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!
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.
“Engaging and frustrating, imaginative and jumbled, original and derivative” –Alexis Soloski, The New York Times
“The refreshing result (half-documentary, half-Genet) is chaotic, but it’s also productive and genuinely subversive; Hamilton gives us the kind of mess you learn from making.” –Helen Shaw, TimeOut New York
“[A] dramatic seed blossoms late in the production when the otherwise goofy Isabel Sanchez delivers a sedating monologue on the real-life implications of the Papin sisters’ brutal act,” –Tara Sheena, Hyperallergic.com
“[A]s intentionally messy as the stage floor after the performers have spit Fritos all over it.” –Tom Sellar, the Village Voice
“To flood a small space with emotion is not an easy feat. I hope, upon entering the space, to see reflections of the artist’s emulated interests. I hope to enter into a place that is somewhat secret, forbidden, and where words and reason are non-essential. That space can be a memory, it can be triggered by the exclusivity of language, it can be a hotel room in LA, or a theater at Abrons Arts Center. But when those spaces collide, and when you realize that the unifying factor is the story of unheard stories, you know you’ve found something worth experiencing. And then you clean it off.” –Georgina Escobar, Culturebot
Sister Sylvester’s The Maids’ The Maids Opens Oct. 31
Photo by Maria Baranova
A note from the dramaturg:
I was just re-watching a video we shot in early summer during the first rehearsals we did for The Maids’ The Maids, (opening Oct. 31 at Abrons Arts Center; tickets $20). It was unpleasantly hot that day, and I’m wearing multiple layers of clothing—basically every shirt, light sweater, jacket, and hat we could find in the space, even a bright pink rain slicker. We’re working with a woman I’ll call Juana, one of our collaborators on the piece, and we’re having her teach us how to be one of her nicknames. She has several, it turns out, each referring to a different part of her life, and this one was “Rambo.” Even though I’m not an actor in the piece (I’m just the dramaturg), when she cast us in roles, she chose me to be Rambo, I guess because I was the only man in the room, or because she likes to flirt with me. (I got my own nickname during rehearsal: “El lechero,” the “milkman” who Genet’s maids lust after in his original play.)
I’m wearing all of these clothes because Rambo is the nickname Juana got while illegally crossing the border, and you’re dressed against the nighttime cold of the Nogales desert. I am quite warm though, and sweating under all those layers, as she has me scurrying back and forth in the rehearsal room, stopping every couple steps to yelp and tug at my pants. “Espinas!” she explains—thorns or cactus needles caught in your pants. You can’t stop to pull them out, so you try to keep the pants off the skin. Then we stop and drop into a crouch. It’s time to rest. The only food you have is in the front pockets of your clothes. There’s no light. You cross when there’s no moon. No cigarettes, no cell phones. Complete darkness and silence.
