The Arthropologist
Pina, The Tiger Lillies & Marc Bamuthi Joseph push the boundaries to examine themystery of performance
Tiger LiliesPhoto by Regis Hertrich
Tommy Shepherd, from left, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Theaster Gates in Red, Blackand GREEN: a bluesPhoto by Bethanie Hines
Dancers from the Tanztheater Wuppertal in Pina Bausch's The Rite of Spring fromWim Wenders' PINA 3-D screening at Cinema Arts Festival at 7:05 p.m. Nov. 13 atthe Edwards Cinema
Miwa Matreyek, Myth and InfrastructurePhoto by Scott Groller
Fred Wiseman's Crazy Horse
Exhausted and covered in dirt, the women of Tanztheater Wuppertal quiver in a huddle during the opening passages of Pina Bausch'sThe Rite of Spring. One of them will be chosen to be sacrificed. The performers themselves do not know who will be chosen until they on are onstage in that very moment.
In Wim Wenders riviting film, Pina, the camera takes us right inside the dance, and more importantly, that very moment. We are literally living and breathing with Bausch's one of a kind ensemble. Thanks to the perception bending qualities of 3D, we feel as if we are in The Rite of Spring.
The film is not only a homage to this seminal dance maker, but to the performers who gave their souls day after day, decade after decade, to fully realize Bausch's singular vision. No film has ever brought me closer to the mystery of performance, the cliff a dancer stands on every time the curtain goes up. Wenders captures the very essence of that risk in the most intelligent use of 3D technology I have yet to see.
Wenders' film brought me to question the very nature of performance and the body, and consider how artists are moving the field forward through innovation, blending boundaries, brave methodologies and sheer virtuosity.
Usually, as audience members, we experience this at a distance. All that is about to change.
Great performances
There are upcoming opportunities to see exactly what I'm talking about this weekend at Society of Performing Arts/DiverseWorks presentation of cult post punk pioneers, The Tiger Lillies, tonight and University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Centee's presentation of Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Red, Black & GREEN, a blues(rbGb) tonight and Saturday. Next week the Cinema Arts Festival Houston (CAFH) offers screenings of Wenders' Pina on Nov. 13 at the Edwards, Frederick Wiseman's Crazy Horse on Nov. 12 at the MFAH, and Miwa Matreyek'sMyth and Infrastructure onNov. 11 at Talento Bilingue de Houston (TBH), co-presented by Aurora Picture Show.
I first witnessed Bamuthi Joseph's mix master style at the Systems of Sustainability conference at the Mitchell Center. Intrigued by the way he seamlessly shifted between telling and moving his story, I found his performance style completely original. Then, last spring he wowed me again at the Houston Museum of African American Cultural.
"You have Ailey in your body but you talk," I told Bamuthi Joseph, in a humble attempt to describe what he is doing.
"I'm going to use that as my tag line," he quipped back.
His uniqueness speaks to the way he develops his work, which is through immersion in the community and his Life is Living festivals, here in Houston and elsewhere. I sat down to visit with Bamuthi Joseph a year ago, and it became clear in the first few moments that he considers his work with Life is Living as performance. He talked about playing dominoes and simply being with the members of the community. And indeed, Houston factors into rbGb, in fact, dancer/actor Traci Tolmaire plays Project Row Houses founder Rick Lowe among other characters.
Drawing from Joseph Beuys notion of "social sculpture," the goal is to jumpstart a conversation about environmental justice, social ecology and collective responsibility using poems, music and murals gathered from Life is Living. The way the audience experiences the performance is yet another point of departure. Talk about getting close, the audience gets to walk around the performance installation, designed by Theaster Gates, before the show actually begins. There's nothing like scoping out the neighborhood to truly deepen an experience.
The other end of the spectrum
The Tiger Lillies take us to a different end of the performance spectrum, that of complete and utter uniqueness. The first time I heard them, I wanted to run away and join the gypsy circus, or at least take up the accordion. You don't become a cult band without being this distinct.
They describe their work as "a twisted fusion of pre-war Berlin cabaret and avant garde music hall in deranged anarchic gypsy style." A blend of theater, cabaret and vocal athletics, The Tiger Lillies set the bizarre standard. But its founder and lead singer Martyn Jacques' falsetto voice that transcends time and place bringing us backward in history to an invented land. It's haunting, eerie and yet supremely intimate too.
Wiseman brings us close by actually backing away. The legendary filmmaker knows his way around extraordinary human movers, as evidenced in his La Danse-The Paris Opera Ballet, a highlight of the 2009 CAFH, and more recently, Boxing Gym, filmed in Austin.
The anthropologist with a camera is at again in Crazy Horse, a documentary of the famed Paris cabaret of the same name, known for its absolute perfectionism in production and performance values. Wiseman, in his usual sly style, takes us inside a new show called Désirs, staged by celebrated French choreographer Philippe Decouflé. Like Wenders, Wiseman surrounds us with his subjects in such a way that we walk among them, feeling the tenor of their daily lives.
Wiseman melds with his subjects, while Matreyek merges with her film. She actually performs with her film, her body effortlessly joining the moving parts in her live performance film Myth and Infrastructure. There's something deeply humanizing about her physical presence engaging directly with her fantastical animation. The real and the virtual collide as Matreyek's shadow partners with an ever changing collage of vivid images and objects.
Through a layering process, she creates a double narrative, where the viewer connects the visual dots. If the audience becomes slightly disoriented between the real and illusion, that's precisely her point. Slight of hand is part of Matreyek's plan. It's surreal, magical and uplifting in one swoop.
So thought the folks at TED, who invited her to perform Glorious Visions. I caught her work two years ago with her troupe, Cloud Eye Control, at the Fusebox Festival.Like Bamuthi Joseph, Matreyek founder her way to her hybrid form in an organic path. Her earlier work contained body parts floating around, so it seemed a natural step to add her own body. Matreyek will shed some light on her process at Meet the Makers: Installation Art and Cinema on the Verge on Nov. 12 also at TBH.
Pushing the boundaries of human experience is part of the artistic terrain, yet rarely do we get this level of proximity. Outstanding performances on stage and in film are at your doorstep Houston. A suggestion: get close to them.
Let Miwa Matreyek put you under a spell in her Myth and Infrastructure
The dancers of TanzTheater Wuppertal bare their souls in Pina Bausch's The Rite of Spring
