A season of Cultural Revolution at Fordham University (II)

One of the most palatable forms of bringing the spectacle into the American universities is the festival/ or rather the “presentational platform”, a less formal category, in fact a very friendly and flexible one, which includes Prelude, an event organized this year for the eighth time at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Founded by Frank Hentschker, the director of”Martin E. Segal Theatre Center” (the Center that published, among other things, the first New York Anthology of Romanian new plays in 2007) and curate every year by three theater critics, Prelude displays an atypical thus provocative format. Its program includes fragments of shows which are being prepared for the stage, works-in-progress witnessing about what is to be presented in the current season in New York or elsewhere.

Spectators –most of them CUNY students – are presented what can be called the “anatomy of the performance”, a type of live autopsy, and they are expected to get involved in commenting and reacting to it. They are asked for their reaction in different ways: either via discussions and Q&A sessions that take place immediately after the show, with all performers, director, playwright and members of audience, or through polls they are asked to answer for, sometimes even as part of the show. After 8 years, Prelude is definitely part not only of the CUNY’s educational package, but also of the New York best avant-garde cultural offer.

Explosive nudity, Chekhov read through feminist lens and the computer-playwright: fragments of Prelude 2011

Untitled Feminist Show, written and directed by Young Jean Lee, is one of the most awaited shows this season in New York. Young Jean Lee is considered the star of the American avant-garde. Her latest productions attack hot themes for the American society, in radical forms which sweep away any trace of taboo. With a reputation of staging exactly the things that she is most afraid of (as she likes to repeat in interviews), Lee was in the general attention last year with The Shipment, a show that presents and comments upon every stereotype connected to racism against black people. The next production she prepares, after Untitled Feminist Show, is dedicated to “white heterosexual men”, as she declared in a recent debate about New Voices in the American theater, organized by Theater Communication Group.

Feminist Show - photo Blaine Davis

“The fear we’re going to offend people was the main engine for this show” Lee said in an interview about The Shipment, adding that the issues they took on were generated by the collective feelings of those in the cast and her only job was to reunite them and translate them for the stage. Lee is Korean-American, which provoked a lot of comments about her being or not justified to sign such a performative discourse about black people.

But Young Jean Lee is also a woman, so less such commentaries will be made about Untitled Feminist Show from which she presented four scenes in Prelude 2011. The degree of discomfort produced to the audience was similar to that of The Shipment, which activated what Americans call “the white guilt”. Here, six women representing different types of feminity – except the standard one – appear on stage completely naked, their movements inscribed in a non-verbal script meant to attack the stereotypes attached to the idea of being a woman.

In one of the scenes, the women compose a moving sculpture, exposing themselves to the spectators’ eyes in every imaginable positions and becoming a type of “feminist civic monument” – an explosive introduction to the show’s subject. In another scene, the most corpulent of the performers (their proportions vary, going to extremes) are involved in a fighting scene re-done in slow motion and at the end of it the spectators are asked if they consider the women tried to use male fighting methods. The questions asked after each scene are important because they indicate different angles of reflection on the modern idea of feminity, systematically attacking from inside the stereotypes related to it. It is worth mentioning that the performers – one of the questions is whether they are women or not, as some of them would rather be defined as androgynous – are disposed not only of their clothes but also of their hairdos, make-up, cosmetic interventions and all possible signs of feminity, the only inserts that could not be removed being their tattoos which thus become a kind of subtext/or note to the show. On the arm of the most masculine of the performers is written with large, visible letters – STRENGHT.

Trying to analyze what is shocking and discomforting in this show  - both sensations become bearable only thanks to the humor used by Lee – one discovers that what is presented on stage is an “organic womanhood”, no additives, no chemical supplements, no fake sweeteners. This womanhood promotes itself as being the natural one, thus discussing and combating the supremacy of the standard model of feminine beauty which became oppressive. In an imaginary analytical balance, compared to the Barbie-like beauties contestants in pageants, all looking alike, the six women in the Lee’s show, which are proudly shaking their fats with a smile on their faces, bravely choreographing the anti-grace and exposing their bodies without inhibitions could, paradoxically, win more of the audience’s sympathy. This is what happened to the über-liberal audience at CUNY where one spectator, recommending himself as gay man, mentioned that he finally understood thanks to this show why his straight friends are so taken with the vagina.

Another feminist intervention came from the experimental group Half Straddle, run by director Tina Satter who also writes and direct the groups’ creations, in the same manner Lee does. In Seagull (Thinking of you) Satter treats Chekov’s text from a contemporary and very personal perspective: she adds fragments from his letters to the text and casts an entirely female distribution which completely changes the relationships between the classical characters. Reminding of Romanian director Radu Afrim’s shows, with which it has in common the love for stuffed animals and for the re-contextualization soaked with contemporary irony, Satters’ Seagull – from which Prelude presented only a scene – promises to be a very interesting production.

Half Straddle - photo Michael De Angelis

It is also worth mentioning two new plays signed by Jackie Sibblies Drury (We are proud to present a presentation about the hero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa...) and Otso Kuopaniemi (Lov.abz).  They both propose original forms of readings, being written from the beginning as performative scripts: the first one has the form of a presentation made by five performers representing different typologies – the white man, the black man, etc – and offering a funny and smart guide to a better understanding of the complicated history of a deeply colonized zone of Africa. Containing no moralizing aspects or boring formulas, this performative lecture, which includes imaginary letters written by German soldiers sent to their loved ones, as well as lyrics and reflections of the author on her own Namibian roots discovered by chance, ends up to be a convincing introduction to a subject that deserves more attention: the relation between colonists and colonized and the profound humanity of both parts which can be the bridge of their reconciliation.

The Finish author Otso Kuopaniemi invites his spectators in a highly contemporary context with a step into the future, with his show involving improvisation techniques and the fully participation of a computer – as author and performer.  Thanks to voice-recognition software, the computer becomes an equal partner of dialogue for the three performers, who are provoked to rapidly react to the machine’s unforeseeable sayings. The result is an extremely funny and unexpected one – not only for the spectators and for the audience, but also for Kuopaniemi who is permanently on stage, as improvisation coach. He drew the lines but the computer fills in the text, by continuing the dialogue the actors begin. This show has the merit of being a reflection on the degree of machine’s involvement in the contemporary life.

Otso Kuopaniemi (Lov.abz). - photo Janne-Jukka Huopaniemi

Prelude 2011, an event symbolically taking place on the school premises, was an explosive prelude for the first season of the second decade of 21^st century.