Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hamlet Arnold doing “To be or not to be” with a cigar clenched in his teeth and a .44 in his hand is the most honest fucking Shakespeare you’re ever going to see. You want purity? You want authenticity? Go watch some Yale Drama School graduate emote at you for three hours. What […]
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Damn everything but the circus!…The average ‘painter’ ‘sculptor’ ‘poet’ ‘composer’ ‘playwright’ is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown’s mouth, orchestrate twenty lions. E.E. Cummings, Staging Modern American Life: Popular Culture in the Experimental Theatre of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, Palgrave Macmillan, 25 October 2011, p. 60 […]
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So it’s basically a haircut. Performance art as a goddamn haircut. Niki with scissors, Michael sitting there probably feeling vulnerable and exposed and wondering if this is profound or if he’s just getting a trim in front of an audience that showed up because there was cheap wine and they knew the artists. And you […]
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The Thing About Knives and Beauty So here’s Amélie Ségarra, a French ballerina, standing on top of a grand piano in some gorgeous, empty Baroque theater in Girona that’s seen better centuries. But she’s not wearing regular pointe shoes, those pretty pink torture devices that already mangle feet into gnarled question marks by age twenty-five. […]
Continue Reading →Here’s the thing about live performance that all our academic seminars and theoretical frameworks can’t quite capture… it’s a fucking high-wire act where the wire is invisible and everyone’s pretending it doesn’t exist until someone falls. What we’re witnessing here isn’t just a “mistake”, that reductive, bourgeois term we use when our pedagogical comfort zones […]
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Nothing, nothing, compares to watching people really lose their shit laughing. Not polite chuckling. I’m talking about that deep, uncontrollable, tears-streaming-down-your-face kind of laughter that makes you forget every goddamn thing that’s wrong with the world. There’s this moment, right? When someone’s guard drops completely. Their face contorts, their shoulders shake, and they make sounds […]
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