1. Biennial founder RoseLee Goldberg on Performa Performa Performa:
“I think what Performa did was suddenly say, let’s dream up another kind of artist performance, and let’s give visual artists who maybe have never made this kind of work before a chance to create something extraordinary that is the equivalent of beautiful work that we are seeing in galleries and museums, and not backwards-looking material that seems to be getting further and further in the corner in a way and being very much about ‘70s and ‘80s and so on.”
Discuss.
2. Emily Johnson’s performance installation “The Thank-you Bar” at New York Live Arts through Saturday.
This is some of what I wrote in 2010, when I was a guest blogger for Portland Monthly Magazine during PICA’s tba festival:
“You know that thing little kids do sometimes when a new person comes into their home, and they want to please and impress the guest so they rush around, showing off their things and themselves?
That daffy, manic energy coursed through”The Thank-you Bar,” an uneven but compelling dance-theater piece by Emily Johnson, featuring a gorgeous live score by James Everest and Joel Pickard … gradually the shadings under Johnson’s need to please darkened, as it became clear that this work is also about meeting (and destabilizing) expectations on another, more volatile level. Johnson, who grew up in Alaska and is of Yup’ik descent, tells the story of being ethnically outed by a friend in grammar school, and then denying it to her frightened and maybe hostile classmates “to save my own skin.”
These tangled identity politics somehow don’t subsume this surprising work, which hops between moods and modes of storytelling. The (very small) audience first sits in a semicircle, watching Everest and Pickard build a looped score layer by layer. It’s a wonderfully gentle beginning, setting the tone for all sorts of show and tells, communicated through words, music and movement (she is a sharp and surprising dancer, a pleasure to watch). At one point Johnson wheels out a tiny makeshift igloo built of brick-shaped paper lanterns, which she hands out to audience members; we hold them as if holding her imagination in our laps. Later she tells a story of the blackfish, spinning a metaphor of survival and cultural endurance….”
3. “Persona.” Yes, the Bergman film. I watched it again last night to prepare for the Ming Wong Performa commission, which I’ll be seeing tomorrow. “Persona” as source material …. I dunno, Ming Wong …that’s setting the bar awfully high, isn’t it? Especially if the best title you can come up with is “Performa Persona.” (Really.)
4. Holcombe Waller at Joe’s Pub, Tuesday at 9:30 p.m. I met Holcombe in September when I was (again) out in Portland, covering the latest tba festival. He’s an interesting artist – a singer-songwriter and performance artist who moves through the waters swirling around music, theater, dance and performance.
Check out his “Hardliners” – it’s a non-controversial music video! You might recognize some of the, er, backup dancers…
5. Why doesn’t the mainstream arts media cover stand-up? The NY Times’ Jason Zinoman bucks the trend. Hmmm. Maybe the P Club should head to a comedy club one of these months.