performance

The Lastmaker was Goat Island’s last performance ever.  It had a few really really great moments but (once again) there were members of the audience falling asleep.  Ordinarily that is the last thing I would use as a marker of how good something is, but I was ready to doze off, myself.  There have been plenty performances that with their methodical slowness have tried to lull me to sleep but I still loved them, sadly, this was not one of these performances.

Maybe the goats are tired, or sometimes the stars just don’t align.  Even though this is your final performance and you would like to go out with a bang, things weren’t meant to be?  I could tell they are seasoned performers, they deconstruct what a performance is, they are studied and methodical in their actions but the whole thing did not come together.  They failed to construct the Haga Sophia for me, even if, they managed to put together a model of it.

Highlights:  a short snippet of (the lengthy) intricate dance; an odd repeated phrase (in a foreign language?); repeating a moment in it’s mirror image; an “old” man hunched over speaking in a horse voice; constructing something so that you litertally place the support underneath yourself while you are (sort of) levitating above it [the kind of thing that only happens in cartoons and dreams].

Perhaps it was said best by the New york times - “more exciting than watching paint dry, but not by a wide margin.”  Very very juvenile, underdeveloped, and boring.  Not somber, cohesive, able to convey a shred of meaning.  Maybe I just didn’t get it. But art is about communicating your ideas, and a lot of the audience was audibly groaning and/or leaving, so they weren’t even in a position to receive anything after sitting in the dark watching blurry photos in a slideshow.

Trajal Harrell
Dance Theater Workshop
October 16 2008

Anger Nation Radiohole

Went to see Radiohole’s Anger/Nation at the Kitchen on Friday (9/19/2008). Interesting. My favorite part was the part “after” the show. Though I can’t shake the feeling I’ve seen that before, oh yes… Snow White perhaps?