It is Sunday night and time to recap this past week’s adventures in performance.

WEDNESDAY took us to The Jazz Gallery to see John Ellis and Andy Bragen’s jazz opera (that’s what I’m calling it, anyway) Mobro. First off, I’ve lived in NYC since 1995 and can’t believe I’ve never been to The Jazz Gallery! It is a cozy loft space on Hudson just below Spring and it is fantastic. It definitely reminds me of what NYC was when I first got here, when you could still taste the bohemian, downtown history of Manhattan in a tangible way. You walk up the stairs to the loft and check in at the door, there’s a table with some bottles of wine and plastic cups with a donation jar, the walls are covered in posters and paintings of jazz greats, there are a bunch of benches and folding chairs in front of a tiny stage. For Mobro, the stage was packed with 9 musicians and 4 vocalists. I started sitting in the front but was soon overwhelmed, eventually going to stand in the back. But even from the back the space has this wonderful warmth and intimacy – you can really hear the music well and you can see the musicians getting into the music, communicating with each other and riffing off of each other as they launch into this dynamic, swinging, complex composition.

The story of Mobro is this: In March 1987 a garbage barge, The Mobro 4000, set out from Islip, New York with 3,168 tons of industrial waste headed for a methane farm in North Carolina. North Carolina rejected the cargo and the Mobro set out for New Orleans, Mexico and Belize, rejected each time, before finally returning to Brooklyn where the garbage was incinerated and returned to Islip. The journey took 5 months and covered 6000 miles.

Composer John Ellis and playwright Andy Bragen approach the story as an epic journey, an Odyssey that unfolds across twelve sections moving from Anticipation to Doldrums and culminating in Celebration. I don’t know a whole lot about jazz, so I don’t feel qualified to critique it in that framework. But as an audience member and music lover, I was bowled over. Ellis is facile in a number of different forms and style – Mobro starts out in a kind of traditional modern jazz mode, moves into a more musical/song genre and into this really interesting electronic/computer/noise section before returning to jazz mode and culminating in a New Orleans-style jazz epilogue. It is kind of a jazz opera that you want to dance to. And the musicians were fantastic – a really interesting multiculti ensemble of great players all of whom took a turn soloing and just blowing our minds with their talent and inventiveness. The space-y noise jam during the Doldrums section was created by Roberto Carlos Lange and it was freakin’ great. I don’t know if it was coincidental, but I saw him sitting at his laptop rocking a Grateful Dead t-shirt, and his electronic composition definitely reminded me of the trippy feedback “space” section that was the centerpiece of every Dead show. Ellis is also a dynamic bandleader, getting out there and bopping along to the music, giving direction and every once in awhile stepping front and center to solo.

The sound system was not totally up to the task of dealing with the vocals, so it was a little hard to understand the lyrics. But the vocalists all sounded great and, from what I could hear and understand, Bragen’s writing was evocative and compelling.

Sadly the run at the Jazz Gallery is over, but the piece could definitely translate well to a bigger venue in its present form. What would be really great would be for some savvy producer to pick it up, attach a director, dramaturg and some set/lighting/video designers and blow this thing up into a full-on show. It has, as they say, sea legs.

THURSDAY night took us to The Kitchen to see Kyle Abraham‘s Live! The Realest MC which was absolutely stunning. I already tweeted about it and wrote a short blurb on Facebook but I’ll expand a bit here.

On its most basic level, Live! The Realest MC is about trying to be gay in the ‘hood. But to reduce it to only that would be vastly understating the importance of the work and its remarkable technical and artistic accomplishment. Abraham’s investigations have frequently been about taking movement vocabulary from “street” and “hip-hop”, abstracting it, re-contextualizing it, and infusing it with contemporary choreography. This show takes this investigation to an entirely new level, getting into the emotional and cultural resonance of these movements, digging deep and coming back from the depths with vision, insight, passion and conviction. Abraham finds what these movements mean, how they are meant to represent power – or a relationship to power – and masculinity, social status, gender, psychology. He seamlessly interweaves and juxtaposes these movements in a way that we watch one simple gesture – a hip roll, for instance – transform from an expression of machismo and masculine privilege into a sensuous and effeminate expression of queer identity. All within one sequence.

I tried to track the exact series of sequences – the show starts with Abraham on the floor downstage right in a glittery shirt and glitter-trimmed Adidas track pants – but I didn’t want to look down too often to write. There are a series of interactions between Abraham and his two male dancers, Chalvar Monteiro and Maleek Malaki Washington, that could be read alternately as hetero “fronting” and gay cruising. The girls enter shortly after that: two African-American girls (Rena Butler and Elyse Morris), an Asian girl (Hsiao-Jou Tang) and a white(?) girl (Rachelle Rafailedes). The show alternates between group sequences and smaller trios and duets, punctuated with solos by Abraham. During one sequence Abraham comes up to the mic and has this incredible moment as an actor (a dancer who can really act!! OMG!) where he starts out posturing as a kind of thug or rapper, honing in on the phrase, “They held me down” and repeating it with different inflections until it shifts from being a statement against “the man” holding a brother down, to a brutalized gay boy who has been held down, beaten and abused by his peers. It is riveting and heartbreaking.

The whole show is not all pathos and heartbreak – there is a lot of humor in there. A particularly hilarious video sequence features an instructional video of a middle-aged southern white woman teaching a class in hip-hop dance. Funny and absurd but also remarkably sharp and insightful into how this movement has been decontextualized, commodified and misunderstood to the point of absurdity.

All of Abraham’s dancers are topnotch and they have the skills to really deliver his vision as a choreographer. Each has their own strengths and as the evening goes on I started to notice little distinctions between the dancers. Chalvar Monteiro seemed a little more sensitive where Maleek Malaki Washington seemed to be comfortable playing the tough. Rena Butler had the most intense and expressive gaze – her eyes were focused and wide and bright, almost supernatural. Elyse Morris brought a kind of grounded, humorous, sensual presence to all of her sequences – but one that seemed like it could go tough and angry at any minute. Hsiao-Jou Tang definitely rocked the “modern dancer” thing, very centered and fluid but with occasional flashes of the cerebral. And I may be a bit obsessive – or this may be because she was the only white girl – but I kept being drawn to Rafailedes’ point and extension. She must have been a ballerina at some point, because it was, like, crazy how far she could extend and how sharp her point was.

The multicultural casting brought a layer of sociological complication to the work, while the ability of each performer to embody Abraham’s movement while maintaining their individuality just made it deeper and richer and more engaging. The soundtrack, the lighting, the video – all of it came together perfectly.

That night I was with a friend of a friend who is a doctor in the Bronx. She works with disadvantaged teens, many of whom are struggling with their sexuality in a neighborhood and culture where homophobia is the norm. After the show she was in tears and she kept saying about the show, “Those are my kids! Those are my kids!”

Damn. That’s good stuff.

FRIDAY we went to Danspace Project to see Tere O’Connor‘s Cover Boy, a different take on gay identity. O’Connor’s work is a lot looser and lighter than Abraham’s. He has brought together four men - Michael Ingle, Niall Jones, Paul Monaghan, and Matthew Rogers – and placed them in a series of different vignettes and situations, riffing on the idea of closeted gay experience. We see various scenarios – two men paired with a third man looking longingly at them as an outsider, interactions that start as “ambiguously gay” and transform, a “catwalk” type sequence that plays with the idea of presentation and identity. In this context “Cover Boy” takes on a double meaning – it is both referring to the prettiness of the dancers, as in a model on the cover of a magazine, and the idea of “taking cover” – living in the closet.

The dancers have a great rapport that lends the piece an informal and improvisatory feel. While it is obviously meticulously structured and choreographed, the interplay of the dancers – the way they talk and whisper to each other, the way they move from sequence to sequence – brings us into a conversation or discussion that feels intimate, like a late-night confession or a “morning-after” recap of the previous night’s misadventures to a close friend.

Once again, each of the dancers has a unique presence, each one bringing a different attitude and tone to the ensemble. Michael Ingle brings a kind of effortless athleticism and gentle wit, Niall Jones brings – and I mean this in the best possible way – a hint of quirky, artsy, awkwardness. He is at home in his body but projects a hint of uncertainty and ambivalence, a gentle outsiderness. Matthew Rogers is like your fun gay hipster younger brother while Paul Monaghan, of slender frame and golden ringlets, is like some ephemeral androgyne from a magickal forest.

I don’t know much about O’Connor’s process, but a note in the program says that portions of the movement material for the work was made in collaboration with the performers. It shows. While O’Connor’s overarching vision for the work is ever-present, it feels as if he made room for each dancer to bring a part of themselves to the process, and the intermingling of these subjectivities joins together to make a fascinating whole.

Speaking of “overarching” – the set was this interesting canopy designed by Aptum Architecture, which, I think, was subtly raised and lowered at different points during the show. I couldn’t quite tell – but I occasionally looked up at the balcony and thought I saw the crew pulling on the ropes and levers that held the canopy aloft.

The music by James Baker and the lighting by Michael O’Connor were well integrated into the work. Together with the canopy they created a kind of intellectual/aesthetic frame for the the embodied emotionality of the performers. It was really wonderful how all the different elements came together into an enjoyable, engaging and satisfying whole.

It continues on 12/13 and 12/15 at Danspace Project, 8PM.  Check it out.

SATURDAY took us to LaMama for the Mini Teater Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Novo Kazaliste Zagreb (Croatia) presentation of Ivica Buljan‘s staging of Macbeth After Shakespeare, from a text by Heiner Muller. Extremely physical, muscular and loud, Buljan’s minimal production places Macbeth in a bleak, bloody and amoral wasteland where violence begets violence with no end in sight. Muller adds characters and scenes, most notably a peasant killed for not paying rent, his body eaten by dogs as his widow and son attempt to retrieve him. We are brought into a world where the violence perpetrated by the ruling class trickles down to the common man, where the brutal and brutish warrior class indulges in orgies, drink and debauchery between bouts of frenzied blood lust. No one is innocent, no one untouched.

Buljan’s cast is mostly strapping young men who wrestle and shout and beat each other up, loudly declaiming their lines as they cast about the stage or run up and down the aisles. Banquo is played by a middle-aged woman (Polona Vetrih Distefani) who serves as a kind of thoughtful counterweight. No less invested in the culture of violence, Banquo is still not quite as heinous as the others and, when returning as a ghost, offers the only intimation of the consequences of murder. Lady Macbeth is also played by a middle aged woman, film actress Milena Zupancic, who wields her scheming sexuality as a weapon in the world of men.

At first I was a little put off by the Grotowski-esque presentation. It was so loud, rough and monotone that I found it difficult to engage. Also the supertitles, projected on the back wall, were frequently obscured by the actors and went by so quickly they were difficult to read. I started thinking about the multiple layers of translation – Shakespeare’s English adapted and interpreted by Muller’s German, translated and performed in Slovenian and then re-translated back into modern English, projected on a wall.

Soon I gave over to the experience and found myself being drawn into its relentless assault. The characters are one-dimensional without inner life, they are the embodiment of our animal nature, unfettered and unchecked. The cruelty and violence of this world is the reality of a world always at war, where introspection, over-thinking and sensitivity are seen as weaknesses leading to death.

I also started thinking about the experience of the performers. Coming from a part of the world that has, for the better part of the last 100 years, experienced ongoing political turmoil, oppression, violence and civil war. Even the youngest of the actors must have memories – or at least immediate, close family members who have memories and stories – of life during wartime. The brutality of a society constantly at war is embodied in their physicality, their emotions, their experiences. This kind of theater reflects that. At times, to the cynical American eye, it looks dated and less than subtle. But it represents a reality and perspective that most Americans are fortunate enough not to have experienced firsthand – though have been responsible for spreading abroad. So it is important for us to see this work, hear these voices, be exposed to these perspectives and reminded of the consequences of our actions. Be reminded how underneath all the high-minded rhetoric and professed ideals there is just blood, brutality and death, that when we foment war we risk, as does Macbeth, losing our humanity entirely and becoming mindless killing machines, bereft of moral compass or redemption.

I was going to go the Immediate Medium party after the show but was too drained and tired. Sorry guys! Hope it went well!

SUNDAY we went to The Joyce to go see Martha Clarke‘s Angel Reapers. Written by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy), Angel Reapers is inspired by the life of Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker movement. As one might imagine, the show is about the effect of sexual repression, which was kind of what Ann Lee was all about, but it was pretty tame except for the brief glimpse of breasts and a moment of dangly man-bits.

Alfred Uhry has won a bunch of awards and Clarke is a revered, MacArthur Genius Award-winning icon of American Dance, the choreography, the text, the dancing, lighting, music, etc. was the embodiment of professionalism and excellence.  I enjoyed it, especially the rhythmic footwork and the singing. That being said, it was definitely a little less experimental and edgy than my tastes usually run. Good mainstream stuff.

FINALLY, just a few hours ago, before I came home to write this article, I went to the Angelika with a friend of mine to see the new movie The Artist. It was absolutely, totally, beautiful and amazing. If I wasn’t so tired and achey and it weren’t so late I would write a whole huge essay about it. It is just a wonderful work of cinema – so smart and well-made. I’m sorry. I’m just too tired, my head hurts and so do my fingers. Go see the movie. And if you want to discuss it further, offer to buy me dinner and drinks. I’m a fun and witty companion who loves good company and free food at nice restaurants. Especially during holiday time and especially in the middle of the month when I’m between paychecks.

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1994:

2011:

The aesthetics of the these music videos are, let’s face it, identical. And musically they’re in a very similar space, expanding rock stylings into the pop realm. But what these two pieces are saying about gender, relationships, sexuality, the body…truly an epic contrast.

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Wow. I apologize – I’ve been so busy  that I’m completely behind on writing up reviews. So here are a few of the things I saw over the past two weeks.

On Saturday, November 19th I had a really fun and interesting night. First stop was The Kitchen for Robert Ashley’s “opera” That Morning Thing. I had no idea what to expect but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was really enjoyable. I had assumed that, given that it was originally created in 1967 and rarely performed, it would be some kind of dissonant, atonal, cacophonous assault on the senses. What it turned out to be was a very interesting, slightly surreal, music-performance-movement-lecture hybrid unfolding in three acts and an epilogue. I’ll be honest – I sat down to watch the show and dropped my pen, thus prohibiting my note-taking process. If I had written this up that night, like I intended to, this would be an in-depth thoughtful review. But time has passed and its all a bit fuzzy. As I recall, the first act, “Frogs”, was a lecture given by “The Speaker”, basically dealing with the difficulty of communication and somehow tying this together with frogs. The men – a chorus of men – sang a repeated refrain of “one, two” in a limited range of tones, the women – a chorus of women – moved in deliberate patterns across the stage. They were dressed almost identically and wore glasses that lit up with LEDs. It was a beautiful and kind of funny stage picture.

Act II, “a Cool, Well-Lighted Room” was comprised of a synthesizer player who riffed throughout the scene, The Singer and The Dancer.  The Singer was performed by the ever-captivating Imani Uzuri who brought a soulful playfulness to the proceedings, even while intoning “one, two, three” across a limited range of pitches.

Act III was called “Four Ways” and a character named “The Director” – who was in fact performed by the actual director, a gentleman named “Fast Forward” – gave people directions. Literally. The Women would ask him for directions – “How do you get to Times Square?” and he would answer them, with commentary. But as it went on it got increasing absurd, out of control and funny.

Finally the piece concluded with an “Epilogue” in wich the chorus of women entered the audience and encouraged us to participate  in the performance by repeating a number of phonemes from the sentence “She was a visitor” broken down into bits. At first it felt a bit dated, but soon I grew to like it – there was something innocent and magical about it, the naive faith in the participatory, the breaking down of boundaries, the implication of the audience in the performative event. I imagine that it must have really freaked people out in the 60′s.

Overall it was a really great piece – a bit of a history lesson, but all the more satisfying because it held up over time and seemed to renew itself in the moment of being performed. It didn’t feel musty, just familiar, but in a good way.

After That Morning Thing I headed up to Harlem Stage to check out the 10^th anniversary of Jump n Funk Live, acclaimed DJ Rich Medina’s groundbreaking international Afrobeat dance party, featuring live music by the band Zozo Afro Beat with visuals by The Marksmen. I hadn’t been to the Gatehouse in ages and I was happy to realize how easy it is to get there. Usually I don’t get up to 135th St., but it is pretty easy to find and it is a great venue. We got to the Gatehouse and checked our coats, headed up to the main room where the party was in full swing. DJ Rich Medina was spinning great tunes – funk, soul, afrobeat – and soon the house – only about half-full but people were starting to arrive – was dancing and getting happy.

Brad Learmonth (prog. dir. for Harlem Stage) & Friend with DJ Rich Medina (background)

After about an hour Zozo Afro Beat came on. I counted at least 12 people onstage, not including dancers. They were amazing!!! The room kept filling up and soon everyone was jumping and jiving to the beat. I’m not that familiar with Afrobeat music in general, I had a friend in college who was really into Fela, and I used to really like this guy Foday Musa Suso, but generally it is not the first thing I turn to. I think that might have to change!! The hypnotic riffs, the syncopated beats, the punchy/funky horns – I couldn’t stop dancing even if I wanted to. I danced to the bar and back to the floor, I just had to get my groove on. And let me tell you, those of you who know me, I’m not exactly a dancing fool. But this was definitely a fun time and the real deal. I had a great time – the room is warm & welcoming, easily accommodating both dance and music performance, the drinks were inexpensive, the staff was super-friendly, the crowd was diverse in age, ethnicity, gender and everything else. It reminded me of the good old days of Body & Soul when it was at Vinyl – good music, good energy and good people.

Here’s the band, Zozo Afro Beat:

Zozo Afro Beat

And here’s one of the dancers:

After the show I was danced out and exhausted and I dragged myself home, still floating on the good times. I don’t know if Harlem Stage has any more of these events planned, but you should definitely sign up for their email list and check out what they’ve got coming up! In a weird, small-world kind of situation, I checked out a Harlem Stage flyer only to discover that Imani Uzuri, who I had just seen featured in the Robert Ashley opera at The Kitchen, will be performing at Harlem Stage on December 10th! It is called Imani Uzuri’s MOSAIC and it is a “sacred music extravaganza” featuring a line-up of kick-ass woman vocalists from  many world traditions. It looks like it is going to be really great – so mark  your calendars for that!!!

On Tuesday November 22nd I made it to the Elebash Theater at the Graduate Center at CUNY for the most recent installment of Live At 365, the world music series curated by my pal Isabel Soffer. The evening featured Persian vocalist and musician Azam Ali and her band. It was a really magical evening. Ali and her band wove together a concert of lullabies and folk songs from across the middle east, adding in some original compositions with digital effects, backbeat, electric guitar, etc. It as kind of trance-y and mystical, like the kind of music you might expect from an artist on 4AD back in the day when they were all Dead Can Dance spooky and stuff. (I  AM SO OLD!!!!) But anyway – it was a super great night. If you haven’t been you should definitely check it out. The Elebash is a really nice, intimate hall with a great sound system. And like I have said before, Isabel is one of the best programmers in this town. She’s been doing world music for over 20 years, she knows her stuff and she is always bringing it to NYC. Go to Livesounds.org and sign up for her email list so you know what is going on.

Then we had Thanksgiving (I saw the movie Margin Call! So awesome. Check it out) and I even had 2nd Thanksgiving (Thanks Derek and Mary!) and then it was the weekend and I saw another movie (Into The Abyss, also really good) and finished writing that essay that everyone has been reading (thank god!) until we got to Sunday when I went to the Storefront for Art and Architecture to see Harrison Atelier‘s Pharmacore: Architectural Placebo. Fascinating intersection of architecture, design, concept and and choreography (BTW  - who coined the phrase, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”?).  Anyway – the show was choreographed by Silas Riener and performed by Reiner along with other Merce Cunningham Dance Company members Rashaun Mitchell, Jamie Scott and Melissa Toogood. Cunningham dancers are just so darned good! Beautiful to watch, precise, focused, lithe and surprising. I’m not sure what the whole thing was about – something about placebos and the creation of a kind of test/lab environment, with the idea that perhaps the performance we’re watching was referencing an actual performance, but was just a placebo/simulation. Not sure. But it was very cool and the Storefront has all these door/sculpture things that spin around and open onto the street, so people kept stop and staring in. At one point two little girls wandered in, onto the stage, and started looking around trying to figure out what the heck was going on and why these strange people were dancing around! It was funny and added a wonderful layer of accidental intervention to the whole thing. OH! I remember – I wanted to give a special shout-out to Loren Dempster, who did the sound design/music, which was really, really good. He played cell and ran it through his laptop to process the sound and it turned into this lush, rhythmic, tuneful but also distance and sometime dissonant soundscape. Doubleplusgood.

Okay so then it was Monday and now it’s today and I’ve got a lot more work to do. And I’m going to try another big-ass essay on some big-ass idea. Maybe more reviews will come. This week is kind of light, but we’ll try and keep up.

Thanks for reading! Keep the comments coming!!

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An animation still from "Brooklyn Babylon," by artist Danijel Zezelj

Usually doing a preview is tricky business, because–absent an interview–what you’re doing is writing about something you haven’t seen, made by artists you may or may not know much about, with the only information at your disposal the biased press release materials you’ve gotten, some only reviews and interviews, and grainy YouTube clips. But for the upcoming pair of offerings at BAM’s Next Wave Fest (which is picking up steam), a pair of my online colleagues have some great things worth checking out.

First, Phantom Limb. 69°S, which opens Wednesday (seating is limited; call the box-office), is one of the shows that has a lot of buzz, because the puppetry is, well, amazing. Seriously–check out the photos. But what’s more, Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff, the husband-and-wife team behind the company, are well-known artists who’ve left their mark on people in the past, and Rob Weinert-Kendt has a lovely post over at the Wicked Stage recounting his own past interviewing the duo.

Phantom Limb. Photo by Sarah Walker.

“My wife to this day rolls her eyes a bit when I start to go on about the magical ‘puppet people’ and that text-less globe,” he writes. (You’ll have to read the piece to understand the part about the globe.) The occasion for the post is his interview with the pair in Time Out, which you can read here.

Second, and a bit more touching, is Parabasis’s Isaac Butler on Brooklyn Babylon (tickets here), which opens next week. A collaboration between artist Daniejl Zezelj and musician Darcy James Argue, the show is a live-art-meets-video-art performance by the artist supported by Argue’s steampunk jazz-band Secret Society. Not only does it sound cool, but for Butler, who was a “directorial consultant” on the piece, it marks completing a childhood dream.

It is also the culmination of a dream I’ve had since I was in college, to be involved in a directorial capactiy on a show that performs in Next Wave. I’ve had a romantic association with the Brooklyn Academy of Music ever since I was a little kid, when my freaky grandparents gave me Philip Glass cassettes and took me to see The Hard Nut and Twyla Tharp and told me over and over again of this world in New York City. A world where these curious, unclassifiable works of performance happened. A world at that time dominated in their minds by The Kitchen and BAM. As I grew up and got into Steve Reich and Laurie Anderson and all sorts of other performing artists of that period, I realized that all of them connected at some point to BAM.

It became– privately– my brass ring. I never talked about it. In fact, this is the first time I’m disclosing it to anyone, but having a show at BAM has been my idea of what success would mean ever since I was a sophomore in college.

Anyway, both shows look visually fantastic and feature collaborations with great musicians (69°S was developed with Kronos Quartet and features live music from Skeleton Key), so check them out, and read both Rob’s and Isaac’s previews of them: when people like that have such a personal interest in the work, it’s wise to take note.

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Last week I went to see Antonio Zambujo on CUNY’s new Live @ 365 series, curated by Isabel Soffer. We don’t cover a lot of music here at Culturebot, but I loved this concert and I wanted to let people know about this great new series.

Antonio Zambujo is one of the most well-regarded performers of Portuguese Fado in the world. I’m not familiar with the form but it is really beautiful. Zambujo’s voice is stirring and passionate, I have no idea what he was singing about – I don’t speak Portuguese – but he could sing about cheese and I’d be thrilled. His ensemble of musicians is also incredible – Luis Guerreiro plays the Portuguese guitar which is like a small steel 12-string, and it just rings out with these bright, crisp tones; it is very rhythmic but Luis would occasionally cut loose with snake-y solos and little trills and frills here and there that popped up and surprised you. Ricardo Cruz, music director and stand-up double bass player, totally held the whole thing together at the bottom end, also occasionally cutting loose with runs and solos that could be moody or funky, depending on the song. And what really took the whole thing to a new place was Jon Luz on cavaquinho, a small guitar-like instrument mostly used in Brazilian music. He was just out there, making everything from kind of feedback-y tone washes to funky up-beat counter-rhythms. It was incredible.

The Elebash Recital Hall at the Graduate Center at CUNY is a tricky space but it worked really well. It was intimate but spacious and the sound was really clean, clear, well-mixed and well-balanced. I’ve known Isabel Soffer for awhile now and she has great taste and an encyclopedic knowledge of world music. The program she has put together for the new Live@365 series looks stellar and I would encourage you to check out the upcoming shows.

Here’s a video of Antonio Zambujo:

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I went to see Karen O.’s Stop The Virgens at St. Ann’s Warehouse with some trepidation. Friends of mine on the crew told me that the load-in had been a clusterfuck and that major design decisions were made last minute, on the fly. They said the show was kind a glorious mess – too much money, not enough focus or dramaturgy. I have to admit, I was expecting a train wreck. I’m relieved to say that this was not the case. If anything, Stop The Virgens is a fun and exciting, if flawed, early work from an artist who, should she choose to continue this field of exploration, has a lot to say and a lot of talent to share.

I’ll start with the good things – the music was really fantastic. I have only been a casual observer to the rise of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and while I’ve enjoyed what I’ve heard, I’m not by any means a knowledgeable fan. I guess I kind of aged out of the demographic. But the music for this show was delightful – a tuneful mix of post-punk rock-n-roll, sprawling operatic balladry and hip song craft. Karen O. is a great performer – welcoming, engaging, entertaining and emotive, and the chorus of “virgens” added depth and texture to the score. The video design was beautiful, the costumes were well-designed and the overall aesthetic of the experience was, in its own way, immersive and interesting. Yes, the entrance to the event was, I felt, derivative (walking through labyrinthine corridors with “virgens” spookily lurking behind curtains reminded me of Les Freres Corbusier’s Hell House, also at St. Ann’s) and the trope of a collection of young women in blonde wigs felt familiar, if not readily placed. But overall – and especially for this show’s target audience – the environment was moody and intriguing.

For the intended audience of rock fans, unfamiliar with the tropes of contemporary performance, this was a unique and different experience. For those of us who regularly see contemporary performance, new opera and experimental theater, it was familiar territory and from that perspective it raised some interesting questions, not least of which is why do people from other disciplines think that experimental contemporary performance – or New Opera – is somehow easy to create? Maybe that’s not fair, maybe “easy” isn’t the right terminology. What I’m trying to say is that contemporary performance and new opera are legitimate, complicated forms in their own right, and I wonder if the artists involved in this project considered its aesthetic context and precedents.

On the one hand, it was exciting to see a young artist from a mainstream discipline spread her wings into a new form. Karen O. is a rock singer and songwriter with a clear and compelling aesthetic sensibility. I applaud her courage in taking on a new challenge. From my perspective, having seen Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Ridge Theater, etc. etc. etc. with their high profile, high-concept gigs at BAM, it was refreshing to see someone from a new generation venturing into this high art territory. I felt hopeful that a new generation of artists might be positioned to replace the old guard in merging contemporary music and art with performance. There have not been many artists of recent vintage who have managed to breach the walls of the high art castle and Karen O. seems to be leading the charge.

At the same time I was disappointed that the work itself fell so short of my expectations. There was no discernible narrative to speak of  (not that I require narrative, but there was no suggestion that the lack of narrative was intended), the direction and choreography didn’t seem to rise to the level of the music. I found myself wishing that Karen O. had chosen better collaborators, and wondering what her process was in choosing her co-creators. The musicians were great and the band – including Money Mark and a host of others – rocked. They delivered a score that was dynamic, compelling, tuneful and dramatic. As I said the videos and the costumes were imaginative and entertaining. But the directing wasn’t very thoughtful and there was no unifying dramaturgical conceit that allowed the disparate creative elements to exist next to each other in a meaningful, resonant way.

I wonder why an artist known for her stylistic innovation and who is creating a work with a female-centered story would choose to work with such a straightforward, conventional playwright in the Mamet/Shepard vein as a director. I have no animosity to Adam Rapp personally, but I’ve never found his work to be particularly interesting or insightful, I’m kind of under the impression that he’s the “flavor of the month” in a long line of “dudes”, making plays for “dudes”  - another straight white guy with a point to prove.

And I’m curious about the choice of Mariangela Lopez as choreographer. I’ve seen Mariangela’s work before and from my previous experience – and the last show of hers that I saw at Danspace – her style is theatrical in concept but not rigorous in execution. It seems like an odd choice for a project like this.

I would be curious to see what would happen if Karen  O. worked with people who have a track record of developing and producing compelling, cutting-edge, contemporary performance. I imagine her working with directors such as Annie Dorsen, Jay Scheib, Daniel Fish, Lear DeBessonet,  or even  Diane Paulus or Alex Timbers or any of their contemporaries/proteges that are creating work in the space between popular and experimental theater. What if she worked with Faye Driscoll (who has done wonderful choreography for Young Jean Lee, among many others) or Sarah Michelson or Maria Hassabi or Luciana Achugar…I don’t know. There  a lot of adventurous, cutting edge, contemporary choreographers. I’m not slagging Mariangela, I’m just saying that there are other choreographers who are pushing the form a little further, who are a little more rigorous.

And that’s where I return to this question about why people in different disciplines – visual art, popular music – think that making contemporary performance is easy? Once again, I wouldn’t presume to know what any artist is thinking, and I would hope that they don’t think it’s “easy”. But I think about visual art performance from folks like Shana Moulton who make a big splash doing performance in a visual art context but seem to consider choreography, dramaturgy, direction and presentational aesthetics as an afterthought.

If I started a band and didn’t know my influences or anything that came before me, I’d be laughed out of the room. If I were a visual artist who didn’t situate my work in the larger context of contemporary visual art, I wouldn’t be given the time of day. But it seems like artists are willing to make theater, or new opera, or contemporary performance, with inadequate knowledge of the history of the forms or the current talent pool and expect that it will be equally compelling.

If you want to make new opera or contemporary performance – and if you call your work an opera, then that is pretty clearly your goal – if you want to translate your work as a popular musician into a new field of endeavor, then it behooves you to do your research, to think about what you are trying to create and how it fits into a musical, theatrical and historical lineage. It behooves you to dream big, to imagine contextualizing your work in the tradition of the Grand Investigations with Big Ideas – learn what has preceded you, play off of it, and collaborate with people who are playing on the same level as you.

I’d be curious to know how this collaborative team was developed, what the dramaturgical and development process was and whether they felt that they achieved what they set out to do.

Like I said, I was excited to see a young artist like Karen O. stretch her wings, push her boundaries and take on an ambitious new project. The music – the part she knows best – was a big success, and I hope she does more. But I would be even more excited for her to take it really seriously, to collaborate with a dramaturg and sophisticated, knowledgeable practitioners who are already creating work in a contemporary context and who would be able to push her beyond the bounds of the known.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Last Wednesday took us to The Kitchen for Faustin Linyekula’s powerful new work more more more…future. The piece explores the sociopolitical landscape of Linyekula’s native Democratic Republic of Congo by juxtaposing visceral, muscular choreography with revolutionary poems by Antoine Vumilia Muhindo and an aggressive, layered score by Flamme Kapaya – a major star in his home country – which is played live by his band.

The piece takes as its starting place the native pop/party music of Congo, known as Ndomobolo. It is high-energy, melodic and celebratory, known for inspiring dancers to states of intoxication and transport. Linyekula establishes early on, by projecting Muhindo’s apocalyptic poetry onto the back wall, that this music is the soundtrack of a people dancing on the edge of destruction.

The music is really what propels this piece and creates the context for everything else that unfolds. Kapaya is an amazingly talented guitarist and composer, he and his band do an incredible job of transitioning between diverse musical styles and creating sonic environments for the dancer/actors. Starting with the light, nimble fretwork of Ndomobolo, they gradually move into a single, heavy metal repeated power chord that turns into an aggressive assault bordering on punk rock. This transitions into a propulsive jazz/funk kind of bass and drums rhythm with trippy guitar soloing on top – and then back again into the heavy metal/punk sound. The singers, too, move from style to style seamlessly – and it is exciting to hear them move from soulful singing to full-on growling spoken word. We feel intuitively how these seemingly disparate forms tap into similar impulses. You can groove to the sounds and rhythms of the whole show but you also feel the intensity and power driving you forward.

The dancers feel it too. They enter shirtless in basic black  but soon put on these strangely-shaped puffy shirts, one fabricated from shopping bags, one from what looks like Euros, and the other one I couldn’t quite make out. They start with simple, smallish moves but gradually expand out into sinuous, athletic and aggressive movement patterns. They seem to be blending little bits of “traditional” dance with popular dance and contemporary movement, embodying the tension between worlds that is The Congo. They look like they are dancing at the apocalypse, summoning up the spirits of the End Times and struggling against forces much stronger than them and beyond their control.

The poems projected on the back wall are broken into sections – many of them titled after Nietzche, “Twilight of the Idols”, “Thus Sang Zarathustra” – which lends a certain structure and point of reference. Sometimes, to me, it seemed a little heavy handed, but overall it spoke to the ideological and political ambition of the work – they’re shooting to engage with big ideas and create an epic experience, tying the plight of Congo into the wider tide of history.

Towards the end of the piece the words projected onto the wall read, “You Deserve A Future” – and this is the point of the piece. Congo doesn’t need media-generated pity, it doesn’t need false promises and it shouldn’t ignore its situation by just dancing. The people of Congo need a future, a vision to live towards, they deserve it. It is interesting, then, that at this point the ensemble make their way upstage to a corner in a dim pool of light where they perform an extended sequence of what I believe was traditional a capella Congolese folk song, complete with guttural interjections and syncopated handclaps. At the same time they are calling out for a future they are referencing the past, something original, something unique, something culturally specific and tied to their heritage. It is a beautiful moment.

After that section they return to the main part of the stage for, almost, a reprise of the Zarathustra section which leads into a film projected on the back wall of clouds floating by on a bright blue sky. Faces emerge from the clouds and we eventually see a group portrait of the artists themselves, which fades back into the blue, leaving us looking at the sky and dreaming. Thus ends this intense dance/music journey.

I didn’t know what to expect going into the show, having never seen Linyekula’s work before. I was surprised and delighted to be so moved and engaged. Really amazing work from a too-little known part of the world.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Back in the 90′s (I know, it isn’t fair to start out that way) I remember seeing David Clement playing at all kinds of clubs, both solo and with his band. He has always been a gifted song writer and performer. (In addition to his own tunes I remember he did a fantastic cover of the B-52′s “Give Me Back My Man“).

Well I don’t get out as much these days but David Clement is still making work – writing, singing performing and collaborating on new projects. This video for his new song “Drinking Buddy” features the vocal stylings of Marylouise Burke. But what makes it extra cool is it was directed by Kaz Phillips Safer, an artist in her own right and wife of one of downtown theater’s nicest bad boys, Dan Safer (who also appears in the video). Check it out here:

Popularity: 4% [?]

Zut Alors! That’s pretty much all I have to say. I know I should write a thoughtful treatise on how Xavier Le Roy, working with avant-garde composer Helmut Lachenmann, courageously undermines the very notion of dance and music by questioning what it means for us to “look” and “listen” and “move”. But really the experience of watching More Mouvements für Lachenmann was pretty brutal.

No, that’s not entirely true.

The first piece, “Pression”, was for one cellist and it was interesting in that kind of “I’m going to use my instrument as an object” kind of way. I assume Le Roy choreographed it a bit as the cellist, Andreas Lindenbaum, moved in a rather stylized way as he brutalized his instrument. Making different sounds from a breathy, scratchy whisper to almost unbearable screeching, Lindenbaum provoked the cello beyond the bounds of “music”. At one point the lights slowly faded and he played for awhile in the dark – which was quite nice, actually. His control of the instrument was impressive, especially given its unorthodox use. And the tension between interesting noise and excruciating racket was kind of interesting. If mostly for the relief you felt when it got quiet again. But overall the piece was pretty cool.

The second piece, “Salut fur Caudwell” had a simple, clever conceit. Four guitarists entered the stage and two of them were then hidden behind black boxes. Those two – hidden from view – actually played their guitars while the other two guitarists sat in front and pretended to play their guitars. It was entertaining to see the movement divorced from the music, especially when the movement became exaggerated, fanciful or unreal. And the “music” – basically more of the musique concrete style of using instruments in nontraditional ways – was less abrasive, mostly, than the previous piece.

But the third piece, mon dieu! Entitled “Gran Torso” it was, um, well, basically a mime piece. Or something. To be honest I kind of blocked it from my mind. The entire ensemble of eight musicians came out and, with music stands in front of them, started to play some musique concrete. Then they would get to a point in the music where they would just sit and stare at the audience (kind of an old trick at this point, the whole audience/performer silent confrontation thing) and then eventually they stopped playing at all and just made gestures and arm movements. For, like, FOREVER!!! I mean I really don’t remember. I kept nodding off and then waking up and then watching and nodding off and waking up. I could feel everyone around my chafing. It was excruciating!! Intellectually I can appreciate the exploration and decontextualization of found movement and the idea of questioning our assumptions about the nature of experience as related to “hearing” music and “seeing” dance and blah de blah blah blah. But OMG. Ouch.

After the show I saw a friend of mine – oh and everyone who is anyone was there tonight – who lamented that it must have been awfully disappointing to the musicians to not be allowed to actually, you know, play their instruments! I couldn’t agree more. Hey I’m all for new music and the avant-garde, but dude, really? But then again – I don’t get Jacques Tati either. (M. Hulot is NOT FUNNY!)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Susan Marshall & Company celebrated its 25th anniversary last weekend with a pair of works using both performance spaces at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. The company is at New Haven’s Festival of Arts and Ideas (curated by Cathy Edwards) with versions of both works opening tomorrow and running through Saturday.

On opening night at BAC, Frame Dances was a live-feed video and movement installation performed in the Howard Gilman Performance Space at 7pm and Adamantine, a 2009 concert dance work, followed in the Jerome Robbins Theater at 8. Both works were originally commissioned by Peak Performances @ Montclair. The 2008 Frame Dances, with video design and projections by Ryan Holsapple and Roderick Murray, builds upon a charming section from Marshall’s Bessie-winning 2006 Cloudless. The video (without a live-performance-feed) of that work began the evening, priming the audience for the ensuing material -  images of bodies negotiating confined space, set to evocative music selections by the delightful Peter Whitehead, before Sandstone, a dirty duet for Joseph Poulson and Kristin Hollinsworth performed live in a sandbox frame, presented them with the dueling realities of process and product. The pristine detachment of the mediated images do not reflect the messy, human labor and effort involved in generating them. The videos define a single perspective and offer no peripheral information. When a dancer is out of the frame, they are absent – visually and artistically; however, for the various audience members encircling the live performers for Sandstone and its companions Green Green Grass and Forward, the dancers outside the box provide a very animated, ontological element. We can still see them there, standing just outside the camera’s purview. Their existence – being “one who is just about to enter” or “one who has just left” – provides the audience with a constant presence that isn’t weighted as heavily in the resulting images. Their proximity offers the dirty, giggly, sweaty truth behind the slick images. Green Green Grass, in particular, is a chaotic circus on the outside, full of a large, multi-generational group of players continually changing Mary Kokie McNaughter’s costumes. The constant rush of off-camera quick-changes, the negotiation of one young boy’s shift out of his wheelchair, through the frame and back into his wheelchair, and the rapid pulling and piling of the in-frame choreography make a playful performance work and the working of the convention of performance into play. There outside the edges, we see a kind of barn-raising communal effort of shared responsibility and care. The resulting video is so tightly executed and glossy that it seems ripe for a color copier ad that fleetingly hints at those values while in pursuit of an assembly line of bodies. In fact, I’m surprised it wasn’t ripped off in the time it takes to say Improv Everywhere versus T-Mobile.

Adamantine is a multimedia work featuring live music by Peter Whitehead (with Elton Bradman), sound design by Jane Shaw, costumes by Olivera Gajic, and shadowy projections courtesy of Mark Stanley. Her company of impressive dancers Kristen Hollinsworth, Luke Miller, Joseph Poulson, Petra van Noort, and Darrin Wright with newest member Ildiko Toth put forth an impressive effort, but Adamantine notably lacks the kind of luster or edge that its title promises. The work definitely hammers away at the viewer with repeated images and an often pounding industrial score, but lacks in the ethereal wonder of Cloudless, the raucous intimacy of Sawdust Palace, and in general, the signature wit of a widely acclaimed artist (other than Whitehead’s charming on-stage moments) whose investigations seem stunted here. The work was developed during a residency in Montclair’s Alexander Kasser Theater, and in keeping with Marshall’s process includes sequences inspired by items the company found in the space. However, it’s hard to call Marshall a found object artist, too many of the material items being played with don’t accumulate beyond moments of gimmickry into a cohesive idea. And, other than Hollinsworth’s luscious swaying moments standing over an underlit floor fan or steaming under a low-hung lamp with Miller, there are few opportunities to enjoy her company as the fascinating individuals they are. For a work touted as in intersection of dance, sound design, visual art, and theater, Adamantine feels like standard concert dance fare.

Popularity: 4% [?]