Production still from Rabih Mroué's "Looking for a Missing Employee" (Photo by Ves Pitts)

Over the weekend, acclaimed and provocative Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué launched his first North American tour, giving the United States premiere of Looking for a Missing Employee at the Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of Performance Space 122‘s annual COIL festival. Looking for a Missing Employee was originally produced for the 2003 Home Works Forum in Beirut, and is an investigation into the disappearance of the government employee Raafat Suleiman, and the political factors that shadowed his grisly end.

Production still from Rabih Mroué's "Looking for a Missing Employee" (Photo by Ves Pitts)

The performance opens with Mroué entering from back stage and turning on a projector. This is the only time the artist is physically on stage. He then relocates to the last row of the theater among the audience, one camera focusing on his face and projecting him magnified above an empty chair at a desk in the center of the stage, another trained on a table where his hands flip through notebooks containing newspaper clippings he collected on the missing employee. From this beginning, a sense of distance between the audience and the artist is set. We are looking into the eyes of a video and he, in turn, cannot see our faces.

As Mroué states, he’s not setting out to find “the truth or untruth,” “the criminals or victims.” Instead, he says:

“Between the truth and the lie there is a hair, and I’m trying to cut this hair.”

Contradictions in news and government sources are tallied on a whiteboard that is projected on a third screen, a graph showing the wildly fluctuating amounts of money that claim to have gone missing with the employee, and the adjectives and titles attached to his name are listed (he is alternately a “Thief” and a “Dedicated Husband”).

As Mroué says at the beginning, Lebanon is a small country, a country where no one should be able to disappear. However, “there will always be holes a person can disappear into,” and thousands of people went missing during the civil war in Lebanon, and continue to go missing in times of precarious peace.

Production still from Rabih Mroué's "Looking for a Missing Employee" (Photo by Ves Pitts)

Mroué obsessively collected newspaper clippings of the disappeared in one of his notebooks, and in doing so came across the story of Raafat Suleiman, an employee of the Ministry of Finance who disappeared on September 25, 1996. The subsequent notebooks on Suleiman are narrated and translated by Mroué in Looking for a Missing Employee, kept captivating as much by his charm (there was more laughing in the audience than spinal chills) as the unsettling subject matter. But the comic elements are sugar pills for the reality of the employee’s brutal fate, making the painful story a prolonged, easy swallow, so we don’t know what we’ve really absorbed until after the performance, when the details haunt: the body of the murdered employee cut up and dissolved in acid, the corruption of the government even after the president declares a “war on corruption,” the fact that even in a small place where “everyone knows everyone,” you can vanish.

Production still from Rabih Mroué's "Looking for a Missing Employee" (Photo by Ves Pitts)

The artist began his performance art in 1990, the year that Lebanon’s 15-year civil war ended, working since then with a small, but dedicated, group of Beirut artists who have used the country’s recent political history as a catalyst. His politically kindled work has faced censorship from the Lebanese government, and his 2007 piece about the civil war, How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke, was banned by the Lebanese Interior Ministry. The play is narrated from the perspective of four fighters in four different militias from the 15-year civil war.

In 2008, he confronted the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War in Je Veux Voir, a film that co-starred French actress Catherine Deneuve, and he continues work out of Beirut as an actor, visual artist, director and writer, using his unique form of documentary theater to examine elements of the volatile political and economic climate of Lebanon.

Production still from Rabih Mroué's "Looking for a Missing Employee" (Courtesy of the artist)

Looking for a Missing Employee ends with the artist himself disappearing, his video image continuing to watch us from the stage. Even under the surveillance of an audience, in a small theater, someone can vanish. We are left only with a copy of the real person, and although Mroué says to never trust a photocopy, our projected amateur detective is our only source. We are not unlike the Lebanese people under their own government: the subjective editing of the news sources is all we have.

Mroué performed Looking for a Missing Employee January 6 to 8 at the COIL festival, and he will be taking the performance to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (January 12-14), On the Boards in Seattle (January 19-21), the PuSH International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver (January 26-28) and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (February 2).

PS122′s COIL festival continues with performances through January.

Images from John Fleck's "Mad Women" (via the La MaMa website)

So there I stood, sharing a cigarette with my friends on the curb outside of La MaMa. We were patiently waiting for the house to open for former NEA 4 defendant John Fleck’s show, “Mad Women,” a dizzying one-man mash-up of the performance artist’s life with the final year of the legendary Judy Garland, when one of the producers approached me and asked, “Do you want to be in the show?”

Now, I am not a performance artist (at least not yet), and this will not be some self-aggrandizing memoir piece about my foray into theater. It’s just that my proclivity for wearing drainpipe jeans caught the attention of the producer, since the show needs a skinny-legged boy to be an extra on stage to hold mirrors, martini glasses and picture frames for the fabulous Fleck. “Men in tight pants,” apparently was a wink-wink, nudge-nudge way of saying “homosexual” in the late 1960s, when Judy Garland was beginning to burn out with the intensity of a supernova, a period of her life that Fleck juxtaposes with his own struggles of personal and professional drama, quasi-drug addiction and being, in his words, a “freak and fag.”

In the glorious drag tradition of lip-syncing, Fleck passionately mouths grainy, crackling tracks of Garland’s deep, slurring speech extracted from her show at Coconut Grove in 1968, proving himself to be a true Friend of Dorothy. Navigating the tragic life of a shining star and gay icon brought the complexities of the melancholic reality and the sparkling illusion all legends embody. Simultaneously, he dug deep into his own personal trauma and history, from his slightly homophobic, alcoholic father to his Ambien addiction and his heart-wrenching relationship to his mother and her inevitable Alzheimer’s-induced demise. Perhaps most amusing and revealing, however, was his confession that he “periodically checks [his] IMDb page, to prove [he] still exists.”

After witnessing Fleck straddle between Judy, himself, and the persona he’s created, he literally holds a mirror to the audience, forcing us then to examine the personalities we have constructed for ourselves, displaying the fragility and mutability of identity in our society.

I bowed with John Fleck in a surreal curtain call, kicking like a Rockette, and with a final bow (and a final spank) “Mad Women” concluded, much to my dismay, for the moment I saw him I fell.

John Fleck’s Mad Women continues at La MaMa through December 11, 2011.

Shen Wei Dance Arts performing "Folding" this past week at the Park Avenue Armory (all photos by Stephanie Berger, Courtesy of the Park Avenue Armory)

I spent part of the third section of Shen Wei’s modern dance showing at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday watching a shoeless young woman (a member of the audience who was, like me, allowed to wander along the grid of 60 dancer-inhabited squares of performance space), stare slack-jawed and wide-eyed at the topless performers smeared with paint leaping and spinning and writhing before her. Her proximity to them was probably jarring enough, but add to that experience the intimidating vastness of the Armory’s coliseum-sized hangar with booming surround sound and a reverberating floor, and it’s easy to see why someone might drop all pretense of understanding and question what’s expected of them.

The creator of the piece, Shen Wei, has quickly become one of those choreographers once prized in smaller circles for his incredible skills and masterfully crafted shows who is now fortunate enough to have people seek out his work simply because he is famous. That is, he’s hit the mainstream. He’d already won a Guggenheim Fellowship before winning the MacArthur in 2007, and recently helped produce some of that scary-amazing (and for some, simply scary) choreography that electrified the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He’s even created his own movement technique, which he calls Natural Body Development, and which involves a great deal of circles — twists and rotations and phrases that carry back around to their beginnings.

The three pieces being performed at the Park Avenue Armory show are so definitively different from each other that it feels best to just dive right in and tackle them separately.

Dancers in perfect form in Shen Wei's work "Right of Spring" at the Park Avenue Armory

Rite of Spring, the first piece, might have been better performed by a smaller, less well-known company than Shen Wei Dance Arts, and in a much smaller space. It is ambitious up to a point and then suddenly plateaus, which with a smaller company might be forgivable. The vocabulary feels restricted, but not consciously so, in the way poetic meter might, serving as a creative restriction that opens the imagination to expansive possibilities.

Rather, the movement is form-fitted to the music, and seems at times unconcerned with eliciting any emotion or reaction from the audience; it doesn’t recontextualize the dancers’ bodies in any meaningful way or hiccup my heartbeat with flurries of the unexpected. Instead it shares with the space’s jagged, marbleized floor design a formality of purpose: the purpose of being seen once and forgotten. Stravinsky’s uninhibited surging score (via pianist Fazil Say) falls away to background music in places, a roar reduced to ambient golf clap, stunted by the ineffectively nourished rhizomes and roots of the dancers making their way up through the piece’s underbelly. In the end, Stravinsky’s celebration of the fierce terror and unscripted passion of life as it’s dragged into being felt replaced by a modern, calculated, quick hydroponic birth under fluorescents.

Which is an odd reaction for me to have, given that I first saw this particular work performed in 2003 for the Lincoln Center Festival and loved it. Shen Wei is known to revamp his old works, fine-tuning and even recreating whole sections. If this is the case, then over-craftsmanship might be to blame, and a viewer only needs to wait until the next installment to see a better presentation.

Folding, the second piece, will irk those who view modern dance as a grounded form of ballet. But for those who consider the simplest gesture worthy of exploration as a dance, and who relish in costume design and the slow progression of what feels like figures in friezes breaking free from the confines of their molds, much like Michelangelo’s “slaves,” Folding is an enthralling, gorgeous sci-fi spectacle. The entire event carries a regal air, as if commissioned by Star Wars Queen Amidala.

Shen Wei's work "Folding" (pictured here at the Park Avenue Armory) was first performed in New York in 2002

White-chested, white-armed, white-faced, with elongated hair wraps (headdresses? are their heads elongated?), the first dancers emerge from darkness to rush stiff-backed along a murky blue-green floor, trailing long skirts whose colors split them into two groups: red and black. The Reds are flitting, twirling, independent creatures that often act in congress, while the Blacks are sealed together in pairs by cloth (like creepy, tragically conjoined Jake and Dinos Chapman creations) and spend much of their time engaging in excruciatingly slow acts of coitus and even slower funereal marches, dragging their lifeless twinned lovers in tow.

The Reds have a king, it seems, and the Blacks a queen (who eventually appears alone). There is a wonderful shift in the dynamic later, when the Reds find unity in what ironically appears to be a group disavowal of one of their own (Shen Wei’s own kingly character, no less), while the paired Blacks seem to locate a more enlightened individuality in the struggle of their pairings. Also, this marks the first performance in which I’ve seen a full-body Spandex suit incorporated, whose wearer arrives as a live-action “character” in what I assume is a mobilized bas-relief, appearing in the background like some glitch in the software of this binomial world. Perhaps this faceless character is the synthesis of Red and Black, or the worshiper’s dream of a Supreme Being, two parts folded into a whole. Perhaps the character is just a minor one, but because it stands out, it has all the cult-star quality of a Boba Fett, and stayed with me into the second intermission.

The final piece, Undivided Divided, received its world premier at the Armory last week. The dance is an exercise, first and foremost, in close-quarters voyeurism. Secondary is its focus on various expressions of sexuality — awakenings, confines of repression, freedoms and prejudices and patterns and failures. I roamed alongside the 60 individual tiles on a grid with everybody else and my first thought (along with everybody else) was My god, dancers have the most unreal, beautifully sculpted bodies on the planet. I will never have sex again until I can look like that or be with someone who looks like that.

I’ve seen maybe fifty dances featuring nudity, and nearly every time there’s a push toward formal desensitizing or desexualization that occurs, sometimes prompted by the choreographer or dancer, but mostly by myself, in order that I may see past the nudity and engage with the performance with more sensitivity on different levels. This usually takes roughly twenty seconds, before the expressiveness of the dance and the abstraction that accompanies kinesis desexualizes the bodies to some extent — not a degendering process, I would argue, but something closer to temporary collective alienation. Occasionally, however, I find myself confronted by a modern dance performance that burlesques itself, that invites its audience to maintain a sexual awareness, albeit from an agreed upon distance. This happens in Undivided Divided.

A dancer trapped in a plexi-glass cell in Shen Wei's newest work, "Undivided Divided"

The dancers start off topless on flat square panels, wearing only the slightest thin nude material for bottoms. As the music develops, the dancers either leave their squares or search out new spatial areas within their squares. Some squares contain large dollops of paint: black, white, pink. Some contain Plexiglas structures the dancers climb up or climb inside. In one instance, a dancer, white paint smeared over legs and torso, slowly and deliberately, with caution even, enters a new square filled with fake human hair. Before long the dancer is squirming about, hair clinging to her in bunches, the strange erotic act effectively simulating puberty.

Another square nearby reveals a meshwork of yellow cords in which a dancer becomes entangled; whether he wishes to escape or to further entangle himself is left up to the imagination. The same goes for the woman trapped in her Plexiglas cell in the far corner — is this containment a psychological act of her own doing? Walking between these episodes, members of the audience linger and watch, or move on. I could understand how a viewer might locate in this experience a theory of sex-worker exploitation operating beneath it all. This very well might be the case, though if so, it’s readily undermined by how the piece began, with the dancers sticking out their tongues, which could either be read as “I see you watching me and here’s how much I care,” or as the rebellious strawberries of a young innocent.

In either case, along with each dancer a nuanced sexual history unfolds, though as the minutes pass, aspects of the spectacle begin outperforming any lasting cultural resonance the dance might seek to achieve. The movements, choreographed or improvised, become rushed and whimsical, and not always interestingly so. The work relies more and more heavily on its fleshiness and flashiness than any developing purposefulness or the powerful vibe of the ineffable. It’s pretty hot stuff, to be sure, and with Shen Wei walking around with his audience, it feels clear that this piece is meant more as a celebration than an accusation.

With any artistic production, you want more than the delivery of the goods you ordered. What I got was worth the price of admission, absolutely, but anyone who’s experienced the at-times subtle, at-times visually drunk magic of Shen Wei’s Re- (I, II, III) might walk away with the sense that this was a filler show between larger and more ambitious projects. The Park Avenue Armory is a perfect venue for these pieces in terms of pure space needed for their production; unfortunately, the scope of the project overall does not fulfill what the space seems to invite.

As for the dancers — they are incredible, and deserving of high praise. There isn’t a straggler in the lot. I tend to focus more on the choreography of a piece rather than specific dancers in large-scale productions, though a few individuals do jump out. From the Lead dancers my favorite performers are Evan Copeland (power), Sara Procopio (elasticity) and Joan Wadopian (power + shaved head + elasticity = plasticity) in the first piece; Andrew Cowan (sheer slowmo strength) in the second; and every primary and secondary dancer in the third, where keeping your cool with two-hundred-plus ogling onlookers up in your grill must be a bit nerve-racking.

As an aside, for those planning to attend future performances, you might want to hide some snacks in your purse. There are two 20 to 30 minute intermissions for stage and costume changes, which puts this production at around two and a half hours.

Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Park Avenue Armory (643 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) opened November 29 and continued until December 4, 2011. All the performances were sold out.

MGMT playing under Maurizio Cattelan's installation at the Guggenheim at the 2011 Guggenheim International Gala Thursday night (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

Hyperallergic rocks it in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, so naturally we felt compelled to review MGMT’s performance at the Guggenheim last night. The band, a staple of any Williamsburg playlist, performed in the rotunda of the museum as part of the 2011 Guggenheim International Gala to celebrate Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s blockbuster exhibition, All. The night was a glossy affair with art world insiders and rich board members and their entourages shmoozing and boozing under Cattelan’s epic sculpture web. As soon as I got to the party I had one question: where are all the hipsters at?

The lone hipster hiding in the back at the Guggenheim gala

A bit of an outsider myself, I tracked down the people who looked like they didn’t exactly fit in and asked what brought them to the event. Designer Andrea Diodati, dressed from head to toe in one of her designs, got a ticket for free and was excited about the pairing of Cattelan’s work with MGMT. “They both have a similar kinetic energy and youthful rebellion about them,” she said.

Bruce Helander, artist and editor-in-chief of the Art Economist (which he brought a copy of to the party) was not exactly an outsider, but his eccentric outfit of day glow camouflage pants and a day glow orange bowler made him stand out. What did he think of the Cattelan? “Its the most inventive installation in the history of the Guggenheim,” he opined.

Before I gave up hope of spotting any true BK hipsters, I saw flannel out of the corner of my eye and my heart stopped. Next to the gallerinas texting and gossiping, was the lone hipster standing awkwardly in the corner. “What is this thing?” he said, pointing to the Cattelan. “There’s like a horse,” he added.

A view of the gala with the lights on and Cattelans handing overhead.

I jumped in to explain the work. When I asked him what he thought about MGMT playing at the Guggenheim he answered. “I’m sure half these people don’t even know who MGMT are,” he said. He was probably right.

The crowds at the gala made it difficult to take in all of Cattelan's overwhelming installation

This was also my first time seeing All, and after hearing so many people gush about it, I was pretty damn excited. But the large crowds on the Guggenheim’s winding ramps made it really hard to see the work, which is already placed at a good distance from the viewer. Surrounded by models and other fashonistas teetering down the ramps in their nine-inch pumps, I wasn’t sure if this was the best way to experience All. Then MGMT started and everything changed.

Neon lights during MGMT's set made Cattelan's work even trippier

As the band took to the stage, neon beams appeared all along the outer walls of the ramps, turning the cavernous heart of the Guggenheim into a fantastic light show. The Cattelan suddenly looked like a scene from a bad acid trip (or maybe an awesome one). Standing right beneath Cattelan’s Picasso sculpture with its creepy engorged head, I was completely transfixed by the flashing blue, green and pink lights ricocheting off the work. The light show was a perfect match for Cattelan’s bad boy installation that turns the pristine Guggenheim into something carnivalesque.

A view of "All" from above during the light show

MGMT’s trippy electronica beats also fit right into the equation, although a lot of the crowd wasn’t feeling it. I overheard one (probably Manhattanite) guy complain, “Give me something with a melody, play songs!”

The set was MGMT’s debut of totally new tracks that they created specifically for the event and were inspired by the Cattelan installation. While at times the songs were a bit too obvious (one piece with electronic organ sounds was clearly meant for Cattelan’s infamous sculpture of John Paul II killed by a meteorite), other tracks had catchy beats and little to no vocals so that one song smoothly blended into the next.

The light show was what really made the performance. Yet it seemed as I looked around and saw people talking amongst themselves and standing still during the show, that this just wasn’t the right crowd to really get into it. The event was missing some key elements: dancing, maybe some drugs and actually more hipsters. Taken out of the stiff setting of a gala, MGMT’s unique collaboration with Cattelan would have reached a whole other level.

Maurizio Cattelan’s All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) continues until January 22, 2012.

MGMT’s second Guggenheim concert will take place tonight at the famed Fifth Avenue building.

*    *    *

Homepage image source: here but essentially everywhere on the web, though the original with attribution to the Mariam Goodman Gallery is on the New Museum’s After Nature exhibition page.

Puppet Shackleton and his crew in 69°S. (all photos by Pavel Antonov, courtesy of BAM)

The alien remoteness of Antarctica has probably never been better depicted on stage than in 69°S., a marionette theatre experience presented at the BAM 2011 Next Wave Festival by performance ensemble Phantom Limb. I write “experience” because I’m not really sure what else to call this. It was an ambitious staging of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Endurance Expedition, where the explorer’s ship was crushed by ice and it took over two years for him and his crew to get back home safely. (Unfortunately, even with that somewhat happy ending, most of them went on to die in World War I, which had escalated while they were stranded on the ice.) Modern dance, video projections, pouding music both live and recorded and a stark set all eerily accompanied the six marionettes acting out the story, their frozen white faces already displaying bitter misery long before their puppet ship collapsed and slid away off stage.

Puppeteers and puppets in the staged Antarctica

69°S. is named for the latitude where Shackleton’s ship was stranded, and it is also the isolated location where the puppets first emerge on the stage, their limbs controlled by looming performers on stilts in flowing, beekeeper-like costumes, their faces totally hidden. Unlike when I saw War Horse, another puppet driven production playing in New York, I never forgot that these people were pulling the strings, never totally bought into these marionettes as breathing little beings. But it worked for 69°S., making it feel like the explorers were already dead, and just the ghosts of their humanity hovering above kept them moving across the tundra.

Unsettling dance of death

Above all,  69°S. was profoundly creepy. The performance was bookended by the unearthly presence of a skeleton animated by the touch of its human carrier (think Marina Abramović’s “Nude with Skeleton”). Phantom Limb, co-founded by Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff, definitely has the edge on theatre of the most disquieting kind, with their previous productions The Fortune Teller (2006) and Dear Mme. (2007) also using puppets to haunting effect. For 69°S., the puppeteers doubled as writhing dancers and the musicians of Sanko’s band Skeleton Key scraped metal and added to a brutal score recorded by the Kronos Quartet, shaking BAM’s Harvey Theater as ominously as the wind at the end of the earth from their perches in the box seats. (Field recordings taken by Sanko and Grindstaff during an actual journey to Antarctica add to the heavy score.) There seems to be a certain 19th century-minded creepiness fueling dark corners of contemporary art these days, with Phantom Limb’s productions being joined by Chong Gon Byun‘s recent curiosity cabinet-type show at the Invisible Dog, the phantasmagoric Night Scented Stock at Marianne Boesky Gallery and just about everything presented at the Observatory in Gowanus.

Puppets rowing to Elephant Island

Shackleton was a major figure in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, and after losing the race to the South Pole to Norwegian Roald Amundsen, he decided he would one-up that by attempting to travel all the way across Antarctica. The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition departed England on August 1, 1941, just two days before the start of World War I, and after crossing the ocean became trapped in ice on February 24, 1915, just a day of sailing away from the main continent.

The ship, called the Endurance, was eventually crushed by the ice and sank, leaving the men with only lifeboats, which they used to row to the remote Elephant Island, reaching it on April 16, 1915. With no rescue in sight, Shackleton set out for a whaling station on South Georgia with a small crew, arriving on May 10, 1916. Finally, he returned to Elephant Island on August 30, 1916, and, remarkably, saved the entire remaining crew. Yet when they finally returned to England, most of the men enlisted in the military and many died in the war, which managed to be even more harsh than inhospitable Antarctica.

Small stage fire in 69°S.

It seemed like 69°S. ended rather abruptly, with Shackleton waving farewell to his men and the skeleton and red dancers returning to leave the audience with a sense of dread. I was expecting that some sign would be given that the poor sad puppets would eventually be rescued, but I guess the raging war that was consuming the world was going to get them in the end. Even if someone didn’t know the story, or wasn’t close enough to the stage to see the forlorn lines of the marionette’s faces, I think they would still take away a deep feeling of cold and isolation, only a phantom of what it must have been like to be trapped without communication, or even much hope, thousands of miles from your home.

69°S. showed November 2 to 5 as part of the 2011 BAM Next Wave Festival, which has events through December 18.

Tuesday night’s premiere of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s “Happy Days in the Art World” at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts kicked off this year’s Performa ”new visual art performance biennial.” A commissioned work, the piece was clearly a work of theatre and not performance art, which the duo is better known for. If a play could give its intended audience a blow job or cunnilingus, well, let’s say this one would be very very popular.

The curatorial team of Performa loves to push boundaries but Elmgreen and Dragset’s tongue-in-cheek send up of the art world was less experiment and more send up. The play was so meta that it may require someone to invent a word for something that is so meta about meta it hurts — my suggestion: memetata.

Actors Joseph Fiennes and Charles Edwards play slightly more dashing and comedic version of Danish/Norwegian duo Elmgreen & Dragset. They do a solid job of making us care for these characters that awake in bunk beds and are seemingly trapped on stage.

Scenes from Elmgreen & Dragset's Performa premiere. (all photos in this post by the author)

Chocked full of cliches about art, it was like watching a made-for-tv art world version of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece “Waiting for Godot.” Sure the jokes were sometimes crisp and often funny but mostly shallow. Occasionally the humor delves deeper (“Your personal emotions don’t make the art any better” or “Land of the free … market”) but mostly it’s about the moment and little else (“We’re stuck in one of our own installations … maybe we are in New York like it said in that press release,”  ”A Gagosian in ever city with atleast two billionaires,” “A city where everyone is artists …Berlin … but everyone is a young artist,” “Where’s that Thai soup kitchen when you need it?” or “It’s a quote by Hans Ulrich.”).

There were many times that I thought the play was headed for certain disaster but the cast and the writing saved it from crashing into flames through a smart joke or unexpected turn. Then there were the many references to the audience itself. When one of the actors jokes about Klaus and points to MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach in the audience or teases about a workshop with Marina, knowing full well that Abramović is indeed present, a part of me died inside.

The artists with the cast of "Happy Days in the Art World" — hard to tell who is who, isn't it?

It’s obvious that Elmgreen & Dragset know their play in memetata — I’m aware the word doesn’t roll off the tongue — but they seem to relish the fact. Just to prove how self-aware they indeed are, one of the characters remarks that contemporary art is “a language for the select few,” and I’m assuming those of us in attendance should’ve felt a jolt of pride knowing that we’re completely fluent.

One character admires the “authentic graffiti” on the massive prop used as the backdrop and the same fellow admits to creating “craffiti” (yup, craft graffiti) by sewing buttons to things on the downlow. They reference their own work (a lot) and probably made a lot of references that those of us not in the 1% simply didn’t get.

Yet even with all these criticisms I have to say that I still inevitably enjoyed the work. It may not have been brilliant or insightful (I arrived not expecting it to be) but it refracted and poked fun at a world I know rather well. Like much of the contemporary art that is being made today, it reflects the interests, obsessions and anxieties of its audience. When one of the characters suggests that artists are disposable, since curators are the ones who can pick and choose the next new (young) thing, we know there’s an element of truthiness to it all. If there was one thing that bothered me the most about the performance it was the deus ex machina that arrived in the form of a spastic and babbling Fed-Ex courier. Sure, that theatrical device is almost always corny but she felt like a diversion and helped keep the play safely on the surface, which, come to think of it, is what most of Elmgreen & Dragset’s work tends to do anyway.

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s “Happy Days in the Art World” took place at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (566 LaGuardia Place, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) on Tuesday, November 1 at 7:30pm. Another performance will take place tonight (Thursday, November 3 at 7:30pm) at the same venue.

Performance by the dance group MGM Grand (all photos by author)

Maybe the name “float” welcomes the flood. After skipping the journey to Queens the previous Sunday due to the torrential rains, I finally made it to Socrates Sculpture Park two weekends ago for FLOAT: Field of Dreams, the fifth edition in the biennial series of “ephemeral and interactive art.”

MGM Grand performance

The 2011 FLOAT is curated by the Greenpoint, Brooklyn-based Cleopatra’s, with over 10 artists collaborating on and creating site specific pieces. I arrived at Socrates Sculpture Park just as MGM Grand (Modern Garage Movement), a dance troupe originally from San Francisco, was starting their performance in the grove at the park’s center. It’s a wonderful setting for a performance, with heavily rooted and more wraith-like trees clustered in front of the East River, glimpses of skyscrapers between their branches. Already I could feel a storm rolling in, with a determined wind rustling through the leaves and dark clouds hovering in the sky. Luckily, the rain held off for the entirety of MGM Grand’s performance.

MGM Grand performance

Photographing dance is an art in itself, and my skills are more suited to completely stationary objects or dogs, so this documentation is meant only as a suggestion of their performance of Oneness: Making It With Love.

MGM Grand is composed of Jmy Leary, Piage Martin and Biba Bell, each of whom was fully committed to rolling in the Socrates Sculpture Park dirt, still soft from the week’s previous rains. But it wasn’t all earthy writhing, as they were all technically skilled, beautiful dancers, captivating as they turned and strode around the trees.

MGM Grand performance

From the title and the song choices, ranging from Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” to the more pulsing music you’d expect to find in a tree grove under threat of storm, I gathered that this was a performance about the ups and downs of love. There were movements of both passion and defiance, and then some that were inscrutable to me like when all the members hid under black blankets.

Overall, I really enjoyed it, and it made me wish that I had been able to see more of the FLOAT performances and how they’d turn the serene park on the edge of Long Island City into a stage. Unfortunately, it was just before the next event that the skies again cracked open and a fierce wind swept through the park, driving me away.

J. Manuel Mansylla, "Ghostnet(works)" (2011) reclaimed derelict fishing and salvaged construction materials

However, I was able to see some of the art currently installed in the park, including some pieces that were part of The (S)Files, El Museo del Barrio’s Biennial. The park is one of several venues participating in the biennial, along with the museum itself, Bric Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn, Lehman College Art Gallery and the Northern Manhattan Art Alliance.

Each sculpture I saw at Socrates incorporated found materials, and even though they made have suffered a bit from the recent wet weather, I liked how they naturally claim the space. Socrates Sculpture Park was, after all, at one time a landfill and then for many years an illegal dumping site, before artists and community members undertook its transformation in 1986. The trash sculptures were like homages to the place’s not-so-illustrious past combined with its present artistic identity.

Simon Vega, "Sputnik NY-Z011 Tropical Capsule" (2011), steel structure, wood, cardboard, plastic and found materials

There are also a few installations by FLOAT artists, although most seemed like they were waiting for performers. I did love these topiaries by documentary photographer and performance artist Chris Verene and Brooklyn-based artist Jessica Grable, created in conjunction with their performance, “Self-Esteem Salon.” The enthusiastic topiary garden was created by cultivating invasive plant species.

Topiaries by Chris Verene and Jessica Grable with the "Self-Esteem Salon"

Hopefully the 2011 FLOAT will be able to stay above water for its final day this Sunday The Socrates Park website has postponed the Sunday, August 28 performances for Float until further notice. The final day will feature Erica Magrey’s Protest Geometry, Georgia Sagri who worked with an American soldier on a monologue and Martin Soto Climent. Even if it does pour, their website says “rain or shine,” so braver art goers than me may defy the storms.

FLOAT: Field of Dreams was originally scheduled to continue this Sunday, August 28 but will be postponed until further notice. A rain date will be announced shorty. Socrates Sculpture Park  is located at 32-01 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City.

Screaming Females on stage at Maxwell's (all photos by the author)

Screaming Females are one of those bands who are just that good; they have an unwavering idea about who they are and what they want to do, have worked relentlessly to get where they are and have retained their weirdo aesthetic throughout. In the past two years, the band has gained the attention of indie icons like Henry Rollins and Jay Mascis, and they have played to huge auditoriums and basements alike, sharing the stage with bands like Dinosaur Jr., Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and Yo La Tengo as well as dozens of local musicians just starting out. The band doesn’t stop at concerts either — on March 30th, Screaming Females teamed up with frontwoman Marissa Paternoster and LNY’s new art collective, called Doodle Drag, for a multimedia show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Punk rock’s DIY ethos, which encourages making your own records, booking your own shows and running your band or project on your own terms, is central to Screaming Females’ inner workings. Following this spirit, Paternoster’s own unsettling artwork graces the cover of each of the band’s records, not to mention their t-shirts. For Doodle Drag’s first event, the collective asked 13 artist friends to illustrate one track each by Screaming Females, and also made an international open call for submissions to illustrate the song “Lights Out.” Given that Paternoster’s enigmatic lyrics play an important part in her visual art as well, the music-visual art connection seemed particularly fitting.

Screaming Females' projection screen

Without much of a comprehensive mission statement, Doodle Drag jokingly aimed to create an “immersive” experience for their audience. Paternoster has explained that Doodle Drag aims to harness the overwhelming energy of punk shows and to bring that kind of enthusiasm to underground art. Again, this relationship between art and music is part of the scene’s history. Punk rock and its ephemera have always gone hand in hand, resulting in coffee table books like Fucked Up + Photocopied and Punk is Dead Punk is Everything by Bryan Ray Turcotte, as well as Punk House by Abby Banks. Visual artists, Raymond Pettibon chief among them, have defined punk through their own dark subject matter and nihilistic aesthetics. Now, Paternoster is doing the same with her own artwork, even teaming up with LNY to paint a mural on one of Williamsburg’s major DIY music epicenters, Death by Audio.

Keeping it local, Screaming Females asked fellow Jersey friends Brick Mower and Black Wine to open the night. The merch table was filled with the standard band paraphernalia, t-shirts and records, but also included comics, a printed program for the evening, drawings available for sale, buttons by the artists, and even a DVD recording of the art show that the audience was about to witness.

Screaming Females' merch table, with zines and drawings for sale

When the time came to start the show, Screaming Females squeezed onto the relatively small stage at Maxwell’s, just to the right of a blank sheet on the wall, which served as a projection screen. “We’re Screaming Females!” Paternoster squeaked out, and as the lights went down, she introduced the first artist: Tiffany Cheng, who illustrated the song “Wild,” off of the band’s latest LP, Castle Talk. The work projected onto the sheet ranged from photograph-based and stop-motion animations to felt pen drawings, grotesque and beautiful all at once. The artwork suited the music — dark, jubilant, fun, neurotic — visual and audio codes that we forget to interpret because we’re so busy enjoying it.

For any devoted fan of the Screamales, the night was exciting simply for its music selection. The band played tracks from all over their catalogue, including a notable rendition of fan favorite “Mothership,” off of 2006’s Baby Teeth, the band’s first LP. The song was illustrated with cartoons of the band made by Anna Jacobson projected in the background. Check out the performance in the video below.

Paternoster ripped into a guitar solo while the audience erupted into applause for their classic “Boyfriend”. Photographer Jamie Bruno paired this track with eerie photographs of nude women laying in fields, covered in dirt. Paternoster shrieked the lyrics, “She is our miscreant / she is our detox / she is our dagger in the dark / she is the knot mess / she is the undressed / she is the boy borne in my heart / while you sit on the fence I will burn in hell.”

While Screaming Females could draw a crowd pretty much anywhere, there was a definite feeling of something new going down at Maxwell’s. Doodle Drag opened up a space I wish I saw more often: the bridging of music and art in a deliberate and forceful way. Doodle Drag and Screaming Females may come from across the Hudson, but New York should take heed: there’s energy that gets lost when we walk into a room of white walls, the same energy that we find when we get together to make work collaboratively, messily, with other artists, whether it’s musical or otherwise. What kind of spaces can we open up to make up for the discrepancy?

"Der Rundegelbenimmersatt" from “Theater of The Arcade,” part of the Game Play Festival Pictured: Hope Cartelli, Stephen Heskett, Josh Mertz, Robert Pinnock and Fred Backus (Photo by Jeff Lewonczyk) (click to enlarge)

“Game Play: A Celebration of Video Game Performance Art” takes place July 9-25, 2010 at Williamsburg’s Brick Theater

Video games appear to be making oddly pervasive cameos across fields as varied as architecture, art (1, 2), cinema, criticism, and now theater. Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage is exactly that, a series of five plays that Jeff Lewonczyk wrote and Gyda Arber directed at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg through July 25.

The premise of Theater of the Arcade is to take the characters from an iconic video game — let’s say “Frogger” — and insert those characters into a world that operates according to the logic and stage vernacular of an equally iconic 20th century dramatist — let’s say Samuel Beckett à la Godot: so, the meaninglessness attempt to get anywhere significant using anything, especially the arbitrary ability to move back and forth or side to side. The result, at least for the first few minutes, is a startlingly suggestive scene.

The technique yields a broad range of results. An uncomfortably misogynistic Donkey Kowalski Kong [videogame] comes home to a crippled Princess Wingfield and destroys the Alabaster symbol that is her one source of happiness. “Pac Man” is recast as the antagonist in a didactic, anti-capitalist Brecht-and-Weill-styled musical. “Asteroids” becomes a Mamet-like display of profanity and chauvinism that culminates in both corporate down-sizing and seduction. And then, of course, we have our lovable, immigrant plumbing duo unclogging their father issues and throwing psilocybinin induced fireballs over the same princess-like lover in a mode that feels both familiar and contemporary, but nowhere near as notable, iconic, or instantly recognizable as the others. Perhaps this lack says more about contemporary theater than anything else.

"The Alabaster Nymph" from “Theater of The Arcade,” part of the Game Play Festival. Pictured: Shelley Ray and Kent Meister (Photo by Hope Cartelli) (click to enlarge)

Each piece stumbles onto several jokes — a consequence of having to justify the presence of things like giant fruit from Pac Man’s labyrinth in Brecht’s world or invent some narrative reason to splinter the asteroid belt to smithereens and dust. The silliness and the pace of the plot (or the “arrangement of incidents” to get Aristotelian about dramatic structure) is more than enough to carry an audience through all five, lighthearted pieces. Arranged discretely, the experience even mimics the way a gamer might spend a few minutes wandering from machine to machine, complete with a bathroom break in the middle. Still, it might be more provocative to see what an effort to stitch them all together would look like, or how the five pieces could hang as a unified investigation into both the importance of interaction and the assertion of agency to the two genres (How about a combination of “Minesweeper” and Augusto Boal? “Tetris” and Tony Kushner?).

I don’t want to get ahead of myself, though, Theater of the Arcade is one cockeyed option in a curio cabinet called Game Play: A Celebration of Video Game Performance Art that’s full of intriguing collisions between the virtual and the theatrical.

Game Play: A Celebration of Video Game Performance Art is taking place at the Brick Theater (525 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn) until July 25. Theater of the Arcade will be staged on the following dates and time: Thursday, July 15, 9pm; Friday, July 16, 7pm; Saturday, July 17, 7pm; Sunday, July 18, 7pm; Wednesday, July 21, 8pm; Friday, July 23, 9pm; and Sun July 25, 2pm.