Fame or Famine

Back in the day, I cut my teeth working performances at places like PS122, the Kitchen, St. Mark’s Place. I worked with dance companies like Li Chiao Ping Dance and artists like Douglas Rosenberg and Jin Wen Yu.
And they were strange. They’d do weird things like dancing in a square of neon tubes, or on the edge of a fishtank, or reciting the words "Falling…not falling…dreaming…" over and over while a projection of clouds was shone on their belly.
It was beautiful. It was strange and beautiful and it was new and unusual.
Which is why articles about "Is it dance? Does …read more

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I could be doing a Thanksgiving post, but everybody’s doing that. Suffice it to say I hope you all have a happy one, and let’s talk more about performance art.
Specifically, the genre of "Conceptual Art." Now, this is a particularly touchy subject, because it’s the part of performance art that usually gets held up by critics (especially people who don’t like funding arts) as worthless. "He just drove nails through his scrotum into a board!" they cry. "That’s not art! That’s WASTING our MONEY!"
Now, let’s not get started on other places that money is wasted, or that artists (who also …read more

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Interesting article about the faces of Mary Poppins in the Times earlier this week. I particularly like this bit:

"Travers captured that double vision — that confusion and melding of realms — that makes childhood so powerful.That is where the film and Broadway show come to rest, fully endorsing a childish vision of freedom, rejecting much of everything else. But in the books that isn’t possible. Discipline is required for the magical realms to be revealed; it is what makes freedom possible. Without the one, there is meaningless fantasy; without the other, there is heartless rigidity. It is their combination that …read more

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You know what early adopters suffer through, right? I’m the guy who suffered through the horrible handwriting recognition of the Newton; who learned how to program the VCR without the helpful menus; who figured out how to network Macs before the network setup assistant.
It goes for performance, too. I was reminded of this during a recent evening event at the Escape Coffee House which was featuring something called "Artist’s Exegesis" which was put together by my friend Chryshelle, a photographer and spoken-word poet. It was billed as a spoken word event with many poets and a couple of bands.
We walked …read more

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I saw the last Les Mis.
Really. It was the absolute last show, as the touring company hit St. Louis, and I traveled 6 hours with my girlfriend to go and see it. It was the end of a 20 year run, and it was my first time, and her third or so, and she cried and I cried and it was all beautiful.
And then I heard that it was being revived on Broadway; that there would be new staging, new orchestrations, a "fresh look". I confess to being a little sceptical, just in terms of the fact that they’d just …read more

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So here’s what I don’t get:
Mario Lopez is dancing to a Michael Jackson song, "Bad", and as part of the choreography puts his hand in front of his crotch. This is a move that Michael perfected long ago, and any dance done in his "style" to his song would almost HAVE to have that in it.
But there’s controversy, people are offended, there’s all sorts of talk about how this may cost him the competition (which, apparently, it did) because the core audience of the show, women and older adults, would be "offended."
Yet somehow, these didn’t offend them:

Does anyone else see …read more

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Holding the Pilots/Holding the Facts is a video created by my friend and colleague Shelby Floyd. He does an especially good job in telling a story with the objects, and the use of rack focus and just plain composition is fantastic. Enjoy!

Tags: stop motion, animation, foundry fields, shelby floyd, music video

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I can’t help it. I’m really excited.
I shouldn’t be. I’m a grown man, for goodness sake.
But today Mary Poppins opens on Broadway.
Now, don’t get me wrong–I’m very wary of what they may have done to this show. In fact, the word that they have actually changed the canonical Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious has me fuming. (Listening to it, I personally think it’s too slow and not an improvement). But I can’t wait to hear what they do with “Feed the Birds” and “Chim Chim Cheree.”
You can supposedly hear some of the new stuff over at NPR. However, right now the streaming media is …read more

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I missed another opportunity this weekend–I had been hoping to see the Blushing Poppy productions show at Links Hall. Alas, between schedules and money a day trip down to Chicago was not in the cards; however, as Nicole Legette, the director/curator, is based in Chicago, I’m sure I will eventually get to see them.
The lack of funding made me think about a discussion I had with a fellow artist a while back at a retreat. She was talking about how a theatre she’d worked at had set aside blocks of tickets for poor people to be able to attend. "Nobody …read more

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Writing about the arts is hard. I mean, we’re trying to use an extremely flawed language system to describe events that truly can only be experienced.
Which is why it brings me such joy to read well-rendered prose that makes me feel like I know exactly what they’re talking about:

"At Blues Alley on Wednesday night, Sumlin played a Gibson Goldtop guitar in trademark, rural, two-finger style — his thumb generating plenty of rhythmic bounce, his index finger juxtaposing skittish single-note runs, swiped chords and octave-leaping exclamations."– Gail Wein

Ah, to be able to listen to G.E. Smith & his trio and see …read more

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