Flocking with the Crowd

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.

 

 

Stop, Look, and Listen

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 watching either candidate are those who have already fervently made up their minds to support the one they are watching.

How is it that so many of us end up only preaching to our respective choirs? Is it because we’ve lost our ability to listen that we all end up just talking at people who are talking at us about the same things – leaving anyone without knowledge of the conversation (be it performance-related or political) to scratch their heads and walk away?

Leaving the political arena to other blogs, how can we as performance-makers find ways to interest those mythical “general audience” members without stooping to pandering? Do we even know what its like anymore to watch something without secretly thinking, “Well, I would have done THIS instead of THAT?” Are we even in touch with our experience outside of mental critique when watching performance?

Recently, as part of the discussion portion of THROW, the works-in-progress series I curate at the Chocolate Factory Theater, one of the artists showing work asked the audience to tell her what they FELT when watching the work she had shown. The responses were nearly all things like “I felt like you were trying to…” or “I felt like you were saying that…” When pushed to use emotional descriptions, only one person could respond in kind.

So, here’s my challenge to you (and myself): The next performance you see, focus on your emotional and physical response without immediately judging it mentally. Just like a meditation when you notice your thoughts and let them go, notice your mental comments and let them go. See what’s underneath. Are we capable of feeling anything? Are we capable of making things that inspire feeling beyond understanding? Until we can do both, I think we’ll have a hard time enticing anyone from the “outside” back into our audiences.

A little fun goes a long way.

On Saturday, my company Red Metal Mailbox performed as part of a showcase of work created in part at the Dragon’s Egg, an artist residency space near Mystic, CT.  There were many different kinds of performing artists on the program, presenting a lot of different types of work.  It was a great reminder that some people make things simply because it’s fun, and that that’s what making performance used to be about for me (before it go so pressured and professional.)  Perhaps I can bring some elements of the fun back, without losing the rigour of professionalism.

On Monday, I helped to produce the 24th Annual New York Dance and Performance Awards (aka “The Bessies.”)  Shifted from the formal awards ceremony of years past to an informal party with awards, this event also had me thinking about fun, as well as the incomparable magic of a full moon on a clear night.

…which brings the question…

I took Ishmael Houston-Jones‘ composition class this week, which focused on text and movement as part of Movement Research’s MELT workshop. We started each class session with a five-minute free write, which made me wonder about free-writing on this blog. Is it possible for me to put myself out there without editing? Can I move without thinking first? If I manage to let go and write more freely, could I maintain a more active, less precious posting presence, or would it just bore my few readers to seek other internet entertainment?

I’ve noticed that I write a lot of questions on this blog. I also found that I wrote a lot of questions during the free write sessions in class this week. Plus, I curate a works-in-progress performance series that is all about questions. Perhaps this is obvious, as my site is titled “Inquisitive Owl” and the subheading is “investigating contemporary performance.” Still, I wonder if the questions are just a way for me to keep from making a statement that might be criticized. Sometimes the questions are tools for true investigation, and a means to discovery, but sometimes they are just my cover.

…

It is always just at the moment when I am leaving New York City that I fall back in love with it. A tinge of pink sunset reflected off of the buildings at Columbus Circle reminds me that the natural and the man-made can be a briliant team. Rushing to the Lincoln Center Festival to catch some Beckett before heading to the west coast for a couple of weeks, I’m reminded again and again of balance. It is such a gift to live in this place where possibilities abound even as they sometimes stifle. Through the crowded buildings, one occasionally catches an expanse of sky, a patch of hope cracked wide open that would likely be missed in a place without such an extremity of contrast.

To expound on Beckett (a crime if ever there was one), just when you think you can’t go on, you’re inspired to do just that. Or, as Beckett himself more perfectly put it, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

What’s that sound?

I’m working on two performance projects right now that employ Foley sound.  One is a radio play to be released via podcast and the other is dance-theater piece which layers a reading of Strindberg’s Easter over a movement duet about String Theory.  Sounds fun, right?  My interest in Foley began with the radio scene in the movie version of Annie (where we learn the heartbreaking truth that Bert Healey doesn’t actually tap dance), and was further encouraged by a trip to the American Museum of the Moving Image when I first moved to New York.  (By the way, not only does AMMI have a great Foley exhibit, it is one of NY’s most under-visited gems.)

Last night, watching Proto-type Theater’s WHISPER at P.S. 122, I wondered if Foley is making a comeback in live performance.  WHISPER, a fascinating meditation on urban life and loneliness, employs live Foley sound as well as a pre-recorded soundtrack to create an audio-environment which the audience experiences through headphones.  (This headphone technique was much more successful in WHISPER than in the recent Macbeth presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, as isolation was a topic of exploration in WHISPER, and the distancing affect of the headphones made one feel more connected to the material instead of less.)

There are many interesting visuals in WHISPER – the action takes place behind a scrim which only occasionally, with a sudden flood of light, reveals the performers to be more than shadows, but I found myself most interested in the sound, particularly the “handmade” Foley sound.  Perhaps that is because I am working with a similar medium in my own performance work, but I wonder if it’s related to a larger conversation that seems to be happening in performance around our society’s relationship to technology, and a desire to keep progress on a more human scale.

Keep your heads.

After seeing TR Warszawa’s much-anticipated interpretation of Macbeth and the National Theatre of Scotland’s interpretation of The Bacchae within a week of each other, I have one thing to say: No more severed heads on stage. Seriously, it never works. Please stop.

Ok, I guess I have a few other things to say too: What’s up with all the blood and guts classics on stage right now? I know we’re in the middle of a bloody time (is there any other kind?), but what do these plays have to say to us except to perpetuate the hopelessness of the barbaric nature of humanity? Sure, classic plays have a lot of draw – the rights are free, they seem to make you legitimate as a director/company/actor/whatever, and often audiences are afraid to disparage them, for fear of being marked as Philistines – but these tales of Boy-Meets-Sword are wearing thin.

I was especially disappointed in the National Theater of Scotland, as their Black Watch last season told a much more complex, unglorified, un-gore-ified story of pride, war and violence. Which brings me back to the severed heads. If you ARE going to deal with violence and death on stage, why take such a cop out and put that plastic prop (which isn’t fooling anyone, no matter how realistic it is, and no matter how far away your audience)? Why not use some real theatricality to create a greater impact of the cruelty of murder instead of turning the whole thing into a joke?

Why not anticipate the need for a prop at the end, and give Macbeth and Pentheus (the murdered prince in The Bacchae) each some defining prop throughout the play, which can then return to the stage bloodied without the laugh factor? (Moreover, in The Bacchae, why not have the same actor who plays Pentheus return as his mad, murderous mother Agave, displaying the messy triumph of wild nature over ordered civilization with a smaller dose of sexism than the play calls for?) I mean, I understand that back in the day, Macbeth was basically an action movie and The Bacchae was a Tarantino film, but since the movies cover that stuff nowadays, is it too much to ask for more from our theater?

outpost

Fellow inquisitor, and current expat, Sarah Gancher wrote an enticing review of a production of Faust she recently saw in Romania. Check it out, and enjoy a wonderous virtual trip to South-East Central Europe. (What a ring that has… )

No place like…

Choreographer Susan Rethorst just wants to stay home. I can relate. For Rethorst, the whirlwind of touring and teaching all over the world has made her appreciate the calm quiet of her living room. For me, there’s the less glamorous whirlwind of trying to keep up with the NY performance world. Now granted, from this description neither Rethorst nor I have a particularly tough life and the pressures and pleasures that pull us away from our respective homes don’t seem so bad. In fact, they’re not bad, but one does crave some down time.

Rethorst’s solution was to create a performance in her living room, which was then displaced to more traditional venues (Dance Theater Workshop last season and Danspace Project this weekend.)  At a post-performance discussion last night, Rethorst commented on the escalating expense of creating performance in New York City and the increasing competition for studio space.  After harboring some frustration that it would be nearly impossible for her to make this new work the way that she has been making works since the 1980s (ah, those mythical times), Rethorst asked the performers with whom she was working, “Can’t you all just come to my house to make this?”

I like the example she’s set: Stop complaining.  Look at what you have.  Start from there.  Be honest.  Take care of yourself.

Still in the running

I’ve given in to the inertia of Facebook, and I’ll never be the same. I’m amazed (and a little appalled) at my capacity to spend hours in a delirium of fake plants and fake flair, pondering a clever “status update” to impress my virtual friends. Still, I guess it’s mostly just replaced the time I stole to watch America’s Next Top Model and Step it Up and Dance.

Between Celebreality and Cyber-reality, pop culture entertainment is cropping up a lot in contemporary performance. I know I’m not the first to point this out, but I’m thinking about it in particular after watching Eleanor Bauer’s AT LARGE at The Chocolate Factory last night.

AT LARGE was ambitious and thoughtful (and has garnered a lot of press attention.) — [On a side note, has anyone noticed that the verb "garnered" is only used in the past tense and only in reference to the object of "attention?"] Anyway — AT LARGE contains all kinds of little nods and winks to entertainment – gold sequins, catchy songs, a competition, even promotional give-aways. Yet, despite all of this, the main focus of the piece is movement. It’s old-school dance in a tricked-out package.

I found myself more interested in the packaging around the movement elements than the movement elements themselves, which made me wonder, “Am I so accustomed to being entertained by ironic glitter that I can’t engage with a smart, well-danced, movement exploration anymore?” If so, can I blame Tyra?