Q: “We’re parodies, what more can we do?”
A: “You’re a fool, dear.”
Big Art Group’s S.O.S. is (theater of the) Ridiculous B movie camp that may or may not be something else entirely. The hyper talented cast plays a trashy queer family of post drag revolutionaries sucking into the big nothing that might or might not be Realness, I mean, Realness ®. The gifted text crams the jargon of all the new academic Studies (Cultural, Gender, Performance, Queer, American) into chaotic fusion with the equally disturbing textual simulacra (infinite copies of ideological cliché) of the non-profit industrial complex. Are you with me? Neither am I. Now add lots of costumes, wigs, lights, loud music, body mics, live and prerecorded video projections, and children’s theater puppet crafts. (I mean by children not for children...
Read moreI hate missing anything. I’m very good at negotiating site-specific performance and pride myself in being a good ‘participant’. In At Play, Lizz Roman’s newest choreography of architectural archeology, a vibrant quintet of dancers enlivens the walls, windows, doorframes, studios, hallways, bathrooms, and fire escapes of Dance Mission Theater. And it’s impossible to see everything. Shit. Then I realized that partial viewing is the point. It’s about the unseen, the surprise, the revelation and the sudden disappearance. It’s about the periphery in relation to the center and it’s about, “Where did she go?” and “Where did he come from?” Not only can the whole choreography not be seen, Roman challenges the idea that there is a whole...
Read more“He’s full of contradictions,” comments Guillermo Gomez Peña as we leave the bar and say goodbye to French dance artist Jerome Bêl. More of a conceptualist than a choreographer, Bêl has achieved considerable international success with a series of anti-spectacles that interrogate dance performance and the Western theater...
Read moreQueer underground survivor and superstar Penny Arcade has made a deliciously vibratory experience for all whores, feminists, fags, dykes, faghags, and the people who love (or pay) them. Appropriately the performance is titled, BITCH! DYKE! FAGHAG! WHORE! An ever-evolving vaudevillian ritual spectacle, the work was born during the sex and censorship wars of the 80’s, but is updated and adapted to today’s San Francisco...
Read moreDracul: Prince of Fire
The Crucible’s 10th anniversary fire ballet was a re-telling of the Dracula story with circus, burlesque, ballet, heavy metal-ish blasts of actual fire, molten metal, and interventions by Rocky Horror’s Brad & Janet, Buffy the vampire slayer, and Michael Jackson’s zombies.
It was somewhat campy but not enough. They drained the radical potential from the Camp. They remade Rocky Horror but forgot the importance of Queer...
Read moreThe performance began with a welcoming from Dracul’s director and primary designer, Michael Sturtz, who is also the founder and executive director of The Crucible. He wanted to answer the question, why a fire ballet? He answered with a series of questions. Who is here to see ballet? A smattering of applause. Who is here for the aerialists? More applause. Who is here for zombies and vampires? Even more applause. And then guiding our crescendo, he called out, who is here for fire? And the crowd roared. Point taken...
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