There’s this moment when you roll up to San Juan Bautista, mission número fifteen in the chain, if anyone’s counting, which they shouldn’t be, and the whole place just hits differently. Not in some postcarded up, sanitized heritage way, but like walking into a room where ghosts still pay rent. The thing squats on a […]
Continue Reading →“Our job may be to open up a temporary utopian/distopian space, a de-militarized zone in which meaningful “radical” behavior and progressive thought are hopefully allowed to take place, even if only for the duration of the piece. In this imaginary zone, both artist and audience members are given permission to assume multiple and ever changing […]
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You walk into the Performance Art Institute expecting some precious meditation on process, maybe a little performative navel gazing with power tools as props. What you get instead is Angrette dropping a fucking bomb on the whole polite machinery of artistic intention, and she does it with hammers, two by fours, the San Francisco Building […]
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Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically […]
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Staging decadence, and I mean real decadence, not the Instagram bullshit where someone arranges twelve cupcakes in a spiral. It’s gotta have that edge. That nervous making quality where you’re not sure if you’re supposed to laugh or recoil or both at once. Gombrowicz knew this. The guy was writing about grotesque courts and paralyzed […]
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When you’re watching a film, and I mean really watching it, not scrolling through your phone while Netflix drones on in the background, that glass eye of the camera? It becomes your eye. It’s a kind of beautiful con job, really. The director, the auteur, whatever pretentious film school dropout term you want to use, […]
Continue Reading →So Tonyanna gets it. She always gets it. You can see it in these frames, she’s not performing silence, she’s weaponizing it. That’s the difference between theater kids playing dress-up and someone who understands that Ivona’s muteness is an act of violence against everyone who needs her to participate in their charade. She’s making them […]
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