Performance

  • She's Lost Control

    April 20, 2018 • Shelley Elizabeth Carter on Susanne Kennedy’s Women In Trouble

    A COLLEAGUE ONCE QUIPPED that the imposing, concrete building of the Volksbühne Berlin looked like it was ripped from the pages of Marvel Comics. “A superhero headquarters for all the dads,” she joked, playfully pointing to the fact that the German theater has traditionally been a home to showcase the work of cisgendered, heterosexual, white, “bad boy” auteurs. While the artistic provocations of the Volksbühne were once confined to the stage, the controversy associated with the theater recently bled out beyond the the playing space. The institution’s director, Chris Dercon, abruptly resigned in

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  • Break It Down

    April 17, 2018 • John Arthur Peetz on Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Autoreconstrucción

    ART GALLERIES have traditionally preserved the paradox between the everyday theater of art, and the spectacle of exhibition display, while artists have simultaneously bucked these artificial divisions, and challenged the systems that reify, and rarify, their work. Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas’s series of autoreconstrucción sculptures have formally investigated these tenuous distinctions through a material vernacular inspired by the low-income favelas, barrios, and shantytowns of Latin America. His assemblages are similarly constructed, utilizing found domestic materials to inhabit, and

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  • All In the Family

    April 09, 2018 • Mira Dayal on Constance DeJong and Tony Oursler's Relatives

    THE SETUP of writer-performer Constance Dejong and Tony Oursler's performance Relatives is simple: a large boxy television sits on a stand at center stage, flanked by two stools. As the TV plays a video created by Oursler, DeJong delivers a fragmented monologue, gesturing to the screen as one would a PowerPoint presentation, or a friend, following its movements, touching its surface, talking to it, finding in it familiar faces of relatives, real and imagined: DeJong’s great-grandmother, mother, uncle, older sister, and younger sister, all representations of family buried just under the glass,

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  • GRACEFULNESS MUST BE SOUGHT

    PRINT April 2018 • Jennifer Krasinski on Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box

    IN HE BROUGHT HER HEART BACK IN A BOX, Adrienne Kennedy’s first new play in a decade, the titular heart is a gruesome rumor—one that holds a truth too unwieldy, too excruciating, to be simply received as fact. As one of the most important experimentalists in American theater, the eighty-six-year-old playwright has written twenty-odd works at once cerebral and unhinged, phantasmagoric and lucid, all of which make vivid the brutalities visited by racism on the mind and body of a woman of color. Throughout her work, it is a condition that leaves madness and monsters in its wake.The mind

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  • TO PRESERVE AND PROTEST

    PRINT April 2018 • Zeenat Nagree on performance art in Bangladesh

    ON FEBRUARY 5, 2018, a half man, half bull riding a black-and-white horse made a grand entrance into the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s premier fine-arts institution. Wearing curved horns attached to a woven rope net that covered his torso, the imposing beast sat on his steed, which was draped with a red caparison, and surveyed the area. Although a strange sight for pedestrians, the bull-man cut a familiar figure for members of the art community, who know him as a recurring character in the work of artist Mahbubur Rahman. Pointedly, he led the charge that evening

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  • Liberté or Death

    March 16, 2018 • Dennis Lim on Albert Serra’s Liberté

    THE FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD CATALAN DIRECTOR Albert Serra has brought his singular sensibility to bear on a remarkable range of works, straddling the film and art worlds with a rare understanding of the contexts of spectatorship and a flair for productive provocation. His films bring the mythic past to life by distilling fabled events to eccentric anecdotes and imbuing figures of legend with the mundane weight of existence. Following the droll anti-adaptations of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Honor of the Knights, 2006) and the Biblical parable of the Three Kings (Birdsong, 2008), he staged the

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  • Forever Young

    March 07, 2018 • Helen Shaw on “Avant-Garde-Arama” at Performance Space New York

    THE LEGENDARY VENUE P.S. 122—rechristened Performance Space New York—finally reopened in January. It’s hard to encompass the tangled mare’s nest of this building’s cultural associations: the place is like an archaeological site, with layers of civilization and history piled up higgledy-piggledy. Occupied originally in the late 1970s by a group of squatter-artists, the repurposed school building and its two theaters were at the center of New York’s experimental scene for nearly four decades. Spalding Gray spoke his monologues there. Philip Glass played a battered piano. Ron Athey literally bled

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  • HOW DO YOU KNOW?

    PRINT March 2018 • Catherine Damman on Richard Maxwell’s Paradiso

    “A MAN DRIVES A PICKUP into a Chelsea gallery” could be the start of a bad joke; instead, it’s the beginning of a Richard Maxwell play. The truck is a white Chevy with a licked finish, the gallery is Greene Naftali, and the massive windows, edged in weathering steel, are vertical blades, rudders pivoted by two guys I worry about in the cold, their irradiated safety hoodies thick but perhaps not enough.

    Addressed to Dante’s Divine Comedy and borrowing the title from his third canticle, Paradiso foregrounds existential questions: What is our purpose? Where will we find salvation? But Maxwell’s

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  • Glory Be

    January 30, 2018 • Andy Campbell on Ron Athey’s Gifts of the Spirit

    IN APRIL OF 2017, Diamanda Galás gave a concert in Vibiana—the airy, deconsecrated cathedral named for Saint Vibiana that once served the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles. Her singular ululations and yowls (perfected in songs like “O, Death”) echoed across the space. I imagined her notes as a physical substance, filling up the nave of the church like a rising tide—apocalyptic and cleansing. Ron Athey’s lush and redemptive Gifts of the Spirit: Prophecy, Discernment and Automatism (a version of which was first staged in 2010 in London) performed here nearly a year later, is a kind of

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  • The Boy in the Band

    December 15, 2017 • Jennifer Krasinski on the art of Morgan Bassichis

    MORGAN BASSICHIS IS A COMPOSER, a comedian, and a cabaret artist (not necessarily in that order). In performance, he plays piano, tells stories, and sings in a voice so honeyed and seductive that audible sighs are sometimes heard coming from the audience at the end of his songs. Lithe as a whippet, with laser beam blue eyes, he carries himself with both the self-deprecation of the comedian, and the self-possession of the diva. “You know I start every day with gratitude,” he zinged at Danspace Project at Saint Mark’s Church in October during a live recording of his forthcoming album, More Protest

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  • CURVE BALL

    PRINT November 2017 • Anthony Byrt on FAFSWAG

    AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND’S largest city, has long instrumentalized Pacific people as a way to demonstrate its cosmopolitanism and diversity. It trades heavily on its status as one of the world’s biggest Polynesian metropolises (boasting a Pacific population of some two hundred thousand, almost 15 percent of Auckland’s total inhabitants); the city’s self-promotional efforts routinely foreground Pacific culture, artists, and, most of all, sportspeople—billboards advertising local rugby matches and underwear alike feature muscular brown men as a kind of shorthand for erotically charged athleticism.

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  • Back to School

    October 17, 2017 • Claudia La Rocco on Sarah Michelson's September2017/\ at Bard College

    THIS IS THE THIRD TIME I’m writing here about Sarah Michelson’s work, following 4 in 2014 and tournamento in 2015. Now comes September2017/\, which I saw September 24 at Bard, and which was the culmination of a four-year residency Michelson had with students there. Culmination is the wrong word, but I can’t think of the right one.

    I didn’t explicitly address those first two pieces to anyone, though of course there was a particular person I was writing to, and for. I’m thinking now of how Michelson has said she makes her dances for four people, herself included; it’s something, like many things

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