Heather Kravas

dead, disappears

New York Premiere

Thursday, January 7, 8:30pm
Friday, January 8, 8:30pm
Saturday, January 9, 5:30pm
Saturday, January 9, 8:30pm
Sunday, January 10, 2:00pm
Sunday, January 10, 8.30pm
Monday, January 11, 8.30pm

* A waiting list will begin one hour before each performance.

Run Time: 55 minutes

Abrons Arts Center, Studio 1
466 Grand Street / tickets $20

Single Tickets Festival Pass

dead, disappears is a new solo work created and performed by Heather Kravas. Striving to reconcile the immediate with the verifiable, the work cites Richard Serra’s 1967 Verb List in an investigation of self-referencing action. Kravas also regards her own body of work and her body itself as it moves through a landscape of effortful states. Words and action vie for primacy, and language eclipses movement with a litany of acts that could be performed by, for and on the artist. Generating emotional intensity as a by-product of sensual formality, dead, disappears invites the audience to view the performer as simultaneously woman and object—and to see their own observation as completion of the artistic act.

dead, disappears is made possible with an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2014), commissioning support from the OnEdge Festival/Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary Art and additional support from Collective Address.

photo by Jason Starkie

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LATE! Summer READING

Putting It Together
by Ellen Chenoweth

LATE! Summer READING

A Predictable Vacuum
by Dean Moss

LATE! Summer READING

What I Remember
by Ishmael Houston-Jones

LATE! Summer READING

Reading Skills
by Buck Wanner

LATE! Summer READING

Dead to me.
by Marissa Perel

Dead to me.

Dead to me.

by Marissa Perel
Published: August 31, 2015 as a part of READING 2015

It was just over 6 months ago, now. I can remember the force of the darkness and wind down Grand St. as I entered the theater again and again after work, after sex, after teaching, after trying to find caffeine. The crowds in the gallery, in the lobby, in the café, at the vending machines at Abrons. Everyone familiar, everyone wanting, everyone desiring – to see, to participate, to become part of the work being shown. Or not. But meanwhile, we all did become part of it, anyway – part of the larger fabric of this history/hirstory.

To write a history of performance, then, is to experience and engage with desire, desire for that which is always already lost(1). You see the thing, you feel the thing, and then it’s over, and we leave each other behind. I’m reaching back to this festival, which is dead, meaning it’s OVER, and appropriately themed, American Realness Is Dead. Long Live American Realness. To engage choreography with the act of writing a history is to dance with the ghosts(2). Let’s dance.

I’m dead and so are you. Can we remember who we were in January? Can I separate my own desires at that time from what I was watching? The work I was doing? The kind of sex I was having? I can’t so this essay is going to be personal, but that’s ok because I’m already gone.

Capitalism is manufacturing exile(3). I’m time-traveling to World War I, going way back to histories of persecution. I’m thinking about the ephemeral movements that started out of the necessity to flee – Cabaret Voltaire, how Dada was founded – by artists who had to escape from Eastern Europe. There is always this need to flee, whether from war or poverty. There is the need to find a means, to find your own means, while meanwhile being subsumed in commodity culture, where consumption is trained to follow desire and desire is never requited(4).

Cynthia, Karen, Michelle, Simone, Antonija, Jeremy, Ivo, Jack, Miguel, I hear your voices. I am here and you are there. There is a stage floor between us. There is a structure that surrounds us. The structure that necessitates a festival. Our desire is not requited. My anus is very fragile(5) in spite of, or as a result of this structure. Our narratives are broken. We are the last great anti-heroes on the frontier of culture, bottling emotions and man-spit(6), making crafts out of hamburgers(7), reading our lists of constructive things to do from the outpatient clinic(8), living off Martha Stewart’s last great shit(9), romancing the staple gun(10), not complaining about the food(11), wielding axes(12).

We’ve searched for everything in each other, and it doesn’t stop being hard. I am laughing at your struggle because you are making it so unbearable and ridiculous and juicy. I’m thinking back on the circular argument between Karen Sherman, Joanna Furnans, and Aaron Mattocks in One with Others, the cacophony of anger and exasperation rising to a pitch in a “hypothetical” argument with a friend that of course, was not hypothetical. The push-pull of hands and fingers moved in rhythm with this tortured blame game, grasping at latches and chains attached to wooden blocks on various body parts. I’m thinking of Sean Donovan as Miguel Gutierrez arguing with Ben Pryor (as Ben Pryor) about something that starts as business but becomes about every unbearable personality trait of Ben that Miguel cannot tolerate, and yet must in Age and Beauty Part 2…. It sounds like it should be a cathartic “heart-to-heart,” something to clear the air, but it never will get cleared. An artist is not a therapist. A manager is not a life coach.

Are you saying I have anxiety and a mood disorder? Are you saying I have AN anxiety and A mood disordahhhh? Are you saying I have anxiety….AND I have a mood disssoorrrdahhh? Jack Ferver asks the mirror. It goes on and on and on and on and I keep wondering how he got there, to that particular dressing room, and what made him stop and act out that scene in front of the mirror, and how of course, this question is rhetorical, and how we are implicated in this affliction of ego, this diva breakdown. I’m on the outside looking in on Jack, wondering at the thin boundary between the inside and the outside of my own skull.

I’m hot for the hooks and locks that hinge your chest and shoulder(13), I’m hot for your tired old man voice (14), your bitchy “I hate everything,” attitude(15). I’m hot for your suicidal ideation(16), I’m hot for your medusa-death-clown-face (17), I’m hot for your dejected, bloody head(18), I’m hot for your inability to make a man-dance(19). I’m hot for your queer body(20). I’m hot for the splintering wood that glistened on your chest as you wrestled her to the ground(21) .I’m hot for your lack of institutional support(22), I’m hot for your butch gray hair(23), I’m hot for your desire to please everyone(24). Please don’t grow testicles for me(25). Don’t stop searching for a Daddy(26). Don’t stop searching for a Mean Mommy(27).

Dear Michelle Boulé,

What are different forms of drag? I have been watching you dance for 14 years. I mean, I’ve been watching you dance with-in Miguel’s work since enter the seen(28). Even now, I can remember your feet against the wooden floor on 249-55 Varet St., wearing drawstring linen pants and a faded purple or black shirt (the costume). I can remember your legendary duet with Anna Azrieli, where you put your fingers in each other’s mouths, noses, ears. There was a bowl of water and soap on the floor for each time you prepared to touch each other. I can’t remember if I understood those erotics at that time. I understood abjection.

Writing to you now, I feel both inside and outside of that time. Was Age & Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@& a swan song? I basically lived through your body among many bodies from 2001-2005, until I somehow managed to crawl out of something broken to find a way to live. The first time you suggested I try Alexander Technique it basically saved my life.

I didn’t expect to be sitting on the stage at Abrons where I remember you reading the poem in Everyone.(29) I cried and cried, and I think I embarrassed or terrified Chris Peck, who was sitting next to me because I couldn’t stop. You were saying:

This is the last piece that I make for you.
This is last piece that will
look like
feel like
sound like
smell like this(30).

And I knew who Miguel had written that for, but it felt like you were also saying that for me, for my own heartbreak. One of the things I love about your dancing, is how you surrender completely to what you are feeling in what you are doing, and how what you are doing looks like/ feels like it is the most urgent, most important, most unbearable thing.

I really can’t imagine having to wear a pink dress and dance an entire archive of work for the past 15 years non-stop while those queens banter on about money and getting laid. When is a dancer allowed to be an artist in the eyes of the public? I don’t so much separate the choreography that you learned from what you collaborated to make. I see how you invent yourself in enduring the greater vision of a work, and how I trust you every time you’re in front of me performing.

It was very hard for me to watch you in dAMNATION rOAD(31). I wasn’t prepared to see you in a fetish role – with your wrists tied to your waist, blindfolded. I remember your solo, dancing the perimeter of the set that replicated Miguel’s bedroom. A mattress, a standing fan, O THAT FAN, and Jaime and Fritz playing(32), as if coaxing you into a possessed state of disorientation. It hurt me to watch you do that every time. But I knew that you had measured where you were on stage with all of your sensory determination, and that maybe you liked getting reckless.

We have so many jokes, jokes that go way back to before we’d ever be ready to say good-bye. The endless search, the unquenchable journey of our bodies, what we give in the name of this world – of dance, of post-modern fuckery, this world we’ve made, this world we are growing, this world we have outgrown.

I didn’t get to see you perform James Dean. I watched Last Meadow(33) on DVD alone in my living room later, and I remember a postcard from you about what it was like to perform in drag for Deborah Hay. Then you performed James Dean in that gaudy pink dress in Age & Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@&, pantomiming as Miguel played and Ben and Sean kept going on their tortured script. Yes, I questioned what was real. Yes, I questioned what it all means. When an aesthetic universe has been forged, and it’s no more than a row on a budget sheet, a set of dates on a roster, a per diem that is like ash, and a shared hotel room.

I can tell you, you changed me. Your dancing made me start seeing a place for what could be real about having a body in front of people. You’ll never stop doing that and being that, even as you dance out of Asian Beauty or Muse or &:@&. I have to say good-bye to the “you” of that dance, and the “you” of the dance before, and the “you” of the dance before that. I have left out other works here, other “you’s” in other dresses – the electrified possession that is always the marker of something Miguel has made. Of course, I betray this whole letter, by ascribing it all to him this way. Asian Beauty.

I think we really became friends after you walked in on me shaving my pubic hair on the edge of the bathtub in what we called “Aspen” – because half the wall and the roof had collapsed, exposing a side of the bathroom to the weather(34). You came in to pee, and I was sitting there working my way down my thigh, and I don’t remember what we said to each other. But that all was it took.

Then in that very insane song at the end of Age & Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@& you sang, “I am more than just a pussy.” It struck me because really, I think that the pussy is all that matters. It’s all that ever did. I’m not essentializing here, everyone has a cultivated sense of pussy. I think it means much more to be the pussy in every sense of the term.

Love,
Marissa

Catharsis is a bitch. It is hard to peel back the years of one’s life spent going back and forth between Bushwick, the Lower East Side, and wherever. My thoughts travel back to another dodgy era, the one so often romanticized by cycles of freaks, Weimar Germany. Like, what Christopher Isherwood said about it in Goodbye to Berlin(35) and the musical, Cabaret(36) that came from his book. It was the perfect cocktail of continuous collapse, as cycles of the Weimar government rose to power and fell, decimating the economic landscape. Meanwhile, the Kit Kat Klub persisted in the dark underbelly of the looming 3rd Reich. All that anyone could do was sing in the face of death, to throw camp at what would become literal camps in which everyone would be thrown.

Something struck me deeply about this year’s festival in how it unabashedly celebrated the most difficult, depressing, humiliating and impossible circumstances of being an artist, by which I mean, a freak. It’s hard to be that, to perform that, and to be seen, let alone expect people to care, to curate. I’m remembering at one point in Death Asshole Rave Video, Jeremy talked about the very real possibility of dying alone. How he had no savings, wouldn’t expect to retire, and might not have any family around to speak of. After hearing this comment, I was moved to write him a letter, in which I wanted to say, “You total cunt, of course you will have people there. You will have me there.” Then I wanted to go on and lament all of his apocalyptic imagery, his lady-liberty-baba-yaga schtick. But I’m grateful for his honesty. Are we here because we are thinking about the future? I think the act of performance is a defiance of the very idea that anything exists other than the now. The purpose of it is to fill the space with only this sense of the present. Here we are.

We really don’t know what is going to happen. We can’t find a place to make work, but there are condos going up everywhere. Gay marriage is legal now if you can afford whatever that means. If you’re not retching and trembling backstage trying to suck the limpid cock of a stagehand, or a presenter(37), or you want lovers, or you think you want lovers. lovers in every port…but the truth is that most sex leaves you uninspired and most people seem too far away even when they’re inside you(38).

I think I should leave the text here. It doesn’t need me anymore. We’re blindly fucking, but I feel that it’s an act of retaliation. It’s time to forget you. Eat my jouissance.

(1) Jane Blocker in What The Body Cost: Desire, History and Performance. University of Minnesota Press, 2004
(2) Jenn Joy reading from her book, The Choreographic
(3) Jeremy Wade’s Death Asshole Rave Video
(4) Jane Blocker, Ibid
(5) Ivo Dimchev’s Fest
(6) Michelle Ellsworth’s Preparation for the Obsolence of the Y Chromosome
(7) Same
(8) Jack Ferver’s Night Light Bright Light
(9) Jeremy Wade’s Death Asshole Rave Video
(10) Karen Sherman’s One with Others
(11) Miguel Gutierrez’s Age & Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@&
(12) Simone Aughterlony, Antonija Livingstone, Hahn Rowe, Supernatural
(13) Karen Sherman’s costume of 2×4 blocks
(14) Cynthia Hopkins’ character in A Living Documentary
(15) Jack Ferver and Reid Bartelme’s dialogue:
Reid: You hate everything.
Jack: I do. I hate everything.
(16) Jack Ferver’s talk with his therapist about Freddie Herko. Jeremy Wade, “suicidal ideation = total liquidation.”
(17) Jeremy Wade
(18) Ivo Dimchev
(19) Michelle Ellsworth’s prompt, “Martha Graham said ‘everyone has a dance,’” in which she tried, without success, to get men to make a dance for the archives of the Y chromosome.
(20) Everyone
(21) Simone and Antonija
(22) Cynthia Hopkins after she used up all her money and didn’t get any grants
(23) Karen Sherman
(24) Ivo Dimchev, re: presenters, Miguel Gutierrez re:presenters
(25) Cynthia Hopkins being told this as a way to reach artistic success at a professional workshop
(26) Michelle Ellsworth, Jack Ferver, Ben Pryor (in Miguel’s Age and Beauty Part 2…)
(27) Ivo Dimchev, Jeremy Wade, Jack Ferver, Karen Sherman-?
(28) Miguel Gutierrez’s first evening-length work in 2002 at Aqui the Bushwick loft.
(29) Performance by Miguel and the Powerful People in 2007 at Abrons’ Playhouse.
(30) Excerpt from a poem by Miguel Gutierrez, published in his book, When You Rise Up: Performance Texts, 53rd State Press, NY 2009.
(31) Performance by Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People at the Kitchen in 2004.
(32) The duo, Pee in My Face with Surgery
(33) Performance by Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People at New York Live Arts in 2009.
(34) In the winter it would snow inside. This was at Aqui The Bushwick, 249-55 Varet St., which is now a luxury youth hostel.
(35) Hogarth Press, 1939.
(36) “Willkomen”
(37) Ivo Dimchev in Fest
(38) from “how to be in artist” in When You Rise Up: Performance Texts by Miguel Gutierrez, 53rd State Press, 2009.

READING is made possible with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

photo by Ian Douglas

What I Remember

What I Remember

by Ishmael Houston-Jones
Published: August 31, 2015 as a part of READING 2015

Keith Hennessy: Bear/Skin
I remember Hennessy’s rapid-fire recitation of a poetic ode to The Action Hero who “saves the white girl.” This felt like one mode of classic Hennessy that I immediately engaged with and was drawn to. This happened near the beginning of Bear/Skin and for me it energetically overpowered everything that followed. Hennessy performed some of the original Nijinsky choreography from The Rite of Spring and he dressed as a human-sized Teddy Bear. I remember that he gave everyone in the audience a thin Mylar space blanket to share with our neighbors, to cover ourselves in our seats and with our fingers we were instructed to make it rain. The resulting soundscape was peculiarly beautiful. This was to be done while Hennessy made a costume change from every day dancing Keith to a shaman dressed in queer-urban detritus. When he had finished the change, we put down our Mylar clouds and he then did a shamanistic ritual dance that didn’t transport me, (nor him I felt) very far. And then it was over. This felt like a mellower, more introspective Hennessy than I am used to being with and I missed his wilder, less restrained persona.

Florentina Holzinger & Vincent Riebeek: Kein Applaus fur Scheisse
I had a certain prejudice watching Holzinger & Riebeek. Even though I enjoyed the show I was irked that the word on the street was that they were the next “hot, new thing” in European performance circles and that Kein Applaus fur Scheisse (No Applause for Shit) is derived from Holzinger’s senior project at the SNDO (School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam); I used to teach there. For all its transgressive schtick, there is something very puerile about the work. Even as Riebeek regurgitates liters of green vomit and urinates on Holzinger and then he pulls something out of her vagina, and they sing pop songs and she does aerial dance — through all of this there is something sweetly naïve about them and their work. As though they had studied the Ann Liv Young, Karen Finley, Carolee Schneeman, Dancenoise, and Cecilia Bengolea & François Chaignaud playbooks and were giving us a kinder, gentler, audience-friendly version of real transgression.

Tere O’Connor: Sister and Undersweet
These two duets by a more established choreographer seemed to me to be two sides of one coin. I remember both pieces being marked by the demographics of the dancers performing them. Sister performed by the stunningly beautiful, mature African-Caribbean-American male and female dancer/choreographers, David Thomson and Cynthia Oliver; Undersweet by younger, vaguely androgynous, comely, Euro-American boy/men Michael Ingle and Silas Riener. I know from talks and interviews that some of O’Connor’s overarching concerns are the fustiness of modernist formal dance construction. For instance, he is opposed to unnecessary entrances and exits. He eschews the traditional theme a variation structure and the repetition of phrases during the course of a dance. Both Sister and Undersweet are illustrations of O’Connor’s theses. Though the age, gender and ethnicity Of Oliver and Thomson are not foregrounded in Sister, I am aware of these attributes as I watch. But what seems to be driving the dance is their obvious companionable intimacy and the affection felt one for the other. There is a non sequitur characteristic to both the choreography and the sound score; there are periods of relative stillness in which both dancers stare directly out onto the audience for an almost uncomfortably long time. These strategies happen in Undersweet as well. But somehow, in Undersweet I am constantly reminded of the demographics into which these two dancers fall. Their gender, though softly neutral, is definitely male. And they are quite white, young and attractive as well. This is underscored by a somewhat less than platonic (though cool) intimacy. They touch; they lie atop one another, there is a certain campiness to the ways that music and movement are combined. There is a dispassionate eroticism lurking within the formal concerns here. I fantasize these two works being performed on the same program, perhaps simultaneously on stage, a la Yvonne Meier’s Pomme frites.

Simone Aughterony, Antonija Livingstone, & Hahn Rowe: Supernatural
Whenever someone asked what were my favorite pieces at American Realness this year, Supernatural was on that list. But asked to describe what happened all I can remember is that the stage of the Abrons Playhouse was strewn with real tree stumps; the two women, Aughterony and Livingstone, were dressed in pants and flannel shirts and carried real axes; they occasionally split logs; Rowe sat off to one side playing electric violin and other electronic instruments; the women got naked. I know I loved Supernatural, but this is all that I can I remember.

luciana achugar: OTRO TEATRO: The Pleasure Project
Immediately after I experienced The Pleasure Project I walked right up to luciana achugar and in that tactless way that I have I said to her, “You are either a genius or a fool.” She probably possesses qualities of both in equal measure. As performance, this performance was definitely anti-performance. The audience was gathered on the Playhouse stage with the curtains drawn. There were no seats. Numerous bottles of bourbon were being passed around, (flu germs be damned.) There was quite a bit of audience milling about waiting for “something” to happen, not realizing that that was what was happening. Gradually there was awareness that some of “us” were writhing kind of masturbatorially against the walls. Then the wall humpers began to vocalize with moans and grunts. The performers were all around us, in our midst. I felt destabilized. Then all the lights went out. A few people were seen heading for the exit. The air felt charged. Sometimes a groaning body would begin to mack right on you. Was that a performer or a fellow audience member getting into the spirit of pleasure? Was this Achugar’s intention? Turning the tables on the viewer vs viewed dynamic? As my eyes adjusted I could see her young son, (five or six) playing along. At some point, (I seemed to lose all sense of time,) the curtains began to be slowly parted. We could see the seats in the Playhouse bathed in an intense red light. Several of the writhers had begun taking off clothes. Some were completely nude. Some went into the theater and ran up and down the aisles or sat in the velvet chairs. I, along with some other audience members, also sat in the theater seats, looking up at the stage as those remaining onstage looked out at us. Watching the audience watch the performance. But who was performing and for whom? The “piece” never actually ended. My friend Jonathan Walker remarked that had this been the 1970s there would have been music and people would have been having sex. I found achugar with most of her clothes off. I gave my genius/fool comment to her then left the theater feeling totally transformed in a way that few of the other shows had made me feel.

READING is made possible with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

photo by Ian Douglas

Putting It Together

Putting It Together

By Ellen Chenoweth
Published: August 31, 2015 as a part of READING 2015

I’m tired of talking about money all the time. I want to see a thousand think pieces about how glorious it feels to dance, and a thousand long reads about how delicious and amazing it is to be a performing artist in America, as we buck capitalist expectations of productivity and rationality. I want us to gloriously proclaim our non-utilitarian nature, shouting it from rooftops everywhere. I want us to bask in our place as cultural guardians, high priests and priestesses of the nation’s soul.

Unfortunately, we are surrounded by inequities and injustices and some of us still don’t have health care, so we have to keep talking about the fucking all-mighty dollar. We keep talking about it, and advocating for artists to get paid, and writing think pieces about the difficulty of making a living, and making work about the trials and tribulations of being a working artist, turning the hustle into a dance. Three performances at American Realness 2015 took a look at some of the indignities and perils of trying to survive as an artist in the current moment: Cynthia Hopkins’ A Living Documentary, Miguel Gutierrez’ Age & Beauty Part 2, and Ivo Dimchev’s Fest.

“What if the art part is all you’re good at? I’m good at making weird songs and performing them. So basically I’m like I Love Lucy, she sucks at everything! I’m like Lucy without Ricky Ricardo!” Fortunately for those of us nestled into the Underground Theater at Abrons, Cynthia Hopkins is indeed good at the art part. In A Living Documentary, she compellingly describes her failings in other areas, the panic attacks caused by logging in to facebook, the production budgets prone to bloat, the struggles with liability insurance.

Swinging the pendulum the other way from some tech-heavy productions in her past, A Living Documentary is enchantingly low-tech. The fact that she is able to weave a spell with an acoustic guitar, a cassette player providing taped accompaniment, and her voice, both speaking and singing, might provoke a renewal of faith in the power of the theater, if you were in need of such a thing. Costume changes happen on the stage as Hopkins channels characters ranging from a wizened playwright advising the women in his workshop to marry rich, to a Creative Capital professional development guru exhorting her participants to grow some spiritual testicles.

Just as I was starting to break out in anxiety hives listening to Hopkins enumerate some of the non-artistic challenges in her life (that bugaboo of liability insurance again, the weight of responsibility that comes when you provide employment for friends, the issue of storage for sets and costumes from productions past), she breaks in with a melodic PSA of self-awareness, “If this sounds like a stress-inducing litany of real life that you’re trying to escape, don’t worry, there’s a story!” As another person fleeing from the wreckage of the 501c3 set-up, I laughed in recognition as Hopkins complained that the structure “is like an albatross around my neck—it’s like a family of fifty albatrosses and I’m gasping for air.”

But rather than letting the bastard albatrosses get her down (or more accurately, in addition to often feeling down), Hopkins has managed to make a work which deftly navigates around the dangers of being simply depressing, whiny or narcissistic. Through focusing on her own story, Hopkins indicts the systems and structures around her, from presenters who back out of agreements, to interim grant reports that are longer than the initial application, to the expectation that artists be salesmen and PR shills in addition to making good work. There are no saints or martyrs in this telling, as Hopkins provides shades of nuance and complexity to her character.

The performer recounts an episode in which she inherited a large windfall, $200,000, from her disagreeable grandfather. She describes her complicated feelings about the money and the man (an engineer for the Manhattan Project). She traces the inexorable path that led to her decision to make a show with the money, and how that show eventually absorbed the entire windfall, and then some. I internally gasp at the loss of all that money, while also thinking, ‘damn that show sounds good.’

In one section towards the end, Hopkins sings about her midlife crisis, with lyrics like “I don’t want to do this no more…. I never meant to become what I am,” questioning, “Should I keep doing this thing with my life?” There’s no easy answer, of course, but it makes your heart hurt. Maybe A Living Documentary should be required viewing for young makers, providing artist-to-artist real talk.

We all walk out of the theater in a respectful hush. Somehow I feel like I’ve gotten all worked up and then quieted down again. There’s a simmer of anger and frustration at the plight of artists in this country, mixed with empathy and awe for Hopkins herself, but there’s some fuck-yeah-defiance in there as well. Hopkins told the audience that A Living Documentary represents “freedom from the tyranny of fundraising and big sets”; witnessing it felt like getting a jolt of vicarious freedom.

Age & Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@&.

I am in the searing pink and white landscape at the Whitney, where I saw Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/ back in April 2014. It is still in my bones. Mickey Mahar like a baby lamb, gangly limbs still being discovered. Miguel Gutierrez emitting a force field of crackling energy. I’m looking for connections between that world and this more austere one.

Part 2 puts me in front of the sound board on the stage at the Abrons Playhouse, seated next to a new acquaintance, Alec White. Sitting next to another administrator manager type adds a layer of richness to the viewing. I can sense that we’re both cheering for manager/curator extraordinaire Ben Pryor, glad that he is singing and dancing on stage, in addition to working on his laptop.

I am transported back to 2009, watching a work-in-progress performance of Gutierrez’ Last Meadow at Texas Woman’s University during a Powerful People residency. As part of Age & Beauty Part 2, Michelle Boule is performing snippets of previous performances and roles, and seeing her James Dean takes me back.

Cut to a scene at a dance company that I worked at for several years: the company artists have invited the administrators to join them in the studio for a showing and some movement exercises. They are trying to include us, to make us feel a part of the artistic work, but I feel exasperated and overextended. Do they want me to get this grant report out so we can get paid, or do they want me to play around in the studio with them? Of course the answer is always both, that both spheres are important. But the reality is that it’s just not always possible to manage both.

I am flashed-back and flashed-over.

The tension between the artistic and the administrative is dramatized in Age and Beauty Part 2. Boule represents the Art, pieces of old repertoire hovering around the edges of the stage, or forcefully inserting herself in the middle, a wild animal force underneath the table where Pryor and Gutierrez calmly continue working out the Business of logistics and money.

On the one side is power, passion, strange and terrible beauty—not to mention the decades of work embedded in Boule’s movement phrases. She is mute but insistent; at the same time I notice it’s oddly easy for my eyes to drift away from her. Stripped of their context, these fragments seem lonely.

On the other side, the discussion is terribly familiar and mundane. We all have these boring scheduling conversations that Pryor and Gutierrez enact for us; our work, more than most, depends on us being in the same space at the same time together. We’re all trying to figure out the best video samples to submit for MAP. We’re all sending out emails and waiting for replies, spending more time than we want to facing these soulless screens. When he’s not talking with Gutierrez, much of the time Pryor is doing just that.

In Part 1, there was an unmistakable throbbing sadness, and this has continued into Part 2. Gutierrez’s text is projected onto screens, so I both read and hear his distress: “I want to stop making work. I make pieces others like or don’t. Feeling like a ghost in my own life. I never want to stop making work. … I want things to be easier at this stage in my life.” I feel torn. I don’t want Gutierrez to stop making work. I want him to make work forever. The losses if he were to stop making work seem …incalculable. But I want things to be easier too, for Gutierrez, and for Pryor. I want all of us to be relaxed and happy, surrounded by happy, stable relationships, having real, healthy budgets for our brilliant projects…. But maybe here too the reality is that both are just not possible.

Pryor sings that “the history of arts administration is an invisible history,” and it rings painfully true. Claudia La Rocco has come at this from a slightly different angle, but identifies one of the roots of the problem in a rehearsal diary from the fall of 2013, published in the Brooklyn Rail: “I think a lot about this idea of artists taking up all the oxygen in the room, and who gets to be an artist, and when. The Artists with a capital A in the dance field are both glorified and infantilized and the people around them are seen as less than full people; they are not meant to exist fully so that the Artists get that space. Davison [Scandrett] isn’t meant to be fully seen; only to light the stars.” Pryor insists, “I have a voice. I’m a muse too. I’m not invisible.”

Hopkins closes A Living Documentary with her desire “to be seen and heard,” the same message that Boule, Pryor and Gutierrez argue for in different ways through Age & Beauty Part 2. Artist or administrator, no one wants to be invisible.

Ivo Dimchev doesn’t so much flip the scripts as he chops them up, throws them into the air, and then loosely stitches the pieces together after they land. He has said that was created out of the predictability of his professional communications, and his resulting boredom. The show he makes in response is gleefully never boring. The Bulgarian performance artist highlights some of the ways in which artists are required to kiss ass.

In the first scene of Fest, Dimchev is negotiating with a Danish festival curator who wants to present his work at her Copenhagen festival. Usually in these situations, the presenter has the majority of the power, and the artist is just trying to break even and show their work. But Dimchev subverts this and has the artist, played by himself, base his fee on the number of fingers the curator allows him to insert in her vagina.

The conversation begins not-so-strangely, with the curator telling Dimchev “I’ve seen your work and I really appreciate it,” but from there things quickly diverge from the usual negotiation. He works up to this ask by first inquiring if he can see her vagina, then smell it, then taste it, then insert his fingers. I am squirming and laughing and aware of exactly how closely the theater seats are squished together, as it feels like I’m very close and intimate with my neighbors in this audience as we listen to the sounds of a vagina being licked.

The curator draws the line at four fingers being too much to ask, and Dimchev replies then the price for presenting his work is 4000 euro, “plus travel and accommodation.” The fact that this piece is being shown during the time of APAP to an audience full of artists and presenters adds to the delicious subversion.

The dialogue is delivered in a forced-neutral, robotic tone. Everyone on stage is so tense while they pretend at neutrality, working so hard to seem like everything is normal. Later, all characters will start shaking and jiggling while maintaining the neutral tone, adding to the impression that the emotions are just barely contained.

Unlike in the real world, the curator discusses her decision-making rationale explicitly, “Ivo is a radical artist, will I be seen as a radical programmer or a freak?” Some of the prestige of the artist will rub off on her by proximity. I’m hungry for this discussion from presenters: if not their emotional vulnerabilities, I would at least like to hear about why the work they choose speaks to them, or why they think it will speak to their audiences. Anything beyond the slick marketing material as empty as it is de rigueur.

When Dimchev arrives at the festival, he must jump through all kinds of hoops in order to keep the technical director happy and on the job. When he finally gets to present his work, we get only the broad outlines, but we do learn that Kenny Rogers is involved. A crazy woman comes up from the audience in this show-within-a-show and kills the artist, so he becomes a sort of zombie. “I hope he can still do the after-talk,” the curator murmurs.

He does indeed manage to muster the strength to do a post-performance discussion. So the artist is dying in his chair, with his tongue lolling out, but still must endure the local critic telling him that she found the work “superficial.” Nonetheless, the critic asks the artist for some sperm, which he obligingly produces, and then she tries to inseminate herself. She doesn’t want to be in a relationship with Dimchev, she just wants his raw material. She herself is not an artist, but “just want[s] to be a part of it.”

The characters are impersonal and dispassionate, highlighting the farce: we all pretend that these discussions aren’t about personality, about desire and love and sex and reputations and money. Dimchev pulls the blanket down, exposing some of the uncomfortable undercurrents hind the bland façade.

After performing as required for the curator, the production crew, and the critic, and doing his show, Dimchev staggers off, minus some sperm and some dignity, presumably to die alone. It is death by a thousand cuts.

The three artists range from late-30s to mid-40s, and each has a substantial body of work and has won a number of awards and accolades. By many measures, they are the successful ones. To see them dispirited and questioning is to know that there is a legion of artists behind them who gave it up and dropped out. These reports from the toughest canaries in the coal mine look at the financial, spiritual, emotional relationships in the ecosystem and call us towards keener vision.

READING is made possible with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

photo by Ian Douglas