Verdensteatret—Theater Inside-Out, Plus Zorn, 3/3/11

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Verdensteatret's And All the Question Marks Started to Sing at DTW, plus Donald Byrd and Pam Tanowitz choreography to John Zorn at Guggenheim Works & Process

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/ballet/verdensteatret%E2%80%94theater-inside-out-plus-zorn/1087/

Verdensteatret's "And All the Question Marks Started to Sing," at DTW. Photo by by Yi Chun Wu.

Imagine a traditional theater—an empty stage surrounded by curtain legs which hide surrounding sound and lighting equipment. Then imagine all the people who operate this equipment—the sound engineers, musicians, lighting people, stage manager, moving silently but with purpose. Now imagine turning the whole shebang inside out so that all these normally invisible people and pieces of equipment were dumped and artfully arranged center stage, and the walls were pushed out to the edges to catch whatever sound and imagery were produced from within. And the audience watches the mechanics of the production as a choreographed ritual, a means to produce an often dream-like, sometimes nightmarish, soundscape and visual environment. The Norwegian collectiveVerdensteatret’s And All the Question Marks Started to Sing, last week at DTW (which co-presented it with FuturePerfect and PS 122), felt like this inside-out theater.

Tune-In Festival: From Bach to Reich, 2/24/11

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Tune-In Festival at Park Avenue Armory

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/tune-in-festival-from-bach-to-reich/1077/

Tune-In Festival. Photo by James Ewing.

You can’t fault the musical ensemble eighth blackbird, curators of the Park Avenue Armory’s recent Tune-In Festival, for lacking ambition. The program I caught,PowerLESS (one of four) had a listed runtime of three hours, but the evening lasted closer to four hours. Granted, it featured works that were supposed to be about form and not content (the prior night, PowerFUL, was about loaded work), but there was still an awful lot of form to process. The festival is part of an eclectic season at the Armory; highlights to come include the RSC in residence in a replica of the Globe Theater, and Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s final performances ever.

Leading off the program was George Haas’ in vain (2000), performed by the Argento Chamber Ensemble conducted by Michel Galante. For me, the highlights were less about the music, perhaps best summarized by the title—shimmering pools and wavelets of sound that ebbed and flowed seamlessly—and more about the blackouts that occurred periodically, during which the musicians continued to play. We in the capacity audience of 725 were left to close our eyes or raise our hungry gazes upward, where sparsely-spaced LEDs twinkled like stars in the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall; strobe lights in the pitch dark added a tear-inducing lightning effect. Steven Schick performed Kurt Schwitters’ UrSonate (1922-32), a devilish tour de force composed of gibberish phrases repeated and sampled. Some took on the cadences of imagined sentences, and others became amusingly absurd in Schick’s ardent performance.