From a monologue on death to a story about a police shootout, Opera Philadelphia’s productions showed us the many things opera can be.
Category: Performance
Posted inPerformance
One Woman, 100 Men, and 100 Arguments
This 24-hour performance resembled a social psych experiment designed to test our patience and desire for change.
Posted inPerformance
A Performance Investigates Domesticity and Power via Simone de Beauvoir
Carrie Ahern’s Sex Status 2.0 is a performance of desire in all of its expressions — anguished, flirty, direct, sorrowful, desperate, awkward, joyous — and, as such, essential viewing.
Posted inPerformance
What Properly Addressing the Migrant Crisis Might Look Like
Artist Alicia Grullon performs the role of a UN representative for refugees to address the migration crisis at the southern US border.
Posted inPerformance
Performing the Legacy of Caribbean Junkanoo
Through “Junkanooacome” (“Junkanoo is coming” in Jamaican patois), Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow offers an adaptation of a pan-Caribbean festival with a parade of masked dancers.
Posted inPerformance
A Political Opera With Big Ambitions Feels Off-Key
Despite a gorgeous, impressively conducted score, David Lang’s prisoner of the state felt overstuffed, unsatisfying, and contradictory.
Posted inPerformance
How Performance Art Leans Into the Unknown
At the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, performances by Mia Habib and Ligia Lewis stood out for their engrossing contributions to the ever-evolving medium.
Posted inPerformance
The Complicated Staging of Experimental Music in Art Spaces
Veteran musician Onyx Ashanti’s performance prompted larger questions of how personal, cultural works hold value in commodified spaces of leisure, excess and consumption.
Posted inPerformance
For Six Hours, Four Performers Freeze in the Act of Falling
In Just a Blink of an Eye, the performers lean backwards, appearing as victims of an unseen violence.
Posted inPerformance
When Artists Recreate Lost Children for Mourning Mothers
While entertaining at first, Reborning, which deals with the phenomenon of hyperrealistic “reborn dolls,” progressively unveils what it means to be an artist in the 21st century.
Posted inPerformance
Mining Robert Mapplethorpe’s Legacy, With Missteps
Though its music, and use of Mapplethorpe’s photographs and texts by Essex Hemphill and Patti Smith were impressive in their own rights, the performance Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) ultimately appeared cheap, forced, and self-congratulatory.
Posted inPerformance
A Strange Loop Stages the Double Consciousness of Being Black and Queer
Michael R. Jackson’s subversive sermon on the conflicted heart of a Black, queer man writing a musical about a Black, queer man details an artist’s fight against society’s expectations of what he should be.