Video from Oasis
Slake your thirst for cool video content with Oasis - the sitelines performance by H.T. Chen and Sharon Estacio.
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Slake your thirst for cool video content with Oasis - the sitelines performance by H.T. Chen and Sharon Estacio.
Ellis Wood's Fire on Wall Street is creating quite a fire in the hearts of dance critics. Look out, Venus can burn.
Field Notes: Dance, Performance & Theater Commentary by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
The Ladies Who Lurch
Eva Yaa Asantewaa
John Rockwell--taste arbiter for the affluent and powerful in his position as Senior Dance Critic of The New York Times--seemed highly incensed at the notion of the all-female Ellis Wood Dance using the balconies of a building just a few blocks away from Ground Zero for a Sitelines site-specific show called Fire on Wall Street. "Insensitive," he deemed it in his review today. "Tasteless." "Rude." "Silliness." But from the look of things, neither stockbrokers nor tourists seemed to mind it much, which might say more about the sorry state of public engagement with the art of dance than about Ellis Wood’s own ability to get a rise out of people.
The title--Fire on Wall Street–works either as a news headline or a command. Twenty fiery women dressed in "flesh"-toned underwear and haphazardly wrapped in wisps of scarlet tulle dangle over the balcony railings and around the Corinthian colonnade of 55 Wall Street, a financial and architectural landmark, and home of the ritzy Cipriani Wall Street restaurant. Wood has created a deliberately over-the-top vision, splashing a prime icon of white male dominion with the red of women’s blood. She has summoned Venus in the person of Cheryl Cochran, a black actress whose electronically-amplified voice breathes fire down upon our heads as she recites inflammatory text by Bil Wright, a noted black gay poet and novelist.
This Venus is no inoffensively sweet love goddess but the original fierce Aphrodite come back to reclaim her throne. She’s flanked by a militant chorus of sirens, banshees, and bacchantes who coyly beckon us forward then wave us away, writhe around and over the rails, rotate their heads as if in trance, and lash the air with their streaming or spiky tresses. There’s music, too--by Daniel Bernard Roumain--but maybe Wood should have hooked up with Diamanda Galas.
If you still own a sense of humor–or at least a rebellious nature--try to catch Fire on Wall Street, which runs again August 28-30 at noon and 12:30pm. It’s free, just short of fifteen minutes, and a hoot.
Fire on Wall Street is a production of Sitelines, curated by Nolini Barretto and presented by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and in association with the River to River® Festival. For more information, visit www.lmcc.net/sitelines and www.RiverToRiverNYC.com. For information on Ellis Wood Dance, visit www.wooddance.net.
©2006, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Eva Yaa Asantewaa has written on dance since 1974 and worked as a freelance dance journalist since 1976, published inDance Magazine, The Village Voice, Soho News, The New York Times, and other publications. Eva is a contributing writer for Gay City News (www.gaycitynews.com), specializing in dance criticism. Please visit this page each week or send a request for automatic notification of postings of new reviews on this site!
Our good friends at the Van Alen Insitute are looking for an intern:
Van Alen Institute: Projects in Public Architecture
Internship (September-October 2006): Gallery Assistant
Van Alen Institute: Projects in Public Architecture, a New York-based non-profit organization committed to improving the design of the public realm, seeks several dedicated individuals to serve as gallery assistants for an upcoming major exhibition taking place in a stunning venue on the downtown Hudson River waterfront, entitled The Good Life: New Public Spaces For Recreation.
Candidate should possess a strong interest in architecture, design, and urban studies with a particular awareness of public space.
Responsibilities include:
- Receiving general public, exhibition participants, and press
- Coordinating discussion panels, gallery talks, and special events with Van Alen Institute staff
Requirements:
- Strong communications, organizational, and multitasking skills
- Enthusiasm for helping where needed
- Attention to detail
- Familiarity with gallery environment
- Bachelors or Masters Degree in architecture, art history, or urban design a strong plus
Candidate must be available for a minimum of 10 hours a week for 5 weeks (September 4 through October 6). Internship is unpaid but course credit may be arranged.
To apply please email exhibit@vanalen.org. Include “Gallery Intern” in the subject line and attach the following:
- Cover letter describing your goals and interests
- Resume
- Two references/recommendation letters
And Were Afraid to Ask Nolini Barretto, Producer, Sitelines Festival; Michele Brody, Artist; Peter Eleey, Curator and Producer, Creative Time; Anne Frederick, Executive Director, Hester Street Collaborative; Adam Kleinman (Moderator), Associate Curator, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
WHAT:
Grants for Art in Public Spaces Panel Discussion and Information Session
Artists and curators in the public art field will present their past projects and discuss conceptual and practical issues in public art, including site and neighborhood selection, permits and insurance, community outreach, and project timelines and budgets. After the panel, LMCC staff will review the application guidelines, present sample timelines and permit agreements, and answer any questions you may have.
WHEN:
Thursday, August 17, 4pm
WHERE:
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
125 Maiden Lane, 2nd Floor
RSVP: http://www.lmcc.net/grants/infosessions.html
WHO (PANELISTS):
Nolini Barretto, Producer, Sitelines Festival, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council worked for the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance for thirteen years. She was the Director of Marketing for Dance Theater Workshop, helping it transition into its new building, managing its re-branding efforts, and launching its inaugural season. While at DTW, Ms. Barretto was part of the National Arts Marketing Project's Advanced Audience Development Training. She was a founding Director of the Emergency Fund for Student Dancers, and continues to serve on its Board and on the Advisory Board of Buglisi/Foreman Dance.
Michele Brody, Artist, has been actively pursuing her career as an installation and public artist for the past twelve years. She has had one-person shows at Littlejohn Contemporary in NYC; Dina4 Projekte in Munich, Germany; and at the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo in San José, Costa Rica. She has been the recipient of grants and residencies from the Pollack/Krasner Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her permanent public works of art are installed on Wall Street, the Allerton MTA station in the Bronx, and at PS/MS 194 in the Bronx.
Peter Eleey. Curator and Producer, Creative Time has organized a diverse range of Creative Time artworks and events including Cai Guo-Qiang's Light Cycle (2003) pyrotechnics project for Central Park; Jenny Holzer's first xenon projections in the United States for New York City (2004); and sculptures, murals, performances, and conferences with Jim Hodges, Alex Katz, Zhang Huan, and Gary Hume, among others. He has also organized multi-artist projects and exhibitions for Creative Time, such as The Dreamland Artist Club (2004-5) in Coney Island, and The Plain of Heaven (2005), an international exhibition situated in a vacant meatpacking warehouse in Manhattan. As a critic, he is a regular contributor to London-based frieze magazine, and has lectured internationally on issues in public art practice.
Anne Frederick, Executive Director, Hester Street Collaborative co-founded Hester Street Collaborative (HSC), a design/build non-profit that works with underserved New York City communities to improve their physical environments. Prior to founding HSC, Ms. Frederick worked as an architect at Leroy Street Studio and taught as a built environment educator in the Parsons Pre-college program and the New York Foundation for Architecture’s Learning by Design program. Ms. Frederick initiated and taught the design-build education program “Ground Up” at Chinatown’s I.S. 131, which in 2004 completed the “The Wishing Garden,” a sculpture garden that students designed and built on their school campus. Ms. Frederick continues to teach at I.S. 131 and has expanded the Ground Up program to include an additional school, P.S. 134 in the Lower East Side. Currently, Ms. Frederick is working to further HSC’s mission by partnering with two local coalitions to ensure community participation in the re-design of local parks in Chinatown and the Lower East Side.
Adam Kleinman (Moderator), Associate Curator, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is a curator and critic who has programmed numerous art exhibitions and events, including a lecture, events series, and rotating mini-exhibit in Terminal 5, Eero Saarinen’s vacated TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport (2004); a retrospective of Architectural Body Research Foundation (Arakawa/Gins) at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway (2000); and numerous gallery shows in Chelsea, NY. In addition to his more formal work, Adam has deployed site-specific one-off performances around New York City. His critical work has been published in Abstract, Artforum, Artnet, Ego, Review, X-tra, “…” and in a range of independent artists' publications.
Opening Ceremony, Hester Street Collaborative's SIGN and PATH, 2006, funded by the 2005 Grants for Art in Public Spaces program
Check out what the New Yorker says about our next Sitelines performance.
Read here about the newest developments for art in Lower Manhattan. Our very own, Tom Healy gets some air time...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/arts/01zero.html?ref=arts
Bright and early at 9:30AM, the celeb choreographs H.T. Chen and Sharon Estacio dropped by the LMCC hive to talk about their newest piece, Oasis. Listen to the conversation and then see the piece. August 9, 10 @ 7 PM, August 11 @ 12:30 PM, August 16, 17 @ 7 PM & August 18 @ 12:30 PM . Pavilion Columbus Park (Baxter, Mulberry, Bayard & Worth Sts.)
The New York Times, July 30, 2006
Jillian Mcdonald, Performance Artist, Forsakes Billy Bob Thornton for Zombies
By CAROL KINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/arts/design/30kino.html
IT was a sweltering Saturday afternoon on an L train hurtling across Manhattan toward Brooklyn. The last car held the usual assortment of characters: two women shrieking about a recent outing to a hardware store while a man lounged before them, guffawing; a young woman hiding behind sunglasses and iPod earbuds; a scruffy man slumped beside his messenger bag. Nobody paid much attention as a slender, elegant young woman began to enact a ritual familiar to subway riders: peering intently into a tiny mirror, she carefully started to make up her face.
Swiftly, though, it became clear that this was makeup with a difference. She was slathering her face with thick white paste, applying dark circles around her eyes and enhancing her frown lines and nostrils with blackmarks. Although she attracted a few glances, most of the other passengers maintained studiously blank expressions. Only when she slipped in a pair of green teeth and began daubing her face with fake blood did people start to stare, exchange meaningful glances and roll their eyes.
When the train reached Morgan Avenue in Bushwick, the woman stood, grimaced delicately and staggered to the doorway. As the man with the messenger bag hurried out behind her, one of the noisy women hissed, “I think it’s performance art.”
And it was, the latest chapter in the oeuvre of Jillian Mcdonald, a Canadian-born artist who in the last three years has developed something of an underground reputation for work inspired by movie mania. Her climb to cultdom began in 2003 with a series of videos and performances derived from her purported passion for Billy Bob Thornton that have been shown widely at small galleries and nonprofits around the world; her spoof fan site, meandbillybob.com, is linked to by countless blogs.
More recently Ms. Mcdonald has delved into the so-called “zombie renaissance” that some say has been sweeping the nation since around the 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s film “Dawn of the Dead” (1978), the second in his classic zombie series. Her subway performance was filmed with a hidden camera by her boyfriend and sometime collaborator, Beckley Roberts, the scruffy fellow with the messenger bag. Called “Horror Make-Up,” it will make its debut on Sept. 8 at Art Moving Projects, a gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Curiously, until four years ago Ms. Mcdonald, now 35, had little interest in either celebrities or zombies. After receiving a master’s of fine arts in nontraditional media in 1999 from Hunter College, she was known mostly for interactive performances that relied on chance encounters with strangers, like placing ads in Canadian newspapers offering her services as a shampoo girl, and then performing in a hair salon or gallery, or passing out chocolate to people in the Union Square subway station in Manhattan.
She found direction when “I was trying to figure out how to make work about celebrity crushes,” she said in an interview. “They fascinate me, and I’d never had one myself.” The answer hit her on the red eye from New York to San Francisco. The film on the flight was “Bandits” (2001), starring Mr. Thornton and Cate Blanchett. Ms. Mcdonald awoke in the dark to see the actors’ lips moving toward each other in slow motion. “I knew immediately and irreversibly that I should be kissing him instead of her,” she wrote later on her Billy Bob Web site. “I was in love.”
The result was “Me and Billy Bob” (2003), a video in which Ms. Mcdonald creates the tale of a doomed love affair by digitally inserting herself into clips from his films. Using scenes from “One False Move,” “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “Monster’s Ball” and others, she charts the relationship from sappy first encounter to tearful farewell. In the final scene she re-enacts her deus ex machina “Bandits” moment: holding Mr. Thornton’s face in her hands, she slowly moves in for a final, despairing kiss.
In 2004 Ms. Mcdonald videotaped a monthlong performance piece, “Billy Bob Tattoo,” during which she inked her leg each day with his name. Then came “Screen Kiss” (2005), now on view at the Sixtyseven Gallery in Chelsea. In it she splices herself into make-out scenes with other actors, including Ben Stiller, Ewan McGregor, Vincent Gallo and Johnny Depp, culled from movies like “Down With Love,” “Along Came Polly,” and “Before Night Falls.” “Dear Billy Bob,” explains the introduction, “I still love you the best but I can’t wait forever and there are a lot of other fish in the sea.”
After most of the kisses, Ms. Mcdonald turns and stares triumphantly at the camera. But the high point comes in a scene (taken from the campy movie “Original Sin” ) in which she locks lips with Mr. Thornton’s ex, Angelina Jolie. As she nears Ms. Jolie, Ms. Mcdonald’s lips and eyes quavering ridiculously with expectation, it becomes clear that the actress’s features are doing exactly the same thing.
What intrigues viewers of both videos is how Ms. Mcdonald manages to transform herself so completely into a variety of personas, and how cleverly she modulates her expressions and gazes to match — and thereby send up — those of her digital partners. Technologically, the works look surprisingly sophisticated; yet Ms. Mcdonald made them at home on a Macintosh, using editing and special-effects software that she mastered through Internet research.
Before filming her scenes, she spent hours analyzing her chosen excerpts and memorizing the actors’ movements. Then she set up a camcorder on a tripod and, counting beats, performed before it, using green poster board from a craft store instead of the green screen normally used for special-effects sequences.
She intended to introduce “Me and Billy Bob” on the Web from the start; the site went up before its gallery debut. “Conceptually my plan was to get attention from Billy Bob,” she said. She swiftly drew an enthusiastic response from his fans. “A lot of people think it’s real,” she marveled. “They think I’m in touch with him.” Although at first she feared the actor’s lawyers would complain, Mr. Thornton’s official Web site now links to her fan site, but he has never made contact with her himself.
Along the way, Ms. Mcdonald admits, she did become infatuated with Mr. Thornton. “My friends would tease me about it,” she said. Now, she maintains, the one-sided romance is over, although her boyfriend, Mr. Roberts, bears a striking resemblance to her former crush. (“Everybody tells me that, but I don’t share that with him,” she said.)
Her interest in zombies began in a similar fashion: she was driven to analyze an obsession she didn’t understand. “I find it amazing and fascinating that people are so spellbound,” she said. She has always been terrified by horror movies; initially she conducted research by playing DVD’s while she cowered with the lights on at the other end of the room. But now she’s hooked on the genre, just as she became hooked on Mr. Thornton. And, as in the kissing films, “it came out of my interest in exposing the artifice that lends itself to humor,” she said. “If you can get to the point where it seems ridiculous, then it’s not scary anymore.”
“Zombie Loop,” the first piece in her “Horror Cycle,” is a two-video projection installation that Mr. Roberts filmed this summer on a deserted Wisconsin country road. In it Ms. Mcdonald plays two roles: a white-garbed ingénue who flees, squealing, and the reanimated rotting corpse who staggers forward relentlessly in pursuit. At the end of each loop the figures switch places.
In “Zombie Portraits” she and nine friends morph into zombies in stages, in a lumpish fashion that suggests B-movie stop-motion animation. (Excerpts from the zombie projects can be seen at jillianmcdonald.net.) As with the digital editing, she researched her special-effects makeup techniques on the Internet. “I’m a big fan of learning things on the Web,” she said.
Yet runaway Web popularity does not necessarily translate into art-world success. Although she continues to receive Billy Bob fan mail, she said, no major art dealers have called. Even so, before long she may begin gathering her own share of zombie acolytes. And in the meantime, “this is my excuse to watch a lot of cheesy movies,” she said. “It’s research.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
