Performing Arts

First off, The Walworth Farce is a great piece of theater.  What I experienced was specific, surprising, complex, and affecting.  For at least two hours after I left the theater I was on edge, slightly jumpy and uncomfortable, even with objects I found near me.  I’ve been trying to understand what it is in the show that did this to me.  During the performance I laughed and watched.  It was a typical theater experience.  The difference I think was in the physicality of the actors.  I was particularly taken with Tadhg Murphy’s Sean.  But they all moved extremely well, rapidly shifting positions/characters/physicalities.  Following the transitions took a lot of attention: mental and physical.  (Neuroscientists have demonstrated that when watching a person do a movement “mirror neurons” fire in the brain of the observer as if he/she were actually moving.)  When the play ended I felt like my body had been through the wringer.  I was stimulated from the effort of watching and exhausted.

Secondly, The Walworth Farce is an Irish piece of theater.  I’ve seen movies and read books about the plight of the Irish under the oppressive thumb of the English.  The Walworth  Farce advanced this story of colonization.  The way Dennis’ sons struggle underneath him and become him is about learning their Irish heritage, but they learn it in a Council Flat in England.  The sons are trapped in a tiny apartment in a country that is not their own without any real knowledge of Ireland.  It’s a transcultural story.

The Irish have been going to England to make their fortune for over a hundred years.  It’s an old story and it’s still happening today.  More than ever people are traveling to rich world cities, leaving their youth, home and family to make money in a foreign culture.   This isn’t always pretty.  It reveals and reinforces unsavory power dynamics – in families and in society.  For the past day, I’ve been wondering about metaphors in The Walworth Farce.  I keep coming back to the metaphor of the transcultural experience.  It’s is surprising.  We certainly have these problems in America.  Look at the recent news surrounding the Somali population here in Minnesota.

I felt and enjoyed the skill of The Walworth Farce’s actors, director, and designers.  For me, what makes the play great is that I also felt the consequence in the play Edna Walsh wrote.

Performing Arts staffer Emily Taylor stopped by the McGuire Theater yesterday as stagehands from the Druid Ireland theater company built the set for tonight’s opening of The Walworth Farce. It’s unusual to see a detailed representation of everyday life on this stage — take a look at those authentically grimy sinks — but Enda Walsh’s play is anything but mundane.

The Walworth Farce has been getting rave reviews on its first North American tour, first in Toronto, then in Columbus, OH, where the Post-Dispatch said “this provocative and ingenious work offers a clever and revealing portrait of how story-telling can become an escape from reality, even a prison … ” We’re expecting more of the same here — and very much looking forward to Walsh’s talk with Guthrie Theater artistic director Joe Dowling this Sunday.

Next week we’ll be treated to The Walworth Farce by Ireland’s Druid Theater. Minneapolis is on the front end of a 209-performance, 22-city, 6-country tour of the world of a new play that is apparently “a blend of the hilarious and horrifying.” It has received all kinds of great press and maybe more importantly played to sold out houses since coming onto the international scene at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival.

I’m excited to see this show for a number of reasons, but I’m also intrigued to see a what a new play that has been broadly successful. It’s no secret that live performance is having a little trouble competing in a super-saturated entertainment market and a troubled economy.

Why am I excited? For starters last spring the Walker presented three fantastic British performances that appeared at the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival: England, Ape, and Story of a Rabbit. I missed England and was chastised for it by my friends. Ape and Story of a Rabbit were delightfully funny as an audience member and challenging as an artist. They challenged me to continue pushing for humanity and clarity of communication even as my work pushes against theatrical assumptions.

Another reason I’m excited is because we have a thriving theater community in the Twin Cities that is consistently producing funny, human, challenging, outlandish work: The Bedlam, Jon Ferguson Theater, Sandbox, Four Humors, Three Stix, Walking Shadow, Red Eye Collaborations, and even my own Live Action Set. Seeing a new play in the same tradition tour the world is inspiring and gives international context for our work. A particularly successful play like this might also help audiences bridge the gap between the Guthrie and the Bedlam.

So what will The Walworth Farce be? It has more institutional backing than any of its British predecessors (Druid Theatre is an established institution in Galway, Farce was presented by the National Theatre in London and by Traverse Theatre – one of the best venues in Edinburgh), and from this youtube clip it looks more like British TV than the others:

As we roll unstoppably towards the impending winter, I’m ready to see something funny and human, maybe a little ridiculous. Are you? If not, check out the Druid website. They make a pretty good case for why The Walworth Farce is special:

http://www.druid.ie/productions/the-walworth-farce-2009

Or if you’re wanting a review, try the NY Times:

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/theater/reviews/19walw.html

Hugh Hughes in Story of a Rabbit

Hoipolloi Theatre Feeling Connected

Raise a glass to celebrate the final event of the UK Performance Now! series and the Walker’s performing arts season. Arrive early for cheap drinks ($3 beer/$5 wine/$2 sodas) and stay late to celebrate with Hugh Hughes from Story of a Rabbit.

Be there: Walker’s McGuire Theater, 4th Floor, 7 pm (before the show)

Stay late: bar service after the show too

Let’s celebrate!

Photo by Paula Court

Don’t be shy. If you haven’t seen Accidental Nostalgia or Must Don’t Whip ‘Um, the first two parts of Cynthia Hopkin’s Accidental Trilogy, you can catch up in a giffy!

First there was the earthy, Southern-gothic road tale Accidental Nostalgia in 2005, whose narrator steals an identity and revisits her small-town past in an attempt to unravel a childhood murder mystery. Two years later its prequel, Must Don’t Whip ’Um, featured a 1970s American rocker (the one whose identity is later stolen) who renounces her career to join a Sufi brotherhood in Morocco, thus making a leap both geographically and thematically from Western pop culture to Eastern spiritual mysticism . . . even as it turned out to be a daughter’s story about her search for a mother she never knew.

The first two productions were, in Cynthia’s words “tapestries of fiction woven from strands of truth… With this new work, I’m attempting to extract the fiction from the truth and to create two Acts which are polar opposites from each other. I conceive of the trilogy as concentric circles: Part I (nostalgia) being a little circle of neurology and personal memory loss; Part II being the next circle outward from oneself, oneself in relation to father and mother and society; and Part III is the biggest circle, oneself in relation to the universe at large. Part I is the brain, Part II the heart, and Part III the spirit of the Trilogy.”

See Part III this weekend to find out what happens!

Earlier this afternoon I sat in on a sliver of the rehearsals by the Accinosco company for The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success), which premieres at the McGuire Theater this Thursday. (Click here for tickets – there’s a special discount for the opening night.) Cynthia Hopkins and fellow company members Jeff Sugg and Jim Findlay, along with director DJ Mendel, production coordinator Anthony, and several other crew members are working pretty much from “10am to 10pm, when it’s not 9 to 11,” says Jeff to finalize the details of this “ancient epic folktale.”

Not only do they need to tailor it for the Walker’s stage, but since it’s a world premiere, those final details are innumerable: Does Cynthia throw the record here? Are the slides in the right order? Can the mike stand be steady? Not to mention other, bigger questions.

Fans know Cynthia Hopkins to be quite the spinner of tall tales – but people who haven’t seen the trilogy’s first two installments will get all the back story they need in the second part of the show, which Cynthia and crew were running through here. This final installment promises to bring an extra dimension to the trilogy – not just with all of the intergalactic space travel (yes, there is flying), but with Hopkins laying bare her own true (we presume) story. As she says as one point, it’s all part of “an elaborate plan.”

Above are views from the front and side of the stage. Those roughly door-sized panels are held up with long bungees, to define a smaller, intimate stage. During the first part of the show, they are dropped down,  creating a shiny black void for the outer-space setting.

Below is Jeff Sugg working backstage – sort of. He and Jim Findlay, the design/tech geniuses behind all of Cynthia’s shows, are actually visible for part of the show (when the panels up above are not raised), working their magic behind a shiny clear sheet of plastic. A transparent take on the Wizard of Oz, if you will. At certain junctures, they leave the computers and control boards and come forward as performers, to boot.

Below: This crazed craft project is one of the many ways that Findlay and Sugg mix high- and low-tech. It’s a tiny model of, as Jim says, “the earth 50 million years from now” (or maybe that’s billion), with some new and no doubt highly evolved improvements. Attached to that wood strip in the center is a mini-camera that can do tracking shots over the landscape, which are projected onto a really cool curved screen hanging high over the main stage. If you look for it, I think this might be visible during the show, in back with Jeff and Jim and all their gear.

Overall, there’s an intriguing mix in this show between homespun design and expansive elegance. I’m eager to see how it all comes together on Thursday night.

In the run-up to the April 16 world premiere of The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success), Cynthia Hopkins and her team have posted some great videos on YouTube. First, there’s the delightfully corny trailer with its old-fashioned anxiety-provoking lead-in: “The Sun is burning out! The Earth is under attack! And only one suicidally depressed alcoholic can save the Druoc race!”

And on a more serious note, Hopkins sits down to discuss just what she’s after with the latest of her “multimedia music performance extravaganzas” – The Success of Failure is the final piece in her Accidential Nostalgia trilogy. One reference point for the title, she says, is the miracle of human life as being the result of a “vast number of catastrophic failures” that came before in the history of the planet and even the universe.

Hopkins et al arrive in Minneapolis today to work out the last elements of the piece on the McGuire stage; we hope to post some snapshots and notes on their rehearsals here in the coming days.

While running around the city yesterday to prepare for APE’s three venue tour, Gary Stevens took a moment and sat down to chat about his performance with Euan Kerr from MPR.

APE

Take a lunch break and be a part of a video shoot for Donna Uchizono Company

Help us fill our seats and be part of an upcoming performance at Walker!

Friday, March 27, 12:30pm in the Walker’s McGuire Theater

The Walker Art Center is hosting the New York-based Donna Uchizono Company for a one-week residency and three performances of Thin Air on April 2-4. In one section of the dance, there is a video image of audience members sitting in the seats of the McGuire Theater projected onto the back wall of the theater. You will be filmed as if you are watching the performance, and will appear as a mirror image of the audience who will be there on the actual performance evenings. 

We need people in the seats, so we hope you can join us. Also please pass along this invite to others that may want to participate. For your participation, we will provide lunch (pizza and salad) after the shoot on the stage of the McGuire Theater and a reduced price $10 ticket to come and see any of the Donna Uchizono Company dance performances!

Video Shoot Schedule:

Friday, March 27 12:30pm: participants arrive at the Walker’s McGuire Theater (Please use the main entrance of the theater; and if you’d like, bring along your coats in order to best mimic a real audience)12:45- 1pm: video shoot

Please email or call Nicole Lahoz-Arne before Wednesday, March 25, if you can participate. And please let us know if you’d like to have pizza with us after the shoot.

Nicole Lahoz-Arne:  nicole.lahoz-arne@walkerart.org or 612-375-7695.

More information about the company’s performance:

Donna Uchizono Dance Company Thin Air

Thursday – Saturday, April 2-5, 8pm Thursday, $18 ($15 Walker members); Friday-Saturday, $25 ($21) McGuire Theater

Click here to see a video of the performance

“The haunting quality of Uchizono’s work shone through-a blend of small but gem-like virtuosic moments, rich metaphors, and unforgettable visual panache.” -Dance Magazine

Award-winning New York choreographer Donna Uchizono draws from the Buddhist tenet on emptiness to create a stunning new trio that combines iconic art-rock guitarist /composer Fred Frith’s densely intriguing score, the visceral power of her own unique movement vocabulary, and Michael Casselli’s ghostlike video imagery. Thin Air is a hypnotic experience that beautifully utilizes sound, simple yet brilliant scenic elements, and finely detailed movement that flows from the deliberate to the frenetic.  For tickets and information, go to walkerart.org.

“Church”, written and directed by experimental playwright Young Jean Lee, is flying to Minneapolis on the wings of a flurry of positive press for its creator. Lee has received a great amount of press in recent weeks, including an article in the New Yorker, a front page review in the New York Times for “The Shipment”, as well as a write up in the Village Voice, Time Out, and two New York Times articles for “Church”. Lee was voted best New York provocative playwright in 2007 according to the Village Voice.Church is being performed this week only Thursday through Saturday at 8pm at The Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater. Click here for tickets.

“It’s an unorthodox contemporary worship service, complete with sermon, praise dancing and a gospel choir… Her slyly subversive drama ambushes its audience with an earnest and surprisingly moving Christian church service that might be the most unlikely provocation produced in years.” Click here to read the complete New York Times Review of Church.

Even as Church’s charismatic and left-leaning central preacher defies traditionally held Christian assumptions, he conveys a passionate message about religion having the power to transform lives, backed up by three female ministers. Hear the word and feel the power as the preaching, dance, and a full gospel choir deliver “a work so enjoyable, so intricate, and so thought-provoking [that] it’s only appropriate to give thanks and praise” (New York Sun).

Young Jean Lee on writing “Church”: ” The premise that all of my shows begin with is, I ask myself the question, “What is the last show in the world that you would ever want to make?” Then I force myself to make that show. My whole aesthetic is about fighting complacency. So if I make a show that goes against my instincts of what I want to do, that creates a very tense and complicated dynamic. For “Church” the last show in the world I would ever want to do was an evangelical Christian service that’s sincerely trying to convert the audience to Christianity, and that’s not ironic or a joke or making fun of Christianity at all. That just seemed like a real nightmare and a challenge for me, and it has been.”
Click to read more of “Faith Confronted, and Defended, Downtown” an interview with director Young Jean Lee and Lear deBessonet in The New York Times.

On Young Jean Lee’s new work “The Shipment”:
“Critics have lavished praise on “The Shipment,” which Ms. Lee also directed and whose run has been extended until Saturday in New York. In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood called the play “a subversive, seriously funny new theater piece.” The New Yorker also gave “The Shipment” a warm and lengthy review — an unusual laurel for a young, relatively unknown writer. ” (New York Times)