Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Theater The Busiest Period of the Year for Theater, Experimental Performance and Dance Begins Today!
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 11:38 AM
Under the Radar Festival, January 5-16:
Last year's big APAP winner, Philly's Pig Iron Theater, scored big at the Public Theater's Under the Radar with Chekhov Lizardbrain, though this year's American contingent includes quite a few well-known performers. There's Reggie Watts, in collaboration with playwright Tommy Smith, live-editing the film Dutch A/V. The Voltron-like combination of director JoAnne Akalaitis, musician Nora York and playwright/performer David Greenspan for Jump, about American actress Sarah Bernhardt's 1905 performance of La Tosca. Another local favorite, Taylor Mac, takes us on his semi auto-biographical The Walk Across America for Mother Earth. UTR's most buzzed-about show, though, has got to be Belarus Free Theater's almost-didn't-happen Pinteresque theatrical protest piece Being Harold Pinter.
COIL, January 5-15:
Performance Space 122's APAP-season festival even features a chamber opera, though the most intriguing performances are undoubtedly Argentinian director Vivi Tellas's Rabbi Rabino, in which two actual rabbis (real, live rabbis!) take the stage and perform their autobiographies, and New York-based director Annie Dorsen's Hello Hi There, in which two computers re-enact the classic Foucault-Chomsky live TV debate.
There's even a trailer (gulp) for COIL 2011:
Culturemart, January 7-23:
There's a bit of a gender war at work in HERE's contribution to the APAP festival season madness (which, you'll note, runs a week longer than the other festivals), what with James Scruggs's Ticket to Manhood sharing a couple evenings with Johari Mayfield's Venus Riff, and Nick Vaughn and Jake Margolin's matrimonial experiment A Marriage. Other promising shows on the Culturemart schedule include Kamala Sankaram's multimedia chamber opera Miranda, Deborah Stein and Suli Holum's self-twinning thriller Chimera and LEIMAY's watery dance piece Floating Point Waves. Personally, I'm pretty excited about Betty Shamieh's The Strangest, which fills out the unexplored identity of the nameless Arab murdered by the main character in Albert Camus' The Stranger.
So don't be a stranger and miss all these shows—try to at least see a couple before they disappear along with the thousands of APAP conference attendees.
Top Commenters
