Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Ever vital, COIL and AMERICAN REALNESS playfully explore space, perspective, and modes of expression

• By drediman
• January 20, 2016
• No Comments

Each January, Coil and American Realness – two slightly overlapping New York-based festivals that present the cutting edge in theater and dance – never fail to have a visceral impact on me. Although I don’t profess to fully grasp the meaning of some of their more avant-garde offerings, I find these festivals to be endlessly inspiring and instructive. That’s because both Coil and American Realness almost exclusively focus on presenting performances that are so out of the ordinary, particularly when it comes to blurring or even re-defining relationships between performers and audiences and toying around with new forms of expression.

Coil

Coil (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), especially, has become a mecca for mind-bending and genre-expanding theatrical experiences, and the results are many times quite transcendent. A case in point was last year’s Youarenowhere (written and performed by Andrew Schneider), which was completely mind-blowing. In the vein of Mr. Schneider’s piece, Coil continues to embrace works that are unafraid to break barriers between genres (e.g., theater, dance, music, and visual arts). I’m happy to report that this year’s offerings at Coil were as revelatory as ever, daring audiences even more audaciously to look at performance and the world around them from different perspectives.

American Realness

American Realness (RECOMMENDED), which focuses on dance (loosely defined), remains as fascinating, playful, and frustratingly elusive as ever – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Part of the fun of American Realness is the unpredictability of the programming; it’s all part of the experience – the good, the bad, and the ugly. This year’s edition happily continues to be housed in the Lower East Side’s Abrons Arts Center and exudes an inclusive arts commune vibe that’s unique to this festival. Collectively, the offerings at Coil and American Realness are a good representation of the current state of the performing arts. These to festivals remain as vital as ever.

Immersive experiences: Playing with space and role-playing

One of the great pleasures of Coil, which mounts shows in various venues throughout the city, is the opportunity to be exposed to new spaces. This year, probably the most fascinating space to be unlocked was the series of subterranean corridors and cavernous halls in the bowels of Westbath Artists’ Housing at 55 Bethune Street in the West Village. Coil, being Coil, saw this as a chance to fully engage in these unique new spaces, creating panoramic vistas and intimate situations that would have been otherwise impossible in more conventional auditoriums. Shows such as niv Acosta’s grooving and immersive DISCOTROPIC (Coil) and Kaneza Schaal’s “active art installation” GO FORTH (Coil) took full advantage of all the nooks and crannies and epic expanses of 55 Bethune. In addition to being dynamic and participatory site-specific experiences, two other shows continued to blur the line between performer and audience: Michael Klïen’s interactive history lesson Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A. (Coil) and The Bureau for the Future of Choreography’s sardonic Score for a Lecture (American Realness) immersed the audience even further by giving them a voice within the narrative.

Form is all

Unlike Under the Radar, which puts a premium on theatrical narratives, Coil and American Realness have no problem bypassing storytelling for the sake of experimenting with form. The curators of both these festivals insist that performance need not have a story, much like plenty of modern and contemporary visual art. This year saw a number of performances try to unleash theatricality solely through sound, color, light, and composition – to varying effect. Shows like Song (Coil), Ranters Theatre’s immersive sound installation, and Jillian Peña’s choreographic play on synchronicity and reflection, Panopticon (a co-production between Coil and American Realness), experimented with form without the encumbrance of having to tell a story, to mediocre results. However, there were two notable “hits”: Findlay//Sandsmark + Pettersen’s o’death (Coil) and especially Helen Herbertson & Ben Cobham’s 20-minute Morphia Series (Coil) were two technically dazzling pieces that proved cathartic through the sheer power of visual suggestion.

Creating new vocabularies to express the human experience

Coil and American Realness aren’t only about form. In a series of raw, uncompromising, and idiosyncratic existential portraits, both festivals proved that they are also committed to creating new vocabularies in expressing the human experience. This year, the results were sometimes witty and humorous, like David Neumann’s highly amusing fantasia on death and dying entitled I Understand Everything Better (Coil), Frank Boyd’s thrillingly syncopated performance in The Holler Sessions (Coil), and Larissa Velez-Jackson’s hilariously improvised Star Crap Method (American Realness). However, more often the results were unfiltered primal screams of loneliness and pain, as in Adischatz/Adieu (another co-production between Coil and American Realness), Jonathan Capdevielle’s anguished portrait of a transvestite; Sorrow Swag (American Realness), Ligia Lewis’s Beckett-soaked and -inspired mediation on sadness; and Sara (The Smuggler) (American Realness), Sara Shelton Mann’s somber memoir of her development as an artist. Less successful were forays into race politics: both Jaamil Olawale Kosovo’s messy #negrophobia and M. Lamar’s monotonous DESTRUCTION were overwrought, heavy-handed, and under-rehearsed.

COIL
Theater/Dance/Music/Visual Art, Festival
Presented by Performance Space 122
Last day was January 17

AMERICAN REALNESS
Theater/Dance/Music/Visual Art, Festival
Presented by Abrons Arts Center (along with other partners)
Last day was January 17