Don't get me wrong, I've seen lots of show between Jan 1 and now. So many that I can't even remember them all. I just spent the last hour filtering through all my crap (we're moving soon) and throwing away all my programs. So I'll just list some highlights that still stick in my memory.
At HERE's Culturemart:
The South Wing's The Gospel According to Jack Vitrolo
A surprisingly funny & surreal journey of a man through the labyrinthian world of hospital/medicine/perversion in search of his kidnapped wife. Pulling from Kobo Abe and some other stuff, the ensemble of actors worked beautifully together. The Kafkaesque level of thwarted expectation and waylaid search reached its height in the sweltering heat of the theater, really wringing the audience through an appropriately torturous level of hellishness.I also saw Faye Driscoll's 837 Venice Boulevard which was an easy to watch exploration of identity, perception and media. Again, really great performers, really funny.
I don't know Faye really well, but she's super cool. And another cool project she worked on was YJL's Church -- the choreography for which was very different from what she usually does but is nonetheless effective in capturing this ineffable joy of religious/sacrilegious salvation.Speaking of Church, which I saw again at the Public for Under the Radar, it was going through a rough spell. Several injuries suffered by the cast made me anxious to watch them try to execute movement. The show didn't quite have the electric sparkle it did at PS122, partially due to the way the theater felt -- cavernous.
Other things at UtR:
Michel Melamed is this Brazilian performance artist who I guess is friends with the Enrique Diaz of the Cia Dos Atores, a company I thought was so brilliant. I went to see Michel's show Regurgitophagy. He was set up a prisoner on-stage with electro-shock shackles attached to his limbs. It was very hard for me to sit through this show...
There was also NO DICE's Poetics: A Ballet Brute was very cute. Except what's up with these big group surprise endings? I find it heartwarming that this generation of seemingly glib, "so over it" "hip" artists are opting for joyful life-affirming endings and all, but somehow seeing this show, and CHURCH, in the same theater, made me feel a bit queasy. But seriously that bearded guy is a freaking amazing performer.
Oh yeah and then there was Jay Scheib's much talked about This Place Is a Desert. I know many people who work with him,but I'll forego any discussion about the drama around him/his work. Drama's probably not the right word for it. Anyhoo, the video/set design was truly remarkable. A marriage of all the great things about cinema colliding with great things about theater. Four screens in a row suspended above the playing space comprised of half obscured, some revealed rooms, hallways. Cameras set all around peeking into peoples' most intimate moments, even a camera guy who follows the action. The effect was pretty mesmerizing: hypnotic the way film is, yet with a rawness of live performance. Although generally the aesthetic seemed to be "sexy" in a very male-gaze kind of way, and I wasn't crazy about the script itself, the montages were great, and some of the actresses were great, in their forlorn women roles.Gosh what else. There was the new Richard Foreman show... I dunno. His work, esp since he started working with projections seems more diluted every year.
There was the Romeo Castelucci's Hey Girl! which people were going ape-shit over. Overall I felt like I was beaten over the head with clunky ideas about women/femininity throughout history. There was Joan of Arc kind of, and she was beaten up by a gang of 30 Montclair University male students. And then there was a black woman who was mostly like naked, and chained up... OK i did fall asleep in the middle. But that's not to say there wasn't some cool-ass shit. Like the consistently and continually dripping goop and dripped so elegantly off the operating table for 70 minutes. And the crazy laser beam. Oh gosh I guess "you had to be there."
I'm about to start rehearsals for oph3lia so I won't be seeing much theater for a while, in fact I haven't gone to see a show since Hey Girl!, probably... But pls check out my other website if you haven't seen it already. www.knifeinc.org
Signing off.
1 comment:
thanks for the shout out. love reading your thoughts.
p
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