I kind of cringe in calling some things art, some things not. Eespecially leery of the term “artist.”

Heartland

Artland

Fartland.

It’s all the same to me.

But, seriously, I think I am slightly blind to the wonders of comedy. I don’t quite get it as a sustaining purpose for work, for good work. (I love Monty Python but wouldn’t call it art.) The comedy I have an understanding of is the very old-fashioned kind, where many things go wrong but then all is resolved in that wonderful way that signals that we are no longer on planet earth–i.e., Shakespeare’s comedy, Austen’s comedy. With the kind of object in question, I look about for an ethos and don’t think to look for it in sheer funniness. For me, funny has to be glued to something a bit bigger to be really funny. Sheer zaniness pales after a while.

Actually I didn’t find this all that funny, anyway. My laughter was impeded by my sense of injustice.

Dance-theater in general I am okay with. Your work, Live Action Set, Off-Leash Area, all just fine. But I have to find something beyond laughs.

How do you feel about the genre itself? re: Big Dance Theater, Elevator Repair Service, i.e. the ‘dance-theater’ ensemble companies that create similar, original work. I am obviously a sucker for this kind of work done well but am curious about your take.

Also, would you speak to your relationship to comedy? I think it’s a pillar of this ‘acting’ form. Maybe more specifically your relationship to laughter. Maybe that’s too personal, approaching quagmire..

What I love in this TEAM show and others like it, is the narrative (psychological?) freedom the ensemble assumes for itself, rooted in a comic absurdity. I would venture to say there is nothing improvised about this show (except obvious pre-show and q&a). It boasts delicious comic timing. From the beginning they’ve thwarted the expectation of creating serious meaning. I think of Young Jean Lee here-. Meaning gets created anyway- how boring for these artists were it not- and I mean let’s talk about Bobby Kennedy right now- but the terms on which it’s created, is now wholly theirs. That’s the thrill for me, that and good comedy is hard to do.

There are currently several local venues or events that aspire to showcase experimental and/or boundary chasing work. The trouble is, of course, that they do not have the resources or cache of some place like the Walker.

Although I am a died-in-the-wool experimentalist (or something like that), I feel uneasy when this question comes up — and not because I am afraid of stepping on toes. This desire for support for the work that we recognize as excellent, experimental, and local can easily become a way of thinking that feeds the “avant-garde” model.

If the “avant-garde” or “experimental” is work that is, as these detestable terms suggest, “out in front” of everyone else, or “a starting point for a future art,” then that puts the work of these artists in a ghetto created by the establishment whose only legitimacy is to serve the purposes of the larger culture. (Hello Legislators, here’s how many we have served today.) And (equally insidiously) that what these artists do will one day become mainstreamed, institutionalized, accepted and part of the more established (and consequently more legitimate and authentic ) culture. I, for one, do not see myself as a feeder for anyone. I don’t think most artists who find themselves outside the mainstream (as either “experimental” or “deviant”) think of their work as support for mainstream arts establishments (whether physical or intellectual establishments).

Art is not a single river fed by multiple streams. It is an ocean in which we are all swimming — along with Everyone Else, not just other artists. If some don’t recognize that art is as much a part of their lives as gasoline it doesn’t mean we need to fuel their cars.

This is the root of my itching ennui. Not that local artists are overlooked, nor that the work that is part of the NPN is familiar and safe, nor that it is depressing to see cheap work done well — these are merely symptoms of a larger inferiority complex created by the idiotically restrictive oxymoron that is the effort to create meaningful art in a hypercapitalist culture.

And I don’t want to leave it there because that seems to shrug off the responsibility onto a structural abstraction when really the solution is part of the question: we must each strive to become experimental avant-gardists for our own work — to support each other by questioning and resisting the pulls of safety in ourselves and our surroundings.

The Revolution is Dead — Long Live the Revolution.

But about the caricature issue: I agree that satire must have accurate targets, but I am open to one-dimensional projections of our own fears being seen on stage (Kara Walker is a keen one on this in her silhouettes) There just needs to be a thinking behind it that can create a mode of representation that uses these cliches effectively. I mean that if one looks for character depth or dramaturgical architecture in work that Heartland seems to aspire to, there is no option but disappointment. The work of Ann Bogart or the Wooster Group are perhaps better models to critique what would otherwise be character and dramaturgy.

Again, my objection is that under the current conditions of “experimental theater”-glut to make this work (which is clearly entertaining) is too easy, too ineffective, and before long distasteful. Why should theater not be held to the same standards of excellence that require, for example, a painter to make something more than just a pretty picture?

The TEAM’s work was a fine example of one kind of work. But I don’t think we need it.

Maybe part of the trouble is rooted in the way arts in general are held in this culture: as little more than a waste of time or as a commodity of cultural capital in which to invest. Like every other slipping lower-middle-class professional, artists need to make money. And one way of doing that is by teaching. And teaching is one way (if you become established enough) to glut the aspiring minds of future artists with second generation versions of your work so that when you look for something new, all you see is Child of Artist, Artist Part II, The Night of the Artist, and The Artist Episode VII.

I posted another blog.

http://www.myspace.com/scottycruzmnrg

I’m with Charles, and I assume others, this piece was like candy… lots to smile about, a little to think about, must delight in the “joy of play”…

How’s this for a suggestion?

We should have a Out HERE series featuring the concurrent boundry smashing work in Minnefabulous!…

who’s on board?

Charles, you are depressed at a level I can’t quite aspire to. However, it’s your area (theater), so I yield you the right to be preeminently discouraged. I would agree that this stayed within the field of its making. Seemingly the creators found their rather conventional quirkiness to be enough.

The cheap shots at regional types do trouble me. A caricature must be accurate to wound, must be made from knowledge. Otherwise the caricature is merely a projection of our own fear–a bogeyman, a puppet.

My complaint was that, despite the entertaining nature of it, the piece was a symptom of a larger laziness or nostalgia in thinking about theater. The acting, lighting, directing, script — all in service to a series of metaphors devised to “uphold the fragility and poeticism of the human body and spirit” — I need something more in contemporary art works. No matter how smart the script or adept the design, it will never go beyond mere candy unless something actually does go unchecked and breaks free of established habits of thinking and practice.

I think they know what they are up to, but I don’t think it is worth it. I would prefer a failed attempt at something risky rather than a successful example of something familiar.

It’s like watching three different screens, except there’s no screen on stage, no fancy technological gismo’s anywhere, actually, just good old-fashioned lighting design, and a script that’s smarter than (we) are.

Indeed, the character’s tv is broken. So is their car, and their family. It’s a study of isolation. This is where the festering of religious dogma goes unchecked, where anything, actually, could go unchecked. Weather as an ancient, powerful spiritual metaphor. Well it is isn’t it?

Thank God for Dorothy.

I said to a friend as I was leaving.. that I haven’t seen acting energy like that in a long time: seamless, generous, audacious.