Silas Riener performing "Nox" (all photos by Robbie Campbell)

The program for Rashaun Mitchell’s Nox contains a lone explanatory note: “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” The words belong to the poet Anne Carson, and they come from the back cover of her book, also called Nox, published in 2010. They make you wonder: Is what we’re about to see a replica of that book, in the form of a dance, as close as the artists could get? A replica of a replica?

As it turns out, Nox, which had its New York premiere at Danspace Project on Thursday, is nothing so simple. Whereas “replica” might suggest an erosion of the original — a photocopy of a photocopy — this hour-long meditation brings Carson’s ideas into sharp, distilled focus.

A duet for two formidable dancers — Mitchell and his choreographic collaborator, Silas Riener — Nox unfurls in the shadowy reaches of St. Mark’s Church. The part-live, part-recorded score interlaces Carson’s plaintive recitations of her own text with Benjamin Miller’s ominous anti-melodies. In the dancers’ craning, careening, stretching, striving, and intertwining — in their slipping into and out of each other’s grasps — movement emerges as an apt metaphor for what Carson evokes in words: a groping-in-the-dark for memory and history; the incomprehensibility of loss; the impossibility of piecing together a life that has ended, or that, despite being over, refuses to end.

A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end. Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light.

Whether or not you’ve experienced Nox, the book — which is as much a visual phenomenon as a verbal one — before seeing Nox, the dance, its structure seems significant to what happens onstage. A scrapbook-like collection of photographs, hand-drawn etchings, and printed words, it takes the form of one very long, accordion-folded page, housed in a box. To open that box is to unleash what feel like infinite reams, as unwieldy as the matter of death itself.

Nox, the dance, tumbles forth with a similar unwieldiness — though one that’s never out of the artists’ control. This quality first arrives via Miller’s music, a live acoustic-electronic mix, which accompanies Mitchell in a kind of prologue, as he paces along the perimeter of the sanctuary. His gait is deliberate, measured, against what sounds like a twisted, tremulous tangle of strings. Taking a seat on the floor, facing the back wall and the balcony that lines it, Mitchell waits. The light (designed by Davison Scandrett) intensifies, streaming in from various doorways, though you wouldn’t quite call it a flood.

Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener in "Nox"

Through one of those doorways bursts Riener, sprinting across the balcony, a terror in contrast to Mitchell’s repose. He disappears as suddenly as he entered, then reappears, on our level now, destined for a far corner, an unforgiving receptacle for the forward thrust of his body. His momentum halted, replaced by forces seemingly outside his control, he slumps and topples across the carpeted risers, coils his limbs around pillars, splays across walls. His legs collapse from under him in his attempts to move immovable edifices.

Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it.

Carson’s voice has entered our consciousness. She has begun translating and evaluating, word by word, “Catullus 101,” the Roman poet’s elegy to his own brother. It’s a methodical retort to the irrational, a rummaging for meaning in the meaningless:

We want other people to have a center, a history, an account that makes sense. We want to be able to say, This is what he did and here’s why. It forms a lock against oblivion. Does it?

Carson is there in the flesh, too. She and her longtime collaborator Robert Currie help to light the space with two wheeled slide projectors. Mitchell, alone for a moment, drifts in and out of the trapezoid of light cast by one of the bulbs, working himself into a swift, rhythmical spin that dizzies even the watcher. If Riener is the deceased, the haunting, Mitchell could be the haunted, in search of “an account that makes sense,” sometimes with clarity, more often in darkness. (“Nox” is Latin for “night.”)

At one point, the dancers back themselves against the rear wall, each lit by a square of harsh white light from one projector. As they whip their bodies from shape to shape, Currie and Carson try to keep up with colored pencils, tracing their transient outlines on a translucent surface. The results, materializing on the wall, look like a jumble of intersecting lines, as wavering as those opening notes, barely approximating the human form.

We learn that Carson was not close to her brother. When she found out he had died, they hadn’t seen each other for many years. Fittingly, we sense both distance and intimacy between the dancers — a prowling both suspicious and sweet. In a recurring motif, they arch their upper spines, leaning back at dangerous inclines. At first, they catch each other; then they don’t, prompting a cascade of reckless crashes to the ground. Yet elsewhere, as when they fold themselves like origami on the smooth wooden floor, they seem to share a brotherly telepathy — or an artistic one, the kind that comes from dancing in the same company for many years. Both of these artists were members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Mitchell for eight years, Riener for just over four. While Cunningham’s technique runs deeply through their bodies, they are mining from it something very much their own.

“Overtakelessness” is a word told me by a philosopher once … that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts — it remains beyond them.

Some literary critics have charged Nox, the book, with responding too clinically, too intellectually, too guardedly to death. Rather than unwieldy, some have seen it as too neat — too nicely stacked-up-wrapped-up in a box. And indeed, it does fold up quite prettily. Nox, the dance, avoids any such tidy packaging. Perhaps movement, with its infamous impermanence, its sometimes maddening open-endedness, provides the perfect foil. Carson, reading a final passage aloud, concludes the performance with a succinct “the end.” But the dancing could continue: the relationship could go further, the pieces could keep on reassembling, finding different ways to interlock. For now, we’ve collected what we will; the rest remains beyond us, perhaps right where we want it to be.

Rashaun Mitchell’s Nox concludes tonight, Saturday, May 12 at Danspace Projects (131 East 10th Street, East Village, Manhattan)

"Hard Heads Make Soft Tales (a Sweetie)," performed by Reggie Wilson, Lawrence Harding and Rhetta Aleong (photo by Alexandra Corazza)

(don’t answer that)

Everyone else, what are you doing tonight?

(if your answer is anything other than going to see reVisitation, Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group‘s absolute knockout of a show, don’t answer that)

Everyone else else, want to hear my favorite Reggie Wilson anecdote, about the first time I interviewed said Reggie Wilson, a Brooklyn-based choreographer who has spent the last 20-plus years building structurally sophisticated, culturally resonant works?

(sure you do. We sat down at this little Austrian [really. it's now closed.] restaurant in Brooklyn. I was doing the interview prep stuff, taking out the notebook, setting up the recorder, etc., and he said, “Before we start I just have to say, I hate words.” and I said ” … ” and he said, “Well, look, what if every time you wrote something, I had to do an interpretive dance in order for people to understand it?” And I said ” … ” And then he gave one of those fabulously nasty little smiles of his, and proceeded to say very smart things for the next hour or so, while I scrambled to keep up. The man is good with words. He’s better with dance. Go.)

Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group’s theRevisitation concludes tonight, Saturday, March 17 at New York Live Arts (219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

"Frontispieces" by Will Rawls (photo by Ian Douglas)

CH:

I am watching a black man gyrate in front of me in a thong over gray briefs. A tuft of synthetic, orange hair peeks out from the front of the triangular fabric. His nearly-shaven head glistens as beads of sweat trickle down his face. His dark eyes stare intensely at us.

—–

When writing about performance, I often feel caught between the body and the word. To attach language to bodies and movement is a complicated matter, calling into question the way words, grammar and syntax codify and enforce the body. A tinge of violence underlies this act of writing — a sort of pinning down of that which is constantly changing. More than a trace, writing marks the body.

I hesitate. I question. Racial identities within performance are too complicated to be pared down to the words black dance.

—–

The gyrating man is the choreographer, Will Rawls. He is engulfed in his own imaginary world, one populated by German Shepherd cutouts. In Frontispieces he plays with them, worships them, discards them; he creates a little dog forest and hides there. I feel like a voyeur when watching him perform — a seeker of forbidden truths.

—–

"Sherry Show" by Ann Liv Young (photo by Ian Douglas)

In 1982, Ishmael Houston-Jones curated Parallels at Danspace Project under the directorship of Cynthia Hedstrom. In the original program he writes: “Parallels was chosen as the name for this series because while all the choreographers participating are black and in some ways relate to the tradition of Afro-American dance, each has chosen a form outside of that tradition, and even outside of the tradition of mainstream modern dance … ” The original series took place over two weekends and included works by Blondell Cummings, Fred Holland, Cristina Rrata Jones, Gus Solomons, jr., Bebe Miller, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Ralph Lemon, and the late Harry Whittaker Sheppard. Miller and Zollar have returned as guest curators in Platform 2012 — an annual Danspace series where a choreographer is invited to curate a series of performances and create a catalogue around a particular theme.

Thirty years later, Houston-Jones returns to that premise, asking: How have the terms black, experimental, and postmodern dance changed? In his curatorial statement, he asks: “For me does ‘Black Dance’ even exist? And assuming it does what defines it?”

——

I’ve seen this dog before, or what I think it represents.

SB:

I know what you mean about the violence of the written word. But movement is good at resisting. It dodges and skirts and slips out from under attempts to describe it; in that instant between image-hits-retina and pen-hits-paper, it has already evaporated, become something else, and something else, and something else. It plays a million practical jokes on the part of your brain that wants to say, “this is what happened.” Your mental calculations can’t keep up; the word you thought was it is now irrelevant.

—-

"Hoo-Ha (twister pump breakdown)" by Darrell Jones (photo by Ian Douglas)

Am I dodging, skirting, slipping out from under the big questions? Do I not know what to make of my own racial and ethnic identity (Caucasian Irish Jew)? Am I afraid of the topic of race? Even the delicate approach—the how-should-I-talk-about-this, the what’s-the-right-way-in — feels like a marking-as-Other. What comes to mind is a work that is not part of Parallels, but that resonates with my thoughts on the series, a recent solo performance by Lorene Bouboushian at the West End Theater. In The White Lady guts flail gluttonous fail, Bouboushian examines what it means to be a white, liberal arts-educated, art-making, female gentrifier living in the predominantly West Indian neighborhood of Crown Heights. In a soulful James Brownian voice, and wearing no pants, she belts: “Oooh, white layyy-DAY.” I see myself reflected in her.

—-

I also see myself—feel myself—reflected in the twisted, tear-streaked face of Young Jean Lee, one of the artists in Black Dance, an evening curated by Dean Moss, who describes the participants thus: “None of them are African American, but all of them are black.” The slap, slap, slap of Lee’s Hitting Video (she is the one being hit), against a groveling masculine voice and booming Korean drum, sears through the darkness of St. Mark’s Church.

——-

“Improvisation has always been in the black vernacular.”

“ … fascinated by the body in pain.”

“My body is my work, it’s my material.”

“We were doing contact [improvisation] but we’d break all the rules. The first rule was that we were black.”

— Ishmael Houston-Jones, during a discussion at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Feb. 2, 2012.

CH:

I come up with a list of my own questions:

How much do I need to have known or have seen in order to write about black dance?

Can I write a piece on black dance without having seen Alvin Ailey’s Revelations?

What is the validity of my voice?

How has black dance been trapped by or grown from its name?

Is black dance a genre that exists today?

——-

the

violence           of

            self-        definition

–Aisha Sasha John, “Self-Portrait Portrait”

——-

“My body can do anything.” One of the dancers said in, Check Your Body at the Door, Sally Sommers’ 2012 documentary about house dancing in the early nineties. A brief excerpt was shown as part of the program, From the Streets, From the Clubs, From the Houses. There is something amazingly raw and flexible about the dancers on screen. They move through quick improvisations that fuse forms like voguing, breaking, and some things there aren’t words for yet.

———

"Synthetic Action" by Isabel Lewis (photo by Ian Douglas)

Between the body and the word is a cool distance.

SB:

Isabel Lewis’ Synthetic Action has the stretched-thinness of a worn Lycra leotard. The dancers (30-some of them) trickle in, warm up, leave. Even those mesmerizing lights, blue bleeding into green bleeding into magenta, cannot disguise the flatness. At a certain point, you realize: This is it. And so, as during long car rides, you resort to games: zooming in on a particular dancer, quietly caught up in her routine; spotting techniques like license plates: Graham, Cunningham, release, Limón, hip hop, Horton.

—–

When Houston-Jones set out to organize the original Parallels series  in 1982, he wrote to Hedstrom:

I know for myself, being black and being outside of the mainstream of traditional modern dance has given my own work the unique perspective of being doubly isolated. I feel and often express this isolation from blacks who expect me to be Ailey and dance audiences who either also expect me to be a little-avant-garde-Ailey or ‘another Bill T. Jones’ or devoid of any racial expression. This isolation has created a kind of healthy schizophrenia in me and my art that I think must be shared by those others coming from similar backgrounds.

—–

Just as I often resist assigning language to what I see onstage, I resist seeking definitive answers to the questions that Houston-Jones has put forth. Is this lazy avoidance, or an acknowledgement that answers aren’t the point here? What’s certain is the absolute necessity of a forum in which to let these questions linger. Necessary because when you go to one of this city’s biggest, brightest dance institutions, New York City Ballet, you can still find but one black dancer on that stage. Is this bastion of whiteness really representative of the metropolis that it claims (by virtue of its name, at least) to represent? Necessary because we are so obsessed with the next thing and the next and the next that we rarely take the time to reflect, in a sustained way, on how we have gotten to where we are now.

—-

Christine asks: How much do I need to have known or have seen in order to write about black dance?

It helps to have a sense of history. It helps to be aware, for instance, of the kind of disturbing racial essentialism that once imbued mainstream dance criticism, shaping popular notions of “black dance.” In his 1940 Book of the Dance, John Martin, chief dance critic for The New York Times, wrote:

The Negro artist, like the artist of any other race, works necessarily and rightly in terms of his own background, experience and tradition. He makes no fetish of it, but on the other hand, like any other artist, he recognizes that there are some roles and categories that do not suit him. Race—exactly like sex, age, height, weight, vocal range, temperament—carries with it its own index of appropriateness.

What he meant, in part, was: Black people shouldn’t do ballet. Elsewhere in the book, Martin elaborated:

… its [the academic ballet’s] wholly European outlook, history and technical theory are alien to him [the Negro] culturally, temperamentally and anatomically … The deliberately maintained erectness of the European dancer’s spine is in marked contrast to the fluidity of the Negro dancer’s, and the latter’s natural concentration of movement in the pelvic region is similarly at odds with European usage.

What would he say about Regina Rocke — one of the artists on the program From the Streets — who morphs, chameleon-like, between wound-up, calligraphic voguing and statuesque fifth-positions, arabesques, tendus?

It helps to know where the conversation once was, so we can recognize how far it’s come, consider how far it has yet to go.

CH:

“I’ve been waiting my entire life to be black tonight.” Ann Liv Young says as Sherry, an over-the-top, white Christian girl from the south, who comes out in blackface for Moss’s Black Dance evening. Sherry is a piece unto herself, a controlling, self-help, cult-like figure with irascible tendencies. In her Sherry shows, an ongoing series of talk show-like performances, she thrives on her audiences’ discomfort, preys on their insecurities. She pokes at individuals until she isolates a raw nerve and exposes it, a feast for the hostility and aggression that lurks beneath the surface of her counseling efforts.

“What are you? You’re not black. Anybody black here? … What about you? What’s your heritage?”

“Could you tell me what the history of minstrelsy is?” an Indian woman in the audience asks. To which Young responds: “Sometimes people ask questions they already know the answer to … ” and then lashes out, screaming at the woman and her equally skeptical friends: “GET OUT!”

Whereas Lee’s powerful Hitting Video, earlier in the program, doesn’t directly address black identity, Young asks: “Why is no one black in this, Mr. Moss?” Perhaps she feels, like I do, that the curatorial idea of looking at “black as other” is a bit half-baked. Maybe when Sherry says: “Gay is like being black in some ways,” or “I’m very white underneath — of course not in the heart,” we are supposed to cringe.

Young creates a palpable tension in the room like no other performer I’ve experienced. Whether that’s for better or worse is not a question. She doesn’t allow the audience to be passive viewers in her spectacle. In attending a Sherry show you are implicated; you are part of the chaos. Both are necessary.

——–

“No one knowing me knows me. I am II.” — Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America

———

For the months of February and March, Houston-Jones has transformed Danspace Project into a labyrinth of unpredictable endeavors that begin with black identity, but expand beyond any aesthetic expectations that may be associated with it. I think back to the first weekend that featured Rawls’ Frontispieces, followed by the distressing evening of Black Dance (I don’t think I’ll ever forget how uncomfortable I felt when Sherry screamed at the three audience members, or when she inappropriately stroked one of their chins while singing Lionel Ritchie’s “Stuck On You”). Fast forward to From the Streets, From the Clubs, From the Houses, where I still haven’t made sense of Darrell Jones’ Hoo-Ha (twister pump breakdown) — the creepy pantyhose masks with long, synthetic ponytails, the red-orange petals, the runway walks and obscure slapping. Is this transcendence?

Platform 2012: Parallels is unlike any other event that is taking place in New York City; the possibilities seem endless. The experimental art world can feel like an exclusively white one. Houston-Jones shows us otherwise.

I was not around to see the original Parallels, but I know that the terms black, experimental, and postmodern dance don’t exist in the same context as they did in 1982. We are still using those terms because we haven’t invented a new lexicon for them yet. How the language will sound, look, or feel … we have yet to find out

SB:

One thing missing from Parallels is the chance to hear the Platform’s younger artists, those who were not making work in 1982, directly address the questions at hand. How would Nora Chipaumire, whose work is informed by her Zimbabwean roots, respond to, “Does it mean anything to be a black artist now?” as opposed to Kyle Abraham, who grew up as a regular on the Pittsburgh rave scene? The work can speak for itself, to an extent, but I, perhaps too literal-minded, crave a more concrete dialogue.

The notion of race, for me, veers back and forth between all-important and entirely arbitrary: In this light, it’s the crux of our identities, in another, no more than a synthetic skin. A color, a culture, a construct, a legacy, a family, a matter of DNA, a where-we-come-from, a who-we-are-now, an afterthought, an ever-present thought, an all-of-the-above. I look for order in the sprawl, conclusive black-and-white. But “black” and “white”: those terms are as amorphous, as porous, as evasive as the most rapturous dance.

CH:

Movement and mistake coalesce. This piece has grown with me over time. His private world of German Shepherds, eerily two-dimensional; they haunt him like a secret addiction. He moves with foreign purpose. Between two worlds or stuck in one.

*   *   *

Platform 2012: Parallels continues at Danspace Project through March 31.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian, "Villa Watch" (2005), Video and 16 mm film on DVD In collaboration with Judith Hopf.

All I could think about was water. I was late and overdressed; the auditorium was ungodly hot, and I was thirsty. What is more, the Berlin-based artist, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, had, as though anticipating me, deliberately placed an empty water bottle on the seat next to the one I slipped into. As she spoke, she sipped from a smaller bottle.

I was there in the Guggenheim’s auditorium to pay close attention to the cerebral meanderings of Haghighian’s ”when night falls in the forest of static choices,” a presentation of her research-based conceptual works all woven into a relational aesthetics experiment. It was going to take a long time.

With a deep dry sigh, I piled my layers next to the dew-drop lined water bottle. Oh, Water Bottle: why do you wink at me?

I was now ready to be absorbed by Natascha’s first story about a video project that played off of Buñuel’s surreal “The Exterminating Angel.” Enlisting multi-perspectival format, “Villa Watch” is about on-lookers, family and friends, and a news van, all keeping vigil outside of a “cultural center” where a group of people who had entered for an event had never exited. The bit ends with a guy on a skateboard attempting to enter and then turning around before he can get in.

I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit of course. And I thought of me, in this cultural center. And I thought, too, about the wetness of the interior walls of the water bottle.

“Villa Watch” is about choices and how they are circumscribed. It is about society and boundaries and when and why we do or don’t cross them.

I wondered if I could pick up that bottle and put my mouth to it. Just to amplify the point. But, just to amplify the point, I didn’t. Also, who knows where that thing had been?

As though enlisted to further my discomfort, someone in the audience demanded to know about “the water bottle” — and it was then that I learned that the thirst-tease now coyly peeking out from under my pile of layers was actually a participant in Natasha’s presentation.

Audience members (those who had arrived on time) were enlisted to help the artist decide which tales to tell about her various projects. On the stage, a projector image showed various icons that corresponded with the inanimate objects occupying seats scattered throughout the audience. When someone chose an object they wished to hear about, Natasha would go and sit next to it and speak about the project that it, the object, starred in.

The coy water bottle was next. I removed my garments from it and tried to look away as Natasha, sipping from the smaller bottle, explained “De Paso.”

It involved a wirelessly controlled trolly suitcase and a frolicking young PET bottle making love in a gothic cathedral in Barcelona — well, actually, from a non-thirsty POV, the handle of the trolly was propped on the bottle and as the suitcase rolled back and forth, the bottle crunched and snapped.

The performers were miked. So was the entire cathedral that the bag and the bottle were performing in, and speakers were strategically placed (based on careful computer generated algorithms) so that the cathedral echoed with the pleasure cries — er, the sounds— of the water bottle.

Also displayed in the cathedral were information boards showing some of Natasha’s research of Barcelona’s water system, its history and its current use.

According to Natasha, this project spoke to our familiarity with water bottles and our trust of them, and with what goes into distributing and using water and how that all dissipates into our habit of taking the water bottle for granted — seeing it as always having been there.

I wished I could take that Poland Spring bottle for granted right here and now.

I thought of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland“:

“Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think”

Natasha’s presentation had been billed as “series of conversations provoked by a selection of objects, allowing the focus and pace of the evening to follow the currents of her audience’s attention.” But while the audience continued to choose objects and to hear about Natasha’s endeavors, my own attention closed in on itself.

 I thought about that Beetles song, “Fixing a Hole.”

I did gather this much: Natasha thinks a lot. She’s a very humble sort who dislikes the objectification of people and things alike. Spotlights produce in her, visions of Foucault’s panopticon. Indeed, the Guggenheim’s invite noted that Natasha’s bio was a link to another project she created; Called “bioswop.net,” it is a site that allows one to trade CVs in a “CV market” thus erasing notions of authorship and even self.

She’s also a mad free-associator and the connections she draws, though on the surface seem surreal,  are ultimately traceable. However, for too many of them, you’ll need to pick up a brochure or a newspaper or a flier, all of which she incorporates into the experience: i.e.: lays out for you to pick up.

Although I found “Villa Watch” amusing in an easy spoofy kind of way, and I was moved in my crazed thirst, almost to tears by the wet wonder of “De Paso.” I found that Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s work is mostly comprised of deep musing along with vague, and often dull, visual and audio accompaniment and the indespensible printed object. Some of the printed things, typically, were the best parts of these projects, filled with scientific graphs, arcana and spoofy headlines.

When the presentation was over, I fled to the reception where I found no water, but only wine. I thought of Jesus Christ and what he did to the water. I thought of Kafka’s The Hunger Artist just because of the title. 

I went out into the cool night air and stopped at a roasted peanut truck. There I obtained a curvy little bottle of Poland Spring. I thought of Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.”

*   *   *

This program is part of the Guggenheim’s Elaine Terner Cooper Education Fund: Conversations with Contemporary Artists series.

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.

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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.