Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Friday, 30 November 2007
A highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 1 December: Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame produced What Would Jesus Buy?, a documentary about the performance artist Bill "Reverend Billy" Talen and his Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir. It's currently running at the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street; tickets and information here. Give post-capitalism a smack in the face and drop by.
Sunday, 2 December: So long as you're in the mood for spending money (or maybe not, considering what you've seen the night before), cruise on over to the Web site for Democracy in America, the latest show from the Foundry Theater. There, you can purchase your way into art: items for sale in Annie Dorsen's new show include a product placement (price varies), a line of dialogue (only $15.00, a real steal) or, for more high-end buyers, an interpretation of the show for $2,500.00 ("Your interpretation will be featured in the program and included in our press packets. We will discuss your interpretation in all forums in which it is appropriate to do so"). There's lots more; information here. C'mon; it's Christmas!
Monday, 3 December: Rain and snow Monday, with a low expected to dip below freezing. Since most theatres are dark, curl up with veteran Foreman actress Juliana Francis Kelly's rehearsal notes from Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland. If you do manage to make it out, however, take a subway uptown to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where the Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poet of Ashes festival continues with a rare screening of his 1975 Salò, an adaptation of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. The screening starts at 8.00pm at the Walter Reade Theatre, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza.
Tuesday, 4 December: Join actress/comedienne Liz Dahmen of Ex-Antwone fame for The Lesbian Overtones Holiday Show and Puppy Love, a double holiday bill at The Green Room at 45 Bleecker Street. Audiences are promised "torch songs, pole-dancing and Dad-drag." Again: c'mon, it's Christmas! More information here; the show runs on Tuesdays through 18 December. (For more on contemporary variety and burlesque shows, by the way, see Claire Nally's "There's more to burlesque than meets the eye" at today's Guardian (UK) blog.)
Wednesday, 5 December: The Elephant Brigade's new production of Man is Man begins performances at HERE, 145 Sixth Avenue. This "real-time theatre" production marries contemporary technology to the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt to create a Brecht for the new century.
Thursday, 6 December: Another unique event at the Japan Society when John Jesurun, just off Philoktetes at Soho Rep, directs a restaging of Harry Partch's large-scale composition Delusion of the Fury. The first act of Partch's music-theatre piece is based on two Japanese Noh plays, the second on an Ethiopian folk tale; both feature the unique, custom-made instruments for which Partch is famous. Runs through Friday night at the Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street; more details here.
Friday, 7 December: The first major Beckett staging of the season: JoAnne Akalaitis' production of four short Beckett plays, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and a new score by Philip Glass, previews at the New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East 4th Street.
Posted at 5.13 pm in /Openings
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Thursday, 29 November 2007
You come most carefully upon your hour. One of the more astonishing effects of the first scene of Hamlet is its compression of time, all time, within the 174 lines of its length in the second quarto. Time, and especially its passing, might be the metatragic theme of both theatre and music. Five or six hours pass within the first scene's duration, but there's more: we are, chronologically, in twelfth-century Denmark, but also England at the turn of the seventeenth century, and of course we are also in the theatre, now, as the play itself runs its course. In tragedy and music we are in all human time; its passing, whether a few hours, a few months, a year, or all eternity, is the tragic recognition.
We are also in Imperial Rome, as Horatio points out, trying to interpret the Ghost's appearance:
In the most high and palmy state of Rome
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell
The graves stood tenantless and all the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
At stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. (1.1.112-119)
Horatio equates the decay of the body with the decay of language. One final layer on Hamlet's palimpsest of time: the biological duration of the human body. Like the gibbering Romans, the ghost of Hamlet's father is for all important purposes incorporeal: Marcellus, Horatio and Bernardo try to strike the ghost with their weapons upon its second appearance, and are unsuccessful: the gibbering and squeaking of the dead, of the ghosts, though present, are beyond mortality. And are, as such, reminders of the audience's and the reader's own awareness of their presence in time, historical, biological and with an end: only to be left with their own gibbering spirits in the streets.
Part I of the Organum is here; recent entries here. I last wrote about Shakespeare in the following November 2005 post on Troilus and Cressida.
Troilus and Cressida
Chaon Cross and William Dick in the
Chicago Shakespeare Theater's 2007 production of
Troilus and Cressida. Photo: Michael Brosilow.
In the list of Shakespeare plays that nobody ever reads, Troilus and Cressida must be somewhere near the top -- below King John and Cymbeline, perhaps, but certainly above Pericles and Coriolanus. But it's a play that captured the attention of one of the 20th century's most influential Shakespeare interpreters, Jan Kott, and in the 1960s the play enjoyed several major productions as its apparent anti-war message fit into the ideological stances of several directors like Joe Papp and Peter Hall. In addition, its ending, which leaves several of the play's plot points unresolved and ambiguous, have made it next to impossible to fit it into a Shakespearean genre; it has the reputation of being the most "20th century" of the middle-period plays. Even in the early 17th century, editors of the quartos and the folio were uncertain whether to label it a "history" or a "tragedy," and my trusty Norton Shakespeare categorizes the play as a comedy, a funny place for a play the final act of which is drenched in blood and mangled corpses.
The anti-war message is, for us, one of the most significant. Seven years into the Trojan War, the Greeks are still at the walls of Troy; the rationalist generals Agamemnon and Odysseus are in a Hamlet-like confusion as to what to do next, while the Greek warrior Achilles, accompanied by his very, very close friend Patroclus, sits to the side, mocking the others. Inside the walls of Troy, where chivalry instead of rationalism controls the behavior of the citizens, Priam and his sons continue to gird for battle. His son Troilus has fallen intensely in love with the fair Cressida, whose uncle Pandarus plays go-between for the young lovers. Troilus and Cressida experience one night of sexual bliss before a deal is made to exchange Cressida for Aeneas, a Trojan commander who is being held captive by the Greeks. Chivalry has its limits, and Troilus gives Cressida up to the Greeks without so much as a by-your-leave; spying her in the Greek camp, Troilus is driven mad with jealousy and the play as a whole ends with grotesque savagery, never mind rationalism and chivalry. As the foul-mouthed gadfly Thersites has it in 5.2, perhaps with the cause of the war, Helen, in mind as well, "Lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion."
Young lovers Troilus and Cressida are trapped in the web of the chivalric code and Machiavellian scheming that drive the play, a web that allows desire no purchase. In large part, this is because the physical body, like the physical world, can't admit the possibility of transcendence that their joined desire can provide; the world of the play, as Troilus puts it, is a place:
... where injury of chance
Puts back leave-taking, justles roughly by
All time of pause, rudely beguiles our lips
Of all rejoindure, forcibly prevents
Our lock'd embrasures, strangles our dear vows
Even in the birth of our own laboring breath;
We two, that with so many thousand sighs
Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves
With the rude brevity and discharge of one
Injurious time ... (4.4.33-43)
The "lock'd embrasures" of sexual coupling provide more than sexual release; it's closer to the jouissance that Lacan describes; for Michael P. Clark, writing in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, jouissance "discloses an intricate interdependence between sexuality and the symbolic that subordinates the body to the law of the signifier. Because the position of any subject vis-a-vis the symbolic is marked by a lack or what Lacan calls a 'fading' before the object of desire, relations between the sexes are always structured according to some missing or third element that makes the relation, strictly speaking, 'impossible.'" In Troilus and Cressida, the third element is two-fold: society and the limitations of the human body itself; it is bodied physicality in community, viciously circumscribed by the accident of time, that prevents the consummation, the jouissance, that the sexual act represents for the lovers.
Troilus himself worries that his mind and his body may not be able to contain the sensual fulfillment that the object of his desire, Cressida, promises. Indeed, he trembles on the brink of erotic oblivion:
I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
The imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense; what will it be,
When that the watery palates taste indeed
Love's thrice-repured nectar? death, I fear me,
Swounding destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness,
For the capacity of my ruder powers:
I fear it much, and I do fear besides
That I shall lose distinction in my joys ... (3.2.17-26)
Troilus' love poetry in 3.2, directed towards his sweet Cressida, only grows more fearful from here: fearing the loss of identity in the sexual moment (death, "Swounding destruction," "I do fear besides / That I shall lose distinction in my joys"), he finally warns her, "This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit" (3.2.82-85). This is also the tragic observation that holds the two spheres of the play, the sexual and the social, together: just as the sexual act fails to provide the yearned-for release, neither the rationalism of the Greeks nor the chivalry of the Trojans are able to contain the ferociousness, the violent cowardice (especially when the "noble" Achilles kills the unarmed Hector) of the battle scenes in the fifth act.
Any contemporary reading of the play has to take into consideration the character of Cressida -- a virgin at the beginning of the play who has been delivered into the hands of the enemy by the end of it through Troilus' cruel betrayal of her. This is a grown-up Juliet, though, who was always smarter and more insightful than Romeo. For the Greeks, Cressida is simultaneously sex toy and mature woman, who can use her sexuality to manipulate the crude Greek commanders; in the camp scene (4.5), in which Cressida meets her captors, she's even got Ulysses on his knees, begging for a kiss (a scene echoed in the final tableau of Pinter's The Homecoming, a play with which Troilus and Cressida shares several parallels); immediately after her exit, though, Ulysses condemns her as "wanton" and "sluttish."
Troilus and Cressida contains some of Shakespeare's greatest love poetry; I'm thinking particularly of Troilus' first description of Cressida in the first act of the play, echoes of which will resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love, unable to get the object of his desire out of his mind:
I tell thee I am mad
In Cressid's love; thou answer'st "she is fair";
Pour'st in the open ulcer of my heart
Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice.
Handlest in thy discourse, O that her hand
In whose comparison all whites are ink
Writing to their own reproach, to whose soft seizure
The cygnet's down is harsh, and spirit of sense
Hard as the palm of ploughman. (1.1.53-61)
But this is a tragedy, and the impossibility of true union with that object is the ineradicable terror of the race. The language of the play is harshly physical, and it ends with Pandarus wishing his own venereal disease on the audience, but there's no escaping it. As Ulysses sees it in 1.3, it's not necessarily desire that destroys us, but that desire joined by earthly will and power that traps us in the bloody cycle of our days:
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself. (1.3.119-124)
And the Trojan War still has another three years to go by the end of the play. No wonder we yearn for the arms of our Troilus, our Cressida; and how tragic that we can never disappear there.
Posted at 9.05 am in /Organum
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Wednesday, 28 November 2007
The mind has deeper ecstasy than the body could ever obtain. In some way it lives from the fact that ecstasy is the dowry of woman. It must have experienced her. ... Finally imagination climbs four flights of stairs, in order not to find the woman, and right up to heaven, without seeking her. It has relinquished matter. But it has form, in which ideas come and with them delight. It has intuitions of what no one may know. It has found itself through ecstasy and from now on, thrusting continually through new circles of experience to new potencies, can never fail, where desires not of the mind would long since have failed. Now imagination no longer needs a stimulus, it becomes self-sufficient and finds its own delight in the rapture of associations, here chasing in pursuit of a metaphor which has just disappeared around the corner, there match-making with words, perverting phrases, falling for similarities, in the blissful abuse of chiastic intertwining, always out for adventure ...
Karl Kraus
Die Fackel, issue 323, page 22
Translated by Edward Timms
Posted at 9.29 am in /Quotes
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Wednesday, 28 November 2007
Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, explaining the reasons for his cancellation of a class he was scheduled to teach at NYU in 2004 (the US now requires visitors to the country to submit either retinal scans or fingerprints for entry):
Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm was no longer the city-state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.
I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and mechanisms. ...
From an article by Agamben published in the 10 January 2004 edition of Le Monde. Many thanks to Rainer Hanshe for calling it to my attention.
Posted at 9.23 am in /Politics
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Tuesday, 27 November 2007
UPDATE: A listing of shows for the 2008 Under the Radar festival is now available.
I thought I could stay out of it but the Guardian (UK) pulled me back in:
I had been hoping to be the only New York City theatre critic/blogger/writer not to mention the Broadway strike. Call it bloody-mindedness, but there's another reason. My beat, if you could call it that, is downtown theatre, theatre that takes place below 14th Street in Manhattan, several miles to the south of Times Square. And honestly, from my point-of-view, there haven't been hordes of theatre-mad holiday tourists stampeding south to get their American theatre fix, far from the dark marquees of 42nd Street.
And why not? Well, you'll have to click through to find out.
Ironically (and on a brighter note), on this very same day, the Public Theater has issued its press release on their 2008 Under the Radar festival, curated by Mark Russell, and a fine schedule it is: This year's UTR will feature work by Young Jean Lee (Church), the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma (Poetics: A Ballet Brut), Jay Scheib (his Antonioni meditation This Place Is a Desert), and much much more, all for only $15 a pop. Tickets will go on sale 7 December; watch this space and the Public Theater's Under the Radar Web page for more details, sure to be posted there soon. Now that's theatre.
Posted at 12.41 pm in /Miscellaneous
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Sunday, 25 November 2007
UPDATE: In re the Democracy in America project noted in the last paragraph below, you can participate yourself in bringing the play to fruition by visiting the project's Web site, where you can purchase a little piece of live theatre. Bring a credit card and your imagination.
Christmas will arrive
early for Bertolt Brecht enthusiasts this year; perhaps with the
Disneyfied post-capitalist labor relations problems uptown, his time has
come again.
The Elephant Brigade is presenting a new production of Brecht's 1926 Man Is Man at HERE Arts Center, 145 6th Avenue, starting on Thursday, 6 December. Paul Binnerts directs, with a cast almost entirely drawn from Tisch/NYU, where the production originally opened this past spring. According to the HERE Web site, "Man Is Man is played as 'real-time' theater, with the actors always present on the stage as themselves, staging themselves in the roles and scenes they play. They tell the story of the play by employing theatrical devices they handle themselves: small objects, miniature set pieces, exposed on tables, which they manipulate and film with a video camera." The production runs through 22 December; more information at the Elephant Brigade's Web site.
About a week later, on 13 December, David Gordon will present Uncivil Wars, a further adaptation of Brecht's Measure for Measure adaptation The Roundheads and the Pointheads (1932/34), at The Kitchen. The production features the Michael Feingold translation and the original songs by Hanns Eisler; the cast includes the inimitable Estelle Parsons. Says the Kitchen Web site: "Uncivil Wars is a new dance-theater work developed with material borrowed from Brecht's treatises on playwriting and from his play The Roundheads and the Pointheads, as well as Eisler's thoughts on composing for the theater. Gordon explores implications of readdressing historical works in the context of our present moment and considers racial, religious, linguistic and geographical divisions resulting in war." An inviting idea and revisioning of Brecht, indeed. The production (which will not be open for review) runs through 22 December. Tickets now available through TicketWeb.
If you find it a little cold this December, though, you needn't step out into the winter night to get your Brecht fix; the PBS series Great Performances will broadcast the Los Angeles Opera production of the Brecht/Kurt Weill opera of 1927/29, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, on 10 December (but, as always with PBS shows, check your local listings). Patti LuPone stars; John Doyle, who recently staged the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, directs. A rare treat.
Looking for something to do tomorrow (that is, Monday) night, 26 November? You might head up to Paragraph at 6.30pm, where Chris Shinn will be speaking at the PEN American Center's Writers' Roundtable (admission is free; the event is open to the public). After that, head down to Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, where Annie Dorsen and friends host the launch party for the Foundry Theatre's Democracy in America spring production at PS122. The doors there open at 9.30. Andy Horwitz has the full run-down at Culturebot.
Posted at 1.48 pm in /Openings
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Thursday, 22 November 2007
While others in the blogosphere on this American holiday might be muttering about Times theatre critics, I cast a look back on the critics America used to have and wonder where they've gone:
When, as a teenager thinking about making a career as a dramatist, I read this criticism, I found critics who believed in a theatre and drama of profound significance to contemporary culture and society; at the same time, they considered 3,000 years of an art form that had over its history touched the deepest wellsprings of human fear and desire. These critics knew that history intimately, too, and engaged with it critically and with enthusiasm. They were as educative, and as inspiring, as reading the plays and playwrights they most carefully and brilliantly considered.
Theatre in America now doesn't produce such critics. ...
I offer no comment there on the new plays that these critics may (or may not) be asked to review; that's another can of worms. But for more on the current situation, there's my latest Guardian (UK) theatre blog post here.
Posted at 9.54 am in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 20 November 2007
A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.
In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.
Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.
Love, or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager's vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments.
They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.
Georges Bataille
"The Solar Anus"
In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-1939
Posted at 9.29 am in /Quotes
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Tuesday, 20 November 2007
My post at the Guardian (UK) theatre blog today is "Mainstream theatre is too intellectualised" (which may surprise some, but not more careful readers of this blog; I can't speak for the careless, more thick-headed ones):
Stoppard and Shaw and Frayn, at their best, investigate the darknesses (though they're never too dark) of the mind and ideology; Beckett and Barker and Kane, the darknesses (and they're often very dark) of the heart and spirit. A theatre lacking the second demonstrates a fatal weakness -- imagine the Shakespeare canon without the tragedies. There remains, on our mainstream stages, that profound absence.
More, including thoughts from Soho Rep's Sarah Benson on her upcoming production of Blasted, here. Also, a few very short notes on the plays of Sarah Kane here.
Posted at 7.12 am in /Miscellaneous
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Monday, 19 November 2007
Tonight at 6.30pm, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center will conclude its "Spotlight Japan" program with a reading from Akio Miyazawa's new play, At the Entrance of New Town, translated by John K. Gillespie. The play, which premiered in Japan only last month, examines middle-class life in the suburbs of large Japanese cities like Tokyo and Osaka. Miyazawa is a ground-breaking experimentalist whose company, Yuenchi Saisei Jigyo-dan, has been producing work since the 1990s. Here, the reading of Miyazawa's play will be directed by Jay Scheib, associate professor of music and theatre arts at MIT, whose staging last year of Daniel Veronese's Women Dreamt Horses was a highlight of the BAiT (Buenos Aires in Translation) festival.
More information here; admission is free.
Posted at 8.07 am in /Openings
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Saturday, 17 November 2007
Yes, I've read Jay Rayner's 11 November essay in the Observer (UK), "Why is nobody doing the right thing?", about the apparent dearth of right-wing playwrights in the theatre, and I'm afraid I'll have to agree with Rob Kendt on its "nattering on" and his considered opinion that the question is "old and tiresome." For me, the question is about as meaningful as "Why aren't there more right-wing paintings, sculpture, music and ballets?" Contrary to Rayner's conclusion (and as he indicates in his article), there's plenty of room for these seeming right-wing dramatists, from Noel Coward to the late John Osborne in his final decades to Tom Stoppard currently (and, here, David Mamet in one or two plays and Jonathan Reynolds). But if you want to fuss, fuss.
Rob does point up a quote from David Hare that lies buried in the article; I hope that Hare was just having a bad day, because it seems inaccurate and closed-minded:
"Of course there's very little theatre which openly argues a hard-right programme," [Hare] says. "But the dominant strain in most modern art theatre is fatalistic. The tone of a great deal of avant-garde work, in particular, is of prettified acceptance of life's seemingly inevitable hardships. [Really? We've still got the Living Theatre and the Bread & Puppet people here, at least; pretty and accepting are two things they ain't. -- GH] Some of the most famous playwrights of the past 60 years have reacted to suffering by implying there's not much you can do about it. As Beckett said: 'The tears of the world are a constant quantity.' The number of playwrights who believe the opposite -- that the quantity of the tears is adjustable -- is interestingly small."
Unless Hare is reading Beckett's mind, that's quite a statement, though he could always go to Beckett's biography to read about his brave and courageous work through the French Resistance movement and his life-long concern and support for dissidents everywhere from South Africa to Czechoslovakia. Beckett's explicit political beliefs can be read from his actions, not his work, though it's true that an implicit political and metaphysical radicalism, I think, can be detected in his novels and late plays.
More from Rob, and several related links, at his complete post.
Posted at 10.13 am in /Miscellaneous
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Friday, 16 November 2007
Noises Off: A Director's Process
 The host of |
All this is a roundabout way of saying that, as part of my unusual practice these days of writing for Web sites other than my own, a report of my visit to a rehearsal for Richard Foreman's next show is now up at the Ontological-Hysteric production blog -- behind the scenes, into the kitchen or the atelier, whatever. Perhaps you will learn something about Foreman, or about the directorial process itself. At any rate, it's a chance to hear about some unique theatre artists at work. I don't think we'll be seeing a show like Richard's Theatre Nightmares on the Fox network anytime soon -- there's much less yelling and bawling, and only rarely do Foreman's performers and technicians respond with a deferential "Yes, chef!" to his notes. But for those who'd like to see it, free103point9.org offers a real-time Webcast of Foreman's rehearsals every Friday from 10:00am to 5:00pm.
Foreman's not exactly a foul-mouthed ex-soccer-playing three-star Michelin chef, and Brendan Regimbal doesn't play Tim Gunn to Richard's Heidi Klum -- at least, not very often. But it's a short peek into the Ontological atelier.
Photo of Richard Foreman © Paula Court
Posted at 12.35 pm in /Miscellaneous
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Friday, 16 November 2007
The Soho Rep's next production comes from Pavol Liska's Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Opening at 66 White Street on Saturday, 8 December, No Dice is a four-hour version of a play almost three times as long, described as "an epic of the everyday blown to transcendental proportions." It was distilled from over 100 hours of taped telephone conversations with actors, friends and family about their jobs, personal problems, aspirations and dreams. The play was first performed at this year's Under-the-Radar festival at the Public Theater; I reviewed their 2006 production of Kelly Copper's Fragment for the Times. Tickets and schedule information here.
Coming up on 26 November, the Monday after Thanksgiving, are two shows: it'll be tough to decide which to attend. First, the Peculiar Works Project is producing a benefit staged reading of William M. Hoffman and Anthony Holland's Cornbury: The Queen's Governor, a play about Edward Hyde, royal governor of New York and New Jersey from 1701 through 1708, and perhaps one of the most corrupt politicians of his or any other time. (A transvestite, too, the press release suggests!) The cast includes David Greenspan and New Georges artistic director Susan Bernfield. Reservations via Theatremania here.
Art is for sale, in more ways than one, at Annie Dorsen's Democracy in America launch party, to be held at Joe's Pub on Monday, 26 November, at 9:30pm. A new project by the Foundry Theatre, Democracy in America is described as a "user-generated theatre project"; on the 26th, Dorsen and company will auction off parts of their next production to members of the audience, who can "buy anything they desire to see onstage (limited only by what is safe and legal)." The resulting play will be performed at PS122 in spring 2008. Ten dollars gets you in the door; what you spend after that is up to you. Joining Annie Dorsen will be Tony Torn, Okwui Okpokwasili and others. Culturebot's Andy Horwitz has more information here.
And one closing: the Theatre of a Two-headed Calf's Drum of the Waves of Horikawa offers its final performances tonight and tomorrow at HERE.
Posted at 8.42 am in /Openings
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Tuesday, 13 November 2007
My first post at the Guardian (UK) was published online today; it concerns English-language dramatists who find their plays first produced in countries other than their own:
Of the five works in the most recent volume of Edward Bond's collected plays, three received their stage premieres in France -- a high percentage of continental debuts for a playwright considered one of the most significant of England's 20th century dramatists. Notoriously, Howard Barker's plays are more often produced in America and on continental Europe than in London, while Daniel Keene spends much of his time overseeing productions of his plays in France rather than in his native Australia.
My further casual thoughts on the subject here, along with Chris Shinn's notes on his own experience.
Posted at 11.42 am in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Suggested Reading: His Lavender Quill at Rest
Playwright Mark Ravenhill wrote at the Guardian yesterday that "writing gay" no longer interests him:
It's worth remembering, particularly in an age of "inclusion," that most good drama is not multicultural. It's created by exploring singular worlds, where there is no allowing for the interplay of gender, race, sexuality and class. ...
Now, I'm surprised to say, I'm happy never to write another gay character again. It feels as though every aspect of the gay experience has been narrated, performed and picked over in the past 30 years. It has left us with some brilliant work. Alongside all the bad generic gay work, artists such as Derek Jarman, Alan Hollinghurst, Tony Kushner and others have left a body of work that is both gay and great. But that work seems over now.
Right now, I'm eager to explore the strange, twilight world of the heterosexual -- to expose its anguishes and mysteries and unconscious comedies. Maybe one day there will be something to pull me back to the gay experience, the sense of something new to be said about the gay world. But, for the moment at least, my lavender quill is at rest.
Mark's full meditation on theatre, inclusion politics and multiculturalism on stage (at least, in conventional drama) is here.
Posted at 9.07 am in /Drama
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Sunday, 11 November 2007
A Hard Heart by Howard Barker. Directed by Will Pomerantz. Set design by Narelle Sissons. Costume design by Chris Rumery. Lighting design by Lenore Doxsee. Sound design by Mark Huang. With Kathleen Chalfant (Riddler), Melissa Friedman (Praxis), Dion Graham (Plevna), Alex Organ (Sentry), Thom Sesma (Seemore), James Wallert (Attila) and Sarah Winkler (Woman). A presentation of the Epic Theatre Ensemble, Zak Berkman, director of artistic programming. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes, no intermission. At The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street, New York, 30 October-9 December 2007. Ticket and schedule information.
PLEVNA: This is very clever, but --
RIDDLER: Please don't call it clever, it diminishes it. It humiliates a person of profoundest thought to be called clever. I would go so far as to say it is a breach of manners.
PLEVNA: No offence intended.
RIDDLER: It is far beyond cleverness, which is cheap and whimsical. This is the personification of imagination and excruciating labour.
Political drama is not necessarily reducible to simple ideological constructs of right and left, good and bad, democratic and fascistic, nor is political relevance merely the naming of names of political leaders or the location of cities on a map. Political drama can explore rather than describe, can locate historical rhythms rather than wallow in self-justification or the simple accusations of guilt. When it does so, political drama begins to slip its definition as political and edges into the more rarified regions of tragedy or comedy; it eludes the label of agit-prop and instead of calling for revolution in the streets it calls for revolution in the mind, the spirit, the emotions. A profounder, more radical revolution of the body politic, in all the implications of that term.
Howard Barker's A Hard Heart, a parable of society and individual genius called into the service of the state, should draw considerable discussion and attention; the Epic Theatre Ensemble's New York production offers the show quite explicitly as a meditation on the continuing escalation of the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East, but admirably manages to maintain a spotlight on the broader issues that the play examines: the responsibility of the individual artist to the culture in which she lives, the community at a disastrous extreme, the inevitability of catastrophe.
This 1991/1992 play is one of Barker's "siege" dramas, like The Castle; there are enemies at the wall of an unnamed city, and Praxis, the Queen of the city, calls its most brilliant strategist, Riddler, "A Woman of Originality," to lend her talent to its defense. And she does: through a variety of creative means, Riddler is able to fend off ultimate disaster for a time, though inevitably it's only for a time. Barker paints Riddler as a uniquely complex character, irreducible to a stereotype: she is the mother to a gadabout, ultimately traitorous son; she is profoundly sexual and draws her sexual being into her creative acts; though the "hard heart" of the title, she is also profoundly compassionate. She is also the only character to see that the destruction of the ideologies that drive communities is inevitable. Isolation as well as freedom is the product of all conflict. The free human being, at the end, is alone in the midst of the destruction that the fight for freedom entails.
As Riddler, Kathleen Chalfant, a performer whom I often find too willing to beg affection from her audience, is surprisingly effective. Riddler is an impossible character to like, and Chalfant takes the risks necessary to render her a woman simultaneously admirable and demonic. She is possessed here of the justifiable pride of her character, and there is a fine sensuality in her performance, a bodied, unbending confidence that bespeaks knowledge beyond the ordinary pale. (Riddler is a genius, after all.) Melissa Friedman as the Queen begins the play with an unwarranted pride in her own position, but as the city becomes progressively and inevitably weaker and she is forced to place more and more faith in Riddler, she finds the only solution to her own position in death; especially in the final scenes, Friedman locates the profoundest pain not only as a political figure but as an individual. James Wallert as Riddler's pusillanimous son Attila and Thom Sesma as Riddler's mad lover Seemore are also standouts in what is a generally excellent cast.
Though the production and the design elements are impressive and elegant (especially Narelle Sissons' versatile set design and Chris Rumery's attractive, beauty- and sex-conscious costumes), one sometimes wished for a little more restraint, especially from Mark Huang's sound design; at times, the loud score accompanying scene changes seemed invasive, especially in the uncredited music, which distracted from the careful rhythms of the play and Barker's subtle lyricism. These are quibbles, however. Chalfant and the company do Barker's Hard Heart to a fine turn here.
Many of the Epic Theatre Ensemble's performances of the play are followed by "post-show" forums about the political implications of A Hard Heart in the current geopolitical situation; on 27 November, Sen. Bob Kerrey joins a discussion, and Sally Eberhardt of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court will be present at the 30 November performance. I note here Barker's stated distaste for such post-show anatomisations of theatrical experience. On the other hand, they should have plenty to talk about.
Further Reading: I wrote about the Summer 2007 production of Barker's No End of Blame by the Potomac Theatre Project here.
Jerry Tallmer's recent interview with Kathleen Chalfant for The Villager is here. Says Chalfant of Barker (whom, Tallmer says, Chalfant is "not yet quite ready to" meet): "He’s a very dangerous writer, which is not easy to do or be. How to say a lot in the fewest possible words. His writing includes many essays about theater: very vigorous, very demanding, very contrarian. If we manage to do some sort of decent job with this play, I would later like to meet him."
Posted at 11.41 am in /Notices
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Friday, 09 November 2007
A few noteworthy openings for the next several weeks.
Will (Thom Pain) Eno's latest play, Oh the Humanity and other good intentions, featuring Marisa Tomei and Brian Hutchinson, began performances last night at the Flea Theater. The evening presents five short plays by Eno, "about people like you, facing lives like yours. About life, in a word. Not suitable for children," says the Web site. Official opening night is 29 November; tickets are available here.
The Red Bull Theater begins performances of Marlowe's Edward the Second (in the Garland Wright adaptation) on 11 December. The company, which last presented The Revenger's Tragedy at the Culture Project, moves uptown to Theatre Row's Peter Jay Sharp Theater for this one. Tickets through Ticket Central here.
Finally, one of the rare Brecht productions this season opens at HERE on 5 December, when The Elephant Brigade presents the 1924-26 play Man Is Man, under the direction of Paul Binnerts. HERE's Web site describes the production thusly: "Man Is Man is played as 'real-time' theater, with the actors always present on the stage as themselves, staging themselves in the roles and scenes they play. They tell the story of the play by employing theatrical devices they handle themselves: small objects, miniature set pieces, exposed on tables, which they manipulate and film with a video camera." Well, that's media-rich Brecht for the new millenium, I suppose. Tickets available now.
More notes on Bertolt Brecht from the last couple of years of Superfluities here.
Posted at 9.10 am in /Openings
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Wednesday, 07 November 2007
It's worthwhile to take a step or two back once in a while to get a perspective on where the theatrical blogosphere is these days; I've been a part of it for some time now. I was, I think, among the first, and haven't done too badly for myself; I started Superfluities in October 2003, just a few months after Terry Teachout, grand master of the form, went online in July 2003.
What a difference four years makes, and yet, plus ça change ... . If anything, a look back gives plausible pause to any theories of blogospheric evolution. The blogosphere has not substantially changed the reception of theatre in the print media -- it might have been Quixotic to think that it could -- and following a burst of relative cultural significance during the Rachel Corrie debate in early 2006, things have been fragmenting considerably. The last few months, especially, have seen a defining-downward of the blogosphere's ambitions. Sniping at Times critics continues unabated, and this surely is not new, the Times has been the target of criticism for its theatre coverage since the days of Brooks Atkinson; many leftist bloggers now seem more interested in chronicling the last days of the Bush Presidency, and since he's on his way out before very long, this seems somewhat impotent; many bloggers have abandoned longer discussions of form, craft and content for plugs of their own shows (and that's not necessarily a criticism, for that's one of the things the blogosphere is best at -- self-promotion -- and it does have an impact). And so far as criticism goes, perhaps the most significant critic born of the New York blogosphere is currently the indefatigable Aaron Riccio, who proves the adage that practice makes perfect; his reviews have been getting better and better.
Where the blogosphere has been particularly poor is in providing a place for the longer essays and thinking about theatre and drama that used to be the province of the Times Sunday edition. Instead, we're getting more inside baseball (not essentially different from the back pages of Variety, though thoroughly within the current paradigm of entertainment news as entertainment itself) about the business of theatre, and especially Broadway, rather than the art of theatre. Woozy nostalgia about the so-called golden years of Broadway musicals and New York theatre itself has been sighted on the ascendant. The recent survey by the League of American Theatres and Producers seems to be the major story on the New York blogosphere this week, thanks in part to the indefatigable Garrett Eisler, who has carved out for himself an excellent corner of the blogosphere in terms of theatrical reporting. There has been a veritable explosion of meaningless, trivial posts, as if saying anything was better than saying nothing. And the usual back-slapping and bitter personal sniping continues, in comments sections and elsewhere. Emerging more recently is a trend by current and former playwrights in offering anecdotal evidence of how poorly other theatre artists (or "the current system," take your pick) treat playwrights.
The New York blogosphere, in reacting to the crisis of legitimacy, isn't responding well; instead, there have been calls for prescription, for the proper ways to write blog posts and reviews, rather than playing to the strength of the Internet, which is to challenge any efforts at prescription. For example, the feeling that the blogosphere is a scene for "dialogue" in comments sections has led to a comments section being seen as essential. Yes, the Times does now offer "Readers' Opinions" alongside its online theatre reviews, but two of the most influential New York cultural bloggers, Terry Teachout and Alex Ross, dispense with comments altogether. The question of who is right and who is wrong here is moot; the form of the blog can accommodate both approaches. Why we have to decide on one or the other as the correct way to run a blog is a question I have a hard time in answering, especially when those questions come from people whose paychecks are issued by the traditional print media.
This is a peculiarly New York response, I think: here, theatre, all theatre, is an industry, with tentacles reaching to the real estate and funding markets; competition, which is fierce in this city in which more than a thousand separate theatrical productions will be offered this season alone, has engendered a certain amount of exaggerated rhetoric, which always draws attention, as empty as the rhetoric may be. There is a breathless sense of self-promotion and self-importance rather than the contemplation and serious consideration that the condition of our theatre and audiences demands. The need for fast, vituperative, jazzy prose and an attentiveness to juicy gossip to attract attention (in the absence of any significant content) is a very New York trend; but this style doesn't suit longer-form dramatic criticism and essays. There's room for that breezy, casual style in the print media; in fact, the print media feeds on such language; it sells magazines and newspapers. The blogosphere, on the other hand, sells nothing -- it's a loss-leader, a freebie. But because it doesn't have that fiduciary responsibility to the publisher and stockholders, the barriers to entry are far lower, and the playing field is level.
My comments, by the way, are restricted to the New York blogosphere; in the rest of the English-language theatrical blogosphere the picture is brighter. I've been happy to see, as one of those first theatre bloggers, the growing prominence of the Guardian (UK) theatre bloggers, who now count within their ranks several writers (Maxie Szalwinska, Alison Croggon, Andrew Field and Andrew Haydon) who have had significant blog presences for years, but it's interesting to note that the sole American voice on the Guardian theatre blog is that of Variety reviewer Matt Wolf. That there are no New York theatre bloggers writing for them says something about the quality of our work, I'm afraid, and especially the seriousness with which we take the form. The New York Times, though its reporters now maintain regular blogs on books, fashion, technology, television and "the arts" generally, has no one writing a blog about theatre, in a city which is arguably the capital of American theatre. Perhaps it's true that theatre is a uniquely local experience, but the Times has "City Room," a blog about local news, as well.
With that, I don't mind stepping back into the thick of it, the blogosphere is what got me there in the first place (since 2003, well-received productions of six plays, stints at the New York Times, nytheatre.com and other publications ... the list goes on). I am discouraged, though, at the apparent irrelevance of the current blogosphere to New York theatre; an irrelevance matched, it seems, only by the condescending coverage with which major New York print publications have been considering theatre. The blogosphere has always been a marginal presence, but with its current lack of serious and thoughtful concern with theatre and drama itself (a lack witnessed by its sloppiness in terms of grammar and spelling, its inability to focus; these things count in claims to legitimacy and good writing both on screen and on page), it's marginalising itself even further. It turns out that, at least at this point in time, the alternative to print criticism that the blogosphere represents is no plausible alternative at all.
Posted at 9.43 am in /Miscellaneous
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Monday, 05 November 2007
In re Andrew Field's comments on form and content in political theatre at his first Guardian blog post and various comments at Ms. Croggon's blog.
Part I of the Organum was recently reposted here.
The object who knows. The performer is privileged object on the stage: she is the Object Who Knows, the displayed perspective of tragedy. She is the figure in the physical landscape who sees it from inside, something quite beyond the poet, and in that sense lives within his construct. But because she lives within it, she is, unlike him, surrounded by it, must make her way. The performer who is brave, tenacious, is willingly absorbed by her surroundings, but in that absorption her power is her own consciousness. So she has power over performance, she shapes the air as much as the other objects and performers on the stage. The poet gives her words with which to valorise her consciousness of her condition.
The profoundly political stance of this condition, indeed the politically revolutionary status of erotic tragedy, inheres in the willing valorisation of this consciousness. Performance is an ecstatic falling, all senses open and willing to experience what terrors and joys lie in wait for the tragic consciousness. As privileged Object Who Knows, she demonstrates, to the audience, her courage, her intent to transform the performance space into an arena of sensuous awareness. As the audience may transform their world outside the theatre, armed with her example.
It is amoral work. The seeming frenetic nihilism however is captured and contained within the discipline of training, of the knowledge of how to see, to move, to appear. The performer's body is a landscape within a landscape, explored for her from within, the audience tracing the inner journey through her flesh. She possesses the power of her body to explore conventional morality, to explore transgression, as an individual agent. The meaning is the exploration; in exploration itself is political meaning, experiential possibility, the truly radical political stance. In that sense, the following is far more radically political than too much American theatre that posits itself as such.
From a February 2007 gallery post:
Paul Cava, Listrum Vulgare. Used by permission of the artist.
De causis plantarum. Pressed between the pages of a yellowed book, its thick red leather cover oxidising with age, or a palimpsest under glass: our vision overlaid upon a translucent writing, etched upon flesh, flesh upon flesh between wooden bedposts (antiqued, whether present or past), and all laid atop the seeds contained in berries hanging from the pulsing vine. An openness, her body a blossom, rooted upon his. A finger reached to touch, to disturb, and the page crumbles: sere and flaked, ink, flesh and leaf easy fuel for a wooden match. The intent of the disturbance to participate, but the couple is beyond us, too fragile for our participation. Their pleasure operates from within the veined green, behind the unreadable text, the foolscap of their history and inscription of their coupling. Legs intertwined to weave and thread through the crumbling textures of history, drawing them all to their root, his deep penetration into her, both arched in criminal desire. (See her limbs, fetished in a caressing silk.) She settles on him, full body surrendered, his body a bed for her that surrounds, into which she sinks, as the layers settle upon a tender page, inside a tender book. Under a glass that protects them, from us.
This could remain in light, as torn as a Schwitters collage, but Schwitters you could drive a truck into, you could laugh at the tickets and the numbers, the only travel here is towards the center, the self, not detritus of railroads, instead things themselves. These handwritten words, besides, not torn but fading: ink disappearing in light; dancing letters and figures in retreat from present torture.
In anger and envy the spectator, businessman, politician, puritan and moralist, shatters the glass that protects them, holds them safe in the confines of the curling leaf, the arms that embrace her. If you were to set a match to the sere linen page, this architecture of the dry surface, it would burn quickly, explode, set them free, in eternal memory of each other.
Posted at 8.30 am in /Organum
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Friday, 02 November 2007
John Moran and Others: What if Saori Had a Party?
What if Saori Had a Party? (a.k.a. Saori's Birthday). Composed and directed by John Moran. Choreography by John Moran and Saori Tsukada. Production assistant: Celine Aguillon. Lighting by Yi Zaho. With Saori Tsukada (Saori), Joseph Keckler (Singing Telegram Man) and Katie Brook (The Baby). Running time: 45 minutes. At PS122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street, 21 October-4 November, 2007. Tickets and schedule information.
Katie Brook, Saori Tsukada and Joseph Keckler
attend Saori's curious birthday (and deathday)
party.
A Philip Glass protegé, composer John Moran has been working with dancer Saori Tsukada since 2003; this is their latest, a commission whipped up for PS122 within the space of six weeks. This parody of anime children's shows is a fleeting amusement -- precise, affecting, but fleeting nonetheless, memorable most for Moran's eclectic score, which distills various musics and sounds into something resembling an operetta, and Saori Tsukada's knowing takeoff on the all-surface, no-texture gleaming cheer and exaggerated pouting of children's television shows.
Hostess Saori lives in a computerised bubble; she greets every day, the warm sun that comes through the window, with a bubbly cheer, and this she can do because, her computerised companion tells her, she has no birthday. But she desperately wants one today, she wants a present, and before long a Singing Telegram Man (Joseph Keckler, possessed of a fine bass-baritone) arrives at her doorstep, bringing her a unique birthday present indeed: a baby (Katie Brook). But with the introduction of birth and reproduction, death is never far in the distance, and when Saori's clean well-lighted bubble bursts after she tries to bring the baby into the bubble with her, all is utterly lost, and Saori winds up writhing on the black floor (trimly but elegantly lit, circus-style, by Yi Zaho), dying and in anguish.
Saori Tsukada's task here is to bring a three-dimensionality to a two-dimensional figure, and to do so largely through movement (her own dialogue is almost entirely in Japanese, the contemporary Japanese that freely integrates English words like "computer"). The precision she brings to the stylised movements of anime (not unlike the exaggerated movements of children's show hosts here in the U.S., too) goes far to putting over the somewhat old-news revelation of the consciousness of death and the persistence of the memory of pain; she and Keckler, a telegram man who wouldn't be out of place in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood either, make a unique team, and Katie Brook's Baby, in a demure babydoll dress, becomes more watchable the more she explores the strangeness of the world into which she's been invited.
The running time isn't much longer than those old Pee-Wee's Playhouse episodes, and John Moran's playhouse appears to be in the same neighborhood: colorful, manic, and closed off from real experience, in an eternal childhood. The irony is that childhood itself brings the worm of mortality. What if Saori Had a Party? is very much in line with his other works that have drawn on popular culture for their formal structures (such as his 1989 Jack Benny! and the 1997 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), but, as Moran said as he introduced the piece last night, this is a piece composed for the "party" that appears to be the overarching concept for this season's programming at PS122. And if you're not hungover the morning after, the memory of a party, like those of most good parties, lingers pleasurably, but begins to dissipate not long after the music stops.
But if you like parties, you'll like What if Saori Had a Party? too; I did. And what better nights for parties than Friday and Saturday night? Final performances tonight and tomorrow at 8:30pm and this Sunday at 6:30pm.
Posted at 8.51 am in /Notices
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Thursday, 01 November 2007
"Or when we are abroad in the storm of tempestuous seas; mountainous waves rise and fall, are dashed violently against steep cliffs, and shoot their spray high into the air. The storm howls, the sea roars, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and thunder-claps drown the noise of storm and sea. Then in the unmoved beholder of this scene the twofold nature of his consciousness reaches the highest distinctness. Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in face of stupendous forces; and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene object of knowing, who as the condition of every object is the supporter of this whole world, the fearful struggle of nature being only his mental picture or representation; he himself is free from, and foreign to, all willing and all needs, in the quiet comprehension of the Ideas. This is the full impression of the sublime."
Arthur Schopenhauer
The World as Will and Representation
Volume I, § 39
"Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individuationis, or the way in which the individual knows things as phenomenon."
Arthur Schopenhauer
The World as Will and Representation
Volume I, § 63
"That night then, all aglow with distant fires, on sea, on land and in the sky, I drifted with the currents and the tides. I noticed that my hat was tied, with a string I suppose, to my buttonhole. I got up from my seat in the stern and a great clanking was heard. That was the chain. One end was fastened to the bow and the other round my waist. I must have pierced a hole beforehand in the floor-boards, for there I was down on my knees prying out the plug with my knife. The hole was small and the water rose slowly. It would take a good half hour, everything included, barring accidents. Back now in the stern-sheets, my legs stretched out, my back well propped against the sack stuffed with grass I used as a cushion, I swallowed my calmative. The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space. The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on."
Samuel Beckett
"The End" (1946), conclusion
(First of the "Siege in the Room" works)
Posted at 10.53 pm in /Quotes
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Thursday, 01 November 2007
Opening: Potatoland Production Blog
Richard Foreman dreams
"of the voice
so deep that its rumble sounds all possible words, all possible ideas, all
at the same time, such multiple universes of sound and sense" as he
launches the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre's new production
blog for the January 2008 opening of Deep Trance Behavior in
Potatoland (England, Japan & New York). A central feature of this
production, I'm told: a sinking grand piano. Fulya Peker, Joel Israel,
Caitlin Mcdonough-Thayer, Sarah Dahlen and Caitlin Rucker are in the
cast.
The first post also features a link to Foreman's production notebook for the show. A sample:
Certain aspects, not yet clarified
One fights impatiently
To fill in such gaps
That might otherwise have led one
Into very real things
It seems that anxiety and fear of falling await us once again. Miscellaneous notes from over the years on Foreman here.
Posted at 3.40 pm in /Openings
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Thursday, 01 November 2007
As anybody who's been reading this the past few days will tell you, I try to advocate for work that recognises that there are languages other than English and countries other than America in which theatre is done. So I'll advocate for this, too -- especially since there's precious little time left to see it.
Through Sunday 3 November at PS122, the Czech-based Lhotáková & Soukup Company (LaS Company),
which specialises in dance theatre from a documentary aesthetic, will be
presenting Beethoven Live, a segment of their longer international
project called The Name of the Game, scheduled to premiere in its
entirety in Prague in late 2007. Choreographer Kristina
Lhotáková and director/sound designer Ladislav Soukup took four
young people from New York City to the Czech capital to work with the
Prague company on a project that explores what the press material calls
"the irrevocability of nature" (they'll get no argument from me there).
The piece draws its inspiration from the movement of non-dancers. The
company's prize-winning work has been seen around the world, from Perth to
Rio de Janeiro.
Lucky readers of Superfluities Redux can get discount tickets to this show during the remainder of its brief New York run, too. Just plug in or mention the code TEN when you order tickets online, by phone (at 212.351.3101) or at the theatre and you'll save a cool ten bucks on the admission price. A tough deal to beat. Remaining performances are tonight through Saturday at 8:00pm.
Posted at 8.32 am in /Openings
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