Tinkling, angelic bells ushered in the most mournful rendition of the Lady in the Radiator’s ascension anthem, “In Heaven,” I’ve ever heard, like a warbling hymn sung at a gravesite scented with night-blooming jasmine. At the conclusion of Xiu Xiu’s live interpretation of Eraserhead’s minimalist whooshing score, performed last week at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere, Jamie Stewart’s … Continue reading
An operatic soprano, introduced by the night’s chirpy emcee duo as Haolan Geng, took the stage at the tony David Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, accompanied by only a young woman pianist in a floor-length black gown. Geng’s precise, soaring vocals belonged at the Metropolitan Opera House just across the way as she bellowed a … Continue reading
“What has been used on one side is lost on the other side. There’s no going back,” lectures a stern voice at the other end of the telephone after Demi Moore’s frantic has-been actress turned Suzanne Somers’-like exercise guru Elisabeth Sparkle calls customer service to whine about a hitch in her new, ill-advised foray into … Continue reading
THANK YOU, NEXT Full disclosure: I am gleefully out of touch with pop music. In fact, I decided to swear it off forever when that whole autotune phenomenon made Cher unlistenable. When all those queens lifted up their index fingers and pranced towards the center of the dance floor as Cher’s autotuned voice … Continue reading
“You should not work to make the audience comfortable with what they are witnessing at all,” writes playwright Jeremy O. Harris in his “Notes on Style” preface of the script of Slave Play. Harris’s is a weighted statement, hidden within seemingly typical stage notes for a theatrical production. Whether onstage or off, so much related … Continue reading
I did not hate Sasha Waltz’s U.S premiere of Kreatur at the Brooklyn Academy of Music because it enlisted every cliché in ‘avant-garde’ dance-theatre—dancers speaking gibberish aloud, awkward jerky movement, bodies colliding, self-conscious actorly dancers, same-sex kissing, topless women, dancers pulling down the briefs of other dancers, expensive couture costumes, hi-tech lighting, an electronic score, gratuitous use of special-effects props. Continue reading
In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer speaks to the presumed lack of disability in imagined, idealized futures. “If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy,” she writes, “Then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; … Continue reading
How many imaginary dialogues with dead poets have you had lately? Multidisciplinary artist Félicia Atkinson recently orchestrated an experimental performance in dialogue with Francis Ponge’s “The Candle (La Bougie)” from his collection Le Parti Pris des Choses (Siding with Things) at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn. An incantation of sorts, Atkinson’s sonic dreamscapes are haunting … Continue reading
“It was the opposite of nihilism, it was more a case of too much care-ism,” quipped my friend as we stepped out onto Park Avenue, having just been exposed to Australian director Simon Stone’s adaptation of Yerma, based on Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca’s play of the same name, which debuted in 1934. … Continue reading
“Once upon a time, there was a little Black girl…” announces LaWanda Page, spinning the tale of that little girl in the Brewster projects whose “modeling career took off” heard at the beginning of RuPaul’s iconic “Supermodel (You Better Work).” With those words–nostalgic to anyone who loves over-the-top queer dance music, Bronx-born performer NIC Kay … Continue reading