To further the promotion and contextualization of dance in the college and the dance community at large, the Department of Dance at Marymount Manhattan College organizes
an annual lecture series called Dialogues in Dance.

On November 9, Laurie Uprichard will be talking about “Contemporary Dance at Home and Abroad: Perspectives and Aesthetics in the Global Village”, focusing on the diverse professional contemporary dance landscape in Europe and its relationship with practices in the U.S.

From the press release:

Modern Dance, a homegrown American art form, has been disseminated around the world since the 1950′s by American choreographers and teachers — by the “offspring” of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, Trisha Brown etc. Establishing firm bases in Western and Eastern Europe (as well as in Asia, South America, and the Pacific), the aesthetics of Contemporary Dance have diverged from their American counterpart. Government support and the resulting funding structures have played a large part in the growth of dance in Europe in particular. This Dialogue in Dance will focus on the diverse professional contemporary dance landscape in Europe and its relationship with practices in the U.S.

Should be fascinating and no-one is more qualified to talk about this than Laurie, who just moved back to NYC!! Yay!!

Dialogues in Dance
November 9, 2011 from 5:30-7:00 pm
Great Hall @ Marymount Manhattan College
221 East 71st Street NYC

Popularity: 9% [?]

Maria Hassabi is always adventurous and exciting. Whether creating work inspired by the performance aesthetics of fashion or challenging the very meaning of dance in her collaboration with Robert Steijn, Hassabi can be expected to upend our expectations.

On Thursday through Saturday, November 3–5, The Kitchen presents SHOW, Hassabi’s new evening-length, installation-based performance. SHOW features performers Hristoula Harakas and Hassabi, sound design by composer Alex Waterman, lighting by Joe Levasseur, and a set designed by Hassabi in collaboration with visual artist Scott Lyall, who provides dramaturgy for the work along with artist Marcos Rosales.

Performances are at 8:00 P.M. with an additional performance at 10:00 P.M. on Friday evening, at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street). Tickets are $15.

I read the description of the installation/performance and still have no idea what it will be. Sounds immersive/interactive and, possibly, unsettling. We’re seeing the show on Thursday and will report back.

Popularity: 5% [?]

An animation still from "Brooklyn Babylon," by artist Danijel Zezelj

Usually doing a preview is tricky business, because–absent an interview–what you’re doing is writing about something you haven’t seen, made by artists you may or may not know much about, with the only information at your disposal the biased press release materials you’ve gotten, some only reviews and interviews, and grainy YouTube clips. But for the upcoming pair of offerings at BAM’s Next Wave Fest (which is picking up steam), a pair of my online colleagues have some great things worth checking out.

First, Phantom Limb. 69°S, which opens Wednesday (seating is limited; call the box-office), is one of the shows that has a lot of buzz, because the puppetry is, well, amazing. Seriously–check out the photos. But what’s more, Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff, the husband-and-wife team behind the company, are well-known artists who’ve left their mark on people in the past, and Rob Weinert-Kendt has a lovely post over at the Wicked Stage recounting his own past interviewing the duo.

Phantom Limb. Photo by Sarah Walker.

“My wife to this day rolls her eyes a bit when I start to go on about the magical ‘puppet people’ and that text-less globe,” he writes. (You’ll have to read the piece to understand the part about the globe.) The occasion for the post is his interview with the pair in Time Out, which you can read here.

Second, and a bit more touching, is Parabasis’s Isaac Butler on Brooklyn Babylon (tickets here), which opens next week. A collaboration between artist Daniejl Zezelj and musician Darcy James Argue, the show is a live-art-meets-video-art performance by the artist supported by Argue’s steampunk jazz-band Secret Society. Not only does it sound cool, but for Butler, who was a “directorial consultant” on the piece, it marks completing a childhood dream.

It is also the culmination of a dream I’ve had since I was in college, to be involved in a directorial capactiy on a show that performs in Next Wave. I’ve had a romantic association with the Brooklyn Academy of Music ever since I was a little kid, when my freaky grandparents gave me Philip Glass cassettes and took me to see The Hard Nut and Twyla Tharp and told me over and over again of this world in New York City. A world where these curious, unclassifiable works of performance happened. A world at that time dominated in their minds by The Kitchen and BAM. As I grew up and got into Steve Reich and Laurie Anderson and all sorts of other performing artists of that period, I realized that all of them connected at some point to BAM.

It became– privately– my brass ring. I never talked about it. In fact, this is the first time I’m disclosing it to anyone, but having a show at BAM has been my idea of what success would mean ever since I was a sophomore in college.

Anyway, both shows look visually fantastic and feature collaborations with great musicians (69°S was developed with Kronos Quartet and features live music from Skeleton Key), so check them out, and read both Rob’s and Isaac’s previews of them: when people like that have such a personal interest in the work, it’s wise to take note.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Karina Smulders and Chris Nietvelt in "Cries and Whispers." Photo by Jan Versweyveld.

I don’t entirely want to slag down the programming at BAM’s Next Wave Fest thus far, but I wasn’t just excited or interested in the shows this week, I needed them. The theater programming has had its moments, SABAB’s Speaker’s Progress a good play hampered by surtitles, and Robert Wilson’s Threepenny Opera, being little more than an exercise in style, was at least fun and cool to look at. But the dance? Ranging from inexplicable (Compagnie Thor) to predictable (Cloud Gate) to promising but a bit disappointing (Beijing Dance Theater), it left something to be desired.

But this week, the festival came out guns blazing with a pair of fantastic pieces from Belgian director Ivo van Hove and choreographer William Forsythe.

As much as I liked William Forsythe’s I don’t believe in outer space (through Oct. 29), there was a small part of me that couldn’t help but smirk at the thought, as I watched it, that it was a giant ego trip. This is a work he’s drescribed as “A look at my life without me” that takes as its leitmotif the lyrics to “I Will Survive” (hence the title, from the lines “And now you’re back/from outer space”), which the company speak throughout.

But of course, even if it is (and there are certainly more subtle interpretations), Forsythe is the sort of artist one can forgive for ego. This was my first time seeing his work onstage, and it did not disappoint.

Much of the credit goes to Dana Casperson. I don’t really know what I expected her to be like, but a short, spunky, irrepressible ball of energy that acted as well as she danced was not it. I’d read about her opening scene performance, in which she performs a dialogue (with herself) alternating between a mousy housewife with an unexpected, almost demonic, guest, but it still wowed me. And the way she moves is incredible. I mean, all of the dancers were great, but she still stood out.

David Kern, Esther Balfe, and Ander Zabala in I don’t believe in outer space (photo by Dominik Mentzos)

The movement was compelling, both fluid and harshly abbreviated all at once. Extensions never fully extended, but would shift into a turn that would twist out into a step, creating a sense of constant flux and movements that disorientingly never quite seem to finish what they’re doing. It was, in a way, vaguely reminiscent of some of the work from Ralph Lemon’s How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere last year on the same stage.

Ultimately, the piece revolves around absence. The space metaphor is apt: it’s as if the dancers, the dialogue, the set pieces (mainly small round-ish foam lumps that start out in a somewhat linear pattern and are kicked and thrown about over the course of the show) are all astronomical objects that have suddenly found themselves adrift in space, spiraling chaotically outwards once the mass they orbited disappears.

I watched, thoroughly entertained if never particularly emotionally engaged with the work. Which, yes, one might see as a negative, rendering the work little more than highbrow entertainment. But even so, it’s smart and compelling. My only slight disappointment, personally, was that it didn’t capture me quite the same way Pina Bausch’s Vollmond did last year, where I spent the two-plus hour performance enraptured. And I don’t think it’s because Bausch’s work was more emotionally captivating. Perhaps today, Forsythe’s style and approach is so ingrained in dance that it loses some of the thrill, or perhaps his approach is just more cerebral.

Ivo van Hove’s Cries and Whispers (through Oct. 29) is oddly bifurcated by a long sequence that occurs only about a third of the way through. A stage adaptation and reimagining of Ingmar Bergman’s film, the first part follows the last agonizing day in the life of a dying woman, while the second and latter part explores the unhappy, unfulfilling lives of her sisters. The reason this scene splits the piece is because it so starkly contrasts with the rest, which is laden with video-based polyvalence, industrialized score, Yves Klein-style buckets of blue paint thrown across the stage and mixed with diarrheic feces, as the story veers hallucinatorially through life and death, past and present and future.

But compared to all that business, the bifurcating scene is a study in simplicity and silence. For some twelve long minutes, three women and two men clean up the aftermath of a prolonged death and prepare for the funeral. They wash the body, launder the soiled sheets, carefully fold the laundry, shroud the corpse, and all in silence. It’s a beautiful study of quotidian domesticity, stripped of the aesthetic tricks employed through the rest of the piece, recalling the beautiful sequence from Vittorio di Sica’s 1952 film Umberto D., that follows a working class woman’s morning routine. (Consequently, Bergman, I’ve learned, cited this movie as his favorite.) In short, watching it, I saw it as a beautiful cinematic trick, by which van Hove translated a filmic effect to the stage.

So I was surprised when, the day after the show, I read in Gothamist’s informative interview with van Hove that this scene was, in fact, his biggest contribution to Bergman’s original vision (I have not seen the film). But upon reflection (and I did a lot of that; I actually left the theater a little disappointed by the show and only the next day found myself deeply engaged with it), I realized that it makes perfect sense: the scene is central to the metaphorical language van Hove develops within the work. If death necessarily makes us reflect on what constitutes a “good life,” then the very concreteness of these images can be repurposed throughout when comparing the unhappiness of the sisters’ experience to the more fulfilling one of their departed sibling.

Bergman’s film was set on an estate in the late 19th Century. The dying woman, Agnes, who never married, is attended by an older maid and caregiver, Anna, and her married sisters Karin and Maria. Van Hove has translated the story into the present, and built the piece conceptually around an idea he discovered examining Bergman’s source material. There was no script drafted for the film. Rather, Bergman wrote a 40-some page prose work that the actors worked off of, which contained the nugget, largely absent from the movie, that Agnes is an artist. Van Hove makes this the focus: his Agnes (Chris Nietvelt) is a painter and video artist who continues working even as she declines.

The set (by Jan Versweyveld) is a deconstruction of Agnes’s apartment. A huge house-shaped frame, suspended above the stage, is lowered onto it at the end, creating a visual image of how the show explores small lives and intimate domestic details. As the work opens,  Agnes is sleeping on a hospital bed, maintained by modern medical equipment, with one of her video cameras trained on her with a live feed to a projection upstage, offering a detailed view of her anguished sleep. As her sisters drowse and Anna (Karina Smulders), re-envisioned as a younger nurse (and possibly Sapphic love interest) does yoga downstage, Agnes wakes, rises, and relieves herself in a medical waste bucket before collapsing in anguish.

In quick succession we see her go through her last agonizing hours and die. The bulk of show comes after the silent interregnum, as we follow Karin (Janni Goslinga) and Maria (Halina Reijn) through their unhappy lives. Maria is seemingly immature, unhappily married and carrying on an affair with Agnes’s doctor. In one scene, child-like, she throws herself at Karin as though seeking support and sisterly love, only to rebuffed by her emotionally closed-off sister. Karin, for her part, is unhappily married to a cold and rather ass-hole-y guy. She’s shut down as a matter of mental and emotional protection–Maria’s loving embraces almost seem to cause her physical pain, while physical pain (in one horrendous moment, she appears to all but circumcise herself with broken glass, blood running freely down the insides of her legs) serves as a release for her.

Much of piece is hallucinatory and dream-like, easing smoothly into a phantasmagoria in which both sisters encounter and draw their boundaries with Agnes’s ghostly presence. And the piece ends, house having descended on the setting, with a monologue from the now dead Agnes. Agnes, in her own telling, never really “lived” like her sisters did, because she gave herself over to her art. But her sisters’ lives bear painful resemblance to a prolonged version of her own death, asking provocative questions over how to define a life lived fully.

Popularity: 2% [?]

This story has yet to gain much traction in the English language press, aside from a write up in the Guardian (see here for an English language report from French national radio), but right now Paris is playing host to ongoing tête-à-tête between far-right religious fundamentalists and legendary Italian theater director Romeo Castellucci. Since October 20, Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville has presented Castellucci’s latest work, Sul concetto di volto nel figlio di Dio (On the Concept of the Face of God). The show has been touring for a while now, and has already played both Avignon and the Barbican in London this year. The work focuses on a man caring for his dying father, and most commentators have obsessed on the father’s incontinence, which permeates the work (quite literally, the show smells like shit), leaving the son to clean up a shit-smeared floor in front of a projection of a painting of Christ with a inscrutable look on his face.

This use of Christian imagery has enraged far-right religious groups, including members of L’Action Francaise and French Renewal, who, having failed to halt the production via legal injunction on anti-religious discrimination grounds on October 18, proceeded to disrupt the opening night performance. As le Monde‘s theater blog noted in a post from October 21 (translation mine with some help from Google):

A group of young Christian fundamentalists hostile to the show launched stink bombs [in the lobby] and tried to block the entrance to the theater with shouting and smoke. The police were at the entrance, filtering each person who entered the theater, and the curtain was delayed by 45 minutes.

At 9:15, the strangely moving scene between father and son finally began, and the smell of excrement came to cover the stink bombs. But after fifteen minutes, a half-dozen young activists broke off the stands, rushing on stage to interrupt the show. “Enough Christianophobia!” proclaimed their banner.

But what began as a protest has since turned into a full on struggle for artistic expression, as the groups have sought, night after night, to prevent audiences entering the theater and to disrupt the performances. The beleaguered theater is planning legal action against the groups to seek damages, and, in classic French fashion, has published an open letter defending freedom of expression signed by numerous intellectuals (see below for the English version, here for the French and list of signatories), which states, in part:

That these violent individuals and organized groups claim themselves from the Christian faith is their business, that they obey to religious and political movements requires investigation. For us, in any case, these behaviours are clear manifestations of fanaticism, that enemy of enlightenment and freedom against which, in glorious times, France has so successfully fought. Theatre has also very often had a decisive part in these struggles.

But the last performances (the run ends on October 30) promise to be similarly acrimonious. Castellucci himself, in an ironic twist, has issued a statement that, referencing Christ’s own words, reads in part: “I forgive them for they know not what they do … I forgive them because they are ignorant and their ignorance is much more arrogant and damaging because it involves faith.” (see here for the French; translation via the Guardian.)

Members of the same or associated groups gained some notoriety earlier this year when they assailed for the upteenth million time Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a copy of which was destroyed by four men following mass protests initiated by Civitas, a conservative Catholic organization, and supported by members of the main French neo-fascist party the National Front.

The irony in both cases is that the art under assault, while not traditionally religious by any means, is not expressly anti-religious, and in fact has spiritual and religious dimensions. As Lane Czaplinski, the artistic director of Seattle’s On the Boards, who has previously presented Castellucci’s work, noted via email: “Not that the protesters in France have any real clue–they’re clearly morons–but Romeo is one of the few artists I know of whose work could be seen to have implications on the divine. Whereas many live performances have seemingly little to do with life as we know it, Romeo’s spectacles cut to the bone and address subjects and states of being with a profundity that could be compared to how religion deals with a similar scope. In a way, the protests only attest to his rare ability.”

Update: According to an article on the website of RFI, French national radio, 20 of the protesters were arrested at the theater last night.

Update 2: Le Monde, the French equivalent of the Times or the Guardian, has an article on the group behind the attacks, “Renouveau français” (RF), or “French Renewal,” roughly, in English. The group behind the assault on Serrano’s work in April, the RF also has a history of anti-gay activism, with actions “against homosexual manifestations, ‘kiss-in’ (kissing in public) and Gay Pride, which they call an ‘anthropological aberration.’ Some of its activists have also been implicated in a racist attack in the 2nd Arrondissement of Paris, in early 2011.” The RF has received vocal support from the likes of Bruno Gollnisch, a National Front politician and convicted Holocaust denier.

Likewise, the group has been supported by and associated with a schismatic ultra-conservative priest, Xavier Beauvais, of Paris’s Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. “Father Beauvais is not a moderate,” according to le Monde. “It was reported that in May 2009, during a memorial service in his church of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, that he appealed to the figure of the leader of the Belgian far-right, Leon Degrelle, who sided with the Nazis during World War II. In this sermon, addressed to an audience of right-wing radical militants, against the backdrop of stylized Celtic cross above the altar, Father Beauvais did not hesitate to call [Degrelle] a ‘martyr.’”

Further:

Xavier Beauvais is a figure of the Civitas Institute, which brings together Catholic traditionalists and fundamentalists close to the extreme right, and who presents itself as “a movement whose goal is the restoration of the social kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The RF willingly plays the role of “shock group” for the Civitas Institute, which it joined in the demonstrations, taking on the most extreme actions and not disdaining violence. The Civitas Institute has called for a national demonstration in Paris, Saturday, Oct. 29, against the “Christianophobia”.

This event should bring the whole Nationalist Catholic family. RF of course will be present, along with the rest of the French anti-Semitic and Pétainist groups. After the play of Romeo Castellucci, the movement has another show in in its sights in Paris: Golgota Picnic by Rodrigo Garcia, on view from December 8 at the Theatre du Rond-Point.

Update 3 (Sat., Oct. 29): The protests against Castellucci’s play have reached an apex (hopefully) today. Following a rally of approximately 2,000 far-right activists in Paris today, some 300 people march on the Théâtre de la Ville, among them the schismatic priest Xavier Beauvais of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, a church that has literally been occupied illegally by ultra-conservatives for three decades, and Alexandre Gabriac, a former organizer for the neo-fascist National Front (FN) party who was booted after photos of him emerged making Nazi salutes. Representatives of a conservative Islamist group, Forsane Alizza, who lent there support. (Via le Monde)
Open letter from the Théâtre de la Ville:

Since 20 October, date of the Paris opening of “On the concept of the face of the son of God”, by Romeo Castellucci, the performances have been critically affected.

An organized group of individuals characterized as Christian fundamentalists, partly claiming to be members of Action Française, have attempted to prevent access to Théâtre de la Ville by blocking the doors, assaulting and threatening the audience, by pouring motor oil, using tear gas and stink balls, while their accomplices having bought tickets, interrupted the performance by occupying the stage and by deploying a streamer bearing the words: “No more Christianophobia”.

They had previously sought by way of justice the banning of the show, a request which was denied on October 18, 2011.

The police must therefore intervene each day at the entrance of the theatre, and we have been compelled on two occasions to summon them indoors to clear those who occupied the stage, the whole thing being handled smoothly, our main concern being to avoid clashes between the invaders and the audience outraged by such actions.

The theatre staff has been deeply committed and effective in these difficult circumstances, and despite the many incidents and interruptions resulting in delays, the performances, so far, have occurred.

That these violent individuals and organized groups claim themselves from the Christian faith is their business, that they obey to religious and political movements requires investigation. For us, in any case, these behaviours are clear manifestations of fanaticism, that enemy of enlightenment and freedom against which, in glorious times, France has so successfully fought. Theatre has also very often had a decisive part in these struggles.

Things cannot remain as they are. Such acts are very serious, and are taking a new, clearly fascistic turn. These groups of individuals also rush to automatically call blasphemous, works which are not directed against believers, or against Christianity. Romeo Castellucci’s intentions as an artist are clearly stated in the house program handed out to the audience.

We do not therefore intend to give in to these heinous threats, and this show will be performed until the end of its season on October 30. We invite the audience to attend, hopefully unhindered.

It is interesting to remark that the work has been presented without any problem in Germany, in Belgium, in Norway, the Netherlands, in Greece, in Switzerland, in Poland and in Italy, and that it is in France that manifestations of intolerance take place.

We are therefore creating a Support Committee open to all people of good will – and this expression is here welcome – to defend – even beyond the work of Romeo Castellucci in Théâtre de la Ville – freedom of expression, freedom of the artists and freedom of thought, against this revival of fanaticism….

Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and Théâtre de la Ville
October 24, 2011

Popularity: 34% [?]

Lyndsey Karr. Photo by Ian Douglas.

Beijing Dance Theater, Haze (BAM Next Wave Fest). Due to a scheduling conflict, I didn’t get a chance to see Wang Yuanyuan’s choreography until closing night on Saturday, and ultimately, it was a mixed bag that left me ambivalent in a somewhat similar fashion to Cloud Gate the week before. While BDT‘s production was more contemporary in terms of the visuals, it remained wedded to the traditions of Chinese classical dance, as my guest–a Shanghai-born and Chinese trained choreographer now based in New York–pointed out. Which she found disappointing if about as expected.

The work is intensely physical and lovely, albeit in a fairly predictable fashion. The company is extremely fit and accomplished (I got a disquisition on the demands facing Chinese dancers trying to enter the academies, and all I can say is damn), but the application falls along decidedly more traditional lines. Claudia La Rocco in the Times even went so far as to compare it to the activist dance of the Thirties, and she has a point. Here, the dancers move through a fog-filled space heavy on the dark atmospherics. Their movement traces personal struggle and disorientation that’s inspired by the huge challenges facing China in the recent past: ecological destruction, earthquakes, a rocky global economy, the fluidity of their technique interrupted by frequent falls on the bouncy, foam covered stage, which made them a bit too fluid for the effect.

But not only does this leave the dance feeling more than a bit literal, it also points to the limitations of Chinese contemporary dance. And hence my ambivalence. It’s a very Western idea, I think, that informs most expectations of contemporary dance that I’m reluctant to foist on a different dance culture. At its heart, contemporary work is anti-tradition and seeks its own unique expressive vocabulary. New York-based artists tend to be more conceptual, while technique-based approaches dominate elsewhere (Europe, Israel), but there’s always a tension in the work between creating new movement paradigms and tearing them down. Deconstruction of received forms is almost a generational movement in the field. In China, this hasn’t exactly happened yet (if Wang is any indication, which admittedly she may not be, though my guest was certainly of that opinion, as well).

On the other hand, compared to Cloud Gate, which revelled in East Asian kitsch for its materials, BDT was at least adventurous in terms of concept and content, which I imagine is an important step. Seeing dance as a vehicle for examining contemporary realities and experience firmly places the form in the midst of a larger cultural dialogue, and the next generation of choreographers may diverge radically from it in terms of form, even as they take advantage of the space companies like BDT carved out for them to work.

Lyndsey Karr, The One (Chocolate Factory). I had little idea what to expect from Karr’s piece going in, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I got. Raw, visceral, and remarkably engaging, I left thinking, “This is the kind of piece that makes kids go into live art (for better or for worse).” There was nudity, satires of female character tropes, things were removed from vaginas, cake was served. It was a big mess of ideas and images that did mostly came together in the end.

Entering the main performance space at the Chocolate Factory for the first act of the show, you found the space transformed into a big white room. The seating, two long single rows of seats facing one another, raked across the space in a diagonal line, forming an aisle in the center. At one end, a large satiny white bag sat with tulle poofing out the top and strings extending to the ceiling as though it were a puppet. Along the walls hung white plaster body casts of women, recalling George Segal’s sculptures. The piece opens slowly as Karr and collaborator Gina Kohler, nude at the outset, begin slow movement sequences behind the audience rows, so that the sightlines were obscured. Eventually the two made it to one end of the aisle, and then the performance really kicked off.

A tortured study of motherhood and love of various sorts, the centerpiece of the first act was a long, tortured crawl down the aisle, which was wonderfully expressive and a study in contrasts. Karr is a decidely skinny woman, while Kohler is more voluptuous, and the movement expressed different things on their respective bodies. As they finished this sequence, the bag rose on its wires, spilling out a collection of white-washed baby-dolls from which the duo retrieved two large rocks painted blood red. To these, the two tied golden cords and then slowly made their way back down the aisle again, unspooling the cord from their vaginas so that it stretched out like umbillical cords tying them to the burdensome, bloody rocks.

Not too much to mistake in that image.

The other acts offered different takes on female experience. Act 2, set in the basement as a sort of cabaret, with seating at small tables, turned on the wife/whore conceit. It begins with the pair appearing in matching platinum blonde wigs and nude-toned body stockings that served to obscure their individuality and turn them into objects. Needless to say, they were also in high heels and performed a sort of burlesque routine. Then made nude again, the pair donned skimpy aprons a la French maid constumes and proceeded to harriedly try to heat and serve each audience member a piece of pie.

The final image occurred in the main hallway as the audience was exiting. Inside the front the doors, the pair stood, naked, sort of bopping or dancing in place to the music while coiling and uncoiling the golden cords around their fingers. It was oddly the most enigmatic and striking image in the entire show, and never progressed beyond that. I wasn’t sure what to make of it as I left, but it certainly capped the piece.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Last week, I wrote a sort of “review of the reviews” about Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at the Public Theater, and offered some thoughts of my own about Daisey’s work. However, I hadn’t actually seen the show, and in the interests of fairness, I went this Sunday to catch the matinee performance. Here are some further thoughts.

First, I have to make clear: most of the reviews tended to split the difference between Daisey’s performance (which they found amazing) and the content of the piece (which they found problematic). I seconded that based on my prior experience of his work, but honestly, I didn’t go far enough. Daisey is a remarkably charismatic performer. Whatever else, there are worse ways to spend two hours and $85 a ticket than in his company. He’s energetic, perceptive, and carefully wanders through multiple layers of performance, deftly handling subtle shifts between narrating in a sort of heightened, literary voicing, to impersonations and imitations, to his no-nonsense, telling-it-like-it-is persona. Funny, compassionate, heartfelt, and moving, there’s a reason he’s won so many plaudits.

Second, there’s an interesting problem any critic faces with Daisey: his monologues are based not on a set text but rather notes and a general outline, with him sort of improvising what’s actually said show to show. Which makes reviewing him a matter of shooting at a moving target, because he can, night to night, internalize and respond to his critiques. In Seattle, a critic accused him of grossly exaggerating the lack of media coverage of worker abuses in Shenzhen, China; at the Public, he acknowledges prior coverage but offers a more detailed critique of the news cycle and the Chinese government’s ability to turn off the tap of information, affecting the entire global system of dissemination. Critics who’ve suggested that his show minimizes what audiences could actually know about such abuses going in have prompted him (I suppose; this is the first time I’ve seen it) to attempt to deal with this fact. He says towards the end, of the worker abuses that produce our gadgets, that “We all know this already,” and talking about our general ability to nevertheless ignore it.

Mind you, I hardly think this ever-evolving approach to his show is a weakness or a dodge. Rather, it’s a strength: here’s an artist who can change and evolve and respond to the larger discourse about his work and furthermore, the things he’s talking about in the work. That’s a great thing for an artist to be able to do, because the work itself becomes a part of–rather than the subject of–a larger conversation.

Still, I left the theater largely feeling my initial point was right. To recap the show, within the performance, Daisey counterpoints two narratives: one is the story of Steve Jobs and Apple, which should be familiar to most people in the wake of his recent death and numerous obituaries. The other is the story of Daisey’s own love of and engagement with Apple’s products, his infatuation and ultimate disappointment in Steve Jobs, and Daisey’s own semi-journalistic inquiries into the manufacture of Apple products, which–along with most (just over 50 percent) other American consumer electronics–are produced in large factories in Shenzhen, China with a long history of severe worker abuses, which he went to investigate first-hand.

The story is much more tech geek than most theater critics seem to have noted. The main transformation Daisey tracks over Jobs’s career is from the initial open-source hacker ethos (he and Steve Wozniak began in 70s by building boxes to hack the long distance phone system) to the “closed” environment of contemporary Apple products. As such, he situates the narrative within the larger intellectual debate about technology, over open platforms and closed ones, and views Jobs’s reversal over the course of his career as a capitulation of his values, which dovetails with his willingness to exploit workers in abusive conditions.

I could point out that there’s a very tenuous relationship between these sorts of values, though. At no point does Daisey actually suggest that young Steve Jobs cared about workers rights or larger issues of social justice. The young techno-utopian turned ruthless closed-system businessman is one story; the abuse of human beings for profitable convenience is another, and despite strenuous efforts, they remain separate except for the broader personal disappointment Daisey expresses in Jobs. Which is unfair. Jobs may be guilty of many faults, but surely we can’t blame him for not living up to Daisey’s (or anyone else’s) false image of him.

But my bigger issue with the piece actually is also reflected in this story of techno-utopianism. Recounting his own embrace of technology (which he claims is his only hobby, in fact), Daisey tells the story of how in college in the Eighties, he did campus security on the night shift as work study, so he could play on the computer. It was during this time he first used the nascent Internet, where he would communicate via bulletin boards with like-minded people around the world, with whom he’d discuss the coming web revolution and the power of disintermediated, free-flowing information to transform the world.

He wryly jokes, “Yeah, we were very young.”

But the big, unanswered question in the piece is, how is the mission of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs any different? Or at least, why would it work this time?

Again, Daisey acknowledges that his audiences probably do–or should, and definitely could–know about the abuses at places like Shenzhen before coming to the theater. But he proposes that his truth-telling piece will become like a “mind-virus,” infecting us with a desire to change this system. But why is his piece supposed to work, to change hearts and minds, if others forms of news and communication haven’t? Isn’t he guilty of the same naïveté now as then?

In the end, I think people involved in the theater fall into two categories over this issue. There are those who, like me, essentially see this as “preaching to the choir,” or even offering audiences a false sense of accomplishment, by virtue of giving them an emotional investment in thinking about something that they likely will not do anything (or very little) about. Others heartily disagree. Rob Weinert-Kendt over at the Wicked Stage offered the following thoughts:

There’s an assumption on the part of Barker and Brown that the transaction involved in seeing a piece of politically engaged theater is something like: Liberal audience feels good about itself for seeing a show about its own complicity in the misery of the world’s less fortunate, then immediately walks out of the theater, calls cabs, and checks their iPhones. It’s a variation of the piety-ends-at-the-church-door critique, which, being a churchgoer myself, I’m familiar with from both sides. I would question this assumption on two interrelated levels: 1. That theater does nothing to change attitudes or behavior outside its walls, that it’s all literally nothing more than after-dinner entertainment for rich people, and 2. That the activity of watching a politically engaged piece of theater has zero ameliorative value in itself.

I appreciate the point, but I think Rob’s going too far in his interpretation of what I’m saying. I’m not against politically engaged theater. Not at all. But going in, I always want to ask, “Why? Why make this piece? What is it supposed to accomplish?” In Daisey’s case, I think there really is a desire to reconnect us to our means of production, to use an old Marxist configuration. He outright says he wants us to see the blood seeping out of the keyboard of our MacBook when next we boot it up. Okay. Fine. But what is his piece supposed to do about that, besides make us feel bad about it?

His hope, I’d guess, is that this will compel us to do something. Talk about it with others, write letters to Apple (he provides contact info), or even agitate for political change. But I’m skeptical that consumer action against a company can really change things. Call me an unrepentant liberal, but when I look at the world, I generally assume there’s a reason it is the way it is, and if we don’t want it to be that way, we should actually expect things like laws to be in place to prevent the things we don’t like, feel are excessive, damaging, or wrong. You don’t write letters of complaint to meatpackers to make their conditions better. It didn’t work in Upton Sinclair’s day and it doesn’t work today.

It’s easy for me to deride work that produces this emotional response function as a theater of good intentions (as Mac Wellman once called it), choir-preaching, or offering a false emotional catharsis (false because you get the emotional payoff when nothing has changed). But I don’t want to go that far because Rob and others are right that there is a value in emotional engagement–rather than purely intellectual engagement–with the world, and for the theater to be a vehicle for asking people to examine their greater emotional, social, and political realities.

Still, there’s a reason Brecht was skeptical of emotional theater, of sentiment as a means to social change. That skepticism informed his entire notion of theater and performance, which sought to deny its audiences a sense of closure or catharsis in order to expose the issues with which he was concerned for what they were: open, bleeding wounds in humanity which demand action to heal. Emotion subsides, sentiment demands closure. The very idea of catharsis seems to run counter to the idea of leaving the theater demanding change. This isn’t new stuff, it’s very, very old. I’m not denying this work a place and application (as many people seem to assume I am), I’m just saying that depending on the story, the goal, the artistic enterprise, it’s worth considering whether simply making people feel guilty enough to write a letter is a particularly meaningful thing.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I know we’re a little behind the curve on this one (there’s a post on p-club about the situation, and it was even written up on pitchfork.) but we were talking about this whole Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker vs. Beyonce scandal over the weekend and trying to figure out what the ramifications are.

If you don’t know the situation – the basics are that Beyonce made a video for the song “Countdown” in which she very liberally “borrowed” choreography from de Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst Rosas. Here’s a short side-by-side video comparison on YouTube:

I’m still researching, but from what I understand the choreographer of the Beyonce video has acknowledged that she was influenced by de Keersmaeker’s work. Anne Teresa herself has chimed in – you can read her statement on her website here, and was remarkably generous in her comments, preferring to take the high road, more or less, saying:

People asked me if I’m angry or honored. Neither. On the one hand, I am glad that Rosas danst Rosas can perhaps reach a mass audience which such a dance performance could never achieve, despite its popurality in the dance world since 1980s. And, Beyoncé is not the worst copycat, she sings and dances very well, and she has a good taste! On the other hand, there are protocols and consequences to such actions, and I can’t imagine she and her team are not aware of it.

To conclude, this event didn’t make me angry, on the contrary, it made me think a few things. Like, why does it take popular culture thirty years to recognize an experimental work of dance? A few months ago, I saw on Youtube a clip where schoolgirls in Flanders are dancing Rosas danst Rosas to the music of Like a Virgin by Madonna. And that was touching to see. But with global pop culture it is different, does this mean that thirty years is the time that it takes to recycle non-mainstream experimental performance? And, what does it say about the work of Rosas danst Rosas? In the 1980s, this was seen as a statement of girl power, based on assuming a feminine stance on sexual expression. I was often asked then if it was feminist. Now that I see Beyoncé dancing it, I find it pleasant but I don’t see any edge to it. It’s seductive in an entertaining consumerist way.

de Keersmaeker makes some important points about the gap between experimental work and pop culture, but personally I think she should take legal action. This is an egregious example of the devaluing and exploitation of contemporary performance by mainstream, commercial culture. Not unlike the AT&T ad that ripped off Christo, it is another case where corporate-funded entertainment and advertising entities create content with no fear about reprisals for the theft of intellectual property from artists. And it is theft.

There are several things at play here–first off there’s the difficult nature of copyrighting and protecting the work of time-based, body-based artists from appropriation. Music and text can be turned into recognizable commodities and object-based forms, they are easier to quantify and copyright. Time-based and body-based performances are, by their nature, ephemeral. But in this age of increased documentation through video, dance notation, etc. it should be easier to copyright performances, their design, execution and aesthetic sensibilities. As far as I know there are very few people working on issues of copyright protection and “fair use” when it comes to dance and performance. But this should be a growing field of exploration and concern. Artists – especially experimental artists – tend to position themselves in the context of larger philosophical, aesthetic and sociological conversations. In some ways performance is a time-based “site” or nexus for the intersection and juxtaposition of different ideas. It is an experiential mode of philosophical investigation, complete with dramaturgy, research and collateral conversations. To suggest that the work of choreographers and other time-based performance artists is not intellectual property as distinct as a book, article, recording or painting is simply wrong.

The Dance Heritage Foundation published an article on fair use of dance-related materials, you can download it here. There’s also an article on fair use at Dance/USA’s “From The Green Room” – you can read that here. And Michelle N. Burkhart wrote an article on the same site – Copyright Basics for Dance Works. She also wrote an article entitled “In a Post Graham World: Choreographing Dance Rights in the World of Media, Technology and Social Networking” which you can download here.

This situation also speaks to the general devaluation of the performing arts in our culture. The general public–and certainly most corporate advertising and entertainment content creators–look down on the arts. They don’t think it is difficult to make, they don’t consider it on par with movies or television, I imagine they think it is largely irrelevant and if someone is foolish enough to spend their time making high-concept art that only a few people go see, then it is not a big deal to steal it. Who will know anyway except for a few artsy-fartsy types?

Of course, I disagree–I think contemporary performance is exciting, dynamic and adventurous, it offers an alternative to the mindless, numbing, simplistic, commodified pablum that so frequently issues forth from the gaping maw of mass media. Don’t get me wrong – I watch TV and films and buy CDs and everything else. And a lot of the things I watch and listen to are well done, thoughtful and entertaining. But I appreciate that I can see live performance as a counterbalance to all the mediated and prepackaged narratives that proliferate in our society. And I appreciate that live performance–especially contemporary/experimental work–can engage with issues and ideas long before they percolate into the mainstream.

It is interesting that these days there are many creators of contemporary performance who readily and wholeheartedly embrace mass culture. Whether it is Neal Medlyn’s post-gender critique of Hannah Montana or Faye Driscoll riffing on talk shows in her recent work at DTW/NYLA or what have you, there is definitely a one-way dialogue here.  We, obviously, live in a mass media world and the ubiquity of stars, entertainment product, personalities and fashion trends makes it inevitable that artists working outside of the mainstream will reference those cultural touchstones. But what are we saying when we do that? Are we merely preaching to the converted when we critique it? Do we, in some way, de-legitimize ourselves by acknowledging how much more impact they have aesthetically and philosophically on the world at large than we do?

Some big questions that come to mind for me are:

• How do we raise the value of live art in the cultural hierarchy?
• How do we situate live art as intellectual property that can be owned, protected and licensed?
• How do we engender a more meaningful two-way dialogue between mass and art culture?

Obviously this is just the beginning of a much longer conversation. Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Oh and here’s a longer video comparing the two works:

Popularity: 13% [?]

Last week I went to see Antonio Zambujo on CUNY’s new Live @ 365 series, curated by Isabel Soffer. We don’t cover a lot of music here at Culturebot, but I loved this concert and I wanted to let people know about this great new series.

Antonio Zambujo is one of the most well-regarded performers of Portuguese Fado in the world. I’m not familiar with the form but it is really beautiful. Zambujo’s voice is stirring and passionate, I have no idea what he was singing about – I don’t speak Portuguese – but he could sing about cheese and I’d be thrilled. His ensemble of musicians is also incredible – Luis Guerreiro plays the Portuguese guitar which is like a small steel 12-string, and it just rings out with these bright, crisp tones; it is very rhythmic but Luis would occasionally cut loose with snake-y solos and little trills and frills here and there that popped up and surprised you. Ricardo Cruz, music director and stand-up double bass player, totally held the whole thing together at the bottom end, also occasionally cutting loose with runs and solos that could be moody or funky, depending on the song. And what really took the whole thing to a new place was Jon Luz on cavaquinho, a small guitar-like instrument mostly used in Brazilian music. He was just out there, making everything from kind of feedback-y tone washes to funky up-beat counter-rhythms. It was incredible.

The Elebash Recital Hall at the Graduate Center at CUNY is a tricky space but it worked really well. It was intimate but spacious and the sound was really clean, clear, well-mixed and well-balanced. I’ve known Isabel Soffer for awhile now and she has great taste and an encyclopedic knowledge of world music. The program she has put together for the new Live@365 series looks stellar and I would encourage you to check out the upcoming shows.

Here’s a video of Antonio Zambujo:

Popularity: 6% [?]

Applications are now available for the 2012-13 ICPP Certificate Program. Updated application information, now live on the ICPP website. On-campus residency dates for 2012-2013 are: July 6–22, 2012; November 15–18, 2012; and March 8–11, 2013. Applications are due February 1, 2012 for the ICPP Professional Certificate Program. Visit the ICPP website for an application and more information.

Popularity: 5% [?]