It’s almost August and with performance in New York about as interesting in hearing yet another comment on the miserable weather, today we look across the Atlantic at an interesting piece that’s up for one night only, August 6, at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre: THEATREclub STOLE Your CLOCK RADIO What the FUCK You Gonna Do About It?

THEATREclub is a young company that, along with like-minded artists such as ThisIsPopBaby, promises to help revitalize contemporary Irish theater, proving the Emerald Isle has more to offer than just retreads of text-heavy theater classics and Gavin Quinn’s Pan Pan. THEATREclub has produced about a half-dozen shows (depending on how you look at it) since 2009, where they made their Dublin Fringe debut. The qualification comes from the fact that THEATREclub have served as much as an incubator as a producing collective, by sponsoring a near annual festival of new works called The Theatre Machine Turns You On at Project Arts Center (read about it in Irish Theatre Magazine).

THEATREclub STOLE Your CLOCK RADIO was the company’s own submission to the first volume of that series, in December 2009, and it toured Ireland in early summer of 2010. Chaotic and churlish, it was a response to the ongoing Irish economic implosion, which transformed what was once the wet dream of American capitalists into the sick-man of Europe, bar Greece. Anyway, the company are bringing it back for a one-night-only performance and party on August 6.

Popularity: 9% [?]

You might have caught the review of The Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun on Culturebot earlier this year (if not, here it is). The piece examines that wavering line between collective and cult through the lens of the Stella Adler Company and experimental theater of the sixties. At this year’s Prague Quadrennial an experiment began anew—this time with Hungarian art group Krétakör and some inspiration from the Fibonacci sequence.

Two women have written a manifesto. They don’t want the “Rudé Právo” building–the gridded, fake-wood-paneled, crumbling site of the former Czech communist propaganda newspaper–to be torn down. It’s not that they don’t understand the pangs of Soviet history. It’s that they’ve developed an emotional attachment to the place. They’ve been living there for the past two weeks.

The women have been participating in a large-scale performing arts experiment, coordinated by Krétakör and run by an 18-year-old Hungarian boy named Balazs. They are part of a group of 12 young people selected from all over the globe to live amongst the ruins of soviet grandeur.

Balazs’ project stems from a sociological theory the artists refer to as “jp.co.de.” It claims to be the sequence by which all communities come into being. “The point is that a community of at least twelve people create a state where the unity of the individuals brings forth a symbolic new person that is the divine manifestation of the community itself,” writes Miklós Hadas, a Hungarian professor and co-founder of the project. “The ultimate goal of the game is to have the internal power relations within the group conform to the Phi Code and so a dynamic/harmonious state of equilibrium based on organic solidarity be reached. This is hierophany–the manifestation of the divine.” Hadas has apparently led similar jp.co.de games all over the world. He could probably get his own reality show.

Speaking of which: yes, the group was filmed, and yes, they were given group tasks. What ensued, however, was not the usual big-brother. The participants were allowed to leave the building: they were allowed not to participate in the tasks assigned to them—and ultimately, they were required to develop their own rules.

I know about the girls’ manifesto because they told it to me. The final product of the community experiment was its presentation to the Prague Quadrennial. This was not some simple tour: it was a two-hour long multi-part event.

People movers at Rude Pravo Building

It starts with people movers. Not the kind in Disneyland with safety-bars, but constantly moving elevators with no doors.Pravo was once the headquarters of the Soviet Czech newspaper: it is a massive series of offices. In order to get to the proper floor, you have to take a quick leap onto a moving platform and hold on tight. No doubt the boxes moved many dutiful workers back in their day, racing between floors of the bustling propaganda center, whisking along the smell of sweat and pickled must.

Getting off on the sixth floor, you find yourself in a grand wood-paneled reception lobby. Surrounding you on all sides a photo exhibition: stunning depictions of middle-class families in tortuous situations, gorgeously lit. The intro explains its exploration of abuse of the psychological nature, the kind that doesn’t leave physical scars. There is free popcorn and juice.

Photo exhibit in Rude Pravo building

This is an effective lead-in to part two. It’s a movie hall, with more fake-wood paneling and green carpeting. Here you see a film, slightly disturbing. It sketches the emotional struggles of an 18-year-old Hungarian boy, haunted by his mother’s psychological issues, wandering alone in a an abandoned building, confronted by pornographic acts and psychological torture. It interviews Hungarian citizens affected by the country’s dire economic straits. It feels long and dark.

It’s followed by a lecture by Hadas, a professor of Sociology. This transition is a bit rough: his English has a unique, halting, cadence, and he discusses everything from religion to math to sociology in an attempt to clarify the theory behind the experiment. The only part that really sinks in is the end, when he steps away from the podium and confesses that the boy in the film is a student of his, and that this entire project is a kind of attempt by this professor/father figure to lead him through the modern-day darkness. The boy is Balazs.

Up again, and back to the people movers. This time you have to leap off at the 1st floor and take the stairs to the basement, where the real grandeur lies. High ceilings, low crumbling floors—where, no doubt, massive machines once sat — and a seemingly endless series of hidden spaces. But your job is not to explore: it is to sit on a mattress and watch yet another film.

printing press floor of Rude Pravo building-- workshop and living quarters for jp.co.de participants

This is the film of the 12 young guinea pigs. You’re introduced to them one by one, students and young professionals from Latvia, Austria, South America. You see a series of their challenges—finding someone on the streets of Prague to join them in the experiment, trying to create an ending to the film you just saw. One theater student from Vienna spends some time alone locked in a dark basement. In the end, the participants depose Balazs, their task-master, and spend the rest of the time creating the presentation you’re witnessing now.

And then there they are. Ladies with manifestos, boys who have turned their bedroom into an exploration of the question “What is your point of no return?” All the bedrooms have been turned into installations, and the kitchen is covered in plaguing questions like “What is the line between fiction and reality?”—the kind of thing you wonder about if you’re enveloped by an artistic project.

Printing press floor of Rude Pravo building-- living quarters and graffiti walls

There’s just one more part of the film (there’s more film? Oh yes). In it, Balazs wakes to find all has been a dream: the project, the psychological torture, and he’s just your usual teenager who grunts at his Dad at the breakfast table. So the whole experiment was meant to be part of his filmic journey– and at this point, it’s impossible to tell where the fictional Balazs begins and the real Hungarian boy who’s hanging out next to you ends. Yeah, he’s right over their with the project participants. It’s a dream? Really? When kids wrote home to their moms, “Hey, don’t worry about me, I’m going to go live in some unknown place in Prague for some unknown reason for two weeks”? The entire event is Part One of what Krétakör calls its Trilogy Crisis. The second part of the trilogy will take place at Munich Opera Festival, and the third part The Priestess in Trafo House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest, both later this year.

There’s a lot left to digest. Even the participants themselves aren’t quite sure what effect the performance has had on them, whether they’ll be returning to their lives somewhat changed or not. You see that recruit number 12 dropped out halfway through the project to go bike to Berlin (“I [felt like I was] totally manipulated after second day. I still don’t know what this experiment is about” he writes in his goodbye note). The project participants are huggy-chummy with each other: they will continue to post on the project blog about how much they miss each other. Ultimately, it feels like you’ve just witnessed a teenagers’ highly intellectualized and grandly orchestrated attempt to make friends.

Farewell note from Participant #12

What jp.co.de does is give a spectacular framework to psychological misfiring. The kind of grievances that seem petty to anyone who’s fighting real starvation or torture, the kind of social ineptitude that feels both ubiquitous and unforgivable. In the end, if any kind of community has been formed, it’s due less to the rules of the code and more to their commitment to work through the weirdness and do something significant. Which is the kind of mentality that sometimes produces great art, and sometimes produces frightening cults.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The New Stage of the Czech National Theatre is green. It is leather green, worn carpet green and veiny stone green. I was at the New Stage as a visitor to the Prague Quadrennial, watching Jakub Hejna christen a new documentary about Josef Svoboda, his grandfather, from my green chair in this massive Soviet space. The New Stage is Svoboda’s stage, and like the stage itself, Svoboda’s influence is grand but fraying at the edges.

Historically, the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) has been a unique event in the world of theater. Countries from all over the world would set up pavilions in Prague showcasing the spirit and methodology of their stage design. It began largely as a result of Svoboda’s work. In 1967, when the PQ began, he was redefining what it means to visually realize the landscape of a play onstage. Movement and projection played a key role in many of his designs, but he also developed new lights and materials to serve the text and his vision. A member of the Communist Party, he was allowed to travel outside of the Soviet Union, working with theaters all over Europe and, indirectly, serving as proof of Soviet cultural might. So profound was his effect on the field that “If Svoboda had not existed we would have to invent him,” insists an Italian cultural worker in Hejna’s documentary, “Theatre Svoboda.”

The Danish Pavilion at the National Gallery in Prague, PQ 2011

Svoboda is also credited with perpetuating the modern use of the term “scenography,” a word commonly used outside the states. In the simplest of terms, it’s the visual element onstage, a kind of fellow performer. The word is associated with a redefinition of the craft of stage design, expanded beyond mere decoration, and highly influenced by the ideas of Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia. This year’s PQ, however, has abandoned the term “scenography,” instead calling itself an exhibition of “Performance Design and Space.”

The change has been creeping in for years. In 2003 the PQ create a dynamic architectural performance space called “The Heart of PQ.” Each section of the space’s layered platforms showcased events designed to attack a particular sense: sight, smell, touch. Workshop lectures took place on one level as butoh dancers slowly waggled past below. The student design competition required the use of a site-specific location—students submitted models for staging Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in tennis courts, abandoned buildings, and 9/11’s ground zero rubble.

The definition of scenography expands and changes as theater is taken out-of-the-theater. In 2007, PQ began hosting site-specific performances in earnest, directing visitors to happenings and moments throughout the old town, and using the central exhibition space to create even more crossover between design and performance.

A performance by CalArts students in a small square in Prague

But that crossover pales in comparison to the level of activity in this 2011 PQ: performances along the river, in the courtyards of museums, along bridges. Performances in the PQ cafe, in the pavilions themselves, performances so everywhere and underfoot you forget that the whole world is not simply staged for your convenience. Seriously. I saw a woman on the ground with a crowd around her and my first thought was not “How did she fall?” but “I wonder which country this performance is produced by?” It wasn’t a performance. A woman had fallen.

The national pavilions for each country still stand prominently, and some of them still exhibit the stage models, drawings and photographs we understand to be the archival materials of scenography. But more and more the pavilions represent a kind of art-space ethos, an assertion of what each country regards as the most pressing issue or methodology in scenographic thinking. New Zealand created a fly-space into which they drop projection surfaces, models and performances. Iceland made a cold-white house into which a mysterious blonde would occasionally wander and have tea. Latvia created an installation of self-playing traditional instruments inside a wooden cabin behind a series of traditional models—based on the scenography of a previous Latvian show.

Self-playing instruments (and jugs) in the Latvian Pavilion, PQ 2011

Hejna‘s documentary of his grandfather’s work is not altogether glowing. We see interviews with his mistress, learn the nicknames he earned based on his egotistical personality, and hear the conditions under which he became a recognized “spy,” trading banal information in exchange for the opportunity to travel abroad. We hear about his unique level of material wealth—fancy cars, central heating, a nice house—in contrast to other struggling Czechs in his field. It hurts a little. It’s a little bit of an idol falling—especially since Hejna spends much of the film lugging around a bust of his grandfather, shoving it in people’s faces, touring it around Svoboda’s old places of prominence. But that pain is likely necessary, as the whole field is experiencing awkward growth. The lines between disciplines are blurring, and the Prague Quadrennial has embraced the fuzziness. It remains to be seen what work will be running underfoot in another four years.

Popularity: 3% [?]

For everyone who (like me) missed Steve Cuiffo‘s sold-out performance of Lenny Bruce’s famous Live at Carnegie Hall performance, which went down on its fiftieth anniversary this past February, you have a trio of new chances this July to catch Cuiffo’s dead-on recreation of the legendary comic/countercultural icon. July 9, 16, and 23, he’s performing at Le Poisson Rouge, formerly the Village Gate Theater, and one of Bruce’s old haunts. Tickets are $20 advance, $25 DOS. Also, be sure to check out Cuiffo’s New Yorker “Talk of the Town” profile from back in January.

Popularity: 13% [?]

With our ongoing partnership with the Fusebox Festival, we present Fusebox Talks Series “Chewing the Fat”: Andrew Dinwiddie & Kevin Nutt, discussing Get Mad at Sin in April at Fusebox Fest in Austin. Dinwiddie’s show will next be seen at Portland’s TBA Festival in September.

Kevin Nutt is a life-long devotee and collector of obscure, eccentric and original sacred and spiritual music from the southern United States. He hosts WFMU’s Sinner’s Crossroads, a radio show featuring “scratchy vanity 45s, pilfered field recordings, muddy off-the-radio sounds, homemade congregational tapes and vintage commercial gospel throw-downs; a little preachin’, a little salvation, a little audio tomfoolery.” The show is consistently excellent; you should download or podcast it from www.wfmu.org or via iTunes. Kevin runs the record label CaseQuarter Records, which has released new recordings and historical collections of music by Elder Utah Smith, The Spiritualaires of Hurtsboro Alabama, Isaiah Owens and the Reverend Charlie Jackson. Kevin is also the archivist for the Archive of Alabama Folk Culture, a collaborative project of the Alabama Folklife Association, the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture and the Alabama Department of Archives and History.

Andrew Dinwiddie is a performer, creator, curator and administrator. He has presented many short works of dance and theater in various New York City venues, and two full-evening pieces, The Accursed Items in 2008 and Get Mad at Sin! in 2010. He is a performer with and the administrative director of David Neumann / Advanced Beginner Group, and has performed with other terrific dance and theater makers, including Big Dance Theater, Ivy Baldwin, Karinne Keithley, Sibyl Kempson, Richard Maxwell and Chris Yon. With Jeff Larson, he curates a bi-monthly performance series called Catch, which perhaps most famously collaborated with Neal Medlyn and Brendan Kennedy to present WHY WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!!, an evening of performance discussed, for better or worse, in the first google hit for the words “Kanye” and “pork.”

You can catch the link to stream or download their chat here.

Popularity: 2% [?]