On October 21, 2016, I attended action movie by Olive Bieringa in the Vital Matters Dance Festival, held at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis, MN. This four-day festival was important in centrally locating the body and its felt experience. I found depth and renewal in
Minneapolis, MN I was catering the opening night of the Vital Matters Festival of Dance at the Southern Theater, so between arranging plates, slicing bread, instructing assistants, opening jars, and fluffing tablecloths, I tiptoed into the back of theater to watch Anna Marie Shogren’s Human
In the context of a contemporary dance festival dedicated to the “vital materiality of the body,” I was surprised that the greatest challenge to my idea of embodiment came about through its negation—through a conscious disembodiment of dance, in Otto Ramstad’s solo work Lineage. In the
Vital Matters Dance Festival The Southern Theater, Minneapolis, MN October 20, 2016 HIJACK, Anna Marie Shogren, Otto Ramstad, //CATHEDRAL\\ I go to shows mostly for two reasons, and I bet they are the same reasons as most of you: For entertainment and fun. For contemplation,
In October, I saw two very different works by the French choreographer Jérôme Bel: Jérôme Bel at The Kitchen and Artist’s Choice: Jérôme Bel/ MoMA Dance Company at MoMA. The first contained no dance as we might traditionally think of it, in terms of constant/grandiose/fast/visible
The Show Must Go On Time has passed since Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On premiered in Paris, and not an insubstantial amount, either: it was first shown in 2001. It returned to New York City this October as part of the 2016 Crossing
A conversation with playwright Kate Benson and director Lee Sunday Evans on their new play, [PORTO], at The Bushwick Starr
La Mama dispatch for PS 122’s COIL Fest, Pavel Zustiak’s “Custodians of Beauty” and “Bastard (The Painted Bird: Part 1)” and Squirts intergenerational queer pairings with stand up sets from Patti Harrison and Marga Gomez. To start the year alternating between bent over from either despair or because I might laugh so hard that the tears trickle down my legs felt fitting to my polar emotional swings of late.
Day 1 of the Festival of Festivals or January Feast: Based on last night’s opening works by Will Rawls, Meg Stuart and Dana Michel I’d say the American Realness focus on the “breakdown of white-supremacist hierarchies” and on the practice of “realness as resistance,” is helping us all define which America(s) we mean to stand our ground for in the coming days.
What a fucking metaphor you guys.
Festivals like PuSh are much more sensitive and responsive to what is really happening in the world than most city theatres are. Festivals are free to focus on the right artistic priorities.
La MaMa’s Squirts celebrates its 5th anniversary with a series of intergenerational duets to “mend the queer generation gap, or at least bedazzle it.” Now more than ever… now more than never, we’re all going to have to protect legacies and build futures together.