October 2011

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Marc Bamuthi Joseph

October 20, 2011 in Guest blogger, Things to do by Kate Mattingly | Comments closed

From left to right Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Emcee Soulati, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Theaster Gates

Show information: “red, black and GREEN: a blues” takes place at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Performances are at 7:30pm on October 20, 21, and 22. For more information, visit http://ybca.org/marc-bamuthi-josephthe-living-word-project

“red, black & GREEN: a blues,” by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, is a performance that explores identity and colors, politics and participation, and there’s probably no one better equipped than Bamuthi to create this work. He’s a community organizer, formidably talented artist, and co-founder of Life is Living, described in his biography as “a national series of one-day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks and affirm peaceful urban life through hip hop arts and focused environmental action.”

For “red, black & GREEN: a blues” Bamuthi collaborated with director Michael John Garcés, set/installation designer Theaster Gates, and a team of others who contributed – visually and acoustically — to the production’s seamless grace and elegance. But it’s the stellar contributions of the cast of four (Bamuthi, Gates, Traci Tolmaire, and Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Emcee Soulati) who turn the performance into a riveting commentary about how people have made abandoned parks into places of possibility. “red, black & GREEN: a blues” inspires each of us to look at the impact of our decisions. Anecdotes range from the story of Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses to an explanation of a Tupac documentary that Bamuthi gives his 9-year old son. Each scene sparks consideration of the fertile tension between history and theater, a chance to see again people, relationships, scenarios and ways in which meaning can be transformed through their retelling.

Bottom row, left to right: Gates, Traci Tolmaire, Shepherd. Above: Bamuthi

“red, black & GREEN: a blues” defies easy synopsis: it’s not only multi-disciplinary, but also multi-directional, encompassing past and current events. Tethered to locations where Life is Living takes place -– Chicago, Houston, New York, and Oakland – the performance use spoken word, rhythms, music, and dance to bring to life different people and encounters. The set by Gates is assembled and dissembled by the cast to provide different environments.

Beginning with an interactive first section that invites us to wander on the stage and get close to the set (this lasts about a half-hour), the cast is onstage for the entire production. The second section takes places in a proscenium-style arrangement with the four artists onstage.

After 90 minutes, I left the theater wondering if I had ever seen a production that so deeply honored people’s stories, interactions, hopes, obstacles, grief, and potential. “red, black & GREEN: a blues” is both affirmation and catalyst, a testament to unwavering commitment and creativity and a form of theater that triggers questions about if/how we consider the well-being of one another.

In a program essay by Berkeley professor Shannon Jackson, Gates is quoted as saying “While I may not be able to change the housing market or the surety of gentrification, I can offer questions within the landscape. To question, not by petitioning or organizing in the activist way, but by building and making good use of things forgotten.” Each decision within the work seems guided by this principle: from the set that appears to be built from discarded materials to the theatrical techniques that are created in order to engage audiences differently, more effectively.

The first section establishes both intimacy and responsibility. We are free to choose which actor or parts of the set we wish to observe, or to step back and see how the movement of the walls transforms the stage from the façade of a house to its interior spaces. The performers’ voices and rhythms create a glue that unites their presence, even when they’re not visible to one another. Bamuthi offers us slices of watermelon. I hear Gates before I see him sitting on a front porch; he is singing – gorgeously.

Initially compacted like a cube, suggesting a shotgun house, the walls appear worn, dilapidated, full of stories. As they separate, the audience finds itself in the midst of an interior and the sensation of being intimately involved with a situation becomes a through-line of the performance.

This approach to theater is not about complacently watching, but insists on interaction and consideration. At one point Bamuthi speaks about “practice as belief,” advocating for artists to dedicate themselves to values that connect with life through architecture, sculpture, dance, theater.

During the second part of the performance, words and images intertwine. Traci Tolmaire captivates as she morphs into different characters: a woman who oversees a community garden or a guy known as “the flower man.” The cast is phenomenally multitalented: singing, dancing, and speaking with conviction. Tommy Shepherd provides acoustic textures that complement the scenes, making rhythms on the surfaces of the set, beat-boxing, and embodying characters.

The production’s details and transitions are extraordinary: television screens built into the set provide images that enrich the stories being told. During one scene Gates’ profile is visible through a window, a glimpse of quiet perseverance. When the stories shift to New York City, the back wall becomes the interior view of a subway station. The design team included media designer David Szlasa, lighting designer James Clotfelter, choreographer Stacey Printz, composer Tommy Shepherd, documentary filmmaker Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi, costume designer Mai-Lei Pecorrai, and sound designer Gregory Kuhn.

A day after the show, certain lines still reverberate: “it’s a trick question” referring to whether or not to bring a mug to Starbucks (why would any environmentally concerned individual be in Starbucks?) or “the paradox of cultivating something you will never see” or “so culturally immune to our long slow suicide” that encapsulates our present condition.

But it’s the last line that resonates most deeply: “If you look real close…”

What might we see? How would we respond? What could change?

Autobiographical Theatre in Argentina

October 11, 2011 in Abroad, Guest blogger by Julie Ward | Comments closed

La Carpintería Teatro

Friday night. Lola Arias’ Mi vida después (My Life After). La Carpintería Teatro, Buenos Aires. A group of grandmotherly women in fur coats and heavy perfume claims the first rows. The stage manager’s request for silenced cell phones is met with a loud “No!” from a woman with a wrinkled face and sleek, black hair, part of the front-row contingent. The lights dim and another of her party cries, in English, “Silence!” provoking giggles and shushes. From the back comes a censorious, “Por favor,” to which one of the dowagers replies, stage-whispering, “¡Es en serio!” Finally, clothing begins raining onto the stage, and the show begins.

Mi vida después debuted in 2009 and has made festival rounds as well as having runs at two different theatres since then. In the play, six actors, one joined by his young son, wear their parents’ clothing, display and interpret photographs of their families and use other objects (books written by an actor’s father, cassette recordings of another’s voice, a live turtle, etc.) to evoke the stories of their parents’ lives. Their parents include an ex-priest, revolutionary militants, a newscaster, an automobile journalist, bank clerks, a secret policeman — all of whom lived during, if not through, Argentina’s military dictatorship. The play, which features professional actors and their real-life stories, is a thought-provoking study of the limits of the self, authority and authorship, and the role of theatre in society.

The characters introduce themselves by describing the circumstances of their births. Blas Arrese Igor, for example, born September 8, 1975, declares: “La nave Viking despega hacia Marte y en la ciudad de La Plata, nazco yo. Mi padre había sido cura y decía que no era parte de ningún partido político salvo el de Dios.”(The spaceship Viking blasts off for Mars, and in the city of La Plata, I am born. My father had been a priest, and he said that he belonged to no party save that of God.) Besides playing themselves, each actor, at some point during the play, embodies his or her parent, whether it be through trying on their clothes, reading their letters aloud or physically going through the motions peculiar to that parent. Carla Crespo leads her fellow actors in exercises her father might have participated in as a sergeant in the People´s Revolutionary Party; Liz Casullo wears her mother’s jacket and reports news from the 1970s, just as her mother did as a newscaster for “Telenoche.” The play must be considered autobiographical, as the actors are, for the most part, playing themselves and telling their stories from their own perspectives. However, this crossover into the realm of their parents’ life stories questions and blurs the limits between the self — the actors— and the Other — their parents.

One particularly interesting moment in the play is when Vanina Falco tells of how her adult brother discovered he was not actually her biological brother. Rather, he had been born in a secret detention camp to imprisoned parents and was subsequently stolen and raised by Falco’s parents. He has taken on his birth name, Juan Cabandié, and Falco’s father has been tried for the crime and found guilty. Vanina Falco wanted to participate in the case against her estranged father and was initially barred from doing so by a law prohibiting testifying against an ancestor. However, this ruling was appealed and overturned, due to the fact that Vanina Falco has effectively no relationship with her father. Part of the evidence contributing to this legal decision was the fact that she has made public her family experiences through her participation in the play.

The play’s text has evolved as this court case has developed. In Mi vida después, Falco sits on a sofa, and the other actors gather round, going through legal documents as she tells the story. She explains that she was the first person in Argentina to be allowed to testify against a parent and that part of the reasoning was that she discusses the case in a play. This moment is powerful for its dizzying circularity — in the theatrical performance that affected the court case, the actor discusses the court case that was affected by the theatrical performance… The spectator is thrown into the position of legal judge as well as being forced into acute awareness of the theatricality of autobiography, the performance that is any life story. The lines between theatrical testimony and legal testimony are blurred, and the frontier between performance and reality is subverted altogether.

The evolution of the play, whose constant dramaturgy is undertaken these days by Sofia Medici, is what allows for such surreal moments. Mi vida después is not a static work, but rather a living exposition of life stories in progress. The selves portrayed are fluid, ranging between parent(s) and child, and the play itself adapts to the actors’ changing reality. Just as the lines between self and Other are blurred in the play, and lines between legal and theatrical testimony are entangled, lines between autobiographical narrator and author are also blurred. Even though the actors play themselves, speak in the first person and tell true stories from their own lives, they are not considered the authors of this piece. Lola Arias’ work interviewing the actors and then compiling, selecting, editing and arranging their stories gives her authorship and authority over the actors’ autobiographies. This blurring of so many lines invites the viewer to question autobiography as a genre, highlighting the impossibility of setting the self in type.

At the end of the play that Friday night last June, one of the previously rambunctious ladies in the front row turned to her friend, who was seated in front of me, and declared more than asked: “A vos no te gustó por la política.” (You didn’t like it because of the politics.) The confirmation was unnecessary, but her friend nodded in agreement anyway. To my thinking, what disquiets the viewer of Mi vida después much more than any political aversion is the way the play pulls back the curtain on the workings of autobiography and dares to question the very idea of the self.

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Contest Reminder

October 8, 2011 in Uncategorized by TBG | Comments closed

Entries for The Berkeley Graduate blogging contest are due Saturday, 10/15! Submit your entries to berkeleygraduate@ga.berkeley.edu

Hinchada

October 8, 2011 in Abroad, Guest blogger by Julie Ward | Comments closed

Hinchar, according to the Royal Spanish Academy’s dictionary, means to increase the volume of an object or body by filling it with air or some other thing. By scanning down to the fifth definition, though, one learns that in Argentina and Uruguay hinchar means to support a sports team with enthusiasm. Entusiasmo might be an understatement. Passion, fervor, frenzy—any word that brings to mind religious zeal tinged with bloodlust gets a little closer to the idea.

I like my fair share of soccer, but can’t claim fandom of any South American team in particular (besides the Uruguayan national selection, which stole my heart during the last World Cup). When I found out that the Buenos Aires institution River Plate was in danger of demotion to the second league after a deciding game with Belgrano, I wanted to cheer for the underdog—the only problem was, I didn’t know which team was worse off. Belgrano was in the second division and stood to rise, but River’s best players had been being sold off to Europe for so long that they were lean to the point of haggard. I decided to go see the game in a pizza place and make up my mind there.

A pizza deliveryman on rollerblades checks the score between runs

The pizzeria filled up as the game began, and my friend Ashley and I filled up on beer and delicious fugazzetta—a pizza consisting entirely of mozzarella, caramelized onion, and deep dish crust. We invited a kid who had only found standing room to join us. Belgrano scored their first goal and the restaurant’s atmosphere seemed to disappear as the River hinchada in the joint sucked in a deep breath and held it in with their disappointed rage. The kid at our table shyly asked us where we were from and who we rooted for. Ashley, who loves Buenos Aires deeply, immediately answered, “River.” I shrugged my shoulders. The kid showed us a photo on his cell phone of himself waving a Belgrano flag in a stadium. He grinned conspiratorially and put away the phone.

The game ended as most knew it would with River demoted and video of police officers hosing down fans who didn’t exit the stadium in a timely enough matter and, later in the evening, riots that left several people injured.

The next day I went for a wander and found the aftermath of the contest painted on the city walls. In Caminito, a touristic street in La Boca, home to River’s rival Boca Juniors, industrious fans had already left their tribute painted on a wall.

“The myth is broken…only the greatest remains.—Boca fans.”

Meanwhile, in a less artistic but more raw graffiti reaction, River fans threatened Belgrano with death.

“You don’t mess with River.”

“Belgrano you are dead.”

I gained a new appreciation for the dedication of the hinchas, and a slight touristic nostalgia for the days of the rivalry. Hopefully River will rise again, and give the policemen a reason to open up the fire hoses.

Review of Silke Otto-Knapp at the BAM

October 3, 2011 in Guest blogger, Things to do, Weekend Update by Kate Mattingly | Comments closed

Courtesy of BAM/PFA

Editor’s Note: Following her preview on Friday, Kate Mattingly presents a review of a special performance marking the opening of the “Silke Otto-Knapp: A light in the moon/MATRIX 239″ exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum. The exhibit continues until January 15, and you can find more information here.

On Friday at BAM, artist Silke Otto-Knapp was asked about the steps she takes to create a new work and replied, “it’s a messy and watery process.”

Her watercolors present shimmering images that emerge from silver-grey backgrounds and come into focus as a viewer walks by and finds an ideal vantage point.  Otto-Knapp says her process inverts a traditional method of applying layers of color and texture: “rather than adding, it’s about taking away.” For this exhibit, several works started with photos of dancers, from which Otto-Knapp makes a sketch, then works her image into watercolor, sensitively washing down the details. Ultimately she finds a translucency and vibrancy that give the exhibited works a distinct theme.

Similar to Otto-Knapp’s process of “taking away,” experimental dancers of the 1960s and 1970s sought a simplified, stripped-down approach to dance, seen in Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A” from 1966 as well as Trisha Brown’s “Walking on the Wall” at the Whitney Museum five years later. Although these creations may seem empty or spare, they are rife with possibility: viewers tend to notice subtle details of bodies in motion when dancers present such reduced vocabularies.

On Friday at BAM a program of events included variations of “Trio A,” films, and dialogue that marked the opening of Otto-Knapp’s exhibit. To see landmark pieces from decades ago and then a new solo made and performed by Flora Wiegmann revealed how dance has undergone its own “messy” process: its evolution has been both multi-directional and controversial.

Friday’s program began with a film of Anna Halprin’s “Parades and Changes” performed at the museum in 1970. The occasion celebrated the opening of BAM and was a bold move by BAM’s founding director, Peter Selz: he knew “Parades and Changes” had just been banned in New York (the piece contains nudity) and selected the piece to commemorate a museum dedicated to artists and innovation. According to Friday’s program notes, “Selz invited Halprin to define the ethos of the space before any art was installed.”

In the film there were stunning moments of juxtaposition: naked bodies tearing sheets of construction paper surrounded by the cavernous, almost brutal setting of BAM’s concrete interior. There were contrasts between the textures of smooth, muscular bodies of Halprin’s diverse cast, and the angular balconies of the museum packed with onlookers. Watching a film of the same setting where we were now seated 41 years later revealed how hairstyles and fashions may have changed (slightly), but the spirit of curiosity and experimentation nurtured by BAM remains.

After “Parades and Changes,” a film of Yvonne Rainer’s “Dance Fractions for the West Coast” included glimpses of Rainer working with 25 students at Mills College in 1969. It ended with Rainer performing “Trio A” (its first filmed version) and then the audience watched live dancers perform the same choreography.

Curator Dena Beard said to me a couple days before the exhibit opened, “every time a dance is recreated it changes,” and Friday’s events made this vividly apparent. “Trio A” was performed as a solo by Linda K. Johnson, who maintained Rainer’s emphasis on non-inflected movement and brought a sense of determined calm to the intentionally unpredictable and smoothly continuous phrase. Then Johnson repeated the phrase with Rainer’s cousin Ruth Rainero trying to distract her by catching her focus. Lastly it was performed as a trio with Johnson, Mimi Moncier, and Kristine Anderson, similar to its first 1966 performance as a trio (but one that denies unison coordination). During the last variation, The Chambers Brothers’ “In the Midnight Hour” provided a soundtrack, and it seemed more challenging for the dancers to resist accents and modulations in phrasing.

To switch from Rainer’s intensely non-glamorous, non-spectacular choreography to Wiegmann’s “Allay Alight” was at first jarring. Wiegmann has a gorgeous, facile movement quality and a body that seems capable of doing anything with exquisite ease. Dressed in short shorts and a loose top she traversed a strip of space marked by two lines of white tape. By repeating images and steps, she chiseled moments into my memory: a triplet phrase facing the dark windows of the museum, a fluid backbend that seemed to open her heart to the sky.

Courtesy of BAM/PFA

The differences in these creations that span 45 years reflect our changing attitudes towards bodies, virtuosity, and choreography. It’s inspiring that a museum recognizes the importance of such live events, which can complement exhibits of paintings and sculptures and shed light on art forms’ cross-fertilizations.

It also seemed apt to pair Otto-Knapp’s paintings with dance events since her images demand a choreography of their own: our shifting gaze can activate elements that initially aren’t visible. This kind of interactivity exists in both performances and exhibits when audiences participate in the making of an image.

It’s also what can turn a viewer’s experience from passive reception into active inspiration: when we recognize an encounter in which we generate our own meaning, our own beauty, we see what transformation may be possible in other interactions and relationships.

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Risks

October 1, 2011 in Abroad, Guest blogger by Julie Ward | 2 comments

I love taking risks. I love to travel to new cities alone, explore, eat in holes-in-the-wall on the off chance I’ll discover a delicious secret. When it comes to the Hasbro “Game of Strategic Conquest”, though, I just can’t be bothered. I am happy with my continent, and really have no Genghis Khan-like impulse to conquer my friends’ territories. The fact that the game lasts for hours or even days does nothing to attract my interest. I usually end the game in a kamikaze move that most other players find so disturbingly enigmatic that it takes several turns for them to dare to kill me off. Since starting graduate school at Berkeley, though, I’ve found that most of my friends are gobsmacked by the game. They become obsessed with it, insisting on kissing, blowing or singing to the dice as they roll to attack neighboring lands. Maybe my love of travel, risky as it can be, and some strong kumbaya tendencies are exactly what keep me from fully enjoying the game.

I learned this past year that, surprising as it may seem, the USA has no monopoly on ludic-imperialist urges. In Buenos Aires I attended a play in the university district that formed part of a cycle of works that were all based on manuals—a gardening handbook, furniture assembly instructions, and the rulebook for a game I’d never hear of called T.E.G. The play I saw was entitled Los pactos (The pacts), and featured a group of characters with no name who suddenly found themselves in a mysterious, foggy realm where they had to roll a die, make pacts with one another, and engage in hostilities in order to pass on to the next, equally mysterious level. The play was entertaining even without the cultural context of having played the game. I began to suspect, however, that I did have some knowledge of T.E.G. when one character, the moderator of the game, named the other characters after territories: Alaska, Labrador, Polonia, and Terranova.  Could T.E.G. be my old, conquerous thorn in the side, Risk?

I resolved to solve the mystery and gain a souvenir after the play. I asked in a toyshop uncertainly: “¿Tienen un juego que se llama…T.E.G.?

The clerk answered immediately and in rapid fire: “Plan Táctico y Estratégico de la Guerra” (Tactical and Strategic War Plan) and pointed to the top shelf of a wall full of games. His assistant scaled a ladder and showed me T.E.G., T.E.G. La revancha (The Revenge), T.E.G. de los Negocios (Business T.E.G.), and T.E.G.: Independencia (Independence). I went with the original, and looked over the box suspiciously. It cost a hefty $160 Argentine—almost $40 USD. This for a game that might very well be a carbon copy of one I already own.

I asked the assistant if he knew of a game called Risk. He hesitated, looked at his boss, and said he might have heard of it. I asked him if it was the same game and he answered, in a beautifully Argentine evasion: “Tengo entendido que tienen sus diferencias.” (From what I understand, they have their differences.)

I bought the game, whose cardboard box promises an “exciting bellic action in which logic, intelligence, and chance intervene” and which has been delighting Argentines since the 1970s (Given the belliferous government that ruled the country during that decade, these liner notes take on a particularly ominous feel). I even had them wrap it as a gift for my Risk-loving husband. We opened it and scoured the rules for anything that might distinguish it from the game of world conquest we know and love (or love to hate). It turned out that this version (I don’t know which came first, and prefer to leave it as a chicken-and-egg provocative mystery) has smoothed out all the kinks that make Risk so, well, risky. How many little brothers have slammed a fist on the board in anger, scattering cannons and cards? How many cousins have quit just when it was getting good after their pact between Brazil and North Africa is betrayed by an evil aunt? In T.E.G., the rules specifically state that pacts must be declared openly and respected. (Another fun difference is the separation of Risk’s monolithic Argentina into two territories: Argentina and Chile.) What is the fun in that? Perhaps it is my cynical approach to the game in which I play for a quick end to the world that appreciates Risk’s anger-inducing rulebook, but I appreciate the bellicose eruptions of familial rivalry that T.E.G. tries to smooth over.

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