floating a queer celestial in Ni’Ja Whitson’s “Oba Qween Baba King Baba”
Ni’Ja Whitson queers divine kingdoms with cosmological meetings amidst a swirl of lineage, legacies and streaming star scapes. Salve.
Category Archives: Responses
Both Lynchian & Eno-esque, PLANO Swirls Ever Inward
If life is a race, all the characters here are lagging behind the leader, just hoping to keep up and find space to breath amidst the density of inevitable heartbreak that comes along with living.
In Response to Celine’s MAGNUM OPUS
I will not say “I’ve grown up” since then, because truly I see this acceptance of paid monotony as a bit of my idealism seeping out. A necessary bloodletting, at long last, giving up my mulishness in favor of a little ability to tame the storm that was my inner mind each day and each night.
The world according to Nicky: “now my hand is ready for my heart” at La MaMa
After over a decade hiatus in making work, with “now my hand is ready for my heart” downtown icon, Nicky Paraiso gushes forth while looking back on several lived lives in Nickyworld.
The Verisimilitude of the Mad Ones
I’m not sure I would call Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie a play, as such, if only because a play suggests an exterior blueprint which is then built or enacted by a group of performers and designers. The Mad Ones appear to build out – they start with what is generally interior, a collection of tiny behavioral tells that shape human intention, and construct around it.
The Story Variations of MARJANA AND THE FORTY THIEVES
through sharing, repeating, layering, and rephrasing, the company finds a way to both underline and subvert the brutality without explicitly pointing at it.
From Bushwick to (off-off) Broadway: How Sasha Velour marries her night club roots with modern theatricality
This is best drag: rooted by a simple movement vocabulary elevated with full design elements embodied by a queer figure in complete control of her material.
The Children Will Show How It’s Done
Since it’s often hard to explain a good piece of theater – as Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces, which had its all-too-brief North American premier two weeks ago at the Skirball Center, certainly was – we might as well start with everything this show is
William Burke’s Containers: VARIATIONS ON THE MAIN
It’s not so much a communing with the dead as an un-containing of the self, casting meaning into the void, hoping perhaps to receive some echo of that meaning back, in the shape of a hug, or song, or strip of tin foil torn from the wall.
A Humble Utopia: Liliana Dirks-Goodman’s Dinner Party 1960-2000s with chef Kristin Worrall at New York Live Arts, March 10th 2019
Feminist philosopher Grosz asks: “How can we understand space differently, in order to organize, inhabit, and structure our living arrangements differently?” Dirks-Goodman takes this as provocation for her homespun meal and her other, more intangible, offerings.
The Neck and The Neutral
When it comes to representation, the question of whose vantage point is accepted as the default. Whose story reads as universal?
Juggalos Deserve Better
A very telling moment occurs right at the top of American Juggalo, a new play produced by collective Unattended Baggage, at HERE Arts Center that closed March 3. After a projected slideshow introduces us in the briefest possible way to the Insane Clown Posse, Juggalos,