After creating a series of “testimonial plays” based on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, playwright Yael Farber approached a group of women from the Xhosa people in 2008, and told them the story of The Oresteia. The Greek tragic trilogy still confronts us with dilemmas our civilization hasn’t fully solved. How do we distinguish justice from vengeance? What is the appropriate punishment for murder? And once “eye for an eye” violence is ingrained in a culture, how can it be stopped?
At the time she was looking for umngqokolo—traditional overtone throat singing for her new project. But the women’s responses to the tale shocked the playwright. What became a spontaneous Greek—yet uniquely African—chorus sought and found a solution to this ancient dilemma of justice. It differed from the one depicted in the writings of Aeschylus.
This week, those women, their musicians and three actors sing and enact the conclusions they’ve reached in the Farber Foundry production of MoLoRa (Ash) at Reynolds Industries Theater.
We spoke with Yael Farber by phone for an hour on March 11.
INDEPENDENT: I’m aware that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has had a profound influence on your work. I’m wondering what lessons you believe the rest of the world hasn’t learned yet from South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Why is a work like MoLoRa (Ash) needed—why is it a work the world should have?
FARBER: The genesis of project was actually images of New York City after Sept. 11. For days after the tragedy, there were those incredibly poignant and moving images of ashes falling down on people in Manhattan.
STREB Extreme Action’s company name is truth in advertising: a group of seven superbly-trained athletes who appear to propel themselves into harm’s way, repeatedly—against walls and floors, off of trampolines and multi-story trapeze-like platforms, into and out of close encounters with a spinning industrial I-beam as it careens across stage, and much, much more. In this week’s story on the CHAT Festival at UNC-Chapel Hill, I described their edge-of-your-seat maneuvers, set to a pulsing techno soundtrack and accompanied by live and digitized video, as “a highly caffeinated remix of death-defying circus acts, gymnastics, motion-picture stunt work and modern dance.”
Choreographer, inventor, and action architect Elizabeth Streb
I spoke with choreographer, self-styled action architect—and MacArthur Foundation “Genius grant” award winner—Elizabeth Streb by phone on Feb. 6, a snowy afternoon in Philadelphia, between the company’s matinee and evening performances at the Annenberg Center’s Zellerbach Theater.
Carolina Performing Arts presents her company Friday and Saturday night in Memorial Hall. Click here for more information and tickets for the show.
Independent: How would you characterize your interest in technology in terms of the work you’re interested in doing on stage? What does technology enable you to do?
Elizabeth Streb: I would say it’s equal: My interest and passion in technology and hardware – mechanical, electronic, hydraulic, what have you – my love for those types for technology is equal to my love of movement. I see them completely similarly; they’re a congruency to me. For the idea of STREB, I started working with more quotidian objects back in the early 1980s: sticks, wood, hills, ropes and hoops. As I developed, I really started to get more metal and hardware devices involved in what I was doing.
It’s like music. As when someone, way back when, decided the human voice alone wasn’t sufficient to express everything the human might express in terms of pitch, key, melody and harmony, I felt that in a Newtonian universe, on the ground, the body’s biomechanical system, which lends itself to motion, was not, in itself, sufficient. Not to express all that can be expressed in terms of physicality.
So we invent hardware, and collaborate with a lot of different technicians, from MIT’s Media Lab and ASU Electronic Arts department to [trapeze artists and engineers] Noe and Ivan Espana, to create pieces of equipment that we can inhabit and develop new physical spatial and temporal vocabularies.
I don’t recall who defined technology as devices that extend the body’s various capacities. It sounds like one of your main interests involves extending the body’s abilities to do a number of things.
It’s sort of a funny thing. I think the initial, more basic question is, “What is the potential content of action?” Not the body doing movement, or machines working the beautiful way they work and function, or the utilitarian aspects of machines and the body, separately and together. But is there a language, exactly, that we can construct with physicality—whether it’s machine-based, electronically-based or physically-based—that will have its own grammar and syntax? That’s my goal.
I’m not just adding equipment and technology because I like it—although I really do. I do it because I think… [pauses] Okay. Let’s take just one aspect of what it means to move and talk about space. If I’m only 5 feet 7 inches tall, and I go into a theater that happens to be 30 or 40 feet tall, then I’m essentially ignoring the major hunk of that space. And for visual and physical reasons, I think that’s a disappointment to the audience and also sort of a tragedy.
When we have a wheel, an injection device, or cables and harnesses, that gets us up into that location. Otherwise, I feel that that location, that empty space, should not exist.
Kenneth Strong, an actor and teacher with PlayMakers Repertory Company and the Department of Dramatic Art since 1979, died Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 12. Strong had fought glioblastoma brain cancer since 2007, a battle whose early rounds were documented by arts journalist Orla Swift in a Nov. 25, 2007 feature story in the Raleigh News and Observer.
Strong had achieved distinction for his memorable contributions to over 50 PlayMakers productions, including Pericles, The Little Prince, God’s Man in Texas, and Art. He also performed in a 1996 Broadway revival of “Inherit the Wind” with George C. Scott, in addition to roles off-Broadway, in television series including “Law and Order,” “Spin City” and “In the Heat of the Night,” and in films.
According to the biographical information on the PlayMakers company website, Strong had also been originally cast to play Newman Noggs in PlayMakers’ 2009 production of “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby.” Weston Blakesley appeared in the role instead.
Strong had been in hospice for just under a month at the time of his death. Heidi Reklis, PlayMakers general manager, posted on his hospice website that at the end, Strong “was very much at peace and had his [wife] Kee, his mother, his brother and Kee’s brother in the room with him. His very last moment was a brilliant Ken Strong smile and a quiet breath. While we are all very sad, you could not ask for a better moment.”
A memorial service will be held Mon. Jan. 18, at 1 p.m., at Paul Green Theater.
In lieu of flowers, Strong’s family has requested that donations be made in his name to the Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University Medical Center. Click here for a link to their online donation page.
Word to the slammers — and all of the other spoken word and poetry performance practitioners in the region: Following the Friday, Jan. 15 performance of The Big Bang by Universes, PlayMakers Rep will sponsor aspoken word performance competition in Kenan Theater. Prizes to be awarded include a 3rd-generation Apple Ipod Touch.
The three-round competition is for original works, performed by their creators, on any subject, in any style. Performances in each round will be timed, and must be under three minutes in length (with a 30-second grace period before penalties will be assessed). Each poem may only be used once during the competition. Contestants are advised to leave musical instruments, pre-recorded songs, props and costumes at home.
The competition will be hosted by CJ Suitt, a poet and facilitator with Sacrificial Poets, a youth performance poetry team in Chapel Hill, and judged by the members of Universes.
To register, email Jeffrey Meanza, PlayMaker’s Director of Education/Outreach, at meanza@email.unc.edu. Participants may also show up on the night of the event, but night-of competition spots will be held on a first-come, first-served basis.
It’s easy enough to say that Gaspard&Dancers posted the strongest opening bid of any regional dance company in recent years in their Sunday, December 6 company premiere at Reynolds Theater. In a region where dance in general and modern dance in particular has waned over this decade, there’s been precious little competition for such a superlative. Still, if a Durham audience gave their opening work, Anemone, a somewhat subdued response, by evening’s end the crowd was on its feet in support of choreographer and dancer Gaspard Louis and his new modern dance group.
And yet, for a dance critic—and, I strongly suspect, for Mr. Louis himself—such accolades seem, in retrospect, a bit beside the point: If standing ovations in Durham are better than the proverbial sharp stick in the eye, they still don’t always indicate if dance creators have truly achieved their artistic goals.
You take a turn down one of the bustling avenues at the Renaissance Festival, and a calamity appears before you. Three girls in ragamuffin street dress from another time assume a defensive football position against the oncoming crowd. “Hunchbacks!” one roars, “One! Two! Three!” Simultaneously, they drop their shoulderblades on one side and grunt, before assailing the onlookers, in 3-D: “NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT MADE SUMMER BY THIS GLORIOUS SON OF YORK!”
Mere moments later, when the fit has passed, the group debates the merits of a man in the crowd. “Think not I love him, though I ask for him,” one says just a bit too nonchalantly to her unconvinced companion, whose arms are folded and eyebrows duly cocked. “’Tis but a peevish boy, yet he talks well. But what care I for words?”
Seconds elapse, and then two hit the ground, awkwardly trying to make their caps into a blanket. The third, still standing, grimaces: “What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell,” waving the air with distaste.
The trio gets laughs from each of these brief scenes, all right. And in the process, they’ve painlessly added a bit more Shakespeare to the lives of passers-by.
Rebecca Blum, Kacey Reynolds and Carmen-Maria Mandley are members of the Nickel Shakespeare Girls, a Raleigh-based group of buskers—a British term used to describe street performers of the very old school. The Girls are celebrating their tenth year of touring their unique blend of acrobatics, humor and theatrics with street shows and more serious featured performances throughout this closing weekend of the North Carolina Renaissance Festival in Huntersville, just north of Charlotte.
On the road some 25 weeks out of the year, the group’s 2010 season already has performances slated at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and “A Somer’s Eve” festival in Bermuda.
Co-founder Carmen-Maria Mandley recalls their start at the NC Renaissance Faire, a different organization that was operating at the time in Raleigh: “We began making a deal with the people in the lane: If they gave us a nickel, we would give them some Shakespeare—or a rock.”
“To start with, about half of them went with the rocks,” Mandley now recalls, laughing.
But the gag ultimately proved so popular that by their second year, they—and everybody else—were calling them the Nickel Shakespeare Girls. “It kind of became our destiny, to bring Shakespeare to people who wouldn’t see or hear it otherwise, as well as to people who love it.”
The group performed in Duke Gardens this spring, and does workshops and residencies for educational programs in the area including Raleigh Charter High and East Chapel Hill High School.
But it’s the challenge of old-fashioned street theater that appeals to the actors. “You have to fight for your audience,” Mandley notes. “They aren’t captive. They’re not sitting comfortably—or uncomfortably—in their seats. You have about 10 seconds to get them. Or they’ll walk on by.”
“What excites me is when people who aren’t already privy to Shakespeare will stop and listen to Henry V, because the way we’re doing it engages them,” Mandley says. “It’s the kids who come back year after year to see us. It’s the energy it takes. It’s a very sacred thing, we care very deeply about.”
Tonight, Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca take UNC’s Memorial Hall through a passionate tour of this Spanish dance and musical form. The name should be familiar: the group closed the American Dance Festival in 2006 — with a vengeance. Here’s what we found in our July 26, 2006 review:
“At the end of the first act, we’d been all but catapulted out of Page Auditorium on the bravado and the daring of dancer Juan Oglalla’s “Maria - Alegrias.” His solo was equal parts psychodrama and dance, as it deceptively swayed from cool disregard to laser-like insistence.
We watched as he negotiated a polyrhythmic labyrinth and technical torture chamber of his own devising; a hellish gauntlet of 30-second and 32nd-note subdivisions within already subdivided syncopated beats.
Call it dancing on a tightrope for one. But that would ignore guitarists Eugenio Iglesias and Luis Miguel Manzano, and the singing of cantaores Manuel Gago, Emilio Florido and Nieves Diaz who kept the melodic line taut — that is, when they didn’t give it a good hard snap, every so often, just to ensure the continued interest of all parties.
By the end of Act 1, the audience was certain it had been petitioned, harangued, warned, pleaded with and advised by the cantaores, even though the overwhelming majority couldn’t understand a word they’d said. The dancers’ eyes didn’t search the darkness before them; they studied it instead. The harsh, hoarse voices of the singers, rubbed raw with emotion, cried out again and again over what they knew. Repeatedly, the performers’ hands grasped, bent and broke off notes in mid-breath. Then their outstretched palms opened, as if holding the excavated facts of desolation.
We were being served notice: Love beckons loss. And as for the particulars? They’re as meaningless as the tongue in which they’re sung.
What kept all of this from veering into parody? What divides drama from melodrama? Sincerity, perhaps. Or maybe it’s a certain cautionary knowledge: Suffering is universal. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t need a translator for this particular performance. On an innate level, we all recognize a cry of pain.
Our tutelage that night included emphatic dances that fully acknowledged the extremity of passion and pain; dances that faced the darkness squarely with a ferocious — and, ultimately, finite — dignity.
Was this an obscure dance and musical form, rendered in a language even more obscure? No. It was a return to the very foundation of the drama instead — the classic form of tragedy.
Note: The video clip from this performance features graphic language and adult situations. Viewer discretion advised.
“I’ve been an HIV nurse for 14 years, and I know all of those people.”
The endorsement came from a woman in the audience, after the opening night performance of intimacies kicked off the Solo Takes OnFestival of one-person shows, Friday night at the ArtsCenter.
As one of the first television and film actors to come out as gay, Michael Kearns helped pave the way for generations to come. But when he announced that he was HIV-positive, his career evaporated before his eyes. Starved for work, he developed intimacies, a one-man show about six striking individuals affected by AIDS — and he toured the world with it.
Eventually, his career recovered as living with AIDS slowly became a reality, and not just a dream. The 20th Anniversary Tour of his now-historic solo performance continues Saturday night at 8 p.m. at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro. Tickets are $15 and $10.
Playwright, ethnographer and performer Ashley Lucas
Some stories you live. Then you tell the tale.
Playwright, ethnographer and performer Ashley Lucas
began work on Doin’ Time, her one-person show in the Solo Takes Onfestival, when her father was denied parole by the Texas prison system in the summer of 2003.
In a 2008 interview, she said, “When I was brave enough to come out and say, ‘I am a child of a prisoner,’ I was overwhelmed by the number of people who came to me wanting to share their stories as they, too, were in similar situations.”
Lucas corresponded with over 400 prisoners from across the country, interviewing family members of prisoners, former prisoners, and workers in prisons and prison activism in California, Texas and New York. Out of those stories and her own experiences, she has created “a harshly realistic perspective of the desperation of the prisoners and of the families they leave behind — rendering the families of prisoners innocent refugees and forgotten victims of the prison system.”
Performances for Doin’ Time are this Sunday, Nov. 15, at 3 p.m., next Saturday, Nov. 21, at 5 p.m. and next Sunday, Nov. 22, at 3 p.m. All performances are in UNC’s Swain Hall.Tickets are $10 / $5.
Nicholas Nickleby at Playmakers Rep. Photo by Jon Gardiner.
Thefirst week of the British blockbuster Nicholas Nicklebycloses tonight at Playmakers Rep– and we are looking for the buzz on the show.
Why? For some reason, journalists aren’t being allowed to see Part I until its “official” opening, on Nov. 21 — at the end of its second week.
Conventional Playmakers productions open with three weeknights of previews before critics are permitted in on a gala—and inevitably papered—Saturday opening night. But after previews Wednesday through Friday, Nov. 11-13, Nicholas NicklebyPart I then goes dark for eight days, until Saturday, Nov. 21.
In a second scheduling quirk, if critics don’t catch the full production on that day—in a back-to-back marathon running from 2 p.m. until 10:30 that night (not counting the party afterward)—they won’t be able to see the complete show until the end of the month. After its official opening night, Part II then goes off stage for eight days, until Nov. 29.
One of the results of this arrangement: The earliest professional review anyone will read of the full production won’t publish—anywhere—before the start of the show’s third week.
Since—for some reason—thecriticsare being kept out of the mixuntil the third week of the biggest show in Playmakers’ history, thecourt of public opinionwill have totake their place.
One thing’s for certain:your comments belowwill likely be theonlypublic critical commentarypermittedonthis show before Thanksgiving week.
So by all means, let the deliberations begin: Who saw Part I this week? How was it? Given the pre-show hype, is Nicholas Nickleby really the theatrical bombshell of the season? We — andthe theater-going public — can’t wait to learn.
DidNicholas Nickleby sustain your interest? Who gave its most memorable performances? What was the show’ strongest suit? What, if anything, needed more work? What surprised you the most about it?
Fill us — all — in. You may comment anonymously if you wish. There will be a delay before your words are posted, since we have to screen comments for spam. Never fear: We promise we’ll publish all non-spam responses.
Lisa Creech Bledsoe on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": "Speed dating for the tech set," funny! Nice write up of an incredible event. I'm voting for Scrubby next year. Scrub-by, Scrub-by, Scrub-by!
Lisa aka @glowbird (the boxing chick)
DK on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": Just moved back to the Triangle from Seattle, which is where Ignite started. It kind of caught on and blew up really fast, and organizers had to keep upping the venue.
I think people have been looking for this kind of cabaret for a while. They like going somewhere and being a crowd together, and it's
Christine Fawley on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": A fabulous night highlighting the diversity of talent and intellectual pursuits here in the Triangle. An event like this could be held every month and still barely scratch the surface of the passions of our community.
We were honored to be included and appreciated the support and enthusiasm of the crowd as we delivered "20
