Big List: The Cinderella Principle

Just got back from seeing this:



Tonight was closing night or I'd tell you to get yourself to the theater.

Sorry for the light posting this week. Working on a big project. I'll get back to the 2009 Bests soon and am working on a post about elevators.

For DFW

Federer As Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body. (This link lets you read the whole article now.)

Big List: What Was I Thinking? Edition

It was wrong to do away with the Big List. The purpose of the list was to keep track of what I want to see and it did its job well. Why did I question it? What craziness possessed me? I do not know.

Oedipus el Rey by Luis Alfaro @ Magic Theatre. Through March 14.

Caucasian Chalk Circle @ ACT. Through March 14.

O Lovely Glowworm by Glen Berger @ ACT MFA Program. Through March 20.

The Importance of Being Earnest @ Town Hall Theatre Company. February 25 - March 27.

Learn To Be Latina by Enrique Urueta @ Impact Theatre. Through March 27.

The Cinderella Principle, Robert Moses' Kin @ YBCA. February 25 - 27.

Carpet Bag Brigade/Bad Unkl Sista @ Counterpulse. March 5 - 6.

2nd Sundays Dance Salon @ Counterpulse. March 14.

And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi by Marcus Gardley @ the Exit. March 12 - April 11.

Big List: NYC Edition

White on White [a random thriller]
alpha version: February 18 – March 1
Artist Talk: Feb 21, 3pm

Momenta
359 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

Shot primarily in post-soviet Central Asia, White on White is an improvised thriller produced simultaneously as an episodic mini-TV series, a feature film, and a randomized movie in which the narrative is determined via computer code. Hundreds of clips are culled from a server and edited in real-time by custom-made randomizing software. The guided nature of the code causes it to pull video and audio based on voice-over and tags written into the metadata of each file and the narrative. The algorithms create new, surprising juxtapositions upon each viewing.

Michael Holz, an ex-pat geo-physicist, has been hired to reverse-engineer algorithms used to model geological formations. He models reams of seismic data without knowing how his work will be used. The program begins to manifest in his daily life, appearing on buildings, signs and clocks in a futuristic enclave where streets have no names and every place is referred to as a set of three numbers. White on White is about a man controlled by the code he is working on, as the course of the story is controlled by the code that edits the film. Couched in a vernacular of nouvelle vague noir and futuristic fantasies and set against a backdrop of the oil and water businesses, this on-going cinematic experiment is an investigation of the dystopian quest for the perfect future.

More info here and here.

New Plays Institute Live Broadcast: How the Devising's Done

Free public lecture and demonstration going on at Arena Stage today. Starts 8pm EST, 5pm PST.

Watch live streaming video from newplay at livestream.com

Watch it here.

Incidentally, there's an amazing conversation that's happening on Twitter about the creation of new, support of new work, devising work, growth of companies vs. creation of projects. Check out #2amt, and #newplay.

What I Saw: Bests of 2009

Boléro Variations - Raimund Hoghe.

I was deeply affected by the simplicity and eloquence of the movement in this piece. Though I admit, I struggled with the tempo and pace of it a few times in the first half hour. The show requires patience and a willingness to slow down, observe, and accept. It was by turns sensual, meditative, breathtaking, and funny. The choreography wasn't there to tell a story or illustrate the music so much as to reveal how it affected each dancer through subtle variations in gesture and tempo. Many people walked out during the first forty-five minutes. The woman sitting next to me laughed at odd moments and she, like half the audience, left at intermission which meant I have a fairly unobstructed view from center. It was never apparent if the dancers noted these responses.

Ornella Balestra was fascinating. It's rare to see an older woman's strength and beauty shown in such a sophisticated, intelligent way. Her movements were serene and deliberate. Her fitted black jacket and skirt and velvet high heels emphasized the lines of her body and highlighted her femininity, but without that necessarily being the point, without making her an object of desire. Emmanuel Eggermont's movement, even the most minimal, was full of beauty and grace. During Benny Goodman's riff on Boléro he moved so lightly that it took my breath away.


The piece takes a more directly political viewpoint in the last twenty-five minutes of the dance when the words of an Auschwitz survivor are played. On the night I saw it - September 11 - this section had a stunning impact due to the absence of Nabil Yahia-Aissa. The evening started with Cathy Edwards, PICA's Artistic Director, announcing that Nabil, an Algerian-born dancer who lives in France, had been unable to board the plane from France because the U.S. department of Homeland security was holding his passport for further review, even though he'd already been granted a work visa.

The dance was not altered to compensate for Nabil's absence, so at various moments the stage would become a bit unbalanced or a hole would be left in a line. During the last 20 minutes, the dancers brought out bags of differently colored lentils or beans and poured them on the stage in a mound - one for each dancer, including Nabil. They also brought out his shirt and laid it by his mound. They removed their own shirts and began a grueling variation that called for them to move their bodies on the floor tracing a circle with their arms and hands. Initially the task exposed the differences between the dancers bodies, but over time it revealed the body engaged in struggle and dissolved differences such as appearance and strength and ability.

Interviews with Raimund Hoghe here and here.

Lit Review: Attemtps to Locate a Function for Criticism

Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence. It is the critic's task to study this activity in the present. A certain aspect of the programme of modernity has been fairly and squarely wound up (and not, let us hasten to emphasise in these bourgeois times, the spirit informing it). This completion has drained the criteria of aesthetic judgment we are heir to of their substance, but we go on applying them to present-day artistic practices. The new is no longer a criterion, except among latter-day detractors of modern art who, where the much-execrated present is concerned, cling solely to the things that their traditionalist culture has taught them to loathe in yesterdays' art. In order to invent more effective tools and more valid viewpoints, it behooves us to understand the changes nowadays occurring in the social arena, and grasp what has already changed and what is still changing. - Nicolas Bourriand, Relational Aesthetics

N.B. What this idea might look like applied to theater criticism. Twelve Thought Experiments On Gauging Distance, Jeffrey M. Jones. Just one possible application.

Magic and Mystery

While We're on the Subject: Best Film Performances of the Decade

The New York Times magazine does a nice film interview with actors (Sandra Bullock, Colin Firth, Woody Harrelson, Jeff Bridges, Zoe Saldana, Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore, Carey Mulligan, Morgan Freeman, Christoph Waltz, Sam Worthington, Vera Farmiga, and George Clooney) discussing who they felt gave the most affecting performance in the past decade. Good stuff. Get it here.

What about you? What's the most affecting performance you've seen in the past ten years. If you want you can do one for film and one for theater.

What I Saw: Bests of 2009

The Frogs - ~AtmosTheatre~, adapted and directed by Stuart Bousel

I'll be honest: there's a special place in my heart for a theater company that asks me to sign a liability waiver before attending a performance of theirs. And even though I know we're talking about risk in legal terms, as a threat rather than a promise, a necessary precaution in case I injure myself walking the trail down to their stage, that upfront acknowledgment of risk still excites me.

For those of you who don't know, AtmosTheatre produces most of its work in the woods up on Skyline Drive, in Woodside, CA. Going to see a show requires driving down a one lane road (It's not the worst or most precarious road you'll ever drive on. People live there after all and it's quite lovely.), parking by the side of the road, signing the aforementioned waiver, slathering on some bug repellent, and then going for a moderate hike. Along the way, there's a picnic spot and, at least the two times I've been, a pre-show that eventually leads the audience down to the recently built stage with a few site specific stops along the way.

The show begins with Dionysus (Nathan Tucker) and his servant Xanthias (B. Warden Lawlor) coming through the audience enroute to Hades. After a little bit of set up to the story (Dionysus is in search of a good poet and they all seem to be dead), the audience is invited to come along on the journey. This included three stops along the way. First, we walked past a wonderful Cereberus puppet. Next we stopped to get our drachmas where we also met up with a grumpy corpse possibly a philosopher or mathematician (not sure), played by Ben Fisher, who formed the rear of the escort and who lobbed the ball right back to me when I was a smart ass and questioned his assertion that he'd been embalmed with formaldehyde in ancient Greece. Really? Formaldehyde? See? Smart-assy.

The final site-specific scene took place at the bridge to Hades where we met Charon and a chorus of giant frogs nestled along the creek bed. Their masks made them look like creatures from a Hayao Miyazaki film. The sound of the frogs singing in the creek bed with the audience stretched out along the trail and all of us situated in a canyon filled with giant redwoods was such a lovely and magical theatrical image, probably the most striking of the show.

One of the strengths of the company is that it's made up of actors who have strong vocal training and who know how to use their voice in relationship to the space (no mics and you can hear them!). There was a sensitivity to how their voices reverberated through the trees. I loved how it could become part of the quiet of the forest. This was especially clear in the frogs' song at the bridge, but was also apparent throughout the entire production. It really is wonderful to listen to an actor who can modulate their voice to the text and the environment - it's a form of music.

This play aims to blend the high and low brow and when it succeeds, it does this very well. There were a couple of awkward transitions where the slapstick humor didn't play, but this was mostly because of the mechanics of shifting from one location to the next. Specifically, the play got bogged down moving the audience from the Bridge to Hades to seating us at the formal stage site. In this case, Dionysus and Xanthias stood in the aisles of the audience seating and acted out walking the rest of the way down to Hades. Just like it takes a few seconds for your eyes to adjust to the lights in the theater going down and back up, it's difficult for the audience (or maybe just me) to shift from seeing things acted in a fairly realistic setting to being asked to imagine the action of a scene. There must be some sort of suspension of disbelief on-ramp merge that needs to happen, where you either need to give the audience enough time to make the adjustment or put the actors in a more appropriate space, or both. When the action finally shifted to the stage proper, the show got back on track for me.

The final scene of the play is a rhetorical death match (or life match?) between Euripides (Ben Fisher again) and Aeschylus (Carl Lucania) where both give hilarious and damning critiques of each others' plays, punctuated by the increasingly drunken commentary of Dionysus. It felt like Bousel pushed the "original" script past it's dramaturgical tolerance, which is pretty tight... er...thin to begin with. He breaks with the story to ask contemporary aesthetic questions about making and watching theater, as well as supporting art in general, and he posed legitimate, hard questions which felt trivialized by the final action of the play when Dionysus decides which playwright he'll take with back with him.

Still, this was an exciting moment for a couple of reasons. Stepping out of the play and making bold statements about the current state of theater and asking why the audience goes to see it is a tricky proposition and a huge opportunity to fail big. I've sat through too many plays where indictments about art and reception are made of the audience and usually they seem rather remote and oblique and condemning and unimaginative and ultimately pretentious and noncommittal all at once. It really is hard to find the right balance in tone. You don't want to preach to the audience (either the converted or the doubtful), or maybe you do. This show didn't. Even though it was clear what the author thought, it wasn't assumed that this perspective was universal. There was room for debate and disagreement. There was reason to Keep Coming Back. The questions seemed earnest, as if the company was genuinely be interested in knowing the answers and/or pursuing them in their work. It felt like the audience was invited to be part of an ongoing conversation. To be continued next summer.

What I Saw: Bests of 2009

SOS - Big Art Group, directed by Caden Manson.

SOS is:

6 performers - David Commander, Michael Helland, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Heather Litteer, Willie Farrad Mullins, & Edward Stresen-Reuter

2 Creators - Caden Manson & Jemma Nelson
8 projection surfaces
22 cameras

And they start out the show with the familiar dimming of the lights speech only they tell you it's okay to film (like with 22 cameras who cares!!?) and to by all means take pictures with your cellphone. So right. Things are going to be a bit different.

SOS has three story lines: Technology amok in the forest. Cute, furry animals come to grips with An Inconvenient Truth by way of The Blair Witch Project with a bit of South Park's Woodland Critter Christmas (one of my all-time favorite episodes) thrown in for fun (minus CC's virgin sacrifice and puma abortion). Another narrative involves a couple called The Profiles (sound familiar?) who are constantly texting and phoning and talking about products and what they're going to do and what they've done and they talk so insanely fast that it's almost faster than the fine line V/O narratives of radio commercials. Insane. I've seen some reviewers refer to these two characters played by Heather Litteer (who looks like a cross between Blondie and Toni Basil) and Mikeah Ernest Jennings, as tweens, but that's too easy.





Most people I know could be a Profile, even if most fall off in the clubbing department by the time they hit 40. The third narrative revolves around a feckless terrorist organization called The Realness Liberation Front. RLF's plan for domination includes takeover of a television network and computer support services and finally the release of a rather large and fearful beast cobbled together out of various hot air balloons.


SOS was created during a year long process. Caden Manson and the cast collected text they felt was important and then handed it off to the writer, Jemma (who admitted to throwing most of it away). They rehearsed for a bit and then had a party in a big warehouse. During the party, the idea was that they'd rehearse some of the elements they'd been working on. Things that happened during the party, such as groups of people encasing themselves in balloon structures, became part of the show.

The show has a sense of party about it, a sense of playfulness and absurdity that come from maybe having a few too many or some such thing and which maybe obscures the fact that underneath it all SOS is smart. In fact, SOS is my favorite kind of smart. It doesn't call attention to itself by apologizing for its intelligence and it doesn't patronize people by telling them it's okay if they can't figure out what's going on or patting them on the back for getting it. There's no judgment or investment either way. It just is. One element among the rest. Ironically, that attitude and approach might give people the sense of being left out, even though I didn't feel that way myself. There is just so much happening that isn't parsed for you that it's possible you could feel entirely at sea. The cameras took some getting used to, I kept thinking they were obscuring people's faces, but I don't think that really happened. I think you see the cameras and all the tape on the floor and your mind starts setting up expectations about how all this equipment is going to operate. And it does and it doesn't.

SOS is always effacing itself, critiquing the text/image in the moment of presentation. The great thing about it is that the critique runs under the surface, so the show is just self-aware enough to let its critique register but facile enough to keep moving, so you're never forced into a preconceived conclusion or response. When you think about it, that's a fairly difficult thing to pull off. There was a lot of sophisticated manipulation of image which has as much to do with the performance strategies of camp, drag and the playful blurring of gender idenities as it does with the use of technology. The best moments are created when low and high tech collide. Those moments of collision create a sense of "realness" where images can be enjoyed and consumed, but also parsed and interrogated - neither is an end in itself, if that makes any sense at all.

For example. There's a moment when Willie Farrad Mullins comes out in a blond wig and a beautiful red dress. The dress is a garland of plastic streamers that are draped on him while we watch and the fabulousness of the moment is created by using a three speed fan as a wind machine and then projecting and enhancing this image by adding music that Willie lip-syncs. It's eye-candy and you can enjoy it for what it is, but you can also enjoy it for how it is achieved and what it says about the superficiality of beauty and glamour and sex that sells even as it's working on you in the moment. That's Realness and SOS is always pursuing this alternate space. To a generation like mine and younger, this is a viable and genuine strategy for getting close to something beautiful or emotional or "real." It's rare to see a moment in a show that even approaches this level of complexity and SOS is layered with them.

Favorite Audience talk-back moment-
Audience member: Where did the animal suits come from?
Caden Manson: Chiiiinna.

What I Saw: Bests of 2009

Since there's no way to avoid making a graphical list of Bests of 2009 in a single post, I've decided to release my choices in a series of posts instead. These are in no particular order except the one that's being imposed by time. This year, I've tried to write something about each show, not so much to explain my choice, but to force myself to articulate one thing that was of particular interest about each. I manage to write a good bit about some and not so much about others. This isn't a reflection on the quality of the show, but on the quality of my attention and with at least one of the shows, the fact that I wrote things down directly after seeing it.

To Be Straight With You - DV8 Physical Theatre, directed by Lloyd Newson.

I don't know where to begin. To Be Straight With You is devised around 85 one-on-one interviews and 200 street interviews reflecting on the topics of tolerance, religion, and homosexuality. The first interviews of the evening focused on people expressing homophobic viewpoints that were often fueled by Christian or Muslim belief and often ended in either advocating violence or engaging in it. Movement sequences were created around the interviews, some of which are played in voiceover while some are performed by the dancers. Digital animation and video are used to create environments and to illustrate various stories. Many of those interviewed, especially people from ethnic groups with strong religious ties, asked that their identities not be revealed because they feared the consequences if their community found out about their sexuality. These anonymous interviews were sometimes depicted using animation to black out the dancer's body, effectively erasing that person.

The show spends a good bit of its time focusing on homosexuality in the muslim world. In one story, Ankur Bahl portrays a 15 year old boy who was stabbed by his father and brother after he came out to them. The the boy's story is made all the more poignant by Bahl's ebullient delivery of the text while doing a rope skipping routine that gets more complicated as he reveals ever more harrowing details. In a later sequence, Bahl and another dancer perform a duet in classical bharatanatyam form to Shakira's Hips Don't Lie as Bahl, playing an Indian man who is married with three kids, explains why he loves to dance and how he has hidden his dancing and his long-time affair with another a man. These two moments stand out for the exquisite beauty of the dance/movement and for the way they reveal the joy and exuberance of the person telling the story. Newson balances very grim statistics and personal accounts with these movement sequences to illustrate the ways men and women confront and manage their identity in the midst of intolerance and violence.

More DFW Interviews

This interview is in 10 parts. Watch the rest here.

SF Bay Area Outrageous Fortune Conversation Feed #1

Decided not to go. But let's do the math: babysitter 2 hours travel time + 4 hours for event (6 hrs total) x $16 per hour = $96. Hmm? Maybe I'll just check out the live twitter feed (go to #newplay) and the TBA Chatterbox blog updates here.

For the past hour, it's been mostly introducing the background of the study and the research methods. Now Todd London is going over the chapters of the book. Lot's of talk about risk aversion and old models (Joe Papp model) that either don't work or don't exist. Alli Houseworth points out via twitter feed that there's a discrepancy between the finding that only 31% of AD's believe that audience is a obstacle to new play production and the complaint that playwrights aren't writing for "our audiences."

Anyway, check it out. I'll update when I can.

Outrageous Fortune Community Discussions

Todd London and Victoria Bailey will be at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley this Tuesday, February 9, 10am to 2pm, to engage the local theater community in discussion about the findings from their Outrageous Fortune study and to explore possible solutions. The event is free and open to "playwrights, directors, critics, funders and everyone concerned with new play development." If you'd like to attend, you need to RSVP. For more information and to find out where to RSVP, go here.

I'm tempted to see if I can rearrange my schedule for the day to go to this. I hear people are taking off work to go which really means that the event isn't free at all.

5 Things: Up Since 3AM Edition

1. How to Feel Miserable As An Artist - Keri Smith.
2. Lemon Shaker Pie, Oh My.
3. Three things that are kind of similar: The Art Monastery Project. I took an online workshop back in September and one of the participants introduced me to the AMP . I'm fascinated with the project for two reasons: 1) It's in Italy. 2) It's an example of what I've been dreaming about creating here in the U.S. Two more examples of implementing a similar idea in an urban area - the Des Moines Social Club and the Philadelphia Art Hotel.
4. Kathryn Bigelow's Uncanny Strange Days. And what about that opening scene, eh?
   
5. V.S. Ramachandran TED talk about mirror neurons.
   

Bonus:

1. Catalog artwork of All the Dishes on Ebay by Penelope Umbrico.
2. How to Read A Movie by Roger Ebert.
   

Theater: Slow Curtain. The End?

Steve Julian (Have A Peak) asks whether theater is dying and gets this thoughtful comment from Jay McAdams, co-founder and Executive director of 24th Street Theatre in L.A. Had to share it. This question comes in the wake of the announcement about the closing of Pasadena Playhouse (the state theater of California - I had no idea there was an official state theater).

Jay writes:

We’ve been debating whether theatre is dying for over two thousand years. However, I do believe that for the first time, we are at a crossroads where theatre artists must change what they’re doing and how they’re doing it or risk becoming even more irrelevant in our society. Theatre will never be completely dead in our lifetime, but it’s moved from Intensive Care to a ventilator, at least as far as the average Joe is concerned.

McNulty said in the Times that if you give the people what they need, they will come. I agree. And if audiences are not coming, then one can assume they don’t need what is being offered. I run a theatre and often don’t feel the NEED to drive across town and pay $50 to see a play that someone else decided to do. And I run a theatre! I’ve made it my life’s work, and I feel that way!

Of course there are theatres that do one specific thing for one specific audience and their houses are full. But creating new audiences is the real challenge in this digital age. Tweeting about your show is not going to convert many twenty-somethings to start going to live theatre. It’s much more than just marketing that needs to be done. People need to be turned on to art when they children. This “creating audiences of tomorrow” cliché that’s been on every grant application for the past two decades has finally caught up with us. Arts Ed is virtually gone and video is the only art kids consume with their Hot Cheetos. Most artists don’t care about Arts Ed, but it is at the heart of the “is theatre dying?” conversation. And until our best artists invest in Arts Ed, we will be pushing a boulder up a mountain in trying to get young adults to start coming to live theatre. LA Unified is virtually shutting down its Arts ED Branch and the letter-writing campaign to save Arts Ed in LAUSD has only generated half the number of letters as did the threat of closing LA’s Cultural Affairs Dept. That is telling. And it is part of the food chain that ate the Pasadena Playhouse.

Theatre artists also need to really ask themselves what their community needs. Will that change the art? You bet it will. And it’s a scary notion. What happens if we just start giving the public what they really want. Isn’t that reality TV? Won’t it lead to the dumbing down of theatre?

Well, we have to look even deeper and not just ask, “What kind of shows the public really needs?”. Theatres need to ask the much more profound question, “WHAT DO PEOPLE NEED IN THEIR LIVES TODAY?” Many artists will have no interest in this question, as it is has nothing to do with how they have always created their works. Yet by definition, non-profits are Public Benefit corporations. We are there to serve the public, not just to do the art that we like and think the public should like too. If they liked it as much as we do, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

This is a sea change. If theatres dare to ask how they can really serve the public in the 21st century, the art will change. The audience might change. The artists might change. The ticket prices might change. But what also might change, is that theatre will clearly matter to our society.

Bonus: Check out this sweet video at Blogorrhea.

Where the Intelletual Kids Spend Ski Week.

Baudrillard Camp! Starts Monday, February 8.

If I lived in NYC, I would so be there. Either that or Feltmaking for Nomads.



h/t Culturebot.

Bonus: The Brothers Quay - A Subjective Survey of Shorts Films 2009

Word Blast is On Again

Four years ago, I can't believe it's been four years, but I guess that's about right, my friend, Susan Faust, suggested that we start a writing exercise - we'd email lines back and forth to each other via email and then see where the play went. The goal isn't necessarily the finished product, more the idea of getting ourselves writing and not knowing where at least half of the narrative is going. We did it for awhile and then I thought it would be fun to move it to a blog platform, because you know, an audience is always nice. Anyway, we suffered some technical difficulties and life intervened as it does and well...the exercise fell off. But we've talked about starting it back up for awhile now and so I was very excited to find that there was a new post today. We're going to see how long we can keep this ball in the air. Check it out here.