VIEWPOINTS – 2018 AMERICAN REALNESS wraps up, and it was as defiant as ever

Today marks the final day of American Realness, the annual festival that celebrates and challenges performative norms, particularly in the sphere of contemporary dance and performance at large. This year’s installment, the ninth, was co-presented by Gibney Dance in association with, as in the past, Abrons Arts Center. Although I ended up catching just two entries, both most definitely lived up to the festival’s out-of-the-box mandate; these were defiant expressions that did not fail to provoked. Here are my thoughts.

 

THE REHEARSAL ARTIST

Michelle Ellsworth's "The Rehearsal Artist"

Michelle Ellsworth’s “The Rehearsal Artist”

(Michelle Ellsworth)

At the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, I caught Michelle Ellsworth’s wild and fascinating performance-cum-installment piece The Rehearsal Arist. This one’s really difficult to describe. With less than ten audience members per performance, the 30-minute “show” was an intimate presentation of a world continuously upended, including performative expectation itself. The centerpiece was a seemingly torturous circular contraption to which a “dancer” was strapped and spun. She wasn’t able to see us, but we observed her. In her confined world, she bafflingly gazed upon scenes from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, while civilizations and social settings were hastily built and and collapsed her. The point of this? Well, perhaps it’s to point out the limitations (oh, ephemerality!), randomness, and just plain objective bizarreness of our existence, encompassing the performance you’re experiencing. Oddly transcendent. And it comes with donuts and a flip-book!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

THIS

Adrienne Truscott's "This"

Adrienne Truscott’s “This”

(Adrienne Truscott)

Yesterday at the playhouse in Abrons Arts Center, I saw Adrienne Truscott’s new solo performance piece, the irresistibly transgressive This. I had seen Ms. Truscott’s Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else!, and was captivated by her fearlessness to go where others dared not trod and her ability to seductively, and unassumingly, take us with her. Her sense of humor and theater initially comes across as accessible, but it consistently turns on itself, leading us to places of doubt, or maybe even truth. It’s a wicked path she takes you on. This is no different. If anything, her expansive new show takes us further into Truscott-land, transcending comedy and establishing our dauntless provocateur as a formidable performance artist. It’s thrilling to behold an artist willing to contribute the entirety her being – body, memory, intellect, emotion, dot dot dot – to crushingly make her points (which are political, but to label them such would be to cheapen them), and fiercely entertain. Ms. Truscott is a modern-day pied piper.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

AMERICAN REALNESS FESTIVAL
Dance/Theater/Performance
Gibney Dance in association with Abrons Arts  Center
Through January 16

Categories: Dance, Off-Broadway, Theater

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