big dance theater Archives - Deeply Fascinating

Sorry Austin...this author's from Portland. — Sorry Austin…this author’s from Portland.

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.

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 End blew 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.