You’ve likely not heard of Jane Bowles, but she wrote a cock-eyed, mesmerizing play that was one of the signal achievements of postwar American drama. It’s right up there with the classic works of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Gertrude Stein, late Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, and Sam Shepard. This post is about Jane Bowles’s unjustly neglected play: “In the Summer House.” Continue reading »
WASHINGTON, D.C. | Tonight, July 8, a young D.C. troupe will screen a film that documents that making of its new dance/theatre project Trust by the German writer/director Falk Richter. The courageous company force/collision has been in search of a dance vocabulary that suits Richter’s virulently comic attack on consumer capitalism. I saw an early work-in-progress performance … Continue reading »
n.paradoxa continues its mission to publish in-depth critical articles on contemporary women artists from around the world drawing on feminist theory in each volume. Continue reading »
The question of guns is a serious theatrical issue and not just a political one, because guns are frequently a crucial feature in drama. This play collection support gun control. Continue reading »
Have you noticed that the French and the Scandinavians dominate this year’s Golden Globe nominees for best foreign language films? To a disproportionate degree. So what exactly happened that only the French and the Scandinavians grabbed most of the Golden Globes booty? Are the best of the best among this year’s foreign language films really so Eurocentric? Continue reading »
I would go so far to say that, after post-structuralism, communication is now the dominant force in design innovations. PQ provides designers with an international art-based platform where they can wrest back the current valorization of time-based performance modes, which visual artists have ruthlessly co-opted for their own ends Continue reading »
Diverse City Theater’s nervy production argues that Two Rooms has not lost an inch of topical relevance. The play has not lost its eloquence. It is a muted cry of rage. Continue reading »
After becoming an internet sensation, Marco Anelli’s powerful portraits of sitters in the historic 2010 Marina Abramovic performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York are now collected and available in their entirety in this volume Continue reading »
Pâquerette is a duet between a man and a woman who re-discover their childlike innocence through the intensities of penetration. Continue reading »
“Auto + Batterie” matches up two enticing signature works, in which French choreographer David Wampach conspicuously foregrounds the theatrical relationship between dance and music. Continue reading »
Macadamia Nut Brittle is excoriating, sexy, hallucinatory, viciously funny. The plot steals from the mode of a reality-TV show, but its stance is subversive and punk. As the noisy evening unfolds, Ricci/Forte detonates, again and again and again, the illusory logic of this TV genre Continue reading »
The Window is a unique theatrical experience, because enigma is a principal aspect of its charms. An inspiring two-part site-specific performance-design project created and directed by Ana Mărgineanu for the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York (RCINY), The Window asks you to pay close attention if you happen to stroll by RCINY’s storefront spaces. Continue reading »
“The Window” succeeds in its creative transformation of an otherwise nondescript building space that is normally used as a bookstore, a reception area or a meeting place. If you did know that there is a Romanian consulate and cultural services in that corner of the neighborhood, you definitely will remember that piece of information the next time you pass by. Continue reading »
Vibrating within a new discipline that is up for grabs, From the Edge proposes one approach toward an American version of performance design. Future curatorial teams will really have to find the courage to contend with the challenge of displaying the U.S. anew in a competitive international environment. Continue reading »
MONCLAIR, N.J.: Think of it as a Follies for the third gender. Or La Cage aux Folles as re-dressed by Pina Bausch. A dance-theater piece from Belgium, Gardenia conjures the closing night of a transvestite cabaret in Barcelonia where seven middle-aged men (between 55 and 65 years old) recall their double lives as cross-dressing movie stars and as … Continue reading »
“Hieronymus” pulses in that liminal space in between dramatic representation and visual abstraction. It’s a picture book of a play. It’s a meditation of the plight of the artist today and a hybrid re-composition that celebrates that artist’s singular voice. Continue reading »
My picks for the world’s top-10 best theater reflects my travels in 2011 and is therefore deeply personal. Continue reading »
A collaboration between Mini Teater Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Novokazalište Zagreb (Croatia), director Ivica Buljan’s Macbeth After Shakespeare forces us to viscerally come face to face with the naked and overbearing fact that the pornography of power is both beautiful and disturbing to look at. It seduces and repels and provokes. Continue reading »
As confusion over arts funding drags on in Bosnia and Herzegovina, how inspiring it is to discover in Sarajevo an artistically rich international theater festival that serves as another point of light shining over that country’s darkened horizon Continue reading »
In an interview he granted exclusively for Applause magazine, Craig Lucas recuses himself from addressing how a Denver Center Theater Company revival of Reckless might speak to our 21st century concerns. “You’re asking me,” Lucas says, in response to my impertinent question, “to assess audiences and society, as opposed to my individual engagement with themes … Continue reading »
