Their arguments, even when hate-filled, are lucidly formed and difficult to penetrate. There’s a weird thrill of uncomfortable relief when we find ourselves half-agreeing with them.
You feel, given the virtuosity and care demonstrated onstage, that you owe this much. You can carry all this. If you let it fall, it’ll break the spell. Don’t spill the water.
They saw, “formalism with flair, and flights of fancy. Quirky, rhythmic, gestural phrases woven into broadly abstract works with exciting choreography. Cute moments that hint at a story.”
Watching the three Players go through an elaborate and very tightly regulated game for citizenship to “The Promised Land,” the dot game would have been more than enough to create a natural tension between the players, with which to fuel their antagonism, and eventual alliances, secrets, and betrayals.
Maybe the political statement is that it’s not political. We can exist together, we can live together, without it being some message or some signpost in the sand, some marker of who you are.
There’s a genial kind of, I don’t know, Brechtian disruption going on when you hurl that sound at people. They just lose their shit and do not know what to do with themselves. It is somehow a punk rock gesture.
“I’ll just put my bias on the table.” What is the impact of the work? “Let’s turn over the rock and see what’s under there.” Terry says.
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.