Alex Tatarsky – SLC Performance Lab Podcast 06.02

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program’s Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program’s core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Alex Tartarsky is interviewed by Amelia Munson (SLC’26) and Sheridan Merrick (SLC’26) and produced by Julia Duffy (SLC’25)

Alex Tatarsky makes performances somewhere in between comedy, poetry, dance-theater, and rant—sometimes with songs. Tatarsky’s pieces play with the tension and overlap between written and improvised sequences, careening between known and unknown, set and scored. Drawing on the lineage of the clown, Tatarsky plays with the expectations and power dynamics of a given context, dissolving the fourth wall to respond to what is actually happening in the room, and probing the construction of genre, self, and narrative in real time.

Sad Boys in Harpy Land, which premiered in 2023 at Abrons Arts Center in New York, NY, is an adaptation of a German novel about a little boy who wants to change the world through art but isn’t very good at it. This narrative collides with other stories of tormented artists during horrific times, moving through the inaction born of anxiety, shame, and overwhelm towards strange and ecstatic modes of re-writing the world together. The performance takes the form of the bildungsroman or development novel—a classic narrative of an individual’s linear progress towards becoming a fully integrated member of society—and lets it decay, reveling in the insights of the fragment, the spiral, the wandering, and the broken bits. Sad Boys in Harpy Land was presented again in 2023 by Playwrights Horizons, New York, NY.

Tatarsky’s other works include MATERIAL, Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (2024); Gnome Core, Glen Foerd, Philadelphia, PA (2023); Dirt Trip, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2021); Untitled Freakout (Tell Me What To Do), The Kitchen, New York, NY (2021); and Americana Psychobabble, which premiered at La MaMa E.T.C., New York, NY (2016), with subsequent performances as part of the Exponential Festival, Brooklyn, NY (2019); and America(na) to Me, a program celebrating the 90th anniversary season at Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, MA (2022).

Photo: Maria Baranova