On my way to the Joyce SoHo last Wednesday, while thinking about David Gordon’s 50th anniversary — and realizing that, while he has been making work for five decades, I would be seeing it live for the first time that night — I got to wondering: What does Gordon, renowned for resisting any sort of tidy classification, think about these tidy little landmarks called anniversaries?
Performance
Posted inPerformance
Dancing with Jack
Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson met in 2008. Both grew up in rural America, both are queer, both have created imaginary worlds. Two Alike, which premiered at The Kitchen last weekend, is their first collaboration, in which Swanson provides the setting for Ferver’s dreams and nightmares.
Posted inPerformance
Ancient Greece Meets Contemporary New York
Readings are a staple of every literary calendar. Author Paul Rome has taken this bit of weeknight ritual and rebuilt it as equal parts performance and literature. To do so, he’s performed a simple trick: Rome writes to read.
Posted inPerformance
Ashes to Ashes, Words to Dance
The program for Rashaun Mitchell’s Nox contains a lone explanatory note: “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” The words belong to the poet Anne Carson, and they come from the back cover of her eponymous book, published in 2010. They make you wonder: Is what we’re about to see a replica of that book, in the form of a dance, as close as the artists could get? A replica of a replica?
Posted inPerformance
Reggie Wilson, Will You Marry Me?
(don’t answer that) Everyone else, what are you doing tonight? (if your answer is anything other than going to see reVisitation, Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group’s absolute knockout of a show, don’t answer that)
Posted inPerformance
On Black Dance: Shifting Movement, Words, Identities
I am watching a black man gyrate in front of me in a thong over gray briefs. A tuft of synthetic, orange hair peeks out from the front of the triangular fabric. His nearly-shaven head glistens as beads of sweat trickle down his face. His dark eyes stare intensely at us.
Posted inPerformance
A Thirst for the Conceptual
All I could think about was water. I was late and overdressed; the auditorium was ungodly hot, and I was thirsty. What is more, the Berlin-based artist, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, had, as though anticipating me, deliberately placed an empty water bottle on the seat next to the one I slipped into.
Posted inPerformance
Even the Artist Disappears
Over the weekend, acclaimed and provocative Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué launched his first North American tour, giving the United States premiere of Looking for a Missing Employee as part of Performance Space 122’s annual COIL festival.
Posted inPerformance
Channeling Tragedy, Comedy and Judy Garland
So there I stood, sharing a cigarette with my friends on the curb outside of La MaMa. We were patiently waiting for the house to open for former NEA 4 defendant John Fleck’s show, “Mad Women,” a dizzying one-man mash-up of the performance artist’s life with the final year of the legendary Judy Garland, when one of the producers approached me and asked, “Do you want to be in the show?”
Posted inPerformance
An Offering of Three Shen Wei Dance Pieces at the Park Avenue Armory
I spent part of the third section of Shen Wei’s modern dance showing at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday watching a shoeless young woman (a member of the audience who was, like me, allowed to wander along the grid of 60 dancer-inhabited squares of performance space), stare slack-jawed and wide-eyed at the topless performers smeared with paint leaping and spinning and writhing before her. Her proximity to them was probably jarring enough, but add to that experience the intimidating vastness of the Armory’s coliseum-sized hangar with booming surround sound and a reverberating floor, and its easy to see why someone might drop all pretense of understanding and question what’s expected of them.
Posted inPerformance
Hipsterspotting with MGMT & Cattelan at the Guggenheim
Hyperallergic rocks it in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, so naturally we felt compelled to review MGMT’s performance at the Guggenheim last night. The band, a staple of any Williamsburg playlist, performed in the rotunda of the museum as part of the 2011 Guggenheim International Gala to celebrate Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s blockbuster exhibition, All. The night was a glossy affair with art world insiders and rich board members and their entourages shmoozing and boozing under Cattelan’s epic sculpture web. As soon as I got to the party I had one question: where are all the hipsters at?
Posted inPerformance
69°S. Explores Antarctica at the BAM 2011 Next Wave Festival
The alien remoteness of Antarctica has probably never been better depicted on stage than in 69°S., a marionette theatre experience presented at the BAM 2011 Next Wave Festival by performance ensemble Phantom Limb. I write “experience” because I’m not really sure what else to call this.