Saturday, April 20, 2024
Lovers of avant-garde, cutting-edge performing arts in tune with the current pulse rejoice! The Public Theater’s annual theater festival, Under the Radar, is back after a hiatus since its 2020 edition. This year brought some of the most exciting creators making new work locally, nationally, and globally. This year’s UTR Festival sprawled out across various venues beyond the Public’s Astor Place home, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The New York Public Library, and La MaMa, to name those I visited. My final show was a homecoming to Joe’s Pub for New York cabaret artist Salty Brine’s monstrously fun
Tag: La Mama
‘The Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker’ at La MaMa
Imagine being a primarily self-taught scientist who wrote several almanacs, built a clock that ran 50 years, corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and was so brilliant performing measurements you were invited to survey what become Washington, D.C. With those accomplishments you'd rate a statue in the Nation's Capital, right? Afraid not. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) has a Park, but still no monument. The current administration and their congressional minions are too busy building false facades to themselves to recognize the accomplishments of a great African-American thinker - or any for that matter. In place of permanence and as a precursor to Black History
Chasing the New White Whale at LA MAMA
Chasing the New White Whale is an homage to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and explores the nature of deadly obsessions. In this play our Captain Ahab is Robbie Foerster – a New England fisherman chasing the “dragon”. Playwright Michael Gorman lost his older brother, a commercial fisherman, to a heroin overdose and this is the tragic wound that drives the creation of this brave work. This play has a literary quality about it in that the text is dense and like Melville’s work is not afraid to use a range of genres and theatrical styles to tell its tale. Where
THE AЯTS at the Ellen Stewart Theatre, La MaMa
THE AЯTS makes you want to start a revolution. It’s a powerful wake-up call to take action. The urgent litany at the end of the play - “It’s time to save the NEA, we must save the NEA again,” has become an urgent mantra on repeat in my head since watching this vital production. We’re like frogs in a pot not realizing that the water is getting hotter. With so much political ‘drama’ coming out of Washington D.C., we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that real artists are losing funding. The National Endowment of the Arts is under threat
Prototypes at The Downstairs, La MaMa
Prototypes - a dozen divine dances. Susan Marshall & Company present a collection of short form works that are mini explosions of intense creativity. Each piece is a stand alone expression of human straining for connection, yet the 12 pieces seem to be talking to one another creating an entangled vine of cross pollinated conversation fragments. It is incredibly satisfying to watch as your brain makes its own connections between storylines, intentions and investigations of behavioral systems. Susan Marshall’s creative vision for the show ensures a seamless melding of the pieces so that you aren’t sure where one ends and
Brooklyn United Live! at La MaMa
I am still walking on sunshine after Brooklyn Unite Live! rejuvenated all of the cells in my body. I feel like I am ten years younger and that I’m the love child of Tony Robbins and Beyoncé – I am beyond motivated and feel like I can conquer the world. If you want to permanently turn your life dial to 100% pure positivity you have to experience these 33 Brooklyn youngsters whose drum and dance corps originality will blow out all of the cobwebs growing on your bucket list. I wish they had this after-school program for adults so we
Time No Line at La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theatre
John Kelly is a conduit for all nine muses. He vibrates with artistry that seems to pour unrestricted through him –there is no resistance to the inspiration he is receiving. In this “live memoir” his mastery of dance, voice, art and text are used to elevate your senses so you feel the best parts of yourself activated and engaged. This production hit me on a cellular level and I left the theater forever changed by his ability to raise one’s frequency to the stratosphere. John Kelly shares fragments of 40 years of journal writing that act as the jumping off point
Finding Fellini at the Series of One Festival, La Mama
Finding Fellini is a theatrical ode to risk takers, big dreamers and delicious hedonism. It’s a mighty memoir about one woman, Megan Metrikin, who leaves the brutality of Apartheid South Africa in search of her muse –Federico Fellini, in Rome. You slip down the rabbit hole with her and emerge into a wonderland of palpable sensuality, exploration and adventure. It’s a wild, obsessive, funny, filmic experience about the power of art to lift you out of any political or emotional doldrums. Her fascination with Fellini starts when her father joins the censor board in SA with the sole purpose of being