#he thinks he’s SO shocking funny and because he is often surrounded exclusively by Terrible People he's REAL comfortable just Being An Ass

[spider-man-2o99]

Miguel is so mean i lobe him

aMEN. miguel is kind but he is NOT nice he is a goddamn bitch and i love that abt him so much

[suicidaloilpiglet]

Paul Winkler (AU/DE)

Turmoil

2000

17:41

‘The films of Paul Winkler, one of Australia’s most prolific experimentalists, contest prevailing images of landscape as a reflection of national and social cohesion, instead meditating on a disconnection between everyday perception and the Australian environment.’ Alex Gerbaz

‘In his films Winkler is meticulously transposing rules of architectural construction into the building of a visual artifice. These films are like ephemeral pyramids. They are like monuments that we are at time permitted to enter. What lies buried within the inner chamber of a Winkler film is the sarcophagus of Technique itself. For those entering there are innumerable pitfalls lying in wait for the unwary weaned on the warm milk of mainstream cinema.’ Dirk de Bruyn

Quintessa Matranga and Rafael Delacruz and Marc Matchak (US)

Lebenswirklichkeit

2017

26:26

Young artists produce a barely fictional representation of themselves, quoting mumblecore and aspirational dramedy simultaneously. Through the narrative and productive gesture alike a localised situation is created within New York City. Of possibly ambitious young Americans possibly examining their possible careers. The mildest nostalgia is indicated, perhaps to San Francisco pre-dot com or Seattle pre-G8. They look at each other and they look at themselves.

Katherine Botten (AU)

2017

Sunday/ Sexy Young Artist Dominic Will Do ANYTHING To Get Into NEW18: Curator Couch. 2017 Map the world on my world. Map my world on the world.

Starring: Oscar Miller and Dominic Sargent.

Stephen Dillemuth (DE)

Elbsandsteingebirge 1789-1848

1994

50:51

“South of Dresden, the bizarre landscape of the Elbsandsteingebirge served as a treasure trove for the motifs of almost all German romantics. Their paintings today shape our romantic vision of the time between the French Revolution and the March Revolution in Germany. In a journey through pictures, films and texts, to a trip in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, we are confronted with our own projections: Was the romance political? Or was politics romantic? ”

Josef Strau: That you tried both, and ask if the exhibition is still related? Or has something new opened up?

Stephan Dillemuth: There was also a parallel, as here, for example, the time of the French Revolution and of the Vormarz (the period from 1815 to the March Revolution in 1848, the Red), one could certainly take any other historical section, but it is important That one then comes to different points, which can not be taken as a direct argument for the time, but which at least take up new points of view.

But what else, Schüttpelz has told us that many of the romantics are very young converts to Catholicism because they found this so medieval, and he compared it with the New German wave. It has played in a very funny and liberating way with totally respectable and bourgeois attitudes, but then immediately identified by the success, everything was already over again, and only a stock-conservative and boring story. So question: How can you keep a broken attitude, also against art? Not that the object or the action, for example, would be as it is meant, but if one believes in what results from it, the stability of one’s own attitude, etc., it becomes really serious. Romanticism is always at the beginning when it has something incredulous and playful, and it reacts like a medieval and Catholicism, but also in the sense of Arno Schmidt, to the surrounding chaos, from within me with outwardly protruding inwardness. Someone has also claimed that the aftermath of the French Revolution led to a revolution in art, which was later called Romanticism. But if you believe it again, you land at the Biedermeier.

Charlie Ahearn and Martin Wong (US)

Portrait of Martin Wong

1998

18:00

‘Martin painted the LES ghetto with the most enigmatic realism of bricks to be seen. In 1992 my friend Martin invited me up to his Ridge St apartment as he began his autobiographical Chinatown series reflecting his youth in San Francisco and later New York. After he was diagnosed with HIV he returned to SF where he later passed away in 1999.’ Charlie Ahearn

RIP Martin Wong

Alex Bag (US)

The Artist’s Mind

1996

30:01

‘This is living-dead art, a critical-hysterical acting out of the deodorized-bathroom neurotic, the suicidal biochemical-test subject and the terminal media addict we all recognize as ourselves.’ John Kelsey

‘This is a different time. Puppets and costumes seem funny, relevant. Club culture exists in the same temporal frame, not wedged between the covers of a coffee table book. Limelight is still open. Drugs are still fun/funny. The Internet is too slow for video.’ Rob Mckenzie

In commemoration of Damien Hirst’s 1995 Turner Prize, Bag made The Artist’s Mind, which takes the form of a PBS-style show chronicling a day in the life of a contemporary visual artist. In this episode, aspiring sculptor/painter “Damien Bag” demonstrates his creative process, which begins with eating breakfast, shopping at Wal-Mart and scouring the local highways in search of fresh road kill. Prompted to discuss his work, Damien says his pieces represent “a form of duality” and “a lot of metaphors.”

0rphan Drift (UK)

Bruises

1997

15:05

‘0rphan Drift is a collaborative media artist and avatar that emerged in London, 1994. The video, performances, installations and eponymous cyberpunk novel 0(rphan)d(rift>) addressed the future through the science -fictional, nascent technologies and related shifts in perception and matter-energy. 0D re-emerges in reconfigured form, again addressing the future as it speaks to us in this moment. Considering current narratives around climate change, bio-capital and related migratory patterns they re-imagine the urban as porous, interspecies and terraformed.’

Excerpts from a 30 minute video commissioned, with accompanying slide installation, by Beaconsfield Arts for screening at John Cage ‘Classic’ audiovisual event. Inaugural concert by (rout).

Here the re edit is set to a section of Cage’s album ‘Shock’, and produced on the 0rphan Drift analogue editing suite, complete with MX30 Panasonic mixing desk.

Hana Earles (AU)

$1070

2017

08:00

Working and making art, in the office and in your bedroom.

I could set the building on fire.

You shouldn’t smoke in your bed.

Carolee Schneemann (US)

Interior Scroll - The Cave, 1975 - 1995

1995

07:32

‘In the early ’60s, Schneemann’s “action” paintings, some embedded with images of nude female figures, literally moved from surface to environment, and her staging of work from static objects to interactive events. Along with her colleagues in the Judson Dance Theater, she pioneered crossovers from music, theater, and dance to art. Transferring the orgiastic qualities in her art from paint to the performance of “her own body,” Schneemann broke ground in charged Dionysian extravaganzas that yielded some of the most memorable and challenging images of the period: serpents writhing over her nude body (Eye Body: Thirty-six Transformative Actions, 1963); an erotic flesh fest of entangled bodies, chickens, sausages, and fish (Meat Joy, 1964); a lecture-performance in which she discussed her work and posed questions to an audience such as “Does a woman have intellectual authority?” as she dressed and undressed (Naked Action Lecture, 1968). In Interior Scroll, 1975, she unwound a scroll from her vagina and read a text about “vaginality.” For many, the problem with her exuberant, Reichian-influenced, utopian-tinged abandon, lies in her “performance” of her own body. We need only glance at the historical record for proof that prior to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire. (Think of Yves Klein’s manipulation of nameless female models as voluptuous paintbrushes for the production of his “Anthropométries” series in the early ’60s.) We have done a terrible injustice to ourselves in continuing to marginalize Schneemann as an “angry woman” or “bad girl.” To pigeonhole her art as aberrant is to risk reducing her oeuvre to sensationalism. Schneemann’s blanket of protection from decades of neglect and misrepresentation has been her sheer exuberance and focused search for the real through uberphysicality. I’m not sure that we, the audience, have fared so well.’ Jan Avgikos

Lutz Mommartz and Sigmar Polke (DE)

Der schöne Sigmar

The Beautiful Sigmar

1971

22:44

New Year party with Sigmar Polke at the department of the Kohlhöfers in Düsseldorf / Germany.

‘The films of Lutz Mommartz are each based on a single idea; the effect then is more sustainable, says Lutz Mommartz. These ideas are often brilliant, sharp and provocative, but just as often they lose lot of their radicalism during the realization. Although Lutz Mommartz is a very conscious Filmmaker, his films convey ostensibly the image of a naive author. Lutz Mommartz manages to combine both features in his films. He knows about his enormous naive playfulness, but bringing it under rational control, he uses it consciously. Because he wants to achieve an effect with each film. Film should be a trigger that activates the audience. Although film currently could provide only general climate conditions or lead to climate improvements, but it could not lead to direct political action. The combination of aesthetics and politics rationale appears to him out of place; the commitment would get lost in the art. Lutz Mommartz believes in socialism, but (you should write that!): “Chemistry is the only chance for socialism!” Because 5 % conscious people would always face 95 % inconscious. For Lutz Mommartz there is no form of government that could counteract this. The relationship between these two groups is the only tragedy that there is today. In order to make the relationship bearable Lutz Mommartz sees only one solution: Drugs.’ H.P. Kochenrath

Pauline Senn and Juan Davila (AU)

50:48

‘Juan Davila is a writer, but first and foremost an artist. His controversial work still divides opinions.  Davila was born in 1956 in Santiago, Chile, and lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. At the time of the military coup in Chile, when Pinochet seized power from Allende, Davila was part of the art scene there. His paintings in response, some of which appear in the documentary, shocked both those of the political left and right.  In this documentary, Juan Davila talks about this period, and about modern art, censorship of expression and the oppression of the Mapuche Indians, the original inhabitants of Chile. He also talks about beauty and the shocking effect of painting it today.  Davila has grown reluctant to the idea of being interview, given the failure of the media to address the complexity of his work. For the first time on film he speaks about this in terms of his upbringing - both bourgeois and Indian. We accompany Juan Davila as he revisits his indigenous Mapuche nanny’s daughter, women who have greatly influenced his work. He takes us to the oldest church in Santiago where, as a young buoy, he saw paintings by 17th century Indian artists in the Western manner that would profoundly influence his future work.  And we see the artist at work, painting en plein air in a burnt forest at home in Australia.’

Jack Smith (US)

Flaming Creatures

1963

40:43

Sylvère Lotringer :Were you ever competitive? Did you ever believe in that?

Jack Smith: Yes, of course, when you’re young. It’s drilled into you, and you have to slowly find your way out of it, because you find it doesn’t work. Capitalism is terribly inefficient. The insane duplication, the insane waste, and the young only know what’s put in front of them… But then, by experience, things are happening to you and you find out that this doesn’t work. I mean this is not productive. It produces waste. I looked through your magazine and I was repelled by the title. It’s so dry, you just want to throw it in the wastebasket, which I did. Then I picked it out… Listen: Hatred of Capitalism is a good name for that magazine. It’s stunning. I’ll never admit that I thought of it.

SL: I doubt that by saying that directly you’ll change anything. Language is corrupt.

JS: Listen, you are a creature, artistic I can tell, that somehow got hung up on the issue of language. Forget it. It’s thinking. If you can think of a thought in a most pathetic language… Look at what I have to do in order to think of thoughts. I have to forget language. All I can do with no education, nothing, no advice, no common sense in my life, an insane mother I mean, no background, nothing, nothing, and I have to make art, but I know that under these conditions the one thing I had to find out was if I could think of a thought that has never been thought of before, then it could be in language that was never read before. If you can think of something, the language will fall into place

in the most fantastic way, but the thought is what’s going to do it. The language is shit, I mean it’s only there to support a thought. Look at Susan Sontag, that’s a phenomenon that will never occur, only in every hundred years. Anybody like that. She says things that you would never have thought of. And the language is automatically unique. Whatever new thoughts you can think of that the world needs will be automatically clothed in the most radiant language imaginable.

Bonny Poon (CA)

Beautiful Balance

2017

01:07:45

Of Bodies… Borders… Boredom…

A dazzling and debauched cast of zombies interpret the erotic story of heroes, Whitney and Taylor. The setting is Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s financial heart.

“We are very similar.” “A slave?”

Starring:

Nathaniel Monjaret, Adrian Manuel Huber, Aziade Cirlini, Mohamed Almusibli, Chingy Hong, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Julian Tromp.

[playsfordaaays-blog]

Wellington Theatre 2016

First post, 22nd January NZ time, hi!

Adam Goodall’s excellent article on the Pantograph Punch, "I Am More Important Than Shakespeare": Ten Moments in Wellington Theatre 2016 opens by analysing the general state of Wellington theatre in 2016. Given that I don’t know anything about the state of Wellington theatre in 2015 or 2014 or in any previous year, I can’t do anything similar here. In 2015, I started to be interested in theatre and went to a few plays, much fewer than this year, drawn by an interest in the theatre department at my then-new school Wellington High and by going to the plays put on by the Wellington Young Actors, a company which my friend Gabe Parkin is a member of. However, I didn’t really have anything approaching an understanding of what was even happening – I didn’t so much as know who The Bacchanals were until about December, and I managed to miss A Christmas Karel Capek. 2016 has been my first year in theatre, as it were, it’s been my first year where I’ve been attending plays regularly and keeping up with developments and criticism. As such, all I can say with my lack of context is that the year in theatre has been good, and that a lot of people have made good plays during it. This list is about those plays.

First item: my top ten plays of the year, in the order I want to give them attention

Hudson and Halls Live!

Everyone loved this play. It got fantastic reviews, apparently did very well at the box office (though I’m unaware of any available figures, I’m just going off how many people I heard talking about it and the large audience I saw it with) and swept the Wellington Theatre Awards. I’m slightly resentful of that last one – it wasn’t even from Wellington! – but I can see where the judges are coming from. Hudson and Halls was a very funny and completely engaging play. The most interesting part of the play for me was the core conceit that this was a live filming of an episode and that we were the studio audience, which allowed for the audience to be very naturally involved in the action because we were present in the diegesis.

The Trojan Women

I put this here primarily for the text. Greek tragedies aren’t put on terribly often, and this one was very rewarding to see. The new translation by Simon Perris was very good, and because of it you can now cite “f*** you and die” as a quotation from Euripides. The production itself was strong, with good performances that handled the meter well. Particular note should be given to Katie Alexander, playing Kassandra with captivating intensity, and to the Mad Max (mostly Fury Road)-based design. (I’d credit the designers, but the program contained the credits in a separate piece of paper and I’ve lost that piece of paper! I’m getting names from Theatreview, and I can get from there that Ashleigh Dixon and Rudimiller Mafi are the costume designers, but there may have been other people doing other aspects of the design and I’ll credit them if I find the credits.) I think that the entrance of Athena, borne aloft by a team of ten Greek men dressed like Fury Road’s War Boys, was probably the coolest thing I’ll see in a theatre for a long time.

Smells Like Xmas          

I started writing this post just a couple of days before I published it, but I was considering starting much earlier (yay procrastination!) Several weeks ago, I was considering making a start, but I thought I should wait until that Saturday, the 17th, when I would see my last two shows of the year: The Better Best Album Party That Anyone Has Ever Been Two and Smells Like Xmas. I considered it unlikely that any candidate for this list would arrive so late, but I was wrong. Binge Culture’s Christmas show was a great success of experimentalism. Its series of skits were often abstract and sometimes difficult to follow, but they were always absolutely hilarious. I’m of the understanding that Binge Culture has quite a good reputation; judging by this, it’s well deserved.

Hamlet

Quite a lot of people heard about this production, most of them were misinformed as to its nature. It was at the Pop-Up Globe for a single day, which is what most people know about it. It was actually touring the North Island, with the Pop-Up being a brief but notable stop. I don’t have that much to say about it, other than that it was a very solid production and that the all-female casting worked very well.

Titus Andronicus

2016 was a very good year for Aotearoa Tituses. This play, once one of the least popular, had three productions this year: one in Auckland at the Pop-Up Globe, one in Hamilton, and this one, in Wellington. It was the only one of these productions I saw (of course), and it was very good. Put on by a brand-new company going by the name of the Lost Shakespeare Company, which states that it is dedicated to putting on more obscure Shakespeare plays, it was a solid minimalist production. One thing that was very notable about it was that it had no fake blood or gore effects; a startling choice for this splatterfest of a play, but one which worked very well, allowing it to play more like a straight tragedy and clearly presenting the themes and characters in the lessened presence of shock.

Riding in Cars With (Mostly Straight) Boys

Another Auckland import! Sam Brooks had two plays running in early December: Making Friends Collective’s production of Wine Lips, which I missed, and this, his own production of the semi-autobiographical play which seems to be his signature. Another one where I don’t have much to say about it, just that it’s a complex, well-written and well-acted piece of work, and that Brook’s Bruce Mason Award is well deserved.

Well

I really wish I had a script of this. Well was a piece of verbatim theatre by new feminist theatre company Women Aren’t Wolves, dealing with mental illness from the perspective of people who have it. As a document it was vital, providing a space for people with mental illness to define their conditions in their own terms. The descriptions stated that they wanted to explore “what it means to be well”, and this production met that goal admirably.

Rukahu

James Nokise is completely amazing. I don’t think that there’s anyone disputing this. This play was simultaneously one of the funniest things I’ve seen all year and a searing piece of cultural comment and criticism. Some of this was lost on me, as I don’t really know enough about the sort of theatre he’s parodying to understand how his character, Senior Pacific Artist Jon Bon Fasi, applies to how real-life Māori and Pasifika theatre is handled by CreativeNZ and the general theatrical establishment (if that is his target, I think it is), but what I could understand was incredibly insightful. Nokise could write a book, but that wouldn’t get the audiences he wants, and it wouldn’t be as funny. This is what political theatre is for, and I’m not sure it even is political theatre.

When We Dead Awaken

This show was massively underappreciated. I’ve heard very little talk about it – there are quite a few reviews of it floating around, sure, but only because it toured the North Island and was reviewed in the newspapers where it went. It certainly had flaws, with the acting sometimes lacking variance in intonation, but this production of Henrik Ibsen’s symbolistic final play was extraordinarily powerful. Stripped down to just under an hour (an Ibsen play!), it was particularly notable for its blocking, its design (though the colour pallet was composed exclusively of my favourite colours so I am biased), its music, and the vocal work of the actors. I saw the first performance in the Fringe Festival and the last one at BATS in October, and both times the ending made me gasp from the catharsis.

Galathea: Into the Bush                                                

Ania Upstill had a strong year, first directing Love’s Labours Lost for Summer Shakespeare (which was OK), then Hamlet, then this. This play was an update of John Lyly’s Elizabethan play Galathea (or Gallathea or Galatea) about two girls being disguised as boys and sent into the forest by their fathers to escape being sacrificed to Neptune and falling in love while in the captivity of Diana’s Hunt, all surrounded by the machinations of various gods. Typical Elizabethan story. Opening a week and a bit after Trump’s election, this play wasn’t just funny (and it was very, very funny), it was happy, it was celebratory, and it represented a great variety of and was primarily aimed at LGBT people. All this made it very appropriate for the time, in a different way to most things of which that can be said. Representation will be increasingly important under Trump, both to humanise the people he’ll dehumanise and to create a space for said people. The humour, the acting, the theatrical skill, and the politics of this play are all things I hope I see more of in the plays of 2017.

Second Item: Shows I missed but really wish I’d seen

Shot Bro: Confessions of a Depressed Bullet

The Vultures

Mana Wahine (I need to make a note of the Kia Mau Festival next year!)

No Post On Sunday

The Fence (directed by the older siblings of one of the WHS Shakespeare directors this year!)

Wine Lips

A Trial and/or It’s a Trial!

Rose Matafeo: Finally Dead

Perhaps, Perhaps… Quizás

Not In Our Neighbourhood (though there’ll probably be another chance to see it)

Third Item: Now For Something Completely Foreign

It wasn’t a New Zealand play at all, but I saw a cinema screening of the RSC Hamlet with Paapa Essiedu and it was completely incredible. Keep an eye on Essiedu, he’s probably got a strong career ahead of him based on his performance. Keep an eye on anyone involved in this, really. This is possibly the best play I’ve ever seen in my limited experience.

Fourth Item: Ten favourite plays with enthusiasm translator (like the Obama anger translator but for enthusiasm)

Hudson and Halls Live!

Really funny! Good theatrical technique!

The Trojan Women 

Yay tragedy!

Smells Like Xmas        

Experimental! Hilarious!

Hamlet

Yay Shakespeare!

Titus Andronicus

Yay Shakespeare!

Riding in Cars With (Mostly Straight) Boys

Yay well-written character-based drama but also with jokes!

Well

I know things I didn’t before!

Rukahu

Best editorial is a comedy show!

When We Dead Awaken

Really impressive presentation of interesting overlooked text!

Galathea: Into the Bush                                               

Spreaded non-holiday-related cheer! (I realise spreaded isn’t a word)

Fifth Item: Shows I’m Looking Forward To In 2017

The Undertow

January. Four history plays about Wellington, viewable two at a time or in one ten-hour session with intervals.

Stoge Chollonge 2006

February. Fringe Festival. Comedy show about Stage Challenge and 2000s period piece.

Possible Bacchanals show

Only exists if David Lawrence manages to get out of the Pop-Up Globe or much less likely, if they go on with less of his involvement. Lawrence has said that he does really want to do something with The Bacchanals for the election year

Nearly Inevitable PSA Show

Almost certainly coming to the Comedy Festival. With an election year AND President Trump for meat.

Anything Ania Upstill makes next year

Anything James Nokise makes next year

Good luck for next year! I don’t think there’ll be much good for the world, but theatre’s going well, however much that even matters!