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note:Its the third and final week of my January adventure.
(Mark, I like heavily peated Scotch.)
.Monday, January 15
.
Hello, La MaMa, my old friend.
The words belong to Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess doomed to be disbelieved.
As dense techno beats throb and LED lights flash, Tansinis Cassandra performs a defiant funeral dance for herself.
Of the Nightingaleisnt a subtle show, but why should it be?
In fact, her eyes do some of the most compelling choreography in the show.
Whatever the legends say, this Cassandra has our attention.
.Tuesday, January 16
On further contemplation, I think subtlety may be dead.
Or in cryo-sleep, waiting for a different era.
Both the whisper and the howl can be done well, or not so well.
Characters are pelted with chalk dust or soccer balls or sprayed with water to represent beatings or torture.
They were wild, but wild and beautiful.
In the words ofRandy Jackson, yeah, thats gonna be a no from me, dawg.
But now Im back at La MaMa for almost two and a half intermissionless hours of new experimental opera.
I have done my lower-back stretches.
This isChornobyldorf,my first dip into thePrototype Festival.
The showisa ritual a series of rituals, in fact, though the context is not ancient but postapocalyptic.
A ballerina dances jerkily along to a sinister player piano that sprouts cables like weeds.
A musician plays an incredible contraption that looks like three trombones soldered together.
Even the instruments have mutated.
This defamiliarized experimentation with fragments of a lost world feels both feral and transcendent.
InRiddley, and inChornobyldorf, we are made human by the pull of art.
.Friday, January 19
Its Dynasty Handbag day!
I should have asked.)
Before the play begins, were treated to a screensaver-esque undersea-scape projected on the back wall.
Cameron hosts a monthly variety show calledWeirdo Night, and …
I think Im gonna like it heeeere.
and Isnt it great we can all enjoy our priv of getting to be here and do thea-tray?
You just know that the car sex scene is going to be great and sticky and it is.
He himself is also shaped like a dildo.
The show proposes no solutions, and its honest about the impossibility of trying to navigate our moral hellscape.
You wouldnt be making this ridiculous farce of performance art without me!
Instead, theyve inspired a welcoming outpouring of the pointedly absurd.
Its the trickster spirit, which will, like roaches and pizza rats, survive the apocalypse.
There are folding tables with coffee, tea, and biscuits.
I run into a friend and meet his friend.
The show is Christianssecond experimentwith the form of the Catholic mass.
Theyre here were all here to contemplate the Divine Feminine.
And so we begin.
Words render something into pieces that has shimmered in exquisite wholeness.
But how do you describe alchemy?
Part of the marvel of a piece likeTerceis the rigor beneath its ecstatic surface.
And in that rigor, theres also humility, an infinite tenderness.
He was also raised in Mississippi, with various forms of southern Christianity all around him.
You know, he said, the verb for a mass is to celebrate.
Though it doesnt usually feel that way.
InTerce, that spirit is still alive.
Next up, Im back with Under the Radar forVolcanoat St. Anns Warehouse.
The piece bills itself as a four-part miniseries.
In our TV-is-everything era, its a smart way of framing things:Four 45-minute episodes?
Hell, I bingedMare of Easttownin one afternoon.
The dilapidated room they inhabit is a suspended box with two glass walls and no door.
Here, though they sometimes pause and blink with Beckettian bewilderment, they mostly dance.
They act out game shows and wedding toasts.
Familiar images leap out of their gyrations E.T.
Implicit in both is the question of whatofus, if anything, will outlive us?
Memory, legacy, and nostalgia haunt many, many plays these days.
We joke cynically (and fret earnestly) about living in the end-times.
It was a big year.
Hubrisisnt a long or super-complex show, but theres an abundance of sly poignancy within its simple frame.
We built a theater in our backyard.
We did plays with our neighbors …
They raised a human.
But Jelliffe is right: Living matters.
The daily choices matter.
And the work matters all of it,especiallyin the high school and the backyard and the cinder-block box.
note:Here it is I take it back about subtlety being dead.]
Meditative and fascinating, sylvesters show is a quiet communal exploration wrapped around a central core of sorrowful outrage.
Then we reneged.)
City planning as an act of war, she says.
The Eagle and the Tortoiseis wonderfully tactile: The audience is gathered to read a book.
We each get a headlamp and a beautifully constructed art book.
Dima is an artist Ive been following for almost ten years, ever since meeting him in grad school.
TheIn Our Own Wordspart of thisOnegins title is the most important.
Mine was named Igor.
He had button eyes and a giraffe onesie.
he rails at the performers.
You cant hide behind your beautiful Russian culture anymore.
Your culture brings death and destruction!
He throws tomatoes at Radin and exits the theater on the verge of tears.
Joness rant feels tacked on, and while its not disingenuous, its clunkiness pushes it in that direction.
Krymov doesnt need to apologize, especially so heavy-handedly.
The work is already its own exegesis and its own self-interrogation.
It floats heavenwards while understanding, even celebrating, its own, and our own, ephemerality.
.Epilogue
In 18 days, Ive seen 26 shows, and its been intense but truly invigorating.
So much of what Ive seen has given me hope.
All of these things require our presence.
And bodies sharing space and time together mean something.
We got honked at, we got forced to the side of the road, we gotcoal-rolled.
They were mostly kind, even curious.
They fed us; they asked about our lives and we about theirs; they wished us well.
It has been a practice, not a product; an event, not an object.
