print May/June 2020

Adam Linder and Shahryar Nashat

CONTEXT MAY NOT BE EVERYTHING, but it is inescapable. And for the New York performance/art world, no context in recent memory was more highly anticipated than the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, unveiled as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s celebrated $450 million renovation. The Studio was billed as a “new live space dedicated to performance, music, sound, spoken word, and expanded approaches to the moving image.” That seemed like a lot to relegate to what was revealed to be a modestly sized “state of the art” gallery (standing

performance February 2020

TRUE CRIME

AT THE TOP of Thomas Ostermeier’s History of Violence, the German theater director’s adaptation of Édouard Louis’s 2016 autobiographical novel, three performers clad head to toe in protective hoods and coveralls mark the stage as a crime scene, placing numbered placards at points across the floor. As one begins to dust for fingerprints, another records the procedure on video, live-streaming it in close-up onto a stark white wall looming behind them. Soon, an ominous image of a brush stirring up a cloud of fine powder dissolves into one of falling snow. It is Christmas in Paris and Édouard is

picks January 10, 2020

The Wooster Group

Negotiating posterity is a weird task for theater artists. Live performance may be impermanent by nature, but there’s limited virtue in being completely lost to time. Which is why this compact yet potent show from the archives of the mighty Wooster Group is so gratifying and compelling: It gives audiences glimpses—both onstage and off—into some of the most essential, influential, and ingenious productions from their nearly fifty-year run as a company.

Vitrines offer up ephemera for the browsing: performance stills, Playbills, scribbled-in scripts, meticulous set drawings, and correspondence both

previews January 2020

“Hilma af Klint: Artist, Researcher, Medium”

Curated by Iris Müller-Westermann and Milena Høgsberg

That she, a mystic—and a woman, no less—would one day draw record-breaking crowds to stand before her divine abstractions likely would not have surprised Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). “Non-Objectivity will be the religion of the future,” she once declared. Painting, for her, was more than a matter of aesthetics; it was a higher calling. Curators Iris Müller-Westermann and Milena Høgsberg will be the next to tackle af Klint’s prodigious output, filling the whole of the Moderna Museet Malmö with 230 of her works. Those who take the time to pore

performance December 2019

Jennifer Krasinski

A PERFORMANCE must be believed to be seen. I likely hang its appearance on an act of faith because I—raised Catholic in the Midwest—received my first exposure to theater by watching men in elaborately brocaded dresses conduct mass every Sunday. (As it turns out, church was also my primer on camp.) Applause was inappropriate, prayer was encouraged, and many years later the two otherwise adverse gestures still share a synapse in my head, one standing in for the other—sometimes.

Which brings me to the frigid Friday in January when I arrived at a Shabbat dinner hosted by comedic singer-songwriter

interviews November 06, 2019

Annie-B Parson

Choreographer and director Annie-B Parson is a force of nature who’s having quite the season. She created the elegant, joyous numbers that propel the great David Byrne and his vibrant cohort of musicians and singers through his rock-show-cum-Broadway-musical, American Utopia, on at the Hudson Theater through February 16. Her company Big Dance Theater, which she cofounded with actor/director Paul Lazar and performer Molly Hickok almost thirty years ago, will present a trio of recent works under the title The Road Awaits Us at NYU’s Skirball Center on November 8 and 9. And last month, Parson

film November 2019

ZOMBIELAND

SINCE 2006, Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška, collaborating as the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, have created brainy and ebullient works for stage, film, and video, aerating serious conceptual heft with an oddball comedic sensibility. For the directing-and-writing duo, scripts have never been hard-and-fast things. Take the one for their epic nine-part video Life and Times (2009–15): The words were transcribed from phone conversations between Liška and company member Kristin Worrall, during which the latter recounted the (often banal) details of her life thus far. What else would one expect from a team

print November 2019

“Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion”

Ninety-seven-year-old Pierre Cardin is fashion’s first mogul; his name evokes the epitome of French chic the world over, though he’s Italian by birth. His story is one of both creative and commercial prowess: After spending his youth honing his craft working under Jeanne Paquin, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Christian Dior, Cardin opened his own shop in 1950 and was soon lauded as Paris’s finest couturier of suits. Believing that all women should be able to afford smart, well-made clothes, he debuted a ready-to-wear collection in 1959—a vulgarity his peers deemed unthinkable until they, out of economic

interviews September 05, 2019

JoAnne Akalaitis

An Obie-award-winner many times over, director JoAnne Akalaitis is one of the most vital forces in American theater, her productions and performances fueled by her intellectual and political ferocity, as well as her boundless curiosity. A cofounder of the trailblazing company Mabou Mines—which she formed in 1970 with Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, Fred Neumann, and David Warrilow—she has previously dismissed the label “avant-garde” as it has been lobbed at her work, conceiving of herself instead as a cultural worker in the classical sense. That said, her daring visions once spurred

previews September 2019

“RACHEL HARRISON: LIFE HACK”

Curated by Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit with Kelly Long

“Every sculpture should have a trapdoor,” Rachel Harrison once mused, although she didn’t say whether the entrances and exits would be made by the art or the viewer or both. One could joke that such insurgence—formal, conceptual, material—is what directs the ins and outs of her virtuosic productions. Her mixed-media pieces can look like acts of oogey buffooning, object comedies that swipe at the sublime by way of the sad sack. Starring blobs and stacks and stuff blasted with perplexing color palettes, punctuated by masscult references,

print September 2019

Alex Israel

Some encounters with art merit an autopsy report more than a review. I confess that, in those cases, I have a hard time parsing whether it is the work that is DOA, or my interest in what it’s doing, or both. Attending two shows by Alex Israel—the born-and-bred Los Angeleno who has made his reputation among collectors as one of that city’s brightest sons—I wondered if he is now feeling as stiffed as I do by the selfie-conscious, celebrity-grazing spectacles he’s been producing for half a dozen years or so. Having cast himself as a kind of Narcissus for our shallow, oversharing, materialistic

performance July 25, 2019

Round and Round

HOW AM I THIS I? So asks composer and playwright Michael R. Jackson’s brazen and brilliant game changer A Strange Loop, a “Big Black and Queer-Ass American Broadway Show” that’s as thrilling and excruciating as having an existential crisis in a hall of mirrors. At its center is Usher (the sublime Larry Owens), who works as an usher in a Broadway theater while struggling to write a self-referential musical called A Strange Loop, about a man named Usher who works as an usher in a Broadway theater while struggling to write a self-referential musical called A Strange Loop. The title, he explains in