So, while trying to strictly manage the pervasive NYC version of Arts Presenters-infected “festival fomo,” I still accumulated enough exposure to the spores of a range of performances in the January flurry to wander into a compost pile of considerations on what is doggedly sprouting among us in the age of extinction.
Two pieces that delve into ideas surrounding worship and identity: Angie Pittman’s “Came Up in a Lonely Castle” and Johnnie Cruise Mercer/TheREDProjectNYC’s “Process memoir 4: The word, the spirit, and Little Rock.”
Ni’Ja Whitson queers divine kingdoms with cosmological meetings amidst a swirl of lineage, legacies and streaming star scapes. Salve.
This idea of American desire and what’s encapsulated in that is this reckoning, but, also holding the truths of being white in American culture means you have to hold the history of being an oppressor. But, then, how do you hold that?
Maura covers The Bessies, MR AoCC Studies Project, AmericanAF, Jasmine Hearn & Mariana Valencia, and Cynthia Oliver’s world premiere of “Virago-Man Dem”
Judy Hussie-Taylor, Ishmael Houston Jones, Will Rawls and over a 112 artists, undertook a labor of revisionist history and artistic accomplishment that is clearly one for the books historic…Lost and Found Ends, but WE WILL NOT REST IN PEACE.
These ugly feelings: disgust, animatedness, mourning, are radical in their fugitivity.
How will we ever go back after the planting that guest curator Eva Yaa Asentawaa sowed during last week’s “the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds?”
You take a risk, almost kill yourself, you find a solution and go from there. Your solution is what you are starting with.
Anne Waldman gave what felt and looked like a sermon. Meredith Monk exemplified how closely voice and body are connected.
In the world that we live in right now, how do you push up against something so big?
They’re going to tensely wait until we are done clapping so this liminal purgatory between art and not art can be over. They’re going to endure this awkwardness.