Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – UNDER THE RADAR 2024 continues to push the envelope with caustic multidisciplinary performances

• By drediman
• January 19, 2024
• No Comments

This week across various performance venues across the city, Under the Radar continued to push the envelope — as it should — with a trio of caustic multidisciplinary performances. As per usual, read on for my thoughts.

OPEN MIC NIGHT
By Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey
Performance Space New York

Over the years, Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey have proven themselves to be one of New York’s most beguiling practitioners of experimental theater. Indeed, with works like [50/50] old school animation and While You Were Partying, the duo has displayed an uncanny ability to unflinchingly investigate the essence of the realities that we live in. For this year’s edition of Under the Radar — in collaboration with Mabou Mines and Performance Space New York — they’ve come up with Open Mic Night (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), a slyly interactive elegy to New York’s storied avant-garde theater scene of yore. As stealthy as always, Weiss and Mounsey don’t merely nostalgically mourn the days gone by — they also call into question the authenticity of experimental theater to begin with. It’s an unsettling balancing act that finds both the duo and the audience between a rock and a hard place.

VOLCANO
By Luke Murphy
St. Ann’s Warehouse

Arguably one of the centerpieces of this year’s Under the Radar is Luke Murphy’s Volcano (RECOMMENDED), a hugely ambitious, stylishly produced dance theater two-hander that’s taken up residence at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Unfolding in four 45-minute episodes and clocking in at nearly four hours in length, the works takes its time revealing its full scope, inviting audiences instead to simply bask in the loosely suggestive, atmospherically wrought narrative — part sci-fi epic, part domestic drama (no further spoilers here!) — and its absurdist flourishes. As performed by Murphy and Will Thompson in an enclosed living room that’s seemingly lost in space, there’s a chilly loneliness that pervades the piece, even when the duo is in heated engagement. Both virtuosic and organic dancers, Murphy and Thompson are equally at home with expressive choreography, as well as more naturalistic modes of movement (there is also a sprinkling of dialogue throughout), thereby imbuing the piece a welcome level of approachability. As apparent keepers of the human civilization, they take their task to heart to the extent our species can.

TITANIC DEPRESSION
By Dynasty Handbag
New York Live Arts

Down at New York Live Arts in Chelsea, you’ll find the larger-than-life Dynasty Handbag (a.k.a. Jibz Cameron) in her multi-media solo show Titanic Depression (RECOMMENDED). A proudly outrageous and demented take on James Cameron’s blockbuster film Titanic, the work straddles stand-up comedy, drag, and of course anything goes performance art in its pursuit to provide hilarious, surreal social commentary on capitalism and climate change. If there’s an air of hopelessness and desperation that pervades her farcical rants, so be it — Dyansty Handbag is prepared to go down in flames engorged in vaudevillian glee. Overall, Titanic Depression is a hallucinatory experience that feeds on spontaneity and an unmistakable punk aesthetic — which gives the piece a meandering quality, for better or worse.