Curated by Sarah Dahnke, the premise for “Object as Performer” was a little more tantalizing than it turned out to be. Two digital video projects were screened in the entrance gallery, and the performance portion consisted of four pieces in various stages of work-in-progress: barrish (A.O. Movement Collective); Restless Nest (Rebecca Davis); Under (Juri Onuki); and Backshore (Abigail Levine). As promised, all four works integrated an object; apparently this mandate also carried an unspoken correlation to nudity, following the long-established relationship between stripping down and perceiving the human body as an object.

The evening, however, got me thinking: what is the difference between an object as a prop or scenic element, and what makes it really a performer? What pushes it from the background or sidelines to center stage? Not surprisingly, in movement-based work, it seems to be physically connected to movement. In The A.O. Movement Collective’s barrish, the sewed together shirts are a driving force in the action, and become a powerful third party in what is ostensibly a duet; Davis’ Restless Nest begins in darkness with a mysterious swishing sound, which turns out to be the props being dragged along the floor. Instead of playing a passive role, inanimate objects can become animate, and that—to me—is the essence of the possibilities of performance.

[Daisey's] hope, I’d guess, is that this will compel us to do something. Talk about it with others, write letters to Apple (he provides contact info), or even agitate for political change. But I’m skeptical that consumer action against a company can really change things. Call me an unrepentant liberal, but when I look at the world, I generally assume there’s a reason it is the way it is, and if we don’t want it to be that way, we should actually expect things like laws to be in place to prevent the things we don’t like, feel are excessive, damaging, or wrong.

Well, as much as I still agree with my final sentiment (there should be some laws, damn it) my skepticism appears to have been masking cynicism. Here, from Mike Daisey’s blog on January 20 (I hope he’ll forgive me for quoting large sections of it verbatim):

First, if you haven’t heard, during this break in the run at the Public we spent a month collaborating with Ira Glass and THIS AMERICAN LIFE to adapt THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS for the radio [...] In its first week the episode was the most downloaded in THIS AMERICAN LIFE’s history. The internet exploded, and the story went everywhere—I received over a thousand emails in just a few days; the response was overwhelming [...] A week after our show was broadcast, Apple made an abrupt announcement. After years of stonewalling and silence, they released the full list of their suppliers, and agreed to outside, independent monitoring of working conditions in the factories they use. It is not everything, but it is a small step down the right road. Details [...] Many news outlets are crediting THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS for being a large factor in Apple’s decision. I’ve received a number of emails from Apple employees who have told me they believe that hearing this story on THIS AMERICAN LIFE, a program many Apple employees listen to with their families and their children, created “a morale situation” that finally compelled Apple to begin to do the right thing…

So yup. Looks like I was just plain wrong. Anyone out there who knows Mike Daisey’s email or phone number should tell him I owe him a drink or dinner or something or other. The show has returned to the Public; see here for This American Life‘s episode on the show/Foxconn.

Originally presented at The Chocolate Factory, I’m Nobody! Who Are You? is re-conceived for the New York Live Arts Ford Foundation Live Gallery Wall. The installation is comprised of a series of life-sized video portraits, presented in pairs, of individuals who are connected directly or tangentially to New York Live Arts. The work breaks boundaries by allowing the viewer to observe other people for longer lengths of time than would exist in standard social conditions. By observing paired portraits, viewers create relationships, and consequently narratives, between the participants despite the known conditions of the filming. I’m Nobody! Who Are You? challenges the viewer to consider how they construct their appearance for others and respond to the same construction of others. Ultimately, I’m Nobody! Who Are You? asks viewers to consider the artificiality of their assumptions about communities, individuals, institutions, and the arts.

with

 

• luciana achugar
• Vanessa Anspaugh
• Anna Azrieli
• Sidra Bell
• Michelle Boulé
• Brian Brooks
• Chloë Z. Brown
• Gabri Christa
• Jean Davidson
• Maura Nguyen Donohue
• Cathy Edwards
• Paul Engler
• Keely Garfield
• Ain Gordon
• Miguel Gutierrez
• Hristoula Harakas
• Anja Hitzenberger
• K.J. Holmes
• Bill T. Jones
• Joanna Kotze

 

• Sheila Elizabeth Lewandowski
• I-Ling, Liu
• Brian McCormick
• Jodi Melnick
• Carla Peterson
• Craig Peterson
• Brian Rogers
• Daniel Bernard Roumain
• Philip Sandström
• Valda Setterfield
• Sally Silvers
• Vicky Shick
• Megan V. Sprenger
• Laura Staton
• Elaine Summers
• Donna Uchizono
• Arturo Vidich
• Marya Wethers
• Enrico D. Wey
• Christopher Williams

http://www.newyorklivearts.org/event/imnobody

A week after seeing a preview performance of Einstein on the Beach and there’s still this feeling of having taken a trip to a 1976 sci-fi time capsule. An operatic spaceship. It was a four-hour train ride from Chicago to the Power Center at the University of Michigan, a venue that in mid-January was home to epic rehearsals of the show. “There’s no doubt about it,” wrote the University Musical Society in fervent pre-show emails. “This is a seriously historic moment.” Historic, yes, but like visiting a sepia-colored dream of some NASA engineer–after a particularly long day pushing buttons in big glasses and a comb-over. Smart, beautiful, disorienting, dated.

A lot of that has to do with the set. The biggest pieces roll onstage in grey plywood slabs, from the wings, with haze and smoke billowing out around them. Prison bars made of ribbons dangle from the battens and billow slightly from the gust of passing performers. Most of the color is flat shades of white, black and grey, with very little blending, and even when we are presented with the representation of an actual building, there’s no attempt to, say, carve a faux stone façade from Styrofoam. We’re very obviously looking at a painted backdrop. Even a giant wall of chasing light bulbs is literally made of old-school yellow globes, not something more modern like LEDs. And yet, that the setting looks like it came out of a Theater History Textbook contributes to its other-worldliness, and its modern meaning.

The scenic accuracy is deliberate. It’s been 20 years since the last re-staging of Einstein on the Beach. There was one in 1984, and again in 1992, when I was 5 and 13, respectively. Creators Robert Wilson, Phillip Glass and Lucinda Childs collaborated to ensure the creation of an accurate re-staging of the original. The work has been the subject of a PBS documentary and is said to have changed perception of modern opera.

This is clear from the production in a number of ways. That the endurance required from the performers is astounding. That aspects of its composition seem tired at this point, having been aggressively adopted into modern opera. That the whole piece is basically a 4.5 hour mental workout, demanding that you stay engaged while challenging you with endless looping chants of numbers, non-narrative speeches, robotic gestures, and straight-out goofiness.

In one of the strongest sequences of the piece, featured performer Kate Moran repeats a line describing an experience in a supermarket: “There were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them,” while slowly moving through space, changing costumes. In the original production, Childs was the featured performer who recited these lines on loop. In this production, Moran owns the text. I never got tired of hearing those lines–with every repetition, the inflection and meaning would change. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, always engaging.

The same is true, to a certain extent, of Glass’ music, in which choruses sing numbers that blend into sentences and words. It’s a little bit like listening to a kaleidoscope. The chorus sings from the pit, from a jury box onstage, in amorphous groups. Everyone wears suspenders, a white dress shirt, and slacks—an outfit stereotypical for Einstein and absolutely ridiculous for anyone else.

So here I am, sitting in a theater of a marathon length of time, watching a work with sets that look like they came out of a vault, everyone’s wearing suspenders and singing numbers, and the lead violinist is actually dressed like Einstein. People are puffing their cheeks out and reciting nonsensical phrases. There is a court scene. There is a caboose scene. There are several dance sequences. There is a visual theme of a bright white line. And all throughout, people are getting up to go to the bathroom as is necessary, because there isn’t any intermission.

It feels both glorious and totally insane—like a dream.

Which is kind of the point. In the PBS documentary, Wilson speaks of the work as depicting character, not narrative. Glass talks about trusting visual and psychological associations with Einstein as a basis for the work. Both acknowledge the German physicist as a powerful, almost godlike presence in their culture. With this devoted re-staging of Einstein on the Beach, Glass and Wilson claim their own territory within the word “godlike,” and the production celebrates not Einstein but the machinations and developments of its lead artists.

With just cause. Ever watch an old movie and think “Well, this is kind of cliché,” and then realize “Wait a minute—this is the thing that MADE the clichés”? That’s what watching Einstein on the Beach is like, for some of us who didn’t grow up in the atomic age, but are instead living in its hangover. For some of us who are familiar with the visual machinations of contemporary opera. For some of us who read about Wilson in our college textbooks and have seen Phillip Glass become the subject of sketch comedy. It comes with a kind of smirking respect. Like when you’re grateful for the incredible sacrifice your grandparents made but wish they’d stop talking about themselves at the dinner table.

So if coming back from this opera is like emerging from a 1976 Time Spaceship, it’s worth the trip, if only to appreciate the contributions of works past and the developments in the field since then. Makes you want to kiss the ground. A little.

“You, My Mother” is a chamber opera project in two parts exploring the elusive and ever-shifting relationships between mothers and their adult children. The piece is performed by Two-Headed Calf regulars Laryssa Husiak and Mike Mikos, along with new music vocalists Kate Soper (Wet Ink Ensemble) and Beth Griffith (musical affiliations include John Cage, Morton Feldman and Karlheinz Stockhausen). Accompanying them is the acclaimed new music ensemble Yarn/Wire + Strings, consisting of Ian Antonio (percussion), Laura Barger (piano), Russell Greenberg (percussion), Joshua Modney (violin), Mariel Roberts (cello) and Ning Yu (keyboard).

Here’s a sample of the music:

The creative team also includes Barbara Lanciers (Choreography), Ahram Jeong (Projection Design), Chris Kuhl (Scenic and Light Design), Yoonkyung Lim (Projection Design), Alice Taverner (Costume Design) and Justin Townsend (Scenic and Light Design).

You, My Mother runs Off-Broadway from February 9 – 20, 2012 in a limited engagement at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, located at 66 East 4th Street between 2nd Avenue & the Bowery in New York City. Performances are Thursdays – Sundays at 7:30pm, along with Saturdays matinees at 2:30pm and an additional performance on Monday, February 20 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $25 for adults and $20 for students/seniors and can be purchased online at LaMaMa.org, in person at the box office or by calling 212-475-7710.

The running time is 70 minutes.

It’s easy to forget that artists and theaters are partners birthing artworks to the world.  So often these relationships can have challenging power dynamics – let’s open communication and get down to business.  How do we work together on logistical challenges, how do we negotiate our needs?

Panelists include: Cathy Eilers, Program Manager at Joyce SoHo; Kristin Marting, hybrid director and Artistic Director of HERE; Brian Rogers, theater artist and Artistic Director of the Chocolate Factory; James Scruggs, theater artist.

Liz Sargent in "Botanica." Photo by Paula Court

“For years, some of my favorite French surrealist pornography was Bataille’s Blue of Noon and Louis Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt,” Jim Findlay explained about halfway through our interview. For the first thirty-some minutes, we’d been discussing plants, some 200 of which surrounded us as we sat in the middle of the set for Botanica, Findlay’s new show (Jan 28 – Feb. 25; tickets $10-$30), giving the big gallery space at 3LD Arts the earthy, loamy smell of a warm greenhouse. Asking what else we needed to discuss in terms of understanding the show, Findlay offered that we had yet to talk about French surrealist porn, at which the conversation changed hue from green to blue.

“So I spent some time researching them, because I had wanted to do something that had sex as a major part of it,” he continued. “They’re both books written by a male, with a first-person narrator, about an amoral woman in their past who they’re still obsessed with, and can’t get over, and who’s unavailable. The amoral love of their life kind of thing. Louis Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt is basically 150 pages of he can’t get this woman’s cunt out of his mind,” he explained almost apologetically. “About trying to figure out how to stop thinking about Irene’s cunt. And Blue of Noon is more sort of this story about this guy’s relationship with a woman who’s falling apart at the seams, she’s a drunk and completely amoral. Kind of destroying the world with her sexuality. Just not going to live by the world’s rules. And I discovered that the books are written about–the woman Aragon was obsessed with and the woman Bataille was obsessed with–were the same real world woman. A woman named Colette Peignot, who wrote under the pen name–and was part of the Surrealist movement–’Laure.’”

Word has been going around about Botanica for a while now, spurred mainly by positive feedback when a selection of the work was shown a year ago at APAP, while Findlay and his collaborators were in residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where the show was envisioned as a twelve-hour long installation performance (“I’ve been calling presenters, telling them, ‘I was just kidding, it’s only 90 minutes long!’” Findlay joked.) Add to that early experiments starting two years ago, as well as a well-received showing at Prelude last year, and it’s a rather buzzed about show–for good reason. The set alone is an incredible piece of design work (by Peter Ksander). The audience is seated at the back of the space, facing towards the front windows of 3LD; downstage-right a small but completely functional greenhouse angles up and off; center-left is a large scientific research station, all brushed steel and clear plexiglass, that wouldn’t look out of place as a setting in CSI; upstage, right in front of the windows, is a rather anodyne living area. Plants are everywhere–in the greenhouse, throughout the living area, in media res on the experiment table. The entire stage-left wall is divided into small cells from which the tendrils of seedlings coil up toward the light or down toward the floor.

Welcome to the biodome in which Botanica takes place.

None of this should seem all that surprising to those familiar with Findlay’s work. A long-time designer with the Wooster Group and a co-founder of Collapsable Giraffe, Findlay is an artist with a well-established reputation. Botanica marks a new phase in his career–an opportunity to define his artistic voice as the primary generator of the work, outside a more collaborative environment.

But for all that about French Surrealist porn, the original inspiration that led to Botanica was far less esoteric and literary.

“It was about two-and-a-half years ago, and I was in Lyon, France working on a show with Ralph Lemon, and I had a dream about Liz Sargent,” he explained, “who’s a woman I’ve been friends with and is a choreographer and installation artist, who used to be a dancer and hadn’t really been performing in New York. But I’d always had this idea that she’d be great onstage. But in this dream…” he paused. “I just had this dream where I saw her in this room that was just filled with plants. I saw her in this environment that was just wall-to-wall plants. The floor was plants and the ceiling was plants. And I just knew immediately that there was a performance in there.”

Findlay’s process was slow and iterative. Along with Sargent, he knew he wanted to work with Ilan Bachrach and Chet Mazur. The four began meeting for exploratory sessions at the Collapsable Hole, the converted garage-space Findlay shares with Radiohole in Brooklyn. One of the ideas that came to inform the piece was the pseudo-science theory of “plant consciousness.” Although Findlay’s research ultimately led to engagement with noted plant experts at such places as the New York Botanical Garden, an early inspiration was the 1970s pop-psychology book The Secret Life of Plants. Partly based in hard science, the work also relied heavily on investigations by the likes of Cleve Backster, a polygraph expert (“If you do any research into it, you sort of discover that anyone who calls himself a polygraph expert is lying,” Findlay wryly pointed out of the oft discredited technique) who experimented with lie detectors on plants in the 1960s.

Based on those initial sessions, they began developing ideas for exploratory improvisations and installations to be presented in mixed-bills, like Avant-Garde-Arama, that would give them to chance to explore human-plant interaction. But fundamentally, it was still based on the image from Findlay’s dream, with the content emerging from the explorations.

“The first thing we did was sort of like an installation improv version at a, Ugly Duckling party at Invisible Dog. And right away, somehow, Chet started having sex with plants,” he explained. “I just wanted Chet in a room with three plants. And at the time I was trying to embed speakers in the plants to make the plants talk. I was always trying to make the plants talk. How to interface with these plants with technology that would bring them alive in a theatrical way. And at that time I had three other performers on remote microphones in the space, so they were forty, fifty feet away, couldn’t see him, but each of them was physically linked to speakers in the plants. So they did a forty-minute improv where the plants competed for his attention. You know, ‘I’m thirsty, I need water,’ so he’d water one. ‘No I’M thirsty, don’t water that one, water me!’ And that kind of somehow, magically led to, you know…” he trailed off with a wave of the hand, as though the result was obvious.

“You put a few performers and microphone there, and someone’s going to start fucking.”

With eroticism brought into the mix, the show began to take shape. The literary menage-a-trois between Aragon, Bataille, and Peignot served as the model for how the characters in the piece interact: two scientists and a caretaker/gardner, living in a biodome and experimenting on plant cosciousness, with a sort of ephemeral female character metamorphosing between human and plant object-of-desire. Findlay admitted that such a narrative-centric piece was new territory for him, but he’d come to embrace it as part of his personal artistic exploration. Although mainly known as a designer, he passed off the job to Ksander, one of the few people whose work we knew well enough to feel comfortable stepping back and letting him handle it without being tempted to meddle.

Instead, Findlay concentrated on working with the performers to develop further ways of using technology to interact with plants. Sonically, the piece is scored with live sound by inserting contact-microphones into plants to be experimented on. “You hear the plant hearing them,” is how Findlay put it. As the performers touch, romance, and torture plants, the audience experiences the sound conducted through the plant’s living material, mixed through a sound-system that combines it with samples of actual recorded plant sounds (using technology well outside a performance’s budget), with the result being an interplay of actual live and recorded plant sounds. It’s particularly arresting to hear the result of tasing one with a consumer-strength electric taser. Findlay and assistant director Maurina Lioce, who was tending to the plants while we talked, were both laughing at their inability to convince audiences during work-in-progress showings that it wasn’t faked. When the performer tases a plant, the audience is, in fact, hearing that plant being tased.

Findlay’s engagement with the show, I suspect, is owed as much to such challenges and the themes the show took on as a transformed into a dark comedy: not only of finding a performance vocabulary for seemingly inanimate objects like plants, but also for the sheer challenge of working with them at all.

“Over the course of this I’ve gone from knowing nothing to being scarily into plants,” he told me. “There’s over 200 plants in here, and at least the hundred that are potted–not the seedlings on the wall–the hundred that are potted I know them all. I know their personalities to a certain extent.”

At the beginning of the processs, “We would kill plants at an amazing rate,” he explained. An important influence in a somewhat ironic fashion was Rob Besserer. Best known to the artistic community as a dancer and performer who’s worked with everyone from Baryshnikov to Meredith Monk, Besserer’s side job is as a plant arrangement designer, a specialty that likely has a more specific name than I’m aware of. (“He calls himself a ‘greensman’ or something like that,” Findlay said.) Besserer helped Findlay and the others understand how to work with–and keep alive–the variety of plants featured in the show, which was a long and tricky process, as they discovered with the sail plants he brought them.

“Some people call them ‘peace lillies’ but I call them ‘sail plants’ because ‘peace lilly’ is so…” he trailed off. “We got them, Rob brought in a bunch of them, and said, ‘Here, try these.’ And we had them for like a week and they were dying, the stems were lying flat over the edge of the thing, Maurina’s calling Rob, saying, ‘Rob, we don’t know what we’re doing, these plants are dying, we’re killing them, what do we do?’ And he’s just like, ‘Put them in the shower.’ Just put them in the shower for like fifteen minutes running and then do the same thing again tomorrow. So we did it for a couple days, and they still looked like the sickest–”

“We didn’t put them in their for fifteen minutes,” Lioce said from across the stage. “I’d put them in there and just leave it running while we rehearsed.”

“Yeah!” Findlay agreed. “We didn’t water them for fifteen minutes, we just left them in there for, like, hours.”

“Rob said they need more water,” Lioce explainded. “He said, ‘There’s no way you can give them too much water,’ so I was like, ‘Well, here’s a shower.’ It worked, though.”

“I mean, they were just flat,” Findlay continued. “Then one day, we came in and they were all…they went from all their leaves drooping over the edge of the thing, literally nothing standing up, and then we came in one day after showering them and they were back up. That was the moment I was like, ‘Holy shit, we did it! We rescued these plants!’” He paused, chuckling. “But yeah, that was the moment I was like, yeah. My little Grinch heart grew one plant size that day.”

A brief description: You enter the theater and sit down. Shortly thereafter, a half dozen women will enter, mostly through the audience. They’re naked. You’ll be unsurprised to know that there is a diversity of body types represented. (Three of the performers (Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle, and Regina Rocke) are primarily known as dance/movement artists; Becca Blackwell is an actor, I suppose [Note: It's been brought to my attention that this could be perceived as dismissive; it was merely intended as a broad if uncertain characterization of Blackwell's practice]; then there’s Amelia Zirin-Brown, better known as cabaret star Lady Rizo; and burlesque performer and artist World Famous *BOB*.) From this point, they will perform a series of vignettes without text. A pantomime fairy tale. A dance routine or two. Lady Rizo will do a comic routine on sex raunch in which she plays a porn vixen switching up the dynamic so that it’s the guy who’s taking it. Another will feature a woman rocking out to heavy metal. Still another has them all gyrating on the floor. The only words (if I understand this correctly) will be a song sung in Welsh. In just under an hour it will end.

In interviews, Lee has spoken about her desire to create a show that wasn’t a polemic, but rather one that embodied some sort of “utopian feminism,” and presented “gender fluidity” (see here or here). My problem is, I suppose, in trying to ferret that out from what I saw onstage. I can sort of see how this was the idea, but, as I’ll get to momentarily, I don’t think this is quite what happened.

One of the things that troubled me in reading others’ responses to the show is that no one really points out the banality of the representations onstage. I don’t mean that pejoratively, mind you. I just mean that what we see is a depiction of banal gender roles in dialogue with one another. Consider the fairy tale pantomime: in it, Lee isn’t subverting female representations in fairy tales. The actions of every character exist well within the bounds of fairy tales. Little girls can also be vicious monster-killers cutting their friends out of a beast’s stomach. Evil witches can also be loving mothers. What Lee shows us isn’t outside the construct of female representations in fairy tales–it’s just outside the Disney version of fairy tales.

Likewise, two long sequences towards the end. In the first, a woman simply rocks out, headbanging and slam dancing to heavy metal. This is followed by her getting into a vicious fight with another woman, played out in slow motion, to a crowd of jeering spectators. Anyone who’s been to a metal club has, I’d wager, seen both scenarios go down and can attest to the veracity of the scenes.

And then there’s a long dance sequence in which the performers, to a house beat, perform a series of eroticized moves derived from stereotypical household “women’s work,” everything from ironing to burping the baby or doing dishes.

How does this relate to the idea of a utopia feminism that supposes a “fluidity of gender,” when in fact all of these are presentations of reality? Fairy tales allow women to occupy contrasting roles without ever being emancipatory. Women do rock out in clubs and, when they fight, can be truly vicious and brutal, just like men can, in ways that have little or no relationship to spectator events that take place in mud pits. And of course (and I’m surprised not to have seen anyone else point this out), there are dance moves based on household chores (stir the pot, anyone?). In fact, the gag in that dance sequence is, I’m pretty sure, about fifty years old or more.

In short, none of these ideas are exactly groundbreaking, and I doubt they’re meant to be. The best sense I can make of the work is that Lee is presenting a plurality of experience and possibility onstage in order to contrast with an oppressive set of expectations based on media and cultural archetypes, stereotypes, and the like–let’s call it the “dominant paradigm.” Indeed, that’s the language that’s subverted throughout. The fairy tale subverts Disney idealization. Lady Rizo’s raunchy routine subverts porn. And another long movement sequence, in which the cast gyrates on the floor to set cellulite jiggling, subverts the fashion magazine prescription of feminine beauty.

Of course, so does a Dove soap ad. And that, I guess, is my first problem: Lee’s target is the host of social pressures and representations that your average eighth-grade health class critiques as the dominant social paradigm. It’s akin to standing onstage and saying, “Models in fashion magazines give young women negative body images.” It’s not that’s untrue. It’s in fact so self-evident that we, the audience, can nod along in agreement and then go back to reading copies of The New Yorker on the subway home, funded by ads for clothes modeled by anorexic waifs, and do so with very little cognitive dissonance. And to this reality, Lee seems to add nothing. She seems to assume that the presentation of various realities–diversity of representations, diversity of behaviors, diversity of bodies–is somehow utopian and that these things, in and of themselves, offer a critique of the dominant paradigm rather the existing comfortably within it.

Reading the reviews of the show, almost all by men, I would almost be tempted to agree that she was on to something. As self-evident as most of these points strike me, other critics seemed duly impressed. In the Times, in an otherwise ambivalent review, Charles Isherwood made sure to note how liberating it was to see a diversity of body types onstage, bared with joy and without a hint of self-loathing (despite, you know, one of the performers being best known as a burlesque artist). Hilton Als in The New Yorker hyperbolically compared the show to Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls… for its courageous truth-telling, apparently (although for colored girls… was about the challenge of telling the truth, while UFS operates on the presumption that we all already know the truth). But the money quote for me comes from Time Out‘s David Cote. I like Cote’s work generally, and his even-handed but very positive review I guess I’ll use as the base-line. In it, he writes:

Most shocking, once you’ve gotten over giggles or puritanical guilt about staring at six women jumping and bouncing around in their birthday suits, you stop seeing the nudity and start focusing on the individual, her quirks and traits. The piece may have no name, but its cast members are anything but faceless archetypes.

So I suppose you could argue that the piece is making its point. See! People are realizing that there’s a difference between the social construct of expectations of women, and what real women are and what they do! But are they really, or is the audience just nodding along to a point we already agree on, again accepting the status quo with little or no cognitive dissonance? Second-person voice notwithstanding, there’s only two ways you can read that quote from Cote. Either he’s talking about himself, his own giggly titilation or puritanical guilt, and his own inability to see naked women as people other than things, or he’s making an assumption–the same assumption as the show–about what some amorphous Other thinks. I’d wager it’s actually the latter. And if you believe the critique of society that the show seems to accept a priori, then yes, I suppose it’s quite good at challenging that dominant paradigm. However, that dominant paradigm is best represented by the caricature of a workplace sexist from your day job’s anti-sexual harassment training video.

None of this is intended to remotely suggest I don’t believe that these things are issues; I know they are. I’m just saying–sometimes shit’s complicated, you know? Perhaps reality demands more than just putting it onstage and then stepping back and saying, Well how about that? And I know that Lee and her collaborators are smart enough and talented enough to offer a more complex exploration than this.

That’s where I get really troubled, because I think there are some undeniable conclusions we can actually draw from this show that are even more problematic. First of all, it’s pretty obvious that Lee’s ultimate interest was in the body, not gender. In interviews, she’s explained her choice to make the performers naked in terms of wanting to de-sexualize them. This is a rather naive interpretation of sexualization. (Really? Naked women aren’t sexy at all?) Even if you want to accept that extended exposure moves us past cheap titillation or arousal, it’s weird to suggest that judgment would pass, too.

Yet this seems to be what she wants to explore most of all. We watch a half-dozen naked performers for nearly an hour; we watch them in different ways ask us to consider different sorts of bodies. Just not that different. Ironically, for all the talk of “gender fluidity,” Lee remains committed, apparently, to a rather binary ideal of biological sex. She gives us twelve breasts and no penises, suggesting, apparently, that male-to-female trans, for instance, is not a category that could fit within her expansive feminist utopia. And what’s more, the choice to remove these performers’ clothes and present them naked seems to demand the audience see the gender spectrum as having primarily to do with the body, since she denies the performers the ability to self-define their own gender through either speech or dress-presentation.

Compared to the work of an artist like World Famous *BOB*–whose one-man show explores her own desire to be a drag queen, among other things–Lee’s work seems kind of toothless, and seems to have appropriated and castrated the work of such a collaborator. (The same could be said of Lady Rizo.) Even more bothersome is the fact that many people seem to have decided the show is–or should be categorized as–dance. In which case it’s most definitely a failure. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the show quite quickly begins comparing it negatively (or at least problematically) to work by movement artists ranging from Deborah Hay to Lee’s own COIL Festival co-artist Heather Kravas. I feel like the plaudits that Lee is scoring for UFS would be better spent on the more ambitious and challenging work of choreographers, who remain ghettoized in the eyes of the mainstream performing arts world, a world increasingly opening its arms to a perceived provocateur like Lee while remaining painfully ignorant of the artistic crucible from which she’s emerging.

So someone please, explain to me what I’m missing and why I’m wrong. Surely gender is a far more complex subject than this, and deserving of a more meaningful and rich exploration than it gets here.

Maggie is a twat – the talk show TEASER from The Mob on Vimeo.

Word from my pal Alexandra Rosenberg from up at the Chocolate Factory (and other artsy things) has it that this Danish performance duo, The Mob, are the real deal, and watching the trailer for their newest show, I have to admit I’m deeply intrigued. If only I was headed to Europe next month! The collaboration of choreographer-dancers Emma-Cecilia Ajanki and Julia Giertz, The Mob explores performance as a “relational art” and use different disciplines and approaches to create performance events. Their latest, Maggie is a Twat: The Talk Show, roasts the Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher. It opens Feb. 5 at Dansehallerne in Copenhagen.

By Cassie Peterson

Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show (at Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of PS122′s COIL Festival, through Feb. 4; tickets $25-$35) is an exquisitely exaggerated performance about the performance of gender which we all negotiate every moment of every day. We live in a world where one rarely has the opportunity to become legible or understood outside of the conscriptions of one’s gender identity. Thus, we always and inevitably perform ourselves as gendered beings in the ways that we move, behave, speak, and relate to the world. Gendered norms intrinsically shape our experiences of “self” and “other” and operate in a way that privileges some expressions of gender while subjugating and silencing others. Untitled Feminist Show works to both acknowledge and disrupt these compulsory gender identifications.

Untitled Feminist Show is a visceral in-your-face clash of varying feminist paradigms. It is a 75-minute non-stop kinesthetic adventure where every archetype, stereotype, caricature, and construction of “woman” is performed in a chaotic First-, Second-, and Third-Wave Feminist Mash-Up. All of the tensions and conflicts embedded in feminist discourses are present and embodied by six fearlessly naked performers (Becca Blackwell, Amelia Zirin-Brown (Lady Rizo), Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle, Regina Rocke, and World Famous *BOB*. This theatrical dancedrama was conceived and directed by Young Jean Lee in collaboration with Faye Driscoll, Morgan Gould, and these six powerhouse performers. The end result of what has obviously been a rigorous choreographic process is an unforgettable performance that works to simultaneously create and undo gendered realities.

In each of the show’s vignettes, the performers temporarily position themselves in a context that feels familiar; existing in historical narratives and power arrangements that momentarily render them as feminized caricatures of themselves. These familiar gender tropes allow audience members to locate themselves and feel known. After all, identity is a relational exchange. I am this to your that. But as each vignette progresses, the performers become unwieldy, unpredictable, boundless versions of themselves, seeping out into the margins and sliding outside the lines of normative gender expectations. In this way, the show becomes an ecstatic celebration of choice–both as a reclamation of the power in historical “female” gender roles and as a pioneering vision into futuristic, feminist utopias. The age-old currents of sexism, misogyny, able-ism, size-ism and transphobia are revealed in this dramatic vacillation and our collective notions of “womanhood” and “feminism” are shattered into a million pieces.

In one vignette, the performers are in a thumping, pulsating dance club. They dance provocatively as if in a typical MTV music video. As the scene unfolds, the dancers begin to incorporate pantomimes of mundane, traditionally feminized tasks, like rocking an infant or cooking dinner. This humorous, physicalized juxtaposition forces us to engage the dominant—and often conflicting—narratives and expectations perpetually imposed on women. Later in the show, Lady Rizo pantomimes sex acts with an invisible phallus. It starts in a familiar way and reads like the clichéd opening shot of any porn. We know this. But she quickly takes us to another place, laced with an aggression and rage that manifests as violence against the phallus. Her message is: I am pleasuring you and destroying you. This is what this show does, time and time again–it pleasures and destroys, destroys and pleasures.

Untitled Feminist Show unapologetically challenges and subverts the limits imposed by the dominant (and always male) gaze and fiercely explores and celebrates the complex, dissonant realities of female and gender-variant bodies and experiences. Young Jean Lee has cast a diverse array of bodies that confront us with our conditioned—and compulsory—impulse to impose essentialized gender assignments onto naked bodies in space. This show interrogates our constructions of woman, female, femininity, and works to destabilize fixed notions of what a woman “is” and what a woman should be. What is a woman? What is a woman’s body? How are women’s bodies exploited? How are they emboldened? What is agency and how do we see it? What is coercion and where is this line? These are bodies that follow the rules. These are bodies that break the rules. These are bodies that know no rules. In this way, the female body is both a site of oppression and a site of critical and creative resistance. Untitled Feminist Show is a high energy meditation on this dialectic.

So the ultimate inquiry becomes: Is this a feminist piece? And the answer is, Yes. This show is willing to explore the multifarious representations and possibilities of gender and feminism. Young Jean Lee and Company resist the temptation to represent one, monolithic, prescriptive version of Feminism. Rather, this show is an invitation to undo our compulsive need to rely on fixed gender identifications or to elevate one version of “Feminism.” There are endless ways to be gendered. There are countless ways to embody feminism(s). It is as if Young Jean Lee has written the word “WOMAN” across the stage and then struck a line through it. It is there. We can see it. But we are also asked to take it apart and examine it. What, if anything, could be a more feminist exploration than that? And yes, these deeply political explorations do not answer to patriarchal demands for reaching some kind of ultimate knowing or singular understanding. Can you handle it?

Cassie Peterson is New York based writer, thinker, activist, healer, & lavender menace.