“We started doing small video screens, partly because we wanted to start cautiously,” William (Bill) Cusick was telling me, “and partly because we had no money at all. And we’ve always worked within our limitations. Kenneth’s work started really small, because he’d build it in his living room. We rehearsed for years in his living room.”

“This is the first show that wasn’t built in a living room,” Kenneth Collins offered. “Even Americana Kamikaze and Welcome to Nowhere, which have toured internationally and played to houses with three-, four-hundrd seats, were designed and built and fully rehearsed in my living room. Which was a small living room! It wasn’t a loft.”

“It was a sixteen-, eighteen-by-twelve room, and the sets were eight-foot-by-eight-foot, sitting in front of a bookshelf, next to a leather sofa and the TV,” Cusick continued. “And it wasn’t like he ripped out his living room, he lived there, it was real. And we’d all come and rehearse there for a couple years…”

“This is the first show that we’ve had a larger environment, which is our rehearsal studio, to build the work,” Collins continued. “And again we’re scraping, we’re hitting the walls, we’re up against the columns.”

Cusick: “This show is almost three-times as large. It’s twenty feet wide and twelve feet high.”

Collins: “But it’s a philosophy of being able to make the work that an audience sees onstage in the studio. And again it’s one of the ways that we approach making theater more like visual artists, perhaps. Because the work in the studio is what’s of primary importance to us. It’s the work we present to the public.”

This was the weekend before Christmas, and I was sitting–shopping bags of gifts around my feet–in the loft of a Soho cafe where Collins and Cusick, the creative directors behind the company Temporary Distortion, had agreed to meet to discuss their latest, Newyorkland, an exploration of the life and myth of the American cop, which premiered at On the Boards in Seattle a couple months ago and makes its way to New York as part of PS 122′s COIL Festival in January at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (Jan. 12-28; tickets $20/$15).

Of all the interviews I’ve done of January artists, this was easily my favorite. Not to sound trite, but the two make a great pairing. Collins, the director and designer, is angular with shorter hair and tattoos, while Cusick, the video artist, has longer hair. Both wore all black. The former can be elliptical in conversation, while the latter can speak enthusiastically about film and video and television. While one responded to a question, the other would sit quietly, occasionally looking bored, but intently listening, jumping in to add to the conversation, occasionally finishing the other’s sentences. And sometimes they seemed to forget all about me and conversed among themselves about some point on which they different perspectives, evidence, I suppose, of the creative frisson that drives the company’s work. Really, I’m not trying to be cute here, but transcribing our interview was a fascinating exercise in trying to capture just how differently these two incredibly smart, thoughtful artists described their work, even as they demonstrated a deep understanding of the other’s process.

Temporary Distortion was founded around 2002 by Collins, who met Cusick in 2004 at the Lincoln Center Theater’s directors lab. Notwithstanding his education in film, Cusick is himself a long-time theater artist. At the time, he was working as an assistant lighting designer but hoping to make the transition to directing, and parlayed his design experience into the directors lab. Shortly after meeting Collins, he caught two of Temporary Distortion’s early shows in quick succession.

“I saw his show at the Ontological, and it was easily the most unique experience I’d ever had to that point in my life in a theater,” Cusick told me. “My participation level was so far beyond anything I’d experienced, that when I watched the show, I had so much going through my mind, in so many ways, that I wanted to get that out of my head and onto the stage.”

Collins, for his part, was already working in the intensely sculptural mode that continues to define the company’s production design aesthetic, putting his actors in “claustrophobic box-like structures” influenced, as he suggested, by the artist Joseph Cornell.

“I’ve always been interested in, how do you make theater that’s more like a form of sculpture?” he explained. “How do you view the work on stage in the same way you look at sculpture in a gallery? How do create that sort of detachment with the audience and give them the time to view the work in that manner?”

The two began collaborating and today form the artistic heart of Temporary Distortion. Collins continues to develop intensely constructed spaces for his artists to perform in, separating them from one another. Cusick’s contribution comes in the form of video elements projected throughout the performance in diverse areas of the tightly constructed space. The work they create is often fragmentary, pulling together video segments that use recognizable filmic tropes, found-texts, and music that re-combine and explore that the aesthetic and content of the show’s subject.

“We’re working in a non-narrative video format, non-narrative visual format that can complement that sculptural installation,” Cusick offered, “basically creating video art to complement the performance art, and actually integrated to create a new form.”

The company’s most recent work has been in the field of deconstructing film. Welcome of Nowhere, about “road movies,” and Americana Kamikaze, about Japanese horror, were Newyorkland‘s immediate predecessors. Like those shows, Newyorkland is a complex document using a variety of sources to present the world of the police officer. But the new work may be a break from that tradition, depending on whose perspective you take.

The genesis of the piece comes from a phone call from Cusick to Collins as they were finishing Americana Kamikaze. They’d been mulling over a couple not quite satisfactory subjects for their next show, when Cusick sat down to watch The French Connection with TaraFawn Marek, the company’s costume designer. Inspired by the film, he suggested that they tackle cop pop culture for their next project. Collins had grown up in a family of police officers, so there was an added connection.

“It very quickly morphed into a project about deconstructing the profession of police-work,” Collins commented, though, “rather than deconstruction the film representations of police-work.”

“We spent about a year thinking of it as taking apart Dirty Harry, taking apart The French Connection,” Cusick continued to explain, “looking at it that way. We watched forty films, fifty films each, and then starting getting into the non-fiction literature, and the fiction begins to feel really frivolous. It begins to feel really repetitive and formulaic, and even insulting to your intelligence. How do you take apart something that simplistic? And then you begin to look at where it comes from. And the cop culture–it’s been said before that police work is the most mediated line of professional work in America.”

“We think of ourselves as very familiar with it,” Collins added, “although that familiarity is based on a fiction.”

So Newyorkland is a departure from the previous shows, which were primarily concerned with genre representations. Here, the company set out to explore the reality of police work as much as its representation. Sources were often as not non-fiction. Calling it an “assemblage,” Collins said: “Really, that’s what we’ve done in building the text and all of the content of this show, is to look at documentaries, to look at interviews, stories that I heard growing up in a family of cops. William went through–”

“The NYPD manual,” Cusick interjected. “There’s two scenes that are completely deconstructions–”

“–of found poetry in the police manual,” Collins finished.

But whereas Collins saw the work mainly as an exploration of the gap between the reality and the representation, Cusick maintained that from his perspective, and his work as the video artist, it remained similar to previous explorations of genre film, referencing dozens of different movies and TV shows.

“What starts as a film genre,” he said, “we realized is a cultural genre, a whole sector of our culture.”

Newyorkland features four live actors and more than twenty in the video segments, which offer a stark contrast to the live performance.

“It’s ironic in way, because there’s a very cold sort of formalism onstage, but in the video we allow ourselves to be very…” Collins searched for the word. “I don’t know, what’s the word? It’s almost the opposite…”

“Intensity,” said Cusick. “There’s another level of intensity in the film.”

Asked to speak more about the process of creating the disparate elements of the piece and how those relate to one another, the two talked about the challenge getting together a long, mixed segment of video and performance they call, internally, “Role Call,” in which the officers get their daily assignments. The company used the event to offer a lens on the challenges facing officers as they present themselves professionally.

“It starts with the traditional Hill Street Blues beginning, like, ‘All right item such-and-such, we got this going on, this item, this is going on, keep an eye out for that.’ And with the video, it’s a follow-shot,” Collins explained.

“It’s the most complex shot in the whole show,” Cusick continued. “An unbroken shot, one long take.”

Collins: “A dozen actors…”

“With a twelve pound camera on one arm, on a Steadicam with no vest. Usually with a Steadicam you have a vest that counterbalances it,” Cusick explained.

“We had a location we dressed as a police station, I think rather convincingly,” Collins was speaking more to Cusick than me at this point.”And we had a number in uniform, a number of officers dressed as detectives, and as Bill followed–there’s a whole choreography set up ahead of time…”

“I’d follow one guy, he’d turn off, I’d follow another guy, he’d turn off, I’d catch another, follow him, he’d turn off…” Cusick recalled. “I worked on Law & Order, and they use Steadicam on every single episode. I remember watching them do it, and it was this really brilliant camera operator who’d wear a vest, and he’d have–they’d use a film camera, so he’d have a sixty-pound camera, and he’d be running down the street, following the cops.”

“The reason it was difficult,” Collins said, turning back to me, “and why we struggled with it, was we had this video sequence which in a way was very fixed because it’s a one-shot–you can’t edit and retain the essence of what it is. And we had a text we also liked, and had an inherent rhythm to it, and no matter how much you edited the text, it had this inherent rhythm to it. And we had music that John Sullivan, our composer, composed during a rehearsal that we also liked. And the three were just missing each other for months.”

“Off by five seconds, off by ten seconds…” Cusick concluded. “The first time we did it, I could see it in its ideal state, and we didn’t get there till six months later.”

There’s an extreme level of perfectionism that goes into a Temporary Distortion show (“When we get to putting a show onstage, we’re done,” Collins told me. Added Cusick: “The only thing that’s not cued when we arrive at the theater is the house lights”), but the results are startling. Newyorkland benefited from an unexpected synergy with public events, opening opposite the crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street encampments nation-wide, in which police were caught in the middle between opposing political units, and often cast as the bad guys in the drama. The show’s deep appreciation for the reality of the police officer’s experience and the challenges facing them in their highly mediated but little understood job is another example of extremely thoughtful and boundary-pushing work going up in January. I heard from numerous people in Seattle how compelling the show is, how strangely timely and important and perspective-shifting it is right now.

It’s also worth noting for those who, like me, missed the company’s previous work, that Americana Kamikaze is available online from OntheBoards.tv; Temporary Distortion will be the first company with two shows available from the site.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Amber Gray, Libby King, Heather Christian, Mikaal Sulaiman & Brian Hastert in The TEAM's "Mission Drift." Photo by Rachel Chavkin

“When we were working on Architecting, towards the end of our time on Architecting, this was in spring 2008, Naomi Klein spoke. The Shock Doctrine had come out, and this thing she talks about of ‘disaster capitalism’ ended up being a major thing for Architecting in terms of Brett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara,” Rachel Chavkin explained. It was earlier this month, and we’d met for lunch at a “bourgie” (to use her term) cafe near NYU, where she was teaching, in order to discuss The TEAM‘s upcoming US premiere of Mission Drift, a hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, as part of PS 122′s COIL Festival (Jan. 8-29; tickets $25/$20)

“But it didn’t feel like we’d fully gotten to solve it,” she continued, “in part because Architecting was so sprawling, and quite deliberately so. But it just felt like we weren’t done with this idea. And that sort of led me to ask the company the question that Klein talks about but hadn’t fully answered for me, which is, ‘Why does American capitalism have its particular character? What defines American capitalism specifically and why did it become that way?’”

That’s a hell of subject for a play to tackle, but based on my experience catching it as a work-in-progress at the 2010 Ice Factory Festival…well, while I reserve the right to change my opinion based on the final version going up at COIL, I’ve previously described it as one of the smartest pieces of political theater I’ve seen in a while. And I’ll stand by that for now. Fun, engaging, intelligent, non-didactic, and touching in a surprisingly humane way (given the stated subject), it challenges the standard for political theater in America and is one of the shows I’m most excited to see this January.

The TEAM coalesced around Chavkin back in December 2004, mainly consisting of fellow NYU alums. The name was originally based on Chavkin’s college nickname (I did not get that story) but, following the advice of an accountant from the Field who said they’d never be able to incorporate a company named “The Team,” the company decided to make it an acronym. In fact, the first group writing assignment was to come up with what “team” stood for, and the combined result was the portentous “Theater of the Emerging American Moment.” Today, the company has nearly doubled in size, mainly with other NYU-trained artists but also including a couple designers with experience at the SITI Company, owing no doubt to Chavkin’s further training at Columbia with Anne Bogart. Chavkin serves as artistic director of the company and the director of the company’s shows, though, given the collaborative nature of the endeavor, she describes herself as an “editor,” bringing together the disparate strands developed through the generative process.

The TEAM's Rachel Chavkin and Amber Gray, with the Edinburgh Fringe Herald Angel Award they won for "Mission Drift."

Mission Drift is the sort of play that suffers in description. Essentially, it tells the story of two couples. The first is Joris and Catalina Rapelje, a fictionalized version of the couple known proverbially as the American Adam and Eve. Married in the Netherlands in 1624, the couple moved the North America the same year and ultimately settled in New Amsterdam, where they’re credited with giving birth to the first European child in the city; today they count some one million Americans as descendants. In Mission Drift, the two exist as perpetual adolescents who set out from New Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century and follow the westward expansion until 1890, when the Census declared the “end of the frontier,” with all supposedly “vacant” land in the United States settled. The two find themselves left in the city of Las Vegas, where they set out to create a new frontier through capitalist enterprise.

Joan is a native of present-day Las Vegas, consigned to working odd service sector jobs while engaging in a form of urban archaeology by preserving the ever disposed signage of the strip as a volunteer at the “Neon Boneyard,” an amateur museum experiment I was surprised to discover is real. (Sadly, apparently, others have, too; according to Chavkin, when the company visited a couple years ago it was still below the radar. Recently though she heard from a friend there that the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs had learned of it and, unintentionally echoing a line from the play, the friend told Chavkin that they “looked at the Neon Boneyard and saw dollar signs.”)

Joan’s erstwhile love-interest is a member of the Southern Paiute tribe displaced by development, forced out of his home by the city pursuing the water rights to his family’s well.

What ultimately unfolds is a drama of conflicting interests, with Catalina occupying the role of frontiersman, longing for the possibility of new discovery and in love with power of creation to cultivate the emptiness of the American desert. Her path is related to the rapacious capitalism Joris indulges, but whereas he’s in love with the accumulation of wealth, she’s is driven by a different need, and this conflict ultimately draws them apart. For Chris, the Paiute, either way, the city they’ve built as developers has displaced him (and whoever said the desert was empty, anyway?) and he rebels against the very existence of Las Vegas. Joan, a non-aboriginal native of the constructed city, finds herself displaced from her own home through the rapacious development of the Rapeljes (mirroring, of course, the real estate bubble that popped shortly after the TEAM began the project).

Oh, and Mission Drift is also a musical. Of a non-traditional sort. With performances and music by the amazing Heather Christian as Miss Atomic. Got all that?

“I think our endless process–and probably endlessly frustrating process–is one of the things that gives our work the density that I hope people associate with our plays,” Chavkin told me.

The TEAM’s work is devised through a lengthy and intense process. I asked Chavkin to describe the process of developing the final work, and for simplicity’s sake, she limited her explanation to the character of Joan, by way of example. Beginning at an early workshop at the Brick Theater in 2009, four of the company members were working on different things. Jess Almasy was interested in developing a character who believed she was Joan of Arc, envisioning the role as a Wisconsin transplant to Vegas. Jill Frutkin was interested in the issue of prostitution, and discovered an organization called Hookers for Jesus, comprised of born-again former prostitutes seeking to help others leave the profession. Libby King was fascinated with Hunter S. Thompson. And Kristen Sieh was interested in playing a tumbleweed, or desert native. The name “Joan” stuck, elements of one or another enterprise went into the final character–a Vegas/desert native, volunteer at the Neon Boneyard, and a theme-restaurant waitress–while others went by the wayside or were incorporated into other characters (the Rapeljes became the immigrants to Vegas).

I knew that an important part of the development had taken place in Las Vegas itself, but when I asked Chavkin who had supported their residency and work on the ground, I got an emphatic “No one.”

“We fundraised like fucking crazy and we tried for support,” she said. “And now I’m thrilled to say we just got a grant from the NEA to bring the final work back to Vegas.”

Ultimately the company paid out of pocket or relied on donations to spend a month in the city, and in her role as director-cum-editor, Chavkin arranged a tight schedule of “field trips” to experience the place in the mornings, followed by intensive work in the theater the University of Las Vegas donated for their use in the afternoons. In their field trips, they met with and interviewed members of the local culinary workers’ union, to get a sense of the labor reality in Vegas. They visited the Atomic Testing Museum (the testing of the bomb also figures apocalyptically in the play). Another trip took them to the Springs Preserve, an institution devoted to the history of the desert ecology and sustainable development, which ultimately features prominently into the work’s theme.

“Las Vegas–which I actually didn’t know before we started this piece–used to be a fertile valley,” Chavkin told me. “It means ‘the meadows.’ And it was totally green, totally lush. It was an oasis. And that was due to the Springs Reserve, which was the aquifer underground that got destroyed in the Fifties, it was tapped out very, very quickly.”

Another exercise took them to the Luxor casino, where each member’s assignment was to interview three people: an employee, an apparent non-employee, and then whoever they wanted. The intense engagement with the city had a profound impact on the story that the company finally presented in Mission Drift.

“The entire way we portray Las Vegas, I can trace it back to a couple interviews we did,” she recalled. “One was with a guy who worked at the culinary union who turned out to have been born and bred in Las Vegas. He was about sixty, as was the head of the office of Cultural Affairs for the city, also in her early sixties. Both of them born and raised in Las Vegas. Very unusual because Las Vegas was a town of about 300,000 for a long period of time. And we heard from both of them almost the exact same thing, which was, this this used to be a small western town. This used to be a small town. Vegas used to be for the locals. It was this phrase we just kept hearing again and again and again. And when we asked about the destruction that had been wrought by the mortgage crisis, every single one of them said, ‘We think growth is good. And we don’t think growth is bad, we think it’s good that Vegas is growing as a city. We just think it grew too fast.’ So I think the entire thesis of the play, that there is something unsustainable about the marriage of capitalism and the frontier, came from right there.”

The one caveat I’d really like to add to all this is that, notwithstanding the influence of thinkers like Naomi Klein on the work, the reason I have so much respect for this play is that the TEAM is so decidedly opposed to easy answers. No matter what you ultimately think of Klein’s work, she is rather easily caricatured as a leftist taking potshots at ideological enemies. The TEAM are not. Their entire portrayal of the shape of American capitalism through the stories they tell is deeply sensitive and avoids easy answers or taking potshots. Intelligently, the company appears to have jointly come together in an effort to present the shape of our economy–including its disastrous boom-and-bust destructiveness–as a function of something deeper in the American psyche, the longing for creating things, for expanding the frontiers and filling the empty spaces our European ancestors imagined the deserts and plains and mountains of the frontier to be. Watching it the first time, I was struck by the thematic similarity between Mission Drift and Cormac McCarthy’s remarkable novel Blood Meridian, even as they diverged radically in tone, aesthetics, and politics. Mission Drift is, as Chavkin also pointed out, a Western, one that links disparate elements together to pose a vexing problem–perhaps the most vexing problem facing our society today. It was the novelist Chad Harbach, lately the lauded author of The Art of Fielding, who posed it to me years ago in a Seattle bar: “What if growth itself is the problem?”

And beyond all of that is the fact that it’s just a damn fine story. “It is by far and away the most emotional of any of our works. It’s, sort of–separate from the politics for a minute–it’s just an incredibly emotional story, because we tell the story of capitalism in this country through the lens of a marriage dissolving, and a marriage that you really love,” Chavkin said. “And now I hope we’ve done a really good job of allowing you to fall in love with these characters and root for them, in the way you sort of root for this American thing of setting out for the territories. And then they just become horrible, and monsters of themselves and lost within that.”

Popularity: 2% [?]

Culturebot is thrilled and honored that Meiyin and Mark at Under The Radar have graciously invited us to collaborate on and organize two discussions on contemporary performance during the festival. We will be engaging with some of the ideas that have garnered the most attention and discussion on CBOT lately: our article on Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance and the issue of Citizen Criticism and the Arts.

Full details below (updates to come as panelists are finalized and bios come in). Hope you will join us!

Can’t be there? Conversations will be livestreamed at http://www.livestream.com/newplay

Under The Radar presents
CULTUREBOT CONVERSATIONS ON CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

Performance and Context: The Black Box and The White Cube
Sunday, January 8 at 1PM
LuEsther Lounge
@ The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street

In today’s cultural landscape, contemporary artists are continuously blurring the lines between theater, dance, installation, performance art, visual art and live art. The work’s context comes from who curates it, where it happens, who writes about it and who is its intended audience. Performance is perceived and evaluated differently when presented in a gallery or museum as opposed to a theater. Why is that? What does it mean? And how can we move beyond the Black Box vs. the White Cube and devise new frameworks for genre-defying performance?

Participants:
Philip Bither (Senior Curator of Performing Arts, Walker Art Center)
RoseLee Goldberg (Founding Director and Curator, Performa)
Liz Magic Laser (Artist)
David Levine (Artist)

RECOMMENDED READING:
Claire Bishop, “Unhappy Days In The Art World” (Brooklyn Rail)
Andrew Horwitz, “Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance” (Culturebot)

Everyone’s A Critic! Exploring the Changing Landscape of Arts Writing
Sunday, January 15 at 1PM
LuEsther Lounge
@ The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street

As the mainstream media continues to cut its arts coverage, an increasingly diverse field of citizen journalists has filled in the gap. Some decry this as a disaster, proclaiming the death of criticism. Others characterize this as a long-overdue democratization of critical conversation. The truth is probably somewhere in between. What is the role of the arts writer in today’s society – either “professional” or “amateur”, what is the difference between a reviewer, a critic and a crank, and what does the future hold?

Participants:
Randy Gener (U.S. editor of CriticalStages.org)
George Hunka (Superfluities Redux)
Margo Jefferson (critic, author, professor)
Tom Sellar (Theater magazine (Yale) & Village Voice)

RECOMMENDED READING:
Michael Kaiser, “The Death of Criticism” (Huffington Post)
George Hunka, “Criticism dies, again” (Superfluities Redux)
Jeremy Barker, “Why Aren’t Audiences Stupid?” (Culturebot)
Andrew Horwitz, “Why Aren’t Audiences Stupid?(Andy Version)” (Culturebot)

PARTICIPANT BIOS:

Philip Bither has been Walker Art Center’s Senior Curator of Performing Arts since April 1997, overseeing one of the country’s leading contemporary performing arts programs. He has overseen significant expansion of the Performing Arts program, including the building of the McGuire Theater, an acclaimed new theatrical space within the Walker expansion (2005), the raising of the program’s first commissioning/programming endowment, the commissioning of more than 100 new works in dance, music and performance, and the annual presentation/residency support of dozens of contemporary performing arts creators, established and emerging. Prior to this, he served as Director of Programming/Artistic Director for the Flynn Center, later becoming Associate Director/Music Curator at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). He received the Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award in 2009. He sits on numerous federal, state, local, and national foundation arts panels and he speaks and writes about the contemporary performing arts nationally.

Randy Gener is the Nathan Award-winning editor, writer, critic and artist in New York City.  He began as a theater critic and staff contributor at The Village Voice from 1991 to 2001, as well as an entertainment writer for The Daily News and The Star Ledger.  A dramaturg at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, Gener is the U.S. editor of Critical Stages(criticalstages.org), an international journal; the Broadway editor of the New York Theatre Wire (nytheatre-wire.org), which he co-founded in 1996; and a contributing writer of American Theatre magazine. As a curator, producer and consultant of international festivals, Gener creatively collaborates with U.S. and European arts organizations, foreign institutes, consulate offices and NGOs to build, design and create artistic programs, strategic alliances, international tours in Europe, conferences and seminars, foreign-media partnerships and editorial content. Gener most recently served for four years as the curatorial adviser and co-creator of “From the Edge,” USITT’s USA National Exposition at the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. A 2003 New York Times critic fellow, Gener contributes critical essays and scholarly articles to books and anthologies, most recently in ”Cambridge Guide to the American Theater” (Cambridge University Press), ”The World of Theater” (International Theatre Institutes in Paris and Bangladesh), and “About the Phenomenon of Theater” (Namayesh in Tehran, Iran).  For his editorial work and critical essays for American Theatre, Gener has received, among other awards, grants and honors, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the Deadline Club Award for Best Arts Reporting from the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists; and the NLGJA Journalist of the Year. Last year, Gener was among five artists from around the world conferred by His Excellency President Benigno S. Aquino III with the Presidential Award as “Pamana ng Pilipino (Legacy of the Filipino Nation).” Gener’s website is theaterofOneWorld.org.

RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator of Performa, is an art historian, critic, and curator whose book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, pioneered the study of performance art. Former Director of the Royal College of Art Gallery in London and Curator at The Kitchen in New York, she is also the author of Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (1998) and Laurie Anderson (2000), and is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications. Recent awards and grants include two awards from the International Association of Art Critics (2011), the Agnes Gund Curatorial Award from Independent Curators International (2010), Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Warhol Foundation (2008), and Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Government (2006). In 2004, she founded Performa, a non-profit arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists from around the world, and launched New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05 (2005), followed by Performa 07 (2007), and Performa 09 (2009). In 2011, Performa presented its fourth biennial, Performa 11 (November 1–21, 2011). Since 1987, Goldberg has taught at New York University.

George Hunka launched the first version of his blog Superfluities Redux, under the title Superfluities, on 1 October 2003. An Albee Foundation fellow, he has written several plays and essays, as well as reviews, theory and feature stories about theatre for the New York Times, the Guardian (UK), Yale University’s Theater, Contemporary Theatre Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and other publications. His first book, Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros and Contemporary Tragic Drama, was published by EyeCorner Press in March 2011.

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson (Vintage). She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 12 years, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Nation, and MS. She has been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Norton); Best African American Essays, 2010, (Ballantine/One World); Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness (Counterpoint) and The Mrs. Dalloway Reader (Harcourt) and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia). She also wrote and performed a solo theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane and The Culture Project. Currently, she teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.

New York-based artist Liz Magic Laser (b. 1981, New York City) is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program. Laser has been a resident at the LMCC Workspace Program, the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited internationally including The Pace Gallery, New York (2011); Casey Kaplan, New York (2011); Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2010); MoMA PS 1, New York (2010); the Prague Biennale 4, Czech Republic (2009); Galeria Horach Moya, Mallorca, Spain (2011) and the Ljubljana Biennale, Slovenia (2011). Her recent public performance project, Flight (2011), took place in Times Square with support from Franklin Furnace and the Times Square Alliance. In November 2011, Laser presented the Performa Commission, I Feel Your Pain at the School of Visual Art Silas Theatre, a former cinema in New York City. Recent articles discussing her work have appeared in publications including, Modern Painters, Frieze, ArtReview, Artforum.com, Art In America and The New York Times.

David Levine‘s work encompasses performance, theater, photography, installation, and video. Dividing his time between NYC and Berlin, where he is Director of the Studio Program at the European College of Liberal Arts, Levine has presented performance projects and other work at such international art spaces and surveys as MoMA, Documenta XII, Mass MoCA, Town House Gallery/Cairo, HAU2/Berlin, PS122/NYC, the Luminato Festival and the Watermill Center, and has directed at Atlantic Theater Company, the Vineyard Theater/NYC, and Primary Stages/NYC. David’s work has been featured in Mousse, The New York Times, Artforum, Theater, Art in America, Bomb, Cabinet, Theater Heute, Art Review, Die Zeit, TDR, The Village Voice, Time Out, and the Believer, and his own writing has appeared in Cabinet, Theater, and Triple Canopy. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Kulturstiftung Des Bundes, and Etants Donnés/French Fund for Performance. He is currently working with composer Joe Diebes, poet Christian Hawkey, and the Watermill Center/NYTW on an opera about Milli Vanilli. David will be presenting Anger at the Movies, a performance seminar, as part of PS122′s COIL Festival starting on Jan 10.

Tom Sellar is Editor of Theater magazine, a journal of criticism, plays and reportage published by Yale School of Drama (www.theatermagazine.org). His criticism and reporting appear regularly in national publications including the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and American Theatre, and he has been a frequent contributor to the Village Voice since 2000. Sellar received his doctorate in 2003 from Yale University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Toshiki Okada, the Japanese playwright and director of the company chelfitsch, is already recognized as one of the most exciting artists of his generation. His 2004 play Five Days in March, which explored the links between the day-to-day life of young Tokyo hipsters and the US invasion of Iraq using a combination of anti-performative techniques, movement, and richly colloquial dialogue, established Okada internationally. The show toured widely and built bridges for the artist with presenters in the US and Europe.  This January, chelfitsch brings a triptych, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech, to the Japan Society as part of Under the Radar (Jan. 5-14; tickets $22).

The following interview was conducted by and translated from the Japanese for Culturebot by the Japan Society. For scholars and Japanese speaking readers, the original, including Okada’s responses in Japanese, is available here as a PDF.

Your company’s name “chelfitsch.” I know it’s a childish version of the English word “selfish,” but I’m curious where it came from, and what it means to you, if anything?

It meant myself when I named it.  Because I thought myself childish and selfish.  I was twenty three years old.  But it changed its meaning after the company’s name got to be known.  When a critic said “chelfitsch” describes the social situation of our time in Japan, especially Tokyo, I was somehow convinced of it. Then I got to like using this explanation.

What were the ideas you set out to explore in Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech and what influenced the script? I understand it’s a triptych—is it three separate plays or are they interconnected somehow?

I created this piece when the “non-full-time employees” issue [Editor's and translator's note: temporary employment is a rising issue in Japan as companies have been able to hire more and more employees on temp contracts; this has created a two-tiered society in which younger workers have been denied access to the security and benefits their parents enoyed as Japan's Fordist model is transformed; see here for an NPR article] became a serious problem in Japan. That is, my play was influenced by this ongoing issue.  At the same time, I wanted to address the universal issue of unemployment through the portrayal of Japan’s local situation, which I believed that non-Japanese audiences could sympathize with.  I think that audiences can enjoy each of the three parts of this triptych even if each one is presented independently.  However, because the three parts have become so closely connected to one another (from Japan Society: “Air Conditioner” was written originally as a stand-alone play and the two other parts were added three years later), I now believe that the three parts should be presented in sequence as one evening-length piece.

What is the creative process like working with your actors? Do you bring in a finished script or does the text change through collaboration? Do you provide them parts of the movement, like a choreographer, or do the actors generate the movement through improvisation?

My text changes constantly–it even changes daily throughout the rehearsal period. Especially for this piece, subtle changes took place often, because I tried to sync up the music with the performance. There are various ways of creating movement.  Since I am not a choreographer, I am not capable of creating movement from scratch. Instead, I ask my actors to extract natural movements from each of their lines and I simply pick up these moves, or manipulate them. For example, I instruct the actors to “exaggerate their movements” or “repeat the same movement over again.” Sometimes their particular movement inspires me to come up with another and I suggest that the actors try out these new movements.  Basically, improvisation is the starting point of setting my choreography, but improvisation takes places even during the performance.

You’ve said in other interviews that since the success of Five Days in March that you’ve been thinking more about how you want to affect your audience, citing Bertolt Brecht. What are you trying to accomplish in Hot Pepper…? What do you hope to convey?

There was a time when I began to think about a method of linking text and body movement, different from the method that my company developed during Five Days in March. One of the ideas was to widen the apparent lag or gap between the text and body movement and to exaggerate the performance into something like dance.  I tried to materialize this idea in a few shorter pieces.  Hot Pepper was the first full length piece based on this idea.

Your writing is hyper-colloquial, but now you’re creating work with the expectation that non-Japanese speakers will see it. Does this affect writing in any way? What has been your experience touring and performing for non-speakers? I saw both your version of Five Days in March, as well as Witness Relocation’s English version, and the experience of the text was very different.

I believe spoken language in theatre is important, but at the same time it is only part of theatre.  And I think also language must affect the body that speaks it.  Language affects not only speech but also the whole performance.

With all the touring, you’ve been exposed to many other artists and their practices. Has this affected how you create work? Have you responded or been inspired by others?

When I sit in a café of a theater where my work is being performed, I really feel what type of function the performing arts play in the lives of the local people living in the city.  I have experienced this feeling in each of the different cities where my work has been performed.  These experiences have influenced me greatly and I have begun to hope that theater will have more of a “public function” in Japan’s society.

Since your work seems to deal with the experiences you or your friends or your collaborators have in their daily lives, I’m curious what’s happening for you now, and where you may be going in your new work. I know it’s been a tumultuous time in Japan, with political shifts and economic issues and of course the Fukushima incident. Are these things you’ll be responding to in future works?

Currently, I have a strong interest in writing fictional works.  You might say that everything that I’ve written/created has been fiction, however, when I was creating my past works, I wasn’t consciously creating ‘fictional’ plays.  Since the earthquake hit Japan, I’ve strongly felt the need to write fictional stories.  I have started to consider “fiction” as not an “unreal fabrication” but rather an “alternative” to reality.  I think the current society in Japan should change to this alternative reality.  That is why I have started to think that “fictional stories are needed.”  I will make my next new work with this idea in mind.

For more information, PerformingArts.jp has two extensive interviews with Okada, from 2005 and 2010. For all of Culturebot’s coverage of Under the Radar 2012 see here, and for all related APAP 2012 events, see here.

Popularity: 3% [?]

With so many known commodities invading the festivals this January, lesser-known and emerging artists can get lost in the shuffle. San Francisco-based choreographer Laura Arrington is one such artist. I first caught wind of her work a year or two ago and she’s one of the people coming in with a strong bit of buzz–Big Art Group’s Caden Manso, for instance, told me just a couple days ago not to miss her work. Hot Wings, the 2010 piece for four dancers she’s bringing to American Realness, is an exploration of gender, the body as animal, and violence. Funny and maybe a bit discomfiting, it earned plenty of praise in SF last year, and you have only two chances to catch it: 7 p.m. Thurs., Jan. 5 and 4 p.m. Sat., Jan. 7 at Abrons Arts Center (tickets $15).

Hot Wings seems to have a very interesting genesis; you’ve said it was an extension of some of the ideas you worked with in your prior piece Fingerbird, which is a response or taking off from the famous ballet The Firebird. What was Fingerbird like and what specifically continued to interest you that you took from that experience?

What was Fingerbird like…? Well, I listened to a lot of R Kelly while we made it.  No, Fingerbird was very artificial. Firebird was a source, but so were a lot of other stories of fancy symbolic birds. Kosinski’s The Painted Bird is one of my favorite books, and as an image it’s a favorite…it sort of takes the metaphor of the bird as transcendent and flips it on its head. Also, In a sort of silly way, R Kelly’s song “I believe I can fly,” this song that borrows a trite kind of plastic sentiment, sung by a complicated pop star, but that ultimately gets me…maybe I’m an idiot. But I like those silly intersections between what’s funny, meaningful, and stupid. When you know better…but, still…you still love the metaphor of flight, the image of the bird, the voice of R Kellly… I sort of likened the bird to a trite or conventional representational imagining of a broken woman.

Photo by Robbie Sweeny

You’ve said two things in relation to this piece that fascinate me: one is the idea of a woman (either gender really, but this is an exploration of gender) as an animal, the body versus the brain perhaps, and you’ve also suggested you’re interested in violence within the piece. Yet it’s pretty funny at many moments. Can you sort of elaborate on the animal and violence concepts and how they related/how you explored them in the piece?

I think the intersection btw humor and violence is a pretty high-traffic intersection. Anything that is as real as aggression or violence has the capacity to be received as funny. I mean humor is often camouflage for something darker and more real.
The animals are integral in the trio of pieces in this series. My most recent was about and starred my dog. It was called wag. A deer features prominently on Hot Wings, and Fingerbird was all birds. I love animals. That’s not super interesting but it’s true true true. There’s a lot to say about the animals, but it’s better to not…

I think even you’ve suggested that this piece is somewhat aggressive in terms of its relationship to the audience; what can the audience expect coming into the theater and why make a choice like that?

I wouldnt say aggressive, or maybe I did… It does ask the audience to be involved in ways other pieces may not. I don’t want to say too much though. Audience participation is such a dirty word to folks, so best not to say it!

Given the ways the audience interacts with the performance, and what you’re trying to do with them, did anything happen during the original run that surprised you? Did you see anyone have a sort of memorable response? Did anyone respond negatively?

It’s always a surprise to see how people respond to instructions. It’s always a surprise to see how groups of people create their own identities and personalities. I’m always so so curious to see how my work gets read by people. A lot of people think Hot Wings is hilarious, other folks it made them cry, other folks thought it was stupid, other folks clever… You never know, or at least I never know. I’m always so curious to see how the group identity of the audience can kind of take the piece on. The end of Hot Wings had vastly different responses. Again, I dont want to say too much as I dont want to give too much away.

What it’s like creating work in San Francisco? What opportunities exist there for you as an artist and what are the biggest challenges you face?

Man, I really love SF. Its a special spot, and it feels very homey. I have a really tight knit group of collaborators/friends. The Off Center/Ernesto Sopprani, Jesse Hewit, Keith Hennessy, and a lot of other folks make it a fantastic place to make work. It’s easy to do shit there. It’s in a pretty vibrant little moment. More and more outside folks are coming in, which is great, because my biggest critique of SF is that it’s a bit isolated.

For the entire line-up of the ambitious 2012 American Realness Festival, see here, and be sure not to miss one of January’s hottest parties, American Pussy Faggot! Realness on Sat. Jan. 7, with downtown impresario Earl Dax’s Pussy Faggot!. For all Culturebot’s coverage of APAP 2012 related events, see here.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Heather Anderson in "Small Incision" at the Bushwick Starr (2010), photo by Shameel Arafin

Witness Relocation, the dance theater company led by Dan Safer, is a perennial favorite on the downtown scene. This January, they’re reprising I’m Going to Make a Small Incision Behind Your Ear to Check and See If You’re Actually Human, which debuted in 2010 at the Bushwick Starr (see here for our review), at DNA for two weekends (Jan. 5-6 and 12-14; tickets $17). The show is a series of vignettes including music, dance, games, and scenes from the sci-fi show V (from which the work takes its title), where the order is determined through a lottery at the beginning. Director/choreographer Dan Safer recently responded to questions via email.

What was the process of generating the material like? You use movement, text, music (if I recall correctly)–how did you try to balance these diverse creative processes with ensuring that in the end, it still formed a singular piece?

A lot of this piece comes from techniques we’ve been working on for a few years–task based and endurance based games, and methods of getting people to really do things on stage, as opposed to act like they’re doing things. All of the sections of the show could be construed as “Learn To Be Human: 101 Lessons for an Invading Alien Race”–the unifying theme stems from that idea, how could they all be hypothetically utilized to do that (with varying degrees of absurdism).

How improvisational or chance-based are the scenes themselves?

The scenes with dialogue from the TV show V are always with the same people. The choreographed “dance numbers” are set. Besides that, everything is up to the performers. We’ve developed a technique called “co-opetition” (I think Kourtney Rutherord came up with the name), where you fight to do the scenes you want to do when they come up, but don’t hog it all. Basically, nobody knows who is doing what until each scene is starting–whoever gets up there does it. It’s an orchestrated catastrophe.

Having already performed a run of the show, what surprised you about it? Were there any orderings that seemed to work better or worse? Any particular performance that revealed something to you that you hadn’t expected?

I love it when the curtain call is really early in the show; conversely, we had a run once where the final scene was “Curtain Call”, so we did that, then the show ended, and we did the actual curtain call. A centerpiece of the show is an extended scene called “Faster/ Slower” that is a development of a game from This Ring of Fire, a duet I co-created and performed with Ishmael Huston-Jones. That scene almost always goes really deep and exposes the performers in a fantastic, hysterical, disturbing way. I like when that scene happens towards the middle of the show.

Will there be any substantial differences between this run and the original at the Bushwick Starr?

We’ve added a scene, revamped some scenes, reworked some of the scenes from V. The show is constantly evolving every time we do it, so as we learn more, it keeps getting sharper/darker/funnier.

Witness Relocation tends to be a very busy company, and I know you work with others. What’s next for you/Witness Relo?

I’m teaching at NYU and Princeton in the Spring, choreographing Alec Duffy’s show at Incubator, and WR is working up to the next show Chuck Mee has written for us (at La MaMa in April 2013). Plus, I’m choreographing The Rite of Spring for the Philadelphia Orchestra with Ridge Theater in Feb of 2013. And a few other projects are bubbling up…

For more on Witness Relocation, see our reviews of Vicious Dogs in Summer (2008), Haggadah (2009), Five Days in March (2010) and Heaven on Earth (2011). For all our coverage of events related to APAP 2012, see here.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hideki Noda Interview from Jeremy Barker on Vimeo.

Many thanks to our friends at the Japan Society for facilitating and producing this video interview–conducted by Mark Russell (see our interview with him here)–for us, with legendary Japanese theater artist Hideki Noda. Originally a co-production between the Tokyo Metropolitan Theater and London’s Soho Theater, Noda’s 2006 work, The Bee, is one of two shows the Japan Society is helping bring to New York this January as part of Under the Radar (the other is by Toshiki Okada and chelfitsch).

My knowledge of Japanese theater history is, sadly, limited, but from what I understand, Mr. Noda was a leading light of the last wave of what’s known as Shôgekijô, or “Small Theater.” Somewhat akin to the Off-Broadway (or even Off-off-Broadway) movement, Small Theater was the term applied to the alternative experimental companies that began emerging in the 1960s. These companies were responding to the dominant realist approach favored by the Japanese regional theater establishment. Noda emerged as one of the foremost Japanese directors (though he also wears hats as writer and performer) during the 1980s, bringing the alternative into the mainstream with a company he founded while still in college, before abruptly disbanding it at the height of its popularity to spend a while learning new techniques in London.

On the face of it, The Bee is a fairly straightforward story about the fine line between victim and victimizer. A man comes home one day for his kid’s birthday to find a violent madman holding his family hostage. In retaliation, he in turn takes the hostage-taker’s family hostage, and quickly proves himself capable of equal, if not greater, acts of violence. Written by Noda in English and further developed by Irish playwright Colin Teevan, the show features the noted British actress Kathryn Hunter in a gender-bending lead role (along with Noda himself). Hunter was recently seen in New York in Peter Brook’s collection of Beckett shorts Fragments, along with fellow Complicite members Jos Houben and Marcello Magni (the latter of whom will be appearing in The Bee when it plays Hong Kong and Tokyo in 2012). For a little more perspective, we invite you to check out our interview with Houben about Fragments and Complicite.

For a broader interview with Noda, you can see this one in the English language Japan Times. I’ve also discovered this site, from the Japan Foundation, which is an excellent resource on Japanese performing arts; sadly, they don’t have interviews with Noda, but they do have coverage of most of his work as well as features on many of his collaborators. The Bee plays Jan. 5-15 at the Japan Society; tickets $25.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Mariano Pensotti is a Buenos Aires-based artist whose 2010 piece El pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal) is playing this January as a joint presentation of the Public’s Under the Radar and PS 122′s COIL Festival. NYC is the first stop on a North American junket for El pasado, that will see it hit the Wexner (Columbus, Jan. 19-22) , the Walker (Minneapolis, Jan. 28-30), the PuSH Festival (Vancouver, B.C., Feb. 3-5), On the Boards (Seattle, Feb. 9-12), Yerba Buena (SF, Feb. 17-19), and REDCAT (LA, Feb. 24-26). For more information, see the PuSH Festival’s interview with Pensotti from 2010, about his large site-specific performance La Mareo, which turned an entire street into a fragmentary jaunt through trauma and memory.

Tickets to El pasado are available either through PS 122 as part of the COIL pass (ten for $100), or through UTR either individually ($20) or as part of a Festival Pack ($75 for five shows).

What is the attraction of live performance for you? In interviews and on your website, you talk about how your work is influenced by literature and visual art and film. This work is inspired both by photographs you collected and the novelistic approach of Balzac. So why a live performance rather than a video or film project, other mediums you work in?

Well, I’m usually interested in creating works that might be a crossover between literature, film and visual arts but always including some live performance aspect. In El pasado es un animal grotesco I was specifically interested in how the past could be retold in the present and how something “ephemeral” such as the past or our memories could be made present in another ephemeral media as the live performance is. Another key point of the project is how to tell epic, ambitious stories that might contain fiction, our personal experiences and socio-political events with minimal resources: just four actors, some old props and a revolving stage… In that context the experience itself of making the performance becomes epic. Our play also deals with the subject of time and the times that go by and I cannot think about another medium where you can have that so strongly present such as in a live performance. Ultimately the play tells the story of four characters during ten years and I had the impression that to see these four actors performing live, nonstop, fighting to make present the past during two hours, to see them tired at the end is like seeing them aging ten years.

In the description of the piece on your website, you wrote of the images that inspired the piece, that “Many seemed to be people from my own generation: A faulty chronicle of a decade.” The past decade has been a challenging one in Argentina. What sorts of experiences do the characters’ stories touch on? Is there a concrete example that you could perhaps share of how something in one of the images inspired the text you developed for the character?

I think the use of the broken pictures was the result of a mixed perception. On one hand there’s a fact that as a young generation in Argentina, a country with perpetual economic and political crises, we had to struggle against a lot of difficulties in our ordinary life. But of course that’s not something that you can relate just to Argentina. On the other hand what interested me more was to discover some common feeling in people from my generation, which is the desire of being someone else, the belief that our lives might be better if we lived somewhere else or that we should become another person different from who we are. Besides the economic crises it probably has some relation to that as a generation we’re the sons of the people who fought to change the society during the ‘70s and who were brutally repressed by the military dictatorship, so in comparison with them we usually feel weak, pointless, without social compromise… as a broken or unclear picture. In that sense my collection of blurred and broken pictures seemed to be a clear metaphor of all that.

In the play I was interested in working with that feeling, which at the end I have the impression is quite universal, and also to place some fiction into a real background to see how social events may affect or not private lives. For example during one of our most terrible recent economic crises, in 2001 and 2002, one of the characters loses his job, his flat and his life change a lot; as opposed to other characters, the same event almost affects him. I had the feeling that at least in Argentine theater there was a lack of relation with political events in recent years, we were much too focused on small family issues, so as a challenge I was interested in dealing with our most recent history, not just in Argentina but also using events such as 9/11 or the Iraq invasion to invent stories. It was much more appealing to work with that in a fiction context rather than to take a distant decade, probably more studied and fictionalized already.

This piece makes use of a rotating set. Where did that idea come from and how does it relate the content of the piece?

In my plays I always try to have sets that work not just as a decoration but rather as a narrative mechanism. I’m also interested in setting a play in a context that might affect the body of the performer as well as the perception of the viewer. In the case of the rotating set conceptually it has clearly to do with the idea of passing time, time that never stops, and the actors go from one small space to the next one while the disc turns around all the time. Narratively speaking, as the play is composed of a lot of small scenes, more than sixty, it helped us to set each of them in a different place making small changes on each space when it is not visible to the audience. Additionally, it creates the visual impression of a long dolly shot from a movie.

The soundtrack and title come from Of Montreal. It’s an interesting choice for a work that explores a uniquely Argentine experience. What appealed to you–beyond the lyrics that provided the title–about their work? And out of curiosity, have any of them seen the piece?

Even if the play is focused on the life of four middle class Argentinians I don’t really have the impression that it explores a uniquely Argentine experience but rather something wider. Anyway, in the globalized world it doesn’t seem so strange that an indie band from the States influences an Argentine author or that a Mexican visual artist gave inspiration to some narrator in Sweden… But it’s true that Of Montreal is not the first band that comes to your mind in Latin America. I really love their records and especially the title song was so related to my intentions with this play. The image of the past as some grotesque animal that changes shape every time you think about it is so close to what happens with the past and the lived experiences when you try to remember them or retell them in the present. The past is always changing. And then the first lines of the song say something like, “The sun is out and melt the snow that felt yesterday, makes you wonder why it bothered”… And it’s a narratively ambitious song, with intense lyrics going on for almost 11 minutes, quite rare for a rock song… I really felt it was close to my intentions for the structure of the play, and I was listening to it a lot while writing the text.

I don’t think any of them have seen the piece so far. We’ve been touring a lot in Europe and Latin America but this is going to be our first time in the United States, so hopefully.

What’s it like creating work like this in Buenos Aires? I’ve been told by other artists that one of the challenges is a lack of infrastructure for supporting ambitious work. Is that your experience? Are there many younger artists–your students at the National University perhaps–who are creating work in Buenos Aires? Other artists whose work you find inspiring or important you’d like a broader audience to know about?

It’s really difficult to develop this kind of work. In Buenos Aires there’s a huge independent theater community and a lot of small venues all around the city, which are part of a long tradition of theater as part of the cultural life. But the state and city support for theater is almost symbolic or it’s just focused on conventional performances for public theaters. From time to time, we can have a co-production with a state theater that allows us to do some more ambitious work, but we usually depend basically on ourselves and in recent times on some international festivals from abroad. The good thing is that there are a lot of people going to theater in Buenos Aires no matter if it’s a big state theater or a tiny independent venue. Right now there are several very interesting artists, and among the people from my generation I feel very inspired by the work of Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Grupo Krapp, and Guillermo Arengo.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I suppose that one of the advantages of being terminally ill is that people come to appreciate you more while you are still alive.  In this way, our heroes have the opportunity to go out like champs, to settle scores, make the most of their celebrity and bully pulpits respective to the medium in which they chose to do battle.  Christopher Hitchens leaves behind a large body of writing as well as podcasts, panel discussions, interview sand some stints as a TV pundit.  As a result of theater being a temporal medium, this is far less true for the directors Garland Wright and Reza Abdoh.  By virtue of Reza making more experimental theater that incorporated video in his productions, there were capable people on hand to document his work.  Garland has virtually no internet presence, reduced to a regional footnote in spite of being one of the great American directors of his generation.  All three men burned bright while alive and perhaps even brighter as a result of their battles against dread disease and their causes.  The lifestyles they maintained were connected to their illnesses and their supersized output—the triumvirate of art, life and sickness unto death formed a hypnotic golden triangle—as if the combination created a metabolic steroid who’s side effects are lethal.  In so doing they showed us how to die with brilliance and honor but give little assistance in navigating the vicissitudes of actually living.

British-born aesthete journalist and political gadfly, Christopher Hitchens died the day before yesterday on Thursday, December 14th of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the esophagus.  Like many of his readers who never met him in person, I feel as if I have lost a friend nonetheless.   If you don’t know of him afore to now, you have the luxury of Google, YouTube or, if you are feeling old-fashion, you can hop on Amazon.com and download one of his books to your Kindle. (I prefer the Spalding Gray mode of literary consumption by way of audiobooks.  The memoir Hitch-22 being a favorite of mine as the author himself narrates.) To read the Wikipedia entry for the recently late Mr. Hitchens is to immediately be sucked into his polemics.  His vacillating screed on the War in Iraq, Mother Teresa and women not being innately funny are all irksome but bulletproof in their caustic erudition.

Unsettling still is that his prolific output was generated frequently under the influence of alcohol and always while smoking cigarettes.  In what can be only described as an Advance Memorial or Literary Viking Funeral, his lifelong friend and erstwhile target, Martin Amis said recently, “You could have a long lunch with Hitch which would turn into a long dinner.  And then you went to bed at four o’clock in the morning reconciled to a hangover that would last half a week.  You’d wake with a groan 12 hours later to find that Hitch had written two 3000-word pieces about John Locke and John Stuart Mill.  This is one of the most galling things about him.  He could hold his drink, stay up all night and then go on some TV program….”  Galling indeed as I struggle to churn out my meager 1,500 words against time, financial ruin and a nasty chest cold­—pitiless in comparison to spinal taps, chemotherapy and Nucleotide Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors—but I digress.

In his tremendously insightful book On Writing, the sci-fi author, Stephen King summed up the perilous dance of tobacco and art making quite nicely. “I think it was quitting smoking that slowed me down; nicotine is a great synapse enhancer. The problem, of course, is that it’s killing you at the same time it’s helping you compose.” I believe Hitchens’ own father also died of throat cancer.  My body has some sort of safety mechanism that is now in full tilt as I careen into damnéd middle-age. (Blurg!) If I myself smoke and drink with any consistency I will inevitably induce a debilitating case of bronchitis, as I presently and moronically maintain.  My paramour was in the shower and thought I had brought a dog home.  With the water running she mistook my coughing for barking.  You would think coughing up meaty, yellow and green lung cookies let well alone the death of a parent would be a great inspiration for substance cessation.  Some of the smartest people behave in the stupidest ways, present company excluded, of course. ::sigh:: If only the converse were true….

Garland Wright was not above a Drambuie or seven after rehearsal in addition to being  an unabashedly heavy smoker.  Back when Bartlett Sher was Bart the one-time mentee at the Guthrie, he told me how the floor of Garland’s car was lined with empty Winston cartons and how the unluckier interns chased after him with ashtrays.  I remember in a workshop of “Edward II” at Lincoln Center, Resident Dramaturge, Anne Cattaneo gave him special permission to smoke in the back stairway—this in a highly anally retentive institution and from diminutive but no-nonsense Anne, who did not carve a foothold at LCT for 20+ years being a pushover.   Like Hitch and Reza, Garland was effusive and charming to the point where you felt smarter for having interacted with him.  Exactly like the culture, the British Theater is very tough to crack as a foreigner.  As soon as you open your mouth in the UK, uttering anything but the Queen’s English, they say you automatically go down a class.  The converse was true when one interacted with one of the three lost greats of whom we currently are speaking.  I miss the hand up and the panoramic view from that elevation.

After unceremoniously stepping down from a ten-year tenure as Artistic Director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Garland became co-chair with JoAnne Akalaitis of the Julliard Directing Program of which I was a member of the flagship class.  In spite of valiant effort to keep it afloat, the Program essentially died with him as he had the map of it in his mind.  Explaining this to people who don’t know of Garland’s career or the Juilliard School beyond mere name recognition (“Oh you went to Juilliard? What instrument do you play?”) feels like describing the Twin Towers to someone from Billings, Montana who never saw them in the 35 years for which they stood.  Garland was short, charismatic and slightly affected much in the way I’ve seen Hitch carry himself on television and the internet.  While still in school I remember sitting on the couch outside Michael Kahn’s office with Garland as he complained of having a rigorous colonoscopy that was part of his cancer treatment. “That’s private stock,” he said ruefully and then laughed as we riffed on notions of who has “keys to the cellar” and “access to the cave” (pronounced ‘kāv‘). Garland died in 1998 at age 52, ten years younger than Hitch.  Had they ever met, I like to think they would have gotten along famously.

Three years earlier, Iranian avant-garde theater artist, Reza Abdoh died of AIDS at age 32.  Admittedly, I did not know him so well as a person but was more of a groupie for his work.  I once traveled 17 hours by train and boat to see one of his shows in Hamburg, Germany.  After the performance I introduced myself in stammering Persian of which I ashamedly only speak a few words.  Then I turned around went back from whence I came before the summer school I was attending noticed I was AWOL.  Another show of his I saw over 20 times.  When I first encountered his multisensory, nonlinear, cacophonous pieces he had already contracted full-blown AIDS and was mainlining the rage against his fast approaching death directly into his work.  Being a hardcore ADHD-dyslexic growing up, seeing a Reza Abdoh production was like coming home, like someone finally found a way to communicate with me where I could not help but listen with rapt attention.  Some audience members described these very same experiences as theatrical hell occurring on a nightmare landscape.  But in Reza’s world where you were totally complicit, you were also completely free.  God was literally a Puerto Rican drag queen and there was no crime you could have committed that would deny you her love.   When I heard of his passing I was devastated, wandering around my apartment for days, fending off bouts of sobbing and depression.

Reza has been on my mind because there is a symposium on his work this coming Monday — The Legacy of Reza Abdoh at CUNY’s Martin E. Segal Theatre.  (FYI there are massive student rallies to protest tuition hikes and their mistreatment by CUNY public safety officers being formed as of late. This is a sidebar but of potential interest or concern depending on which side of the barricade you find yourself in the next couple of days.) There will be videos of his work show and panel discussions with former collaborators, all free and open to the public. To the experimental theater neophyte it might be very worthwhile.  But I am torn unto whether or not to attend myself… I mean what will I gain by going? Solace? Inspiration?  Or will it just be a painful reminder of what is irrevocably lost?

My title for this piece of writing was the first thing that popped into my head yesterday morning when my sleeping companion told me of Christopher Hitchens’ death.  I felt it then (or, at least mean it now) as a tolling church bell sounded in mourning more than a bunch of Umpalumpas celebrating the melting of Elphaba Thropp.  Yet the contradictory subtext remains… in addition to plain old sadness, there is anger and confusion.  Would Reza’s work have touched me as deeply if it was not paid for with the diseased fire in his blood?  Would Garland’s theater and Hitch’s writing be as brilliant if they did not have the synaptic fuel of nicotine to amplify their already brilliant minds?  Or the balm of booze to quell their restless souls?  One can’t ever say one way or the other.  It is impossible to judge, rendering closure just as untenable.  Irregardless these questions burn in perpetuity with the added luster of guilt in having entertained them at all.

The savage limbo of losing the paradox that was these great men (all queer as the day is long, by the bisexual) spills over into my own humble biography.  On the whole, I have no idea what to do with myself.  Most of the freelance theater jobs that kept me afloat have dried up with our shitty economy.  Do I go back to school (again!) and get my PhD in some esoteric field of study like Avant-Garde Theater of the 90’s?  Do I go get some menial job in film or TV where my double-sided theater c/v can’t even be used as scrap paper?  Or perhaps I should just chuck it all and volunteer for OWS while working as a Barista at Starbucks who I hear offer health benefits and stock options (the latter, sadly not the former… not yet any way >:-)

For now I am going curl up with some theraflu and a nice audiobook, maybe Letters to A Young Contrarian or Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone.  If you have any thoughts or suggestions unto how to live please post them below…

Popularity: 4% [?]

Irish playwright Enda Walsh is getting to be a regular in New York. In the past four years, St. Ann’s Warehouse has presented The Walworth Farce, New Electric Ballroom, and Penelope, and now hosts his latest: Misterman, a riveting, if decidedly dark portrait of one man’s disintegration (through December 22, tickets $45-$77).

Recognizable to US audiences as Dr. Jonathan Crane/The Scarecrow from Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Cillian Murphy makes his stateside stage debut with a knock-your-socks-off performance as Thomas Magill, a pious young man in the small (fictional) town of Innisfree. The cartoonish beginning, as Magill dashes the length of the cavernous performance space in vain attempt to stop a tape player from blasting music, seems a surprising opening for the relatively sober play that follows. But it hints at the unruly nature of the voices Magill hears, and his capacity for violence.

Memory and repetition are prominent themes in Walsh’s plays, and here they manifest themselves in Magill’s obsessive need to replay—literally, via reel-to-reel tapes—the events and conversations of one fateful day. Constantly wearing a portable recording device, Magill restages and repeats his interactions with his neighbors, taking both roles in each conversation. Magill is insufferably judgmental, with more than a touch of missionary zeal, and ends each encounter by scribbling a damning sin about his neighbor in his notebook.

Flipping between Magill and these different characters, Murphy is extraordinary, and sustains a manic energy that is essential in propelling this one-man show forward. It’s often funny, except Magill becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator; his scenes with his “Mammy,” who is represented by a reel player at the head of a table, really ratchet up the demented factor. Without giving away too much, let’s say the ending isn’t surprising, and if anything, its very predictability fulfills the premise that repetition is inevitable.

[For those in the market for Walsh Lite: he has written the book for the musical Once, now playing at New York Theater Workshop and moving to Broadway in 2012.]

Popularity: 2% [?]