TDRThe Drama Review the journal of performance studies

EditorRichard Schechner

Associate EditorMariellen R. Sandford

Consortium EditorsRebecca SchneiderBrown University

Jill Dolan, Stacy WolfPrinceton University

William H. SunShanghai Theatre Academy

Managing EditorGelsey Bell

Assistant EditorJessica N. Pabón

Books EditorBranislav Jakovljevic

Critical Acts EditorT. Nikki Cesare

Provocation EditorsCoco FuscoSteve Kurtz

Contributing EditorsFawzia Afzal-KhanEugenio BarbaJohn BellTracy C. DavisGuillermo Gómez-PeñaOng Keng SenBarbara Kirshenblatt-GimblettCarol MartinRabih MrouéAnna Deavere SmithDiana TaylorNgugi wa Thiong’oTadashi UchinoSusanne Winnacker

Editorial Assistant Yasmine M. Jahanmir

Above: Anne Gridley of Nature Theater of Oklahoma dances through strands of simple gestures in Poetics. Theatre of the Riverside Church, New York City, October 2005. See “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Aesthetics of Fun” by Rachel Anderson-Rabern. (Photo by Peter Ngrini)

Front and Back Cover: Kristen Claire Sieh (back cover, with gun) and Libby King ( front cover) in an early workshop of Mission Drift, BRIC Studio, Brooklyn, NY, 2009. Directed by Rachel Chavkin. See the articles on the TEAM by Carol Martin, Maurya Wickstrom, and Rachel Jessica Daniel. (Photo by Peter Dressel)

2TDR: The Drama Review 54:4 (T208) Winter 2010. ©2010New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ProvocationG®FRP: The GloFish® Freedom and Reconciliation ProjectGMO, Let ’em go

Adam Zaretsky

I had it in my head, but I had to really do it. I did it too. I let some GloFish® go in the Gulf of Mexico: one male and three females, all Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). Not the cheesy Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) or the yellow ribbon Yellow Fluorescent Protein (YFP) but big, old, commie Red Fluorescent Protein (RFP) expressing, vertebrate interna-tionalists...and I let ’em go in the brackish waters of the Gulf Coast. Yeah, I bought some transgenic beings their freedom. I bought them at a local pet store in Corpus Christi, Texas. I rolled up my pants and waded into the gulf with my mixed, inbred, interspecies cousins. I immersed the plastic bag of Starfire Red® Zebrafish in the waters to acclimatize. Then I popped the bag and let them go. They swam off. Was the modified family welcomed in their new environs? Did foreign GMO species have trouble integrating? Is there a living brood of intentionally released, different colored fish in the Deep South?

Risk Assessment versus Mutant Animal Rights

If the GloFish® Freedom and Reconciliation Project is an act of political art, the argument about inten-tional release would not be complete without a comparison between the risk GMOs pose to the environ-ment and the need to liberate those entertainingly contained personish beings: GloFish. Humans have forced added value upon the GloFish by jamming the flow of hereditary mutation upon them in accor-dance with anthropocentric desires and other equally sick pleasures (www.glofish.com). Without the benefits of 3.5 billion years of beta testing, releasing them into the ecosphere is pollution. But, from a GloFish-centric perspective, they deserve to live outside of command and control: the farm, the store, the suburban house, and the sacrificial toilet bowl. They are fish. They are not automatons, but kinds of per-sonages...just like you and me. If hot-swapping anatomical curiosities for free-range diaspora leads to habi-tat turbulence and eventually to reduction of biodiversity, that is the price of respect for difference.

Speed-mixing of traits does breed inherently irresponsible, interspecies hazards. Ought it be forbidden to free the non-things after painful and frivolous experimentation because they pose a risk to the barely known environment? Sure, they have built-in reproductive potentials, but this is all the more reason for their exterior existence. Transgenic life should have a chance to run wild for its own sake, not just for the sake of profit. Mutants on the range are more important than environmental stability because defects R us! After all, we used to be worms. We have grown, over time, into surprisingly odd, fucked-up globs of extras: senses, brains, emotions, elbows, and big toes. Let difference reign supreme. Applaud new anatomy. Otherwise we must wipe out the rock snot of the lab and categorically stop the production of any ugly,

Figure 1. G®FRP Intentional Release Document, 2010. (Courtesy of Adam Zaretsky)

3

Provocation

unassimilated, invasive species. Can you decide? Are GloFish® proud rebels or are GloFish® a local Gulf Coast disease, a swimming red tide, a threat to indigenous, market hugging, heritage-KKK populations? What are we to do with the afterbirth of a nation?

Is the creation of a toxic Gulf of Mexico an ecological art?

Ding, dong, the Gulf is dead. BP killed my GloFish® artworks. What does it mean to contemplate the British Petroleum oil spill, the intentional GloFish® release, and other corporate and grassroots environ-mental wastage as a kind of sadistic art brut? Is the industrial creation of wastelands, landfills, toxic water-sheds, genocidal disregard of human and nonhuman life forms still codifiable as creative commentary on eco-political relations? In essence, is pollution just a byproduct of industrialization or is it an intentionally cruel aesthetic realized as time-based, new media, air-water-soil-cancer art? Can we thank corporate dereg-ulation for DHOSPP (the Deepwater Horizons Oil Spill Performance Project) as a free-to-the-public ver-sion of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty?

Neither humor, nor poetry, nor imagination means anything unless, by an anarchistic destruction generating a prodigious flight of forms which will constitute the whole spectacle, they succeed in reinvolving man, his ideas about reality, and his poetic place in reality. (1958:92)

Is the mass extinction we are facing really just a process-based minimalism? Is it a collective clean-freak’s obsessive-compulsive, aesthetic wet dream, cum planetary ecocidal self-fulfilling prophecy? Is environmen-tal tragedy worthy as drama?

To the Glofish®...

Go write your transpecies memoirs. Go get fucked under the cratered moon. Pour your gonads out a stiff one in the river of time. Pass dissonance as heritage dissidents. Differently abled is either a compliment or a pariah. Breed faithlessly, outside of your ® brand affiliation. Go and be free! Life is fundamentally uncontained, and those built for ornament still deserve a feral chance.

Reference

Artaud, Antonin. 1958. “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto).” In The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press.

Adam Zaretsky is a wet-lab art practitioner mixing ecology, biotechnology, nonhuman relations, body performance, and gastronomy. He focuses on legal, ethical, social, and libidinal implications of biotechnological materials and methods: MART [Molecular Assisted Reproductive Technology] and Transgenic Application Architecture. Currently

he is cocreating Solar Zebrafish: genetically modified, photosynthetic plant-animal hybrids subjected to embryonic personality studies. He is headmaster of VASTAL (The Vivoarts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd.) and a PhD candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. BioSolar art/sci studiolab research supported by the Waag Society, TAGC and Gorlaeus Laboratories. www.vimeo.com/vastal

Figure 2. Ring of Fire, 2010. (Courtesy of Adam Zaretsky)

Provocation

GFRP: The GloFish® Freedom and Reconciliation Project

Adam Zaretsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Caught Off-Garde: New Theatre Ensembles from NYC (mostly)

To Avant or Not to Avant: Questioning the Experimental, the New, and the Potential to Shock in the New Garde

T. Nikki Cesare and Mariellen R. Sandford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

A flush of new theatre ensembles producing, for the most part, group-devised work prompts questions about the viability of the term avantgarde, the confluence of events behind the activity of this latest “bunch of experimental theatres,” and their relationship to the original “bunch” from the 1970s.

Next Up Downtown: A New Generation of Ensemble Performance

Paige McGinley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

The work of seven up-and-coming performance companies—Hotel Savant, Temporary Distortion, New Paradise Laboratories, Knife, Inc., Ex.Pgirl, Witness Relocation, and Banana Bag & Bodice—explores intermediality, transnationalism, and political affect. All emphasize the continued dominance of networked, spatialized storytelling.

Liberté, Fraternité, Corbusier!: An Interview with Alex Timbers

David Savran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Under the artistic direction of Alex Timbers, Les Freres Corbusier has carved out a niche for itself as a purveyor of an anarchic, hyper-literate variety of what Timbers calls post-ironic theatre, an “aggressively visceral theatre combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and rigorous academic research.”

Image Eaters: Big Art Group Brings the Noise

Jacob Gallagher-Ross. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Making noisy art for noisy times, New York ensemble Big Art Group’s hyper-mediated aesthetic stages the sensory surfeit of modern life. Employing batteries of screens, prismatic live-feed video, and roaring digital soundscapes, the company’s experiments with attention and perception create a new model for political theatre grounded in the contested dynamics of spectatorship.

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Aesthetics of Fun

Rachel Anderson-Rabern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma stages devised work that explores the experiential and aesthetic properties of fun. Their particular presentation of everyday source material resists idealism while irreverently yet sincerely proposing ways of living: attentively, and with pleasure.

What Did They Do to My Country!: An Interview with Rachel Chavkin

Carol Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Five Years and Change with the TEAM: Moving Fast Past the Apocalypse

Rachel Chavkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Carol Martin and Rachel Chavkin discuss the intellectual formation and working methods of the young American theatre company, the TEAM—Theatre of the Emerging American Moment.

The Labor of Architecting

Maurya Wickstrom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

In Architecting, the TEAM inaugurates a unique form of theatrical labor. This labor moves beyond identitarian politics to imagine, in the midst of neoliberalism’s tendencies to development through destruction, an entirely new kind of space in which an Idea, in Alain Badiou’s sense, is resurrected.

Art in the Age of Political Correctness: Race in the TEAM’s Architecting

Rachel Jessica Daniel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

The TEAM’s award-winning play Architecting is primarily about the reconstruction of the South during the Civil War and after Hurricane Katrina. Through Architecting, the TEAM, an all-white theatre company, comments on American race relations by engaging in an ethical performance of blackness.

The Most American Thing in New York City: The Historiography of the National Theater of the United States of America

Jessica Del Vecchio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

New York City–based NTUSA uses a census-based creation process to develop vaudevillian spectacles that investigate the construction of local and national histories. Their performances expose tensions between art as a commercial enterprise and a community-building effort, testing the boundary between esoteric avantgarde and purely entertaining, popular performance.

“Comedy, Truth, and, like, Real Shit”: Derek Ahonen, the Amoralists, and the Well-Made Play

T. Nikki Cesare .................... 175

Derek Ahonen, playwright, director, and founding member of the Amoralists, describes the journeys he takes his characters and audiences on in his plays, as well as the journey of the Amoralists themselves—from literally betting on their success in Las Vegas to finding an unlikely but snug niche as the well-made-playmakers on the contemporary avantgarde theatre scene.

Emily Letts as Anita Prowler (on screen) with audience, in New Paradise Laboratories’ Fatebook: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time. Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, 2009. See “Next Up Downtown” by Paige McGinley. (Photo © Jacques-Jean Tiziou)

Discovering What We Don’t Know: An Interview with Steve Cosson of the Civilians

Sarah Kozinn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188

Since 2001 the Civilians, a small but prolific New York–based company best known for its investigative theatre, has been creating shows on an array of topics such as the culture of the evangelical church, divorce, the porn industry, and ecological disaster. Under the artistic direction of Steve Cosson, the Civilians challenge what audiences have come to know as documentary theatre.

“Ta daaaa”: Presenting Pig Iron Theatre Company

Nick Salvato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

If the recent attention given to Pig Iron Theatre Company is any indication, 2010 may be the year of the pig. Although the group’s founders met 20 years ago, it was their 2003 show James Joyce Is Dead and So Is Paris: The Lucia Joyce Cabaret and the 2010 production of Chekhov Lizardbrain that landed the Philadelphia group in the New York theatre scene. Pig Iron’s abiding investment in adaptation’s possibilities and continued commitment to physically intricate performance is now being passed on through their latest venture: a training program in physical theatre.

Books

A Politics of the Scene by Paul A. Kottman The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched

by Paul WoodruffFreddie Rokem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s by Carrie Lambert-BeattyMJ Thompson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Magic Flutes & Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater by David J. Buch

Pannill Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage During China’s Revolution and Reform by Ying Ruocheng and Claire Conceison

John B. Weinstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works edited by Sharon FriedmanAnnika C. Speer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235