No Thanks, I'm still high from my reviews in London!
On going back to the theater with Parker Posey and Hari Nef
This weekend we took a chance and queued for last-minute seats to the sold-out performance of Thomas Bradshaw’s Seagull/Woodstock, NY at the the Signature Theater. We were rewarded with front row seats, spitting distance from this perfectly cast adaptation of Chekov, written a decade ago but totally adroit to our post-pandemic present.
Recent visits to the Signature center have been reshaped by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon’s The Watering Hole, a site-specific performance that led audiences through ten installations through the Pershing Square complex. Going backstage, into dressing rooms, and into empty auditoriums made the theater feel even more ghostly than it typically is. What I remember most is the long list of artist-submitted wishes for a better theater post-pandemic that was posted in the lobby. I go into shows nowadays equally curious about what the audience and the players are getting out of it, trying to figure out a new what exactly this contract between performers and audiences is and how it might get remade in ways that both honor the form’s history and keep open the new.
Accolades on the last score to the casting director of The Seagull, Judy Henderson. This role is not usually lauded in the theater, and when it is noticed we use the pejorative term “stunt casting” to dismiss what after all is just a professional doing their job well. The Seagull cast Gen X icon Parker Posey with It-millennials Hari Nef and Nat Wolff, all of whom had eager fandoms waiting for them in the lobby (all but Posey made an appearance the night we went). I was also excited to see Patrick Foley — of Circle Jerk notoriety — in the cast too.
On Sunday I went to the new Open Movement series at PSNY, a recent discovery that has been so transformative that I feel like I should be keeping it a secret. PSNY is one of institutions that has returned from the system shock of the pandemic stronger and more vital than ever, in no small part thanks to deep artist and community involvement grounded in decolonial and anti-racist principles. One old thing that is new again are these free Sunday sessions, last week led by visual arts choreographer Elliot Reed and this week by Young Boy Dancing Group. YBDG are suddenly everywhere, and the reports are so breathless that I was a bit skeptical at first. But their work is the sort where you can get as much out of as you put it, and it turns out that this is exactly what I had felt myself starved for: collectively improvised movement without the anxiety of goals. The group of dancers were more than game for what YBDG had lined up for us. The final piece had me gasping for breath as I moved from body to body.
I was reminded of the Deleuzean mantra in my old department: make of yourself a body without organs. But this technique felt more like the opposite, making a series of organs without bodies.