November 9th, 2009 §
Managed to catch some Viennale films and a couple of Viennale parties.
The strange thing at the parties is that many of the people there had not been to any films or to just one film. I suppose at the films many of the people had not been to any parties.
If you get the chance, I'd recommend to do both.
While I was at the Soul Powered evening on 31 October I managed to snap some photos both upstairs and downstairs.
Viennale party upstairs Badeschiff
Viennale Soul Powered on Badeschiff Continues »
September 25th, 2009 §
September 25th, 2009 §
September 25th, 2009 §
September 25th, 2009 §
August 16th, 2009 §
On a balmy August Saturday night I was making my way home when I found two groups of people dining in the street. One group had a table under Karlskirche on Karlsplatz. The other were taking bowls of soup from the back of a van by the Vienna Technical University.
These two locations are just a few hundred meters apart.
Cities and differences.
Dinner in Vienna Soup Kitchen Technical University
Dinner in Vienna Karlsplatz Church
This was supposed to be a post not associated with ImPulstTanz. Ironically, the group dining under Karlskirche turned out to be associated with ImPulsTanz. It's the theatre usher team. I only realised when preparing the photo for publication at 100% magnification. Great idea to take a table out and eat on Karlsplatz.
August 5th, 2009 §
The Love Piece is one of the more unique pieces in the 2009 ImPulsTanz festival: it is entirely experiential and completely different every time it is played and for every participant.
The creators and cast of The Love Piece provide an environment and a context and the rest is up to you.
The Love Piece: Where it all happens
The experience for the most part is positive, but as I wrote the quality of your experience depends mainly on you and what you bring to that evening.
Here's what the program says about the piece. This much is public knowledge:
The Love Piece unfolds along a loose score that can described as: there as many audience members as performers. As they come in, audience members are each taken by the ahand by a performer, who for the duration of the show 'give love' to his/her audience. What such a love can be, is the stake of the piece. Love songs are playing the whole time.
There are just 10 performers - so very few people had the opportunity to experience The Love Piece. I was one of that fortunate 100 and will reveal the details to you about my own visit.
*** SPOILERS FOLLOW - PLEASE DO not read farther ***
*** if you expect to attend The Love piece personally ***
ImPulsTanz 2009: Alice Chauchat - The Love Piece Continues »
August 5th, 2009 §
One of the curiosities at ImPulsTanz this week was the stage performance of Transformers, the culmination of two weeks of rehearsals and workshop led by Eszter Salamon and Christine de Smedt.
This is one of three or four professional level two week programs, mainly populated by the DanceWeb dancers. For those not familiar with DanceWeb, it is a program run by ImPulsTanz which brings about forty dancers from around the world to Vienna to study dance at the ImPulsTanz workshops and at the performances as well for free. DanceWeb is one of those great initiatives which changes the world by providing a conduit for international exchange. Often DanceWebbers end up visiting one another across the globe. I have been the guest in Venezuala on a road trip with one of my friends from DanceWeb. This is not untypical. So that is the context of this two week intensive: working professionals from around the world, but with no prior experience dancing with one another.
Some will argue that Transformers should not be critiqued as it is just the results of a workshop. Not so. It is deliberately presented as a stage work and not in laboratory format.
Salamon & De Smedt & Pro Series - Transformers
© Alec Kinnear
Black box stage. Stage environment not accented, more black curtains and shadows than raw backstage. All the dancers are in everyday clothes: blues, reds, yellows, browns. Nothing remarkable.
A curiosity are the wires going into each dancers left ear. More on them later.
The show starts off slowly with heavy breathing moving to amplified shch whispering noises and lot of meandering around the stage. The whispering slowly accelerates to quiet howls over the course of twenty minutes. Frankly this warmup session is pretty painful.
We have cute little hobbit "hee hee" noises. Let your inner voice out, seventies kind of primal scream warmup. Definitely useful for ungluing uptight dancers from stiff cultures. Not so entertaining.
accelerating Transformers voices © Alec Kinnear
They now turn it up a notch and go into spasms and fits and real primal screams. Particularly amazing is a guy who looks like one of Ghenghis Khan's lieutenants with long dark hair and high cheekbones. You fear for his life and yours as he screams and thrashes.
Particularly effective is Chris Haring's dancer Alexander Gottfarb who doesn't let the spasms go through his whole body but confines it to one part of his body at a time in a controlled rotation, focusing your attention much better on the nuance. Alexander has an unfair advantage here though as Chris uses spasms as well as part of his stage vocabulary (albeit a small part rather than the whole enchilada as here).
This thrashing and screaming goes on for at least a quarter of an hour.
Somehow it turns into a love-in with dancers merging together and blending with other groups. At first it seems heterosexual but over time same sex couples and mixed threesomes appear. The dancers keep their clothes on but otherwise with the passionate breathing and screams you are witness to a full on orgy. Somehow it is unclear if this is meant to be sensual or off-putting.
When it quiets down the stage goes dark and you think the purgatory is over. Not at all.
The lights slowly come back up and the dancers begin to assault the audience verbally.
contact audience © Alec Kinnear
"Do you know what standing by means while the government kills your fellow man?"
"What about La Hacienda?"
"It is time for a revolution."
"Stop the injustice. Just wake up and stop it."
The dancers come right up to the first row and look in the eyes and shout in the face of the audience. Most of them believe in their revolutionary text and pronounce it with fervour. Quite effective.
They then move up the staircases of Halle G shouting at audience members higher up.
Sho Ikushima © Alec Kinnear
I thought they were all going to leave the theater as in Delgado or The Love Piece, leaving the audience alone to muse on what we just saw. It would have been quite effective.
But no, they made it back down to the stage.
Fairly robust applause when the lights went up, but the audience is mainly fellow dancers and friends - hardly impartial.
One could argue that Transformer is a workshop and not a performance to be critiqued. On the other hand, Eszter Salamon and Christine de Smedt made a conscious decision to present on mainstage and not in a laboratory session.
My neighbour Keith Hennesy complains about these white European kids appropriating the text from the Civil Rights movement (The Last Poets). This critique doesn't seem particularly relevant to me. The issue is with revolution and injustice, not with colour and civil rights. Colour is a very narrow view of injustice which has become as much as an economic issue as one of race.
I could live without the half hour of painful buildup as the young dancers build their nerve up to explode on stage and then do their love-in.
But the peak moments did have a genuine character, enough to make one reflect on what humanity means and the differences between man and beast. Apparently not a lot. A fair enough conclusion. Beasts do less damage to the earth as we do.
I do have issues with the technology used. Apparently the wire into the left ear is actually an earphone attached to an iPod shuffle. Each dancer has a soundtrack with both noises and instructions on it, to guide him or her through the performance. For me, giving them a constant hidden soundtrack to perform to is the equivalent of cheating on exams. Almost all of the sound the audience gets is from the dancers.
The dancers should have learned how to generate these noises unselfconsciously without doping themselves with dialogue in their ears. If the dancers need a conductor or fluffer, that should be provided from the first row.
However, Christine de Smedt says the title Transformers is about transforming those sounds and those instructions from the iPod shuffle into performance. Okay, but this is not really preparing the students for the true internal work on themselves. As a prep exercise okay, but I'm not convinced.
Technology should be used to enhance, not as a crutch. I'd like to ask the participants about how they feel. If any of them read this, feel free to leave a comment about the experience of performing to recorded instructions and audio.
© Alec Kinnear
It should be noted there is scant little dancing in Transformers, but given the sparsity of dancing in the entire ImPulsTanz festival, there appears to be scant need for contemporary dancer performers to be able to dance. If all pro dance workshops go in this direction, we are bringing up a generation of dancer cripples who will be able to do little else than howl and writhe.
Despite that caveat, Transformers is far from the dullest show among this year's mainstage performances. There is movement, there is emotion, there is excitement, there is a point.
Performers:
Sandro Amaral, Tim Darbyshire, Kathryn Enright, Elisabete Finger, Alexander Gottfarb, Arianne Hoffmann, Tahni Holt, Sho Ikushima, Lenio Kaklea, Benjamin Kamino, Igor Koruga, Karen Lambaek, Enora Riviere, Bert Roman, Salka Rosengren, Liz Santoro
July 27th, 2009 §
July 27th, 2009 §
The Bagwell in me begins with a man in drag in a bathtub with his/her feet up.
performance begins - man in a bathtub
"Hi my name is Sherry, feel free to stop the show and ask us any questions as we go."
The audience for the most part is quiet throughout the evening despite Young's attempt to knock us out of our stupour.
Ann Liv Young is hiding behind a white plastic bead curtain at a table with a Macbook Pro on it.
Her opening question kicks us all in the crotch, men and women. "Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who can't get it up?" The voice is steely and male coming through a distortion filter like the one they use in horror films.
Ann Liv Young
"Have you ever lived with someone you can't fuck?"
A girl titters. She seems like a plant but promises she isn't after the show. Young comes after her: "Why are you laughing? What is so funny? There is nothing funny about being horny and not being able to fuck. It's very frustrating."
This was just the prologue.
Ann Liv Young is a phenomenon unto herself. The Bagwell in Me is the third production I have seen and reviewed. Each year Young takes her on stage shock therapy further. The first year, for Melissa is a bitch it was just fat girls naked dancing to pop songs and a lot of dirty talk. For her last visit two years ago with Snow White it was penetration while Young was seven months and very visibly pregnant.
Ann Liv Young & Michael & Jaguar
In The Bagwell in Me, Young manages to take matters even further. To get our attention and to play out her own peculiar fantasies, this year Young brings a pen camera on stage which is hooked up to a video monitor. That way there can be no mistake about the open legged masturbation, cuninlingus, fellatio, golden showers and full on penetration which takes place on stage. They are not simulating, this is live sex.
Beyond her joy in shocking and disturbing people, what seems to concern Young is hypocrisy and injustice. At a deep level, Young feels life is unfair and she and her friends are getting the short end of the stick. And she will make society pay for her suffering. Here Young is attacking blind American patriotism and its foolish jingoist ideas. George Washington is known as the greatest American president and a freer of slaves. But as Young points out, Washington's slaves were freed upon his death when he no longer needed them. Which makes Washington first and foremost a slave owner. Young asserts that Washington was the father of one of his slave maids children. Naturally his wife Martha objects. Young's vision is very dark indeed: the story ends with the maid in prison and George Washington sexually mutilated.
Michael with towel over his head & Ms Young as Martha
The two strongest moments in "The Bagwell in me" are the dialogue between Washington and his wife Martha and the dialogue between Martha and Oney Washington's slave mistress. Young plays both parts most of the time, switching frenetically between voices. Apparently there is a version of The Bagwell in me with another female performer, who perhaps handles the second role sometimes.
To manage all these impersonations Young has rubber masks, white wigs, black wigs, blackface, frocks and little black baby dolls.
On Sunday night a videographer Jaguar in a zipped up purple jumpsuit filmed the entire performance. Her prim suit and hairdo was a striking contrast to Young's open legs and wild flying hair. Young told us that Jaguar was only there that night - but an integral part of the performance. Young's work seems to follow a rough scenario but with episodes which can change as it strikes Young's fancy. She plays off her own mood and that of the audience.
Ann Liv The Bagwell in me
The contrast between her controlled reasonableness when she comes out of character and her frenzy in character is exceptionally Brechtian. Young lets us lose ourselves in her experiential world and then knocks us out of it and asks us to consider seriously her ideas on subjugation of races and women.
Someone at the end of the show asked why so much sex?
The show is about an illegitimate child, Young explained. Contempt and quiet rage slips into her voice as she explains the obvious. "How do you get a child? Only by fucking, so if that's what my show is about, why should I hide the fucking? Of course there is sex. You would have to be really stupid or really naive to make a show about an affair and hide the sex."
When I asked her why she wanted to treat this particular theme, Young went into the ramble you can read in the program about her forefathers being slave owners and visiting distant aunts living in southern estates in Virginia with what are now called black maids instead of slaves. Hogwash, I say. There are deeper reasons Young is obsessed with sexual hierarchy and legitimacy. I'd like to know what they are. Young also seems obsessed with infidelity and the pain of women reluctantly sharing a man both want.
While to retell it all of this sounds merely sordid, Ann Liv Young is a consummate showman now and the show rarely flags. She skips from one hysteria and pop song to another bringing out the voyeur in all of us. You don't want to watch but you must as she commits one effrontery after another and orders Michael her common-law husband and father of her child around with despotic nonchalance.
The show alters between explication and explicit sex to karaoke numbers as varied as "Billie Jean" to "Slip Sliding Away" to disco to strange cute pop songs from the 1920's. Young doesn't sing too badly considering the limited attention she pays to her singing.
But after The Bagwell in me what is there left for Ann Liv Young to do on stage? This time we had bondage, urination, fellation, cuninlingus, full penetration with a dildo, genital organ mutilation. All that remains are anal sex, rape, eating of feces.
While The Bagwell in me didn't perturb me much, I'm not sure I will be able to handle Young's next show.
At the end, Ann Liv Young seemed very concerned that we felt we got our money's worth. Her question set me thinking on what terms? I once heard live sex acts in the New York area run about a $100/head admission so at 25 euros perhaps The Bagwell in me is excellent value. On the other hand, there was scant little dance or much uplifting. Ann Liv Young is a sexual enigma wrapped in scatological mystery. Be glad that she is selling visitors passes to her world and not one way tickets.
