Performance

  • APAP Smear

    January 17, 2014 • Claudia La Rocco at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ conference

    ONE.

    “We began to engage in a strange duel of asceticism,” Edgar Oliver explained, if that’s the word, during Helen & Edgar, his monologue about growing up in Savannah, Georgia, with his sister and mother. If only. This show, part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, was the single best hour I spent during the orgy of excess at APAP, the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ conference.

    Twelve performances, five production meetings, three showings, two conferences, one studio visit, and various miscellaneous networking and social happenings, concentrated in Manhattan with

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  • Claudia La Rocco

    December 26, 2013 • Claudia La Rocco on performance in 2013

    WHAT TO SAY ABOUT THESE LISTS.

    They’re weird; I think we can all acknowledge that.

    As well as wildly spotty and biased and unscientific (in the artistic sense). One of their (my) problems is that they don’t take into account all of the shows the people (me) writing these lists didn’t see—you know, like Jon Kinzel’s Someone Once Called Me a Sound Man, which happened at the Chocolate Factory Theater earlier this month and, according to everything everyone smart said, was one of the best things to have hit a New York stage in ages. Didn’t see it, dunno, can’t comment, etc. And yet. Yes. Let’s put it

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  • Growing Pains

    December 20, 2013 • Jennifer Krasinski on The Life and Death of Marina Abramović

    AS THE STORY GOES, performance artist Marina Abramović asked director Robert Wilson if he would stage her funeral as a theatrical event that would double as “a celebration of life and death combined.” Wilson agreed, with the proviso that she grant him permission to stage her life as well. The artist consented and supplied Wilson with personal anecdotes and biographical details; she also promised to participate as a performer. Wilson enlisted actor Willem Dafoe, composer/lyricist/performer Antony, singer Svetlana Spajić, composer William Basinski, as well as an impressive group of other musicians

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  • Every Which Way

    December 06, 2013 • Agnieszka Gratza on Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s Way In at Danspace

    IN A FOUR-WAY “conversation” with his collaborator Silas Riener, dance critic Claudia La Rocco, and lighting designer Davison Scandrett, posted on Bomblog on the eve of Way In’s premiere, choreographer and dancer Rashaun Mitchell said: “I’m always thinking about what’s the way into this and out of this.” What follows are four ways into the piece I went to see at Danspace Project during its brief run, offered up as my way of making sense of it (with a little help from my friends).

    The Way of Taste

    In a prior incarnation, a site-specific performance and installation at the BFI Gallery in Miami, Way

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  • Valhalla, I Am Coming

    November 30, 2013 • Nathaniel Lee on Guido van der Werve’s Running to Rachmaninoff Run

    WITH TEMPERATURES in the mid-twenties and a forecasted high of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, not to mention a “wind advisory” in effect until 6 PM, the last Sunday before Thanksgiving in New York City began as either the first real day of winter or the absolute last day of fall, depending on your personal calculus of late-November cold. It was on this morning, around 10 AM, that a dozen or so spandex-clad runners began to assemble in the foyer of an otherwise shuttered Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea. Their objective: to run, as a group, from the gallery, thirty miles north to Kensico Cemetery in

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  • Hit or Myth

    November 29, 2013 • Jennifer Krasinski on the use of cosmologies around Performa 13

    THERE WERE UNEXPECTED ZEITGEISTS that bubbled up through the curated themes of Performa 13, one of which was the rewriting of cosmologies both personal and shared. It certainly made sense. The artist, like any creator, makes the world, unmakes the world, and/or remakes the world each according to their own compass. In some cases, the self was very much at the center of the work; in others, the artist seemed to serve as a lens for what lies beyond our present knowledge.

    “This idea of animal does not fit nicely into our typical ideas of city,” wrote Denise Hoffman-Brandt and Catherine Seavitt

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  • Live from New York

    November 20, 2013 • Jennifer Krasinski on three Performa 13 events

    PERFORMA, THE AMBITIOUS BIENNIAL FESTIVAL of theater and performance held here in New York, is now in its fifth iteration, hosting over one hundred events at more than forty venues throughout the first three weeks of November. As with all festivals, it’s a chance to exhaust oneself running from theater to gallery to museum, gorging on plays, performance pieces, and other, more hybrid genres. While the offerings I’ve seen so far have been of varying success, Performa is doing what it does best: providing a focused opportunity to witness the varied state(s) of the rambling field they call “visual

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  • You Don’t Know Squat

    November 13, 2013 • Claudia La Rocco on Squat Theatre

    “HERE WE GO,” someone in the crowd, I’m almost positive it was The Unidentified Flying Dancer, said with an anticipatory sigh that seemed born of long experience, maybe? Batten down the hatches.

    The UFD (aka Sheryl Sutton), issued her warning on a recent Wednesday night at Electronic Arts Intermix, as a conversation between two former members of the Hungarian-born collective Squat Theatre, long since disbanded, staggered to a halt:

    Anna Koos: “It’s my opinion, let me have my opinion.”

    Eva Buchmuller: “But I can argue.”

    Koos, Buchmuller, and Sutton (a Squat collaborator) had gathered for a screening

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  • Conflict Resolution

    October 31, 2013 • Claudia La Rocco on Boris Charmatz’s Levée des conflits extended at MoMA

    LAST YEAR, when MoMA launched its Some sweet day dance series curated by the choreographer Ralph Lemon, there was a lot of talk about the impossibility of the atrium space as a site for any art, let alone a body-based one, and about the fraught tensions between these two art-world cultures.

    But, really, what were we all thinking?

    That was my thought on Sunday afternoon, when I spent a little more than two hours watching Levée des conflits extended (Suspension of Conflicts Extended) by the French choreographer Boris Charmatz. The work, from 2010, comprises twenty-five gestures performed by twenty-four

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  • Oto Didacts

    October 14, 2013 • Agnieszka Gratza at the Unsound London festival

    “IS IT JUST ME? Lightning Bolt’s been doing it for, like, ten years,” a stranger sidles up, sensing a fellow-skeptic. I nod. “The shirtless thing, the masks,” he adds. My response is drowned out by waves of sonic interference. Out there in the spotlight, a balaclava-clad man stripped down to his waist is pounding away at some homemade drumlike instrument, while his bare-chested companion, a shaggy black wig covering up his face, is strumming on something resembling an elongated rocket. We’re being treated to sonic warfare by Poland’s noise rock band BNNT. Derivative or not, the act has got raw

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  • Means to an End

    October 09, 2013 • Jennifer Krasinski on Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play

    THE END, whether it is near or not, is certainly upon us: The contemporary American imagination is seized by the terror that we—here, now—are civilization’s last sigh. Film, television, and literature are of course the most prolific purveyors of sensational apocalyptic visions, offering an array of endings to suit every demographic. (It is of no comfort to observe that in our politically fractured, post-Empire America, one of the few unifying sentiments is an impending sense of doom.) We may be besieged by flesh-eating zombies, obliterated by a rogue asteroid, enslaved by alien invaders, wiped

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  • Ifs, Ands, or Butts

    October 01, 2013 • Travis Diehl on Joe Sola and Michael Webster at 356 S. Mission Rd

    EVERYONE HAD KIND OF NOTICED, but then forgotten, the big yellow woodchipper. But now somebody fired it up; the performers, still dressed in their candystriped vaudeville getups, sliced through a giant Laura Owens painting with a little branch-clearing chainsaw and fed it piece by piece into the machine’s funnel.

    Joe Sola and Michael Webster have appeared as Shakey’s since 2006. For Shakey’s in “Der Hintern in der Luft,” held on Saturday, September 14, the duo turned their knack for endearing self-effacement on their willing venue—356 S. Mission, famous in Los Angeles for hosting “12 Paintings

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