The Green Room: From on stage, back stage and the theater seats, the Performing Arts blog illuminates the intersecting worlds of dance, theater, and music.
Mariano Pensotti listened to Of Montreal’s song “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” “a lot” while he created his theater work coming to the Walker. Pensotti said, “Its excessive duration and ambitious narrative made me feel it [was] close to what I was developing. I decided to use the name and include the lyrics in [...]
Mariano Pensotti listened to Of Montreal’s song “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” “a lot” while he created his theater work coming to the Walker. Pensotti said, “Its excessive duration and ambitious narrative made me feel it [was] close to what I was developing. I decided to use the name and include the lyrics in the play when the stories reach their end.”
The song is pretty epic. Check it here:
The Past Is a Grotesque Animal plays the McGuire Theater January 26-28, 2012.
chelfitsch will return to the Walker three years after their January 2009 presentation of Five Days in March, which was a piece about twenty-somethings shacking up at love hotels at the beginning of the Iraq War. Their work coming to the Walker January 19-21, 2012, is Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and The Farewell Speech; originally [...]
chelfitsch will return to the Walker three years after their January 2009 presentation of Five Days in March, which was a piece about twenty-somethings shacking up at love hotels at the beginning of the Iraq War. Their work coming to the Walker January 19-21, 2012, is Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and The Farewell Speech; originally three separate pieces, chelfitsch director Toshiki Okada combined them into a magnum opus of sorts.
chelfitsch’s singular anti-choreograpy emphasizes the ways we are stuck in our bodies, employing a dance vocabulary of formalized awkwardness and hunched postures that registers its relevance in terms of a contemporary experience of youth. If Robert Longo ever choreographed a piece about twenty-somethings stuck in a Japanese temp agency, it would look something like this.
The characters speak in fragmentary sentences and their movement could be called hyper-pedestrian in the ways ordinariness is magnified and repeated until it becomes its own vernacular. chelfitsch’s parallels with the American film sub-genre/phenomenon of Mumblecore seem striking, as relationships and conversations take precedence over narrative cues. More literally, the company’s name comes from a mumbled, disarticulation of the English word “selfish.”
You can watch snippets of each piece in the video below, made by the Japan Society, with Japan Society Director Yoko Shioya providing some contextualization.
Acclaimed playwright/director of chelfitsch Toshiki Okada will lead an Inside Out There workshop Saturday, January 21 at 11 am. Participants will explore the nature of unconscious physical movements in creating choreography. Open to all levels of movers.
Photos by Toru Yokota
Rabih Mroué— Lebanese visual and performance artist, actor, director, and playwright—is performing Looking for a Missing Employee during the second week of next month’s Out There 2012: Global Visionaries festival. In Looking for a Missing Employee, Mroué performs the role of a multimedia detective mining the fate of one of the tens of thousands of [...]
Rabih Mroué— Lebanese visual and performance artist, actor, director, and playwright—is performing Looking for a Missing Employee during the second week of next month’s Out There 2012: Global Visionaries festival. In Looking for a Missing Employee, Mroué performs the role of a multimedia detective mining the fate of one of the tens of thousands of Lebanese people who went missing during the Lebanese Civil War.
Mroué has said, “How can one establish dialogue in a traumatized society, aware of this reality but not falling into the trap of disconsolate mourning, as the politics of memory is often seen today?” He answers partly through the use of absurdity in his work.
"Make Me Stop Smoking" 2006, video stills courtesy Rabih Mroué
In Mroué’s work Make Me Stop Smoking, he re-casts Freud as a member of Hezbollah, and in I, the Undersigned he “addresses the lack of accountability of those responsible for the Lebanese Civil War by offering his own striking apology.”
"I, the Undersigned" 2007, video stills courtesy Rabih Mroué
About his work How Nancy Wished That Everything Was An April Fool’s Joke, the New York Times wrote:
The four characters tell stories of contradiction that ricochet off one another. They will adhere to an ideological position and then change it. They pledge loyalty to a political leader and then betray him. They make allies and then forsake them. They switch sides and get lost. In each story they tell they are killed in battle, only to come back to life again in the next round, like irrepressible players of video games.
With similar irrepressibility, his work Old House (2006) oscillates visually between destruction and composure while Mroué at the same time narrates his own process of “remembering and forgetting.” And in Noiseless (2008) he presents a concocted newspaper article about his own disappearance with an image of himself that eventually blends into the notices of other missing persons until his image evaporates and becomes a void.
Born in 1967, Rabih Mroué began his work in plays, performance, and video in 1990, also the year the Lebanese Civil War ended. His emergence marks the aftereffects of a chronically “traumatized society,” one in which absurdity becomes the commensurate accuracy with which to express the loss of a quarter million people, and the tens of thousands disappeared.
Mroué’s investigation of the disappeared of his home country recalls, for me, the desaperacidos of another place, same time (roughly). Pinochet’s regime in Chile began before the Lebanese Civil War and continued over the same time period, with the disappeared in Chile numbering over 3,000. Most of all I am reminded of Roberto Bolaño’s novel Distant Star, which similarly mines the absurdity of (Chile’s) “traumatized society.” Distant Star tells the life story of Lorenzo—an HIV-positive gay artist with no arms who was born into poverty and became an adult at the height of Pinochet’s reign—who commits suicide by jumping into the ocean but who changes his mind at the last minute and swims to the surface using only his torso and legs: “In the current socio-political climate…committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.”
Continually plagued by censorship at home, Mroué has freely performed his theater work and exhibited his visual art abroad, including the Istanbul Bienniale (2009), Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art in Toronto, and recently at the Rivington Gallery in London. As part of a U.S. performance debut tour, his engagement at the Walker is from January 12-14 2012 and includes an Inside Out There workshop January 14 , 11 am, where Mroué will present The Pixelated Revolution, a lecture-performance about the impact of mobile phones and social media in the recent Syrian uprising.
With the Walker Cinema closed for renovation all of January, it appears the Out There Festival really is one of the few reasons to love living in Minneapolis during our tundra months. Out There opens with Young Jean Lee’s latest, Untitled Feminist Show (formerly Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show), which workshopped at the New [...]
Young Jean Lee Theater Company t-shirt
With the Walker Cinema closed for renovation all of January, it appears the Out There Festival really is one of the few reasons to love living in Minneapolis during our tundra months. Out There opens with Young Jean Lee’s latest, Untitled Feminist Show (formerly Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show), which workshopped at the New Museum last December and generated so much controversy that Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company has a word doc exceeding 100 pages with all the comments they received. The completed work has its world premiere here January 5-7, 2012, and it’s likely its reception will be just as effusive.
Even at the Walker, where nudity in live performance often finds a home (Naked and Choreographers’ Evening come to mind) Young Jean Lee’s new work caused a minor discussion in regards to marketing here: it was decided the best disclaimer is “this performance contains (a lot of) nudity,” but we just as easily could have said “this performance contains only nudity.” Eschewing text for choreography and music alone, Untitled Feminist Show is a different direction from Young Jean Lee’s previous work which has always maintained a script of some sort.
From workshop footage I’ve seen let’s say this piece takes the opposite approach to a Laura Mulvey-type organization (sublation) of visual pleasure and opts instead for a disorienting hypergaze of explosive spectacle. The completely naked provocation will probably be especially shocking as we arrive to the theater donned in our excessive layers of winter gear.
Besides the show, there is an also an opportunity to take a writing workshop with Young Jean Lee on Saturday January 7. As editor of the anthology New Downtown Now: An Anthology of Theater from Downtown New York and master class-teacher at NYU/Tisch and the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, this Inside Out There workshop will be a chance to generate some surprising new material under the guidance of of an avant-theater iconoclast.
