there is no end

Last year (2009) I got married and had a baby. So I didn't much get to the theater. I just stopped wanting to be in the theater. In fact i stopped wanting to do anything that had to do with culture or literature. I could barely read a book. I read one book in 2009 and it was Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris which was pretty darned entertaining. It got a bit mushy towards the end for my taste, but I guess the world needs things to tie themselves up into a nice package. Dan R gave me the book for Christmas 2008. Although I guess he doesn't celebrate Christmas (Jew) so it was really just a friendly holiday gift. Such a sweet guy.


Anyway I did see another show after the baby popped out. It has been hard to find a way to get out of the house by myself to go to the theater -- it seems like such a luxury now. It forces me to find value even in the lousiest shows. Jeremy Wade's there is no end to more, however, was not at all a lousy show. I think I appreciated it more, now that a month has gone by since I saw it. Starring Jared Gradinger, who I saw in Constanza Macras' piece(s), this children's TV show on acid x poop + manga had some really amazing chunks of text in it -- scatological in tone which I love. The movement was nuanced and precisely executed, but I didn't really "get" into it. It was a really well made show -- like the show that the Big Arts Gourp wanted to be but couldn't.

the importance of keeping your mouth shut

I insist I am not biased, just because I worked on the translation.
Dan Safer is one of those people I'm really glad I met. Despite his rockstar persona, over a tall cup of tea I learned he was extremely thoughtful, generous and perceptive.
To tell the truth I wasn't sure I fully embraced his production of Mikuni Yanaihara's The Blue Bird, because it seemed like the non-stop ADD break-neck game-show-like antics of catchy dances, song/screaming and theatrical nonsequitors were more gimmick than could be held together by the structure and actual meat of the play. And I'm not sure if I was convinced otherwise -- however in the last 15 minutes of the play, with a surprisingly simple but beautiful transformation of the space with the music and the video and the images, and the sequence that followed, he caught that bird and made it fully, unapologetically, poignantly his own. Not sure how Yanaihara felt since she went to see it 2 weeks ago, but I felt fully tricked and not half-way indignant about it.

Nothing New

Went to see Jan Fabre's Orgy of Tolerance.
Imagine an evening of competitive masturbation, cock-sucking, furniture-fucking, rifle-barrel-butt-fucking, a room full of guys getting hand jobs while discussing their collection of ethnic humans, torturing people for the sake of consumerism, and a litany of 'fuck you's aimed at every single conceivably religious/ethnic/gender/sexual orientation group you can think of.
Shocking?
On the contrary. It was sophomoric, predictable, shallow and also felt terribly outdated, by like 30 years. I couldn't believe that this was the new work by the leader of the Flemish Wave -- it felt more like some college student's first self-made dance-theater piece (in fact it did remind me of the works of a few college acquaintances), except with an enormous budget.
The performers were all very talented and could obviously move, but their energies were embarrassingly wasted on a fetid work.

a jump in the pool

OK OK OK! So my show is finished, I went to Japan and back, and I have very little excuse for not having gone to see more shows, except that I'm entirely burnt out and don't want to go to the theater at all. That's why I went to see Headlong Dance Theater's Hotel Pool, because it takes place, well, in and around a pool. In this case, the body of water was located near the southern tip of Manhattan in a high-end luxury condo building called Rector Square.

The show was sold-out a while back, but Banana who has some roots in Philly, had made reservations early on. We arrived quite early on a rainy Thursday, and were one of the first people in the lobby, waiting. By the time they tarted opening the house and shuffling people into the pool area, we were at the end of the line. By the time we reached the performance space, we were one of the last ones in, and had to settle for a seat on the ground, right alongside the pool. There were rolled up towels placed along the poolside, suggesting what was to come.

The piece began with what I found to be an arresting, Murakami-esque premise. A business woman checks into a hotel, but somehow gets lost on her way to her room and ends up at the hotel pool, and locking herself in(out). She makes some frantic phone calls, in an attempt to get the hotel management to get her an actual room. She needs to take her medication and pops a pill into her mouth, when she realizes that her water bottle is empty. Looking around, the only water is... in the pool. Gingerly she kneels down and takes the water up to her mouth in cupped hands. She falls asleep at the poolside. Then a troupe of mysterious water-beings begin an underwater dance that continues throughout the piece, eventually tempting the woman into their universe.

What these water-creatures are, and what they represent, is never entirely clear -- they seem to be emblematic of the spirit of love/fun/life/joy, in contrast to the woman who is coming from a cold, corporate place. Although other stretches seemed lengthy, and there was a whole scene with dialogue in the middle which I couldn't comprehend at all (sound too low, dvd player not working). Plus I got my butt SOAKING WET (like peed-in-my-pants wet --- which is really one of the most uncomfortable feelings in the world). The company always manages to achieve that sense of BIG LOVE that can usually only be created by companies of artists who really love and trust each other. Some of the movement really took me places in their simplicity and repetition.

The mythologies of John Moran (and his neighbor Saori)

When I first ever saw a work by John Moran, it was at the Kitchen, and he had just gone through terrible heartbreak. After his long-time German (I think?) partner and girlfriend left him, he incorporated the sad event into his lush looping Goldberg Variations, weaving this beautiful wistful story of loss through seamlessly interwoven and looping soundtracks and choreography. That was the first time Saori worked with him, and whatever conflicts or dramas they might have had, together I think they are wonderful artistic collaborators.

Their latest at PS122 was not really about (as the titles of the piece suggested) what if Saori had a party? but it was instead a rather dark meditation on mortality and loss of innocence. The top of the show introduces Saori as a super-cute robotic anime-type character who lives in a bubble (think Astroboy + Teletubbies + Twiggy x a dose of acid). She is "not real" as she admits, and desires nothing more in the world than "to exist" (i.e. be real). Her companion, Mr. Computer (which is just the voice of a talking mac) informs her that today, somehow, her wish can be granted -- today is her first ever birthday. A singing telegram man shows up with a surprise birthday present -- which turns out to be a baby. Saori must then learn to take care of this baby, who fusses and cries, and repeatedly goes through a cycle of "growing up." Eventually in an effort to understand why the baby suffers, and what loss means, Saori is burst out of her bubble and experiences the suffering of life first-hand, all the way to death. It's a poignant Pinocchio story without glorious salvation or redemption. Though it never reaches the depths of grotesqueness and despair that compares to the height of its saccharine sweetness, Saori's Birthday was still a great display of Saori's phenomenal physical control and grace of movement, Katie Brook's precision and sweetness, Joseph Keckler's awesome singing voice and John's deeply emotional sound-score that spirals the audience into intimate moments of vulnerability.

the grotesque

The two Dairakudakan Kochuten shows at work got great notices in the press, but frankly I wasn't thrilled. Maybe because I remembered their previous visits to New York so vividly. Back in 2002, they dropped into a sweltering New York summer for a series of shows that were totally fascinating, fun and exciting. There was a parade of men with sausages sticking out of their thongs -- and a hag-demon who cut off their "phalli" and weighed them on a scale, cackling; there was an underground society of creatures who sawed off their the crown of their victim's skull and ate his still-living brain; a strange slo-mo wedding procession complete with accompanying horses and stolen kisses to Andrea Bocelli's Time to Say Goodbye. Deliciously kitschy stuff.

Their latest pieces, Tiger's Cave and Yupiters did not captivate the way the other pieces did. The all-male Tiger's Cave, created by Kumotaro Mukai, was a comic imagining of a training camp for butoh dancer. An air of austerity, discipline, and asceticism is disrupted when one of their fellow trainees (or is it a teacher?) returns from a journey abroad sipping a cup of espresso and bearing gifts: a flag of France, a baguette, a pair of salt and pepper shakers, and a whip. His sauntering in to the theme song from The Triplets of Belleville infects the group and soon they've all given up the rigid butoh life for the Parisian one. At the height of this joyous revelry, the phone rings. With trepidation one of them answers. Whatever he hears on the receiver is enough to render him paralyzed and speechless. He hands the phone off to another trainee and the same thing happens to him. The third guy is finally able to spit out the words in terror: "CLEAN UP!" The pupils scamper around to destroy any evidence of their moment of fun to greet the return of their next teacher: a man/horse whose limbs are balanced precariously on the traditional Japanese laquerware. He clomps about noisily and wears a bizarre bit-like brace in his mouth that keeps his teeth perpetually bared. And so it goes on for a while. The concept is not uninteresting, but it was the indulgence and pacing that killed it for me. A reminder that what makes for a stunning picture cannot hold its own without a smart sense of time and timing.


Yupiters, the all-female companion piece by Yuko Kobayashi, proved to be much more esoteric. An ethereal trance-like landscape of ever-shifting images. The ensemble of women transformed themselves time and again, with elaborate costume changes and with extraordinary contortions. Gigantic fishbowls (with live fish) dangled from the sky. Mirrored panels surrounded the gathering, undulating wildly, creating an overload of visual information. The climax of the piece in which Kobayashi, painted entirely in silver, is surrounded by a throng of village women who prod and provoke her (without ever really touching her) and she is left to spasmodically churn and convulse, much like a fish out of water. For all its intensity and spectacle, this piece, too, left me feeling rather unmoved. Like eating at a super-fancy restaurant -- each dish looks so gorgeous, but does little to actually satisfy your hunger.

In the middle of the run I went to see the Red Bastard at the Brick Theater's NY Clown Festival. It was the 3rd time I'd seen him. While he certainly hit the mark I couldn't help but feel like he was under the weather, because he didn't wrangle his audience with the nonchalant ease with which I've seen him do so in the past. Nonetheless, he remains one of my favorite performers of that ilk -- if you've never seen him, you must, you must, you must.

wade in retards

Fall is officially upon us. I need a light jacket or sweatshirt now. And the performance season has commenced. Which means a lot of manic running around for me.

To kick off the fall, I was fortunate enough to see Jeremy Wade's latest -- a group piece (a quintet to be precise) from the Bessie-winning American choreographer based in Berlin: ...and pulled out their hair at Joyce Soho. Apparently this piece was originally slated for PS122 but for unclear reasons made the move to Soho instead.

The first five minutes of the piece absolutely thrilled me.

When we walked in, there was one man standing on the white marleyed, white-walled stage. He was a rather big man, a rugged handsome type, dressed in a white short sleeve button-down shirt and black tie and slacks. He stood at the edge of the marley and surveyed the audience coming in with shifty eyes, twitching shoulders, and insipidly creepy grin. At times convulsing, and other times leering, he was the very image of a barely checked homicidal child molester or a developmentally impaired sexual deviant of some sort. After a while, 4 others entered upstage left, stumbling haltingly. Those were two women (in short black skirts and white blouses) and two men (in white button-down short sleeves, black shorts and suspenders), all, like our first man, somehow not completely in control of their physical and mental faculties. The group altogether seemed to form a school or society of degenerates, indeed, a grotesque portrayal of our own culture.

Throughout the course of the piece, this team of squealing, drooling freaks tumbled, stumbled, clambered, wrestled, fought, fucked, sniffed and embraced each other, at times demonizing, and at others, coddling each other -- as if they were the purest representation of the human id, bursting with uncontrollable desires. At one point, the performers faced the audience in a line and opened up their faces to an extreme. And their faces remained that way for the rest of the performance, suspended in a state of total shock or an unending yawn or expression of utter vapid idiocy, depending on what you wanted to see. After a while I began to see their wide-open saliva-secreting mouths as body parts as intimate as flowering anuses -- in fact the whole performance seemed to be some twisted inversion of the order imposed on us writhing breathing wild humans by the system we call society.

Though unlike much dance I see this work was very dramatic (in terms of describing a sequence of events and interactions amongst people), it somehow lacked a rhythmic drive to pull the audience from one excruciating portrayal of the human condition to the next. Clocking in at just under an hour, it presented a rich if a bit tired (and very very sweaty) view of human nature.

Constraints

Last week I went to see Nina Winthrop & Co.'s Constraints I, II & III. I didn't know anything about this company's work, except that I vaguely recall seeing one of their photographs displayed on their website as part of BAM's Next Wave last autumn (and I already told you how that went...). The reason I went was partially work-related; apparently, the choreographer had created the second of her Constraints while in residency at Morishita Studios in Tokyo -- ah, international collaboratioarf, I mean, collaborarf, a-hem, excuse me, collabarf, cough cough, collaboration. Sorry it's just a sensitive subject for me, both the "international" and the "collaboration" part. ANYHOO I went with a bunch of my co-workers.

Let me focus on what I thought were positive things first: The costumes, designed by Naoko Nagata conveyed the idea of constraint -- in I, the American dancers were dressed in jagged remnants of business suit material, anchored to their bodies by straps and belts. In II, the Japanese dancers were in colorful swaths of fabric, which, somewhat kimono-inspired, were tied to their bodies by sashes. In these dances that seemed to be about our tendencies to restrain oneself, the costumes worked towards epitomizing that idea, and very stylishly at that.

OK otherwise there was not much more there for me. I don't want to write about how inconsequential the American dancers were, especially compared to the Japanese performers who at least had stage presence and verve shining through the vapid choreography. There seemed to me that there was no exchange going on between dancer and choreographer -- no deep necessity for II to have been performed by Japanese dancers (if at all). This unfortunate evening was salvaged by (total non sequitur) great xiao long bao at Joe's Shanghai.

Technology Kills Art?

Koosil-ja's latest version of mech[a]OUTPUT sounds great on paper. A multimedia work from the dynamic Korean-Japanese-American choreographer/singer re-de-constructing the classic noh play Dojo-ji from a feminist p.o.v. and live performer-technology interaction with video (a la Wooster Group), live 3-D game space, live music and a swinging digital bell.

Dojoji itself is based on an old Japanese legend in which a love-lorn woman spurned by a monk chases him into a temple where he hides inside a bell, at which point her jealous rage turns her into a gigantic serpent and she coils herself around the bell breathing fire and roasts him alive. Alternate versions have the temple monks' fervent prayers releasing the woman from her earthly attachments and ascending to heaven, or sometimes she is the one who hides herself away from the world in the bell where she transforms into her reptilian-monster self, and ultimately just slithers away into the river. yowzers. The noh play, of course, with a super-refined and rigid performance form passed down through centuries from performer to performer, is a slow, intense display of subtle emotion. As is the "Japanese" aesthetic of wabisabi focus is on restraint, and that which is NOT apparent, as much as it is about what is. To the western layman, noh would probably be intolerable to watch and boring as hell.

With such fecund material and willing and skilled collaborators at hand, it is difficult for me to admit that mech[a]OUTPUT was a exciting as someone's master's thesis. There was no seamless marriage between concept and art -- there was high concept, flapping dryly in the wind, and there was great skill, embodied in Koosil-ja's heartrending voice and fierce physicality. But the two seemed never to meld or complement each other, leaving both heart and brain to drift off. It also didn't help that the transitions were handled with utter clumsiness and artlessness. Perhaps with the aid of an editor or director, these elements could have been shaped into a theatrically satisfying event. But as is, it was output to be forsaken.

Berlin, Berlin

I'm back, I'm back, I'm back from Berlin. A sprawling flat city that somehow reminded me of San Francisco pre-internet days: grimey and laid-back, funky and functional. I did not have much organizational time to plan out my theater-going itinerary, so it was basically pure luck that I found in my Ex-Berliner mag that the latest from Constanza Macras/Dorky Park was playing at The Prater in Prenzlauer Berg. Following a gorgeous Russian meal at Pasternak, I went to stand in line for an available ticket to the sold-out show of I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE PART TWO.


You may or may not recall that Dorky Park was the company that made one of my top 3 show in 2006 so I was excited to see this new one, and compare it to my experience of the other show. And, well I wouldn't say I was disappointed, but I do feel like I have now seen a clear isolation of the creative formula -- and like anything magical, once you see its mechanism clearly, a certain mystique and ineffable wonder wear off. back to the present, which I saw at DTW last year, was an explosive, sweaty, wild, youthful, funny, sexy collage of pop-culture and personal narratives. I'm not the only one presented a similar series of vignettes, at times invoking that same kind of indie-rock energy, but with a smaller cast. And the focus seemed to be on intimacy -- the strange desires and contradictions we experience one-on-one with each other, and as an individual within a group. There were vague references to Twin Peaks, violent dance duets, a massive cream pie fight, and a balls-to-the-wall karaoke singing session, a bizarre and beautiful contortionist Gail Sharrol Skrela pitting will against body performed by the intense Hyoung Min Kim. Unlike back to the present, this piece seemed to lose its steam and arc. back to the present, with all its randomness and schitzophrenic jumping around held together energetically and moved from a fun-kitsch to something more grounded and profound. I'm not spent a lot of time circling in a holding pattern, and by the time the amazing Korean singing burst out, the piece had lost my attention. Partly it could have been that I missed Part One, and also, the theater had become unbearably hot and uncomfortable. It certainly felt like the piece could have used an editor.

The following night I went to see another performance -- I'd come across a flyer for Mustafa-Woyzeck at the Theaterdiscounter. The theater was on the ground floor of this amazing building in Mitte. The show, which was, granted, entirely in German, seemed to be a very superficial deconstructed look at Buchner's incomplete play through the lens of a Turkish-German DJ. Language and jet-lag aside, the music was uninventive, the actors unengaging, and they certainly did not earn the final image in the show: a big pudgy Woyzeck pouring a bucket of blood on himself. Oh that just reminded me of another horrible Woyzeck I saw at St. Ann's Warehouse last year -- Daniel Kramer's London "rock and roll" production was, asides from the stark opening image, a dreadfully predictable and oversimplified plastic version of one of the most influential plays in Western theater.

Where is The Other Here, if there is no there there?

What is a human's life worth, in the end? What do we work for? Who do we work for? Do our achievements, our wealth, our accomplishments accumulate in any truly quantifiable, or rather, truly meaningful way? Or is there really only silence, nothing within nothing, nothing to hold in our cupped hands, nothing to show for after we pass? Is there something in the negative space? Are our sentiments communicated to another -- or do they outgrow their tiny containers and become unwieldy, or reticent? What if our gifts to each other only reveal themselves to be burdens? What do we owe each other in life, in death?


These are the questions that strike me thinking about the show I saw last night (and will see another 4 times) The Other Here is an intriguing piece from Big Dance Theater, and surprisingly (almost to a fault) linear and easy to follow in terms of a narrative, I found myself craving more of a sense of mystery and the painful hollowness that Ibuse's writings suggest. The company wove together (rather too comfortably for my taste) two Ibuse short stories (The Carp and Life at Mr. Tange's) and found texts from a life insurance convention. The resulting tale about an aging insurance salesman, his servant, and a carp given to him by a now-deceased friend really begins nowhere and ends nowhere -- and i don't mean that in a bad way at all. Scenes from an insurance conference (complete with sporadic questions from the convention audience) and terse, often-incomplete dialogue between characters are interspersed with heartfelt Okinawan pop songs in quotes and dances that emerge and dissipate like the wind.


The ensemble of actor-dancers held the audience with sure, playful and trustworthy hands. Though there were many people in the audience who were perplexed by the piece's seeming to never land here or there, or anywhere at all -- I thought that that was where I could find magic and resonance the most: in the liminal spaces between between form and content, story and dance.

Pages Out of Order

Yoshiko Chuma is a force of nature. If you ever met her, you'd know exactly what I mean. The intensity, velocity and passion with which she communicates is sometimes too much to handle. So I was surprised when, in the cab over to DTW, Yoko told me that her work is consistently finely crafted, deliberate and clean. I'd sat in on one rehearsal for Page Out of Order: M at the Mabou Mines studio maybe a month ago. I was mesmerized by the repeating and intensifying sequence of two men manipulating two tables, throwing them at each other, catching them, sliding over and under them -- interspersed was some text about national/cultural identity. I was excited to see the piece in its entirety, with the huge 8' x 8' cubes I'd heard about, and the video projections. Plus my friend Saori is in the show, and she is just such a phenomenon to watch.

I have to say that... I just didn't get it. I didn't get it. I didn't get it. Maybe it was the frame of mind I was in. But... There were a lot of things going on: two, and at times maybe three (?) projectors showing clips from b/w film (presumably Macedonian films, since the theme was Macedonia, and the piece was built through Yoshiko's experiences traveling and working there); the aforementioned texts about national identity and repetition/overlapping; dancing through, between, under these massive skeletal cubes; swaths of cloth manipulated to become different articles of clothing as well as wrappings for corpses; a live band which included of three amazing Japanese traditional instrumentalists and the kick-ass vocalizations from Sizzle Ohtaka, whose is also a benshi, or narrator for silent films; and Yoshiko performing a solo herself, while being masked and unmasked by screened cubes, projections, her shadow turning and writhing against the muslin.

For all these delicious elements, I could not for the life of me, find a way to piece them together in a way that made any cohesive sense to me. I left feeling as if I had just not studied enough Macedonian history, or Macedonian film history (sorry Kyoko-san) to fully appreciate what was being done here. But hey, let me in for God's sake. I'm not a dummy. Granted I am not a dance fanatic either, and maybe my theater-trained brain is too rigid to appreciate the internal logic of this work -- but if a piece begins with text or language, I do expect there to be a discernable thread, linear or otherwise. I read the reviews about PAGES being a commentary on art and political upheaval etc. but that's too broad, too general for me. (And it's like some kind of RULE now, that performance has to be political in order to be noteworthy at all). That's my main complaint about dance, actually, is that more often than not, there is no journey. For all the movement, the work is a static expression as opposed to something that moves, grows, unfolds and changes... OK come on, fight with me.

Best of 2006

Thinking back on all the live performances I saw in 2006, I am a bit sad to say that all the show in my top3 were works from outside the u.s. not surprising, but still disheartening... what does that say? well let's not dwell on that...

the countdown for me would go like this:

#3: hedda gabler, schaubuhne am lehniner platz, directed by thomas ostermeier
This was the saving grace of the Next Wave festival at BAM (http://bam.org) for me -- I had the very bright idea of buying subscription tickets to a shitload of shows with a shitload of my friends, it was an organizational nightmare, and something i'll not do again... at least for the next 5 seasons. Anyway, this show was BEAUTIFULLY designed, and so smartly directed. this was the first production of ibsen's that really made sense to me in a contemporary context. i did fall asleep in the first half, but that's just the way my life has been... i appreciated the production for NOT dumbing down the characters, and allowing them to have complex interactions -- yet remaining advocates of ibsen's original scipt. the beach boys soundtrack was revealing and worked well, not cutesy.

#2: back to the present, constanza macras / dorky park
Irwin took me to see this because his friend kevin slavin did the video for it (the choreographer is kevin's ex) ok nevermind the complicated relationships... (too much) this was a dance piece (also from GERMANY, as #3) at DTW (http://dtw.org) with lots of theatrical elements, karaoke singing to bon jovi, elvis costello, violent lovers fight with lots of thrown chairs, wrestling choreography with mounds of stuffed animals, bizarre orchestra vignettes and video following each perfomer's personal nightmare. what's it like to be a young creative person living in the first world/europe? it didn't hook me til the second act -- at first i thought it was just kitschy and too-cool-for-williamsburg. but somehow it managed to be much more revelatory and personal in the second half. it reminded me a lot of what the international wow company was trying to do (at least in my mind) in the early days (1997-2001), full of love, raw, vulnerable, edgy, a la mode, punk rock, young love and lots of sweat and more love...

and...

#1: rehearsal hamlet, cia dos atores
It's been almost a year since I saw this show.... three times!!! lisa hori was visiting me at the time. at the public theater, but not really the public (I mean, come on, does the public do anything really interesting, ever?) the under the radar festival (thanks mark russell -- for 2007 line-up: http://www.publictheater.org/UTR/shows.php). A troupe from Brazil (http://www.ciadosatores.com.br/home_fr.html). BRILLIANT exploration of Hamlet. so inventive and fun and smart and moving... the company of about 6 or 7 actors, flitting in and out of different characters, on an essentially bare stage with simple props (clip lamps, shower caps, mics, suitcases, boombox, vase of sand, video camera). Images to remember: Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern as the red and blue power rangers entering to the theme song of pacman; Gertrude trying to dress Hamlet in clothes way too small; the actor (male) playing laertes and polonius and ophelia all together; "agua agua agua" song for the drowning of ophelia, laertes's eulogy to ophelia as he takes a hot iron to a raw steak... and proof this is a small world, i kept running into the director enrique diaz all over town that week, it became embarrassing. but it turns out that he went to saratoga (for the siti thing) with ravi jain several years ago -- which is why half the siti company were in the audience on closing night, and that was rather obnoxious because enrique gave a post-show shoutout to them -- i mean, ok, whatevs, man, the siti folks are cool and all, but what those brazilians made was far more interesting and emotional and shocking than anything i've seen by siti. sorry, just my humble opinion. hope the brazilians make their way back, or maybe i should head down there... capoeira anyone?

YUBIWA Hotel: CANDIES girlish hardcore

I'll start with a kind of self-serving one... I work at Japan Society in the Performing Arts program. I do a shitload of stuff there, from contracting artists, booking/selling tours, organizing publicity, writing the playbill and brochures, writing grants, translating scripts, translating events, organizing programs/events, etc. and on and on.

This week we kicked off the season with YUBIWA Hotel's CANDIES: girlish hardcore.
Shirotama is a friend of mine. I helped her with a lot of stuff when she was in NY for 6 months on the ACC grant. She put on this crazy show that happened simultaneously in NYC and Tokyo, and the actresses connected with their scene partners via the internet. Some kind of video-conferencing program that had a deadly 8 second delay. She worked with 4 NY-based actors here and directed her 4 Japanese actors via internet too. insanity.

I feel like she is trying to express/explore the same subject matter in all of her work. Essentially - the experience of growing up as a girl. Or how a woman (a Japanese woman) is taught how to interface with the world. Though her work always has images and ideas that are engaging and striking, I always felt on some level that she fed into the objectification and fetishism of cute japanese girls, rather than opposed such phenomena or offered an alternative to them.

But CANDIES was somehow different for me. There was something very bare about this one, very vulnerable. It wouldn't make much sense for me to describe what happens here; it was essentially a series of vignettes and montages that were not really linear or narrative, many scenes accompanied by a voiceover of an older woman reciting a pensive poetic text about all the things she's lost in her life. We follow 5 girls from childhood into old age, at times wearing animal masks, moving through what should be prominent events in one's life: marriage, going to school, playing basketball, death, and making pancakes out of another woman's secretions and eating them with your best friend. always a highlight for me.

But something happened in this piece, the cumulative affect of these quizzical interactions, and the lovely finale where the 5 women discard their animal masks, frilly skirts, and dance a kind of repetitive, frenetic strip tease that ended with them putting out their cigarettes on the soles of their high-heeled shoes -- it was extremely moving. This is why I think Shirotama is pretty great, despite her idiosyncracies. She can capture these moments, and create a visceral, emotional experience out of scraps and pieces. I was left really wondering what a human being's life, a woman's life, ultimately consists of. "So, walk alone, like a rhonoceros' horn." The strength and the loneliness of abandoning one's family, friends, lovers, community. What are you without your community? What are you without your culture? Can you really shed your cultural identity? Your gender identity?

Oh Shirotama. Once she came from Japan to stay at my house, and she brought 2 other people with her -- without telling me she was bringing more people. But she's a sweetheart. She's got this big fat old orange cat she's in love with. http://www.yubiwahotel.com/