Prelude to the Occupation

Before the below post about artistic stuff, a reminder that today (Saturday) is the Occupation Party at Times Square, details here:http://www.theoccupationparty.com/  It sounds fabulous.  I plan to be there.  Was delighted that pure public pressure from people, politicians, artists, writers and of course the occupiers themselves cleaning all night long, kept Zuccotti Park from being 'cleansed' on Friday.  Now my BCC students still have to go down and interview them.  That is good.

In other news, the Prelude Festival was happening the last few days at Martin Segal Center.  In retrospect, I wish the work, any of it, had been a bit more responsive to the events on the ground in NYC, but in fairness to the artists, they have been preparing this work for the festival for a while and theater is collaborative, etc.  However, I found it interesting that in a talk with academics at Columbia that could be absorbed but not so much with artists at CUNY.  Then again, a talk is easier to adjust than a production...

Below is some stuff I wrote last night about what I saw at Prelude.  I am only mentioning that which stood out for me, but there was a lot of good stuff.  However, I am kind of tired of what I see as almost stereotypical postmodern irony, so am not addressing work that I felt fell in that category.  When confronted with even very well done versions of this, I find myself initially laughing and then thinking: wait a minute, this again?  It's like Cheese Whiz for smarty pants.  Oh yes, there are the codes, oh ha ha, they've been broken, etc.  I think some of my own work has probably fallen into this category at times, so this is not finger wagging, it's just me wondering: are we there yet?  When can we begin creating something new? (For more about Irony, you can read my post from August ranting about this subject - Irony and its Discontents...)

Below, however, is some stuff I felt differently about that seemed to have its own weight all by its very self...

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Seeing Steve Mellor performing a reading of Mac Wellman's Muazzez, which is a story from a collection based on apparently real asteroids was a revelation - as much for the acting as the writing, which were both spectacular.  I have not been so riveted through so much dense material in a long time.  The actor is speaking from the point of view of an abandoned cigar factory (ACF), who only speaks to one other ACF (Fin - the 'smarter ACF apparently).  However, this ACF has not only a consciousness but a claw.  I fear in attempting to describe this I will do a horrendous job of paraphrasing.  I do know they are planning on making this reading into a show, so I will simply say: go see it.  The premise may sound bizarre, but within this performance of text in which language goes dizzyingly astray - making the familiar strange and the strange familiar - there is an exhilarating journey through human consciousness and even - dare I say it in these postmodern times - soul.  By having a solo performer embodying the text, which itself deals with the aberration of a body(building) that is 'steadfast' having the ability to dig into the layers of its own foundations thereby discovering its origin but also in that moment of discovery also realizing it/s/he has dug its/his/her own grave in which s/he/it will fall eventually, gives the text a kind of emotional/spiritual weight it would not have otherwise.  There is a continual lament throughout the piece, the reason for which I will not reveal as, believe it or not, it kind of keeps a certain dramatic tension throughout the wild trajectories of the text, which is "They lied to me!"  What that lie is turns out to be the axis on which the discovery the ACF makes digging with his claw turns.  And I must confess it is only now writing this that I put that together...so there you have it: dense and recurring (in a good way!) material.

Two other shows were stand-outs: one was Paul Lazar reenacting a talk given by artist Suzanne Bocanegra at MOMA about how she became an artist and its relationship to her Catholic upbringing in Texas.  This included watching an artist re-do her local church with decidedly modernist Rauschenberg-like gestures in the wake of the 1960s reforms of Vatican II, and in seeing the power of this artist to disturb, provoke and to her eyes create great art, even if the rest of the congregation disagreed.  This experience she believes added validity to her wanting to become an artist and showed her real art may not be loved but was always noticed.  The interesting talk, with images, and the alienation of hearing her voice and Lazar's giving the same lecture was charming, unsettling and ultimately quite moving.  Lazar did an excellent job simply inhabiting these words, without strain or showiness in a way that brought a past talk it into the present, took it out of the personal, and handed it to us in the audience as our own experience somehow.  Fabulous.

The other show that interested me was created by Otso Huopaniemi, a Finnish-American writer/director, in which he worked with 3 other performers, a laptop, Google Translate and voice recognition software.  This made the piece unpredictable, visible in its creation and showed the fragility of language, understanding and the strange persistence of our ongoing relationship with machines.  I can't summarize the experience, but it was quite compelling to watch.  And it made everyone question the notion of authorship in an explicit way, which is always a good thing.  It is called abz.love so go see it when it's completed.

There were some other interesting performances, but these are the ones I want to focus on for now.  Prelude, by the way, is free and open to the public and is another reason I love being in NYC.  Free stuff, lots of it, that is excellent.  And seeing as with my adjunct salary, once I figure the actual hours I work, is basically minimum wage, this is a good thing.

Now off to get prepared to go meet with some friends, meet my protest-buddy Christian to Occupy Times Square and then to another friend's birthday party...assuming I manage not to get arrested, which would be a plus.