The ICA presents Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, the first comprehensive museum exhibition on the influential school in the United States. The exhibition features works by more than 90 artists, including Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Knight Lawrence, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, as well as archival materials, a soundscape, and a piano and a dance floor for live performances including recreations of rediscovered work by Merce Cunningham.
Photo by Maria Baranova.
Photo by Maria Baranova.
Photo by Maria Baranova.
Photo by Maria Baranova.
Photo by Maria Baranova.
Thoughts on Faye Driscoll’s aesthetically promiscuous, collaborative, radical, uncategorizable work.
Wow Mom Wow (2007) spotlighted talking butts and lovers wrestling, while I sat wide-eyed in the audience on a date. In 837 Venice Boulevard (2008), we all sat on an imagined beach with Faye, perverted preteen dreaming, in a world created through the gestures of a threesome. There Is So Much Mad in Me (2010) left me feeling hurt and wounded, on the receiving end of the vibrancy of anger’s movement. You’re Me (2012) was exhausting, playful, and frantic. Watching Faye and Jesse Zaritt perform this physically demanding duet—feathers and baby powder flying—made me feel as though I could watch Faye’s choreographed faces for hours. Her expressions moved down her body, a gorgeous, evil, and maniacal worm face that melted in every inch of flesh and fabric.
Faye Driscoll’s work has been at the forefront of a shift in the genres we use to describe live or time-based arts in particular. Or rather, Faye’s work comes out of an intermedia history that never wanted neat disciplinary boundaries to begin with. While her training is in dance, she also choreographs plays, directs theatrical events, and stages sensations between word, sound, and language. Having collaborated with Young Jean Lee, Taylor Mac, and Cynthia Hopkins, among others, Faye is familiar with the bleeding out of form. Pushing on postmodern dance’s clean affective palate, she paints a tightly choreographed explosion, with herself, a gentler Lars Von Trier, in the director’s chair.
We might call Faye’s performances time-based work, body art, sculpture, contra dance, and emotional labor. Her work is contemporary performance with a linguistic foothold in dance. Faye admits others have called Thank You for Coming: Attendance “a play,” a word that rings differently than “theater.” Her practice is both collaborative and “toppy,” with dancers confidently moving one another’s bodies, like structures and building blocks, like erector sets or Legos, or something far softer. They assemble a human beanbag mountain where one body, arm, or earlobe gets stacked upon another. Holding its shape, the tower is piled to the ceiling, a pillar made only of lipstick, tinsel, and the silver blanket capes that marathon runners wear.
During a talk Faye gave in 2014 at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, I wrote out a list of thoughts in response to her work in my notebook: “dishes in my sink,” “broken down buildings,” “it’s funny how you sneak virtuosity in there.” Another list might be: Jennifer Monson, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Yvonne Rainer, Karen Finley, Reza Abdoh, Vito Acconci, Marlon Riggs, Vaginal Davis, Beverly Hills 90210, Tevas. Sculpting with the audience’s bodies, she manifests props that explode in a tightly woven hot mess. Faye’s work is aesthetically promiscuous; she pulls from a variety of media and influences, creating television on the dance floor. The audience is not incidental in her work, but neither are they called out. There is something implicit and subtle in the way her performances make you feel a mix of radical emotions.
Entering Thank You for Coming: Attendance, I take my shoes off and adorn my body with the accessories handed to me. My chest rings with the dancers’ feet pounding out a rhythm on the platform floor. My body has become a percussive site, and all my tears and belly laughs rise to the surface. Faye’s pieces form an accumulation of aesthetic prompts, and I find myself responding over time, like the stacking of muscles on a dancer’s body.
It is 2004 when I first meet Faye in San Francisco’s Delores Park, sitting in the sun. We are in our early twenties. In the winter of 2006, she stages a short film with Hedia Maron called Lez Side Story where she plays a gym teacher with neatly combed and greased hair parted in the middle. Instead of the Sharks and the Jets, the Fruits battle the Lezzies. Later on, perhaps in 2007, Faye installs a video in the bathroom of New York’s PS122 and whispers to you on the toilet: come closer. Something is made between spectator and artist, even while it is Faye’s voice that comes through again and again. So, to borrow her words, “what we build together is this kind of canopy,” a canopy under which we gather to look at the stars together, before we rage and break apart.
Katherine Brewer Ball is Visiting Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Theater Department at Wesleyan University, where she previously held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. Brewer Ball earned her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her interests include performance, visual culture, black and brown aesthetics, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. Brewer Ball is currently working on a book project, The Only Way Out is In: The Queer & Minoritarian Performance of Escape, and conducting research for a new project on GLBT archives, performance, rage, and refusal. In addition to teaching, Brewer Ball works as a writer and curator.
Lars Jan, The Institute of Memory (TIMe). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Four remarkable new theater pieces and why you should see great performance more than once.
The Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), put on by the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Oregon) for the past 13 years, is one of my favorite places to see new and experimental theater, dance, and music from around the world. Taking place throughout the city in theaters, parks, churches, abandoned warehouses—pretty much anywhere you can imagine—there is a casual vibe where artists and Portlandia folk come together to express their individuality and community.
This year I was able to be there for just a couple of days but caught a couple of great artist talks and four remarkable shows in that short time.
My first show was Requiem Mass: LGBT / Working Title. A labor of love by the composer (and Portland native) Holcombe Waller, the event took place in the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral and honored those whose lives had been cut short because of their sexual/gender orientation. The one-hour work had all the trappings of a mass—a procession down the aisle, readings, sermons—but it was really the music, with a choir of 40 community singers, a pipe organ, and an ensemble, that raised the spirit of the 300-plus attendees.
Next up was a real eye opener for me. Until the week before, I had never heard of the Italian choreographer Allesandro Sciarroni. The U.S. premiere he presented, FOLK-S, Will you still love me tomorrow is impossible to describe—and any attempt to do so only makes it sound deadly dull. It is anything but. As the audience enters, six dancers in silhouette on the stage perform rhythmic movement taken from a Bavarian folk dance (one of the dancers is wearing Lederhosen). After the audience is seated and the house lights dim and the stage lights come up, the dancers extend the movement across the stage. After a pause, one of the dancers says the dance will continue as long as there is at least one person seated in the audience and one person on the stage. I could go on, but to what effect? You have to see it. Suffice it to say that throughout the next 90 minutes or so, one goes through a range of experiences—humor, jet-lagged exhaustion, trying to figure out just how they are doing what they are doing, excitement, awe and, in the end, a powerful sense of empathy with both fellow audience members and the dancers on stage.
The work that drew me to Portland this year was Lars Jan/Early Morning Opera’s The Institute of Memory (TIMe). I have seen other works by Jan and been seduced by the mystery he creates with text, performance, and media. In this latest work, which was first presented last spring but has undergone a substantial rewrite since, he sets out to uncover his father, who is a distant memory at most. A refugee from Nazi Germany, a fighter for the French resistance, and perhaps a spy for the CIA, his father looms as a shadow throughout Jan’s life, but only a few specific memories of him remain (including his giving him a Gore Vidal novel for Jan’s fifth birthday.) The search to find who his father really was takes him to the Polish Institute of National Memory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Washington, D.C., and Harvard, where the elder Jan was associated with the School of Government. The story is told simply with two actors, an amazing mobile light grid, some media, and Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony. Stay tuned. The ICA is a co-commissioner of this work through the National Performance Network, and we may well be presenting this in Boston.
As a rule, I wish we could all see performances more than once.
Finally, I was able to (re)see a work I had seen last spring in New York: Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic. Living in the intersection between dance, theater, and a visual art installation, the work channels the confusion and anxiety that an 11-year-old girl growing up in the Bronx might feel as her body transforms, her friendships complicate, and people start looking at her differently. The innocence of playing double Dutch collides with sexual assault in this very powerful performance.
As a rule, I wish we could all see performances more than once; as with great visual art, great performance reveals more upon every viewing. I can’t end this report without relaying what a powerful performer Okwui is. Her use of words and trance-like movement takes a story and burns it into your being. Upon first viewing, the work made me uncomfortable. But now that I’ve seen it a second time, I know that 11-year-old girl lives somewhere inside me.
Photo: Julieta Cervantes
From an over-the-top interpretation of Jean Genet’s The Maids to a notorious opera infused with the genius of artist William Kentridge, four productions worth traveling for.
The ICA’s Director of Performing and Media Arts and Assistant Director of Performing Arts share their top picks for New York theater this fall.
Chambre, by Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson
New Museum, as part of the Crossing the Line Festival
Sep 23 – Oct 4
In the summer of 2009, the ICA hosted writer, choreographer, and director Jack Ferver and American visual artist Marc Swanson, as part of our Summer Stages Dance residency program. Last fall I had the opportunity to see their latest collaboration, Chambre, a wild take on Jean Genet’s The Maids, which serves as a point of departure for a farcical and haunting attack on our culture of celebrity and greed. Catch it while you can at the New Museum, where it’s running as part of the Crossing the Line Festival organized by French Institute Alliance Française.
Ferver refracts Genet through many lenses, including the gruesome facts of the real-life murders that inspired The Maids, Lady Gaga’s infamous courtroom deposition speech, role-play, and a manic fantasy escape to the City of Lights.
His wild imagination and over-the-top performance finds the perfect setting in Swanson’s mythic and evocative sculptures, which function both as freestanding art and a theatrical set, and will be on view as an installation at the New Museum during museum hours. —David Henry, Director of Performing and Media Arts
Glasser and Jonathan Turner: Charge
The Kitchen NYC
Oct 23–24
Electropop songwriter Glasser (aka Cameron Mesirow) will perform her lush, intimately epic songs at The Kitchen, accompanied by visual artist Jonathan Turner’s films and animations. Both artists explore the ways that technology intersects with the natural and human world; this show should be both visually and sonically gorgeous. —John Andress, Associate Director of Performing Arts
Twyla Tharp 50th Anniversary Tour
Presented by the Joyce Theater at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center
Nov 17–22
Unless we were paying close attention to dance 25 years ago, most of us know the iconic choreographer Twyla Tharp mostly for her work in ballet, Hollywood, television, and, of course, Broadway. For her 50th anniversary she has returned to her roots in modern dance and created three new works to celebrate her 50 years of dance-making in what is sure to be THE dance event of the fall. —David Henry, Director of Performing and Media Arts
Lulu
The Metropolitan Opera
Nov 5–Dec 3
Artist William Kentridge stages a new production of Alban Berg’s Lulu for the Metropolitan Opera. The opera tells the story of Lulu, a notorious femme fatale who lures men and women to their doom. Full of sex, obsession, and death (everything that makes opera great!), the production includes costumes, scenery, and animated projections that Kentridge designed for the revival of this early-twentieth century masterpiece. Especially recommended for those who saw—and were mesmerized by—Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time at the ICA last year. —John Andress, Associate Director of Performing Arts
Image credit: Jack Ferver in Chambre; image by Julieta Cervantes