The artistic spaces that once housed me hurt me, causing tremendous trauma. This project—the second installment of “soft bodies in hard places,” “very peak summer solstice”—was a haven.
Does the key to life come less from real knowledge and more from a sense of rhythm? Pattern recognition? A skewed version of the old saying, “If it looks like a life, and it walks like a life, then it must be a life?”
There is a general consensus that this moment can’t restore power to a people who aren’t in the room. But perhaps it can deflate the confidence of a narrative that props up those in power?
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.”
With XIV, my favorite experimental constitutionalist bruthrr George Emilio Sanchez is crashing a brown, brooding and bold biography into the broader American histories of other fights for equal rights. XIV offers an incisive and often intimate look at the never ending challenge that is our country’s constant separations of equality in a show that continues this weekend and next at Dixon Place.
pathetic is writer/director Julia Jarcho’s riff on Racine’s Phedre, the neo-classical exploration of a woman’s lust, so of course it takes place in a high school.
Donovan builds a tranquil place effortlessly, and then creates darkness within the negative (theatrical) space around it, using it as atmospheric pressure to hold the memory in place.
Dan Safer is the devil you’ve been dying to dance with and Ae Andrea’s enviable lines and swag make them an optimal fiend friend for that card.
In summary: This should shouldn’t have been put up, here or anywhere
A composite of quite ordinary gestures that combine to make something novel, much in the way the entire play uses old poses in service of a show much more than an aesthetic or expressionistic dance.
Ni’Ja Whitson queers divine kingdoms with cosmological meetings amidst a swirl of lineage, legacies and streaming star scapes. Salve.
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.