What's he gonna do with that stick?
Robert Wilson’s Quartett (Heiner M(e)uller) with Isabelle Huppert and Ariel Garcia Valdes @ BAM. November 4, 2009.
This, Wilson’s newest in a long string of performances presented at BAM since 1969, delights, bores, and infuriates. Or, more specifically: infuriates, then delights, then bores. The Times calls it “the very opposite of an aphrodisiac” but what do you call something that stimulates teeth grinding sans sleep?
The 4th was opening night. Before the performance began, Charles Mee presented Wilson with the Fisher Award, a commemorative gesture given this year as a walking stick designed by Fort Green sculptor Chris Gullian. Mee knows Wilson; Wilson knows Mee; BAM knows Wilson (did I mention performances since 1969?); and BAM knows Mee. The groping expanse of the Harvey shrank into the tiny bubble of New York’s avant-garde, internationally “published” elite. Or, at least, it tried to: Bob and Chuck, Chuck and Bob. Wilson got choked up, “It’s good to be home;” the balcony of 20-30 something Brooklynites (everybody knows: the best-looking collection of lean art consumers in the city) inched forward in their high chairs (please, please let me in); and the sprawl of Manhattan’s informed and adventurous theatre consumers snuggled into their proverbial home slippers. Oh, how I wanted to love the show. Oh, how I wanted to sneer at my siblings and peers who couldn’t be bothered with an internationally-acclaimed production. Oh, how I want to believe in you, BAM. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. And I just can’t. What exactly is “Next Wave” about a guy producing within your venues for the last forty years, BAM? This show is twenty years old. How dumb are we, New York?
The insider’s wink broadcast to a “public of us” did make me squirm but that wasn’t what killed the show. Neither was the fact that despite about 15 years of French schooling, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what Huppert or Valdes were saying (maybe I’m rusty?). Nor was it the incessant shrieks of laughter and just too loud claps that punctuated each scene, change, or continuation. Wilson’s visual use of theatrical space is incredible and the old man in shirttails (the dramaturge’s notes suggest Wilson conceived of him as Muller, the playwright), dancing in his naked whiteness across the stage through scene changes was delightful. Huppert is amazing. But it didn’t ring like a show so much as a mishmash of theatrical titillation. As with the characters and the tension the play presents, at first you want to touch it, you want them to touch each other, just have the sex already, I want the sex, show us the sex! But by the 45-minute mark that provocative stimulation is no longer a delicate petting, it’s a rubbing that has crossed way over into soreness and irritation.
Through November 14th. (Photos: Richard Termine.)
All Saints
Before the fishnets tear, the cat ears get dropped in the punch, and the fake blood irredeemably smudged into the lapel, New York’s 36th annual Village Halloween Parade promises giant puppets, 42 different bands, dance, and thousands of New Yorkers in costume. Starts at 6th avenue below Spring St above Canal, 7 pm. Jeane Fleming, artistic director.
For more details, go to http://www.halloween-nyc.com/.
Performance mirrors weather: great in sun, miserable in rain.
Bad news first: the rain in Queens. Who is John Jesurun and where is this hype coming from? Because Liz One (The Chocolate Factory: Saturday, October 24) disappointed, to say the least. I’m not sure the mixed media was a bad choice, but the script and the acting (oh, the acting) don’t speak to a sound aesthetic decision making. Theatricians take note: acting into a camera, much as we might enjoy your pretty faces, doesn’t entirely mask an inability to transmit story.
Hanne Tierney, on the other hand, presented by Dream Music Puppetry (and the sound aesthetic experimenting of Basil Twist, always a good sign) rocked her less than 60-minute puppet orchestra. In My Life in a Nutshell (HERE Arts Center: Sunday, October 25), marionettes A-E flirt with love, death, each other, Gertrude Stein and slinkies in the barely illuminated darkness of HERE’s small puppet studio. Hanne dictates her story while manipulating her near-nude, floppy, larger-than-life, stuffed characters. An old-school projector creates and changes the set and a live bass provides the soundtrack. “Dream music,” indeed.
Moral of the story: show me a stuffed one over a live one any day.
Sunday, October 25, 2009 (click here for link)
Hanne Tierney My Life in a Nutshell @ HERE Arts Center, Manhattan.
LIFE SIZED MARIONETTES. Menage a trois and death. Who could ask for more from a Sunday?
Saturday, October 24, 2009 (click here for link).
John Jesurun directs Liz One with Black Eyed Susan in a one-woman show based on the diaries of Queen Elizabeth. At the Chocolate Factory, Long Island City, Queens.
September 19, 2009
Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam in New York again, this time part of the New Island Festival on Governor’s Island. The one woman show’s actress (Halina Reijn) is superb but Van Hove shows a knack for presenting the same kind of woman over and over again. Reijn plays a younger though equally distressed and self-destructive version of the lovesick “Myrtle” played by Elsie DeBrauw in last year’s Opening Night (part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival). The suicide that caps the play is a moment that makes us question (rather than affirm) why we like going to the theatre.
Photo credit: Jan Versweyveld
October 7, 2009
Big Dance Theatre @ the Kitchen.
Almost but not quite. Parsons and and Lazar flirt commendably with Deftness but fail to coax the ol’ girl into the sack. Their script (adaptation of Varda’s Cleo from 5-7) is good and most mixed media attempts are satisfying but something just doesn’t “wow” by the end. 
Photo credit: Mike VanSleen
October 10, 2009
Lepage + ExMachina’s 9 hour theatre marathon, Lipsynch @ BAM. Was I just in a good mood? Lepage’s melodrama and its push it just to push it 9 hours didn’t strike me as the most offensive thing I’ve seen at BAM and a few choice mixed media scenes made it.
Simple story telling. Maximum use of theatrical space. And it’s clear there’s money there, too.
October 15, 2009
New York Premiere of Ame to Ame (Candy and Rain)
Shinichi Iova-Koga of inkBoat ad Yuko Kaseki of cokaseki collaborate in a Butoh dance piece directed and designed by Marc Ates.
