Disrupting the 1% or Inconveniencing the 99%? #OWSDS May 26, 2012

Saturday, May 26 marked the kick-off of OWS’ Disobedience Summer School, weekly trainings in preparation for Black Monday – the one year anniversary of the Occupy Movement. On the syllabus for the 26^th was “invisible theater,” based on Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed.” A theatrical form of sabotage, invisible theater hopes to convey its message by slowing down the operation of the antagonist’s machine with low-key disruption. Examples that came up during the introduction at Bryant Park were asking for a large sum of money at the bank window in nickels and dimes (because the banks are “nickel and diming” us); wiping the walls, windows, and counters with a rag (because the bank is dirty); and so on and so forth. Good in theory, but the proof is in the pudding. While Saturday may have been effective as training (and this is summer school), the immediate effect was perhaps counter to Occupy’s goals.

We walked to the Citibank on 42^nd and 9^th in “civilian mode,” or without chants, banners and the usual accoutrements of a march. The police kept us company along the way, but across the street from the bank, the group dissolved, and the police soon left to do whatever police do when they’re not marshalling protesters. About five or ten minutes later, the protesters started to filter into the bank and form a long line. This was at about 1:30 in the afternoon. Not many people, apparently, do their banking on beautiful Saturday afternoons. There were only a handful of customers and bank employees there, well outnumbered by the 20 or so Occupiers. Most of the theater that they did was so low-key that I couldn’t pick it up with my camera from across the room. Mostly it was for the benefit of the people around them – other Occupiers and the increasingly frustrated employees and customers, all of whom are part of the 99%. All the action seemed to accomplish immediately was to throw up a barrier between Occupy and the rest of the Commons. Hopefully it was at least educational for the protesters, and next week’s theater will be more effective.

You can check out my footage of the events here:

Eagle Project's "America Unveiled"

The Eagle Project’s third event, a spoken-word and stand-up revue at the Three of Cups, seems in keeping with founder Ryan Victor Pierce’s mission to “explore American identity through performing arts and our Native American heritage.” At the same time, however, it highlights the vagueness of that very mission. Their two previous projects, Wood Bones and Broken Heart Land, were play readings, giving the evening to one narrative about American identity with special focus on Native perspectives. A revue gives forum to a multiplicity of voices.

Ethnically and topically, America Unveiled was highlighted by its diversity. Ethnically, it was mostly Indian and black. Topically, it was a fairly even split between spoken-word and stand-up. The spoken-word was uniformly serious, ranging from topics of growing up black in Brooklyn (Dominique Fishback) to being a Latina in America (Erica R. DeLaRosa). The comedy went for a lot of cheap racist and genital jokes. Notable exceptions of Brian Jian and emcee Margaret Champagne, who told funny true-to-life stories without needing to rely on shock-value for their laughs.

America Unveiled was a step away from what I’ve seen Pierce and his Project doing: developing Indian theater in New York. This revue shifted towards a look at the stories of American racial minorities. If that’s what Pierce is going for, then that’s great. But if he’s going to focus on Indian stories, he’s going to have to focus more on getting Indian artists. He also might want to reconsider having his events in bars or letting the emcee give the artists “Native American” animal symbols before they get up to perform.

Sophie Gets the Horns

Riot Group’s new play Sophie Gets the Horns was almost, in the words of Winston Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But, unlike a swelling super-power breathing huskily down the neck of a continent breaking out in war, Sophie Gets the Horns lacks any necessarily compelling quality, unless it’s the force of the acting. But good actors, committed to the play, can make even the most earth-bound story take wings. They were the only ones standing between the audience and the piece’s infectious solipsism.

They were mesmerizing – and the story (a play about Sylvia Plath within a coming-of-age tale set at a small liberal arts college in the 90s) did take me on a trip down memory lane. I graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 2008, but, in Portland, it might as well have been the 90s. But as it progressed away from the gentle marijuana use and sexual experimentation into the feverish Plath-esque world of Alice’s (Mary Tuomanen) mind, it became more foreign, more alien, more like Reed College.

While the stellar acting and initially reminiscent setting let me ignore the play’s faults at first, I left Incubator Arts Project wondering what Riot Group was trying to get at. Was it supposed to be about Sylvia Plath? If that was the case they could have stuck with the play-within-a-play and dispensed with the intricate framing devise. Was it a celebration of being a privileged white girl in the 90s? And is that really play-worthy?

Obviously it is, at least in playwright Adriano Shaplin’s (who also played Bernardo and did sound) mind. But a theme drivingly interesting to the artists but not necessarily to the audience smacks of solipsism. It wasn’t just limited to Alice’s poetic brain-child “Sylvia Plath Fucks the Minotaur”, but extended to the incomprehensible lines and circles drawn on the floor to Professor Shallembarger (Drew Friedman) going to “Sylvia Plath Fucks the Minotaur” without any apparent motivation for doing so.

But I could be wrong about all this. It seemed like Sophie Gets the Horns really mattered to the Riot Group, and the trip down memory lane to the liberal arts college experience I was fortunate enough to have was nice for me. When I imply that nobody is particularly interested in the stories of privileged white women who came of age in the 90s, I omit one important group: privileged white women who came of age in the 90s. It seems that the Riot Group and Incubator Arts’ main audience are hipsters, probably the best audience for this sort of play. If it is to succeed, it will be with them.

Sophie Gets the Horns is playing at Incubator Arts Project until May 20^th. Tickets are available at the door or online at http://incubatorarts.org/riotgroup2012.html.

You are in an open field

Playing through May 19^th at HERE, You are in an open field is a fun romp with free-style rapping, game-play as a coping mechanism, and awesome old-school video-game imagery – you know, the kind where you can count the pixels if you aren’t paying attention to the show. Not that that’s an issue: You are in an open field is a Neo-Futurist shout-out to the nerdcore sub-culture that has you toe-tapping along, nerd or not. The subject matter was of secondary importance to me – of greater weight was how that subject matter fit into a visualization of game-play as a coping mechanism.

Robert N. Bellah sets up his book Religion in Human Evolution with a description of Abraham Maslow’s Being and Deficiency cognition, or B- and D-cognition. D-cognition is the anxious world of daily life – afraid of getting hit by kickballs on the playground, feeling hustled on the subway, a sense of artistic malaise. It’s “the recognition of what is lacking and what must be made up for through striving.” (5) B-cognition, on the other hand, is more transcendent: “When we are propelled by B-motives, we relate to the world by participation, not manipulation; we experience a union of subject and object, a wholeness that overcomes all partiality. The B-cognition is an end in itself…and it tends to transcend our ordinary experience of time and space.” One sphere in which B-cognition reigns supreme is game-play, from video-games to free-style rap competitions, from treasure hunts to making forts out of the sofa cushions. Play, then, exists in a clean break from the world of daily concerns. (Huizenga 3) In his ground-breaking Homo Ludens, Huizenga lists a pair of descriptors as to what constitutes play: it is a voluntary activity (7), and it is “a stepping of out ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.” (8) The temporality and separateness of play lends itself to the manufacture of inviolable rules, since “they determine what ‘holds’ in the temporary world circumscribed by play.” (11)

All of this holds within the world of You are in an open field. The different kinds of game-play are figured as escapes from the anxieties of ordinary life, and they all adhere to strict rules. For example, if you can’t follow the rules of a free-styling competition, then you are out and you lose. If somebody calls you on the “no food in the fort” rule, then you respond by trying to establish that it is not, in fact, a legitimate rule. The performance itself is a kind of super-game that encompasses all the other games. It is separate from the anxieties associated with space outside the theater, and it adheres to its own rules. First, the world constructed within the piece must be consistent (and it is). Second, the Neo-Futurists have their own code of rules that define their performance, and so You are in an open field needs to be consistent with those aims (and it is).

The flaw in analyzing game-play, however, is that it tries to reduce B-cognition to D-cognition. (Huizenga 3) The point is that the game is fun, and effectively takes you out of D-cognition. And, except for a few places where they slipped into didacticism, the Neo-Futurists in their You are in an open field did that for me.

If you want to see if they do that for you, you can check them out now through May 19^th at HERE on 6^th Avenue. You can buy tickets at the door or online at http://here.org/shows/detail/898/.

To learn more about the New York Neo-Futurists and their rules, please visit http://www.nyneofuturists.org/site/index.php?/site/whats_the_whatism/

And if you want to read the books that I cite in this review, here’s their full publication info:

Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Huizenga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Amazon eBook, 1971.

Fathom

Amy Jensen is a storyteller. By which I mean I see her doing exactly the same sort of thing with her ancestral Danish stories as I’m doing with my ancestral Karuk ones. At its most basic state, traditional storytelling is sitting around the fireplace or kitchen table telling tales of yore. But Jensen isn’t just a storyteller – she’s also a dramaturg. And an artist who is both of those things will bring a whole portfolio of theatrical tools to the old stories augmenting them, making them come alive.

Jensen’s work-in-progress Fathom is her telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s Wild Swans. Like any good teller of folk-tales, she uses the story not as a literal script, but as a guideline to which she can bring herself into the story, and the story into herself. And she does this quite literally. She weaves Wild Swans together with her own experiences with loss and depression, and with beautiful oral imagery of a museum exhibit filled with all kinds of weights and measures. Her storytelling also incorporates the choreography and dance of Heather Heiner and the composition and percussion of Levy Lorenzo. But the crux of Fathom is the juxtaposition of Wild Swans with Jensen’s deeply personal experiences. At times, this crux threatens to overwhelm the dance and music, and it’s not until Jensen steps back, or else incorporates herself into the choreography, that those other elements are able to come to the fore.

On the other hand, Fathom is yearning to become an immersive piece of performance. From the dance and music, to Jensen’s evocative oral descriptions of the setting, to her and Heiner’s bringing suds in their hands to incorporate the sense of smell, this piece is bursting at the seams, ready to explode into a quietly passionate experience. But for this to happen, it seems to me that the choreography, music, and set will have to flourish in the same way the storytelling already is.