Got this a few weeks ago, forgot to post. But for Brooklyn theater fans its big news:

New downtown Brooklyn TKTS booth, opening Thursday July 10.

TDF and METROTECH B.I.d. announce new TKTS location at 1 Metrotech center at the corner of jay street and myrtle avenue –

Theatre Development Fund (TDF) and MetroTech Business Improvement  District  today announced that a new TKTS Discount Ticket Booth located in the MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn will open on Thursday, July 10 at 11am, preceded by a ribbon cutting ceremony.  TDF will offer Broadway, Off Broadway, music, dance and Brooklyn performing arts events at discounted prices to Brooklyn residents and visitors.  TKTS Downtown Brooklyn will be located on the ground floor of 1 MetroTech Center at the corner of Jay Street and Myrtle Avenue. TKTS offers same-day evening and next-day matinee tickets at discounts of up to 50% off full price.

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this looks pretty cool:

carriage trade invites you to a closing reception for

Market Forces / Part II: Consumer Confidence

On Wednesday, July 2 beginning at 7pm

carriage trade

94 Prince St. 2nd fl New York, NY 10012

(between Greene St & Mercer St.), n/r train to Prince Street

open: Thursday- Sunday, 1 pm- 6 pm

Featuring work by:

David Baskin

Dara Birnbaum

Dan Graham

Filip Noterdaeme

Ron Rocheleau

Walter Robinson

Monika Sziladi

Momoyo Torimitsu

JeongMee Yoon

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Just in case you think we’re gettin’ a little too artsy fartsy around here, we’re going to plug (heh-heh) the upcoming show Peg-Ass-Us. Never seen it, know nothing about it, but dang ya gotta give these kids credit for pure pervy-ness!

Peg-Ass-Us

Performed and Created by John Leo & Sophie Nimmannit

A Production of Pack of Others

Dates: July 10th, 11th & 12th at 8 PM

Location: HOT! Festival at Dixon Place, 258 Bowery, NYC

Tickets: $15 ($12 student/senior)

(212) 219-0736 or dixonplace.org

Peg–Ass–Us: Queer Sex For Straight People?

Peg–Ass–Us is a theatrical burlesque all about “pegging,” the sexual act where a woman wearing a strap-on dildo penetrates a man’s anus. A charming duo, Sophie and John (portrayed by co-creators and real-life couple Sophie Nimmannit and John Leo) set out to spread the word about the pleasures of prostate stimulation and strap-on sex. Their headlong dive starts with the facts, but once in the deep end, their personal differences play tug-of-war with the lesson plan, pulling sex from silly to serious, between kink and dignity, and wrangling over issues of gender, sexual identity and personal desires. Armed with original songs (accompanied by banjo-uke and glockenspiel), dance, puppetry, drag, physical comedy and audience participation, the two lovers turn their bedroom and hearts inside out for the world to see. And take off their clothes.

The term “pegging” was coined in 2001 when Dan Savage, author of the popular sex advice column “Savage Love,” found that he was receiving a sufficient number of questions on this subject to warrant finding a name for it, and held a reader-based competition. The subject was recently featured in the Village Voice article “Pegging Goes Big: Straight Men Get It In the End” (June 17, 2008.)

Peg–Ass–Us is part of the HOT! Festival, Dixon Place’s 17th Annual Celebration of Queer Culture. The show premiered at the 2008 Montreal Fringe Festival in June and the fringe website buzzed with audience enthusiasm: “Kind of like the sex ed you wish you’d had in high school!” “Hilarious, totally shameless in a good way.” “An awesome exploration of how it feels to prefer sexual activities that are perceived to be outside of the norm.” In September, the show will travel to the San Francisco Fringe Festival, where it will be hosted by the Center for Sex and Culture (directed by Dr. Carol Queen, who starred in the “wildly successful” 1998 film Bend Over Boyfriend.) Pack of Others’ first show FLUID, a personal exploration of “bisexuality,” by founding member Erika Kate MacDonald, toured to Minneapolis, Boulder, NYC, and Portland last year.

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As long-time Culturebot readers will know, I have an ongoing fascination with the evolution of the Teen age Girl In Popular Culture, beginning with Valley Girl in the early 80′s, through Clueless in the 90′s to Britney and, now, Miley Cyrus. One day I guess I’ll go to grad school and write a thesis. Or maybe get some funding from somebody to do an experimental theater piece about the changing representations of femininity and power as exemplified by Teen Girls in American Popular Culture. But probably not.

I don’t have cable – I just stick the cable in the back of my TV and see what I get – I can always rely on C-Span, NY1, The Food Network and Bravo, but the other come in and out. The other day I was just going through the channels (Wow! I got SPIKETV! When did that happen?) when I somehow managed to get Disney Kids, where I saw the Jonas Brothers. Not terribly interesting. A bunch of neutered mama’s boys, but I can see why teen girls would like them. And I can hope that at least one of them will go bad or come out as queer. But in the meantime….

I also so this Miley Cyrus video:

And was kind of stunned and I’m not sure why. It wasn’t the music – I had never really heard Miley’s music (the ownership thereof being somewhat in question) but I wasn’t surprised that it was bland, inoffensive, catch-y mall rock, kind of like Alanis Morrisette Lite. Which is funny because Alanis Morrisette was kind of like, oh, Sleater-Kinney Lite. I guess. Back then I was listening to 7 Year Bitch, L7, Mudwimmin and stuff like that, when it came to “chicks who rock”. Even Liz Phair was more authentic. So I’m just going to take the whole authenticity thing off the table.

I think it was the video itself – this parade of actual teen girls getting truly and authentically worked up about their ex-boyfriends. And, knowing full well that this was completely manufactured, that Miley Cyrus is completely manufactured, that all of this has been carefully crafted and market-tested to appeal to its target demographic, I was amazed out how hear-felt and real it seemed. I later found out that the video was directed by Brett Ratner, which added to the corporate-processed veneer of the whole thing. Yet still, here is a generation of Juliets and we should never underestimate the power of the teenage girl or her emotions. Certainly by design and certainly through product testing, the industry has realized that Teen Girls respond to other Teen Girls who understand the turmoil that they are going through. And thus the video unashamedly, unambiguously, unironically and without condescension, validates those emotions. “Miley is like you,” it says, and here are some other girls like you – and here follows a parade of artfully quirky and “authentic” young girls lip-syncing, crying, playing, dancing, being “themselves” and I have to say my inner 14-year-old-girl responded. Oh my god, Miley, you like, totally get me!

I haven’t really done a lot of research on Miley and her YouTube following, I haven’t given a lot of extended thought to how this relates to empowerment or any of the big issues. But this video was made for teenage girls, which is different than Britney’s whose videos seemed to be made for guys. Is it moving forward or moving back? It is just fluff, but there’s something to it. In strange counterpoint, Saturday night I was exhausted and flipping through the tv stations while I did some paperwork. I stopped when I came to SNL which was broadcasting a “best of” or something and there was Janis Ian looking very young and very nervous, heartbreakingly vulnerable and absolutely earnest as she stood up for every awkward teenage girl and sang At Seventeen:

I am not ready to theorize on whether we’ve made progress or not. I just place them in juxtaposition and allow you to draw your own conclusions. Or comment.

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Read more about Miley and the video for “7 Things” on the L.A. Times “Extended Play” blog by Todd Martens.

Today is the last day of the New Haven-based annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas. The day’s events includes a walking tour and a bike tour, and the festival finale—a dance performance by Liz Lehrman titled “613 Radical Acts of Prayer.” Anyone can participate; just show up at the Fountain on the Green at 3:30, wearing white and prepared move. Details are here and more on the project is here.

You can take Metro North to and from New Haven.

Well, our ever-expanding ranks of contributors keep growing! Please welcome Vanessa Baish. We have high hopes!

Vanessa Baish, who grew up in a small and quiet Maryland town, was introduced to performance in 1989 when a friend took her to see Laurie Anderson. It was the same year she read “Absalom, Absalom” by William Faulker, and the combination of Anderson and Faulkner marked the beginning of her love of the arts.

Vanessa is an adjunct lecturer in English at Hunter College–where she completed an MA in Literature–and, sometimes, a yoga teacher

Everybody give her a warm welcome!!

“Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found.”

Yikes. This article in the NYTIMES on “source amnesia” is really interesting. It discusses how we remember things and how susceptible we are to misremembering. Or how we basically re-write our memories every time we recall them, thus we are constantly altering our personal historical record of our experience

Makes you think. No really.

photo: Mike Hipple

The second company invited by the Incubator curators to perform at the Ontological Hysteric Theater was Helsinki Syndrome, a performance art collective based in Seattle. I went to their last performance this past Saturday and found light plastic blankets awaiting the audience on the seats. The program warned us: there will be (stage) blood!

The performance turned out to be an icy meditation on solitude and alienation, mixed with Gregorian-like chants of hallelujah and an electronic bear-puppet who sang with the airy voice of Marlyn Monroe. I particularly enjoyed the light design for the piece, made up of movable flashlights occasionally covered in light, transparent plastic to form unexpected icebergs on the stage. The piece created aesthetically seductive tableaux, playing with light and dark and with the spotlight-power of head lamps to guide the audience into different worlds. All three performers brought different qualities to the piece, playing different roles and constantly shifting in the relationships to each other. (The performers were Rachel Hynes: Co-Director, Writer, Ensemble; Mike Pham: Co-Director, Writer, Ensemble; and K. Brian Neel: Ensemble). In the midst of breaking glass and the crushing of ice, Hynes’ soft tones and gentle singing voice particularly surprised me.

True North was an exciting taste of work done by a collective coming from the West coast, a reminder that there is plenty of dark humor and doubt on the other side of the country! Helsinki Syndrome seems to fit with a generation of artists very much in line with the abstract composition style of directors such as Richard Foreman, but more inviting towards their audience- choosing themes such as solitude and obsession and making them somewhat readable for the spectator while still working with non-linear, interdisciplinary performance. Thumbs up to the Incubator crew for bringing more interesting work to the city!

Neil Greenberg’s Quartet with Three Gay Men.

Last week I attended one of the last performances of “Dance by Neil Greenberg” at Dance Theater Workshop. I went to the performance excited by the many reviews that spoke so well about Greenberg’s work: see, for instance, reviews by Roslyn Sulcas, Claudia La Rocco, and Gia Kourlas. In addition to the reviews, I was curious about the explicit use of “queer” in the title of the performance. In my undergraduate studies, I have thought often about the meaning of “queer”- historically, politically, in literature and in the media- yet I have never considered how the word might be used to describe movement and dance. Greenberg’s title felt like a fun and interesting provocation.

After seeing the performance, there are several thoughts still going through my mind. On one hand, I enjoyed Greenberg’s choreography, particularly in the shorter piece, Quartet with Three Gay Men. In the piece, three men move through smooth spiraling turns and soft landing jumps, crossing the floor with their arms fluttering like birds, to suddenly stop on their feet and perform a sequence of energetic arm gestures. Without ever making direct contact with each other, the dancers are at once engaged in an intimate exploration of their personal movement and aware of each other’s presence. The piece has moments of humor and of tenderness, each dancers’ body expressing itself differently even while reproducing the movements of other dancers. The brevity of the piece makes it feel like a short poem, a little reflection on movement and homosexuality. The title of the piece itself plays with the audience: three out of the four men performing on stage, we are told, are “gay men”. What does that mean for the spectator? Are any of them performing “gay” movement more “authentically”? Greenberg plays with us and simultaneously brings to the forefront important issues, both in the dance world and in performance at large. (You can read more about some of the questions he was exploring in Kourlas’ article.)

I was less intrigued by Greenberg’s second piece, Really Queer Dance with Harps. Conceptually, the piece seemed to lack the abstract quality of the first piece. You could almost trace a story, something echoing the battle of the sexes but with more indifference: two genders dancing separately, taking turns as each gender pushed the other off stage. First the women, then the men, then a brief time in which both men and women share the stage, after which each returns to be separate. In many ways, the movement of Really Queer Dance referred back to the Quartet, making the pieces work well with each other. Yet the second piece felt less organic than the first, more concerned with a structure of call and response between the two groups that soon became repetitive. The performance was also somewhat visually confusing due to the three harps in the middle of the stage. In fact the music for the piece, beautifully written by Zeena Parkins, was performed live on the stage. The sound worked very well with the movement of the dancers, bringing in a new texture to movement repetitions and phrases danced out in a canon. On the other hand, it was not clear to me why the harps took up the place they did on the stage and what (if any) relationship there existed between dancers and musicians.

Overall, I found Greenberg’s pieces interesting and provocative, although I was not quite as excited as I expected from the reviews. This makes me wonder about the meaning of “queer” today: has it been reclaimed to the point that it is fashionable? Is it enough for the word “queer” to be in Greenberg’s titles to make for such a reception to his work? Hopefully not.

Good stuff from Creative Time all summer long…

Throughout the summer Creative Time will present selections from fashion icon, agent provocateur, and founder of the Sex Pistols Malcolm McLaren’s new video series Shallow at 44 1/2: MTV’s outdoor, gilded, HD screen in the heart of Times Square. Catch the films on Broadway between 44th and 45th. More info here.

On July 1 at 8pm at The Kitchen, Creative Time will present avante-garde filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s The Fullness of Time: an experimental film exploring the psychological fabric of Hurricane Katrina’s survivors. The film was shot concurrently with Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: a talk between Smith and Chan will follow the screening. Tickets will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.

Catch an in-depth documentary about public art in New York City on July 2 at 8pm on Channel 13. The program will include an interview with David Byrne about his installation Playing the Building, as well as an interview with Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director of Creative Time, and information on many other public artworks, including Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls.

The weight of history will fall on the City of Angels on July 19, when artist Mark Tribe re-presents a speech by César Chávez as part of Creative Time’s Democracy in America: The National Campaign. Taking place at Exposition Park, the same location as the original speech, Tribe’s reenactment highlights the similarities between the problems addressed by Vietnam-era radicalism and activists today. Presented with LACE.

Visit www.creativetime.org for more information.