Here are some of my favorite responses to Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA poli sci student who, during the stress of exam week, uploaded an anti-Asian rant. If you haven't seen her Youtube video, here's the re-posting which had received over 5 million hits in about 2 weeks...
Deadly Disappointing Eonnagatta
Two hours of folkloric performance – storytelling, shadow dancing, masks, dance, martial arts – appropriated in the service of hoity-toity art. Brook would have referred to this bourgeois exercise as deadly theater, meaning soulless or no longer relevant to today’s audiences and issues. But slapping this production with the label of deadly is a complicated move. The makers of this performance and the tactics they celebrate (with their considerable personal and financial investment) are heavily influenced by Brook’s generation of dance, theater, art, and social experimentation. What went wrong? I mean besides the gentrification of the world through a corporate takeover of government and society?...
Read moreTop 10 Youtubes, Jan 2011
Pop minstrels, corporate domination, and teenage puppets:
A quick look at the top 10 youtube hits of all time (as of Jan 1, 2011)
I just watched the top ten youtubes of all time so that you wouldn't have to. There's still DIY content available on youtube but the top ten is mostly a story of domination by pop cult machinery constructing and exploiting nearly every teenage click of global computer access...
Read moreDance.Eats.Money. - Ishmael Houston-Jones on The A.W.A.R.D. Show
Originally written for Issue 2 of the Salt Lake City journal LEARNING TO loveDANCEmore: MANIFESTO.
Dance. Eats. Money.
by Ishmael Houston-Jones
“Imagine So You Think You Can Dance without the flashing lights, screaming fans and millions of TV viewers, and voilà: The A.W.A.R.D. (Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance) Show,” wrote Apollinaire Scherr in the Financial Times. From the first time I heard about the A.W.A.R.D. Show I have been uneasy with the idea...
Tiara Sensation - avant-drag pageant
The 1st annual Tiara Sensation avant-drag pageant was birthed into the world by the SomeThing team of VivvyAnne ForeverMore, dj down-E, and Mr. David aka Glamamore (pictured above). It was an only-in-San Francisco, queer-freaks-do-it-better, oh-no-she-didn’t, genius night out. As co-host Mr. David stated just before the pageant winner was announced, all the queens were gorgeous and gave fabulous performances. That wasn’t just generous, it was necessary. Experimental, messy, and postmodern drag in San Francisco (since the Cockettes, since Klubstitute, since Jerome Caja and Phatima at Uranus, since Kiki and Herb, since the early days of Trannyshack…) means that almost every queen or king invents her own genre of performance. That makes pageant judging either ridiculous, impossible, or ummm intuitive...
Read moreKeith Hennessy wins a Bessie!
2009 Bessie Award & Thank you speech
October 18, 2010
Symphony Space, NYC
After an intro by HT Chen and a short video of Crotch by Charles Dennis, Yvonne Rainer read this text written by Ishmael Houston-Jones...