Jack Ferver and Michelle Mola. Photo by Ian Douglas

Characterizing Queen Cleopatra, Jack Ferver’s maniacal grin charges the Abrons Arts Center Experimental Theater during Monday’s American Realness performance of Me, Michelle with the charming Michelle Mola. In a silvery floor-length dress, Mola repeatedly lifts her hands behind Ferver’s head, spreading her fingers to suggest a crown. As a servant, she scrambles to appease Ferver who barks demands: “I’m bored. Tell me a story. I’m lonely. Bring me the thing.” Like children, they play ball and hold a small dog, exhibiting an innocent kinship when not conversing about poison, death and murder.

Simultaneously endearing and dark, their performance maintains a stream of dialogue pouring effortlessly in tandem with the physical action. Mola’s wispy voice continues as she circles Ferver. She swoops with her head close to the floor and one leg raised. Ferver struts in white tights, oscillating between the grandiose Cleopatra character and himself. Ferver and Mola share a bright chemistry and their characters reveal shades of the past and the modern. When Ferver finally announces that he will take the poison, the dialog and upright sequences dissolve into a dance frenzy of floorwork and arabesques, augmented by John Fireman’s music. The ending is surprisingly straightforward: he dies and she cries, concluding a distinct act of the festival.

Another duet the same evening, Tool Is Loot by Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey with music by Johnathan Bepler at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, leaves more to the imagination. Lacey treats a chair as she might a person, enacting a one-sided flirtation directed at the piece of furniture. She eventually grinds her pelvis against it. Later, recorded text describes an object with physical and emotional traits usually reserved for humans, suggesting a sort of inversion. After disappearing behind a screen, Lacey emerges in a sailor dress with Cardona, the two skittering, jogging and lacing arms. Parallel to the opening text which reads “The whistle travels to the part of the room unseen,” Cardona and Lacey now exit behind the screen where one can imagine their dance continuing. All the audience sees for the duration is the dance of light – a moon-like projection that mysteriously shifts to more solid colors with the heavy brass music.

Also on Monday at American Realness, Jeremy Wade performed Fountain at the Playhouse. With the curtain closed the audience joins him onstage for a participatory group ritual, during which Wade guides the group to circulate, make “sprinkle fingers”, growl, and sustain vowel sounds while shaking. (A similar group sequence was guided late night on Saturday during Wade’s appearance at Public Assembly as part of American Pussy Faggot! Realness. He endured through interruptions by an impatient Penny Arcade and the bar crowd proved more willing to perform and lie on the floor – this one beer-soaked.)  Everyone is onstage. Everyone is a performer, and at the end of the invigorating group section, the audience surrounds Wade in a circle.

During his solo, Wade, in denim shorts and a plaid shirt, struggles to suck in a breath slowly, standing concave. He expells the air, deflating with effort. Again and again he takes these long arduous breaths progressing to an animalistic state. Wade offers intense eye contact as he travels with tensile writhing movement. The group participation before witnessing Wade’s solo adjusts the energy of the shared space to become welcoming and expansive. Left more embodied and physically connected to the performer, the viewer’s perception of Wades solo intensifies as a result of the communal effort.

American Realness at the Abrons Arts Center continues through January 15. Tickets $15.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Heather Lang and Eleanor Bauer. Photo by Ian Douglas

A whole lot of real exists in The Heather Lang Show By Eleanor Bauer And Vice Versa Trash Is Fierce Episode 2: Destiny’s Realness, and that’s a good thing. Smart, vital and spontaneous, Eleanor Bauer and Heather Lang host an insightful infomercial unpacking “realness”, which the audience experiences both live and on a television screen. The dynamic characters work in the business of connecting people to one’s “spirit product” in a direct and endearing style.

Wearing recycled materials (Lang, in a stiff dress of magazine pages and Bauer, wrapped in flowing layers of plastic bags), the two pontificate on the couch and riff about inner-light, the evils of capitalism and repurposing trash to make somethingness out of nothingness. After showcasing each product in the style of a roadshow, audience members call the 800 number for the spirit product, which is then lovingly presented to the caller by Lang or Bauer.

While the talk show format makes watching the full performance on screen possible, Trash Is Fierce should be seen in a room full of people, it’s live-ness crucial. Bauer cracks her character just once on Thursday, slumping into the couch. She cups her mouth laughing, the moment fresh for a show about realness and unifying in its honesty. In the end, Bauer and Lang remind their viewers to be awake in the world by literally holding up a compact mirror. They also remind everyone that “Trash Is Fierce!” which the audience repeats with gusto. If we are lucky they’ll bring us another episode.

Michael Hart’s photography exhibition, Unreal, with text by Ryan Tracy packs years of life and art moments into a mosaic of roughly 200 images. During the opening Thursday in the Abrons Arts Center, several of Hart’s subjects present at the show informally identified their images pointing and telling anecdotes. The subjects recalled Hart’s captured moment, at times clarifying whether the shot was real or staged. Those live conversations illuminated Tracy’s text, “In the end, the body is what we have and what we use to make “the world” and with which we remember it. Real or staged. Live or performed.” The subjects made clear that those moments were both – lived and performed.

Eight short pieces compose Daniel Linehan’s Zombie Aporia performed by Linehan, Thibault Lac and Salka Ardal Rosengren in the Abrons Arts Center Experimental Theater Friday. During the first section, the performers rhythmically repeat the phrase “The music is the background for the dance” although for Linehan, the music is truly created by the dance.  The trio generates a soundtrack of music with the body through sustained monotone vocalizations, repeated words and percussive footsteps resulting from the given movement. For one song, Lac applies pressure with his hands to Rosengren’s throat and stomach to manipulate the force of her throaty tune. The execution provides a physical image of that which is heard. The exacting, often mechanical sequences cast a distance between the audience and the performers. This distance extends even in the moments during which the three get physically close to the audience, stiffly moving through the crowd to create formations dictated by a computer screen.

(M)imosa/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (M) on Friday in the Abrons Arts Center Underground Theater employ a raw and layered approach to reveal the possible identities of (M)imosa. Story upon story, song upon song Cecilia Bengolea, Francois Chaignaud, Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Trajal Harrell unravel the identity of (M)imosa. The spectacle swinging from glow-in-the-dark club moments, to Stravinsky, to a crowd-pleasing rendition of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights successfully disorients and then settles as Harrell discusses authenticity through a story about the situations in which one should bring the real fancy handbag out, versus the times when the fake is the better choice. Echoing the sentiment he also suggests that in terms of realness, there is a time to be vulnerable and a time to keep one’s real to oneself.

American Realness continues through January 15 at the Abrons Arts Center. Tickets $15.

Popularity: 3% [?]

From Gob Squad's "Super Night Shot." Photo by Prudence Upton

This is sort of a weird review to write, because I don’t actually have too much to say about either one of these. You want my elevator trip length take?: Gob Squad is awesome, whereas Builders Association’s Sontag: Reborn is complicated, with a compelling character inhabiting a not fully realized piece.

The Builders Association is a company known as a tech/video company, and that comes with some baggage. In discussions with others (and this piece generated either strongly negative or guardedly positive takes, insofar as I’ve seen), a lot of people seem to be asking the question: Why video? I’m not sure that’s the right one to ask. Video is incidental to this piece; the point is to interrogate the narrative, to add layers of meaning and perspective in dialogue with one another. But that’s precisely the piece’s weakness–it doesn’t quite pull that off.

Based on Susan Sontag’s diaries, the show (through Jan. 15; tickets $20) is essentially a solo live performance by Moe Angelos, who performs Sontag from the age of 15 until around 30, narrating from Sontag’s own diary text. Her performance is mediated by the video installation, mainly in the form of opposing Angelos’ in situ performance with an aged and chain-smoking Sontag reflecting upon her earlier self. The problem is, these two never really achieve a complex dialogue. In fact, I felt like the video Sontag essentially disappeared by the end of piece, leaving us mainly with Angelos’s live performance and begging the question of why they’re bothering with the counterpoint at all. In fact, the video elements become too filmic by the end, in the sense of mainstream cinema biopics (the final sequence at the close is wholly unnecessary). The central motif is reproductions of Sontag’s handwritten text from the diaries, which is a weird choice. I get it in the sense that this is the story of Sontag as a writer, so the writing is important. But this is painfully literal (something Sontag the critic would have cringed at).

It’s cool, in one sense, but it actually begs a question that the show doesn’t really address: Sontag’s diaries as the self-conscious efforts of a writer trying to “write” herself. It’s a textualization of identity. So…why have a person inhabit those words? To mock Sontag’s overwhelming self-consciousness is apparently the only reason. We know her high self-regard is ridiculous, but the show both wants us to take it seriously at the same time it wants us to laugh at a precocious teenager’s self-regard. Weird and unresolved.

However, the show is saved by Sontag herself. She’s self-absorbed, self-regarding, obsessed with her own sense of self-importance, and so loveable. I saw myself in that person, obsessed with her books and desperate to assert her own sense of self-importance (with the crucial difference that Sontag was immensely smarter and more talented than I was). You learn to love Sontag through the text, and that says something. The only problem is that the Builders buy into Sontag’s own self-mythology; the crucial arc of the play is to get her to the publication of her first novel, which she saw as actualizing. Of course, the truth is Sontag was a shitty novelist but an amazing thinker. Anyone hoping that this piece might connect the dots between her life and the amazing essays (“Against Interpretation” and “Notes on Camp” were foundational for me and inform the critic I am today) she wrote will be disappointed. As much as they pretend to engage the writer’s own vision of herself, the Builders seem to only understand Sontag through her own words, which is unfortunate and limiting.

As for Gob Squad, well, you knew they were going to be awesome, right? Their Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good), was the hit of January last year, and it’s coming back to the Public for a full run (at much higher ticket price–still worth it) later this month. Super Night Shot isn’t as good, but it’s still a fun and a bravura performance. The conceit is that one hour before curtain, four members (including the adorable Bastian Trost) set out each operating a video camera, to film an hour-long movie within three blocks of the theater. No cuts, no edits. They’re running through the lobby in their underwear while you wait for the house to open. Onstage, the four camera videos are project side-by-side; the only mixing is the audio (four videos you can follow; four soundtracks would be impossible). An attack on the sense of anonymity in contemporary urban life, the work proposes that a person can be a superhero and that anyone walking the streets can be the romantic interest. It’s beautiful, moving, remarkable, and fucking hilarious. I love this company.

Sadly, I doubt you can get tickets, but if you can, do it! Tonight and tomorrow at 9 p.m. (tickets).

Popularity: 3% [?]

From "Alexis. A Greek Tragedy." Photo by Pierre Borasci

It’s taken me a couple days to get anything out because my response to Motus‘s Alexis. A Greek Tragedy (at Under the Radar through Jan. 14; tickets $20) was so complex. I think maybe I wanted to like it more than I did, or distrusted my anger and irritation at it, which I suppose says something about its ability to provoke. It’s an accomplished production but one that I found ultimately shallow and vapid and maybe even irresponsible in the current moment. I probably could have written way more than I have, but I already think I’ve rambled on too much.

A mixture of documentary and performance deconstruction, Alexis is mainly concerned with the story of Alexis Grigoropoulos. On Dec. 6, 2008, 15-year-old Grigoropoulos was hanging out with friends in the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, home to the Polytechnic and the center of Athens’ radical and anarchist community. Some cops came by and something happened, but what’s for certain is that a short chase took place that ended with one cop firing his gun and Grigoropoulos lying dead. Within two hours, the streets were flooded with riotous protests that eventually generated sympathy marches in cities around the globe.

For Motus, the fascination here lies in these real world events’ synergy with Motus’s own exploration of the story of Antigone, which serves as an archetype for the protester: Antigone, the lone woman who opposes her state and risks her life in pursuit of a moral good. Alexis Grigoropoulos, a kid literally left dead in the middle of the street by the trigger-happy cops, becomes a modern day Polynices, Antigone’s brother left to rot on the streets of Thebes (if you don’t recall the story, he was declared a traitor and could not be buried or mourned on pain of death; doing so was Antigone’s protest).

As the show opens, the theater is filled with smoke and large amber floodlights are pointed at the audience from upstage, as actress Silvia Calderoni aggressively throws her upper body up and down, dancing around the stage as rock music churns. We’re in the midst of the chaos of a protest, in other words, watching the individual standing up to…well…something.

From there, the four actors in the show jump back and forth between elements. There’s video they took in Athens, interviews with journalists and friends of Grigoropoulos, photos of Exarchia. The video documentation is interspersed with live elements: an exploration of staging Polynices’s death pose and Antigone’s mourning-protest, and discussions among the performers about their presentational choices or experiences in Greece. (Alexandra Sarantopoulou, a member of the company, was in Exarchia during the protests/riots.)

I think at heart, what Motus is fascinated in here is thinking about what it takes for a person to essentially risk everything–to take on personal, physical, financial, and legal risk–to protest an injustice. For as collective as a protest is, the company’s focus remains almost myopically on the individual. This becomes problematic and gets lost amidst the larger conversation they seem to want to have about what Grigoropoulos’s death and the subsequent protests mean. Motus seems to want to place them in a broader political context encompassing the devastating effects of the recession on people around the globe, who face few job prospects, years of government enforced austerity, and less opportunity than previous generations. But as was the case with the riots last in year in England, the exact link between the political-economic situation and the rage you see on the streets is complex and unclear. The opportunism and nihilistic rage that are the salient features of these riots are hard to link to a clear sense of protest.

About halfway through the show, things start to get really troubling, and not in a good way. In one scene, an unintentional small-scale Milgram Experiment unfolds, as the actors encourage members of the audience to get up onstage and mime throwing rocks during a riot. Watching this from the audience (maybe thirty audience members joined in), I couldn’t help recalling the scene from Toshiki Okada’s Five Days in March, where the pair of listless hipsters at the anti-war march are really concerned about where they are in the action. They don’t want to be near the front with the really hardcore protesters who will get beaten by the police.

The four actors, of course, were the ones in front, running further forward toward the seating to pretend to throw their rocks or Molotov cocktails or whatever. The audience volunteers clustered towards the upstage area and sort of egged themselves on, sticking close together behind the actors, with only one or two taking the initiative to really join in.

Furthering the sense of hipster dilettantism, this scene was quickly followed by Sarantopoulou and Calderoni having a conversation about whether they could actually throw a rock and hurt someone (there is in fact a big brick onstage, provocatively recalling Chekhov’s Gun), as though it’s wholly a matter of personal choice. All this un-ironically following a solid demonstration of herd mentality.

The show is nominally about Grigoropoulos, but in the end he feels main exploited as the raison d’etre for their exploration of the figure of the protester. But abstracted like this, through myth, archetype, and theatrical practice, what we’re really dealing with is the radical chic glamor of the figure without any of the content. Don’t forget, these are also protesters (you just can’t see them here, only what they’re protesting). Grigolopoulos’s story creates some sort of pretext for assuming that the protest actions we’re looking at are somehow okay or justified, things which Motus doesn’t otherwise seem all the interested is asking questions about.

The final image of the show, for me, was the most damning. Throughout, a rolling cart is used to play the video projections through a MacBook. Using the photobooth function, which gives you a three-count before snapping your photo through the webcam, Calderoni took a run leap at the audience and was photographed from behind at the top of the jump. The image shows her from behind, the lone individual independent and defiant in front of the crowd. Unfortunately, for me it quickly recalled the recent Levi’s ad campaign that appropriated the image of the young protester–the ultimate individual–to sell jeans. Motus is aiming for different ends, but the means are essentially the same, a cheap trade in the aesthetics and glamor of protest, absent any real discussion of the political realities in which the act occurs.

Popularity: 3% [?]

World of Wires, From L to R: Laine Rettmer, Tanya Selvaratnam, Jon Morris, Sarita Choudhury, Jay Scheib, Mikeah Ernest Jennings. Photo Courtesy of Jay Scheib

Capping the trilogy Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems, World of Wires is Jay Scheib‘s adaptation of filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht, opening Friday at The Kitchen. Catching Scheib on the phone during his final week of rehearsals, he talked with me about science fiction, simulations and the new work.

World of Wires is your third production in the trilogy Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems created in residence at MIT. What’s it like making work there and what has the environment offered to your process?

Six or seven years ago I asked a group of students what they expected to be doing in 10 years and one student said she’d probably be the first woman on Mars. That was the first I knew there was a really serious Mars program out there in the world. Then a month later I had a conversation with Joe Gavin, the guy who directed the moon lander. He was the lunar lander brain. He said he wouldn’t go to Mars unless it’s a one-way trip. He didn’t want to be involved in a mission to Mars to go there and bring back rocks. The only mission he’d do is to first build a habitat, and then six months later send people, and then after that send supplies and more people and actually have a station on Martian surface. This is the famous one-way mission model, which was essentially adopted and there’s an entire community of people who are engaged in that.

So that’s the seed that started the human simulation trilogy. I learned about the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert where scientists and researchers go and wear spacesuits and live in full simulation for months at a time. So I began putting together the pieces, combining that with some of my other interests. Although I’ve been doing other productions in between – operas and plays, the ballet in Hong Kong – this trilogy it has remained a real focus of my life.

For this part of the trilogy you focus mostly on the disciplines of computer science and artificial intelligence. Can you describe how those areas helped you generate material and the interface with professionals or research in these fields?

For this production, someone approached me after a performance of Untitled Mars and said “Oh my god, do you know the work of Nick Bostrom?” So I found this guy who is the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University. He wrote a paper called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? In the white paper he speculates that there’s a pretty high probability that we are in fact living in a computer simulation. It turns out that the idea has a healthy following. The article is brilliant and synthesizes a number of interests that I’ve had over the years growing up, reading about simulation and finding myself drawn into the world of MIT and artificial intelligence, so its been an interesting ride. A lot of artificial intelligence is actually like Amazon.com can tell you what you want based on your preferences. We have these computers gathering information and drawing conclusions about our lives, which can be pretty nice in a way, but is also very dangerous.

There’s also my love of science fiction, which in the United States, is one area where, in my mind, really interesting thinking about the world and the way in which its changing is reflected. I don’t draw a line between science fiction and literature. I find that many of our science fiction authors are the greatest we’ve produced. The ideas are interesting. I worked with Philip K. Dick first and then spent a couple of years building a piece based on Samuel R. Delany novel Dhalgren and getting to know Chip Delany was really the highlight of the decade. Now we’re working with a novel by Daniel F. Galouye called Simulacron-3, although the piece is really based on Fassbinder’s adaptation of Galouye’s Simulacron-3. Galouye wrote this novel that’s about people who discover that they’re living in a computer simulation and it’s one of the first novels that contains the trope of plugging yourself into a network. I found that interesting pre-Matrix.

So in The Matrix, would you take the red pill or the blue pill?

We make a joke about that! In the play, this character in the Garden of Eden pours a whole handful of pills into his hand and everyone gives him advice: “Only take the blue one…Only take the red one.” I agree with Mikéah Jennings who decided in the performance to just eat all of them. That’s what happens. It would just double the affect.

I understand that a robbery you witnessed at Duane Reade influenced this work. Can you talk about what happened and what it got you thinking?

So Galouye writes in Simulacron-3 that simulations have this uncanny ability to migrate into the real, and sometimes the simulation becomes real before you expect it to, so if you want to test the theory, try simulating a bank robbery. Enter a bank with a fake pistol and stage a robbery and very quickly a customer will die of a real heart attack, the bank teller will hand you with shaking hands real money and the police officer will likely shoot you with real bullets. This is kind of a bland example, but of course if you told the cop that you’d be robbing the bank with a fake gun, you wouldn’t really learn a lot about bank robberies. It wouldn’t be a worthwhile simulation. So this is one of those ideas that stuck with me and there was something about it that didn’t make sense to me.

Then a couple of years later I was in a Duane Reade drug store on 111th and Broadway and I found myself in the middle of a really violent robbery. I had a gun held to my head for what seemed like an hour and was probably only about 40 minutes. People got beat up and hurt really badly and there was a moment where he pointed the gun at someone else and I saw it and I swear it was fake. I didn’t test the theory at the time but it stuck with me forever where I thought that’s definitely a fake pistol and if he pulled the trigger, maybe a little fire would have come out the end like a lighter or something. So that was a really scary horrifying event. There is nothing funny about what happened in that room, but the pistol – I still carry that with me that the pistol was fake. Was it all real?

In terms of working with your performers, can you give an example of what you might ask to do in rehearsals to work with this material?

We spent three weeks on Governors Island thanks to a residency from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. We took the ferry and hung out on an island. We watched a lot of  Fassbinder films. We read the entire novel out loud. We read the screenplay based on the TV series. We improvised for two and a half weeks and came up with a list of tasks: maybe that’s 10 entrances and exits, someone has to accidentally get hurt, and we improvise with these small event structures. Then we showed a work in progress assembled again in November. This is where things got interesting. We decided that in order to start the project we’d make a different work by Fassbinder first. We did a little work on a play of his called The Garbage, the City and Death and then switched to another early film called Katzelmacher. We actually shot our own version of Katzelmacher, in which we improvised text and new situations in a week and a half. Basically, we made a knockoff Fassbinder film and that’s how we started our preparation and re-entered this work. We had a studio in Tribeca for a month in an old office building, then had another residency with the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side, a month on Governers Island and one at MIT.

What else are you thinking about during these final rehearsals before the opening?

The thing I’m thinking about a lot right now since I am making final decisions, is that I am onstage during the whole play, which means that there are almost two plays. The play staged for the audience and the play that I see. I’m operating the camera the whole time. What comes from the Katzelmacher experiment is that essentially the making of the production is also the making of a 90-minute single take film. So there are a number of dimensions to the work, which is an interesting prospect. It’s not staged in a traditional sense because I never leave the stage. It’s a live film, but at the same time, because we’re working on material that questions live-ness, we are trying everything we can to continue questioning live-ness from beginning to end and there are a lot of things that go into that. I don’t think I should say anything else about it!

World of Wires runs January 6-21 at The Kitchen. Tickets $20.

Jon Morris and Mikeah Ernest Jennings in Jay Scheib’s World of Wires from Jay Scheib on Vimeo.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Welcome to Culturebot‘s resource page for news, information, and responses on Under the Radar, COIL, American Realness, APAP, and showcases from your trusty CBOT correspondents Alyssa Alpine, Jeremy Barker, Maura Donahue, Andy Horwitz, Aaron Mattocks, and Julie Potter. This page will be updated throughout the festivals on a daily basis–reviews and other proper articles will be published as normal onsite. You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook for more information.

12:05 p.m., Sat., Jan. 14 – Daniel Kitson: It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later at St. Ann’s Warehouse

Slightly rumpled, sporting owlish glasses and a trace of a stutter, British comedian and storyteller Daniel Kitson seems an unlikely candidate for a one-man show. His unprepossessing presence, however, is part of his charm, and Kitson writes and performs his hilariously irreverent, yet poignant material with disarming panache. We New Yorkers only discovered Kitson—a repeat winner at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival over the years—last January, piling in droves to see The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church at St. Ann’s. Kitson’s latest show, It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later (playing thru January 29) is a series of detailed anecdotes about the everyday lives of William and Caroline, two people who never meet, but exist at the same time. The chronology skips forward and backwards in an unpredictable manner, but each story touches on snippets of daily life; even though it’s a simple show both structurally and production-wise (just Kitson talking about two different people, with a bunch of hanging lights onstage), the magic of the theater happens and the audience gave a collective, if surreptitious sniffle, near the end on the night I attended.

–Alyssa

11:33 p.m., Thurs., Jan. 12 – The TEAM’s Mission Drift

Just got out of Mission Drift at the Connelly Theater, where it’s playing as part of PS 122′s COIL Festival. It’s been a year and a half since I saw it in workshop, and a lot has changed. But still, I think Charles Isherwood is dead wrong about it. Yes, there are some problems, I’ll grant you that, but the script remains a extremely smart piece of political theater, and the performances–led by but by no means exclusive to the lovely Heather Christian–are phenomenal. Perhaps the biggest problem this show faces is an aesthetic one. It’s very theater-y, more so than much of what you see in the contemporary performance festivals in January. I hope people don’t pre-judge it too much based on that. Go, sit down in the theater, dust off that “willing suspension of disbelief” thing all us post-dramatic theater people shut away in the closet, give it 20 minutes, and you’ll be hooked.

–Jeremy

12:06 p.m., Thurs., Jan. 12 – Fun Times With the Times

Charles Isherwood on The TEAM’s Mission Drift:

There’s a lot about the company’s new project to take heedless, heady pleasure in, notably the bluesy music by Heather Christian, who plays the piano and portrays the evening’s unofficial M.C. and resident leggy showgirl, called Miss Atomic. Ms. Christian has a terrific soulful voice that can ache with yearning intensity at one moment and vibrate with the fervor of roof-raising R&B the next. (She also has a little of the impish pixie charm of Kristin Chenoweth.)

I have two responses: (1) The constant need to see theater through the lens of Hollywood and celebrity culture is one of the most risible parts of the Times contemporary critical practice (at least as evidenced by Isherwood and Brantley); and (2) a LITTLE? Heather’s got way more impish and pixie-ish charm than Kristin Chenoweth.

–Jeremy

12:50 a.m., Thurs., Jan. 12 – Michael Klien’s (with Steve Valk) Dance About Architecture

Tonight over at the Invisible Dog Art Space, I caught the closing of Choreography for Blackboards at COIL. I’m glad I did and sad I didn’t do it sooner (and was so exhausted–I left before the talkback and went home and slept till midnight). This was easily the most radical experiment in performance I’ve seen thus far in January, and I sincerely hope that more people got to experience it than I think did.

This one’s hard to write about without being jargon-y and sounding unnecessarily abstract, so bear with me. I’m going to use an old adage–variously ascribed to about two-dozen different people–to try to get at what it’s doing: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

Obviously the original intent of the phrase was to point up the absurdity of trying to describe the sublingual effect of music, but I’ve always loved it because, of course, you can write about music and dance about architecture. But for a moment, let’s just think about architecture. Architecture is the art that most easily reveals its impact on us. Far more than mere utilitarianism (creating space) or ornamentation (looking pretty), at its most profound (or insidious, depending upon the goal), architecture radically affects how we interact with space. It’s an art, yes, but it has a very concrete impact on how we all live our daily lives.

In Choreography for Blackboards, Klien and Valk want to explore how we might imagine a different artistic practice–design or choreography–having a similar affect on our lives if we apply the practice to the quotidian. What if, in other words, we asked dance to affect our experience of daily life much as we allow architecture to? It is, in the best possible meaning of the word, a mundane experience.

If dance can be fundamentally understood as an act of “brute agency”–to borrow one a phrase hung on the wall of the space–by which the dancer takes a series of concrete actions through delineated space and time, then the half-dozen performers in this piece, who spend an hour making a series of drawings on blackboards according to a set of specifications provided in advance, can be seen as dancers performing a choreography. And yes of course you could probably see them as something else, too; that’s precisely the point.

Here, to paraphrase something Valk was telling me, high culture collapses back–through taking experimentation to its most radical conclusions–into low culture, allowing the two to mix. Anyone’s actions can be seen as dance through contextualization, but not in the banal sense of a choreographer placing a non-trained dancer in the piece, but rather through understanding dance and choreography as a practice which can be applied analytically to a non-traditional space. If experimentation has led dance to abandon the proscenium for the blackbox, and then to the gallery, and then to intervention acts within the street, well, why not imagine any part of daily life as, essentially, choreography?

That’s the natural conclusion of the processes you experience in Choreography for Blackboards. It nominally maintains the structure of a traditional performance–it has a starting time, a place, you buy a ticket, etc.–but within the space, you’re encouraged to walk around, talk, read, engage with others, relax and have tea. The audience, as I see it, is as much a part of the work as the half-dozen performers. And as a part of the work, the audience then naturally becomes engaged in the larger processes Klien is tackling. I left the show before it was done, in other words; the talkback was as much a part of the show as anything else.

I don’t want to go on too long in this space, though I’m not sure how to approach this work otherwise (I don’t think a review is exactly appropriate). All too easily this begins to sound very hippie-ish and countercultural, but that’s not what they’re getting at. Yes, they might like to radically alter the way we live through encouraging us to engage through artist practice with our daily lives, but this is not about living in communes. Just as the OWS protesters loved their iPhones even as they challenged the shape of contemporary capitalism, this is not about revolutionary rejection, necessarily, or radical breaks, but rather a different approach. I keep coming back to that word “practice,” the artist’s engagement with his or her form. This piece supposes that through allowing community to engage with one another through diverse practices, informed by artists’ long-term engagements with them, we can reinvent how we live. It’s quite simple, experimentation taken to its natural extreme, but offering the promise of allowing art to truly add richness to or otherwise inform daily life.

It was, in short, quite good, and I’ll return to it in some other format.

–Jeremy

12:12 a.m., Thurs., Jan. 12 – Take 2 on Joh Jasperse @ American Realness

I was quite moved by the splendid work, Canyon, by John Jasperse.  He is a thrilling dance maker, and even to say only that is somehow to sell him a bit short.  He’s also fuctioning as an art curator, bringing together other complete installations of sound and sight, with completely mind-blowing music by Hahn Rowe, and a stunning gaff tape set by Tony Orrico.   Both elements function constantly to contextualize and shape the art of Jasperse’s choreography.  I was especially taken with Rowe’s score – the way it is so intensely atmospheric, in the way that it can both suggest environment and emotion so strongly, setting up and stirring feelings within that contribute to the reading of the work – I was anxious, exhilerated, upset, blissful.  I don’t know if choreographers get enough credit for this kind of thing – it’s definitely a skill to repurpose any kind of pre-existing music and make dances to it – but to commission a completely new work of music, and a completely new work of visual art, and also create a third work of equal strength and quality and complexity, and then to be the one responsible for putting all of these elements together, and making them function, and having a kind of mastermind plan to create sense out of the ordered chaos when these things exist together.  It’s not just a dance.  I don’t know how else to say this – it’s a f$*%ing experience.  And I’m constantly impressed by his choreography for groups – the way you watch and see it changing, morphing before your eyes, and you can catch trails of knowing how it’s changing, but more often than not he’s hidden it from plain view and it just keeps moving and changing and evolving.  People always seem to be dancing in unison with one person, and then the other, and there are two duets and a solo, and suddenly you realize that one of the duets has become a quartet, and now three of these people have moved other there and are dancing together, while the other two are together in a new way, and then one of these dancers, and one from the other group, are in unison while the others…it’s so satisfying and one of my favorite things about Jasperse’s work.  His complexity of architecture is some of the best around.  He’s a smarty pants – and I bet it takes a real long time to build – but it’s so worth the figuring.

It’s funny – as Jeremy mentioned in his earlier review of the piece at BAM, and as Claudia La Rocco also talked about at the Times, there is a really wonderful and highly energetic opening dance for the company, but both critics found the piece ultimately lacking, and pondered what didn’t take shape for them.  However, it was a bit further after this opening that the piece really took its terrible hold of me and refused to let go.  In fact, well into the work, four of the dancers came to a complete stillness, staring out in this searching, vulnerable, and mostly neutral kind of way (dancer James McGinn looked scary), and the music was just pulsing and creating such incredible tension, and a heavy grid of lights slowly descended on the quartet.  Yes, there was an intimation of close encounters of the third kind, but I don’t think this was an alien spaceship, and the dancers human.  I went down another path, reading the dancers as these beautiful natural creatures, native animals, and the threat of crushing lights as the demise of nature by industry and machine.   Standing watching their silence, their non-dancing bodies, and the powerful mechanics slowly move down on them, I wanted to sob.  I distinctly felt the power and danger and inevitability of “progress”.   There was also a wrenching moment when the cast broke out of dancing, looked down at the floor, and just systematically ripped up and apart the incredible visual installation that lay all over the floor.  Again, like thoughtless machines leveling native forests.  And out of this, surprisingly, while others around him continue to rip apart this visual world, Burr Johnson emerges into his kind of leitmotif shape, this strange dinosaur/bird stance of mysterious power and beauty and I felt such sorrow and longing and confusion expressed in this expansion.  The striking of his pose seemed suddenly so out of place, the way seeing a wild ostrich would be in an abandoned corporate park.  I felt like so much of the work could be seen in these terms – as explorations of the inherent beauty of nature and native things, the curious but not-yet-afraid regarding of foreign things introduced into the native environment, and then the shift, the strange coming together or forced coexistence of the more destructive forces, and how those forces might affect or destroy or change the original.  I wonder, knowing well the other writers, and knowing too Jasperse’s work for many years, if this was by any way a case of scale?  Perhaps the work, though I’m sure frustratingly adapted for such a smaller space as Abrons, gained from the intimacy, from the dancers become larger and the space more constrained.  Whether or not this is the case, I’m happy to report that John Jasperse is as powerful a dance maker as ever.  The rigorous, studied, detailed art experiences he builds for his audiences continue to take hold, delight and terrify; through intense abstraction he brings up the most provoking, uncomfortable, and important questions of our human experience and thrusts them out to us for our hopeful consideration.

–Aaron

11:07 a.m., Weds., Jan. 11 – Keith Hennessey at MR’s MELT Intensive and American Realness

I’m 2 days into Keith Hennessy’s “Improvisation as Potential Shamanism” workshop at Movement Research’s January Melt Intensive. After 45 minutes of shaking yesterday, it felt like we were just cracking open something potentially transformative. The 2-hour time blocks aren’t providing quite enough time to gather, focus, hear about what Keith calls his current distractions (sexism in dance) or longer standing considerations (capitalism and christianity, engagement of indigenous practices, anti-systematic processes), and then process our group explorations. So, yesterday’s walk from Eden’s Expressway to a meeting on 4th St. and 2nd Ave. right after a joyful, urgent, invigorating entrance into a physically instigated emotional state was perhaps where the shamanic potential occurred. I was either wrapped in a force of calm receptiveness or totally spaced out. I was late for my meeting because there was no more doing I could do with my 2 legs other than be on them as they executed their own progression up Broadway. For a “body in motion stays in motion” proponent, this was a powerful state. The ownership of slowing down will moving on.

Anyway, all of this is to say that in addition to the great things that Aaron and Andy have said about Keith’s last work and that we’ve posted from Keith saying elsewhere, my experiential relationship to his ideas is seating itself with a healthy sincerity and that makes me all the more interested in catching his work-in-progress showing of Turbulence (a dance about the economy) today at 5:30pm as part of the Show and Tell series and his 10pm performances tomorrow (Thursday) and Friday of Almost for the American Realness Festival at Abrons Art Center.

Almost is spontaneous performance action. Keith Hennessy comes to American Realness to improvise; to invent a performance from almost nothing, accessing almost everything. Curious about histories of moving bodies and social movement, Hennessy’s improvisations are a dynamic mash-up of Judson, body art, stand-up, Ridiculous, site-specific, lecture, and ritual (where Ridiculous means, among other things, queer subversive camp, and ritual is about how a group of people experience magic and/or death together). He might go off on a political rant, he might take questions from the audience; he’ll probably change costumes and struggle to be still.

A body accumulates information and makes choices. Tactics and images from the historical body of Hennessy’s work appear like habits, crutches, old friends. Almost is simultaneously research and the distillation of research into composition. Improvisation is sometimes like fishing, a practical effort that might become thriling or it might be boring and then it’s ok to space out and dream of other worlds… Remix, spectacle, ritual, action, dancing, not-dancing, speaking, playing, ridiculous, activist, visceral, performance.

466 Grand Street / FREE / Reservations Required / RVSP: americanrealness@gmail.com / AbronsArtsCenter.org

Turbulence (a dance about the economy) is a bodily response to economic crisis, an experimental hybrid of contemporary dance, performance, agitprop, and circus. A collaborative creation choreographed by Keith Hennessy, Turbulence features a core company from San Francisco, musician Jassem Hindi from Paris, and 10 local performers. Modeling efficient solutions to economic and ecological crises, Turbulence uses resources sparingly and is adaptable to various venues. The intent of Turbulence is to inspire engagement and discourse in response to current economic crises and their historical antecedents  visible is a performance work that explores epic journeys, myths, dreams, and memories of the known world and an imagined future in an unknown land.

–Maura

1:57 p.m., Jan. 10 – Additions to the Buzz List below, Dance Style

Shouldn’t have forgotten this one: Heather Kravas’s The Green Surround at COIL. It’s one of the few dance pieces that was presented outside AR and other showcases, and I think it probably struggled to get as much attention as the theater that clogs up UTR and COIL. Plus it was a remount. That said, it was a great show the first time around (as I mentioned below) and I hope that their consistently sold out performances helped get this fine piece some attention from non-NYC presenters. At American Realness, which I haven’t even made it to yet, Daniel Linehan and Miguel Guttierez were the names I kept hearing about.

–Jeremy

12:27 p.m., Jan. 10 – The Word of Mouth Best at UTR/COIL

It’s Tuesday lunch time and my exhaustion and hang-over have largely lapsed, allowing me to fruitfully return to work. More extensive proper reviews of a number of shows are coming, but in the interests of keeping readers up-to-date, I thought I’d take a minute to call out the most buzzed about shows at the festivals this year so far, based on my own experience with them as well as what I’ve been hearing from others.

• Mariano Pensotti’s The Past is a Grotesque Animal at UTR/COIL: This is easily the one I’ve heard the most about. A two-hour drama tracking the lives of four young Argentineans from 2000 to 2010, it’s a mesmerizing, beautiful, and stunning portrait of a generation. The performances are extremely strong and confident, the script is tight, and the presentation–on a constantly rotating stage–is fantastic. It’s going through the 15th before it heads out on tour across the country, so get your tickets and check out our interview with Pensotti.
• Toshiki Okada/chelftisch, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech at UTR. This one’s likely a no-brainer for anyone who’s seen Five Days in March, which was admittedly stronger and more timely. But this trio of plays helps cement Okada’s reputation as one of the strongest younger voices in world theater. It’s an extremely funny show that explores the very small experiences of a series of temp office workers in Japan, a very humanizing portrait using the vocabulary of the mundane (Nicolson Baker’s obsessive little novel The Mezzanine kept coming to mind). But there’s a real dark streak that underlies the show, a listlessness or sense of instability in these characters lives owing to their precarious employment. For such a talented and subtle writer like a Okada, what’s not said is still as important is what is. Highly recommended (through Sat. 14)
• Gob Squad. Everyone loves it. Super Night Shot is a much airier piece than Kitchen, which opens this week and was the hands down hit of last year’s UTR.
• Honorable Mentions: Rabih Mroue won over a lot of people with Looking For a Missing Employee (COIL). I sadly missed it, catching the Pixelated Revolution instead. It’s bit more of a sleeper hit, if you will–I think the darkness and density of the material make it harder to really get excited about, but that says nothing about quality. Claudia La Rocco has a really insightful review in the Times you should check out. It’s unfortunately closed (but headed out on tour to Seattle, Minneapolis, Pittsburg and Vancouver this month), but In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields is still running through this weekend. This Polish production is kind of devisive: plenty of audience members are just plain irritated by the volume, and there is this entire video sequence at the end that virtually everyone feels is unnecessary. But otherwise, plenty of people I spoke to had the same response as me: it’s conceptually provocative (staging a dialogue play as a rock concert) and, after you get past the initial bombast of the production, you realize that the director has made some extremely subtle and intelligent choices in terms of where he has the actors take their performances. I also heard–as I had feared–that the mixed response to Rychcik’s Versus at UTR 2010 had discouraged some people from checking it out. I think that’s a mistake–if you have a chance, see In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields, and if it’s really that bad in your mind, I’ll buy you a drink.

–Jeremy

11:12 a.m., Jan. 10 – Two More to Keep on the Radar

Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War at the New Ohio Theatre
I saw this quirky show by theater collective The Mad Ones when it premiered in 2010 at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg, and it’s only gotten better over time. An engrossing mix of radio drama, low-budget sci-fi, and nostalgia for 1950s Americana, it’s a sharply calibrated production that makes me curious to see what the collective will do next. Samuel & Alasdair is playing Wednesdays – Saturdays at 8pm thru January 21, with a special APAP Happy Hour performance tomorrow: Monday, January 9 at 5pm.

TAKES by Nichole Canuso Dance Company
Apparently well-established in its home base of Philadelphia, Nichole Canuso Dance Company brought an intimate duet, TAKES, to 3LD Art and Technology Center this weekend (January 5-8). The structure and choreography weren’t always riveting, but the duet negated its problematic moments via a fascinating set, courtesy of multimedia magician Lars Jan: a cube made of white gauze walls framed the performers and provided the surface for live projections that were evocative and never less than mesmerizing.

–Alyssa

6:30 p.m., jan.8 – Mariano Pensotti Is Amazing

Want to know this year’s stand-out so far? Mariano Pensotti. Go see this show.

–Jeremy

11:35 a.m., Jan. 8 – Sunday Morning Report

Who’s hungover? Not me! Had a great night, spent some time at the Scandinavian dance presenters’ cocktail party in Chelsea last night, before retreating to the EV for drinks with friends. A few notes:

• The Curators Project is happening, per Vallejo, in COIL 2013. He also says it’s a strong piece. So I guess we’ll all have to wait and see.
• Choreography for Blackboards @ PS122: Another cool note, Michael “the best mind in Irish dance” Klien’s “Choreography for Blackboards” features an amazing line-up of performers, ranging from Fitzgerald and Stapleton to the noted Irish poet Paul Muldoon! (He may be only performing today). PS also mentioned that tickets are still available for this show, which seems to be flying under people’s radar. Check it out!

–Jeremy

8:58 p.m., Jan. 7 – Gossipiness We Know You Love

Okay, since I got so much #humblebrag for this already, here’s the lovely European ladies I wound up taking out last night. And since someone at UTR was already saying her interns were asking about me…if I didn’t already know the intern, I would be totally in love with myself.

But in all seriousness–we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on this particular section, talking about what everyone’s talking about. Honestly, I’m not in-the-know enough myself to really do it justice, but it’s a fascinating and salient feature of January that really, everyone knows–and knows things about–everyone else. I don’t know how Andy does it–if I can’t walk down St. Mark’s without running into people I know, what’s he supposed to do? I mean, comparatively, I don’t know anyone.

So here’s some things I’ve come across I guess I’ll share:

• The Irish. They’re back! Ireland’s been super hard hit by the economic crisis roiling Europe, but even so, they’ve sort of stuck to their guns arts-wise and have sent some 70 artists to NYC to represent at APAP, even though Experience Ireland (the program to re-brand the country through exporting artists, if my memory of the name serves) is wrapping up. Met with Jess and Megan from junk ensemble, whose show was a hit at the Dublin Fringe this last year, as well as the current director of the Dublin Fringe, plus other artists (Fitzgerald & Stapleton are around somewhere, too), so in short, it’s good to see the Irish in town. I think they face a chicken-and-egg dilemma–North American presenters don’t want to expend resources on them yet because their work is somewhat raw and undeveloped, but how are they to develop without opportunities to be challenged by new audiences? There’s a lot of great energy in experimental Dublin theater right now, and virtually none of it is on US shores yet. Perhaps IAC can help with that by funding some more touring opportunities in 2012/2013. We can hope…
• Fusebox in Austin: Ron Berry is, as usual, a veritable man about town. But this year, he’s here with two new full-timers at Austin’s Fusebox Fest, which is a good sign of growth, development and stability. Ron’s a great guy and he gives me hope for the future. In general I’m skeptical of the entire concept of the “curator” in performance, which seems to be getting ahead of itself with the ICCP or whatever at Wesleyan plus other initiatives… What the field needs isn’t a bunch of kids with college degrees looking to “curate” festivals in NYC–we’ve got too damn many already, and the big ugly secret is they’re financially shitty for local artists–but rather committed partisans around the country who can build a destination from the ground up. Fusebox is one of the newest and most successful, and based on what Ron suggested could be at the festival this year, it seems like they’re firmly on their own two feet in terms of being able to drive the conversation by supporting artists independently, rather than relying on cross-funded tours to get artists to their locale. It’s good news for Fusebox, Austin, and the field at large, and everyone here at Culturebot is really excited for them.
• The Europeans Respect Us! One of the things I was pleased to discover in my conversations over the last few days was the sense that European presenters were impressed by the level of discourse we Yanks are developing about the field, and not just the entire viz art v. performance issue that Andy’s going to be moderating tomorrow at the LuEster (see above pic/link for Culturebot Conversations). European presenters, I think, have been lulled into complacency when thinking about Americans by virtue of our radically different arts landscape. It’s hard for us to fund and promote artists, so from their perspective, our curatorial practices have seemed compromised by dint of practical limitations. But the people I was talking to–who aren’t newbies–seemed impressed to discover the quality of conversation and critical discourse that actually does exist, and yes, I like to think we, in our own way, have something to do with that. Facing substantial limitations, our curatorial practices are actually extremely scrutinized internally, and they seem to be coming to understand that. Our choices are hard and complex, and owe a lot to a lot of different interests; but really, I’m most impressed to see that recognized. Which brings us to…
• WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CURATORS PROJECT? Everyone who met those Croatian women who want to do a show about curators has been wondering this. Isn’t Vallejo Gantner supposed to pirouetting onstage right now in their show, baring all about his decision-making philosophy (and possibly just baring all)? Has anyone asked? Does anyone know? Many people I know suspected they were full of it (which was a bit my interpretation, based on them interviewing me), but others remain committed. WHAT’S THE DEAL?

--Jeremy

5:40 p.m., Jan. 7 – Stupid Shit Some White People Say

Not APAP/Jan related at all, really, but tenuously so based on what I recently wrote about Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s new role at YBCA. This article is the stupidest, most risible bit of arts analysis I’ve read in ages. First, read the great responses by Jason and Isaac at Parabasis. Next, dear January theater-goers, think of who you’re seeing onstage. Are you comfortable with the racial dynamics you’re seeing? Good lord…I’m speechless because of this article. Next year for Culturebot Conversations: Race in Contemporary Performance.

–Jeremy

5:05 p.m., Jan. 7 – SUPER PRODUCTIVITY YO!

Thank GOD for bars with free wifi. My review of Gob Squad and Builders Association is up. Sontag: Reborn is a hard show. It’s under-developed and doesn’t come together and I know a lot of people who mostly respond to that, because the mediation makes it read as cold and detached. By Sontag is a hell of a person, and I saw myself in that precocious, self-absorbed teenager. Serious empathy was happening, but it was all because of the performance and Sontag being so amazing. The production was cold and formal. It was a techie version of the stage version of A Year of Magical Thinking, except, you know, not based on a shitty book.

And as for Gob Squad, it was so good! Super Night Shot isn’t as smart or compelling as Kitchen, but it’s a super fun ride. You know, yesterday NY Times critic Jason Zinoman got raked over the coals by solo performer Holly Hughes and supporters (including Randy Gener–tsk tsk!) on Twitter for his January preview (see link below). Their main complaint was that his preview was oriented towards making the work seem non-threatening (which to their minds did the opposite). But Gob Squad, to my mind, is one of those companies who need that sort of attention.

They could be such a gateway for audiences, and if artists could get over their hard-on for critics who tell them what they want to hear and appreciate someone’s earnest desire to get butts in seats…well, I guess I just never expected to put Holly Hughes in the same bucket as Michael Kaiser. Sorry to have to disabuse you guys of your outdated notions again, but the spectator is emancipated–they’re not aspiring bourgeoisie anymore, dependent on a newspaper critic’s endorsement so as to know what they have to do to seem with it and high-class. The way to win them over isn’t to expect newspapers to contextualize things, it’s to get people in front on work that sucks them in and lets them realize that that insufferable, impenetrable performance art they saw isn’t inexplicable, it just wasn’t very good.

–Jeremy

3:45 p.m., Jan. 7 – Quick Thoughts on Beth Gill’s Electric Midwife

Oh pain in the ass trains! I got sidetracked getting from The Chocolate Factory to Abrons and am missing Laura Arrington. Damn it! Well what would January be without one fuck up?

I just caught Beth Gill’s Electric Midwife, which the Chocolate Factory is putting up again for a limited number of performances, mainly for presenters (audience max is 12 people). I missed the first run but have been fascinated with the show ever since, based on so much positive feedback from so many people (not to mention its trio of Bessies). It’s a beautiful piece of formal choreography–one person there even declared it “existential,” begging the question of why?, and indeed, there’s a tension as you wait and expect its mirror effect and impeccable timing to break (which it never does).

Still, I couldn’t help but feel it looked very downtown. Gill definitely applies more sense of stage geometry to the piece than you often get. It’s consciously choreographed, which is different from the generative approach you normally get here, in which the artist is primarily interested in inhabiting the stage but doesn’t exactly step back to consciously draft the piece on the stage. So on the one hand, I think Gill demonstrates some remarkable gifts, but on the other it feels like the work exists firmly within the bounds of New York dance. Honestly, I’m not sure if that’s exactly a criticism or not. Anyway, if the question is whether I’d recommend the show–just for the avoidance of doubt–the answer is yes. If you’re a presenter interested in looking for important emerging voices, Gill may just be the woman for you.

–Jeremy

11:30 a.m, Saturday, January 7 – Andy’s Update

Okay so here are a few brief notes on what I’ve seen so far. Balancing my actual job and Culturebot has been a bit of a challenge (thank goodness for Jeremy, Julie and the rest of the Cbot crew!) but here are some quick thoughts. Also a reminder about the conversation tomorrow at 1 PM in the LuEsther Lounge which will also be livestreamed at NewPlayTV.

Wednesday night – saw Sontag: Reborn. Jeremy and Jane liked it more than I did. It was interesting to see Sontag as a young, aspiring writer, to see the story behind the icon. I did not know that she had an affair with Maria Irene Fornes! But despite all the technical wizardry – the design was quite beautiful and impressive – I was underwhelmed. The text was edited thoughtfully but not really crafted into anything beyond diary excerpts. Left wanting more.

Thursday – Started the day with Word Becomes Flesh – not blown away but it was solid. Loved the live DJ and the mix of spoken word/movement as an idea, but fell a little short in execution. Next was In The Solitude of the Cotton Fields, which I really enjoyed. Some of the people I talked to after the show did NOT like it at all, which wasn’t surprising but a little disappointing. It was too long, especially the video sequence towards the end, but I really loved the writing and the band was incredible. The performers projected a kind of dark insanity that I really liked. It was kind of like a punk/techno Polish version of a Hubert Selby, Jr. novel, all drug-addled and desperate and dark. I guess that’s just kind of my thing. I feel like Lou Reed would like it. After that headed up to Japan Society for Toshiki Okada’s Hot Pepper… and Hideki Noda’s The Bee. Liked Hot Pepper… – interestingly it was presented in the Japan Society’s gallery, so I started thinking about performance and context, imagining Okada’s work situated in the visual art realm, which seems like an interesting proposition. I prefer Five Days In March and Enjoy, but this was a good intro to Okada. The Bee was not my cup of tea, so to speak. It was kind of like one of those Japanese Horror Porn movies where a domestic situation goes horribly awry turning bloody, gothic, cruel and inhuman. It was interesting to a certain extent and Kathryn Hunter was very impressive. But overall it felt a little dated and messy.

Friday – was at work most of the day – busy, busy, busy. Went to see Chimera at HERE which was kind of neutral – Suli Holum gives a fun, engaging performance but the show promises more than it delivers. Then hurried over to the Public to see Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot. OMG. So good. Those Gob Squad kids hit it out of the park again. It is sold out so you can’t see it but maybe if you beg and plead or mug somebody on the line you can get in. Totally mug somebody if you have to, because it is just that freakin’ good. Went to LuEsther Lounge after to hang. Fun times.

–Andy

3:39 p.m., Fri. Jan. 7 – Friday Afternooniness

Good lord can time not speed up just a wee bit? I’m ready to leave the office and get on with this! People are flying in, I’ve got a pair of shows at Japan Society tonight (which I’m very excited for), and you know. Stuff. Anyway, a couple brief notes:

• See here for info on watching Culturebot Conversations (and other stuff at UTR) via the interwebs
• See here for my review of Motus’s Alexis
• See here for TenduTV’s Marc Kirschner’s list of 10 things the dance field needs to be thinking about for 2012

–Jeremy

12:22 p.m., Fri. Jan. 7 – Ben Brantley’s Times Review of Motus

From today’s Times:

The heat that rises from these debates may give you brain burn, but it’s also thoroughly absorbing. So watch out. Toward the show’s end you may wind up leaping to the stage to join an instant protest movement that illustrates the differences between the single heroic gesture and the same gesture repeated ad infinitum. Even if you don’t know exactly why you’re raising your fist and making like you’re charging barricades, you’ll feel the exhilaration of people caught up in something bigger than themselves.

I wonder if the editor knew that the action Brantley describers as “heroic” was miming chucking a rock in a cop’s face? I also wonder if Brantley knew?

–Jeremy

7:54 p.m., Thurs., Jan. 6 – Builders Association at UTR

Just a quick note–I’d heard mixed things about “Sontag Reborn” at UTR, as had CBOT’s Jane Jung, but we were both really impressed. I think it lacked something–the performance never achieved a complex dialogue with the content of Sontag’s journal, and we were both left with the “why live?” question unanswered–but overall it was enjoyable. That insufferable young woman was me (with more talent and intelligence), and even if I was left a bit underwhelmed, I enjoyed it.

–Jeremy

3:3o p.m., Thurs., Jan. 6 – Marc Bamuthi Joseph Named Curator at YBCA

Okay, so the press release from Yerba Buena Center for the Arts just came in, and indeed, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who has a show at UTR right now, has been named performing arts curator.

In general, I think it’s a good choice for a couple reasons. One, although he’s from New York originally, he’s been working in the Bay Area for a while and the choice is probably at least in part an attempt by YBCA to re-engage the local community, which is great. An ongoing project of mine is exploring how local communities have different (and often less developed) arts support infrastructures, and I think a re-commitment by top tier arts centers is important to developing their localities as arts hubs. If Joseph can more align YBCA with the work being made in SF, it’ll be another important piece of the puzzle with Z Space and the Off Center and the great work they’re doing.

Second, it’s good to see a non white guy being made a curator. I’ve written about this before, but the ugly truth is that contemporary performance has a race problem. This is a huge, complicated issue in numerous ways, and one I don’t have time to try to suss out even in part here. But my hope is that in his role as a curator, Joseph will try to find new ways to support artists of color, and seek to recontextualize how their work is presented to place in the larger arts discourse where it belongs.

The question I guess is, will he prove as competent and accomplished a leader as he is an artist? I don’t know as much about the work he’s done locally, but my hope is that he’s been brought on as much for his proven leadership as for his local ties or taste-making eye for emerging artists. I think he does have a background in this, but I don’t have time to look into it further. Anyway, much luck to him and if you see him around the Public in the next few days, be sure to congratulate him.

–Jeremy

12:15 p.m., Thurs., Jan. 6 – More Reading

• Mini interview on ArtsBeat with the directors of Motus.
• We have another interview up–Maura Donahue speaks with Molissa Fenley about the two pieces she’s showing at Judson Church on Mon., Jan. 9.
• George Hunka posts a fantastic essay–one I really liked immensely when I first read it–on criticism from Australia’s Alison Croggon.
• Alexis Soloski has a piece in the Times interviewing Gob Squad.

–Jeremy

1:55 a.m., Thurs., Jan. 6 – Day 1 Wrap-up

Well, it’s damn near two in the morning, and I’m home, fed, showered, and ready for bed. After seeing MOTUS’s Alexis, I hit up–thanks to my +1′s more in-the-know-ness–the opening night party for UTR at the Public. Met some interesting people, had some interesting discussions. More to come tomorrow, but here’s a quick wrap-up:

• MOTUS at UTR: I decided not to review tonight, because I’m tired and didn’t want my response to get the better of me, but broadly speaking, it will be negative. Emotionally manipulative , intellectually weak, and even potentially exploitative, not only is it politically irresponsible political theater, but it compares poorly to the work of other artists on display this month (work by chelfitsch and The TEAM came to mind while I watched it, along with Gunther Grass’s The Plebians Rehearse an Uprising).
• Are we seeing the end of January? God I hope so; look, I was planning on saving this until after the fact, to have as a broader discussion one way or another, but let’s face it: everyone knows that things have gotten out of hand. While the public face of January festival time is that it’s a happy-go-lucky string of festivals, the truth is that all this was born of a trade-show mentality that wanted to put top artists up in front on the handful of North American presenters at APAP who can program this stuff (realistically you can count them on two hands). Anyway, I got to talking with people about the fact that HERE Arts Center’s Culturemart has become the first January festival to push itself outside the APAP window. The reasons are complicated but…it’s surely a sign of things to come. With COIL, UTR and American Realness delivering more than 40 shows alone, the fully “produced” work is just plain too much for the presenters to take in. As a trade show, it’s a failure. We’ll see what happens after the fact.
• Curators and who gets what curating job is a constant fascination of this community. APAP casts a big tent that includes a large number of people who have virtually nothing to do with the theater and dance we talk about at January festivals. Seriously, in the USA there’s about ten non-NYC presenters of note. Now, I haven’t actually followed this too closely, but a new job opened up at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SF earlier this year when Angela Mattox left her performance curation role at YBCA to take up the artistic director job in Portland at PICA, where she’s replace Cathy Edwards at TBA. Tonight I heard tell of who’s getting Mattox’s position–and equally interesting, who were the runners up–but as I don’t see evidence it’s been publicly released, I won’t say anything other than it would seem to confirm the rest of the country’s anti-NYC bias.

–Jeremy

4:45 p.m., Weds., Jan. 5 – Reading Materials

It’s nearly time for me to head off towards the East Village, where I begin 18 shows in 11 days with Italy’s MOTUS at La Mama as part of UTR, but I thought I’d take a minute to share some other writings on what’s going on.

• Jason Zinoman’s NY Times preview is def worth a quick read.
• Helen Shaw has a breakdown of what’s the what at Time Out
• At the Voice, Alexis Soloski has the beginning of an interesting exploration of technology and mediation in live performance; it’s a great over-view of what you’ll see, but it has little critical perspective. This is something I believe I’ll be returning to in a week or so once I have time to digest the performances.
• Meiyin Wang of UTR has a great thought piece on approaching contemporary performance over at HownRound
• George Hunka has a nifty post up today on critical authority; Hunka will be on the panel for the second Culturebot Conversation at UTR, and by way of example (and preview), he uses David Levine, who has a show at COIL and who happens to be on the first panel for us. David was one of the artists we didn’t have enough time to give his due onsite, so thanks to George for pulling out slack.

–Jeremy

12: 15 p.m., Weds. Jan. 5 – Dance Worth Seeing

There’s three dance events I want to call it since they’ve gone unmentioned so far.

• Heather Kravas’s Green Surround at PS122′s COIL Fest. I wanted to interview Kravas but ran out of time. Readers may recall that I love this show when it debuted at PS in May, and if you missed it you should catch it now. As I wrote at the time:

What unfolds from there is an implacably paced and painstakingly deliberate exploration of how women are encouraged to pursue the expectation of physical and aesthetic perfection. Heavily referencing classical dance as a stepping off point for what it reveals about idealization of the feminine, Kravas runs her company through the gauntlet, forcing the dancers through a series of ever more ridiculous–and even dehumanizing–processes of synchronization in pursuit of an ideal, while letting bits of personality and individuality bleed through the cracks.

• Zoe Scofield at the Joyce. So, has anyone else notice that the Joyce has also gotten on the festival bandwagon? No? I didn’t think so. It’s called Focus Dance and it opened last night. Zoe is an amazing artist from Seattle and she’s going to be performing again on Saturday. I caught her show A Crack in Everything at TBA last fall and had this to say:

Anyway, the point is, I think this is as good a way as any to approach A Crack in Everything, a complex, provocative, and occasionally stunning dance-installation (the set itself rises to the latter definition, plus there is an actual attendant gallery piece which I did not see). Its central images all focus an unrelenting gaze on experiences, inhabited by the dancers, engaging them over and over again, in a sense chopping up the linear flow of time to demand we consider otherwise fleeting moments, without the comforting sfumato effect memory offers.

• Rebecca Patek at CPR this Saturday. Patek is a flippin’ genius. All I got to say. Girl cracks me up and she’s a fine dancer too. From my glowing review of her at Fresh Tracks 2010:

The entire thing is deliciously absurd, occasionally cringe-inducingly awkward humor. In terms of movement, Patek made sure she had at least one beautifully realized solo, but also managed to throw herself around the stage in comic pratfall (with three audience volunteers, playing the people who failed Baby Jessica), as well as perform a redemptive baptism in which the audience is compelled to be the response in a quasi-religious call and response.

–Jeremy

11:17 a.m., Weds. Jan. 5 – Welcome to the Resource Page

Welcome to our first “blog” entry for January festival time. As most readers probably know, there’s a lot to do–in fact, the entire theater community has apparently adopted the habit of labeling this time of year with some sort of mental derangement: “madness,” “insanity,” “craziness,” what have you. And it’s true, there is in fact too much to do, which is a shame, because from the outset I know I’m going to miss some phenomenal artists who are going to slip under the radar (pun intended), unable to stand out. There’s 16 shows at UTR, eight or ten at COIL, and 20 at American Realness. And that’s not counting the showcases, Jay Scheib at the Kitchen, and so on.

But this is also Culturebot’s biggest time of year. We’re the only news and review source we’re aware of (at least in New York) that’s exclusively dedicated to covering contemporary performance, progressive theater, live art, dance, and so on. We’ve been busy all December interviewing artists showing this month (and we’re still busy–interview with Big Art Group and Jay Scheib are coming in the next 36 hours). But with that said, we want to encourage you to check out the interviews we’ve done that will hopefully help inform your showgoing:

• Argentinean director Mariano Pensotti (UTR)
• Lebanese theater artist Rabih Mroue (COIL)
• chelfitsch writer/director Toshiki Okada (UTR)
• Witness Relocation’s Dan Safer
• Buzzworthy SF choreographer Laura Arrington (Amer Realness)
• Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish, two of the minds behind influential company Goat Island (COIL)
• The guys behind Temporary Distortion (COIL)
• The TEAM’s Rachel Chavkin (COIL)
• Awesome Polish director Radek Rychcik (UTR)
• Japanese theater legend Hideki Noda (UTR)

That’s a hell of a lot of work, and we hope it’s helping audiences place the work they’re seeing in context. Also, PLEASE join us for Culturebot Conversations. These are Under the Radar Fest events that happen on Sunday Jan. 8 & 15, moderated by our own Andy Horwitz. We hope to see you there and around!

–Jeremy

Popularity: 9% [?]

Chatting with Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué on the phone a couple weeks ago, I was surprised to discover that his work Looking for a Missing Employee, which comes to PS 122′s COIL Festival this month (Jan. 6-9; tickets $25/$20), was an older piece, from 2003.

“It’s a very old piece,” Mroue admitted, “but I just presented this piece [during its opening run, in Beirut] only two nights. In a way, I was asked not to do it again.”

“By whom?” I asked.

“By the family of the missing employee, actually,” he told me. “They asked me kindly, actually, not to present this piece unless I come back to them to let them see what I’m doing in it. And I felt it would be a kind of censorship, and this is why I decided I don’t want to go negotiate with them and I preferred not to show it in Lebanon anymore.”

Mroué is one of the most internationally known artists working in Beirut today. With work that ranges from theater to performance art to visual art, he’s developed a reputation for exploring the challenges facing the complex multicultural–and civil war-scarred–society of Lebanon. His theater has toured internationally (though this is his first US tour, taking him to Pittsburg, Minneapolis, and Seattle as well as Vancouver’s PuSH Festival), his art has shown in important institutions throughout Europe (this year, he’s at Documenta 13), and he’s even produced a film with the ne plus ultra of French actresses, Catherine Deneuve, Je Veux Voir (2008). A second piece, The Pixelated Revolution, is also being presented for one night only on January 9.

The product of a secular family committed to religious tolerance and pluralism in an often balkanized country, Mroué ‘s life was marked by the conflict that’s been a hallmark of Lebanon for decades: a civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990; incursions and partial occupations by Israel during and following that time; and occupation and meddling control by Syria that continues in one way or another to this day. Mroué ‘s grandfather, in fact, was assassinated for his writings.

In Looking for a Missing Employee, performed by the artist himself, Mroué used the story of an actual missing employee–a worker who disappeared in the early Aughts, whose story he followed through the newspapers–as a lens through which to explore a more nefarious and complex part of Lebanon’s history: the some 17,000 persons who disappeared and remain unaccounted for during the civil war.

“The idea came by totally chance, by accident,” he told me over the phone. “I was collecting photos and news about missing people, that has nothing to do with the war. Just people who are missing for no reason. And there was this employee [who disappeared] and I cut out his news brief and the second day, there was another news story, and the third day another news story, and so forth. And suddenly his case became a big scandal in the whole country and I found myself following it and collecting all the articles and news about this missing employee.”

“And then I found that I had a really big archive about him, and I decided to do something out of his story, out of his case. And that’s how it came about,” Mroué explained. “But what was actually interesting to me about the missing person was–it’s really something that I didn’t realize at the beginning but only later–I thought that I was maybe really surprised how one can go missing, or how one can disappear, in a country such as Lebanon. Because Lebanon is known as a very closed society, like, it’s said that everyone knows everybody else. And for me it’s interesting for me to think that still, in this country, one can slip through cracks, still one can vanish. For me it was a kind of sign in a positive way.”

The experience of the war has had a huge impact on Mroué ‘s work, and on his approach to creating theater. Like many experimentalists, his approach was driven by a need to communicate something beyond what he could through a standard, more traditional theater vocabulary.

“There’s a difficulty today, for me, let’s say, to see theater and do theater, in the way I used to study it,” he told me. Labelling his approach to theater as “oblique,” or obscured and indirect, explained it in terms of a failure to realize his ambitions through a more traditional exploration.

“Especially what I was trying to do, creating or researching for body language,” he said, “a body which is imprinted by civil war. Because I was actually trying to find physical theater, visual theater where the body of the actor is the main role within it.”

“After some years I found myself at an impasse,” he continued. “And I didn’t reach anything with this research, and I found that every time I represent this body onstage, I find it’s [less], it doesn’t reach the experience that my body had during the civil war. So this is how I started to think about, how can I represent this body in theater? I started to put this question in my theater works, and I started actually to talk about this body, and not to show it anymore. And in other words maybe what I’m suggesting is that this body is represented by its absence. In this manner–this is my suggestion–maybe we have to look to theater in an oblique way, not in a direct way.”

Beyond simply a desire to present Looking for a Missing Employee again, Mroue acknowledged that partly, his choice to make this his first US presentation was born out of a desire to present a piece in English for English-speaking audiences. Much of his other work is performed in Arabic. Asked if he anticipated challenges for American audiences, potentially unfamiliar with Lebanon’s history, in approaching the show, Mroué only acknowledged that some local detail may seem unfamiliar, but added that this was true of every non-Lebanese audience, not just Americans. Otherwise, he was adamant that it would not be an issue due to his approach.

“I’m not afraid that the audience will not understand. For me, I’m sure the audience will understand,” he said. “I deal with the audience in an equal way, in the sense that they know as much as I know. I’m not doing theater to teach them, and they’re not coming to the theater to learn anything from me. I’m there to put some ideas, some questions, to share with the audience.”

For more information, see here for an interview via CNN, and here for a post on the Walker Arts Center’s blog.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Stephen Fiehn in "Let us think of these things..." Photo by John Sisson

For twenty years, Chicago’s Goat Island was recognized as one of the most interesting and challenging theater groups in the world. When they decided to disband with a tour of their final show The Lastmaker, which finished in 2009, it was obvious that although the company was through, the artists would surely continue making work. Now, New York is getting its first taste of post-Goat Island work, with Every House Has a Door‘s Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never. at PS 122′s COIL Festival (Jan. 5-9; tickets $20/$15).

Founded by Goat Island’s Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson, the company is intended to serve as a vehicle for project-specific creations with artists unable to devote themselves to a longer term engagement with a company. Although they’re on their third or fourth piece now, Let us think was their first. In fact, the idea behind it was born of the final Goat Island show, when a Croatian presenter in Zagreb, Marin Blažević, suggested they produce an international work with Croatian artists. Selma Banich and Mislav Cavajda began collaborating with Hixson, Goulish, and Stephen Fiehn, a fellow Chicagoan and recent transplant to NYC with his company Cupola Bobber. Over more than a half-dozen intensive residencies in Chicago, Zagreb, and England, Let us think was developed. I recently spoke with Hixson and Goulish over the phone about the show; Carol Becker has a long interview with them in the current issue of the Brooklyn Rail which is also well worth reading.

The genesis of the show comes from several sources all pointing to the Serbian film director Dušan Makavejev. Makavejev is an experimental and provocative filmmaker from the former Yugoslavia who spent many years in exile in the United States, where among other things he taught at Harvard, including lecturing about Ingmar Bergman’s films. At the same time Hixson and Goulish came across his groundbreaking film Sweet Movie, Goulish came across an essay about Makavejev’s work by the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, at which point the possibilities for a performance exploration began to open up.

“It gave us a way to approach an intercultural collaboration,” with their Croatian collaborators, Hixson told me. “And as we got into it, it was like Cavell was a stand-in for the Americans, and Makavejev was a stand-in for the Croatians and the ex-Yugoslavians, and Bergman became this third thing that none of us really knew that much about and could respond to.”

“Initially it was [Makavejev's] biography that was very interesting to us and the way he spanned…the way his life spanned the issues we were hoping to access with this collaboration,” Goulish added, “with the dissolution of Yugoslavia into seven different countries, the international utopian dream of the initial multicultural society that you sort of saw in the idea of Yugoslavia. That you sort of see in the idea of Makavejev’s films, with their international casts. But one thing that happened immediately, in the first conversation about Makavajev, between us as collaborators, it became acutely apparent that he was not very well known in the ex-Yugoslavian states.”

That added another layer of interest for the performers from Croatia, who saw part of their mission as reintroducing his work to their contemporaries.

The show was mainly developed from a story they heard about Makavejev at Harvard. In 1978, in order to deliver a lecture on Ingmar Bergman’s films, he edited together more than 20 scenes from 11 films to play within the space of only an hour. After contacting Makavejev, they were able to track down his editing notes and used the classroom experiment to build a piece through mediated experiments. As such, Let us think is both a deconstruction of film and, in essence, a performance lecture.

“Why performance lecture? Or why film in a performance? Our response to those questions always circles back around to this question that Lin continually asks as a director: ‘Why is it live?’” Goulish told me over the phone. “Or what is this piece’s ‘live-ness,’ what is its reason for being in a room with a live audience rather than in some other mode? And I think her way of answering that, and our way of answering that, is actually by trying to keep those different strands separate, by not trying to merge the film and the performance, by not merging the lecture and the performance. And that’s where you get into some of the potential for…I mean, for me, it’s a kind of lecture performance when someone comes out onstage before the performance and makes a pre-show announcement, and says, ‘Please turn off your cell phones, the show is about to begin.’ Because the show has begun, but here’s this person announcing, ‘I’m not part of the show, so I’m just a messenger telling you to do X, Y and Z, and then the show will start.’ And I think we try to exploit that for comic potential, in that first the actors will do a pre-amble in lecture-mode, and then they will do the performance they just introduced, which is a radical shift between the two things. They never quite occupy the same territory.”

“Our specific interest in these films, in Makavejev, is the experiments we’re talking about, where he showed three Bergman films at once, or he edited a number of sequences from different Bergman films into one new film, those were done in classrooms,” Goulish said. “And they were a kind of ecstatic pedagogical experiment. Treating the classroom as a kind of theater. So there’s also the interaction between the performers and the classroom, and the classroom and the film, and this sort of impractical but very exciting way of bringing all those different questions into one container.”

Filmic vocabulary came to heavily influence the piece, but in complex ways. Not only are Makavejev’s films potentially unknown to audiences, but they are purposefully left out of the performance; audiences only catch glimpses of them during the show. The company’s intent, in other words, was to force the audience to experience film through live performance, something which the audience is essentially informed of in advance, allowing them to play with the gaps between expectation and what’s actualized onstage.

“The film is actually playing in the performance room, and they [the performers] are watching it, but the audience never sees the film until they’ve seen Mislav on the computer,” Hixson explained, “you can see a scene from WR [Makavejev's most famous film], but that’s late in the performance. The audience does get a glimpse of that. But it was important to me that we never see the film, actually. Except for these glimpses. That you only see the film peripherally. So that technology is embodied to the performers. You see it through the performers.”

“The other part of the question of ‘why is it live?’,” Goulish added a bit later, “in this case, is what is the affect on the body of the performer in playing out these films live? To interpret them for an audience who can’t see them. What does that do to the body of the performer over the length of time? How do they sweat? How do they eat an apple? How do they drool? How do they get chocolate on their hands or clothes, how does the stage become slippery and more dangerous over the seventy minutes of the performance?”

Popularity: 3% [?]

“We started doing small video screens, partly because we wanted to start cautiously,” William (Bill) Cusick was telling me, “and partly because we had no money at all. And we’ve always worked within our limitations. Kenneth’s work started really small, because he’d build it in his living room. We rehearsed for years in his living room.”

“This is the first show that wasn’t built in a living room,” Kenneth Collins offered. “Even Americana Kamikaze and Welcome to Nowhere, which have toured internationally and played to houses with three-, four-hundrd seats, were designed and built and fully rehearsed in my living room. Which was a small living room! It wasn’t a loft.”

“It was a sixteen-, eighteen-by-twelve room, and the sets were eight-foot-by-eight-foot, sitting in front of a bookshelf, next to a leather sofa and the TV,” Cusick continued. “And it wasn’t like he ripped out his living room, he lived there, it was real. And we’d all come and rehearse there for a couple years…”

“This is the first show that we’ve had a larger environment, which is our rehearsal studio, to build the work,” Collins continued. “And again we’re scraping, we’re hitting the walls, we’re up against the columns.”

Cusick: “This show is almost three-times as large. It’s twenty feet wide and twelve feet high.”

Collins: “But it’s a philosophy of being able to make the work that an audience sees onstage in the studio. And again it’s one of the ways that we approach making theater more like visual artists, perhaps. Because the work in the studio is what’s of primary importance to us. It’s the work we present to the public.”

This was the weekend before Christmas, and I was sitting–shopping bags of gifts around my feet–in the loft of a Soho cafe where Collins and Cusick, the creative directors behind the company Temporary Distortion, had agreed to meet to discuss their latest, Newyorkland, an exploration of the life and myth of the American cop, which premiered at On the Boards in Seattle a couple months ago and makes its way to New York as part of PS 122′s COIL Festival in January at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (Jan. 12-28; tickets $20/$15).

Of all the interviews I’ve done of January artists, this was easily my favorite. Not to sound trite, but the two make a great pairing. Collins, the director and designer, is angular with shorter hair and tattoos, while Cusick, the video artist, has longer hair. Both wore all black. The former can be elliptical in conversation, while the latter can speak enthusiastically about film and video and television. While one responded to a question, the other would sit quietly, occasionally looking bored, but intently listening, jumping in to add to the conversation, occasionally finishing the other’s sentences. And sometimes they seemed to forget all about me and conversed among themselves about some point on which they different perspectives, evidence, I suppose, of the creative frisson that drives the company’s work. Really, I’m not trying to be cute here, but transcribing our interview was a fascinating exercise in trying to capture just how differently these two incredibly smart, thoughtful artists described their work, even as they demonstrated a deep understanding of the other’s process.

Temporary Distortion was founded around 2002 by Collins, who met Cusick in 2004 at the Lincoln Center Theater’s directors lab. Notwithstanding his education in film, Cusick is himself a long-time theater artist. At the time, he was working as an assistant lighting designer but hoping to make the transition to directing, and parlayed his design experience into the directors lab. Shortly after meeting Collins, he caught two of Temporary Distortion’s early shows in quick succession.

“I saw his show at the Ontological, and it was easily the most unique experience I’d ever had to that point in my life in a theater,” Cusick told me. “My participation level was so far beyond anything I’d experienced, that when I watched the show, I had so much going through my mind, in so many ways, that I wanted to get that out of my head and onto the stage.”

Collins, for his part, was already working in the intensely sculptural mode that continues to define the company’s production design aesthetic, putting his actors in “claustrophobic box-like structures” influenced, as he suggested, by the artist Joseph Cornell.

“I’ve always been interested in, how do you make theater that’s more like a form of sculpture?” he explained. “How do you view the work on stage in the same way you look at sculpture in a gallery? How do create that sort of detachment with the audience and give them the time to view the work in that manner?”

The two began collaborating and today form the artistic heart of Temporary Distortion. Collins continues to develop intensely constructed spaces for his artists to perform in, separating them from one another. Cusick’s contribution comes in the form of video elements projected throughout the performance in diverse areas of the tightly constructed space. The work they create is often fragmentary, pulling together video segments that use recognizable filmic tropes, found-texts, and music that re-combine and explore that the aesthetic and content of the show’s subject.

“We’re working in a non-narrative video format, non-narrative visual format that can complement that sculptural installation,” Cusick offered, “basically creating video art to complement the performance art, and actually integrated to create a new form.”

The company’s most recent work has been in the field of deconstructing film. Welcome of Nowhere, about “road movies,” and Americana Kamikaze, about Japanese horror, were Newyorkland‘s immediate predecessors. Like those shows, Newyorkland is a complex document using a variety of sources to present the world of the police officer. But the new work may be a break from that tradition, depending on whose perspective you take.

The genesis of the piece comes from a phone call from Cusick to Collins as they were finishing Americana Kamikaze. They’d been mulling over a couple not quite satisfactory subjects for their next show, when Cusick sat down to watch The French Connection with TaraFawn Marek, the company’s costume designer. Inspired by the film, he suggested that they tackle cop pop culture for their next project. Collins had grown up in a family of police officers, so there was an added connection.

“It very quickly morphed into a project about deconstructing the profession of police-work,” Collins commented, though, “rather than deconstruction the film representations of police-work.”

“We spent about a year thinking of it as taking apart Dirty Harry, taking apart The French Connection,” Cusick continued to explain, “looking at it that way. We watched forty films, fifty films each, and then starting getting into the non-fiction literature, and the fiction begins to feel really frivolous. It begins to feel really repetitive and formulaic, and even insulting to your intelligence. How do you take apart something that simplistic? And then you begin to look at where it comes from. And the cop culture–it’s been said before that police work is the most mediated line of professional work in America.”

“We think of ourselves as very familiar with it,” Collins added, “although that familiarity is based on a fiction.”

So Newyorkland is a departure from the previous shows, which were primarily concerned with genre representations. Here, the company set out to explore the reality of police work as much as its representation. Sources were often as not non-fiction. Calling it an “assemblage,” Collins said: “Really, that’s what we’ve done in building the text and all of the content of this show, is to look at documentaries, to look at interviews, stories that I heard growing up in a family of cops. William went through–”

“The NYPD manual,” Cusick interjected. “There’s two scenes that are completely deconstructions–”

“–of found poetry in the police manual,” Collins finished.

But whereas Collins saw the work mainly as an exploration of the gap between the reality and the representation, Cusick maintained that from his perspective, and his work as the video artist, it remained similar to previous explorations of genre film, referencing dozens of different movies and TV shows.

“What starts as a film genre,” he said, “we realized is a cultural genre, a whole sector of our culture.”

Newyorkland features four live actors and more than twenty in the video segments, which offer a stark contrast to the live performance.

“It’s ironic in way, because there’s a very cold sort of formalism onstage, but in the video we allow ourselves to be very…” Collins searched for the word. “I don’t know, what’s the word? It’s almost the opposite…”

“Intensity,” said Cusick. “There’s another level of intensity in the film.”

Asked to speak more about the process of creating the disparate elements of the piece and how those relate to one another, the two talked about the challenge getting together a long, mixed segment of video and performance they call, internally, “Role Call,” in which the officers get their daily assignments. The company used the event to offer a lens on the challenges facing officers as they present themselves professionally.

“It starts with the traditional Hill Street Blues beginning, like, ‘All right item such-and-such, we got this going on, this item, this is going on, keep an eye out for that.’ And with the video, it’s a follow-shot,” Collins explained.

“It’s the most complex shot in the whole show,” Cusick continued. “An unbroken shot, one long take.”

Collins: “A dozen actors…”

“With a twelve pound camera on one arm, on a Steadicam with no vest. Usually with a Steadicam you have a vest that counterbalances it,” Cusick explained.

“We had a location we dressed as a police station, I think rather convincingly,” Collins was speaking more to Cusick than me at this point.”And we had a number in uniform, a number of officers dressed as detectives, and as Bill followed–there’s a whole choreography set up ahead of time…”

“I’d follow one guy, he’d turn off, I’d follow another guy, he’d turn off, I’d catch another, follow him, he’d turn off…” Cusick recalled. “I worked on Law & Order, and they use Steadicam on every single episode. I remember watching them do it, and it was this really brilliant camera operator who’d wear a vest, and he’d have–they’d use a film camera, so he’d have a sixty-pound camera, and he’d be running down the street, following the cops.”

“The reason it was difficult,” Collins said, turning back to me, “and why we struggled with it, was we had this video sequence which in a way was very fixed because it’s a one-shot–you can’t edit and retain the essence of what it is. And we had a text we also liked, and had an inherent rhythm to it, and no matter how much you edited the text, it had this inherent rhythm to it. And we had music that John Sullivan, our composer, composed during a rehearsal that we also liked. And the three were just missing each other for months.”

“Off by five seconds, off by ten seconds…” Cusick concluded. “The first time we did it, I could see it in its ideal state, and we didn’t get there till six months later.”

There’s an extreme level of perfectionism that goes into a Temporary Distortion show (“When we get to putting a show onstage, we’re done,” Collins told me. Added Cusick: “The only thing that’s not cued when we arrive at the theater is the house lights”), but the results are startling. Newyorkland benefited from an unexpected synergy with public events, opening opposite the crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street encampments nation-wide, in which police were caught in the middle between opposing political units, and often cast as the bad guys in the drama. The show’s deep appreciation for the reality of the police officer’s experience and the challenges facing them in their highly mediated but little understood job is another example of extremely thoughtful and boundary-pushing work going up in January. I heard from numerous people in Seattle how compelling the show is, how strangely timely and important and perspective-shifting it is right now.

It’s also worth noting for those who, like me, missed the company’s previous work, that Americana Kamikaze is available online from OntheBoards.tv; Temporary Distortion will be the first company with two shows available from the site.

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Amber Gray, Libby King, Heather Christian, Mikaal Sulaiman & Brian Hastert in The TEAM's "Mission Drift." Photo by Rachel Chavkin

“When we were working on Architecting, towards the end of our time on Architecting, this was in spring 2008, Naomi Klein spoke. The Shock Doctrine had come out, and this thing she talks about of ‘disaster capitalism’ ended up being a major thing for Architecting in terms of Brett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara,” Rachel Chavkin explained. It was earlier this month, and we’d met for lunch at a “bourgie” (to use her term) cafe near NYU, where she was teaching, in order to discuss The TEAM‘s upcoming US premiere of Mission Drift, a hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, as part of PS 122′s COIL Festival (Jan. 8-29; tickets $25/$20)

“But it didn’t feel like we’d fully gotten to solve it,” she continued, “in part because Architecting was so sprawling, and quite deliberately so. But it just felt like we weren’t done with this idea. And that sort of led me to ask the company the question that Klein talks about but hadn’t fully answered for me, which is, ‘Why does American capitalism have its particular character? What defines American capitalism specifically and why did it become that way?’”

That’s a hell of subject for a play to tackle, but based on my experience catching it as a work-in-progress at the 2010 Ice Factory Festival…well, while I reserve the right to change my opinion based on the final version going up at COIL, I’ve previously described it as one of the smartest pieces of political theater I’ve seen in a while. And I’ll stand by that for now. Fun, engaging, intelligent, non-didactic, and touching in a surprisingly humane way (given the stated subject), it challenges the standard for political theater in America and is one of the shows I’m most excited to see this January.

The TEAM coalesced around Chavkin back in December 2004, mainly consisting of fellow NYU alums. The name was originally based on Chavkin’s college nickname (I did not get that story) but, following the advice of an accountant from the Field who said they’d never be able to incorporate a company named “The Team,” the company decided to make it an acronym. In fact, the first group writing assignment was to come up with what “team” stood for, and the combined result was the portentous “Theater of the Emerging American Moment.” Today, the company has nearly doubled in size, mainly with other NYU-trained artists but also including a couple designers with experience at the SITI Company, owing no doubt to Chavkin’s further training at Columbia with Anne Bogart. Chavkin serves as artistic director of the company and the director of the company’s shows, though, given the collaborative nature of the endeavor, she describes herself as an “editor,” bringing together the disparate strands developed through the generative process.

The TEAM's Rachel Chavkin and Amber Gray, with the Edinburgh Fringe Herald Angel Award they won for "Mission Drift."

Mission Drift is the sort of play that suffers in description. Essentially, it tells the story of two couples. The first is Joris and Catalina Rapelje, a fictionalized version of the couple known proverbially as the American Adam and Eve. Married in the Netherlands in 1624, the couple moved the North America the same year and ultimately settled in New Amsterdam, where they’re credited with giving birth to the first European child in the city; today they count some one million Americans as descendants. In Mission Drift, the two exist as perpetual adolescents who set out from New Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century and follow the westward expansion until 1890, when the Census declared the “end of the frontier,” with all supposedly “vacant” land in the United States settled. The two find themselves left in the city of Las Vegas, where they set out to create a new frontier through capitalist enterprise.

Joan is a native of present-day Las Vegas, consigned to working odd service sector jobs while engaging in a form of urban archaeology by preserving the ever disposed signage of the strip as a volunteer at the “Neon Boneyard,” an amateur museum experiment I was surprised to discover is real. (Sadly, apparently, others have, too; according to Chavkin, when the company visited a couple years ago it was still below the radar. Recently though she heard from a friend there that the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs had learned of it and, unintentionally echoing a line from the play, the friend told Chavkin that they “looked at the Neon Boneyard and saw dollar signs.”)

Joan’s erstwhile love-interest is a member of the Southern Paiute tribe displaced by development, forced out of his home by the city pursuing the water rights to his family’s well.

What ultimately unfolds is a drama of conflicting interests, with Catalina occupying the role of frontiersman, longing for the possibility of new discovery and in love with power of creation to cultivate the emptiness of the American desert. Her path is related to the rapacious capitalism Joris indulges, but whereas he’s in love with the accumulation of wealth, she’s is driven by a different need, and this conflict ultimately draws them apart. For Chris, the Paiute, either way, the city they’ve built as developers has displaced him (and whoever said the desert was empty, anyway?) and he rebels against the very existence of Las Vegas. Joan, a non-aboriginal native of the constructed city, finds herself displaced from her own home through the rapacious development of the Rapeljes (mirroring, of course, the real estate bubble that popped shortly after the TEAM began the project).

Oh, and Mission Drift is also a musical. Of a non-traditional sort. With performances and music by the amazing Heather Christian as Miss Atomic. Got all that?

“I think our endless process–and probably endlessly frustrating process–is one of the things that gives our work the density that I hope people associate with our plays,” Chavkin told me.

The TEAM’s work is devised through a lengthy and intense process. I asked Chavkin to describe the process of developing the final work, and for simplicity’s sake, she limited her explanation to the character of Joan, by way of example. Beginning at an early workshop at the Brick Theater in 2009, four of the company members were working on different things. Jess Almasy was interested in developing a character who believed she was Joan of Arc, envisioning the role as a Wisconsin transplant to Vegas. Jill Frutkin was interested in the issue of prostitution, and discovered an organization called Hookers for Jesus, comprised of born-again former prostitutes seeking to help others leave the profession. Libby King was fascinated with Hunter S. Thompson. And Kristen Sieh was interested in playing a tumbleweed, or desert native. The name “Joan” stuck, elements of one or another enterprise went into the final character–a Vegas/desert native, volunteer at the Neon Boneyard, and a theme-restaurant waitress–while others went by the wayside or were incorporated into other characters (the Rapeljes became the immigrants to Vegas).

I knew that an important part of the development had taken place in Las Vegas itself, but when I asked Chavkin who had supported their residency and work on the ground, I got an emphatic “No one.”

“We fundraised like fucking crazy and we tried for support,” she said. “And now I’m thrilled to say we just got a grant from the NEA to bring the final work back to Vegas.”

Ultimately the company paid out of pocket or relied on donations to spend a month in the city, and in her role as director-cum-editor, Chavkin arranged a tight schedule of “field trips” to experience the place in the mornings, followed by intensive work in the theater the University of Las Vegas donated for their use in the afternoons. In their field trips, they met with and interviewed members of the local culinary workers’ union, to get a sense of the labor reality in Vegas. They visited the Atomic Testing Museum (the testing of the bomb also figures apocalyptically in the play). Another trip took them to the Springs Preserve, an institution devoted to the history of the desert ecology and sustainable development, which ultimately features prominently into the work’s theme.

“Las Vegas–which I actually didn’t know before we started this piece–used to be a fertile valley,” Chavkin told me. “It means ‘the meadows.’ And it was totally green, totally lush. It was an oasis. And that was due to the Springs Reserve, which was the aquifer underground that got destroyed in the Fifties, it was tapped out very, very quickly.”

Another exercise took them to the Luxor casino, where each member’s assignment was to interview three people: an employee, an apparent non-employee, and then whoever they wanted. The intense engagement with the city had a profound impact on the story that the company finally presented in Mission Drift.

“The entire way we portray Las Vegas, I can trace it back to a couple interviews we did,” she recalled. “One was with a guy who worked at the culinary union who turned out to have been born and bred in Las Vegas. He was about sixty, as was the head of the office of Cultural Affairs for the city, also in her early sixties. Both of them born and raised in Las Vegas. Very unusual because Las Vegas was a town of about 300,000 for a long period of time. And we heard from both of them almost the exact same thing, which was, this this used to be a small western town. This used to be a small town. Vegas used to be for the locals. It was this phrase we just kept hearing again and again and again. And when we asked about the destruction that had been wrought by the mortgage crisis, every single one of them said, ‘We think growth is good. And we don’t think growth is bad, we think it’s good that Vegas is growing as a city. We just think it grew too fast.’ So I think the entire thesis of the play, that there is something unsustainable about the marriage of capitalism and the frontier, came from right there.”

The one caveat I’d really like to add to all this is that, notwithstanding the influence of thinkers like Naomi Klein on the work, the reason I have so much respect for this play is that the TEAM is so decidedly opposed to easy answers. No matter what you ultimately think of Klein’s work, she is rather easily caricatured as a leftist taking potshots at ideological enemies. The TEAM are not. Their entire portrayal of the shape of American capitalism through the stories they tell is deeply sensitive and avoids easy answers or taking potshots. Intelligently, the company appears to have jointly come together in an effort to present the shape of our economy–including its disastrous boom-and-bust destructiveness–as a function of something deeper in the American psyche, the longing for creating things, for expanding the frontiers and filling the empty spaces our European ancestors imagined the deserts and plains and mountains of the frontier to be. Watching it the first time, I was struck by the thematic similarity between Mission Drift and Cormac McCarthy’s remarkable novel Blood Meridian, even as they diverged radically in tone, aesthetics, and politics. Mission Drift is, as Chavkin also pointed out, a Western, one that links disparate elements together to pose a vexing problem–perhaps the most vexing problem facing our society today. It was the novelist Chad Harbach, lately the lauded author of The Art of Fielding, who posed it to me years ago in a Seattle bar: “What if growth itself is the problem?”

And beyond all of that is the fact that it’s just a damn fine story. “It is by far and away the most emotional of any of our works. It’s, sort of–separate from the politics for a minute–it’s just an incredibly emotional story, because we tell the story of capitalism in this country through the lens of a marriage dissolving, and a marriage that you really love,” Chavkin said. “And now I hope we’ve done a really good job of allowing you to fall in love with these characters and root for them, in the way you sort of root for this American thing of setting out for the territories. And then they just become horrible, and monsters of themselves and lost within that.”

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