Obscene Jester

sharkskin gets yelled at... in a BAR

Okay, so I'm not necessarily a particularly confrontational person.  In fact, I shake before I speak up, whether that be in class, in (godforbid) a performance, in general.  Which doesn't mean I don't speak up, it just means that I've accepted the tremulous corporeal quality of said speaking.  And, you know, I'm cool with that.  Quivers can be sexy too.  However, I was completely unprepared for my experience recently at my favorite post-class wine bar Shade.  A place I may very well never venture into again.  Harrumph.  (Where else to procure my favorite vino verde within easy distance of that beacon of academic veracity and exploitative verve that is NYU???)

So, it's Friday evening.  I'm in "the city" because I'm meeting a student for coffee, then seeing a friend's film, then a student show.  It is a full evening, and well deserving of a little lubrication.  Betweenst coffee date and film, I head, with Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics firmly in hand, to Shade.  It's a good spot to spend the off hour, and to contemplate. 

Whilst there, I engage two somewhat elderly gentleman, both retired professors, who are waxing WAY poetic.  I think they're cute.  Clearly, this is some sort of academic sin that I will not commit again.  I ask where they teach; they ask what I do.  And then, seriously, all HELL breaks loose.

Apparently, the fact that I study, legitimately, performance art is a SERIOUS affront to more-elderly gentleman (who is NOT a gentleman at ALL) of the two.  I am, in his, oft-repeated words, a "phony."  This was accompanied by an almost Gertrude Stein-ian repetition of "WOULD YOU ROLL IN PIG SHIT FOR FREE."  I kid you not. 

For the record, I'm not really that interested in pig shit.  Blood, other bodily materials, sure.  Just not the explicitly scatalogical.  But I didn't have the time, shall we say, to explicate this.  I simply, after being YELLED AT for a full-on three minutes, paid for the gentleman's drink, and (this is significant, considering the fact that I live on a grad student/adjunct prof salary) left mine UNFINISHED, and walked out.  Well, there.  Can you think of a better way of saying "Fuck you" without actually saying it?

Not knowing whether to  laugh or cry (and veering dangerously close to the latter), I simply moved on.  It was, indeed, a New York experience, whatever that means.  But, point to this anti-eligiacal fabel: love what you do, and always have an extra $20 on hand. 

Oh, and old men, as cute as they might seem, are evil.

a little night music

Listening to Ikue Mori's "laptop music" is a curiously bodied experience, given the media she uses.  Though electronic music, with some exceptions, usually distances me somehow from the more corporeal relationship I have in the "live"/read: acoustic/event, Mori's music--like Iannis Xenakis' La Legend d'Eer,  Karlheinz Stockhausen's  Gesang der Jünglinge (in a particularly disturbing way), and So Percussion's recent work, for instance--gets inside.  It moves through the nerves and muscles, becoming strangely sexy. 

Pairing her music with Maya Deren's too rarely viewed silent films from the 1940s that in turn play with perceptival notions of the body and dance  is just about perfect.  And it was, until the projector ended the performance midway through--just as Deren, on a beach, stroking the hair of two women playing chess, steals the bishop. 

Moments of failure in performance can be so satisfying--the dancer's misstep, the musician's break, the line just missed.  They make the performance more of one's own, something seen that night not seen any other.  And I think it's also very much part of what makes films from the '40s and earlier particularly intriguing--the scratches on the film itself a visual metaphor for the graininess of a record player.  It's beyond nostalgia or romanticizing, but rather brings the very material of performance into visual and aural focus.  Yet, as my technologically inclined friend commented afterward, "it's endearing when performers make mistakes, but not when the techs do." 

And, unfortunately, the disappointment of not seeing the rest of Deren's At Land tainted the next part of the performance, which added harpist Zeena Parkins, and percussionist Cyro Baptista.  This had little to do with the music, but more with the incongruous video happening behind, not with, it.  Especially after the gorgeous synchronicity of Mori's music and Deren's gesture, it was almost egregious to be confronted so suddenly with the overly colorful overly jumpy type of screen-saver video art that simply irritates me.  Okay, the cartoonish cockroaches were kind of cute, but, really, I could have done without the visual signifier.  It distracted from the *real* visual onstage: the musicians; and in its scopic distraction, also distracted from the music.

By the time pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and (be still my beating heart she gets amazing sounds out of a drum set) percussionist Susie Ibarra took the stage with Mori, I  had gotten over my critical condition and could just relax into the music.  A little more tonal than I expected, for sure, but still very very cool. 

That said... isn't there always a "that said"?... I have to wonder about the significance of the space we were in to  experiencing this music and imagery.  Sitting in a more formal concert hall than usual, I found myself rendered far more passive than I generally am during performances, and this architecturally altered how I experienced the event.   I know I have a chip on my shoulder about the uptown/downtown divide, and perhaps I do wax too nostalgic for a period of the downtown New York scene that I never experienced; but I kinda think even the silly video would have been more engaging in, say, John Zorn's space, The Stone.  Certainly listening, unconfined by the strictures of concert hall etiquette, would have been as open, as corporeal, and, indeed, as sexy as Mori's music always should be. 

 

a haunted stage

Oh, it’s been so long since yours truly has seen a play as solid as The Poor Itch, now playing at the Public LAB series.  A beautiful script, ridiculously strong ensemble of performers, and simple but lovely design, the story of Iraqi War vet Ian’s (Christopher Thornton) struggles as he returns home without the use of his legs is heartbreaking and awe-inspiring without falling into the plethora of clichés that await a production of this genre.

Remarking on Ibsen's statement that all his plays could have been titled Ghosts, Marvin Carlson writes that theatre "is the repository of cultural memory, but, like the memory of each individual, it is also subject to continual adjustment and modification as the memory is recalled in new circumstances and contexts."

The ultimate irony is not lost here: Itch's playwright John Belluso passed away from complications resulting from his rare bone disorder in the middle of composing the piece a year and a half ago.  It is an unfortunate case of serendipity that director Lisa Peterson and cast have reconstructed the piece, complete with the playwright’s notes to himself, issues and themes he would like to have dealt with, problems with the characters and structure, and alternate drafts (lettered A through H) that are understatedly read by cast members.  The Itch becomes both haunted and haunting both in form and content.

Ian’s return home is complicated by the curse of his “disability,” and his expectations of what life would be like once he returned home.  Neither happy with getting back to a routine, nor the painful superficiality of the “hero’s welcome,” a man who was happy to both better himself and serve his country has his plans and hopes shattered by a no nonsense mother, dysfunctional, meth-head friends, and a strong and attractive caretaker.  Realizing the figures around him are just as disabled as he is, the temptations of OxyContin, dreams resulting from post-traumatic stress disorder, and escape through drugs and alcohol are the solace he has from the death of friends and the horrors he both witnessed and took part in while serving.

Particular attention must be paid to Thornton, who carries the show through the sheer dynamics and magnitude of his role without judgment, but with the most genuine understanding and respect for a character that a performance-goer can find.

Yes, the play can most certainly be read as a political statement in an age when the death count soars on th front page of the Times next to the incredibly shallow reports on gubernatoria indiscretions, but it by no means begs this reading.  It is a strong statement made when the poltical and personal, the human, can be melded so smoothly, inextricably.  Most importantly, the synthesis of an incomplete work along with the unwritten (and disappointing) life of the characters fosters the ghosts within the piece and without, becoming not only a tribute to the eloquence of Belluso and The Poor Itch as a work of art, but also a lovely yet devastating meditation upon and tribute to the process of creation.

she's been seeing plays, she swears

But they have been, for the most part (what's the lesser part?, she wonders), productions involving to some degree her students.  And it would be simply unethical to blog about them.  She thinks.  Though she's admittedly a little divided on the issue.  So, to pass the time until her classes end and she sees something she's undivided on in terms of ethics, here's a happy little video. 

(Please do note, that whilst in Paris, sharkskin did not partake of any free hugs.  And, since she's postscripting anyway, what's up with the skeevy umbrella guy?  Dude, free hugs, not free cop-a-feels.  The kids sure are cute though.)

ravaged by media

One question I constantly have to field as a student of “multimedia” performance is, if I’m so interested in the mediated body, why choose “live” performance and theatre as objects of inquiry?  Why not film, visual arts, computers?  The truth of the matter is that performance provides an explicit site of struggle between what we consider the live and the mediated.  No matter how successful, each piece reveals ideas, biases, and stigmas we associate with the contemporary, fragmented self.

The synapses in my brain went nuts seeing James Scruggs’ RUS(H) at the 3LD Arts Center.  The projection work was of the utmost simplicity: a white cloth backdrop with nearly constant images reflecting both the place and inner worlds of the characters.  A bedroom is surrounded by dewy leaves, a hospital room is surrounded by claustrophobic, rhythmic EEGs and X-rays.  To up the ante, the performance includes “video puppets” (beautifully danced by Marc Bovino and Dax Valdes): two men dressed in shadowy black with small monitors attached to their hands, which become physical parts of the dancers and actors (a shoulder, a face, a foot) as well as practical props (computers) and the imaginations, memories, and consciousnesses of the characters.  These elements come together in an astounding manner, resonating, contradicting, and engaging with each other.  Which isn’t to say all is well in medialand.

When taken in concert with the themes of the play, the violence and violation of the mediated body is manifest.  Our a-hero, Rus (Luis Vega), after hitting a man with his car, decides to take the victim on as a personal “project,” and instead becomes the project of the victim, Sonny (Lathrop Walker), a crystal meth addict who gets a thrill out of bringing out the dark desires of Rus (“I saw your face through the glass.  You enjoyed hitting me”).  Rus and Sonny form a masochistic-dependent relationship of violence and eroticism, reflective of the terror and pleasure we feel at our own fragmentation in a simulacral society.  The decision to have the characters address the audience directly, although at times hokey, also points to our own implication in this multimediated event.

The characters are a bit reductive, representing archetypes that belong to both science fiction and situation comedies: Rus as the repressed and overly macho husband, pushed by society to become physically violent in order to “feel”; Sonny as the hedonistic scout leader who is enlightening others whilst battling his own demons; and Sireene (chandra thomas), the wife who has begun to conflate love and sexuality after being ignored by said husband.  And while these archetypes are certainly valid characters in Scruggs world, their fragmentation shouldn’t result in a simplification of the people and problems the mediated world presents us with.

Georges Bataille wrote that we can no longer differentiate between death and sexuality when they both represent disorder (and, ergo, fear) in an otherwise ordered society.  Remaining discontinuous from others (and I would add ourselves) creates the desire to cross the taboo of individuality, which becomes the reproduced, deterritorializing self that multimedia performs, imbued with violence and desire.