Category: Responses
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The Devastation of A Frustrated Dream: Micaela Fariña and Gonzalo Quintana’s La consagración de nadie (Unsuccessful)
A few weeks ago I got a gig working the book table at BODY/SHADOW, a Douglas Dunn + Dancers performance at Judson Church. In preparation I perused the books– all penned by Dunn– for sale. One in particular caught my eye; a small black book titled Aidos. I flipped to a random page: “Shame at…
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The Whales are Missing: In Abe Koogler’s DEEP BLUE SOUND, Politics Linger While Characters Humanize and The Audience is Drawn Near
Every American town has some marker that sets it apart from every other American town. I’m not talking about geography, population, values, or even baseball teams, but rather, those quirky pieces of trivia you share at dinner parties with out-of-towners. The famed house on Cherry Creek Lane built to emulate a ship and featured…
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In Dan Blick’s LAKE GEORGE, Hell is the Liminality of A Holiday and A Rented Lake House
Sartre was right when he said that “hell is other people”. Nothing can encapsulate the feeling of purgatory like a family vacation at a rented lake house. Sartre’s full quote should actually read, I think, something like, “hell is other people, and so are AirBnBs furnished entirely from IKEA”. There is something uncanny about occupying…
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Dear Kayla Farrish, Burn it Down! At Least the Ashes Will Enrich the Earth
Imagine being told that what you have just experienced did not actually happen the way you experienced it, that it was actually just a collection of dissonant apparitions created by your own strained need to link unrelated events together.
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Miya Shaffer on “I Feel Like You Don’t Trust Me” by TAQ Dance
These haptic qualities enable the audience an imagined point of entry into the onstage sensations, inviting vicarious feeling of the braided hair, the waxiness of plant fronds, the lightness of linen clothing against bare skin.
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In ANGEL VISITS Worship and Communion Traverse The Divine
If we are to honestly appraise the people’s history (those we refer to when we shout “power to the people!”), we must acknowledge the unceasing, if ever-evolving, presence of violence. A sense of scale inspired by looking up into the cavernous arches of St. John the Divine showed me the grandiosity of the human capacity…
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In Conversation with I’M REPEATING MYSELF Playwright Chad Kaydo
Kaydo knows that theatre is the perfect medium to reflect impermanence, and the specter of death is inside every breath of this play–but Kaydo has a light touch. He lets us listen and find the echoes and connections ourselves.
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In GOD ARE YOU THERE? MAYBE IT’S ME. The Black Performer Becomes Sisyphus
My performance practice has been affectionately described by a mentor as sisyphean–cyclical, futile, pointless and yet entirely necessary. Necessary for what-and-whom? I ask. As punishment for his crimes, Sisyphus was banished to the never ending task of rolling a boulder up a hill which inevitably crashes down. His labor is his punishment. What is it…
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Thank You, Steve.
“There he is.” Nicky Paraiso is sitting next to me and wants me to look at something on his phone. Ostensibly, we´re here at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery to see a show, the first of Danspace Project´s 50th season, but tonight feels more like a reunion, a gathering of old friends. It’s 7:15, the event was…
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THE BARBARIANS: When Language Vexes, Declarations of Love and War are Futile, and Cigarette Butts Have a Life of Their Own
Language: as much as it lets us express ourselves, also lets us express how trapped we are in the prison of others’ buzzwords, binding decrees, and unforgiving commands. We don’t give babies enough credit, even though the sounds of their babble exceed the limits of any one of the languages we’re suffering within. Jerry Lieblich’s…
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When a Body in Motion Becomes Self Destruction, “IO//ODIO” at SoHo PlayHouse: An Abrasive Encounter with 21st Century Body Fascist
Earlier this month hours before ‘curtain’ on a Friday night show at SoHo Playhouse, I chose to brave the ‘last chance’ lines and attend the Edges of Ailey at The Whitney. What I saw was compelling. The display, curated by Adrienne Edwards, readily incorporates a range of materials, archival footage, paintings, old notebooks, and programs.…
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Why Wait? The Fire Burns Now: The Sixteenth Anniversary of “The Fire This Time Festival”
In 2011, during the second year of the annual Fire This Time Festival, organizers produced the work of an up-and-coming playwright named Dominique Morriseau. The writer, now known as a MacArthur Fellow, an Artist in Residence at Signature Theater, and a Tony Nominee, still had another ten years before she would be called one of…