But one man is about to take up the torch of what often feels as much like a social cause as it does an artistic industry. Ben Pryor (full discloser: we’re kind of BFFs…), who has been working to represent artists with Pentacle for the past two years, has decided to strike out and start up his own management endeavor, tbspMGMT. Yay!

Pryor’s first act/action as an independent rep. is AMERICAN REALNESS, a curated festival of contemporary dance artists (Gelflings?) that is being held at Abrons Arts Center (a venue that now can be counted on to present New York City’s edgiest artists), which coincides with APAP and The Public Theater’s Under the Radar (UTR) festival, a festival that has built a solid reputation for presenting excellent emerging theater work, but one that has also drawn criticism for under representing NYC’s dance community.

For AMERICAN REALNESS, Pryor has managed to assemble what The New York Times’ Claudia La Rocco might term “the cool kids” of downtown dance (Uruk Hai?), including Jeremy Wade, Miguel Gutierrez, Jack Ferver, and our very own Ann Liv Young. Specifically, though, these artists all seem to share an outlook that engages the body in performance in ways that are gritty, explicit, passionate (or its opposite, dispassionate), and generally queer.

I emailed Pryor about American Realness and his decision to go it alone as an artist representative, and these are some of the things he had to say…

Counter Critic (C.C.): What the fuck are you doing?

Ben Pryor (tbsp):

Re Defining American Contemporary Performance

trying to sell the work of these artists who are pushing, reshaping and erasing the boundaries of dance and theater.

Starting my own management entity with a bang.

Showing some amazing work, and maybe some tits and ass.

C.C.: How are you doing it?

tbsp:

By the seat of my pants.

Blood sweat and tears

C.C.: Need more info about AMERICAN REALNESS.

tbsp:

I love under the radar, which has been the best platform for contemporary work during APAP, but it doesn’t show dance.  It became a dream of mine to create an “under the radar fordance”, if you will.

I am marketing the whole thing as a festival because it is a better way to put the work out there than a showcase. The goal is selling the work, but I am also trying to reshape international perception of american work. somehow they don’t really know the contemporary stuff is happening, not in a big way. I am trying to give attention to that. I am also trying to challenge american presenters (outside the 10 that do present contemporary work) to get with it and show some good shit!

This is also sorta the launch of tbspMGMT. I haven’t clearly established relationships with everyone, but I am trying to make it an organic progression.

Why these artists?

Cause these artists give me chills when I see what they do.

I love the way they think.

That they are reshaping contemporary work and it is not being seen outside new york and that is CRAZY.

Cause who doesn’t like calling out a whole industry of your peers for being lame and old fashioned.

Cause I like making a splash and so do these artists.

American Realness begins Friday, January 8 @ Abrons Arts Center and runs through January 11. Tickets to shows and a full festival schedule can be found here.

The Public Theater's "The Bacchae" -Photo by Damon Winter, for the NYT

I know it’s been a while since I threw down a bona-fide review around these parts. So I’m breaking silence with some thoughts on The Bacchae, which wraps up its run The Public Theater’s Shakespeare In The Park this week. (Warning: this may fall more under “rant”.)

It’s also been a while since I had been to one of the Delacorte shows. Getting older leaves you less zest for pulling an all-nighter at The Works (now closed (sad face)) and stumbling over to be one of the first people in line on Central Park West at 3am, just to get tickets to see Meryl Streep in “The Seagull”; although, it was totally worth it just to see her do a cartwheel on stage.

At any rate, this year’s Virtual Line made it easy for the old folks (hit “send” when the Mac strikes midnight) to get in, so I drug myself up to Central Park to check out what a friend of mine said he “wished I had seen”. He later clarified that he was just curious about my opinion, and wasn’t really recommending that I see it. Hmm…

Well, I suppose I would categorize this show under the old-artists-got-picked-to-do-a-big-gig-together-and-no-one-pushed-them-to-do-better-work category (I’ve still got my eye on you, Trish). The wafts of arrogance this production exudes is troubling. Not blatant arrogance—although, there is plenty of that in Jonathan Groff’s petulant Dionysus—but the “we’re great artists and don’t we know it, and the public won’t know any better” kind of arrogance; casual; comfortable; like a nice pair of orthopedic shoes.

But when we go to the theater, we don’t want orthopedic shoes. We want riveting ideas, and risk-taking gestures. We want to be pushed (although, not necessarily physically pushed, Ms. Young). We want to know that the artists are pushing us, and themselves, to the level beyond where we are. We want the art to be in front of us, so, by going to it, we are taken to a new place. This production fell far back and behind what we know about theater and what we know about ourselves. It eschewed the central subject of the play with demure stereotyping and philosophical meandering. (In case you’re wondering, the central subject of the play is Dionysus: The god of drinking and fucking.) And along the way, presented us with several examples of exactly how not to use drag and homosexuality in the service of constructing a heterodoxic narrative.

What director JoAnne Akalaitis was thinking when she conceived this piece is beyond me (I’ll get to details when I get to them). For help, I looked to the program notes. Sometimes, you just have to.

In the notes, Nicholas Rudall, who made the translation for this production, is quoted as saying, “The Bacchae is a play rich in themes, and one of its most disturbing is the inadequacy of rational human government in the face of the ecstatic irrationality of Dionysus…The Bacchae is, in the end, a document of human folly. Dionysus lacks mercy. And to assume that human wisdom and human rationality are forces that can resist him is a monumental mistake.”

Umm, wrong. The folly at the heart of The Bacchae is irrational resistance to the libido; specifically. Dionysus, as the living god of the libido, demands that everyone acknowledge him, or else face grave consequence. This is a timeless theme, and is the exact opposite of the prevailing Judeo-Christian paranoid morality that warns at every impetus the perils of indulging sexual and festive impulses. And Ms. Akalaitis—in tandem, I assume on some level at least, with Mr. Rudall—has missed an enormous opportunity to address here a very tangible stress on our current American culture, which is that of the politics surrounding teen sex and HIV/AIDS.

Under the policies of the previous Presidential administration, which flouted pseudo-Christian abstinence-only initiatives over rational sexual education, this country saw, for the first time in two decades, a rise in teen pregnancy rates and STD infections.

Also, there is currently this ridiculous measure on the health care reform docket that would make circumcision routine for American boys as a “precaution” to limit the spread of HIV. Let alone the classist lean here (the measure would disproportionately affect the less educated), it’s simply crazy to promote amputating a part of the male body (which, incidentally, is designed with the chief goal of providing pleasure and mechanical facility during intercourse) to prevent a disease that could virtually be eradicated through proper education.

By asserting that Euripides’ complaint is against rationalism, Rudall reverses the lesson of The Bacchae, the primary paradox of which is that the irrationality (the sensual activities) that Bacchus promotes is ultimately rational and for the good of people, and not for the ruin of “rational” human governance, which, according to Euripides, in this instance, is far from rational.

For these misunderstandings, and for the hodge-podge eclecticism of the production at hand, JoAnne Akalaitis’ “Bacchae” is basically illegible.

She casts Bacchus as a posing wannabe rocker, whose attitude and airs represent less Dionysian indulgence than they do the bland superficial personae of American-Idol-made faux rock stars—this is no Sid Vicious or Patti Smith. The few times young Mr. Groff grabs a vintage mike and croons in falsetto fall flat and forced; not necessarily because of his performance (which is capable, if somewhat lacking depth), but because the directorial choice feels condescending and not thought out.

In the opening, as the audience chubbles (see Shari Goldhagen) to their seats, Mr. Groff enters with a suitcase and a rucksack, red lipstick smeared across his cheek, and has apparently been directed to make a coy, weak nod to the theater by pulling out various costumes and trying them on before us. At one point, he holds up a purple dress (yes, it will come back) and gives the Oooo, aren’t I naughty look. Finally, he drops trou and throws on a pair of blue jeans and a leather jacket (such a rebel, this one), and he is transformed –by the magic of theater!—into our Dionysus.

During his opening, earnest monologue, we get the parade of characters, milling about on an operatic amphitheater (designed by John Conklin) that peals out of the ground in an arching wave made of slender steel beams.

The female chorus, which often doubles as The Bacchants (or, the followers of Dionysus) is dressed—as if in cantilever to an entirely different production—in orange iridescent, vaguely Indian jumpsuits. It is impossible not to notice that the chorus is heavily stacked with women of color. Characterizing the lascivious Bacchants as generally dark-skinned was problematic to begin with. Then take into account the several times they are instructed literally to hiss and claw at various party-pooping Thebans, and we have ourselves a classic stereotype of the “exotic” dark-skinned woman. Throw in a nice African drum beat (I didn’t know Philip Glass did world-music eclecticism) just for fun, and you can pretty much burry this corpse.

To cast the chorus (which, if not always playing The Bacchants, is always on the side of Dionysus) as a harem of Indian Subcontinental tribal ladies who fall at the feet of a 21^st century white American teenage rocker defies all logic while trouncing any vestige of social conscience.

The chorus—if we are to accept that Dionysus would become self-incarnate through one of the Jonas Brothers—should have been cast as a screaming chorus of teen groupies, the kind that would throw their virginity to the wind for even of hope of getting backstage. Or make it more adult, and have the chorus be real groupies; hard-core, alcohol swigging, spread-legged ladies of the road. They know a lot more about Dionysus than our own racist fantasies about African and Eastern women.

At any rate, choices like this ruin The Bacchae, and get to the heart of what was always bad about Bogartian post-modernism. Eclecticism isn’t problematic in itself. It’s when the choices seem unhinged from a consistent creative point of view, or worse, ironic stereotypes of various “cultures”, that this kind of theater comes to a screeching halt.

It also occurred to me during the show that the youngest generation of theater-makers (I include many dance artists in this) seems not at all to be interested in this kind of process. The majority of young theater seems rounded, whole, entirely conceived, and without any of these imposed and bulky aesthetic rifts. Today’s young artists seem more inclined to trust in the subjective hand of creation; in the salient, total usability of  their lives, without parsing them through the lens of identity politics, or, in the case The Bacchae and productions like it: Identity aesthetics.

This last term shares a lot of blame for another out-of-date tactic Akalaitis reaches for in this production; that of using heterdoxic stereotypes of queerness to further the dramatic narrative.

Euripides’ late play actually creates a legitimate window of opportunity for the representation of onstage homosexual activity. Although, to be clear, it would seem more to favor the representation of female homosexuality (finally, lesbians!).

But Akalaitis’s Bacchae shies away from that option, opting, instead, to insinuate the more threatening, degrading and ultimately fatal stereotypes of male homosexuality. This happens when the nefarious specter of gay lust is conjured by Dionysus as a ploy to lure the doubting Pantheus into a deathtrap. It isn’t just that here, Bacchus designs a plan to get Pantheus to disguise himself as a woman (re-enter the purple dress!) so he can visit the secret horde of Bacchants (which is actually part of the play and, presumably was meant, even in ancient Greece, to humiliate the male character), but Akalaitis directs the two actors to invent a homoerotic charge during the seduction. It comes out of nowhere, and its only point is to titillate while ultimately perceiving the attraction as false and bad news.

The other giveaway is that this is the only part of the score where Philip Glass writes anything remotely dissonant. Ugh, it’s just the worst! And two seconds before this, I was like, Hey, I never realized how much of a modernist Glass is, in the sense that no matter what is happening subjectively onstage, the music sounds pretty much the same. But then this! I mean, falling back on the cinematic cooption of atonal music to represent horror and psychological friction—a tactic held over from the sturm und drang Romantics—is just gross.

It was like watching the Greek version of “Cruising”, and with The Rambles so nearby, one couldn’t help but scoff at the irony. The fact that The Public is selling shirts that read “Cross Dressing In The Park” is both offensive and un-self-aware, specifically in light of this production.

But one punch, at least, that The Bacchae does not pull, is its treatment of gore. In solid American fashion, the sexual content is muted, while the violence is amped up to the hilt. A fantastic decapitated (and scalped?) head of Pentheus is dragged out triumphantly by Joan Macintosh playing Agave, his mother. It’s just dripping with blood, and Ms. Macintosh’s wild-eyed performance is pitch-perfect. Granpappy Cadmus (played well by George Bertenieff) drags out a bloody sheet that barely tethers together the severed limbs of the young king. And when Agave pulls out one hand, then one leg, from the jumbled mess, it’s simply awesome.

This, and a riveting monologue delivered moments before by Rocco Sisto (met with due applause from the audience), are the only parts in Bacchae that soared, and are—not coincidentally—the only parts where Ms. Akalaitis and Mr. Glass got out of the way of the play.

But when Dionysus returns to issue his final scorn upon the foolish Theban royals, we’re back in la-la land. Bacchus, unable to show mercy, ultimately comes off as a spoiled brat, overfed with fantasies of his own self-worth, who demands attention and then starts killing people when they don’t give it to him.

For my part, that is not the Dionysus I know and worship.

I just don’t get why this happens so much in the professional, big-stage arts. There is no shortage of money here. So that’s no excuse (and, by the way, that is a completely legitimate excuse for emerging artists). Is the problem curatorial? Is it institutional? Is it generational?

Even here, David Neumann, whose work Feedforward at DTW was one of my favorite events of 2007, seemed to have been uninspired, contributing what amounted to elegant but obvious interpretive dance for the chorus. The only moment that struck me at all as recognizable Neumann was when Cadmus and the prophet Teiresias (played with delightful passion by Andre de Shields) clucked their heads and stamped their feet as they prepared for the feast of Dionysus. More, please.

I mean, what will it take? For me to offer The Public Theater to direct one of their shows next summer, free of charge? Fine, then!

Dear Mr. Eustis:

I hereby volunteer to direct a play for your Shakespeare In The Park festival during the summer of 2010, free of charge. You pick the play, I’ll show up.  You’ll save money, and you won’t come out with anything worse than the trainwreck that is The Bacchae. I promise.

I can be reached by email at editor@countercritic.com. Or, you can just confirm our agreement in the comments field below.

Sincerely,

The Counter Critic

P.S.

I’m serious.

MTV reports on the meeting of the auteur with the motley assemblage of downtown artists, giving this account of the performance offered by our very own Ann Liv Young:

“The evening became tense and uncomfortable when notorious (and buck-naked) performance artist Ann Liv Young confronted Kanye personally, shouting that she didn’t think 808s was his best work, all the while grinding barbeque pork into her naked crotch (and then eating it). We all know Kanye is no stranger to confrontation and controversy, so perhaps Liv Young was paying tribute to that? In any case, the audience reacted with absolute horror during her “interpretation” of “Love Lockdown.” To Kanye’s credit, he barely flinched. (Liv Young rather shrewdly ended her performance by shouting, “I love your work with Common” before gathering her clothes — and pork products — and scurrying offstage.)”

In all seriousness, this is quite a touchdown for downtown performance, which competes daily against an assumption that  its work and interests are marginal, unmarketable, and doomed to obscurity forever.

It’s hard not to knock Kanye for being an egotist (which may ultimately be a superficial way of appraising an artist who is clearly–even importantly–influential) since, in a way, you could argue that vanity helped him fall into the trap of the homage. After all, it is the quintessential daydream of the homage-making artist that his offering will be noticed and and heralded by the artist whom he seeks to honor (or lure).

But props to Kanye for being one of the few, if only, mainstream artists who have responded–in person–to the downtown, high-art shout-out of a generation of performance artists who have made it their project to forge meaning out of a relationship with popular culture that is too often dismissed as empty, compulsory, and heartless.

Also props to Ann Liv Young for calling shit out.

These started, as far as I can surmise, shortly after my first writing on Ms. Young’s work.

The central anxiety of these dreams–and they are always anxious dreams–balances precariously on a paradigmatic axis of whether or not Ann Liv Young likes me.

This state, I suppose, is a state of my reality. I do not know Ms. Young personally. While we may share mutual friends and acquaintances, we have never communicated directly. So I don’t know what Ms. Young feels toward me other than what I have experienced at her performances, which, unlike almost any other performance work today, make it a chief concern to deliver to the audience a packaged bundle of various fields of regard Ms. Young either does or does not have for them.

The only two pieces of information I have to evince what Ms. Young may or may not feel about me is miniscule, but perhaps telling.

First, silence.

After publishing that first article, I realized that I should probably have given Ms. Young a “heads up,” since the highly sensitive issue–that of a child’s welfare–and my calling into question the constitution of her work as “art” necessarily implicated Ms. Young as having performed a non-artistic act against a child that may be deemed by some as neglect. So I sent Ms. Young an email, using the address found on her website at the time, alerting her about the piece. I have never received a response from Ms. Young either to that email or to any of the pieces I have written about her work since.

Second, and possibly related, hearsay.

A friend of mine went to one of Ms. Young’s “Christmas” shows, which she held at her home last winter. I dared not go myself: 1. I was busy, 2. Because I don’t like to be terrorized during performances, and 3.) Because I really wasn’t sure how Ms. Young would respond to my presence, should she even know who I am.

Nevertheless, my friend went, and I asked him, afterward, what his experience had been like. After reporting some predictable activities (people getting naked, obnoxiously loud music), my friend said he had a brief conversation with Ms. Young, afterward, in which she mentioned to him, “Some people think I’m a bad mother.”

Hmm. Could I be “some people”? I cannot know, but I don’t think it would be a stretch assume.

At any rate, the first dream I had in which my subconscious mind conjured the figure of Ann Liv Young was brief, and I can barely remember it now. (I have a vague feeling that erotic activity may have figured in.) What I do remember, though, is that I was concerned, within the dream, about how Ms. Young felt about me personally: Did she like me?

The dream was probably inconclusive—as dreams may be—but the feeling of it, the ambiguity of where I stood within Ms. Young’s personal regard, was strong, and would remain the vital crux of the dreams that were to come.

The second dream, which occurred back in January, was much more elaborate than the first, and I am lucky enough to have briefly transcribed it within the thread of a G-chat I had with a friend. I will include the transcript below (protecting the anonymity of said friend). (The excerpt also includes an unrelated dream involving drag and Danny Devito. Just for fun.)

Transcript of G-Chat:

me: Did I tell you I had a Sudafed-induced dream that I was performing in an improv drag act w/ Danny Devito?

[redacted]: !

um, no

me: It was weird, and sexual, but I was going with hit.

I was the one in drag, in platform heels. He was the “straight” guy. Then there were all these curtains that kept getting in our way. Sounds sort of Fruedian, no?

Did I also forget to tell you about the latest Ann Liv Young dream I had?

[redacted]: lordy

tell me

me: Well, I was at her latest performance, which turned out to be really good! I was really happy with it. Then, to make it truly interactive, ALY had privately researched everyone in the audience, and had the mother of one of the attendees flown in to make a guest appearance in her piece. (How amazing is that?) Then, as I was leaving the performance, whicl it was still going on, I went to tell someone how great the piece was because it was free of all the low-brow shock tactics, when I looked back over my shoulder and saw the entire cast start vomiting onstage in synchronization.

[redacted]: hahahahhahaha

BRILLIANT

me: I know. It was so vivid.

It’s weird to have dreams about another artist.

[redacted]: i think you should go to one of the performances in her home

me: Scary…

:-o

Even in this dream, I felt a heightened anxiety about my presence at the performance. I vaguely recall exchanging an inchoate glance of recognition with Ms. Young, who was performing.

The anxiety is compounded by what seems both inventive and invasive, the choice of Ms. Young to conduct reconnaissance on each member of the audience. Could she have selected my mother to participate in the show? At least in the dream, she didn’t. But the gotcha moment of revelation touches on that cloud of vertigo into which one descends at, say, a surprise birthday party when one is the unknowing recipient of the surprise. The lay of the land shifts abruptly to create a void; a distrust of the real. That is where art happens. And in the dream, I enjoyed this as a powerful tactic suffused with meaning.

Interestingly enough, my enjoyment of the work and the ruse, in the dream, seemed to have allayed my own misgivings about Ms. Young as an artist and as a person. I felt a “relief.” I felt, perhaps, that this could put me on positive ground with the artist in terms of a personal connection. I was so uplifted by the scenario that I left the performance while it was still going on to share the news with someone.

But then, sure enough, as I make that irresistible, notorious glance back over the shoulder—following in the fated footsteps of Orfeo, of Lot’s wife, of anyone who dares to accompany insatiable human curiosity (rooted in erotic distrust?)—the illusion of the unsullied work is eviscerated by a revolting, collective chorus of regurgitation orchestrated by the artist.

I remember, now, my friend (who attended the Christmas show) telling me that he became anxious during the performance that Ms. Young had tailored her work’s content to the audience in attendance (I think she requested full names for RSVPS). His anxiety must have slipped into mine and tethered into the fabric of my dream.

What set off the most recent dream, I have no idea, but it occurred before I knew of Ms. Young’s upcoming “Yard Sale,” which is to take place at her home in Brooklyn, where “ins and outs plus some salvaged set pieces!” will be hocked by Sherry, one of Ms. Young’s more congenial personas.

In this dream, I was suddenly in Ms. Young’s home, which was set along the sea, perhaps within the shelter of a bay. It was twilight.

Ms. Young greeted me indirectly by my full name. To someone else, she said, “Oh! It’s Ryan Tracy.”

Relief again! I was finally in, I felt, as I grabbed a glass cup from a glass showcase.

There were children there. I think she had two young children now.

Ms. Young said to me that she was sorry I wasn’t at the performance the day before, because now I wouldn’t know the routine for the group dance.

Soon we were in front of the house. The garage door was open and there were people everywhere, both inside and sitting in crowds around the driveway.

The performance started, and soon there was the group dance. I watched.

Suddenly we were back inside the house and also in the back yard. Some kind of reception was going on. And for some reason I kept taking my shirt on and off.

Eventually, everyone kind of disappeared, and I wondered where they’d gone. Then I realized they had all gone back to the front of the house. I headed for the front door, pulling my shirt back over my head, and jostling the glasses I was wearing. It was difficult to see.

When I came around the front of the garage, I beheld a magnificent barbecue. A cucumber barbecue, to be perfectly–surreally–exact!

During the “reception,” Ms. Young’s boyfriend—in the dream, he was gay—had helped set up the cucumber barbeque as the final performance component of the evening. It was like a hanging garden, with cucumber shavings, bright and dark green, falling from lattices. Black smoke rose in the air over a large grill that was piled up with cucumbers. A few men were tending the grill as everyone socialized. I looked down at a nearby table that was crowded with all kinds of cooked cucumbers. In a square glass bowl, there were chunks of golden, deep fried cucumbers, charred on the edges.

As I picked up one of the pieces, stabbed by a toothpick, I felt a cool, juicy piece of raw cucumber already in my mouth.

The “Yard Sale” will take place Saturday, June 27, starting at 10am. Directions can be found at http://www.annlivyoung.com/directionstosherrys.html.