Recently in performance Category

Tarek Halaby, Lecture/Performance: An attempt to understand my socio-political disposition through artistic research on personal identity in relationship to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Part One

Posted by: Dusty Hoesly

Tarek Halaby's lecture/performance is ridiculously and too easily titled "An attempt to understand my socio-political disposition through artistic research on personal identity in relationship to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Part One." It's an "attempt" alright. As Halaby readily admits during his short piece, most of his sketches are failed ideas, possibilities that he determined wouldn't work even before performing them. Yet he performs them anyway, primarily as an explanation of a two-year, funded artist residency in Brussels that he squandered, vainly searching for a great new idea to perform. Suffice to say, the search continues.

Pan Pan Theatre, The Crumb Trail

Posted by: Dusty Hoesly

The Crumb Trail, Pan Pan Theatre's take on the Hansel and Gretel story, is an absurdist mix of technology, wine drinking, bread making, reappropriation, dance, music, costumes, rape fantasies, and other sorts of eye-popping hoopla. However, dancing on stage as you reenact whatever's projected on a screen behind you (such as when Pan Pan dance to famous YouTube clips) is redundant in the art world and especially at TBA. It's not fresh; it's just old. It's full of sound and [mild] fury, signifying nothing. In an attempt to mimic the show's style, I just used a cliché. While it's certainly fun and exciting at times, to what end does all this energy go?

Back to Back Theatre, small metal objects

Posted by: Dusty Hoesly

Back to Back Theatre's small metal objects is a deceptively simple performance about a disrupted drug deal (which takes place in Pioneer Courthouse Square). While the plot is easier to ascertain, the motivations are less so: why does one of the dealers not want to work with today's buyer? In a show that prioritizes friendship over quick cash, people over money, we see what the world ought to be. The actors with the disabilities play characters who know the value of friendship, while the actors without disabilities play characters who have yet to learn that value.

Daniel Barrow, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry

Posted by: Dusty Hoesly

Daniel Barrow's Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry is my favorite piece of this year's festival. Subdued yet revelatory, Barrow's storytelling combines words, music, and art to exquisite effect. As Pablo de Ocampo, curator for Cinema Project says, this work ranks among the best in moving images art. Barrow manipulates over 300 drawn and colored transparencies as he tells one of the strangest and saddest stories I've ever heard. The recorded soundtrack, by Amy Linton (of the band The Aislers Set), highlights the moods and acts like a film score.

locust, crushed

Posted by: Dusty Hoesly

Crushed is an explosive mix of hip-hop and contemporary dance, live beatboxing and sampled music, and video projection showing the same dancers in other contexts. The opening video images of a locust in a farmer's field are both funny and upsetting: the video is edited to show the locust and then the farmer, cutting back and forth between the two as the farmer runs into the field and crushes the insect, all while musician Zeke Keeble provides live sound effects for each character. Right away we engage several themes in the show: life and death, sensuality and violence, organic and inorganic, sequencing and randomness. The color green dominates the show, appropriately symbolizing nature and new life or inexperience.

Pan Pan Theatre, The Crumb Trail
Posted by: Jim Withington

I began this post today simply because I felt the need for a different voice up here: simply put, Pan Pan Theatre's The Crumb Trail is not a bad show, and I didn't want it to go out like that. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this is the best of the "weird" this year, of the stuff that made the "WTF?" bells go off in my head. And for many festival-goers, that'll be enough of an endorsement for them to see the show.

It's not a perfect show, and it wasn't my favorite of the year, but it was definitely both good and worth attending, and I only wish I could have gotten this post out before the last performance started tonight.

Every Time I see your Picture I Cry

By Emily Katz

Daniel Barrow's performance/film piece titled: "Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry", is a brutally honest story of a man filled with longing to create something immortal, a love of Helen Keller, and a eye dropper addiction.

Daniel Barrow, Everytime I See Your Picture I Cry
By Jens Larson

It's safe to say that liking art and appreciating art are vastly different propositions, so while viewers may not "like" Daniel Barrow's Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry (it is, after all, a bit deviant and defies more than several narrative conventions), most will appreciate the skill behind its creation.

Barrow's performance combines live narration, an original musical score, hand drawn art, a bit of video, and the dexterous use of an overhead projector (which is not quite obsolete, it seems). Throughout the hour-long performance, Barrow and his assistant cycle through a series of transparencies as Barrow tells his tale. A Christmas-y, bell-filled soundtrack supports the show, which is quite possibly one of the most unique and intriguing performances at TBA this year and certainly one of the performances most in keeping with the festival's mission.

locust / crushed
Posted by Jim Withington

Just saw locust's show and it left me that kind of joyous "HELL yeah!" feeling that I've been wanting during TBA this year. The festival has had heavy covered, maybe more than ever, this year (Meg Stuart; Young Jean Lee), and I've taken in confusion (Erased James Franco) and the downright eclectic (yesterday's Melody Owens-curated short films). What I've been waiting for, in a venue other than late night WORKS shows, was the exhilaration of something like last year's Superamas show, or the first year Nature Theater visited us. I've been looking for that unity of vision, fun, purpose, and ass-kicking energy.

Tonight, I got it.

Meg Stuart and Philipp Gerhrmacher, Maybe Forever
Posted by: Daniel Manuszak

In the span of a relationship failing, two spines intertwine and move like jerks through strobe lights backwards. They relate the way insects dance. Phrases mimic each other as do movements, then at times they become completely disparate.
Buddhists say, "All life is suffering." Would this decay of a relationship disjointed from the first juncture rephrase that as, "All life is struggle?" It sure appeared so.
I wonder if these two had chosen to depict a successful pairing, would the movements have been any different? All flowing lines and sweet caresses? I don't think so. I think the movements would have been equally erratic. Sure, forces would have aligned more frequently, but, more often than not there would have been the same push and pull, the constantly re-defined exchange of energy and coercion of will that characterize all vital relationships in the making. The only difference is that nobody would have gotten lost backstage. And, the dancers would have ended up together.

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