Posts from — October 2011

Chunky Move changes the rules of dance

There’s a massive paper net hanging over the floor. It’s suspended in the air by dozens of strings, and when they move, the net springs to life, undulating like a wave or swinging like a pendulum.

And then there are dancers. They move beneath the sculpture and beside it, creating elegant shapes with their paper partner. It’s an eerie, beautiful effect, and it makes Connected, the latest show from the Australian dance company Chunky Move, a striking part of the Joyce Theater’s fall season.

“[The sculpture] is mesmeric and organic,” says Gideon Obarzanek, the company’s founder and artistic director. “When it first moves, the audience gasps, giggling in awe. It’s very gratifying.”

[Read more →]

Designer Anita Yavich gets metaphysical for Broadway’s “Venus in Fur”

Bags of tricks don’t get much deeper or kinkier than the one Vanda carries into her audition/ambush/apotheosis in Venus in Fur.

Though she seems like a desperate actress with a thick outer-borough accent, Vanda (Nina Arianda) quickly commandeers her would-be director, Thomas (Hugh Dancy), with the help of her roomy satchel. She’s carrying thigh-high boots, frock coats, froufrou dresses and everything else a girl would need to enact David Ives’s sprightly riff on the 1870 novella “Venus in Furs.” Clothes make the man and woman here, then remake and re-remake them, upending any number of power dynamics along the way.

That’s where Anita Yavich comes in. An Obie Award-winning costume designer, she earned a Henry Hewes Design Award nomination for her work on Venus in Fur’s Off-Broadway run with Classic Stage Company last year. She’s back on board for the Broadway transfer, which is currently in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

To suit the ambitions of the play, her costumes have to strike a balance between literal and metaphysical worlds. How much is happening in the dingy rehearsal room where Vanda and Thomas initially meet, and how much is happening in a more abstract realm of desire and debasement?

[Read more →]

How crowds and spaces affect PigPen Theatre Company’s work

A play’s identity changes based on where you see it and whom you see it with. The same production seems different in a large, empty theatre than it does in a crowded basement, and that’s half the beauty of live performance. One way or another, everything and everyone makes an impact.

For proof, just look to PigPen Theatre Company’s production of The Nightmare Story. A dark fable about dreams that spring to life in the woods, the show premiered in a tiny downtown venue as part of 2010′s FringeNYC Festival. Until the end of the week, however, it’s playing at The Irondale Center, a massive converted church in Brooklyn.

The audience has been just as variable. Often, PigPen plays to adults who see theatre all the time, but on four Thursday afternoons, TDF has sponsored special matinees through its Stage Doors program. Those performances are for local students who almost never see shows.

[Read more →]

The “Chinglish” actors speak two languages in their Broadway debuts

At the moment, Broadway shows are set everywhere from the African plains to the Australian outback to the trenches of World War I, but no matter how cosmopolitan they are, they’re all performed in English. Except for Chinglish.

Sure, David Henry Hwang’s new comedy is frequently in English, but it also features monologues, arguments, and entire scenes in Chinese.

The overlapping languages are central to the play, now in previews at the Longacre Theatre. We follow an American businessman who wants to revive his career by landing a contract with the Chinese government, so he hires a British expat named Peter Timms to help him impress local officials. Things go awry when a Chinese minister named Xi Yan reveals that she understands enough English to know when an American is acting like a fool. From there, language barriers inform everything from an awkward dinner to a surprising romance.

[Read more →]

Steampunk Haunted House blends horror and dance

Plenty of haunted houses have blood and guts and monsters, but only one lets nightmares mingle with dance.

Presented by the dance troupe Third Rail Projects, Steampunk Haunted House first appeared in 2009, and this year, it plunges audiences into a dark world inspired by Lewis Carroll and his Alice stories.

That’s a natural motif for choreographer Zach Morris, one of Third Rail’s co-artistic directors. He’s always been drawn to the Victorian era, and Carroll inspires much of the company’s work.

Steampunk, meanwhile, is a science fiction genre that imagines a modern world dominated by Victorian-era technology and style. Its elegant creepiness—think of the shadows and gadgets in Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes—is a natural fit for a haunted house.

And a haunted house, of course, widens the possibilities for a dance performance. Morris says Third Rail “wanted to create a fully immersive world where audience members were experiencing different things at different times.” (He co-choreographed the piece with his fellow artistic directors Tom Pearson and Jennine Willett.) The troupe fills the Abrons Art Center, and as audience members roam the building, they encounter art installations, theatre, sound design, costuming, and site-specific work.

Steampunk Haunted House: Through the Looking Glass from Third Rail Projects on Vimeo.

The suits the house’s Alice in Wonderland scenario: “Alice is an iconic text that can be a jumping off point,” Morris says. “If you wander into a room with a character, you already have a frame of reference.”

But the company isn’t just retelling famous stories. They are digging deeper to find Carroll himself within the texts. Morris explains, “There is much biographical information about Alice Liddle and Lewis Carroll that proved to be the richest source of inspiration. We are dealing with duality: Order versus chaos, regimentation versus freedom, desires of adults versus those of children.”

(more)

[Read more →]