Tag Archives: joe diebes

CULTUREMART 2014

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
January 28 – February 9, $15
212-647-0202
www.here.org

The January performance festival season might be winding down, but HERE’s annual CULTUREMART is just getting under way. From January 28 to February 9, the downtown arts organization will present thirteen multidisciplinary workshop productions from current and former participants in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), with all tickets only $15. The festival kicks off January 28-29 with Bora Yoon’s Sunken Cathedral, a multimedia journey through several rooms, exploring the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Matt Marks and Paul Peers’s Mata Hari, an opera-theater piece about the WWI spy’s last month, is paired with mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn’s Science Fair, which is told through songs, slides, and live experiments. In Restless Next, choreographer Rebecca Davis examines the body’s ability to change. Joseph Silovsky uses video, oratory, robotics, and puppetry to relate the story of Sacco and Vanzetti in Send for the Million Men. Stefan Weisman and David Cote’s multimedia opera of James Hurst’s The Scarlet Ibis will be stripped down to a concert version consisting of the piano and vocal score; at two hours and fifteen minutes, it’s the longest show of the festival. (Most run between twenty and sixty minutes.)

Soomi Kim’s CHANG(E) examines the performance artist and political activist Kathy Change’s bizarre end (photo by Hunter Canning)

Soomi Kim and Mei-Yin Ng’s Chang(e), a dance-theater work about controversial performance artist Kathy Change, shares a bill with Ng’s Lost Property Unit, which deals with surveillance and robotics. Dancer-choreographer Laura Peterson is back with The Futurist, a collaboration with the very busy composer Joe Diebes that uses sound and movement to investigate what lies ahead. In Genet Porno, Yvan Greenberg and Laboratory Theater update Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers into a contemporary tale about porn and a gay prostitute. Leyna Marika Papach’s opera/movement-theater piece Glass Mouth (Part 2) delves into the nature of personal identity, with visuals by Jerry Smith Jr. CULTUREMART concludes with LEIMAY’s Frantic Beauty, in which dancer choreographer Ximena Garcia and video installation artist Shige Moriya look at dreams and desires, and Michael Bodel’s there are caves and attics, which uses Michel Foucault’s Corps Utopique to probe the concept of place. As usual, CULTUREMART provides a potpourri of intimate, experimental works from creators who are willing to take chances while both entertaining and challenging audiences.

COIL: AN EVENING WITH WILLIAM SHATNER ASTERISK

New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher St.
Through January 12, $20
888-596-1027
www.ps122.org
www.newohiotheatre.org

“Right now I have something to tell you,” philosopher and starship captain James T. Kirk, as portrayed by the great William Shatner, says near the beginning of An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk. “You could call it a transmission. A transmission from the future. Your future. Where you are going. I’m sure you’d like to know. Do you want to know where you’re going? Or maybe you don’t.” Kirk then goes on to give a nearly sixty-minute lecture that examines art and science, time and space, savagery and civilization. He does so via an ingenious technique developed by director Phil Soltanoff (SITSTANDWALKLIEDOWN) in collaboration with writer Joe Diebes (I/O, Botch) and systems designer Rob Ramirez (I/O): Soltanoff cataloged every word spoken by Kirk on the Star Trek television series, then strung them together to create sentences and new words, sometimes syllable by syllable. (For example, Kirk never said “art,” so Soltanoff clipped if from “start,” while “ontologically” and “epistemologically” were made up from syllables from multiple words.) The audiovisual sampling creates a kind of new language, part classic Shatner choppy overemoting, part early electronic voice generation computer speak. The clips, mainly close-ups of Shatner’s face, appear on a video monitor pushed around the stage silently and deliberately by Mari Akita, as if Kirk is moving about, reminiscent of Shatner’s recent one-man Broadway show, Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It . . . For most of the performance, Kirk’s talk is translated via subtitles on two flanking screens, but by the end the subtitles go away; it is easier to understand because the audience has begun to recognize and associate certain words and pictures. The lecture is rather simplistic and repetitive, even when it occasionally mocks itself, although there are numerous funny bits. The show also includes several minutes of the Star Trek episode A Private Little War as well as a brief monologue by Akita, but they end up being more puzzling than enlightening. “This might seem confusing at first,” Kirk says at one point. “At first you might think I’m full of it. You might think I’m full of shatner.” And really, when all is said and done, is being full of Shatner ever a bad thing?

COIL 2014

Multiple venues
January 3 – February 1, $15-$20
212-352-2101
www.ps122.org

PS122’s East Village home might be under renovation, but that isn’t stopping the organization from presenting the ninth annual incarnation of its winter performance festival, Coil. This year’s festivities comprise nine cutting-edge works in various disciplines, with tickets for all shows only $20, so there’s no reason not to check out at least one of these unique, unusual productions. Reid Farrington stages the ultimate heavyweight match in the world premiere of Tyson vs. Ali at the 3LD Art & Technology Center (January 3-19), in which live action and multiple screens pit Mike Tyson against Muhammad Ali. Mac Wellman’s Muazzez at the Chocolate Factory (January 7-17), from “A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds,” transports the audience, and actor Steve Mellor, into outer space. Heather Kravas’s a quartet at the Kitchen (January 8-12) consists of four dancers performing four dances in four parts each. Director Phil Soltanoff, systems designer Rob Ramirez, and writer Joe Diebes boldly go where no one has gone before in An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk at the New Ohio Theatre (January 9-12), creating a hybrid work highlighted by humans interacting with video clips of words spoken by Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek but strung into new thoughts and statements. Tina Satter’s highly stylized House of Dance at Abrons Arts Center (January 9-13) investigates a tap-dance contest and the relationship between a teacher and his student. The performance series CATCH 60 celebrates its tenth anniversary with the one-night-only CATCH Takes the Decade at the Invisible Dog Art Center (January 11), with works by Cynthia Hopkins, Molly Lieber & Eleanor Smith, Anna Sperber, Ivy Baldwin, and others. Okwui Okpokwasili’s solo Bronx Gothic at Danspace Project (January 14 – February 1) is a song-and-movement-based coming-of-age story about two eleven-year-old girls. All three parts of Jeremy Xido’s solo piece The Angola Project will take place at the Invisible Dog (January 14-17). And family tragedy lies at the center of Brokentalkers’ Have I No Mouth at Baryshnikov Arts Center (January 14-26), with company director Feidlim Cannon and his mother trying to put things back together. In addition, the Red + White Party will get folks mingling as SPIN New York on January 12 ($30 and up) with Elevator Repair Service, and the SPAN conversation series will be held at NYU on January 18.

JOE DIEBES: CHRONOLOGY

Joe Diebes’s “Scherzo” is centerpiece of frenetic multimedia installation at Paul Rodgers/9W

Paul Rodgers / 9W
529 West 20th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through December 2, free
212-414-9810
www.paulrodgers9w.com

At the beginning of this year, No Longer Empty held a music-related exhibition, “Never Can Say Goodbye,” in the old Tower Records at Fourth St. & Broadway. The star of the show was Joe Diebes’s “Scherzo,” a frenetic video installation of cellist Rubin Kodheli playing a score by Diebes as fast as he possibly can while being filmed from eight different angles by Andrew Federman. Kodheli’s virtuosic playing had been fed through a computer algorithm that resequenced the various segments into a brand-new, thrilling yet impossible sound piece that questions time and space as well as the reality of seeing and hearing. “Scherzo,” which comes off as a sort of punk-classical amalgamation, is located in one of the small rooms behind what looks like a white closet in the middle of the Paul Rodgers/9W gallery, surrounded by four other audiovisual pieces that line the walls. “One to One,” “Anachronism I,” “Anachronism 2,” and “Steeplechase” involve Diebes tracing and/or erasing scores by Bach, Beethoven, and Charlie Parker, using and/or reusing translucent vellum sheets, while the compositions can be heard through headphones. “I’m receiving and transmitting, or recording and playing, at the same time,” Diebes explains in the exhibition catalog. “My hand is the authority of the composer, but I’m not the composer. My hand is being driven by the recorded performance, so I’m really just a mass of nerves and muscle processing real time information. I’m trying to do it the best I can, but it’s all error.” Diebes might call it error, but the result is an intoxicating multimedia presentation that boggles the senses.