Kate Wilhelm, 89

Kate Wilhelm, Prolific Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 89
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, March 16, 2018

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Ursula K. Le Guin, 88

Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88
by Gerald Jonas, The New York Times, January 23, 2018

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Brian Aldiss, 92

Brian Aldiss, Author of Science Fiction and Much More, Dies at 92
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, August 24, 2017

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Richard Hatch, 71

Richard Hatch, Who Starred in ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ Dies at 71
by Christopher Mele, The New York Times, February 7, 2017

Emma Tennant, 79

Emma Tennant, Who Wrote Beyond the Fringe of Realism, Dies at 79
by William Grimes, The New York Times, January 29, 2017

COIL 2016 festival: It's "DISCOTROPIC" down below

Diahann Carroll as the holographic Mermeia
from Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)
(photo from Starwarsholidayspecial.com)

Somewhere, there must be an Official Contemporary Performance Checklist that itemizes terms like "Afrofuturism" and "queer politics" and "the black female body," all of which show up in promotion surrounding niv Acosta's DISCOTROPIC (part of PS 122's COIL festival). I'm always wondering where this spaceship is headed; the answer isn't always clear. But DISCOTROPIC turns out to be a quality ride, bracing and perhaps as illuminating as any potential destination.

Running for ninety minutes, DISCOTROPIC utilizes rough basement space at Westbeth, artist housing in the West Village, including a recessed room, straight and spiral staircases and an ample platform. As architecture, DISCOTROPIC revels in the aesthetics of hide and seek, hear and strain to hear, sincerity and exhibitionism. Instrumental and electronic sound sources are tucked around the space, and bold, color-saturated video abstractions and lighting play a hallucinogenic role. Audience members stand to watch and--carefully, please--step here and there, following the actions of Acosta, Monstah Black, Justin Allen, Ashley Brockington and Dion TygaPaw.

DISCOTROPIC, we've been told, exists "between the pragmatic and the fantastical while exploring the relationship between science fiction, disco, astrophysics and the black American experience." The unseen, but presiding, archetypal figure here is the elegant Diahann Carroll. Specifically, Acosta's literature references Carroll's acting role as a sea creature in a 1978 television movie. Added to the cast after pressure to bring in a Black performer, Carroll portrayed not a flesh-and-blood woman but a sexy sea creature--and a hologram at that. Acosta sees Carroll's role as "an illusion that distills the ways in which the black female body has been consumed in mass media: as alien, bodacious, and marginalized."

That's a familiar concern in contemporary performance, and the bodies in Acosta's work, with booties frequently a'twerking at any and all angles, can be viewed in these ways, both boldly playing to and subverting exploitation.

"I exist for you. As you create me, yes, I control your reaction. I'm getting your message. Are you getting mine?" 

--Ashley Brockington in DISCOTROPIC

But I sensed something deeper going on in DISCOTROPIC that proved unique and exciting. I sensed the engineering of a durable spaceship.

My first inkling came as Monstah Black, back turned towards us, flailed his arms and slipped his sneakered feet over what appeared to be a layer of black sand in a recessed storage room. His "sand dancing," his more distinct stomp-and-drag rhythm, and a minute burst of shimmying had me thinking about vaudevillian dance acts. In a later segment, I watched the dancers form a tight, disciplined squadron in which various dancerly routines emerged, the sort of thing we used to see Black singing groups do to enhance the appeal of their acts. I thought of how some marginalized, underemployed tap dancers survived by teaching dance skills to these emerging pop and R&B artists.

Invoking We Travel the Spaceways, by future-perfect jazz priest Sun Ra, the cast's circling, metronomic, escalating vocal patterns suggest an evolution of something post-human, proto-robotic.  But not post-Black. Black survives in the rocking, the swinging and, eventually, in the excess--Acosta's beaming as joy leaps out of his vocal performance.

There's always something passed along, voice to voice, body to body. Something Black survives any alteration of form and any displacement of form, from Africa to the Americas, from the Americas to worlds beyond. Black always was and always will be.

DISCOTROPIC's remaining performances run today at 3pm and 8pm, and Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Westbeth Artist Community
55 Bethune Street (corner of Washington Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Melissa Mathison, 65

Melissa Mathison, ‘E.T.’ Screenwriter, Dies at 65
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, November 5, 2015

The maximal A.O. Movement Collective

Above, Lillie De and below, Ariel Speedwagon
in scenes from ETLE and the Anders
(photos: Alex Escalante)

You know how it is when you first open a sci-fi or fantasy novel and, right away, you're plunged into a world teeming with characters, creatures, exotic place names, complicated back stories, unfamiliar languages, ideas and values? It can be jarring, overwhelming. You need a little time to acclimate.

The ETLE Universe--a massive project shaped by feminist and queer thought, three years in the making by Sarah A.O. Rosner and her A.O. Movement Collective--reminds me of that experience. I have dipped into just one portion of it--ETLE and the Anders, a performance set in Clinton Hill's Loft 172. To use a Rosner term of choice, it is maximalist.

My best guess is that ETLE and the Anders is a schematic of what it might look like, sound like and feel like to have any number of universes rushing at you all at once. And I believe Rosner and her collaborators take this to be necessary training for a coming world that awaits our evolution--or maybe a world that's already here, waiting to be noticed.

I don't feel moved to describe most of what happens in this piece. Go have your own experience, please. But here are some things I'm still thinking about.

It would be limiting to call ETLE and the Anders a dance work, just as it would be limiting to ignore the way ETLE universality encompasses everything from dance to gaming to fashion to photography to shopping to porn. (That's right, thanks to ETLE, Rosner's bio now reads: "choreographer, pornographer, and radical arts businessman....") Nevertheless, bodies and movement carry the main charge and main interest in ETLE and the Anders--some of the most diverse, unconventional, in-your-face bodies in professional dance and some of the most prodigious energy. Rosner thrills us with the momentum and sound of these bodies rushing through air and making contact with the floor. When her dancers run the ring of their space, the breeze hitting the audience is pretty damn maximal.

They execute movements and movement patterns in a big, open way. Heroic. Also somewhat predatory. Not afraid of being large and in charge. Not afraid of the body. Not afraid of any body. They jabber and shout. They build and deconstruct imagery with a speed that will make you question whether you saw what you just saw, and they fracture your ability to attend to any one thing at any one time. Destructive of boundaries, expressive of multiplicity, they require that you release your own hold on form and focus and certainty.

The mysterious ETLE--unseen but referenced as "she" and "her," and maybe those pronouns should be capitalized--appears to be driving what will turn into sacred erotic ceremony, centered in the stately Anna Adams Stark. Coordinating Anders efficiently arranged the audience closer to peer through the transparent windows of a vinyl enclosure.

Here, performer Lillie De--who also serves as the collective's manager, we're told--guided our way. With De in the spotlight, I felt the tone shift, and a handle present itself to me. I needed a handle, a way into this work. It seemed to come in the note of irony she introduced.

But even that irony quickly fell apart. No sooner did De draw chuckles from some of us than orgasmic ecstasy buffeted and wrenched her.

Each time we hurl our bodies through space, we have shifted the universe.... Our bodies are time machines...."

Let yourself go! Let your Future Self in!

Suddenly, dancers sailed past us, naked or nearly so. Inside the clear vinyl enclosure, Ariel Speedwagon--dressed in a long, medieval tunic, arms stretched out from her sides--revolved and whirled to the martial cadence of Idgy Dean's live percussion. For a brief moment--everything ETLE flares, shimmers and becomes something else--wary dancers patrolled the enclosure, baseball bats in hand, tough attitudes in place. Baseball bats seem kind of old school for sci-fi, don't they? But the sight of them was both amusing and entirely convincing. We get the message. I have never seen a better protected ceremonial site.

ETLE and the Anders is a fascinating experience, but I won't pass judgment on it in isolation from a web of manifestations that I won't have the chance to experience. See for yourself. The ETLE Universe continues, through October 10, with three weeks of performances, parties, screenings, workshops and much more. For a schedule of ETLE and the Anders performances and a guide to the entire ETLE universe of events and resources, click here.

*****

ETLE and the Anders performers: Lillie De, Anna Adams Stark, Aya Wilson, Ariel Speedwagon, Eli Steffen and Tara Aisha Willis with Tony Carlson, massima selene desire, Benedict Nguyen, and Jax Jackson. Music by Idgy Dean. Costumes by Walter Dundervill and Jeff Poulin. Lighting by Vincent Vigilante. Video and installation by Andre Azevedo + Caitlin Rose Sweet. Set designed by Sarah A.O. Rosner and created by Abigail Lloyd

Loft 172
166 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Leonard Nimoy, 83

Leonard Nimoy, Spock of ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 83
by Virginia Heffernan, The New York Times, February 27, 2015

Thank you, Ursula K. Le Guin!

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now.... Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art--the art of words.

--Ursula K. Le Guin

Read more:

“We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom”: Ursula Le Guin and Last Night’s N.B.A.s
by Rachel Arons, The New Yorker, November 20, 2014

Frank M. Robinson, 87

Frank M. Robinson, Dies at 87; Author and Adviser to Harvey Milk
by Paul Vitello, The New York Times, July 4, 2014

H. R. Giger, 74

H. R. Giger, Swiss Artist, Dies at 74; His Vision Gave Life to ‘Alien’ Creature
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, May 13, 2014

You, too, can create a universe: Sarah A.O. Rosner's ETLE

Sarah A.O. Rosner: Creating a New Queer Universe
by Marcie Bianco, Lambda Literary, January 19, 2014

Who--or WTF--is ETLE?

I found this in my inbox today.

It's more than a little unnerving. Truthfully, I don't know what to make of it.

Maybe you do...?

Feel compelled to figure this out? Click here.

Afrofuturism: Black to the future!

[BLACK ALT] What Is Afrofuturism?
Has Janelle Monae become the poster girl to a movement that started way back with Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney and Lt. Uhura?
by Michael A. Gonzales, Ebony, October 1, 2013

See also:

Black in the future 
Announcement of Studio Museum in Harlem's Afrofuturism exhibition, The Shadows Took Shape (Nov 14, 2013 - Mar 9, 2014)
InfiniteBody, July 10, 2013

Frederik Pohl, 93

Frederik Pohl, Worldly-Wise Master of Science Fiction, Dies at 93
by Gerald Jonas, The New York Times, September 3, 2013

Black...in the future

Studio Museum in Harlem

presents

The Shadows Took Shape 

Nov 14, 2013 - Mar 9, 2014

The Shadows Took Shape is a dynamic interdisciplinary exhibition exploring contemporary art through the lens of Afrofuturist aesthetics. Coined in 1994 by writer Mark Dery in his essay “Black to the Future,” the term “Afrofuturism” refers to a creative and intellectual genre that emerged as a strategy to explore science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and pan-Africanism. With roots in the avant-garde musical stylings of sonic innovator Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914–1993), Afrofuturism has been used by artists, writers and theorists as a way to prophesize the future, redefine the present and reconceptualize the past. The Shadows Took Shape will be one of the few major museum exhibitions to explore the ways in which this form of creative expression has been adopted internationally and highlight the range of work made over the past twenty-five years.

Read more here.

Studio Museum in Harlem

144 West 125th Street (between Lenox Avenue (Malcolm X Boulevard) and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard (7th Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Writers of color in science fiction and fantasy

Beyond ‘Game of Thrones’: Exploring diversity in speculative fiction

by Mindy Farabee, Hero Complex, Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2013

Ray Bradbury, 91 [UPDATED]

Ray Bradbury, Who Made Science Fiction Respectable
by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, June 6, 2012

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) Brought Mars to Earth With a Lyrical Mastery
by Gerald Jonas, The New York Times, June 6, 2012

NEA Big Read: Meet Ray Bradbury

Sci-Fi: Write now, write future

What We Leave Out: 

The Art of Science-Fiction Writing

Monday, July 18, 7pm

at 92YTribeca Mainstage

Scientific experimentation is as much about what we choose not to study as what we do—researchers must always ignore some elements of a problem to focus on others.

Similarly, writing is a process of taking out as much as putting in, of deciding what we can include and what we must leave untouched. Writers who work with the future tend to care most about a particular aspect—about changes in technology, society or the environment.

Panelists Anna North, Carl Schoonover and Lawrence Wechsler discuss the ways writers fashion a future by whittling down an infinity of possibilities until that which most interests them remains. Join them as they shed light on the processes of writing and experimentation and how the eventual results are only part of the story.

Event Code: TS12D111

Program notes, panelist bios and tickets

92YTribeca
200 Hudson Street (south of Canal Street), Manhattan

(map and directions)