Friends party like it’s 2033 in Monstah Black’s HYPERBOLIC! (photo by Manchildblack)
Dixon Place
161A Chrystie St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
Friday, July 22, and Saturday, July 23, $15-$22, 7:30
212-219-0736
dixonplace.org
If you thought the world was going to end on an August day in 2033, what would you do the night before? Performance artist Monstah Black decides to throw a truly strange farewell party in the chaotic but fun Hyperbolic! (The Last Spectacle). The centerpiece of Dixon Place’s twenty-fifth annual Hot! Festival: The NYC Celebration of Queer Culture is a pre-apocalyptic nightmare, possibly taking place completely in the dreaming mind of the blond-wigged Tucker (Joey Cuellar). As the audience enters the downstairs theater, there are five bodies on the floor and one on a bed; it’s difficult to tell if they are real or mannequins. Something truly awful has happened, as furniture and other objects pin the figures to the floor, glittering red fabric oozing off their bodies like blood. Eventually they rise and slowly get up and start prepping for the festivities, choosing their outfits, putting on makeup, and getting the food and drink ready. For a little over an hour, Tucker, Decay (Alicia Dellimore), Geez Louise (Shiloh Hodges), Dezi and Trigger (Johnnie “Cruise” Mercer), Bubbles (Benedict Nguyen), Goddess #1 (Marilyn Louis), Goddess #2 (Yuko “Uko Snowbunny” Tanaka), and Holiday Tahdah (Monstah Black) create themselves and construct their personas, working on makeup, striking poses, and primping in mirrors while also considering what the end means. Sprightly anarchic vanity is on glorious display: Dezi, for example, spends much of the early part of the show making love to his selfie stick, while Holiday frets: “I’ve been spending the last three days trying to figure out how I’m going to fit my shoes into my suitcase. How am I going to fit my shoes into my suitcase, Tucker? How? I know that sounds crazy considering the chaos and disorder we live in, but I have priorities.”
Chaos and disorder abound as the utterly confusing non-narrative piece of unique dance theater rages on, celebrating bodies, desire, glam fashion, cocktails, hair, style to the max, and Madonna-style voguing while evoking Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning. And that’s all before the masks come out. Black is credited as conceptual designer, movement generator, costume designer, theatrical director and camera operator with Ashley Brockington, and music producer with his group, the Illustrious Blacks; his husband, Manchildblack, is musical consultant. (You can follow the couple’s adventures on their YouTube show, At Home with the Blacks.) Under his given name, Reginald Ellis Crump, Black wrote the script in addition to collaborating on the lyrics with Derek D. Gentry. In order to spread the word about Hyperbolic! Dixon Place encourages the audience to take photos and video and post them to social media; however, try not to film nearly the entire production, as the person sitting in front of me did, causing a major distraction, and don’t use your flash, as a man in the first row did. Instead, just let Black and his cast and crew lead you on one wild, unpredictable ride as doomsday approaches. The Hot! Festival continues through August 29 with such other works as Mike Nelson’s If You Want to See the Devil, Ry Szelong’s Interabang, and Dandy Darkly’s Myth Mouth!
In Exposed, visual artist Beth B, who got her start in the 1970s underground scene in New York City, invites viewers into the inner world of burlesque, going behind the scenes with eight current performers who share intimate details about their lives and their shows. Beth B (Two Small Bodies, An Unlikely Terrorist), who wrote, directed, produced, edited (with Keith Reamer), and photographed (with Dan Karlok) the seventy-six-minute documentary, goes backstage at such New York venues as the Slipper Room, Le Poisson Rouge, the Cutting Room, Dixon Place, P.S. 122, Galapagos Art Space, and Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore as burlesque performers discuss issues of gender, control, freedom, disabilities, power, nudity, femininity, personal and professional identity, and more. “What the world projects as normal, it’s just such an illusion, it’s such a fantasy,” Bunny Love says, “and I love that fantasy.” UK comedian and cabaret performer Mat Fraser, who was born with “flippers” for hands, explains, “If you can make them laugh and make a political point that fuels your outrage, all the better.” And Rose Wood adds, “I’ve tried to present my audience with an indelible picture of the body seen in another way, seen in a way that’s different than they see themselves. They have ideas of what’s normal — what a man does, what a woman does, what a heterosexual does, what a gay person does — and I try to present them with another way of seeing the body.” Among the other performers who share their stories are Tigger!, who uses burlesque as a kind of sexual political theater; Dirty Martini, who pays tribute to such early stars of the wordless art form as Dixie Evans and Vickie Lynn; Bambi the Mermaid, who produces Coney Island’s popular Burlesque at the Beach series; Julie Atlas Muz, who honors Pina Bausch in her performance art; and World Famous *BOB*, who points out, “I never lie to people. People would say, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ And I would say yes. That quick wit was something that I learned from my drag family, that quick wit, that ability to turn anything that hurts you inside into something that’s funny.”