Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
not for review
This is not a review. Dael Orlandersmith's showing of Stoop Stories at Under the Radar is a work in progress and it says right in the program that it is not open to review, but I am signed up to blog it, so hopefully Ms. O will not mind a few non-review words from this humble writer.
In a festival of multi-layered, multi-media and multi-disciplinary work, it is refreshing to hear this singular voice get back to some of the basics of theatre: language, story and character. Orlandersmith embodies a range of characters from a young African-American child to an elderly Jewish man, delivering their stories simply and compassionately through her voice as a writer and speaker. I imagine from the title that these might be the stories neighbors tell each other on their stoops - individuals striving to connect to the universal. These everyday people share stories of their close brushes with love, death, violence, fame and transcendence, some brief, some epic, all their own window into another human life.
- Erin from PICA
disinformation
In this pre-apocalyptic musical revue "anthropological humorist" Reggie Watts explores the lighter side of global climate change, consumerism, racism, and the end of the world as we know it. Punctuated by commercials for the show's ominously-named corporate sponsor Carnaidesai, Watts delivers a word salad of absurdist monologues, corporate sound bytes, spot-on beatboxing and faux-German rap. Just as I got traction on one of his ideas he switched directions, persona, accent or genre, always at least one step ahead of my comprehension. With a soulful voice and deadpan delivery, Watts remained cool as a cucumber as I sweated to keep up.
I wonder if New Yorkers notice the influence of the Pacific Northwest in his work. As a citizen of "Ecotopia" I am all too familiar with environmental and political content in art, although I cannot recall an example as delightfully effective, successful and subversive as "Disinformation." Watts and his group embody the collaborative d.i.y spirit (where do-it-yourself means get all your friends in on it, too) and effortlessly morph between dance, theatre, comedy, music, video and everything in between. They also manage to get their message across without the use of a 2x4. Although I watched most of the performance through tears of laughter, I must admit one line from the show still echoes through my head as I dutifully sort the remains from my lunch into the compost, recycling and landfill containers recently installed in our office: "The more that you use, the less that you are."
. . . edited to add that you can still catch this show (if it is not sold out yet, i assume it will be) at Under the Radar Jan 18th at 9:30, Jan 19th at 10:30 and Jan 20th at 4:30
- Erin from PICA
Theater of Resistance?
GENERATION JEANS
Belarus Free Theatre
The story of the Belarus Free Theatre is an inspiring and upsetting one. The current Belarusian government sponsors a culture of censored artistic freedoms. Performing quite literally under the radar in small apartments and basements, and each time risking the arrest of both the actors and the whole audience, the Free Theatre’s credo states that their task “will be ended when the situation in Belarus will be changed from dictatorial regime to democracy.”
Equally inspiring and upsetting is the story that Nikolai Khalezin tells when he takes to the Public’s less censoring stage. In an hour and a half long monologue underscored by a Velvet Revolution soundtrack mixed live by DJ Laurel, Khalezin tells of the path that led him to a life of political activism and resistance, of the political heroes that have inspired him, of time spent in prison, and of his trafficking of the durable trousers that have come to symbolize those individuals who eschew the luxury suite culture of “The Man” to speak out for rights of the people. His persistent optimism is striking, ultimately reaching out to his audience with a perhaps too easy, but nonetheless affecting plea—a kind of anointment of we participatory spectators as inheritors of the transgenerational, international jeans generation.
Particularly intriguing and thought provoking is the utter lack of the theatrical convention familiar to American theatre audiences. Khalezin simply tells it like it is, with performative flourish and theatrical gesture few and far between. The momentum of his tale can be labored, and his simplicity almost alienating at times, and yet there is a deeply welled honesty in his presentation. The raw minimalism of Khalezin’s performance brings to the fore an inevitable comparison, given the backstory to the Free Theatre of Belarus. What must it be like to view a piece like this in a Belarusian basement? I cannot claim to know much about Belarusian theatre beyond this one performance. But I wonder in a culture with a relative dearth of freely articulated storytelling, what is the experience of watching this sparsely theatrical tale?
Generation Jeans’s Under the Radar performances come now with a somewhat unfortunate preface. Festival producer Mark Russell begins each night with an apology: there is a moment late in the show when, ideally, Khalezin lights a hunk of flammable solid and stands holding a burning ball. Because of New York City fire code, Under the Radar cannot allow Khalezin to actual set anything ablaze. “Use your imagination,” Russell pleads. A friend of mine who is working for Under the Radar tells me that in their first performance, having never run the show fully during tech, Khalezin actually lit the hunk of flammable solid, much to the shock and mild heart attacks of the crew standing in the wings. The restriction was levied in subsequent performances, and so too Mark Russell’s introduction at the Free Theatre’s request. Am I the only one that finds this editing deeply, perhaps sadly ironic?
Really I think the qualification is unnecessary. I found the sans-flame moment perfectly theatrical and effective; the DJ brings up the music and Khalezin stands there with his characteristic stoicism. The point is made. But the acceptance of fire codes highlighted by Russell’s preface deepens the comparison between the two national theatres and up a concern that I find constantly plaguing as a young person making a way in theatre: Can theatre in America be an act of revolution? Seeing Generation Jeans at the Public feels less like an act of resistance and more like a diluted, but nonetheless important, lesson on artistic censorship in one corner of the world. In being presented in an openly advertised theatre, an in accepting New York City fire codes, is Khalezin’s performance not somewhat undermined? I can imagine the sensation of actively taking part in revolution that might be felt by a Belarusian audience member, but I certainly don’t feel it myself. If not here, where can we now find a forum for resistance?
Elliot B. Quick
Belarus Free Theatre
The story of the Belarus Free Theatre is an inspiring and upsetting one. The current Belarusian government sponsors a culture of censored artistic freedoms. Performing quite literally under the radar in small apartments and basements, and each time risking the arrest of both the actors and the whole audience, the Free Theatre’s credo states that their task “will be ended when the situation in Belarus will be changed from dictatorial regime to democracy.”
Equally inspiring and upsetting is the story that Nikolai Khalezin tells when he takes to the Public’s less censoring stage. In an hour and a half long monologue underscored by a Velvet Revolution soundtrack mixed live by DJ Laurel, Khalezin tells of the path that led him to a life of political activism and resistance, of the political heroes that have inspired him, of time spent in prison, and of his trafficking of the durable trousers that have come to symbolize those individuals who eschew the luxury suite culture of “The Man” to speak out for rights of the people. His persistent optimism is striking, ultimately reaching out to his audience with a perhaps too easy, but nonetheless affecting plea—a kind of anointment of we participatory spectators as inheritors of the transgenerational, international jeans generation.
Particularly intriguing and thought provoking is the utter lack of the theatrical convention familiar to American theatre audiences. Khalezin simply tells it like it is, with performative flourish and theatrical gesture few and far between. The momentum of his tale can be labored, and his simplicity almost alienating at times, and yet there is a deeply welled honesty in his presentation. The raw minimalism of Khalezin’s performance brings to the fore an inevitable comparison, given the backstory to the Free Theatre of Belarus. What must it be like to view a piece like this in a Belarusian basement? I cannot claim to know much about Belarusian theatre beyond this one performance. But I wonder in a culture with a relative dearth of freely articulated storytelling, what is the experience of watching this sparsely theatrical tale?
Generation Jeans’s Under the Radar performances come now with a somewhat unfortunate preface. Festival producer Mark Russell begins each night with an apology: there is a moment late in the show when, ideally, Khalezin lights a hunk of flammable solid and stands holding a burning ball. Because of New York City fire code, Under the Radar cannot allow Khalezin to actual set anything ablaze. “Use your imagination,” Russell pleads. A friend of mine who is working for Under the Radar tells me that in their first performance, having never run the show fully during tech, Khalezin actually lit the hunk of flammable solid, much to the shock and mild heart attacks of the crew standing in the wings. The restriction was levied in subsequent performances, and so too Mark Russell’s introduction at the Free Theatre’s request. Am I the only one that finds this editing deeply, perhaps sadly ironic?
Really I think the qualification is unnecessary. I found the sans-flame moment perfectly theatrical and effective; the DJ brings up the music and Khalezin stands there with his characteristic stoicism. The point is made. But the acceptance of fire codes highlighted by Russell’s preface deepens the comparison between the two national theatres and up a concern that I find constantly plaguing as a young person making a way in theatre: Can theatre in America be an act of revolution? Seeing Generation Jeans at the Public feels less like an act of resistance and more like a diluted, but nonetheless important, lesson on artistic censorship in one corner of the world. In being presented in an openly advertised theatre, an in accepting New York City fire codes, is Khalezin’s performance not somewhat undermined? I can imagine the sensation of actively taking part in revolution that might be felt by a Belarusian audience member, but I certainly don’t feel it myself. If not here, where can we now find a forum for resistance?
Elliot B. Quick
Consuming Regurgitophagy
REGURGITOPHAGY
Conceived, Written and Performed by Michel Melamed
Directed by Alessandra Colasanti, Marco Abujamra and Michel Melamed
By chance, twenty four hours before I saw Portuguese monologist Michel Melamed’s Regurgitophagy I sat in a nearby bookstore and reread Shirley Jackson’s hauntingly calculated story The Lottery. The 1948 short story about the an annual ritual in small town America levels a trenchant critique on the ways we all accept, allow, and perpetrate violence in our communities (it’s a wonderful and disturbing story, and if you haven’t read it you should). So it was with my mind already attuned to question of my own complacency that I sat down to view Melamed’s meditation on cultural brutality.
Regurgitophagy finds a way to complicate and make visceral the critique in Jackson’s story. At start, with the tattered clothing and stoic placidity that you might expect in guillotine scenes from the French revolution, Melamed walks out into the sparsely and simply designed stage and clamps the metal cuffs on his wrists and ankles into the interface cables hanging from the ceiling. The interface, known as ‘Pau-de-Arara,’ is set up thusly: microphones trained at the audience will transform every sound you make—laughter, cheers, sobbing and coughing—into electric shocks transmitted to Melamed’s body. As he launches into the cavalcade of streaming words that makes up the substance of Regurgitophagy, the audience sits in anxious anticipation, unsure if and how to interact with the performance.
Melamed, however, assures you that it is okay to respond. Even as his body is tautly contorted from the painful shocks, he encourages you to engage. He eggs you on. He almost seems to enjoy it. The content of Melamed’s performance—a fiercely intelligent and fast paced deluge of lyric word play performed with a mixture of wild abandon and intent focus—is frequently laugh inducing. His manic cycling through personas and subjects feels much like surfing through a litany of grotesque and perverse cable stations. Yet the pained convulsions of Melamed’s body with each vocal response might be enough to silence even the rowdiest audience if it weren’t for his absolute and direct insistence that we engage. When he is met by silence, Melamed points to a man near the front. “What’s your name,” he says. And he waits patiently until the man musters the courage to respond, delivering the shock that we all know is coming. At another point, stepping into the role of radio pundit, Melamed looks into the house, asks “Who’s there?” and then waits with the patiently honest look of a performer prompting audience interaction. When someone from our midst voices a response, I’m not sure if I should judge him for his willingness to enact this violence or respect him for being brave enough (braver than I) to give Melamed what he wants.
With as prevailing a concept as this, the show risks being overly reliant on the shocking (sorry) gimmick— Melamed uses the same machine in two other shows as well, and I’d be curious to see how well those shows play. What allows Regurgitography to broaden into a more complex cultural critique is the meaning of this somewhat cumbersome title. A program note breaks it down into its component parts: REGURGITATE-“to expel, to cast out that which in a cavity is in excess, especially in the stomach.” And PHAGY-“to eat.” Regurgitophagy is then the act of excising everything in order to decided what to re-consume. As Melamed throws out a litany of cultural touchstones, he highlights our selection of what to re-consume by allowing the decision to register physically on his body.
There are certainly moments in the performance that don’t always pack the emotional punch they might. The feverish pace of the text combined with Melamed’s thick Portuguese accent make the language sometimes feel impenetrable, ultimately diluting the visceral terror of being asked to commit this violence a muddling our ability to truly regurgitophagate. Feeling sometimes alienated from the content of Melamed’s words left me more invested in the intellectual and conceptual questions raised by the piece, than in the specific moments of highlighted consumption. But it is precisely in this task of interrogating the more easily digestible challenge to our everyday complacency that Regurgitophagy is most successful. I could write for pages on the philosophical quandaries that Melamed has me pondering—issues of martyrdom, questions of internationalism and the role of foreign cultures in both mediating and acknowledging violence, and of course the cyclical paradox of who is enacting the violence and who is having the violence enacted upon them (Melamed for the obvious reasons vs. me for being forced to commit violence). It’s a sprawling litany of cultural concerns and one that I will be sifting through for a while.
Elliot B. Quick
Conceived, Written and Performed by Michel Melamed
Directed by Alessandra Colasanti, Marco Abujamra and Michel Melamed
By chance, twenty four hours before I saw Portuguese monologist Michel Melamed’s Regurgitophagy I sat in a nearby bookstore and reread Shirley Jackson’s hauntingly calculated story The Lottery. The 1948 short story about the an annual ritual in small town America levels a trenchant critique on the ways we all accept, allow, and perpetrate violence in our communities (it’s a wonderful and disturbing story, and if you haven’t read it you should). So it was with my mind already attuned to question of my own complacency that I sat down to view Melamed’s meditation on cultural brutality.
Regurgitophagy finds a way to complicate and make visceral the critique in Jackson’s story. At start, with the tattered clothing and stoic placidity that you might expect in guillotine scenes from the French revolution, Melamed walks out into the sparsely and simply designed stage and clamps the metal cuffs on his wrists and ankles into the interface cables hanging from the ceiling. The interface, known as ‘Pau-de-Arara,’ is set up thusly: microphones trained at the audience will transform every sound you make—laughter, cheers, sobbing and coughing—into electric shocks transmitted to Melamed’s body. As he launches into the cavalcade of streaming words that makes up the substance of Regurgitophagy, the audience sits in anxious anticipation, unsure if and how to interact with the performance.
Melamed, however, assures you that it is okay to respond. Even as his body is tautly contorted from the painful shocks, he encourages you to engage. He eggs you on. He almost seems to enjoy it. The content of Melamed’s performance—a fiercely intelligent and fast paced deluge of lyric word play performed with a mixture of wild abandon and intent focus—is frequently laugh inducing. His manic cycling through personas and subjects feels much like surfing through a litany of grotesque and perverse cable stations. Yet the pained convulsions of Melamed’s body with each vocal response might be enough to silence even the rowdiest audience if it weren’t for his absolute and direct insistence that we engage. When he is met by silence, Melamed points to a man near the front. “What’s your name,” he says. And he waits patiently until the man musters the courage to respond, delivering the shock that we all know is coming. At another point, stepping into the role of radio pundit, Melamed looks into the house, asks “Who’s there?” and then waits with the patiently honest look of a performer prompting audience interaction. When someone from our midst voices a response, I’m not sure if I should judge him for his willingness to enact this violence or respect him for being brave enough (braver than I) to give Melamed what he wants.
With as prevailing a concept as this, the show risks being overly reliant on the shocking (sorry) gimmick— Melamed uses the same machine in two other shows as well, and I’d be curious to see how well those shows play. What allows Regurgitography to broaden into a more complex cultural critique is the meaning of this somewhat cumbersome title. A program note breaks it down into its component parts: REGURGITATE-“to expel, to cast out that which in a cavity is in excess, especially in the stomach.” And PHAGY-“to eat.” Regurgitophagy is then the act of excising everything in order to decided what to re-consume. As Melamed throws out a litany of cultural touchstones, he highlights our selection of what to re-consume by allowing the decision to register physically on his body.
There are certainly moments in the performance that don’t always pack the emotional punch they might. The feverish pace of the text combined with Melamed’s thick Portuguese accent make the language sometimes feel impenetrable, ultimately diluting the visceral terror of being asked to commit this violence a muddling our ability to truly regurgitophagate. Feeling sometimes alienated from the content of Melamed’s words left me more invested in the intellectual and conceptual questions raised by the piece, than in the specific moments of highlighted consumption. But it is precisely in this task of interrogating the more easily digestible challenge to our everyday complacency that Regurgitophagy is most successful. I could write for pages on the philosophical quandaries that Melamed has me pondering—issues of martyrdom, questions of internationalism and the role of foreign cultures in both mediating and acknowledging violence, and of course the cyclical paradox of who is enacting the violence and who is having the violence enacted upon them (Melamed for the obvious reasons vs. me for being forced to commit violence). It’s a sprawling litany of cultural concerns and one that I will be sifting through for a while.
Elliot B. Quick
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)