Whispering Pines 10 – Trailer from Shana Moulton on Vimeo.

Rhizome presents Whispering Pines 10, a one-act opera by artist Shana Moulton in collaboration with composer Nick Hallett, and featuring vocalist Daisy Press. It features a live performance by Moulton as her alter ego Cynthia, a hypochondriac agoraphobe prone to colorful hallucinations and absurd fantasies. While Cynthia seeks health and total happiness within her virtual environment—an interactive video set that utilizes real-time multimedia techniques its creators call “live animation”—she usually settles for fad cures and new-age kitsch, creating situations in turn comic, contemplative, and surreal. The opera, directed by Elyse Singer, will play at 4:00 pm on both Saturday, January 8 and Sunday, January 9 at the New Museum theater on 235 Bowery. Tickets are $15.

Whispering Pines is the celebrated video serial created by Moulton in 2002 that has previously spawned nine episodes, along with related performances, videos, and gallery installations. Whispering Pines 10—the latest installment—is an innovative performance hybrid that incorporates elements of traditional opera into contemporary video and performance art. Its premise—a woman alone in her private environment, aided by technology—enables a flexible sensibility wherein popular and experimental forms can mingle. The original music and libretto composed by Hallett take advantage of the narrativeʼs dream logic to weave what is essentially a pop music vocabulary into an experimental idiom, enabling a virtuosic exploration of the human voice. As the protagonist does not effectively speak, the sounds of her inner psychology are sung—glossolalia and the songs in her memory, ostensibly derived from tacky pulp culture, but somehow heightened. The work is a conversation-generating update of the monodrama or “mad scene,” realizedwithin a mediated, medicated, feminized, and quintessentially American vernacular.

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Thought of You is part of animator and artist Ryan Woodward’s Conte Animated project. As he explains on his site:

Conte Animated is a personal project of mine that combines several art forms into one exhibition. These concepts include the following:

1. The exploration of the drawing the human figure in a variety of creative approaches.  This stems from years of teaching creative gesture drawing.
2. 2d Animation.  This process of animation revisits the passion in my early career as a 2d animator. The illusion of life!
3. Contemporary dance.  Although I am not a dancer, I appreciate the talent and dedication that goes into a beautifully choreographed piece.  A graceful moving human form can communicate more emotion that any length of dialogue.
4. and finally, the exploration of experimental processes and concepts contributes to my own personal growth as an artist.  Having worked commercially for years, this project has allowed me to stretch beyond my former understanding of art

There’s a lot of amazing stuff there, well worth checking out.

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First off, I apologize for the incompleteness of this article, but I’m trying to do my small part to help the international campaign. Yesterday in Belarus, strongman President Alexander Lukashenko won a fifth term in a vote the international observers determined fell far short of international standards for free and fair elections, which is basically journo speak for, he’s a dictator and steals elections he’d probably win anyway. Belarus’s fragmented opposition protested in Minsk, the capital, and were brutally cracked-down upon by security services. Various reports suggest several people were killed and several hundred detained.

Among the detained is Natalya Kalyada, the director of the dissident performance group Belarus Free Theatre, and her collaborator Nikolai Khalezin. One of–if not the only–independent theater companies in the country, the Free Theater has, along with pretty much every other facet of open society, faced severe repression. Lukashenko–a former manager of collectivized farm prior to entering politics–has maintained a Soviet-style state, complete with secret police and a command economy that has substantially hampered economic development, leaving the nation poor and dependent on outside aide. For much of the last 15 years, that aide has come from Russia, but the relationship has cooled over the past couple years, leaving the regime isolated and increasingly paranoid. In the run up to the election, they even allowed some free speech from opposition parties, but Lukashenko handily won with arround 80 percent of the vote.

Unfortunately, at the moment, there’s simply not a lot that can be done to help Kalyada or other dissidents other than to express support. This is not an entirely empty act: while hopefully all will be released with little more than another police beating to show for it, permanent disappearances are not uncommon in Belarus (in fact, such has been the subject of Free Theater’s work). Aaron Landsman, a theatre artist and friend of the company in New York, has asked people to support the cause by sharing the below letter. While there’s nowhere to send these, per se, other than to friends and acquaintances, the idea is that the only thing that can be done to help Kalyada is to make her case such a cause celebre that more extreme measures by the regime against her would be untenable.

Landsman is also in contact with the Public Theater in New York, who produce the Under the Radar Festival at which the Free Theater is to appear in early January, and where supporters are hoping to develop a more directed strategy to help secure Kalyada’s release.

So please, read the letter below, share it or this entire article by email, on Facebook, Twitter, whatever, and check the Public’s or Under the Radar’s website for potentially more information about what you can offer besides solidarity. Finally, a friend of a friend is a photographer in Minsk, and photos and some information about the protests can be found on his website.

Statement demanding release of political prisoners in Belarus:

As American theater artists and professionals, we wish to express our support of Free Theater Belarus. We demand the immediate release of political prisoners and Free Theater co-directors Natalya Kolyada and Nikolai Khalezin and all others jailed in the wake of Belarus’ most recent elections. When any artist, in any country, is jailed for expressing herself freely, for making art, or for challenging a repressive state our entire field is diminished and we must, as they say, act.

Since 2006, Natalya and Nikolai have led a courageous group of underground theater artists in Minsk. Their work together includes producing original devised theater, and presenting the work of emerging and recognized writers from Belarus and many other countries. In Europe’s last dictatorship, this simple act has meant they and their families have been blacklisted, beaten, jailed, and censored. They have seen their friends disappear, their families fired from state jobs, and seen the bodies of their murdered colleagues turn up unexplained.

One of the most damaging things about a country in which individual expression, the freedom of press, art and public assembly are all curtailed unilaterally by the government, is that the truth is compromised at every level. It is impossible to know exactly how many have been jailed, what conditions they are being kept under, and when or if they will be released. As theater artists, a part of our worth rests on our ability to channel fundamentally truthful moments and craft them in such a way that they expand what we think is humanly possible and meaningful. When any of our colleagues is kept from doing this work, we are all responsible to help keep them free.

Update: Reuters has a story on their arrest.

Update2: According to Mark Russell, artistic director of Under the Radar, Natalya Kolyada has been released on $1 million rubles bail, as opposed to a one- to two-week detention as other protestors face. However, another member of the Free Theater, Artsiom Zheleznyak, was also apparently arrested by the KGB (yes, that’s what they’re still called there) and his whereabouts are unknown.

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Name: Adriano Shaplin
Title/Occupation: Playwright
Organization/Company: The Riot Group

Adriano Shaplin is the writer of Freedom Club (directed by Whit McLaughlin of New Paradise Laboratories) which runs from January 6 – 15 at the Connelly Theater (220 East 4 St.) in NYC. The play officially opens January 6. (Photo by Duska Radosavljevic)

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

I grew up in Burlington, Vermont in the 80s when Bernie Sanders was the mayor. It was basically a socialist utopia that I did not appreciate because I had nothing to compare it to. My parents were hippies and there was a lot of art-making and music and reading in the house. I got involved in community theatre when I was a teenager and got the opportunity to go to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. I started making performances there with my friends and we called ourselves The Riot Group. We were all, like, 18 when we came up with that name. 14 years later we’re still making work together.

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

It is the collision of two works of art that had the biggest influence on me. The first was Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. My mother read it to us when we were very young and it inaugurated my imagination into America and into art. The other was a water-color portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeni, painted by my father, which hung on the wall next to the dining room table. I think all of my plays have flowed out of the crack between those two works of art.

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

I would like to be able to direct. In the early days of The Riot Group we were all in the shows and there was no director. We didn’t have an outside eye. Later on I stepped outside the cast and tried to direct a couple of my plays and I wasn’t happy with the results. Somehow I just couldn’t understand the plays by sitting in the audience, I felt like I needed to be on stage to understand them. Now I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with some really awesome directors and I have a hankering to try it again and test what I’ve learned from them. I’m becoming more collaborative as a theater artist, less interested in executing my “vision” and more interested in what the people in the room bring to a project.

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

I make a third of my living off of play commissions, a third from adjunct teaching, and a third from wages that come from rehearsal or performance. Technically, according to the 2009 numbers, I live above the poverty line, but just barely.

I have no routine. If I don’t feel like being creative I’ll send some emails. If I don’t feel like sending emails, I’ll write in my notebook. I always have a writing project, but I don’t force myself to be creative. I might go on a long walk or do some drugs. If it was a good day and I got something done, I’ll party with my wife. If it was a bad day I’ll wash it off by partying with my wife. Things will change when we have kids, I presume.

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

The last job I had other than teaching was being a bouncer and I really liked it. I would take bribes all the time from people that wanted to cut in line. Making art to make money can be its own kind of compromise. Sometimes I fantasize about getting a job as a librarian or a full-time teacher so that I could completely insulate my creative work from the need to pay the rent. My work is not commericial at all, but I still wonder “Am I playing it safe just to get by?” In my heart of hearts, I’m an amateur. I do this because I love it and I love playing with my friends. I don’t want to be a professional. I don’t want this to be a job. I know there are a lot of artists out there that would like nothing more than to earn their entire living from making art, but I think they should be careful what they wish for.

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A short film from London-based filmmaker Megali Charrier. (Via Dance Ground)

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“We made something out of nothing,” said Ann-Marie Melster. In this case the something was sunken paper islands and complicated film screenings. The nothing is a dearth of funding and support. Artport and Cinema Planeta joined forces to bring some culture to Cancun and surrounding cities, where the 16th annual Conference of the Parties for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took place this year.

Since 1995, the COP has met annually and quietly, in a new country every year. The gathering is best known for developing the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. But last year the pressure came to boiling point for COP15 in Copenhagen. Hopes for a binding treaty were high, and art exhibitions, performances and interventions descended on the city along with the expected horde of protesters and activists.

The frenetic activity could not produce a positive outcome for the talks. Some political mishandling by the Danish government created a rift between developed and developing countries, and the singular accord to emerge from the conference is largely regarded as weak. But culturally, Copenhagen served as a climate change flashpoint, with everyone from the Yes Men to Tate Modern to Artport curating and creating eco-centric artworks.

The culture of Cancun was quite different. Many of the NGOs, organizations and artists that felt excluded from last year’s talks were part of two official side venues: Cancunmesse, where the conference’s shuttles convened, and the Climate Change Village, placed in between the conference and downtown proper. That sounds like everything was in the same area: it wasn’t. The conference was some 15km outside of town, south past the airport.

Logistics have made becoming official both a blessing and a curse for the cultural aspects of the COP. Many presentations were shifted last-minute, canceled, appeared never to have existed. A giant traffic jam delayed delegates on the first day of talks, shuttle routes were long and awkward, with frequent security checks. Artport’s project was not immune to the practical difficulties.

Titled “Two degrees of separation,” Artport’s endeavor brought artist Xavier Xelasco to different communities near Cancun, along with an environmental film festival. The artist went to different schools, teaching the children how to make little paper islands while teaching them about the effects of rising sea levels caused by climate change. On the weekend between talks, the children of a school in Playa del Carmen were supposed to show up at the town’s Civic Plaza to participate in a performance. They would have gathered in a mass and drowned their paper islands in water. Instead, only one of the school’s administrators showed up with her two children.

Still, in the spirit of something out of nothing, Melster marched her tiny group down to the beach, where Xelasco was waiting. Two armed guards stood by a tiny seawater pool in the sand while the group taught nearby children how to make paper islands. The fuss attracted more children, until a decent group of kids stood at the ready by the seawater pond with armfuls of tiny paper islands.

The beach along the eastern Yucatan peninsula is not really a quiet place. Dotted with hotels, bars, playgrounds, it’s sometimes hard to find a quiet getaway. Artport’s bit of performance beach was right next to the main dock into Play del Carmen. But all that noise disappeared as the children placed their islands into the water. The islands sank. They sank silently and swiftly, slowly obscured by the sandy, salty pool. It was quiet and gut-punch powerful. The kids stared at their underwater creations, eyes wide with questions: Did I do it right? Is that everything? Their islands now mystical mini-Atlantis-es.

Xavier Xelasco explained: if we can’t keep our climate to a 2-percent increase in global temperature or lower, sea levels will continue to rise, and island communities, like those on Isla Mujeres, could be fighting to stay above water. The kids nodded and continued to stare.

As the group slowly drifted apart, an inflatable screen rose on the shore: Cinema Planeta would show its series of global warming shorts, Cool Stories for When the Planet Gets Hot, out in the open for the public.It was one of many screenings during COP16, in multimedia complexes and movie houses around the Cancun area. The partnership was one of the few to make it outside of the official boundaries of the conference.

“Governments won’t change anything,” said Melster in an interview at the Climate Change Village. “Their income is at risk if they change. Change must come from the masses . . . any creative part of society is maybe the most important part of society.”

It remains to be seen how the kids in Two Degrees of Separation have been affected by their participation in it. The outcome of COP16, as expected, was an undramatic but diplomatic move forward. Increasingly it’s clear that climate change is a global problem requiring a global effort, artists (especially) included.

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Photo by Susana Millman

Mark Morris has said, at as early as 14 or 15 years old, he wanted to compose a dance to the entire score of Tchaikovsky’s Casse Noisette, Op. 71 (The Nutcracker).   Twenty years later, as the director of dance at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Belgium, with his company, the Mark Morris Dance Group as the resident dancers, he began to do just that.  And twenty years further on the timeline, we have the opportunity to see this stunning production as the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s final Next Wave Festival 2010 presentation.  It is one of Morris’s greatest achievements, a rare and special feat made all the more spectacular by the grand scale and the loving approach to the classic score.  What could be a satirical “take” on The Nutcracker in the hands of others is rather played out as a beautiful, bold, sensitive, nuanced, and totally earnest coming-of-age story – this IS the Nutcracker.   And, in a further treat for audiences, we get to see the man himself performing, as the central father figure, Dr. Stahlbaum – perhaps our only chance to see him on the stage today, especially disappearing into a role rather unlike his own grandiose being, the choreographer Mark Morris.

Morris has always said that the reason he makes up shows is so he has something he enjoys watching – in effect, he is simply building the show for his own entertainment, and then sharing with us –  and how lucky we are.  Is there a better “Waltz of the Snowflakes” in all the numerous productions?  I’m not so sure.  Morris is genius in this respect – rather than beautifully and evenly falling, as the snow does in Mr. Balanchine’s production (there is not the possibility for drama, then, no rhythmic punch though the effect is lasting and serene) – the snow comes up from the dancers’ fists, in bursts and clumps and sprays.  It seems, as one gets lost in the flurry, that these snowflakes, dressed uniformly in tutus and Soft-Serve headgear, are playing – it’s the way you would throw snow yourself – sure it’s fun watching the snow come down, but isn’t it even more so to run freely through the blanketed white, carousing and romping and wheeling.  It’s magical.

But this is of course not to say that there is anything less than extreme sophistication about this choreography.  One of the things often said about Morris’s work is that it feels like you could just run down the aisle onto the stage and join the action – there’s a democracy of the body, and a welcoming communal feel that keep people holding themselves back from charging forth and leaping into the throng.  This couldn’t be less true, however – and the choreography for the Snowflakes is a case in point.  Amidst your laughter and awe at the precise beauty of it all, you may or may not miss how incredibly complex, musical, structural and architectural the whole thing is.  Take away the snow and the costumes, and you’d still have a perfectly masterful dance.

Perhaps I’m revealing too much about my own psychology, but the inner child in me looks forward, with not a negligible amount of glee, to the moment when it is again acceptable each year to start listening to Christmas music, with Tchaikovsky being one of my favorites.  The Nutcracker score, though it inspires groans and eye rolls in plenty of circles, many with years-long associations to lackluster annual childhood productions, has nothing of this kind of effect on me.  It is sheer magic, and evocatively gorgeous.  I just can’t help myself.  And this, too, is what makes Morris’s production a gem.  I can’t believe it when I see it, but he’s able to give the entire first half hour of music – the party scene, the gift giving, the parents and children – a total 70s vibe that works as though Tchaikovsky meant it this way.  And though he’s using popular dance forms, and very open personal vernacular, Morris infuses each moment, each joke, with a musical reinforcement that makes it impossible not to appreciate.

This is not parody of the Nutcracker – this isn’t making fun at all, except perhaps at ourselves or our parents – the whole thing plays out almost like the pivotal key party in Rick Moody’s Ice Storm – everyone gets drunk and ribald and the whole thing nearly collapses into chaos.  It’s rather an expert staging of a groovy party scene, whether real to Morris or imagined, and all of it layered over Tchaikovsky’s lush score so expertly that there is no possibility of anomaly – the staging and music coexist with an elegance and refinement that renders it extraordinary.  The production design, which does an excellent job making this possible, is based on the work of sequential artist Charles Burns.

The coming-of-age aspect is what makes the show so powerful and emotionally relevant.  In other, former productions of the Nutcracker, the second act deals only with the magical land of the sweets, and Marie (danced impeccably by Lauren Grant) stays a child throughout – she doesn’t have a moment of recognition, and therefore neither can we.  However, in Morris’s approach, Marie begins an innocent girl, but something about what her Uncle Drosselmeier (William Smith III) gives her, in his Nutcracker gift, pushes her over the brink of girlhood and into the adult realm.  And her mother is wonderfully complicit in the development.  The Waltz of the Flowers begins with Mrs. Stahlbaum (the exquisite and hilarious John Heginbotham) gesturing offstage to the young heroine who has just exited, with open hand:  “My daughter…” she tells us, then turns around and makes the same gesture to a nearly vulgar depiction of a giant hanging flower – “…is about to be a woman.”  The floating set piece is vivid in its entendre, yet it ushers in the genius Waltz of the Flowers, at once an innocent Busby Berkeleyian show number, and also Mrs. Stahlbaum’s reckoning of the naive past with the erotic future.   In telling us this bit of story Mrs. Stahlbaum knows where Marie is headed, while the chorus of dancers (another completely serious and deeply beautiful dance of its own right) enjoy the bliss of color and youth.  Here they are dressed in Brussels sprouts caps and floral dress (throughout, the costumes by Martin Pakledinaz are truly sensational), each with a bright pink or orange or purple underskirting.

Later in the show, Marie and her heroic Nutcracker prince (the splendid David Leventhal) dance to the Sugar Plum Fairy music.  There are shudders in the strings, separated by a few beats, repeated several times again but separated by not so much – he kisses her hand on each, and it’s as though this zing of vibration is actually felt in her heart, or, perhaps with Morris, even lower.  And there’s a joke at the end – but it’s also serious and we all know the feeling – she eventually sticks out the other hand: she likes the way this feels, adulthood, love, and she wants more.  She knows it.  She’s changed, she’s alive in a new way, and there is a poignancy, a loss of childhood, but also an important gain of the kind of love we can’t ever get from our parents, far from the world of fairy tales and dreams and the like.  The Hard Nut gets to the heart of this matter of growing up, but in doing so along the way also renders us all children again, or childlike, in our awe. This dichotomy of feeling is what I love so much – there is always a push and a pull, a loss and a gain, but in the yearning for growth and understanding, there are many significant lessons learned – the things we most need are actually the closest to us, we just need that moment of clarity, the trial and error that brings us to eventual recognition.  The journey is paramount to the conclusion, and I afterwards coexist in a happy state of nostalgia and hope.

The Hard Nut

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue
Dec 15—18, 2010, 7:30pm
Dec 19, 2010, 3pm
Mark Morris Dance Group
Featuring the MMDG Music Ensemble with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus
Conducted by Robert Cole
Choreography by Mark Morris

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Dynasty Handbag‘s (a.k.a. Jibz Cameron) newest show, Brothers and Sisters and Motherfuckers, opens tonight at PS 122 and runs through Sunday (tickets $15/$20). Culturebot contributor Mashinka Firunts recently chatted with Cameron about this show.

The show description for Brothers and Sisters and Motherfuckers promises the appearance of psychic siblings, hexagonal twins, and devil or grandma “on the menu for the Handbag Family Holiday Dinner.” How will this smorgasbord of nuclear familial dysfunction unfold onstage?
To be honest, when I wrote that particular description I was not yet finished with the script, so I was sort of predicting what might end up in there…based on my loose idea of what was going to go down.  I can say that “devil or grandma” made the cut though.  What happens in the show is that Dynasty Handbag throws a dinner party for her siblings (that may be imaginary, they are just projections on screens on stage of me playing those characters).  Everyone gets sick during dinner and they all start blaming eachother and yelling and flipping out.  Then something happens which I won’t tell you about but a family secret is revealed!  And she shit goes down, and there are lots of sound effects and dramatic lighting.

How does this compare with VERTititGO, your HOT Festival neo-noir where you combined pre-recorded sound with live dialogue to assume the personae of a fast-talking PI, his femme fatale client, and all the protagonists in between?
Lets see, well as a comparison I guess it is similar in that there are characters I am interacting with that are not physically present.  That is usually the case with Dynasty Handbag, she is only experiencing things in her head, from her point of view, which is actually exactly like how it is in reality…so there!  With VERTititGO the other characters were just audio tracks, or more accurately  I, the protagonist, was a voice and then “I” the performer got to play all the characters–in BSMFs I also played all the other cast members, but this time they are interacting all at the same time with each other  via video projections, whilst me, the performer is swimming in the middle of it all.  I don’t know how that is going to feel.  Insane probably.  Because I will be performing live off of my own performances…and if they are annoying or problematic it will be hard to stay on point.  It will also just be emotionally whacked because all the characters are sort of heightened versions of family members, but they are also me – my identification with those people, my projection of them…as a projection.  A video projection of my projection.  That is the project.  Tion.

You’re currently a member of the adjunct faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where you recently taught a course on performing the self/selves. The extensive roster of venues where you’ve appeared ranges from the Slipper Room and the Starlite Lounge to Syracuse University’s Matrilineage Symposium. NYU Professor of Performance Studies Jose Munoz includes a discussion of your work in his most recent text Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Does your involvement in the academic sphere enter into your performative practice or process?
Since I teach a performance class that is practice-based as opposed to theory-based, most of what I try to convey to students has to do with the creative process and figuring out how to get the most honesty out of your work, so mainly it is things I just need to remember myself.

How does it interface with your output as a performance-maker?
As far as my output goes, it is very good for me to keep learning about other artists and sharing their work with students and discussing styles and execution.  I can say it is beneficial.  Yes.  Very much.  Now, were I to get into theory, I think that would fuck me up for sure.

In what way?
During the writing process I think about wether or not the work makes emotional sense to me and that is the main focus,  but were I to try and imagine it in any other context, say by comparing it to the work of my contemporaries or think about how it fits in to the “state of performance art today” or even think about it’s political significance while I am writing – that would take me out of the work and it would become about that stuff and not about it’s root.  Maybe I will someday write from a different seat, like sit down and say, I want to write something that addresses the current climate of queer theatrical practice or something like that.  So far that has not been the case.  However, it is very good to know how to discuss my work in academic terms when trying to get money to make more of it.

Munoz has written about your work’s engagement with what he calls queer futurity, or queer utopianism.  He contrasts the category of broad-minded utopianism with a short-term pragmatic imperative concerned with legislative victories and same-sex marriage. How would you situate your work in terms of these categories?
If I understand your question correctly, I would answer that my work, like everyone’s work, like people, like everything, is significant to exposure and visibility.  We all live our politics, and though my work may or may not speak directly to the “queer agenda”, as it is understood in contemporary terms per se, it is certainly important to me to contribute to diversity, if that makes sense.  As in, all forms of queerdom, of feminism of whateverism need to be exposed, recognized, respected.  Which is why issues become so ridiculous, because the less diversity that is visible, the more polarized the issues become and the narrower the scope of ideas, which means DEATH! Death of imagination, death of acceptance, more us and them.  I am not saying that I like the log cabin republican idea, but I can certainly see that there is a place for them just as much as there is for hippies.

Brothers and Sisters and Motherfuckers is being presented as part of PS122’s 30th-anniversary season, whose programming continues the institution’s history of spotlighting currents of queer performance throughout its three-decade span. How do you see your work–and Brothers and Sisters… in particular–positioned in this lineage and in relation to earlier pioneering figures of queer performance who occupied the theater’s stages?
AAAHHHH!!! The more I work in NYC, the more I see that the paths I am invited to tread have been forged by those brave souls.  I can only hope my work does them justice and continues to be a well placed stain on the pants of new york city theatrical history.

Popularity: 4% [?]

From Toni Dove's Spectropia

ctrOne of the first shows I went to after moving to New York was Witness Relocation‘s production of the English translation of Toshiki Okada’s Five Days in March at La Mama, and the cast was nice enough to invite me out afterwards for opening night drinks, so I harbor a soft spot for Dan Safer & co. They were my introduction to New York theatre. But what’s more, I was fascinated by the play itself, having seen the original production by Okada’s company chelfitsch a year and some before on tour in Seattle.

If there was a problem with Witness Relocation’s version, it’s that the play (through no fault of their own) suffered in English translation in an odd and unpredictable way: rendered into a language the American audience could understand, the hipster speech of the characters became the focus, and was endlessly commented on by critics who couldn’t seem to look past it for what the show was actually trying to accomplish. As a non-Japanese speaker, when I saw chelfitch’s version, I certainly got a sense of how they were talking (the actors delivered their lines like they were telling a story in a bar; even though you only knew what they said not how they said it, the affect was obvious), but was able to otherwise focus on what was happening.

If a lot of art strives to make sense of the complexity of the world by treating it like an onion, to peeled away layer by layer in search of the truth, than Five Days in March does the reverse: the show takes a diced-up onion and reassembles it piece by piece (it’s fitting that the climactic moment of the show–the invasion of Iraq–takes place on the third of the titular five days), building out the layers in brief segments that don’t properly connect, or come in fragmentary bursts. The show is not some indictment of the ineffectuality of youth, and some people seem to think. It’s an ambitious attempt to link the quotidian lives of everyday people, who normally experience history as spectators, to world historical events.

Just as the lives of the characters in the show come to overlap the lives of the actors playing them (for instance, at one point an actor performs a line telling another character where a subway stop is, then breaks character and says, “Oh, I didn’t know that”), so too would the lives of the affectless Shibuya hiptsters the play follows come to connect–through some degrees of separation–with those of the American soldiers pouring into Iraq, the foreign fighters preparing for a jihad-driven insurgency, and eventually even to the leaders and decision-makers and all the other actors driving the world-historical drama unfolding as a backdrop to a story that’s otherwise about pop culture and anonymous hook-ups. Aesthetic style aside, there’s a great deal of commonality between Okada’s play and Sarah Kane’s Crave, in that both are drawing links between the small dramas of our everyday lives and the bigness of war.

Interestingly, there’s a thematic link between Five Days in March and I’m Going to Make a Small Incision Behind Your Ear to Check and See If You’re Actually Human, Witness Relocation’s new show, which opened this week at the Bushwick Starr (through Dec. 18; tickets $15). If the former presented chaos and complexity through a carefully constructed, multilayered text, then the latter invites it in through sheer randomness.

When I took my seat mere moments before the show began, the wall at downstage-right was already covered in carefully ordered pieces of paper, each laying out the topic of a scene. It was only when I read Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s review that I fully understood how the operation was conducted that put them up: as the audience entered, each was invited by Dan Safer to choose a pingpong ball that corresponded to a scene; the order of selection determined the order of scenes for the evening. So instead of beginning with an introduction from the managers of the Bushwich Starr (that came about halfway through), we started with the cast assembling themselves in a line and trying to make themselves cry. One man started slapping himself hard in the face. Or biting his hand. Another squeezed onion into his eye. And within a few minutes, indeed, the stage was filled seven weeping performers. And then the show kicked off.

If there’s one problem I’ve always had with works that rely on so much chance and improv to structure themselves, it’s that in the end, they never really manage a dramatic arc. They become a series of vignettes, with no climax to the evening. They just end. And while that is sort of the case here, Witness Relocation largely makes up for it with their balls-to-the-walls intensity, the performance far more radically anarchistic than a chance gambit to determine the order of the show’s scenes. It’s funny, occasionally a little shocking, but definitely worth the trip out to Bushwick. In both shows, complexity and random connections are deeply linked to human experience, referenced in Witness Relocation’s rather long title for their new show. The proof of humanity is the eating of the messy, messy, pudding, shall we say.

Chance and remix als figure prominent in video/performance artist Toni Dove‘s Spectropia, a “live mix” film, which opened last night at the Kitchen and plays through Saturday (tickets $15).

Spectropia is, at its heart, just a film, not so different from any other: a hybrid sci-fi/noir set in a future England, in which history is banned as a function of radically late capitalism, which demands constant consumption. Spectropia is a young woman searching for her father, who’s disappeared back in time (sort of), having built a machine that can scan historical bric-a-brac and artificially generate the historical impression it made. Trick is, scan yourself along with it, and you can scan yourself i to what’s either a compelling simulacrum or potentially history itself.

The plot revolves around Spectropia’s search for her father, which leads her to 1931 New York, where he was desperately trying to uncover the family’s lost inheritance. I won’t give away the story other than to say that water figures prominently, making it almost a cyberpunk Chinatown, minus all the incest.

The film-performance is projected on three large screens, with Dove and her collaborator R. Luke DuBois controlling the affair from a bank of computers and other tech gear upstage-right. The Spectropia film is concentrated on the larger center screen, while the smaller screens to left and right shift between a live feed of DuBois and Dove, alternate shots of the film, or sometimes expanding the scale of the same shot across all three.

In addition to the computers, the film is controlled by mixers that Dove and DuBois manipulate like a theremin wand. Hand movements can slow, reverse, or speed up the film in one of the simplest and most obvious mix techniques employed. Additionally, two of the characters in the film, William (Richard Bekins), a double-crosser from 1931, and Sally (Helen Pickett) a burlesque dancer famous for her bubble routine, can directly address the audience. This is accomplished videographically by representing through a series of extremely short clips, allowing them a variety of expressions and a series of facial movements for when they “speak.” The result is a stuttery, cut-up effect. As for the dialogue, insofar as I understand it, it was accomplished through a computer program that emulated (possibly through the actors recording words) their voices, based on a simple text-to-speech program.

Thematically, the film’s cut-up, lix-mix actualization relates to the story it tells in much the same way as Witness Relocation’s show: complexity is a function of potentiality, and Spectropia‘s spelunking expedition into the past–a mystery story that reveals something about the present–reveals a multiplicity of potential outcomes that could have occurred, which nicely dovetails with the fact that each screening of the film itself is a unique live performance, distinct from every other. And in the end, it’s just plain cool to watch. Highly recommended.

And finally, on a completely different note, last Saturday took us up to Baruch College for the opening of Wakka Wakka‘s newest puppet show, Baby Universe (through January 9; tickets $20-$30). While the story takes its inspiration from real concepts in contemporary physics, Baby Universe is primarily a story told in emotional and human terms, and realized as one of the more stunning puppet spectacles I’ve had the chance to see.

Set in a future in which the sun is dying, humanity (or the last dismal dregs of it) lives deep underground in bunkers awaiting a seemingly inevitable fate. Scientists, desperate for a solution, have been creating “baby universes,” realized as adorable little black-hole dolls, who, should they develop, could create an entire new universe, complete with a new earth and a new sun, and offer salvation for humanity.

Each baby is tended by a mother-figure nurse (there are many baby universes; most don’t survive), and the story quickly establishes itself as mother-son love story in which the child will ultimately have to make a great sacrifice for the sake of love. The plot is rounded out by a villainous cast of plenatary (and other astronomical bodies) avatars, all in the service of the dying Sun, who, in his despair, is desperate to take humanity down with him.

This is all realized in stunning fashion, Wakka Wakka having run amok with models, puppets, lighting, and actors performing on a mutable set that’s constantly transforming. You spend the roughly 90-minute run-time of the show enraptured by the amazing thing unfolding before you. Of special note was the Sun himself, a nearly ten-foot-tall figure in bedraggled clothes, lobster red (and operated, it turned out, by one of the smallest members of the cast). Wakka Wakka’s founders Gabriel Brechner, Kirjan Waage, and Gwendolyn Warrock have done a fantastic job.

On a final note, I have to point out that description aside, Baby Universe is not exactly a kid’s show (though plenty of slightly older children would love it). While it’s not nearly as dark as their previous show, FABRIK: The Legend of M. Rabinowitz, set during the Holocaust, Baby Universe still asks some very difficult questions about exactly what we’re doing to our planet, which resonates in environmental terms even if that’s not part of the show’s plot. The impact of environmental degradation, and what it means for our planet to become inhospitable to human life, are brought in frequently terrifying terms through a radio program broadcasting from “the darkest corner of the bunkers,” with suggestions of despair, suicide, and cannibalism. And it speaks to the company’s willingness to ask hard questions that this serves as Baby Universe‘s denouement, even as the story technically has a happy–if somewhat bittersweet–ending.

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Playwright and director Young Jean Lee’s collaborative band Future Wife has released a single, “I’m Spending Christmas Alone” (available as a free download on her website), in advance on her one-woman-show, Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show (editor’s note: Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show is a different project of Young Jean Lee’s company; the solo show which goes up at Joe’s Pub in April as Lee’s contribution to 13p is, apparently just untitled, which is fine–that means twice as much of her distinct brand of awesomeness in the near future). A second work-in-progress showing of Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show is coming up December 16-19 at the New Museum, so after that I’ll have a better idea what I’m talking about. In the interim, let’s all just enjoy the song, which, adorably, comes in either swear-word or non-swear-word version.

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