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to you, telling you, ‘This is how you should read this,’ or ‘This is what this is about.’ But through various disguising and transformative elements, it can impart these political messages or any sort of message. Art should never hammer things over people’s heads. If that’s happening, then that’s a problem…A lot of political theatre veers in and out of this aggressive performance art that has on the tip of its tongue, ‘This is the dogma’ or ‘This is the dictum.’ I don’t think that really honors the nature of what theatre is. Basically how I feel with the arts is this: ‘Take an art. Figure out what that art’s good at. And once you’ve figured out what that art is good at, then you can blend it with another element.’ That’s my feeling about multimedia theatre as well. That’s my feeling about circus theatre, for example. That’s my feeling about political theatre. How do you reconcile the personal dialogueoriented method of social theatre with the political initiative of your programs? Reka: When I was trained in social theatre for my Masters degree, there was a whole class there on the ethical dilemmas of taking funding from various organizations. Obviously the aim of social theatre is not to take a political vocabulary and set of ideas and push that forward. So it becomes problematic when you get funded by a certain funding body. But it’s really a case-by-case thing. In many cases it’s about taking the money and doing the work, but kind of negotiating some way around their demands. I was very lucky in the sense that the UN pretty much gave me full reign. They said it needed to be around the theme of sexual health because of their funding. So I tried while we were devising themes to bring up some sexual health questions – not even criteria, but questions – to see how the group reacted. But they were actually a lot more concerned with gender roles, which could relate. And that’s what I mean by negotiating. It can relate, but it’s not only about sexual health. I have a fiscally sponsored organization called Fronteirra. And the funding that we’re looking for, what I’m looking for is really around immigration issues. So, it’s really about informative projects around the immigration reform that’s happening right now, about strengthening the immigrant community…So, there’s already that focus. But then afterwards, what the issue is, what themes they want to discuss are up to group What is your take on social theatre? Adam Willson: In general, social theatre is basically using theatre to build community mobilization. The idea is to get together a group and have them focus on their story, whatever that story is. And I like the premise of it. But I think it’s maybe a little too utilitarian for me. It seems the goal is to use theatre as a way to implement education. And I think a strong element in theatre is education, but not the only element. Also, I’m a little skeptical of democracy. I’m skeptical because REVOLT I believe that once you get so many voices in a room, first of all it’s going to be hard to come to some sort of consensus. But also I think there’s this idea that when you allow so many voices – and basically in a certain sense, you’re trying to take the average voice of the group – what ends up happening is you lose sight of the best and the worst…And I’m worried that democracy in the arts or otherwise tends to facilitate mediocrity. If you’re only focusing on community devisement, I think you’re losing sight of the possibility of actually creating a masterpiece. I think a masterpiece could come out of that sort of methodology. But at the Photo courtesy of Frontierra Theatre Group. same time, I can see how quite often it doesn’t…I very much appreciate that social theatre is being done. And I appreciate that there are governing bodies or NGOs or whatever who are funding these projects. But at the same time, by basically taking these sequestered groups or differentiated groups and working with them on particular issues, with a specific goal in mind, for a specific time, I think it could end up cramping these groups’ abilities to actually express themselves in a free way. Theatre is a serious business. All art is a serious business, and I think a lot of people who don’t do art don’t realize how serious it is. If you want to do good stuff artistically, it takes a lot of fucking work, and it takes a lot of fucking focus…Without the proper preparation and training, I’m worried that these workshops might prevent people from really seeing what theatre is about. But that may not be the worst thing in the world. After all, it’s getting them out and performing. So, I can’t knock it too much. I’m just talking about my concerns. How would you characterize the difference between social theatre and conventional theatre? Reka: Over the weekend, I watched Farrah Crane’s play called ‘Night.’ It takes place in Lebanon in wartime. It’s a very strong piece and very well written. It was performed by lovely actresses but who, as far I know, have had no experience of war. And they’re performing for people who, just like them, have generally had no experience of war. That doesn’t mean it was less interesting. But in my head, as a social theatre practitioner, it’s like what’s the point? I mean it’s interesting, but it’s something that’s not legitimate – it loses something. I feel like we’re taking advantage of a dramatic situation, and it’s like ‘Oh, something terrible is happening over there, and let’s make a piece about it.’ And we feel bad about something we have nothing to do with and have never experienced and don’t know about… But I don’t have some of the experiences of the groups I’m working with, and that’s a conflict too. The way I was introduced to theatre was also as a bystander…But at the same time, it got me where I am…So it’s an ethical wheel. For me and a lot of the colleagues of mine, I came from a middle-class background. I have had no traumatic experiences. So, I come into this field like ‘Yes! Change! It’s good!’ Because I have the privilege of being able to think for myself. My hands are not tied. I remember a specific incident where I was faced with this veil I have over my head. I was working with a homeless group, co-facilitating. We were doing a forum piece in a homeless shelter. There was this piece about a recovering alcoholic. There’s this recovering alcoholic who’s 9 months sober in the beginning. She’s doing great. She wants to give back to society. She works with refugees as a volunteer. But then there’s this one refugee whose case gets worse and worse, and this individual can’t help. So she starts drinking and drinking and drinking. By the end of the piece she’s so drunk, on the floor, and this refugee friend comes knocking on the door and says, ‘I have nowhere to go. Can I stay here?’ And the character says ‘Ah! Sorry, no! Just go! I can’t help you’ Then we asked the audience, ‘Is there any point in the play where you would’ve said or done anything different?’ One person said, ‘Yeah. It’s the last thing, I’d change something right there.’…So, the spectator comes up and replaces the character of the recovering alcoholic. The refugee friend knocks on the door, it opens, and the guy says ‘yeah come on in, come on in.’ They both sit down on the bench for 30 seconds completely silent, and then the guy who intervened, he takes this big bottle of whiskey and asks, ‘do you want some?’ And the actor shrugs and says, ‘Yeah.’ That’s it. And they just drink on this bench for 30 seconds. Everyone claps, and we ask, ‘so what was that all about? Did that change anything?’ The guy who intervened said, ‘Yeah, totally. I mean I’m in the shit. She’s in the shit. Might as well be in the shit together.’ For me it was a great shock…It’s a beautiful idea that I would not have thought of, because I’m with this sort of background. I was brought up with the opportunity to make a difference. My parents were fighters. So I had a very active kind of upbringing… where you can’t just take something for granted – no, you have to move forward. And that’s a luxury. It really is. But sometimes it’s about being rooted in the present, and taking the moment for what it is. Work on the now. I’m still learning constantly. I have a lot to learn about conventional theatre as well. <strong>Magazine</strong> Number 4, 2013 34
THEATREVIEW Kay Turner's OTHERWISE: QUEER SCHOLARSHIP BY KATIE CERCONE INTO SONG A production conceived and directed by Kay Turner, Otherwise: Queer Scholarship Into Song, ran at the Dixon Place on the lower east side the first week of April. Intellectually dense, witty, filled with unexpected high notes and badass funky flows, Kay Turner’s full-length evening academic post-punk sing-alongsong excursion had me tipping my hat. Not only did Turner succeed in making heavy reading sexy – herself and nearly all female cohort of colleagues draped in animal print, shimmery lame et all (with sensible shoes) – I also just want to rhetorically applaud Turner for banging the mic stand on the floor ceremoniously throughout the final number. Inspired by the likes of 10 “Professors of Pleasure” who have all published new works of queer scholarship within the past year, Turner hired equal number of musicians and in some cases performing artists to “translate” the works into musical scores for the live performance. Each segment featured an introduction by the professorial author followed by the musical interpretation. When not serving as MC, Turner sang with Gretchen Phillips (known together as the proto-riot grrl punk and funk lesbian rock band “Girls in the Nose”) and ended the show with a musical approximation of her latest publication Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. “I want you to go home humming an academic tome,” said Turner, who had guests singing outloud academic buzzies linear time-keeping from within the plush gold confines of a stage prop Turner called her “Great Chain of Queer Being.” Things turned dangerous when Lisa Duggan introduced her new book Sapphic Slashers. Based on the 1892 case of a Tennessee woman who slashed the throat of her female lover and killed her, the book anchors its narrative in an act largely motivated by the “inconceivability” of femalefemale public union in the 19th century southern United States. According to Duggan’s book, this incident marks the emergence of the “Lesbian” in American mass culture and caused distortions that still haunt American female homosexual mythology today. Inspired by the book, the evening’s musical interpretation by Turner with Viva DeConcini and Mary Feaster weighs “expert” (male) testimony peddled to the public imagination at that time – ie “Girl slays girl! Victim of Erotomania! Feast of Sensation!” - against the truth of women who committed crimes because they were not permitted to love one another. Kay Turner singing “I Prefer My Meanings” with lyrics arranged from Tavia Nyong’o’s forthcoming Little Monsters: A Queer Bestiary. Photo: Dixie Sheridan. I can’t believe I’m saying this but, thank god for booze! Without New Yorker’s dangerously consistent marriage of spirits and the social, we might not have radical performing arts laboratories such as the Dixon Place on the island at all. Started as a salon in Paris in 1985, Artistic Director Ellie Covan imported DP to her East Village living room a year later and maintains its state-of-the-art facility to this day in part due to the sale of pre and post show bevs. Not that I generally partake. On the record I arrived adrenaline drunk on single origin hot chocolate, giddy and wired enough to take copious notes throughout the evening. like “Queer Bestiary” and “collective temporal distortion.” OTHERWISE was a brave, canon-breaking, raw and juicy rampage for, through and between the energetics of queerness. José “Cuban Missile Crisis” Muñoz started off the night with Cruising Utopia, a book which explores intersections between queer futurity and “the Utopian Kernel of art.” Temporality, particularly as a site of future-possibility, was a common thread running throughout the evening. In Carolyn Dinshaw’s introduction to her book How Soon is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, Dinshaw discussed the “mystical divine now and the collapse of time” in pre-modern nonsequential Medieval texts. With Medieval Barbie as her boxed-in sidekick, Dinshaw boldly collapsed Before the conclusion of the evening we had heard from several more scholars and musicians including Dr. Ann Cvetkovich who’s work on depression as a public feeling was interpreted by a yellow jump-suited Dynasty Handbag. An emerging icon of queer performance, Dynasty has been hailed a “crackpot genius” by the Village Voice and a “dislocating mess, in a good way…” by Time Out. For her interpretation of “Dr. Ann’s” work she presented an exhilaratingly absurd laptop accompanied vignette about a nun trapped in the prison cell of her imagination (lots of tongue wagging and teased hair). And if all that wasn’t hitting the jugular of this queer era we live in, we also heard from “Witch Brew Two,” a New Jersey based “crone” rap duo with yin-yang duds and an old school Casio keyboard followed by the lovely Maxine Henryson, a photographer who’s work portraying the Divine Feminine of Contemporary India was presented Kirtan-style by Masi Asare and Chris Williams. If you missed the show, and wasn’t converted by the sassy review in the Times (Queer Theory May Not Have a Beat, but Academicians Can Still Dance to It) (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/books/ otherwise-queer-scholarship-into-song-at-dixon-place.html?_ r=0) you can still read the books, that is - flashy clothing, intoxication, violence, and witchy babes (optional).
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Page 9 and 10: artist, “Father of MTV,” concep
Page 12 and 13: TOP 10 NYC !#$%12456!@# ARTISTS NOW
Page 14 and 15: FASHION Today The Cult of the First
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Page 18 and 19: the Black Power Movement on the att
Page 20 and 21: Westbeth Artists' Housing, New York
Page 22 and 23: Westbeth PHOTOS BY SCOTTO MYCKLEBUS
Page 26 and 27: Art & Politics:Fracking Drawingthel
Page 28 and 29: Christy Rupp, Cut & Run, detail, cu
Page 30 and 31: THE LITERARY VIEW Skyscraper Blues:
Page 32 and 33: THEATREVIEW Theatre for the Person:
Page 36 and 37: ARCHITECTURE VIEW On Being Post-Seq
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Page 40 and 41: 2 Tha Beat Y’all When Hip Hop Ped
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Page 44 and 45: SWAGILISH Salomon and THEillUZiON B
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Page 48: Dominique Claire models Revolt Wear

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