Tag: #fusebox2016

So there’s two shows that, I think, have become audience favorites for Fusebox 2016: Bronx Gothic and Dickie Beau: Unplugged. Or, at least, that’s the result of my unscientific polling around the hub last night, as well as my own personal experience. I saw Bronx Gothic when it premiered in New York and was wowed by it. Okwui is a fantastic performer who I’d seen several times before in work with Ralph Lemon, and it was exciting to see her tackle her own work.

All of which is to say that I already knew how good Bronx Gothic was, whereas Dickie Beau was completely new to me. Afterward I wound up talking with a curator and a critic from New York who mentioned that we’d all, apparently, missed Dickie Beau as part of the last Queer New York International Arts Festival, from Croatian curator Zvonimir Dobrovic. Which makes me disappointed in myself, because his piece at Fusebox was remarkable.

The show is basically a deconstruction of the devices employed in drag performance–lip syncing, dress up, interpretation of content–but employed in a way I’ve never seen before. Beginning with a lip synced performance to an audio recording of Kenneth Williams–a British comedian whose character on Round the Horne was one of the first clearly gay characters in British media, prior to decriminalization of homosexuality–Beau goes on to offer a truly sincere explanation of what it means to claim someone else’s voice for your own.

I was really struck by the show, which deserves a stronger and more extensive write-up, but the ending was particularly affecting. Having employed the myth of Echo and Narcissus as his frame, he performs the Echo role as the closing. Whereas most drag performance is a camp imitation of celebrity, here Beau takes a found audio love letter (apparently a lost cassette tape on a train) and performs it: The ultimate nobody, in other words. And the tape is fairly banal–a love letter that begins with the humdrum then descends into passionate sexual longing and ends on an ambiguous note. Beau’s performance, far from camp, was sincere and heartfelt. A video recording of his voice box intoning the words he merely syncs onstage added a truly over-the-top note to the performance. There were precious few dry eyes in the house, and it was a wonderful example of the power of simple theatricality.

Samson Young is considering sonic warfare. Night bombing videos are a thing on YouTube, like how cat videos are a thing. They sound different than you’d imagine, he started wanting to do sound design for these videos. As he continues working on this project he consideres feeling the magnitude of what it means morally to do this for long periods of time; what does it mean when creating sound around bombing videos, when it starts to feel like going to work, much in the same way that drone operators slip into the routine of bombing?

The durational performance, Nocturne, is happening until 6pm today at Big Medium.

Much of the conversation at this year’s festival has centered around geographical context. Questions have come up repeatedly about the balance between presenting local and non-local work, how to engage community audiences and the pros and cons of touring work that was created in a vastly different context than the one at a given festival. Personally, I have been struggling with the relationship between this year’s festival and a tragic Austin event that coincided with the kickoff of the Festival.

Jeremy and I stayed up late sipping beers and discussing Manwatching at the festival hub Friday night. We had vastly different experiences of the performance. He saw it Thursday alone, I saw it Friday with colleagues from UT. The premise is that an anonymous British woman (of some stature in her field) casts a local white male stand up to cold read a script which is full of details about the woman’s coming of age through sexual fantasies and mastrubation. The fellow reading for the Friday afternoon performance was witty, self aware and charming.

Jeremy remarked that it seemed like an easy pill to swallow, watching this white dude read the intimate details of some woman’s private sexual thoughts and experiences. Maybe that was the point, that it is an easy pill to swallow, but for the woman who wrote the piece it wasn’t. This information, when read by a white man isn’t really that jarring. It points to a more insidious danger, one that white straight men won’t ever experience. It was about a structure of feeling that I know in my bones, a type of fear so internalized that was brought to the surface in Austin this week. The piece is about the patriarchy in a funny way, making it possible for me to consider a critique of the system without breaking down sobbing.

Here are the first reactions that I shared with theater director and dramaturg, Gabby Randle.

It’s day number four of the Fusebox Festival, and I’m feeling that festival exhaustion start to set in a bit. The run-around intensity of seeing shows, chatting quickly with people, making way between venues, then drinking at the hub at night…it takes it out of you!

The same thing happens to me every January in New York, when a host of festivals simultaneously take place. And the funny thing is, I love it when that happens. As a critic one of the things I get asked a lot is, “You see so much, aren’t you just jaded?” Or variously other comments to that effect, meaning in general that the critical perspective gets skewed by the exhaustion, leading to unfairly harsh assessments of artists’ hard work.

It’s possibly true to some degree, but at the same time–and I know I’m not alone in this–it actually sort of opens you up to the experience of the work. There’s no better feeling than dragging your exhausted self into a theater, thinking all the while that you should probably just skip this one, take a break or grab a proper dinner, and then all of a sudden the show you didn’t think too much of blows you away.

Timothy Braun was saying something to that effect to me the other day, and I wholeheartedly agree. It’s always the show you didn’t give much thought to going in that sticks with you in the end. Such is the magic of a festival. All of which is to say: Hang in there and keep going!

Tonight, the LA-NYC performance group My Barbarian present the latest iteration of Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT) at the festival hub, in participation with their residency at UT Austin’s Visual Art Center. Straddling theater and visual art performance, the group do provocative work, and I’m excited to get to experience PoLAAT, which was developed in New York in 2008, a couple years before I moved there. I interviewed Alex Segade a couple years ago, which you can check out here, but I was provoked by this quote and wanted to share it:

“This is where I think some of the visual art training comes in very handy, because with performance art, one of the things you notice historically in the conversation is that context has been incredibly important, and visual art has investigated that a lot,” he continued. “Theater has too, but I don’t know that tradition as well, of theater in non-theater contexts. But I know how art works, how to design itself in a new context. So when our work changes context that’s one of the things we try to deal with—what are the parameters, what are some of the things that the audience brings with them to their seats and how do they perform their own position as audience in that context? So in visual art usually you have a viewer who’s moving around and distracted and not even paying that much attention. And that’s the kind of audience we’ve often engaged with, even when we have them sit down. We know we’re designing their expectation. Theater is a different animal that’s about focused attention, and an identification with the performer that’s also very different from visual art.”

Workin' #fieldguide #standup

A photo posted by Rude Mechs (Austin, TX) (@rudemechs) on Mar 15, 2016 at 5:55pm PDT

Last night I caught the opening of the Rude Mechs’ Field Guide, a bizarre, devised, loose adaptation of Doestoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Perhaps most notable about the production design is that fact that scenic design–consisting of abstract set block pieces–was made primarily of cardboard. The guy who designed it is named Eric Dyer, who I’ve known for some years, and I chatted with him briefly about it afterward.

Cardboard isn’t new to Dyer, exactly. Radiohole, the 15-odd-year-old company Dyer co-founded in New York used cardboard in different ways in the last two shows, Myth or Meth and Tarzana, so I was curious about the choice to employ it here in Austin with a different company. As Eric explained over drinks at the festival hub, the choice was mainly his. Eric doesn’t see himself as a designer, really; while design is important to Radiohole’s work, he and the company collectively write, perform, and design their shows. It’s rare, then, that he works in a specifically design role, and when he does, he likes to use the chance to explore his own fascination with materials–to see how far he can push them, and what new things he can do with them. The Rude Mechs were receptive to what he wanted to pull off, so they went along.

Specifically, all the set pieces except one are made entirely of cardboard. Which may not sound like much, but when you see the show it’ll surprise you: People climb on top of, move around in, sit on, stand on, dance on, and knock over these pieces. And all but one are made entirely of cardboard. (The one that uses a wooden frame is the one on casters, for the eagle-eyed.) Apparently the fact that cardboard can support that much weight is well known to some people–plenty of people we were talking with knew it–but it was certainly new to me, and made the entire experience a little richer.

Coincidentally, Eric Dyer did an interview with the Rude Mechs a couple years ago for BOMB magazine, which you can read here. I did an interview with Eric a few years ago, which can be read on Culturebot, and for a great and thorough introduction to Radiohole’s work, I’m publishing a long essay on them in the forthcoming sixth issue of Chance (print only), a serial art book on theater and performance design.