Rattler Makes a Day
February 11, 2019 | by Guy Zimmerman | Filed Under: Performance

Related Posts: Tis a Gift to Be Not-Simple, The Cassandra Syndrome, A Sign of Life from the Post-Dramatic, Vieux Carré, LeCompte and Co.
The Wooster Group does this thing they’ve developed where the actors listen to some prerecorded text and re-enact it for us. The technique straddles the hi-lo divide between Bertolt Brecht on the one side, and your local karaoke bar on the other. Endlessly fascinating to anyone working in theatre, the technique turns the actor into a living, breathing version of a puppet, channeling or transmitting the work of an other. If you know your theatre theory you know that the transcendent eloquence of puppets is in no way to be underestimated. As Kleist put it in an influential essay, On the Marionette Theatre, puppets have the advantage of being entirely free, in their expressive movements, of affectation. This is often the effect of the performances the Woosters put on— in their tight focus on the strictly technical challenge of hitting their marks at the right time, the actors reveal themselves more completely.
I always respond to the Wooster’s experiments with this approach to performance, but never quite so much as in the B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons” a Record Album Interpretation, which ran at REDCAT in early February. B-Sidewas conceived by the performer Eric Berryman, directed by Kate Valk and it features Berryman, Jasper McGruder and Philip Moore. I saw the piece on a Friday night, and was back for the Sunday matinee to see it again.
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Anthology: Ten Years of TQ – Robert Kato
January 9, 2019 | by Robert Kato | Filed Under: Photography
From Robert Kato's seeing iPhone — Related Posts: Portraits: Paper and Clay, Passages, Streetscapes, Night@Mare, Man Forgets the Earth Remembers Portrait of a Leaf, 09.27.2011 Standing … [Read more]

Lute Salute
December 9, 2018 | by Sean Hughes | Filed Under: Music
Paul O'Dette, Lute, The Da Camera Society, Greystone Mansion — In virtually every Hollywood movie depicting Renaissance Lives of the Rich and Famous, there is a cliched banquet scene: … [Read more]

Backyard Echo Park _ Quintet
December 2, 2018 | by Nancy Cantwell | Filed Under: Photography
Echo Park Flora and a Seat of ContemplationPlease Click to Enlarge … [Read more]

Gob Squad and the Slow Vogue
November 3, 2018 | by Guy Zimmerman | Filed Under: Theater
Gob Squad, Creation (Pictures for Dorian), REDCAT, October 19, 2018 Watching The Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian) at REDCAT brought home to me the fact that you can … [Read more]

Beyond Category
October 15, 2018 | by Sean Hughes | Filed Under: Dance, Music
David Roussève: Halfway to Dawn, REDCAT, October 4, 2018 — Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington deserved his royal nickname. Throughout his fifty-year reign as America's premier … [Read more]
SELECTED FEATURES
Mud, Blood and Flood
July 6, 2018 | by Sean Hughes
Michael Curtiz: A Life In Film, by Alan K. Rode — Ask an average, eighteen-year old American to name a movie director and he or she might think of Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Tarantino or Tim … [Read more]
Wormwood
February 17, 2018 | by Aram Yardumian
‘But still I was ordered to believe, even where the ideas did not correspond with, even when they contradicted, the rational theories established by mathematics and my own eyes' – Augustine, … [Read more]
Perpetration
October 13, 2017 | by Aram Yardumian
Casting JonBenet (2017), Netflix, Directed by Kitty Green — ‘Can you know what your prayers have set in motion?’– CT Dreyer ‘Ordet’ ‘A real whore should be able to attract by what she’s … [Read more]
Lean On Me
September 25, 2017 | by Guy Zimmerman
Hybrid-dharma and the Issue of Ownership — Sometimes late at night traveling with my father I'd wake up knowing nothing about where I was but feeling Steve McQueen close, as close as the … [Read more]
Teen Age Lust and Far-from-Equilibrium Dynamics
July 31, 2017 | by Guy Zimmerman
The History of Timelessness — Related Posts: Money and the Time Suck, Toward an Experimental Politics of Nonviolence, Of Fargo, Dopamine and the Image of Nectar The first time I … [Read more]
Art and Practice with The Heart Sutra
June 7, 2017 | by Guy Zimmerman
Toward Re-organization — Related Posts: The Aristotelian Detour, Field Mapping, Toward an Experimental Politics of Nonviolence Most of us spend our lives avoiding the Heart Sutra, but it … [Read more]
READERS RESPONSE