Juliana F. May’s revealing COMMENTARY=NOT THING returns for American Realness festival (photo by Alex Escalante)
JULIANA F. MAY / MAYDANCE: COMMENTARY=not thing
Abrons Arts Center Playhouse
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Through January 13, $20
212-598-0400
www.americanrealness.com
www.maydance.org
For the American Realness festival, Juliana F. May and her MAYDANCE company are restaging Commentary=not thing, a daring, intimate hour-long piece that debuted at New York Live Arts in February 2013. In certain ways a follow-up to February 2011’s Gutter Gate, Commentary=not thing explores interpersonal communication through speech and the body and, like Gutter Gate, features a bold dose of nudity. With the audience sitting in three rows on two sides of the stage at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse — get there early if it matters whether you sit on a chair, a stool, or on the floor — Benjamin Asriel, Tanya Epstein, and Kayvon Pourazar enter fully clothed and proceed to walk and run around the space with a heavy concentration of spinning and arm movement. They occasionally make guttural noises or shout out snippets of text that are repeated by Epstein and Pourazar, the former demanding to know what’s happening because he shouts that the latter is his wife. (The spoken text, delivered at a variety of volumes and occasionally while breathing inward, is a collaboration between May and original dancers Asriel, Pourazar, and Maggie Thom.) Soon Asriel brings out some wooden tables and chairs — the only other objects on Brad Kisicki’s spare set are three speakers hanging at different levels from the ceiling — clothes come off, and Pourazar and Epstein continue to argue while Asriel coolly stays out of it. The piece then arrives at its centerpoint, a thrilling series of circles around the stage in which the dancers form an ever-changing chain, reaching out and touching the person in front of and behind them, then switching places like a very adult take on the childhood game of leapfrog. The moves, which involve, among other things, the cupping of the others’ genitals two at a time, are not as shocking or erotic as one might expect but rather feel natural as the dancers abstractly and repetitively explore the human body. Costumer Reid Bartelme’s contemporary clothing continues to come on and off as the dancers are joined by Chris Seeds’s electronic score. All three dancers give powerful performances; Asriel in particular seems to have become the go-to guy when it comes to nudity, as he has previously taken it all off for John Jasperse’s Fort Blossom Revisited at NYLA in 2012 as well as for Gutter Gate. With Commentary=not thing, May has created a piece that is not about nudity itself but more about everything that surrounds it — from such emotions as love, shame, and guilt to societal, religious, and performance taboos and the artistic expression of personal and individual freedom.
Pema Tseden’s Old Dog is a beautifully told, slowly paced meditation on Buddhism’s four Noble Truths — “Life means suffering”; The origin of suffering is attachment”; “The cessation of suffering is attainable”; and “There is a path to the cessation of suffering” — that ends with a shocking, manipulative finale that nearly destroys everything that came before it. In order to get a little money and to save the family’s sheep-herding dog from being stolen, Gonpo (Drolma Kyab) sells their Tibetan nomad mastiff to Lao Wang (Yanbum Gyal), a dealer who resells the prized breed to stores in China, where they’re used for protection. When Gonpa’s father (Lochey) finds out what his son has done, he goes back to Lao Wang and demands the return of the dog he’s taken care of for thirteen years. “I’d sell myself before the dog,” he tells his son. And so begins a gentle tale of parents and children, set in a modern-day Tibet that is ruled by China’s heavy hand. Gonpa’s father doesn’t understand why his son, a lazy man who rides around on a motorized bike and never seems to do much of anything, doesn’t yet have any children of his own, so he pays for Gonpa and his wife Rikso (Tamdrin Tso), to go to the doctor to see what’s wrong. Meanwhile, the old man keeps a close watch on his dog, wary that Lao Wang will to try to steal it again. Writer-director Pema Tseden (The Silent Holy Stones, The Search) explores such themes as materialism, family, and attachment in a lovely little film that sadly is nearly ruined by its extreme final scene. If you missed Old Dog last year as part of the MoMA series “Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions,” you have another chance to catch it, as it’s screening January 12 at 3:30 as part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders,” consisting of exemplary films the museum believes will stand the test of time; upcoming entries include Jehane Noujaim’s 
Told with the surreal flair of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and 8½, the dark, witty cynicism of Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry, and the psychological intricacies of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is a masterful epic about an Italian writer looking back at his life as he turns sixty-five, and not liking what he sees. Toni Servillo gives a sparkling deadpan performance as Jep Gambardella, a deeply sarcastic and intentionally hypocritical journalist in Rome who scored a huge success with his first novel, The Human Apparatus, but has been unable to write a follow-up for decades, instead spending his time attending wild parties, sleeping with woman after woman, and sharing his unique views on the sociocultural, political, and religious nature of modern-day Rome. He is surrounded by sycophants, jealous writers, a mysterious neighbor, a culinary cardinal, bizarre performance artists, an aging stripper, a magician, and many more hangers-on (played by Isabella Ferrari, Roberto Herlitzka, Sabrina Ferilli, Carlo Verdone, Massimo De Francovich, Pamela Villoresi, and others who appear to have come straight from a Fellini set), but the only person who truly understands him is his diminutive editor, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola). “You’re a spectacular woman,” he tells her. “You’ve had the career you deserve.” She responds, “But you haven’t had the career you deserve.”
