choreography took that as a starting point, using ballet – and ballet dancers – as source material and then stripping away all the frills down to some very sparse, select, precise movements. The piece was alternately fascinating and frustrating – less because of the intentional exploration of absence, time and emptiness, but because it just felt, to me, somewhat cold and analytical. That being said, perception is everything. I was frequently riveted by Ashley Tuttle who seemed to verily radiate. My colleague seated next to me found her to be conventional and mechanical. Go figure. But it is always, always a delight to see incredibly well-trained dancers re-purpose their skills into a contemporary context.

Saturday March 10 took us to The Joyce for Stephen Petronio’s The Architecture of Loss. The evening began with Petronio coming onstage and doing a five minute intro to his staging of Steve Paxton’s “Intravenous Lecture”. This was probably my favorite part of the whole evening, as he started talking about the time he saw Nureyev dance and then, within a few months, met Paxton and then Trisha Brown. In five minutes Petronio explained in the most succinct and personal way, the evolution of dance from Ballet to Modern to Post-Modern to Contemporary. And he did it with words AND his body. He physically demonstrated the transition from Nureyev’s rigid spine to Paxton’s flexible spine, from being oriented towards the audience to existing in 365-Degree space. It was beautiful. Then he started “Intravenous Lecture” which was kind of cool – he’s a great dancer – but I wasn’t so in love with the text.

Also on the bill was Wendy Whelan doing a short solo called “Ethersketch I” which was amazing. In some way this seemed to draw a line from Melnick on Thursday, to Tanowitz on Friday through to Petronio on Saturday. Something about the evolution of dance, the influence of ballet, of Trisha Brown… something about the way embodied movement can, ideally, comment on what it means to us, as non-dancers, to exist in the embodied world. Hm.Food for thought. I pass this on to you, dear reader, to expand and comment.

Monday night I had some family in from Mississippi and was at a loss as to what to do with them. Broadway being dark and so forth. Luckily I remembered that Rinde Eckert’s show And God Created Great Whales was playing at 45 Bleecker, produced by The Culture Project. My uncle and his wife are both mental health professionals, so it seemed like a show about a man losing his memory to Alzheimer’s (or some related if unnamed disorder) would be interesting. I think they liked it. I know I did. It has been many years since I first saw it but it held up in the new version. Rinde Eckert is just one of those artists who has incredible presence and a unique, fascinating creative sensibility. I’ve rarely been disappointed by his work and this is a great example of blending music/opera with poetic writing and imaginative, dream-like staging to create a kind of memory play, a sad, moving and intimate portrait of a man trying to hold on to his identity as it slowly erodes. Universal and tragic, powerful stuff.

Thursday, March 15 took me to the Gene Frankel Theater to see Lost & Found Project’s Doroga. ДOROGA, is a play that explores personal family stories about the Russian-Jewish immigrant experience from the current generation of 20-somethings, intertwining with the history of Jews in the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU).

Not normally my kind of thing, but Culturebot’s office is frequently located at the back tables at Shoolbred’s, because they have a great two-for-one happy hour, a fireplace in winter and no televisions. And one of our favorite bartenders is Mariya King, and she’s part of this company and, well, you know, you gotta support your bartender, am I right? Also, I used to work in Jewish Culture so I kind of feel like I want to check in on things from time to time. Also, when I worked in that world I gave a lecture on “Envisioning Contemporary Jewish Theater and Performance” and I keep hoping that someone will actually do it, rather than replicate the same sort of conventional, narrative-based, work that confines identity to this very narrow slice of reality. Here’s that lecture, which is about 20 minutes long so you can just watch it some other time:

Envisioning Contemporary Jewish Theatre Lecture from Andy Horwitz on Vimeo.

ANYWAY – ДOROGA aroused in me the same feelings I often have about earnest, culturally-specific work. It feels cruel to criticize because it obviously means a lot to everyone involved and it definitely means a lot to the audiences that come and see it. It is validating and gratifying to see one’s “story” on stage, but at some point you have to make work that matches the critical and aesthetic standards of a general audience. That comes over time and I certainly hope that the young, enthusiastic and energetic team involved with this production continues to develop their craft, maybe gets exposed to performance makers who are doing more innovative work around culturally-specific performance and evolve into something more rigorous.

Friday March 16 took me to HERE Arts Center to see 64, written by Culturebot’s own Austin, TX correspondent Timothy Braun and presented by Surf Reality. I used to go to Surf Reality back in the day (it is now a “hot yoga” studio) when it was a teeming pit of cheap beer, cigarettes and weird LES performance art depravity. Glad to see that Rob Pritchard and Co. have not grown up too much! The technical elements – laptops, videos, sound design, etc.- have gotten a lot more sophisticated, the scenarios make a little more sense and there is a lot less in the way of bodily fluids and on-stage nastiness, but that same kind of DIY. rough and ready, a view from underground aesthetic still applies.

Timothy Braun was at an artist retreat when he met Jennilie Brewster who was in the midst of creating 4 paintings, often using NY Times images as source material. Braun was inspired to write 64 one page plays, and Pritchard then reimagined the plays as a kind of multimedia collage. Images come and go, soundscapes are mixed live, people meet, interact and vanish. Sometimes stories seem to reflect on each other and connect, sometimes they just appear and then drift off into the ether. 64 is a fluid, floating nightmare dreamscape of America going down in flames.

Speaking of which, if only tangentially, Saturday the 17th took us out to Bushwick Starr for Karma Kharms directed by Eliza Bent as part of Target Margin’s Last Futurist Lab. It was fun and crazy and silly movement-based, ensemble work with live origami-folding. It was based on the writing of Daniil Kharms an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. I don’t know exactly how this all fits into Futurism (someone send me a press kit, pronto!) but I do think that there is probably a darker, more dangerous component to all of this. I’d surmise that so much of art in the early 20th Century was an attempt to assimilate the startling velocity of change that as much as it will sometimes appear frivolous to us, there is a kind of manic, nervous laughter attached, floating above a deep, ontological terror about the death of God and the dawn of essential meaninglessness. And the onrush of a new century birthing unprecedented genocide enabled by previously unimaginable weapons of mass destruction. But Karma Kharms was fun.

Sunday the 18th took us to Abrons Arts Center for a concert by Alarm Will Sound, part of the American Mavericks Festival presented by Carnegie Hall. The concert featured work by Cage, Varese and three others (I lost my program) and it was really great. It was free and the place was packed, even at 3PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Alarm Will Sound, led by Brooklyn Philharmonic’s Alan Pierson, is a diverse and dynamic 20-person ensemble who are always presenting new and imaginative interpretations of iconic material, supporting the work of early career composers and arrangers and just generally breaking down barriers left and right. You should definitely check them out.

Then more work then Friday and we’re back to Exit Art which brings us back to today. Sunday. Which I’ve now spent writing this column. SO MANY SHOWS SO LITTLE TIME!!!

Okay, hope you’ve all been having an art-tastic month and we look forward to seeing you out and about!!

Popularity: 3% [?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 3% [?]