Meet your doom--maybe--with Split Britches at La MaMa

Above: Lois Weaver
Below: Peggy Shaw
Split Britches brings Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)
to La MaMa for its US premiere.
(photo: Matt Delbridge)

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), a US premiere from famed lesbian theater duo Split Britches (Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw), takes inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's political satire Dr. Strangelove (1964). It works from a similar wackadoodle take on the threat of nuclear disaster within reach of itchy Twitter--I mean, trigger--fingers. A top-flight general (Shaw) is stationed by a desk and computer monitor where he keeps track of time and apparently takes calls from gal pals. Weaver, referred to by Shaw as "Madame Mr. President Sir," initially slumbers at a far curve of circled "Situation Room" tables. They communicate via landline phones, although sometimes the phone rings, it's not Weaver, and Shaw breaks into randy old pop songs.

The situation at La MaMa, then, is less tense than Shaw's tracking of the countdown clock might suggest. Yes, the show itself must finish by the end of sixty minutes, but Billy Ward and the Dominoes's "60 Minute Man" is one of those randy songs, and there seems to be plenty of time for studly Shaw to bop out to that. Yes, something must be done about the impending doom we're trying to track on confusing overhead monitors, but there's lots of time to field a council of elders from among the oldest of us in attendance. And, no, although lined up with other greyheads, I failed to make the cut.

Directed by Weaver and written by the pair with Hannah Maxwell, the show contains clever text aligned like precision-cut puzzle pieces (best delivered by saucy Shaw) and room for whatever unpredictables the elders might bring to the table. (One woman seemed obsessed with the mysterious whereabouts of one Tiffany Ariana Trump, offspring of Marla Maples and POS...oops, I mean, POTUS. Now that I think about it, Tiff does seem to have been out of the public eye for a suspiciously long time...hmmm.)

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) is more chuckle-provoking and captivating than Kubrick--well, of course! it's lesbian!--with the additional benefit of encouraging the audience to determine not only how the play will go but also, you gotta hope, how the rest of our lives will go. Folks came up with some really good stuff!

Part of The Public Theater's now-closed Under the Radar Festival, and originally scheduled to end last weekend, Unexplode Ordnances (UXO) fortunately continues tonight, Saturday, at 8pm and Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa -- Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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My upcoming Long Tables for Gibney Dance & Abrons Arts Center

I'm so excited to be curating and facilitating two more arts community Long Tables and hope you can join us for either or both of these welcoming, informal conversations for artists of dance, performance or any discipline!

A Long Table conversation--as first conceived by theater artist Lois Weaver--is initiated by an invited core group of participants who "set the table" with food for thought, but it is open, throughout, to other folks, sitting around the perimeter, who can come up and take seats at the table to share their experiences, ideas, questions and insights in a non-hierarchical, non-panel/Q&A setting. They are not so much "audience" as listening and contributing community.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: Deneka Peniston)

CENTER LINE:

MOVING INTO WRITING

WITH EVA YAA ASANTEWAA

Wednesday, November 8

6:30pm to 8:30pm

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter 53A Chambers), Manhattan

(directions)

Moving into Writing considers approaches to the written word as response to, collaboration with, and documentation of dance and performance. What can writers and dancers learn from each other? What role do writers play within local, national and international dance ecosystems? Core participants will include Maura Donohue, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Paloma McGregor, Marissa Perel and Tara Sheena.

Free admission. Everyone is welcome to listen in and/or pull up a chair at our table to share your thoughts and questions.

An RSVP is not required, but it helps us better plan our space. Click here.

Produced by EYA Projects and Gibney Dance

DISCOMFORT: A LONG TABLE

Thursday, November 30

7pm to 9pm

Abrons Arts Center

466 Grand Street, Manhattan

(directions)

DISCOMFORT makes space for dance, performance and other artists to talk about the place of discomfort in our lives, processes, practices and relationships with collaborators, audiences, our society and world. Core participants will include NIC Kay, Dan Fishback , Ash RT Yergen and Joya Powell.

Free admission. Everyone is welcome to listen in and/or pull up a chair at our table to share your thoughts and questions.

Please hold this date. RSVP information to come.

Produced by EYA Projects and Abrons Arts Center


And I'm already planning more Long Tables for 2018! I hope you will support these community gatherings with your presence and by helping to spread the word to your network of friends and colleagues. Let's get this out there all around social media!

Thanks!

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Gibney's new Center Line season presents Long Table convos

I'm looking forward to a new season in the arts in New York!

Please join me on September 27 and November 8 

for two special Long Table conversations 

at Gibney Dance, 

free and open to all!

******

Center Line Conversation Series

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

Curated and facilitated by dance writer and independent curator Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Center Line is a conversation series highlighting issues concerning the dance community. Center Line conversations will adopt performance artist Lois Weaver’s non-hierarchical Long Table format to encourage “informal conversation on serious topics.”


Casting About: About Casting
Wednesday, September 27 at 6:30pm

Initiated by Yanira Castro, Casting About: About Casting will explore present day dynamics of cast, audience and choreographer. What does a cast represent? How does access to resource affect the composition of a cast, and does this change the relationships between performers, the work and the choreographer? Does the mutability of the contemporary performer challenge or stimulate creativity? Invited participants include Yanira Castro, Aaron Mattocks, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Kyle Bukhari and Leslie Cuyjet.


Moving into Writing
Wednesday November 8 at 6:30pm

Moving into Writing considers approaches to the written word as response to, collaboration with and documentation of dance and performance. What can writers and dancers learn from each other? What role do writers play within local, national and international dance ecosystems? How can dance artists best interact with critics, scholars and creative writers in their field? Participants may bring one sample written about or for dance, to share if time permits (350 words, maximum). Invited participants include Maura Donohue, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Paloma McGregor, Tara Sheena and Marissa Perel.

******

For information on this and all Gibney Dance programming for Fall 2017, visit Gibney Dance Center here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (entrance at 53A Chambers), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Lois Weaver's Tammy WhyNot brings fun for all ages

Lois Weaver as Tammy WhyNot with three of her
"sexy senior divas," the WhyNets, singing backup
(photo: Jonathan Slaff)

Lois Weaver brings fun for all ages in What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Old and Having Sex: The Concert Tour, (November 6-23 at La MaMa). The veteran, beloved performance artist from Split Britches becomes twangy alter-ego Tammy WhyNot--part-time country-western singer, part-time researcher in senior centers from Zagreb to Chelsea. (Tammy even landed in the place where I take my yoga and Zumba classes, recruiting a few of her cast members, but I missed my chance!) Her topic of deep study (aka, "intense porch-sitting")? Sex in the golden years.

The marvelous WhyNets
dance choreography by Stormy Brandenberger.
Foreground, left to right: Carmen Estrada, Jorge Escalera and Dora Chu
(photo: Jonathan Slaff)

Weaver with Peggy Shaw
(photo: Jonathan Slaff)

The hour-long variety show is a charmer--a little sugar, a little spice. Weaver doesn't so much break the theatrical fourth wall as completely ignore it, with her disarmed audience, spanning many decades in age, contributing nearly as much fresh hilarity to the content as she and co-writer/Head of Security Peggy Shaw has.

Of Tammy's songs, The Time I've Wasted, a sad tale of KMart shopping "to fill the shopping cart I call my heart" might be my favorite, but it's hard to choose. But the greatest thing about Tammy is her generous heart and her welcome to a stageful of colorful seniors--like dancers Jorge Escalera and Carmen Estrada who will wow you with their spirit and talent.

There's no resisting Tammy. Let yourself go! You have until November 23 to get your tickets--and your sexy on--right here.

La MaMa
First Floor Theatre
74A East 4th Street (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

NYC organizations launch Helix Queer Performance Network

The Helix Queer Performance Network is a collaboration between La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics, seeking to nurture emerging queer performers, unite diverse queer communities, and celebrate the legacy and lineage of queer performance in New York City.

Through educational initiatives, innovative stage productions and challenging public conversations that prioritize diversity across age, race, class and gender, Helix aims to foster an inter-generational, multi-racial, multi-gender performance community where artists can document a broad spectrum of queer experience in the context of a rich artistic history.

Each of Helix's three partner institutions hosts an HQPN flagship program, directed by performance artist Dan Fishback. With La MaMa, we present La MaMa's SQUIRTS, a series that showcases emerging performers, with guest appearances by legends of the queer performance world. With BAX, we run NEEDING IT: Performance & Queer Community, an eight-week workshop, in which students create their own original pieces while studying the history of queer performance in NYC. And with the Hemispheric Institute, we curate an ongoing series of Long Table discussions using Lois Weaver's template of informal conversation to generate dynamic new ideas to improve our communities, and to answer the perennial question, "What does queer performance want?"

For more information, visit helixqpn.tumblr.com.

"Ruff": Peggy Shaw rocks Dixon Place

Watching Peggy Shaw perform Ruff--her new one-woman show at Dixon Place for PS 122's COIL festival--offers an intimate, affecting lesson in empathy. A legend in queer, progressive theater, the much-beloved Shaw suffered a stroke in 2011. This hour-long show is her comeback--a marvelous one--and a way of sharing what it feels like to know that some memories and resources that made you what you are are now unretrievable.

What remains, as Shaw performs it, races by in a stream of consciousness and digressions that are Shaw's but quickly become the audience's, too. As if I'd had the stroke, I found myself struggling to retain the memory of specific words--explication, quips, tales, often amusing--while sartorial details and props (one of which, a brown-and-white wingtip men's shoe, I briefly held for Shaw), body language, facial expressions, shadowy video imagery, music and song easily zapped into my brain and hunkered down. In fact, Shirley Ellis's tongue-and-memory-twisting novelty hit from the 1960's, "The Name Game," became last night's earworm, finally dislodging this morning.

Shaw pivots from tender butch to stage-ruling rock star to slightly mystified stroke survivor who needs a trio of monitors to recall her intricate lines. The audience rides these rhythms and moods, grateful that we occasionally get to see those monitors, too--we sometimes need them--and even more grateful that Shaw has let us into her experience of loss.

Here's a 2010 video clip of Shaw talking about women's roles in theater.


One more thing, a special announcement from Dixon Place founder Ellie Covan: Shaw--who won PS 122's 2011 Ethyl Eichelberger Award--can now also boast that DP's theater has been named for her.

Directed by and co-written with Shaw's partner, Lois Weaver, Ruff runs through Saturday evening at Dixon Place. For a schedule of remaining shows and ticketing information, click here.

Dixon Place
161-A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Peggy Shaw returns to the stage at COIL

Peggy Shaw

Certain to be a highlight of Performance Space 122's COIL Festival, Ruff marks the return to the stage of the great Peggy Shaw--actor, producer and playwright--since her 2011 stroke.

Co-presented with Dixon Place,

Ruff pays tribute to the host of crooners, lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands and eccentric family members who have kept Shaw company, living inside her, for the past 68 years. Guided by longtime collaborator Lois Weaver, Shaw throws off the stigma of age and embraces the joy—and necessity—of creating new work, post-stroke, aided by new technology and even deeper courage. Shaw is the recipient of the 2011 Ethyl Eichelberger award.

See Peggy Shaw in Ruff, January 10, 16, 18, 19 at 7pm; January 11, 19 at 10pm; January 12 at 6pm; January 15 at 9pm. For more information and ticketing, click here or call 212-811-4111.

Dixon Place
161-A Chrystie Street (between Delancey and Rivington Streets), Manhattan
(directions)