Last night at Fusebox Eve, Paul Lazar described Fusebox as “equisite for an American city” while discussing the importance of Fusebox and other festivals for the American arts community. There is something about dining together, with colleagues, artists, new faces, locals and out-of-towners, that made that importance tangible. Or as Aaron Sanders put it “holy hell you should have been there.”
Here’s to the beginning of #Fusebox2016!
It’s 77 degrees Fahrenheit and I’m sitting outside, listening to the chirping of birds and getting acculturated to Austin. Having just flown in from New York–where we enjoyed one last stab of wintry cold as spring opens up–it’s a bit of an adjustment. I’ve already received a bit of an introduction to Fusebox audiences courtesy of Tim Braun, my erstwhile editor and project organizer, but I wanted to take a minute to introduce myself and share what I hope to have happen during my time here at Fusebox 2016.
For the duration of this festival, myself, my collaborator Christine Gwillim, and the others we cajole or invite into offering their insights, experiences, and opinions, will be trying to engage in an ongoing conversation. Sometimes that conversation takes place online, either here or on social media, which we will link to from here. Sometimes it takes place IRL, in which case we’ll do our best to share it here for those who couldn’t be part of it. And then–hopefully–readers and audience members will take that and continue the conversation with us, online or IRL. If you don’t know me, feel free to reach out and we can meet in person. I’ll be as Twitter-savvy as possible for the next week, and you can follow me @jeremymbarkerNY. Christine is on Twitter @clgwillim. And in general, track #fusebox2016 to keep up.
By way of a personal introduction, I’m a contemporary performance critic based in New York. I’m passionate about dance, experimental or non-conventional theater, visual art performance, and so on–a whole host of alternative (or, in Fusebox’s preferred vocabulary, “hybrid”) performance practices that I lump under the rubric of “contemporary performance.” While I’m based in New York, which has an amazing performance scene, I don’t like to think of myself as a “New York critic.” Indeed, I’ve only lived there six years (as of yesterday, come to think of it!), having grown up in Portland and spent some seven years in Seattle. Having moved to New York at the age of 30, I never quite had the romantic experience of joining the New York art-scene; I was too old. And furthermore, having come of age outside the cultural metropole, I moved there knowing that there’s a whole wonderful world of art being made outside of New York that was every bit as deserving (and occasionally decidedly more deserving) of attention than what happens in the Downtown art world.
I first got to come to Fusebox back in 2012, when I was editor of Culturebot.org. Andy Horwitz, Culturebot’s founder and visionary, and I presented a few events as part of the supplementary programming, and got to see a lot of great art and eat a lot of great food. I look forward to the chance to do so again.
By way of closing, I wanted to share a quick anecdote that I think illustrates what I hope to help accomplish with this project on this blog. The year I moved to NYC, I took a trip home, to Portland, in September, to see my family and to cover the TBA Festival, Portland’s own Fusebox-style festival. One of the shows I caught was a dance/movement piece by Maria Hassabi, a New York-based choreographer whose work is (IMHO) remarkable. It’s also not very “dance-y” if by dance you expect musicality, lots of leaps and footwork, and so on. Her work is slowly, contemplative, beautiful, and challenging. Outside the theater, after the performance, I saw more than one couple walk away chatting, bewildered or bored. I wanted to get the chance to talk with them about their experience of something new that maybe wasn’t part of their art vocabulary. Because that’s what a festival like Fusebox is for: Being exposed to something new, and creating dialogue and expanding our vocabularies for talking about art.
One of the great blessings of my life is how much I’ve gotten to engage with this sort of work, and I love sharing it with others. I would love to have that conversation (which I couldn’t have after Maria’s show) with people here in Austin. So Tweet at me, or meet me for coffee or a drink. Tonight I’m seeing Manwatching tonight at 7 and Every Song I’ve Ever Written at 9. Around 8 I’ll be at the festival hub, where Tim Braun promises to kick my ass at bowling (a likely event). So you know where to find me.
I look forward to getting to chat soon.
Wanna support #fusebox2016? pic.twitter.com/9DmiXCrU9d
— Wendy Mitchell (@myownroom) April 6, 2016
I, alas, missed the kickoff last night (and nearly my connecting flight in Dallas-Ft. Worth), so I don’t know exactly what this means yet, but it sure makes me regret not having been there.
A quick round-up of some of the preview press for Fusebox 2016.
Ah Salvage Vanguard! Very excited to be seeing it again. Also, keep an eye out for photos on Instagram for #fusebox2016.
One of the fun parts of my job being a critic and all is getting to follow artists over the years around the country (and to a lesser degree, the world) as they present their work and develop. Fusebox 2016 is great in that it gives me the chance to meet some artists whose work I’ve followed for years but never met, catch shows I’ve missed, or catch up with artists in Austin whose work I wish I had the chance to see more often. Based on all that, here’s a quick break-down of thoughts and impressions on the artists showing in 2016, based on a non-exhaustive review of the artists and my own prior coverage of them.
Deborah Pearson. I am absolutely stoked to finally meet Pearson IRL. A theater artist of no small accomplishment herself, I really first became aware of her work as one of the organizers of the Forest Fringe, a programming series of experimental contemporary performance that emerged under Pearson’s direction in 2007, and quickly became one of the most exciting parts of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Forest Fringe has toured shows internationally–including to Fusebox in 2013, and New York in 2014, when I interviewed Andy Field, Pearson’s collaborator and co-curator. But Pearson I never met nor spoke to, our only communication having been back in 2011 when she wrote an essay for Exeunt on narrative, its uses and the traps it catches artists in. Isaac Butler here in the US took issue with some of her arguments, which I endorsed, and anyway we emailed a few times on the topic. Her show this year at Fusebox, Like You Were Before, is a reprise of her first solo piece, an exploration of her experience leaving Canada. You’ve only got one chance to see it, though: Thursday, April 7 at 5 p.m. Also be sure to check out Fusebox’s artist profile on her.
My Barbarian. Formerly LA (now New York) based, I first caught this visual art performance group at the Whitney Biennial in 2014. Their practice as art makers is a fascinating example of how different arts ecologies, funding structures, and critical discourses influence the work. Having emerged from various experimental performance fields, the company began exploring theatrical forms as a sort of material for visual art exploration. At least that’s how I first encountered them, doing a Brechtian production of Brecht’s The Mother, the didacticism of which became the subject of their exploration of political engagement. It was re-presented a couple months later in New York as part of the 2015 American Realness festival, where I interviewed one part of the trio, Alexandro Segade. Anyway, I had always wanted to see their experiments in Post-Living Ante Action Theater (PoLAAT), which Fusebox is presenting this year. More on the Austin project here, also I recommend checking out the BOMB interview they did a few years ago, and finally Andy Horwitz’s ever-popular essay on the white cube vs. black box.
Big Dance Theater. When I first moved to New York, I made the pilgrimage to see as many of the “big” downtown performance companies and artists as quickly as I could, the ones from which so many other artist genealogies trace. The Wooster Group. Richard Foreman. Anne Bogart/SITI Company. Mac Wellman. Of all of them, to be quite bluntly honest, it was Big Dance–the 25-year-old dance theater company co-founded by Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar–that most decided didn’t disappoint. Quite the opposite, of all those groups (whose work has certainly amazed and informed me), it’s Big Dance that’s always been the most consistently and remarkably creative, from the first show I saw–from Supernatural Wife way back in 2011, through the Sibyl Kempson-penned brilliance of Ich Kürbisgeist, the bizarre genius of Allan Smithee Directed This Play and now Short Form, a collection of short choreographies by Parson. Not to be missed.
No rest for the weary, they say. It feels like only a couple weeks back that we were closing our revival of They Are Gone But Here Must I Remain at Under the Radar (according American Theatre, we’re an “always intriguing company continues to create unexpected, challenging work that approaches story and ideas from multiple angles and generates a thrill with unusual juxtapositions.”
Well, we’re already back at work, this time re-tackling our 2014 piece The Maids’ The Maids, which had its first presentation at Abrons Arts Center. We’ve torn the piece apart, reduced the cast, re-written substantial elements of it–basically took all the parts we loved and seek to make them work better. The occasion is an invitation we’ve received to present The Maids’ The Maids as part of The Working Theater’s 2016 Reading Series on April 4. The Working Theater is dedicated to “tell[ing] stories that reflect a diverse population of the working majority, that acknowledge their complexity and oft-denied power in an increasingly complex world, which we hope will unite us in our common humanity.” Which makes us a great fit with their mission. Our “reading” will be a “staged reading,” however, demonstrating the use of objects, movement, and so on, that are so central to the show.
The reading takes place at 6:30 on Mon., April 4 at the Dorothy Strelsin Theater at 312 West 36th Street. $10 suggested donation, RSVP available online–with limited seating I suggest you get your ticket soon!
After Tanya Tagaq’s appearance with Nanook of the North at the 2015 Fusebox Festival in Austin, I heard from a couple people that it was the sleeper hit of the festival, the piece most people went in to not knowing what to expect and left wowed by. So I was excited to get the opportunity to see it as part of Under the Radar 2016. (It’s worth noting the piece has been performed in New York previously, most recently, I believe, as part of the opening fall 2015 season of National Sawdust.) And indeed, it was surprising and moving and, I think, disturbing in some brilliant ways.
There’s a lot to unpack in the piece, but to begin with, a simple explanation of what to expect. Nanook of the North is an iconic documentary, filmed in 1920-1921 in Northern Quebec by an American named Robert J. Flaherty, following an Inuit family led by a noted hunter, the titular Nanook. Celebrated on its release in 1922, the film earned Flaherty a reputation as the “father of ethnographic film,” and it became, if not the first feature-length documentary, then the first commercially successful documentary, a template followed over subsequent decades by individuals operating in what is known as “salvage ethnography,” essentially an effort to document—primarily through film but also other means—so-called “primitive” tribes and cultures who were increasingly being exposed to elements of modernity, and therefore having their long-time ways radically altered.
While this particular ethnographic impulse has been subject to all matter of criticism over the past several decades (due primarily to its inherently colonialist enterprise), Nanook of the North has been subject to a series of very specific criticisms. For one thing, parts of it were staged, most notably its most iconic and parodied scene, in which Nanook, being shown a phonograph at a trading post, bites the record in an attempt to understand how it works. (In reality, Nanook—whose real name was Allakariallak—was already familiar with phonographs.) Also, Nanook’s wife wasn’t actually his wife, and in the famous walrus hunt scene, they used spears rather than the already typical guns (an admittedly recently introduced tool) at Flaherty’s request.
So Nanook of the North is today recognized as a problematic document. While many have defended Flaherty’s impulse, and contrasted the resultant film and its heroic depiction positively against racist stereotypes of the era, it is also, without a doubt, a document of a white American looking at another culture, and a conscious staging, not of the “authentic Other” but rather of the filmmaker’s own psycho-social construction of who that Other is.
Which brings us to Tagaq. An Inuk artist raised in Cambridge Bay in far northern Canada, Tagaq began exploring traditional Inuit throat singing while studying art in Halifax. After her performances began receiving notice along with her visual art, she wound up receiving an invitation to join Bjork on tour in 2004, which gained her substantial exposure. Since then she’s released four albums blending throat singing with contemporary electronic forms and even, occasionally, hip hop (I particularly dig “Fire – Ikuma,” a collaboration with Faith No More’s Mike Patton).
Tanya Tagaq’s performance of Nanook of the North began in 2012 as a commissioned presentation of the Toronto International Film Festival’s retrospective “First Peoples Cinema: 1500 Nations, One Tradition.” A collaboration with composer Derek Charke, percussionist Jean Martin, and violinist Jesse Zubot, Tagaq’s piece is, essentially, an original and counterpointing musical score performed opposite an end-to-end screening of the silent film.
Note: The following article concerns some very troubling online communities; while I cannot assert that the hyperlinks are to non-triggering content (almost all probably are), they are nevertheless exclusively to mainstream media and feminist writers/websites; none directly link to Roosh V.’s work or like-minded thinkers’ websites.
The less insane parts of the Internet today are having a field-day with mockery of Roosh V. (Wikipedia), the pick-up artist (PUA) and Men’s Rights Activist (MRA, just to understand the lingo, even if he wouldn’t agree with the term) who may or may not be living in his mom’s basement (NYMag).
The background of this is that Roosh V. announced last week his intention to hold an international meetup of “neomasculinists” (his term) in 43 countries this Saturday (since cancelled due to “security concerns”). This supposed meetup (more in a minute on that qualifier) got a lot of press because Roosh V. has argued in the past that, essentially, some forms of rape should be legal. Hence their characterization as “pro-rape rallies.”
Anyone really interested can research more of this themselves. These people and their ideas aren’t news to me, unfortunately, but the publicity Roosh V.’s claims generated got a lot of attention from people who perhaps more blissfully unaware. And I found myself reading numerous outraged posts on social media about the event, mostly written by people with little or no knowledge about how people like Roosh V. operate. Which was problematic, because at least one of his prominent critics was consistently arguing that the entire affair was essentially a canard, a ploy for attention that would result in a predictable public backlash, grant valuable publicity to Roosh V., who likely never intended nor would have been able to pull off a 43-county collective protest against feminism by people who explicitly or implicitly endorse rape.
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.
It’s a mystery as to why.
