Artists Reach Out: Dan Safer

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

Dan Safer

Dan Safer
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Dan Safer is Artistic Director of Witness Relocation and has directed/ choreographed all of their shows, ranging from fully-scripted plays to original dance/theater pieces to many things in between. Dan choreographed and co-directed the acclaimed UBU SINGS UBU with Tony Torn (Abrons, Slipper Room, American Rep, BB King's, Highline Ballroom). His work as a choreographer has been at BAM, DTW, Danspace Project, Ash Lawn Opera, and many other places. In 2011, he choreographed Stravinsky's RITE OF SPRING for Philadelphia Orchestra with Obie-winners Ridge Theater. Artforum Magazine called him "pure expressionistic danger" and Time Out NY called him "a purveyor of lo-fi mayhem." Currently, he is faculty at MIT. He got kicked out of high school for a year, used to be a go-go dancer, and once choreographed the Queen of Thailand’s Birthday Party.

Dan Safer (front) with Ae Andreas
in the duet, Surveys The Prairie of Your Room
(photo: Maria Baranova)

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

I had JUST started work with the amazing composer Christian Frederickson. We had no timeline but were planning on meeting once a week and improvising together to see what would happen. We had one meeting.

I have a show I'm making with my amazing friend and collaborator Robert M. Johanson (who I made The Loon with). We workshopped it at MIT last fall. It's like a nine-person play with dances that takes place in a split-level ranch house based on designer Sarah Brown’s childhood home. The audience is just in this house with the performers; there’s no official ’seating.' It has original music by Sxip Shirey and videos by Josh Higgason. Abby Marcus from Vampire Cowboys is our producer.

We were up for a few residencies to develop the next round of it, all of which have been cancelled. It's about bears and homes and your life falling apart and experiences doing Toad Venom as intensive psychedelic therapy.

I teach a full load of classes at MIT. I'm basically the entire Dance Department. I'm in the Theater Arts program, the only person teaching dance classes. This semester I'm suddenly remotely-teaching Choreography, Improvisation, and an Intro to Acting Class.

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

I got into dance going to Punk shows and slamming around in the pit, but when I was very young, I used to make my parents and their friends watch my ‘shows’ which involved me putting on a suit and thrashing around on the floor to a Bee Gees album. I think very little has actually changed.

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

I'm staying sane by doing yoga every day, but that's been the deal for a few years now.

The last piece I made for Witness Relo was a duet, Surveys The Prairie of Your Room, with Ae Andreas and music by Heather Christian. I had no idea how to make a full length duet, or how to be in the whole piece from start to finish as a performer, so I made that show to see if it was possible for me to do so, and to try doing a thing I had no idea how to do. Now I’d like to make a solo, because i have NO IDEA how to do that. This seems like the world has conspired to set me up to do that.
I'm also filing yoga classes and putting them online for people to do if they want, as a way of getting moving and taking care of themselves in isolation/stay-in-place-ing. I'm trying to think of how to put ‘good,' whatever that is, out into the world right now.

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

A while ago, I changed my official ‘mission statement’--you know, the thing on the website and that you need to put down on grant applications--to something about “combining dance and theater to make shows about the fact that, when it comes down to it, you just don’t need to be an asshole." That's basically how I feel.

I've been dealing pretty intensely the past few years with being in recovery (alcoholic, etc.), and my life as I knew it kind of falling apart and re-assembling itself. I feel like I'm still the same person, but a LOT has changed and I approach other people and reality in general from a very different place now, and I think my work and practice have begun to reflect that.

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

That's what we’re all figuring out, isn’t it? I think there is something about the fact that everyone is getting through self-quarantine by watching movies and reading, which means the arts are actually really important to our lives. I'm trying to figure out how I teach and make work for this new reality and am considering the fact that this might be a regularly-occurring thing in the future, and how do you teach Contact Improvisation to isolated people via Zoom, or ensemble work, or any of the things I really love doing. I'm getting a website together of free resources for people to share, of idea and techniques and warm-ups and etc., so that's one way I'm trying to contribute and help.

Besides that, I'm just gonna plug away and try to make a solo, and see what happens and how it can get delivered. I'm not very satisfied with the experience of Video Conference Performance yet, but it is VERY early days on that stuff. I don’t know. I really want to be in a room full of people, to be honest, and I’m keeping it together and holding it down, but I’m also pretty fucking sad sometimes. I'm also super-lucky to have food and shelter, and I actually still have a job right now thanks to my teaching practice, so that's super-lucky.

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

Produce seems to be available. Eat lots of greens. Exercise. A friend of mine is trying out blowing a hair dryer up her nose, and my mother told me to gargle with hydrogen peroxide solution because a friend of hers from Trenton told her it would help.

******

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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BAM Next Wave presents "Haruki Murakami's Sleep"

from Haruki Murakami's Sleep
(photos: Julia Cervantes)

If you did not sleep for seventeen nights, wouldn't you be terrified? Jiehae Park doesn't look a bit frightened, though, when we first find the actress portraying "Woman," a Japanese housewife and mother, in Haruki Murakami's Sleep, presented by BAM Next Wave.

She's calmly, evenly performing a dry ritual--logical gestures and motions of everyday life in the everyday world, hands purposeful, smooth and deft. Where are the items her hands would actually touch and handle? From our point of entry and view, they are invisible. The box that houses her--taking up not quite all the width of BAM Fisher's Fishman Space--is open to the front and contains only a few, simple, representative things. A chair, a standing lamp. Normal enough. Normal enough...to be suspect.

With the audience fully assembled and houselights lowered, Park begins to address her sleeplessness and its cause. But, under a cool wash of light, her affect hints at fiery excitement. Her face betrays it; her speech races. What might be a source of legitimate concern for any one of us has become, for her, a portal to freedom. She relishes it.

Rachel Dickstein shares directing and choreographic credit with her Brooklyn-based Ripe Time troupe. With a luscious live soundscape by NewBorn Trio and an adaptation by playwright Naomi Iizuka of Murakami's short story, "Sleep," the production draws our eyes and ears into an internal world splintered and continuously shuffled like a deck of cards.

A husband slips into and out of the box--a dentist, nothing more down to earth than that--but he is clearly archetypal "Husband" as he exists inside "Woman's" head. And that head can produce more apparitions through the visual magic wrought by Dickstein's design team and the troupe's physical theater strategies. There are clever projections and material embodiments of "Child," "Shadow," "Anna Karenina"--a character lifted from Woman's daily reading--and other beings and other selves. And a floor board that can detach to become a table. And a table, tilted onto one edge, that still functions as a table you might sit to and gaze across because you see what you choose to believe.

She was not herself.

But no one has to know.

Woman awoke, one day, with one foot still anchored in a dream and chose this situation as a way to survive. An alluring time out of time for Woman becomes one for us as well.

Set design: Susan Zeeman Rogers
Projections design: Hannah Wasileski
Lighting design: Jiyoun Chang
Sound design: Matt Stine
Costume design: Ilona Somogyi

Haruki Murakami's Sleep continues tonight through Saturday, December 2 with evening performances at 7:30pm and an additional 2:30 matinee on Saturday. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Witness Relocation answers the call of "The Loon"

L-r: Eva Jaunzemis, Robert M. Johanson and Dan Safer in The Loon,
a world premiere by Safer's Witness Relocation
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Early into The Loon--Witness Relocation's new show at Abrons Arts Center--I surrendered. I knew I had no way to keep pace as its writer/monologist, Robert M. Johanson, raced through a discourse on time, on muon particles and on chaos and its possible comforts. His outpouring of words threw out a tensile, almost visible barrier between the audience and Dan Safer's dance ensemble despite the close quarters of Abrons's Experimental Theater. Safer and chorus hit back with robust gesture, churning bustle, smoldering glamour with an aura of danger; Kaz PS hit back with a barrage of projected imagery, dazzling and ambiguous. But Johanson remained a gravitational force to be reckoned with.

"How do you feel when he moon is full? Do you find yourself having strange thoughts?" he asks.

Described as "a knock-down-drag-out, dance/theater show based on 1. an educational record about loons; 2 sociologist Erving Goffman; 3. the western house; 4. late night parties that last until the next morning," The Loon is 60 minutes of overload punctuated with hostility, distraction, drunken wrenching about and tender slow-dancing to a song about sex and death. During that hour, you learn stuff--like how surprisingly easy it is for your mind to cough up two handfuls of small memories, or what are four types of cries a loon makes and the purpose of each. It is full-moon strange, indeed, a seductive collage with vibrant performances from Alexa Andreas, Kelly Bartnik, Sunny Hitt, Annie Hoeg, Eva Jaunzemis, Johanson, Vanessa Koppel, Trevor Salter and Safer.

The Loon continues through October 29. For schedule and ticketing information, click here.

Abrons Arts Center (Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Satter's Half Straddle rocks out at New York Live Arts

Playwright/director Tina Satter
of Half Straddle

The lights go down at New York Live Arts, and a big WHOOP goes up from the audience.

Yeah, it's not a dance show.

It's Ghost Rings, the latest theater piece from Tina Satter's Obie-winning Half Straddle troupe, and her fans are pumped.

Commissioned by NYLA, Ghost Rings takes the form of a pop rock concert featuring a made-up band credible enough to be a real band. Performers include actor/singers Erin Markey (deep into her being and as compelling as ever) and Kristen Sieh; keyboardist/backup singer Chris Giarmo; and Satter, herself, narrating, singing and drumming. (Satter learned to drum to perform in this piece.) Markey and Giarmo share credit for composing the music. Half the time, I had no idea what anybody was singing about--my hastily-scrawled lyrics notes might only confuse you--but they sounded fantastic, funky and passionate, and that's all that mattered to me. Rock on!

Driven by music and movement, the piece looks back on Satter's childhood closeness with her sister (now estranged) and their fantasies of having a band. For some reason, there are two animal spirit guides in the mix--adorable seal and deer puppets manipulated and voiced by the lead singers. These charming creatures appear to shyly dip into risky territory best friends Samantha (Markey) and Shawna (Sieh) otherwise avoid. The force of the music and vocals and the sweetness of the interactions with the deer and "Sealy" give Ghost Rings a heartfelt impact.

Ghost Rings continues through Sunday, April 24 and returns April 26-30 with all performances at 7:30pm. On April 28, there will be a Stay-Late Discussion moderated by Kate Valk. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Circus at APAP: Acrobatic Conundrum (Seattle), Company Oktobre (Paris)

Dance, theater, performance folks, scoot over a bit, won't you? Circus has arrived, taking its place among the city's vast APAP-related offerings. The mission? To make visionary, contemporary circus as thriving an artform in the US as it is abroad. For the second year, Circus Now--the community's support and advocacy organization--has partnered with NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The festival features six troupes and runs for three nights.

Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Exposure 2016 opened last evening at Skirball with performances by Acrobatic Conundrum, a Seattle ensemble founded in 2012, and Company Oktobre, an accomplished trio of Parisian performers. Essentially two shows in one, the program ran over two hours. If you're going to program like that, I question the need to have festival MC Sxip Shirey--a musician and veteran of circus--consume time delivering two circus-boosting intros, each with its musical performance. One wild-haired man, his toys and his electronics can sound like a party in full throwdown, but a little of this goes a long way. Next time: One and done.

Acrobatic Conundrum's piece, The Language of Chance, frustrated me. The clear talents of the company--most notably, amiable and multi-skilled Ty Vennewitz--were not matched by signs that anyone grasped the potential dynamism of activating the entire stage space, not just filling it with decor, and the importance of pacing and smooth transitions. Performers often simply crouched or lurked within the set like deadweight while one or another person performed in the center. Contemporary circus can offer a more holistic, integrated stage with people and things cleverly interconnected and interacting. Done right, that makes for truly magical, unforgettable experiences in the theater. Acrobatic Conundrum has produced five shows and made it to this prestigious festival but, by evidence of The Language of Chance, it needs to step up its game.

After Acrobatic Conundrum, intermission, and Shirey Part II, I would have liked to come to Company Oktobre with something approaching freshness of eye and ear.  But that was not to be, which I regret because the sophisticated Oktobre--created by its performers, Eva Ordonez-Benedetto, Jonathan Frau and Yann Frisch and director Florent Bergal--deserves better attention. When you're presenting farce, your technique and timing must be razor-sharp. You have to quickly get your audience invested in your people--total strangers, usually--with their weird and tickling idiosyncrasies, their little sleight of hand tricks and struggles with props. In the case of Oktobre, you're asking watchers to toggle between baffling behavior and English supertitles that only deepen the absurdity. In all things, Company Oktobre is completely on point, and I look forward to any chance to see them again.

Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Exposure 2016 continues tonight and concludes tomorrow night. Here's the lineup:

FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 8pm

Water on Mars (Sweden)
Andréane Leclerc/Nadère arts vivants (Canada) — Whore of Babylon
Barely Methodical Troupe (England) — Bromance

SATURDAY, JANUARY 16

Aloft (US) — Dinner of our Discontent
Water on Mars (Sweden)
Barely Methodical Troupe (England) — Bromance

For complete festival information and tickets, click here.

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts 
566 LaGuardia Place (south of Washington Square Park), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Your next must-see: Khadijah Queen's "Non-Sequitur"

Congratulations to Khadijah Queen, winner of the 2014-15 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers! Her play, Non- Sequitur, is a delight, and I can see why it won the judges' unanimous approval.

Presented by THE RELATIONSHIP at TheaterLab, now through December 20, and directed by Fiona Templeton, Non-Sequitur unfolds in the compressed, narrow confines of a tiny runway of sorts flanked by audience seating. Over just one hour, the play introduces a cavalcade of characters, each with "voices on multiple registers: the voices in our heads, under our breaths, on our voicemail, hard to have to listen to, hilarious voices, blurted voices, bodily voices." Oh, yes, depictions of such anthropological acuity--each one perfectly captured as if within a flash of lightning--such absurdity and such glee, scarcely leaving us time to breathe, that the nonstop shocks can keep a silly grin plastered on you face from start to finish.

For my dance folks out there, just go see this thing. The well-chosen cast includes a few dancers you know and love who prove to be wonderful actors. Of course! But they would be an asset to Queen's play anyway. The heightened physicality of the characters is as eloquent, stunning and giggle-producing a factor in this work's effectiveness as are the words.

With performances by Lenora Champagne, Stacey Karen Robinson, Helga Davis, Dawn Akemi Saito, Yon Tande, Zselyke Tarnai and David Thomson.

Non-Sequitur continues through December 20. For complete schedule and ticketing information, click here.

Click here to learn more about the late Leslie Scalapino and here to read more about the biennial award named in her honor.  Non-Sequitur, the book, is available here.

Theaterlab
357 West 36th Street, 3rd Floor (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

BAM Next Wave presents NYC premiere of "The Exalted"

Carl Hancock Rux (l) and Theo Beckmann
in costume for The Exalted
(photo: John Labbe)

I might have drawn closer to The Exalted--or, at least, felt a better grasp of its purpose--had writer/teller Carl Hancock Rux delivered his words with a consistent clarity to match their earnestness. I found myself often straining to follow text stuffed with historical and biographical data, distracted from other elements of the collaborative piece--strangely enough, Onome Ekeh's trippy and quite showy video. I started off wishing that Rux could speak without being hemmed in by music but quickly realized that the problem was not the impingement by Theo Bleckmann's sound design but Rux's vocal and narrative cloudiness. Bleckmann's ethereal melodies and supple voice, in fact, handsomely served this multimedia fantasy throughout its hour.

Bleckmann, as performer, contributes an understated elegance, wafting in and out of Rux's awareness like a shade. He portrays the influential German-Jewish art historian and critic Carl Einstein, noted for his scholarship on African sculpture and Cubism, leftist ideology and engagement in the Spanish Civil War. Trapped in Nazi-occupied France in 1940, Einstein committed suicide. Rux's interest in the writer appears to have roots in his own history--an adoptive father who served in World War II, a revelation, through genealogical research, of a link to Germany, and perhaps more.

Under the direction of SITI Company's Anne Bogart, The Exalted gracefully incorporates physical theater--characteristic movement and articulate gestures through which the men initiate a playful understanding of each other. But in a telling scene, Rux stands stock still, mid-space, warily gazing at Bleckmann as he skirts around him, lecturing on how Europeans devalue African art. In this encounter--and, perhaps, in this work--so much remains to be unpacked and examined.

With lighting by Brian H Scott and scenic and costume design by Maureen Freedman

The Exalted continues its run tonight through October 31 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Rage against the machine: James Thierrée at BAM Next Wave

James Thierrée in Tabac Rouge
(photo: Jack Vartoogian)

James Thierrée with Valérie Doucet
(photo: Jack Vartoogian)

What technical glitch kept a big, well-behaved audience standing for 45 minutes in the lobby of BAM Gilman for last night's performance of Tabac Rouge before ticket-takers finally opened the doors?

Here's my guess: James Thierrée's set. Specifically, the massive, mobile wall--old, discolored mirror panels on one side; dark, formidable lattice of pipes on the other.

This cleverly adaptable sculpture maintains such a crucial, active, nearly living presence throughout the 90-minute piece that you might argue for its status as lead dancer and star. And it has all the makings of a diva that you wouldn't want to cross, with capacity to maim its human co-stars--Thierrée and several members of his Compagnie du Hanneton--in any number of ways as they touch it, move it or scramble over it.

Did its lifting mechanism seize up? Or did it bop someone in the head? Mash a foot? Slice a hand?

Certainly, this structure sets the work's dystopian mood right off. The curtain rises on the wall, pipes-side forward, confronting the audience from the edge of a murky, smoke-filled stage. Viewers barely make out a few dancers crossing the back of the stage or clinging to frameworks that rise or descend. Now and then, a glow will flash from deep within the haze, like distant lightning. Fluorescent bulbs fire, here and there, but you quickly sense that any meaningful illumination (of the literal or metaphoric kind) will be hard-won.

Matina Kokolaki and other cast members in Tabac Rouge
(photo: Jack Vartoogian)

Thierrée, a performer of exquisite physical skill, hails from a storied lineage: child of circus innovators Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thierrée; grandson of Charlie Chaplin; great-grandson of Eugene O’Neill. His previous confections have drawn from the worlds of mime, dance, physical theater and circus, but he considers this steampunk fantasy, Tabac Rouge, to be more in the realm of dance or dance-theater.

Whether bodies are swirling in smooth, circular patterns, hurling themselves with desperate, revolutionary fervor or twisting into showy contortions, the dancey-ness of Tabac Rouge seems pitched to fill space and time and the hunger for entertainment. The second-night audience--perhaps overeager after such a long wait to claim their seats--seemed to crave little things to chuckle at; their choices left me deeply uncertain.

Elements of dance, mime and circus seem stuffed into a container that, in itself, has no clearly thought-out identity. In place of a developed story, there appears to be a situation--Thierrée portraying, maybe, hallucinating, an ash-coated despot whose court includes a military man, a woman who might be a daughter and another who might be a lover, presumably survivors of an unspecified disaster. Things look not only grimy but grim despite dancing and clowning. The balance of power keeps shifting, sort of the way Thierrée's angular balances shift--continually, weirdly, improbably--when he dances.

It's material for a drama--in this rendering, only material. The piece lives, instead, in its central visual element, making Tabac Rouge most convincing and satisfying as art installation. I consider the wall's final, dazzling moments to be my reward for enduring that wait in the lobby.

With performances by Thierrée, Mehdi Baki, Valérie Doucet, Magnus Jakobsson, Namkyung Kim, Matina Kokolaki, Thi Mai Nguyen, Ioulia Plotnikova and Soa Ratsifandrihana

Direction, set design, and choreography: James Thierrée
Costumes: Victoria Thierrée
Sound design: Thomas Delot
Lighting: Bastien Courthieu

Tabac Rouge runs through Sunday, October 4.  For schedule and ticket information, click here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

"Daily Life Everlasting": For weekend fun, relocate to La MaMa

Vanessa Koppel in Daily Life Everlasting
 (photo: Kaz PS)

Easter season finds a trio of bunny-costumed people bopping around La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre in a set that looks like someone's poorly-furnished studio apartment. It's never clear why, but don't mind that. After all, it's Witness Relocation. Just follow those bunnies down the rabbit hole of Daily Life Everlasting, the latest collide-oscopic collaboration of writer Charles L. Mee and director-choreographer Dan Safer.

Although one seeker of meaning will mouth the words "Things can't just happen for no reason at all," don't believe it for one minute. With Mee and Safer, things happen for no reason at all all the time to delirious, sometimes delicious, effect. Daily Life Everlasting sends love and sex and Mee's verbal exuberance through Safer's trusty blender along with the usual helping of quirky gestural movements, all-out ensemble dance numbers, video hallucinations, and other playful distractions. There's action front, back and at the sides, there's same-sex canoodling, and there's singing. If divided attention (or strobe-lit orgies) stress you out, don't go.

Performed by Alexa Andreas, Aziza Barnes, Nikki Calonge, Philip Gates, Tori Khalil, Vanessa Koppel, Mike Mikos, Dan Safer and Chinaza Uche

Original songs: Heather Christian
Video and projections: Kaz PS
Set: Jay Ryan with Andrew Bordwin
Lighting: Jay Ryan
Sound: Michael DeAngelis
Costume: Brad Callahan

Daily Life Everlasting continues through April 19: Thursday through Saturday performances at 8pm; Sundays at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Nature Theater of Oklahoma crosses the line

Once again, French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) tempts us to cross boundaries of geography, genre and imagination with its eighth edition of Crossing the Line festival (now through October 20). I will share my thoughts on a few CTL events in coming weeks.

Last night, I attended FIAF's New York premiere of The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma is Calling You!, a documentary by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, founders and co-directors of the OBIE Award-winning Nature Theater of Oklahoma. (The name, if you're wondering, derives from Kafka; this New York-based performance troupe is about as Oklahoman as I am.) The reaction I posted on Facebook, earlier today, says it all: "Endearing and alarming: THEATER!"

Running at 127 minutes, the diary-like film traces events before and during a 2013 residency in Berlin, a demanding time for the anxious Copper and for Liska, a charismatic Slovak complete with bald head and natty handlebar mustache. Liska wrestles with urges to be creatively out of control and in charge at all times. The couple's personal relationship and their confidence as artists are taxed by the considerable stress of overwork, tension and insecurity wrought by their project's complexity.

We witness the heady playfulness and the nearly impossible intricacy of NTO's group process, so much hard, ceaseless labor for productions that seem so slippery of form, swimming between the familiar and the unknown, buoyed by droll humor. A visual knockout with unrestrained, cheerful light and color, the film can also plunge its unsuspecting viewers through emotionally cloudy and dark places.

Oddly enough, The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma is Calling You! made me think back to a Hollywood film I'd just caught up with--George Clooney's World War II drama, The Monuments Men, a diverting, if slapdash, throwback. That film stepped all over its opportunity to make, for our blasé nation, a solid and still necessary case that art is worth sacrificing and maybe even dying for. But I thought of that argument as I watched the NTO collaborators labor and Liska struggle to the point of near breakdown. Maybe not so much why this particular strain of hipster art might matter to society at large but why it matters, greatly, to the artist's soul.

For information on Crossing the Line 2014 programs and venues, click here.

"Trade Practices" on Governors Island: "Dude, money is crazy!"

Scenes from HERE's Trade Practices
Above, l-r: Daphne Gaines, Mary Rasmussen, Peter McCabe
Below, l-r: Mike Iveson, Jr., Peter McCabe, Dax Valdes
(photos by Carl Skutsch)

A theme as weighty as the financial collapse of 2008, the hand basket we found ourselves in, and what money means in American society might take a project as big, as intricately textured and as labored upon--by a list of collaborators as long as my two arms and two legs spliced end to end--as Trade Practices, created by HERE artistic director Kristin Marting and David Evans Morris. A two-hour event directed by Marting and set in Governors Island's Pershing Hall, the site-specific, multimedia, physical theater performance is audience-immersive and interactive to the max, a game of "high-stakes" investor role-playing on our part as we move among rooms and storylines. It also has song-and-dance numbers, undercurrents of soap opera and even a bloodcurdling touch of the supernatural.

Clearly the entire creative team had a blast growing the witty, rousing Trade Practices and making the ten actors work their sweaty butts off--most notably, Daniel Kublick who, with all his physical might, gamely throws himself into his role as a roguish factory foreman. Tip: If you go, you'll sweat, too. This year for sure, Labor Day doesn't really mean the end of summer, and few of these Pershing Hall rooms have A/C.

Above and below: details from Works Progress Administration military history murals
inside Pershing Hall, Governors Island's former Administration building
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Trade Practices--written by Erin Courtney, Eisa Davis, Robert Lyons, Qui Nguyen, KJ Sanchez and Chris Wells--introduces us to the fictional Tender family and employees of Tender, Inc., proud paper manufacturers who go back centuries in New England and US history. Tender's CEO, played by the versatile Peter McCabe, would like to keep some of that New England history (and all of the corporation's current troubles) under wraps. Audience members get to trade shares in Tender, Inc. and witness the secret damage and debris from extremely close vantage points. Cast members' performances, and your own, can be fun even if this sort of thing--high finance, corporate intrigue--is so not your thing. Each viewer's experience will differ according to the storylines followed; if you find yourself disengaged, as I did at one point, you'll have a few opportunities to trade your shares for something potentially more promising.

L-r: Daniel Kublick, Dax Valdes and Mariana Newhard
(photo by Carl Skutsch)

Trade Practices runs through September 21 with performances by Jenniffer Diaz, Daphne Gaines, Megan Hill, Brooke Ishibashi, Mike Iveson, Jr., Daniel Kublick, Peter McCabe, Mariana Newhard, Mary Rasmussen and Dax Valdes. Click here for full details, including performance schedules, ticketing and Governors Island ferry departures from Manhattan and Brooklyn. Enjoy Governors Island.

FringeNYC benefits: "Cortez"

Heather Holmes
in Milkwood Theater's Cortez
(photo: Cortney van Jahnke)

Cortez

Presented by Milkwood Theater

Written by Judith Goudsmit

Directed by David Riley

I'll be upfront about it: A large part of the reason I chose Milkwood Theater's Cortez out of numerous Fringe fest offerings was a photo (seen above) that showed a woman of color (Heather Holmes) in what would appear to be a significant role as a marine biologist. Of course, I hoped I'd also take interest in the rest of Judith Goudsmit's characters, played by David Riley, who also directs, Cory Lawson and Peter Waluk--three white male actors. Kudos to Milkwood for casting Holmes for a (sort of, really, really sort of) romantic role unspecified by race. But, sorry to say, I ended up not caring, one way or another, about anyone here. 

At the center of this hour-long physical theater piece about scientists Mike (Riley) and Heather (Holmes) and their research expedition to the Sea of Cortez is a deteriorating relationship. Since we do not get to see this couple at its best, we build no investment in their lives, together or apart, and it's irritating, and more than a little confusing, to witness how their personal failure impacts the innocents they're studying--the poor, nearly-extinct tomatians. 

What? You've never heard of tomatians? Think squishy, tomato-red ball with little knobby protrusions all over it. Tomatians are losing their ability to reproduce. (Shhhh! They don't really exist at all. But you'll end up giving more of a damn about them than about....)

All of this floats in the dreamy absurdity of some well-done movement-oriented segments and gestural characterizations (the physical in "physical theater") as well as Matthew Keff's fanciful, ghostly-white projections--a drifting full moon, a boat's revolving steering wheel, slowly-twirling candelabra, marine creatures flashing through the sea's inky darkness. There's charm and diversion in these aspects of Cortez.

The show opens with Riley giving a glitchy, harried presentation for the fictitious Monterey Research Institute, his funding source. He starts off by suggesting a better name for Planet Earth--Planet Water--since our planet has far more of that element. After watching the behavior of humans in Cortez, I'd have to agree. Yes, let's focus on the sea creatures.

Remaining shows:

Thursday, August 21, 2pm

Saturday, August 23, 8pm

Buy tickets for this and other FringeNYC shows.

Theater at the 14th Street Y

344 East 14th Street (at 1st Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

For all things FringeNYC, click below.

New York International Fringe Festival

Go see "Ubu Sings Ubu" at Abrons Arts Center

Take one part Ubu Roi--translated from the satirist Alfred Jarry's French by good ol' reliable Google--and one part Pere Ubu song list. Mash that up with some dance moves and puppetry for extra flava and feed it to the hungry souls of Tony Torn (Pa Ubu) and Julie Atlas Muz (Ma Ubu) with the hallucinogenic notions of Kaz Phillips Safer (video) and Jay Ryan (lighting), and you'll get the psychotropic elixir that is Ubu Sings Ubu, now at Abrons Arts Center.

Co-directed by Torn (who adapted the work) and Witness Relocation's Dan Safer (who choreographed), the boisterous, electrifying Ubu Sings Ubu can't stay in its place. It continuously sloshes and spills past the performance area the way a storm-driven ocean barrels into a low-lying village. I like the radiant actor Torn very, very, very much--but at a distance where his mercurial performance dazzles. Pa Ubu up in the face? Not so much. A stupid man, mad for power and free of conscience, Ubu's an explosion waiting to happen, a walking id and nightmare from the heart of darkness. (In other words, stay away!) For her part, Muz's bawdy and scheming Ma Ubu might climb onto you and lock her legs and naked nether parts around your neck.

The Underground Theater at Abrons doesn't allow much wiggle room, either. It's tiny, and you'll probably find yourself packed in with a mess of folks trying to catch the final shows. Ubu sings (and plays) LOUD. Stay well away from the speakers.

You did say you relish immersive theater, right? Just checking.

Sets and costumes by Deb O; a truly amazing animal cape by Ben Rosenberg; and sound design and musical direction by Vera Beren; musicians Beren, Emmitt Joe George, Matt Butterfield and Patrick "Paddymyke" Conlon

Ubu Sings Ubu runs through April 26. Wednesday-Saturday, 8pm with late shows on April 25 and April 26 at 11pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Life on the Fringe: "Inexcusable Fantasies" [UPDATE}

Susan McCully

The New York International Fringe Festival

(now through August 25)

Say, do you know where you're going to be this Saturday afternoon? Specifically at 4:45pm? (Or, as I just learned, tonight at 7:30!) Well, I do.

You'll be in the East Village, at The Theater at the 14th Street Y, seeing Inexcusable Fantasies, a two-woman play written by Susan McCully and performed by McCully with Rachel Hirshorn. Inexcusable Fantasies takes up musings and memories from the perspective of an aging lesbian--one with humble charm, wired nerves and uproarious humor to burn--in a complicated relationship with her own fluctuating libido. Over seventy minutes, the tale spans several scenes, including one with a couple of rival job seekers nearly coming to blows over one's driving lust for Martha Stewart, the media empress painstakingly analyzed and finally deemed "just the perfect erotic blend of butch/femme in motion." Both actresses are gifted with deft physical and verbal adaptability--McCully, enormously so. Her total embodiment of a biker dyke trying to flex her powers of seduction is simply perfection.

This is one Fringe show that makes and keeps its promise, and I predict you're going to have fun.

You're welcome.

Director: Eve Muson

Last chance: See it Saturday, August 24 at 4:45pm. Get tickets!

WAIT, WAIT! There's a show tonight at 7:30, too!!!!

Theater at 14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues, close to 1st), Manhattan
Entrance at the big orange banner (directions)

For complete information on the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival, click here.

Life on the Fringe: "Pussy"

Maura Halloran in Pussy
(photo by Claire Rice)

The New York International Fringe Festival

(now through August 25)

Predictable double entendres abound in Pussy, a one-woman show on the ups and mostly downs of a bi-cultural lesbian affair, written and performed by Canadian-born, San Francisco-based actress Maura Halloran. Just short of an hour, the work leans heavily on character sketches and physical theater techniques, especially in the form of clever mimicking of feline behavior. Yes, an especially nosy cat--who stages one hilarious and pivotal intervention late in the story--is one of four characters the lithe and sly Halloran portrays. She also impersonates a sweet, vulnerable Canadian woman, her snobby, exploitative English lover and their watchful Russian landlady. Halloran's often uncomfortably sharp talent for the subtleties of psychic shifts and facial expressions are the main reasons to catch this otherwise modest production.






Pussy

Director: Claire Rice
Movement Director: Julianne Fawsitt

Upcoming performances:

Thursday, August 15 at 8:15pm
Sunday, August 18 at 3:30pm
Wednesday, August 21 at 2pm
Thursday, August 22 at 9:30pm

The Steve & Marie Sgouros Theatre
115 MacDougal Street (between West 3rd Street and Minetta), Manhattan
(map/directions)

For complete information on the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival, click here.

Witnesses relocated to La MaMa

Javier Perez and Saori Tsukada in Eterniday (Photo by Adele Bossard)

Let me tell you: Watching Witness Relocation theater troupe while dealing with the last but tenacious dregs of jet lag is a very weird thing. The wacky disjointedness gets even more disjointed, and if something isn't making clear sense--I don't know: something about clouds, something about love, something about traffic circles, something about Don Quixote, and I can't even read my notes at this point--well, who's fault is that? If jet lag is all the ultimate trouble of drinking without any of the fun, Witness Relocation's frothy, boisterous Eterniday--running now at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre through April 21--provides the fun part. When New Agey metaphysicians talk about how material things are, in essence, energy, they're talking about Witness Relocation, and the prevailing energies here, at La MaMa, are luminous, airily poetic, un-ironically romantic and playfully sexy.

While the usual suspects--Mike Mikos and Sean Donovan--are capable and charming beyond measure, I think you'll especially enjoy Saori Tsukada's star turn (how vibrantly she embodies the Witness Relocation dance/acting nexus) as well as the plummy intonations of Carey Harrison (son of Rex) whose larger-than-life image comes to us by way of video.

Members of Witness Relocation in Eterniday's strobe light segment (photo by Jonathan Slaff)

Written by Chuck Mee. Directed and choreographed by Dan Safer. Co-created and performed by Nikki Calonge, Sean Donovan, Vanessa Koppel, Kate Lee, Mike Mikos, Javier Perez, Saori Tsukada and Carey Harrison.

See Eterniday now through April 21. For information and tickets, click here.

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

(map/directions) 

Reboot with Witness Relocation's Summer Bootcamp

Witness Relocation's Summer Bootcamp

for pre-professional and professional artists

June 10-22, 2013

A two week intensive dance/ theater workshop conducted in a newly renovated dance studio and the surrounding environs of a 23-acre former horse farm in the picturesque northeast Catskill Mountains.

    Create dynamic, genre-defying dance and theater.
    Learn techniques that focus on what is happening in the room, building material from what is on hand and spiraling out from there into surprising and endlessly inventive territory.
    Explore task based, problem solving methods that eliminate the pressure to “be creative” and simply allow you to work and make discoveries.
    Make sure what you do is continuously fun and exciting, as well as a little scary.
    For pre-professional and professional artists.

For complete details, including application information, click here.

Also on Facebook

All the world's a Stage Stage Stage Stage

Cast of Beginning of The End of The...: Graham, Solomons, Fire, Mattocks, Setterfield, Gordon, Cunningham, Cohn, Skeist (Photo: Andrew Eccles)

David Gordon and Valda Setterfield (Photo: Andrew Eccles)

In the playwright's head (and here that would be the head of writer/director/choreographer David Gordon as well as the head of David Gordon playing the head of Luigi Pirandello), the world is not constructed of four primal elements--air, fire, water and earth--but of four stages. And the world of David Gordon's Beginning of The End of The..., as manifest at Joyce SoHo, is composed of four stages separated by hop-able gaps and demarcated by rectangles formed by neatly-placed lines of pristine white tape. And the mutable world and mutable narratives inside each of those rectangles are made of numerous characters--each rambunctiously alive with his or her back story, resentments, desires and passionate intensity.

Gus Solomons jr and David Skeist

Based on Pirandello texts--Six Characters in Search of an Author, A Character's Tragedy and The Man With The Flower In His Mouth--Gordon's Beginning runs only 60 minutes but packs enough verbal wit, choreographic elegance, visual playfulness and emotional vitality to supply 60 other dance makers. Vividly leading Gordon's deft Pick Up Performance Co(s) troupe in this cyclical tour de force on love and mortality, on autonomy and loyalty, on art's illusion and the theatricality of reality, are Gus Solomons jr (a harried and somewhat irascible commuter), David Skeist (a fierce man wrestling, poetically, with a fierce diagnosis) and Gordon's actual leading lady and wife in real life, exquisite Valda Setterfield who, at one point, reminds us that, unlike the others, SHE wears black for DRAMATIC EFFECT! These three performances are flashes of lightning skimming over the smooth, subtle, dependable flow of colleagues Charlotte Cohn, Scott Cunningham, Norma Fire, Karen Graham and Aaron Mattocks. "What a pleasure, watching good wrappers wrap," someone says here. And I can only add, What a pleasure, watching David Gordon's players.

With lighting by Jennifer Tipton

Beginning of The End of The... runs through June 30, a happy bit of news for a dance show. So, take advantage. Get schedule and ticket information plus David Gordon's own cheeky description of the piece here.

Joyce SoHo
155 Mercer Street (between Houston and Prince Streets), Manhattan
(directions)

What’s wrong with dance?

What’s Wrong with Dance?
by ASHLEYANDERSONDANCES, loveDANCEmore, Spring 2012

you guys...

a poem for Movement Research
and Raïna von Waldenburg

you guys...

this is not an introduction this is the piece

and a perfect moment it is too

here we are
trying to be in a mystery

the main thing:
to be in the friggin' room with you guys

in the joy

in the wild wind

losing voice
mind
wing
religion
measurement
experiment
shape
senses
time

in the mystery that invites us in
and swallows us whole

you guys
everything in motion
in these days
atomizing
and available

do
do
that hoodoo
that you
do
so well

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(c)2011