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What are Kronos Quartet playing this weekend?

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Here’s the rumored song list for this weekend, which is open to change. All of these songs were either written or arranged for the Kronos Quartet. Just an FYI, this is a set list; these artists will not be performing with Kronos Quartet. FRIDAY night: Derek Charke – Cercle du Nord III   Ram Narayan [...]

Here’s the rumored song list for this weekend, which is open to change. All of these songs were either written or arranged for the Kronos Quartet. Just an FYI, this is a set list; these artists will not be performing with Kronos Quartet.

FRIDAY night:

Derek Charke - Cercle du Nord III

 

Ram Narayan (arr. Kronos, transc. Ljova) – Raga Mishra Bhairavi: Alap

 

Unknown (arr. Ljova & Kronos) – Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me

 

Sahba Aminikia – String Quartet no. 3: A Threnody for Those Who Remain   (hear the composer speak about the creation of this work)

 

Franghiz Ali-Zadeh – Oasis

Terry Riley - The Ecstasy from Salome Dances for Peace

 

Ramallah Underground (arr. Jacob Garchik) – Tashweesh

 

Aleksandra Vrebalov -…hold me, neighbor, in this storm…


SATURDAY night:

Bryce Dessner (of the National) - Aheym (Homeward)

Missy Mazzoli – Harp and Altar

Damon Albarn (of the Gorillaz) - Untitled

Amon Tobin (arr. Stephen Prutsman and Michael Winger) – Bloodstone

JG Thirlwell (of Foetus) - Eremikophobia  (hear Thirlwell speak about this new composition here)

Aviya Kopelman – Widows & Lovers

I. White Widow

II. Lovers

III. Black Widow

Laurie Anderson (arr. Jacob Garchik) - Flow

Maria Schneider - String Quartet No. 1: Third Movement

Michael Gordon (of Bang On A Can) - Clouded Yellow

Spending time – A SpeakEasy for L’Effet de Serge

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Time passes. Time passes…time passes… Days go by. Days go by filled with modest projects to occupy minutes and hours. Days go by comprised of pauses, silences, awkward exchanges, minor hopes, inconsequential embarrassments, forgotten and forgettable encounters. Weeks go by and Serge creates 1-3 minute performances for a small assembly of acquaintances. He invites them [...]

Time passes.

Time passes…time passes… Days go by.

Days go by filled with modest projects to occupy minutes and hours. Days go by comprised of pauses, silences, awkward exchanges, minor hopes, inconsequential embarrassments, forgotten and forgettable encounters. Weeks go by and Serge creates 1-3 minute performances for a small assembly of acquaintances. He invites them in, he invites us in. The actor playing Serge shows us his environment, its possibilities, its limitations, and the objects that make up his world. And we, or rather a small group of us, gather afterwards to discuss the performance.

Book ended between a show we didn’t see and show we won’t see, L’Effet de Serge, offers an extended, quite reflection on the minute accomplishments, formalities, and routines that make up a life. An interview included in the program notes presents the essence of Vivarium Studio’s work as centered on the human need for one another and the “reliance on a poetic spirit to transcend mundane lives of sometimes astounding insignificance.” Given the profound smallness of any one life, what is L’Effet de Serge – Serge’s effect, or impact, on the world? Is the life presented before us beautiful or tragic?

As one participant proposed, Serge can be viewed as a blank slate onto which can be projected subjective assessments of success or failure. In this respect, the piece is evocative, opening a space for musings and personal interpretations, as opposed to provocatively inciting a response. Serge’s life is beautiful because rather than generating meaning through the consumption of commodities, his weeks are centered on active creation. Serge’s life is tragic because his activities are so subdued; he has no grand aspirations and does not change dramatically over the course of our time with him. His life is easily trivialized because his successes are so incremental and so modest. In this character, we can read the relative absurdity of most human social dramas generally – immediate and important to those involved, utterly insignificant in the larger course of history.

As brought out in an opening night blog written by Theresa from Mad King Thomas, an individual often marks life as a succession of important events, strung together by the seemingly unimportant time in-between. Viewing linear time in this way, the focus is on advancement and the achievements that punctuate a timeline. This progress is intensified in the heightened reality of theatre where so often audiences are presented with concentrations of activity flowing quickly from stasis to conflict to climax, through denouement and resolution. In L’Effet de Serge, we marinate in the time of Sunday late afternoon transitioning to early evening. Time passes without dramatic reversals and unexpected twists. Time passes Sunday to Sunday and Serge continues to occupy himself with endearing spectacles. Neither tragic nor exquisite, his life simply is.

Serge’s theatrical productions, although brief, are surrounded by ritual and formality. While offering a comic element, this aspect also serves as a microcosm of the theatre world where the time taken up by a performance is a fraction of the time leading up to the performance event. In Serge’s brief post-performance exchanges, one can read variations of a desire or attempt to connect on both the side of the creator and the side of the audience. What results is perhaps a misconnection, but one that is not uncommon when dealing with translating art and the experience of art into a language of response and explanation.

L’Effet de Serge offered a performance centered on the passage of time without dramatic development, the small activities that give life meaning and structure, the routines that propel us slowly forward through minutes, hours, days, and weeks. Rather than marking time event to event, the performance offered a different means of perception, a view of life as something small and precious that is not held and possessed in accomplishments, but rather cherished as it slowly slips by.

__________

Thank you to all the participants for the engaging discussion reflected in the above paragraphs!  Readers interested in continuing to explore related themes at the Walker are  encouraged to visit the exhibit The Spectacular Vernacular, on view through May 8, 2011. 

Our next SpeakEasy post-performance conversation will take place on Saturday, February 19, following Sarah Michelson’s Devotion.

L’Effet de Serge Re:View Overnight Observations

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This show was called L’Effet de Serge. It could have also been called: The effect of florescent light. The effect of living alone. The effect of art. The effect of music. The effect of quiet. The effect of time. The effect of small things. The effect of people coming into a room together to sit [...]

This show was called L’Effet de Serge. It could have also been called:
The effect of florescent light. The effect of living alone. The effect of art. The effect of music. The effect of quiet. The effect of time. The effect of small things. The effect of people coming into a room together to sit and be silent and watch a thing someone else is doing for them and calling art.

I left the theater feeling sad, sweet, awkward. Like Serge’s friends on stage, who come, sit down, watch a thing he has made, find a comment to fill the silence of that thing being done, and go.
How many times do I go to a performance, file into the theater, watch my friends perform, file out, say something inane, hug them, and leave? What do you say to someone after they have shown you something called ‘art’? Either it is too big to be put into words, or it is too small.

Smallness was important. Much of the charm in this piece came from its simplicity. The illumination of a small act as a piece of art, a small interaction as one of value, a small awkwardness as natural, a small awkwardness as enormous. The smallness of our lives. A series of small art projects made up the piece, but it was bookended by the suggestion of grandness.

The opening of L'Effet de Serge, smoky and mysterious

The actor who played Serge began by entering (with a great deal of smoke and mystery) in an Astronaut suit, telling us it was from the end of Phillipe Quesne/Vivarium Studio‘s last show. At the end of this show, he left, giving us an image of the beginning of the next show, five invisible rockers jamming out, only their wigs bobbing in more smoke and dramatic lights. All that happened in between, the mundane actions of a lone man in a fluorescent-lit apartment, was framed by the suggestion of louder, livelier more outrageous shows, scenes that suggested the promise of action, narrative and flash. What we might think of as ‘real’ theater.

What were we given instead? A man eating pizza, drinking wine, watching a documentary, a voice-over telling us in the protagonist’s charming French accent, “Time passes, time passes, time passes.” What do we do with the time that passes? The quietness became heavy. The sparks of Serge’s momentary pyrotechnics became comparatively bold. Life becomes art, art becomes awkward. The weight of three minutes. One minute. Waiting for the next small spark. Smallness gains importance in the heaviness of the time all around it.

I wondered, is this my life? Long stretches of waiting for the next tiny excitement? Am I so small? How beautiful each small spark is, and how sad.

(From Theresa of Mad King Thomas)

“L’Effet de Serge”

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If you come to Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio’s performance of L’Effet de Serge this Thursday through Saturday, you will see: local volunteer actors sitting onstage trying their best to be a convincing micro-audience for the larger, McGuire audience; Quesne’s partner/lead actor Gaëtan Vourc’h in the role of himself and also the eponymous Serge; and an onstage [...]

If you come to Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio’s performance of L’Effet de Serge this Thursday through Saturday, you will see: local volunteer actors sitting onstage trying their best to be a convincing micro-audience for the larger, McGuire audience; Quesne’s partner/lead actor Gaëtan Vourc’h in the role of himself and also the eponymous Serge; and an onstage car (highly animated for an inanimate object). A video here show’s the difficulties a crew faced in bringing said car onstage for a run in Sao Paulo. If you visit the Performing Arts Vimeo, you’ll see we had an opposite experience.

If you come Thursday-Saturday, you’ll see a sparkling, remote-controlled car circle one of these volunteer actors sitting in a chair (see 0:48-0:52 in the trailer below). L’Effet de Serge features Serge’s menagerie of one-three minute performances for his onstage audience (and the larger audience across the proscenium), miniature tableaus that range from tender to the absurd, and through the improvised community onstage Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio hope to convey “the simple joy of being together.” The swansong for this year’s Out There Festival will be as understated and gentle as Betontanc/Umka.LV’s Show Your Face! was a violent force to be reckoned with.

Tickets still available.

New York Times review here.

Vivarium Studio will be leading a workshop Saturday and all are welcome.

Sarah Michelson’s “Devotion”: Is the Accessible Unnecessary?

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“What I really like about making a dance is doing something that seems doomed to fail—partly because dance often seems like something useless and you have to question yourself about why even do it. It sets up a challenge.” In a recent interview, choreographer Sarah Michelson confirmed her considerable reputation for making demanding work. For [...]

Sarah Michelson photo by Gene Pittman

“What I really like about making a dance is doing something that seems doomed to fail—partly because dance often seems like something useless and you have to question yourself about why even do it. It sets up a challenge.” In a recent interview, choreographer Sarah Michelson confirmed her considerable reputation for making demanding work.

For her 2005 Walker commission Daylight (for Minneapolis), Michelson drew from numerous sources of inspiration and influence, including the multidisciplinary institution’s “more than a museum” mission as well as the forms and theories of Walker expansion architects Herzog & de Meuron. Her heady, complex spectacle, which incorporated more than 50 large-scale painted portraits, was designed to be only partially seen, depending on where audience members were situated. A host of local performers and dance students, including 50 girls ranging in age from 6 to 15, joined Michelson’s New York ensemble for the indoor/outdoor performance.

Devotion, Michelson’s new Walker-commissioned piece, is a provocative and visually striking dance that originated from a story by Richard Maxwell, a playwright noted for his deceptively deadpan style. Leaders in experimental dance and theater, Michelson and Maxwell (a veteran of the Walker’s Out There series in 2005 and 2000) are both renowned for strangely transfixing, fiercely uncompromising productions. The two artists have long admired each other’s work—Michelson praises Maxwell’s “purposeful stage aesthetic” and “the magic he creates in exploring tensions between people.” The choreographer also touched on intriguing ideas in discussing Devotion’s performers—two actors and four dancers who seem to embody a tension between innocence and experience, between charisma and the possibility of its “hothouse” cultivation. Actors Jim Fletcher (Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz) and James Tyson have performed in numerous Maxwell plays, while Eleanor Hullihan, Nicole Manorino, and Rebecca Warner have considerable experience in ballet, modern, and contemporary dance. The fourth dancer is 13-year old Non Griffiths, who was honored last fall with a Bessie Award for bringing “an innocent but romantically charged fervor to Michelson’s eccentrically elegant vision [Dover Beach].”

On a broader level, Michelson likens the process of making new work to creating her own universe. It’s a kind of “totalitarian experience” in that she takes charge of sets, costumes, and lighting to a degree most other choreographers do not. The results can be simultaneously befuddling and bewitching. Village Voice critic Deborah Jowitt wrote, “Sarah Michelson’s work makes people ask questions ranging from ‘How did she come up with an idea like that?’ to ‘What does she think she’s doing?’ No one, however, asks more questions than Michelson herself—in private and in print—about her choices and gut instincts.” As the choreographer puts it, “I’m trying to make dance that’s inaccessible, because the more you make it accessible the more it seems unnecessary.”

Berlin’s Bonanza Re:View-Overnight Observations

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Bonanza—A Documentary for Five Screens by Berlin is five films side by side underneath a miniature replica of the town Bonanza. The model includes the five houses of the seven permanent inhabitants, the line of mailboxes in the center of the town and the old fire house now used for monthly town meetings. The topographical ground [...]

Bonanza—A Documentary for Five Screens by Berlin is five films side by side underneath a miniature replica of the town Bonanza. The model includes the five houses of the seven permanent inhabitants, the line of mailboxes in the center of the town and the old fire house now used for monthly town meetings. The topographical ground is metal, reflecting the stage lights that shift with the seasons. It’s metallic nature is not merely a lovely reflective, changing surface, it is also metaphor: Bonanza was once a silver mining town.

Bonanza, circa 1900

The citizens of Bonanza keep to themselves. They all seem to be there to be alone and despite being able to see each other’s houses from their own windows, rarely interact face to face. Indeed, this is an oft tossed about complaint – the new neighbors on the hill (the snobs on the knob) never tried to get to know us, the doesn’t-live-here town mayor never stopped by to introduce herself. It is a tiny town and everyone collects their mail in the same place but they do not cross paths. Indeed, in a rather amazing moment the recently widowed Mary asks the unseen filmmaker to thank her next door neighbor for his note of condolence upon the death of her Roger. She wants him to know that it really meant a great deal to her.

With moments like this, I wonder if Berlin got to know the residents better than they do themselves. And I wonder how much things changed because the filmmakers were there.  And I wonder more about the subjects; it’s interesting that on the whole these self-made hermits seem uncommonly open and forthright, willing to talk and comfortable being filmed, but so unwilling to talk to each other.

They have quirks, quirks that are cultivated into something larger and more defining by isolation and time. They are disproportionately religious, artistic, and engaged with energy work. But these shared affiliations do not bind them. Indeed, as one resident suggests, they apparently function on different energetic frequencies.

I want to go back to the metallic topography used in the recreation of Bonanza. The film gives the feeling that nobody is really able to sink their roots down in the land there. All but one of the seven residents settled in Bonanza at some later point in life. There are no children and there will be no homegrown future. The mayor of the town who is, controversially, not from town, might have a longer history to that land and area than any of the inhabitants. And the inhabitants, they’re there, but not always willingly; Mary claims she wouldn’t live there if she had known what it would be. And they’re there, but not necessarily permanently. Mark is shown as most integrated with the land, we see him outside chopping wood, walking through the forest, sifting through abandoned junk, sitting on the top of mountain surrounded by shale and memory, but he will only stay as long as god wants him to be, and might leave as soon as tomorrow.

Berlin asks and tries to answer the question “why would you live here?”   It’s a question creates a uncomfortable otherizing that continues over the course of this work. Their answer seems to be “you gotta be crazy” and they slowly destablize our view of the inhabitants, showing them to be progressively dysfunctional, extreme and self-righteous.

The piece is a story of failed community in some ways. But maybe not appropriately. The residents of Bonanza don’t drink the water, the land is so poisoned it can’t be.  They don’t dig in deep, but there is nothing down there anyway.  So maybe they aren’t there to share in the bounty of the land – a bounty that if it existed was exhausted long ago. Maybe they aren’t looking for paradise or even community. Maybe they are really there to be alone, to get by, to pass the days the ways they choose.  Perhaps it is not so different from living in a city and the anonymity of urban life.  Why wouldn’t having the social space to be yourself and to isolate yourself be as appealing in the Rockies as it is in New York?

(From Monica, of Mad King Thomas)

This past October, Antonya Nelson wrote the essay Living in a Ghost Town for the New York Times. Wikipedia purports the unnamed town in it is actually Bonanza.

Choreographing “the Real” – A SpeakEasy for Gob Squad

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Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) is a remount of Andy Warhol’s 1965 film Kitchen. – Well, not exactly. How can you accurately remount something you’ve never seen, something known more through rumor and recollection than its original form? Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) is a restaging of [...]

Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) is a remount of Andy Warhol’s 1965 film Kitchen.
- Well, not exactly. How can you accurately remount something you’ve never seen, something known more through rumor and recollection than its original form?

Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) is a restaging of Warhol’s Kitchen, a new take on a mid-century film for the contemporary YouTube/social networking/reality TV culture.
- And more…while heavily mediated, it gets at the personal question of what it means to “just be” in the midst of an overabundance of representations of the act of “just being.”

Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) manifests a desire to connect to an imagined feeling associated with Warhol’s Kitchen, to recreate the perceived essence of an era that has passed.
- But it is also about the difficulty of such a project, the impossibility of recapturing the spirit of another time and the degree to which any past – personal or communal – is inevitably viewed through the lens of the present.

Gob Squad’s  addition to the Walker’s Out There Series is a performance that continuously references a film while also referencing the company’s on-going act of performing a reference to a film. As part of the SpeakEasy post-performance discussion program, a group of audience members convened following the Saturday evening show to talk about the work. In the interest of establishing an avenue for continuing and expanding the original discussion, this blog highlights key themes touched upon, distilling ideas from a conversation that was itself a reflection upon an insistently derivative and self-referential performance. Let the layering begin…

Borrowing from pop culture and common commodities, Warhol transformed the idea of what has value, of what is worth looking at. Part of his contribution to this emphasis on the everyday involved films stripped of elaborate effects and edits or complex narratives – extended shots of sleeping, hanging out, or in the case of “screen tests,” simply sitting and gazing back at the camera.

Gob Squad began their performance by trying and failing through position, props, and attitude to encapsulate a quality of “everyday 1965,” coming to the conclusion that as performers they simply couldn’t get it right. A performer knows the evening’s plan, has read the script, and can anticipate the lines and reactions of other actors. With each performance, the company therefore takes a risk, selecting audience members to unexpectedly stand in for them and respond in real time. Multiple discussion members expressed a feeling of intimacy that hinged on this inclusion and the openness and trust required of both actors and audience participants.

The question arose, however, as to how a spectator in a theatre can differentiate between real intimacy and representations of intimacy. Gob Squad blurred this boundary not only by including audience members but also by their usage of technology. The camera zoomed in to create private moments, screens faded in and out, and scenes paused to direct our attention. The numerous technologies involved were laid bare, made so transparent that even though obviously mediated, the hyperreal scenes appeared to evoke a deeper “real.” Onstage, actors and spectators mingled and explored the duration of the performance together, responding to whatever direction or stimuli may come while the rest of the theatre watched their choices and reactions unfold. On a bed, their heads and upper torsos taking up the majority of the shot, laid a performer and an audience member (who on Saturday was coincidentally also a performer, a company member of SuperGroup). This scene of a conversation between strangers was new and known, repeated every night with the variable of a different audience participant. It was in this respect both intimate and staged.

Given the involvement of audience members, the discussion turned to the question of whether it is preferable to be chosen or to remain a spectator. On the one hand, in Augusto Boal’s formulation, spectators in a theatre are placed in a passive role that parallels the passivity requested of them in everyday life. In this binary of passive spectator to engaged performer, it is desirable to step out of the role provided to viewers and to become actively involved. Yet in our conversation about Gob Squad’s performance, the passivity attributed to audiences and hierarchy of experiences was debated.

Over the course of the performance, Gob Squad played across the spectrum between performing and “just being.” In one sense it may be possible to partially “forget oneself” while watching a performance – in lieu performing a range of versions of oneself to suit varied social situations, in a theatre one perhaps gets closer to “just being” through projecting one’s attention outside oneself. Yet Gob Squad refused to allow us to simply “forget ourselves,” reminding us of our positionality by commenting that we were all undergoing screen tests from our seats. During an extended kiss between an audience member and performer, three audience participants slowly raised their hands to their lips. From our seats, we watched them watching the kiss, their action mimicking the identification that sutures viewer to viewed, and perhaps paralleling an array of recollections, desires, and thoughts called forth by the scene. While not on-stage, many audience members felt themselves aware of their relationship to the performers and fellow audience members and in this respect felt engaged and included.

This tension between experience and performance presents an interesting quandary. To what degree is what one experiences brought to the theatre by the individual spectator and to what degree is it a response taken away from the evening’s performance? The process of having a discussion about performance is particularly interesting in this respect in that it involves finding a meeting point between the experience commonly shared of having seen the same events unfold and the inevitable variations of interpretations and reactions that each individual uniquely experiences.

Please note that there will be no SpeakEasy for Berlin’s Bonanza. We will reconvene in the Walker’s Balcony bar on Saturday, January 29, to discuss Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio’s L’effet de Serge.

Want more?

Mad King Thomas’ Theresa has posted her blog responding to opening night.

Check out the City Pages articles by Ed Huyck from January 12 and 14.

 Stay informed of upcoming Walker performances on the Performing Arts Department’s website.

and, of course, please feel free to post your own comments below.

Gob Squad’s Kitchen Re:View Overnight Observation

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I know embarrassingly little about Andy Warhol. That much was clear to me while watching Gob Squad’s Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good). But it was also clear that I didn’t need to know that much about Andy Warhol. This piece was about so much more than recreating Kitchen. (As they say [...]

I know embarrassingly little about Andy Warhol. That much was clear to me while watching Gob Squad’s Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good). But it was also clear that I didn’t need to know that much about Andy Warhol. This piece was about so much more than recreating Kitchen. (As they say in the program notes, the film is simply a “starting point.”) It was asking about the possibility of recreation at all, of authenticity, of fungibility, of time and timeliness, of here and now, past and gone, of eras and epochs, zeitgeist.

http://youtu.be/PjAwB_0KTPg

I’m sure I would have gotten many more references if I had half an arts history education, or at least a better knowledge of Warhol and the Factory, but the performers charmingly filled me in on what I needed to know, telling me what they were recreating in an appropriately meta way. And there is no surer way to my heart than charming performers and heavy doses of meta.

That said, charming performers can sometimes be a dangerous thing. In a piece that concerned itself with realness and authenticity, a too-knowing performer becomes cute, camp, commentary-less. I felt hints of this near the beginning in the glances and addresses the performers sometimes shot the camera, but as they finessed the continuum of “real” to “performed” (with all the fun complications of performed realness and real performance) I was completely won over.

Those complications were at the heart (or maybe one of the hearts?) of the piece for me. As the performers slowly replaced themselves with “real” people from the audience, feeding them lines from their headsets, coaching them, the distinctions blurred. How lovely to recreate your re-creation. How else can you find innocence? (What a loaded term. Maybe naiveté? That overused and mysterious concept authenticity?) The problem was set up early on in the far right screen, where one performer, Simon, explained the process of Warhol’s famous screen tests to the other, Sean, in order for him to recreate it. Of course knowing the process spoils it. How can you be authentic when you know what you are doing?

And somehow, Gob Squad got us there. To a place of naïve knowing. Or knowing innocence, if I can reuse those wrong words. The four audience members, who had been watching and learning the show, who knew what the performance was doing, still managed to not know, to be coached along line by line, moment by moment. It feels like this is the kind of recreation something like Kitchen needs. If that film could portray a slice of the era, a sense of the newness, a truth of the ‘then’, then this film/performance had to show a truth of the now, our knowingness. We are in the information age, the time of meta, irony, recycling, collage. We eat everything up and vomit back out bits of different pieces, ending with a partially digested new old. Everything has been done before and we can only complicate it. Innocence (I have to keep using that word, as much as I abhor it) can only be real once. We can’t keep burning our bras without knowing full well where bra-burning has (and has not yet) brought us so far. There is no way to tap into the freshness of that feminist anger. You have to find the fresh anger now. I loved seeing Sharon go from her feminist “Fuck the man” speech, struggling to recreate a cliché, into some strange immortal monologue that felt both of a trippy past era and yet somehow real to the moment.

The moment is important. As Sharon asked her “stronger, wiser, more balanced” stand-in, “would you rather your life were a painting or a movie?” A painting is a perfect moment. But a movie, the wiser Sharon responded, was many moments. Gob Squad’s Kitchen had to be a movie, and it had to be live performance. The many moments, each of them now, collecting onstage behind the mediated projection- it was the right complication. It is new every night, and the same Kitchen every time.

(from Theresa of Mad King Thomas)

Gob Squad the New York sensation hits MSP this week

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Gob Squad is the hit of New York’s Under the Radar Festival! I just returned home today from the exhausting, and sometimes exhilarating Association for Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference in New York, which now umbrellas four simultaneous performance/dance festivals, hundreds (maybe thousands) of showcase performances alongside dozens of panels, meetings, gatherings, and on the [...]

Gob Squad is the hit of New York’s Under the Radar Festival!


I just returned home today from the exhausting, and sometimes exhilarating Association for Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference in New York, which now umbrellas four simultaneous performance/dance festivals, hundreds (maybe thousands) of showcase performances alongside dozens of panels, meetings, gatherings, and on the fly conversations with artists.

Within an hour of arriving there last Friday, three colleagues all stopped to tell me the same thing, Gob Squad’s Kitchen (you never had it so good) was the must see event. This mantra continued unabated over the next four days…of course these folks didn’t realize the show was already coming this week to the Walker.

The Walker first introduced the work of Gob Squad to Minnesota more than a decade ago. I travelled to Stockholm nearly two years ago specifically to see Gob Squad’s Kitchen, was totally knocked out by it, and I have been working on bringing the show to Minneapolis since then. Mark Russell, good friend and brilliant producer of Under the Radar Festival in New York, is also a fan of Gob Squad’s and didn’t have the chance to see this latest piece live. And, remarkably enough, Gob Squad had never yet shown their work in New York. I am grateful Mark trusted in my enthusiasm around the piece and was thrilled that it was such a hit with presenters and the public alike.

If you’re interested in new performance, theater, contemporary art and ideas, and of course all things Warhol – or, if you just want to have a great time in the theater – you owe it to yourself to see this unique, smart, joyous show.

Here is New York’s Culturebot review that I think captures it perfectly:

“If there’s one show that’s already played over the last week that’s generated real buzz, it’s Gob Squad. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked with has had nothing but praise for the London-Berlin based company’s take on Warhol’s filmic work…” Click here to read more.

I look forward to seeing you in Gob Squad’s KITCHEN this weekend!

- Philip Bither, Walker’s Senior Curator of Performing Arts

Click here for tickets to this weeks performance running Jan 13th-15th.

SpeakEasy – Show Your Face!

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How can one represent the thousands of individuals who have disappeared in the midst of political oppression, whose lives and faces have been erased and whose bodies have been dispersed? How can one create something personal from this vast array of faces, stories, and contexts? Show your face! engages with these challenges through the creation [...]

How can one represent the thousands of individuals who have disappeared in the midst of political oppression, whose lives and faces have been erased and whose bodies have been dispersed? How can one create something personal from this vast array of faces, stories, and contexts? Show your face! engages with these challenges through the creation of a character who is both a lone individual and an everyman – a child’s snowsuit manipulated by the puppeteers of Umka.LV and harassed, seduced, threatened, tormented, comforted, and abused by the performers of Betontanc.

Through a series of vignettes and the work of alternately benevolent and cruel puppet masters, a world was invented on-stage, coming into being as it deteriorated and devolved into bedlam. On Saturday evening, a group of audience members gathered to pick through the rubble of this world during a SpeakEasy, a post-performance discussion in the Walker’s balcony bar.

The recurring theme of the evening’s conversation was the concept of facelessness. The problems of the snowsuit began when he was called out of anonymity, setting up a world where there is safety in the mass and danger in becoming singled out. This scenario was later reversed through the introduction of a character desiring fame, beyond anything wanting to be recognized apart from the mass. The evening’s title, Show your face!, encompasses a variety of such situations – a demand shouted by an authority figure, the creation of a subject from a faceless mass through such a command, a desire to be recognized, and an impetus to stand for something and take action.

Despite the facelessness of the primary character, a number of audience members noted an expressive quality and personal connection to the performance. The manipulation of found objects enabled spectators to complete scenes with their own imaginations, involving a degree of personal investment in the anthropomorphizing of the main character. Visible puppet masters demystified the magic of puppetry, which was simultaneously reinstated by interactions between performers and puppets. For some, the presence of puppeteers onstage served a larger symbolic purpose of uncovering power and where power lies.

Ruminations on facelessness in the context of Eastern European communism led to a discussion of the complications involved in balancing the needs of the individual with those of the masses. Such a negotiation exists between the extremes of justifying violence in the name of the collective good and individuals fiercely defending their own power and privilege while the masses rot. Yet violent oppression is but one aspect of the unequal individual/collective relationship and the more prevalent offense is perhaps complacency. Betontanc and Umka.LV brought this home by accosting the audience, shouting out instances where individuals are quick to participate – buying a bracelet for a cause or boycotting a commodity. In contrast, they insisted that when it truly matters, in cases of government corruption – “You do nothing!”

This sequence led to a discussion of the enticement of comfort and the many invitations to participate in social change through small, convenient behaviors in lieu of the commitment involved in direct action. The irony of the commodification of Che Guevara’s face tied into both the theme of facelessness and the affront on the audience. Despite the popularity of his face, Guevara’s life, work, and beliefs are overshadowed by the vague associations with counter-culture or rebellion against authority that his face has come to represent. The man has become separated from his own face.

For some, the evening’s performance seemed to be a call to action, a reminder of the need to continuously reengage, to fight against the lulling allure of comfort, to “Wake up!”  The imperative Show your face!, as one audience member stated, is a demand to “be present, be active.”

Join us on January 15 for a post-performance discussion of Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good).

Individuals interested in the themes of Show Your Face! may also be interested in Minneapolis-based Skewed Visions’ on-going Free Belarus Project: http://fbnow.wordpress.com/

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