RIP Ellen Stewart, Founder & Steward of LaMaMa

One of the truisms of this world is that someone somewhere is always leaving us. Years ago I realized that if I were to note the death of everyone I considered significant or admired, I could fill this blog up with nothing but such accounts--and I love reading obituaries, especially the fuller and more fulsome British versions--but that struck me as macabre and time-consuming, so, as regular J's Theater readers know, when I have time to blog I will post thoughtful but brief personal commemorations, and when time is as scarce as mountaintop air, I will simply post links and a short note.  I have little time today, so I'll be posting links to several obituaries of one of my personal hero(in)es, Ellen Stewart, the founder of La MaMa e.t.c., who died yesterday at age 91.

La MaMa e.t.c. (for Experimental Theater Club), which I am glad to be able to say I set foot in a few times, during the late 1990s (though I only smiled at Ms. Stewart, too afraid to utter a single world), is simply one of the most important theater and performance institutions in New York and the United States. Countless major actors, playwrights and performance artists got their start in its E. 9th St. basement and later first-floor spaces on E. 4th Street from 1962 onwards. Stewart, an African-American woman who had no theater experience when she started La MaMa and was working as a dress designer, directed and maintained this jewel with an almost unerring aesthetic compass and a determination that would make many a soldier jealous.  It has played an almost incalculable role in the development of Off and Off-Off Broadway theater, as well as in nurturing the possibilities of formal experimentation in a city and a larger culture that over the last 50 years has become increasingly hostile to anything non-commercial that isn't located within the walls of academe.

As I pointed out on a friend's Facebook link about Stewart's passing, one of the things that ought be noted is how crucial to the aesthetic, social and economic ecology of New York theater and performance, and national and global theater and performance this little downtown theater has been. Writers such as Adrienne Kennedy, Maria Irene Fornes, Sam Shepherd, Harvey Fierstein, Lanford Wilson, David and Amy Sedaris, and Tom Eyen, to name just a few, had some of their earliest productions in its theater, and, to quote the New York Times, acclaimed actors including "Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Olympia Dukakis, Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler, Diane Lane and Nick Nolte" appeared in its productions during its early years.  The Times's Ben Brantley, in his appraisal of Stewart, notes how artists from around the world, sometimes significant figures from troubled regions, such as the Belarus Free Theatre and its current joint La MaMa-Under the Radar Festival production of Being Harold Pinter, circulated through Stewart's institution, making it a key node in an vital and thriving thick, material network of international artistic and intellectual exchange and relations.

The Public Theater has announced that it will dedicate the remainder of its 55th season to Ms. Stewart, and the Under the Radar Festival, which ends on January 16, has followed suit.

Ellen Stewart's Playbill obituary
Ellen Stewart's New York Times obituary
Ben Brantley's New York Times encomium to Ellen Stewart

PARK @ Freshkills Park

I've posted several times about my colleague poet/scholar/translator Jennifer Scappettone, who teaches at the University of Chicago and who was one of the primary forces behind the wonderful visit of some of Italy's leading experimental poets to the US a year ago.  Most recently I wrote briefly and posted photos from her performance at the Red Rover experimental poetry-performance series in Chicago. At that event and after, Jennifer told me about her spring residency at Freshkills Park, which is the new incarnation of what was once the largest (29,000 tons of trash a day) landfill in the US, the notorious Freshkills Land Fill, in Staten Island.  As part of her residency, she worked with choreographer and dancer Kathy Westwater, and architect/designer Seung Jae Lee to create a site-specific dance-poetry-performance version of one of Westwater's pieces, "PARK," at the park, and I decided not to miss it.

Below are photos and short videos from the performance, which required getting to the Manhattan Staten Island Ferry terminal at 9 am this morning, riding on a bus from the St. George Ferry terminal (on which we got an excellent introduction by Freshkills Park Outreach Coordinator Doug Elliott) to the park, and then visiting two different sites at which the performance unfolded. It was, to put it simply, unforgettable.  I'm no dance critic so I won't even try to describe it, but I did appreciate how the performance metaphorically and symbolically explored ideas concerning our consumerist, throwaway society and our relation to garbage/waste/debris, our (re-)constructions of "nature," "land" and "landscape," our struggles to communicate, community and atomization in relation to the natural world and (human) bodies, and, throughout, the role of time, in a setting like this still-unfinished, still-transforming "park." Kathy Westwater's and Jennifer's performance of insideness and outsideness, and their conceptualization of participation, involving themselves, the performers, the audience, and the surrounding landscape--with the wind providing an ever-shifting soundtrack, as the videos attest--was also enlightening.

Here's the writeup from the Freshkills Park blog:

It seems like no New York City site has truly been inaugurated as a public space until it has hosted an avant-garde dance performance.  Our time has come!  A group of artists and performers organized by choreographer Kathy Westwater has developed a movement-based project responding to their research and on-site study of the Freshkills Park site over several visits this spring.  PARK, as the project is called, isn’t a traditional dance performance—more a combination of movement, writing, and game playing.  It is “concerned with our construction and consumption of nature.”

Kathy and her dancers have previously performed PARK in locations as varied as Yosemite Park and Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea.

And now, the photos and videos:


Jennifer Scappettone (in white, in foreground), with dancers and audience around her

The dancers on the first hill

One of the string phones at the second hilltop (note how far it stretches into the meadow)



Three string phones visible (painter Vilem Benes in the foreground)

The dancers on the meadow

One of the dancers leaving the meadow

The dancers closing a circle through and within the audience

The dancers reading the words we'd written down, exchanging, chanting, discarding them

Dancing

Jennifer reading/performing

Dancing a cloud-storm

Forming a clock/signifying time

Creating a waste-flower, as time (a dancer) runs on

The dancers departing

Freshkills Park, from East Hill

Marina Abramovic @ MoMa

A few weeks back I posted about Marina Abramovic's (1946-) doppelgänger, Brooklyn-based artist Anya Liftig, and since Abramovic's Museum of Modern Art show, "The Artist Is Present," began last month (March 14), I've been intending to catch it, and after one of my conceptual art/writing students described her experiences at the show, I vowed not to miss it. Though the nude artists reeneacting Abramovic's prior performances and the spectators misbehaving while interacting with to them have garnered the most attention, the centerpiece of the show is Abramovic's reprise of her durational performance piece on MoMa's second floor, "The Artist Is Present," in which she sits, motionless except for eyeblinks, facing any museum patron who wants to sit across the table from her.  She has performed this piece every day since the exhibit began, and will continue it through the end of the show, on May 31.

In the post I'd referenced above, Liftig dressed up as Abramovic, down to the single braid falling over her shoulder and proceeded to mirror her, sitting across from her motionlessly for the entire day, leaving only when the guard's ushered her out at the museum's closing. She labeled her corps-à-corps with Abramovic "The Anxiety of Influence," after Harold Bloom's famous study and theory.  I was curious to see if someone else would try Liftig's approach while I was at the museum, but no such luck. Nevertheless, when I arrived at the exhibit, amidst a large crowd drawn not only by the Abramovic show but by concurrent shows focusing on Tim Burton (sold out), Picasso (a crowd pleasure), and William Kentridge (which I also viewed), a young woman was sitting facing Abramovic intently, almost as if throwing down the gantlet, and I watched Abramovic and her for a while, trying to register any response on Abramovic's part while also trying to discern the ferocity I perceived on the young woman's face, in her posture, in her affect. It was almost as if she were viewing the performance as a form of mild combat, and her rigidity and stillness did not ebb in the slightest for the entire time that I watched them; Abramovic, for her part, slumped a bit forward, moving only her eyes, present in body and mind, a presence writing herself into the consciousness of everyone there. I was, almost in spite of myself, riveted by them.

There wasn't a long line, so I could have gotten in it and possibly faced Abramovic, but I wasn't sure I was ready to do so--if you do face her, you consent to being both photographed and filmed by the museum and her--and I wanted to see the rest of her exhibit, on the 6th floor, so I asked the guard how long the young woman had been sitting there, and he told me with weariness that she'd been there for about 20 minutes. I'd taken a few photos, which were verboten, and the guard saw me about to take yet another and stopped me, so I showed him that I could draw on the phone, and he carefully watched me for a while as I did a quick sketch of Abramovic, which I posted below, then headed upstairs.  It was definitely worth it.



While the nude performances unsurprisingly have drawn a lot of attention and sparked some misbehavior on patrons' part (when are most people, especially men in this society, socialized to act maturely around nudity, especially nudes of the opposite sex, except perhaps in a locker room?) and are eye-catching at the very least, what I found even more compelling was the historical trajectory of Abramovic's solo body-centered performances, with a fused personal-political edge, in 1970s Belgrade. The earliest series, called "Rhythm," culminated in Rhythm 0, reminiscent in some ways of Yoko Ono's Cut Away and similar Fluxus actions of the 1960s: taking "full responsibility" for her passivity, she stocked the gallery with 72 items, including knives, a hammer, a saw, a pistol and bullet, a whip, blue paint, and so forth (I actually wrote down all the materials listed), and empowered the audience to utilize any of these implements on her. While it appears several men did undress her or adorn her with paint, one, horrifyingly, loaded the bullet into the pistol, placed the gun in Abramovic's hand and then lifted it to her head, before setting it back down. I read this in part as a demonstration of the humanity and rationality underlying the alternately liberal and brutal political, economic and social system in which she was living, as well as a commentary on social and gendered power, participatory art and chance, but also as a kind of limit test for the sort of conceptual, aleatory and performance art that she had been engaged in up to this point.  When I think contemporary public discourse in the US, I shudder to consider an artist attempting this today.

The show then shifted to her later projects with her partner at the time, Ulay (Uwe Lay Siepen, 1943-), with whom she performed some of her most famous pieces, including early versions of what would become "The Artist Is Present."  Some performances involved extending ideas to their logical or illogical end, as when the two stood back to back between two pillars and rush forward until they banged into the barriers, then walked backwards, or a durational performance in which the two screamed at each other, or sucked breaths from each other, or slapped each other; in all cases, both Abramovic's and Ulay's bodies served as the ground and primary medium of art, and again, the personal and public fused, as they had a relationship during this period that lasted until around 1988, when they embarked on their final joint performance, approaching each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, and then formally bidding each other goodbye when they met at the midpoint.

After this Abramovic returned to solo performances, but also has staged events involved others, created sculptures, made videos, and continued along the path she marked out in her early work, though since the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequently of Yugoslavia, the political valence has shifted, I'd, towards a critique of the personal itself and of the myth, practices and possibilities of conceptual and performance art. One of her most famous US events occurred in November 2005, when over the span of a week she staged Seven Easy Pieces, a re-enactment of seven noteworthy performance pieces, by artists such as Bruce Nauman (Body Pressure, 1974), Vito Acconci (Seedbed, 1972), Valie Export (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969), Gina Pane (1973), Joseph Beuys (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965), and herself (Lips of Thomas, 1975), from the heyday of conceptual and performance art, on and beneath a large round stage, at the Guggenheim Museum. (I remember when this piece was performed, but I was in Chicago and didn't get to see it.) To these she added one new piece, Entering the Other Side, 2005. The Lips of Thomas was and remains particularly notorious because it involved Abramovic not only carving the Yugoslavian star into her stomach with a razor blade, but then lying on a bed of ice, while a heatlamp increased blood flow from her open wound. At the initial performance, audiene members pulled the ice blocks from beneath her, but, from what I gather, did not do so in New York. The 6th floor exhibit documented all these performances in depth, and includes several reenactments of individual and duo pieces. These include the nude human walkway--which I did pass through, rather clumsily--and the woman on a bike seat, though unlike in Abramovic's earlier version, these performers were suspended high above the audience. The woman who was performing it when I initially entered the room seemed almost to be tearing up; after noticing this, and her intent gaze back at an elderly man who appeared to be transfixed by her, I had to walk away. Yet another piece, originally performed by Abramovic and now enacted by someone else, involved the woman lying nude beneath a human skeleton, her breathing animating it. As I stood watching her, a man was taking pictures (forbidden), and she looked back intensely, though eventually a guard did tell him to stop.  With both these nudes, the power dynamics I saw on display disturbed me a bit, and I wondered if I would have felt the same way had men been perched nude up on the wall or lying beneath the skeleton. (Perhaps they were; I missed them.) Before I left, I made a point of taking part in at least one more interactive piece, Abramovic's wall sculpture, The Green Dragon Lying (1989), a slab of marble and a quartz pillow spectators are invited to lie on, until they feel the spiritual effects Abramovic suggests the piece conveys. I lay on it for about 2 minutes, as a large crowd gathered in front of the video of Lips of Thomas, which featured Abramovic flogging herself, and rested there for a while. I thought I perceived someone photographing me, so perhaps a photo of yours truly is now part of someone's archive.

Before I left, I passed through the William Kentridge exhibit, but I was almost too exhausted--in a good way--by Abramovic's tableaux (some vivants) and documentation to really imbibe Kentridge's compellingly complex artworks. I did study some of the mixed media paintings, drawings, prints, and etchings, though, and was able to appreciate in a way that no photograph of his work can convey the layers of material and media constituting each. I read this layering, its richness and invisibility except upon close viewing, and his restrained color palate (mostly blacks, whites and grays) as obvious but productive metaphors for the longstanding realities of his native country, South Africa. I would like to go back and see his exhibit again before it closes.  Below are some photos I took of the 2nd floor performance.


"The Artist Is Present" from an upper floor

Abramovic and participant, "The Artist Is Present"

"The Artist Is Present"

Abramovic

Abramovic and participant

Spectators at "The Artist Is Present," and the entryway (the white line on the floor served as a visual cordon)

Tim Burton balloon sculpture and patrons, first floor, MoMa


Woman sketching Abramovic's "The Artist Is Present"


Participatory art: a museum attendee lying on "Green Dragon Lying"

Links Hall: Memory as Innovation

I've been a little off the blogging grid of late, primarily because of work-related duties, but also because I've been preparing for a performance (as opposed to the usual reading) that I participated in, with Chris Stackhouse, at Links Hall this weekend. We were one of a number of people that Links Hall Associates Amina Cain and Jen Karmin invited as part of the second week of a four-week festival devoted to the idea of memory.

The first week included readings and performances by Judith Goldman with (my new colleague) John Beer; Nicole LeGette, Jenny Roberts, Timothy Yu; video by Abigail Child; and Lee Ann Brown, with Jeff Harms/A D Jameson/Toni Asante Lightfoot/Sarah Merchlewitz/Anni Rossi/Auroar Tabar/Rachel Tredon, and Roberto Harrison.

The lineup for this weekend was:

Friday, January 16
Patrick Durgin with Jen Hofer, the Seismosis Duo, Laurie Jo Reynolds with Amy Partridge, and video by Temporary Services

Saturday, January 17
Tradeshow, Jen Hofer with Dolores Dorantes, Seismosis Duo otra vez, and Jennifer Karmin with Mars Caulton/Joel Craig/Lisa Fishman/Krista Franklin/Chris Glomski/Daniel Godston/Lily Robert-Foley

Sunday, January 18
Tradeshow, Jen Hofer with Dolores Dorantes, Jennifer Karmin with Kathleen Duffy/Brandi Homan/A D Jameson/Lisa Janssen/Erika Mikkalo/Ira S. Murfin/Timothy Rey, and video by Laurie Jo Reynolds.

Originally Chris and I were going to present a new project, RAM (Revolutionary Access Memory), which we've been talking about and working on for several months, but because he's in NYC and I'm in Chicago, and I didn't have much free time this past fall, we decided to try out a new performative version of Seismosis. While we have co-read and delivered talks (to artists only) on the project, we'd never created a multimedia performance of it, though we'd spoken about this all the way back to the time we began collaborating, so we figured out how we would feature the images and texts, and then created two sets, which we performed on Friday and Saturday.

I'm usually wracked by anxiety over such things, but I have to say that a few years of teaching has done wonders for my shyness, and we were able to sync our readings, the images and projected texts, and stage entrances and exits properly after only a few rehearsals such that things went off without a hitch. (And we stayed pretty much within the requisite 20 minute framework!) The images, which we took from the pdf galleys as opposed to new scans, appeared immense and crisp on the rear white wall, while the texts pixillated a bit, and were probably harder for audience members to read.

We led off the first night, whose highlight I thought was the direct testimony in Lauri Jo's playlet, involving members of the TAMMS YEAR TEN project, by three men who'd served extended solitary confinement--TORTURE--in the horrific TAMMS CMAX "supermax" prison, in southern Illinois. Writer Terri Kapsalis led a talkback after the performance, and by common assent, the three ex-prisoners took the floor and spoke about how their experiences, and those of more than 200 others at TAMMS and countless others across the country, continued to pass under our society's radar. Mustafa Afrika, one of the men testifying as part of the playlet and talkback, eloquently related the experience to Abu Ghraib, and noted that while that international horror shocked the world, similar forms of torture, of US prisoners (one of the men spoke about having been in prison for 29 years, only to be released when the prosecutor and courts realized that they had no case against him), merits almost no commentary, protest or outrage. It was an emotional evening, to put it mildly, but I was glad that we were able to present in conjunction with the other artists and to have a little dialogue with them afterwards.

On the second night, we followed Jen Hofer and Dolores Dorantes, and Jen Karmin's polyphonic performance followed us, with the dancing duo of Tradeshow coming last, so the balance was different, but equally provocative, and got me thinking even more deeply about ideas around and the practice of collaboration, as well as future work to pursue.

As I was preparing for the event, I realized that you can easily movies with the newest version of PowerPoint (who knew?), so below is a short movie featuring images from Friday and Saturday. (There are none of us because I wasn't able to film us, but poet and composer Daniel Godston told me that he has both audio files and still photos, so when I get those I'll post or link to them.)



One of the coolest aspects of the event was the opportunity to experience collaboration in the moment, as we improvised at certain points with some of the texts--like "Geodesy"--while following a stricter set of directions with others ("Analysis I"). I told Chris that all my years of observing other poets freestyle on their own work had taught me some pointers about writing improvisatory possibilities into a work, and it's something I'm aiming to do in at least one new project.

Many thanks to Amina and Jen for inviting us, and thanks to all the wonderful artists we performed with!

Wura Natasha Ogunji's "infinite return (bird on the sun)"

A back post. I'd been thinking of posting a link to this video before, but since I've posted a link to Pënz, why not post it now? Wura Natasha Ogunji, performing "infinite return (bird on the sun)."



Enjoy!