For the past week and some, I’ve been struggling with my response to Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show (part of PS 122′s COIL Festival, through Feb, 4; tickets $25-$35). From the moment I left the Baryshnikov Arts Center two Saturdays past, I had the feeling that I was missing something, some thing that would make it all make sense, a reason for the choices Lee made that allows all the pieces to fit together. And that sense has only been furthered by the show’s critical response, which has been overwhelmingly positive. But with about ten days’ time to reflect, and to talk to others about their experiences (most people I know are also deeply ambivalent about the show), I just can’t justify it anymore. There’s something here that just doesn’t work.

A brief description: You enter the theater and sit down. Shortly thereafter, a half dozen women will enter, mostly through the audience. They’re naked. You’ll be unsurprised to know that there is a diversity of body types represented. (Three of the performers (Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle, and Regina Rocke) are primarily known as dance/movement artists; Becca Blackwell is an actor, I suppose [Note: It's been brought to my attention that this could be perceived as dismissive; it was merely intended as a broad if uncertain characterization of Blackwell's practice]; then there’s Amelia Zirin-Brown, better known as cabaret star Lady Rizo; and burlesque performer and artist World Famous *BOB*.) From this point, they will perform a series of vignettes without text. A pantomime fairy tale. A dance routine or two. Lady Rizo will do a comic routine on sex raunch in which she plays a porn vixen switching up the dynamic so that it’s the guy who’s taking it. Another will feature a woman rocking out to heavy metal. Still another has them all gyrating on the floor. The only words (if I understand this correctly) will be a song sung in Welsh. In just under an hour it will end.

In interviews, Lee has spoken about her desire to create a show that wasn’t a polemic, but rather one that embodied some sort of “utopian feminism,” and presented “gender fluidity” (see here or here). My problem is, I suppose, in trying to ferret that out from what I saw onstage. I can sort of see how this was the idea, but, as I’ll get to momentarily, I don’t think this is quite what happened.

One of the things that troubled me in reading others’ responses to the show is that no one really points out the banality of the representations onstage. I don’t mean that pejoratively, mind you. I just mean that what we see is a depiction of banal gender roles in dialogue with one another. Consider the fairy tale pantomime: in it, Lee isn’t subverting female representations in fairy tales. The actions of every character exist well within the bounds of fairy tales. Little girls can also be vicious monster-killers cutting their friends out of a beast’s stomach. Evil witches can also be loving mothers. What Lee shows us isn’t outside the construct of female representations in fairy tales–it’s just outside the Disney version of fairy tales.

Likewise, two long sequences towards the end. In the first, a woman simply rocks out, headbanging and slam dancing to heavy metal. This is followed by her getting into a vicious fight with another woman, played out in slow motion, to a crowd of jeering spectators. Anyone who’s been to a metal club has, I’d wager, seen both scenarios go down and can attest to the veracity of the scenes.

And then there’s a long dance sequence in which the performers, to a house beat, perform a series of eroticized moves derived from stereotypical household “women’s work,” everything from ironing to burping the baby or doing dishes.

How does this relate to the idea of a utopia feminism that supposes a “fluidity of gender,” when in fact all of these are presentations of reality? Fairy tales allow women to occupy contrasting roles without ever being emancipatory. Women do rock out in clubs and, when they fight, can be truly vicious and brutal, just like men can, in ways that have little or no relationship to spectator events that take place in mud pits. And of course (and I’m surprised not to have seen anyone else point this out), there are dance moves based on household chores (stir the pot, anyone?). In fact, the gag in that dance sequence is, I’m pretty sure, about fifty years old or more.

In short, none of these ideas are exactly groundbreaking, and I doubt they’re meant to be. The best sense I can make of the work is that Lee is presenting a plurality of experience and possibility onstage in order to contrast with an oppressive set of expectations based on media and cultural archetypes, stereotypes, and the like–let’s call it the “dominant paradigm.” Indeed, that’s the language that’s subverted throughout. The fairy tale subverts Disney idealization. Lady Rizo’s raunchy routine subverts porn. And another long movement sequence, in which the cast gyrates on the floor to set cellulite jiggling, subverts the fashion magazine prescription of feminine beauty.

Of course, so does a Dove soap ad. And that, I guess, is my first problem: Lee’s target is the host of social pressures and representations that your average eighth-grade health class critiques as the dominant social paradigm. It’s akin to standing onstage and saying, “Models in fashion magazines give young women negative body images.” It’s not that’s untrue. It’s in fact so self-evident that we, the audience, can nod along in agreement and then go back to reading copies of The New Yorker on the subway home, funded by ads for clothes modeled by anorexic waifs, and do so with very little cognitive dissonance. And to this reality, Lee seems to add nothing. She seems to assume that the presentation of various realities–diversity of representations, diversity of behaviors, diversity of bodies–is somehow utopian and that these things, in and of themselves, offer a critique of the dominant paradigm rather the existing comfortably within it.

Reading the reviews of the show, almost all by men, I would almost be tempted to agree that she was on to something. As self-evident as most of these points strike me, other critics seemed duly impressed. In the Times, in an otherwise ambivalent review, Charles Isherwood made sure to note how liberating it was to see a diversity of body types onstage, bared with joy and without a hint of self-loathing (despite, you know, one of the performers being best known as a burlesque artist). Hilton Als in The New Yorker hyperbolically compared the show to Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls… for its courageous truth-telling, apparently (although for colored girls… was about the challenge of telling the truth, while UFS operates on the presumption that we all already know the truth). But the money quote for me comes from Time Out‘s David Cote. I like Cote’s work generally, and his even-handed but very positive review I guess I’ll use as the base-line. In it, he writes:

Most shocking, once you’ve gotten over giggles or puritanical guilt about staring at six women jumping and bouncing around in their birthday suits, you stop seeing the nudity and start focusing on the individual, her quirks and traits. The piece may have no name, but its cast members are anything but faceless archetypes.

So I suppose you could argue that the piece is making its point. See! People are realizing that there’s a difference between the social construct of expectations of women, and what real women are and what they do! But are they really, or is the audience just nodding along to a point we already agree on, again accepting the status quo with little or no cognitive dissonance? Second-person voice notwithstanding, there’s only two ways you can read that quote from Cote. Either he’s talking about himself, his own giggly titilation or puritanical guilt, and his own inability to see naked women as people other than things, or he’s making an assumption–the same assumption as the show–about what some amorphous Other thinks. I’d wager it’s actually the latter. And if you believe the critique of society that the show seems to accept a priori, then yes, I suppose it’s quite good at challenging that dominant paradigm. However, that dominant paradigm is best represented by the caricature of a workplace sexist from your day job’s anti-sexual harassment training video.

None of this is intended to remotely suggest I don’t believe that these things are issues; I know they are. I’m just saying–sometimes shit’s complicated, you know? Perhaps reality demands more than just putting it onstage and then stepping back and saying, Well how about that? And I know that Lee and her collaborators are smart enough and talented enough to offer a more complex exploration than this.

That’s where I get really troubled, because I think there are some undeniable conclusions we can actually draw from this show that are even more problematic. First of all, it’s pretty obvious that Lee’s ultimate interest was in the body, not gender. In interviews, she’s explained her choice to make the performers naked in terms of wanting to de-sexualize them. This is a rather naive interpretation of sexualization. (Really? Naked women aren’t sexy at all?) Even if you want to accept that extended exposure moves us past cheap titillation or arousal, it’s weird to suggest that judgment would pass, too.

Yet this seems to be what she wants to explore most of all. We watch a half-dozen naked performers for nearly an hour; we watch them in different ways ask us to consider different sorts of bodies. Just not that different. Ironically, for all the talk of “gender fluidity,” Lee remains committed, apparently, to a rather binary ideal of biological sex. She gives us twelve breasts and no penises, suggesting, apparently, that male-to-female trans, for instance, is not a category that could fit within her expansive feminist utopia. And what’s more, the choice to remove these performers’ clothes and present them naked seems to demand the audience see the gender spectrum as having primarily to do with the body, since she denies the performers the ability to self-define their own gender through either speech or dress-presentation.

Compared to the work of an artist like World Famous *BOB*–whose one-man show explores her own desire to be a drag queen, among other things–Lee’s work seems kind of toothless, and seems to have appropriated and castrated the work of such a collaborator. (The same could be said of Lady Rizo.) Even more bothersome is the fact that many people seem to have decided the show is–or should be categorized as–dance. In which case it’s most definitely a failure. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the show quite quickly begins comparing it negatively (or at least problematically) to work by movement artists ranging from Deborah Hay to Lee’s own COIL Festival co-artist Heather Kravas. I feel like the plaudits that Lee is scoring for UFS would be better spent on the more ambitious and challenging work of choreographers, who remain ghettoized in the eyes of the mainstream performing arts world, a world increasingly opening its arms to a perceived provocateur like Lee while remaining painfully ignorant of the artistic crucible from which she’s emerging.

So someone please, explain to me what I’m missing and why I’m wrong. Surely gender is a far more complex subject than this, and deserving of a more meaningful and rich exploration than it gets here.

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Cassie Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 6% [?]

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% [?]

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.

Popularity: 3% [?]

“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.

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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Mariano Pensotti is a Buenos Aires-based artist whose 2010 piece El pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal) is playing this January as a joint presentation of the Public’s Under the Radar and PS 122′s COIL Festival. NYC is the first stop on a North American junket for El pasado, that will see it hit the Wexner (Columbus, Jan. 19-22) , the Walker (Minneapolis, Jan. 28-30), the PuSH Festival (Vancouver, B.C., Feb. 3-5), On the Boards (Seattle, Feb. 9-12), Yerba Buena (SF, Feb. 17-19), and REDCAT (LA, Feb. 24-26). For more information, see the PuSH Festival’s interview with Pensotti from 2010, about his large site-specific performance La Mareo, which turned an entire street into a fragmentary jaunt through trauma and memory.

Tickets to El pasado are available either through PS 122 as part of the COIL pass (ten for $100), or through UTR either individually ($20) or as part of a Festival Pack ($75 for five shows).

What is the attraction of live performance for you? In interviews and on your website, you talk about how your work is influenced by literature and visual art and film. This work is inspired both by photographs you collected and the novelistic approach of Balzac. So why a live performance rather than a video or film project, other mediums you work in?

Well, I’m usually interested in creating works that might be a crossover between literature, film and visual arts but always including some live performance aspect. In El pasado es un animal grotesco I was specifically interested in how the past could be retold in the present and how something “ephemeral” such as the past or our memories could be made present in another ephemeral media as the live performance is. Another key point of the project is how to tell epic, ambitious stories that might contain fiction, our personal experiences and socio-political events with minimal resources: just four actors, some old props and a revolving stage… In that context the experience itself of making the performance becomes epic. Our play also deals with the subject of time and the times that go by and I cannot think about another medium where you can have that so strongly present such as in a live performance. Ultimately the play tells the story of four characters during ten years and I had the impression that to see these four actors performing live, nonstop, fighting to make present the past during two hours, to see them tired at the end is like seeing them aging ten years.

In the description of the piece on your website, you wrote of the images that inspired the piece, that “Many seemed to be people from my own generation: A faulty chronicle of a decade.” The past decade has been a challenging one in Argentina. What sorts of experiences do the characters’ stories touch on? Is there a concrete example that you could perhaps share of how something in one of the images inspired the text you developed for the character?

I think the use of the broken pictures was the result of a mixed perception. On one hand there’s a fact that as a young generation in Argentina, a country with perpetual economic and political crises, we had to struggle against a lot of difficulties in our ordinary life. But of course that’s not something that you can relate just to Argentina. On the other hand what interested me more was to discover some common feeling in people from my generation, which is the desire of being someone else, the belief that our lives might be better if we lived somewhere else or that we should become another person different from who we are. Besides the economic crises it probably has some relation to that as a generation we’re the sons of the people who fought to change the society during the ‘70s and who were brutally repressed by the military dictatorship, so in comparison with them we usually feel weak, pointless, without social compromise… as a broken or unclear picture. In that sense my collection of blurred and broken pictures seemed to be a clear metaphor of all that.

In the play I was interested in working with that feeling, which at the end I have the impression is quite universal, and also to place some fiction into a real background to see how social events may affect or not private lives. For example during one of our most terrible recent economic crises, in 2001 and 2002, one of the characters loses his job, his flat and his life change a lot; as opposed to other characters, the same event almost affects him. I had the feeling that at least in Argentine theater there was a lack of relation with political events in recent years, we were much too focused on small family issues, so as a challenge I was interested in dealing with our most recent history, not just in Argentina but also using events such as 9/11 or the Iraq invasion to invent stories. It was much more appealing to work with that in a fiction context rather than to take a distant decade, probably more studied and fictionalized already.

This piece makes use of a rotating set. Where did that idea come from and how does it relate the content of the piece?

In my plays I always try to have sets that work not just as a decoration but rather as a narrative mechanism. I’m also interested in setting a play in a context that might affect the body of the performer as well as the perception of the viewer. In the case of the rotating set conceptually it has clearly to do with the idea of passing time, time that never stops, and the actors go from one small space to the next one while the disc turns around all the time. Narratively speaking, as the play is composed of a lot of small scenes, more than sixty, it helped us to set each of them in a different place making small changes on each space when it is not visible to the audience. Additionally, it creates the visual impression of a long dolly shot from a movie.

The soundtrack and title come from Of Montreal. It’s an interesting choice for a work that explores a uniquely Argentine experience. What appealed to you–beyond the lyrics that provided the title–about their work? And out of curiosity, have any of them seen the piece?

Even if the play is focused on the life of four middle class Argentinians I don’t really have the impression that it explores a uniquely Argentine experience but rather something wider. Anyway, in the globalized world it doesn’t seem so strange that an indie band from the States influences an Argentine author or that a Mexican visual artist gave inspiration to some narrator in Sweden… But it’s true that Of Montreal is not the first band that comes to your mind in Latin America. I really love their records and especially the title song was so related to my intentions with this play. The image of the past as some grotesque animal that changes shape every time you think about it is so close to what happens with the past and the lived experiences when you try to remember them or retell them in the present. The past is always changing. And then the first lines of the song say something like, “The sun is out and melt the snow that felt yesterday, makes you wonder why it bothered”… And it’s a narratively ambitious song, with intense lyrics going on for almost 11 minutes, quite rare for a rock song… I really felt it was close to my intentions for the structure of the play, and I was listening to it a lot while writing the text.

I don’t think any of them have seen the piece so far. We’ve been touring a lot in Europe and Latin America but this is going to be our first time in the United States, so hopefully.

What’s it like creating work like this in Buenos Aires? I’ve been told by other artists that one of the challenges is a lack of infrastructure for supporting ambitious work. Is that your experience? Are there many younger artists–your students at the National University perhaps–who are creating work in Buenos Aires? Other artists whose work you find inspiring or important you’d like a broader audience to know about?

It’s really difficult to develop this kind of work. In Buenos Aires there’s a huge independent theater community and a lot of small venues all around the city, which are part of a long tradition of theater as part of the cultural life. But the state and city support for theater is almost symbolic or it’s just focused on conventional performances for public theaters. From time to time, we can have a co-production with a state theater that allows us to do some more ambitious work, but we usually depend basically on ourselves and in recent times on some international festivals from abroad. The good thing is that there are a lot of people going to theater in Buenos Aires no matter if it’s a big state theater or a tiny independent venue. Right now there are several very interesting artists, and among the people from my generation I feel very inspired by the work of Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Grupo Krapp, and Guillermo Arengo.

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