January Marathon

So…I saw a lot of shows in January. I’ve written about it before, but it bears repeating: it has been a delightful fire hose of performance, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. To write about the festivals, though, in a way that puts a neat bow on a defiantly and purposefully unruly batch of shows, feels like a fool’s errand at best, and a misrepresentation at worst. January festivals tend to be curated in the loosest sense of the word, and the shows this past month spanned from intimate solo performances to massive operas (and a surprising amount of birds). Despite this, during this sampling of 25 shows over 22 days (for there are always more shows to see), I noticed several patterns emerge, and I would be remiss not to wind down my coverage this year by drawing your attention to a handful of them! Here is just a taste of the work that was on display in the month of January.

While familiarity guided many of my tickets this past January, leave it to the intrepid team behind Exponential Festival- this year’s new co-directors are Bailey Williams and Nurit Chinn, along with Producing Director Nic Adams- to put me on to something new. BODYCOUNT (amani meliyah & Maleek Rae), MOMMA! (Akane Little), and Creature / Comfort (Mann & Materials) could not have been further from each other in content and form, from a lyrical exploration of cruising and self-acceptance, to a devastating butoh-infused wrestling match with maternal love, to a puppet-drag-king-synth-pop-camp musical. Where else but Exponential can you see, as in Creature / Comfort, up-and-coming creators performing a trans monster wedding with puppet chicken ringbearers celebrating the murder of J. Edgar Hoover as the denouement? Or the heartbreakingly danced panic attack set to Paramore in MOMMA!? Or the tender embraces amani meliyah stages out of the cast of BODYCOUNT? While these voices may be new to me, at the performance I attended of Creature / Comfort had a packed house that seemed to know every word and gag in advance. It seems Exponential is (hopefully) just the beginning

maybe only the third craziest moment in Creature / Comfort pc: Gavin Strawnato

Meanwhile, at Under the Radar, downtown stalwarts were on full and glorious display. While the teams behind Elevator Repair Service’s Ulysses and Narcissister’s Voyage into Infinity have been creating for decades, it’s a comfort to see them continue to push into new horizons, from Elevator Repair Service tackling Joyce’s behemoth of a novel to Narcissister constructing a Rube Goldberg machine that seemed to break through the proscenium of the NYU Skirball stage.

Over at BAM, one could also see the NY premiere of Richard Foreman and Michael Gordon’s thrilling post-rock opera What to wear. Only a year after his death, Foreman’s theatrical voice still remains utterly transfixing, here melding perfectly with Gordon’s pulsing score (with a superb pit of Bang on a Can All-Stars led by Alan Pierson). What to wear is an absolute phantasmagoria of images and sounds, to the point that I wrote in my notes halfway through, “too much to write down.” No need- like the last Foreman show I saw (Object Collection’s Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey), it has a habit of sticking with you, even as you glide along its waves.

What to wear pc: Stephanie Berger

Clowns had a big year this festival season, with both Exponential Festival and Under the Radar providing a welcome home this year for aficionados of all stripes. For the more by-the-books fans out there, it was hard to beat Jo Fong and George Orange’s endlessly winsome physical clowning in The Rest of Our Lives (playing at La MaMa as part of Under the Radar). Fong and Orange had chemistry for days as they tumbled relentlessly across the Downstairs Theater floor, colliding into one another (and audience members in the front rows) with surgical comic precision. It takes real skill to be as gracefully goofy as this pair is, and even more ability to take us into the show’s more heartfelt moments, as when their partnered lifts morphed into a mournful meditation on the loss of bodily autonomy with age. Like the best of clowns, Fong and Orange approach life’s problems big (mortality) and small (how do you sit in a chair?) with wide-eyed wonder and comic panache, bravely rising after every (prat)fall.

For those preferring their clowns to be a bit more down in the dumps, Little Lord’s PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT was a gleefully mean-spirited takedown of corporate self-help seminars. Making superb and thrilling use of Target Margin’s Upstairs Studio, a coterie of sad-sacks filed in with the audience, shuffling over to folding chairs and stopping to read the smattering of delightfully depressing Garfield posters on the walls. While at first the attendants are enthused, with repeated chants of “Body is enthusiastic about what the day will bring,” the performance devolves into a kind of sad, meaningless, wonderfully grotesque emptiness. The language of self-help, from blandly positive feedback to vague affirmations, is randomized across the company, with lines assigned anew at random each night. It’s like if the cast of Severance wandered into a Todd Solondz joint and just sort of curled up and resigned themselves to their fate. It’s magnificently painful to watch, and I could have watched it twice more.

As if a corporate hellscape wasn’t enough, I ventured out into climate catastrophe (winter storm Fern) to catch Hannah Mitchell’s bouffon-on-the-inside, polished-tradwife-on-the-outside clown show TRAD, a gonzo sendup of the growing Christian conservative “tradwife” movement. The clown show heaviest on audience interaction, TRAD excels most during Mitchell’s excellent crowdwork. At the performance I attended, an audience member was forced at (prop) gunpoint to empty the contents of her wallet, ending in a Trojan condom plopping onto the ground. Mitchell’s immediate response of comic disgust remains a highlight of the festival.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT pc: Valerie Terranova

Also relying amply on the audience, Ann Marie Dorr slyly subverted the confessional mode in their quasi-solo show i’m going to take my pants off now. Nestled in the round (production design by Carolyn Mraz), the audience becomes an active participant, often asked to provide Dorr “a kindness,” from the mundane (holding a light) to the deliberately provocative (spanking Dorr’s naked body). Giving and receiving (and the imbalance between the two) become key. We’re used to the one-man format, but Dorr’s continuous engagement shifts us away from being passive purveyors as well as themselves from being static narrator.

Equally hallucinogenic was Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein’s virtuosic Friday Night Rat Catchers, a disco-infused 70s beauty pageant shot through with Adult-Swim-at-3-AM energy. Fagan and Engelstein (as well as Marianne Rendón as a queasily chummy host) construct a triple feat of dance theatre: I so rarely see work that has such an abundance of technical skill, subversive commentary, and visual style all at once. Rat Catchers excels at turning nostalgia into grotesqueries. A young girl solemnly completes a flawless beauty pageant dance routine, then sticks her hand down her diaper to reveal a hand covered in literal shit. The crowd, just before entranced by the dance, recoiled back in squealing laughter.

I felt a similar push-pull relationship with the audience during Hillary Gao’s I want to hold onto something beautiful and empty. Gao makes ample use of an ASMR-esque storytime Get Ready With Me format (spot-on sound design by Emma Hasselbach), which draws the audience in beautifully, making The Brick’s deep stage feel increasingly intimate. Character fractures among the ensemble (Nikkie Samreth, Isabel Ebeid, Miranda Kang, Sam Xu, and Ring Yang) as they shift in and out of office sirens and power-posing bosses. The stories become increasingly bizarre as we fall deeper under this spell: tennis courts, grandmothers, and dynastic empress dowagers all swirl through.

Lisa Fagan in Friday Night Rat Catchers pc: Maria Baranova

Detachment from reality prevailed in Noah Latty’s online-suicide-cult play Time Signatures. Surrounded on all sides by Attilio Rigotti’s disturbingly hypnotic projections, this internet community feels removed both from the outside world and from their own selves. When either intrudes (mostly in the form of gruesome images sent to one another as both provocation and flirtation), the images are grainy and near impossible to make out. When you spend all your time online, the real world feels low-definition in comparison.

In the same venue (Brooklyn Art Haus) and in the same festival (Exponential), another community tries to shut out the world in Ife Olujobi and Garrett Allen’s spectacular down&out: vol. 2: crisis! Like a modern-day Cabaret, a collection of club kids, bouncers, and performers all cavort in and around the standing audience. However, as snippets of club life play out in 360 degrees, the real world can’t help but crash the party, at first sneaking into conversation, then smashing through in a visceral, extended strobe light freakout. Out of the 25 shows I saw in January, down&out is one of the shows that has stuck with me the most, and is a clear example of the kind of formally inventive work independent theatre festivals like Exponential are vital for helping produce.

down&out vol. 2: crisis! pc: Jose Miranda