Monthly Archives: February 2017

A bleak creative vision infused with scenic dazzle gave a distinctive edge to three works by young, New York-based choreographer Jonah Bokaer on Friday in Royce Hall at UCLA.

Cold and dark, Bokaers action-plans often focused so intently on Daniel Arsham's mobile settings that dancing became replaced by task-oriented movement theater. In those pieces, Arsham's set designs danced and Bokaer's company didn't.

In the intense, danceless 2010 solo Recess, for example, Bokaer manipulated an enormous roll of white construction paper into pathways, canopies, tents and mountains, creating imposing, ever-changing landscapes but staying just as overwhelmed by pain as he was at the beginning. An oppressive soundscore by Stavros Gasparotos and the unseen presence of James McGinn animating the origami structures from within helped to make a statement about how artists transform the world without ever vanquishing their own demons.

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In the 2011 quartet Why Patterns, the cast used long transparent tubes to wall off the stage floor. Then the cast moved inside those barriers for exploratory solos. Suddenly a ping-pong ball flew in from the left, then another, and, as the dancing continued, the balls began arriving in twos and later threes. Eventually the first of two huge overhead cascades of balls blanketed the stage and the piece became about coping with them and, ultimately, rebelling by flinging them into darkness. But they inevitably returned.

Obviously, the piece can be seen as a metaphor for the obstacles that life hurls at us. Or, if you like, you can think of it as the nightmare of someone who has seen the Nutcracker snow scene far too often. Either way, Arsham and his collaborator Alex Mustonen provided the dominant experience, with the music by Morton Feldman and Alexis Georgopoulos/ARP amounting to no more than an oppressive sonic wash and the dancers increasingly serving as faceless functionaries, except perhaps for Laura Gutierrez and Szabi Pataki.

Sustained dancing did turn up in Rules of the Game (2016), along with a terrific original score by pop star Pharrell Williams. But here Arsham was in apocalyptic decline-and-fall mode, with oversized images of sculptural faces, limbs and objects repeatedly colliding and shattering in his large-scale video projections. Perfectly in sync, Boaker had his eight dancers progressively strip out of their layered pink Chris Stamp/STAMPD costumes as their choreography became progressively violent and combative.

As Western Civilization crumbled, James Koroni struggled effectively against the march towards barbarism, Pataki and Sara Procopio found love of sorts among the ruins, and McGinn and Albert Drake battled manfully.

Boaker and Arsham did offer a smidgen of hope at the very end new Adam, new Eve thoughgiven the prevailing pessimism of the program, we might have expected them to be pelted with another barrage of ping-pong balls. These collaborators dont offer much consolation or dance in their portraits of the zeitgeist.

Recorded accompaniments served all the pieces, as did resourceful lighting by Aaron Copp. Besides the dancers previously mentioned, the company also included Callie Lyonsand Betti Rollo.

Follow The Times arts team @culturemonster.

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Movement as bleak theater, with some terrific Pharrell music too - Los Angeles Times

New York Times

These '80s Artists Are More Important Than Ever New York Times The Pictures Generation has become a ubiquitous, awkward catchall term, probably abrasive to the artists themselves, for something that was less an organized movement than a heterogeneous expression of a zeitgeist. Their art was connected by an ...

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These '80s Artists Are More Important Than Ever - New York Times

At the beginning of the Grammy Awards, Jennifer Lopez evoked the words of Beloved author Toni Morrison to stress the importance of courage in a time when art is threatened.

This is precisely the time when artists go to work, she recited. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.

The quotation was a stirring kickoff for the Grammys, where throughout the evening, many artists strove to embody thiscri de coeur. Katy Perry wore a Planned Parenthood pin and a sequined persist armband, in solidarity with the womens movement, as she was outlined by a projection of the U.S. Constitution. A Tribe Called Quest led a chant of resist! after a politically charged performance denouncing President Agent Orange. Laverne Cox, in her introduction to Lady Gaga and Metallica, educated the audience about Gavin Grimm and the fight for transgender equality.

In effect, the evening was a crescendo of resistance to political and systemic oppression. However, this crescendo was cut shore when ceremonys top honor, the Album of the Year, did not go to the artist who fulfilled the promise of Morrisons words. It went instead to Adeles 25.

This is not to say that 25 is without artistic merit. The song Hello, in particular, is a stirring power ballad of loss and heartbreak, which resonated worldwide. Commercially, it is one of the best-selling albums of all time.

Yet artistically, it does not hold a candle to Beyoncs Lemonade. Upon its release, the visual album was a revelation, which combined music, poetry, and history with themes of feminism and racial injustice. It gave voice to movements like Black Lives Matter. It was beautiful, painful, and daring. Today, when members of vulnerable communities women, immigrants, people of color, and queer people fear for their safety and rights under a Trump administration, the album seems downright clairvoyant.

In the face of this zeitgeist, The Recording Academy made the wrong decision. And Adele knew it. You could see the embarrassment and confusion swirling in her face when Lemonade was not announced as the winner. For a moment, standing onstage, it seemed like the British artist might reject the music industrys highest honor.

I cant possibly accept this award, Adele said in her acceptance speech. And Im very humbled and Im very grateful and gracious. But my artist of my life is Beyonc. And this album to me, the Lemonade album, is just so monumental. Beyonc, its so monumental. And so well thought out, and so beautiful and soul-baring and we all got to see another side to you that you dont always let us see. And we appreciate that. And all us artists here adore you. You are our light.

And the way that you make me and my friends feel, the way you make my black friends feel, is empowering. And you make them stand up for themselves. And I love you. I always have and I always will, she added.

However, Adele, for all her praise of Lemonade and its social importance, did accept the award, with the army of those who helped produce the album standing behind her. Grammys, I appreciate it. The Academy, I love you, she said.

Yet, did Adele truly love the Academy for putting her in this position, for making her yet the latest example of an unjust voting outcome? Should she have rejected the award, handed it to Beyonc, or made some other symbolic gesture to give voice to those who once again felt silenced and marginalized? Probably, yes.

Adele continued to express her conflicted feelings in the media room after the win, telling reporters, "My album of the year was Lemonade, so a piece of me did die inside, as a Beyonc fan."

But ultimately, it is not about how Adele responded to the award or feels about its deservedness. The issue is how The Recording Academy played it safe in a year when, as Morrison said, there is no room for fear. Throughout the awards ceremony, there was much talk of the importance of art and politics. Yet when push came to shove, it was the political and artful that got shoved. After all, if Beyonc can't win Album of the Year for creating music about black lives, what other artists have a chance?

In short, Lemonade was robbed. But fortunately, itdid win for Best Urban Contemporary Album, which gave Beyonc an opportunity to address the urgency and intent of her work.

My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness and our history, to confront issues that make us uncomfortable," she said.

I feel its vital that we learn from the past and recognize our tendencies to repeat our mistakes, she concluded. The Recording Academy would do well to listen.

DANIEL REYNOLDS is an editor at The Advocate. Follow him on Twitter @dnlreynolds.

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The Grammys Honored the Wrong Album, and Adele Knew It - Advocate.com

After months of discussing the Church of Englands position on same-sex marriage, its bishops will deliver their summary to the General Synod in London on February 15. As events take place around the country celebrating LGBT History Month, this could have been a good opportunity to explore a rich and positive dialogue around faith and sexuality. But the bishops have blown it. In a document published before the meeting, they reaffirmed the traditional belief that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, for life, for the procreation of children.

The so-called Shared Conversations, the name of the discussion process, offered a chance for the church to jive with a sexuality-savvy generation. The bishops could have made a step further towards institutional equality and shown that they mean it when they say we are all wonderfully made.

But they could not be more culturally tone deaf. What should have been a moment to bridge generations is shaping up to be a lesson in alienation par excellence. When it comes to sexuality, the bishops discussion document is not just a beat behind the cultural zeitgeist, it is an entire hymn sheet behind.

What will appear on the synod agenda on February 15 is a fumbling discussion on sexuality that never achieves eye-contact. Synod is being asked to have a take note debate which means no vote will actually take place for or against the document about same-sex marriage though no doubt campaigners on either side will seek to get their point across. A group of 14 retired bishops published an open letter ahead of the meeting, concerned that the church was not listening to gay Christians.

Todays gender and sexual parlance is conspicuously missing from these debates. The millennial and post-millennial generations are embracing a whole new, non-binary, sexual vocabulary and they are free to be genderfluid, polyamorous and pansexual.

There is more silence than discussion in the bishops document and I suspect the heavy-handed editing was required to present a reassuring unity, something which the bishops are keen not to disrupt under any circumstances. There is little sense in the report of just what was actually discussed among the bishops. They attempt to generate a sense of moving forward in thinking about diverse sexualities, but it is overstated. In fact, you could stub your toe on the inertia the church has moved not an inch.

The synod will be presented with a heavy dose of church law, mainly to restate the traditional belief that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, for life, for the procreation of children. The nuclear family is spiritually and morally privileged. This may generate the rolling of eyes from much of the public, since the spiritual home for all the people of England is megaphoning its belief that swathes of the population are slip-sliding along a continuum of deviancy and sin, having sex outside the sanctity of lifelong heterosexual marriage.

But at the same time, a rather oxymoronic suggestion in the report argues that the church should really work on its welcome to lesbian, gay and bisexual people, while re-affirming its moral stance against same-sex marriage at the same time.

The bishops base their deliberations on the rickety and equivocal three-legged stool of tradition, reason and scripture. My ongoing research with women clergy, however, suggests there is elasticity in belief within the church. Aware of their own journey from the margins, many of these women want the church to be far more open to diverse sexualities.

The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement and clergy blogs are expressing disappointment in the bishops homage to heteronormativity. These weather vanes may indicate a shift in direction within the church and a growing resistance to its narrow doctrine.

To me, the act of relying on tradition to legitimise outmoded thinking is myopic. Lesbian, gay and bisexual clergy and lay people (trans people are invisible in the bishops discussion) are being cast as others in their own church.

What especially vexes the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement and their allies is the reinforcement of the expectation that gay and lesbian clergy should remain celibate, since they have an exemplary position, binding by church law, and are held to a higher standard of sexual conduct than churchgoers. In the movements letter to the bishops, they wrote:

It is now clear that the process has almost entirely failed to hear the cries of faithful LGBTI+ people. You are proposing to formalise Dont Ask, Dont Tell among clergy in same-sex relationships far from equalising the situation between straight and gay clergy it pushes LGBTI+ clergy back into the closet.

This letter clearly borrows from the language used during the struggle for womens ordination. The church hierarchy has resistance and protest on its hands once again.

The bishops might be able to publicly maintain collegiate unity, but it risks built-in obsolescence for the church. I would like to think that there are bishops who would distance themselves from this report if they could. Against the fast-paced change in social attitudes to sexuality, particularly among the young, the bishops Shared Conversation is just cultural white noise.

Link:

Bishops' fumble with same-sex marriage means the Church of England is about to lose a generation - The Conversation UK