Recommended: Cynthia Hopkins in "A Living Documentary"

Cynthia Hopkins
as her sassiest character in A Living Documentary
(photo by Jeff Sugg)

Whatever enrages, disturbs, and/or frightens me most becomes the subject of my work.

-- Cynthia Hopkins, from her Artist Statement

More intimately enraging, disturbing and frightening than global climate change--a topic Cynthia Hopkins treats in This Clement World--is the abject condition of the serious theater artist attempting to live a healthy life and make meaningful work in New York City. The multiple award-winning Hopkins takes on this issue in her new performance, A Living Documentary, this week at New York Live Arts.

In this quasi-fictional, quasi-autobiographical "documentary," Hopkins transforms herself into a series of comedic characters--veterans of the performing arts scene, for better or for bitter--whose behavior and words maintain a sizzling tension between what's off-putting and what's wise, what's over the top and what's completely down to earth. Their varying points of view on the possibility of a sustainable arts career shape up into a pretty interesting seminar. It's a more bracing kind of career seminar than you might ever imagine attending, with generous helpings of profanity and poignant musical interventions from this irresistible singer/composer.

For her ninety-minute show, Hopkins has adopted the sustainable strategy of simplicity. First, it's a solo. That saves a lot of cash right there. There's recorded music--played on an ancient cassette recorder to boot--and a set and props that look as if they were pulled from her apartment and/or some thrift shop. That's enough when the mission is to call bullshit on the external arts gatekeepers and overseers as well as the internal sabotage agents that conspire to keep artists fearful, passive and broke.

My favorite character, her hilarious motivational speaker-type--rocking rhinestones and a jet black halo of feathers--exhorts us to "act like you're worthy of a prosperous life...act like you're a woman of dignity...even if you're not a woman!" Hopkins knows that while one part of us is smirking, the other part is likely absorbing, that the clown's job has always been to slip around the guards and Make. That. Delivery.

A Living Documentary runs through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

March 6, 6:30pm -- Come Early Conversation: The Truth Behind A Living Documentary. Moderated by Paul Lazar

March 7 -- Stay Late Discussion: No-nonsense - Discussing the Economy of Art-Making. Annie-B Parson in conversation with Cynthia Hopkins

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Big Dance Theater, as always

The week is finally winding down with some glorious weather. But, hey, I still think you should spend at least some of it in a theater!

If you can manage to get a ticket, do check out Big Dance Theater's Comme Toujours Here I Stand--now at New York Live Arts--a 2009 work sourced in filmmaker Αgחès Varda's Çléο de 5 à 7 (1961). With its cheeky narrative fragmentation and visual splintering, Comme Toujours deals less with how things go in life than how they go in our heads when the world presses forward while we stress out and grasp at anything that could make momentary sense or soothe or distract. BDT founding member Molly Hickok is stellar as the central character who--like Varda's beautiful, vapid Parisian pop star, set adrift by a scary Tarot reading and impending medical test results--becomes a magnetic hub for phenomena that continuously remind us that we're watching a movie, an entertainment, something artificial that we construct and control and invest with a power not necessarily intrinsic to it.

Directed and choreographed by Annie-B Parson, co-directed by Paul Lazar. With Hickok, the cast includes Tymberly Canale, Chris Giarmo, Jeff Larson, Aaron Mattocks, Ryutaro Mishima, Aaron Rosenblum and Kourtney Rutherford.

Now through Saturday at 7:30pm. For more information and ticketing, click here.

And take in a screening of Varda's Çléο de 5 à 7 at NYLA on Saturday, May 19 at 3pm. Details here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

It's witchcraft

Somewhere in the midst of Suzanne Bocanegra's When A Priest Marries A Witch--that video and live "artist's talk" in which actor Paul Lazar verbally channels Bocanegra while being thoroughly Paul Lazar--I felt the artificial juxtaposition of channel and channelled fall away. Standing before me, just a few feet away, was neither Bocanegra nor Lazar alone but some deep, thorough cohesion of the two, and I fell madly in love. That's a condition, I assure you, not unfamiliar with regard to Lazar, but Bocanegra, a multidisciplinary artist, is totally new to me.

Up until that moment, though, I had already been well-entertained by Bocanegra's narrative, delivered by Lazar in a shallow space before a packed and cramped but chuckling Chocolate Factory audience on closing night. Through her genial mouthpiece, Bocanegra revisited her childhood in Pasadena, TX (oil- and NASA-loving country), where the artistic youngster dreamed of coloring for a living, and surveyed a transitional time for Roman Catholics like herself (Vatican II, folk masses, singing nuns, Sr. Carita's art, the Berrigan Bros). Having been raised in the church, too--although in oil-poor, astronaut-deprived New York--I'd lived or witnessed all of Bocanegra's Catholic cultural landmarks. I knew of which she spoke and felt her a sister soul.

On the soundtrack, we could hear her actual voice, at low volume, speaking the monologue just a few beats behind Lazar's voice, but her presence also loomed large in the hour's visual and verbal imagery--First Communion (wearing pink!); first outfit bought with her own money (black satin brocade suit paired with a cowgirl hat and an old pair of white go-go boots); checking out the art and architecture of her church and bemoaning the transition from nun-habit haute couture to the more humanizing but unacceptable dowdy ugliness of post-Vatican II sartorial reform ("the biggest fashion mistake of the 20th Century").

A "Catholic Mass groupie," she found the tradition gave her, "room to space out and think your own thoughts. Nobody can bug you. You're praying!" Later, the example set by a local designer in reworking the interior of her church--again, post-Vatican II, and in ways that seriously messed up Catholic habits, not the wearable kind--taught her that "you could make art, and it could be a grown-up thing, not just a kid thing, and you didn't have to work for an oil company."

So anyway, why did Paul Lazar have to be Suzanne Bocanegra? I don't know. But I also don't know why Paul Lazar shouldn't be Suzanne Bocanegra or why anyone who has to deliver an artist's talk shouldn't hire Lazar to step in and deliver it. I'd certainly do that.

But we are talking about a person--Bocanegra, I mean--whose Web site's home page looks like this, and I kid you not:

work
info

That's it. Seriously. A page, blank except for her name in a small, black font and those two links.  Visit http://suzannebocanegra.com/ and see for yourself.

While you're there, visit this page

http://suzannebocanegra.com/priestwitch1.htm 

and check out the still from Change of Habit (1969), which appears to be a towering monument to cheesiness. It starred Elvis Presley as a doctor and Mary Tyler Moore as a nun with the hots for him, a crushing ambivalence about her vows to Jesus, and an application of false eyelashes and shadow that might work perfectly for me but for a nun...? That section of When A Priest Marries A Witch has got to be one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.

Lord! What will The Chocolate Factory do next? Click here and find out.

Paul Lazar is out of this world!

Just five minutes from Grand Central Station, there's a curiously-enchanting world known as 1965UU, created in all its fabulous fabulosity by playwright Mac Wellman from his book of imaginary tales about real asteroids--A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds--and directed by Stephen Mellor.

1965UU is a tiny world inhabited by the likes of the looming, mean, lustily-flatulent Albedo, the delicious but elusively-speedy Rosalind, and a thoughtful, heartsick but resilient soul, Ravenelo, played by Paul Lazar. Lazar--co-founder, with Annie-B Parsons, of Big Dance Theater--gives one of his cherishable performances as the focus of the piece, acting like a spinning wheel that refines Wellman's textual flights of absurd fancy through every well-considered, masterfully-coordinated inflection of movement, glance and voice. Supporting Lazar in what is considered a solo performance are narrator Heather Christian, dancer Kate Marks, and actors Ed Jewett and Daniel Manley.

Now through October 4, the asteroid 1965UU will be in residence at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, which is certainly as good a place as any for a miniscule space body that appears to be a long, metallic platform spanning the length of the performance space.  Get yourself a front-row seat, and see a show in which, thrillingly, sparks really fly!

For tickets, directions and more information, click here.