WaxFactory’s “PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!” Photo by Maria Baranova
What an exhausting few weeks it’s been! I’ve been to Austin, Toronto, and out and about in NYC. This weekend I head to Chicago for a business trip. And in between I celebrated my birthday with a lovely pub-and-bookstore crawl across Brooklyn. So I’m rather tired. But with all that said, I wanted to share what I’d been up to.
The 2016 Fusebox Festival in Austin. I made my second trip to Austin for the annual Fusebox Festival last month, and wrote about the festival for them. This website played host to the project, which included my new friend and acquaintance Christine Gwillim, who helped me cover the events. All of work can be found here on the Deeply Fascinating @ Fusebox page. I also wrote an archival round-up for the festival, published on Storify, which can be found here. And finally, I joined Lindsay Barenz of Maxamoo, a weekly theater and performance podcast, wrapping it up here. So, exhaust yourself with our exhaustive coverage of Fusebox.
Devising Process in the Brooklyn Rail. I made my premier in the Brooklyn Rail this month (May) with a piece on WaxFactory’s latest; you can check it out here. The show, PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER! #montage, at 3LD May 18-19, is the fourth in a series of studies the company is putting forward as it devises a contemporary version of Chekhov’s The Seagull. The article grew out of a dialogue between Ivan Talijancic and me about the relationship of process to art, inspired by a similar project I was involved in with Seattle dance/performance company zoe|juniper, called “No Ideas But In Things,” which you can read part of on the company’s website and a essay-length piece on in Chance 5.
May Previews! I returned to Maxamoo just this week to talk about what’s up in May, touching on the Wooster Group, the aforementioned WaxFactory presentation, Hadestown at NYTW, and finally Jim Findlay’s Vine of the Dead, a piece I was amazed by last fall and am stoked to see at the Invisible Dog May 26-28 at 9 pm. It’s a strange, wonderful, bizarre experience, and I highly recommend it.
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.
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 life of a writer is a miserable, solitary one. Or something. Actually, I tend to find life to be exciting and interpersonal interaction filled, which is perhaps why I’m not quite the writer I sometimes wish I was. But trust me–I’ll take friendship and human interaction over suicidal loneliness and depression any day. That said, there are some things I’m writing about, or have recently written about, or that you should know about, and this is a blog post that just slaps it all down. Welcome to the confusion of my mind.
What does the 1955 New American Machinist Handbook have to do with Susan Sontag, James Agee, and the ever-present tension in socially or politically engaged art between call-to-action and aesthetic seduction? I have no idea, personally, but these seem to be the questions Sibyl Kempson is grappling with in Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, which opens this coming week at Abrons Arts Center, and constitutes the debut of her new theater company.
David Herskovits of Target Margin Theater is one of those people whose positivity and relentless optimism always blow me away. Not many directors think like him anymore: His TMT Lab series, an ongoing laboratory and incubator for exploring dramaturgical strategies for grappling with concepts, aesthetics, and ideas, has provoked me many times in the past, particularly with his last round dealing with the legacy of LES Yiddish theater from the early 2oth century. The next round is still in progress, tackling the work of Gertrude Stein. Whose work I’ve only seen staged once, by Heiner Goebbels. Who liked the bizarre interview I wrote up enough to have it republished in program notes for the show around Europe.
Jim Neu’s The Floatones. Which will be staged this May, by Catherine Galasso, at La Mama (where it premiered in 1995), with Jess Barbagallo, Greg Zuccolo, Joshua William Gelb, and Larissa Velez-Jackson. Someone pitched it to me as a series of “performance crushes,” which made me jealous because my performance crushes!
Catch at the Invisible Dog. If I haven’t seen you for a while, say hi at the Invisible Dog tomorrow where I will be a Catch. Which I haven’t been to for a while. NYC is playing host to Philly artists for iteration no. 67, so let’s give them a friendly Brooklyn welcome. I love Philly.
Yesterday, I finally punched out some very quick thoughts on the controversial move by Actors’ Equity Association to make radical changes to LA’s 99-seat showcase code, and I felt like I should come back to it to more fully address what strike me as the most important issues raised by what’s going on there.
To briefly recap, Equity has proposed changes which essentially make it impossible for members to take part in small indie productions by requiring those producers to pay at least minimum wage for Equity members’ labor. This radically increases production costs and presents an existential threat to the health of a vibrant small theater community. On the other hand, it appears that LA’s more flexible existing showcase code has permitted some small theaters (particularly those most critically recognized) to grow much larger and robustly funded than, say, their New York counterparts.
While it seems clear that Equity’s move is overkill–throwing the baby out with the bathwater–the controversy nevertheless reveals the pernicious degree to which the devaluation of performers’ labor has become endemic in American theater. This is hardly limited to LA.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about the imbroglio in the Los Angeles theater community over the past few weeks–since Actors’ Equity, the stage actors’ union, announced plans to change the city’s local 99-seat showcase code–and I keep coming back to a conversation I had with the artistic director of an arts center that presents independently produced theater productions (the sort of experimental contemporary performance I write about). He’d been involved in several projects and initiatives that sought to figure out how to better compensate these artists for their work, and among other recommendations, one such panel had simply suggested that artists make less art, on the dubious grounds it could increase demand for the remaining pieces.
To which I suggested that if the purpose was to pay artists some sort of minimum for their work, perhaps they should just form a union to require institutions such as the one he ran to ensure that artists made such a minimum while they were working there, and preventing his institution from presenting works that violated such wage minimums. To which he responded with some version of: “A union? Are you kidding me?”
The point isn’t to throw stones at some anonymous figure (who, for the record, has instituted several initiatives to ensure better compensation for artists). Rather, it’s to get at one of the core problems we in the arts face whenever we try to deal with these sorts of issues. Even the best meaning people, confronted with the practical reality that our behavior would have to change in order to achieve the ends we want, tend to retreat from the positions they hold so dear. It’s easy to say, “We value paying artists a living wage for their work,” but much harder to change our own institutional behavior to make that happen. And this is the problem which lies at the heart of the controversy playing out in Los Angeles in increasingly vitriolic terms.
Then the screening began. The film begins with footage of Yanukovych’s legendary press-conference, where he breaks a pen. Literally seconds later, special agents [police] appeared, the lights were turned on, and they announced that there was information suggesting a bomb had been planted, and requested that we immediately evacuate the premises. While this was happening, the special agents who’d been impersonating audience members, and those who’d entered when the screening had been halted, demanded that the proceedings not be photographed or filmed in any way. It got to the point where cameras were being openly knocked out of [audience members’] hands. In the basement’s exit, those who were being “rescued” from an explosion were stopped by at least 5 special agents, who’d organized a check of documents and a search of possessions. We requested that they explain whether their operation was to save us, or to detain us.
I’m going to miss Tom “Rampant Lesbianism” Coburn, Oklahoma’s recently retired senator. I mean, there are so many great things he’s done! True, he lacked Sam Brownback’s visual-aid skills, and has always lacked the high-minded intellectualism of James Inhofe. Nevertheless, I always got a kick out of Tom Coburn, and in particular his annual Wastebook, where he calls out all kinds of wasteful spending those liberals get up to. Such as, in the 2014 edition, The TEAM, for RoosevElvis which received $10,000 for “their next run of RoosevElvis at a still-to-be-determined date before May 2015.” Which you can come see as part of the 2015 COIL Festival, where it plays the Vineyard Theater.
As Arizona’s Senator Jeff Flake–for whom bipartisanship is literally a Survivor-esque contest–notes, in the sort of pull-quote most theater companies can only dream of: “What in San Juan Hill is the federal government doing funding this hunk-a-hunk-a-burnin’ waste?”
Truly one for the press kit.
For more recommendations on shows coming up in January, see here.
Like many people I know, the last few weeks have been a matter of spending fairly large amounts of money on tickets to shows in January for Under the Radar, COIL, American Realness, and so on. Or, well, let me clarify: Under the Radar. As a critic I tend to have the opportunity to receive review comps. But for various reasons I usually wind up buying my own tickets to Under the Radar shows. Which makes me one of the lucky ones, to be sure–the cost would be staggering otherwise. Anyway, a Facebook friend threw this up this morning and it cracked me up:
As he pointed out, $25 for a 15-minute performance works out to a little over $1.66 per minute of performance. Which, for some reason, does seem expensive. $25 for a downtown performance is a little higher than average I want to say, but still solidly within the expected price range. But for only 15 minutes? It’s an odd bit of math to do: what is the value of a minute of performance?
The economics of production dictate that the fixed costs (design, set construction, load-in, etc.) are more or less the same for a show regardless of whether its run time is five minutes or 5 hours. If I were James Surowiecki writing in The New Yorker‘s financial page, I’m sure I’d have some pithy little analysis based in social science research that would provide a concrete language regarding why it is that–even though I know why the prices are the same for a short performance or a long one–that it seems somehow unfair to have to pay the same for a show that’s short as for one that’s long. Instead, I just decided to start running the math on various shows based on ticket prices I’ve paid (or would have paid had I been forced to buy them):
600 Highwaymen’s The Recordat the Invisible Dog ’13: $0.26 per minute ($15 suggested donation at nearly exactly 57 minutes–if Abby or Michael feel so inclined, they can provide exact run-time for the most accurate cost-per-minute analysis here)
TR Warszawa’s 4.48 Psychosis at St. Ann’s Warehouse ’14: $0.75 per minute ($45 per ticket, 60-minute run-time)
Philippe Quesne’s Bivouac at Performa 13: $1.50 a minute? Maybe? ($20 for a 30-minute…90-minute… Wait, if the bus ride was part of the performance, do I have to figure out how long it was supposed to take if the driver hadn’t gotten lost? And do I subtract the period during which the performance was interrupted to make us all stage a scene for a different performance Quesne was making? Fucking performance art…)
Jim Findlay’s Dream of the Red Chamber in Times Square ’14: $0.00 per minute ($0.00 ticket for up to 12 hours; at zero cost it’s not worth debating the validity of whether you experience performance while you’re asleep for the purposes of calculation)
Fernando Rubio’s Everything by my side at Crossing the Line/PS122 ’14: $0.33 ($5 for 15 minutes…though I actually think the “performance” was much less than 15 minutes)
Gerald Kurdian’s The Magic of Spectacular Theaterat Crossing the Line ’12: $0.50 per minute, or $0.30 per minute, or $15 for nothing, depending (Assumes $15 ticket purchased in advance for the performance that started 20 minutes after scheduled curtain due to artistic crisis, which in turn led to the artist not actually performing the intended show. So pricing is based on whether you assume the show started late but you accepted the alternate performance of a few songs; or whether you accept the artist’s statement that what took place onstage was all a matter of conscious decision, which means the show didn’t start late; or whether you assume you didn’t actually get the thing you thought you paid for at all)
Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz in Seattle in ’07 or NYC in 2010: $0.06 per minute, or $0.41 per minute (depends on whether you paid $24 for the show at On the Boards in 2007 or $160 top price at the Public in 2011)
The author in Company I, at the Park Avenue Armory
Not that I usually indulge in very personal blog posts, but today has been a rather interesting and—in a good way—emotional day. Getting up earlier than I rather would on a Sunday morning, I rushed into the city to meet friends at MoMA to see the Matisse cut-outs exhibit. Matisse is not particularly one of my favorites, but a good friend is very fond of his work, and so me and her and her husband had made plans to see it, and finding a time (it’s a ticketed exhibit) proved tricky.
While I have to admit to being touched by the Matisse exhibit, the emotional part came more through visiting MoMA with someone who’d never been there before. For someone like me, an embittered critic (or something) whose job it is to tackle some of the more thorny intersections of labor, artistic production, and art presentation, I have all manner of complicated responses to an 800-pound gorilla in the room like MoMA. But mostly what I was reminded of—wandering the fifth floor permanent collection after our time with Matisse—was how spell-binding MoMA was the first time I went there. March 1997, me on a trip with my high school drama class from Portland, Oregon. I was nearly 18 years old and the entire affair was very, very exciting. It included mostly Broadway shows—Rent with the original cast, and Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Forum with Whoopi—but on our one free day, while most of my friends either shopped for knock-offs in Chinatown or entertained themselves by wondering what it was like inside the strip-clubs that still lined Times Square that precious few of us could enter, I went off, by myself, to MoMA.
I’m not sure why, exactly, visiting today affected me so. I go at least a few times a year for one reason or another. Hell, I once did a power visit for Boris Charmatz’s Musee de la Danse: Three Collective Gestures, just to score a print of Jim Fletcher re-enacting a Vito Acconci performance (sort of) piece. Which still hangs on my wall. Anyway, today, while standing in front of Van Gogh, and glancing to my left, through the archway to where Desmoiselles d’Avignon hangs, I was rather affected by the entire experience, as much tied to the passage of time as to anything else, and have been in a weird sort of fugue ever since.
Right after I had to rush north, up to the Park Avenue Armory, where I was hosting a rehearsal by Susana Cook in the space I had to vacate immediately after in Company I on the second floor, Sister Sylvester’s home over the past four or five months. The space was courtesy of Sasha Frere-Jones (of the New Yorker and whatnot), who was the proper artist-in-residence there and on whose behalf we performed The Fall: A Performative Screening on November 12 as part of the Armory’s “Under Construction” series. Sasha opened with a passionate and intelligent plea that organizations like the Armory avail (some, at least) of their space and resources to emerging artists like us.
It was quite hard to lug that last box of materials out of the Armory (not least because it contains various BDSM-y implements, including a four-foot-long closet rack with leather neck-chokers, which attracts more than its fair share of attention on the subway). This was a sort of home-away-from-home for some time. Depositing a few spare beers I found inside one of the regimental lockers in the second-floor kitchen refrigerator, I was reminded of sitting in that kitchen desperately trying to finish a draft of a bizarre essay on Suzanne Bocanegra, Sibyl Kempson, and Big Dance Theater’s Ich,Kürbisgeist, which was just published in Chance magazine, of which I’ve become an editor. I need to pick up my copy at our Union Square offices this week. This edition also includes a photo spread of Sister Sylvester’s The Maids’ The Maids, shot by the amazing Maria Baranova (the best in the business says the editor–hire her).
Maybe my entire seasonal nostalgia trip began a few days ago, when I heard from Performance Space 122, asking me to serve on the invite committee for the annual Red & White Party in January. How time does fly! How much has happened since last January. When I was also on the invite committee, from which I learned to flog—and flog hard!—the event as early as possible. (See how clever I was, there? $30 a ticket or contact me! January 11–ping pong again!)
With my good friend and collaborator Kathryn Hamilton, I’ve developed two full productions (Dead Behind These Eyes and The Maids’ The Maids) and two work-in-progress showings (Make Like Its Yours and The Fall: A Performative Screening). With Chance, I’ve written a lengthy profile of Kenneth Collins and his transitional durational work My Voice Has an Echo In It (part of the 2015 PS 122 COIL Festival); completed research on zoe | juniper’s BeginAgain (also part of PS 122’s COIL Festival—I’ll be busy this January!); the aforementioned critical inquiry into the nature of authorship (you just have to read it) about Ich,Kürbisgeist. Four shows with Kathryn and Sister Sylvester. Two shows (Immersion and, opening last night, Lisa and Her Things) with Sans Comedia. I’m in discussion with my friend Steve Valk and his frequent collaborator Michael Klien about a forthcoming project in New York. I’ve written lengthy profiles and features on admirable artists like Mimi Lien (in American Theatre) and Dan Safer and Tony Torn (for Culturebot), whose fantastic Ubu Sings Ubu may well be coming back to NYC stages (if Facebook hints are to be properly analyzed and believed). And I watched Mallory Catlett—whose This Was the Endblew me away on its opening weekend—sweep awards in the city for her and her collaborators’ brilliant work.
All things considered it’s been a fantastic—if troubling and problematic and everything else—year. And as November slips uncomfortably into December, the weather gyrating between pleasantly autumnal and brutishly cold, I’m looking back on time elapsed, another year older (and thereby closer to death, world death rates remaining constant at 100% despite best efforts), wiser (maybe?), happier (who knows?), but certainly more jaded.
Which was why it was nice to visit MoMA today. To be reminded of the very genuine experience of discovery and awe. When I first visited that lonely morning around 18 years ago, it had never occurred to me what it would mean to truly feel like I was a part of the world of the arts. I may not be super important, I may be stumbling (or fumbling, awkwardly) forward like everyone else I know in this field, but as much as I sometimes miss the feeling of what it was first like to be overwhelmed by art, I nevertheless am ecstatic to have wound up the little cog in the machine I now am.
