APAP is upon us! The yearly festival of performance gluttony has arrived in all its schedule-busting glory. For its out-of-town target audience, it might be a great time, and a useful way to grab a Cliff’s Notes version of the New York performance season, but for those of us who work in the NY performance community, APAP becomes a bizarre competition of who can see the most and get the least amount of sleep during the ever-expanding “weekend” festival.
It’s an amped-up version of the status quo in the NY performance world, come to think of it. Consume, consume! Don’t be the only person who hasn’t seen THAT show! If you miss THIS one, you might as well hide in your room for the next month! The quantity of performance work presented in this town is the reason we’re all here, but it can also be self-defeating. How much can a person actually engage with a work, if s/he is headed to the theater again the next night? The experience of watching performance has become practically disposable.
What is to be done? Every year around this time, I think about making a New Year’s resolution to see less, and engage more. Every year, by the first weekend of January, my resolution has gone belly-up, because I just don’t want to miss anything. Yet, I couldn’t tell you what I saw at APAP last year. Perhaps the only thing to do is to keep going and hope for that rare performance event that stops you in your tracks.
it’s true – I moped for a year after missing small metal objects
It’s hard to know which one is going to be the one, right? So we just all run around trying to see everything. Ironically, one of my favorite shows during the conference was one that made me feel like I should leave the theater and immediately return to real life – call my mom, kiss my husband, wash my dishes. “England,” presented as part of the Under the Radar Festival at the Chelsea Art Museum, constantly directed us in the audience to “look” at our surroundings forcing an awareness that one usually escapes in a dark theater. As a refracted museum tour unraveled into a tale of deceit, global politics, and a life-saving/life-taking heart transplant, I couldn’t help be think about the preciousness of life and wonder why I was spending mine surrounded by strangers at performances every night — unless of course, it is to remind me of just such things.
GODDAMMIT!!!!!! i had tickets to that and missed it because of a sinus infection. I missed two shows this APAP, because of this sinus infection — England and DD’s piece. and the ones I got to…… well, they were not nearly as good as the ones i missed, let me tell you. I sure flunked APAP.