All right, so today I’m violating one of my editorial rules and writing about performing arts criticism. I try to avoid this because I think it’s ridiculously navel-gazing for people to write about what they do, particularly when the field itself is so ridiculously impoverished (as I’ll explain in a moment). Surely all us critics could be writing about better things than what we do. But critic and playwright George Hunka recently wrote something that irritated me just that much that I had to respond.

The quick backstory is that the Times‘ Jason Zinoman recently wrote a nice post (well worth reading) on ArtsBeat about the value of writing bad reviews. Parabasis followed up, and you should glance that over, too, and it was that which led me to Hunka. I’ve never met Hunka, but he seems nice enough, and though I don’t agree with everything he writes, he’s undeniable smart, insightful, and passionate about theater. However, quoting himself from the comments on Zinoman’s article, he wrote this:

“It’s not so much a matter of whether a critic who gives a bad review to a show has a vendetta or seems to engage in abuse. It is, however, a matter of whether or not the reviewer has the thoughtfulness or the knowledgability to render such a review valid. Especially with plays that seek to extend the form, the critic should be able to differentiate between a bad play and those which do not yield their pleasures as easily as others.” The contentious and rude review often enough calls attention to itself and the reviewer, not the play and the artist, which does a disservice to reader and artist alike. It also might serve as a cover for ignorance. The same can be said for rude and contentious political arguments, for that matter, whether from Noam Chomsky or Ann Coulter. True, sometimes readers find these reviews fun — but that’s only to cater to the lowest common denominator. Perhaps in a world of 140-character Tweets and Facebook status updates, this is to be expected, but the serious reader should want more than this, the serious critic or reviewer should want to write it, and the serious arts editor should want to publish it. That such criticism and reviews can be provocatively and entertainingly written is proven by the writings of critics from George Bernard Shaw to Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, and many many others.

Ok. Insofar as the first part makes an argument (the middle is just a bunch of suppositions, and the end a list of critics who conveniently no longer write), it’s complete bollocks. With all due respect. And furthermore–and this is why it really irritated me–it actually argues against good criticism. Read the quote within the quote again. Now let me paraphrase. This is nothing more than a verbose version of the complaint I’ve gotten from everyone I ever wrote a bad review of who thought to argue with me: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Needless to say, the artists I give good reviews to, particularly those I notice coming up in their careers, at least occasionally think I’m a rather insightful critic. One can, apparently, be both at once, if my own experience is to be believed. But for those on the receiving end, who I’m concerned with now, I’m not properly educated (as Hunka provides for) to pass judgment on their oh-so-visionary work, the brilliance of which I failed to note due to my benighted ignorance. This particularly occurs when I write about dance, because I studied theater and comparative literature, not dance (as has been pointed out to me more than once). My standard response to this sort of drivel, in short, is: “Exactly how educated in the form do you expect your audiences to be to enjoy or experience the work?”

In the case of dance, for instance, while I don’t have formal training as a dancer nor an academic background in it, I do talk with choreographers about the form regularly, I read about it as much possible, and in the past year, by my rough count, I’ve seen between 50 and 60 distinct pieces of choreography. If all of that actually left me still unqualified to offer a personal impression of whether or not a given piece is interesting or demonstrates some form of accomplishment, who in God’s name is your target audience? And furthermore, if dance is actually only something that can be understood through personal participation and/or academic work in the field, I have to tell you, the art form has bigger problems than a couple bad reviews.

All of this applies equally well to theater, which, as it happens, I did study. But for Hunka, that may still leave me unqualified to critique work that seeks “to extend the form.” Fundamentally I don’t dispute that there’s a big difference between Art Theater, experimental work, devising, etc., and your standard Broadway or mainstream fare, but as a yardstick for policing the police, as it were, this is stupid. If “extending the form” is the definition of success, than I’d say the work actually has to do so in practice, by actually influencing and inspiring work in the future. Short of being a seer, only time will tell. And furthermore, there are always multiple traditions of work at any point in time. There are plenty of works in the past that did “expand the form” that I’d still argue are not good, not a good influence, and better forgotten or consigned to the pages of a theater history textbook. Influence alone is not a sign of quality; breaking new ground is not always a sign you’ve done something well, or important.

And finally, I want to make one last point. In the world of books or music–which have much healthier critical fields than performing arts–critics are not seen as arbiters of taste or quality who can speak with god-like authority. True, plenty of writers complain that certain critics, like Michiko Kakutani, have too much influence on the buying public, but fundamentally, book criticism isn’t a matter of passing judgment, it’s a form of intellectual discourse and engagement. The essay, as a form, is dead in American publishing. Aside from literary magazines, the only mainstream publication that features them that I can think of is Harper‘s. Otherwise, we’re left with book reviews in which to discuss and engage with ideas in substantive form shorter than an actual published book.

The performing arts, on the other hand, seems to yearn for the sort of recognition a god-like critic can supposedly confer (solace or consolation, perhaps, for a sad lack of other sorts of rewards in the field, such as money or meaningful support). Whereas writers of books (novels or non-fiction) see themselves as equals of their critics (possibly even superior) and think nothing of writing essays and reviews themselves, performing artists seem to prefer a separation between the two fields, and refuse to engage. For them, writing about the form is usually the aforementioned matter of conferring value, not part of a broader discourse about the art. That’s sad, because it actual retards meaningful discussion. It’s not that artists don’t have opinions, mind you; two drinks and even the cheeriest booster of the idea of community will let loose with a fusillade of complaints and criticisms of his or her fellow artists, faulting ideas, aesthetic, execution, whatever. But all too rarely do artists themselves choose to even voice them, even mildly, in a public forum, let alone overcome their own sense of victimization enough to take part in a broader discussion as an interested party, rather than just to rebut this or that thing someone else said that they didn’t like.

So my advice is first, don’t listen to George Hunka (in this circumstance, at least); second, treat yourself with the dignity and respect to air your own arguments and thicken up your skin enough to be able to deal with the fact not everyone will agree with you (like Hunka does); and third, stop trying to convince yourself that a critic’s acceptance or rejection is the end-all, be-all, and accept that criticism and reviews are, at best, part of a broader discourse about arts and society. In short, read this from Zinoman and take it to heart; your work is worthy of being talked about as part of something bigger than itself, and you should help by being part of that conversation:

Of course, fairness is important in criticism. Critics are human and a negative review can go off the rails and veer into cruelty and personal attacks. The temptations of the witty put-down are real, and when it comes to the Fringe, seeing five shows in a day can also play a role. We should take our responsibility seriously. But I would rather live in a theater culture where discussions about plays can get as contentious (and occasionally rude) as those about politics. Theater may be known as the fabulous invalid, but artists and critics who go into this low-paying, highly competitive field are tougher than you think.

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Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Neighbors" at LA's Matrix Theater Co. in 2010. Photo by I.C. Rapoport.

A couple days ago over at Parabasis, J. Holtham–better known in some circles as 99 Seats–linked to a piece at Howlround by Keith Josef Adkins, Holtham’s co-producer of New Black Fest, a festival of new voices in black theater that premiered last year. I didn’t catch it then, but I intend to this year, because it seems a promising attempt to offer a counterweight to the ridiculous marginalization of black artists and stories in the mainstream American theater, which is guilty of a shocking amount of tokenism and cultural tone-deafness. (It’s also worth pointing out that they’ve launched a series starting this May and going through Juneteenth of new work exploring the legacy of slavery and the Civil War–check it out.) Adkins’ essay, which amounts to something of a year-two mission statement for New Black Fest, is worth reading in its entirety, but something did catch my eye from the first paragraph:

I believe this is truly one of the most exciting times in theater. Playwrights are actually sitting center stage with decision-makers talking about the relevancy of new play development, and, more important, the future of American theater. I, for one, believe this conversation couldn’t come at a better time. On the other side of the planet, Egyptians stand up against a bullying government. Here in the U.S., President Obama turns his nose up to anti-gay marriage laws. In Wisconsin, public workers protest a state budget that would inhibit their bargaining power. So, it brings me much joy to know the American theater, that I often believe to be the most antiquated of all the artistic institutions, has decided to turn the spotlight on the livelihood of the playwright. Why? The playwright’s creative observations often acts a barometer to our humanity, and that, my friends, ideally should incite change. Exciting times, indeed. In fact, I would dare to tag this time as revolutionary, or, at least, a revolution in the making. Believe me when I say I have my fingers crossed.

Got that? Amid all the revolutionary and transformational fervor energizing Adkins, the main aegis of change in black theater will be…playwrights.

Now, I don’t want to further what might be my growing reputation as anti-playwright (for the record, Andy is actually more philosophically against traditional modes of theater than I am). Come on–I welcome playwrights getting to expand their vocabulary and tackle new topics in original ways, and I want a more vibrant, diverse, and engaging theater overall. But if that’s the goal, I’m always surprised the degree to which playwrights are seen as the primary aegis of change, as though someone sitting in a room and writing up well-rounded characters going through some sort of dramatic action is the only way to create theater, the only artist in the production who generate change.

My point here is not to take issue with Adkins on this point, because in my experience, he has little or no reason to expect to find black artists working in other modes of theater production, and that is what I’m really curious about. Holtham himself made note of this fact a few months ago during the entire “what is devised theater, exactly?” discussion, acknowledging, “For whatever reason (or whatever combination of reasons), this work is done mainly by white artists.” But unfortunately he doesn’t really extend his questioning beyond expressing mystification because it “strikes me as odd, since I know so many black artists and artists of color who are well suited to tackling work in this manner,” and acknowledging the New York Neo-Futurists, whose work I’ve yet to catch but who do, apparently, feature a much more diverse group of artists and were the one devised company to participate in the inaugural New Black Fest.

So the question is, why aren’t more African-Americans making theater outside the traditional text-based mode? Devised theater is just one variant of contemporary performance that’s primarily in the theatrical (rather than dance or movement) vein, but from what I’ve seen, it is, even beyond strictly devised theater, rather unusual to find black artists working in these experimental, multidisciplinary modes. And this really struck me reading through Adkins’ essay, particular when he talks about “the waiting game” he and other playwrights (black and not) face trying to get their work produced.

“Over the last four years,” he writes,

I have been in numerous conversations with fellow artists about what to do with this “waiting game” so many of us find ourselves in. I simply mean waiting for larger theater institutions to legitimize our talents and qualify our careers. In truth, many theater artists (color and gender aside) believe we are not a legitimate playwright until the Public Theater, Manhattan Theater Club, the Goodman, etc., stamp their marks of approval across our playwriting souls. That’s not only a grand burden for these institutions to carry, but it’s also a bit delusional for the playwright to expect all and everything from these institutions.

Those sorts of barriers are precisely where ensemble-driven theater comes from–artists tired of beating their heads against a wall, trying to get their work done, who find some like-minded compatriots and start their own companies to produce their own work. And don’t get me wrong–I’m not saying it’s easy, but there’s a big difference between waiting to be recognized and have your work produced, and fighting to make things happen. (This is, I should point out, why Adkins started New Black Fest.) I’m sure most of the playwrights Adkins and Holtham talk about have, at some point, self-produced or worked with small companies. But there’s still this glaring question of why more of them don’t deepen and develop those collaborations, rather than assuming that small work is just a stepping stone to doing the sort of big theater plays they really want to.

In the end, necessity being the mother of all invention, much of what we take for granted as “experimental” or “avant-garde” aesthetics grows out of the processes that develop in small companies making work. Anti-acting styles come from not working with trained actors. Eric Dyer of Radiohole started out as a writer, and if I understand it correctly, Radiohole’s first show was a scripted play by him, but like most of the best small experimental companies, at some point Dyer no doubt decided that it was more interesting working with the people he was working with and the process by which the company created its shows changed, from top-down scripting to full-on collaboration. Young Jean Lee started The Shipment doing a lot of writing, most of which didn’t work, and the show was retooled over and over again through developmental experiments with the company until it became the piece it is.

To throw in some personal critical perspective, I’d say that generally the best avant-garde companies start from this perspective: they have limitations because of how they’re going to do these shows, and that necessity informs the aesthetic. We’ve certainly all seen enough bad imitations of Richard Foreman and Big Dance Theater to know that simply mimicking an aesthetic is not a route to success. So again, if experimental modes of theater production are at least in part a natural development of companies working together and deepening their collaboration over time, why aren’t more black artists working in this vein? In the end, it’s a set of tools, not a style, and I’m curious why more black artists don’t employ them.

Off the top of my head, two thoughts occur. First, it may in fact be some function of class. In New York, which is really the hot-bed of experimental non-scripted theater in America, most artists come out of one only a few tracks: Foreman, NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing/Big Dance Theater, Columbia/Anne Bogart/Siti, Mac Wellman/Brooklyn College, and the Wooster Group. Given that two of those are associated with elite universities, and there’s plenty of incest in the scene on top of that, we shouldn’t be surprised to find a lack of diversity in the field if the colleges feeding it are not sufficiently diverse.

But second, I wonder if it is, in fact, a function of the sort of work that a lot of black artists are interested in making. Scripted plays, except for the most radical, tend to rely on some form of naturalism and psychological realism; characters tend to have a wholeness, a solid, grounded identity. Experimental modes tend to favor deconstructive types of characterization, through fragmentary or found texts and a rejection of psychological-realist characterization. So you wind up necessarily with a contrast between an essentialist form of theater in terms of identity, and an anti-essentialist one. Feminist and queer artists tend to reject an essentialist view of identity in favor of play, camp and  identity performance (as Judith Butler would put it), and other ways of attacking the dominant paradigm, which they see as constructing their identity for them. They favor artistic forms which represent a more Protean identity, in other words.

In racial politics, though, the idea of cultural experience is often very important. Representing the “African-American experience,” for instance, becomes a political and moral task. That’s what August Wilson excelled at. And obviously when we talk about a group with a shared experience, particularly a violent and oppressive one, we don’t tend to treat that facet of identity as Protean or performative, but rather essential, defined, and owned. I’m white, in other words; I don’t understand what it’s like to be black in America. I’m a gentile, I don’t understand what it’s like to be Jewish, or understand the legacy of the Holocaust from the perspective. We tend to treat that experience as an essential part of identity, and that’s why it’s still far more shocking to see a blackface performance than a drag one. Political correctness tends to determine whether a concept of identity can be deconstructed, an idea neatly summed up in the title of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, itself an essentialist response to Sartre’s anti-essentialist Anti-Semite and Jew.

There’s certainly plenty of counter-examples in the theater. The AIDS crisis in the 1980s gave rise to a distinctly realist form of gay theater based on that shared experience, but Tony Kushner wound up blowing it out of the water in the early Nineties with Angels in America, and writers like Terrence McNally expanded their vocabularies well beyond traditional well-made plays. George C. Wolfe’s Colored Museum was an amazing satiric deconstruction of black realist drama in the late Eighties, but it sort of stands on its own. Mainstream African-American theater, as even Adkins notes, remains beholden to the legacy of August Wilson. But when you compare that sort of realism to the work of an African-American woman like Suzan-Lori Parks, the differences are striking. I don’t think Parks rejects the idea of an essential African-American identity, but her work does explicitly explore how identity is performed, from Venus to The America Play to Topdog/Underdog. And I suspect that has something to do with her gender, and approaching identity from a pair of perspectives that wind up conflicting, much as they did in Ntozake Shange’s best work.

But overall I think these remain dominant paradigms, and I wonder if that’s not ultimately limiting. Again, experimental modes are at their heart a series of techniques and devices that allow artists to explore concepts in a different fashion, and they allow us to expand the realm of things the theater can address. I think we all lose out if entire groups of artists don’t get to explore their experience through these lenses. But of the work I’ve seen and know about in New York over the last year or so, I can really only think of one piece in this vein. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is primarily a playwright who gained a lot of notice with Neighbors at the Public’s LAB Theater a couple years ago, but he was exploring decidedly new territory in his adaptation of The Octoroon at PS122 last spring, in collaboration with Pan Pan’s Gavin Quinn. The collaboration unfortunately spectacularly imploded leading to no shortage of controversy at the time, but what was largely overlooked in the aftermath was how Jacobs-Jenkins was expanding his repertoire well beyond textuality into movement and design through the collaboration. It’s unfortunate it didn’t come together, because from what I understand about what Octoroon was supposed to be, it could have been truly groundbreaking.

There are black artists working in contemporary performance, of course. Bill T. Jones and Ralph Lemon are giants in the field, to name but two, but interestingly, both came to this sort of performance from dance–rather than theater–backgrounds. Their example demonstrates clearly that such tools can be used to create meaningful explorations of race, identity, and politics, which again leaves me wondering why more people from theater backgrounds don’t seem as interested in pursuing them. Still, that’s just my perspective, and if anyone has any other thoughts to offer (or examples of black artists working outside the standard process I’m unaware of), I’d love to hear.

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The cast and crew of "L'Effet de Serge" with their "zombie visas," photo courtesy of On the Boards.

Money Money Money: As I’ve mentioned before, I’m sick and tired of Big Ideas demonstrating what a Serious Person you are in terms of lobbing arts sector bombs talking about this or that on the financial side, proposing ineffective, unenforceable plans about how to make things better or save the arts (as though saving isn’t really just a resistance to change, anyway). So it was nice over the last week to encounter a series of more philosophical responses. Seattle-based playwright Paul Mullin (a must-read in the theater world, up there with Parabasis) has a great essay up called “Money Isn’t Everything…or Anything,” in which, rather than bombastically attacking anything, he subtly goes for jugular nonetheless, exploring the relationship of art to money, and offers a rather beautiful defense of theater as an amateur endeavor if that’s what’s required.

“All art is a conversation—theatre doubly so.  If my former friend is telling me I can only hold a conversation with the upper middle class of the Western World circa early 21st century I am obliged to either politely ignore him, or firmly insist he go fuck himself,” he writes, adding: “Yours is the territory you refuse to surrender.” Well worth keeping in mind more often.

Then, over at HowlRound, Polly Carl has a great piece on the idea of “gifts,” and the power of art within the social framework of gift moments. There’s some cross-over with Andy’s essay here on art as a gift economy, and both are also well worth reading.

Update on France’s Vivarium Studio: Two weeks ago we broke the story that, due to visa issues, L’Effet de Serge, a well-loved piece of theater from France’s Vivarium Studios, would potentially have to cancel their upcoming performance at Seattle’s On the Boards. Privately, I was told that the decision to cancel had already been made and the theater was just waiting to announce after the weekend. It was a surprising piece of news given that the show has already played the US on more than one occasion, including the 2010 Under the Radar Festival, and Vivarium Studios has toured other shows previously. The good news is, due to outcry and the intervention of one of Washington’s US Senators and Representatives, the visa rejection was overturned at the last minute, and the show will go up on schedule. I certainly wouldn’t presume to take any credit, as, you know, that probably goes to the state’s elected representatives, but I know that some readers took the time to write in to the addresses I provided. And indeed, it appears that ultimately Mr. Alejandro Mayorkas stepped in to help deal with situation, so to all the readers who wrote in, as well as the bloggers who helped pick up the story (Parabasis, Infinite Body, Contemporary Performance), give all yourselves a pat on the back.

Waking Up: The Brits are all a-twitter over The Independent‘s theater critic Paul Taylor falling asleep and snoring loudly during a performance. The Guardian‘s theater blog has the story, and it’s an amusing read. But I only mention it in passing, because what I really want to point readers to is Claudia La Rocco’s fascinating essay-lecture in the current issue of the Brooklyn Rail, “Some Thoughts, Possibly Related, on Time, Criticism, and the Nature of Consciousness.” I mention the sleeping issue in tandem because sleeping at the theater also comes up in La Rocco’s piece, but it’s so much more–a lovely, free associative, fragmentary exploration of ideas that says less than it asks. I have nothing to add, but be sure to check it out.

Odds & Ends: Keith Hennesy talking about Joseph Beuys and Crotch in Berlin – Kansas loses their only modern dance company – one of London’s most praised pub-theaters is shut down over stairway concerns – Belarus Free Theater is back in the news (UK) and onstage (NYC) – Bellyflop tallies up the Place Prize winners in London – a Beijing modern dance company tries to teach the Chinese it’s not all just pretty ladies – Ben Brantley defends feel-bad theater – dancer/choreographer Catherine Cabeen on drag performance and Richard Move’s Martha@

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Irish Modern Dance Theater's "Fall and Recover" at La MaMa.

They forgot to mention a tip jar: Last week, on March 17, a group called the Collective Arts Think Tank, consisting of the directors of PS122, DTW, the Chocolate Factory, the Field, and others, released a letter addressed to the community regarding the results of a year-long endeavor try to re-think how artists are compensated for their work. The entire thing is certainly interesting and worth reading, particularly because the people involved actually put some actions behind their big ideas (a rare enough thing to see), and I think we here at Culturebot will be returning to it in the near future. But that said, for as much as I appreciate their efforts, I’m going to have to dissent from a fair bit of what they have to say, particularly big statements like: “Art is a profession; and artists who do not get paid are not professionals. Period.”

Actually, I have trouble imagining how artists actually are professionals, rather than amateurs (in the Olympic athlete sense). Looking over how the various presenters are trying to offer more money to artists reveals a ridiculously low rate of pay. As PS122, this includes $450 per week before opening (for a 40-hour week) and $250 during the run. I’m not criticizing them for the amount they’re paying, it’s just that by no stretch of the imagination is $11.25 an hour actually fair compensation for an artist. Your “job” is always a transaction: you exchange your labor for a certain benefit. Artists accept less money for a reason, and there other economic exchanges occurring simultaneously to simply being paid. The signatories of the letter are certainly correct when they note that we are all “creating an ecosystem that has as its foundation labor paid for by unrecognized sources from outside of the ‘Arts Sector’ [i.e., people's day jobs],” but it’s a stretch to describe that situation as “undervaluing the artists and their product.”

In the broader sense, that suggests that the only “value” the product has is its commercial value, which is obviously quite low; in the narrower sense of this being written by commissioning presenters, I suppose that means they think they should have been paying more. However, they don’t exactly address whether it’s an issue of they should have or could have. And considering that at PS122, for instance, higher commissions and fees are being paid for by reducing the number of commissions by 15 percent, I think we have our answer.

The point is, looking at this critically, what I see is a general sense that artists aren’t compensated properly. Fair enough, but without an existing market mechanism to determine what the level of pay should be, you have artistic curators essentially deciding to do their best to nominally increase payments by decreasing other cost outlays. In practice, what that means is that if Vallejo Gantner, say, likes your work, you’ll get paid a bit more; if he doesn’t, you will in fact have less opportunity to get produced and develop your career because PS122 is producing fewer shows. And nowhere does this address the very complex commissioning process used to support big new shows, often through simultaneous commissions throughout the US tour circuit, as documented by Alyssa Alpine previously at Culturebot.

We just wanted to make sure we weren’t the ones who tortured them: The Journal has an article on the travails international artists face getting visas to perform in the US, concentrating on Irish Modern Dance Theater‘s Fall and Recover, which was meant to open last week at La MaMa but couldn’t due to visa delays (the show now opens Friday). The piece is a collaboration between members of the company and torture survivors who received asylum in Ireland, and I’ve been mulling over snarky headlines directed at the State Department for a couple weeks now. But the Journal article is a must-read just to get an idea of the insane BS artists go through. Here’s my favorite tidbit, from the Citizen and Immigration Service’s (USCIS, part of Homeland Security) review questioning IMDT’s visa applications: “Given the multi-ethnic composition of the group and the universal subject matter of the work to be performed, USCIS is unsure whether the term ‘cultural’ applies in this case.”

So “multi-ethnic” and “universal” subjects don’t count as “culture”? Apparently, America has no culture.

Tempest in a bloggy teapot: Oh, how I love the interwebs for their debates! Really I do, and I love taking part in some of them. Other times, well…I hope people have started to notice my generally sneering disregard for “big ideas.” Case in point: poor playwright Mat Smart, who dared write the piece “The Real Reasons Playwrights Fail.” TONY‘s Upstaged blog has a nice round-up, but here it is in short: Smart argues that “we’re fucking lazy.” The post is, as Isaac Butler well summarizes, “supposedly provocative” but really just “a lot of reinforcement of institutional thinking disguised as Bold Contrarian Truth Telling.”

Arturo Vidich's "Body Island," March 24 at Abrons Arts Center.

The trick is that as Helen Shaw rather sagely pointed out in Upstaged, Sharp’s post was really just saying that success is often a matter of hard work, and that many playwrights (and generally other artists) conflate personal challenges with institutional woes. Of course, he says this rather poorly, and his critics are generally right to point out that, indeed, there are institutional issues which need to be addressed. Desperately. In cases like this, I like to point people to my friend Paul Mullin, a Seattle-based playwright, who has written extensively about what it would take to make Seattle a world class theater town. His critiques and punchy but very smart, and he does (I believe) a good job separating personal challenges from legitimate structural issues.

Odds & Ends: Marc Kirschner of TenduTV discusses social media policy in the arts – Modern dance and ballet come to Abu Dhabi – our pal Zachary Whittenberg on three choreographers bringing politically engaged dance to the Chicago stage – our London chums at Belly Flop magazine wonder if artists actually like sports as London prepares for the Olympics – East of Borneo has a marvelous piece on the films of William Leavitt – and don’t forget that Arturo Vidich’s Body Island goes down tomorrow at Abrons Arts Center.

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tEEth Performance's "Home Made," at the Fusebox Festival in Austin this April. Photo by Aaron Rogosin.

What’s In a Joke?: Isaac Butler over at Parabasis is starting a new series of investigations of narrative. “Story Matters I” focuses on a joke about a Clown (no, not that sort of Clown Joke), which, in written rendition, utterly flops. Which is precisely his point. “The point of The Clown Joke—like all Shaggy Dog stories—is that the punch-line is miniscule and unsatisfying,” he writes.

The more grandiose the set up, the more dramatic the distance, the more perversely pleasurable the joke becomes, for the storyteller, anyway. For the listener, the point is to be indoctrinated into an inner circle of knowledge via a lengthy trial in which you have no control. You get for this a story good enough to hold your attention and the ability to play this same trick on others for your own enjoyment.

Either way, narrative has a very clearly defined role to play. This is not true in other storytelling mediums. Long have we debated the purpose, value and role that narrative plays in theatre, in fiction, in poetry, in film although the latter two seem to be more resolved on this issue (poetry rigidly against, film slavishly for). Does story serve some other goal or do those other goals serve story?

From my perspective, all too often contemporary playwrights operate like the joke-writer he describes, but with a slight twist: everyone now no doubt knows the Aristocrats, which is the ne plus ultra of the operation Butler describes and the mode most often employed by playwrights. Not only does it set up a miniscule punchline, everyone knows the punchline in advance; the success of the joke is entirely dependent on the narrative which gets you there from the beginning, which tells you where you’re going. Most contemporary plays are very essayistic like this; given the homogeneity of the typical theater artist and audience, we know that a play that starts off about war will have something bad to say about it, that a play that engages with gay issues will be pro-gay. (Someone please name me the last big pro-war or anti-gay play you saw professionally produced.) In this typology, the “narrative,” which is essentially the entire play being produced, exists to narrate a series of points that makes the predictable ending impactful, which we charitably still refer to as catharsis. This is why I generally don’t like contemporary playwriting.

That said, I like that Butler is interrogating and asking questions like this; a nice companion piece on the function of jokes came up in February’s issue of The Believer and can be read online.

Belarus Free Theater: Well, they’re not exactly “free” anymore, if by “free” you mean “free to return home,” which makes them a bit less Belarussian. Maybe. (I’m trying to be too witty. Apologies.) The point is, the Belarus Free Theater, a courageous collective of theater artists from Minsk who spent nearly a decade producing samizdat plays in the repressive state have been in the US since January, when, with the help of fellow dissidents and the international community, they managed to sneak out of the country to perform at Under the Radar. In February, they were in Chicago, and now they’re coming back to New York to produce a trio of shows at La Mama starting on April 13. Whether they’ve returned home in the interim I do not know at the moment, but I kind of doubt it. Several members were detained following the latest rigged presidential election in December, when dictator Sasha Lukashenko “won” yet another term. Government provocateurs helped incite protesters to riot, providing a thinly veiled excuse for the security services to brutally crackdown. With the world’s attention elsewhere (read: the Middle East and Africa), Lukashenko is comfortably out of the news and back to his wacky dictator stuff (did you know he nationalized the fashion modeling industry? Yup, he’s that crazy), leaving Belarus’s future as bleak as ever.

Fusebox Festival Line-up Announced: Woo-hoo! The Fusebox Festival, one of the nation’s premiere contemporary performance destinations, has announced the line-up of this year’s festival, which goes down in Austin, Texas from April 20-May 1. The fest features the work of some New York mainstays, including Young Jean Lee‘s The Shipment and choreographer Faye Driscoll‘s well-reviewed There is so much mad in me, as well as some other pieces we’ve recently seen, including Jerome Bel’s Cedrix Andrieux. But Fusebox definitely has its own treasures, some of which I will be catching the first weekend of the festival. First off, Austin’s own Rude Mechs, whose amazing The Method Gun closes at DTW this weekend, will be debuting a new work, I’ve Never Been So Happy, which plays in rep at their own theater The Off Center, with the also-local Rubber Rep‘s The Biography of Physical Sensation, an interactive biographical work that plays out for all five senses. And it looks like curator Ron Berry is one of the first nationally to hip to Portland, Oregon’s tEEth Performance, who, if I understand correctly, have only been seen once in NYC at the Joyce Soho in ’09, despite being embraced in Northwest and making repeat appearances at Fusebox. Home Made, their newest work, which is coming to Fusebox, recently captured first-prize excerpted at The A.W.A.R.D. Show! at Seattle’s On the Boards, and my sources tell me it’s amazing.

More on Looking at Dancers’ Bodies: Not had enough of “Sugarplumgate” yet? (Really? That’s what we decided to call it?) Well, over at DanceUSA’s eJournal, Houston-based writer and teacher Nancy Wozny weighs in with a personal, reflective essay, “My Eyes, Your Body,” where she admits that at a recent performance, she found herself “fixated on the circumference of a dancer’s thighs.”

“Watch the dance, not the legs,” I silently yelled at my brain. What’s wrong with me? And me, of all people, a thick-thighed somatic educator, who spent two decades teaching people to accept their bodies. This can’t be true. At war with my own attention, I missed the performance entirely by trying not to be bothered by a pair of less-than-perfect legs. Too distracted by so-called imperfection, I became a victim of my own learned blindness.

It’s a generally lovely, thoughtful, and remarkably self-excoriating piece, but what troubles me about it is the degree to which she faults herself for being, well, normal. We’re not always proud of ourselves and the way in which we look at and judge other people, but declaring your intention to force yourself to think differently seems to kowtow to political correctness. What I find fascinating is that a writer has revealed something personal about the way she experienced a show, which would likely never make it into a review. Personally, I think we need more “I” in reviews and a willingness on the part of the reviewer to reveal their actual experience, not hide behind a veneer of authorial arrogance. Does it seem mean to admit that the way a dancer looked in a performance distracted you? Maybe, particularly if you take the Alastair Macaulay route and make it a joke. But if Wozny was reviewing the performance she mentions, it’s probably worth admitting. Is it really any more mean to say so (revealing your own shortcomings in the process) than it is to give a show a bad review, and tear down someone’s hard work and a massive investment of time?

In fact, I’d argue that it’s deeply important to be that honest. Far too often, artists live in a world of positive feedback loops, where anything negative is swept under the rug. In the end, the artist is responsible for his or her choices, from casting to costuming.

Body-blind casting is as naive and problematic as race-blind casting. We’ve all seen choreographers who choreograph for dancers of a certain type and then have to make do with what pick-ups they can manage. Context is everything, of course, but I’ve been insulted on a dancer’s part more than once seeing them forced to do something they’re not built to do. Choreographers do not always choreograph in a way that supports the essential human dignity and inherent beauty of the body, and that is something they need to be held accountable for. (On a side-note, I want to point out that one of the choreographers whose work has most impressed me for her capacity to work with diverse body types in beautiful and meaningful way is none other than Angelle Hebert of tEEth, noted above.)

As for critics, we (hopefully) enter the theater seeking to experience what the artist wants us to, which is easier for people who are more familiar (like us) with the vocabulary of the art. But we do always need to take a step a back and ask how successfully they achieved their goals, and call out problematic issues. The truth is, it’s more a fear of exposure on the writer’s part that keeps us silent than anything else, and that’s disrespectful to the artists. They expose themselves in ways most of don’t have to; the least we can do is take them seriously and offer an honest response.

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Mike Daisey's "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" at Berkley Rep.

In the Studio: I have something I like to call the “Facebook rule”–I post links to articles on Facebook all the time, and if one of them takes off with tons of comments, no matter how innocuous I think the subject is, then I figure there’s actually something interesting there. Case in point, this little piece from the Guardian‘s theater blog. Now, I don’t want to get bogged down in the details (ballet vs. contemporary, etc.), suffice it to say that what I found interesting was the initial premise: “Whenever I have an opportunity to interview a director or choreographer,” the author writes, “I always ask if I can watch them rehearse. The theatre chaps usually decline.” Choreographers, on the other hand, are less wont to do so. That’s definitely been my experience as well, which I’ve always found interesting. Admittedly, a number of dancers and choreographers made clear that there’s a big part of their process that’s off limits, but I’ve been in rehearsal for run-throughs, techs, and even setting work on brand new dancers. I’ve never been invited to watch so much as a run-through of an experimental piece before opening night. So come on Culturebot readers, give us your thoughts. That’s what comments are for.

Challenge vs. Abuse: Over at Parabasis, Issac Butler has an interesting little note about a conversation he had with a director about “the whole theatre artists saying they want to make challenging work, and he said ‘well, it depends on whose definition of challenging you’re using. What community is being challenged? And by whom? And how do you define what is challenging?’” Butler lays out his dichotomy: it’s one thing to be challenging by pushing your audience in uncomfortable ways, another to just plain abuse them. For my part, though, I think it risks becoming a cop-out to suggest that context is the only delineator, because theater is usually preaching to the choir. Avant-garde work is usually about as challenging for its audiences as the sort of thing you see at a regional theater or on Broadway, because audiences self-select. The real question that’s unasked is, “How entertaining should it be?” Because it’s the entertainment value–which, if you want to be cultured, is often an act of paying to see a “challenging” show–that keeps the butt in seats, which is precisely why I see the logic of actually abusing your audience: the difference between “challenging” and “abuse” is often just another way of delineating whether the artists kept up their end of a transaction.

Terry Teachout, Playwright?: Well, maybe he already was (probably, in fact) but I didn’t know. I have, however, appreciated his work as a critic (for the Journal and online) for quite a while, and was surprised to learn he’s deep into a residency at Rollins College working on a one-man-show about the relationship between Louis Armstrong and his manager Joe Glaser. Which, um, well, let’s help the WIP showing goes well for Teachout, because it’s his first time directing, and even a seasoned actor may need some help flipping back and forth. But what particularly caught me was this comment: “The play itself is probably not what you’d expect. Most one-man shows about famous people are unchallenging, sweet-tempered exercises in hagiography. Not Satchmo at the Waldorf. I’ve tried to show Armstrong as he really was and make him speak the way he really spoke–this is absolutely not a show for kids, unless you’re the kind of parent who’d take your kids to see American Buffalo–and I’ve also tried to suggest the knotty complexity of his quasi-filial relationship with Glaser, an ex-gangster from Chicago who ran his career with an iron hand.” Teachout has a stellar rep for being one of the most engaged critics with mainstream American theater, so if he’s saying that, I can only assume he’s actually pushing some buttons.

Steve Jobs’ Agony Doesn’t Stop Mike Daisey: Monologist and former Culturebot contributor Mike Daisey will go ahead with the new show he’s been touring, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which opens this week at Berkley Rep (in rep with The Last Cargo Cult), despite the fact that his subject recently announced he was stepping down indefinitely as CEO of Apple to pursue medical treatment. This is…not a story. Except to point out to California readers they can go see the show. Mike Daisey may be many things, but a shock-jock he ain’t. Whatever tiny lumps he may throw Steve Jobs’s way, Jobs no doubt earned them, along with his billions.

The A.W.A.R.D. Show, LA: Choreographer Barak Marshall and Body Traffic won the LA edition of The A.W.A.R.D. Show, earning a tidy $10K grant to make new work. Congrats! Insofar as it helps out emerging-ish artists produce work, I’m all for it, and next week the show turns to my old hometown of Seattle.

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