Warren Fry
Being in a room with Arai Shin-Ichi is something like being in a room with a coyote; misunderstanding is a given, but reciprocal inquisitiveness guarantees a good time.
Ralph Eaton flapped the elongated, noodle-like sleeves of his patchwork, neon-yellow suit as he marched in a loose column of bicyclists, performers, and costumed revelers. A young girl with a popcorn bucket on her head pointed at him and shouted, “Look, it’s that weird piece of art.”
In the 49 years since La Monte Young, John Cage and others first investigated chance, duration, and atonality in Yoko Ono’s Chamber St. Loft, experimental music has broadened and defined its boarders, trickled into discrete genres, and almost entirely left private residences for spotlit galleries and trendy venues.
"Museums Cave In To Radical Feminists” read the sign on poster board in hot pink letters, hoisted by a Brainstormer on the corner of West 24th St. and 10th Ave.
The Bowery Poetry Club was transformed into the chapter house of an abandoned flying saucer on July 20th with a performance by Michael Peters and Erik Carlson, the magi-like annunciators of Peters’ Vaast Bin. The venue’s stage was covered in spaghetti-like ringlets of wires and Christmas lights, with Carlson crouched in front of an inlet of sound pedals and audio devices.
On Friday the 20th I was descending into the 72nd and Broadway subway station when my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a man shouting broken words from the platform below.
“Lactose Intolerance Acceptance Revolution!” We Are The Seahorses front man Darren chanted while pumping a glittered fist towards the basement crowd at Courtlandt-land, part of Three Day Weekend, a festival of basement shows that took place across New Brunswick, NJ, April 25 -27.
Despite my reservations about the venue, politics, and professionalism of the team who organized the Transmodern Festival in Baltimore, Maryland, there was one work included in their menagerie of interventionist® chic that avoided the prescriptive clichés of interactive performance.
Is Second Life merely an iconic simulation of commerce, privatization, and exclusivity or could it work as an engine for building social awareness? Attempts to awaken users to the concerns of real life by way of strife-free virtual worlds may seem counterintuitive at best.
William Blake’s aesthetic of idiosyncratic world-making, espoused in his declaration that “[he] must create a System or be enslaved by another Man’s” seems a fitting ethos for Thoth, who’s spent his life creating the world Festad, which boasts a mythic history, world geography, Festadian language, and the Herma, an epic in the form of a three-act solo opera.
Victor Frankenstein, his sister Elizabeth and brother William played hide-and-seek in the woods outside Geneva, their laughter and giggling voiced by two performers seated in plain view on either side of a small proscenium stage.
For the first ten minutes of their reading, the Be Blank Consort sat in a circle near the stage hashing out the details of their performance, while casting glances over their shoulders at the audience as it trickled in.
“Excuse me,” asked a young graduate student, “what is it you’re protesting exactly?” The person in the pink bunny suit gave no reply and continued pacing in front of an esteemed blue-chip Chelsea gallery, stopping on occasion only to adjust its sandwich board, which read ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
As clouds gathered in the evening sky over McCarren Park in Williamsburg, the United Sugar Refiners Health and Temperance Society’s last at bat versus the Hipsters of the North Side Fitness Center proved one for the (as yet non-existent) Straightjacket Softball record books.
After arriving an hour early to an event at the Grace Exhibition Space in Bushwick, which features performance work, I found myself chopping vegetables in the kitchen. It was another Performance + Dinner! Thursday, and the Dominican artists of the Colectivo Chocolatera were preparing Sancocho, a traditional festival dish; this, however was no intervention or audience participation piece—these folks needed help with the salad.
“Face melting” does not do Realicide justice. It’s more akin to skull melting and face imploding. The visceral quality of their primordial screams was buoyed and punctuated by the distressed noise and tornado thuds issuing from an expertly flitted mixer: the umbra of the curled fist.
The night started out with Flux Radio + TV. Five small televisions and one radio were wheeled out on a cart and turned on; images and sounds of the day’s news blared for ten minutes. Then came Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns for cello and keyboard.
At Chashama’s 44th Street gallery, the collaborative team Trouble and the B-Keepers (Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris) invited over fifty performance groups, noise musicians and DJ’s to perform throughout the month of May.
Jamie McMurry, whose performances have been praised for their evocations of the latent violence beneath that vast swath of American youth culture mired between the disenfranchised rural and hyper-self-conscious urban, otherwise known as suburbia, brought his 15-minute work titled Archive last month to the Cardiff School of Art and Design’s Trace: Installaction Art Space as part of its performance series The Cat Show.