All of the Festivals: UTR, Prototype, and Exponential Festival, Oh My!

Okay, friends. After yesterday’s technical snafu, I am back and we are going to try again!

Thus far, I have only recapped events from The Public’s Under the Radar Festival, but January is chock full of new and exciting work, so today, if all goes at planned (@squarespace, don’t ruin this for me), I will be writing about works presented at three different festivals. Let’s get this show on the road!

Under the Radar

INCOMING!

In addition to the fully developed pieces I’ve watched over the past few days, I also watched INCOMING! a presentation of works in development by the members of The Public’s Devised Theater Working Group (DTWG). The DTWG is comprised of live performance makers who use untraditional development methods, so, basically, anyone who makes live performances that isn’t a playwright who sits down and types a play on their computer and hands it to actors. The eight members of the group each presented a three minute excerpt from what will be a full performance at the (fingers crossed, in person!) UTR Festival 2022.

These bite-sized works were diverse in terms of both form and content, but some themes were reoccurring. These ranged from engagement with the theatrical canon- two pieces directly referenced Shakespeare, another Brecht- and themes grappling with hyper contemporary issues, such as the hell-scape that is late-stage capitalism. While there is something for everyone in this group of individual creatives, I found myself most excited to follow up with Eric Lockley’s Afro-futurist dark comedy Sweet Chariot and Raelle Myrick-Hodges concept album, He Has the Prettiest Handwriting, based on letters written to her by her father.

Prototype Festival

I have a confession to make. I am not confident in my ability to write about music.

I have a musical background- I sang in choirs from third through twelfth grade, I dabbled in piano, and have performed in many musicals- but I lack advanced formal musical education. I feel lacking in vocabulary and nuanced understanding of musical lingo.

I brought this up once to my friend Ashley, who is probably the only musical genius I know in real life and my go to person when I have questions about music, and she told me that writing about music is kind of like dancing about architecture, and that made me feel better.

So, all that being said, I am more nervous to write about Prototype, a festival of new opera and musical theatre, than I was about UTR. I just felt like you, my non-existent reader, should know that.

Times^3 (Times x Times x Times)

I am going to continue with the confessional section of this blog post and let you know that of all the pieces available to me in the Prototype Festival lineup, I did pick out Times^3 (Times x Times x Times) because it was the shortest. It’s only about half an hour.

I was initially disappointed to find that it was a fully auditory experience, meant to be played through headphones as the listener walks around Times Square. The last time I was anywhere near Times Square was late last February, so I listened from my couch. In reality, I was only about seven miles away, but it feels so much farther.

At first I was honestly worried that Times^3 wouldn’t hold my attention without any visual stimuli and because I wasn’t in their intended location. However, the creators anticipate this possibility and include prompts for audience members that may or may not be in Times Square. Composer Pamela Z and writer Geoff Sobelle have created a sort of yogic, meditative experience that asks you to become more aware of your surroundings. I tuned into the hum of my heater, the voices drifting up from the streets below, and the ever present sirens of my own neighborhood as I was taken through the history of Times Square and the journey from Lenape land to a center of culture and commerce for their colonizers.

Amidst the history lessons that were incorporated into the music, dialogue, and found sound, my favorite part was when the piece takes you below Times Square into the subway station. I might be the subway’s number one fan, and can talk at length about the necessity of a successful public transit system as a way to combat climate change and promote social mobility, but that’s for another day. In Times^3, you aurally head underground and are met by the sound of an incoming Number 2 train, arriving at the Times Square-42nd Street station. They never tell you it’s the Number 2 train, but I recognized the sound immediately. It’s one of a few trains in the subway system that, for whatever reason, makes three distinct notes when it pulls into a station. Between the first two notes is an ascending minor seventh and between the second and third notes is a half-step. This happens to also be the same intervals of the first three notes of “Somewhere” from West Side Story. I’m sure that the creators were aware of this and chose it deliberately, and it made me very happy and very nostalgic. I’m glad I took the time to listen; it reminded me of the magic of New York, even in a place as chaotic and touristy as Times Square used to be.

Exponential Festival

A Blueish Fever Dream

I’m not a stranger to performance art. In my time, I’ve seen a one-man adaptation of The Iliad that involved smashing vintage TVs playing pornography. I’ve seen a completely non-verbal butoh Macbeth with live bagpipe accompaniment. And OF COURSE I’ve seen someone pull a lot of stuff out of her vagina. And those aren’t even the weirdest examples, those are examples of the performance art I actually got something out of.

However, sometimes, you take in a piece of performance art and have to accept that, for whatever reason, it’s not for you. That was how I felt within maybe the first five minutes of A Blueish Fever Dream, the one offering I have watched thus far from Exponential Festival, the only New York based festival fully dedicated to experimental performance art.

Created and performed by Kennie Zhou, A Blueish Fever Dream seemed to be a queerification of the (admittedly already pretty queer) children’s TV show Teletubbies. That’s about all I have to say about that. I got pretty much nothing else out of the 18 minutes I spent watching it. It wasn’t for me, but maybe you’ll like it!

So anyway, that’s my festival recap of the day! I don’t know how much more energy I have in me for festival season, so we’ll see if I keep up with this level of coverage. I kind of want to give my brain a break and just watch Schitt’s Creek.