Just got back from Lemon Andersen’s COUNTY OF KINGS at The Public. I was prepared to not like it, thinking it was just another solo show about identity politics and hip-hop but I was delighted to discover it was a moving, thoughtful, expertly written and performed show. Plot-wise it was somewhat familiar territory as Andersen makes his way from being the child of a drug-addicted HIV-positive mother to being a crack dealer and convicted failing to discovering his voice as a hip-hop artist. But his commanding rhymes and his stage presence make the show not only feel new but authoritative. He’s a gifted storyteller and he brings you into his world in a complicated, compassionate way.

I have to say that as much as I complain about the over-familiarity of the “hip-hop identity politics solo show” when I really reflect on it, I haven’t seen very many of them in the recent past. And Lemon’s show isn’t about identity politics, it is just a compelling personal story. I found it refreshing and exciting. I was also glad to be hearing a voice from a different background and class than so much of what is normally onstage. It really reinforced how rare it can be and how jaded so many of us theatergoers are that we can often dismiss an entire genre of work without acknowledging the complexity and variation within that genre, not to mention the necessity of bringing new voices to the stage.

The show is only playing until 11/8 so if you get a chance, go check it out. Here’s a link to FB and $25 tickets:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=157334540422

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this is amazing:

By the middle of next year, Internet surfers will be allowed to use Web addresses written completely in Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages using non-Latin alphabets, the organization overseeing Internet domain names announced Friday in a decision that could make the Web more accessible.

read the rest @NYTIMES.

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last saturday i went to see Jack Ferver in the afternoon and LIZ ONE at Chocolate Factory in the evening. In between, after a chat over tea with friends, I made my way over LIC and spent a bit of time at Dominie’s Hoek. As it rained outside and proceeded to get darker I sat in the pub with a pint and a book, warm and sinking into warmness. It reminded me of years ago, winter late afternoons spent in Seattle’s Comet Tavern, drinking and smoking and writing poetry. Ah youth. I suppose in this day and age, in this city, it is not terribly fashionable to opine over the simple comforts of a warm pub, a cold pint and a rainy afternoon, the beautiful melancholy pleasure of slightly dulled senses during the half dream of winter and warmth and wet. But anyway – it made me feel like this:

which is slightly different than when covered by Kiki and Herb. Since I couldn’t find that, I offer this one:

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The Spoleto Festival is seeking an Associate Producer:

The Associate Producer works closely with Festival Producer and artistic staff on details of programming and producing annual 17-day festival. Responsibilities include drafting and tracking artist contracts; international artist visas; serving as artist liaison on myriad details; recruiting and training seasonal housing and transportation staff; serving as liaison with performance venues; administering Festival intern program and numerous other responsibilities. The ideal candidate will possess superb administrative and logistical skills and meticulous attention to detail. Strong writing and interpersonal skills essential as well as the ability to prioritize and execute under intense deadline-oriented pressure. Requires significant administrative experience and some supervisory experience. Performing arts and/or non-profit background useful. Position is full-time, year round and is available mid-November. Salary is commensurate with experience. To apply, send resume and cover letter to: SPOLETO FESTIVAL, Associate Producer Search, 14 George St, Charleston, SC 29401. Email: apsearch@spoletousa.org.

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Name: Thomas Kriegsmann
Title/Occupation: Producer
Organization/Company: ArKtype
URL: www.arktype.org

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I evolved in the great state of New Jersey. Luckily, my Queens-bred parents worked in the City so early exposure to its chaos led me toward as many solitary NYC pilgrimages as I could afford to soak in the theater and music scene. I preferred to be alone, and the theater won for making more sense of alienation than the punk clubs could.

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

As the landscape of what the theater was opened to me, these trips would often involve a first experience with the work of an artist or company. The journey of seeing them for the first time was profound to say the least, and what influenced me to dedicate my life to live performance in some way, awestruck by what I’d seen, staring out the windows of a dirty NJ Transit train at age 15 wondering how the f*ck I was going to get out of there. These include the first time I saw Foreman, Forsythe, the Wooster Group, Mnouchkine, Roger Guinevere-Smith, Bogosian, Ron Athey, Peter Brook/CICT, Bergman.

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

Vulcan mind control. I spend a lot of time speaking to presenters from all over the US whose communities reflect a pure potential, whose daily diet of digital culture far exceeds the local arts orgs ability to comprehend and reflect that input in a way that would bring their people to live performance – imagining how to get their organizations to make the mental jump to understand and hear that artist in a formidable way, and how to spend their money wisely. They don’t – it don’t, and their audiences are inevitably fading away. I feel the time-tested techniques of the Vulcans would help me inspire their confidence to get beyond the fear of the unknown.

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

I produce and tour internationally based theater projects, and just finished producing the Ringling International Arts Festival in Sarasota. Since I have the privilege of working from home, I abuse that privilege by never stopping. It begins very early, ends very late.

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

I made the choice to make moving art my work – there’s a lot of creativity in it, but in the end my job is to clear the path for the artist, or obstruct it in a way that moves the work forward. The choice between art and work for me comes down to who’s to blame.

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The Exchange announces it is currently accepting applications for The Orchard Project’s 2010 Summer Residency Program taking place June 2010.

Founded in 2006, The Orchard Project has quickly become one of the nation’s foremost institutions championing the development of new plays and musicals by providing artist residencies to today’s most dynamic and influential theatre companies. In the past three years, it has hosted companies and artists as diverse as Moises Kaufman and Tectonic Theatre Project, London’s Royal Court, The Public Theatre, Pig Iron, Naked Angels, Elevator Repair Service, Edge, New Georges and many others. The Orchard Project has played a significant role in the development of new works which have since been or will be produced on and off Broadway and at theatres such as Arena Stage, St. Anne’s Warehouse, PS122, the Edinburgh Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, Yale Rep, the Royal Court and more.

The Orchard Project operates a residency program in beautiful upstate NY commencing just after Memorial Day and running through July 4. Throughout residencies, theatre and dance companies, artists and teams are provided room, board and rehearsal space for up to 10 days. Residencies are intentionally designed and scheduled to encourage cross pollination of ideas and talents. This unique intermingling is the cornerstone of both the Orchard Project’s success and its mission – enabling world class companies and artists to learn from each other through collaboration and conversation.

The Orchard Project accepts people – not projects. Companies, teams, writers, directors and any other generators of new work of theatre and dance can apply. To apply for a residency, it is required that you complete a short questionnaire about your previous and upcoming work and how the Orchard Project can uniquely support your development. NO SCRIPTS NEED TO BE SUBMITTED. This initial application is due no later than December 21st, 2009 and is available at www.exchangenyc.org.

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(photo by Steven Battaglia)

Name: Leslie Strongwater
Title/Occupation: Director of Programming/Curator
Organization/Company: Dixon Place
URL: www.dixonplace.org

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

If I say New Jersey I’m screwed, right? So, let’s say this. Seminole, Oklahoma shaped my formative years, New York educated me in the theater, and Hampshire College (in Amherst!) molded me as an artist. New York was an easy, logical move, but a lazy decision in retrospect.

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

Christ, Andy. I guess Ballad of the Sad Café or maybe To My Chagrin by Split Britches. The scene with the projections of her grandson was the one that did me in. Peggy Shaw used to talk about this funky little space on the Bowery back when she taught at Hampshire. Her work- that downtown aesthetic moved me. She literally led me to Dixon Place. I’m still totally obsessed with Peggy, which can be a little embarrassing, and surreal as we’re commissioning her and Lois to create their new work, The Lost Lounge this December! Oh my god. Can we just talk about them for the rest of this interview? No? Well, I also love Hendrik Goltzius and the whole Dutch school. They light me up! Go see Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus would Freeze! Seriously.

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

I wish I could drive stick. (for a fast getaway.)

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

I am a teaching artist in the NYC public schools, so some days I’m in the Bronx or wherever they send me, playing theater games with a bunch of kids! At Dixon Place, I am responsible for the curation of our wonderful performance programs, which means I review submissions, meet with artists, create new programs, and see a lot of shows! It’s normal to me, but definitely insane. The artists outnumber us 300 to one.

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

I make those choices a little bit everyday, but really it just vacillates back and forth and everything balances out in the end. Being surrounded by so many artists, and so much work (administrative and artistic), sometimes, I forget to make my own stuff. I’ve got my feet wet now though with Peg-Ass-Us, so I feel fulfilled. And I’m pursuing my Master’s Degree at NYU where I’m encouraged to combine my passion for theatre and education, so that’s a nice compromise!

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Morgan Thorson’s Heaven is a devout and meditative exploration of faith and transcendence. On the one hand it is a heaven where nothing much ever happens, on the other hand it is a Heaven fraught with millions of tiny shards of truth. It is glimmery and white and resonant. It is a tone poem, it is small gestures adding up to patterns, growing into big gestures, growing into a chorus of angelic voices that sing like a particularly gifted folk choir.  Lovely stuff.

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cartoon by Eli Valley

The Foundation for Jewish Culture and The Forward present “Eli Valley vs the Sway Machinery in the Temple of Self Hatred” with special guests Girls In Trouble previewing their new CD, a reading from the winner of the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers and other guests and surprises. The event will be held on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 7PM at Joe’s Pub.

Eli Valley, maker of mind-bending comics, teams up with Jeremiah Lockwood and The Sway Machinery, makers of mind-bending melodies, for an evening of neurotic superheroes, paranoid turtles, memories, music and mayhem.  Valley’s work has brought back a marauding sensibility to The Forward, the landmark Jewish newspaper formed in 1897 as a bulwark of secular Jewish culture in America.  The Sway Machinery has reinvented and reinvigorated cantorial melodies for a post-punk age.  Together, they play off each other like a rabbi and cantor of a synagogue on the other side of sanity.  Watch them mix and mash styles, share personal stories and narrate comics to a live, avant-semitic soundtrack, bringing a kinetic new spin to contemporary Jewish culture.

Girls in Trouble is the songwriting debut of multi-instrumentalist Alicia Jo Rabins, who performs all vocals, guitar parts and string sections for the album. Alicia marries her classical training and folk-punk sensitivity to her penchant for Jewish literature, mysticism and history. The result: pop hooks grounded in experimentation, subtle musicianship and a taste for ruminative lyrics.

Tickets are $15 and are available online at joespub.com, by phone at 212-967-7555 or in person at The Public Theater Box Office (425 Lafayette Street) Tues-Sat from 1:00pm to 7:30pm; Sun + Mon from 1:00pm to 6:00pm

NOTE ABOUT THE ABOVE IMAGE FOR PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE OFFENDED:

The image above  is taken from one of Eli Valley’s comics commenting on Paul Buhle’s scholarly work Jews and American Comics. In context, it is meant to humorously illustrate Buhle’s assertions about the European origins of the Jewish American comedic sensibility. Out of context it is a multivalent satire – both a representation of Valley’s personal comic sensibility and a comment on Jewish self-hatred. It is meant to amuse, attract attention and engage, hopefully spur curiosity among the target audience – young people – and entice them to come to the performance. The image, in a single panel, manages to engage many of the themes that Eli Valley explores in the performance.

“Eli Valley vs. the Sway Machinery in the Temple of Self-Hatred” is a humorous and moving statement on contemporary Jewish identity. Valley is the son of a rabbi, Lockwood the grandson of a cantor. They are staging the piece in such a way as to reference the interchange between these two roles. More significantly, Valley uses this presentational forum to explore his family history of coming from a house divided between religion and secularism, between piety and irreverence. For Valley, comic books became the artistic medium through which he explores this conflict. And by exploring the history of comic books he explores himself, deconstructing and re-contextualizing Jewish self-hatred as he examines his own relationship to his Judaism.

Both Valley and Lockwood see their Jewish heritage as a wellspring of meaning and a cornerstone of identity. At the same time they struggle to make it their own, to bring Judaism into the framework of their expressivity, to add to the ongoing conversation that is Jewish culture in a profound, personal and meaningful way.

The image and the performance are not intended to offend but to provoke questions, invite response and encourage dialogue. Valley’s fiercely intelligent satire is tempered with a human, moving and compassionate sensibility. His work, by intertwining personal narrative and public commentary, is a generational statement embodying Jewish pride tempered with ambivalence. Like all great artists he articulates the personal in a way that invites the audience to empathize and identify publicly; in so doing he creates opportunity for real, transformative change.

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Just for fun and in honor of my own personality crisis, I give you the New York Dolls:

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