Photo by Pavel Antonov

Downstage-right on Malgorzata Szczesniak’s marvelous set–which has all the tyrannical lines of a de Chirico painting, without the calming perspective shifts–sits a large, claw-foot bathtub surrounded by a translucent white shower curtain that extends all the way up to the rigging. During the suggestive moments of Festen that play out in this space, it’s lit from directly above, creating a sort of ghostly silhouette of the performer. And indeed, in this very tub, it’s revealed, a woman recently committed suicide. So the suggestion of the supernatural is intended. It’s a pregnant image, employed variously throughout the production, and–if you haven’t seen the film the play is based on–you find yourself expecting again and again for a ghost to emerge. Which seems to happen more than once. Except, it doesn’t. There are no ghosts (other than the metaphorical sort) in this play. Rather, in a clever bit of stage-magic, the presentation contorts itself into something that appears to be surreal only to reveal that really, it’s all a matter of realism and convention (how else, after all, do you light a closed bathtub?).

It’s really a perfect metaphor for what makes Festen, from TR Warszawa, one of Poland’s top contemporary theaters (playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse through April 29; tickets $55-$75) so compelling: Everything that you see onstage is, indeed, happening within the action. This is a completely realist play, and no matter how odd–a roomful of people nonchalantly ignoring gross accusations, people circling one another on all-fours like dogs preparing to mate–it is in fact happening. There’s no broad, un-realistic theatrical metaphor. It’s just so odd that, within the play, you are at first tempted to assume that the production is using broad metaphor rather than verisimilitude. But that very ambiguity is itself a metaphor for the central drama of the action: A father, on his sixtieth birthday, is confronted by one of his children (the twin of a sister who committed suicide in the wake of years of abuse) with his past as a child molester. No one believes the son, Christian (Andrzej Chyra), of course, and choose simply to ignore his outburst (delivered as a part of anecdotal toast). Which, upon reflection, isn’t a particularly unbelievable response (witness 50 years of child abuse known and tolerated by the Catholic church). It’s a trick as old as A Turn of the Screw.

Magdalena Cielecka in the bathtub setting. Photo by Pavel Antonov

All of which is actually quite fitting, given Festen‘s provenance being the first film produced under the tenets of Dogme 95, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s (the latter of whom directed Festen) anti-Hollywood manifesto. By rejecting the stylistics of post-production, soundtrack, and special effects in favor of just what you can capture live on camera, the movement at first blush suggests a return to grounded realism. Except that, of course, someone like Von Trier is hardly interested in social realism for its own sake. Instead, the rejection of the sorts of techniques filmmaking traditionally uses to create the world of its action forced filmmakers to re-orient themselves toward the actor and expose the convention–the sort of technique Von Trier would later employ in works like Dogville (the 151st Dogme 95 film). The what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach to filmmaking wasn’t ultimately a rejection of film’s ability to create larger, more abstract metaphorical effects, but rather a way of re-focusing the creators on the means by which they create them.

The story and characters in Festen are extremely conventional, even predictable. A family is gathering for dad’s birthday at the hotel that is the source of the family’s wealth. As the play opens, Christian, now a chef but shockingly passive and emotionally distant, dressed in a dapper dark suit, is directing the staff in the preparations as his youngest sibling Michael (Marek Kalita) lounges about. Michael is a classical ne’er-do-well, dressed in loud clothes painfully out of keeping with the atmosphere, and is something of a loser in desperate need of money. He and his wife Mette (Agnieszka Podsiadlik)–equally tacky and déclassé–coasted in on fumes with their two children, and can’t even afford gas to leave. His father’s indulgence in his ongoing excesses ensures Michael’s support throughout. Michael and Christian’s sister Helene (Danuta Stenka) is a classically rebellious daughter, who’s strayed far from the family’s expectations (studying anthropology, rather than pursuing the service industry as the dutiful Michael has) and who serially dates black men to provoke her family. One of the few outright bits of comedy in the show is her boyfriend Gbatokai (Carlos Ferreira), a terribly handsome man (the last scene features him wandering about shirtless, to the endless fascination of the women), who, though subjected to endless racial taunts, is the moral center of the play, the only truly good and untainted character. The plot turns on the revelations within Michael’s twin sister’s suicide note, hidden in a room and uncovered by Helene through the mechanism of a shared childhood game.

Director Grzegorz Jarzyna, one of the most respected younger artists in Poland (he’s the artistic director of TR Warszawa, which has long presented the work of René Pollesch), rather brilliantly translates to the stage in his play of Festen. Jarzyna doesn’t reject the language of the stage as Dogme 95 did film, but he certainly plays against type: Polish theater in particular is marked by a directorial willingness to engage in big metaphor. Audiences enter the theater with the expectation of seeing something that takes as its mandate something bigger than an attempt to realistically translate a story onto the story.  But in Festen, the very convention of this sort of theater is twisted around to surprise the audience’s expectations. When Christian accuses his father publicly of molesting him, and he’s ignored, we wonder what we’re supposed to make of it. Was it imaginary? Was this what Christian wanted to do but didn’t? Or if not, is the rest of the dinner party’s willingness to directly ignore his statement a broad theatrical metaphor for society’s unwillingness to grapple with child abuse? The answer is of course neither.

Shortly thereafter (but long enough to keep the audience wondering if the other guests actually heard what Christian said, and questioning whether the world onstage is symbolic or realist), the mother, Else (played with empathetic dignity by Ewa Dalkowska) rises to give another toast, in which she gently recalls Christian’s history of emotional instability and “fabrications,” and chastises him not to keep “making up” stories. Now the audience can read the nonplussed response to Christian’s allegations a different way: Is he insane, a serial fabricator? Perhaps everyone just expects these sorts of outbursts?

The terrible truth, though, is that everyone in the room has actually just reacted the exact same way Else herself did when, years before, she walked in on her husband Helge (Jan Peszek, who has the charisma and looks of a slightly younger Silvio Berlusconi, without the hints of trashy excess) raping her children: they simply ignore it.

For the audience, Festen presents a growing challenge as it unfolds in an increasingly boozy, fantastical fashion. Namely, the audience is continually surprised to discover that no matter how unrealistic what they’re seeing onstage is, it is, in fact, the result of a sort of cognitive dissonance produced by the sheer shock of child molestation. It may seem surreal that a group of people would simply ignore the accusation of rape by a beloved family member, but it’s in fact sadly quite real. How else to explain the actions of someone like Mike McQueary, the Penn State football intern who walked in on Jerry Sandusky raping a child in the shower, and only reported it the next day–and even then not to the police.

Jarzyna’s brilliance as a director is in translating the original film’s play against our expectations–that the reality is so contrary to our expectations of our own, and thereby others,’ behavior–into the language of the stage, where any semblance of Dogme 95′s WYSIWYG filmmaking is impossible given the facticity of the theater itself. Suggestive imagery (like the bathtub/ghost provocation) are revealed to be nothing more than the result of standard theatrical practice. In a winking nod, no doubt, to Dogme 95′s prohibition against non-diegetic music (which the original film respected), the play features both incidental live music as well as a soundtrack over the PA. He invites us into a world of broad theatrical metaphor only to reveal its similarity to our own depressing reality, the aesthetic of metaphorical language collapsing into a shocking and deranging realism.

My guest and I left the theater for intermission profoundly shaken and surprised, she perhaps more than I (she’d never seen the film; I couldn’t remember it) because she’d spent the day watching gritty realist films of, er, child molestation and other similar crime at a festival. (The intermission comes extraordinarily late in the evening, two hours in, after the climax, and simply sets up the denouement; there’s perhaps 15 minutes of action left upon re-entering.) Festen is not an easy play to experience, but it is a moving one. By the next morning, the initial shock of my own implication in questioning the accusation of child sex abuse gave way to the sense of relief to have experienced a truly solid piece of theater. Jarzyna’s work is top-notch, no caveats attached. This is a phenomenal play–not aesthetically revolutionary, perhaps, but benchmark-worthy–that should not be missed.

Popularity: 2% [?]

It’s seldom that the description of a piece embeds itself verbatim in my memory, but this was the case with the cleverly penned tagline for BLOOM! Dance Collective’s piece CITY: “a political pamphlet entwined with movement.” Over the next three weeks, the acclaimed Budapest and London-based collective will be touring limited runs of its Rudolf Laban award winner to New York and Pennsylvania. Tomorrow night, they bring CITY to Abrons Art Center, followed by performances in Philadelphia (May 3–4), presented by Thirdbird at Arts Bank, and in Pittsburgh as part of the newMoves Festival (May 10–13) at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater. On the eve of their NYC premiere, BLOOM! members Moreno Solinas and Igor Urzelai discuss the piece, upcoming projects, and the defamiliarizing effects of comedic spectacle.

CITY will be held at Abrons Art Center Friday, April 27, and Saturday, April 28, at 8pm. Tickets are $15 and are available through the Abrons box office by calling 212-352-2101 or visiting www.abronsartscenter.org.

Mashinka Firunts: A characteristic commonly ascribed to your work is the successful simultaneous negotiation of politicized content and elements of hyper-comedic slapstick, which is a slippery tightrope to tread for many artists. What are some of the ways in which you navigate that territory?

Igor Urzelai: I think we address important issues in CITY, issues that are familiar to most individuals in contemporary society. However, as we are constantly reminded about the seriousness of many matters in our everyday lives, we often end up getting used to these issues and tend to forget about them; or not being very responsive to them. That is why when we are invited to laugh about an issue sometimes we react in a more effective way, it can bring up mixed feelings and invite us to think. But humour is essential to cope with what is hard to us as individuals and in society and when laughing about something that matters to us we are also laughing at ourselves, which can be very constructive.

Moreno Solinas: Humour is central to our work because it is a valuable tool to connect with the audience. It is a delicate territory though, and it needs to be well measured and timed in order to be effective. Our work deals with universal issues, which would be easy to overdramatise. Treating them with sense of humour allows us to defend them whilst having perspective over them.

MF: CITY is described as a ‘political pamphlet’ centering on social inequality and the ways in which systems of power function in urban contexts. What are the strategies you employ to address these issues through vocabularies of movement?

IU: Movement is rarely exempt of meaning though, and at BLOOM! we like embracing that. Also we make use of as many theatrical elements available to shape our ideas. Dance is our background and our field of choice as artists, but often an idea comes from a visual image or from a text; none of these elements has primacy over another, but rather they support each other to help us deliver our ideas and our choreography as clearly as possible to the viewer.

MS: In BLOOM!’s work movement is always regarded as a medium which carries meaning. As humans we constantly communicate with each other through our bodies: the distance between people can tell you whether they are individuals or whether they are forming a group; someone’s focus emphasises the direction of his/her actions; gestures and facial expressions carry meaning too. This seems to me our ground to build choreography.

In CITY there are also references to iconic images of dictatorship and abuse, which our audiences might have encountered in other forms such as cinema, visual arts and popular culture in general. On top of this, we used text to sharpen our message and to be able to reflect upon our work within the work itself.

MF: Your press materials emphasize that CITY is at once a work of dance and theater. How do you see these genres converging in the piece?

MS: The five co-choreographers of CITY share a background in contemporary dance, therefore dance is the prevalent language we use. Igor was also trained in dramatic arts and this – combined with the interest of all of us in delivering a clear message – brought text into the work. We also pay special attention to the way we perform the work: it is important that our actions are not mechanic – unless they are meant to be so for the purpose of a specific scene; as performers we always look for a connection between intentions and actions.

IU: It is often very hard to find the line between dance and theatre, and often impossible. Both contemporary dance and contemporary theatre feed each other constantly, often moving towards each other as art forms and jumping that line from both sides. It’s a blurry place with a long history that we now call physical theatre. When it comes to BLOOM! I like thinking that all performance elements have room in the studio whether they be dance, theatre, music, etc. and the final result we come up with is choreography because that is what we know, it’s our field of expertise. I think that mastering and being able to apply as many other theatrical elements is important in our work.

MF: BLOOM! is self-described as a collective. How would you articulate your approach to collaborative production and the way that individual versus collective processes of authorship operate in the creation of your pieces?

MS: Working collaboratively is a very rich territory for creation: we start from the belief that many minds working on a piece are better than one single mind. There are always plenty of ideas and as we all have different strengths the final result is refined on many layers through the work of each component. On the other hand collaboration can be very challenging: the process is often slow, which can be frustrating for some artists, and in some cases it can be hard to reach an agreement. You need the right combination of characters and a shared taste for this kind of process to work successfully; and it is very satisfying to get to a final result which we all feel strongly about.

IU: When an idea or concept is proposed in the studio with BLOOM!, then the idea becomes part of the collective mind. That means that everyone involved is welcome to develop this idea/concept and this way we often get to places that you couldn’t predict beforehand. Individual authorship is different, it’s harder to surprise yourself, whereas in a collective context ideas are constantly challenged.

MF: You’re currently working on The End is Near. Your (wonderfully witty) description for the piece identifies it as an attempt “to deconstruct the multiple facets of the hero” and to navigate “between countries, between languages and between egos.” What are the claims you’ll be making about individual talent and notions of the artist-genius in the work, and how do they refer back to your collective practice?

IU: For The End Is Near we were a bigger group in the studio. That meant we had more possibilities and more to deal with. Egos are often what can make the collaborative process tricky, and there are times that we do have to deal with them. When working in a group is also important to try and not to lose our individualities, but that happens every day in and out of the studio anyway. That is probably one of the constants in this piece.

We all had different understandings of what ‘hero’ meant very much affected by our backgrounds, and it was very interesting to find a place for all of them. In the piece we wanted to highlight the individual and make it important for reasons that we wouldn’t normally think of as ‘heroic’, this way questioning binary values often given for granted in our society and that don’t let us see beyond them.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Ian Daniel is organizing an event on Thursday, April 26th (7pm-12am) called Apocalyptic Shift that combines music, video, technology and performance to create a digital landscape of dystopia. This is going to happen at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (540 W 21st St.) where artist Mary Mattingly has been in residence, literally, living there as part of her Flock House Project.

There are a bunch of great artists involved incuding Yoshi Sodeoka, Sabrina Ratte, Max Hattler, Sara Ludy and Daniel Givens as well as the bands Young Magic, Warm Ghost, Chrome Canyon, and DJs Saheer Umar/BLVCK AMERICA.

Here’s some words that Ian sent me that I cut and pasted together and I’m not sure if they make sense:

In order to survive in a hyper-mediated and delirious world, mobility, reuse, and appropriation are essential. Apocalyptic Shift is inspired by Mary Mattingly’s Flock House project, a microsphere of orbiting habitats that move around massive urban architecture. This night reimagines urban geographies and repurposes the Happening. Apocalyptic Shift turns Eyebeam into an immersive environment and creates new visions for a post-industrial landscape, combining music, video, technology and performance to create a digital landscape of dystopia.

More info? check out eyebeam.org or facebook

Sounds like fun! We’re going to try and be there. Also, Flock House will be touring the city this summer with two stops in Manhattan as part of the River To River Festival! So even if you can’t make the party, make a donation!

Popularity: 2% [?]

“Giant Yves Klein All Out Attack” – Dan Safer, Mike Mikos wrestling in paint at Exit Art as part of Culturebot’s “Ephemeral Evidence” project.

Giant Yves Klein All Out Attack from Andy Horwitz on Vimeo.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Rather than subject ourselves to an outside interviewer, Andy and I decided to interview each other, as collaborators. We felt that this was in keeping with the idea of our piece, COME OVER TO OUR PLACE: that conversation is key. We wanted to create a profile in the form of a conversation. This conversation took place via google chat, the best way to create an archived transcript that I know of. – Chloe Bass

9:06 PM  

Andy: ready?

Chloë: ready.

9:07 PM 

Andy: So, Saturday at Exit Art will be our first collaboration. It seems fitting that it should be about food, community and conversation. Tell me a little bit about your practice and how this project intersects with it….

9:09 PM 

Chloë: I was actually really captivated by something that you said to me earlier this afternoon: that bringing people together to talk is your artistic practice. That’s the work you make. In some ways, I think this has been true of me as well, and food is one of the ways that’s easiest to bring people together. We all eat. We all know what to do in the context of sharing a meal. So it’s a nice place to start: people feel comfortable, not like they’re “doing art.”

9:10 PM 

Andy: I agree. For me what’s really exciting about this moment is that there seems to be this endless possibility to contextualize every day life as Art and creative practice. It seems like before the idea of “praxis of everyday life” was very academic and self-conscious, but now it is about sacralizing the everyday.

9:11 PM 

Chloë: Or making it strange.

Andy: or calling attention to it

Chloë: I like to bring people together for something they think they understand, and then turning the tables.

(probably not literally)

(probably)

9:12 PM 

Andy: yeah. i love what happens when disparate people come into proximity and engage and I love creating space for open communication and interaction, trying to subvert the frameworks of power and hierarchy food is a great equalizer. so are nametags, too, kind of.

Chloë: nametags?

9:14 PM 

Andy: you know, that feeling of like “we don’t know each other” b/c you’re at some generic networking function? it is very pedestrian but it is also equalizing. it alleviates some of the “don’t you know who I am” or the “you’re not one of the 25 people I see at every opening” vibe…

I’m joking, a little bit.

9:15 PM 

Chloë: I did a piece last year with my collaborator TJ Hospodar called Boardroom Bed & Breakfast. We “performed” (mostly on the web, at boardroombb.com) as a company hosting retreats for corporations. We did stage one complete photoshoot for a conference that never happened, mostly focusing on capturing conference ephemera. A lot of our design time went into the creation of nametags and programs.

9:16 PM 

Andy: i love the ephemera of business – it is eloquent and sad.

Chloë: Again, it’s about bringing in what’s familiar. Putting nametags on people makes them familiar in two ways: first, you know the person’s name. Second, it’s a situation where it’s normal for people to wear nametags — we know what to do there.

9:17 PM 

Andy: yes, the familiar. i think if we start from the familiar and tweak it, we can move more readily into the unfamiliar and theoretical and “meta” – we have this common vocabulary of social interaction that allows us to establish connection and then move outwards

Chloë: absolutely. I hate work that starts with the meta. I think the meta is meaningless without the everyday.

9:20 PM 

Andy: i agree. i think that is the beauty of the web, to be honest. is that because of hyperlinking it is almost inherently “meta” so you can develop a language, a vernacular, that skews towards the pedestrian and familiar, yet explicitly entwined in that are literal pathways to the meta-conversation, the additional information.

9:21 PM 

Chloë: it’s also very elitist. hyperlinking is like the ultimate footnote.

Andy: that’s why I always try to find a balance in my writing and, generally, in communication, that is personable and approachable, but provides access to the more esoteric if you want it.

Chloë: but we think of it as totally accessible.

Andy: how so?

Chloë: hyperlinking allows a writer to reference something without explaining it — just “link out” — in the way that we generally use footnotes in text. but heavily footnoted text is deeply coded as academic, inaccessible, etc. yet look at something really lowest common denominator, maybe people.com. every page is full of hyperlinks, assuming and building a body of knowledge.

9:24 PM 

Andy: i think this kind of raises the issue of “fact-knowledge” vs. comprehension/reflection and modes of cognition. There are probably many people who acquire tons of “information” and raw data that doesn’t necessarily resonate or have implications beyond its facticity (is that a word?) Is it elitist to suggest that some ways of knowing or some information is more valuable than others?

9:25 PM 

Chloë: not really. i think it depends what you do with your knowledge. i was also trying to think of footnoting as almost a form of hospitality. it’s like an invitation: enter into my world! read deeper! and i think that the depth of things can really vary. for example, the links on people.com often lead you in a kind of circular direction. i would say that’s less useful than linking out and out and out again. if you know what i mean.

9:27 PM 

Andy: i do. i like the idea that a link is an invitation to explore and share. and sometimes a link is a question, like “I found this but want to know more!” – breadcrumbs on the trail of the quest for wisdom

9:28 PM 

Chloë: “come into my world” is a nice invitation. “come into my labyrinth” is a scary one.

Andy: well that’s a psychology question, i think. some people’s worlds are labyrinthine, some people’s are more Edenic. it is not the invitation so much as it is who is inviting….

Chloë: so when we say “come over to our place,” what are we asking?

Andy: well, it is a physical place as much as anything…

9:30 PM 

Chloë: I had originally conceived of it as drawing the line between the hospitality of a bar or restaurant and the hospitality of a house. What different kinds of conversations are enabled, what do we expect to do, how do we expect to feel in each of those spaces.

9:32 PM 

Andy: I think for me, there are a couple of things at work. One is the idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, for a few hours we are creating a place this is “ours” but is also shared – it is definitely more of a house than a restaurant. It is a space given over to conversations about art and life and, in keeping with the themes of the show, ephemerality. I hope we can bring people together to consciously engage with each other and model a certain kind of interaction and thoughtfulness.

9:34 PM 

Chloë: sure. and perhaps another important delineation here is what we can ask of people. in a space that’s “ours,” we can set the ground rules. whereas in a space that’s “public,” in the way that a bar is public, there’s an assumption that we all just try to get along. the rules are a little more abstract and just have to do with basic good behavior, not depth of interaction. to do this within a gallery space is interesting, though. i think galleries usually ask for about the same kind of conduct as bars, in terms of people speaking to each other.

9:35 PM 

Andy: yes, I think galleries tend to enforce, by their nature, a kind of formality and distance. I’d like to break that a bit.

Chloë: and there’s a kind of safety, a kind of knowing what’s going on. if you’re of a certain cultural demographic, you go into a gallery and you know what to do. just like going to the bank. (this is a pretty elitist position.)

9:37 PM 

Andy: yeah. but from hanging at Exit Art I actually have been getting a much different, much more welcoming vibe. I feel – and maybe this is partly due to the 30 year retrospective show that is hanging next to our space – that we’re in the company of some great voices and spirits that historically rejected that attitude. I feel like we’re part of a conversation that has become harder to maintain in NYC but all the more important for it – art as place for community, communion and communication, not commerce.

9:38 PM 

Chloë: definitely important. I don’t want that conversation to become some kind of ghost, in the way that Exit Art as a space will become a ghost not so long from now. i mean there’s a difference between the ephemeral and the ghostly. it’s small but important.

Andy: true… but ghosts are the persistence of the past into the presence in some ways.

i don’t know

9:40 PM 

I saw the Merce Cunningham Company show at the Armory in December and I had this flash that (and yes I’ve taken hallucinogens) the dance is always there, the movement, the sound, the rhythm…. and that it manifests in space/time for a moment, coalesces and vanishes again. I feel that way about a lot of art, music, etc. Ghosts are just momentary manifestations of things that persist and are waiting to be embodied again at the right moment by the right people.

Chloë: that sounds kind of buddhist. But the buddhists are also big into hospitality of a certain ephemeral yet rooted nature, to my understanding. the body is important. feeding the body. speaking to the body.

Andy: yes well I don’t know a lot about buddhism, but i believe in treating the body well, in this life, now.

9:43 PM 

Chloë: i’m actually making a cake right now. is that weird?

Andy: mmm. that sounds good. what are we having Saturday?

Chloë: does it change the way you feel about the conversation, knowing that i’m making a cake?

Andy: not at all.

Chloë: we’re not having cake on Saturday.

Andy: darn. well i’m excited. i’m looking forward to it. I was telling you today that I never cook for myself so I kind of feel like this is a rare opportunity for me to participate in a group effort that involves cooking. and beer. Kind of a like Passover but, you know, without the really long story and family drama.

Chloë: you never know! we are inviting a number of people who i’m sure could tell some excellent long stories . . .

Andy: that’s true! I would love to hear a long story. Or a good-tempered but heated disagreement.

9:48 PM 

Chloë: i think actually all of this does build on the family drama idea in a good way: bringing together people with a sense of a connected and ongoing lineage, and discussing that lineage, even in its problematic elements. performative, but non-theatrical. everyone has roles. i’m looking forward to it!

Andy: me too!

9:49 PM 

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve been asked to cover the QMAD (Queens Media Arts Development) performance art festival ITINERANT for Culturebot, awesome.

A bit of background before we get crankin; QMAD, launched in 2005, is a not for profit arts organization based in Queens to produce and implement arts and communications media programs and encourage Queen’s multicultural communities to actively participate in forging an artistic identity for the borough.  Hector Canonge, one of the QMAD founders, initiated ITINERANT in May 2011 as Queens’ first performance art mini-festival with the objective to bring the borough the Contemporary Performance Art of a handful of Queens-based artists and artists from NYC at large. Hector doesn’t have a specific intent for how ITINERANT fits within the family of performance art venues and programs/festivals but he believes ITINERANT has it’s own characteristics and approach as far as presentation.  And while I could feel this lack of specificity in the festival arrangement and curatorial intent, ITINERANT is young and growing and is providing the platform and space for more performance artists to share their work with the possibility of a broader/broadening audience, and that is awesome.

I arrived late to Grace Exhibition Space on April 6.  It was 8:45pm-ish and Hector was in the process of leading a cheer and tacking letters on paper to the gallery wall. “Give me a A.” (insert weak response from audience here) :::STAPLE:::  “Give me a N” etc. I paid a donation ($10 suggested at Grace) and made my way to the bar where I grabbed a free beer and readied for the evening’s line up of 12 performers.  I had already passed the Flamenco dancer laying face down on the entryway stairs with feet toward the approaching audience, red carnations placed perfectly crossed on the stairs down to her and a bunch scattered near her hand –I expected 11 more surprises.

Someone garbled speech into the amplification of a megaphone, and  the audience of about 80 people gathered in a semi-circle around a lit area and woman in nice blouse, leggings and socks sitting center.  Sound starts and she starts talking. The sound playing was so loud it was difficult to hear her speak. I tried and then noticed the video playing behind the entry counter in which a woman smeared lipsticks on; she was loving it. Blouse and leggings, which performer was this -  not the first one listed in the program it turned out – the program was not in order of performance, was holding note cards and it seemed for a moment or two that maybe we were listening to a kind of live MadLibs script but she was probably just ‘on book’.  She was talking like a guru in a yoga class for cubical dwellers who want to learn sure fire ways to hook up with others.  There was a bottle of champagne placed on the floor for offer; a man stepped up (I thought he was a plant but his intent on participation showed that he was just a giver later). When the bottle was passed around there was a live unexpected spit take that was thrilling and sprayed the scattered notecards with mouth champagne while the performer gave head to a squeaky unfilled balloon.

Out of 175 local, national and international submissions 45 artists were selected for the 5 week festival via a process of elimination based on the theme of this year’s program; self-reflection and introspection.  Hector clarified, “Selected artists are exploring that theme from the inside out.  Meaning that their performances are not just to create some ‘crazy’ destructive or cute work for the sake of performance (and I have seen so many of those) but a well thought-out piece.”

I heard what I believed to be an Irish accent coming from a woman setting up in front of a black curtain.  She was convivial and introduced herself as Rosalind Murray.  I went over and got a closer seat than I had for the first piece hoping to hear.  She discussed the death of painting, she unpacked a painting in a bag, she illustrated how it sounds like walking on snow, that’s why she loves it, and she told us that we can have this performance art at home (buy the painting in the bag, otherwise known as a drop cloth, for $3 and walk on it).  She had a yellow duck that was a measuring tape and notes on a computer that also made sounds.  I thought of performative essays and their popularity in Europe and she was talking of undiscovered psyche, framing, and (from under a layer of her painting) sleeping on the street.  There was a puddle of champagne from the last performance and I wondered if it was going to get her painting gross, and she packed up the plastic painting and then we all applauded.  A dark haired woman said something in the megaphone, the bar called to the audience.  I asked the videographer/photographer where the next piece would be.  He said, over where the light is on and that he normally documented live bands, but he was having a great time tonight. I was able to find a little folding stool, next to Hugo, so I could stop kneeling on the icky floor.  I felt like I was in the front row of a fashion show.

Arms and legs started coming through the holes in the black curtain.  I thought about the Slipper Room, it was burlesquey and one or two audience peeked backstage to see who the limbs were attached to.  Three ladies came through the black and performed some choreography to a language heavy narritave.  Their moves were object eye candy and the one in the red shoes was disrobing.  There was another inbetween the gallery colums leaning on a saran wrap support until she slowly fell face down on the floor.  She talked about ‘him’ and red shoes laid on the floor and invited the audience to eat cheese off doilies covering her nipples, knees, on a tray over her pelvis.  The cheese went slowly, but when it did, we all applauded.  Megaphone sound came from somewhere over the crowd.  I wondered who these artists all are, what if any clear acknowledgent their names should have attached to their pieces, and why I didn’t bring more paper.  Closer to the bar there was a woman in a blingin’ disco-style goddess robe and headpiece holding candles goddess reciting mantras of positivity and negativity about the honesty of the flux of the mind over new age music.  She called out the present moments of her inner life and said chaos and clarity are illusion.  I thought about social discomfort with spirituality and the different ways I’ve seen ritual and devotion addressed by various contemporary performance artists.

There was a break in the action, or I can’t remember what was happening, and over by the entryway a woman solicited confessions through a tin can phone from the audience.  It’s a pretty set, pretty girl, nice clean uncluttered idea that fits the festivals theme, witty and good design for the eye now and in photos later.  After about 5 confessionals being written on the board, distorted by the difficulty of hearing and understanding, we all applauded.

The audience was about 100 deep at this point in the night and there was a violinist tuning up.  I was sitting there thinking about the density of the way performance art festivals pack in artists performances, always feeling like a Performance Art Fair, a circus sideshow of sorts. I haven’t been to many spaces that give a performer a length of time to have a solo show, and for years have been debating the entertainment vs. art work framing of contemporary performance art – is it just something for your one-off night event or can it be appreciated over time, the ephemeral given space to age and continue a social dialogue.  The lights all went out.  Theirs is a Mac computer, it’s operator, and the violinist lit by the computer screen and then a video. We saw a group in the video, all was dark but a scopes site of light and in that moment of glitch of live and mediated the audience was caught off guard and  people ask is that us, is that live, is that me?  Then I saw cops,  their reflective gear glowing casting an ominous presence on the edges of the masses of non-gear wearing crowd. The post special of flashlight circle seeing in the dark targets specific people, are we at the occupy protests, and asks who’s going to act out.  Is that person dangerous, who is dangerous, is that person going to lash out, is someone going to get hurt, what happens to a group mind, and my mind went with it for a bit and then the reprise in the music shifts and I turn away. Short attention span strikes again and I began to not watch in protest.  The edited non-liveness of video is often experienced via headphones or in separate room in the gallery this was a change in the energy of the space for the night, a bit of a reprieve.

An organizer was on the megaphone making the alarm go off in hopes to corral people to the center.  There was a mirror and some fabric on the floor and some seriously harsh lighting hitting the side of the audience across from me.  A guy began putting on white face and a painted red nose, he had coal dust on the butt of his underwear. Sound played and it was a child’s creepy laughter, I wondered if when he turnd his back on our side of the audience the other side sees something we don’t see, and then I see there is a hairball on the lipstick that he is putting on.  He attacked the standing mirror with his fists.  It shatters but there is no blood from broken glass, and the mirror was tippy and wouldn’t stay stuck in the right position, this is what happens when you have to buy cheap because props are disposable.  He had a great understanding of the theatrical structure or narrative arc, everyone was applauding and then went towards the bar.

An organizer (or helper? Who is it this time?) was trying to silence crowd (they’ve been drinking for hours) over the megaphone and direct them to the last two pieces of the evening.  Was the expectation of the organizer for full focus the expectation of the performer? I wondered how the next performer felt about audience noise and full focus and if the organizer asked them and was trying to meet their wishes.  This performer, Carlos Gonzalez, (I heard someone say his name to him before he begins) was generating a strong energy, and fierce focus.   Once it was go time and he made all the audience stand, picked four and made them enter his stage square and hold out their arms.  His physical energy soon reached fierce level, and sweat begin dripping off him to the floor as he did some martial art like controlled dance, trying to outlast the chosen audience in their ability to hold up their arms.  Other audience members were feeding the chosen few beer, interrupting the energy flow, helping hold up their arms, etc.  At one point the performer pushed them out, took a time out, twice the lights out went out from audience pulling the cord. Disruptions abound, but Carlos had it under control.  I wonder how frustrating that is, or if he expects the disrespect or if as a performer doing silent but powerful energy performance he doesn’t even see it as disrespect.  He is able to acknowledging the audiences focus even when it’s not directed somewhere where he is not looking.  I start to have many judgmental thoughts about non performers performing loudly in public when asked to participate and their hyper awareness and level of comfort in knowing that the eyes may be on them. Eventually Carlos bests all the audience participants.  He is soaked.  We all applauded.

Jill and Hok make some announcements about their upcoming showings at Grace Exhibition Space (they have some fierce artists; stop by on Fridays) and we move on to the last performance of the night.  A black man in a sari like garment and head wrap did some ritual washing and then covered himself in white paint.  He was transformed into an effigy or an idol, a saint, and a moving alter.  He approached the audience with candles in his toes, hands, underarms and offers the one in his mouth to the audience.  Once they are all lit he stood dripping wax until he fell to the floor. We applauded.  It was almost 1am. The bar was still open.

ITINERANT gives you the chance to see a large group of artists performance work over a number of days, in some venues that are supportive of a night, or more than a night, of this form taking up their space.   Even if I’m still not thrilled the prevalence of sense that this medium is made for 15 minute or less one-off performances shown in a lineup of 12 artists a day – and that this may be the only way to guarantee an audience – ITINERANT will get 45 artists the space to show their stuff and that’s awesome.  Go check it out, but don’t check the QMAD website for information, it is outdated and has no link from the home page to ITINERANT, go right to the site at www.qmad.org/itinerant.

MAIN FESTIVAL:
Saturday, April 21, 6 – 9 pm at Crossing Art Gallery, Queens

Saturday, April 28, 7 – 10 pm at Floor 4 Art, Manhattan

Sunday, April 29, 6 – 9 PM at Bronx Art Space, Bronx

Public Performances:

Every Friday, April 6th – May 4th, 3 – 6 PM  at 37^th Road Pedestrian, Queens

“Worlds Together, Worlds Apart,” a durational performance collaboration between Camila Cañeque and Hector Canonge,

Saturday, May 12th, 3 – 6 PM public performances by Chloe Bass, John Cichon, Nadja Marcin, Lizzie

Scott, and Priscila Stadler

ARTISTS: Maria Fernanda Alves da Silva (Brazil), BabySkinGlove, Michael Barrett , Chloe Bass, Thomas Bell, Anya Liftig & Christina deRoos, Cynthia Berkshire, Jessica Bonenfant, Camila Cañeque (Spain), Bryon Carr, John Cichon, Irene Chan, Christen Diane Clifford, Charles Dennis, Christine Ferrera, Amy Finkbeiner, Carlos Gonzalez (Oregon-USA), Jil Guyon, Ian Hatcher, Kanene Holder, Whitney V. Hunter, Maria Hupfield, Maya Jeffereis, Marie Christine Katz, Sarah Kipp, Jia-Jen Lin & Yung-Li Chen (China), LuLu LoLo, Stiven Luka, Nadja Marcin, Lili Mihajlović (Italy), Rosalind Murray (Ireland), Zavé Martohardjono, Alex Nathanson & Dylan Neely, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Ioanna Neofytou & Klitoras Charalampopoulos (Greece), Nancy Nowacek, Diana Pettersen, Miles Pflanz, No Collective, Anthony Romero & Marissa Perel, Lizzie Scott, Negin Sharifzadeh, Priscilla Stadler, Alaina Stamatis, Chris Udemezue, Genevieve White, and Jess Whittam & Lorelei Ramirez.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zhenesse Staniec Heinemann has created art in New York City since 2005 in varied spaces such as John Connelly Presents, English Kills Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, Collective:Unconscious, Interart Annex, the Scope Art Fair NY, chashama spaces, and the Red Room. She holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from the University of Southern California and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University and has been the recipient of a Puffin Grant in 2007 and 2009, a Scope Grant, and multiple chashama space grants.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Aretha Aoki. Photo by Ian Douglas

I met Aretha Aoki during grad school in Western Mass about six years ago. She’s half Japanese, I’m half Vietnamese. We bonded over our hapa status and moved on to more interesting discussions (often at my kitchen table, with a bottle of Maker’s Mark) with fellow grad Vanessa Anspaugh, about art and life and how those things intersect. Aretha’s work interested me first in discussion; our first semester was built more around reading, writing, and talking. We weren’t necessarily rolling around the studio together much, so our connecting points were mostly concept and theory and how these would inform our individual processes. There was something vital to each of us about the role of “the Author” and what that meant to our interests in individual and shared experiences. We would consider mining the personal to build artistic treatments of the authentic-integrated-sincere Self. Our various experiments in performance and process (and life practice, really) would inevitably lead to an understanding of impermanence as a constant state that challenged static notions of artistic ownership. Impermanence, in a sense, ephemerality not just in dance but, in all lived experience, provided us with a grounding foundation. We were able to reflect on our own work within constantly shifting categories leading to clearer definition, greater expansion, and eventual decay.

We worked together after surviving school and getting back to NYC and I’ve appreciated watching her choreographic work develop at various venues in the city. She’s currently a Fresh Tracks artist at New York Live Arts and the “Ephemeral Evidence” project caught her in the midst of that residency. The Solo Project that she will be investigating on Tuesday at Exit Art,  looks at narrative, at a personal story that reaches “beyond the personality of the solo dancer.” For the day she’ll engage a relay process that she (and fellow EE artist Arturo Vidich) identified as a kind of ekphrasis, the transposition of one form to another in with the intention of conveying the essence of the original.

• She’ll begin the day alone, then will be joined by two dancers Lily Gold and Jessica Ray. They will move and write, generating stories based on the movement work.
• After they leave, Tanya Marquardt, a playwright, will arrive and write a play from their texts.
• Then an actor, Becca Kauffman, will arrive to read and record the play.
• Ryan MacDonald will be emailed the sound file and will develop a sound piece offsite.
• Kim Hennessy will arrive and create an installation with the play and the writings while Ryan’s sound piece plays in the space.

The project pulls apart the solitary nature of a solo dance by bringing other artists in to generate material and giving them license to create their own versions of the individual works. The choreographic authority is subverted in a considered sharing of authorship. And, in a pragmatic way provides Aoki with the chance to “work out some very early questions and curiosities” and with the opportunity to collaborate with a range of artists she might not normally be able to gather in one shot.

The process shifts away from dancing pretty early in its progression. In a sense, the evidence of the dancer’s ephemeral activity arrives pretty early in the day, but each resulting form must work to reflect the fleeting nature of the first exploration. As Aretha states:

I’m very curious and excited to see how dance translates into other mediums and also that these mediums can act as a container for a future dance and for all the dancing that preceded them. For instance Kim, who makes incredible, wild and intricate installations out of paper and cardboard and more… I wonder how her work–undeniably ‘object’–can point to, in its objectness, the dance (and maybe more) that is intangible.

There is a focus on maintaining an interconnected relationship between the modes of expression and an egalitarian autonomy for each medium, reflecting Aoki’s interest in not privileging any individual form. In addition to a collaborative spirit, it engages a discussion around what she describes as disciplinary limits and how the different forms can inform and extend those limits.  We recently had an exchange via email.

When did this kind of interest (in not prioritizing) take shape for you? Is it based on the community of artists you find yourself among or did you have to seek out artists to make these ideas happen?

I think there is a bit of both happening. Your work comes to mind as an example within dance, of the trust you would put in your dancers to make certain decisions and choices. So, there was not this sense that you had all the answers and our job as dancers was to give you what you want. I think in NYC in general, people are working for little or nothing and a hierarchical model simply doesn’t work.

I’ve also worked in an interdisciplinary way for a long time, since I started making dances. The first dance I ever made, “Synergy” was a collaboration with Rica Kunitate and Debra Ao. We collaborated on every single detail on that dance…every movement, everything. I remember how painstaking it was but also, I discovered how that process resulted in a deep connection onstage. It was an “Aha!” moment about process and performance.

I went to an interdisciplinary undergrad school in British Columibia—Simon Fraser U–and worked with my peers in the theatre and visual art departments. In some of my earliest works, I worked with actors and dramaturgs. I also formed the collective “kitchen” with visual artist Cindy Mochizuki and theatre artist Tricia Collins. We collaborated on making site specific, performance installations. We made it our mission to explore each other’s disciplines and make work that didn’t speak loudly as any one medium in particular. I think this experiment [for Ephemeral Evidence] is allowing me to return to my earlier practice of making work.

Aoki in a piece by Emily Johnson, during an MANCC residency

By bringing additional dancers into this process, what are you saying about ‘solo’-ness and how do you hope to use their input?

When you asked me to be a part of this experiment I had just begun rehearsals for my Fresh Tracks residency, working toward a couple performance opportunities. As far as any sort of plan, I had none, other than to go into the studio and see what was happening–generally, to be guided by intuition. I realized that at least for the purposes for these upcoming showings, I would be dancing by myself. I wondered what it means to be making a dance on myself. It felt wonderful and luxurious to not have to go through the scary process of being in a room with other dancers and having to direct them, and to be on no one else’s schedule but my own, but also very insular for the same reasons, especially because at that point, my research wasn’t grounded in any articulated ideas, just the mercurial voice of moment-to-moment intuition. So I decided to take the Exit Art experiment as an opportunity to work with other people, to find out what of the material I’ve been working on translates on other people and in other mediums. If I’m not dancing this material what of it remains?

By working with Lily and Jessica, two people I don’t have a lot of history with in the studio but would like to get to know better, I feel like I can simply get an understanding of what it is that I’m doing. I’m leading them through writing and dancing scores I often do by myself to get into a sort of rhythm for movement. I want to know what kind of material these scores generates for them, to see how other people respond to what feels like personal choreographic motivations. I also want the practice of articulating the scores to other people. And of course, I’m very literally using their input-their writings–as material for Tanya to write a play.

Did your time with Sarah Maxfield’s One-shot influence your interest in solo?

I hadn’t thought of One-Shot, though it’s funny you mention it because Sarah and I hung out recently and I recalled how that experience helped me to get back into choreography in general after having taken some time away from making work. Solo work is just what I’m consistently drawn to. I sometimes feel a bit of shame around it–that ‘real’ choreographers make work on large casts–and even though that’s an absurd and judgmental voice I’m trying not to pay much attention to, I want to search for ways to relate the world of me in the studio to the world outside.

You mention “layering and juxtaposing visual, written and embodied forms to both generate and disturb a sense of character, place and narrative.” What is it about narrative that interests you? Or rather the formation of narrative?

I am very drawn to language. Language–poetry and short stories–are very generative for me. In rehearsal I may read a poem and then improvise, or shift rapidly between writing and dancing as a way to find a sense of rhythm. Within dance, I think of narrative in a very generous and open way, not linear at all. To me, stories exist all the time in performance–the stories that are carried in the bodies onstage, of the overall experience of a work, the stories that audiences bring into the theater. Stories don’t just exist in books, they are the way we make sense of the world. I feel like dance is a way to bring attention to these stories in a nuanced sort of way.

You’ve described bringing together movement, text, sound and video, to allow for spaces where the unexpected can emerge. What is it about the un-expected that you are after?

I think it’s related to the last question. I want to create a space where fictions are invited to exist but that they also can be undone, replaced by new stories, and so on. To me, the unexpected is that space of possibility where anything can happen and one’s perceptions are invited to shift a little or a lot.

I’m also as a maker, I’m just not interested in knowing something from beginning to end. I want to create ways to surprise myself.

What is your take on ephemerality and dance?

Dance is ephemeral and that is a beautiful thing! Dance doesn’t last and neither do any of we and we are so lucky to be in a medium where we have to confront that always and maybe then reflect on our own mortality. And left with essentially nothing, the process or experience of making the dance becomes primary.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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.

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