Ten years into the 21st century, it seems a fitting time to look at the state of New York City’s theatrical avant-garde. How has it evolved over the past decade? Who’s doing the most inventive work, and who’s coming up short? What exactly constitutes a vanguard these days, and where is it heading?

Big Art Group, Radio Hole, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Thomas Bradshaw, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Les Freres Corbusier, Cynthia Hopkins, Elevator Repair Service, Witness Relocation, The TEAM, Taylor Mac, Sibyl Kempson, Improv Everywhere, and Mike Iveson are discussed among others.

Ultimately, there are degrees of “avant-garde”: Not many artists today call for, say, burning down museums and libraries in the name of new technology, as the Italian Futurists did a hundred years ago. Nor do we hear many downtown voices calling for a new order, or even for an end to a disastrous war—as theatermakers here did in the 1960s. In 21st-century New York, aspirations look milder and more careerist: Experimental stage artists want creative outlets and a responsive public. Understandably, they also seek good publicity and financial relief. But in the next era—now under way—there’s an appetite and opportunity for enlarging the theatrical experience in New York. If anyone can seize the day, it may be Big Art Group, Nature Theater, and anyone else with the intellectual muscle to build up the vanguard.

Read the full article here

Contemporary culture knows no boundaries, it affirms its identity in the interaction between genres and languages, and constantly redefines its own form, ignoring barriers and set boundaries. The birth of Prospettiva 09 is the fruit of these interactions, of many dialogues between projects and realities that are very far removed. It will be an opening festival, which previews many of the themes of the 2009/2010 season of Teatro Stabile di Torino – I refer to the international guests, the narrative theatre, the rereading of classics and the link between theatre and music – but it will aim not to present them merely with different styles and forms: cross-pollination offers opportunities for new, heterogeneous considerations, transferring content that is normally destined to less institutional spaces to unusual settings. This is the context in which our various collaborations were born, with Torino Danza, and Prospettiva 09 will incorporate part of its programme, with the “Artissima 16” international contemporary art fair that this year will include both the exhibitions in Lingotto and a number of performances and productions, and with the Festival delle Colline Torinesi and the “Club to Club”, live sets of electronic music. An Autumn festival, which will focus attention not only on live performances, but also on a theoretical cycle of political interaction and considerations on issues related to the problem of presenting reality in contemporary society, which bring together artists and scholars, journalists and maîtres à penser. Following the laws of perspective composition, this festival is a mass of intersecting lines from which a pattern of relationships and encounters emerges: we could also risk using the word “system”, not only in a purely artistic context, but also in terms of the management and pooling of resources. - Fabrizio Arcuri

.

SOS

devised by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson
direction, video installations, stage design and costumes Caden Manson
text and soundtrack Jemma Nelson
with David Commander, Michael Helland, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Heather Litteer, Willie Mullins and Edward Stresen-Reuter
technical direction, lighting and stage design Hillery Makatura
produced by Ana Mari de Quesada
assistant director Kathleen Amshof
video system design Jared Mezzocchi
video system technician Dan Hansell
Big Art Group and Diane White co-production with The Wiener Festwochen and The Kitchen

The provocative Big Art Group from New York stages its latest work entitled SOS. With an investigation of the nature of sacrifice within a society saturated with media images and messages, the Big Art Group transforms the space on stage into a forest of cables and telecameras in which different narrative structures are superimposed. A number of animals, interpreted by actors wearing costumes and video cameras, move from their natural habitat to other areas that offer no hope of survival. In this jungle, populated by multimedia soft toys, the text analyses the large-scale transformation from a human being with a low technological intensity, who has always been the result of himself and what he has at his disposal to survive, into a homo tecnologicus, opening up new scenarios even in terms of dependence. In a society with an uncertain future, SOS tries to answer a basic question: how can we build a better world and what will it cost us?

.

Void Story

devised by Forced Entertainment
text, images and direction Tim Etchells
with Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor
stage design Richard Lowdon
sound and music John Avery
lighting Nigel Edwards
Forced Entertainment (United Kingdom) for SPILL
with the support of Tanzquartie (Vienna) and Tate Media

Void story tells the “fairy-tale” of a couple who make a journey through the decimated remains of contemporary culture. Through underground tunnels, degraded urban landscapes, attacked and colonised by insects, the two characters travel clandestinely in cold convoys, stopping in hotels that are bewitched or lost in the jungle, travelling in the heart of the night in which “there are no stars to see”. A dark but still comic fairy-tale, that resembles a radio play, staged by Forced Entertainment, sitting at a table leafing through the pages of the text, and creating a soundtrack for the sequences. The sound of shots, rain and telephone interference alternating with scenes dominated by projected images that act as a storyboard for an impossible film version of the disturbing text written by Tim Etchells.

.

Lev

devised by Muta Imago
with Glen Blackhall
directed by Claudia Sorace
dramatisation and soundtrack Riccardo Fazi
stage setting Massimo Troncanetti
stage costume Fiamma Benvignati
Muta Imago 08/Ztl Pro/in collaboration with Inteatro/
Scenari Danza 2.0, Amat/Kilowatt Festival

Lev cannot remember anything, a bullet in his brain has cancelled his past. It is a story like so many others, but merciless and true, the story of a Russian boy veteran of the Second World War, a case studied by the great psychiatrist Alexander Luria. In fifty minutes Lev’s claustrophobic mental space is recreated; he constantly falls over, digging with his own hands, scratching the encrusted surfaces, at the mercy of apparitions and visions, the remains of some still active corners of his capacity to remember. Muta Imago was founded in Rome 2004 by Riccardo Fazi, Claudia Sorace and Massimo Troncanetti, who were joined two years later by Glen Blackhall. Comeacqua (2007), (a + b)3 (2007) and Lev (2008) are their most recent productions.

.

Lotta di negro e cani

by Bernard-Marie Koltès
translated by Valerio Magrelli
directed and performed by Teatrino Giullare
Teatrino Giullare
with the support of Comune di Bologna/Provincia di Bologna/Regione Emilia Romagna

There are four key words in Bernard-Marie Koltès’ theatre: confrontation, solitude, night and desert. The poetry of this author evolves around these words. He died of AIDS in 1989 aged just forty-one, a hunter of reality, capable of writing with an extraordinary visual force, inspiring unforgettable metaphors. Combat de nègre et de chiens is a crude photograph of a hidden Africa, narrated through alternating lights and shade, sounds and words in the night, using a cinematic technique of open views and close-ups that underline the dual claustrophobic and apocalyptic nature of the text. A striking story of inescapable cruelty, that continues unarrestably to its tragic final conclusion. Since 1995, Teatrino Giullare, founded and directed by Giulia Dall’Ongaro and Enrico Deotti, has produced theatre productions, exhibitions and laboratories all over Italy, and in many other countries around the world. It has received numerous prizes including the National Critics Prize (2006), the Special Ubu Prize 2006, the Special Jury Prize and Brave New World Prize for best director at the 47th International MESS Theatre Festival in Sarajevo (2007).

.

Post It

with Sara Bonaventura, Iacopo Braca, Matteo Ceccarelli, Claudio Cirri
dramatised by Daniele Villa
stage design Camilla Garofano, Giovanna Moroni
Teatro Sotterraneo (Florence)/Fies Factory One in co-production with Centrale Fies
in collaboration with Teatro della Limonaia,
with the support of Teatro Studio di Scandicci — Scandicci Cultura

A neutral cubic volume, 5 metres by 5. A sheath of black canvases. Four performers who attack the box of the theatre, making cuts and openings. Adopting an approach of “revealing by hiding”, Teatro Sotterraneo arranges a funeral knowing it is on stage, an assembly line that goes from production to packaging and elimination, a stage presentation that offers and then removes, wraps, and puts away things and people. Post-it is a recess, a memory box where every possible ending can be found and verified: when we consume objects, when an argument or a score ends, in the absence that always precedes a return. Teatro Sotterraneo is an experimental theatre collective in which five elements coexist in a horizontal plane that extends from the planning of a stage product to its circulation.

Find the full programing and further information and video of Prospettiva 09 here.

The Big Art Group’s Flicker and the Screened Body in Performance

Read the PDF