DTW’s Studio Series kicks off tonight at 6pm with Souleymane Badolo showing work-in-process Solo’s Solo/”Basic”- a study on how NOT to go so low or too deep (with changes in direction). During Souleymane’s 100-hour creative residency he and choreographer Reggie Wilson met to investigate movement, gesture, repetition, and structure.  Looking to see when, how, and if narrative can arise from form and structure. Focusing on order, rhythm, patterns, texture, comparison and relationship they have abandoned improvisation, movement-invention, character and emotion.  There will be another showing tomorrow (Saturday) night at 6pm with In-Process Talks after each showing moderated by Nora Chipaumire.

The Studio Series offers an opportunity for research and development in a creative residency format, providing resources of time, space, and a commission. The Studio Series is a laboratory for physical explorations and new movement investigations with a focus on process, not final performance/product. The “performances” are intended to be informal public showings to share ideas with an audience in the intimate working space of the studio.  This season, I will be having quick conversations with each Studio Series artist to highlight the valuable investigatory nature of this program.

So, how did you and Reggie come to work together?

When I saw the performance he made with Andreya [Ouamba], it was a new thing for me as a way to make dance.  After that, I talked with Nora and we had an idea about asking him to make a solo for me.  His way of working was something I wanted to understand. I asked him and it took a while for him to say he could make some time to work together.  When I got the Studio Series, I said “I have space and time to show something.  Let’s work.”  So, our first step was to make something for the Dance Kings of Black Brooklyn in the fall.  Reggie was getting an award as an important black male dancer and choreographer in Brooklyn and I showed the first version of our dance for him at this.  Then, we came back and developed this dance out of a gesture. It isn’t only that I want to work with Reggie. There are many African American choreographers who work differently; the way they are moving is completely different. They don’t do ballet. It’s not African. It’s their own. It’s very different for me.  Like Trajal [Harrell], I spoke with him. I would like him to make some work for me.  I want to learn new things. I’m a dancer and a choreographer and I’d worked with a lot of people in Europe and the way they work here is different. It’s important to work with these artists and learn more, it’s for my own education, my own black, African education. I need this, I need these Americans to help me learn more about what they are doing and who I am and who we are. For me, I never went to school for dance like them.  I learned from the company and for events. I learned it by doing it and doing it. I want to work with people who think about dance with ideas that are exciting for me, like Ralph Lemon and Gus Solomon. For me, it’s important to talk with them and make the possibilities to make this work. When I see what people are doing in NYC, it is very contemporary and I’m very excited.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Chicago’s EVERY HOUSE HAS A DOOR had to postpone their showing of Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never at PS122 but the film they produced, WAKING THINGS, plays this weekend at Anthology Film Archives.

Popularity: 4% [?]

San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) announces the pilot session of YBCA: YOU, a free “aesthetic fitness” program designed to empower individuals to make arts learning an ongoing part of their lives. From March 1 through November 30, up to 100 participants will embark on a highly personalized, dynamic arts education curriculum organized around aesthetic themes and YBCA’s Big Ideas. The YBCA: YOU cohort will be given free admission to all YBCA performances, films, exhibitions and community engagement events, and encouraged to use this all-access pass as they would a gym membership. Participants will also be offered opportunities to take part in exclusive behind-the-scenes socials, artist talks and field trips.

YBCA: YOU’s education and engagement specialist, Laurel Butler, will act as an arts-focused personal trainer, assisting with individual goal development, ongoing self-assessment and final evaluation.  In addition, she will organize exclusive behind-the-scenes socials, artist talks, and field trips aimed at strengthening the YBCA: YOU community and fostering the exchange of ideas among participants.

“Ultimately, we want more people having better and deeper experiences with art,” says Joël Tan, YBCA’s director of community engagement. “This pilot is about an actual live human guide connecting with individuals and small groups to experience arts and cultural events that are custom-tailored to their aspirations, desires, and educational goals. We invite anyone looking to build their aesthetic muscles to register, whether they want to learn a few pointers for their next cocktail party or attend all the openings in town and just need the motivation to do it.”

YBCA: YOU’s approach is based in Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a research-based teaching method that improves critical thinking and language skills through discussions of visual images rather than through academic instruction. VTS is the technique currently used in YBCA’s successful Art Savvy programs. This progressive arts education method provides a supportive, dynamic setting for participants to deepen their connections to contemporary art, starting with refining their observational skills.  No prior knowledge of contemporary art is necessary.

To register for the orientation on Thursday, March 3, 6-8pm, applicants must e-mail lbutler@ybca.org by 5 p.m. on February 28 with their name, age, telephone number, and one sentence on why they would like to register for the program. Participants must be at least 18 and will be selected based on their interest in collaborative arts enrichment and the ability to make a nine-month commitment to the YBCA: YOU program.  Due to the pilot nature of the program, participants will be expected to provide feedback on their experience to help shape future sessions.

Popularity: 5% [?]

See our interview with Perforations Festival founder and curator Zvonimir Dobrovic, as well as previews of the artists.

La MaMa in association with Perforacije (Perforations) Festival in Croatia presents Perforations Festival New York, a live arts festival featuring some of the leading contemporary performing artists from the Balkan region. The festival includes 12 productions with more than 50 artists from five countries—Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Macedonia.

The Perforations Festival takes place annually in Croatia and presents a range of artists working in performance art, theater, and dance, whose diverse approaches to art-making blurs the borders between these genres. Their work touches upon issues of identity (public, political, religious), redefining borders and space, a collective past, and personal histories, but most of all their work talks about the present. Highlights from this festival will be presented in New York, offering audiences insight into contemporary lines of artistic thinking from some of the most provocative and influential artists in the region.

The Perforations Festival is also the largest initiative focused on artists from Central and Eastern Europe whose work is created within the so-called independent artistic scene. Curator and producer of Perforations (Croatia and New York) Zvonimir Dobrovic comments: “State-subsidized venues receive the majority of available arts funding in the Balkans, but some of the most exciting and compelling work in the region is being developed by independent artists working outside of these institutions. It is this group of artists that Perforations supports and presents, in part, to counter established funding and cultural policy that has not created a sustainable working environment for these more progressive artists.”

Perforations Festival New York will feature U.S. premieres from Ivo Dimchev (Bulgaria); BADco. (Croatia); Sanja Mitrović (Serbia); Igor Josifov (Macedonia); Petra Kovačić (Croatia); Željko Zorica (Croatia); Slovenian Youth Theater (Slovenia); Via Negativa (Slovenia); and Ivica Buljan/Mini Teater (Croatia/ Slovenia). Program information for each event follows.

Performances will take place at Club La MaMa, 74A East 4th Street (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue), New York City. Performances run March 11–20 (Friday, Saturday, and Thursday at 10pm; and Sunday and Monday at 8pm). Tickets are $15 for general admission/$10 for students and seniors. Tickets can be purchased through La MaMa’s box office at 212-475-7710, and online at www.lamama.org. The performance installations on March 14 and 18 are free of charge, but a reservation is required.

On Monday, March 21 from 6–8pm, TCDS of The New School for Social Research will present Transgressing Borders in the Balkans: The State of Art, a panel discussion with festival participants, artists, academics, and experts on the region. Location: The New School for Social Research,
66 West 12th Street, Room 510, New York City.

Performance Schedule: March 11–20, 2011

March 11 at 10pm
Ivo Dimchev (Bulgaria)
Lili Handel

Ivo Dimchev is a choreographer and performer whose work is an extreme and colorful mixture of performance art, dance, theater, music, drawings, and photography. Over the last several years, he has become known for his radical work in the area of physical theater. Dimchev’s incentive for creating Lili Handel came from the idea of the human body as a subject of physical and aesthetic consumption. Subtitled “blood, poetry, and music from the white boudoir of a whore…,” Lili Handel is the final cry of a variety show diva. The tagedy of Lili’s fading beauty takes center stage as Dimchev conjures the ancient desire of the stage diva to give the public her innermost life, here, in a passionate and sinister display of her pains.
Lili Handel has been presented more than 70 times in Bulgaria, Macedonia, France, Hungary, Italy, Turkey, Romania, Germany, Slovenia, Czech Republic, and Sweden.

March 12 at 10pm
BADco. (Croatia)
Semi-interpretations or How to Explain Contemporary Dance to an Undead Hare
BADco. is a collaborative performance collective based in Zagreb that includes core members Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, and Zrinka Užbinec. The collective systematically focuses on the research of protocols of performing, presenting, and observing by structuring its projects around diverse formal and perceptual relations and contexts. Semi-interpretations, or How to Explain Contemporary Dance to an Undead Hare, a solo created and performed by Nikolina Pristaš (Hooge Huysen award winner for Best Young Choreographer in 2002), reconfigures established boundaries between audience and performer and is inspired, in part, by the work of Joseph Beuys, François Delsatre, Franz Kafka, Steven Shavior, Bruno Latour, and Graham Harman.

March 13 at 8pm
Sanja Mitrović (Serbia)
Will You Ever Be Happy Again?
Are we ever going to be happy again? It’s a question the German population asked themselves at the end of the Second World War. A significant part of the Serbian population faced the same question in the wake of the new millennium. Conceived and directed by Sanja Mitrović (2010 BNG Theater award for Best Young Director), Will You Ever Be Happy Again? is developed around autobiographical accounts of its performers, the Serbian Mitrović and German Jochen Stechmann, and employs documentary strategies to explore how nationality influences one’s personal identity. The work is structured as a succession of performative situations, based on the performers’ personal and collective memories. They counterpoint and mirror each other’s cultural and historical backgrounds as they approach the problem of self-representation–the way one looks at the other and the urge to see oneself through the eyes of another.

March 14 at 8pm (shared evening)
Two performance installations presented throughout the evening beginning at 8pm

Petra Kovačić (Croatia)
Act(ing)

Petra Kovačić is a 2008 graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. The concept for Act(ing) originated from her desire to provide audiences with the experience and feeling of creation. The work is defined as a performance installation—a symbolic view of the creation of a visual artwork that is developed over the course of the performance. Movement is created through the gestures Kovačić uses to build the piece. The material constructed and its final destruction looks to the importance and necessity of experiencing feelings and emotions in the moment.

Željko Zorica (Croatia)
Digitalization of Monumental Heritage and Its Commercial Exploitation

Željko Zorica has worked within different artistic fields as a coauthor of theater performances, set designer, puppeteer, dramatist, graphic designer, writer, and founder of several theater companies. Digitalization of Monumental Heritage and Its Commercial Exploitation is part of an ongoing project that started in 1983 when Zorica developed a fictitious scholar named H. C. Zabludovsky whose writing investigates the phenomena of people rarely stopping and reading what is written on memorial plaques. In response, Zorica has created a faux space that memorial plaques occupy, replacing the plaques with light monitors that screen text and visual material referring to the commemorated person or event. Zorica also creates and places newly invented plaques in strategic locations to reference significant events that took place there. The performance events that surround this activity are somber and staged ceremonies, with speeches, music, and other kinds of theatrics that typically accompany such events.

March 17 at 10pm
Slovenian Youth Theater (Slovenia)
Damned Be The Traitor of His Homeland

The Slovenian Youth Theater was established in 1955 as Slovenia’s first professional theater for children and youth. Today it is known for its wide range of innovative works by various young directors and its ensemble energy, which avoids star hierarchy by investing in a laboratory approach to build its creative ensemble. Every collaborator–actor, director, choreographer, set designer, musician–researches, develops, risks, and creates. Through its performances, the company strives to address universal paradoxes and to develop new codes of theatrical practice, new visual paradigms, and new points of view on the classics, modernism, and postmodernism. In Damned Be The Traitor of His Homeland, Croatian director Oliver Frljić led the company through a series of improvisations to create the language and material for this work. Using an aggressive style, the piece deconstructs Yugoslavian political, theatrical, and historical stereotypes while addressing the danger of committing a crime. Frljić is seen as the leader of a new generation of Croatian theater directors and is known for his use of hyperbole along with grotesque and strong visuals to talk to his audience, to be political, contemporary, and relevant.

March 18 (off-site performance installation – time and location TBA)
Igor Josifov (Macedonia)
Present Memories

In Igor Josifov’s work, an analogous collapsing of borders occurs between artist and form. After several years working in a range of media, Josifov has now chosen his own body as his primary and essential medium. Present Memories is a performance installation in which Josifov comments on the process of entering and moving through different mental constructs that artists embody during performance. He will perform elements from five previous works in this revisiting process: Purification Process, PPP Mental Prison, Emit, 2 Dimensional, and Reflection on Originality. All of these works are anchored in visual and body art and share a through line of endurance. This is a durational work during which Josifov casts himself as a signifying body in a field of social semiotics and uses performance and visual representation to explore psychoanalytic themes such as identity, death, loss, and the status of the ego in contemporary society.

March 18 at 10pm
Via Negativa (Slovenia)
Out

Via Negativa’s work is focused on the relationship between the performer and the audience in real space and time. This relationship is identified as a complex flow of points of view, expectations, judgments, conclusions, recognitions, stereotypes, fallacies, prejudices, tolerance or intolerance, and knowledge or lack thereof. All of these perceptions trigger various emotional, rational, or irrational responses. No matter what the subject or story behind the performance, Via Negativa always searches for the situation(s) that triggers and activates this relationship. The company dedicated its first seven years (2002–08) to addressing the seven deadly sins. Out, the final piece they developed during this period, focuses on the sin of vanity. The work examines the logic of expectations in the relationship between viewer and performer, and tests how the spectator and performer will act out their roles in a situation in which it is no longer clear what they can expect from each other.

March 19 at 10pm
Via Negativa (Slovenia)
Game With Toothpicks
Invalid
Tonight I Celebrate

Via Negativa’s Game With Toothpicks is described as a documentary performance where a Serb and Croat enact a knife-game scene (which is also referenced in Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 10), literally cutting each other on stage. This scene is part of the piece Not Like Me and reflects upon the horrified media response to the work. Game With Toothpicks deals with the media’s “exterior” reaction as if it’s the “interior” of their experience. Performers Kristian Al Droubi and Boris Kadin adopt two radically different positions, turning the performance into an absurd self-referential machine.

Invalid begins in 1990 when the performer, Primož Bezjak, injures his knee after being struck by a stone. Bezjak is an active dancer, actor, and performer, and discusses his diagnosis and therapy at length. At every rehearsal and performance he is in constant danger of dislocating his knee, which has happened many times before. At his request, viewers render his performance impossible. At the core of this work is the idea that without a mangled body a dancer cannot exist or succeed in the system.

Tonight I Celebrate focuses on the relationship between a performer and an audience, on its depth and profanity, its authenticity and illusion. The title song “Tonight I Celebrate My Love for You” by Michael Masser and Gerry Goffin serves as the introduction to eight popular songs from which the singer/performer Uroš Kaurin, accompanied on contrabass by Tomaž Grom, expresses his love for the audience. The ultimate question this work asks is: If the audience of today is ready for everything, does that mean that a performer of today must be ready for everything too?

March 20 at 8pm
Ivica Buljan/Mini Teater (Croatia/Slovenia)
Ma and Al

Ivica Buljan is one of Croatia’s most prolific directors; he codirects Mini Teater with Robert Waltl, and is known for his extensive work with Pasolini and Koltès texts. Ma and Al is inspired by various texts by J.D. Salinger as well as Koltès’ play Sallinger. The space is decorated with fragments of props and the border between the real and fictitous becomes blurred as the audience is called upon and drawn into the playful hysteria of the actors. Issues raised in the show are varied and about the everyday: family breakups, the death of a child, American democracy, the relationship between traditional and contemporary theater, art, and the Vietnam War.

* * * * *

The Perforations Festival in Croatia is produced by Association Domino, a presenting organization that produces two major international festivals in Croatia annually: Perforations and Queer Zagreb. Founded in 2009, the mission of Perforations is to commission, produce, and promote internationally significant work by young and emerging artists from Central and Eastern Europe. Perforations takes place in three cities in each fall: Rijeka, Dubrovnik, and Zagreb. Queer Zagreb, which has been presented in Croatia since 2003, challenges heteronormativity within transitional societies through art, theory, and activism. Zvonimir Dobrovic is the Artistic Director and Producer of both of these festivals.

Perforations Festival New York has received support from Trust for Mutual Understanding, Dance Theater Workshop’s Suitcase Fund as part of the East/Central Europe Cultural Partnerships Program, with support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Croatia, FACE Croatia, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Zagreb Office for Culture, Zagreb Tourist Board, and City of Ljubljana with additional support from CEC ArtsLink.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Better Numbers Say Things Are Worse: Yesterday, I linked to a Culture Monster post that made some difficult to substantiate comments about the benefits of arts spending; last night I found Americans for the Arts recently released arts “vitality” report, which puts some hard numbers in place that present a sobering picture of the state of the arts in America, the “vitality” of which is at its lowest in the twelve years it’s been measured in the report.

It’s an interesting report to dig into, and I encourage anyone involved in the arts to do so. The bad news: the public’s consumption of the arts remains flat, while arts orgs are seeing their share of philanthropic giving fall. For all the talk of NEA cuts, the fall from 4.9 to 4 percent of philanthropic giving took $2.5 billion out of the arts sector in 2009. The good news though is that the arts remain surprisingly vibrant despite a lack of support; during the Great Recession, more than 3,000 new arts ventures were launched around the country. And ethnically and culturally oriented organizations have doubled nationally in the last decade.

More on the Numbers: Interestingly, the NEA’s #NewPlay Festival is currently underway at D.C.’s Arena Theatre, and I came across this fascinating blog post from just yesterday, recapping a talk-back with Rocco Landesman, the head of the NEA. The discussion, featuring a variety of theater producers from all over the US, was apparently a barnstorming affair by Landesman who declared: “Look. You can either increase demand or decrease supply. Demand is not going to increase, so it is time to think about decreasing supply.”

What’s definitely cool about it, though, was how much Landesman focused on how he wants theater around the country to be more locally focused. Plenty of criticism is thrown at the regionals (a lost cause if I’ve ever seen one) for violating the public spirit of their founding. “[H]e is very interested in seeing regional theaters invest in more work that is designed specifically for their own community,” Arena Stage’s blogger summarizes, “rather than passing around the latest Broadway hit. He wants to see regional companies generating work that speaks directly to their own communities…work that shares and reflects the unique values of its particular audience.”

All fair and good, but the really interesting parts don’t get quite as much attention. I think I’ve already made my dubiousness at the possibility that the regional theaters could really step up into this role patently clear, and if Landesman thinks there are too many arts organizations competing for limited dollars, I know exactly where there’s fat to trim. The issue was only obliquely addressed:

As Kirk Lynn from the Rude Mechanicals pointed out in the question period, a $3k grant to an organization of his size has real impact on the work they can generate and how many audience members they can reach with it. The $25k grant to a $4 mil organization has less relative impact. He wonders: Is this weeding out of the overabundance of the theater community going to concentrate more resources into the hands of already large institutions? And what will that mean for the companies whose work isn’t compatible with the structures of large institutions?

Obviously, my sympathies lie with smaller organizations. Yes, I know a lot of people were pleased that Landesman also expressed outrage that professional theater artists in the US don’t make enough to support themselves. But that said, Landesman seems to view the problem through a business lens: concentrating resources in a few larger institutions at the expense of diversity is a recipe for success in the same way Wal-Mart is. The proper place for granting and development institutions in the current moment is to help sustain diversity and risk-taking. The reality is that regional theaters don’t get enough money from public funds that people like Landesman should care. The heavy-lifting is being done by smaller organizations, and that’s why Lynn’s comment is dead-on: the benefit of a small grant to an org like the Rude Mechs is almost always a better investment, in my book, than throwing spare change at legacy institutions that live off the largesse of wealthy patrons.

Republican Realpolitik: And just on a side-note, yesterday I also argued that the Republican opposition to arts funding was purely a matter of bias, not economics. That’s why Sarah Smarsh’s editorial snark today, reporting in the Huffington Post on now-Governor Sam Brownback’s (oh how the senate will miss you, sir!) proposal to make Kansas the first state in the nation without an arts commission, was dead on:

“Happy New Year, Art Fags!”

Personally, I think he’s shooting himself in the foot. Without arts, who’s going to help educate his Snowflake Babies to make those “spontaneous” and suspiciously large-scale art projects for his idiotic presentations?

Popularity: 5% [?]

In October of 2011, Pig Iron Theatre Company will open the doors of the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training, a two-year program in physical and ensemble-devised theatre for emerging theatre artists, based in their hometown of Philadelphia.  This bold new venture will bring together a diverse mixture of performance-makers who will train their bodies and imaginations, develop their artistic vision, and meet friends and collaborators from across the country and the globe.

The core of APT will be inquiry: inquiry into movement and into what moves us. It will be a meeting place for daring, passionate performers and directors to meet, train, devise and form long-lasting collaborations. The journey of each student will be a journey both inward and outward, searching for his or her own creative motor while simultaneously responding to the world around us – its rhythms, characters, and contradictions.

Applications are being accepted through April 15. Places in APT’s inaugural class will be filled with qualified applicants (as determined by the admissions committee) on a rolling basis up until the deadline. To apply please consult the application instructions and requirements, available as a PDF here.  Send all questions to admissions@pigiron.org. Once the full application has been received, you will be notified regarding the committee’s decision within 6 weeks.

For more information, make sure to visit www.pigironschool.org.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Josephine's Echopraxia, "stifle," part of the Seattle edition of The A.W.A.R.D. Show! L-R Rosa Vissers, Marissa Rae Niederhauser, Meredith Horiuchi, Meredith Sallee, Allie Hankin. Photo by Ryan K. Adams

Republicans Don’t Care About Saving Money–They Just Hate Us: One of the big things that’s got the arts & culture world a-twitter is the recent news that some evil Republican party satraps, in a dark conference room somewhere, billowing with the smoke of illegally imported Cuban cigars made of actual Cubans, have concocted a wicked plan to balance the federal budget by eliminating the NEA, NEH, public broadcasting subsidies, and a host of other things that liberals everywhere love. This has predictably led to plenty of hand-wringing amongst arts supporters, who proceeded to try to defend federal arts dollars (no easy task given creatives’ infamously poor math skills). LA’s Culture Monster piped in with the rather extreme claim that the $1.6 billion in total annual federal arts and culture dollars feeds $30 billion back into federal, state, and local tax coffers (I have no idea where they get their figures, but if the arts actually gave you a 1,800 percent ROI, we’d all be rich).

Now, far be it from me to ever to suggest arts and culture funding is a bad investment (actually, I do have a problem with the idea that it’s an “investment” at all, but that’s a different story), but no matter how you try to justify the investment, it won’t work for the Republicans because they don’t care. This has nothing to do with anything other than partisan hatred; no matter how good your math, you won’t win. They just happen to hate us. We’re “elitists” and they want to take us down. There’s a fantastic essay in the current issue of n+1 magazine on just this topic. And how much is the Republican “plan” nothing but partisan b.s.? Well, amongst other things, it calls for eliminating subsidies for organic farming, but not non-organic farming despite record cash revenues. So don’t even bother, people, and don’t worry about brushing your math skills–this isn’t about budgets or economics, this is just the latest front in the culture war, from the people who really like waging it.

Tragedienne: Horrible news coming out of Russia. Among the victims of the suicide bombing of Domodedovo Airport in Moscow was Ukrainian playwright Anna Mashutina, who wrote under the name Anna Yablonskaya. Unfortunately, I”m unfamiliar with Yabloskaya’s work, but remembrances have poured in from all over, from John Freedman at The Moscow Times to The New York Times to the Guardian in the UK, where Natalia Antonova described Yablonskaya’s work as “about family life, love and sex. Never the type to try to shock her audience, her writing was very subtle, feminist but not overtly political.” Yablonskaya’s most regarded play Pagans is scheduled for a reading at the Royal Court in London on April 7, 2011, as part of their international playwrights season.

Dance Critic Critique: Over at the DanceUSA blog, former NY Times dance critic John Rockwell offers his thoughts on the role of the dance critic. I have to admit that I’m oddly ambivalent about what he has to say. On the one hand, it’s all by-the-book true, even the parts at the expense of people like me (“Right now, a print critic is different from a blogger in that there is usually still at least one major daily newspaper per town, and hence its critic assumes a disproportionately influential role in the local community”). His sentiment that “[W]e see the critic’s role as a noble one–trying to encapsulate in resistant prose the artistic experiences we encounter, maybe helping to educate our readers and provide them a sounding board for their own opinions, advancing the standards of an art form we love,” is a perfectly noble way of putting it. It’s also J-school by-the-book unreality, which is my other hand: first of all, Rockwell’s adorably out-of-touch if he thinks most towns still have a “dance critic,” as opposed to some freelancer who occasionally gets to cover something besides the ballet, and as a blogger whose career path seems predicated on the eventual collapse of traditional publishing, I call b.s. on all the high-minded sentiment about how being an arbiter of taste (the traditional role of the critic) really adds to discourse.

The truth is, critics are a dying breed because they exist largely outside of a discourse, which is where people like me come in–people who actually believe in trying to generate discourse–and yes, I’m rather proud to not be above being an “institutional booster, especially of fledgling companies,” or serving “the dance community or particular artists.” Why shouldn’t I support artists whose work I believe in? Why shouldn’t I try to support the community?  So let’s all get over ourselves and admit that the only reason Alastair Macaulay’s job still exists is because ballet companies areabout  the only people in the dance world with money to advertise in the newspaper, which is why the Times thought it was worth it to send him around the country to see The Nutcracker ninety-billion times.

A.W.A.R.D. Show Seattle: On to supporting the community: this Thursday night, The A.W.A.R.D. Show! kicks off in Seattle at On the Boards, and anyone interested in a brief guide to Seattle dance should, ahem, feel free to read my preview. Really, the program includes most of the really interesting artists from the region, from Zoe Scofield (whose newest work premieres at Jacob’s Pillow in a few months) to Waxie Moon, Seattle’s most innovative queer performer, to Portland, Oregon’s experimental dance-movement company tEEth, to the work of choreographers I respect and have been enthused by, from Ellie Sandstrom to Olivier Wevers to Marissa Rae Niederhauser.

East of Where?: East of Borneo is a fantastic online visual art magazine out of LA, and it’s one of the most-visited sites on pretty much every computer in the Culturebot newsroom. Seriously, we love this site and you will too. So, just because, I’m linking to the latest little treasure a reader has uploaded to their site: the publisher’s note-cum-manifesto in the first issue of Little Caesar magazine from 1976. Written by Dennis Cooper before he was a darling of the downtown scene, or a resident of Europe, the note casually announces that “We’re not fifty year old patrons of the arts. We’re young punks just like you.” It’s a page of history, and worth checking out along with everything else East of Borneo presents.

Odds & Ends: If you happen to be a reader from LA–welcome!–be aware that one of New York’s finer devised theater companies, The Civilians, will be presenting a cabaret evening of songs from a work-in-progress musical commissioned by the Center Theatre Group on Feb. 5. “A Pretty Filthy Evening” will showcase songs that the company has developed through their documentary theater approach, centered on the adult entertainment industry. Mmm…porny! Here in NYC, Jordana Che Toback and Clarinda Mac Low are this season’s SPLICE over at DNA, where Jan. 27-30, their a dinosaur attacks a lighthouse is playing (tickets here). And speaking of dance, DFA’s Dance on Camera Festival is…entering its last week! Damn! Should have been on top of that a little more (emails help people). Fantastic work being showcased daily–for the line-up, see the website.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I first saw The Red Bastard (Eric Davis) a long time ago at some crazy performance art loft party in Bushwick. I was completely dumbfounded by his ten minutes of confrontational clowning. Never before had I seen a clown who was so aggressive and, well, weird. Dressed in his tight red suit with the bulbous protrusions, his face stark white with red-rimmed eyes, he looked like Satan’s unleashed Id, simultaneously amusing and terrifying his captive audience. Over the years I’ve checked in on Red Bastard’s work from time to time but this farewell show at Dixon Place demonstrated that he’s reached a whole new level.

The show started “normally” enough (for the Red Bastard) – he started in on a surreal monologue intro that quickly turned into an audience participation. In his unique blend of taunting and amusing, he activated the audience by getting them to jump up and down and eventually daring them to run around and switch seats. He did his standard bits – “something has to happen every ten seconds” and having people pull money out of his ass – but about 3/4 of the way through the show it took a turn for the decidedly intensely weird and uncomfortable. He shifted to what can only be called “sincerity” – and played that by engaging with the audience in “genuine” fashion. Making heartfelt statements of thanks and affection to individual members of the audience and eventually singling out one person – a girl named Monica – to shower with intense, stalker-y affection. “You are my favorite person in this room” he said. He then completely undermined the “sincerity” by singling out another woman in the audience and doing a similar bit.

Red Bastard played the audience like a demonic maestro, unnervingly swerving between outlandish oversized Bouffon and intense sincerity, blurring the line between real and artifice, challenging us to “feel” while at the same time risking humiliation. Then the Red Bastard reminded us of the “contract” he’d made with us in the beginning of the show – he would entertain us and when the time came we would be truthful. Then he did a whole new bit about a “Dream Bag” where he solicited the audience to shout out their dreams. At this point he identified another member of the audience, had her take out her cell phone and challenged her to call her soul-killing dayjob and quit. The final 1/4 of the show was, dare I say, Shamanic in a psychotherapeutic way, as Red Bastard continually pushed the audience’s psychological buttons “How can you realize your dreams if you can’t articulate what they are?”, alternately bonding, guiding and mocking everyone and everything. His instructions to the audience kept getting more outlandish and challenging, creating a tangible tension in the room and a genuine sense of chaos and frightening possibility. For his penultimate bit he encouraged the audience to run around the room doing whatever crazy thing they wanted – the room broke into pandemonium.

Finally, Red Bastard came onto stage and, literally, stripped off his clothing until it was just Eric Davis, standing alone on the stage naked, exhorting us to give up the fear of the things that are holding us back, our fear of life, our fear of dreams and “go out in the theater of life” and engage at our fullest possibility.

Writing it now it sounds a little cheesy – but it didn’t feel that way in the moment. It felt like Red Bastard fulfilled the primal, almost religious, ritual function of theater – to bring people together, to enter into “sacred” (or at least non-normal) space and be transformed. He led us down this crazy, twisting, hilarious and terrifying path of self-discovery in a group setting that felt out of control and yet completely structure. It was truly visceral, harrowing and hilarious.

It was a great send-off for the Red Bastard and part of me feels like its good that he’s leaving. His outsize performance is probably bigger than downtown venues can plausibly contain. He’s ready for bigger stages and those of us who have been fortunate enough to experience his work in intimate settings can join the ranks of people who say, “Oh, I saw him way back when….” Still, it is hard to imagine what Cirque de Soleil will be able to do with Red Bastard’s unique brand of terrifying, hilarious, psychoanarchic interactive performance.

Popularity: 4% [?]

The Debate Society's "Buddy Cop 2." Photo by Ian Savage.

The Debate Society, Buddy Cop 2 (PS 122′s COIL offsite). The Debate Society is one of the companies I’ve been hearing about since I moved to New York, and I was excited to have a chance to see Buddy Cop 2–which I missed during its initial run at the Incubator–re-staged as part of PS 122′s COIL Festival.

This show made a number of critics’ best-of-2010 lists, so it feels kind of redundant to go through the entire description–I’ll try to keep it brief. The play is an amalgam of several different pop cultural tropes: the buddy cop movie, the bittersweet comedies of the 1980s, the Christmas movie, and finally the media-saturated community-dealing-with-a-tragedy story.

Set in small-town Shandon, Indiana, Buddy Cop 2 takes place in the early Eighties. The main character, who provides the voice-overs that open and close the play, is Darlene Novak (Hannah Bos), a recent divorcee who’s taken a small town police job to start her life over. Her two colleagues are the slightly awkward Terry (Paul Thureen), who’s nursing a crush on her, and Don (Michael Cyril Creighton), the overly intense cop who’s nominally in charge while the chief is on his summer vacation.

Throughout the show, nothing really happens to the three main characters, who mostly play racquetball (the police station is temporarily housed in the community center due to flood damage), josh one another, and accept Christmas gifts of baked cookies that come in from citizens every so often. The tragedy of the show unfolds essentially as a back story: Skyler (Monique Vukovic) is a local child tragically dying of cancer. In an effort to express their support, the entire community has decided to celebrate Christmas in August, since Skyler loves Christmas. Her story captures the hearts of America,with the governor flying in so his daughter can perform a rollerskating tribute, and generally inviting all the self-absorbed media pageantry amid the town’s best intentions. But all this is in the background as Terry flirts awkwardly with Darlene, Don grouses about being shut out of the governor’s security detail (the highest profile task to fall to them in ages), and they try to figure out what to do with all the cookies that keep rolling in.

But that’s the trick to TDS’s production, which is cleverly and understatedly brilliant: much like Laura Jellinek’s stunningly detailed set (with the incredibly rendered police office downstage and the racquetball court upstage, separately by a hallway that doubles as the playing space for off-set action), Buddy Cop 2 makes its point through the accumulation of detail. What emerges during the roughly 90-minute show is a tenderly rendered portrait of deeply human and humane people. And the ending, which in less adept hands could have been shockingly over-the-top, instead plays as a touching moment of decent people being decent.

Radiohole, Whatever, Heaven Allows (PS 122′s COIL offsite). My first exposure to Radiohole was a couple years ago when they were touring Fluke, and I fell in love in immediately. Words like “smart,” “irreverent,” and “brilliant” are thrown around so much that they’re basically meaningless, but experiencing a Radiohole show is a true eye-opener: if The Debate Society are stylists, Radiohole are anarchists. If TDS is playing with pastiche, Radiohole is bricolage, their chaotic shows expressions of T.S. Eliot’s prophetic fragments, shoring up the ruins of the postmodern, late-capitalist American psyche. They’re not plays, they’re experiences, delivered with punk rock intensity and, for all their avant-garde pedigree, nary a hint of pretension.

If I could find a fault with Whatever, Heaven Allows, it’s that it struck me as almost too accessible compared to Fluke. In the beginning, Eric Dyer’s opening monologue (which changes over time, I guess: I heard that the obligatory “fire exit” notices were worked in at PS 122, as part of an apocalyptic narrative) recounts him seeing an ad on television with people falling (up, if I recall correctly), which caused him to fall down, literally off the couch in a weird moment of ecstasy (or, given Dyer’s personality, possible hysterical laughter). The word “fall” takes on a double-meaning through Milton’s Paradise Lost, humanity’s fall from Grace intersecting through linguistic play with Dyer’s own, and his love for a certain “Young Jean” in the room with him…love and falling, life and the Bible, all twisted into one through a clever bit of wordplay.

What follows from there is a mishmash of Milton and Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, and through all the chaos onstage–the mix of video, abstract stage elements, and, yes, booziness–emerges a series of provocative questions about love, the price we pay for it, and ultimately about the body itself. Loss of social status may seem an unequal match to the loss of Grace, but if knowledge and the experience of love are the price to be paid in either case, what’s so wrong with that? Why is it that in both cases a fear of the body (either in its essence, in the one case, or the discrepancy in age in the other) is supposed to constrain our connect to another? And why the hell does everyone else–whether it’s God or the folk down at the country club–get a say in it?

Reading other reviews, it’s obvious that some people just don’t get what Radiohole is doing. It’s as though their frankly earnest approach to asking questions and engaging their audiences is seen as déclassé, which, needless to say, is an extremely pretentious (and in this case, ironic) way of evaluating them. These guys aren’t your grad school avant-garde–they were smart enough (which is patently evident), but they dropped out to actually do something with their lives. (That’s metaphorically speaking; for all I know, they all have MFAs.) The company seems to exist to refute the idea that the avant-garde is the expensive French restaurant of the theater world, something to pay to go to feel uncomfortable, to struggle with a language you don’t understand, and to pretend you’re classy because because the staff treats you like crap.

Radiohole is the punk rock of avant-garde theater–they’re hard, fast, smart, and fun, experimental theater for the proletariat. Buy a ticket to their show, and they’ll even get you a beer just to make you feel at home. I preferred Fluke, but Whatever, Heaven Allows was no disappointment, and it’s inspiring that this crew is around making work the way they do.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Starting this Friday, Jan. 28, Austin, Texas’s Breaking String Theatre hosts their New Russian Drama Festival, which–by the look of it–should be a pretty fantastic, if short (it only goes through the thirty-first) series of events.

Breaking String is a professional theatre company in Austin with a threefold mission: “We strive to create excellent productions of Russian traditional and avant-garde plays; to provide artists with a creative, respectful and professional environment in which to work; and to be a thread in the rope linking Russian and American theater communities.” While the festival features readings of new plays by leading Russian dramatists Maksym Kurochkin and Olga Mukhina, the centerpiece of the festival is Breaking String’s production of Mukhina’s Flying (which plays through Feb. 19; tickets ~$25).

Flying is a documentary play Mukhina has constructed based on interviews with 15 thirty-somethings, Russia’s “Golden Youth.” The product of the post-post-Soviet world, they lived charmed, hedonistic lives in media and culture industries, a reality Mukhina punctures powerfully, exposing the soullessness and moral bankruptcy of contemporary Russian society under Putin and his protege Medvedev, a society far more tolerant of the rapacious pursuit of wealth and self-gratification than political dissent.

The show is a co-presentation of Breaking String, the amazing folks at the Rude Mechanicals, our buddies at the Fusebox Festival, and the Center for Internation Theatre Development, and translated by John Freedman, a wonderful American theatre critic who’s been covering Russian theatre for The Moscow Times since 1992. A concurrent event by nth Word magazine, which has been doing some incredible cross-fertilization work in the performing arts, will be a Facebook based presentation of Mukhina’s play.

Popularity: 3% [?]