P 2 G S N 8 I 1 S R 20 18 0 N G I 2 N G R P 1 N S I 0 8 2 1 0 N G I 2 IN R P R P 8S G2 1 N 0 I S 2 PR 8 1 #SOUNDS 0 S#MOVES 2 2 #SURPRISES #MATTERS G #QUESTIONS #DELIGHTS N G I N R 8 1
IT’S A BIG WORLD IN HERE. #MOVES #VIEWS #EXPERIMENTS #PLAYS #ACTS #TALKS #LIVES #ENCOUNTERS #PLEASURES Welcome to NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Think of NYU Skirball as NYU’s largest classroom, and laboratory, and one-stop vehicle for international interdisciplinary studies. Whether you’re a student or not, experiment and explore with the Spring 2018 season. There are opportunities every week – and then some – for you to encounter something here that you might not otherwise encounter, whether it’s a language you don’t speak, an art form you don’t know, or an experience you think you won’t relate to. See something that sounds intriguing and then hang around after the show to talk about it, with strangers, friends, and fellow travelers. On the next page is a diagram of thematic suggestions to get you rolling, a map of where we can take you if you’ll let us. What can performance(s) tell you about the world and your place in it? What kinds of unexpected pleasures might you find along the way?
Readings
Throughout the following pages you’ll find more on the diverse events we’re sending your way, along with Indefinite Articles by NYU faculty and friends to help contextualize/explain/obfuscate what we’re up to. And we offer reading lists throughout too. On nyuskirball.org there are video clips, interviews, a calendar of preand post-show talks, discussions, seminars, downloads for reading, advance production programs, and discussion boards to share your insights, your concerns, your discomforts — and hopefully also your surprises and delights.
André Lepecki, ed., Dance (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art) (Boston: MIT Press, 2012).
NYU Skirball is bigger on the inside, and it’s a big, brave, bold new world in here. Come see for yourself, expand your own horizons and be wowed by ours.
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2013).
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985). J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). Peter Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate (New York: Touchstone, 1995). Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (Third Edition) (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011).
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2015).
Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016).
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GRRRLS TO THE FRONT #grrrls Wang Chong/Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental: Thunderstorm 2.0 January 6 & 7 THISISPOPBABY: RIOT February 15–17
ACT LOCALLY, SPECTATE GLOBALLY #internationalartists
V.4 Dance Festival April 19 & 20
Wang Chong/Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental: Thunderstorm 2.0 (China) January 6 & 7
Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods: Until Our Hearts Stop May 4 & 5
Nature Theater Of Oklahoma and EnKnapGroup: Pursuit Of Happiness (Slovenia) January 12–14 CULTURE AS RESISTANCE #cultureasresistance
Rivers of Sound: Not Two (Everywhere) February 10
THISISPOPBABY: RIOT February 15–17
THISISPOPBABY: RIOT (Ireland) February 15–17
Teatro la Re-Sentida: The Dictatorship of Coolness April 5–7
Jérôme Bel: Gala (France) March 1–3 Gob Squad: War and Peace (Germany) March 29–31
Lil Buck and Jon Boogz: Love Heals All Wounds April 14
Teatro La Re-Sentida: The Dictatorship of Coolness (Chile) April 5–7
V.4 Dance Festival April 19 & 20
V.4 Dance Festival (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) April 19 & 20 Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods: Until Our Hearts Stop (Belgium) May 4 & 5
SERIOUS FUN! #familyfun Jérôme Bel: Gala March 1–3
USE YOUR SENSES: Listen, Look, Touch, Try #senses
Lil Buck and Jon Boogz: Love Heals All Wounds April 14
ICE: the whisper opera January 24–February 4 Rivers of Sound: Not Two February 10 Jérôme Bel: Gala March 1–3 Gob Squad: War and Peace March 29–31
LAUGH TILL YOU CRY (OR VICE VERSA) #laugh/cry
Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods: Until Our Hearts Stop May 4 & 5
Nature Theater Of Oklahoma and EnKnapGroup: Pursuit Of Happiness January 12–14 THISISPOPBABY: RIOT February 15–17 Jérôme Bel: Gala March 1–3 Gob Squad: War and Peace March 29–31 Teatro La Re-Sentida: The Dictatorship of Coolness April 5–7
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THÉÂTRE DU RÊVE EXPÉRIMENTAL & WANG CHONG #PLAYS #ENCOUNTERS #UTR18 NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE JANUARY 6 AT 7:30 PM JANUARY 7 AT 4 PM
“Arguably the most interesting and intelligent nextgeneration avant garde theatre director in China.” TimeOut Melbourne Tickets start at $25
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Readings Mary Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s PostExile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Xiaomei Chen, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Rossella Ferrari, Pop Goes the AvantGarde: Experimental Theater in Contemporary China (Enactments) (Calcutta: Seagull, 2013). Jörg Huber and Zhao Chuan, eds., The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre (Berlin: Transcript-Verlag, 2013).
Indefinite Article: Elizabeth Bradley How unexpected even in our post-Weinstein world to encounter a revelatory exploration of gender inequity emanating from an avant-garde Beijing based theatremaker! Yet this, and considerably more, is what Wang Chong’s Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental offers New York audiences with Thunderstorm 2.0. As the title suggests, Wang Chong has reinvented a classic of Chinese modern drama into a multi-textured cinematic experience intended to resonate with a digitally saturated contemporary culture. The core of the story however needs no updating. “This is a theme that transcends time and space… Rich guys can still do whatever they want and women are powerless, regardless of their social status,” said Wang Chong. By stepping away from the conventions of Chinese theatre and harnessing the expressive potential of new technologies, Thunderstorm 2.0 challenges the dominance of hierarchies that extend beyond gender concerns. This is subversive political theatre expressed in breathtaking visual semaphore.
Cao Yu’s early 20th-century drama Thunderstorm, regarded as a masterpiece in Chinese theater, is dismantled and reassembled in Thunderstorm 2.0, a new interpretation by Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental, helmed by internationally acclaimed director Wang Chong. Using real-time video editing and sound mixing from action occurring on stage, a hypnotic, near-silent movie unfolds to tell the explicit story of two female characters discovering that they have been cheated on by the same womanizing playboy. Updating the story to a Beijing official’s home in the 1990s, Wang and his company of Beijing performers reinvent the classic play to reflect the complexities of contemporary capitalist-communist society, the ubiquity of technology and the sex-obsessed global landscape. Chong incorporates live pingtan players, a centuriesold form of traditional Chinese musical storytelling, to create the dialogue and soundtrack onstage.
Both by engrossing and by increasingly implicating viewers as the story-telling perspective shifts, Thunderstorm 2.0 challenges us to ponder how little has changed in the dynamics of power whether in the realm of interpersonal relationships or among nation states attempting to exert ever more dystopian control over the lives of their citizens. Thunderstorm 2.0 asks what we will do about what we now know. Elizabeth Bradley is an Arts Professor in the Department of Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She teaches courses about global arts leadership and facilitates international cultural exchange. Last spring she was appointed as a theatre critic to the new original theatre journalism digital site Broadway.News.
Co-presented with the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival Performed in Chinese with English subtitles Running time: 1 hour and 25 minutes Made possible in part with a grant from the Asian Cultural Council to advance international understanding through cultural exchange in the arts.
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CHALLENGES US TO PONDER HOW LITTLE HAS CHANGED IN THE DYNAMICS OF POWER.
NATURE THEATER OF OKLAHOMA & ENKNAPGROUP #MOVES #EXPERIMENTS #UTR18 US PREMIERE JANUARY 12 & 13 AT 7:30 PM JANUARY 14 AT 2 PM
“ ... Generates an orgy of images, memories and emotions in the heads and the hearts of the audience.” De Theaterkrant (NL) Tickets start at $25
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Readings R. Anderson-Rabern, Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). R. Anderson-Rabern, “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Aesthetics of Fun” in TDR, 54.3: 81-98. Leopold Lippert, “Performance Labor, Im/Mobility, and Exhaustion in Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times” in Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, April 2017, Vol. 5 Issue 1. Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). Daniel Sack, ed., Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (London: Routledge, 2017).
OBIE-Award winning, New York-based performance group Nature Theater of Oklahoma takes on the American Dream and the bleak desert of its aspirational aftermath. Created in collaboration with six dancers of the highly acclaimed Slovenian dance company EnKnapGroup, Pursuit of Happiness charges through a rough-andtumble, endlessly morphing myth of the Wild West, where whiskey pours, fists fly, and bullets ultimately settle the score. Through hyper-masculine hijinks and disruptions of submissive stereotypes, this fast-paced, entertaining and affecting piece careens towards a shocking and unseemly Hollywood ending. With a brief detour to Baghdad, this raucous dance-theater performance hybrid travels from the dark corners into which we collectively chase our wildest dreams to the anarchic frontiers of lust, greed and violent means to examine the “unalienable right” to happiness. Pursuit of Happiness is co-produced by Théâtre de la Ville and steirischer herbst. Co-presented with the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival en-knap.com oktheater.org Running time: 70 minutes The project is supported by U.S. Embassy in Ljubljana. International travel expenses of the project participants is supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska’s work on this production is made possible in part by the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. Indefinite Article: Julia Jarcho While you were living somewhere else, Nature Theater of Oklahoma became the coolest theater company in New York City. You found this out before you even got back into town, and naturally you were curious and maybe a little suspicious or worried that there was this whole new thing happening that you had maybe missed. Kelly Cooper’s name was known to you through her membership in Joyce Cho, a collective of terrific playwrights who had all been students of Mac Wellman, the master experimental playwriting mage of Brooklyn. Before you saw any of Nature Theater’s work, you read an interview that Young Jean Lee did with Kelly and Pavol in the Summer 2009 issue of Bomb and it proves beyond doubt that they are all cool. “Nature Theater of Oklahoma is one of the best ensemble theater companies in the world,” wrote Young Jean in her introduction to the interview. “Their work is weird and unlike anything you’ve ever seen.” That interview would make anyone with a
heart want to be an artist. Kelly says: “I know that what we do is ridiculous, that no one would care tomorrow if we stopped making it, but I always hope that what we do changes people’s lives, that it alters consciousness, that it cures cancer and AIDS. I know I am failing miserably at any one of these goals, but I have to keep striving for big things when I invite all these people into a room. I have to believe in the power of that encounter.” Later in the interview, Pavol talks about watching TV: “I cherish… shows about sharks,” he says. “I love sharks… I’m definitely afraid of sharks.” When you finally got the chance to see their work for the first time, it was January 2013. You were a broke grad student but you pulled together about a hundred dollars to go to the Public and see a marathon showing of the first four installments of Life and Times, a multimedia performance epic scripted by the transcript of a company member telling her life story. It lasted all afternoon and evening and everyone you knew was there and even Björk was in the audience in an amazing black-and-white suit. The piece was funny and virtuosic and sometimes transcendent, a testament to what you might create if you had the willpower to stick with silliness in a really serious way, if you could be truly konsequent (as they say in Berlin) about the inconsequential. Reviewing the show, Hilton Als wrote that it “does what Faulkner and Gertrude Stein did with English prose: makes us hear it in all its terrible richness and peculiarity and flatness as it struggles to express itself, or hide from its own emotional life and specious truths.” But there was also something comforting, personal, about the way the show kept reminding you that art is people getting ideas and running with them. And running. Nature Theater of Oklahoma is a company about blowing up the scope of the imagination. About exploding out beyond the parameters of the event underway so that it has to re-form itself again and again. They’re too smart to claim to be speaking for America, but they know you’ll want to be there when they try. Julia Jarcho, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at NYU. She is the author of “Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama,” and an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director with the company, Minor Theater.
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ART IS PEOPLE GETTING IDEAS AND RUNNING WITH THEM. AND RUNNING.
ICE: THE WHISPER OPERA
#SOUNDS #ENCOUNTERS #SECRETS JAN 24– FEBRUARY 4 TUESDAY– SATURDAY AT 7:30 PM SATURDAY & SUNDAY AT 3 PM “Impressive … adventurous.” The New York Times Tickets start at $75
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Readings Selected and annotated by David Lang
My piece – the whisper opera – is a mysterious little alternative world. It has its own rules and its own peculiar way of proceeding, it has its own architecture, it builds its world by giving the viewer only a few bare hints of text and music, it is full of secrets. Here are a few of my favorite books that feel to me like they must have had something to do with how I made this piece. Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones (New York: Grove Press, 1972).
A novella that imagines a community of people confined to a small space, and whose lives are consumed by trying to discover just how small that space really is. John Cage, Silence (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
A book of essays by the music world’s great experimenter and philosopher. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).
the whisper opera, with words and music by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lang and direction and design by Jim Findlay, is performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) with the musicians, singer, and audience enclosed in an intimate onstage set, and is performed almost entirely in whispers. Lang explores the question: “what if a piece were so quiet and so personal to the performers that you needed to be right next them or you would hear almost nothing. In honor of this, the score to the whisper opera states clearly that it can never be recorded, or filmed, or amplified. The only way this piece can be received is if you are there, in person, listening very closely.” David Lang is an American composer living in New York City. Co-founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, which went on to win a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. He was nominated for an Academy Award for “Simple Song #3” from the film Youth. He wrote the libretto for the whisper opera by typing short, personal phrases into a search engine and writing down the results. The opera includes these anonymous confessions, which are whispered by soprano, while four instrumentalists from the International Contemporary Ensemble never play above a hush. The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective committed to transforming the way music is created and experienced. ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. The ensemble’s 35 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. The group currently serves as artists in residence at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Mostly Mozart Festival, and previously led a five-year residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. iceorg.org davidlangmusic.com Running time: 80 minutes This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Made possible in part with support from Con Edison - a Skirball Sounds sponsor, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
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An idiosyncratic essay about how people relate to each other, masquerading as a kind of anthropology survey. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications; reprint edition, 1989).
An idiosyncratic list of rules for the creation of beauty in art, masquerading as a kind of architecture survey. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale (New York: Knopf, 1990).
A deep and moving examination of a moment in American history, assembled through microscopic reading of the mundane details found in the diary of a pre-Revolutionary War midwife.
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THE ONLY WAY THIS PIECE CAN BE RECEIVED IS IF YOU ARE THERE, IN PERSON.
International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE): the whisper opera photographed by Nathan Keay, Š MCA Chicago
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RIVERS OF SOUND: NOT TWO
#SOUNDS #ENCOUNTERS #TRAVELS FEBRUARY 10 AT 7:30 PM
“Among the most promising figures in jazz today.” The Chicago Tribune Tickets start at $40
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Readings Philip V. Bohlman and Goffredo Plastino, eds., Jazz Worlds/World Jazz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Thomas Burkhalter, The Arab AvantGarde: Music, Politics, Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, eds., The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2011). Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (London: Verso, 2015). Howard Medium Mandel, “Amir ElSaffar: Exquisite Alchemist” in DownBeat, January 2014. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, eds., Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
he learned to speak Arabic, as well as to sing and play the santur (the Persian hammered-dulcimer), and to alter and expand his trumpet-playing language.
Rivers of Sound is a 17-piece musical ensemble led by composer, trumpeter, santur player and vocalist, Amir ElSaffar. In performing Not Two, an original composition by ElSaffar, each musician interacts with the group through both improvised and composed material to create a novel composite sound. An expert in jazz and Iraqi maqam, ElSaffar is a master of diverse musical traditions and a singular approach to combining Middle Eastern musical languages with jazz and other styles of contemporary music. His music is both timely and urgent. amirelsaffar.com Running time: 120 minutes Made possible in part with support from Con Edison - a Skirball Sounds sponsor.
His last decade-plus of recorded work, including the sextet albums Two Rivers, Inana, and Crisis, as well as the quintet album Alchemy, and the most recent Not Two, by his 17-piece Rivers of Sound Orchestra, have found various elegant ways to make the modal maqam music merge with the jazz tradition. In the large ensemble especially, this merging happens at every level: between Arabic and western tuning systems, between collectiveimprovisation strategies and the cathartic upswellings that result from them, and between the timbres of individual instruments. ElSaffar’s hybrid musical conception has passed far beyond experiment. “Nothing is more natural to me,” he has said. “The maqam is as natural as bebop, or certain types of free jazz, or playing in symphony orchestras. So if I’m going to going to have a piece that happens to have elements of these different traditions, it’s just autobiographical, it’s just what’s coming out of my experience.” Ben Ratliff teaches cultural criticism at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is the author of “Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty” and “The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music.”
Indefinite Article: Ben Ratliff Amir ElSaffar is an Iraqi-American trumpeter from Chicago, trained in classical music and jazz. In the first years of the new century, after having won some prestigious trumpet competitions and worked with improvisers dedicated to the new, including Cecil Taylor, Vijay Iyer, and Rudresh Mahanthappa, he started to explore a centuries-old tradition of Arabic music. Sixteen years later, he is still exploring the Iraqi branch of the maqam, a complex and endangered musical system. The maqam, which means “situation” or “place,” is both a repertoire of musical material and a set of rules. It is a family of modes (seven-note scales, in which sometimes the notes are quarter-tones, falling between two adjacent notes on a piano); specific modes correspond to specific emotions. It is also denotes an ordering of sections within larger structures of vocal and instrumental music, and a strategy for improvising within those structures and modes. ElSaffar arrived in Baghdad in March, 2002, in his midtwenties, having visited there only once previously and knowing little of the language. Over time, and with the help of various mentors and teachers — including the London-based singer Hamid Al-Saadi, believed to be the only musician who knows the entire maqam repertoire —
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THE MAQAM IS AS NATURAL AS BEBOP, OR CERTAIN TYPES OF FREE JAZZ, OR PLAYING IN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRAS.
THISISPOPBABY: RIOT #ACTS #ENCOUNTERS #QUEERS US PREMIERE FEBRUARY 15–17 AT 7:30 PM
“Extraordinary … audiences were transported.” The Irish Times Tickets start at $50
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“Glamour is resistance.” Defiant queer self-presentation carves out space – and also sends up signal flares to the attentive – for different ways of moving through the world, in which pleasure and aesthetics meaningfully shape our resistant practices, beyond the limitations of normative respectability. History teaches us that the process of fighting for access to substantive equal rights and social change is rarely polite, respectable, or wellreceived – how do we sustain ourselves, and each other, so that we can persist in this urgent work? Or as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney put it in The Undercommons: how can we “be together and think together in a way that feels good?”
RIOT, the jaw-dropping theatrical highlight and winner of Best Production at the 2016 Dublin Fringe Festival, is a disorderly cocktail of wild theater, gut-punching spoken word, banging jigs, slapstick comedy and eye-popping circus that leaves audiences dazzled and dizzy. RIOT is both party and politic, a love letter of hope to the future, a clarion call on the state of the nation and a celebration of Ireland. The all-star cast includes Panti Bliss, Ireland’s Queen of Drag. THISISPOPBABY, self-described “theatre makers, club creatives and good time gurls,” lands somewhere between pop culture, counter culture, queer culture and high art. Founded in 2007, the Dublin-based company regularly sells out across Ireland and stages Queer Notions, a mini-festival of queer ideas and performance. thisispopbaby.com Running time: 120 minutes RIOT is co-presented with the Irish Arts Center
Indefinite Article: J de Leon THE FIRST GAY PRIDE WAS A RIOT. This defiant wordplayas-slogan, appearing with variations on stickers, pins, patches, and protest signs since at least 1989, succinctly reminds us that the Stonewall riots – and earlier riots at Cooper’s Donuts and Compton Cafeteria – were in direct response to police violence, and refutes the orderly parade routes, corporate sponsors, and cheerful rainbow ads that now gild NYC as Pride approaches. Bringing RIOT to the heart of downtown puts its raucous, hopeful energy just blocks from landmarks of queer history – so much of which was led by trans women of color and gender non-conforming folks, whose legacies are regularly overwritten, or altogether unrecorded. Stonewall, with Marsha P. Johnson’s legendary “shotglass heard round the world” – the Christopher Street pier – Washington Square Park, where Sylvia Rivera gave her searing rebuttal to transphobic feminist organizers during a Christopher Street Liberation Day rally, and where annual Trans Day of Remembrance gatherings are now held – the STAR House – the LGBT Community Center, formerly known as the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, where ACT UP meetings were (and still are) held, and more recently RISE AND RESIST meetings, organizing against #45 in myriad ways.
Whether the longevity of ACT UP (their recent 30th anniversary message: “we’re not celebrating”) or the flash-mob-in-the-pan Werk for Peace, whose protests took the form of queer dance parties in public spaces – including the streets in front of Ivanka’s and VP Pence’s homes – queer activists make canny use of pleasure, spectacle, and performance when putting their bodies on the line – from the infamous, impromptu chorus line of dancing, singing, rioting drag queens during the Stonewall riots – to ACT UP’s kiss-ins – to Werk for Peace’s twerking protesters blocking access to security checkpoints as part of J20. Werk for Peace was founded in the wake of the Pulse nightclub Latin Night shooting in 2016 – which has already been surpassed as the deadliest mass shooting in US history – and their statement of purpose aligns politics and pleasure, taking Emma Goldman’s proverbial “if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution” further to assert that without dancing – or whatever pleasures sustain us – there won’t be any revolution at all: “We take to the streets around the world to claim space and assert: We are here. And we will dance. We take to the bars and clubs and we assert: We are here. We will dance.“ In José Muñoz’s formulation, this is what utopia might look and feel like, the pleasure of making our ways through potential utopic iterations, glimpses of better times and places – past and future – from within the bounds of here and now. Muñoz lays out this queer logic in his abstract-as-manifesto on the first page of Cruising Utopia: “Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” Benjamin Shepard puts it more plainly in his writing on ACT UP: “Without pleasure, there can be no justice.” This is not an either/or logic between politics and pleasure, art and activism, instead reflecting the both/and breathless urgency of THISISPOPBABY’s name and work, no time for spaces, all caps locked. PLEASUREISRESISTANCE – words to live by, and with, and for – “We are here. We will dance.”
J de Leon is NYU Skirball’s Assistant Director, Engagement. They hold a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU. Their research argues for the queer ethics and aesthetics of self-indulgence.
RIOT is in part a commemoration of Ireland’s revolutionary past, marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rebellion. The show has become a lens onto Ireland’s revolutionary present, with the presence of queer performers whose self-presentation echoes another artist in NYU Skirball’s 2017–18 season – Justin Vivian Bond – who regularly reminds us in word and deed that
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Readings Che Gossett, Reina Gossett, and AJ Lewis, “Reclaiming Our Lineage: Organized Queer, GenderNonconforming, and Transgender Resistance to Police Violence,” in A New Queer Agenda, special issue of Scholar & Feminist Online, vol. 10.1-2, Fall 2011/ Spring 2012. Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” “The Uses of the Erotic” and “The Uses of Anger” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984). José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Siobhán O’Gorman and Charlotte McIvor, eds., Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2015). Benjamin Heim Shepard, Queer Political Performance and Protest: Play, Pleasure and Social Movement (London: Routledge, 2009). Dean Spade, “Dress to Kill, Fight to Win,” in LTTR Vol. 1, September 2002.
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WITHOUT PLEASURE, THERE CAN BE NO JUSTICE.
THISISPOPBABY: RIOT photographed by Fiona Morgan
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JÉRÔME BEL: GALA #MOVES #VIEWS #SERIOUSFUN NYC PREMIERE MARCH 1 & 2 AT 7:30 PM MARCH 3 AT 3 PM “We’re not only cheering them on, we’re wishing we were on stage too.” The Guardian (UK) Tickets start at $40
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Readings
Featuring amateurs, professionals and everything in between, the 20 dancers of Gala will be cast in NYC from all walks of life. Through their movement, the gentle humanity of each performer lights up this inspired production. Breaking the sanctity of the stage, this is a jumble of joys, failures, and stumbling insights into the uniting power of dance. Jérôme Bel, the “mischievously entertaining” (The Guardian) Paris-based choreographer, explores the relationship between choreography and popular culture, dancer and audience, often using humor to break the formality of a theater apparatus. Bel’s work has often been referred to as conceptual. He questions both art and contemporary dance by deconstructing modes of presentation and the notion of authorship while problematizing the historical prominence of technical virtuosity in dance. jeromebel.fr Running time: 90 minutes This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. NYU Skirball’s Serious Fun family matinee series is made possible in part with support from Con Edison for family educational and enrichment programming.
Ramsay Burt, Ungoverning Dance (New York, Oxford University Press, 2017). André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (London: Routledge, 2016). Gerald Siegmund, Jérôme Bel: Dance, Theatre, and the Subject (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz, eds., Disabled Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Simon Murray and John Keefe, Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, 2nd Edition (London: Routledge, 2015).
be seen alone onstage. Those experiences cut deep. Community recitals are a training ground where we begin to understand which bodies are valued as virtuosic in relation to ability, capacity, class, race, sexual and gender identity, how they are privileged onstage, and how that value system is transformed into aesthetic “taste.” But recitals are more than that. In the presence of other human shrimp, I learned the pleasures of becoming a company. Recitals endure and people perform in them for the pleasure, to quote Jean Luc Nancy, of “being singular plural.” And this is where theater can both model and organize social change. For the hour or two when I belonged to a crustacean chorus, I was something other than myself and very much myself. I felt special and felt like a shrimp in an ocean of another’s devising. As Sondheim would have it, I got a taste of what was possible when I was “side by side by side” other crustacean singularities and folded into a fleeting performative assembly. There is political potential in this. In a community recital, the audience is expected to devalue critical judgment and shower the performer with love and support. But critical judgment can never be fully suspended. How could it? We’ve been trained to judge other bodies from way way back when we were little shrimp. But community recitals do privilege empathic reception toward the performers and the others in the audience with us. As conceived by Jérôme Bel, Gala engages that empathy as it makes the audience reflect on how we use our critical judgment and to what end. Drawing from what is common and familiar in transnational culture to blur and reconfigure assemblies and divides, Gala is the joy of singing, dancing and watching categories of people transform into singularities that change, and recombine, and recombine again by means of performance. Gala becomes a theater of being singular plural, of “company company,” an example of what Performance Studies scholar José Muñoz identifies as a “concrete utopia.”
Indefinite Article: Debra Levine Commenting on his musical Company in a PBS documentary, composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim said, “Broadway theater has been for many years supported by upper-middle-class people with uppermiddle-class problems. These people really want to escape that world when they go to the theatre, and then here we are with Company talking about how we’re going to bring it right back in their faces.” Sondheim’s worlding made for a groundbreaking musical where Broadway regulars could see themselves aestheticized, transformed into a representation of the human condition. But Company didn’t strive to change Broadway’s demographics, nor did it depict economically, sexually or racially diverse experience. Every performer was white and able bodied, and all could sing brilliantly in a minor key.
Debra Levine, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at NYU Abu Dhabi and affiliated faculty at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She would like to gratefully acknowledge her own “Company Company” — her 2016 NYUAD “Thinking Theater” class who accompanied her to Singapore to see Gala at the Victoria Theater, and who generously shared their insights, which greatly influenced this essay.
Broadway is still the holy grail for so many aspiring performers who first strutted their stuff in community recitals and grade school shows. And although there has been much cultural progress, Sondheim makes it clear that most professional theater is often an even stricter application of community standards. When I was five years old I was a shrimp in my Peabody, Massachusetts community ballet recital. I plié-ed my heart out among other pink leotard and tutu clad shrimp. Parents clapped for me even as they cheered a bit more loudly for their own dancing crustacean. But I didn’t get to solo, and that denial made it clear that I wasn’t good enough to
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IT MAKES THE AUDIENCE REFLECT ON HOW WE USE OUR CRITICAL JUDGEMENT AND TO WHAT END.
Jérôme Bel: Gala photographed by José Frade
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GOB SQUAD: WAR AND PEACE #PLAYS #SMARTS #WHACKEDOUT US PREMIERE MARCH 29–31 AT 7:30 PM
“This feels like one of the most impossible, beautiful, courageous and epic theatrical experiences you can imagine.” The Guardian (UK) Tickets start at $35
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collaborative processes of generation, experimentation, critique, revision, and much debate. While these extended processes of devising theater as a collaborative ensemble are slowly becoming more prominent in the U.S. mainstream, they are much more common in Berlin, where generous funding and other institutional structures enable alternative modes of making that eschew the playscript as the origin-point or end-goal of the theater.
Gob Squad, Berlin’s outlandish theater renegades, set their sights on Tolstoy’s opus War and Peace, only to discover that neither war nor peace are coming without a fight. The setting is a literary salon, where audience members join the cast in a live theater/video performance in which art and daily life, history and the present, reality and fiction blur. In this American premiere, a neverending parade of characters dance, dine and duel while performers prepare for scenes as if going into battle, all in order to reframe Tolstoy’s central inquiry: Can we live a moral life in an imperfect world? Gob Squad, Berlin’s notorious and challenging arts collective, make live video performances that unsettle the lines between the prepared and the improvised, performer and bystander, fiction and life. Gob Squad has been devising, directing and performing together since 1994, motivated by a desire to elevate the everyday and empower audience members to step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators. gobsquad.com
These processes of collaboration extend beyond the group’s interpersonal working relations and penetrate the very fabric of their performances. Indeed, all of Gob Squad’s work is constituted by collaboration across genres, across media, and across the proscenium arch. Firmly based in traditions of the historical avant-garde, as well as postdramatic theatre and Live Art performance, Gob Squad’s pieces generously embrace “real” people, places, and things of everyday life. Audience members inevitably find themselves onstage, and their participation is one of the show’s central media. The members of Gob Squad take the stage too and never appear as anyone but themselves, working to find and forge meaningful connections with their co-players in real-time, some rehearsed, others improvised. At the same time, the intimacy that Gob Squad manages to create through their wonderfully-idiosyncratic performance scenarios is also challenged – even alienated – by the over-abundance of digital equipment onstage. In all Gob Squad shows, interpersonal interactions are always mediated by live video. While this layer of artificial media seems to critique the role that i-gadgets have come to play in our lives, Gob Squad makes productive use of the digital realm to open up new and unexpected possibilities for encountering and experiencing the world – and the world of the theatre. Gob Squad does not shy away from the big themes or the penetrating questions. Nor do they shy away from playful bouts of parodic mimicry and pop-culture. Their last few shows have grappled in refreshing ways with the history of “revolutionary” fervor in the 1960s, with the nostalgia for youth that comes in mid-life, and even the whole of Western Society. This time the Gob Squaders have bitten off or into perhaps one of their most primordial questions yet. A question that becomes only more timely with each passing day: “Is it possible to live a moral life in an ethically imperfect world?” What kinds of answers will they discover and what kinds of new questions will they pose through their signature style of associative assembly? We will have to wait and see. But one thing is certain: their intimate and thoughtful engagement will be coated in plenty of glitter.
Running time: 100 minutes Indefinite Article: Brandon Woolf War and Peace is back in town. With its immersive salon staging, its playful interaction between performers and audience members, and its free-flowing vodka and blinis. Indeed, there is still an abundance of music, there are wildly audacious costumes, and there is a very large cast of characters. But unlike Dave Malloy’s Great Comet over Broadway, Gob Squad’s War and Peace does not attempt to adapt a slice of Leo Tolstoy’s 1200-plus-page classic for the stage. No: they have taken on the whole epic book, copies of which are strewn about the theatre – with one shiny copy propped up on a pedestal. And yet Gob Squad is not all that interested in retelling Tolstoy’s story; they are not much interested in narrative at all. Instead, they have chosen to playfully refract some of the book’s central themes, ideas, and questions through our present moment: both our political realities and our contemporary aesthetic modes.
Brandon Woolf, Ph.D. is a theater maker and the Director of the Program in Dramatic Literature at NYU’s College of Arts and Science. He is currently at work on a book about contemporary performance and cultural policy in Berlin after the Cold War.
War and Peace marks Gob Squad’s third trip to New York from their home base in Berlin. They are a collective of artists from Germany and the UK who have been co-conceiving, co-directing, and co-performing interdisciplinary “live events” since 1994. The group takes this notion of the co-llective very seriously and as fundamental to their creative process, which challenges the often hierarchical strictures of the theater. Each new piece is composed through an extensive process of assemblage, in which each group member contributes ideas, images, texts, scenarios, design elements, even styles of performance to the collective cauldron, and the group as a whole then participates in taking on that material, trying out new things, reflecting on what is there and what is needed, and restructuring constantly. In other words, all Gob Squad works come about through
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Readings Matt Cornish, “Kinetic Texts: From Performance to Poetry” in Modern Drama 58.3: 302-323. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006) Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll, Steve Giles, eds., Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) Nina Tecklenburg and Benjamin Carter, “Reality Enchanted, Contact Mediated: A Story of Gob Squad” in TDR: The Drama Review 56.2: 8-33 Liz Tomlin, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990-2010 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013)
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IN WHICH ART AND DAILY LIFE, HISTORY AND THE PRESENT, REALITY AND FICTION BLUR.
TEATRO LA RE-SENTIDA #PLAYS #MATTERS #WHACKEDOUT US PREMIERE APRIL 5–7 AT 7:30 PM
“Inventive and subversive, incandescent and indispensable ... deserves the highest praise.” Les Trois Coups (FR) Tickets start at $35
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Readings Catherine M. Boyle, Chilean Theater, 1973-1985: Marginality, Power, Selfhood (Madison, Wisc: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992). David Brooks, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014). Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, “Counterrevolution, the Spectacle, and the Situationist Avant-Garde” Social Justice 33.2 104 (2006): 5-15. Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973 (Melbourne: Art & Text, 1986). Alexandra Ripp, “Remembering the Coup: Chilean Theatre Now” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 36.3 (2014): 87-101.
The Dictatorship of Coolness, an American premiere performed in Spanish with supertitles, is a raucous social satire reflecting on art, culture and contemporary lifestyles, inspired by Molière´s The Misanthrope. The show is set on the 1st of May, as Santiago’s cultural and artistically elite gather to celebrate the new Minister of Culture. As the streets pulse with the ambiance of protest, the Minister realizes the hypocrisy and inefficiency of bourgeois culture and renounces capitalism and greed, turning the celebration into a nightmare. Teatro La Re-sentida (The Resentful) is a collective of young activists and artists from the Chilean national theatrical scene who regard theater as a critical instrument with major political responsibility. Their work embodies the pulses, visions and ideas of their generation and assumes as duty, audacity, the desecration of taboos and reflection generated from provocation. Their works give theatrical creation great political responsibility, understanding it as an instrument of critique, reflection and construction. Their works have been performed in more than 17 countries. teatrolaresentida.cl Running time: 1 hour and 40 minutes Performed in Spanish with English supertitles Indefinite Article: Sebastián Calderón Bentin Among the many important contributions by the Situationist International (SI), the artist and activist collective working in Europe from 1957 to 1972, lies the concept of recuperation. Recuperation identifies the process under capitalism whereby radical ideas and actions are defused, absorbed and commodified into mainstream culture. An iconic example being the use of Che Guevara’s image as a mass market fashion trend or, more recently, Vanessa Beecroft’s quotation of a Rwandan refugee camp image as an inspiration for Kanye West’s 2016 fashion show in Madison Square Garden. For artists and activists committed to social change the process of recuperation poses both theoretical and practical problems since contemporary capitalism can appropriate radical gestures and sell them back to us in alluring yet antiseptic forms. As one of the Situationists’ main thinkers, Raoul Vaneigem, writes in The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), under capitalism the function of “art and culture is to turn the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty.”
to accelerate more visibly in the art world which prides itself on endorsing progressive views. Take the comments expressed by German video artist and theorist Hito Steyerl in The Guardian last year that “contemporary art is made possible by neoliberal capital, plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories and growing income inequalities.” An urgent critique about the art world is succinctly articulated in these remarks. And yet a few months after this interview we read the following headline in Deutsche Welle, “German video artist Hito Steyerl tops ‘Power 100’ list of ArtReview.” Being named “the most influential person in the contemporary art world” for the year 2017 by an arts magazine might help propel Steyerl’s critique into greater visibility but one cannot help but pause at the irony of a system that absorbs (and rewards) its most ardent critics through its own market logic: the ranking of artists, the calculation of influence and the production of prestige. Under these conditions how is radical political art even possible? And what might a truly revolutionary artistic movement look like? It is into these contradictions that Teatro La Re-Sentida’s The Dictatorship of Coolness dives in with fierce intelligence and bold humor. As an indictment of the narcissism, careerism and complacency that pervades the contemporary art world The Dictatorship of Coolness wrestles with the problem of recuperation by ushering its spectators into the messy, chaotic and unstable space between decadence and revolution. The show’s searing critique begins, quite poignantly, with the performers themselves and resists the redemptory urge of a romanticized political answer. Instead the piece reminds all of us of our status as political actors where “in the name of a free society,” as Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “some are guilty, but all are responsible.” Sebastián Calderón Bentin, Ph.D., is an actor, director and Assistant Professor of Drama at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His research focuses on the role of illusion and mass media in contemporary Latin American politics.
For artists working under the logic of capital, “the road to complete recuperation is well posted,” Vaneigem continues, “they have merely to follow the progressive sociologists and their ilk into the super-corporation of specialists. They may rest assured that Power will reward them well for applying their talents to the job of dressing up the old conditioning to passivity in bright new colours.” Indeed, the process of recuperation tends
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THE MESSY, CHAOTIC AND UNSTABLE SPACE BETWEEN DECADENCE AND REVOLUTION.
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Teatro La Re-sentida: The Dictatorship of Coolness photographed by Michael GalvĂŠz
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MAI: LIL BUCK AND JON BOOGZ #MOVES #MATTERS #SERIOUSFUN NYC PREMIERE APRIL 14 AT 3 AND 7:30 PM
“Lil Buck and Jon Boogz use their performances to get people to reconsider what movement can do.” The Atlantic Tickets start at $40
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Readings Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, eds., Black Performance Theory (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014). Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016). Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Theater: Theory/ Text/Performance) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
Love Heals All Wounds, an evening-length work by MAI (Movement Art Is), addresses social issues such as police brutality and violence in America while seeking to promote diversity, inclusion, and empathy as a uniting force. MAI (Movement Art Is), co-founded by Jon Boogz and Lil Buck, uses movement artistry to inspire and change the world while elevating the artistic, educational and social impact of dance. Through movement art films, workshops, performances and exhibitions, MAI is resetting the spectrum that defines dance. Jon Boogz is a movement artist, choreographer and director who seeks to push the evolution of what dance can be – sharing with audiences of all backgrounds an appreciation of the melding of art forms while inspiring and bringing awareness to social issues. He co-starred in the viral short film Color of Reality, which continues to screen at film festivals worldwide and has won numerous awards. Lil Buck is an International phenomenon. He began jookin’ – a street dance that originated in Memphis – at age 13 and went on to train in hip-hop and ballet. Named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” his collaboration with Spike Jonze and Yo-Yo Ma performing The Swan went viral in 2011. Since then he has collaborated with a broad spectrum of artists across the world, and is an avid arts education advocate and recipient of the WSJ Innovator Award. movementartis.com Running time: 80 minutes NYU Skirball’s Serious Fun family matinee series is made possible in part with support from Con Edison for family educational and enrichment programming. Indefinite Article: Michael Dinwiddie Whenever Lil Buck and Jon Boogz take to the stage, in their tennis-shoed pirouettes and glissades, we understand that social life — and death — are proper subjects to be interrogated and examined through the creative process. In the landscape of their bodies, they celebrate a rootedness in the African diaspora that is both timeless and timely. They exist in the present moment but have no qualms about paying homage to those who have gone before. In their own era, such unique talents as Buck’n’Bubbles, Vaslav Nijinsky, Jeni LeGon, Fred Astaire, Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker and others inspired radical change in notions of what movement could be, what it should do, and what it might mean.
and “I can’t breathe,” or walking through menacing city streets, they pause the everyday and give us an opportunity to contemplate what we often ignore. Their kaleidoscopic world illuminates a planet where every choice is a political one, from climate pollutants to the poisonous racial, gender and class divides that infect modern American discourse. We begin to empathize with that “other” who does not hear, see, feel, touch or share our taste(s). And by sampling their visionary “artivism,” Lil Buck and Jon Boogz remind us that, for human beings existing in the 21st century, standing by and watching is not enough. We will all have to put our bodies in the struggle. Michael Dinwiddie, an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU, is a playwright and composer. As 2018 marks the sesquicentennial of Scott Joplin’s birth, Michael is commemorating this musical genius by playing “The Maple Leaf Rag” on any piano within reach.
As we experience Lil Buck and Jon Boogz, we are inspired to take note of linkages — from balletic jookin’ to moonwalking, from capoeira-inspired postures to streetdance poses — that give us a glimpse into a psychic “No Man’s Land” where pain — and pleasure — are partners, accidentally thrown together and shaping emotions that lurk just below the next pop-and-lock. Whether sitting in front of a television blaring stories of “Stand your ground”
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STANDING BY AND WATCHING IS NOT ENOUGH. WE WILL ALL HAVE TO PUT OUR BODIES IN THE STRUGGLE.
V.4 DANCE FESTIVAL #MOVES #EXPERIMENTS #TRAVELS US PREMIERE APRIL 19 & 20 AT 7:30 PM
Tickets start at $20
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Readings
The V.4 Dance Festival brings together some of the boldest dance-makers from the The Visegrád Group (V4), the cultural and political alliance of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. They come together for this rare two-day festival of Central European contemporary dance.
Gabrielle Cody and Meiling Cheng, eds., Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres (London: Routledge, 2015). Susan Foster, Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power (London: Routledge, 1995).
The festival offers a satisfying and intimate sampling of the fantastical and the hypnotic, the tongue-incheek and the playful humdrum of everyday. Featuring performances by Debris Company with choreography by Stanislava Vlčeková (Slovakia), Věra Ondrašíková (Czech Republic), Paweł Sakowicz (Poland), and Timothy and the Things with choreography by László Fülõp (Hungary).
Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism (London: Zero Books, 2015). Bojana Kunst, Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in Contemporary Dance and Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (London: Routledge, 2006).
Curated by Laurie Uprichard. Running time: 90 minutes
Randy Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1998).
Made possible in part with support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, Visegrad Fund, Quinnipiac Central European Cultural Institute, Balassi Institute, and the Polish Cultural Institute. Indefinite Article: Larry Wolff In 1991, following the collapse of their communist party governments in 1989, political leaders from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia met at Visegrád on the Danube in Hungary to establish a regional alliance for cooperative development, as these countries pursued the transition from communist economies and societies toward eventual membership in the Europe Union. Originally a three-member group, it became a group of four in 1993 with the “Velvet Divorce” of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. All four countries entered into the EU together in 2004, which marked the consummation of the alliance, and their cooperation was, at that point, partly absorbed into the broader integration of Europe itself.
published his essay in Paris and New York to demand that the Western public not forget that Central Europe had been abducted. “There are no longer any illusions about Russia’s satellite countries. But what we forget is their essential tragedy: these countries have vanished from the map of the West. Why has this disappearance remained invisible? We can locate the cause in Central Europe itself. The history of the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians has been turbulent and fragmented. . . Boxed in by the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, the nations of Central Europe have used up their strength in the struggle to survive and to preserve their languages. Since they have never been entirely integrated into the consciousness of Europe, they have remained the least known and the most fragile part of the West — hidden, even further, by the curtain of their strange and scarcely accessilbe languages.” When the term Central Europe was first widely used during World War One, it was used by German imperialists — as in Friedrich Naumann’s 1915 book Mitteleuropa — who believed that these lands on Germany’s eastern border were natural targets for German economic domination. Kundera buried this older negative significance of “Central Europe” and recoined the term as an affirmation of the Western and European affinities of the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Hungarians. He recalled their common cultural experience within the Habsburg monarchy before 1918 (admittedly, only part of Poland, Galicia, belonged to the monarchy), and invoked such culturally European figures as Franz Kafka, Béla Bartók, and Bruno Schulz from Central Europe, figures who, like Kundera himself, were indispensable to the European cultural tradition.
The Visegrád meeting of 1991 looked to the precedent of a medieval meeting of the Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian kings in the very same place in 1335. In fact, the crucial cultural precedent for this grouping of countries dated back only a decade to the early 1980s when the Czech writer Milan Kundera published a celebrated essay on “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (first in French in 1983 in Le Débat, then in English in 1984 in The New York Review of Books). This was the era of renewed Cold War, and Kundera’s essay, coinciding with Ronald Reagan’s denunciation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” in 1983, was also intended as an indictment of the Soviet Union and its Cold War domination of the communist party states of Eastern Europe. Refusing to accept the idea of Europe divided into a communist “Eastern Europe” and a capitalist “Western Europe,” Kundera insisted on introducing a different designation — “Central Europe” — to describe countries that, he insisted, had nothing culturally in common, no eastern historical affinities, with Russia: “What does Europe mean to a Hungarian, a Czech, a Pole? For a thousand years, their nations have belonged to the part of Europe rooted in Roman Christianity. They have participated in every period of its history.” Kundera boldly suggested that the countries of Central Europe — Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia — had been “kidnapped” from the West by Russia, and he
The Visegrád countries of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic continue to pursue a sense of common purpose within the European Union. The common Habsburg legacy that once bound them together has become increasingly distant, now a hundred years since the dissolution of the monarchy in 1918, and even the post-communist legacy dating from 1989 is now almost thirty years old. Yet, the Visegrád countires have a renewed commitment to defense coodination, especially since the Russian military intervention in Ukraine in 2014, and their political coordination in Brussels has, ironically, been tinged with Euroscepticism as right-wing populist parties have become increasingly important in the region. In the early 1990s, in the political age of Vaclav Havel and Lech Wałęsa, the initial Visegrád declaration was meant to affirm, as Kundera had, Central Europe’s essential European identity, but it remains to be seen — in the current populist decade of Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński — what role the Visegrád countries will play in the ongoing project of European integraton. Larry Wolff is Silver Professor of History at NYU, Director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and Executive Director of the Remarque Institute. His books included “Inventing Eastern Europe” (1994), “Venice and the Slavs” (2001), “The Idea of Galicia” (2010), and, most recently, “The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage” (2016).
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THE HISTORY OF [THE VISEGRAD GROUP] HAS BEEN TURBULENT AND FRAGMENTED.
MEG STUART/ DAMAGED GOODS
#MOVES #MATTERS #INTENSE US PREMIERE MAY 4 & 5 AT 7:30 PM
“Extraordinary.” NRZ Der Westen (DE) Tickets start at $40
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In Until Our Hearts Stop, six performers and three musicians find themselves in a place that is both a nightclub and an arena: an unreliable, high-octane refuge, a place of desire and illusion, experiencing extreme intimacy at each other’s hands. To the sound of throbbing basses, piano and drums – a mix between improvisation and composition – they connect and explore each other, drawing the audience into their immersive world. Meg Stuart is a New Orleans-born choreographer and dancer living and working in Berlin and Brussels. Stuart moved to New York in 1983 and was actively involved in the downtown New York dance scene. Together with her company, Damaged Goods, she has created over 30 stage works, ranging from solos to large-scale choreographies, site-specific creations and improvisation projects. Stuart strives to develop a new language for every piece in collaboration with artists from different creative disciplines and navigates the tension between dance and theater. Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods has an on-going collaboration with Kaaitheater (Brussels) and HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). damagedgoods.be Running time: 120 minutes Indefinite Article: Allyson Green & André Lepecki Disfiguring dance, refiguring the human – Memories of Meg Stuart exchanged in correspondence As I write I am in Hammerfest, Norway, improvising in a festival with Latvian, Norwegian and Russian dancers. The skies completely darken here by 1:30 pm. So I am in a strange Nordic dreamlike state as I travel back in memory to 1989 when Meg Stuart and I were both working in the Randy Warshaw Dance Company. Dancers learn much about each other by moving together; an intimate conversation built of trust and shared experiences that form our homes on the road and in the studio. Our bodies become containers of memories that have settled into our bones. I close my eyes and I can still see Meg darting forward in the opening movement phrase of Randy’s “Fragile Anchor.” Meg’s dancing was (is) at once fierce and tender, determined and vulnerable. In fact “fragile” and “anchor” are apt words to describe her performance. My memories take me inside Randy’s studio on Wooster Street. I can still feel the reverberations of a quartet created with Meg, Jennifer Lacey, Susan Blankensop and me; exacting hours of recalled improvisation to acquire minutes of set material. I treasure a gift photo of a duet with José Navas, with Meg watching from behind; it keeps us three dancing in a fleeting moment captured in black and white. We were all weaving our lives together in and out of downtown studios, and trying to make ends meet. Fellow striving artists were creating magic in the lofts of Soho, long before it transformed into a high-end shopping mall. We formed our chosen family during a time that became marked by the AIDS epidemic. Too many loved ones left us far too soon. The grief gave us a determination to keep creating, to keep moving, to keep working for long hours into the night. Nothing would stop those of us left behind. Meg would soon catapult from fellow NYC dancer to a renowned European creator. In 1991 American choreographer Meg Stuart premiered her first evening-length piece at the Belgium dance Festival Klapstuk. Titled Disfigure Study, it was a quiet, dark, somber and deeply moving hour-long trio that immediately created a stark contrast to the highly theatrical and hyper physical dance that informed most of the European dance scene at the time. Indeed, Disfigure Study truly disfigured expectations of what a New York based dancer trained in the traditions of release technique and contact improvisation was supposed to present to an European audience in 1991. The piece was minimalist without being formal or abstract; profoundly affective without being theatrical or expressive; deeply technical without relying on one identifiable technique; highly visual, and yet, mostly taking place in shadows, penumbra, and darkness. Where one would expect integral bodies and fluid movement, Stuart offered a stark sense of post-AIDS melancholia, turning dancing bodies into incoherent (and yet very consistent) collections of partial body parts. Whereas the piece was directly inspired by Francis Bacon’s art, Disfigure Study did not explicitly refer to any of his paintings. Rather, it tapped into Bacon’s main aesthetic principle, what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called Bacon’s “logic
of sensation.” Disfigure Study’s disfiguration of series of cliché images of avant-garde dance at the end of the 1980s was a refiguration of what it meant to desire movement in the wake of so much death.
poetic micro-details as well as to endure the most violent spasms in a dancer’s moves. If there is any violence, it is always under the project of highlighting a deeply touching understanding of the ultimate fragility of living.
I remember our excitement for Meg when she was given the commission to create “Disfigure Study.” It was remarkable in those days to get such support to spend time in the studio, and then to present in Europe, hurrah! Watching the last rehearsals, I knew she had created something special; a new and distinctive voice that spoke to how we were all recovering, adapting and moving on. She had discovered the seeds for what would blossom over the next years. I remember trying to encourage her to trust when her work was ready to be seen, but she had so many doubts at the start. The pressure was great. I recall watching as André quietly offered insightful collaborative dramaturgy that grounded and amplified Meg’s visual, physical and conceptual explorations. Meg was building a new chosen family and “Damaged Goods” seemed exactly the right words to name her fledgling company (taken from the last line of a review by Burt Supree). A few years later she would teach me one of her solos, to add into an evening work of mine entitled “Recuerdo: Passing Back through the Heart.” There was a specificity of form in her direction that was precise, emotional, and intimate. Rooted on the spot, the repetition of percussive movement, “oh yeah huh,” right shoulder jutting forward, still reverberates in my core.
I am grateful that we have improvised our way back to crossing again in New York, to the NYU Skirball Theater just blocks from that studio on Wooster Street. My path led me to become the Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts where as a student Meg first began to choreograph so many years ago. And André offers his eloquent words once again, now in his role as distinguished author, curator and Chair of Performance Studies at Tisch. Who would have imagined that in those early days? I wait in anticipation to see Meg’s work. Passing back through the heart, our next memories will refigure my bones.
Since then, Meg Stuart’s work has metamorphosed into all sorts of directions: large improvisational events gathering visual artists, composers, philosophers, dancers (Crash Landing [1996-9], or Auf den Tisch [2005-11], to mention two examples); intimate interactive installations (for instance, Intimate Strangers 2009-11]); large group pieces (VIOLET [2011], or the extraordinary Built to Last [2012]); sound projects (the LP Until Our Hearts Stop); publications (Stuart’s Are We Here Yet? 2010); films (Study of a Portrait [2016]); and series of solo works performed by Stuart herself (most recently, Hunter [2014]) – these are just a very small fraction of all the titles comprising Stuart’s impressive and multifaceted body of work. In each of these manifestations of Stuart’s unique artistic impetus, we can find the poetic force of sensation at work. We can sense the logic of corporeal affects being made to operate by this indefatigable choreographer/ dancer/performer in singular and powerful ways in order to deliver to her audience not only new images, but new imaginations: of the flesh, of modes of existing, of ways of moving, of entangling, of touching, of choreographing. Affects-as-imaginations exuding from the trembling body, or erupting through the animal quality of a very human howl, are what allow Stuart to consistently and logically move her dance and dancers across the most disparate disciplines, spaces, bodies, in delirious images and through lysergic sounds. Stuart’s works are events aimed at attacking (sometimes rather unceremoniously), and at redressing (sometimes quite touchingly), her audience’s affective field. From then our journeys led us into different directions that would cross from time to time. We would see each other in Europe, in New York, in class, in performance, in improvisations, and I loved to see her explorations in both big productions and in intimate settings. Each of us would grow into roles as creators, teachers, leaders, curators, and writers, and still we are always asking questions and pushing through doubts. I was always frustrated that I never got to see enough of Meg’s company in New York. I have continued to find her work to be profoundly moving, with haunting visual, sonic and physical images that linger in memory long after viewing. Her book “Are We Here Yet” has become a bible of choreographic methods loved by multidisciplinary artists in many countries. Choreographically, Stuart approaches the dancer’s body (including her own) as an impermanent collection of independent, autonomous, distorted entities, as if each limb, each body part, was moved by a desire of its own. Compositionally, her pieces gain consistency by the ways Stuart meticulously saturates the scenic space with highly affective forces that she draws from her dancerscollaborators. Dramaturgically, every scene links to the next by relentlessly affirming the constitutive ambiguity inherent to every single situation in our lives. Thus the haunting effects in Stuart’s works. They are unparalleled in contemporary choreography, simultaneously requiring from the audience a capacity to attend to the most
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Co-written by Allyson Green and André Lepecki in travel between November 6th and 9th, 2017 in NYC, Hammerfest, Norway and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Allyson Green is the Dean of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. André Lepecki, Ph.D., is the Chair of Tisch’s Department of Performance Studies.
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THERE WAS A SPECIFICITY OF FORM.. THAT WAS PRECISE, EMOTIONAL, AND INTIMATE. Readings Ramsay Burt, Ungoverning Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Göksu Kunak, Meg Stuart: Make the First Move (Berlin: mono.kultur, 2016). André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (London: Routledge, 2016). Jeroen Peeters, Bodies As Filters (Maasmechelen: Cultural Centre Maasmechelen, 2004). Meg Stuart and Jeroen Peeters, Are We Here Yet? (Dijon: Presses Du Réel, 2011).
Meg Stuart/ Damaged Goods: Until Our Hearts Stop photographed by Iris Jank
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NYU SKIRBALL SPR ING 2018 To purchase tickets: Visit nyuskirball.org, call 212.998.4941 or visit 566 LaGuardia Pl, NYC All NYU Student Tickets are only $15: Visit NYU Home for more information Become a Skirball Member and save 30% on tickets: For more information visit nyuskirball.org/support NYU Faculty and Admin save 15% on tickets: For more information, visit NYU Home
THÉÂTRE DU RÊVE EXPÉRIMENTAL/WANG CHONG: THUNDERSTORM 2.0 JANUARY 6 & 7 NATURE THEATER OF OKLAHOMA AND ENKNAPGROUP: PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS JANUARY 12–14 ICE: THE WHISPER OPERA JANUARY 24– FEBRUARY 4 RIVERS OF SOUND: NOT TWO FEBRUARY 10 36
GOB SQUAD: WAR AND PEACE MARCH 29–31
SKIRBALL TALKS: JUDITH BUTLER FEBRUARY 12 THISISPOPBABY: RIOT FEBRUARY 15–17
TEATRO LA RE-SENTIDA: THE DICTATORSHIP OF COOLNESS APRIL 5–7
JÉRÔME BEL: GALA MARCH 1–3
MAI: LIL BUCK & JON BOOGZ: LOVE HEALS ALL WOUNDS APRIL 14
NATIONAL THEATRE LIVE: CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF MARCH 4
V.4 DANCE FESTIVAL APRIL 19 & 20 MEG STUART/ DAMAGED GOODS: UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP MAY 4 & 5
NATIONAL THEATRE LIVE: JULIUS CAESAR MARCH 25 37
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