Artists Reach Out: Gabrielle Civil

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Gabrielle Civil

Gabrielle Civil in
Experiments in Joy
(photo: Dennie Eagleson)

Gabrielle Civil is a Black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit MI. She has premiered fifty original performance art works around the world including in Puerto Rico, The Gambia, Ghana, Canada, Zimbabwe, and Mexico where she lived as a Fulbright Fellow. She is the author of the performance memoirs Swallow the Fish (2017) and Experiments in Joy (2019) and was lead contributor to Experiments in Joy: a Workbook (2019). A 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist, she teaches creative writing and critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Gabrielle Civil
(photos: above, Fungai Machirori. Below: Starr Rien)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

The project of living has been affected by the pandemic. The project of teaching, breathing, being, and being connected to loved ones. The project of keeping time. It’s been almost three months since these questions arrived, and I can’t believe how long it has taken me to respond--except that everything takes longer now. Things feel both sped up and slowed down. In my house, I swim through pools of time: dog paddling or trying to hold off a crashing wave but sometimes floating in memory or hope. Lately, I’ve been riding the swell of the Mississippi River from the headwinds of Minnesota all the way down to the crumbling confederate shores....

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

Maybe it was reciting a speech for MLK Day at church as a kid in a pink velveteen suit with a hat. Or poring over the “Sugar Plum Tree” in Childcraft Vol. 1 Poems & Rhymes (which I still have on my shelf). Or hearing my mother recite "Dreams" (Hold fast to dreams....) by Langston Hughes while she cooked in the kitchen. I’m not sure, but I know that literature, art, and performance have always been juicy to me.

In college, I trained as a poet. And I loved readings and open mics and slams and spoken word events but after a while, I grew restless.... I craved new cadences, new ways to circulate language in space. Despite my limited performance background--I had never seriously danced or acted on stage--I craved activating my body. In my book Swallow the Fish, I talk about turning to performance art as a way to make a different kind of poem, as a way to embody poetry itself. I move from figures of speech to figures of the body and back. That’s still the heart of my practice today.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

Right now, I am practicing performance / writing. My new book, the déjà vu, is about experiential echoes and Black feminist double vision. It’s due at the end of the year, so I’m practicing imagining, crafting and believing in my wild ideas! I’m practicing dreaming and trying to show up for a new, better world that might crack through this time. I’m practicing preparing.

I’ve got a rad performance residency at Automata in LA later this summer where I’ll activate the idea of living objects. In the fall, I’ll actually teach a class with this title on Black material culture, so this embodied exploration will be key. I’m practicing serious patience. I’m writing this half way through a 14-day self-quarantine in Michigan. Once I’m done, I’ll get to see my parents in Detroit and I will hug human beings for the first time in months! I am envisioning that hug with my entire body!

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I love reading writing teaching performing art-making listening learning connecting Black people body hugging books poetry archives liberation and joy. My practice and visioning are about all of those....

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

It’s got to go deeper. The dual moment of pandemic and uprising is unprecedented and foretold. Creativity and imagination are the way forward—plus a lot of bravery. Hold fast, slow down and transform.

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

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Artists Reach Out: Rosamond S. King

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Rosamond S. King

Rosamond S. King
(selfie courtesy of the artist)

Rosamond S. King’s goal is to make people feel, wonder, and think, usually in that order.

She is a creative and critical writer and performer whose work is deeply informed by her cultures and communities, by history, and by a sense of play. Her guerrilla performance art has appeared somewhere near you; staged performances have been curated by: CalArts, Dixon Place, the VIVA! and Encuentro Performance Festivals, Brown University, the African Performance Art Biennale, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere. She has been an Artist in Residence with ChoreoQuest and Alice Yard.

Poetry publications include the forthcoming All the Rage, the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone and poems in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies. Scholarly work includes Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination.

King is Creative Editor of sx salon and Director of the Institute for the Humanities & Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. She is currently working on dis/obedience, a series of linked performances, and This     intentionally left blank, a book of erasures.

www.rosamondking.com

Rosamond S. King
Jardin d'hiver still
(photo: Swati Khurana)

Brandi Rei Tucker in #SAYHERNAME
by Rosamond S. King
(photo: RestorationArts)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

For almost a year, I’ve been working on sanctuary, a collaborative outdoor performance dreamed up by Ana Maurine-Lara with Ana, Akiko Hatakeyama, Courtney Morris, and myself, directed by D’Lo. It was to be presented in May at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum in Oregon. There’s deep disappointment, grief even, but we’ve done so much work on it that we know it will be presented at some time….

Ironically, I had also committed myself to regularly devising in proper studios this year to continue creating dis/obedience, a series of dances….

My next book of poetry, All the Rage, coming out next year, has been affected because I thought it was done, but I’m going to add some poems reflecting on the pandemic.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I’ve basically been dancing since I could walk, and I was put into formal classes when I was  three. My parents were committed to exposing their children to the arts: dance, painting, writing, music....

I started making performance art before I knew the term. I was visiting Paris, and having a hard time. I experience a lot of racism there because my skin color, hair, style, and fluency in French mean that people read me as African, and therefore as an undocumented or unwanted immigrant. I wanted to create an embodied response to that embodied experience, so I covered my colorful body in colorful fabric from The Gambia, and moved around Jean Dubuffet’s black and white installation, Jardin d’hiver. I asked a friend to photograph me, and when I showed people the images, they called it performance art.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

I am literally practicing a lot by taking a lot of dance classes, and I am writing a lot of poetry. For the first month, envisioning through my own movement was difficult. I had imagined working in Mark Morris’ bright, wide studios, and now I am in the much smaller, furnished space of my apartment. But now I am finally trying to embrace our circumstances.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

Taking dance classes--and paying the instructors--aligns with how much I value creative community, particularly the communities of Caribbean and African dance, which sustain me. I am happy to dance with, learn from, and help sustain folks who are part of that.

Taking classes is also an important part of my self-care, since dancing, cooking, and sleep are probably the only times I’m not thinking about the pandemic.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I had a (long) moment when I thought the projects I am working on were irrelevant to the now, but I’ve realized that’s not true. We need sanctuary now more than ever, and people are having different responses to being in homes that are supposed to be sanctuaries. My dis/obedience series and All the Rage--both about black life in the USA today--are more relevant than ever, as black people die at alarming rates, as our deaths often go uncounted, as calls to militarize isolation will target us disproportionately--and as we continue to find and make joy, love, shine, and humor.

Beyond that, creativity of any kind reminds me that I am alive, and that life is worth living. As I say to the ghosts of the dead around me, I get to live, so I am going to live.

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

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Can I get a witness? Viewing mayfield brooks at JACK

Performance artist mayfield brooks
(photo: Amar Puri)

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych)
by mayfield brooks
JACK
January 30-February 1

In the tiny storage room, where the pungent aroma of earth and rose petals prickles your nostrils, I stand in a single line of people skirting the edge of a funereal bier covered in colorful decaying foliage. I see a bare foot sticking out from this cover, even as I hear mayfield brooks' voice on a looping recording (calling for "a witness") and tamp down a feeling of being trapped. I notice a thin, dry stalk, its end lightly poking the sole of brooks' foot, and I wonder if brooks feels it, is irritated by it. I wonder if I shouldn't pluck it away. But I dutifully stand, like everybody else, listening, looking in this solemn enclosure. Finally, I carefully--so as to not startle brooks or draw anyone else's attention--reach for the stalk and pull it off brooks' flesh.

In small groups, the audience will cycle through that opening viewing room then gradually assemble in a larger but still intimate space nicely set up to encourage comfort and seating choice. This feels more like a funeral parlor than a performance space. Merging two of brooks' works, Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) is every bit as much a memorial service, a participatory ritual, a raucous channeling and a party with festive cakes (by Susannah Simpson) as it is a performance.

Attend and you will have ample time to gaze or move around the space and commune with the dead (brooks' and yours). Inspired primarily by the late Black gay activist and Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson, this evening introduces us to brooks' ongoing practice of writing heartfelt letters to this role model and would-be mentor and gently suggests we take up a similar practice with our own ancestors of blood or mind.

Will you also see strong, compelling performance in this space? Oh, yes. brooks' collaborating team--a water bearer, a tea maker, a florist, a guide and various viewing hours caretakers--establishes and eases us into the fluidity of the space, but brooks rules the space and gives a master class in commitment, responsiveness, fervent aliveness.

The evening, nearly two hours of sensory richness, is well worth the sometimes frustrating task of navigating subway travel to, from and around Brooklyn. (As of last night, the "C" in C train stands for "cusswords.") Maybe just give yourself at least 15 minutes more than you think you might need to get there, then don't fret because the opening of the piece is experienced in shifts. Relax with some tea in the lobby.

Technical Director/Creative Consultant: Niko Tsocanos

Curated by Stacy Grossfield as part of her IMAGES // LANDSCAPES series and JACK's Reparations365 series.

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) continues with 8pm performances tonight and tomorrow. For information and ticketing, click here.

JACK
18 Putnam Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
C to Clinton-Washington or Shuttle to Franklin Avenue

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

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Geoffrey Hendricks, 86

Geoffrey Hendricks, 86, Attention-Getting Fluxus Artist, Dies
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, May 22, 2018

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Vito Acconci, 77

Vito Acconci, Performance Artist and Uncommon Architect, Dies at 77
by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, April 28, 2017

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Alicia Grullón reenacts Wendy Davis's Texas filibuster at BRIC

Alicia Grullón performs Filibuster
at BRIC House
(all photos: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

It began with a pair of pink Mizuno Women’s Wave Rider 16 Running Shoes. On June 25, 2013, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis stood for 11 hours in these pink sneakers, filibustering against a restrictive abortion bill and creating history. Bronx artist Alicia Grullón will recreate this piece of history in its entirety (in an identical pair of pink Mizuno shoes) from 10am until 9pm Wednesday, April 13 at BRIC House.

--posted by BRIC Art Blogger, March 25, 2016

When, with the anti-abortion bill HB60, a defiant Texas legislature wedged itself between women and their physicians, State Senator Wendy Davis took a stand--literally--hour by hour, speaking truth to power. Her 11-hour embodied act of principle was not a stunt, and neither was Filibuster, Alicia Grullón's reenactment of this historic and remarkable effort, presented as part of the BRIC House exhibition, Whisper Or Shout: Artists in the Social Sphere.

I spent just one half-hour, yesterday, seated in front of Grullón on the porch at BRIC, but each of those thirty minutes hit hard. One particular story cited in the letters Davis/Grullón read concerned an expectant couple told their baby was severely ill and would not survive. Day and night, the mother lived with anguish that her child might die inside her before she could ever see and hold her.

"I was petrified that my baby was going to die while I was asleep," she wrote. "We decided to have labor induced. We were informed that it really wasn't possible." Why? Because her health insurance was provided by her employer, a faith-based firm.

"Knowing that your daughter is dying is heartbreaking," she wrote. "It feels as if your soul is ripping apart."

But the legislators who heedlessly wandered in and out of the Texas chambers as Davis read these words and other testimony had no interest in real life, just the pandering politics of so-called "pro-life."

Grullón read from another protesting letter: "I've seen the 1950s, and I don't want to go back there."

I witnessed only a short part of Filibuster--neither Grullón's first reenactment nor her first filibuster, as you can read here--but I know the physical, mental and emotional discipline required to perform it must have been enormous. As a woman of color, Grullón committed to this challenge to underscore the impact of retrogressive social policies on women and families of color and the need for us to be at the forefront of movements for social justice.

The exhibition Whisper or Shout: Artists in the Social Sphere continues through May 1 in the Gallery at BRIC House. Click here for information.

BRIC House
647 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(directions)

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Brendan Connelly and Scotty Heron at JACK

In Appalachian Spring Break, composer Brendan Connelly and performance artist Scotty Heron collaborate at JACK for an hour of mayhem triggered--let us not say "inspired"--by the collaboration of Martha Graham and Aaron Copland on Graham's Appalachian Spring. Here, with each artist continually invading the other's territory, the worlds of music and dance collide--let us not say "merge" or "overlap"--again and again.

The sonic assault starts right away. From on high, the pair train clarinets down upon the defenseless audience in a shrill and gurgly fanfare. You might notice that handlettered sheets of cardboard subtly bear the word "fanfare," a nod to Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man as well as a sign of the DIY spirit of the production. Music making employs stand-alone instruments (clarinets, kazoos), a snaggle of increasingly snaggled, endangered electronics and the whimsy of amplified stuff simply hitting or being dragged along the floor. Movement involves, among other things, whippet-thin Heron risking life while, strapped into pointe shoes, he laboriously climbs to the top of a stack of tables, or channeling Graham's iconic Lamentation, tense angles stretching the fabric of what a U Michigan arts blogger once called "The Infamous Giant Sock Thing."

No. Not Scotty Heron this time.
The real Martha Graham performs Lamentation.
(photo: Herta Moselsio)

Heron's centerpiece work as Graham is a thing of mystery and scrupulously contained drama, gorgeous in its own way.

Appalachian Spring Break concludes with two performances tonight: 8pm and 10:30 pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

In their skin: BAAD! presents works by men of color

Jonathan González
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Benjamin Lundberg
(photo: Jeca Rodríguez-Colón)

In Our Skin--a one-evening show presented at BAAD! with Pepatián for the 2015 BlakTinX Performance Series--offered a rare and important opportunity. The event focused on works by young male choreographers and performance artists of color--Benjamin Lundberg, Gentry George (who showed several short pieces), Alvaro González Dupuy, Eduardo Fajardo and Jonathan González. The run-on format--two hours with no intermission--should be rethought as it became tedious, poorly serving works presented late in the program. Why not distribute the lineup of artists over at least two evenings of reasonable length--say, no more than 90 minutes--allowing breathing room for both these artists and their audiences?

In a program ranging from Lundberg drawing vials of his own blood to mix with dishwashing liquid as a painting medium (Limpieza de Sangre) to queer chatterbox Fajardo charmingly singing and dancing along to a cumbia hit he later questions for its misogyny (CABARET), George's solos and duets stood out for conventional polish--the look of Ailey crossed with contemporary ballet--and the remarkable facility of their performers. In Our Skin certainly could not be faulted for lack of variety in approach to performance.

Chilean, New York-based Alvaro González Dupuy was, for me, the strongest discovery and pleasure of the evening. In Dame la Mano and i give you my elbow--his duet with equally vivid Emily Smith--stream-of-contact, genial roughhousing and audience involvement yielded unexpected freshness. I would welcome the chance to see more from this mind.

Jonathan González's curious deep divine shows him to be a clean, feline mover with an interest in engaging the possibilities of his environment and messing with the way we understand sound, lighting and the body in theater space. Sorry to say, by this point, the lengthy evening found me feeling captive, low in energy and unprepared to give my best attention. But González--recently seen in Patricia Hoffbauer's Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People at Gibney--has some new projects coming up in 2016. Worth getting on your radar.

Closed. For information on remaining BlakTinX Performance Series programs (closing November 21), click here.

BAAD!
2474 Westchester Avenue, Bronx (map/directions)

Decolonizing mind, language, history

Clockwise from left:
Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi (photo: Ben Carver),
Tommy Pico (photo: Tommy Pico),
Mette LouLou von Kohl (photo: Laura Bluher)

Hosted by artist-activist Dan Fishback, DECOLONIALLY QUEER drew quite a crowd to a small studio--legal capacity: 78, and things were kept legal, more or less--at NYU's Performance Studies department. The program--a collaboration of The Helix Queer Performance Network, Queer Union-NYU and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics--featured three queer artists of indigenous heritage and offered a bracing corrective to the week's traditional Columbus Day commemoration. In fact, if performers Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Tommy Pico and Mette LouLou von Kohl could agree on an anthem for Decolonially Queer, it might well be Fuck Columbus and The Ship He Rode Over In, a sentiment the evening made abundantly clear.

Each artist rallied the strength of resistance and self-definition. Kumeyaay poet Pico, self-described "weirdo Indian faggot" living in Brooklyn--opened with wry defiance of typical expectations that he'd deliver a poem about nature--like "anemones and shit," "fodder for the Noble Savage narrative" before dazzling us with cracked wit and torrential delivery. Nature emerged in Pico's own time, on his own terms, giving us images of hills with "backs that love being stroked by our eyes" and the sky as the sole "stellar inheritance" shared by himself and his ancestors.

Lady Dane--accomplished singer, dancer, writer and ritualist--declared herself "the mother of a verbal revolution" powered by the complex experience of being a trans woman at the intersection of African, Cuban and indigenous American cultures. "Growing up, I was told by my elders, 'You have to read people who look like you.'" Stripping off her high-heeled sandals--"I'm decolonizing my feet, bitches!"--she wove a partly-sung incantation designed to shake listeners awake. Later, in the talkback moderated by Marlène Ramírez-Cancio of the Hemispheric Institute, Lady Dane spoke of her influences--outspoken singers like Nina Simone and Abby Lincoln, formal gestures recorded in Egypt's ancient hieroglyphs, rich ancestral practices disrupted by colonization and now reclaimed. In her work, she confronts English, crafting ways to turn that language into a protective and healing force.

Von Kohl's performance incorporated dance, photography, video, audio and voice in a poetic and moving evocation of her Palestine at a time before Israeli occupation. With Lebanese/Palestinian (mother) and Danish (father) ancestry, she speaks only English and French; we hear speaking French as she portrays her cigarette-smoking grandmother. Unlike her grandmother, though, von Kohl speaks no Arabic, and that disconnection pains her.

In silence, she crushes an orange she had carefully, tenaciously grasped between her jaws--juice, pulp and seeds falling at her feet. "To remember is to resist," she later tells us. With that precious orange, she calls attention to the richness of the land, the once-earthy wealth of Palestine before Israeli occupation, when her parents were orange farmers. "This is not about nostalgia," she says. "This is about memory as a weapon, as noise for the silenced."

All three artists grapple with the limitations and creative possibilities of language. For queer artists of color, indeed, this struggle has high stakes, meaning the difference between erasure and empowered presence. Pico remarks that he had to "flush all the ideas I had about poetry" and, instead, focus on "how do I sound?" Lady Dane studies, she says, "who I was before colonization; that's at the heart of everything I do."

The inspired and inspiring DECOLONIALLY QUEER ran for one night only, but you can keep up on Helix Queer Performance Network's future activities by clicking here.

BIOS:

LADY DANE FIGUEROA EDIDI

“The Ancient Jazz Priestess of Mother Africa” is an African, Cuban and Indigenous American performance artist, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, Author (Yemaya’s Daughters, Brew, Baltimore: A Love Letter), playwright, healer, cohost of Inside Out Radio Show, a member of Trans Women of Color Collective Leadership Team, a volunteer at Casa Ruby, and a founding member of interdisciplinary theater company Force/Collision. She began producing her own cabarets at the age of seventeen. In 2013 she became the first trans woman of color published author of a work of fiction in DC. She has also written the book and lyrics to Roaring The Musical.

TOMMY PICO

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is the author of absentMINDR (VERBALVISUAL, 2014)—the first chapbook APP published for iOS mobile/tablet devices—was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, and [PANK]. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and with Morgan Parker co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) @heyteebs

METTE LOULOU VON KOHL

Mette Loulou von Kohl was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. Currently based in New York City, Mette Loulou is a mixed-race queer femme, born to a Lebanese/Palestinian mother and Danish father. She has lived in New York, Romania, Morocco and Denmark. She is fascinated by the intersection between her personal identities as a jumping off point to reveal, dismantle and rebuild realities and dreams. Mette Loulou weaves movement, words, and her love for the unexpected into the exploration of her embodied histories. Mette Loulou is a graduate of EMERGENYC- the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program and participant of EmergeLAB and Needing IT ALL at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She is the co-founder of the performance collective A Beautiful Desperation and has performed both nationally and internationally in Canada and across Europe.

THE 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, empower 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 justice 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.

Adrienne Truscott: a fool in the king's court

Dance/performance artist Adrienne Truscott writes that when, in the early stages of exploring stand-up comedy, she booked her fledgling act on a lesbian cruise, she ran into a little trouble. A feminist telling jokes about rape to a staunchly feminist audience? What could possibly go wrong?

"It was an incredibly 'safe' space as a woman and an unpredictably conservative space for a comedian," she writes in her "Creator's Note" for Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else.

No comic or anyone else for that matter wants to be told what they can or can't say, nor should they be. It is often a comic's job to utter the unutterable; that doesn't mean that they (we?) are beyond rebuke. Comedy is bold, powerful and supple but not unassailable. There is a difference between a fool and the fool in the king's court....

Now through October 3, you can watch this court fool perform a show that gives new meaning to the word chatterbox, a show where Truscott manages to be, at once, giddy and spot-on.

Hosted by Brooklyn eatery and comedy club The Creek and The Cave, co-presenting with The Chocolate Factory and Performance Space 122, Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It gives Truscott a platform to land important points about rape culture, victim shaming and right-wing hypocrisy while dissolving her audience in laughter. And there's even more educational value! Science nerds will enjoy detailed lessons in duck anatomy and gerbil crisis management. It all works, and while I'm still baffled by the gears in this machine, I'll note that if I told you a single joke out of context, that funniness might fall apart. The wholeness of Truscott's performance is the thing that works.

Truscott's exuberant persona is wildly nonstop, relentless, irresistible and, famously, naked in the netherparts region. Yikes! No wonder she likens this stand-up act to an act of rape!

The most real danger you'll face from Truscott, though, is the likelihood of getting smacked by a denim jacket ripped off and hurled from the stage--my face stung from a slight graze--in one of her acts of divestment. Let's just say, if Trickster Truscott were Salome dancing for Herod, she'd be working 70 veils, not seven.

What she's stripping at, though, is our tendency to avert our eyes and stay silent about things that upset the state of order. (It took a long time for some people to snap out of the Cosby Show trance, didn't it?) But there's absolutely no escaping when pussy's got something to say, damn it, and she will not be denied!

Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It runs tonight at 8pm and this Saturday at 7pm. It continues Wednesday-Saturday, September 30-October 3 at 8pm. For information, visit The Creek and The Cave's Web site here.  To purchase tickets, click here.

The Creek and The Cave
10-93 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions: scroll to bottom of page)

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko: #negrophobia in brief

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
(photo: Scott Shaw)

I like the odd little Studio A at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. You know, that room, right off the Gibney lobby, that you mostly ignore as you sign in with the guard and climb the stairs. It's 15 x 30 (got that off the Gibney Web site), suitable for, say, a sleepover with a small bunch of girlfriends. It's also the space of choice for Nigerian-American performance artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, presenting his new work, #negrophobia as part of Gibney's Fall 2015 Making Space season.

The experience of being physically drawn inside a work of art, and one that's alive with change, cannot be called new. But there are times when it seems particularly apropos. #negrophobia qualifies.

Studio A, transformed by Kosoko, looks like a Pinterest board. Prints of photos snake along the floor. Looking around, I recognize, for instance, James Baldwin, Forest Whitaker, an arrested Tiger Woods. Iconic books like The Bluest Eye and PUSH take talismanic places of honor. Mounds of tangled celluloid stand in, I suspect, for the murky history of Hollywood's relationship to the Black body and Black talent. On one table rests a memorial card for Kosoko's deceased brother. (There's a story there, which I don't know, but Kosoko will later show us "my dead brother's shoes" and we will hear clink of chains running through his hands.) A lithe, incredibly model-slender dancer (Kentrell/IMMA MESS), wearing only a cloth mask, blonde wig and tomato-red thong, slinks and slithers around taking selfies and live video, sometimes interacting closely with the bling-spangled Kosoko. One wall features video projections, and music pumps through the space. Kosoko is a little bit Olivia Newton-John ("Magic") and a little bit Seal ("Crazy").

The audience can sit on slick white floor runners, stand on the sidelines or, within considerable limits, move around to view things from different angles. What we cannot do is leave.

There's one door, and it's largely--I sense, deliberately--obstructed by Kosoko's stool and microphone and Afrofuturistically golden being. Tiny Studio A becomes all about airless confinement, blockage and, through the Kosoko's text, the toxic detritus of other people's sick thinking about the Black body, specifically Black masculinity.

God, I wanted a Cosby Show life, and you gave me a reality show life.

You ain't shit...You ain't even gonna be shit.... From the moment you're out of your mama's womb, you are being told [this]. What does this do to childhood? How do you build your dream? I'm obsessed with this question.... How do you push against this to realize yourself?

Kosoko points and picks at the source of this devastation, although I do not think he disrupts it much in #negrophobia. That may be impossible, and fruitlessness might be the point. But as I looked around the room, I wondered if even the young white people in attendance--clued-in at least enough to go to something called #negrophobia--found anything here unfamiliar enough to be urgent, eye-opening news.

One interesting feature is the ending that isn't. Kosoko gets to a point where it looks as if he has completely lost it and wants to throw in the towel. Over and over, he seems to dismiss us: "It's over. You can go now." He insists, wearily and somewhat testily. "You can go home to your Manhattan apartments. You don't have to watch it anymore."

Not a single person moves, because you can't really, and you can see this is just the exhaustion talking. The exhaustion of breathing in decades of toxic fumes and struggling to stand. Besides, there's some more costume foolery up ahead to watch and now--possibly forever--a perky KKK song to listen to. As Yogi Berra would have said, "It ain't over 'til it's over." And it ain't.

Nightly through Saturday, September 26, at 7:30pm* with limited ticketing. Friday night's performance will be followed by a discussion with George Sanchez. For information and tickets, click here.

*UPDATE: A show has been added for Saturday at 5pm, but hurry!

Learn more about Jaamil Olawale Kosoko|anonymous bodies here.

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

Ecosexuals Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens marry that mountain

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
remake environmental activism for a sexy new era.

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle stand before all the world--tall in their funky platform boots--as proud, passionate ecosexuals. And they recruit. With those two, you're well aware, surely, of the sexual part. But what's with that eco prefix?

The couple answered that question--and more--last night at the New York City premiere screening of Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story, their 2014 documentary film about mountain-top removal mining in the Appalachians where Stephens was born and raised and has family. That's the eco part. We'll get to sex in a minute.

Hosted by Abrons Arts Center, the event helped launch the 2015 Queer New York International Arts Festival in partnership with MixNYC, the queer experimental film festival. The cheerful pair greeted the audience after having led an EcoSex walking tour of Central Park earlier in the day. They shared a list of "25 Ways to Make Love to the Earth."

"Talk dirty to her plants" and "Love her unconditionally even when she's angry and cruel" were two standout suggestions. So, if you have not pieced it together already, ecosexuality--a state of mind, identity and practice open to anyone regardless of gender or orientation--derives from the notion that Earth is not Earth, Our Mother but Earth, Our Lover.

"Mommy's not going to take care of us," Stephens warns. "Mommy's tired." We have much work to do.

Through giddy imagination and wit, Sprinkle and Stephens shift the balance of power to inspire us to take a more direct role in the well-being of our planet. As they see it, the key to this new form of activism is bonding with nature through enlivened senses and pleasure--the sensation of slippery mud and gnarly tree bark and chlorophyll on one's skin. The pair have traveled around, staging weddings in which they get married to mountains and snow and the moon and what have you. And, you know what? I have no idea what "cloud sex" is, but I'm all for it.

In Spain, they married coal. In Stephens's West Virginia, they married a mountain and helped local activists draw awareness to the coal mining technique that imperils natural beauty, biodiversity, health, community and heritage. Goodbye Gauley Mountain shows what they're up against--a powerful industry holding the whip hand of steady employment over many workers who envision no other way to feed their families. But Stephens interviews others who know all too well what's going on, and their intellectual resistance--and deep love of the land--is most clear and ultimately moving.

To learn how you can see Goodbye Gauley Mountain, contact Stephens and Sprinkle here.

Closed.

Queer New York International Arts Festival continues events at Abrons through September 26. For information and tickets for other QNYIAF events, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Gerard & Kelly achieve fair pay for Guggenheim performers

Looking at How Performers Are Paid for Performance Art
by Hilarie M. Sheets, The New York Times, July 30, 2015

Saving New York: James Godwin's "The Flatiron Hex"

James Godwin in The Flatiron Hex
(photo: Jim Moore)

The pipe is the underworld of NYORG. The main section is what’s left of an old pipeline. Nobody knows what used to flow through it or even who built it.. Some of the old tech still works and the L train still makes its run across the island. Granted, it’s only 4 times a month. AND NEVER ON WEEKENDS.

--James Godwin, The Flatiron Hex

One of Manhattan's most distinctive, most photographed structures, the Flatiron Building certainly captures the imagination. But did you know that it also holds the key to our salvation?

Okay, neither did I. Something about opening the right windows in the right order to create just the right Aeolian harp-like tone and vibration. But you can try figuring it out with hilarious James Godwin at The Flatiron Hex, his new puppet/performance art/visual art extravaganza, a Dixon Place commission directed by his co-writer and sound designer, Tom Burnett.

This is a supernaturalhexacalifragilistic tale of one Wylie Walker, a sorcerer-shaman hired to protect a futuristic, plague-ravaged New York City (now called NYORG) from an impending superstorm. We meet the nonsense chant-spouting Walker--"Most of what I do is flim flam..."--and Godwin surreptitiously controls and visibly speaks for a host of some of the creepiest, most pointless puppets you've ever seen. Favorites include an elegant rat queen and The Tongue--security firm owner and mayoral candidate--who makes exits in a certain way that, for no reason at all, leaves people in stitches.

Godwin's super-power appears to be the ability to creep and gross us out while keeping us tethered to his charm. Last night, that charm got tested to the max by equipment malfunction, a situation Godwin milked and milked productively and quite winningly.

Just avoid the front row because...well, there will be blood.

Remaining shows are tonight; May 22-23; and May 29-30--all at 7:30pm. I suspect this will sell out. So hurry to get more information and tickets here.

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

Rachel Rosenthal, 88

Rachel Rosenthal, Bold Performance Artist, Dies at 88
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, May 13, 2015

NEEDING IT, free workshops with Dan Fishback, is back!

Dan Fishback (Photo: Allison Michael Orenstein)

NEEDING IT: 

Solo Performance in Queer Community

with Dan Fishback

at BAX / Brooklyn Arts Exchange

March 9 - April 27

Mondays, 7-10pm

Application due: January 27

Admission is FREE

Students will develop solo performances based on their personal obsessions and political impulses, all the while exploring the recent history of queer performance in New York City, and meeting some of the great artists of our time.  Performance artist and instructor Dan Fishback will work closely with students to move beyond conventional notions of “self-expression” and “autobiography” to something more primal and satisfying. 

For application instructions, click here.

This workshop is made possible, in part, by the Stonewall Community Foundation.

BAX / Brooklyn Arts Exchange
421 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

The cupcake-ization of New York: Penny Arcade speaks out

Penny Arcade on the Professionalization of Performance Art
by Geraldine Visco, Hyperallergic, December 31, 2014

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)

I love you Raja Feather Kelly

Raja Feather Kelly
has been doing some more thinking
about Andy "Drella" Warhol.
(photos by Andy Toad)

The name of this winning and humorous ensemble piece from dance artist Raja Feather Kelly might be The Feath3r Theory Presents: Andy Warhol's DRELLA (I Love You Faye Driscoll), as it appears in promotional materials, or The Feath3r Theory Presents: Andy Warhol's DRELLA (I Love You Faye Driscoll) Black by Popular Demand, as it appears in the black-on-pink program notes. Either way, you get the picture: a mashup of race, gender, the cult of personality, runway models in white face, drag and house culture, karaoke, mad juggling of archetypes and stereotypes and ebullient ballet steps performed in dirty ankle socks. Let's call this craftily messy beauty Drella for short--that name itself a shortening of Dracula and Cinderella and an invocation of Warhol.



For a few additional clues, I snipped this passage from the artist's statement on the beloved Faye Driscoll's Web site:

I am obsessed with the basic problem of being "somebody" in a world of other "somebodies," and in my work I attempt to pull apart this daily performance of self. I do this by enacting it in excess, blowing it up to the extreme in order to reveal its edges and create more space, more possibility for who we can be.

Likewise, Raja Feather Kelly is about creating more space and, from the looks of things, he knows exactly what to do with it.

Last call to see The Feath3r Theory in Drella at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn is tonight, 7:30pm. The show runs 70 minutes, and there's not a dull minute among them.

Seating is very limited. Check here for possibilities or, if you can't get in, do as some neighbors did last night: Catch it all through the center's storefront window!

Drella afterparty tonight at 9pm (free and open to the public). Information here.

The Invisible Dog
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Lucy Sexton on what makes a family

I Married the Gay Father of My Child
an interview with performance artist and Bessie Awards producer Lucy Sexton
by Anna Sale, Death, Sex & Money, WNYC, June 4, 2014