Buddy Greco, 90

Buddy Greco, Singer Who Had That Swing, Dies at 90
by William Grimes, The New York Times, January 13, 2017

William Peter Blatty, 89

William Peter Blatty, Author of ‘The Exorcist,’ Dies at 89
by Paul Vitello, The New York Times, January 13, 2017

Martha Swope, 88

Martha Swope, 88, Who Etched Dance and Theater History in Photographs, Dies
by Sylviane Gold, The New York Times, January 12, 2017

APAP SEASON CHOICES: "Blind Cinema" by Britt Hatzius

Blind Cinema
(photo: Britt Hatzius)

In 'Blind Cinema' the audience sits blindfolded in a darkened cinema. Behind each row of audience members is a row of children who in hushed voices describe a film only they can see. The children watch the film for the first time, and each performance involves a new group of children all aged between eight and eleven.

--from program notes for Blind Cinema 

I'm not sure why the job had to be done by kids, but Blind Cinema--offered by the film, video, sound and performance artist Britt Hatzius in this year's COIL Festival--is certainly one of the more curious events this APAP season. Presented by PS 122 and SVA Theatre in partnership with East Village Community School (from where the youngsters hail), this forty-minute experience feels like a combination of torture, mind-altering experimentation and goofiness. Years later, you'll be able to say, "I did that," but what exactly "that" was or if it was necessary might remain open to question.

Intentionally or not, my experience of Blind Cinema began in the SVA Theatre's lobby, standing around on line forever waiting to enter the cinema as staff members wordlessly wandered back and forth, possibly counting us. From the noise of people's chattering and the extended wait, energy drained from every fiber of my being. When we were finally admitted to the hall, it was further dispiriting to be forced into the front row abutting the edge of a high platform stage. I don't know about the legroom for the rows behind us but, in the front row, our knees and feet jammed pretty close to that platform. And we had no choice. As we entered, we were ordered to fill the rows all the way across, and I had the great good luck of being one of the first folks in that front row. Add blindfolds to this look and an audio cone that must cover one of your ears, and Blind Cinema is not a good move for anyone with claustrophobia.

The cone helps you hear your assigned movie viewer/whisperer. I hope my fellow audience members found their cones helpful. My ability to hear my young attendant came and went--partly because the child wasn't always very clear-spoken; partly because when you darken a room and cover my eyes, my body gratefully cries sleep time!!! and hijacks the situation. This is actually a healthy thing though inconvenient for this particular sample of performance art.

For me, Blind Cinema was a truly surreal experience, a matter of letting go of understanding WTF was being said; why some people in distant rows, who were not children, were giggling when I could find nothing funny; what was happening on the platform stage where certain noises coming towards us suggested potential danger; and, overall, the ability to stay conscious. I don't think I actually ever fell asleep, but I did go into that liminal "tween" state. When I was most conscious and actually catching words, I was also worrying about how my neck and shoulder were scrunching up as I struggled to maintain connection to the cone. I was, simultaneously, worrying about the narrative I'd lost and getting to a place where I didn't give a damn what I heard or could not hear.

But, okay, maybe Hatzius would find every bit of that well aligned with her purpose as described on PS 122's website:

Through Blind Cinema, Britt Hatzius examines ideas around language and interpretation along with the potential for discrepancies, ruptures and (mis)communication.

Blind Cinema concludes this afternoon with a performance at 5:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Om Puri, 66

Om Puri, a Film Actor Who Rose With the Indian New Wave, Dies at 66
by Nida Najar, The New York Times, January 9, 2017

"Native American Realness": Address/redress cultural appropriation

Rosy Simas and Christopher K. Morgan
(photos: Tim Rummelhoff and Brianne Bland)

On Saturday, January 7, American Realness 2017 presented a conversation featuring Native American choreographers Rosy Simas (Seneca) and Christopher K. Morgan (Native Hawaiian) with Sara Nash, Program Director, New England Foundation for the Arts at Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room.

The afternoon session was organized by American Realness in response to concerns first raised in mid-December by Simas about the APAP-related festival's planned programming of a solo performance by Latifa Laâbissi, a French national of Moroccan lineage. (See Rosy Simas Reads Laâbissi’s "Self Portrait Camouflage", InfiniteBody, December 13, 2016.)  Sima's complaint and subsequent conversations with American Realness founder, curator and producer Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor led to an apology statement from Pryor, who had programmed the Laâbissi show in collaboration with MoMA PS1 associate curator--now Executive Artistic Director of Performance Space 122--Jenny Schlenka. Although Pryor quickly withdrew his organization's co-sponsorship of the Laâbissi event, MoMA PS1 kept the show on its APAP schedule. In the meantime, Simas and Laâbissi had an extensive conversation about the issue. 

The Native American Realness forum was convened on Saturday:

"to discuss the state of Native American performance work across the US and the epidemic of institutional negligence, insensitivity and attempted erasure of and towards Native American / Indigenous / First Nations’ values, histories and contributions to contemporary artistic practice. This conversation seeks to investigate how our dominant culture’s historical insensitivity aids in forms of cultural appropriation, Redface, and racism in artistic practice, spectatorship and presenting. Does Redface sell? Is curating Native artists seen as risky, unsellable, or uninteresting, or does this speak to institutional and societal ignorance?"

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.--co-founder, with Ricarrdo Valentine, of Brotherhood Dance!--attended this session and contributes a report.

Native American Realness

by guest contributor

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

Native American Realness was nothing short of a resistance that's been happening for over 500 hundred years. Artist Rosy Simas from Minneapolis initially sparked what's part of a larger fire as it relates to indigenous performance, life and well-being. Simas challenged the annual American Realness festival to reexamine why it would present Latifa Laâbissi's Self Portrait Camouflage, a Red Face performance, an appropriation by an artist who may or may not have done the research on indigenous performance.

Laâbissi was not there to defend her work and dialogue with Simas. Should she have been?

The conversation opened with each person stating their names and if they belonged to any indigenous nation--a traditional way of opening the space and filling it with ourselves and our ancestors. The first questions posed for the room were loaded yet poignant: What is "Red Face" and why is it problematic? Why is it programmed? We further questioned: Why does Red Face programming get funded in the United States while Native American artists do not? Boundaries were set so that Indigenous people in the room would speak first.

It should be noted that not every cultural institution would have the integrity to share their failure so publicly and be willing to host the provocateur and many others who stand in solidarity. And they did this only a month after the controversy arose. Response plus action.

Red Face is a racialized representation of Native American people similar to Black Face in America. Red Face is the impersonation of Native American people by white people of European descent, though not exclusively. People of color can also objectify their own cultures as well as others. Educational structures and cultural production sectors use this and other similar mechanisms to control the image of Native Americans. These efforts continue to write Native Americans out of their own stories, never affording space or access to funding for Native Americans to write their truths.

As the conversation progressed, further challenges emerged around intention and the research process. Who is authentic? For bodies of color, entering European performance spaces is a radical act in and of itself.

Participants questioned how context can be provided for the audience. Should it even be provided? When it comes to esthetics, what is disruptive? If the standard is European esthetics, then we must question who is radical. Someone mentioned a recent performance by Will Rawls that was sourced in Balkan dance traditions. What does "radical" mean for different cultures? In the words of Rosy Simas, "If an artist says it's radical, shouldn't we believe them?" Contextualizing performance is left up to the artist who must negotiate how much they want to let the audience in on their intended communication.

As the ninety-minute conversation ended, everyone realized that this was only a beginning to the work of excavating the dissociative culture we live in and its reluctance to process the trauma suffered by indigenous cultures. How do we heal?

Native American Realness was an opportunity for cultural workers and community members to have open dialogue about the misrepresentation and appropriation of Native culture and performance. This conversation was an example of how cultural production platforms and artists can work together to incite change, offering healing resistance with rigorous dialogue and harmonious creative space.

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Orlando Zane Hunter Jr. is a choreographer and dancer who researches, illustrates and creates from an African-American male perspective. In his work, he tackles issues resulting from a capitalistic imperialist patriarchal white supremacist system. Hunter grew up dancing hip-hop and graduated with a BFA in Dance from University of Minnesota, where he performed works by Donald Byrd, Bill T. Jones, Carl Flink, Louis Falco, Colleen Thomas, Uri Sands, Stephen Petronio and Nora Chipaumire. His solo Mutiny was selected to represent the University of Minnesota at the 2011 ACDFA gala in Madison, Wisconsin. Orlando studied LGBT activism and history in Amsterdam and Berlin. He has performed with Christal Brown/INspirit Dance Company, Contempo Physical Dance, Forces of Nature, Makeda Thomas, Threads Dance Project, TU Dance and Ananya Dance Theater, an all-women’s company where he was the first male member and toured with them to Trinidad & Tobago and Zimbabwe. Hunter is a co-founder of the collective Brother(hood) Dance!

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: Dana Michel

Dana Michel performs Mercurial George
in this year's American Realness festival.

The Black Canadian dance artist Dana Michel--who made a big splash at home and here in New York in 2014 with her solo Yellow Towel--is back with a new solo, Mercurial George, at Abrons Arts Center for American Realness.

She has described the hour-long piece as an act of “wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig” asking “What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body?” A seeming extension of Yellow Towel, with its genesis in racial stereotypes, Mercurial George implies the release of an authentic identity not imposed by others.

This is pertinent for exploration. Identity and marginal otherness--from immigration status to religion to gender--are battlegrounds with renewed real life-or-death stakes in the current moment. And Michel is a curious, fearless explorer, eccentric and mercurial indeed in her body language, fascination with the odd prop oddly used, and tendency to randomly mumble or declaim. She opens dimensions of mind and body that we usually declare unseemly and diseased and seems to say, "Look what else is here."

It's an interesting task and an interesting approach, requiring a performer who can submerge her calm, charming persona and grab hold of a viewer, no matter how resistant, for the space of an hour. Not easy. Go take a look and see what else is there.

Mercurial George
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Here's a mini-interview with Dana Michel

on the occasion of her January 2014 presentation of Yellow Towel

for American Realness.

(And here is my review of that show.)

Mercurial George will be presented again on Monday, January 9 at 4pm and Tuesday, January 10 at 7pm. Run Time: 55 minutes. For information on this and other American Realness events, now through January 12, click here.

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

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