Performing Arts

“The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928)” at New York Theater Workshop features, in foreground, Susie Sokol and Vin Knight. Photo by: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

I was so pleased to wake up this morning and read Chief New York Times Theater Critic Ben Brantley's rave review of our friends Elevator Repair Service's production of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (April 7, 1928). The Walker has long been in ERS's corner, ever since I first saw their deliciously ridiculous Cab Legs at PS122 in 1998. On their first Minneapolis visit, we presented their odd-ball, ecstatic Total Fictional Lie as part of Walker’s 2000 Out There series. They returned with Room Tone (2003 Out There) and, most recently, we co-commissioned their audacious, every-word-of-the-novel marathon production of The Great Gatsby (GATZ) ,which received its U.S. debut here in September 2006.

Rights issues with the Fitzgerald estate have tragically not allowed the brilliant GATZ to yet be seen in New York City, but a year after the Walker introduced the work to the U.S., it did successfully tour to cities like Portland OR (at PICA's TBA Festival), Philadelphia (at the Philly Live Art Fest.) and Seattle (On The Boards). So, it's a bit irritating that both Brantley and Justin Bergman (who wrote an ERS preview last Sunday in the Times) seem oblivious to the fact that GATZ ever came to the U.S. at all ("the famously venturesome Elevator Repair Service" wrote Brantley "...toured Europe with a seven-hour rendering of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby" ...).

While Brantley and Bergman maintained the Times' long-standing New York parochialism (assuming nothing of cultural interest takes place West of the Hudson), Brantley did do a nice job of articulating the steep challenge that director John Collins and ERS set up for themselves in taking on the notoriously dense and, at first read, confusing, first section of The Sound and Fury, which is told from the point of view Benjy Compson, a 33-year old mentally disabled man. "Trying to translate this perspective from the page to the stage would seem to be an act of folly and hubris," wrote Brantley... "Benjy's nonlinear, noninterpretive point of view has been the bane of uninitiated English students for decades. But reading this account of a Mississippi family's decline is like looking at an impressionistic painting that at first seems to lack discernible forms, but stare long enough, and details emerge so precisely that it's finally sharper than any photograph....". In the end, the company's rigor and ingenuity wins over Brantley completely - "(ERS) brings a sanity, humility and theatrical ingenuity to their interpretation that, like the novel, illuminates the clarity within apparent chaos."

Congratulations again to director John Collins all our friends at ERS. I can't wait to catch up with the production (and all of our ERS pals) on my next trip to New York in mid-May.

Click here for the NY Times article on ERS Faulkner's Haunted Family, Moving in and Out of Time April 30, 2008.

This is not necessarily new news, but I have been so excited about this (as in, “where can I find a really cheap plane ticket today?” excited), that I had to share:

Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, frequent Walker performers and artistic directors of the Improbable Theatre company, debut their remount of Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha today at the Met in New York (the original production opened last year at the English National Opera).

Improbable Theatre brought their low-tech, improvisational exploration Animo to the Walker last season (other Walker performances include The Hanging Man and Shockheaded Peter). There is an article in the New York Times today about Satyagraha that includes a video with footage from the production and interview excerpts with McDermott and Crouch. Having seen Animo, I was particularly taken with how they have expanded their imaginative work with newspaper and other found mediums into the large and formal scale of opera.

Since I once broke my wrist falling whilst on 5′ tall stilts, my mind was blown by the gigantic and gorgeous backpack puppets in the image above and in the NYT video. Many of the performers are on stilts while operating these puppets and -this is important- the Met stage slopes downward toward the orchestra pit. I’ve seen this stage up close and in person and I am terrified just thinking about the performers’ feat.

So watch the video and if you happen to have an extra plane ticket to NYC in your back pocket, let me know.

Image via Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Join Marc Bamuthi Joseph and the cast of the break/s following the Friday show at this special event!

What:Afterparty with KRS ONE Live in Concert
When: Friday, April 11: 10 pm-1 am after the break/s at the Walker.
Where: Trocaderos Night Club Downtown Mpls. 107 3rd Ave No, Minneapolis

Tickets for the 18+ afterparty / concert available at 612.465.0440 and by clicking here

The event’s myspace page : click here for a listen.

Click here for tickets to the break/s at Walker

William Yang’s US tour is well under way and with the recent news coming from Australia, Shadows is now even more relevant. Here are some articles to add to your experience of William’s performance at the Walker:

From May 2000 after the march in Sydney which William refers to in Shadows, Australians March in Support of Aborigines
And from the front page of the Times on February 13, 2008, Australia Says 'Sorry' to Aborigines for Mistreatment .

For more insight into William’s relationship to Shadows please see his photo essay from MCA in Chicago.

And finally in closing, a note from our former Performing Arts curator, John Killacky, who originally brought William Yang to the Walker:

“I loved William and his tender fierce intensity, his work resonated in my psyche for years afterward. I am thrilled the Walker Art Center community will once again have a chance to encounter this very special artist.”

I will see you at the show,
Michele

No one coughed, no candy wrappers were opened, and nary a cell phone disturbed Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Hey Girl! on the McGuire Stage at the Walker Art Center last night.

The nearly full house was engrossed in the many enigmatic images that passed before our eyes through the course of the performance; a female body slowly emerged from primordial goo; words flashed across a screen so swiftly they could just barely be perceived; a pack of men inflicted an aggressive beating on our anonymous heroine that could be seen only in strangely beautiful bursts of flashing florescent light; the white heroine whose story was on display sold the black heroine who joined her onstage into chains; the skin of the black heroine was painted silver as she stood brandishing a mirror and sword over a stage covered in broken glass.

4-D art is work created in any media that incorporates time. Hey Girl! is one of the loveliest works of post-modern performance art that I have ever seen and an exquisite example of a truly multi-dimensional work of art. In addition to playing through time Hey Girl! also plays with the notion that there are multiple 'truths' in history. Nothing felt fixed or absolute in this piece. Movements and images were presented and then repeated in new contexts where meanings were revised.

The piece quotes elements of classical and modern performance. For example, text from the balcony scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was projected above the parts of the performance and the white heroine looked like a re-invented Joan of Arc while draped in a flag and brandishing a sword. There were certainly strains of narrative, I watched a white woman be 'born' and make her way through this strange, surreal world. I watched black woman appear on the scene in this world, be stripped to her skin and chained. But this show was not like a tragedy of star-crossed lovers in which I could find catharsis or even a beginning, middle or end. Identities shifted, power was revealed and reassigned.

While watching the piece, I felt the 'girl' in the piece was not a universal representation of every human. As soon as I saw her be complicit in the oppression of a woman of another race, I realized she was a person with a class that was complex and sometimes changing. The two virtuosic female performers, Silvia Cost and Sonia Beltran Napoles, were more like modernist symbolic figures than characters. Castellucci took many familiar elements and ideas, like words, bodies, mirrors, swords, etc.out of familiar contexts and repositioned them in a new, brutally poetic combination.

Toward the end of the piece, a sharp, pencil thin point of light shone on the head one of the two women in the show like a laser beam. Hey Girl! hit my brain in a similar way. I was completely enthralled, I watched the piece with razor sharp focus while it played before me and thought of nothing else. And, since walking out of the theater, my brain has been wrestling and processing the content of the show and trying to figure out what it means to me. I've been thinking about men and women, history, slavery, loneliness, connection, violence and art. In short, the performance passed what a friend of mine calls 'the butt test' and 'the brain test' with flying colors; meaning I sat in rapt attention through the piece (my but was still) and after it finished my brain recalled the intriguing images clearly and I wanted to re/examine what I saw voraciously.

“Hip hop music appeals to a wider audience than ever. Poet and dancer Marc Bamuthi Joseph says he hopes to teach people of all ages and races that hip hop is not monolithic, and not all negative.” - MPR

Click here to listen

Marc Bamuthi Joseph: Arts activist, dancer, hip hop and spoken word artist. The Walker Art Center recently was awarded a Joyce Foundation grant to support the world premiere of “the break/s” as well as Joseph’s artist-in-residency. Joseph will perform the work April 10 - 12 at the Walker in Minneapolis. Click here for tickets

“To most people a bus stop might seem a mundane place. For Romeo Castellucci, the experimental Italian stage director, the sight of listless teenagers waiting for their ride was mind-altering.

Mr. Castellucci, 47, sat in his car while braked at a traffic light in his native city, Cesena. Adolescent girls clustered a few feet away. Studying their body language and facial expressions, and noting how they were positioned in relation to the surrounding physical space, Mr. Castellucci was inspired to create an original theater production evoking their states of mind.

For this project Mr. Castellucci wanted to try something new. He built visual sequences for "Hey Girl!" around various symbols of femininity. Scenes reel through time and space, traversing the young woman's mind. One moment she appears in beatific bliss; the next she is deformed by eerily unreal acts of male aggression and violence.” -New York Times Click here to read more

Hey Girl is at Walker Art Center February 14 - 17. Click here to purchase tickets.

Okay, I’m back. Still waiting for the relief to kick in, but let’s just swim ahead and hope we hit shore before we drown.

The thing I’ve latched onto here is the thing I’ve latched onto elsewhere: the movement vocabulary. Or style. Or…something. (Not knowing what the proper terminology is can be fatal, but my arms are still doing the strokes…)

The solo that Mr Medlyn did that I mentioned last post is maybe the best way to get into this. It started from, I think, a baseball pitcher’s conventional rubbing of the ball in the mitt. It went from there into something like a fevered, panicked version of this — still attached to the reality of what we know (even those of us non-fans) but extended to parody or commentary. But then it went hogwild or apeshit…

(Briefly: how many times can we hear fuck and its relatives in an evening — and is that more than comedy?)

…and it, for me, exploded into a kind of movement that nearly approached trance-inducing. The way the movement became disconnected from the body as well as from any motivation, rationalization or impulse and sort of floated there in the light.

And I think to get there you have to get around the huge Wall of Art that goes up whenever there is a presentation of art. I don’t think this is a new thing, but I think that people have to find new ways of climbing, skirting, tunneling under that wall because even to see something twice or to know what you will be seeing is just another brick in the wall. The Wall that kills the life of the work.

It’s death, really. The way it is so inevitable, so unforgiving, so immediate and so final. It erases the life. The movement’s fascinating quality is in its surprise, its mobility of thought, its fragility, its ephemerality, its fleeting delicate presence that is so direct and beautiful (even heavy ugly art can have this fragile beauty).

And so to escape this Wall of Art that is Death someone has to continually reinvent the world (in dance, in movement, in performance…whatever). It is not easy, clearly. It is also not always recognized as a goal of art. But it also has nothing (or very little) to do with whether the work is enjoyable or not. But if it doesn’t escape the best it can be is entertaining or boring.

When I come back as God, I would make feedforward about 38% shorter and work for those moments of escape.

That said (’cause now it’s out of the way and can be seen for the useless, pointless and petty comment that those kinds of comments really are) there is a movement afoot that, in the best cases, skirts this Wall of Angry Implacable Death by skirting Art with pedestrian movement.

But not always that. There’s something more reality-based than that involved. True, sometimes the movement comes from everyday life, but sometimes everyday life itself takes part in the performance — not chance (or not only chance) but a version of reality that is brought into the performance that works sort of like a talisman or even a weapon against the Ancient and Evil Edifice of ArtDeath.

Which is kind of funny — but maybe that inversion of the relationship between art and life is why it has the potential to work.

I swear that title was a major coincidence. It gave me a little frisson, if yknowwhaddamean, when Neil started singing it.

Okay, now I know where “David” and “Neumann” come from. Duh. The title is beyond me this morning though, “feedforward.” Okay.

It felt a little like old home week with the guest performers and the many connections to ABG. I’ve even seen Neil Medlyn on YouTube. Which makes him familiar.

And sports were more like an excuse or justification than a tool or subject, I thought.

I have a little headache that has been sitting behind my eyes for about 24 hours so I realize that my experience last night was probably not the most generous. Even so, I didn’t look at my watch until about an hour in, just before the guests and the squirrel-suit with pink penis.

All right. Sure. Fine. Whatever. You know what I’m saying?

I was sort taking it all in for the first 20 minutes or so, more engaged by the text than the movement — I think that there was a connection between sports commentary and dance criticism (or at least trying to talk about dance) which is an interesting subject to me (how do you talk about something that is fundamentally nonverbal — and I think this is true of most if not all disciplines: if we could say what the pieces we make were about we wouldn’t have to make them…).

Sorry, not up to par here in the brains department.

But I did get a little tired of the cleverness. Until Neil’s solo. Not his monolog or the video or the whole baseball thing, but that thing he did that took it away from the pitchers mound and into a very frenetic thing with his hands and arms. For me that was worth the price of admission, had I paid it.

So I’m going to take a little break here, get some pain killers and come back to try and be more articulate.

Just as an experiment, I am posting now — before I see the show — to see what kind of preconceptions I have about the performance and how my experience tonight will be different. Or similar.

I’ve seen the picture from the Walker brochure frequently over the past week because it is sitting on a table in my kitchen (not The Kitchen) and I remember a relative close-up of faces, hands and arms in what looks a little like a tussle. But I am also remembering this is dance or dance-based, so I’m guessing there won’t be actual fighting. Also there was something in the written material about sports and Merce Cunnigham. The sports reference did nothing to excite me, given my predilection for non-sport sedentary events. I think there was something about the name “David,” but that may be the name of the artist or group.

Sheesh. Okay. I have virtually no recall. Can’t even remember the name of the show.

Oh, and there are Rugby stripes on the shirts.

The sports thing sticks in my head because it is something that does not make me want to see the show. And I have nothing against sports in principle, just as a personal preference I find participating and watching them kind of boring. Questions about funding for a sports stadium will bring out a slightly different response, but let’s not go there.

So this thing is at the Walker, at the McGuire, both of which I am pretty familiar with. But given that I know I’m not seeing a dog fight or watching paint dry, this doesn’t say much.

Until tonight then…

I’m feeling very emperor’s new clothes here. Er. . . that was dull. Irritating. Condescending. Adolescent. I’m sorry, that’s not a terribly nice way to begin. But the gloves are off, aren’t they?
In my experience (Friday) the “plants” were not nearly so obvious as in that NY review Galen pointed us to (thanks, Galen). The people behind me chattered non-stop and sang along, causing me to move halfway through, and there was some more misbehavior, but it only reached the level of annoyance/confusion. Since I came in three minutes before the show began and lost my program in the move, I never read the text. Oops. Perhaps that invalidates my entire comment. . .
Let me start over. What did Wampler want from the audience? What did she want to happen to us? We were all stirred up by the plants around us–some to imitation of their energy, some to irritation. So then we find out they were plants and feel, I don’t know, like chumps? Justified? Manipulated? Alienated? It’s not too hard to confuse, manipulate, or alienate, so I can’t see that as an achievement.
Clearly I’m getting nowhere in this response. I just don’t understand what Wampler wanted. In the continuing saga of performer-audience relations, her apparent level of frustration with the audience is. . . well, unreasonable? People have a limited range of things they are willing to do in public. They have their self-respect, they have their manners. Are these such bad things?
Start over (again). Perhaps this was meant to be cathartic and judgment free. Something for everybody: hate for the haters and love for the lovers, something to feel, to get into. That’s the most generous interpretation I can come up with. But even so. . .
People just aren’t that simple. Even audience members.

On the way out I told a friend that I just don’t think I have the gene to enjoy this kind of performance. That’s how it feels to me. Plenty of people in the audience loved the show, but I was left with the feeling I’d been watching an improv exercise–performed by a group of talented and enthusiastic people, no doubt, but still. . . I just didn’t see that anything happened here. The older sister did at last get to kiss a girl, but for a born-again that certainly wouldn’t be the end of it, and we didn’t see the end of it. All I could glean of overall shape is that the performance opened and closed with explosions.
I wonder about the “heartland” the TEAM presents here. Those kids weren’t recognizably Midwestern–at least, they didn’t exhibit any of the characteristics that I’ve come to know as Midwestern in the seven years I’ve been living here. Instead, they were just garden-variety hicks, the sort careless persons might imagine living anywhere in the US. In fact they rather reminded me of the stereotyped versions of Southerners that Midwesterners so love to put on. So at one level this performance read as a pretty easy skewering of some straw folks: the Midwestern born-agains, relentlessly ignorant, cloaking their own desires under religious or patriotic language, shopping at Walmart, etc.
Then again, the kids had their moments of nobility, and the Northeastern adults seemed pretty flawed themselves. I don’t know quite what the TEAM are up to here, or how it’s supposed to work on us. It didn’t work on me, at any rate.

Participate in a stunning and powerful performance at Walker Art Center this February!

Acclaimed Italian theater director Romeo Castellucci is looking for male volunteers of any age to perform in a short section of Hey Girl!, which is being presented next month in the McGuire Theater. No experience is necessary, all are welcome. Click here to see the trailer

40 Male Extras Needed (Hurry, spaces are filling quickly)

• Where: Walker Art Center, McGuire Theater
• Please bring you own regular street cloths ( without logos or writing ) for the performance
• The volunteer performance time is no more than 15 minutes per show
• A great resume addition
• Small stipend given to cover parking/gas
• Must be available on all of the following dates:

o Rehearsal: Meet in McGuire theater lobby on the 3rd floor of the new building. Rehearsal times are: Wednesday, February 13 from 8pm-11pm
o Performances: February 14 - 17, 2008. Meet one hour before curtain each night. Performances begin at 8pm ( 7pm on Sunday) and last 90 mins.

For additional information or to volunteer contact Natalie Bowers at Natalie.bowers@walkerart.org or at 612.375.7695

Hypnotically beautiful [with] a visual resonance that you find all too rarely on stage. . . . Exquisite intensity flows through much of what Castellucci calls his drama of movement. - Financial Times, London

Become enveloped in a stunning tour-de-force by Italy's acclaimed director Romeo Castellucci. This unforgettable theater of the subconscious unfolds fascinating and frightening visual landscapes equally profound, enigmatic, and dreamlike that provoke the imagination and make the senses swirl. With raw architectural sets, surreal costuming, film projections, exploding glass, and riveting performances by two actresses (and 40 male performers), Hey Girl! constructs a world that alternates between the beautiful and the horrific. Note: Contains nudity and simulated violence. Copresented with the University of Minnesota Department of Theatre Arts.

Before stepping into the great unknown of the Walker’s Out There 20, you might want to get a leg up by scanning these reviews of the artists we’re bringing here over the next four weekends:

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, Everyone (Wednesday-Saturday, January 9-12):

The New York Times (March 2007)

The Brooklyn Rail (April 2007)

The Village Voice (March 2007)

The TEAM, Particularly in the Heartland (Thursday-Saturday, January 17-19)

Time Out New York (March 2007)

The Edinburgh (U.K.) Scotsman (August 2006)

The New York Sun (July 2006)

Claude Wampler, PERFORMANCE (career ender) (Thursday-Saturday, January 24-26)

The Brooklyn Rail (January 2007)

The New York Times (November 2006) - part of a longer trend piece by John Rockwell. Scroll toward the end to read about Wampler.

BLURB: The New Yorker (November 2006)

David Neumann/advanced beginner group, Feed Forward (Thursday-Saturday, January 31-February 2)

The New York Times (October 2007)

Off Off Off Dance (November 2007)

Counter Critic (October 2007)

One local theater critic, running down 2007 in Twin Cities theater for MPR last week, made a request of local producers for 2008: Take more risks.

Note to critic: The Walker heeds that call every January.

The Out There series is an annual bedrock of the Walker's performing arts season - four weekends of artists who fuse theater, movement, music and multimedia and, in the process, broaden and redefine the meaning of performance. The series has helped strip the work of audience-repelling tags such as "abstract" and "inaccessible" and become a trusted, respected channel for both artists and audiences to some of the world's most cutting-edge work.

The 20th Out There features four artists new to the series, bowing to the series' roots of faith in the unknown. The New York choreographer Miguel Gutierrez and his ensemble, the Powerful People, open the festival January 9-12. Following weekends give rise to New Yorkers The TEAM, performance/visual artist Claude Wampler and the upstart choreographer David Neumann.

"This series has tried to track the most interesting discoveries we can make in contemporary performance," says Philip Bither, the Walker's William and Nadine McGuire Senior Curator of Performing Arts. "Unless there are American institutions willing to take chances on these artists, we really risk losing this great creative part of our culture."

Cynthia Hopkins, a New York City artist who creates hybrids of theater and music, embodies the impact this series makes with artists and audiences. After bringing Hopkins' Accidental Nostalgia to Out There in 2005, the Walker commissioned a sequel from Hopkins, who premiered Must Don't Whip 'Um, at the 2007 Out There. Hopkins is working with Walker curators to complete and stage her trilogy in the McGuire Theater.

"Without the support of institutions like the Walker, I couldn't make the work that I make," Hopkins says, mentioning both funding and the physical and technical requirements the Walker fulfills for her to create work. In turn, she says, appearing through Out There has brought critical attention and invitations from other performing arts centers throughout the country.

"More important than that is the moral support - it's psychologically uplifting," she says. "Part of the benefit of an institution like the Walker that's very well established is it has an audience that's been built up and trusts the choices Philip makes. His support, in a way, is an endorsement."

Out There premiered as a collaboration between the Walker and Southern Theater, with avant garde performance artists Rachel Rosenthal and David Cale highlighting a two-weekend festival that closed with cabaret-styled evenings with a carousel of Twin Cities performers. Two years later, Out There had expanded to four weekends and become a beacon for some of America's most intriguing emerging artists.

"I realized there wasn't much programming in January, and I thought that's probably when people most need to go out," recalls John Killacky, Bither's predecessor at the Walker, who is now with the San Francisco Foundation. "Jeff (Bartlett, the Southern's founding director) said 'Why don't we do something really out there?' I thought, 'Hmm ... out there.'"

Mary Ellen Childs had only recently formed her first percussion ensemble when she took part with other local artists in the first Out There. Even then, she recalls, artists shared the sense of taking part in something special. Childs and her ensemble, Crash, produced a larger piece for the 1999 Out There, and Childs recently produced a 20-year retrospective at the Southern Theater.

"I loved to be seen as 'out there,' because that's one of the things I love to toy with, whatever the edges are for me," she says. "I present my work in a lot of difference places, but I love being able to claim I was presented at the Walker. For audiences, it's definitely a stamp of approval, that it heightens your artistic credibility and integrity."

Minneapolis theater artist Michael Sommers remembers a charged atmosphere in the early years of the series. He emceed and performed in the opening festival - Minneapolis Star-Tribune writer Mike Steele called him "a performance art festival unto himself."), took the stage again the following year with the experimental performance trio Bad Jazz and in the 1993 Out There in a production from Ballet of the Dolls. Now the artistic director of Open Eye Figure Theater, Sommers and other local artists watch Out There perhaps more closely than any other series produced through the Walker. He points to the workshops artists in this series hold for locals and encourages these opportunities for interaction between visiting and local artists.

"Twenty years ago, we were so young and we thought everything we did was great, but things have changed and even our notion of what is new has changed," Sommers says. "What's great about Philip is he's bringing in things you wouldn't normally see, things that really are on the edge, and I think the artistic community is really grateful for that."

Today, Bither says, Out There is "a survey of the most interesting work we can find," wherever it resides. Under his direction, the series has trained its lens on New York and Europe, fostering artistic development, continued relationships and new work from Hopkins, Richard Maxwell, and Big Dance Theater, among other cutting-edge luminaries. Some Out There artists have been invited back for residencies to develop new work or for exclusive weekends on the performing arts calendar to premiere Walker commissions.

Out There has cultivated an audience open to the unpredictable and undefinable, Bither says, and success isn't measured at the box office or in the next day's newspaper. Many artists invited into this series "are working ahead of their time," he says, and it may take years for their influence to show up in the arts at large.

"We take great care to provide an informed, supportive audience, and many Out There shows sell out. But audience response and even most critical response is not the primary indication, to me, of artistic value," he says. "We believe that certain ideas and innovations in art need to be supported, and this series allows us to introduce an artist to an audience and also to us, as curators. I hope Out There always stays a place we can take these chances."

OPENING WEEKEND

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People
Everyone

8 pm Wednesday, January 9

8 pm Thursday, January 10 (post-show Q&A)

7 and 9:30 pm Friday-Saturday, January 11-12

$20 ($14 Wednesday; $16 Thursday-Saturday Walker members)