this week in dance

QUEER NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

Bruno Isaković and Nataša Rajković’s Yira, yira (Cruising, cruising) is part of QNYIAF (photo by Silvija Dogan)

QUEER NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl. between Third & Fourth Sts.
February 7 – 17, $25
212-945-2600
nyuskirball.org

After a six-year break, the Queer New York International Arts Festival returns to the city, taking place February 7-17 at NYU Skirball. Started by Queer Zagreb founder Zvonimir Dobrović in 2012 at Abrons Arts Center, the fest consists of works that address queerness in today’s society, this year with presentations from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, and Germany, including live performances, installations, and public talks.

The 2024 QNYIAF kicks off February 7 with Croatian artist Arijana Lekić Fridrih’s From5to95, a hybrid video installation and online project in which Croatian women from the ages of five to ninety-five share their personal stories about gender inequality. On February 7 and 8, Croatian artists Bruno Isaković and Nataša Rajković’s Yira, yira (Cruising, cruising), which premiered in Argentina in 2019, is performed by sex workers Juan Ejemplo, Leandra Atenea Levine Hidalgo, Pichón Reyna, and Sofía Tramazaygues, exploring the relationship between client and sex worker.

Bruno Isaković and Mia Zalukar’s Kill B. reimagines the Bride from Quentin Tarantino films (photo by Hrvoje Zalukar)

Isaković collaborates with fellow choreographer and dancer Mia Zalukar on Kill B., inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Playing February 9 and 10, the piece focuses on the character of the Bride as well as artistic hierarchical structures and their own professional partnership. On February 13, Toronto-based performance artist Clayton Lee goes through his sexual history in The Goldberg Variations, which mashes up Johann Sebastian Bach with WCW and WWE wrestler and actor Bill Goldberg, host of the 2018-19 competition series Forged in Fire: Knife or Death and a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice. Some iterations have included smells and live snakes, so be ready.

On February 15, Argentinian interdisciplinary artist Tiziano Cruz will deliver the autobiographical performance lecture Conference, followed by a discussion. His piece Soliloquy — I woke up and hit my head against the wall was about his mother; in Conference he turns his attention to his ancestors and his late sister. On February 16, Brazilian artist Wagner Schwartz’s performance lecture La Bête is an interactive solo in which he activates a plastic replica of one of Lygia Clark’s rearrangeable hinged metal sculptures known as bichos, or “beasts,” and then the audience does the same, except with Schwartz’s naked body.

QNYIAF concludes February 17 with Raimund Hoghe Company members Emmanuel Eggermont and Luca Giacomo Schulte’s An Evening with Raimund, a tribute to German choreographer, dancer, and journalist Raimund Hoghe, who died in 2021 at the age of seventy-two; excerpts from his works will be performed by seven dancers. “To see bodies on stage that do not comply with the norm is important — not only with regard to history but also with regard to present developments, which are leading humans to the status of design objects,” Hoghe said. “On the question of success: It is important to be able to work and to go your own way — with or without success. I simply do what I have to do.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

COMPAGNIE HERVÉ KOUBI: SOL INVICTUS

Compagnie Hervé KOUBI worships the sun in Sol Invictus (photo by Nathalie Sternalski)

DANCE REFLECTIONS: SOL INVICTUS
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 23-28, $10-$71
212-645-2904
www.joyce.org

French choreographer Hervé Koubi studied dance and biology at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and he combines the two elements gorgeously in Sol Invictus as his company of eighteen performers pushes the limits of what the human body can do.

In a program note, Koubi calls the seventy-five-minute piece “a manifesto for life,” and he fills it with sections that explore ritual, worship, faith in a higher power — in this case, the sun — and life, death, and rebirth.

Continuing at the Joyce through January 28, Sol Invictus, which means “invincible sun,” is named for the Roman Sun God, a deity that inspired cult followings. It begins in silence with Allan Sobral Dos Santos running around in a circle, faster and faster, moving lower and lower until his hand touches the reflective floor. The other dancers watch him from either side.

Soon the soundtrack starts — the score features music and soundscapes by Mikael Karlsson, Maxime Bodson, Beethoven (the funeral procession from the Seventh Symphony), and Steve Reich — and a friendly street dance battle breaks out. Koubi’s movement language melds hip-hop, capoeira, ballet, and contemporary dance, heavily influenced by his discovery in 2009 of his Algerian heritage; his troupe comes primarily from North Africa.

They twirl, jump, slide, shake, lift, toss, and dash around the stage, doing flips, cartwheels, head- and handstands, and dazzling twists and spins in musical arranger Guilaume Gabriel’s muted-palette culottes, loose-fitting skirts or shorts, several of the men going bare-chested, revealing impressive, heavily tattooed bodies. For the first time, Compagnie Hervé KOUBI includes women (Francesca Bazzucchi, Joy Isabella Brown, Hsuan-Hung Hsu), toning down a bit of the beefy masculinity on display.

Lionel Buzonie’s lighting ranges from heavenly glows to ominous fog; the eight spots at the top back bounce off the floor, casting ululating shadows on the Joyce’s ceiling. At one point a handful of dancers, each with a light behind them, approaches the stage slowly, like zombies. The narrative shifts from dance-off to postapocalyptic survival to West Side Story jubilance.

A long stretch of fabric in the back becomes a glittering gold translucent parachute enveloping first Bazzucchi, then later the one-legged Samuel Da Silveira Lima.

The dancers spend most of the show closely observing one another, but occasionally a single performer comes to the front and looks out at the audience, both warning us and beckoning us to join in the group worship of the sun as a way to rise out of the hazy darkness.

Koubi, who previously presented The Barbarian Nights, or The First Dawns of the World in 2020 and What the Day Owes to the Night in 2018 at the Joyce, can get a bit lost in all the razzle-dazzle, as impressive as it is, but he finds hope and love in the gathering itself, and it’s hard not to find the joy on his journey.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

UNDER THE RADAR: VOLCANO

Volcano gushes forth over four episodes and nearly four hours at St. Ann’s Warehouse

VOLCANO
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
January 10-21, $54
stannswarehouse.org

Luke Murphy’s Volcano is an eruption of ingenuity, a multimedia, multidisciplinary melding of past, present, and future bathed in mystery.

Continuing at St. Ann’s Warehouse through January 21 as part of the Under the Radar festival, the nearly four-hour presentation takes place in a large transparent box, with the audience sitting on two sides in rising rafters. Alyson Cummins and Pai Rathaya’s set is a ramshackle room with drooping wallpaper, television monitors, a disco ball, a black trunk, toy figurines, and other odd, seemingly random items.

Every time an old-fashioned radio suddenly blurts on, two unidentified men, portrayed by Irish writer, director, and choreographer Murphy (X) and London-born dancer and actor Will Thompson (Y), they grab a camera on a tripod and try to film themselves dancing. Other times they glide into compelling duets in silence, interrupted by light and sound glitches that make it feel like they are under someone else’s control. Which, to some extent, they are.

The two men are participants in the Amber Project, a 1950s-like space mission. “We at the Amber Project are ready to take the next step in the exciting and illustrious heritage of exploration and technological advancement,” a spokesman tells them on the monitors. “This Alinia rocket with the mission designation Pod 00 will soon hurl a crewless spacecraft into orbit — the first of a series of interstellar vehicles, similar to the one which will soon carry two travellers past the reaches of our solar system for the first time.” But what’s really going on?

Volcano pours out over the course of four forty-five-minute episodes — “Frequency,” “Realia,” “Gift,” and “Pod 261” — with two five-minute pauses and one standard intermission in between. If you’re looking for easy answers to what’s happening, you’re not going to find them.

“I’m confused. And I’m scared. I don’t know anything. It’s like my mind’s a library and I just went to a section of shelves I don’t normally go to, and all the book are gone. . . . I don’t even know what books are supposed to be there. And that scares me. I . . . keep wondering . . . What are we doing?” Y says at one point. “I keep wondering whether the things I recognize, the things that make me feel comfortable . . . Do I trust them because I know them, or do I trust them because I don’t know anything else? . . . Now, I know something’s changed here, but I can’t tell if I’ve lost focus on something I used to see or if I’m only now noticing what I couldn’t see before. And mainly . . . I’m wondering who knows all the things I don’t. And that . . . that makes me scared.”

The abstract, surreal narrative breaks out into a game show, a weather report, Amber Project testimonials, magic tricks, a nod to virtual reality pioneer Morton Heilig, and songs by Hot Chip, the Beach Boys, Dirty Beaches, and Billie Holiday. Visual references are made to Superman, Marilyn Monroe, Michelangelo, and iconic 1960s sci-fi television.

The dialogue doesn’t make things much clearer, only adding to the conundrum:

Y: You know, I feel like we’ve got a real opportunity here, you know?
X: I’m not sure I understand what you mean.
Y: Well, you know, we can’t walk away from this; we should, you know, grab the bull by the horns.
X: You were saying you felt confused?
Y: This feels . . . this is important.
X: I believe you, I think.

And:

Y: Do you ever just wanna do something different?
X: What do you mean?
Y: Never mind.

Volcano is a technical marvel, mixing analog and digital in complex and humorous ways; the lighting is by Stephen Dodd, with sound by Rob Moloney. The prefilmed videos were directed by Pato Cassinoni, with a cast that includes Adam Burton, Amaya Gill, Ciaran Bermingham, Emily Terndrup, Ghaliah Conroy, Gina Moxley, John McCarthy, Lily Ockwell, Mufutau Yusuf, Pearse Donoghue, Rocio Dominguez, and Sile Maguire.

Does Volcano need to be as long as it is? Probably not. Should the audience have to wait about two and a half hours before a proper intermission? Not really. But if you give in to its conceits, it’s not unlike binging a limited sci-fi series that is as perplexing as it is riveting, with the added bonus of captivating choreography.

Murphy (Slow Tide, Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte) and Thompson are a dynamic duo, immersed in a cryptic world that reveals humanity losing its grip on reality — but always with a ray of hope somewhere out there on the horizon.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

RONALD K. BROWN/EVIDENCE WINTER SEASON AT THE JOYCE

Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE return to the Joyce with Walking Out the Dark (photo by Ernesto Mancebo)

Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, a Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 16–21, $52-$72
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org
www.evidencedance.com

One of the highlights of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s sixty-fifth anniversary season at New York City Center last month was a new production of Ronald K. Brown’s 2009 Dancing Spirit, a celebration of longtime Ailey dancer and artistic director Judith Jamison. Before and after the December 23 presentation, Brown, who suffered a stroke in April 2021 that almost cost him his life, stood in the back of the orchestra with his life partner, dancer and associate artistic director Arcell Cabuag, hugging, kissing, and shaking hands with friends, colleagues, and well-wishers. Brown still has a lot of work to do, but his progress has been awe-inspiring.

Brown, a Bed-Stuy native, now brings his Evidence company — named after the 1948 Thelonius Monk composition — to the Joyce for its annual winter season. Running January 16–21, the show features two of Brown’s masterworks, 2001’s Walking Out the Dark and 2012’s Torch.

The former, a fifty-five-minute choreographed conversation among mother, brother, sister, lover, and friend dealing with self-examination, ritual, and healing, has an original score by Philip Hamilton (“Freedom”), with text from letters by Brown in addition to songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock (“Oh Death”), Ballet Folklorico Cutumba de Santiago de Cuba, and Toumani Diabate and live drumming by Abou Camara. The cast alternates between Demetrius Burns, Joyce Edwards, Gregory Hamilton, Isaiah K. Harvey, and Cabuag, who is celebrating his twenty-fifth year with the troupe and will take on the “Gratitude” solo four times, and Stephanie Chronopoulos, Austin Warren Coats, Valériane Louisy, Shaylin D. Watson, and Burns (“Gratitude”); the movement is inspired by dance from Benin, Cuba, and Côte d’lvoire.

The latter is a touching tribute to the life and memory of former Brown student and dance enthusiast Beth Young, who passed away in January 2012. The half-hour piece, which focuses on perseverance and self-determination, will be performed by Burns, Chronopoulos, Coats, Edwards, Hamilton, Harvey, Louisy, and Watson, with music by Teddy Douglas and DJ Zinhle featuring Busiswa Gqulu, remixed by Brown.

There will be a Curtain Chat on January 17 and a family matinee on January 20 at 2:00.

In addition, in conjunction with APAP, Brown and Cabuag are presenting an excerpt from Percussion Bitter Sweet, which they are creating for “Max Roach 100”; the sneak peek takes place at the Joyce on January 13 at 4:00 and at Alvin Ailey Studios on January 14 at 5:30.

No company has the kind of dancing spirit Brown and Evidence display, and it should be on full view in this winter program at the Joyce.

Out-FRONT! Festival

Ogemdi Ude’s Hear is part of Pioneers Go East Collective’s Out-FRONT! Festival (photo by Maria Baranova)

Out-FRONT! FESTIVAL
LGBT Community Center, 208 West Thirteenth St.
Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St.
January 10–20, free – $28.52 (suggested donation)
pioneersgoeast.org

Pioneers Go East Collective, which is dedicated to “radical queer performance, dance, and film for social change,” is presenting the 2024 Out-FRONT! Festival, taking place January 10-15 at the LGBT Community Center and January 17-20 at Abrons Arts Center. The bill features live performances by Arthur Aviles and Collaborators, Joey Kipp with Pioneers, Christopher Unpezverde Núñez, Jason Anthony Rodriguez, Paz Tanjuaquio, Ogemdi Ude, and Annie MingHao Wang; workshops with Rodriguez and Magda Kaczmarska; and a film program.

“This year’s festival brings together ten extraordinary multigenerational artists whose socially engaged practices explore issues of race, gender, disability, grief, migration, and our collective humanity in ways that continue to inspire us,” Pioneers artistic director Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte said in a statement. “We created Out-FRONT! to both celebrate artists with community-driven approaches to art-making and to offer them a platform to share their work with audiences during the Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference, an opportunity we hope provides new connections and sparks a positive dialogue about creative participation in shared spaces.”

Rodriguez, who played Lemar Wintour on Pose, will stage Take a Good Look with Dominican dancer and actor Gaymer and the solo Meet Me in the Moon. Aviles’s Naked Vanguard series continues with reimaginations of earlier works (Morning Dance, In the End, Let’s Begin, and A Jamaican BattyBwoy in America) in addition to the world premiere of Untitled #5A After Ted Shawn AKA Dansé Mexicaine & Jamaïquaine Américaine, performed by Nikolai McKenzie Ben Rema, Hunter Sturgis, and Aviles. The film screenings consist of a new short by Fana Fraser, And I was recognized by Omega X, Danni Venne, Matt Harvey, and Laura Marie Marciano, and The Personal Things by Tourmaline.

Below is the full schedule; admission to all events is free with RSVP (suggested donation $25).

Wednesday, January 10
Jason Anthony Rodriguez, Take a Good Look / Meet Me in the Moon, LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301, 8:00

Thursday, January 11
Jason Anthony Rodriguez, Take a Good Look / Meet Me in the Moon, LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301, 7:00

Joey Kipp with Pioneers Go East Collective, Tracing Lorraine, LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301, 8:00

Friday, January 12
Voguing for Teens, NEXT! TEEN Workshop with Jason Anthony Rodriguez, LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301, 3:00

Joey Kipp with Pioneers Go East Collective, Tracing Lorraine, LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301, 8:00

Saturday, January 13
Films by Fana Fraser, Omega X & Danni, Matt Harvey, Laura Marie Marciano, and Tourmaline, LGBT Community Center, Gallery 101, 5:00

Ogemdi Ude, Hear, LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301, 7:00

Sunday, January 14
NEXT! Workshop for older adults with Magda Kaczmarska, dance and storytelling, LGBT Community Center, 5:00

Ogemdi Ude, Hear, LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301, 6:00

Christopher Unpezverde Núñez, YO OBSOLETE, LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301, 7:00

Monday, January 15
Christopher Unpezverde Núñez, YO OBSOLETE, LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301, 8:00

Wednesday, January 17
Arthur Aviles and Collaborators, Naked Vanguard, Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, 8:00

Thursday, January 18
Annie MingHao Wang, had my mouth, Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, 8:00

Friday, January 19
Paz Tanjuaquio / TOPAZ ARTS Dance Productions, Silweta, Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, 7:00

Arthur Aviles and Collaborators, Naked Vanguard, Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, 8:00

Saturday, January 20
Annie MingHao Wang, had my mouth, Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, 5:00

Paz Tanjuaquio / TOPAZ ARTS Dance Productions, Silweta, Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, 6:00

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LIVE ARTERY 2024: WEATHERING

Humanity gets caught up in the maelstrom in Faye Driscoll’s Weathering (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

WEATHERING
New York Live Arts
219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
January 9-13, $10-$45
212-924-0077
newyorklivearts.org
www.fayedriscoll.com

As I noted in April 2023, Faye Driscoll’s latest work, Weathering, is, well, everything.

It is now back for an encore run January 9-13 as part of New York Live Arts’ Live Artery 2024 series. Below is my original review; do whatever you can to get a ticket to this extraordinary experience.

—————————————————

The seventy-minute Weathering takes place on a squishy white movable platform raft designed by Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan. The audience sits on all four sides of the object. One by one, ten performers — James Barrett, Kara Brody, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Amy Gernux, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Jennifer Nugent, Cory Seals, Eliza Tappan, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, and Jo Warren, in Karen Boyer’s costumes of everyday dress, some with backpacks, bags, and other accoutrements — step on and off the platform, eventually all standing in place and freezing, becoming what Driscoll calls a flesh sculpture.

Stage managers Emily Vizina and Ryan Gamblin, in all black, go to opposite corners and gently push the platform so it spins around, extremely slowly at first. The dancers barely move a muscle, but as the platform rotates, you can start to tell that the performers have shifted ever so slightly, lowering a knee, reaching out a hand, turning a foot, almost imperceptibly; the effect is like you are watching a living, creeping flipbook. Soon they begin touching, the connections electrifying, as if the contact is life affirming, which is especially potent as we emerge from Covid restrictions that kept us physically apart from one another. As the bodies interweave, they close gaps, filling spaces of loss and absence.

Performers encounter all five senses while spinning around the New York Live Arts stage (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

Driscoll incorporates all five senses as she and the stage managers occasionally spray the performers (and the audience) with citrus-smelling water and some of the dancers let out small groans and grunts as they put their mouths on an arm, leg, or neck that approaches them, somewhere in between the hunger for sex and the hunger of zombies seeking sustenance.

As the score builds — the sound and music direction is by Sophia Brous, with live sound and sound design by Ryan Gamblin and composition, field recordings, and sound design by Guillaume Malaret — the raft is spun around faster and faster. Personal items fall haphazardly to the ground: keys, a wallet, cellphones. Clothes start coming off, revealing more of who these people are and challenging what we might have previously thought about them while harkening back to our primeval existence, equating the beginning and the end. Chaos ensues, as the audience tries to capture as much of the action as it possibly can, not wanting to miss a single thing, as if every little movement, every sound, every change could upset the balance of this mini-universe.

Driscoll is telling us to pay attention, letting us know that humanity is failing and we are destroying the planet. The raft, evoking Earth and its orbit, sometimes slides slightly out of control, nearly hitting the people in the first row.

Faye Driscoll’s Weathering continues at NYLA through April 15 (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

The faster the raft goes, the more the audience is overcome by an intoxicating joy mixed with impending doom; it is absolutely exhilarating to follow each of the performers’ journeys, ten individuals striving to survive on their own and as a group, just as we in the audience are.

The show is accompanied by the companion reader Durations of Short Detail, with short pieces by dramaturg Dages Juvelier Keates (“We Are So Close”), dancer and choreographer Jesse Zaritt (“To Hold and Be Held”), and Driscoll, whose poem “Chariots of Flesh” relates, “We’ve been trembling in the trench for / Days? / Weeks? / Years? / Lifetimes? / Despite thick fog / I am overcome / By the smell of your clean shaven skin / Face, eyes, gaze, nose, mouth, fear / I try to pound you out but you latch onto my arm, / wrap your leg around me and reverse position / You try to pound me out but I latch onto your arm, / wrap my leg around you and reverse position / We are desperate to know the outcome / Desperate to know the outcome / Desperate to know the outcome. . . .”

As she has in such previous pieces as the Thank You for Coming trilogy, You’re Me, and There is so much mad in me, Driscoll investigates the intrinsic relationship between performer and audience, the imperative bond, but there is a lot more at stake in Weathering, nothing less than the future of the human race.

I don’t know that we can save the world through art, but with creators such as Driscoll, we can have a hell of a lot of terrifying fun trying.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

UNDER THE RADAR 2024: TOP FIVE

Get tickets to such shows as Volcano at the Under the Radar festival before time runs out (photo by Emijlia Jefrehmova)

UNDER THE RADAR 2024
Multiple venues
January 5-21
utrfest.org

There was quite an uproar in June when Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis announced the cancellation of the widely popular Under the Radar festival, which the Public had hosted since 2006. Held every January, the series featured a diverse collection of unique and unusual international theatrical productions, discussions, and live music and dance, from the strange to the familiar, the offbeat to the downright impossible to describe. Eustis followed that outcry with another message:

“Last week, difficult news was shared that the Under the Radar festival would not return for the Public’s 23–24 season. We made the painful decision to place the festival on hiatus. I understand and share the hurt that those who participated in and loved the festival have expressed over the past few days. . . . Unfortunately, these are exceptionally challenging times in our field. The Public, like almost every other nonprofit theater in the country, is facing serious financial pressure. . . . In the certainty that better times will come, we continue to work to preserve the health and mission of the Public. We look forward to a time when we can fully expand back into the robust and expansive theater we need to be.”

Festival founder and director Mark Russell was determined that the show must go on, and he brought it back to life. “Festivals are celebrations. They mark harvests and other moments of abundance or recognition,” he said in a statement. “Under the Radar is a festival that each year celebrates the vibrancy of new theater, in New York and internationally. At this moment, even in very challenging times, there is still innovative work rising from communities around New York and in far-reaching parts of the globe. Under the Radar aims to spotlight this work for audiences — not only those ‘in the know’ but from a wider stretch of communities, diverse in all respects, that could benefit by engaging with these creative leaders.”

The 2024 program includes two dozen presentations at seventeen venues, taking place from January 5 to 21. Below are my top five choices, which do not include two highly praised and strongly recommended works that are making encore appearances in New York, Dmitry Krimov/Krymov Lab NYC’s Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: In Our Own Words at BRIC and Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s bilingual Public Obscenities at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. In addition, the UFO sidebar of works in progress consist of Matt Romein’s Bag of Worms at Onassis ONX Studio, Zora Howard’s The Master’s Tools at Chelsea Factory (with Okwui Okpokwasili as Tituba from The Crucible), Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon’s How does it feel to look at nothing at National Sawdust, Theater in Quarantine and Sinking Ship Productions’ live debut of the previously streamed The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy at the Connelly Theater, Jenn Kidwell and *the Blackening’s We Come to Collect [A Flirtation, with Capitalism] at the Flea, and Penny Arcade’s The Art of Becoming — Episode 3: Superstar Interrupted [1967-1973] at Joe’s Pub. In addition, a free symposium at NYU Skirball Center on January 12 at 9:30 am features Inge Ceustermans, Hana Sharif, Sunny Jain, Taylor Mac, Jeremy O. Harris, Ravi Jain, and Kaneza Schaal, hosted by Edgar Miramontes, looking at the future of independent theater.

A book club offers unique insight into Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (photo by Ros Kavanagh)

THE FIRST BAD MAN
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Samuel Rehearsal Studio, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza
January 5-13, choose-what-you-pay (suggested admission $35)
www.lincolncenter.org
www.panpantheatre.com

Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre has staged unique versions of Beckett’s Embers and Cascando as well as Gina Moxley’s The Patient Gloria. The company now turns its attention on a unique aspect of literature; for The First Bad Man at Lincoln Center’s Samuel Rehearsal Studio, audience members watch a book club dissect Miranda July’s wildly original 2015 novel, as characters and story lines intersect with reality.

A bouncy castle becomes more than just a fun children’s place in Nile Harris’s this house is not a home (photo by Alex Munro)

this house is not a home
Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 6-14, $30.05
www.abronsartscenter.org

A bouncy castle helps Nile Harris explore how the world has changed over the last two years, with the assistance of Crackhead Barney, Malcolm-x Betts, slowdanger, and GENG PTP along with a gingerbread minstrel, vape addicts, a movie cowboy, and others, in this house is not a home. Afropessimism is on the menu in this collaboration between Abrons Art Center and Ping Chong Company.

Hamlet | Toilet makes its NYC debut at Japan Society (photo courtesy Kaimaku Pennant Race)

HAMLET | TOILET
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 10-13, $35
japansociety.org

In 2019, Yu Murai and Kaimaku Pennant Race blew our minds with the outrageous Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, a bizarrely entertaining mashup of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. They’re now back with another mad mix at Japan Society; I’m not sure there’s much more to say that what’s in the press release: “Notoriously iconoclastic and scatological director Yu Murai’s Hamlet | Toilet runs the Bard’s highbrow tale of existential woe through the poop chute.” Each ticket comes with free same-day admission to the exhibition “Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus.”

VOLCANO
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
January 10-21, $54
stannswarehouse.org

Melding theater, dance, and sci-fi, Irish writer, director, and choreographer Luke Murphy (Slow Tide, Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte) introduces audiences to the mysterious Amber Project in this four-part miniseries of forty-five-minute multimedia segments starring Murphy and Will Thompson, exploring their past as they face an uncertain future.

OUR CLASS
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 12 – February 4, $68-$139
www.bam.org
ourclassplay.com

During the pandemic, Igor Golyak and Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theatre broke through with innovative, interactive livestreamed productions, attracting such stalwarts as Jessica Hecht and Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the troupe. Following shows at BAC and Lincoln Center, the company brings a timely new adaptation of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class to BAM, about a 1941 pogrom in Poland that severely impacts the relationships of a group of students. Broadway veterans Richard Topol, Alexandra Silber, and Gus Birney star, alongside Jewish and non-Jewish cast and crew members from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Israel, Germany, and the US.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]