Many readers of Hyperallergic know about the art fairs that serve the visual arts community, which seem to expand and replicate themselves at an ever-increasing rate around the globe. But readers may not be aware of the corollary in the world of performance. Of course, a dance work or a work for the stage can’t be bought and sold in quite the same way, and certainly not for remotely the same price tag, as a Jeff Koons or an Agnes Martin. Yet, there is still a clear marketplace around contemporary performance works, even if most performers participating stand to profit very little from it. And one of the hubs of that marketplace is the annual conference in New York City of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP).
Performance
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A Report from Cyberfest: Russia’s New Media Festival
Cyberfest, the first and only yearly festival of international media art in Russia, was founded in 2007 by artists and curators Anna Frants and Marina Koldobskaya. Since that time they have brought hundreds of international media artists to St. Petersburg, and in the process raising its international profile.
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REMIX! Is the Magic Still There?
Fitting for an event exploring the transformation of existing material into new work, the RE/Mixed Media Festival last Saturday offered any number of unique experiences depending on which panel, performance, or music event you decided to sample. There was Greek theater colliding with hip hop, classical literature transfigured through comics, politics mashing with performance art, battling remix-DJs, and discussions on copyright, authorship, and appropriation.
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The Invention of the Teenager
It’s strange to be reminded in the 21st century that there was a time before “teens” and “tweens,” before those years between childhood and adulthood, i.e. adolescence, had a name and now, a stereotype. All of us who attended the Books & Talks lecture Friday night, however, at Artists Space’s new offshoot on Walker Street, were reminded that before the 1950s teenagers as we know them didn’t exist.
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A New Kind of Theater Space Opens BAM to More Aggressive Work
Standing at the corner on which Jay-Z and Barbra Streisand helped anoint the new Barclays Center at the southern edge of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, it’s possible to feel an air of controversy around the 19,000-seat sports arena and concert venue that opened its doors for the very first time just weeks ago. Meanwhile, over at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the 150-plus-year-old arts institution that has long helped to anchor the area, began inaugurating a new space of its own in September.
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Picasso at His Most Surreal
Last night and tonight, the Guggenheim is staging two special, performance-like readings of Pablo Picasso’s obscure play, “Desire Caught by the Tail,” as part of the museum’s Works & Process series.
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A Play Brings the Politics of Fascism to 21st-Century America
As a high school kid, I thought Eugène Ionesco was pretty much one of the best writers I had encountered up to that point. He was an entrenched misanthrope with a brutal wit who wasn’t afraid to take on politics, philosophy, and the unfortunate realities of human interaction. And, most importantly to me at that time, one of his sharpest tools was his sense of the absurd. As a teenager who had moved a number of times and changed schools every couple of years, who spent most of her time in her own head or with her nose in books, and who was grappling with depression and a latent queerness, absurdity made perfect sense to me. The world outside of my head was excruciatingly absurd and twisted to me then, and most of the time I hated it and assumed it hated me right back. Ionesco was perfect.
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Instrumental People
When DD Dorvillier introduced an excerpt from her Danza Permanente at Judson Church last year, explaining that each of her four dancers would mirror one instrument in a Beethoven string quartet, a dance historian might have been puzzled. On the timeline of American concert dance, this sounded rather familiar: Didn’t the modern dance pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn do something similar about 100 years ago, when they developed a choreographic approach known as “music visualizations”? Hasn’t Mark Morris, famous for his musically complex choreography, been physicalizing classical scores since the 1980s? Oh, and then there’s Balanchine…
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Two Dance Experiments Peel Back the Layers
RoseAnne Spradlin’s beginning of something was evocative but didn’t offer enough to chew on; DD Dorvillier’s Danza Permanente is not one of her best works, but it gives gives viewers a glimpse of the choreographer’s process.
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The Light Bulb Moment: Eclipse Debuts in New BAM Space
The British sculptor and installation artist Anthony McCall’s sculptural parallax of thirty-six, 300-watt incandescent bulbs is a site-specific installation for BAM’s new 250-seat Fisher building, made in conjunction with Jonah Bokaer, the thirty-something dance whiz kid. Bokaer was the youngest member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and founder of Chez Bushwick, and his relation to McCall tiptoes around the famed collaborations between Isamu Noguchi and the Martha Graham Company, or Cunningham and Andy Warhol’s helium filled silver pillows. Those collaborations pivoted sculptural sets as integral parts of the choreography.
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Queer Spectacle: Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok
It’s a hot Friday afternoon. Inside the LAVA Studio in Brooklyn, six bodies take turns tumbling on a large blue mat: forward rolls, cartwheels, back handsprings, backward rolls into handstands. They cheer each other on throughout the warm-up. Their bodies are strong, their energy joyfully palpable.
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John Waters Does Vegas?
While skimming through my Facebook news feed last week, I noticed that Murray Hill had posted a picture of himself with Patti Lupone in her dressing room, following a performance of her show Far Away Places, which ran for a couple of nights at the new lounge/cabaret space 54 Below, near Times Square. Just below the picture Murray had a note about the resurgence of nightclub acts he’s noticed of late.