By Cassie Peterson

“Dear Mom, I hate the world so much it’s making me queer…”
(Jen Rosenblit’s informal artist statement during the making of In Mouth)

On Wednesday, February 15th, Vanessa Anspaugh’s Armed Guard Garden and Jen Rosenblit’s In Mouth will premiere at New York Live Arts. In addition to being a frothing-at-the-mouth fanatic of these two dance-makers, I have also been working as a conceptual collaborator on Vanessa’s piece and I will be hosting the pre-show conversation on opening night. In preparation, I’ve been exploring, with both of them, ways to speak about their work without reducing their visions or spoon-feeding audiences. What has ensued is an on-going dialogue and investigation into the ways that Jen and Vanessa identify as young, queer artists and how their relationships to queer inform and shape their respective works.

Before I dive headlong into the details of their art practice/process/production, let me take a moment to try to contextualize queer…

Ultimately, queer is an elusive and indefinable Poststructural paradox because its task is to actually deconstruct definitions and identifications. It sort of folds in on its self and reveals the shortcomings of our current language practices. To queer something is to both expose and disrupt the ways in which heterosexual norms achieve a naturalized, unquestioned, and privileged position in society at large.

Queer has had an interesting semiotic evolution. It derives from the German word, quer, which means across or diagonal. It entered the English language in the 16th century and was used as an adjective that meant odd or strange or suspicious. Historically, queer has referred to something being out of normative alignment and it became a derogatory and oppressive slang-term that was used to identify and describe “homosexuals.” But since these early, hateful deployments of the term, queer has also been linguistically re-appropriated by many sexual minorities as a source of great power and pride. The term was initially reclaimed by members of Queer Nation and ACT-UP, during the height of the American AIDS crisis. Since that time Queer Theory/Queer Studies has become a very well-known and legitimate theoretical framework within the Academy and supports critical thinker and writers like Judith Butler, Judith “Jack” Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz, just to name a few.

When reclaimed, the word queer represents a kind of pluralistic (un)identity that works to undo the oppressive limitations of fixed, binary sexual and gender identifications. Instead of adhering to stringent and essentializing social categories, queer embraces its ambiguous “otherness” and opts for a discursive home on the fringes and in the margins. Thus, queer rejects a legacy of dominance and (hetero)normativity, and works to protect alterity in all of its multiple, irreducible manifestations. In this way, queer is an anti-normative consciousness that is a very purposeful departure from a more mainstream, assimilationist gay and lesbian agenda.

Queering… In Mouth

Jen Rosenblit is intense. Complex and multiple. And hilarious. I can’t help but laugh at every thing she says and love everything she puts in front of an audience. Both she and performer, Addys Gonzalez, agree to meet me at Yale University on a Friday evening. They are performing a sneak preview of their new show for eager graduate students in a small theater on campus. We meet before the show in the Yale bookstore, which is actually Barnes and Noble, which is actually Starbucks. Every part of the Ivy League campus is locked, creating a distinct separation between Yale and the rest of New Haven. We feel strangely like criminals even though we’ve technically been invited here.

One of Jen’s primary characteristics as a dance maker is her rigorous investigation and her ability to thoughtfully challenge some of the basic principles of performance and dance. Specifically, in the making of In Mouth, her desire was to challenge the expectation that dance always have some kind of underlying “Structure.”

Jen: Choreographers that I respect are always talking about the “structure” of their pieces. Well, I wanted to know… “Can a piece be structure-less and if so, how? What does it look like? Feel like?”

Throughout the process, Jen experimented with different ways to subvert arising structural realities. For instance, she and Addys spent many hours in unorthodox kinds of “rehearsal” spaces. Their task was often simply to share the space of their regular, domestic lives and to call it “rehearsal.”

Jen: My primary intention was to find ways to make a dance without rehearsing.
It was like domesticity for art-making purposes. We would sweep the floors and say, “Okay, this is what I am thinking now.” Or we would do the dishes and report back our “findings.” We drank wine and watched bad television, all the while thinking, “This is what I’m doing and this is what it’s making me think and feel.” All year long, we were just trying to find new ways to activate parts of ourselves that had already been activated.

What came up for both Jen and Addys in this domestic rehearsal (anti)structure were the ways in which they are conditioned to think of themselves as the “makers” of work. Within this dominant construction of the “artist,” art making exists as a labor and a responsibility that resides inside of a singular self. In an effort to deconstruct this notion of the self-owned creative act, Jen and Addys would imagine that masses of people where in “rehearsal” with them, pushing their bodies and the work forward. Jen envisioned ways to make the (anti)structure of the piece more about allowing one’s self to be moved by the material, rather than having to produce it.

Jen: We tried to think of the work as carrying us, instead of us carrying the work. We were inspired by the Occupy Movement and this idea of a mass of bodies taking up space in resistance. This was completely exciting and inspiring to me.

Addys: There was a kind of hidden collaboration in the work. We were constantly, internally calling upon all the people in our lives and in the Occupy Movement to help us in rehearsal. Our intention was to feel as though there is a whole community, an entire mass of people behind us and behind every movement choice. Your body has to do less when there is a mob of people behind you. A singular body has to do so much, internally and externally. It has to carry all the responsibility.

Queering Bodies & Relationships…

Though it formally and “structurally” appears to be a duet, In Mouth is simultaneously working to disrupt dominant notions of duet, in multiple ways. Jen’s body of work is renowned for being consciously engaged with the politics of the body and the relationships between them. She identifies as a non-conforming body in multiple ways and understands the complex reactions that arise when she puts her queer body next to Addys’s queer body, in front of an audience — a strange juxtaposition of two very different bodies, intimately relating in space, in a way that is not easily identifiable or familiar for many audiences.

Jen: People will always say,” That’s a really beautiful duet except that Jen is…. too fat… or gay…. Or Addys is black and you are white…” or “They look so strange together”… or whatever it is. There is always something that seems to put us “outside” of what people expect from the duet form. Its as if people always put a weird asterisk next to our work, like “**It would be a beautiful dance if it weren’t for these things…” These “things” of course, being our actual bodies.

At the beginning of the creative process, Jen played with people’s perceptions of their bodies by having she and Addys performing a kind of exaggerated, beastly dumbness. They clunkily lumbered around in space, inviting people to attach clichéd characteristics to their bodies. But then, somewhere in their process, Jen decided that she also wanted to give them permission to embody beautiful and sexy and elegant because a queer body knows no bounds.

In Mouth is a beautifully moving piece. It embodies a kind of austere and precise intensity…

In addition to the overt queerness of their actual physical bodies, In Mouth is also a challenge to the conceptual expectations embedded in duet forms. There are implicit expectations of duet as a kind of energetic intertwining – an ebbing in and out of the space of self and into a unification with the other. In fact, “duet” often becomes a metaphor for “relationship,” as if it is the only way to relate – both in dance and in society. In this dominant idea of the duet, the duo becomes the dance’s focal point and every other kind of relationship becomes peripheral or even illegible. But Jen was determined to disrupt duet. She accomplished this by exposing the realities of “back-stage” and incorporating the tech and production crew right into the real-time realm of the performance. She also involved objects and audience into the sphere of primary and legitimate relationships.

Jen: What about our relationship to the audience? What about our relationship to the objects in the piece? And what about our relationship to ourselves? I think its funny that we see two bodies moving together and we automatically call it duet and then from there, we have certain expectations connected to it.

There is a section in Jen’s piece where she and Addys perform a kind an internal strip tease/peep show for one another. They take turns watching one another. And the audience watches each of them watching the other’s solo. In this, they are exploring the multiple ways to relate to each other, to the audience, and to all the objects on the ground. Every time they touch or use an object, they give it the same attention that they have generously been offering to each other. Thus, there is no privileging of certain “kinds” of relating in this piece. There is unequivocal regard for the cloth on the floor, the production crew, and for the people sitting in the audience. We are all asked to relate in a way that de-centers the primacy of the duet and of the “couple.”

I’m struck by how these disruptions of the duet mimic alternative, queer kinship patterns. Queer kinship patterns maneuver outside of the normative expectations of the married, romantic couple and the corresponding nuclear family arrangement. Queer kinship models do not subscribe to the same markers of social appropriateness. They are often bloodless and lawless relationships that redefine lover/friend/family/community. They privilege love and pleasure over power and position. Queer desires cannot be regulated. Queer affections cannot be legislated. I feel this relational multiplicity when I watch In Mouth.

Addys: Yes, exactly. To me it’s the multiplicity and possibility of relating that makes it queer… Can objects be in a duet? Are the fabrics in relationship to each other? Are we in relationship to the object? We’ve investigated multiple ways to access relationship with ourselves, with each other, with the audience, and with “other” things.

In this deconstruction of the duet, Jen and Addys successfully re-arrange kinship and reconstitute notions of belonging. They do this while also making subtle and abstract, visual references to the marriage institution. At one point in the performance, Jen is standing next to Addys. They are arm-in-arm and she is wearing a veil-like fabric over her face. Later in the piece, Addys puts on a wedding dress-like train and walks across the stage. He is perhaps the most beautiful bride I have ever seen.

Jen (laughing): Yeah, this was not an overt commentary or a concerted effort to politicize the work or make it topical, but “Gay Marriage” images would organically arise. It’s just a singular reading on what was happening.

But In Mouth does, in some indirect way call into question Marriage and comment on it as a heteronormative ideology. Marriage is a container that makes a request for a particular relational outcome. And when people fail at it, these failures are not embraced or celebrated. Jen Rosenblit wants to embrace the failure to arrive at specific situational outcomes. Queer celebrates failure.

Queer makes failure look so good.

Jen: Sure, let’s pass that law so that we can actually start talking about how fucking weird marriage is….

Amen sister. Amen.

Queering… Armed Guard Garden

Being perpetually locked in/out of Yale University reminds me of Vanessa’s piece, Armed Guard Garden because of the ways in which the piece explores our compulsive need to create and protect borders, boundaries, and territories. We organize ourselves around lines carved out in material and psychic spaces that work to include and exclude, depending on what side you find yourself on. A locked gate on a college campus or a beautiful garden in a gated community construct simultaneous realities – the promises the inside vs. the fate of the outside.

Queering Ways of (Un)Knowing…

Working on Armed Guard Garden means that I occasionally step into the rehearsal process and tell Vanessa what I think I’m seeing. We eat a lot of meals together and try to make sense of whatever it she is making. Vanessa is a very intuitive investigator and movement maker — making choices first and then finding ways to name and understand them much later in the process. Vanessa’s art practice is an example of a queer epistemology – an alternative process from which to “know” the world. Throughout her process, Vanessa resists conditioned ways to “know” or understand the world(s) that we create and inhabit.

Vanessa: I am a queer human in the world. Anything I shape is going to be molded by a queer way of knowing. The work doesn’t have to be about “queer” things to be queer. It’s less of an identity and more of a process. To me, queer is an identity-less identity. I like to play with identity-less-ness in my work.

The relationship between her and her work is happening on a different register — a different line of latitude that is not legible through a normative lens.

Vanessa: I like to think of queer as a religion of sorts — not in a repressive, normalizing way, but rather as a guidepost. It’s the willingness to entertain a radical and expansive consciousness and to have enough faith to let my work originate from these places. That’s how I try to approach my creative process – with an open, unknowing stance. I don’t want my work to be essentialized as one kind of experience. I want to facilitate multiple realities — a welcoming rather than a singular or controlled entry point.

Perhaps queer is the method to Armed Guard Garden’s madness.

Queering Borders…

If Jen’s piece is sparing and severe, Vanessa’s piece is busting at the seams with a kind of bizarrely wild, Technicolored melo-drama. Armed Guard Garden is a different world entirely. Utopian. Extraterrestrial. It houses unfamiliar sounds and beast-like human forms moving in grotesquely violent and erotic ways. There are protagonists and antagonists and they are constantly exchanging positions and purpose.

Vanessa constructs “the garden” and the “guard,” rendering a dual reality – each part made from shared material and only coming into being through its contrast to the other. In this way, Vanessa’s piece is a commentary on the ways that we violently put boundaries around the world in order to make sense of it.

Armed Guard Garden works to construct and then disregard these insidious binary identifications and dual notions of reality.

At the beginning of the piece, five badass performers – Aretha Aoki, Niall Noel Jones, Molly Leiber, Lydia Okrent, and Mary Read – mark up the theater in grid-like gestures. They produce literal lines and divisions on the walls and the floor. They create these divisions with chalk and flour and then spend the rest of the performance skewing the lines in the most exquisite and grandiose fashion. They roll around in their own ephemeral boundaries — disrupting them, blurring them with a total abandon and taking unabashed pleasure in their demise. The dancers queer the lines that they themselves have drawn, making a beautifully depraved mess of themselves and the space. It’s an ecstatic refusal to be bound — and a celebration of the parts of self & other that can only exist in the queer, in-between spaces that arise when The Known crumbles.

Queer Politic(s)

Armed Guard Garden resonates both on a sociopolitical scale and delves deep into the micro-politics of the interpersonal moment. AGG explores the dehumanizing effects of a militaristic society and is an embodied commentary on War as a dominant, normative practice. Interpersonal power relations mimic and mirror international relations. We learn how to relate to each other from the world we live in. Thus, how does war live inside of us? Between us? Vanessa positions bodies in opposition to one another and then in a moment, has them join and unify in a kind of inexplicable tenderness. It’s a meditation on the desire to connect and the desire to destroy. It’s a meditation on the instability of power — oppression becomes resistance and loops back again.

Vanessa: It reminds me of being at Wall Street protests and being faced by walls of police with cameras recording every face they could for their surveillance purposes. Simultaneously the protesters were filming the cops filming them, creating a feedback loop. The video screen was also split in half to show a live feed of the protestors watching the trial –watching themselves – watching themselves being watched. How does power move through this loop? Who has it? Who loses it? Gains it? And how does it shift?

Vanessa does most of her movement research through collaborative improvisational practices between she and her dancers. In this process, the performers translate the realties of the external world into the microcosmic world of her dance. She works to create a political “container of now” as a way to gather and metabolize the external world. It’s a kinetic transmission.

Vanessa: The language of improvisation is political. It’s not didactic but it’s always politically relevant. The performers act as filters – bringing the world into the work through improv. Rehearsal space is alive and active and connected to the larger context of the world. Armed Guard Garden is interdependently situated within everything that happened this year. We would all go to rehearsal after being at the protests and the power of that massive movement translated into our own singular movements in the studio.

A queer politic is not topical per say. It, like the Occupy Movement cannot be distilled to a singular demand. Rather, it is an investigation and an interrogation of the entire system and its inexcusable power arrangements and discrepancies.

Queer – movement out of stasis. Out of status quo.

Both Armed Guard Garden and In Mouth hold the tension between what is expected and what is really happening. Each piece incites a sense of a traversing and transgressing something. Everything.

For Vanessa and Jen, it is clear that queer is a kind of embodied resistance. Queer is a reference to process and practice, more than explicit content. These artists accept and employ this constellation of principles and make work that transmits it. Queer is kinetic. A queer body is a body in motion.

Vanessa: Making art with body, bodies unedited — this is queer. Bodies are always bleeding outside their own form. They get dirty and sad. They bleed and shit all over the place. They are never what you expect them to be. Bodies in motion is a radical queer politic.

Jen: Maybe modern dance is already a queer act? Modern dance is very political. In its historical context, it is a very young form of a hyper-political movement, based in radical resistance.

Addys: The performing body is a political ground. Everything we experience as people, as queers, is present in the body. You don’t have to make a piece topical to be deeply political or queer because it’s all there anyway. So in a sense, we made everyone queer with this dance… if you’re moving, dancing, you’re already embodying a queer politic.

There is no essential queer object or subject. Queer is not an objectifiable identity, domain, or dwelling, but is rather produced as a contrast against which normalcy is produced and codified. Hence, queer never is, it never fully arrives. It is always, disrupting, refusing, and resisting the ever-shifting power of (hetero)normativity and dominance, in an effort to carve out more psychic and material space for everybody.

Jen: I really wanted the ending of In Mouth to be a tangent. I don’t want it to be understood. No certainty or conventional conclusion. I want to acknowledge that it’s confusing that things end.

Cassie: Yes, it is confusing. How should we end this?

Queerly.

But what does that mean?

I don’t know….

Exactly.

Cassie Peterson is a New York-based writer, thinker, activist, healer, & lavender menace. She works as a psychotherapist by day, and moonlights as a dance/performance conversationalist, consultant, and critic. Her extemporaneous musings and inqueeries can be found on her blog, Self & Other.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Alfredo Narciso & Lisa Joyce in "The Ugly One". Photo: Julieta Cervantes

An attractive face is a form of social currency, a fact attested to in fairy tales and regularly touted by modern-day scientific studies. German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One, playing at SoHo Rep through February 26, mines the correlation between good looks and power, making the implicit explicit in an absurd drama that focuses—unconventionally, but refreshingly—on a man instead of a woman.

This bitter comedy, rife with social commentary, follows the fortunes of an unspeakably ugly man (Lette) who undergoes cosmetic surgery to get a new face. His new, extraordinarily handsome visage transforms his life: he is immediately successful at his work, and at conferences, queues of women fight to offer companionship after his presentations. Not all of the effects of this seismic change, however, are positive. Lette’s behavior shifts towards condescending entitlement, and as he becomes a poster child for the wonders of plastic surgery, his face is mass-produced, prompting all kinds of identity confusion.

There are lots of layers here, as many as the gauze bandages sported by patients post-surgery. The staging is spare, with an almost clinical feel, yet highly theatrical. Under the direction of Daniel Aukin, each of the four cast members deftly rotates between several roles, and the split-second flips between characters (youthful wife to aging mistress, boss to plastic surgeon) add a frisson to the action. The fishbowl, “I’m sizing you up” mentality is reflected in the audience/stage configuration, which places the stage between parallel sets of risers; I found myself periodically assessing the faces across from me.

By taking cosmetic surgery to fantastical extremes, Mayenburg teases the link between the external and internal, the impact of outward appearance on behavior, and the malleable understanding of “identity.” You laugh while you’re in the theater, but you walk out the door thinking.

[Postscript: Last week’s New Yorker includes a fascinating article on facial transplants as an extreme form of reconstructive surgery. In short, a victim of a terrible accident gets a new face. Eerily familiar.]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Liz Sargent in "Botanica." Photo by Paula Court

“For years, some of my favorite French surrealist pornography was Bataille’s Blue of Noon and Louis Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt,” Jim Findlay explained about halfway through our interview. For the first thirty-some minutes, we’d been discussing plants, some 200 of which surrounded us as we sat in the middle of the set for Botanica, Findlay’s new show (Jan 28 – Feb. 25; tickets $10-$30), giving the big gallery space at 3LD Arts the earthy, loamy smell of a warm greenhouse. Asking what else we needed to discuss in terms of understanding the show, Findlay offered that we had yet to talk about French surrealist porn, at which the conversation changed hue from green to blue.

“So I spent some time researching them, because I had wanted to do something that had sex as a major part of it,” he continued. “They’re both books written by a male, with a first-person narrator, about an amoral woman in their past who they’re still obsessed with, and can’t get over, and who’s unavailable. The amoral love of their life kind of thing. Louis Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt is basically 150 pages of he can’t get this woman’s cunt out of his mind,” he explained almost apologetically. “About trying to figure out how to stop thinking about Irene’s cunt. And Blue of Noon is more sort of this story about this guy’s relationship with a woman who’s falling apart at the seams, she’s a drunk and completely amoral. Kind of destroying the world with her sexuality. Just not going to live by the world’s rules. And I discovered that the books are written about–the woman Aragon was obsessed with and the woman Bataille was obsessed with–were the same real world woman. A woman named Colette Peignot, who wrote under the pen name–and was part of the Surrealist movement–’Laure.’”

Word has been going around about Botanica for a while now, spurred mainly by positive feedback when a selection of the work was shown a year ago at APAP, while Findlay and his collaborators were in residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where the show was envisioned as a twelve-hour long installation performance (“I’ve been calling presenters, telling them, ‘I was just kidding, it’s only 90 minutes long!’” Findlay joked.) Add to that early experiments starting two years ago, as well as a well-received showing at Prelude last year, and it’s a rather buzzed about show–for good reason. The set alone is an incredible piece of design work (by Peter Ksander). The audience is seated at the back of the space, facing towards the front windows of 3LD; downstage-right a small but completely functional greenhouse angles up and off; center-left is a large scientific research station, all brushed steel and clear plexiglass, that wouldn’t look out of place as a setting in CSI; upstage, right in front of the windows, is a rather anodyne living area. Plants are everywhere–in the greenhouse, throughout the living area, in media res on the experiment table. The entire stage-left wall is divided into small cells from which the tendrils of seedlings coil up toward the light or down toward the floor.

Welcome to the biodome in which Botanica takes place.

None of this should seem all that surprising to those familiar with Findlay’s work. A long-time designer with the Wooster Group and a co-founder of Collapsable Giraffe, Findlay is an artist with a well-established reputation. Botanica marks a new phase in his career–an opportunity to define his artistic voice as the primary generator of the work, outside a more collaborative environment.

But for all that about French Surrealist porn, the original inspiration that led to Botanica was far less esoteric and literary.

“It was about two-and-a-half years ago, and I was in Lyon, France working on a show with Ralph Lemon, and I had a dream about Liz Sargent,” he explained, “who’s a woman I’ve been friends with and is a choreographer and installation artist, who used to be a dancer and hadn’t really been performing in New York. But I’d always had this idea that she’d be great onstage. But in this dream…” he paused. “I just had this dream where I saw her in this room that was just filled with plants. I saw her in this environment that was just wall-to-wall plants. The floor was plants and the ceiling was plants. And I just knew immediately that there was a performance in there.”

Findlay’s process was slow and iterative. Along with Sargent, he knew he wanted to work with Ilan Bachrach and Chet Mazur. The four began meeting for exploratory sessions at the Collapsable Hole, the converted garage-space Findlay shares with Radiohole in Brooklyn. One of the ideas that came to inform the piece was the pseudo-science theory of “plant consciousness.” Although Findlay’s research ultimately led to engagement with noted plant experts at such places as the New York Botanical Garden, an early inspiration was the 1970s pop-psychology book The Secret Life of Plants. Partly based in hard science, the work also relied heavily on investigations by the likes of Cleve Backster, a polygraph expert (“If you do any research into it, you sort of discover that anyone who calls himself a polygraph expert is lying,” Findlay wryly pointed out of the oft discredited technique) who experimented with lie detectors on plants in the 1960s.

Based on those initial sessions, they began developing ideas for exploratory improvisations and installations to be presented in mixed-bills, like Avant-Garde-Arama, that would give them to chance to explore human-plant interaction. But fundamentally, it was still based on the image from Findlay’s dream, with the content emerging from the explorations.

“The first thing we did was sort of like an installation improv version at a, Ugly Duckling party at Invisible Dog. And right away, somehow, Chet started having sex with plants,” he explained. “I just wanted Chet in a room with three plants. And at the time I was trying to embed speakers in the plants to make the plants talk. I was always trying to make the plants talk. How to interface with these plants with technology that would bring them alive in a theatrical way. And at that time I had three other performers on remote microphones in the space, so they were forty, fifty feet away, couldn’t see him, but each of them was physically linked to speakers in the plants. So they did a forty-minute improv where the plants competed for his attention. You know, ‘I’m thirsty, I need water,’ so he’d water one. ‘No I’M thirsty, don’t water that one, water me!’ And that kind of somehow, magically led to, you know…” he trailed off with a wave of the hand, as though the result was obvious.

“You put a few performers and microphone there, and someone’s going to start fucking.”

With eroticism brought into the mix, the show began to take shape. The literary menage-a-trois between Aragon, Bataille, and Peignot served as the model for how the characters in the piece interact: two scientists and a caretaker/gardner, living in a biodome and experimenting on plant cosciousness, with a sort of ephemeral female character metamorphosing between human and plant object-of-desire. Findlay admitted that such a narrative-centric piece was new territory for him, but he’d come to embrace it as part of his personal artistic exploration. Although mainly known as a designer, he passed off the job to Ksander, one of the few people whose work we knew well enough to feel comfortable stepping back and letting him handle it without being tempted to meddle.

Instead, Findlay concentrated on working with the performers to develop further ways of using technology to interact with plants. Sonically, the piece is scored with live sound by inserting contact-microphones into plants to be experimented on. “You hear the plant hearing them,” is how Findlay put it. As the performers touch, romance, and torture plants, the audience experiences the sound conducted through the plant’s living material, mixed through a sound-system that combines it with samples of actual recorded plant sounds (using technology well outside a performance’s budget), with the result being an interplay of actual live and recorded plant sounds. It’s particularly arresting to hear the result of tasing one with a consumer-strength electric taser. Findlay and assistant director Maurina Lioce, who was tending to the plants while we talked, were both laughing at their inability to convince audiences during work-in-progress showings that it wasn’t faked. When the performer tases a plant, the audience is, in fact, hearing that plant being tased.

Findlay’s engagement with the show, I suspect, is owed as much to such challenges and the themes the show took on as a transformed into a dark comedy: not only of finding a performance vocabulary for seemingly inanimate objects like plants, but also for the sheer challenge of working with them at all.

“Over the course of this I’ve gone from knowing nothing to being scarily into plants,” he told me. “There’s over 200 plants in here, and at least the hundred that are potted–not the seedlings on the wall–the hundred that are potted I know them all. I know their personalities to a certain extent.”

At the beginning of the processs, “We would kill plants at an amazing rate,” he explained. An important influence in a somewhat ironic fashion was Rob Besserer. Best known to the artistic community as a dancer and performer who’s worked with everyone from Baryshnikov to Meredith Monk, Besserer’s side job is as a plant arrangement designer, a specialty that likely has a more specific name than I’m aware of. (“He calls himself a ‘greensman’ or something like that,” Findlay said.) Besserer helped Findlay and the others understand how to work with–and keep alive–the variety of plants featured in the show, which was a long and tricky process, as they discovered with the sail plants he brought them.

“Some people call them ‘peace lillies’ but I call them ‘sail plants’ because ‘peace lilly’ is so…” he trailed off. “We got them, Rob brought in a bunch of them, and said, ‘Here, try these.’ And we had them for like a week and they were dying, the stems were lying flat over the edge of the thing, Maurina’s calling Rob, saying, ‘Rob, we don’t know what we’re doing, these plants are dying, we’re killing them, what do we do?’ And he’s just like, ‘Put them in the shower.’ Just put them in the shower for like fifteen minutes running and then do the same thing again tomorrow. So we did it for a couple days, and they still looked like the sickest–”

“We didn’t put them in their for fifteen minutes,” Lioce said from across the stage. “I’d put them in there and just leave it running while we rehearsed.”

“Yeah!” Findlay agreed. “We didn’t water them for fifteen minutes, we just left them in there for, like, hours.”

“Rob said they need more water,” Lioce explainded. “He said, ‘There’s no way you can give them too much water,’ so I was like, ‘Well, here’s a shower.’ It worked, though.”

“I mean, they were just flat,” Findlay continued. “Then one day, we came in and they were all…they went from all their leaves drooping over the edge of the thing, literally nothing standing up, and then we came in one day after showering them and they were back up. That was the moment I was like, ‘Holy shit, we did it! We rescued these plants!’” He paused, chuckling. “But yeah, that was the moment I was like, yeah. My little Grinch heart grew one plant size that day.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Brad Learmonth, Director of Programming at Harlem Stage, to talk about their upcoming season and get a peek into the future.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to Harlem Stage and what you do?

Well, it’s a long story, but I’ll be here twenty-four years in February. It’s kind of a ground-up story for me. I started as an assistant to what was the executive producer at the time and within three years became Director of Education. For a decade I grew that initiative while working on other programming with the Director of Programming. I eventually became the Assistant Director of Programming and in 1998 became Director of Programming. There was a big transition – Patricia Cruz came on as Executive Director and Laura Greer, my predecessor, left that year.

Essentially what I do is oversee all of the programming of the institution. So I do the long-term planning, creation, development and implementation of programs, including education. Now, though, my program and arts education manager, Simone Eccleston, has really taken over the direction of the education program, much as I did in the 90′s. She’s really brought it back up to a good level and increased its growth.

Twenty-four years is a long time, you must have seen a lot of change. What is Harlem Stage doing now?

Well, it’s a very exciting time for us. We had a bit of an economic challenge when we moved over to the Gatehouse in 2006 after a two-year, $26 million renovation of our building, the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. As happens with a lot of organizations when they undertake something that big, we stepped out a little too far on our programming and had to pull back a bit. So we went through this turnaround and under Pat Cruz’s leadership it was a huge success. We are now in a really good place, especially given the situation in the economy. We’ve been doing extremely well for the past couple of years, not just surviving but even, I would say, in some ways thriving notwithstanding the challenges that everyone is facing, the tremendous challenges in fundraising We’ve launched a new series that has had huge success that targets young people and brought other programs back into their full realization – the film program, the Waterworks program, which is our signature commissioning initiative.

And we’re about to go into our 30^th Anniversary season! We incorporated as an institution in 1982/1983, the paperwork was filed in 1982 and it was signed, sealed and delivered in 1983. So we’re going to have kind of a soft launch of our 30^th anniversary season starting in January 2012 and go into a hard launch when we have our 30^th anniversary gala on May 21^st,. Starting in September 2012 we’ll go into a full campaign of 30^th anniversary programming which will focus on the institution, highlighted by three world premieres from our Waterworks program, along with quite a number of other significant presentations and projects.

We’re also embarking on an ambitious five-year plan. For the last year we’ve really been looking at our programming, institution and mission and honing our vision so we can really distinguish ourselves in what has become, locally – and I mean immediately locally – a very healthily competitive field in Harlem.

Where we were sort of the reigning presenting institution in Harlem for decades, there is now a real scene being created now in Harlem, again; one that’s bringing people back in a way that hasn’t happened in a long time. Harlem’s always been a vibrant community, but it tends to be under-represented in the media. While it has never lost its vibrancy, it is definitely coming back in a big way. So as we look at the immediate landscape, and the national and international landscape as well, we’re looking at ourselves as an institution and really trying to hone in on what really distinguishes us.

We’ve been working to identify what we’re going to focus on more fully as we define the future of the Harlem Stage.

What are the implications of that in terms of programming?

Well one of the ideas that we’re working with, something that we’ve identified as central to what we do, is the notion of “Dig Deeper.”

Harlem Stage presents programming that is, by its nature, investigating the deepest part of the creative process, the most expansive and innovative thinking that artists do. We also investigate issues that resonate for people in the culture today – particularly artists and people of color, because that’s what our mission represents. All of the artists we work with are in some way or another activists both in their communities, through their art and in the world. Often they’re addressing very challenging and difficult issues in their work.

So we support the creation of work that takes a deeper look, that is both socially and artistically bold and adventurous. At the same time the artists are doing it in a way that not only transmits great information but also offers the possibility of digging deeper and, dare I say, entertains you or transforms you, the way art should.

So we’re using that idea of Dig Deeper to look at how we can broaden our offerings and our activities All of our humanities components are going to be looked at more closely and marketed more visibly. They’ve always existed but sometimes it seems like it’s the best kept secret. So we’re going to be working on really letting people know what we do and giving them a way in.

You said this spring is a “soft launch” of the 30^th Anniversary. What does that mean?

Well, what you’re going to see starting in the spring is programming that reflects the “Dig Deeper” idea that came out of the focused thinking that is part of our strategic planning process, and as we move forward that’s going to get even sharper and sharper.

We begin the season with – and we actually end the season – with two vocalists who are extraordinary innovators in their field. One is Jose James who opens the season for two nights and four sets on February 10^th and 11^th.

Its kind of a pre-Valentine’s thing if you wanna look at it that way because he’s very smooth and sexy and he sings a lot about that kind of thing. But he’s an extraordinary artist with an exceptional voice and incredible vocal and stylistic range. He spans the worlds of hip-hop and soul and is very much in the jazz world as well. He’s worked with great jazz people like McCoy Tyner – he’s got several albums under his belt and with us he’s going to be doing all new material from his upcoming album. Jose’s an exceptional artist that we’ve recently discovered and we’re very excited to be presenting him.

At the end of the season in June we’re going to be presenting an artist we’ve worked with for over a decade: Tamar-kali. She comes more from the Afro-Punk movement but is also an extraordinary composer and singer who tackles everything from Nina Simone to jazz standards. We’re going to be presenting a program called Voices, which over the course of three nights will feature the three ensembles that represent different strains of her creativity. One of evenings will feature an acoustic string ensemble, then she has another project called the Pseudo-Acoustic Sirens and finally she has a group called 5ive Piece, which is a pretty hard-hitting blow-the-roof off rock band. So we’re going to be doing all three of those, for the first time for her, in one program. We’ve worked with her many times over the years. Exceptional artist.

I’m just curious – how did Tamar-kali get her name? Does she have an Indian background?

No she is African-American, I think she might be from Brooklyn but her family is largely from the Gullah community off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Tamar-kali is her created name. It has a lot of various meanings. Tamar was a very powerful female figure in the Old Testament and Kali, of course, is the creator-destroyer deity of Hindu mythology. There’s a lot of stuff going on in that name and there’s a lot going on in that artist, that person. She’s a phenomenon.

Harlem Stage has a penchant for identifying artists who, like Sekou [Sundiata], we really stick with over the years. Artists who we feel are exceptional voices with exceptional vision in their particular craft and in the field in general. We try to develop a relationship with them that nurtures them and gives them visibility while celebrating what we try to do as an institution. Tamar-kali is one of those people that we’ve really stuck with for over a decade now and we’re really trying to sit down with her to figure out what’s next. “What have you got up your sleeve that we can help you move into the world?” Same with Vijay Iyer. Jason Moran is someone we’ve worked with for over a decade, we gave him his first platform as a band leader and he’s been a great friend to Harlem Stage every since, creating great things. Of course Sekou was probably the exemplar of that relationship with us over a twenty year period, and there are others. We really try to nurture artists that gives them a platform to discover who they are or further that discovery and we just join in with them.

Great. Sorry for the digression! So back to the season – after you open with Jose James, what’s next?

Following Jose James we’re doing a four-part program, called “A Tribe Called Quest: Innovations and Legacies – A Movement in Four Parts”. That was created by Simone, our program manager, and it’s going to be really looking deeply at A Tribe Called Quest’s contribution to and influence on the whole hip-hop movement of the last decade, plus. Tribe not only created incredible. [positive, music in the genre of hip-hop, but they were really innovators in terms of blending it with jazz. They just took the genre and created a new language for the music that has been hugely influential.

That will kick off with a panel discussion called “Footprints: A Discussion on the Innovation and Impact of A Tribe Called Quest”. The next night will feature a Tribe Called Quest Tribute from the Revive The Live Big Band headed by the trumpeter Igmar Thomas with special guests. That will be followed, on the same night, by an after-party called “SPIT: Speaking In Tongues”. DJ Cosi will be playing the music of, and inspired, by the Native Tongues Collective which was comprised of the groups De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, Leaders of the New School, Black Sheep, as well as individual artists Monie Love and Queen Latifah. The final night will be a concert called “Beats, Rhymes and Beyond” featuring The J. Dilla Ensemble. J-Dilla was a producer and DJ and musician that died very young of lupus but was instrumental in moving the Tribe legacy forward. The J. Dilla Ensemble is an ensemble out of Berklee College of Music in Boston that celebrates his music.

For us this is not only a celebration of great music but it also helps us advance the idea of contextualizing these younger generations of musicians not just as songwriters or DJs but as composers. People are re-thinking what classical music is – understanding that it is not just Western European-based music but that there are classical musics around the world which are different for everybody. That’s something we’re looking at in various ways – we’re working with the Cuban composer Tania Leon and Symphony Space on their annual February series called Composers Now and Jose James fits into that as well.

But in that context the Tribe Called Quest program really represents a much deeper look at a particular movement, elevating the idea of looking at hip-hop and its innovations in a way that people like myself who aren’t really of the hip-hop generation but appreciate it – to have a greater understanding and appreciation of the work. Also we could offer a platform for Simone, whose a younger programmer, to do her thing and present it to audiences – which is important to what we do as organization.

Then in March we’ll start our monthly film series that we do with our primary partner, Black Documentary Collective, and a new partner, Media That Matters. They bring in great short films that get paired with these great documentaries.

At the end of March we’ll be presenting the Afro-Peruvian singer Eva Ayllon across the street at Aaron Davis Hall. She’s been in the business for over 40 years, celebrating Afro-Peruvian music. She’s an amazing vocalist and it’s a free concert – so that’s very exciting. We’ll be presenting that with our long-time partner, for twenty-five years, the Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert program

In April we have our annual dance series, E-Moves which is in its thirteenth season of showcasing emerging and evolving choreographers. We’ll have eight emerging choreographers who are, in many cases, presenting their very first works some of which have been supported by grants from our Fund For New Work grant program.

The E-Moves program has grown into kind of a university, that’s how we think of it. We audition artists and then we set them up with a mentor that they work with for a period of six to eight months while they create their works. They have open rehearsals where they come into Harlem Stage and present the works-in-progress with their mentors and we give them feedback and then they go on to present the full work in E-moves.

The evolving choreographers that we’re working with this year are an Indian-American choreographer from L.A. named Sheetal Ghandi and Souleymane Badolo who is from Burkina-Faso, and they’re both presenting new works. We’re very excited about that because it brings more of an international dialogue to the series.

Then in May we really concentrate on our jazz programming which includes the second annual Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival which we do in consortium with The Apollo and JazzMobile. There are between 30 and 40 events over a week’s period, they’re all $10 and the three organizations work together to celebrate the Jazz Shrines of the last 100 years. We identify the places in Harlem that were seminal in creating or providing a platform for creating the music we know as jazz.

Each of the organizations takes three or more of the shrines and celebrates them either literally, because they still exist, like the Lenox Lounge, or we recreate some idea of the shrine such as the Savoy Ballroom, and we bring in artists that pay tribute to it, though not necessarily literally, because the idea of the program is both to look back and move forward.

This year we’re celebrating Cecil Taylor with three pianists: Vijay Iyer, Amina Claudine Myers and Craig Taborn. We are also bringing Cecil in the week after the festival to perform himself, which will be an amazing experience.

We’re bringing in The Mosaic Project by Terri Lyne Carrington which is a project celebrating women in Jazz – women in music, really. She created this project a couple of years ago and I think they’re up for a Grammy this year. That will feature Terry Lyne, Nona Hendryx, Lizz Wright and a host of other artists performing with them. After that we’re going to be presenting a “Tribute to Club Havana San Juan” with The Havana San Juan Orchestra led by Louis Bauzo, then our gala is on the 21^st and we end with Tamar-kali. So we’re bookending the season, as it happens, not really by design, with these two amazing vocalists.

The program is a great mix of disciplines and has a strong intergenerational component. How is that going to play out in the humanities programs?

Well, the Tribe Called Quest program starts with a panel that will include at least one member of the original Tribe and other people that are important to the movement. The reason I’m not telling you them yet is that they’re still being confirmed and Simone is really working on that project, so I’m going to give her all the credit on that one. But that will be really looking at and understanding what Tribe’s impact was, which is why the panel is called “Footprints”. These are the tracks that these artists laid down that other people have since followed. And then the other three movements then not only celebrate their music but the people that followed them directly – Native Tongues, J.Dilla Ensemble.

With Jose James we’re trying to formulate a humanities program that is specific to him. What we try to do is work with the artists to see what’s going to resonate for them and what’s going to get their voice heard in the best possible way.

We’re going to have a much more interactive component on our website and for some of these artists the Dig Deeper aspect may only be there, but for everybody there’ll be something there. You’ll always have the opportunity to dig deeper by going to our website and seeing film clips or audio clips or reading or hearing interviews, and exploring a variety of ideas.

With our E-moves program we have discussions with the artists and the mentors that will follow two of the programs. And we’re going to be showing films this year that will highlight some of the programming that we’re doing. One of the films we’ll be showing is the 2007 film Movement (R)evolution Africa which talks about contemporary African choreographers and features Souleymane Badolo. And we’re showing a new film by David Rousseve, a short film called Two Seconds After Laughter which was filmed in Java. It doesn’t directly relate to Sheetal’s work but David Rousseve is Sheetal’s mentor and there’s some connection to the movement because of the Indian connection in Indonesia, so we’ll find a way in there. But it does give another look at a more international scope of dance and how its being interpreted from the traditional into the contemporary.

With the Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival there will be whole week of humanities components around that. We work very closely with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and they are a collaborating partner in the festival. They will be creating a series of humanities events on their own and we’re going to do symposia. We’re talking about possibly doing symposia at Columbia around Cecil Taylor and have scholars present papers that will then get published. We’re really trying to celebrate Cecil Taylor in a way that he really has not been celebrated and really deserves.

As part of celebrating Cecil we will we have the three pianists in a wonderful set-up, where we’re going to have two pianos. Each of the pianists is going to do a solo and then they’re going to do duets with each other in combinations. So some of the humanities may be artist talks where we discuss not only Cecil’s influence on them but also on the music itself. He’s one of the geniuses of the last century so he needs to be recognized.

And every film presentation is followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and a wine and cheese reception. We’re very big on receptions, because we believe that breaking bread with artists and audiences is a wonderful way to complete the experience. It also gives people an opportunity to have a little bit of one-on-one, not only with each other, but with the artists.

I was going to ask about that. It seems that you do have a lot of opportunities for people to engage in other ways beyond just being an audience member.

It’s really about building a family for Harlem Stage. We tend to look at it more in terms of family and friends – but it all amounts to community. For us it really is about creating this living organism that is more than just: “We’re the presenters and you’re the audience and you buy a ticket and come see the work and isn’t that lovely.: It’s a much more in-depth experience. And its not just about “here’s a great lecture” either – its really about rubbing elbows with people and breaking bread, and having a reception is certainly a way to always do that. We also have great dance parties – The Uptown Nights series – and we have a lot of events that begin and end with a DJ set: there’s a bar, there’s food and it’s cabaret style seating. We try to create an atmosphere, where appropriate, that’s not just a proscenium look at art.

With the Cecil tribute we’re going to put a platform in the middle of the space and we’re going to surround it with seats, probably cabaret style seating, and serve wine and some food (that doesn’t make noise!) and really celebrate this evening and celebrate this artist. We want to give people an opportunity before and after the show to mingle with themselves and mingle with the artists. That will also provide a way into the context and the content of the work whether its that night or later, online.

Another project we’re launching is the Harlem Stage Reading Circle which is more than a book club, because a lot of the works we present are inspired by literature or historical material. So we’ll be reading in groups of people and then we’ll have a potluck dinner or some kind of gathering – always with food – to explore the content and context of the work.

For instance we’re working on developing an opera called Makandal by Carl Hancock Rux that was originally inspired by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. So we’ll offer an opportunity for people to read the book and then gather – it could be a dozen people, just a half-dozen people – twith Carl and other artists connected with the work in question. We’ll discuss the book, discuss the work, discuss the content and the context of it as it relates to the work that’s been created or is being created along with how it resonates with the world today.

We’re also developing a project with with Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd that looks at veterans of color in conflicts. We’ll be looking at what it means to be a veteran of color in this day and age in the United States military. What does it mean to go over to another country, be shooting at people of color and then come home to the challenges of being a person of color here.

These are all things that are resonating in the world as we speak, and that move through the art that we’re creating. Makandal deals with freedom, immigration, revolution – all these things that couldn’t be more appropriate or poignant to be creating a major work now that deals with those issues.

So we’re interested in finding ways to engage those people who want to be engaged in a deeper conversation and discover how that can be a further transformative experience beyond just coming to the show. The performance can be an extraordinary experience in and of itself – but how do we take it deeper and offer something to people that choose to take that journey, encourage those people that are on the fence and drag the rest…

These sound like big projects. Are these Waterworks commissions?

Yes, Makandal and Vijay Iyer’s project Holding It Down – The Veteran’s Dream Project are Waterworks commissions. The 30^th Anniversary season will start in September 2012 with Holding It Down, which has been in development for several years now. It is being created by Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd with Maurice Decaul who is a veteran poet. Patricia McGregor is directing and it has a wonderful ensemble including Guillermo Brown, Pamela Z. and Kassa Overall.

Then we’ll close the year and the 30^th anniversary season with the world premiere of Makandal which we’re also producing, which is somewhat new for us. We produced one other project over ten years ago that was kind of a “trial by fire” experience. We have ventured into that land again a little by default – and that’s a really long story I won’t go into – but Makandal has been in the works for over four years. It was written and conceived by Carl and conceived of by Carl. It is composed by Yosvany Terry, the Cuban composer and saxophonist with the visual design is by Edouard Duval Carrie who is a celebrated Haitian-American artist. And now its being directed by Lars Jan, who is this kind of wunderkind out of CalArts and we’re going fully into the next phase of development beginning in January.

So these works – Holding it Down and Makandal in particular – will be in full development stages through the spring and in Makandal‘s case through next year.

And once again we’ll be creating “Dig Deeper” kinds of events so people are aware of these projects as they’re in development. While there will be some of the traditional show-and-tell work-in-progress showings or open rehearsals, we really want to use the Reading Circle to build awareness and engagement with the work. Its especially appropriate to Holding it Down in which they’ve taken the dreams of veterans and woven the poetry of veterans into an evening of music, text and video design – it’s a really powerful piece. So we’ll be looking at veteran poetry and other relevant works.

Makandal deals with Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba in contemporary, historical and mythical settings. So for that the Reading Circle might engage with any number of works that inform the process – the writing of Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende’s recent book Island Beneath the Sea, the works of Maya Deren which also includes film. All these things are sort of ripe for the picking for a reading circle that looks at the history of Haiti, its revolution and the consequences of that revolution. It provided and still provides a lot of inspiration to the world. And of course there’s the complicated relationship between Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba – not to mention the rest of the world – and how those intertwined histories inform those islands and those cultures – and how they’ve informed our culture. You know when the Haitian revolution happened a lot of those slaves came to New Orleans and that’s one of the reasons you have vodun in New Orleans. And how the music came from Cuba to New York. I mean, there are so many connections and so much information that we just don’t know – we certainly don’t know the details. We know broad swipes of information if we’re into the music or the culture, but there’s so much detail there, so much complexity. And its really rich material.

So we want to find ways to investigate all that information because Carl certainly does, if you know his writing. He’s a brilliant writer with a wealth of knowledge and in that libretto is buried a treasure of historical and mythological information. Unpacking that a little bit is not only fun but allows you to enjoy the piece even more.

What’s the history of Waterworks?

Waterworks was created as the signature commissioning program for Harlem Stage when we re-branded the institution and moved over to The Gatehouse in 2006. We had previously been Aaron Davis Hall, Inc. – that still is our legal name – but now we’re Harlem Stage. Waterworks looks at master artists who are really exemplary in the field, giving them larger commissions and extended development periods to create new work that has artistic merit but also looks at issues of social justice, arts and activism. Four works were created to open the building, including one by Sekou – 51^st Dream State, Roger Guenveur Smith, Tania Leon and Bill T. Jones were the other three artists that created work. And its gone on to be our most significant commissioning program.

I remember coming up to meet you when Bill T. was loading in. I remember a lot of red drapes.

That was the piece he created for Waterworks and it was created specifically for the Gatehouse. He was very inspired by the space. He saw the space when it was completely gutted and empty four stories down. It was magnificent. We’re going to be celebrating that renovation more as we move forward. He created Chapel/Chapter for the space and he completely wrapped the inside in red drapery and it was all done in the round. It was a great piece.

The Gatehouse is a historic landmark building that was part of the aqueduct system of New York State in the 1800′s. It literally fed the first clean drinking water to New York City in the 1890′s. It was the gatehouse where the water was gated as it flowed down from Croton Aqueduct. So we work with that water imagery/metaphor a lot and it definitely feeds the institution in many ways. Not the least of which is…. Well, you know, if you believe in such things, there’s a real kind of spiritual connection when you come into the Gatehouse building. A lot of artists feel that. They feel very – they feel a real energy in there that’s powerful to them and allows them to embrace their creativity. So a number of works have been created for it.

What are the other commissioning programs beyond Waterworks?

Commissioning is something that is really significant to what we do, and from what I’ve gathered in the field we seem to be one of the few organizations who are trying to hang on to the idea of being major commissioners.

We also have a commissioning program called the Fund For New Work, that gives emerging artists their very first commissions and opportunities to develop new work. And we’re looking more deeply at giving mid-career or evolving artists more support. That’s an area where we haven’t had funding. We’ve had funding for emerging from the Jerome Foundation and for the Waterworks program primarily from Time-Warner but also other organizations like Nathan Cummings, but the evolving part has been elusive. We’re going to be more aggressively looking at that because that’s a huge bunch of artists that need support.

One examples of that is we’re commissioning Kyle Abraham for his new work Boys In The Hood which will have its premiere at Harlem Stage next November. He’s an artist we gave his first emerging artist grants to, and we’ve been working with him ever since and he’s come up to be a really celebrated choreographer. We’re going to be giving him his own week of presentation in November. He’s an amazing young artist who’s really grown a lot and I really love working with him, he’s a great spirit.

So Waterworks is our major, signature commissioning program but commissioning overall is a big thing for us. We’ve actually created a Commissioning Circle which is another way of allowing individuals to support work – you can become a commissioner of a work or a co-commissioner of a work at different levels. So we’re giving people an opportunity to invest in work in multiple ways, including financially.

That’s an interesting idea – letting donors target their donations to a specific project.

Well, it’s a way of offering people a form of targeted giving that may resonate more for them. And they have a personal investment in the creation of a work that gives them access to to the creative process in a way that not everyone will have – special meetings with artists, and things like that.

But moving commissioning front-and-center seems pretty innovative, or at least it sends a message about the organization.

A lot of organizations have very creative ways of parsing out ways of donating. You know. you can buy a year’s worth of toe shoes for this much money. A lot of dance companies have been innovative in that way – but this is specifically toward commissioning, and really letting people know what that means and what’s involved in bringing a work from concept to presentation.

We want to get supporters involved in the process in a way that works not only for them, but for the artist. It works very differently for each artist: their process is different, their comfort level at being exposed while they’re in the creative process is different. And there’s a dialogue that goes on there. Some artists become more comfortable and find ways that really inform the work for them. You know, they discover that being a little more vulnerable or open in the creative process can be a win-win. So it’s a wonderful opportunity for audiences and it opens up the dialogue for artists to find new ways to connect through their art.

One of the things we’re really looking at as we move forward is the fact that not enough people – especially people that are, in theory, really close to us either geographically or in the arts field – really know the breadth and scope of what we do. So we’re looking to find ways to make ourselves more visible and to let people really know what’s going on at Harlem Stage. And we’re really going to be looking at that as we move into the 30^th anniversary and the future. We’re doing a lot of great work and we want people to know about it and be a part of it.

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

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

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

–Alyssa

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

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

–Jeremy

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

Charles Isherwood on The TEAM’s Mission Drift:

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

–Aaron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Maura

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

–Alyssa

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

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

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

--Jeremy

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

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

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

–Andy

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

From today’s Times:

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Jeremy

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

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

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

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

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

–Jeremy

Popularity: 9% [?]

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

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

“By whom?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 3% [?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 3% [?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collins: “A dozen actors…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Toshiki Okada, the Japanese playwright and director of the company chelfitsch, is already recognized as one of the most exciting artists of his generation. His 2004 play Five Days in March, which explored the links between the day-to-day life of young Tokyo hipsters and the US invasion of Iraq using a combination of anti-performative techniques, movement, and richly colloquial dialogue, established Okada internationally. The show toured widely and built bridges for the artist with presenters in the US and Europe.  This January, chelfitsch brings a triptych, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech, to the Japan Society as part of Under the Radar (Jan. 5-14; tickets $22).

The following interview was conducted by and translated from the Japanese for Culturebot by the Japan Society. For scholars and Japanese speaking readers, the original, including Okada’s responses in Japanese, is available here as a PDF.

Your company’s name “chelfitsch.” I know it’s a childish version of the English word “selfish,” but I’m curious where it came from, and what it means to you, if anything?

It meant myself when I named it.  Because I thought myself childish and selfish.  I was twenty three years old.  But it changed its meaning after the company’s name got to be known.  When a critic said “chelfitsch” describes the social situation of our time in Japan, especially Tokyo, I was somehow convinced of it. Then I got to like using this explanation.

What were the ideas you set out to explore in Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech and what influenced the script? I understand it’s a triptych—is it three separate plays or are they interconnected somehow?

I created this piece when the “non-full-time employees” issue [Editor's and translator's note: temporary employment is a rising issue in Japan as companies have been able to hire more and more employees on temp contracts; this has created a two-tiered society in which younger workers have been denied access to the security and benefits their parents enoyed as Japan's Fordist model is transformed; see here for an NPR article] became a serious problem in Japan. That is, my play was influenced by this ongoing issue.  At the same time, I wanted to address the universal issue of unemployment through the portrayal of Japan’s local situation, which I believed that non-Japanese audiences could sympathize with.  I think that audiences can enjoy each of the three parts of this triptych even if each one is presented independently.  However, because the three parts have become so closely connected to one another (from Japan Society: “Air Conditioner” was written originally as a stand-alone play and the two other parts were added three years later), I now believe that the three parts should be presented in sequence as one evening-length piece.

What is the creative process like working with your actors? Do you bring in a finished script or does the text change through collaboration? Do you provide them parts of the movement, like a choreographer, or do the actors generate the movement through improvisation?

My text changes constantly–it even changes daily throughout the rehearsal period. Especially for this piece, subtle changes took place often, because I tried to sync up the music with the performance. There are various ways of creating movement.  Since I am not a choreographer, I am not capable of creating movement from scratch. Instead, I ask my actors to extract natural movements from each of their lines and I simply pick up these moves, or manipulate them. For example, I instruct the actors to “exaggerate their movements” or “repeat the same movement over again.” Sometimes their particular movement inspires me to come up with another and I suggest that the actors try out these new movements.  Basically, improvisation is the starting point of setting my choreography, but improvisation takes places even during the performance.

You’ve said in other interviews that since the success of Five Days in March that you’ve been thinking more about how you want to affect your audience, citing Bertolt Brecht. What are you trying to accomplish in Hot Pepper…? What do you hope to convey?

There was a time when I began to think about a method of linking text and body movement, different from the method that my company developed during Five Days in March. One of the ideas was to widen the apparent lag or gap between the text and body movement and to exaggerate the performance into something like dance.  I tried to materialize this idea in a few shorter pieces.  Hot Pepper was the first full length piece based on this idea.

Your writing is hyper-colloquial, but now you’re creating work with the expectation that non-Japanese speakers will see it. Does this affect writing in any way? What has been your experience touring and performing for non-speakers? I saw both your version of Five Days in March, as well as Witness Relocation’s English version, and the experience of the text was very different.

I believe spoken language in theatre is important, but at the same time it is only part of theatre.  And I think also language must affect the body that speaks it.  Language affects not only speech but also the whole performance.

With all the touring, you’ve been exposed to many other artists and their practices. Has this affected how you create work? Have you responded or been inspired by others?

When I sit in a café of a theater where my work is being performed, I really feel what type of function the performing arts play in the lives of the local people living in the city.  I have experienced this feeling in each of the different cities where my work has been performed.  These experiences have influenced me greatly and I have begun to hope that theater will have more of a “public function” in Japan’s society.

Since your work seems to deal with the experiences you or your friends or your collaborators have in their daily lives, I’m curious what’s happening for you now, and where you may be going in your new work. I know it’s been a tumultuous time in Japan, with political shifts and economic issues and of course the Fukushima incident. Are these things you’ll be responding to in future works?

Currently, I have a strong interest in writing fictional works.  You might say that everything that I’ve written/created has been fiction, however, when I was creating my past works, I wasn’t consciously creating ‘fictional’ plays.  Since the earthquake hit Japan, I’ve strongly felt the need to write fictional stories.  I have started to consider “fiction” as not an “unreal fabrication” but rather an “alternative” to reality.  I think the current society in Japan should change to this alternative reality.  That is why I have started to think that “fictional stories are needed.”  I will make my next new work with this idea in mind.

For more information, PerformingArts.jp has two extensive interviews with Okada, from 2005 and 2010. For all of Culturebot’s coverage of Under the Radar 2012 see here, and for all related APAP 2012 events, see here.

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