Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
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Home > Openings Wednesday, 19 May 2010 Openings: Ben Brantley on That FaceIn the comments section of yesterday's post on the New York opening of Polly Stenham's That Face, Aaron Riccio wrote that its New York reception "[doesn't have] anything to do with the Enron divide, though. This isn't a symbolic or showy production; it's a dismally effective glimpse at how illness affects a family." Well, hell, Ben Brantley thinks it does, in his New York Times review of the play today:
Don't blame me; I didn't start it, though perhaps given what I mentioned about accents in my post yesterday I should set up shop as a prognosticator of New York Times theatre reviews. I'm not sure what's more condescending about this review: Brantley's call for a "moratorium" on plays about crazy moms (though he doesn't seem to have a problem with those who sing, as his admiration for Gypsy and Next to Normal attests) or his recent explicitly parochial disdain for new British plays, especially by teenaged playwrights with a bone to pick with their parents. Brantley is right that the mother- It's fine that he didn't like the play; but perhaps he should have just left it at that, instead of providing more grist for the blogospheric mill, as it likely will. Posted in /Openings Home > Openings Monday, 09 March 2009 Weddings and BeheadingsWeddings and Beheadings, the new work from Pavel Zuštiak's Palissimo dance company, opens this Wednesday night, 11 March 2009, as part of the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, 55th Street and Ninth Avenue in New York. It runs through Sunday, 15 March. While dance isn't "drama" precisely, it is certainly theatre, as Ms. Croggon pointed out in a recent post. Her thoughts on the subject are worth reading; she says:
One of those "multiple narratives" that Palissimo's previous production, Blind Spot, generated is mine, in the below review of the group's appearance last year at PS122. More information and tickets for Weddings and Beheadings is available here. Embodied Doubles: Blind Spot
Oxygen as a sexualised fetish for
life: Ashleigh Leite in Blind Spot Blind Spot. Choreography, direction, set design and sound
design by Pavel Zuštiak. Lighting design by Joe Levasseur. Costumes
by Nick Vaughan. Music by Tiersen, Pompouguac, Taizé. Photography by
José Aragón. "The Voice": Jeffrey Fracè. Performed and
created with Gina Bashour, Yo- Pavel Zuštiak's meditation on love, desire and the recalcitrant body returns for an encore performance. In dance theatre, bodies are what we have to work with: when Yo-el Cassell emerges to begin Palissimo's Blind Spot, originally premiered at Chashama in 2003 and returning for an all-too-few six performances at PS122 through this Sunday, he tries to communicate with individual members of the audience via American Sign Language. Movement bears the weight of the conventional linguistic signifier: the body entire speaks instead of the mouth, which in dance nearly reaches the status of fetish itself. Touching desire, the body starts to yammer hopelessly, its expression confined to the private sphere between two people, and ever-imperfect: the speaking body becomes tongue-tied. Untying that tongue is the project of Pavel Zuštiak's beautiful, elegant, sexy and winning full-length dance piece. There are points at which it nearly touches the sublime, and I'm not at all sure that it doesn't in fact succeed at that. But that would leave Zuštiak and his company nowhere to go, and it's exciting to think that in future work they will indeed go further. In Blind Spot, there are three couples among the four dancers. A man (Cassell) and a woman (Gina Bashour) in everyday dress attempt the expression of desire, but among these "real" bodies there are two strangers, dressed more brightly. Anthony Whitehurst, in white t-shirt and pants, is Cassell's body double; Bashour's is Ashleigh Leite, who emerges wearing a blonde wig and wearing a pale fringed leotard (and later a silver dress: the fine costumes here are the work of Nick Vaughan). When Cassell and Bashour meet, the sudden and unexpected emergence of desire calls upon their bodies to express that desire in a manner in which they had not expressed it before: they suddenly realize Whitehurst and Leite as untrained potentials for expression in their own bodies. Much of the 70 minute program consists of the clumsy attempts of the real couple to negotiate and incorporate the Ideal couple within themselves (and the consequent real coupling to Ideal coupling). The couple has their work cut out for them. Cassell, violently trying to manipulate Whitehurst's hopelessly liquid arms, finds them completely useless, unable to grasp or hold (an amusing metaphor for impotence). Bashour's challenge is different – Leite, once unleashed, is everywhere on the stage, bouncing against its boundaries, violently birthing new possibilities of movement and expression, finding bizarre pleasure as well as profound irritation at being contained within the spatial limits of the performance area. In a series of duets, trios and quartets, each performer attempts to come to terms with the dynamics of desire: at times the Real and the Ideal, potential and realisation, can be glimpsed in the triangulations of desire so well expressed by Anne Carson's meditations on Eros and Sappho's poetry. Bashour, looking beyond Cassell, sees an Ideal of desire and love in Whitehurst: she recognises the potential and indeed can dance with him, be swept up in the possibility. It is left to Cassell to embody that potential in the real. Eventually, in the hopeful dénouement, the couples – all three of them – are engaged together: both the paired women and the paired men are able to incorporate elements of each other's potential, thereby staking a claim to the expression of desire between Bashour and Cassell. The visible fetishistic attributes of desire – here, four pairs of shoes, two men's and two women's – are comically manipulated only to be violently disposed of once the potential for expression is entirely embodied in corporeal movement rather than objects. Finally, desire having matured, Leite can tear away the translucent plastic curtain to unveil the linguistic expression of desire: the body has found voice for the precision of love. Desire is dangerous: the final duet between Cassell and Whitehurst indicates, without conclusion, that the body in desire is always poised between a life-enhancing swim in its possibilities and a risk of drowning. But as the text presented at the end of Blind Spot indicates, where nothing is risked, nothing is gained. Every real body is capable of a prayer to desire's potential; but then one needs consciously to pray for it. Rereading the above, I can sense a certain linguistic thickness in this description of Blind Spot. This is, however, dance: where words fail. This description shouldn't serve as analysis, but as tentative approximation. What words and photography can't catch are the beautiful bodies and movements of the four performers in this violently energetic essay. It is a work, perhaps, of modest means, though this modesty manages to render it far more egalitarian, far freer, than other recent attempts at limning the same themes (the self-important, overproduced, smug wankery of Romeo Castellucci's Hey Girl! seems for example unutterably twee next to it). Violent stylised movement in the name of desire's expression is Zuštiak's palette here, as violent stylised spoken language is that of the drama. One could say that, here, dance is perhaps fifty years ahead of the drama – this, however, is overstating the case. Quite regularly at PS122, one finds the future of theatre in an astonishing array of works of the present, in both dance and drama. So long as Vallejo Gantner and his crew there continue to curate as brilliantly as they do, there will be newly-hewn bricks to work, and to build, with. A brick, of course, is an entirely inappropriate metaphor for the delicacy and elegance of Blind Spot. Nonetheless, it inspires as well as amazes. Posted in /Openings Home > Openings Friday, 02 January 2009 Orgy of Tolerance
Photo: Frederik Heyman If Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva ran a theatre company, it might
resemble Jan Fabre's Belgium-
You can read Fabre's full program notes from the show here. A short trailer for the show can found here. Citing both Monty Python and Brecht as inspiration, Fabre and the Troublyn company produce some of the most beautiful transgressive theatre in the world. Tickets for the very brief Montclair run of Orgy of Tolerance are available here. Below, my review of Fabre's Je Suis Sang, which travelled to Montclair two years ago. 
Photo: Wonge Bergmann Je Suis Sang (I Am Blood). A Troubleyn/Jan Fabre production. Text, scenography and choreography by Jan Fabre. Assistance and dramaturgy: Miet Martens. Assistance choreography: Renée Copraij. Actors, dancers, musicians: Linda Adami, Tawny Andersen, Vicente Arlandis, Dieter Bossu, Dimitri Brusselmans, Katrien Bruyneel, Sylvia Camarda, Cédric Charron, Anny Czupper, Stijn Dickel, Els Deceukelier, Brbara De Coninck, Olivier Dubois, Sung-Im Her, Ivana Jozic, Marina Kaptijn, Guillaume Marie, Apostolia Papadamaki, Maria Stamenkovic-Herranz, Geert Vaes, Helmut Van den Meersschaut. Peak Performances at the Kassel Theater, Montclair State University, 25-28 January 2007. The title Je Suis Sang is followed by a coy subtitle: "A medieval fairy tale." The performance may have its roots in the Middle Ages, but it's really more of a carnival, a pageant, or a black mass, with one significant difference: the soul is defined and incarnated in the body, not the Catholic Church. "It is 2007 AD and we are still living in the Middle Ages. And we are still living with the same body that is wet on the inside and dry on the outside. We are still living with a body that is more colorful inside than outside," a mock-priest (one of four) tells us at the beginning of the 90-minute performance. And of one color – red – we'll be seeing quite a bit. Fabre is well- The body here is literally armor at the start of the evening: as soldiers in medieval metal gear tromp onto the stage, skin and bodies are visible between the edges of the armor, the flesh no match for the seeming overkill of the sword. (And this is a rhythmic, percussive evening, that armor does provide metallic pounding thunder in the choreography by Fabre and Coproij.) Scenes of torture and pain in blood-letting, but there's finally joy in it. Several brides, wearing white, begin to menstruate together, and after a moment of fear, joy begins to emerge when the fecundity this represents is recognized. They begin to show pride, they become ecstatic, and (in that old 1960s-era consciousness-training trope) they reach their fingers down between their legs, raise them back to their lips, and taste it. Men, in all this, tend to be idiots. They're the ones rampaging around the Middle Ages lopping off heads and breasts and limbs, and this bloodthirsty idiocy is repeated in their mating rituals. The men, like bulls, stampede towards the women, drawn by their blood-stained wedding dresses, and like toreadors facing particularly dim bulls, the women easily fend off their approaches (at least, until the men's ire becomes uncontrollable). But Fabre is fair; a few of his knights are women, a few of his brides are men. In the most troubling tableau of the evening, the concentration camps are evoked: On a series of tables, each lit with an eerie shaded yellow light, bodies are tortured bloodlessly, blood trapped in the painful flesh, terror exacerbated by the torturer's labor. In this, Fabre seems to reach an extreme of tragedy, a denial of life's escape from the suffering flesh. But this is a pageant, a mass, even if black and Dionysiac; the evening ends in a celebration of the dry body made wet, if not with its blood with wine, and water, and joy; if on some level this seems vaguely trite, then so is shameless ecstasy (and Fabre's troupe is shameless in the best possible sense), at least in an age of unsubtle, adolescent irony. One of the chants of the production's liturgy is that two things are certain: that we will die; and that we must transgress the limits of our existence, break and smash taboos, in the urge to transform suffering into pleasure; body and soul, pain and pleasure homoousian. Je Suis Sang admits both, and in doing so evokes a sensual richness in a production as blatantly celebratory and spectacular as any Broadway musical. In fact, were I a Broadway producer, I'd open this show right across the street from The Lion King. But then, that's why I'm not likely to ever be a Broadway producer. On the other hand, I'd at least try to get a week's performances out of the production; after three performances, Troubleyn is back to Belgium. Readers interested in Fabre's work can purchase the most-aptly-titled Corpus Jan Fabre, a gorgeously illustrated catalogue of his performance work, edited by Luk Van den Dries and available in English translation through Imschoot. (My own copy of this is now lost, alas.) Posted in /Openings
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