I’ve been working on an essay addressing the state of contemporary performance: its opportunities and challenges in the current socio-economic upheaval that we’re experiencing. With established structures disappearing by the minute in every social sector, the opportunities for new thinking are equal only to the pervasive anxiety caused by the constantly-shifting ground.
Yesterday, I came across [...]
Archive for the ‘theory’ Category
You said it.
Posted in theory on August 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
That’s absurd.
Posted in theory on April 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been heartily enjoying a read of Martin Esslin’s landmark book The Theatre of the Absurd. It’s a bit embarrassing that I haven’t read it before, actually. (Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that when I was studying theater in college, my theater history professor believed that the only post-Shakespearean theater worth [...]
This is not a contest.
Posted in theory on February 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The very-frustrating Amendment introduced by Senator Coburn to exclude the arts from government stimulus has sparked much heated conversation and activity in the arts community, as it should. However, I’ve been discouraged to see so many of us playing into frameworks of ranking and hierarchies. Isn’t it precisely art’s influence that can lead us to other models of thinking and organizing [...]
Sweet Sensation
Posted in theory on February 5, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I watch a little too much Food Network. This past weekend, while most people were watching the Superbowl, I was glued to a mini-marathon of the Oklahoma State Sugar Art Show. Yup, I spent an evening watching people alternately cheer and cry over gum paste flowers. While it is quite amazing what some of these folks can do with [...]
Flocking with the Crowd
Posted in theory on January 6, 2009 | 3 Comments »
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 [...]
Stop, Look, and Listen
Posted in theory on October 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
As the New York fall performance season gets gets underway, I can’t help but notice (again) that most of the folks watching so-called “downtown” (nee “experimental”) dance and performance are the same folks who make the stuff.
As the political campaigns reach a fever pitch, I can’t help but notice that the people most interested in [...]
Tell me a story
Posted in practice and process, theory on December 1, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
I’m working on a new performance project that is an investigation of time, and it has me thinking a lot about linear narrative. It’s interesting that our macro experience of life (birth into death) trumps the cyclical, sun-driven structure of our day-to-day existence. If my boyfriend read that last sentence, he would say, “What the [...]
this is not a manifesto
Posted in theory on November 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
It’s so easy to be angry. I’ve started numerous posts over the past few weeks, none of which have made it past “draft.” Why? Well, I started the Owl as a way to investigate performance through writing, but I’m finding that it’s much easier to write a manifesto than truly investigate. If this site was called [...]
Performance, once removed
Posted in theory on October 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Cool Op-ed article in the NY Times today. It goes along with Sarah’s chorus idea that the arts more moving when the audience can feel they are participating– not necessarily as a put-on-the-spot individual*, nor in a forced structure**, but as a spontaneous individual part of a whole.
*Anyone who knows me knows the hyperventilations and [...]
I’m gonna THROW this out there.
Posted in theory on October 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
I curate a works-in-progress series at the Chocolate Factory Theater called THROW. While there are other series in NYC which focus on works-in-progress, (Draftwork and Danspace Project, Movement Research’s Open Performane and Judson Church series, The Field’s Fieldwork program, and supposedly everything at Dixon Place), nearly all of them have been transformed (by those [...]
