Last night, video installation artists Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons bid farewell to their multi-channel video and sound installation at The Chocolate Factory with a live performance by NYC/HK dance artist, Abby Man-Yee Chan .  “Revolving Twilight” has been in the basement of the LIC theater since early December and was extended until last night.  My experience was of immediate submersion, both from the subterranean locale and the immersive sounds and lights.  With four projectors, several cameras and tv monitors, chalked drawings on the walls, tables with various nautical items, a hanging spyglass, and piles of salt, the artists have created a space that feels haunting and homey, like the captain’s quarters at dusk (oh, or maybe twilight, duh) on a long, cross-Atlantic voyage.

I was particularly held by a video projected onto a screen set inside an old shaft that runs from the basement up into the theater space.  The shaft still has two old, weathered doors and with a ghostly image of Leslie Kraus (with her stunning red hair) shaking inside it, the effect is beautiful.  Later, when Chan stands inside the shaft and the projected video hits her body she begins to glow with a snowy pattern and bears a ghostly arm across her chest.  The live performance was a pretty effective integration of dancer and installation with Chan moving through most of the different spatial environments, handling materials from the tables, and chalking the floor.  Chan veers from ghostly girlishness to sophisticated malaise with ease.  She strikes a stunning figure throughout and strengthens the tonal quality of the images and sounds that surrounded all of us.

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Andrew Schneider
WOW+FLUTTER
February 25-27, 2010

Thursday – Saturday at 8PM
@ The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, NYC 11101

The Chocolate Factory begins its Spring 2010 Season with WOW+FLUTTER, a new solo performance by Andrew Schneider. Schneider uses the body as a physical playback device of recorded media. Using custom-built wearable electronics, subsonic sound scores, interactive projections, and some heavy-duty mountaineering equipment, WOW+FLUTTER literalizes the mashup. In Schneider’s surreal world, time loses linearity. Using a mix of live and prerecorded media, the past and the future poke holes in the present. Schneider draws on the works of author David Foster Wallace, legendary physicist Richard Feynman, and the millions of would-be film-makers of YouTube to collage together the story of our collective cultural memory. Dance, song, and spoken word are fractured and filtered through the use of Schneider’s custom built wearable electronic devices. Schneider’s body literally controls the media, and the media, in turn controls Schneider. WOW+FLUTTER will feature live sound by Omar Zubair.

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Hoi Polloi
Three Pianos
Written and Performed by Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy and Dave Malloy
Directed by Rachel Chavkin

February 25—March 20, 2010
Performed everyday except Mondays and Wednesdays at 8p.m.
At The Ontological Theater at St. Mark’s Church • 131 East 10^th Street (at 2^nd Ave.)

Three Pianos is a theatrical explosion of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle written, arranged and performed by three inventive theater artists – Rick Burkhardt of the Nonsense Company, Alec Duffy of Hoi Polloi and Dave Malloy of Banana Bag & Bodice. Rachel Chavkin of the theater company The TEAM directs. Three friends, each at their own piano, lead the audience through their respective passions for Schubert’s famous song cycle on winter heartbreak, performing the songs,grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of music, slipping into the skins of Schubert and friends during one of their famous Schubertiads, and drinking way too much. Compositional mayhem, shifting rivalries, and some unfortunate butchery of the German language ensue. Ultimately, the three separate understandings of Schubert’s mastery and impact collide, and what starts as a reasoned exploration of the music ends in mayhem. Filled with fantastical touches and inventive arrangements of Schubert’s music, Three Pianos is a colorful and imaginative piece of chaos that brings these three talents together onstage for the first time.

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My friend Tobaron is the first transgendered artist to be exhibited in a major Jewish museum exhibition – Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life at the Jewish Musuem – and he has won the Audience Award for the favorite work in the exhibition!

Tobaron Waxman is the winner of The Jewish Museum’s first-ever Audience Award, selected from nearly sixty international artists.Votes were gathered from visitors to the exhibition in person and online, between September 13, 2009 and January 11, 2010. Waxman was selected for his provocative installation Opshernish, 2000/2009. The piece examines the construction of gender in Judaism by recreating and condensing a multi-part performance installation.

Read the rest on the JewMu’s blog.

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Name: Phil Soltanoff
Title/Occupation: Director
URL: http://www.philsoltanoff.org

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

I grew up in Stamford, CT right on the border between middle class and upper middle class white cultures. I didn’t like it there, but I did find a starting point working as a technician in a local regional theatre. I didn’t really connect with the theatre they were making, so I moved on….and on…working with various people in various places until certain questions about space and time began to solidify. I made my first original work, TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN in 1996. It was a huge leap, a rip of some sort, between my old self and a new aesthetic position that I was inventing as I went along. I’ve followed and advanced those ideas ever since.

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

I think its John Cage’s book SILENCE. It expressed in a very clear and naive form, ideas about space and time that I was grasping at but couldn’t articulate. I had been hung up on an idea of the right notes and the wrong notes, so to speak, for a very long time. Cage’s writing freed me from that conundrum. Its a very simple thing really: Why is it every time a child or dog walks on stage they’re totally compelling to watch? They’re doing all the wrong things onstage, but they’re unforgettable! I finally found a way to think about the whole space, what’s happening regardless of the rules, and that opened the door to everything.

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

Honestly, I’m in awe of people who can really cook. My dearly departed wife Stephanie used to improvise in the kitchen, no cookbook or anything, just grabbing this and that spice with an intuitive knowledge of what each one could do. It blew my mind.

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

I feel very fortunate to make a living as an artist. Luckily, I don’t need or want alot of stuff. Granted, I have a high-end road bike and a small army of stratocasters, but other than that, my life is about my next project. I work all the time. Each project has its own notebook and portable hard drive, so as ideas come to me out of left field, I just grab a notebook and jot it down. I don’t worry about where it fits or what it means, I just note it and let it stew. My day is about working and practicing–making work, working to get more work, riding 40 miles a day, practicing music. Sometimes I socialize, but I’m pretty much a monk devoted to the pleasure of working. I should add that I’m not independently wealthy. I don’t have a trust fund or anything like that. I did it all myself.

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

I taught at Skidmore College for a long time. Actually I had a wonderful position there: Full-time-half-time-Senior-Guest-Artist-in-Residence. It was a position cobbled together year to year by the department to keep me around. I would work a semester, then go make art for a semester in New York. Eventually, the demands of art making put too much pressure on my time, so I leapt into the unknown. Its terrifying to give up a regular salary and benefits but I’m thoroughly glad I did it. Its turned into an amazing adventure including the creation of two works with CIE111 that have taken me around the globe. Matter of fact, I just got back from India where one of those shows PLAN B, created in 2002, performed in Mumbai and Chennai. Amazing!

***
Phil Soltanoff’s LA PARTY will be coming to the COLLAPSABLE HOLE (146 Metropolitan Ave. (Berry St.) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211) on Feb 18 – 20 and Feb 25 – 27. Shows are at 8pm with 10pm shows on the Fridays and Saturdays 19, 20, 26, 27. ALSO a benefit show for Haiti on Sunday Feb 21 @ 5pm (all proceeds to a Haitian relief fund, specifics TBA)

TIckets will be 15.00 cash only and reservations can be made via email at LaPartyCo@gmail.com For any other inquiries about this production of LA Party please email LAPartyco@gmail.com

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“You can go to any number of dance panels where this comes up—about context and why artists are able to support themselves and dancers aren’t,” said RoseLee Goldberg, the author of a history of performance art and director of the performance art biennial Performa. “They don’t understand why if you did the same work in a dance context, you wouldn’t be able to command a price to sell the work. You’re looking at the very crux of the difference between these two economies and the histories that shape them.

Read the article on scam artist/genius Tino Seghal over at The NY Observer.

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It was cold last night and as I wound my way downstairs and downstairs and down into the Atlantic Theater’s Second Stage I didn’t know what to expect. I had heard great things but, you know, you never know, so now I know. I know I’m late to the party, but better late than never. And that definitely applies to the Foundry‘s production of David Greenspan’s The Myopia which is playing until February 7th at Atlantic Theater’s Second Stage. If you haven’t seen it yet, you still have time and you don’t want to miss it.

The performance – and the writing – is nothing short of magical. Magical not only in the sense that Greenspan is a bewitching storyteller, but in that the internal logic of the show is one of dreams and fairy tales. On one level The Myopia is a comedy about a character named Barclay (who is just a pulsing orb of light) who is struggling to finish writing a musical about Warren Harding which had been started by his father, Febus, who was married to a Rapunzel figure named Koreen, who is the daughter of Yetti, who is actually a goddess…. and the whole thing is ACTUALLY being told by a “raconteur” who is played by Greenspan, the actual author and performer of the entire oeuvre. On another level it is even more complicated than that. Carol Channing makes an appearance as does Gertrude Stein and a stubborn mule named Dearie.

But more than being a story -and it is a fascinating story – it is a show about imagination, about theater, about watching something actually happen in front of you and believing it, no matter how far-fetched or unimaginable it might seem. And in that regard Greenspan is a magician, drawing us into his imagination and leading us on a whirlwind ride all from his seat in an armchair.

If I had time – and this weren’t a blog and I were getting paid to do this instead of my day job – I would re-read the script and pluck out all the gems of wisdom and wicked one-liners to share with you. But as that is not the case and I’ve got to wrap this up, for now, let me just say that if you want to have a singularly amazing evening in the theater – then don’t miss The Myopia.

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Voice & Vision is looking for projects initiated by women theater artists including performers, directors, writers, designers and groups of collaborators for

The ENVISION Retreat
June 13 – June 27, 2010
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

go to http://www.vandv.org/sub.html for details  or contact retreat@vandv.org with any questions.

POSTMARK DEADLINE: March 1, 2010

Voice & Vision develops and produces vibrant theater works with women at the core, and provides them with time, space and resources to create in an environment free from commercial pressures. Founded as a not-for-profit in 1990, Voice & Vision’s programming includes professional and educational opportunities for both established and emerging artists to articulate their voices and realize their visions. At the heart of Voice & Vision’s programming is the ENVISION Retreat at Bard College in the summer, followed by the ENVISION Lab Series in New York City.

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Over on ArtsJournal there’s a real highbrow conversation by celebrity arts admin bloggers.  Here’s the basic premise:

Are the terms “Art” and “Culture” tough enough to frame a public policy carve-out for the 21st century? Are the old familiar words, weighted with multiple meanings and unhelpful preconceptions, simply no longer useful in analysis or advocacy? In his book, Arts, Inc., Bill Ivey advances “Expressive Life” as a new, expanded policy arena – a frame sufficiently robust to stand proudly beside “Work Life,” “Family Life,” “Education,” and “The Environment.” Is Ivey on the right track, or is “Expressive Life” a dead end? Can we define what’s in and out, use “Expressive Life” to argue the value of heritage and artistic engagement, or should we just pump fresh oxygen into the old talking points? Is Ivey the Pied Piper, Don Quixote, or cultural policy’s rendition of Bernie Madoff? Beginning Monday, fifteen of the smartest thinkers on art and society will put Expressive Life through the wringer. May the public interest win!

If you want to check it out go here.

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Philly Fringe is inviting artists to submit to participate.  Go here for more information.

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