Netta Yerushalmy’s Dance Dance Demonstration, taken from stream
Netta Yerushalmy – Dance Dance Demonstration, presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts with Los Angeles Performance Practice
Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities, presented at the Wexner in 2019, was one of two or three things I still think about regularly. I’ve loved dance with the fierce ardor of a clumsy man – like watching a magic show – and a crazed metaphor addict for a couple of decades; the Wexner Center planted that seed with two shows: Savion Glover my senior year of High School and William Forsythe when I was in college.
Distant Dance Demonstration was a new work, filmed at the end of the summer in East River Park, choreographed by Netta Yerushalmy, and danced by Marc Crousillat, Stanley Gambucci, Nick Sciscione, Caitlin Scranton, Hsiao-Jou Tang, Babacar Top, and Symara Johnson. It was designed for the screen by Jeremy Jacob, with photographs by Maria Baranova, camera work by Alex Romania and Maira Duarte, and edited by Yerushalmy and Romania.
With this new piece, presented by the Wex and Los Angeles Performance Practice, Yerushalmy finds a way, with her steady crew of exquisite dancers, to not only make work in all of this but to thrive while acknowledging the hell of the pandemic and everything else going on with the world in a way that made me tear up even on a screen in my office. I can only imagine the crying I would have done if I’d been in the vicinity. It was hard not to have pangs of jealousy for the handful of assembled watchers we see in the margins.
Everything filmed from a remove kept entire bodies in focus and also nudged a reminder of the restrictions we were under – not too close, for the greater good; nevertheless, a lack, an absence. The title’s “demonstration” nodded to both the necessary and too-often-ignored-or-minimized Black Lives Matter protests and the demonstrations against the ill-advised profiteering plan to replace the beloved East River Park and its band shell for yet more ugly housing in a neighborhood so many of us loved.
The sumptuous filming uses a ‘70s-like patina of grain and discoloration and shifts from black and white to color with still photos as pop art punctuation, amplifying the drenched, saturated-in-history nature of these movements. They batter against the ugly history and dance with it, erupting with the joy of survival and connection in a way dance does better and more directly than any other form I can think of.
The framing by Yerushalmy had that deceptively easy, intoxicating manner of articulation that made interviewing her one of the great pleasures of my time writing about art. It’s an introduction that does what kept me coming back to the Wexner Center early, a handshake for challenging work that doesn’t strip away the mystery or undersell the joy and the pleasure of it.
I’m enormously thankful for the Wexner Center giving us this and profoundly regret I didn’t get to it sooner to tell more people and watch it four or five times.
Russan Troll Farm – From Upper Left, Haskell King, Ian Lassiter, Greg Keller, Danielle Slavick. Provided by TheatreWorks Hartford on their site.
Theater:Russian Troll Farm by Sarah Gancher, directed by Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson, presented by Theatreworks Hartford and TheatreSquared in association with The Civilians.
I still miss being in a theater, crammed around my fellow audience members, breathing as one, with an uncommon fire. But watching theatre artists – new jacks and veterans alike – mold today’s tools and limitations into beautiful things that feel like theater even split over different rooms.
I saw one of my favorite examples of this 2020 alchemy this weekend. Long-standing champions of the new The Civilians teamed up with Fayetteville, Arkansas’ TheatreSquared, and Connecticut’s Theatreworks Hartford for a dazzling, incendiary romp through Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm.
Subtitled “A Workplace Comedy,” the play zooms in on a St Petersburg office to follow a team of trolls sowing discontent and confusion among Americans through Twitter. Former journalist Masha (Danielle Slavick) joins the established dynamic of laser-focused Egor (Haskell King), stunted throwback Steve (Ian Lassiter), and erstwhile artist Nikolai (Greg Keller), in the shadow of the manager: Soviet throwback Ljuba (Mia Katigbak).
Gancher understands this low-level almost-tech job’s dynamics: the infighting, the jokes, the sourness, and sweetness. A vibrant scene of intense, flirtatious volleying between Slavick and Keller captures the adrenaline of being good at something, even something that feels both futile (from the inside) and evil (for those of us looking in), and Russian Troll Farm is littered with scenes this good.
Gancher and her cast understand how similar the American and Russian psyches are but filter the characters through their environment’s specifics. Lassiter – recently very good in Gold’s uneven King Lear – has a ball playing the lusty, coarse Steve, bouncing off Slavick’s Masha and King’s brilliant, understated Egor. They create a world that feels like those little rooms for those of us who’ve done call center work or similar and makes us question how much of what we did for those hours and those years was just as morally questionable.
Directors Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson found ways to impose their stellar cast on one another with trickery that doesn’t lose its amateurish afterbirth completely but uses the seams we can see to its advantage. When Katigbak, in a heartbreaking soliloquy, says, “Are you even here? You’re the relic of a dying empire, the ghost of a glorious future that never came,” it snaps into sharp focus that we’ve been seeing ghosts all this time.
Russian Troll Farm was a triumph I’ll be thinking about for a very long time.
Bill Chats: Screenshot taken from livestream
Talk: Bill Chats – The Future is Present: A Casting The Vote Project. Bill T. Jones in conversation with Charlotte Brathwaite, Janani Balasubramanian, Justin Hicks, and Sunder Ganglani.
Bill T. Jones, through his New York Live Arts in association with Bard University, hosted a delightful, recharging conversation with four of the people behind The Future Is Present, a group running workshops at the intersection of performance and collective action.
It’s invigorating watching these ideas of what an artist means or even can mean bounce between people of color who came up in wildly different scenes, at different levels of outward acclaim and success. Jones said, “When I started in the art world, they said, ‘You wanna make art, make art. You want to do politics, do politics.’ And I thought the we was political…Trying to get to a ‘we’, many artists head for the door when that happens. An artist is trying to close the gap between this internal space here and the rest of the universe, and an artist finds a language, a form that lets them do that.”
That resonated deeply with me, who grew up steeped in the kind of late modernism Jones helped define before me, but I was enraptured by the way the younger people he’s talking to centered other people in the lens of their own languages. For instance, Justin Hicks said, “Even transcribing what [young people] want changed the ‘we’. I know lots of artists who don’t trouble themselves with the questions I do,” and “The concept of potential is much more important to us than certainty.”
After Jones posted the question “What are your dreams” to the panel, Sunder Ganglani said, “It’s not easy to imagine one’s self into a world in which you want to live. We have hopes, though,” and Janani Balasubramanian riposted, “You asked that question about certainty – I don’t think this project hinges on certainty, it’s actually present with discomfort, difficulty, and experimentation which is being cleared away in our society, through science, through catastrophe, through violence. In that space of clearing is a process of collective experimentation: sometimes difficult, sometimes joyful, sometimes both. I want to get to a place where people can verb it. Can ‘future’.”
Watching this clear-eyed group articulate a future worth fighting for and creating, while acknowledging the ambiguity it comes with, gave me more hope than anything I’ve seen, read, or heard, in quite a while. As Balasubramanian said, “Future making is about speculation but also about closing that gap between what’s speculative and what’s material – if we’re demanding something of the future, we’re demanding it of the present…Young people don’t need our encouragement for world-building.”
Theater:The Self-Combustion of a 30-Something-Year-Old Chet or, Icarus Tries to Catch the Sun by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, presented by New Ohio Theatre
Oliphant uses the raw material we all know about beautiful and damned Chet Baker and gives it new, molten life with Nicholas McGovern as the seductive wreck in a tiny apartment, old film clips playing on the wall like memories written on skin.
McGovern brings this his utter, unshakable commitment in the life Baker committed himself to, his ability to see magic where it confronted him – a gorgeous reverie about Charlie Parker “rising above us on corrupted wings,” snatches of songs – and his role as a self-identified truth-teller. His Baker is deep in the throes of “poetic self-destruction,” there to “remind [the audience] what it’s like to be awake.”
Somehow, in the crucible of this Zoom so intimate it’s like we’re eavesdropping these words distill into a hard crystal as the liquid boils off and they snap with the hard, sweet rhythm they need – with invaluable assistance from Jacob Robinson’s sound design. The text grows so large and thin we can see through it to the desire behind the words we’ve all heard too many times; the desire that’s all that matters here.
In lesser hands, this raving, this disappearing-ink last testament, could have been laughable, a plywood cartoon. But here it felt like that perfect tune on the jukebox as you order that one last drink you know you shouldn’t have.
Talk:Virtual Bodies: Bill Chats – Ricardo Montez, Bill T. Jones in Conversation with Ricardo Montez, moderated by Joshua Lubin-Levy
I’ve been trying to stir in some more talks and workshops into the weekly diet of internet consumption, the same way I try to keep a rotation of weightier books and comfort food books. I struck gold this week with a conversation between the choreographer/organizer Bill T. Jones and professor/writer Ricardo Montez, sparked by Montez’s new book Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire.
Jones’ early work is inextricably tied to the vibrant early ‘80s New York downtown milieu that captivated my peer group 15-20 years later and still feels fresh, striking, and full of life. Particular attention often focuses on Jones’ collaboration with his friend, the painter Keith Haring – the famous photo of Haring painting Jones’ nude body adorns the cover of Montez’s study.
Their conversation ranged from the intersection of race with abstraction, Jones reminiscing about the small number of black artists playing at The Kitchen in that era (“George Lewis, Douglas Ewart, maybe Bebe [Miller]”), and the need for irreverence and engaging with your own time.
Jones balancing his role as an elder statesman and a survivor, a witness, always inspires. Reflecting on his transition into his current roles and what keeps him motivated, he mused, “Do you still believe in beauty, Bill?” and sang a snatch of the standard, “Have I Stayed Too Long At The Fair,” his famous collaborator/companion/muse Arnie Zane’s favorite song.
There were so many lines here that struck me like a molten nail into grey flesh. Of the iconic cover image, he said, “Do I have the guts to do anything like that anymore? Can I be generous like that?” Jones described his goal as “How can I find the fervor of my Mother’s prayers in formalism?” And the thing I’m thinking about nailing like a thesis above my writing desk, his provocation to Montez, “Artists should always be in the face of academia saying, ‘You think you can capture this butterfly?’”
John Hiatt and Lilly Hiatt, taken from the livestream and edited
Music: John and Lilly Hiatt, presented by Topeka
John Hiatt and his daughter Lilly have crafted catalogues of songs that dig as deep into the joy of connections and the reason we live as anyone else I can think of. Joy and pain aren’t discrete objects and neither are community and self for either of them. Hiatt’s career, at least since his ‘80s comeback Bring The Family is littered with gems, songs that make people want to sing (I promise, if your town has a bar with music back, someone is covering “Memphis in the Meantime” right this second).
And especially with her last two records, Lilly is keeping him on his toes. As John said in this stream, “She just writes these amazing songs that make me try to keep up.” Their easy camaraderie, affection, and respect made this livestream deeply comfortable and exciting at the same time; that layer of familial affection didn’t create tension, but it also didn’t smooth out this classic guitar-pull style show.
Songs aren’t mirrors and they aren’t autobiography but it’s hard for a fan to not read a little of that even for those of us who are text essentialists. In that spirit, the father and daughter – who have been open about their struggles – singing together on two of the finest songs ever written about recovery moved me deeply. Lilly’s “Walking Proof,” the title track of her beautiful new album, had John’s authoritative and sweet growl rise to join hers on the chorus’s plea for acceptance and connection: “I could tell you that it’s easy but that wouldn’t be the truth; If you ever need to call me, well, you know there’s walking proof.”
Later in the set, John’s anthem to those same materials of life, “Through Your Hands” shot into the stratosphere with a light injection of Lilly’s wry harmony as they danced through “And you ask, ‘What am I not doing?’ She said, ‘Your voice cannot command. In time you will move mountains. It will come through your hands.’”
They each had eight songs in the main set, with a two-song encore. John closed with the closest he’s written to a standard, “Have a Little Faith in Me,” that still jerks tears free when I’m not expecting it. With all the connotations of thirty years in our hearts and being covered by so many people, that sets a standard for the other encore.
Lilly met that energy with “Imposter,” a slow-burn highlight from her breakthrough Trinity Lane about her famous father. I loved “Imposter” before it finished the very first time I played it and I’m still beguiled by its ferocious empathy and its delicate power, its rock-solid sense of perspective even through its whip-crack shifting. It accomplishes an impressionistic, all-angles-of-a-perspective feat that makes me think of “Famous Blue Raincoat;” it’s one of the great songs of the 21st century so far.
From left: Jose James with band, Taali. Taken from the livestream and edited
Music: Jose James with Taali at Le Poisson Rouge
I’m keeping my fingers crossed for every venue I love to make it through to the end of this and watching with interest as they create alternative models to live. Without being privy to the finances of these places, I’m most heartened by the subscription efforts, treating a venue a little like public radio until we can pack in and buy beer.
The big one here is Smalls which shows up in this column regularly but with October 1st, another of my favorite venues, Le Poisson Rouge in lower Manhattan, launched LPR.tv with an exciting slate that goes a long way to capture their diverse, open-ears booking. Saturday, I caught jazz singer Jose James (who also had Harlem Stage release the archived recording of his dazzling tribute to Billie Holliday to Youtube this week) with an opening set by Taali.
Taali’s spacious and incisive synth and vocal sculptures captivated me. She roamed from her finely wrought originals – “I’ll Meet You” haunted me with its sliding descent through the hook “I will take you home,” – to well-chosen covers. The latter included a lovely Regina Spektor piece, a mesmerizing version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” that sounded like melting ice slipping off scaffolding onto concrete and slipping away into fractal patterns and steam on its way to return to water, and a gorgeous multi-tracked vocal on a Jewish hymn she introduced as “The song my parents walked down the aisle to.”
James brought a crack band to that stage I love so much to celebrate a 10th anniversary reissue of his breakout sophomore record Blackmagic. “Code” featured crisp keys from Big Yuki and a burst of acidic guitar by Marcus Machado before he broke down the repeated line “Don’t forget what my name is,” with a jazz singer’s improvisational excitement, a slam poet’s sense of digging up everything a word means through repetition and a DJ’s Burroughs cut-up sense of rhythmic possibility. The rest of the record got the same careful treatment, slow-burn ballads and dancefloor smashes and intriguing riddles.
Selection of Screenshots from the August Bang on a Can Marathon
Music: Bang on a Can Marathon
Bang on a Can’s founding composers (Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Michael Gordon) have put on a marathon of new work since the mid ‘80s and the current climate changed the marathon’s form but didn’t diminish any of its vital joy, intensity or defiance.
This, the third version I think, was as full of magic as anything I’ve been lucky enough to see since we’ve been shut inside. Highlights included Olivia de Prato’s dark and holy read of Missy Mazzoli’s Vespers for Violin, singer-cellist Layla McCalla’s songs inspired by Langston Hughes, Ken Thompson’s fiery world premiere of Nicole Mitchell’s A Much-Deserved Ass Whooping, and Jodie Landau’s beguiling version of Jacob Cooper’s Expiation.
Patterson Hood, screenshot of livestream
Music: Patterson Hood
I think I first heard of the Drive-By Truckers when I was in college through the one-two punch of No Depression magazine and niche CD site Miles of Music (also where I got my first Marah records), around the time of Pizza Deliverance. I first saw them around 2000-2001 when I was down for an Anime Weekend Atlanta and it stands as one of the most electrifying live shows I’ve ever seen – for years I don’t think I missed them any time they were even close to me.
My fandom for DBT has ebbed and flowed, but they won me back big in the last two records. Patterson Hood (and partner/only other constant member Mike Cooley) has not only built one of the most consistent catalogs of songs, but he’s lit an example of how to grow up in rock-and-roll. He’s stayed true to his impulses and interests, but he left room for them to expand. He’s grown into his curiosity and let his empathy grow instead of shrink. His home-recorded livestreams during this pandemic have been a balm, like hearing from an old friend reporting back.
That said, it might make me an enormous hypocrite that my favorite of these streams so far and the one that nudged me to add it here was his delve back into “The Heathen Songs.” As he and Cooley were gestating their breakthrough Southern Rock Opera, they also wrote a flood of songs for what ended up being the next two records, Decoration Day, The Dirty South, and Hood’s first widely distributed solo disc Killers and Stars.
That was my favorite period of the band, when they shrugged off some thought-it-was-a-joke-song classic college rock feint of the first two and opened up the aperture of their view of the south, and only indulged the big guitar jamming sporadically, with songs that ripped my heart out at the same time I was partying with my friends on the dancefloor.
This trip back down memory lane had a clear eye for what those songs meant to him at the time – particularly on his “divorce trilogy”: “Hell No I Ain’t Happy,” “(Something’s Got to) Give Pretty Soon,” and “Your Daddy Hates Me” – and what the songs mean now. That delicate balance between catharsis and wryness gained new, slippery facets on the driving-hot-nails elegy of “Do It Yourself,” “And some might say I should cut you slack, but you worked so hard at unhappiness. Living too hard just couldn’t kill you, so in the end you had to do it yourself.”
The long – almost two hour – set hit his winking nods on “George Jones Talkin’ Cell Phone Blues” and “Uncle Disney” and a hilarious shaggy dog story wrapped around a talking blues about an early tour involving one of the Columbus’s greatest bands and my dear friends (and, clearly, Hood’s) The Lilybandits.
Hood also put in a plug for Lilybandits singer Todd May’s current gig with Lydia Loveless and spoke with love about Wes and Jyl Freed, the recently deceased Carl Dufresne and Todd Nance, and other friends – famous and not. That love littered the set like the confetti from the war we all should be lucky enough to fight and luckier to survive.
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, from the artist’s official website
Dance/Theater:Chameleon: A Biomythography by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Kosoko was in Columbus in late 2018, touring his hypnotic epic of intimacy, Séancers, at the Wexner Center. While in Columbus, he took advantage of a Wex residency grant to help develop his new piece Chameleon. When I interviewed Kosoko for a preview of Séancers, we talked at length about Audre Lorde, a mutual inspiration of ours.
That inspiration flowers in Chameleon, subtitled a biomythography in a nod to Lorde’s Zami and delving into his ancestors, the pain and joy of his background and the vital chimerical work of making art and surviving as a queer, black man in the toxic nature of America. The power of memory, but also the vital, tragic tonic of forgetting.
Talking about his uncle, Kosoko reflects, “Once he told me, ‘The past will always leave a footprint,’…After his funeral, no one wanted to go inside; it was much easier to pretend he never happened. Although I had been the one to feed him, to clean him, to brush his hair, I was afraid. Not so much for him as I was for myself: for how fast my concerns shifted from keeping him alive to removing every infected memory of his existence. What scared me – and still does – is how successful I was. No one speaks his name: his voice, his laughter, are all questions; a black-bodied amnesia taken back by the ethers. Was he ever really here? On this earth? In that stank room? In that stank, angelic body? Was he ever here teaching me something about love?”
But the work isn’t just its lacerating words, it’s a melting, roiling collection of indelible images cracking the world open. And alongside that, Kosoko fully engaged interactivity, the internet and the moment, taking the snatched-away opportunities for this to premiere at Princeton and Tanz with a combination of Vimeo and Discord, context and community and dialogue. A masterpiece that left me looking for my throat and heart on the floor of this second-story room.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion, “The White Album”
“The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.” -Audre Lorde, “Power”
Mia Barrow in The White Album, provided by Lars Jan via the Wexner Center
The two soul-enriching elements best delivered by performance, empathy for others and the feeling of community, have never been more needed by me personally and by the world. In a year of extreme highs and fucked up lows, a year where I often didn’t know whether I was coming or going, theatre and dance were the balm they’ve always been – and more.
Having an outlet and hearing from people who were reading and listening and interested in digging deep meant more to me than I can say and I hope I did justice by what I saw. This year was the hardest in memory to whittle down a top 15 from the 60 shows I saw. There was more good work in a wider range of styles than I could take in. Mostly spread between New York and Columbus, I didn’t make it to Chicago and I couldn’t work plays into the handful of Cleveland trips. As always, everything is in Columbus unless stated otherwise. All art is provided by the artists/companies for promotional purposes, either sent to me directly or from their site.
Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and Other Works by John Bernd,conceived by Ishmael Houston-Jones and co-directed by Miguel Gutierrez and Ishmael Houston-Jones, adapting choreography and text by John Bernd. (Danspace, NYC) – This highlight of a particularly stuffed-with-joy APAP could have justified the cost of a winter NYC trip all on its own. Dance is one of the most alive, immediate artforms – we all know the body – and one of the most dazzling for its presentation of what the body can do. This work of memory, combining texts and choreography and compositions from the artists’ friend John Bernd (a tragically early AIDS casualty) reasserted how alive this work is and raged at the loss of its creator simultaneously. I wrote about it at more length here.
2. Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. by Alice Birch (Available Light) – In a year where Available Light hit it out of the park repeatedly with work no one else does better, this raw, mesmerizing Alice Birch play was first among equals. Eleni Papaleonardos’ direction balanced thoughtful abstraction with intense physicality and every performance showed me something new or painfully reminded me of something I already knew. I reviewed this for Columbus Underground.
3. Andrew Schneider, Youarenowhere (Wexner Center) – There’s a certain joy in seeing something that uses tropes you know in such a fresh way it feels completely new. This Schneider piece was a heartbreaking magic show: a virtuosic solo performance, the best science fiction grappling with alcoholism since The Man Who Fell to Earth and a chaotic jumble of the glitching, out of sync nature of the modern world glued to a beating heart. More images that haven’t left me since January than anything else I saw all year.
4. The Realistic Jones by Will Eno (CATCO) – This deceptively simple Will Eno fable about two couples named Jones was a perfect example of the beautiful, human storytelling CATCO brings to the table at its best. Bishara’s direction unwrapped this for the audience like a gift without pandering or trying to sand down the weirdness. I reviewed this for Columbus Underground.
5. The White Album by Lars Jan and Early Morning Opera, adapted from Joan Didion (Wexner Center) – A righteous performance by Mia Barrow at its core charged and illuminated this powerful adaptation of one of the finest American essays. A look at all the ways telling shapes the life and the stories grow into themselves. The accusations this wasn’t dramatized enough had some merit, but it’s probably not surprising hearing those words was as much of a shot in the arm as I needed.
6. Assassins, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by John Weidman (Short North Stage) – My favorite Sondheim on a visceral level, Assassins, received a gorgeous technicolor-nightmare production at Short North Stage featuring razor-sharp direction by Gina Hardy Minyard and a cast that’s hard to imagine being bettered. I reviewed this for Columbus Underground.
7. Pursuit of Happiness by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper (Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, Under the Radar, NYC) – Nature Theatre of Oklahoma have a knack for taking things we think we know and making sure we really see them. This look at America through the lens of the Western in collaboration with En Knap, blows up our treasured (or sneered-at) myths about America into a hilarious, grim Grand Guignol cartoon.
8. Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth (SRO Theatre); Falsettos by William Finn and James Lapine (Gallery Players) – These two shows are high water marks for the ability of the musical to shine a light on our worst, most craven tendencies and point to the hope of self-realization. Great direction – Kristoffer Green for Company and Ross Shirley for Falsettos – casts, and musical direction gave a new coat of paint on these fabulous scores and sent me out into the night thankful for my town and mulling a lot of things over. Reviewed for Columbus Underground: Company and Falsettos.
9. An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Available Light) – This Jacobs-Jenkins play was one of the most acclaimed and controversial Off-Broadway hits in recent years and the Available Light production was a marvel, directed by Matt Slaybaugh and with a for-the-ages performance by David Glover at its heart. I reviewed this for Columbus Underground.
10. [PORTO] by Kate Benson (Available Light) – Benson’s [PORTO] was a sharp and funny look at the complications and dangers of trying to live in the world, to stake out a place for yourself without treating others badly. Note-perfect direction by Eleni Papaleonardos and a phenomenal cast including standout performances by Elena Perantoni and Michelle Weiser, made this terrific play an experience that was impossible to forget. I reviewed this for Columbus Underground.
11. Breaking the Code by Hugh Whitemore (CATCO and Evolution Theatre Company) – These CATCO and Evolution collaborations always bear fruit and this gripping take on Whitemore’s classic dissection of Alan Turing, directed by Joe Bishara, was especially soul-enriching. A riveting performance by Ian Short as Turing and Dave Morgan as Dilwyn Knox, particularly Morgan’s horrifying soliloquy about compromise, knocked this over the fences. I reviewed this for Columbus Underground.
Etrois sont les Vaisseaux, Wexner Center
12. Étroits sont les Vaisseaux by Kimberly Bartosik/daela (Wexner Center for the Arts) – This dance piece, named for a mammoth Anselm Kiefer sculpture, took a look at a couple on a shifting, melting landscape of intimacy (danced by Joanna Kotze and Lance Gries). When I interviewed Bartosik for a preview she said her goal was to find that emotional, dramatic space without being dramatic or emotional and this succeeded in spades. Every subtle gesture, every undulation, felt charged and fraught without being obvious or over the top. This ripped my heart out and used it for a shadow play.
13. White Rabbit Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleilmanpour (Available Light) – This piece travels the world, speaking for its author Soleilmanpour, forbidden a passport because he wouldn’t serve in the military. It takes what could be a parlor trick, a play the actor hasn’t seen before the curtain comes up, and (with the careful facilitation of Eleni Papaleonardos) turns it into a fable about complicity and compromise. In the middle of a very long day – that started with a phone call from the day job at 4:15am – this shook me to the core. I couldn’t bring myself to stay for the talk-back but I stopped twice on the mile walk home to text friends about this; I just couldn’t not talk about it.
14. Our Country: The Antigone Project, Conceived and Devised by Annie Saunders and B. Wolff (Under the Radar, NYC) – This was a beguiling, complicated intermingling of memory and myth, childhood and America. Created based on taped conversations between Annie Saunders and her brother, and starring Saunders and Max Hersey, and with direction by Wolff that merged a deep empathy with not letting its characters off the hook, it was as immediate and accessible as a house on fire but so hard to nail down it would have required many, many viewings to exhaust.
15. Apologia by Alexi Kaye Campbell (Roundabout Theatre, NYC) – This British import featured a volcanic Stockard Channing at its center as an art historian who just published a summing-up memoir that’s roiled her family. With a supporting cast led by a terrific Hugh Dancy and Megalyn Echikunwoke and strong direction by Daniel Aukin, despite an ending that pulled its punch too early, this was a haunting look at the costs for women in pursuing success.
This is the time of year when performance slows, when companies lean towards the family-friendly, and those of us who think too damn much about arttuck into making lists. On which note, look for my live music list and records soon, theatre and visual art at the end of the month because there are things on the NYC agenda that could be contenders. But before you surrender to that warm egg nog stupor, there are two thorny, fascinating pieces this weekend to add a little bite and a second thought to your tidings of good cheer.
I saw Available Light’s production of Iranian playwright Nassim Soleilmanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit in the last night of its first weekend at Wild Goose, at the end of a day that started at 4 am with a work testing call. I wrote a preview for Columbus Underground, interviewing facilitator (and AVLT Artistic Director) Eleni Papaleonardos and three actors in this project, so I was already excited. Public mea culpa, I apparently accidentally spelled Eleni’s name Elini in the article and missed it until just now. One of my favorite artists in Columbus, I should always get her name correct.
I left the theatre stunned. Even as exhausted as I was, the uncomfortable identification between actor the playwright’s unfiltered voice, the sense of watching a beacon from far away and having to decode its signals. The humor and the audience participation and sudden shifts into abject bleakness and rage all had a profound effect on me. I didn’t stay for the talk-back because my complicity and I needed air and sunlight, but I stopped at the taco truck and messaged a friend about it for twenty minutes. I don’t want to give much away but if you can tolerate random audience participation, do not miss this. Some of the best actors in town performing a sui generis experience.
Seancers
The other must-see this weekend is a poetic dance work from Detroit-based artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Séancers. I conducted a fascinating interview with Kosoko for Columbus Underground which left me hungry to see this work. In it, Kosoko said, “I also find art is a way of communicating with an audience, so we know that we’re asking the same questions as it relates to our humanity and ways of being in the world,” Kosoko said. ”We’re going about it in different ways, but I think those core inquiries are certainly present in all of us. That proposal invites the audience, piques their interest enough to venture into the room and come on this journey with me.”
This work received amazing press from the New York Times, in which Kosoko said, “The creative work for me is a catalyst to engage in dialogue and critical conversation. That’s really what I thirst for, to be part of a larger conversation.” Art in America called it “powerful interrogation of the way whiteness restricts and confines and fails to provide ways out.” In a solid year for dance and theatre at the Wex, this promises to be another high point. Get out there, try to open yourself up, especially if, like me, you easily get overwhelmed and beaten down this time of year.
Dance might be the art form I love most and understand least. I’m so intrinsically clumsy that it’s like watching a magic trick I fall for every goddam time. “Oh my god, where did that rabbit come from?” I know a little more but I’m still that goofy, grinning mark.
The Wexner Center and Chuck Helm, in particular, shaped that interest from nothing into a real fire. Without that center being so close to me and having turned me onto so much music and film, I’m not sure I would have given modern dance a chance.
As Helm’s final season draws to a close – and don’t misunderstand, I’m very excited to see what Lane Czaplinski brings to the table – I’m trying to talk about what that era, that legacy, that place meant to me.
The modern dance double-bill coming to the Wex starting tomorrow is a prime example of Helm’s eye for the creme of the New York arts scene that a hip Columbus audience can embrace. The preview I wrote is too long but I’m pretty proud of most of it. And I can’t wait to see these two pieces.
How much of remembering is an act of love? That question suffuses every molecule of Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd, the unequivocal highlight of my first day in New York this trip.
The first time I saw Ishmael Houston-Jones it was like the first time I heard Monk or Joni Mitchell; the first time I heard Amiri Baraka; the first time I saw a Rauschenberg combine. So I went into this revival presented by American Realness barely knowing anything about John Bernd, to whom tribute is being paid, and only a little more about Houston-Jones’ co-director Miguel Gutierrez. That instinct didn’t disappoint.
The cast of dancers is perfect, Toni Carlson, Talya Epstein, Alvaro Gonzalez, Charles Gowin, Madison Krekel, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, and Alex Rodabaugh. They feel like they like each other. Physical chemistry is paramount and abundant but there’s a warmth that’s much harder to capture. For a show about communion and tending to one another that sense means everything.
Sweet moments of singing syllables that boil down to “Oh, hi, heya” stretching out and sparkling like stardust (Nick Haslett beautifully reworks Bernd’s original compositions) master the supple stillness of being together many of us only strive for. There’s a gorgeous, subtle glow in the way these bodies slide through the original music; themes build, go through a chrysalis, then spark between the dancers.
Toni Carlson’s warm intensity, especially in concert with Charles Gowin, is a highlight; they ground the more abstract sequences in a heightened, best-selves version of the world we know too well.
There’s a delightful slapstick edge here, most prominent in a sequence about fighting illness by “Taking control of [your] diet” making a parody of a smoothie. This shifts into a thesis statement as everyone puts their hands on the blender like a sorcerer’s talisman and chant in tones equal parts defiance and desperation words of hope like “I will not die before I do justice to my gifts.”
The use of pre-existing songs here is remarkable, with nary a cop-out crutch or easy wink for miles.
Copland’s “Hoe Down” section from Rodeo gets jubilant irreverence. This only piece from a traditional ballet gets razor-sharp use of that post-Balanchine narrative dance language but also the childlike play at Cowboys and Indians and some frankly erotic “playing at cowboys.”
Prince’s Dirty Mind grows out of the kind of hard triplet stomping Houston-Jones says is a signature of Bernd, a thudding, sensual shudder that’s a call to attention that could turn into “Walk this Way” at any moment. With this Prince song, the dance vocabulary that served as a quicksilver carrier for many moods, flowers into an electric bacchanal. Pairing off, tossing each other around, finding space for one another’s body. The highlight for me was Epstein, split off from the others, dancing in shadow back by the audience, twitching like a power-line violently ripped from its moorings; the kind of intense, erotic defiance of gravity and death it takes this much craft to look natural. I blushed and wanted to look away but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. New Order’s Age of Consent captured the bursting joy and melancholy of that song in a way I’ve never seen any movie or TV use pull off.
The coup de grace (double-entendre sting on “grace”) came with Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. Circumventing what most people gravitate toward in this song, the hustler narrative, Variations drops us right into Part C. We get strings already growing lush and Springsteen’s cameo before the sweet, keening melancholy of “I need you, baby. Oh please, baby… Please don’t slip away.”
I know how reductive this is for such an intense and complex work. But what I left with was: no energy is wasted. Bernd was an unlikely candidate for the canon but his friends made a zine 10 years after his death in tribute. 20 years after that an oversold crowd had the privilege to sit in a church built in 1799 and marvel at all the work in this recreation.
I don’t want to get all “Can I get an Amen” on you, but… May we all be so lucky to have someone love us that much. To love even one thing we made that much. To be some small part of reflecting or amplifying that love in some small way.
Screen of Distance 