You’ve had a great teacher in your life, haven’t you. A perspective-shifter, horizon-expander, foundation-shaker kind of person. I think great teachers (like great directors) are awakeners. Sometimes literally (I can’t believe I ever started school at 7:45 AM), sometimes in that ineffable eye-opening “o captain! my captain!” way that we are lucky to experience even once in a lifetime. During the first weekend of shows that kicked off this January fire hose of performance, I kept returning to one in particular: my high school English teacher, Mr. Albano, who taught me how to read.
Mr. Albano: soft of voice, big of hair, wearer of plaid shirt and khaki pants. Not the teacher who literally taught me to read, rather, what I appreciated most was the way his teaching would crack open a book, showing new ways of seeing. “A good book,” he would often say, “is like a city, there are many ways of getting in.” His lesson for the day (a given work’s themes, characters, structure, etc.) could be an express train to downtown, or a three-transfer bus route, but in the end, it would hopefully get you somewhere, if not useful, at least interesting.
Of course, one of the things that makes these great works of art, these sprawling metropolises, so wonderful is how they remind us that life is equally city-like, with endless avenues and streets and alleys and backroads to ramble through. They remind us that our own human experience, despite ostensibly being singular, is in fact many-voiced, sometimes startlingly direct, other times disjointedly complex.
Photo by Amelia Golden
I felt this fracturing of narrative acutely in Juliana F. May’s latest dance piece, Optimistic Voices, which ran at The Chocolate Factory Theater as part of Live Artery Festival. As May’s dancers jerk and glide across her appropriately retro burnt red shag carpet of a set (which exquisitely matches the space’s rusted beams overhead), a memory emerges from the fugue of tumbling repetitions. Snatches of text about a general manager, desire, and fucking in a back alley spill out, but with each repeat, something shifts. A line spoken in first-person moves into third, a stray solo movement suddenly snaps into synchronicity with another dancer, and a presumed ownership over an individual story begins to diffuse from one performer to the ensemble as a whole. An act as quotidian as walking to the store becomes defamiliarized, until the movement reaches a pause, and the collective bursts into uncannily beautiful and primally rhythmic choral singing (songs by May with composition by Clara Hunter Latham). Even in this fog of memory, moments of harmony peek through.
Arriving from overseas, a pair of international works in Under the Radar also concern themselves with evoking past lives. In MAMI, from Albanian wunderkind Mario Banushi, mothers and sons silently pass through the NYU Skirball stage in this wordless tone poem of a piece, dedicated to the women who raised him. Meanwhile, in the Spanish theatre troupe Agrupación Señor Serrano’s Birdie, a live documentary crew returns again and again to a single (real) image, taken by migrant rights activist José Palazón. In the foreground, two golfers tee off. In the background, a group of migrants climb over an immense wire fence.
MAMI, too, is drawn to this harsh poetry of juxtaposition. A striking early sequence in MAMI depicts a feverish mother giving birth while a frail old woman is carried to bed by her adult child. Caregivers become the cared for, as this reciprocal cycle luxuriates in the low golden hues of designer Stephanos Droussiotis’ lights.
Still, it was hard to watch both works and find the humanity underneath. Poetry can heighten, sure, but raise something too high, and you begin to lose definition. I began to feel while watching both pieces that they valorized their subjects more than they revealed anything novel. While dealing with the tangible issue of migrants, Birdie frequently indulges in vague poeticisms about “the natural order” of animals being migration. (migrants seem to be hand-waved into such animal categorizations). A performer, clad in the same red hoodie as one of the climbers in Palazón’s photo, sits facing upstage for the entirety of the show (even before the audience arrives). At the very end, long after I had written the figure off as a mannequin, the actor jumps off the table to face the audience center stage. However, the show ends before a word is spoken, and I was left disheartened by how this performed migrant still felt stuck on the prop table they came from.
One near-baffling moment towards the end of MAMI has Mario Banushi himself emerge onstage to cut himself out of a large cloth baby photo of his mother breastfeeding a young Banushi. Kneeling before the picture of his mother, he was now in the breastfeeding position his younger self had been pictured in. The image is crystal clear, but…call me crazy, it’s….not not a little fetish-y, no? Again, strikingly staged, sumptuously designed, but to what end? While depicted as both givers and recipients of care, the women in MAMI display little dimension beyond their standpoint on this 2-D spectrum. Poetically focusing on a single aspect to reveal a greater whole, or myopically lionizing to the point of flattening? My view remains…mixed.
As opposite in location from Birdie’s roost uptown at Lincoln Center as one could possibly be, The TEAM’s dizzyingly complex RECONSTRUCTING covers nothing less than how we as a community could navigate the original sin of American slavery. How this history resurfaces and passes down through performance is the main subject of the piece, with a panoply of perspective and topic shifts along the way. You can really admire RECONSTRUCTING for its earnest ability to put its money where its metatheatrical mouth is. If the goal is to figure out how a country as big and wide and diverse as America can tell itself a story containing all of us, then…you’re gonna need a lot of storytellers. For this immense undertaking, co-directors Rachel Chavkin and Zhailon Levingston have assembled a truly ludicrous group of all-star creatives, including a writers room 22 strong (Jeremy O. Harris! Eisa Davis! nicHi douglas!) and a cast including Eric Berryman, Ato Blankson-Wood, and Rachel Chavkin herself!
The show talks about race and intimacy until talk is not enough, so then song emerges, then reenactment, then conversations about that reenactment, then discourse about that conversation, then…you start to get the picture. In a strange way, this endless folding in kept reminding me of Möbius strip works like Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About the Show, as we see not just a show being rehearsed in real time (or reconstructed, natch) onstage, but discussions about the show between creatives during the process of rehearsal folded in too. Your mileage may vary as to whether this process-as-product mentality is fascinating or too inside baseball to engage with. Again, what I think saves the show is its earnestness. The piece as a whole feels like a mixtape of ideas and scenes, featuring endless ways to navigate our collective history, and while some didn’t quite hit home for me, some packed a wallop, and it feels right for a show about America to not always work for all Americans at all times. Incisive questions weave their way through the show, like “Is there anything you do to protect yourself from me?” often asked of Black actors by white ones who half-fear the response. Like the best kind of questions, there are no easy answers, and RECONSTRUCTING’s provocations have stuck with me long after this first weekend of festival shows. Like America, it’s fractured, messy, self-obsessed, relentlessly ambitious, and somehow, both in spite of and because of the multitudinous communities within it, enduring. In these sublime moments, out of many, it achieves one.
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