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Snout

February 25, 2011 | by | Category: Film | 7 Comments
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About SNOUT (2008) I tend to find “one person shows” somewhat deadly. The deadliness is not rooted in the banality or the narcissism that have characterized many (but not all) such spectacles. What I have always objected to most is how inert and unexplored the theatricality often is. For me, as for many people who work in theater, the stage is really a big deal – a sacred space – and it’s really not good to just plunk something down in that space and simply uncap it. I have always thought that most one-person shows would be vastly improved by simply placing on stage a second person, a listener. Suddenly, there’s tension, a sense of danger and also allure. The question, what will happen?, begins to animate the moments as they ... [Read more]

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Modern Commitment to the Present and Past

February 22, 2011 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
JACK [Justin Bernhaut] web

JACK Quartet, SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) Chamber Music in Historic Sites, 13 February 2011 In this uncommonly vibrant and relevant program of contrasts and collisions, the New York-based JACK Quartet demonstrated thrilling engagement with music from the medieval, Renaissance, and 20th century periods. When one considers the extensive list of string quartet composers, including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bartók, and Schoenberg, it is even more impressive that the JACK Quartet began the concert with three arrangements of songs originally written for unaccompanied voices by 14th-century master Guillaume de Machaut. These settings, by quartet member Ari Streisfeld, gave the intricate polyphony of Machaut ... [Read more]

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Sight and Sound

February 18, 2011 | by | Category: Film, Music | Leave a Comment
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Iannis Xenakis: Now and Tomorrow Curtis Roads: New Work, with Brian O'Reilly, Video, REDCAT, January 30, 2011 –  The CalArts Center for Experiment in Art, Information and Technology (CEAIT) Festival returned this year to REDCAT with an extraordinary three nights of concerts and two symposia featuring the work of the highly experimental architect and composer Iannis Xenakis. Presented in conjunction with the MOCA exhibition Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary, Angelinos got a rare opportunity to dote on the work of this complex hybrid master. The culminating CEAIT program included Xenakis works, Dikhthas (1979), Epicycles (1989), Akanthos (1977) and Polytope de Cluny (1972), and that night's opening performance ... [Read more]

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Cutting Up the Beat

February 14, 2011 | by | Category: Music, Performance | Leave a Comment
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George Herms: THE ARTIST'S LIFE, REDCAT February 3, 2011 - February 5, 2011 "Loving everyone. Knowing nothing." —George Herms, on himself In this joyously messy, shambling show, jazz fan and beat generation icon George Herms put together a happening/opera, framing his assemblage art with an all-star ensemble of L.A.'s jazz legends, the Bobby Bradford Mo'tet and  the Theo Saunders Group. Herms tuned in to the audience with bat-like radar, waiting for the last program to cease its rattling and the last guy to stop chattering to his girlfriend, then announced that we had just experienced The Afterparty (listed as the first piece in the program) in the lobby beforehand. Indeed, I reflected, my lobby experience had been really fun ... [Read more]

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Beatific Annihilation_Part 2

February 11, 2011 | by | Category: Music | 2 Comments
Gira (photo by Peter Kondyrev)

Swans, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, Young God Records, 2010 – My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, the title of Swans’ 2010 record, refers to Michael Gira dying and following his parents up to heaven on a rope of smoke, and obliquely to the relief from asthma he experienced after giving up smoking. It is very much a journey into the unknown, as any endeavor would venture after a thirteen year hiatus. The new six-piece version of Swans includes members from different incarnations of the band—Norman Westberg and Christoph Hahn on guitar, Phil Puleo on drums, and Chris Pravdica on bass, as well as the percussionist Thor Harris. (Jarboe’s absence, though significant, is not conspicuous. She and Gira ... [Read more]

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Beatific Annihilation_Part 1

February 9, 2011 | by | Category: Music, Performance | Leave a Comment
Love of Life (1992)

Swans, Early Ruminations, 1981-1997 – One evening in 1981, the members of a New York City band called Circus Mort agreed to call it quits. Two of them, Jonathan Kane and Michael Gira, left the rehearsal space to get beer and cigarettes, and by the end of the night they had begun a new band called Swans, under Gira’s direction. Kane stayed with Swans less than two years and many other members have come and gone; only Gira has remained constant and for thirty years Swans has been his personal pursuit of the same untailored nihilism pursued by Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Strauss, and Yeats. Buttressed by No Wave rebar, Swans rebuilt the psychedelic castle with open-tuned guitar sound sheets and sonic cement. Yet at heart it was always pure ... [Read more]

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Wallace Shawn and Our Planetary Fever

February 4, 2011 | by | Category: Performance, Text&Context | 4 Comments
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Material and Mystery on a Bathroom Floor –  Ignoring their embedded-ness, complex systems relate to the environment with greed and aggression. If world religions are based on any one experience, it’s the kind of night Wallace Shawn documents in his play The Fever. We’ve all had them. The harsh inner judge shows up with his clipboard and his tilted scales demanding full access to the heart. In flashes of self-recognition we glimpse the demonic patterns that have covertly governed the course of our lives. Cherished self-images collapse in on themselves as the mind swirls around in a soup composed of everything it feels disconnected from. Delivered as a single long monologue, The Fever manages to link an experience of this kind to ... [Read more]

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Forti On All Fours

February 1, 2011 | by | Category: Performance | Leave a Comment
forti and filmon

Simone Forti, MOCA Grand Avenue, 23 January 2011, In conjunction with The Artist's Museum exhibition by Alan Berman Dancer-choreographer-writer Simone Forti returned to her roots in more ways than one in her Forti on All Fours performance last Sunday at MOCA Grand Avenue. By including works from 1968 and 1974 alongside improvisational pieces, she presented a convincing overview of her early choreographic process which began in 1955. And by choosing a museum for the event, she was recalling her 1960s performances given at New York art galleries and Yoko Ono's loft. Joining Forti for two of the four works was French improvisational dancer Claire Filmon. The entire event was recorded by by an ever-present videographer and photographer ... [Read more]

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