Gassman is the real article, the authentic listener, who has heard in the city’s woke and hip aspirations, its angry and tired lives, and its ever-evolving demography the real meaning of ordinary anguish.
A dominating thread of grief and healing wound its way through La MaMa Moves! 2021 and most of the artists brought song and storytelling into a festival that, as curator Nicky Paraiso acknowledged was full of resilient artists “making work that is essential and true to this pivotal moment in time.”
Live art is still here, and as Shelley understood two centuries ago, it will remain alive for as long as we do.
And then, time reversed itself.
Coop seeks to remind us that we are here, together, and that “the piles of things we’ve forgotten” are scattered everywhere around us.
No one goes into the archive unless they have a hole to fill. Archives are the remedy to forgetful minds, faulty sources, and even death itself. They promise concrete answers and facts.
All those toxic names on our money, our buildings, even our clothing. How they got there, and what it might mean to strip them of their meaning and power.
Peter Mills Weiss + Julia Mounsey X Tara Sheena
Mallory Catlett and Aaron Siegel X Melissa Levin
The made-up movie feels like one of those sweeping international melodramas with lots of expansive cinematography. In the minds of its creators, it’s an epic-length narrative replete with multi-generational strands and leaps forward in time.
It’s about how we try to use stories to explain things that we otherwise can’t explain, and how sometimes even those stories don’t do the work for us. How do we keep doing the work after the story?
Leopard slugs, and CAKE as a whole, provides a reminder to all of us that the romance-as-happy-ending thing is an odd societal compulsion, perhaps even an obsolete one