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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 3% [?]

Photo by Yi Chun-Wu.

One of the biggest challenges facing the arts these days is professionalization. Once upon a time, artists came to their field with mixed backgrounds and could speak to broader audiences from more diverse personal experiences. Today, with college and internships and MFA programs, artists can spend their entire lives just being artists. Which means that pretty much the only thing they know about is being an artist. And in turn they make art about what they know: novelists write novels about being novelists, musicians write songs about life on the road, indie filmmakers make self-referential low-budget movies about making low-budget movies, and theater artists make plays about theater artists.

The hope, of course, is that the intense examination of one’s own experience will ultimately reveal some bigger truth about the world. It rarely works out that way. What we’re usually left with is art that comes off as self-indulgent navel-gazing from people who willingly choose to divorce themselves from the everyday challenges of everyone else, and everyone else therefore duly doesn’t give a damn about their art.

But then again, every so often, it does work. Spectacularly.

A case in point is the Austin-based theater company the Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun, which opened last night at Dance Theater Workshop and runs through March 12 (tickets $30). Beginning as a gentle, tongue-in-cheek ribbing of the pretensions of experimental theater, by the end the Rude Mechs have overwhelmed you nearly to (and possibly past) the point of tears with a simple but very profound set of ideas, brilliantly executed, and wrapped-up without ever really resolving the mysteries that propel the hour and forty-minute show forward.

Wandering to the subway afterward, I tried to formulate something to say about it to our editorial assistant, who accompanied me, but I was left speechless. And what better way is there to leave a theater after a show?

Conceptually, The Method Gun is structured as a documentary play developed by the Rude Mechs. Their subject is the life and work of an obscure theater director named Stella Burden, who, in the Sixties, was developing a communal, collaborative ensemble company that sought to achieve a new level of theatrical authenticity in the model of the Living Theater et al. Then suddenly, in the early Seventies, she disappeared to South America. The Rude Mechs’ research began as an attempt to resuscitate her performance method, which she called “the Approach,” similar to Stella Adler’s “Method,” but what they ultimately found more fascinating was the story of what happened to her company after she disappeared. For several years, they continued rehearsing the show she’d been developing, which they performed exactly once: a production of A Streetcar Named Desire without the characters of Stanley, Stella, Blanche, and Mitch.

The Method Gun unfolds as a series of short scenes, tracing the Stella Burden Company’s rehearsals over the years, going through each scene of Streetcar, interspersed with re-enactments of interviews with the company members that jump forward nearly thirty years to the present, a motley assortment of would-be actors and idealists who themselves careen towards insanity. Occasionally the Rude Mechs break character to simply deliver lectures explaining Burden’s radical methods, which come from the stew of Sixties’ idealism. It’s Apocalypse Now meets Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, all leading up to a moment that recalls the power of Gob Squad’s Kitchen (the last show I saw that really surprised and affected me), where all the gimmicks and meta-commentary and conceptualization provide the context that finally reveals the raw, moving power of a work of art that is otherwise dead and lost to us.

The company would start rehearsal before dawn so they can watch the sun rise. They also drink at every rehearsal. Art comes from personal truth, so no one can have thoughts secret from the company. One woman prays constantly, and Burden instructed her to pray out loud, through a microphone. Her actors would write the names of people who inspired them on pieces of paper at the beginning of rehearsals, which she’d then burn both to honor and exorcise the influence of teachers. And finally there’s the “method gun” itself, which, in a Chris Burden-esque twist on Chekhov’s Gun, is simply the presence of actual loaded gun onstage at all times to introduce real risk into performance, since at any time anyone could shoot anyone else.

So yes, the script is, in fact, deeply referential and meta, but the result is brilliant. The members of Burden’s company go down a seemingly endless spiral of booze-fueled self-doubt, slavishly devoted to a guru who ironically preached complete artistic independence. The irony is biting. They’re tertiary figures in the history of American theater, playing secondary characters in one of America’s most famous plays, confused, lost children of Sixties idealism, giving up the best years of the lives in pursuit of a single artistic achievement.

But what the Rude Mechs pull out the miasma is a powerful, heartfelt story that achieves what virtually any performance method, from Adler to Burden, aims for: the representation of essential human dignity. The Rude Mechs bring these small-scale tragic characters to life, and the ending works a neat double-trick: on the one hand, it begs the question of whether or not art is worth the cost, while at the same time, the process of getting to the climax–the performance of Streetcar reduced to five minutes and featuring none of the main characters–provides you a context to see what they finally put up through fresh eyes, and it is, in a word, stunning.

All I can say is get tickets to this show. It is absolutely not to be missed.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Photo by Arthur Coopchik

Name: Taylor Gordon

Title: Freelance Ballet Dancer

URL: www.taylorgordononline.com

I grew up in a small town about an hour outside of Boston.  But if anyone asks, I’m from Boston;  I spent more time going in and out of the city for ballet class, at Boston Ballet School,  than I did at home anyway <chuckles>. The commute and the drone of small-town life was not appealing,  so the summer I turned 15,  I moved alone to The Rock School, a ballet boarding school in Philadelphia.

Even though I had known New York was the place I wanted to be since my first trip here around age 7, (to a dance competition at the magical Marriot Marquis in Times Square), Philadelphia was a decent place to grow up fast.  I spent two long years there, graduated from high school at age 16, and immediately signed up for my first New York apartment: a college dorm in midtown Manhattan. This is my 5th year in NYC.  It’s home, and I hope I’m here forever!

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

Is it cheesy if I say The Nutcracker? I first saw Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker when I was probably 4 or 5 years old and my parents say I was just mesmerized by it. Two years later I danced my first season onstage in that same production, and it was the start of my obsession with performance.  All I did was stand there as a “doll” during the battle scene, but oh, that stage.  If it wasn’t already clear, I knew then that I wanted to dance forever. To this day when I see a Nutcracker, or hear the music playing it has a huge influence on me…

3.  What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

It depends on the day.  There are so many things I want in life.  Some days I wish I could sing.  Some days I wish I could not worry so much about the future.  Some days I wish I were blonde.  For me,  life is constantly about the pursuit of those skills, talents, attributes, and whatnot that are so elusive.  I think it’s boring if you’re simply satisfied with what you have.

4.  What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

Right now I am fortunate – SO fortunate – enough to be making a living from my dancing. I’m currently dancing in my 2nd season of The Radio City Christmas Spectacular as an ensemble dancer.  It’s an insane schedule and a physically grueling job,  but I can’t express how thankful I am to be an employed dancer – at least for 3 months of the year.

A normal day depends on what our show schedule is like. If we have only 2 or 3 shows that day (the norm) I start my day with ballet class.  Most of the rest of  the cast thinks I’m crazy for getting up and dancing even more than we have to.  My body needs it though, and I love my teacher.  Her class gets me set for the day.

Then I’ll usually grab lunch and/or more coffee,  and head to the theater.  Hair and makeup take about half an hour, then I check emails for another half an hour, and then at our half hour call I start to get dressed and stretch a bit for the first show. That process repeats for 2, 3, or 4 shows a day. Home – crash – repeat the next morning.

5.  Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art?  What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

I don’t know that I’ve ever had to make an extreme either/or decision between the two.  I like to find some kind of compromise.  I think the biggest fork in the road I’ve faced so far like that was deciding to go to college right after high school, whereas many ballet dancers on a  path similar to mine opted out.  I had a strong interest in writing/journalism, and I really didn’t want a degree in dance, so in my 3 years of college/grad school I chose to bombard myself with work and pursue a double life:  work in publishing through many, many internships on top of school work, while simultaneously training 30 hours a week at Ballet Academy East, a professional ballet school.  It wasn’t easy to find that balance between work and art, but it’s always been worth it to me.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Nombre: Claudia Norman

Profesion/Ocupacion: Directora de programacion/ El Teatro del Museo del Barrio, Latino Cultural Festival-Queens Theatre in the Park/ Productora y Fundadora/ Celebrate Mexico Now/ Co-Productora: La Casita-Lincoln Center Out of Doors

Compañia o Indpendiente u otra cosa?: El Museo del Barrio/Queens Theatre in the Park/ CN Management

website:

www.elmuseo.org

www.queenstheatre.org

www.lincolncenter.org

www.cnmanagement.com

Naci y creci en la ciudad de Mexico y llegue a Nueva York siguiendo al amor de mi vida

El violin concerto de Bethoveen….porque es simplemente unico

Cantar. Creci con mi padre cantando opera y mi madre tambien “no canta mal las rancheras”

Trabajo programando artistas. Me paso todo el tiempo en conversacion con varios artistas, viendo presupuestos y “rascando de bajo de las piedras” para poder tener mas fondos para mis programaciones

He tenido la fortuna que mi trabajo siempre ha estado relacionado con el arte, mismo cuando trabaje en restaurantes….es un arte el que puedas servir  20 mesas al mismo tiempo! Afortunadamente elegi y me fue mejor programando festivales.

Popularity: 1% [?]

the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council wants to give it to you:

Swing Space

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council will begin accepting online applications for the next session of its Swing Space program on December 10, 2008. In partnership with area landlords, LMCC makes vacant storefront, commercial and office space downtown available to artists, curators, and cultural organizations for periods of two to four months. The program is designed to address short-term space needs for a range of projects, and to encourage creative, experimental and collaborative approaches to artistic practice in unconventional spaces. Applications will be accepted for Presentation Space, Development Space, and Office Space in the Performing Arts and the Visual Arts.  Past space grants have included theater and dance rehearsal space, studio space for visual artists, unconventional venues for self-produced performance, and groundfloor storefront spaces for installation projects and exhibitions.  Artists, directors, choreographers, theater and dance companies, music ensembles, collaborative artist groups, curators and arts organizations are eligible to apply. Stipends ranging from $300 to $3,000 are provided to support project costs. Swing Space was created with lead support from The September 11th Fund.

Application guidelines and forms are available online:

www.lmcc.net/swingspace/apply

Deadline:

January 21, 2009

Information Sessions:

RSVP required: www.lmcc.net/swingspace/apply

Thursday, November 20, 4pm at 100 Church Street

Wednesday, December 10, 7pm at 14 Wall Street

Thursday, January 8, 4pm at 14 Wall Street

Contact:

Ben Kerrick

Program Manager, Artist Residencies

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

125 Maiden Lane, 2nd Floor

Tel: 212.219.9401 x104

Fax: 212.219.2058

E-mail: bkerrick@lmcc.net

Website: www.lmcc.net

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you are in the mood for dance this weekend, make your way to the Chen Dance Center at 7.30pm (Fri-Sat) for a real treat. The center, formerly the Mulberry St. Theater, curates newsteps: “a semi-annual dance series dedicated to providing support and performance opportunities for choreographers who are creating innovative and risk-taking works”. Tonight and tomorrow, among the six performances that share the evening, there is a little gem: a duet performed by Makiko Tamura and Ryoji Sasamoto (both members of Ellis Wood Dance) entitled Order Made. Tamura, who choreographed the piece, was inspired by her grandmother’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease, as well as by photographs of the same grandmother in her lively youth. The result is a mesmerizing, poetic dance, an abstract and expressive ten minutes of precise gestural movement, intimate physical (mis)communication, and overall beautiful dancing. Tamura’s choreography begins slowly, mechanically, and soon builds to a faster pace, exploring the many possible relations between the dancers on stage. Throughout the piece both performers maintain a puppet like quality that keeps their dancing unemotional, their eyes looking distant like those of wax sculptures – this is particularly powerful, as their dance does not demand empathy or sympathy, and develops out of what appears to be a strict necessity to move. Tamura and Sasamoto are wonderful dancers, at once powerful and contained in their energy, totally committed and present in their performance: it is a delight to see their work in the intimate space of the Chen Dance Center.

While Order Made is definitely the highlight of this newsteps series, other pieces in the evening deserve attention. Young choreographer Catherine Galasso‘s The Passion of A Hillbilly Greaser, for instance, is a fun dance theater piece that plays with the contrasts between the two performers: Brandt Adams and Yuko Mitsuishi. In an unexpected turn of events, we are serenaded by Mitsuishi’s questionable karaoke skills, while being magically transformed into the audience of some kind of Japanese show. Galasso is particluarly skillfull in establishing an ominous mood, only to subvert it and shake the audience with uneasy humor. Galasso‘s piece stands out in the evening, rejecting the claim to “serious dance” that some of the other works attempt (like the somewhat overly dramatic and repetitive last piece entitled Unibody).

Choreographers’ series like newsteps give you a chance to sample many different styles of work. Of course, it is also the case that pieces showcased at events like this one are not always…ripe. Overall, however, it is exciting to see that there are still dance spaces willing to make room for new, non-commercial, dance. Stepping into Chen Dance Center felt like entering a place from New York before the 1980′s economic boom and the general commercialization of the arts. If you miss this series, keep your ears and eyes out for Tamura – I wouldn’t be surprised to see her work showcased somewhere else soon.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Photo by Richard Termine.

At PS122 this weekend through November 23, Joseph Silovsky presents a wonderfully sweet and quirky one-man performance that tells the story of the mysterious jester of the Pacific island of Tonga. Beginning in 2001, inspired by a New York Times article entitled “The Money Is All Gone in Tonga and the Jester’s Role Was No Joke”, Silovsky set out on a mission to discover for himself the details of how $23 million dollars theoretically belonging to the people of Tonga were claimed by the island’s king (on the grounds that the people would spend it on silly things like “roads”), placed in an American savings account, made to profit and increase by $11 million dollars, and then completely lost in a bad investment.

While the events that took place in Tonga in themselves make for an interesting and unusual plot, what really works in Silovsky’s piece is his poetic and unusual approach to telling the story. On a stage crowded with suitcases of different sizes and colors, microphones, and functional technological sculpture, Silovsky walks about, turning on little cameras, opening screens, awkwardly displaying a 1:1 map of the island of Tonga, claiming that he wants to make the story as clear and accurate as possible for us. His narration is made up of a series of vignettes, memory bubbles that he presents to the audience with the aid of paper-cut puppets, video and audio recordings, and Stanley, Silovsky’s robotic invention through whom we first hear the perspective of the jester of Tonga himself.

The irony in Jester of Tonga lies in the juxtaposition of the potential for precision and accuracy offered by the technology on stage, and the softer and more overtly interpretative story telling strategies used by Silovsky to share his own subjective understanding of Tonga and the events that took place in the small Pacific island. Silovsky, throwing suitcases out of his way and stumbling over his own lines, exposes the narrator’s struggle in piecing together a story that begins as something foreign and surreal, but eventually turns into an intimate and personal interpretative exercise dealing with recollection and memory. Part comical detective, part compassionate self-conscious anthropologist, and part nerdy techy artist, Silovsky’s character gently offers his research work to his audience and leads us through a humorous evening and a story that painfully echoes the recent economic developments on this side of the Pacific.

Nov 13-23

Wed-Sat 8pm

Sun 6:30pm

Tickets from $20

$15 (students/seniors)

$10 (P.S. 122 members)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Screen Test is director and visual artist Rob Roth’s latest multi-disciplinary work, currently on show at the Lower East Side’s Abrons Art Center. The piece is a one-hour long eerie, haunting, and sometimes tickling performance that takes place in the nightmarish apocalyptic setting of a post-nuclear-holocaust scenario. It’s hard to describe exactly what happens during this concentrated hour: the star of the show is Theo Kogan, founder of the rock band Theo and the Skyscrapers. Kogan plays at once a composite of genteel divas from 1950’s Hollywood (Marlyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor are evoked in her performance and in the projections on her white dress), and a loud and screaming punk rock singer backed by a guitarist, a drummer, a bass player, and even a cello player.

Unfortunately, and probably because English is my second language, I often had a hard time understanding the lyrics of Kogan’s songs. It is particularly unfortunate as the lyrics make up most of the text in the piece (apart from the disturbing and demanding requests made by the off stage voices of the presumed directors of Kogan’s performance who remind her that she really needs to “nail it” in order for the show to “sell”). In a particularly touching scene, however, I was able to follow Kogan’s words. After the “generators” fail and Kogan is lit by her crew holding up flashlights, her singing slows down, becomes more intelligible, and we hear her sing: “no one speaks of what is worse, to bleed or turn to stone. I’d rather fade away”.

The show brings up images of nuclear explosions and radiation exposure, combined with shots of Marilyn Monroe and other acting female icons from the 1950′s. Screen Test is as much about the damage of a hypothetical nuclear holocaust as it is about the pressure to perform and entertain. Is a film being made? A music video? What about the suffering and pain surrounding the show’s star? As the directors speak of “takes”, we are left baffled by the priorities in this apocalyptic world. The moments of staged rage and general craze are some of the least appealing in the performance: the volume of the music is not loud enough to be as powerful as it wants to be, and the performers’ bodies are too in control to give off the energy of actual distress. The piece is most successful when the layering of sound, projections and live acting creates images and moods otherwise impossible to achieve. The screens behind the performers are placed at an angle, so that the projections seem to mirror each other and produce an organic-like symmetry that makes the images look alive, and the bodies of the performers are often used as screens in themselves. It was particularly striking when the naked torso of a skinny man wearing a gas mask was projected with glowing rib-like shapes, changing him into a pulsing insect-like creature filled with light.

Overall, the haunting atmosphere created in Screen Test perfectly fits the mood of this Halloween weekend (it will only play through November 2, with an extra performance on Friday night at 10pm). It feels like the large cast for the piece greatly enjoys spooking their audience, the performers looking as gruesome and pale as they can master. The music in the piece is fun and the Butoh inspired choreography is a great match to the apocalyptic setting. This short and well-timed performance is visually powerful and brings together genres that speak with each other in disturbing harmony. Leaving the theater last night I felt strangely uplifted, this vision of horror, pain and confusion so theatrical as to continuously reassure me of its artificiality, while the poetry of its images and sounds lingered with me through the rest of the evening.

Popularity: 1% [?]

There is a visually stunning and not very well publicized production at La Mama that will be running through September 28. Atomic City is a clever composit of dance, theater and live music that takes spectators into the lives of two neighboring families whose troubled patres familias both work as physicists in the town’s laboratory. The plot of the performance unravels slowly, as we learn about the characters’ relationships to each other, and observe them interacting through dance, words and song. Indeed, one of the strongest aspects of the piece lies in the balance of different performance forms that take turns at telling the story. For example, just as a spoken introduction to the piece seems to point us in the direction of a wordy theatrical work, the nimble bodied orator (Karl Sørensen) ends his prologue and throws himself into an extremely physical dance phrase filled with suspensions and inversions, all emphasized by a spotlight that gives his dance a dramatic twist.

The cast for Atomic City is also a combination, a mix of artists with different backgrounds and nationalities: there are two musicians from Sweden, two Danish dancers, a physical theatre performer from Guatemala, and an acrobatic dancer and mover from the US. More generally, the work is a collaboration between the Danish company Terranova and US performer and producer Jon Morris (Fuerzabruta, Cirque du Soleil). They produced the piece in an intensive residency this summer at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, and this in New York is their premiere. Probably because the piece is so new, there is a raw quality to it that makes the work exciting: these artists are taking risks with their bodies and their voices, in a collaboration that has pushed each one of them to a new place in their artistic practice.

When something does not run so smoothly (some of the harmonizing could use a little more practice!) the visuals of the piece by and large make up for it. The set for Atomic City beautifully contrasts the darkness of the performance space with white panels of waxed paper and a green square of fake grass. Spectators sit on opposite sides of the square, a choice that is elegantly exploited several times during the performance by movable wall divisions and the different facings of the performers. Apart from one character, “the gatekeeper”, soberly dressed in grey shades, all the performers wear white costumes. The result is a bright and clean look, easily associated with snow or the stark light of an atomic explosion.

Atomic City is at once readable and abstract: “a recipe for pie and one for destruction”, as described in the flyers for the show. This young group of international artists from different disciplines has created a unique world within the La Mama Annex theatre, a white city in which, as one of the physicists claims, “we are suspended in language”, as well as in sound and movement. In this secret place, human relations unfold playfully and painfully through beautifully physical phrases of movement and broken fragments of language. With its light humor and poetic aesthetic, Atomic City is a promising collaboration, one that should not be overlooked.

La Mama – The Annex

September 11 – 28, 2008

Thursday – Saturday at 7:30pm

Sunday at 2:30pm & 7:30pm

Tickets $25

purchase tickets online

Popularity: 1% [?]

Photo by Paula Court,

On entering The Kitchen this Saturday, I was curious to see how Radiohole had dealt with Chelsea’s sizable performance space for the staging of ANGER/NATION, their latest production. The company usually performs at the Collapsable Hole, a theater made from two neighboring garages in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and a space they share with fellow experimental theater company Collapsable Giraffe. The Collapsable Hole is cozy and a little claustrophobic. There are no chairs, just large steps with movable pillows, which do not seat more than fifty people. Watching Radiohole in their own performance space is raw and intimate, their ultra technological sets making it feel as though you just entered a post-apocalyptic underground world: red lights, monitors every where, exposed bricks, and familiar objects used for unfamiliar purposes. It was difficult to imagine their work in the clean and fashionable Chelsea space.

Yet for their performance at The Kitchen , Radiohole successfully recreated that sense of intimacy and technological overload by using only about a third of the stage’s depth, and building a fiberglass firework-like structure that bursts towards the audience, mini monitors attached to the end of each rod, physically breaking the imaginary fourth wall between audience and stage. In this production, a large, bluish-grey, cardboard moon hangs above stage right, and the set is dissected through the middle by a ramp that ascends to a darkened backstage. Horizontal, color-changing panels act as a back drop, while on the sides and the front of the stage are visible various light and sound switches: Radiohole members usually operate all the cues in their performances.

ANGER/NATION’s set alone is like a sculpture, and could survive as an installation even when not inhabited by its performers. It is a little like a space ship, filled with light switches and monitors, almost breathing, with its changing colors and tiny movements. Yet the performers are there, all the way from the beginning: pouring beer for the audience, talking to each other, attempting drunken speeches, some of them wearing adjusted German folk dresses complete with embroidered edelweiss. For this show, Radiohole has centered around the historical character of Mrs. Carrie A. Nation (Maggie Hoffman), the “Bar Room Smasher” born in “Garrard County, Kentucky” in 1846. After loosing her husband to drinking and sailors, Mrs. Nation takes on the quest of cleansing America of “sin and degradation” by destroying every bar she sets foot in. Like in other Radiohole productions, narrative is non-linear, and Mrs. Nation’s story appears at intervals between songs, disturbing tableaux, and violent repetitive acts, as when two of the men on stage repeatedly shoot each other’s buttocks with air guns.

About half way through the performance, pink American flags make their appearance on the background monitors, and Mrs. Nation declares that all will participate in her crusade: more specifically “if they are women, they will join [her], and if they are boys, they will follow [her] unwillingly”. Mrs. Nation’s crusade, with its conservative thrust and Born-Again Christian overtones, brings to mind the real world, and at one time Miss Alaska runner-up, Governor Sarah Palin. In fact, Radiohole’s emphasis on questions of gender and sexuality, as well as their dissection of religious zealotism, could not come at a more salient time in the history of American politics.

Mrs. Nation’s crusade eventually takes on an unexpected turn, and the pregnant actress finally appears to us in a radically different attire from the widow like costume in which she first descends onto the stage. The conclusion of the performance is at once surprising and thought-provoking: disclosing it would decrease its efficacy.

ANGER/NATION deals with sex, alcohol, queerness and decadence, with great irony and without sparing the macabre and the gruesome. Filled with chauvinistic jokes, beer smashing, and unexpected props, such as the prehensile penis on actor Eric Dyer, ANGER/NATION is a visceral experience, often overwhelming, sometimes digressive, and always provocative and challenging. Radiohole’s latest production proves once again their unique position as a company on the cutting edge of performance, one taking risks and, on this occasion, breathing fresh air into the now fashionable Chelsea district. There is no one like them in New York.

Radiohole: ANGER/NATION

The Kitchen

September 24-27, 8pm

Popularity: 1% [?]