A couple weeks ago I came across a press release that struck me as ridiculously racist. The show was Classic Stage Company’s production of Brecht’s Mother Courage. The hook was that the play (by a white dude), directed by Brian Kulick (a white dude), had original music by the incomparable white dude Duncan Sheik, starring not-white-dude Tonya Pinkins, but was set in CONGO! Because contemporary!
Anyway, tonight a friend came up to me at a bar and asked, “On, have you heard the controversy?”
“No…?” I responded.
It turns out Pinkins has left this star-white-studded production of Mother Courage.
For some time now I’ve been thinking about starting to write about what I see in the news. Not as political commentary exactly, but rather as an extension of my work as an arts critic—a critical lens on how I see ideas being formed not only in the media but also among the online communities I find myself part of. I resisted for a long time because it’s a slippery-slope down into the think-piece industrial complex, but I figured I’d give it a stab.
Today, I want to write about “terrorism.” I hate the word. I think it’s overused. I think people rely on it as a rhetorical crutch. And all of that does real work in the world that I find very frightening.
Terrorism is a subject on which so much has been written, which intersects with so many different sorts of discourses, there’s not too much to add. Yet ironically, we in America seem to constantly be fighting about who is or is not a terrorist. Consider the man who just murdered three people in a mass shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood. Intersecting as it does with the messy and vicious Republican presidential primaries, liberal and even mainstream publications have been tracking with intense interest which candidates have chosen to name these shootings “terrorism,” which apparently would imply a willingness to risk alienating Christian Evangelical voters, who might not look so unfavorably upon an individual motivated to kill in the name of protecting unborn children.
A couple days ago, I got a funny text message from Andy Horwitz out in sunny San Diego. It read simply, “OMG my head is going to explode.” He pointed me to a Facebook discussion initiated mainly by Andrew Dinwiddie, who was lamenting the news that Time Out New York may be completely folding its dance page due to lack of interest. It’s not surprising, nor is it new news: that’s probably been in the works since Gia Kourlas left months ago, leaving Helen Shaw as the publication’s part-time dance writer. The Village Voice, of course, axed its dance coverage a couple years ago. Not much real estate left for dance writing in NYC.
I couldn’t help but think about this when my latest article for Culturebot went up this morning. It’s a 4,500-word profile of Parabasis blogger Isaac Butler. It covers nearly 15 years of New York theater history. It’s very long, and I suspect few people will read it.
A couple years ago, Brian Rogers told me one of the reasons he appreciated what we do at Culturebot is because it’s the closest we have today to what C. Carr used to do for performance in the ’80s and ’90s in her long reviews for the Voice. The writing is a record of ephemeral events, a living, ever-developing history of contemporary performance in New York (and, insofar as we can, elsewhere). I appreciated Brian’s point and took it to heart. I read Carr’s collection On Edge and did my best to be inspired by it.
Sister Sylvester’s “They Are Gone But Here Must I Remain.” Photo by Maria Baranova
Under the Radar and PS122’s COIL Festival have announced their line-ups for the 2016 festival season, and they come with pleasant surprises. First of all, I can’t help but plug the work I am myself involved in: Sister Sylvester is reprising They Are Gone But Here I Must I Remain as part of UTR’s Incoming! series. We’re pretty stoked about it. We go up on Saturdays January 9 & 16. It’s very exciting and we’re ecstatic to be part of the same festival as Toshiki Okada, whose God Bless Baseball is presented at the Japan Society as part of UTR. Kathryn Hamilton and I actually met at an afterparty back in January back in 2012 talking about Okada and how much we loved his work. I maintain he’s one of the most interesting theater artists working today, and worth checking out.
Our latest from Sister Sylvester is halfway through its run, and so we want to make sure you know about it. It’s strange even for us: A highly intimate (no more than 10 people per night) performance called What’s Yours Is Mine (On a Beach At Night Alone).
It starts with a story that may or may not be true, about finding a book on the night train to Lisbon. It’s about – and an experiment in – radical hospitality. It references Genet. And…other things happen.
Featuring a remarkable cast and what might be our most ambitious design yet, it takes place at Torn Page in Chelsea, the art space and reading room maintained by actor/director Tony Torn in the historic home of his parents Rip Torn and Geraldine Page, which is also the most beautiful spaces we’ve ever performed in (with all due respect to Abrons Art Center and JACK).
Kathryn came up with the parenthetical part of the title. I came up with the actual and I don’t think she actually knows what it’s from. So scroll down if you want to relive part of your childhood, Americans, and otherwise visit BrownPaperTickets to reserve a spot. We close this Saturday, November 21.
Yesterday over on Culturebot I published a response to Jack Ferver’s and Marc Swanson’s Chambre, at the New Museum, co-presented by the Crossing the Line Festival. My response was…not very positive. You can read it but it basically came down to how remarkably conservative I found the choices in the piece. Today, Helen Shaw reviewed the performance (which runs through this weekend) in Time Out, and she had a rather different response.
Which is great. I like that work can induce widely different responses, and anyway I don’t have to feel so bad writing something critical about an artist whose work I respect. But Shaw’s response likewise left me sort of scratching my head. Like Ferver, I have immense respect for Helen Shaw—she’s one of only a couple critics in this city I believe are actually serious—which is why it was so weird to read her review.
When did Helen Shaw get so conservative?
Here’s the problem: Ferver’s show is a sort of devised, fragmentary adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids through the lens of drag. Which Shaw doesn’t seem to reference at all. The word doesn’t even come up in her review. Now I know you might be tempted to say, “Oh Jeremy, it’s not a drag performance just because men play the roles of women.” And you’d be right in general; just because men play the roles of women doesn’t mean it’s drag. But I do mean very specifically that this is a drag performance, in that part of what it deconstructs and reconfigures is drag performance. Like the sort with drag queens. In a bar. Performing.
Look: Ferver and Jacob Slominski perform as women. They dress in women’s clothes. Ferver imitates a celebrity pop-singer in high camp mode, and the only female role is performed through lip-syncing. How does this not sound like drag?
Now the reason I think it’s important to acknowledge this is because, as I argued overall, the entire piece is fairly conservative. And as drag, it’s conservative and mild. Yet somehow Shaw winds up arguing that:
Rather than admiring Ferver the choreographer, we’re watching Ferver the postmodernist, the comic playwright, the social critic and provocateur. He consistently engages with ideas of selling the show and himself (he chose the title because it’s “fancy-sounding”), and in this we see the fury at the heart of his humor. Ferver frankly equates himself with a girl whose poverty and social proximity to wealth drove her to pluck out a rich woman’s eyes.
Ok, so playing up the idea of pretending to be fancy and using humor to reveal hidden fury? That sounds a hell of a lot like the heart of a drag performance. Which leads me to point: Given that—compared to most drag performances—Chambre is pretty tame, why is it that Ferver doing it in a museum makes him a postmodern provocateur and social critic? Surely Shaw has seen a drag performance, many actual drag performers having been co-opted by museums and the Art World.
It’s just weird. Maybe I’ve reached the point where nothing’s shocking anymore, but I can’t help but feel like she’s dramatically overstating the case. A little not-so-nasty ribbing of Lady Gaga, playing up the poverty of artists and joking about prostituting yourself or your art, and doing scenes from The Maids in drag as the sisters whose sensational crime inspired the story isn’t provocative or transgressive or subversive. To suggest that it is feels like dilettantism, in that the hallmarks of such things are assumed to shock in lieu of the actual thing.
The actual thing, in this case, being a drag show. Or Jean Genet’s The Maids. And this being the year 2015.
In my (never really completed) essay on transgression in art, I noted that “if transgression were to be defined exclusively in terms of violating the law, performance sports an impressive rap sheet of criminality…” A mostly amusing side-note to the sorts of troubling performance transgression I was concerned with is the story of how that rap-sheet now includes bank robbery.
In November 2014, Joe Gibbons—an experimental filmmaker and one-time professor at MIT—robbed a bank in Providence, RI as part of a video art project. As he told the NY Post in a lengthy article (performance art bank robbery? Of course the Post has been all over the story of the person it terms “the nutty professor”), “I tried to make it a funny note, something to get it on the news. The upsetting thing there was that the teller was jolted by the note. It really upset her.” The note suggested that the money—$3,000 in total—was for his church. Gibbons followed up on New Year’s Eve 2014 by robbing a Manhattan Capitol One, escaping with $1,002. He was caught shortly thereafter.
Weekend note: This Friday night June 29, I’m off to Trash Bar in Williamsburg for a midnight performance by the Dublin-based electronic/experimental band Everything Shook, which apparently (I vaguely recall this a few years ago…) I may have helped name in conversation with their bassist Aine Stapleton. Anyway, feel free to join. They’ve just released their debut EP Argento Nights, and my personal favorite track is “Misericord.” There’s also a music video.
(The following is a draft of an in-progress and/or abandoned essay, which is why there are no links nor citations. It was abandoned in its current form because, really, it constitutes several different pieces and should be read as a rough stab at a set of ideas.)
I.
Back in March 2012, a bizarre media spectacle unfolded over Clifford Owens’ solo show at MoMA PS1. As part of the exhibition, Owens had commissioned 26 performance scores from other African-American artists, including Kara Walker. Dubbed “art rape” by the art blogosphere, Walker’s score called for Owens to “force” a “sex act” on a member of the audience. He was to continue forcing the act on them (to points left vague) unless the audience member acquiesced, at which point he was to flip the tables, accuse them of sexual assault on him, and beg for help from others.
What made the entire thing so strange was how lackadaisical it seemed, all the juicy pseudo-controversy notwithstanding. By the time the story made the media rounds, Owens had been performing the score to one degree or another for some weeks, but without going all the way (see the above photo); in fact, his failure to take it sufficiently far enough led him to announce that it would be fully realized the last Sunday of March, turning the completion of the score into a sort of spectacle. Adding to this entire muddled sense of purpose was the fact that the artists seemed somewhat ambivalent about actually doing it–Owens called it “problematic on so many levels,” and Walked dubbed it “evil.”
In the end, far from aggressive sexual assault (to say nothing of flipping the dynamic as the original score called for), Owens enacted a mild form of invasion, kissing two audience members with his hands behind his back, Walker herself in tow as though to minimize the aggressiveness of the act, and making it a female transgression rather than a male one (which seems to subvert the entire purpose of staging black male sexual aggression), and the entire thing felt like a let-down. The press had been primed for sexual assault as art, and what was delivered was a timid pantomime that called into question the entire, already questionably-premised, affair.
