Alternatetakes2

~ arts journal~ Lewis J Whittington

Alternatetakes2

Monthly Archives: September 2010

bloglog

22 Wednesday Sep 2010

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(solstice 11:09)

This long hot summer on a hot tin roof in the heat of the night. It is taking taking a slow exit with temps going to 90 on the first day of autumn. A fall preview Sunday with 70s spendour at the Rittenhouse fine art show with the canvas cabanas populated with some interesting work. Everybody seemed chilled out around the Square. Playful, vibrant or dark abstracts butted against vibrant florals, seascapes, urbania, portraiture. Was hard to bike around the square and remember to stop because it was so interesting taking in as a flyby.

hanging out

20 Monday Sep 2010

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‘And later’ by Jan Carroll

Stage

20 Monday Sep 2010

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Hemingway’s dubious depictions of Spanish gay men aside, it was hard not to be intoxicated by the New York literary troupe Elevator Repair Service and their adaptation of The Sun Also Rises having its US premiere at the Arts Bank. ERS animate the entire book and it was a moveable feast all Sat. afternoon (3:30 or so) with  Hemingway’s boozywriters, lushes & hangers on listing out of Paris and Barcelona, escaping cafe society with expatriot’s pissing contest. Papa’s romanticized proxy Jake Barnes as played by Mike Iveson is so likable that at points he handily narrates pages of text without tedium. In fact he is so likable that he overrides the length and some structural creaking. Another captivating performance is Lucy Taylor’s Lady Brett Ashley the hard-luck socialite who must rip her life apart to pull it back together. Taylor’s perpetually wind-swept blond mane, her physicality and slumming RAMA cadence makes men of all bents fall in love.

Stage

14 Tuesday Sep 2010

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The Mutter Museum was the perfect spot for the telling of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, the first person account of madness and the chambers of personal hell.  John Zak is straight jacketed and sequestered in one of museum’s rooms without forensic exhibits of human organs, but just eerie enough with an iron period ward cot and a padded backdrop. John acts the short story, written in the first person of a man driven to murder by his psychotic reality. This is so well done by the actor and the invisible hand of director Domenick Scudera.

A disabused American master storyteller, Poe and his work has been rescued onstage from countless camp horrors film. Scudera who has directed everything from Shakespeare to comedy revues, knows good theater text and this story just begs to be acted. Zak, such a versatile actor, just inhabits this character and we rediscover the imagery and power of Poe. It is a theater version of hearing a virtuosic pianist playing a masterpiece.

Stage

12 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by alternatetakes2 in politictictic, Stage, Theater

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Showing much theatrical bravery is Freedom Club, a new play by Adriano Shapin, mounted by Philly-based troupe New Paradise Laboratories and New York’s Riot Group as a Live Arts centerpiece. Their collaboration is certainly provocative, mirroring the festered political boil that American politics has become.

Act I plays with our collective psyche with no less a sacred image than Abraham Lincoln skulking around as in a Greek tragedy, wracked with uncertainty that he presides over a broken empire. (The year is 1865.)

As Lincoln, Elliot Drew Freidman goes for much more that a haunted image of the president. The play’s back half is set in the future, with some not so shocking self-fulfilled prophesies about where we will be as an even more divided nation.

Director Whit MacLaughlin keeps the action at a fevered pitch in the front half. Lincoln looms, top-hat bowed in shame – one of many symbolic images that punches you in the gut. It brings to mind ’where did we go wrong?’ from our perception of Lincoln’s vision. From those startling contemplations, we are then treated to a sexually repressed Abe and Mary Todd pathetically, if not humorously, trying to get each other off. So much for Walt Whitman.

Loitering in his own follow spot is John Wilkes Booth, played with volcanic intensity by Jeb Kreager. Kreager is masterfully stealth in a mannered interpretation of a political monster that Shaplin makes appear to come out of our current political landscape. Ambitious material, without doubt.

Lincoln ruminates on a country divided by race and reflects on his attempt at reparations to black Americans, as if it could possibly make up for the atrocities they withstood. He grieves with the knowledge that the country is forever divided and that he is authoring a pipe-dream union.

Booth lunges toward Shakespearean madness, concocting an internalized manifesto of political vengeance. All rationale is aimed at hurling racist bile (and the ’n’ word) as he lusts over his sister or fornicates anything in a hoop-skirt.

Aside from Kreager, six other players take various roles in Booth and Lincoln’s orbit. The staging is witty with its use of 19th century silhouettes in key moments and mime. And there’s inspired comic relief: one moment has a goofy Lincoln watch two actresses in My American Cousin taking pratfalls immediately before he is shot; another has Booth finish a rant with Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell (intoning more, more, more). But, things get clammy as the Shaplin’s breathless polemics take over, as as the act careens toward Lincoln’s fait accompli.

In Act II, abortion is the political flashpoint as a feminist militia tries to create a safe passage for women seeking them. In Shaplin’s future world, liberals have been politically castrated, the religious right has taken over the halls of government and women have no rights over their bodies. None of the characters communicate, but everybody is ranting.

MacLaughlin, so inventive in the first half, can only stiffly stage the action as the rhetoric engulfs like wildfire. Freedom Club ultimately limits itself to carpet-bombing the audience with the same message. Still, for this take-no-prisoners political play in perilous times, NPL and TRG is to be commended.

DanceMetros2

11 Saturday Sep 2010

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Dancers, choreographers, artistic directors and fans packed the Perelman Theater for the LiveArts Lucinda Childs DANCE, a multimedia reconstruction of her sensational opus from 1979, scored to the whirling-dervish electronia of Philip Glass, who was also in attendance for this event.

Sol LeWitt’s film of Childs’ original production from 1979 is projected on a proscenium scrim, with the dancers in life size or big screen images. The current troupe virtually gets to dance with the previous company. Childs choreographs dancers in perpetual chasse and builds from lateral jumps, reverse turns and skip steps that break to roundelay. The choreography is draughtsman like, playing with perspective- horizontal, vertical, diagonal and (through film) top view.

Together, the relentlessness of the choreography, Glass’s dizzying score, the phantom dancers, either breaks you or hypnotizes. For those who resist it could induce vertigo or worse, boredom. but for those who go under the spell, it is trippy. It strips the mind of linear thought like successful meditation.

Love the concept or not, the dancers are amazing. Their skill, stamina and elan from start to finish is remarkable. This audience definitely was keyed into that. Lucinda, who dance in the original, joined them onstage for a bow to the lusty ovation.

DanceMetros

09 Thursday Sep 2010

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TAKES at Philadelphia Live Arts

A cubed scrim in the warehouse space of the Hub is the stage for Nichole Canuso dancey-filmic installation TAKES. She inhabits that space, with no aesthetic distance from the audience with Dito van Reigersberg, some beaten whicker furniture, a birdcage and record player. Are these private moments of a couple circa 1961? Is this one evening in the life of, or a lifetime? They play records, they dance around a bit, they up end the wicker (ugly either way), they hide airmail letters in the birdcage. Scenes from a marriage? A day room in a psyche ward? A dream?

All through this the couple is being traced in bleached out projections on all sides of the transparent cube. The layers, the exposition of their faces, Canuso’s reclining torso looms and their faces refract like a hall of mirrors. It has a cumulative hypnotic effect and people start to move around the cube (as they were invited to do so as if this were a living sculpture).

There is no linear narrative and Canuso’s dance template is limited and she could strengthen the dance side of it, but this is a whimsical, melancholic scenario and one of the most intriguing pieces Canuso has created. Nicole and Dito have beautiful, secreted chemistry. At one point he dresses her as if she were helpless. Is she passed out or debilitated. These characters remain a mystery, but the intimacy they conjure in performance is palpable.

The visual effects which Canuso called a ‘video landscape’ is achieved through the tech wizardry of Lars Jan. Just as impressive is Mike Kiley sound design and the original music that goes from 60s sambas to concussively spiked overlays. There are real – time projection, but sometimes it is manipulated or delayed, which plays with your depth & time perception. There are after burns of moments that stick in the mind. Those moments when Canuso exhitbits memorable dramaturg.

Botanica & traveler

07 Tuesday Sep 2010

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‘Rainy bug’  by Jan Carroll

MetroScape

05 Sunday Sep 2010

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An updated Seurault-esque afternoon along the river drives with bustles and umbrellas replaced by booty shorts and sports equipment. Everyone was in motion so any attempt at pointillism was a blur. Along boathouse row cyclists, runners, skaters and walkers navigated around each other. There are a lot of squirrelly moves, steer-clears, near collisions (boxing as it dubbed on the ballroom dancefloor). and otherwise a fascinating glimpse into movement instincts- the good, the bad and definitely, the ugly.

Speaking of dancing, former UK PM Tony Blair was doing a lot of it with Christiane Amanpour in an interview on This Week. His rationale for endorsing Dick Cheney’s New World Order post 9/11 was quite a snakedance.

DanceMetros

05 Sunday Sep 2010

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Tribal fantasia of Sanders’ Sanctuary

One of the centerpieces of this year’s LiveArts-PhillyFringe festival is Sanctuary, by choreographer Brian Sanders and his troupe JUNK. Sanders has turned the festival’s warehouse space in Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia.

Ten dancers (including Brian) are the mohawked denizens of a future gothic fortress pursuing enlightenment through physical and intellectual freedom. In this piece Sanders continues to explore acrobatic dance language, laced with his signature physical comedy and, as usual, liberated sensuality.

At a run through this week, Sanders was dashing on and off the set, wearing hats as director and dancer, he was otherwise calmly working out some of the kinks with various suspension apparatus.

“All my dancers think I’m a mad man now. I definitely lost my cool more than usual and am so preoccupied where everything is supposed to be that I keep forgetting my own choreography when I am trying to be just a dancer.” he said standing in just his dance-belt and sweat. He admits it was very hard working with such a large scale and being in the piece himself.

Dancers vanish in mysterious chambers or they assemble on a wooden skeletal galley that pitches with the weight of the dancers, which Sanders calls “pew.“ There are also suspension pipe-cubes that men mount and dance in and spin into bodysculptures.

Sanders, who himself danced with Momix and choreographed for Cirque du Soleil, pushes movement physics with dancers in ever precarious positions, inversions, vaults and swinging (on industrial nylon). In one sequence, the troop of ten are rested on each other and bloom into lush bodyscapes that keep evolving out of yogic and gymnast poses.

The soundtrack, a mix of club chant of the Cure and other 80s apocalypto mixes, including Jimmy Somerville’s fab remix of Don’t Leave Me This Way. Hey, I think I remember that night.

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All poems by Lewis Whittington unless otherwise noted

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