A week after seeing a preview performance of Einstein on the Beach and there’s still this feeling of having taken a trip to a 1976 sci-fi time capsule. An operatic spaceship. It was a four-hour train ride from Chicago to the Power Center at the University of Michigan, a venue that in mid-January was home to epic rehearsals of the show. “There’s no doubt about it,” wrote the University Musical Society in fervent pre-show emails. “This is a seriously historic moment.” Historic, yes, but like visiting a sepia-colored dream of some NASA engineer–after a particularly long day pushing buttons in big glasses and a comb-over. Smart, beautiful, disorienting, dated.

A lot of that has to do with the set. The biggest pieces roll onstage in grey plywood slabs, from the wings, with haze and smoke billowing out around them. Prison bars made of ribbons dangle from the battens and billow slightly from the gust of passing performers. Most of the color is flat shades of white, black and grey, with very little blending, and even when we are presented with the representation of an actual building, there’s no attempt to, say, carve a faux stone façade from Styrofoam. We’re very obviously looking at a painted backdrop. Even a giant wall of chasing light bulbs is literally made of old-school yellow globes, not something more modern like LEDs. And yet, that the setting looks like it came out of a Theater History Textbook contributes to its other-worldliness, and its modern meaning.

The scenic accuracy is deliberate. It’s been 20 years since the last re-staging of Einstein on the Beach. There was one in 1984, and again in 1992, when I was 5 and 13, respectively. Creators Robert Wilson, Phillip Glass and Lucinda Childs collaborated to ensure the creation of an accurate re-staging of the original. The work has been the subject of a PBS documentary and is said to have changed perception of modern opera.

This is clear from the production in a number of ways. That the endurance required from the performers is astounding. That aspects of its composition seem tired at this point, having been aggressively adopted into modern opera. That the whole piece is basically a 4.5 hour mental workout, demanding that you stay engaged while challenging you with endless looping chants of numbers, non-narrative speeches, robotic gestures, and straight-out goofiness.

In one of the strongest sequences of the piece, featured performer Kate Moran repeats a line describing an experience in a supermarket: “There were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them,” while slowly moving through space, changing costumes. In the original production, Childs was the featured performer who recited these lines on loop. In this production, Moran owns the text. I never got tired of hearing those lines–with every repetition, the inflection and meaning would change. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, always engaging.

The same is true, to a certain extent, of Glass’ music, in which choruses sing numbers that blend into sentences and words. It’s a little bit like listening to a kaleidoscope. The chorus sings from the pit, from a jury box onstage, in amorphous groups. Everyone wears suspenders, a white dress shirt, and slacks—an outfit stereotypical for Einstein and absolutely ridiculous for anyone else.

So here I am, sitting in a theater of a marathon length of time, watching a work with sets that look like they came out of a vault, everyone’s wearing suspenders and singing numbers, and the lead violinist is actually dressed like Einstein. People are puffing their cheeks out and reciting nonsensical phrases. There is a court scene. There is a caboose scene. There are several dance sequences. There is a visual theme of a bright white line. And all throughout, people are getting up to go to the bathroom as is necessary, because there isn’t any intermission.

It feels both glorious and totally insane—like a dream.

Which is kind of the point. In the PBS documentary, Wilson speaks of the work as depicting character, not narrative. Glass talks about trusting visual and psychological associations with Einstein as a basis for the work. Both acknowledge the German physicist as a powerful, almost godlike presence in their culture. With this devoted re-staging of Einstein on the Beach, Glass and Wilson claim their own territory within the word “godlike,” and the production celebrates not Einstein but the machinations and developments of its lead artists.

With just cause. Ever watch an old movie and think “Well, this is kind of cliché,” and then realize “Wait a minute—this is the thing that MADE the clichés”? That’s what watching Einstein on the Beach is like, for some of us who didn’t grow up in the atomic age, but are instead living in its hangover. For some of us who are familiar with the visual machinations of contemporary opera. For some of us who read about Wilson in our college textbooks and have seen Phillip Glass become the subject of sketch comedy. It comes with a kind of smirking respect. Like when you’re grateful for the incredible sacrifice your grandparents made but wish they’d stop talking about themselves at the dinner table.

So if coming back from this opera is like emerging from a 1976 Time Spaceship, it’s worth the trip, if only to appreciate the contributions of works past and the developments in the field since then. Makes you want to kiss the ground. A little.

Popularity: unranked [?]

I love Two-Headed Calf. Brendan Connelly, Brooke O’Harra and their rotating cast of collaborators are always making work that is adventurous, challenging and usually pretty fun. For “You, My Mother” they’ve brought together some super-duper stars of downtown including Bessie-winning playwright/choreographer Karinne Keithley Syers, Obie Award-winning composer Rick Burkhardt and Obie-winning playwright Kristen Kosmas to make what is sure to be a fascinating adventure in contemporary opera. Performed by the talented Yarn/Wire + Strings ensemble, this should be very compelling stuff.

“You, My Mother” is a chamber opera project in two parts exploring the elusive and ever-shifting relationships between mothers and their adult children. The piece is performed by Two-Headed Calf regulars Laryssa Husiak and Mike Mikos, along with new music vocalists Kate Soper (Wet Ink Ensemble) and Beth Griffith (musical affiliations include John Cage, Morton Feldman and Karlheinz Stockhausen). Accompanying them is the acclaimed new music ensemble Yarn/Wire + Strings, consisting of Ian Antonio (percussion), Laura Barger (piano), Russell Greenberg (percussion), Joshua Modney (violin), Mariel Roberts (cello) and Ning Yu (keyboard).

Here’s a sample of the music:

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The creative team also includes Barbara Lanciers (Choreography), Ahram Jeong (Projection Design), Chris Kuhl (Scenic and Light Design), Yoonkyung Lim (Projection Design), Alice Taverner (Costume Design) and Justin Townsend (Scenic and Light Design).

You, My Mother runs Off-Broadway from February 9 – 20, 2012 in a limited engagement at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, located at 66 East 4th Street between 2nd Avenue & the Bowery in New York City. Performances are Thursdays – Sundays at 7:30pm, along with Saturdays matinees at 2:30pm and an additional performance on Monday, February 20 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $25 for adults and $20 for students/seniors and can be purchased online at LaMaMa.org, in person at the box office or by calling 212-475-7710.

The running time is 70 minutes.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Cassie Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 5% [?]

Photo: Ian Saville

In the alternative universe invented by theater collective The Mad Ones, The Cold War was abruptly curtailed by an alien robot invasion that wiped out North America. The Soviet Union survived, although the specter of subsequent devastation has loomed ever since. Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War is set in the midst of this doomsday scenario, with the New Ohio Theatre’s basement space on Christopher Street providing an appropriately bunker-like setting (performances through January 21, and then February 9-18).

It sounds more than a little kooky, in a glowing green UFO kind of way, but Samuel & Alasdair more than holds its own in this theater-drenched month. The Mad Ones have crafted a behind-the-scenes drama that has all the charm of a live radio broadcast, with music, canned sound effects, perky advertising pitches, and call-in trivia contests, but shaded by the intensity of the post-apocalyptic state the characters inhabit.

The radio show, “The At Home Field Guide,” is broadcast each week by a devoted quartet from a makeshift sound studio: the masterful, if slightly unctuous Host (Joe Curnutte); Dr. Mischa, a socially awkward but brilliant scientist (Marc Bovino); and Anastasia, a jaded but dedicated singer (Stephanie Wright Thompson). These three make an odd triangle, with Alexei “Tumbleweed” Petrovya (Michael Dalto) providing a musical—but otherwise silent—fourth.

The title of Samuel & Alasdair refers to this week’s radio drama, a coming of age story of two bothers and the girl they love, set in a small, Iowa farming town shortly before the alien robot invasion. The radio episodes, sprinkled with folk songs, refract nostalgia for 1950s Americana through a completely original lens while reframing the action in the present.

Undercurrents of tension ripple between the players when they aren’t on the air, with unspoken feelings and tensions about the direness of the situation outside running high. In many cases, gestures, inflections, and small details read more strongly than the spoken dialogue. The combination of apparent paradoxes—futuristic nostalgia, unsentimental emotion—plus spot-on timing, add up to a smart, well-structured piece of theater.

I saw Samuel & Alasdair back in 2010 when it premiered at The Brick in Williamsburg; it won three New York Innovative Theatre Awards that year. The work has gotten tighter since then, and my only quibble is with the ending, which remains a bit hasty.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Oh, the days when slapping a video behind a dance or music piece made it a ‘multimedia performance.’ The novelty rapidly waned, and our expectations for multimedia are higher now—as they should be. Still, it’s a treat to be newly amazed by the possibilities of video in live performance. The dance/performance installation Takes (presented by Philadelphia-based Nichole Canuso Dance Company at 3LD Art and Technology Center this past weekend as part of the APAP blitz) integrated live video and projections with a subtle, yet knock-your-socks-off level of inventiveness.

The credit for the concept of Takes goes to Nichole Canuso and multimedia director Lars Jan, a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow who has produced a slew of intriguing performance/installation projects. Performed by choreographer Canuso and Dito Van Reigersberg within the confines of a box created by white gauze-like walls, Takes is a series of snippets about a relationship gone sour. The substance and the magic of this piece lies in live projections of the performers onto the transparent walls of the box: the action inside the box is recorded simultaneously by multiple cameras and superimposed on the walls/screens, creating different perspectives and layers of each moment that add up to more than the individual parts. Combining all this with an evocative sound score and skillful lighting, Takes casts a net of intimacy that is impossible not to fall into.

Nonetheless, the choreography, while no doubt crafted with an eye towards the projections, is largely unremarkable in terms of its movement vocabulary. Structurally, the piece follows the predictable arc of an angst-ridden love story, with some fragments reading more strongly than others, and a few trite moments along the way (ironic that a paper letter takes center stage in an era of electronic communication).

The close-ups and level of detail captured by the cameras mean that gestures come across particularly powerfully, and these are the moments that stuck in my mind: his fingers playfully marching up her knee in the beginning, and later, his fists striking the air in frustration. The solo sections are the least engaging, perhaps because they rely more heavily on movement alone, as opposed to the interactions between Canuso and Van Reigersberg. The performers’ commitment to the work salvages some of these shortcomings, but can’t rescue them entirely.

The suggestive possibilities of the projections and rich quality of the images is nothing less than mesmerizing, but as I watched the video loop roll across the screens at the end, I realized that I was rather satisfied with these pre-recorded projections of movement. Am I just a junkie for beautiful footage? I’d like to think not—Takes is missing something in the link between video, choreography, and performance, and this time, the gap isn’t on the multimedia side.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Jack Ferver and Michelle Mola. Photo by Ian Douglas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

Heather Lang and Eleanor Bauer. Photo by Ian Douglas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 3% [?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 3% [?]