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.
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.
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.
(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.
This mass expanse of blank and unattractive concrete was conceptualized by Renzo Piano you ungrateful little shits.
Note: Upon re-reading this, I’m irritated by how rant-y it is, and have added what I hope is a fairly succinct post-script at the end.
For the past two days, the theater Internet has been blowing up in response to a pair of reviews—published in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times respectively—harshly criticizing Steppenwolf’s production of Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval’s This Is Modern Art (based on a true story). A number of issues are in play at once: the role of the critic in responding to art, the obligation of art to uphold the moral good when oriented to children, racial privilege and bias, and, somewhere in there, the merits of street art.
Unfortunately all of this has proven quite difficult to unpack, mainly because Hedy Weiss’s review in the Sun-Times is not only blatantly racist but easily one of the dumbest reviews anyone’s read in a major newspaper in recent memory. This is unfortunate in that it distracts from the more pertinent issues at play across both. The Tribune’s Chris Jones is not overtly racist in his review, giving it the gloss of relative acceptability despite its dubious (at best) moral argument against the play, so it becomes hard if not actually unfair to treat him as on the same side of a debate as the wholly objectionable Weiss.
What the whole thing adds up to, though, is the single greatest indictment of the sorry state of American theater criticism I can imagine. This may not be the most important point (the racial dynamics at play are just plain ugly and ignorant) but the fact these reviews exist demonstrates the complete lack of fucks everyone involved in their publication–from author to editor to publisher–don’t have to give for theater criticism.
This is an update to the post I finally decided to promote yesterday. Sometimes you know things aren’t good for you, and apparently daring to say that what’s racist is racist is one of them…when people decide that racism is okay. An overstatement? Yes, obviously. The point I set out to make is one that people either got and found uncontroversial, or didn’t get and apparently was objectionable because free speech. I don’t know exactly what to say other than to try to clarify how I understand the objection.
The post I wrote was an attempt to apply ideas from Stanley Fish’s essay “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech” to understanding the tensions that exist over the actions–and responses to those actions–of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical and investigative newspaper targeted in early January by terrorists in response to that publication’s cartoons depicting a variety of subjects: first and foremost the Prophet Muhammad; second, mockery of traditional Islamic values through the Muhammad caricature; and third, a tendency towards racialized, stereotypical presentations in the service of the prior two points, as well as toward “terrorists.” I add scare quotes around the word “terrorist” because, among other angry interlocutors on the Internet, I was accused of not distinguishing between a religion (Islam) and a race (Arab…or maybe North African, depending on context) which are necessarily represented thusly. In any event, for this failure I sincerely apologize: I assumed people had seen the cartoons Charlie Hebdo published that caused such a fuss. Or maybe that they could grasp why portraying “terrorists” as grody bearded dudes in Aladdin costumes might seem racist.
In any event, I apologize; if you can’t see these points, you surely have bigger problems to deal with in this unhappy world than a critic pointing out the failings of your own critical faculties.
Like many others, I’ve spent the last week and a half trying to wrap my head around the traumatic events that unfolded in Paris, when gunmen slew a dozen journalists and cartoonists in the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. I also watched as, predictably, a heated debate exploded online within mere hours following the initial assault (and well before the bloodletting ended in simultaneous sieges a couple days later) over whether Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons mocking Islam (or, at least, targeting certain aspects of Islam and associated extremist practitioners and political ideologues, if you prefer) constituted racism or Islamophobia. Richard Seymour at Jacobin magazine made the first big splash by declaring: “I simply take it as read that — irrespective of whatever else it does, and whatever valid comment it makes — the way in which that publication represents Islam is racist.” The response to those suggesting that perhaps Hebdo was a problematic standard-bearer for the cause of free speech and expression was angry and occasionally near deranged in its outrage (consider Jorg Heiser in Frieze).
For my part, I was both troubled and didn’t, at first, want to try to respond by writing something. As a journalist and a critic, one of the things I’ve grown tired of to my bones is an Internet flame-war. I’m flogging a dead horse by pointing out that these days, reflection and reporting are out of fashion; it’s easier for writers to churn out several-thousand-word think-pieces in mere hours, apparently, than to grapple with the deeper and more problematic aspects of the issue they’re supposedly responding to. In fact, what we normally wind up with are puffed-up jeremiads about this or that–bloggers and opinion columnists yelling at one another across the web. This sad state of affairs will flame for a few days and then, when the news cycles on, the discussion will simply be dropped, regardless of whether it’s an important one to have.
Anyway, I had no desire to contribute to that, so I simply sat down and read Stanley Fish’s There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech (and it’s a good thing, too!) [PDF] and then thought for a while.
The setting is of a cold January night in New York City, where a lonely critic sits hunched over his chickenscratch notes when begins to shake in disturbing fashion the cracked rectangle of obsidian black glass at his elbow, simultaneously emitting a tinny sad trill of bell-like tinkling. Pick it up he does, swiping a finger from left to right across the distressingly lattice-worked bit of glass, and to his ear to hear the squawking voice of the editor. Where’s the report? he asks. On its way, replies the critic, but the notes are a mess! Deadlines are past! replies the editor. It’s hopeless! says the critic. Surely there’s a subject? squawks the box. Too much, is the reply, and not enough at once! How was the trade-show? asks the voice. Outgrown itself, is the reply, and continues: Ouroboros-like, it eats itself–a trade-show pretending it’s the festival itself that the trade-show is meant to feed. To which the editor responds: Surely there’s a story there!? To which the critic responds: One that everyone knows! But there’s art! rejoinders the apoplectic editor. Of a fashion, replies the despondent critic. Surely it’s diverse? the critic is asked. As the Oscars! he replies, sardonic. What are these people paid for then? asks the editor. The critic: Paid? The editor: Yes, who pays them? The critic: Where are they from?
It was an answer as much as a question.
Silence on the line. The discussion is at an end. Deadlines are past, repeats the editor, story’s due. The notes are shit, is the critic’s pathetic response. And there’s silence again.
A Joke
A Brazilian and an Argentinian walk into a bar, where they meet Eisenstein. He tries to explain montage to them. They misunderstand him and make bad theater.
[Rimshot]
The Brazilian assumes that the point is that, by taking similar (rather than dissimilar) narratives and collapsing them together in a confusing scenario, new meanings can emerge (they don’t). The Argentinian assumes that the point is that, if you provide the subjective back-stories for multiple films, new meanings can emerge (rather than humdrum social commentary). Theatrical devices are employed in the presentation of these rather conventional narrative theater pieces, which is why it’s so sad in the end: If only they’d known that instead of bothering to try to stage complicated filmic narratives, they could have just made (mediocre) films, everyone would have been happier!
“Забей на это дерьмо,” says Eisenstein. Alas, they don’t quite understand.
“Estúpido de mierda ruso,” says the Argentinian (according to Google Translate).
“Você não entende saudade,” says the Brazilian (according to Google Translate).
“Вы не понимаете, как сделатьхороший театр,” says Eisenstein (according to Google Translate). “Это не монтаж То есть просто рассказывать историю.”
But everyone who can’t read this exchange without Google Translate went home happy, because intercultural exchange happened.
Vignette 2
Thursday past, or rather early, early morning Friday past: H. and B. wander into an LES top-shelf whiskey bar to meet C. and Other-B, who are curators. C. is dancing in lively fashion with Tat. A bear-hug is initiated with B. Flights are too early but deference must be paid. Welcome to the hyperjetlagged international performance art jet-set. Pleasantries are exchanged. Nominal discussions of art unfold. Old acquaintances rekindled in proper trade-show fashion. New acquaintances made. Email addresses exchanged. Others depart. C. and Tat are the first as needs must. The gate is dropped halfway and everyone smokes indoors. January in New York.
On 38 Young(er) Slovenian Singers
Recalling the day following the previous vignette, it was–at least in the estimation of one of our guests–beautiful. Carmina Slovenica, a Slovenian choral performance group, arrived at St. Ann’s Warehouse as part of the Prototype Festival. For a piece called Toxic Psalms. It’s quite lovely. It has to do with how people in a social situations defer to power. Wars in the Balkans are referenced, as are the Milgram Experiments. The chorus is invited to develop the piece, and the banality of influence takes over (the irony of deference to power thus lost). They produce a choreography worthy of a youthful imitation of Pina Bausch, happy to please a scenographic imitation of Robert Wilson.
The singing is good.
Vignette 3
Saturday night and the intrepid correspondents, in need of release, sojourn down to the TriBeCa Grand for a party hosted by a certain Kunt. At which a surprising number of heterosexual males, incapable of grasping the subversive spelling of the host’s name, came in hopes of finding their way into some of the titular good by night’s end. Which was confusing to most others.
Everyone agrees this is the best work anyone’s seen so far this week.
[The drummer awkwardly begins to rimshot, then doesn’t know what to do, and elects to smoke what we assume is tobacco.]
Vignette 4
Setting: Late night, near the individuated bathroom stalls of an LES bar. One man holds a plastic bag containing a contraband substance. Along with another, he wanders into one such stall. The following is overheard:
Man 1: So what do we do with it?
Man 2: There’s really only three options, and I don’t see lighting it on fire as a good idea.
They pursue the remaining two options with equal aplomb.
Outside WMFU’s Monty Hall
Radiohole has minutes before completed a reprisal of Myth (or maybe meth), a text written by the late Tom Murrin. The event is a gloriously and disastrously marvelous, prompting questions such as: “Did he really just puke inside his box costume?” [yes]; “Did the constant slipping on food detritus distract from textual fidelity?” [possibly?]; and [this author’s favorite], “I’ve never seen this one before–which part did they fuck up? Because something was definitely fucked up there.”
Cigarettes alight outside Monty Hall (where the staff seem increasingly concerned about the sort of New York art-world riffraff permitted inside their fine establishment), B., a performer from whose costume crustacean-nethers audiences recently witnessed a green-jello roe being consumed, comments that, “This is like the dudes’ version of Untitled Feminist Show.” Which elicits a lengthy conversation about how best to present a marathon evening of Myth (or maybe meth) alongside Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show and, most lately, Straight White Male. The primary point of contention is the potentially best order in which to program said three shows.
So yes, the entire January shit-show thing is coming back and whatnot, and personally I’m still trying to wrap my head around it all. There’s tons and tons of mainstage, head-lining shows to see that are new (or largely new) to New York audiences. But for better or worse, the entire reason the entire January festival season thing is a shit-show is precisely because it’s a showcase of work from New York and around the world–for audiences from around the world. So, in the interest of serving what few readers this blog occasionally has, I thought I’d throw out some really strong pieces that should not be missed this January, based on my knowledgeable critical opinion, which may or may not be of interest to you. The list is preliminary and by no means exhaustive, but what follows is a group of artists whose work I’ve followed with engagement and interest, and I’d be remiss not calling them out.
Temporary Distortion’s My Voice Has An Echo In It (COIL Festival)
Kenneth Collins is a relentless sort of artist. He had something good (commercially, if that’s the right word) going with his trilogy of film deconstructions: Welcome to Nowhere (on road movies), Americana Kamikaze (Japanese horror), and Newyorkland (cop films and TV shows). However, as I reported in a lengthy feature on Collins in Chance magazine earlier this year, the entire progression left him cold. From a beginning as an artist interested in arresting but largely static situations, the engagement with film tropes kept inviting in the terror of narrative, until–despite commissions and opportunities–he felt he had to turn his back on it all. A couple years of false starts and deep artistic exploration later, he and his company return with My Voice Has an Echo In It, a durational installation performance piece which takes his Minimalist-sculpture-inspired box aesthetics to new heights. It’s not to be missed.
Similar to Temporary Distortion, my engagement with this piece began critically and journalistically. For two years, I followed the company’s development of the piece, as choreographer Zoe Scofield and designer/visual artist Juniper Shuey attempted to further the aesthetic considerations that had informed their work for years. Juniper’s design has always been beautiful and arresting, but Zoe’s choreography–to be blunt–has been divisive amongst choreographers I know. The dominance of conceptualism in contemporary dance makes Zoe’s highly technically accomplished work a little outside the mainstream as it resolutely refuses to move toward either contemporary ballet or deconstructive conceptual performance. Instead, in this piece, Zoe and Juniper attempted to design a development process that would challenge them to collapse their aesthetic concerns further, subtly shifting the site of spectacle from the dancer’s body (the balletic quality Zoe was so known for) while at the same preserving and furthering Juniper’s exploration of design/installation as a means of lyrical and fluid expression, rather than a conceptual/deconstructive environment or, worse, a “set.” Those who might be tempted to write off the company’s return to Baryshnikov as part of PS 122’s COIL–based on the fact they were here in May with the Joyce Theater (off-site at 3LD)–should be aware that the earlier New York appearance was a reconceptualized “installation/performance” considerably different from the stage version I saw opening weekend in Seattle in March. So even if (or particularly if) you caught the 3LD version, come back. It won’t disappoint.
Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble’s The Art of Luv (Part 1) (Under the Radar)
Ah, the ROKE! Consistently challenging and irreverent, Royal Osiris (the brainchild of theater artist Tei Blow and visual artist Sean McElroy) defies description. Nominally based on characters with a dramaturgically solid (if narratively irrelevant) backstory, Royal Osiris defies traditional categories, as much deconstructive performance art as immersive theater. Blow and McElroy create performances through archaeological excavations of media that ranges from relationship advice shilling to New Age spirituality shilling to…karaoke. But the “shilling” is the important part. Below what at what first blush seems a wormhole of odd-ball YouTube videos (most of which are actually too rare to appear on YouTube) is an indictment of the nightmarish way the ever-increasing prevalence of media self-help, buoyed by a surprisingly solid foundation in business management theory, warps our perceptions of love and self-worth. Also operative in the above is the statement “at first blush”–at first blush, Royal Osiris may not seem to be your thing. Give it a second blush (whatever that euphemism actually means); let them surprise you.
When Ubu Sings Ubu premiered at Abrons this past April, well…I think it more or less did well, but it sort of avoided the popular (or rather, scene-y) downtown performance consciousness. For a few reasons. Despite having been a member of Reza Abdoh’s company for a series of seminal works, Torn was sort of an unknown in the contemporary. Couple that with Dan Safer, who I think sometimes suffers (unfairly) from the sense that if you’ve seen one Witness Relocation show, you’ve seen them all. And then there was the play itself–Alfred Jarry’s seminal Ubu Roi, a play everyone knows, many people did shit versions of in college, and no one can think of good production of. Oh, and the amazing Julie Atlas Muz? Ubu Sings Ubu opened less than two weeks following the closing of the surprise hit that was her turn in Beauty and the Beast. All of which is really sad, because in this piece, the artists, all bringing their distinctive voices to the production, realized the most effective and original version of Jarry’s oft-neglected text imaginable. Paired with the music of proto-punk outift Pere Ubu, Torn and Muz bring ear-bleeding ferocity to Jarry’s tale of the brutish and ignorant would-be king of Poland. Dan Safer will do some full-body wrestling as the bear. It will stink to high-heaven of kielbasa. And the video/animation design by Kaz Phillips Safer is wonderful.
