Critique théâtrale, janvier 2015  Festival American Realness, 8-18 janvier 2015Performance review, January 2015 American Realness Festival, January 8th-18th 201

Gallagher-Ross, Jacob

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Miranda
Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone /
Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English-
speaking world 
11 | 2015
Expressions of Environment in Euroamerican Culture /
Antique Bodies in Nineteenth Century British
Literature and Culture
American Realness Festival—January 2015
Festival Review
Jacob Gallagher-Ross
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/7634
DOI: 10.4000/miranda.7634
ISSN: 2108-6559
Publisher
Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès
 
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Jacob Gallagher-Ross, “American Realness Festival—January 2015”, Miranda [Online], 11 | 2015,
Online since 21 July 2015, connection on 16 February 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/
miranda/7634 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.7634 
This text was automatically generated on 16 February 2021.
Miranda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International License.
American Realness Festival—
January 2015
Festival Review
Jacob Gallagher-Ross
 
General Information on the Festival and the Shows
1 American Realness website: http://americanrealness.com/ 
Show 1: Age & Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her
Muse or &:@&, Miguel Gutierrez
Cast: Miguel Gutierrez, Michelle Boulé, Ben Pryor and Sean Donovan
Lights: Lenore Doxsee
Music: Miguel Gutierrez, Jaime Fenelly, Pee in My Face with Surgery (Jaime Fenelly &
Fritz Welch), Chris Forsyth, Neal Medlyn, Ryoji Ikeda, KC and the Sunshine Band
Sound Production/Assistance: Leo Martin
Projection design: Miguel Gutierrez and Leo Martin
Production Management: Sarah Lurie
Costume Consulting: Ásta Hostetter
Costume Construction: Dusty Childers
Miguel Gutierrez website: http://www.miguelgutierrez.org/pieces/age--beauty-part-2/
2 Show 2: The Mother and Other Plays, My Barbarian 
Cast: Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade
Script: Alexandro Segade
Masks: Jade Gordon
Score: Malik Gaines
Backdrops: Alexandro Segade
Set Design: My Barbarian
Video Design and Production: My Barbarian and Robert Hickerson
Production Manager: Robert Hickerson
My Barbarian website: http://www.mybarbarian.com/ 
American Realness Festival—January 2015
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3 Show 3: Fest, Ivo Dimchev
Cast: Dolores Hulan, Sandra Wieser, Mirko Feliziani, Ivo Dimchev
Text: Ivo Dimchev 
Light design: Giacomo Gorini
Music: Emilian Gatsov
Production  of  Humarts  Foundation  and  Volksroom  Brussels;  Co-produced  by
Impulstanz Vienna, Kaaitheater Brussels, Frascati Amsterdam
Ivo Dimchev website: http://www.ivodimchev.com/
 
Review
Nice Work If You Can Get It
4 Negotiating labor with Miguel Gutierrez, My Barbarian, and Ivo Dimchev at the 2015
American Realness Festival
5 Work  was  on  artists’  minds at  this  year’s  American  Realness  Festival,  the  annual
extravaganza of edgy performance, hosted by Abrons Arts Center on New York’s Lower
East  Side,  that  has  quickly  become  one  of  New  York’s  boldest  and  most  vibrant
exhibitors of new live art. And it wasn’t just the labor of performance that artists were
investigating—the hard physical and mental work of getting a performance right in
front of an audience night after night—though, of course, that was part of it. Instead,
several pieces meditated on the often-unseen industry that allows the art to reach the
stage at all: the curation, the grant-writing, the scheduling, the marketing, the touring,
the  teching,  the  negotiating—even the  day  jobs  (teaching,  leading  workshops)  that
sustain artists while they steal time to rehearse, and the affective labor of charming
artistic directors and wooing new gigs. For artists straddling today’s hyper-competitive
labor and art markets, there’s nothing more real than that. 
6 The  baroquely-titled  Age  &  Beauty  Part  2:  Asian  Beauty  @  the  Werq  Meeting  or  The
Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@&, choreographer Miguel Gutierrez’s melancholy hymn
to  arts  admin,  juxtaposed  two  kinds  of  retrospection  about  career-defining
relationships. Dancer Michelle Boulé, who has been a constant presence in Gutierrez’s
group pieces since 2001, appeared onstage to represent the embodied knowledge of his
oeuvre she has accumulated over their years of collaboration—she danced a wild solo
drawn  from  earlier  work,  and  huddled  with  Gutierrez  for  short  conversations
indicative of so many others they’ve conducted in rehearsal studios. But this kind of
collaboration  was  juxtaposed  with  another,  less  obvious,  but  no  less  vital,  kind:
Gutierrez’s  years-long  relationship  with  his  manager,  advocate,  and  all-around
consigliore Ben Pryor—Pryor also curates the American Realness festival. In dialogue
drawn from transcripts of actual work meetings between the two of them, Gutierrez
pointed  to  another  kind  of  dance,  equally  intricate,  equally  artful:  a  durational
choreography of time, money, and opportunity that has allowed Gutierrez to pursue a
career  in  contemporary  performance—this  sense  of  scheduling  as  performance,  as
choreography, is literalized later in the piece, when Pryor starts dancing, too. At times
almost despairing about the straitened economic circumstances attending the artist’s
life,  Age and Beauty nevertheless affirmed its  intangible value through the obdurate
devotion of true believers like Pryor. Werqing is hard work.
American Realness Festival—January 2015
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7 The  most  revelatory  moment  in  art-performance  ensemble  My  Barbarian’s  timely
reimagining of Brecht’s agit-prop classic The Mother—in which an un-political peasant
woman  is  progressively  radicalized  by  witnessing  the  mistreatment  of  workers,
including her own child—came when the performers temporarily suspended the action
to address the audience directly on the subject of pedagogy. The play, of course, is one
of Brecht’s Lehrstucke—teaching-and-learning plays designed to acquaint participants
with  divergent  points  of  view  through  participation.  Here,  My  Barbarian  took  the
opportunity  to  hold  a  teach-in  about  teaching—the  play  features  a  cynical  teacher
character, whose rote methods are contrasted with the experiential learning pursued
by The Mother—and by extension, the play’s spectators. The performers asked audience
members to indicate, by show of hands, how many of them earned at least part of their
living by teaching. Many, many, hands in the audience went up—American Realness
attracts an art savvy crowd of artists, intellectuals and academics. The Barbarians then
asked how many people felt their employment was secure. Many hands dropped. The
moment came as a stark reminder that university teaching has become, for many, a
precarious  occupation—particularly  in  the  arts.  Brecht’s  learning-and-teaching  play
was deployed to remind its audience that teaching itself is a flashpoint for labor politics
in today’s America—one of its most contentious. 
8 The  hidden  labor  of  theater-making  returned  again  with  the  violence  of  long
repression  in  Fest,  Ivo  Dimchev’s  satirical  dystopia  about  theater  festival  culture.
Dimchev, a perennial fixture on the European festival circuit, and, increasingly on the
New York scene as  well,  is  intimately  familiar  with the various  kinds  of  weirdness
germane to itinerant performing. In scenes of mounting absurdity, Dimchev staged the
theater world’s lizard brain: a beleaguered performance artist—also called Ivo—enacts
the implicit seduction of the curator-performer relationship by performing vigorous—
and microphone amplified—cunnilingus on a frosty festival  programmer; fellates an
unhelpful technician to get some time to tech a show; and dies a painful death at the
hands of a pedantic critic—only to rise from the dead, and as a zombie, suffer through a
lengthy, obtuse post-show discussion. 
9 Besides  being very  funny,  these  antics  unveil—albeit  in  grotesque  form—the
extraordinary affective labor required to get a show onstage at performance festival:
curators  must  be  wooed,  technicians  mollified,  critics  flattered,  querulous audience
members indulged. Not to mention the travel, the packing and unpacking, the grind of
self-care  in  a  succession  of  hotel  rooms.  All  for  those  few  fleeting  moments  of
performance: when Ivo simulates “Ivo”’s festival performance, he does so by muttering
its text—and his concurrent emotional subtext—double-time, accompanied by a weird,
hasty dance. Performance is short; the work that gets it onstage is long.
10 There are many familiar reasons to explain this preoccupation. The American economy
is limping into recovery, but New York City has never been more expensive—which
means that artists must be uncannily resourceful if they hope to sustain themselves
while  making  stridently  anti-commercial  art.  The  old  day  jobs  aren’t  enough.
Experimental  performance  requires  serious  creative  entrepreneurship  now.  That  it
does persist—stubbornly, maybe quixotically— is close to heroic. It’s good work if you
don’t weaken.
American Realness Festival—January 2015
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ABSTRACTS
Performance review, January 2015
American Realness Festival, January 8th-18th 2015
Critique théâtrale, janvier 2015 
Festival American Realness, 8-18 janvier 2015
INDEX
Subjects: Theater
Keywords: performance review, art industry, American economy, agit-prop, experimental
performance
Mots-clés: critique théâtrale, industrie culturelle, économie américaine, agit-prop,
expérimentation artistique
AUTHORS
JACOB GALLAGHER-ROSS
University at Buffalo, SUNY (USA)
Assistant Professor
jg287@buffalo.edu
American Realness Festival—January 2015
Miranda, 11 | 2015
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American Realness Festival—January 2015

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American Realness Festival—January 2015

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