Armory Show

Last Friday I joined the P. Club at a performance of Moving Theater's Armory Show. I was particularly looking forward to this one because I'd never been to the Park Avenue Armory before and was excited to see it (and it was worth the excitement).

Several days later I'm still having trouble thinking of the show as a cohesive whole. But I was certainly interested in all the constituent parts. I particularly liked the way they addressed history and militarism in a space rife with both.

Go here for the Performance Club post and discussion.

Lewis Forever

The most recent Performance Club outing was to see Lewis Forever at the New Museum. While I'm not sure it really went anywhere it was a fun show to attend. We got to color and put together our own stick puppets, drink, throw things . . . I do like it when performers bring that sense of play into their work. And the audience participation was nice, although somewhat undermined by the fact that our actions didn't really seem to have a reason behind them--or at least not a reason that became clear to me. The performance itself lacked cohesion. Some parts weren't terribly engrossing, perhaps because it seemed unclear how they fit into the whole, others were fun (a bit related to Back to the Future, for example), and even oddly lovely. On the balance though I had such a good time though and you really can't complain about that.

The Performance Club discussion post is here.

3 Dancers, 4 Chairs, 26 Words

I attended this on Saturday with performance club and very much enjoyed it. It felt like such a fragile thing . . . so contained and particular and carefully crafted. The performance club post and discussion is here. 

Dribs and Drabs

So much to say and so little time to say it. Isn't that always the story. A few things:

• I like to talk but don't definitely don't love to hear myself talk. Still, I loved listening to the Performance Club audio that Claudia just put up. Despite cringing when I heard my own voice (I find that so unnerving) I liked revisiting bits of conversation with more distance from the performance and also hearing things I missed. And selfishly I hope that these audio recordings are done for more events, particularly ones I can't attend with the P. Club, because the post-show conversations are such an enriching experience for me and it would be fun to sort of eavesdrop when I can't take part. 
  

• I'm really enjoying New York magazine's "Vulture Reading Room." I have no desire to read Charlotte Roche's Wetlands. It sounds genuinely awful, and not in a fun way but in a just-plain-atrocious way. But reading about it has been genuinely entertaining and this back-and-forth particularly so. Hopefully they'll continue the feature for other books. 

• My younger sister is hiking the Appalachian Trail right now and the other day she did 29 miles. Seriously. In one day.  I, meanwhile, walked to Central Park and, entering from the southeast,went up around the Great Lawn, and back. I promised I'd hike with her for a few days later on, you see, and I need to train. So far? Not such a good start. 

• PEN World Voices has started and as always I'm looking forward to it. Although it's a disappointment that the NYPL doesn't seem to be taking part this year as their panels, etc. are usually particularly interested. Tomorrow--today, really--I'm going to watch a panel about women translating women. I'm looking forward to that.

Hawksley Workman, St. Matthew Passion, Death is Certain

I've loved Hawksley Workman's music for years. He's pretty eclectic and, frankly, his work is fairly uneven, but when it's good it's really good. So I was looking forward to seeing him perform live, particularly since he doesn't play in New York very often. As it happened, he was ill and the performance was pretty so-so, although the talky guy who got to go on stage and play guitar for one of the songs seemed thrilled. And I was tired enough that even if it had been an awesome concert I would have probably felt sort of blah about it. Fortunately it was at Joe's Pub and started at 7:00 then ended by 8:30-ish.

That was Wednesday and on Friday I went to BAM to see St. Matthew Passion (why no apostrophe in that title?). Which was a bit too much Jesus for me. I mean, I'm not stupid so obviously I knew it was about Jesus. But still. That's more religion than I've subjected myself to in quite some time. Which would have been fine, I think, if the guy singing the role of Jesus hadn't bored me so much. I know nothing about music and for all I know he's actually fantastic. But he just seemed kind of lumpen (his presence not his singing since, again, I certainly couldn't judge anyone's singing and wouldn't know what constitutes lumpen singing anyway). I did think the circular staging was neat and also liked that everyone was dressed casually. And I very much enjoyed the guy singing the Evangelist--Rufus Müller--probably at least in part because I could understand everything he was singing. What I really loved though, were the chorale parts. 

As a sidenote, I sat next to a very nice man who gave me a cough drop during the intermission (the two of us had a little two-person chorus of allergy-related sniffling during the first act) and chatted with me. Also, there was a guy on the subway Friday afternoon asking me about my e-reader (I have it for work) and then I ran into him at BAM as well. Which has nothing to do with anything but was kind of funny in a small world sort of way. 

Then on Saturday, wrapping up my happening week, I went to see Jack Ferver's Death is Certain at St. Mark's Church, which was a Performance Club outing (P. Club post here). I'm not really sure what I thought of the performance as a whole but there were a lot of things going on that I was interested in; I felt like there was a kind of overflowing of ideas which is far preferable to watching something that's lacking ideas. And there were numerous times when I felt emotionally engaged/invested in these people and scenarios I was watching. I also spent a lot of time thinking, ooh, that even sounds painful. You could really hear the dancers hitting the floor, hitting each other, etc. At one point Tony Orrico (one of the three dancers in the performance) was shaking Ferver hard enough that you could hear Ferver's cheeks flapping and I was a bit worried that it could cause whiplash. What I liked best though was the way the piece explored how the same people can be both a burden and a support, at one time pulling you back or obstructing you, at another time lifting you up, the ways we have power over one another. Or maybe this is too literal an interpretation? Anyway, I'm really glad I went. 

Beowulf: 1000 Years of Baggage

This was one of the performance club shows this month. I wasn't able to go with the club but I did go on my own. The performance club discussion is here. I started writing this blog post days ago and if I had started now instead I might have written something slightly having read the comments over there. As always, they've given me all kinds of things to think about. But I'm lazy, and my general take on the show hasn't changed, so you're pretty much going to get what I wrote before. (This is what happens when you leave your taxes to the last minute. I did them Tuesday night and was so tired that I fell asleep at about 8:45 yesterday [that's a little sad and maybe shouldn't have been admitted publicly].)

I'm a bit conflicted about this. On the one hand, I thoroughly enjoyed the show. I thought it was fun and funny. On the other hand, I felt like what I was seeing was Beowulf divorced from its context and that this was being put forth as more desirable--less "stifling"--than academic study. The three academics featured throughout the show are basically caricatures. But was it really less stifling? The poem is part of a formulaic Old English literary tradition. And also related to a body of interconnected Scandinavian work that features the same people and places. Does knowing that--being familiar with these traditions--turn the work into a museum piece or does it deepen and strengthen one's appreciation for it? 

In the musical* the story rarely felt full-bodied. It seemed like they didn't necessarily believe in the strength of the source material. The biggest victim of this is Beowulf himself, who is portrayed through much of the show as a musclebound idiot--like the dumb jock in a high school comedy--which seemed to me like a strange choice in part because I don't think the violence is really the most remarkable or noteworthy feature of the poem. I mean, that's kind of a feature of Europe in the early middle ages, no? And shouldn't Beowulf be so much more than that. So it's not so unique to see it represented in literature.When the performance focuses less on the aspects of the story that can be reduced to cartoons--or action figures in this case--it starts doing something interesting and distinct from what you'd find in academia. Instead of attempting to understand Beowulf as it was created, it seems to be addressing the ways in which the story can speak to a modern audience across the years. 

Toward the end of the musical, Beowulf challenges the most straight-laced of the three academics (who up to that point has pretty much been a caricature), saying that she hasn't experienced the kind of violence she's describing, a sword slicing flesh, etc. It's true of course, but it's also true of pretty much everyone who is going to read Beowulf or see a play based on it. These people and their concerns are pretty alien to us; we can't really understand them. And maybe that's the point. Or maybe it's not. Still, it feels at the end like they want to be doing something more serious, but because the show up to that point hasn't really gone below the surface it can't really support the reach for something more significant. 

*They call it a songplay, which I found obnoxious until I realized that "songplay" was kind of a kenning and therefore pretty appropriate to a musical based on Beowulf. So now I find the term tolerable--score one for academia and formal teaching there--but not so much so that I actually want to refer to the work as anything other than a musical.

Rambo Solo

I went to see this on Wednesday with Performance Club and think that it was the first thing I've attended with the group that I didn't enjoy. It's not that I hated it or had a particularly negative reaction to it . . . I just found it frequently tedious. At first I thought that the fact that I've never seen Rambo nor have I read the novel, First Blood, upon which it's based might be what prevented me from being more actively engaged. But it turned out that many people were equally unfamiliar with the source material but enjoyed Rambo Solo much more than I did. It might have been partially that I was uncomfortable. We were all sitting on this shag carpet with cushions and unless you were sitting against the wall--which I wasn't--there was nothing to lean against. By the end of the show I was fairly cranky about that.  But at the same time, some of the parts where I was most bored were toward the beginning, before I was all that uncomfortable. 

I think that sometimes it's hard to say why you're bored by something that other people enjoyed. I just had trouble getting into the story and for quite some time felt like I wasn't interested in having it recounted to me. With books I'm pretty comfortable saying that something--however great it may be--just isn't for me. With performance I'm often much more anxious about doing that; I feel as if I'm just missing something or being a lazy viewer. But in this case I think it really is just that the show wasn't my cup of tea and I feel pretty much OK about saying that. 

I'm not saying that the show doesn't have value for me.  There were moments I loved, particularly in the way Zachary Oberzan used his apartment as the setting for the story. There was a very childlike sense of play in his crawling under the futon or pretending the loft bed was a cliff (not to mention throwing M & Ms). In a sense he seemed to be transposing the make-believe games of childhood into an adult setting where they are no longer so normal and expected and where willing co-conspirators are thin on the ground. I haven't gone crawling around on my floor for any purpose other than cleaning it in years, but watching the show reminded me how fun that had been when I was a kid.

I'm also much more interested in Rambo Solo in retrospect than I was while actually experiencing it. As the retelling of the story came to its climax, I became more engaged. I grew interested in Rambo Solo as a portrait of an obsession and I actually wanted to know how it would end, since I didn't already know the story. It's also a testament to the way in which books can influence us. How they can get under our skins and into our heads. Even when they're not very good books. Or at least not of any particular literary value. But by the point when I actually started to be interested in these things my tailbone was killing me and I didn't feel like the payoff was enough for my prior boredom. 

The way I felt was far from universal though, and to read the interesting-as-always Performance Club conversation go here. 

Also over on the WNYC blog: a post about The Wooster Group's La Didone where the comment thread has focused in part on the use of technology in live performance. I haven't been able to get to the show--much to my disappointment since I thought it sounded pretty awesome--but I've been following the discussion closely as these multimedia, technology embracing performances are something I'm kind of conflicted about. 

Chautauqua!

This past Friday I went to see Chautauqua! with Performance Club. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Others did not. There's a lot of discussion going on over at Claudia's discussion post on the WNYC blog. All of it far more interesting than what I could come up with on my own to post here.

I will say that I think my unfamiliarity with downtown performance--and really with performance in general--definitely causes me to miss things but probably also, at times, allows me to enjoy things that people who've seen more don't because it's still all new to me. It's been a lot of fun to discover things that are new to me.

The Shipment

This was one of the January shows for Claudia LaRocca's Performance Club. It was something I never would have wound up going to on my own. I would have (possibly) read the review in the times, thought oh, that sounds interesting, and then gone back to reorganizing my kitchen cabinets or whatever and never gotten around to actually getting a ticket. I have motivation issues. But knowing that I'll have the opportunity to talk about what I've just seen with other people is exciting and makes attending things so much more fun. 

Last month I was a bit nervous because so many of the people are involved with performance as as more than just a sometime audience member and so very much more knowledgeable than me. But everyone's been so nice and easy to talk with that it was soon clear my worries were misplaced. Instead, I feel like I'm expanding my performance-viewing horizons while learning from other people and having a really good time. So it's basically a win-win-win situation. And on top of that, I've genuinely enjoyed both things I've gone to so far, which certainly isn't necessary, but it a plus.

But about The Shipment. I've been trying to think about what exactly I have to say about it. Or rather, how I can organize my thoughts about it well enough to write about it in a cohesive, worthwhile way. As much as I enjoyed it, I'm still turning it over in my head (a good thing, no?). The cast was wonderful and the show itself definitely made me think about my own preconceived notions of race but also about my own discomfort with talking about race in anything other than a politically correct way. I didn't think everything worked equally well, and I'm not sure how to interpret some things, but other things really intrigued me, particularly in the way Lee raised questions about how our expectations and preconceptions influence media representations of African Americans and vice versa?

The Performance Club post for discussion of The Shipment is here..