CULTUREBYTES

A Performance-Installation for the Antropocene Era

Marit Sandsmark in findlay//sandsmark’s o’death. Photo by Maria Baranova The title of o’ death, the performance installation by findlay//sandsmark that played as part of PS122’s COIL Festival, comes from a recording by J.M. Gates entitled “Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting?” Gates was a Baptist minister and prolific recording artist who, between 1926 and 1941, produced a series of records mixing…

I Know Nothing About Opera

Photo by Cory Weaver This month, I saw two pieces of “opera-theatre” as part of the Prototype Festival: Dog Days composed by David T. Little and Angel’s Bone composed by Du Yun. Both librettos are by the obviously versatile Royce Vavrek. As a writer for Culturebot, I’m asked to respond to the work I see. Not review it. Thank God. It seems (to an occasionally repellent degree) that theater…

Together in Sadness: Ligia Lewis’ “Sorrow Swag”

Photo by Dieter Hartwig A geyser of blue fog mushrooms up from the stage floor. Its steady, languid unfurling brings the tempo of the room down. Some American Realness performances build off the frenetic pace of the festival—the high energy pitch of get to the venue get tickets find bathroom get seat get to next performance on time. From its first moments, Ligia Lewis’ Sorrow Swag demands we let…

Past Versions of the Present Future in niv Acosta’s DISCOTROPIC

Photo by Justin Fulton Iterations of niv Acosta’s DISCOTROPIC, a performance that “explores the relationship between science fiction, disco, astrophysics, and the black American experience,” have been shown at venues as diverse in feel as the Kimberly Project and New Museum. This version, part of the 2016 COIL Festival, brought us to the basement of Westbeth, a labyrinthine building that has…

Minor Threats: Chris Thorpe & Rachel Chavkin’s Confirmation at The Invisible Dog, COIL Festival 2016

Photo by Maria Baranova I haven’t thrown a dildo in the mailbox for Oregon, but I’ve belatedly followed the white militia’s armed occupation of a wildlife refuge and the ensuing conversations around who is labeled a terrorist, and how race and gender – in both sly and slap-you-in-the-face ways – shapes the narrative and physical treatment of these men. One person’s terrorist is another’s patriot.…

Photo by David Andrako House lights still up, Baba opened his mouth, his heart, his eyes, pouring straight into ours, thanking Yako for the soup, for the music, thanking us all for being there. We basked in his rosy glow, his wailing, his hip hop eulogy for his father.   Together, we plunged into darkness, into the twist and swirl of memory, with Sequoia Rose as our wondrous guide, whose four…

An Exercise in Vocal Release

Meredith Monk by F. Scott Schafer, 1999 Anne Waldman, beginning her Entanglement Variations at the alter of Saint Marks Church, adorned with long black robe and white scarf, gave what felt and looked like a sermon. Moving closer to the audience with each section, Waldman delivered abstracted social and political commentary as a moral teaching – a story whose direction, if not astutely followed,…

Under the Radar 2016: 600 Highwaymen’s “Employee of the Year”

Employee of the year 2014 600 HIGHWAYMEN. Photo by Maria Baranova I first fell in love with the work of 600 Highwaymen a few years ago in Austin, where they performed This Great Country—an experimental version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman featuring a cast of 17 ranging in age from twelve to 80—at the Fusebox Festival in 2012. I’ve followed their work closely since, and while some pieces…

On The Offending Gesture, or what means ‘work’?

Photo by Richard Termine Along with fellow playwright whisperers Paula Vogel and Eric Ehn, it’s difficult to overstate the amount of influence that Mac Wellman has had on the up-and-coming cohort of emerging playwrights, particularly those who are unafraid of labels like “experimental,” or the slightly less broad “non-linear.”  Mr. Wellman, who heads the playwriting program at Brooklyn College,…

The Builders Association: Shannon Jackson & Marianne Weems in Conversation

This book begins with the building of a house, and the building of a company while building the house. It expands to look at the ideas found in various rooms, some of which expanded into virtual space while they still were grounded in the lives of the artists in the house. – From the preface by Marianne Weems In their new book The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary…

LongYarn at The Bushwick Starr

Photo by Sue Kessler It is two weeks and one day before the world premiere of Banana Bag & Bodice’s LongYarn. The town of Beacon, NY is teetering on the edge of freezing. Jessica Jelliffe and Jason Craig, who together lead and are the only two permanent members of the alliterative theater troupe, have recently moved to Beacon after years of being based in Brooklyn. The town is about an hour and a…

MDLSX, as a site of radical recomposition

Photo courtesy of Motus A long table stretches alongside the back wall of La MaMa’s downstairs theater.  Otherwise, the space is largely bare.  A playing space is delineated by a swatch of metallic fabric laid upon the floor.  On top of the table are a series of mixing boards, a microphone, and what appears to be a lamp.  In general, DJ equipment.  Behind, on the back wall, a circular projection…

Upcoming Community of Practice Sessions

Community of Practice (CoP) is a new initiative for early-career movement artists developed by Culturebot with the support of Alison Fleminger & University Settlement to open up space, time, and discourse surrounding dance. An initial seed for this was planted by original instigator of all things Culturebot, Andy Horwitz, in a short post following a Project Audience event of the same name. The…

Jazz in the Blood

Photo by John Ulman Frank Boyd is the sort of supremely talented performer whose craft is so refined it’s nearly invisible. For all I know, he might very well be a sweaty, smalltime jazz DJ who lives on a diet of coffee, peanuts and Charlie Parker in real life. His one-man-show, The Holler Sessions, created in collaboration with the TEAM, assumes the form of a live radio broadcast and begins as a…

For Anyone Writing About Keith Hennessey: Read This F&*king Interview

Alex Romania Alex: I originally thought I wasn’t going to be able to see your new show Bear/Skin before interviewing you, so I was really interested to talk to you about your work at large. I’m interested in asking questions from the perspective of a maker about your bi-coastal performing history, your intersection with NYC, from all the improvisations and work you’ve shown here over the last…

Experiments, Jokes, and Choices: Elevator Repair Service’s The Select

Photo credit: Rob Strong On January 6th, 2016, Kyoung H. Park interviewed John Collins in Santiago, Chile. Kyoung Park: Why is your company called Elevator Repair Service? John Collins: When I was about 11 years old, I was visiting a relative at work, and what she did for work was to create these surveys that helped unemployed people figure out what type of job would be the right job for them to…

The Radical Pleasure of Convening: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko & anonymous bodies’ “Imaging Justice for the Dark Divine” and beyond

“…the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic Power Audre Lorde The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood…