To be trapped in Soho in a hellish, multi-room environment that has been, or is, inhabited by mutants or delinquents—this might occur once in a blue moon, but twice in one week? Yup. (And I’m not talkin’ about Topshop.) Once at Here Arts Center, where Los Grumildos was on view last week, and again at Deitch Projects’ Wooster Street space, where Jonah Freeman/Justin Lowe’s Black Acid Co-op is up through August 15.
“Grotesque. Charming. Sordid. Tiny.,” is how the installation by Peruvian artist Ety Fefer is concisely described on the postcard for Los Grumildos, part of Here’s puppetry program. Foot-tall puppets—hybrids of humans and crustaceans, with lobster claws, scorpion tails, and extra limbs—in individual terrariums “play” various instruments, their herky-jerky movements driven by small motors. read more
Choreographer Joe Goode, based in San Francisco, has been making work for his company for 23 years, and visits New York once in a blue moon. The two pieces at the Joyce (through this past weekend) showed Goode’s ability to forge narrative, camp, identity issues, humor, and oh yeah, dance, into an appealing theatrical style all his own.
The program included the New York premiere of Wonderboy, featuring a boy puppet by Basil Twist. read more
For most stage directors, enticing audiences towards an appreciation of a work has always been something of an exercise in accommodation. That is, giving recherché knowledge the appropriate context. Style, epoch, provenance, language, politics, philosophy, etc., all amount to considerations that must be grappled with and reconciled, in one way or another, before an audience might find meaning or relevance in a performance. Witness the abiding success of an opera production like the Met’s Franco Zeffirelli Bohème, which takes all the bustle and hubbub of a Parisian street-scape and plops it down on the company’s stage in an effort of exacting verisimilitude. At the same time, consider the ways in which a production like Robert Wilson’s Lohengrin — an austere and hyper-stylized staging that also happens to be one of my favorite productions in the Met’s repertoire — arguably succeeds by emphasizing the universal and archetypal over the specific.
In this case, I’m not talking about the details of singing, acting or music, but rather the onstage creation of time and place, “setting.” And I can’t help but wonder if we’re living in an era of live performance that will amount to the setting-sun of traditional scenery and stagecraft. read more
subscribe to RSS feed
find SundayArts on Facebook
