Another Festival Season Post; or, Why Do I Do This to Myself?
Friends, I think we’ve already discussed in this blog that I have a tendency to overcommit to ideas and projects without fully thinking them through.
Deciding to write about arts and culture for (at least) ninety days was supposed to serve the following purposes:
Force me to practice writing, something I am ostensibly good at, but have not had to actively work on since I graduated college.
Help me remember all the content I consume, because writing about something forces me to put my feelings into words and practice articulating what I like or dislike about a piece of art, and this makes it all stick in my brain better. This will also be helpful when the world opens up again and maybe I have job interviews or networking events to attend! (A girl can only dream.)
Encourage me to stay up to date about new releases in the sector and avoid falling back on old favorites.
You know, just give me something to do besides stare into the abyss.
So far, a little over two weeks into this personal project, points 1, 2, and 4, are proving fruitful. I’m already learning more about my writing style and the habits I fall into, I’m doing a better job of remembering the names of work and creatives that I enjoy, and I have a task I need to check off every single day other than the ongoing work of keeping myself alive. Point number three is where we are having a problem.
I’ve been kind of making myself miserable by forcing myself to consume as much festival content as I possibly can. This is a bit of a moot point, because Under the Radar ends today and yesterday was the last day of Prototype (Exponential Festival continues through out the rest of the month), so even though I plan to continue to incorporate made-for-screens “theatre” in my streaming schedule just to stay up to date and engaged with the field, I feel like I am falling into a habit that I actively try to discourage, which is that I am taking in the content I feel like I’m “supposed” to be consuming.
I’ve talked before in this blog about how I resist the demarcation between “high brow” and “low brow” content and the racist, sexist, and classist connotations of the terms. I don’t believe there are any types of books/music/theatre etc that one must read to be cultured, and I don’t believe in or use the term “guilty pleasure.” I think a lot of the rhetoric around “must reads” or “must listens” or whatever are rooted in classism and lead to explicit and implicit gatekeeping, and I don’t think people should feel guilty about what they enjoy (unless what they enjoy is part of the oppression of a marginalized community, than they probably should feel guilty, examine that feeling, and stop consuming the offensive content). In my bio on this very website, I genuinely call Mamma Mia! a masterpiece.
However, I think I’ve internalized more of this messaging than I realized. Yesterday, instead of enjoying my Saturday and watching Schitt’s Creek or One Night in Miami or any of the other movies or TV shows on my never ending to watch list, I dedicated hours to watching four more festival offerings, two from Prototype and two from Exponential. The following is, word for word, the note I wrote on my phone shortly before shutting down my electronics for the evening:
“Prototype
The Planet- A Lament
The Murder of Halit Yozgat
Exponential
Theater in Quarantine
Virtual Queerality
I am so fully checked out of all of these
The Planet was good
Best use of dance and movement
Gorgeous music
Even though it was not in English the narrative was clear and simple
Love being exposed to new culture
Murder was boring, first 30 minutes or so were captivating and then the next hour and a half I was just waiting for it to be over
Seemed like an exercise more than a show
Wished it was more of a documentary
Theater in quarantine is artsy fartsy and depressing
Maybe would have been interesting in march but I’m over it
Why do I force myself to do things like this because I feel like I should
Why can’t I just watch things I enjoy”
So you see the problem. The thing is, I don’t really like opera or performance art. Have I seen opera and performance art that I’ve enjoyed? Yes. In non-corona time, would I ever have chosen to go to the opera or see performance art instead of a play or musical, a movie, an art exhibit, a ballet, or staying home to watch something on Netflix I was really excited about? Probably not. I would probably only go to opera or performance art because the tickets were free and/or one of my friends invited me.
Giving myself the homework of consuming as much festival content as possible has been unfair to me and the creators of these pieces. I’ve been forcing myself to take in all of this to stretch myself, broaden my horizons, and expose myself to new creators and aesthetics. That’s all well and good, but I could have dedicated one or two days to that endeavor instead of spending an entire week on it.
I’m going to expand on the aforementioned note and try to give a bit more explanation about the pieces I watched yesterday, but I am so glad festival season is basically over. I need to watch some mindless TV, ASAP.
Prototype Festival
The Planet-A Lament
The first piece I took in yesterday was actually by far my favorite. A collaboration between filmmaker Garin Nugroho and composer Septina Rosalina Layan, The Planet- A Lament is both a response to climate catastrophe and a celebration of creation and rebirth. While I wish we didn’t have to write operas about climate change, I think it’s super important that the arts sector brings attention to the impending disaster that’s already disproportionately impacting impoverished communities, communities of color, and the Global South. We gotta do something!!!!
Anyway, the piece features the fourteen member Mazmur Chorale of Kupang, Indonesia as a community devastated by a tsunami gathering to recount their culture’s creation myth. The chorale is joined by Layan as a soloist (and in my interpretation, as Mother Earth, although I’m not familiar enough with the myth to say if that’s accurate) and five dancers, who embody their story.
I’m going to be completely honest with you- I have no idea what language this was in. Layan is Papuan, the chorale and director are Indonesian, and the creative team is comprised of individuals from all over the Indonesian archipelago and Australia. Papua New Guinea has five official languages and over 800 indigenous languages and Indonesia has over 700. My best guess is that it was in Papuan or Indonesian, but I am not familiar with either of these language and don’t want to make any assumptions.
All this is to say that it doesn’t really matter. There were subtitles and the language used was largely poetic and metaphorical. The emotion of the piece was exquisitely portrayed through music and movement, and a thorough understanding of the language or the cultural myths was not required for me to feel the despair at the destruction of their community or the joy and celebration at the possibility of rebirth.
Of everything I’ve watched so far this festival season, this was by far the most visually dynamic. It was a filmed stage production from sometime pre-rona, and while some of the projection design didn’t translate on film, the stage pictures created by Nugroho and the choreography by Joy Alpuerto Ritter were dynamic and stunning to watch. The movement vocabulary was also distinct and unique from any dance styles I am familiar with, and the dancers, as well as the company of singers, moved with confidence and flair that demanded attention of the audience.
Like with Espiritu at UTR, watching The Planet- A Lament was a joyful reminder that there are so many stories, creatives, and styles of work that I am unfamiliar with- especially work outside of the English-speaking world and the Western world in general. There is always more to discover and learn about the world and other cultures through their art and storytelling, and as much as I am glad to be done with opera for the moment, I will keep this in mind in other types of work.
The Murder of Halit Yozgat.
I was already wary of this piece because it’s over two hours long, by far the longest festival piece I’ve watched. Two hours is not long for an opera or a musical, and I’ve sat through many that are actually much longer. Normally my attention span isn’t this much of a problem, but these shows have been wearing my down.
Anyway, The Muder of Halit Yozgat is an opera by Ben Frost and Daniela Danz based on the true story of Halit Yozgat, who was shot and killed in the internet cafe his immigrant family owned in Kassel, Germany in 2006. In many ways it is a powerful piece of political opera and calls upon the audience to analyze the idea of otherness, and in the case of the would-be German audience, who is considered German and who is not? Of course, the sentiments are equally if not more resonant for an American audience.
However, in my opinion, there was no reason for this to be two hours long. The opera is a recreation of what happened in the cafe in the five to ten minutes before Halit was murdered. The characters are Halit, his dad, and the various cafe customers. This scene is replayed over and over again with the seven actors rotating between all the roles. This meant that the cast, which was diverse in terms of race, gender, and age, were playing characters that sometimes matched their demographics and sometimes did not.
I understand how this served to drive the point home of the piece. It erases the delineations that we create between those we consider to be us and those we consider to be other. It also asks the audience to examine their perception of, for example, a young Black man lying on the ground after being shot versus an older white woman. All that being said, after half an hour, I did not want to hear the same music and watch the same blocking, even if it was all done by different people, for the next hour and a half.
Rehearsals for the piece were shut down due to COVID, and the piece was filmed as a mix of rehearsal footage at music stands and the staged blocking being done with masks and gloves. I thought this was an interesting choice, but I wish it had taken more of a documentarian approach rather than trying to portray the piece as close to it’s intended staged form as possible. I think it would have been really moving to see how the team pivoted to still explore their craft, while acknowledging that this was not what anyone had imagined for their story.
Exponential Festival
These ones are gonna be short cause I just… I just can’t.
Theater in Quarantine
Theater in Quarantine was a compilation of short dance and movement pieces conceived by Joshua William Gelb and KatieRose McLaughlin and performed by Gelb in his 2’ x 4’ x 8’ East Village closet. Gelb is a dancer and choreographer and while some of these pieces had narration, most of them were explorations of movement, space, and color. He began this project in March, when most of us were still in the “what the actual fuck is going on” phase of the pandemic, not yet in the creative phase. Maybe in March I would have been excited by these experiments, but in January I am just feeling jaded by virtual theater and honestly this did not hold my attention at all. Gelb is clearly a very talented dancer and choreographer, but I just couldn’t watch an hour of closet dances.
Virtual Queerality
Virtual Queerality, created by Teresa Braun, is, as the name suggests, intended to be VR experience of queer utopia. I don’t have a VR helmet (cause I’m not a massive nerd [just kidding, I am, just about other things]), and even if I did I am not sure how to access the actual VR experience as opposed to the YouTube tour I watched. The space created is a kind of maze of gender that invites you to meet avatar versions of trans and non-binary performance artists who introduce themselves as well as their work, and discuss their gender identity as well as their relationships to the internet. Overall, I think this was a very cool idea, but I didn’t get much about of a YouTube tour of a virtual space meant to be explored and experienced on an individual level. I will say, one of the featured performers works under the stage name “Egregious Philbin,” and I think that’s genius.
Another massive festival post WRAPPED. Thanks for bearing with me if you read all of this post, or all of the posts of this week. For my sake and yours, I’m gonna start consuming a more diverse array of content ASAP.