Pooling to Paradise (filmed Zoom reading)

Written by Caytha Jentis

Directed by Alice Jankell

Review by Brendan McCall

Since No Exit premiered at the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier in 1944, folks around the world have been nodding their heads in agreement with playwright Jean-Paul Sartre´s most famous line, that “Hell is other people.” This line pops up in writer-producer Caytha Jentis´ comedy Pooling to Paradise, a filmed version of a Zoom reading of her latest play–only this time, instead of being trapped in a locked French drawing room for all of eternity, these four characters car-pool from Los Angeles to Paradise, Nevada, each finding a little bit of redemption along the way. It’s a charming premise, and for the most part Pooling to Paradise works.

Stressed out Jenny (played with spunk and sarcasm by Veronica Dang) is hurrying to get to catch her flight out of LAX to attend a “Mommy-blogger conference” in Las Vegas, her first time away from home and her kids (a theme Jentis has also explored with her series The Other F Word). However, her laid-back Uber driver Marc (Jersten Seraile, a warm, everyday Buddha) informs her that she has opted for a carpool. After picking up an aspiring actress Kara (the delightful and energetic Eulone Gooding) and then heartbroken casting agent Sean (played with ease and clarity by Stephen Reich), the car decides to drive to Paradise (literally and figuratively), hoping to escape each of their own personal hells.

Director Alice Jenkell, who worked with Jentis before on The Other F Word, elevates the piece to something more than a reading: title cards chronicling their geographic progress, an occasional score to augment a scene, and other techniques help experience the passage of time and space on their spontaneous odyssey through the desert. Gooding and Reich, in particular, seem utterly at ease on camera, consistently making this visual frame their own. My only critique would be the sound-quality of the actors´ voices, making it challenging to hear what they were saying from time to time, which I think is just a shortcoming of recording within our present medium of Zoom.

Unlike Sartre´s grim existential drama, Pooling to Paradise is upbeat, relatable, and humorous. In addition to French existentialist drama, Pooling to Paradise borrows elements of The Odd Couple (times two) and the psychedelics of Dennis Hopper´s Easy Rider. Like every good road-trip story, this is an odyssey, and each passenger experiences a “dramedic” epiphany before Marc parks their car in the desert. Jentis´ actors are well-cast, and each delivers Jentis´ script with commitment, timing, and solid emotional availability. At just over one hour in duration, Jentis´ reading seems to put on the brakes a bit abruptly at its conclusion. Hopefully, this Zoom film of Pooling to Paradise is just a pit stop, and her car-pool will hit the road again soon.

This Body Shows Up (virtual showcase)
7 & 8 March 2021*
*(videos may be viewed online through 8 April 2021)

Review by Brendan McCall

Truly, there is strength in numbers. Initiated by five performing artists based in New York–Nadia Hannan, Alessia Panti, Sara Roer, Diane Tomasi, and Marcie Yoselevsky–This Body is a dynamic and resilient expression of pooling creative resources, and of how a collective can uplift each individual.

This past weekend, the group presented This Body Shows Up, a showcase of short movement and dance films amplifying the work of queer/women/non-binary/BiPOC performing artists. Created during this past year of quarantine and social isolation during the global coronavirus pandemic, This Body Shows Up framed a delightfully diverse field of invention, ingenuity, and imagination.

Things Are Not Fine – how have you been? by guest artist Gabriel Bruno Eng Gonzalez is a kind of virtual collage of solo performance, lip-syncing, and multiple social media platforms. Constantly moving on one´s screen like a series of video-cards in continuous flux, the piece rides waves of gender-fluidity, with art, self-expression, and the internet serving as compasses.

Sara Roer´s emotionally eloquent Holding (me) refracts images of women isolated in multiple different interior spaces. Through editing, sometimes it appears that their partner could be touched through the wall through their gestures. The contrast between the sensual phrases of movement against the unforgiving walls of these apartments breaks one´s heart.

Abrupt silences and changing landscapes punctuate the unpredictability of Vanish, a solo created and performed by guest artist Maya Lam. Whether on a rooftop, in a park, or concealed in a bag, her surroundings feel oppressively empty, as if her dance is a forgotten scrap of imagination emerging from the environment.

Marcie Yoselevsky´s Capsule relishes line, form, shape. Five dancers in various squares athletically execute phrases to a percussive, repetitive rhythm, sometimes overlapping into unison, sometimes diverging into solos and duets. Through the accumulation of the work, one can see how the phrase is interpreted in various bodies, as well as notice the surroundings of each dancer–a living room, an attic, a studio.

Out of the Folds of Women, created and performed by guest artist Anabella Lenzu, immediately confronts the perception of the viewer. In addition to being shot in black/white, there is always an object occluding a clear view of her body in movement–a semi-transparent curtain, or a glass distorting her face.

When Philadelphia-based Sophiann Mahalia´s trio The Reclamation Dance Project begins, it is an immediate celebration of the fierceness of Black women. In vivid color and playful power, her dancers sensually move with authority in various outdoor locations in a piece that heralds so much more yet to come.

In some ways, Diane Tomasi´s Still is a coda to Roer´s Holding (me), as movement-passages are recycled and recontextualized. The soundscape is an ode to grief and resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City, particularly those uncertain early days: Tomasi combines ambulance sirens, the clanging of pots for first-responders, and news clips with her own phone calls with her friends and colleagues to rehearse, move, create.

Performance-based art-making can sometimes feel like crawling uphill, particularly within the horrific context of a series of policy failures in response to a global health crisis. The title of this showcase is purposeful, and perfectly appropriate. This Body Shows Up shines a light on artists who are multifaceted and multi-skilled. In addition to being choreographers and dancers, they are editors, composers, filmmakers. Perhaps some of them already possessed these skills during “the before times”, but the immediacy of these online pieces, the rawness and vulnerability contained within each of them, is palpable. Each piece is an urgent cry speaking through the screen and into the silence of our own still-quarantined bodies at home.

EN: 2021
Hybrid performance (online live performance and films)
6 & 8 March 2021
Choreographed, Directed, and Produced by Yoshiko Sienkiewicz (Yokko)
Presented by Ren Gyo Soh

Review by Brendan McCall

Before Ren Gyo Soh´s performance begins, the screen offers a definition of the Japanese word for En: a powerful connection between ourselves and another person, another object, a place. This connection could be brief or last a lifetime, could be intentional or occur by chance. With En: 2021, butoh artist Yoshiko Sienkiewicz (also known as Yokko) collaborates with six artists to create imaginary worlds which are potent, poetic, and occasionally nightmarish.

Yokko´s collaborators are multifaceted. In addition to performing, each has created their own short film, which weaves in and out of live episodes during the 80-minute experience of this abstract hybrid performance. An opening montage combining snapshots of New York City, people wearing masks, and fragments of news reporting of the past few months, contextualizes En: 2021 as emerging from our disorienting dystopian present. Initially, we see all six performers simultaneously in their squares, within various apartments and engaged in recognizable activities: exercising, reading in bed, playing an instrument. But once the ominous music begins, the everyday bleeds into the strange.

The various worlds that the members of Ren Gyo Soh create are vast and far-ranging. Technically, Yokko and her creative team brilliantly link the pre-recorded films with the live performance segments, supported in part by a luscious and haunting soundscape by Alyssa L. Jackson and Paul Michael Henry. Also, each of these six performers are masters of light, creating completely different moods and emotional atmospheres by saturating their screens in icy blue, infernal red, or using lights to birth fireflies or even stars.

There are multiple moments within En: 2021 which particularly struck me. At one point, the extreme motionlessness of Frankie Mulinix´s smiling face and gaze disturbed, as she gently moved her arms and hands in simple gestures. At another moment, Zak Ma´s hands and expressions seemed to ripple like the shifting surface of water struck by drops of rain. Annie McCoy once appeared like a ghost forged out of lightning, and then later moved under a projection of stars to a spoken poem. Miles Butler offered a sensitive and delicate ode to memory, incorporating interludes of family photographs and voice recordings with loved family members. Contorting himself within a business suit, Jorge Luna illustrated the cage of civilization on the purer animal state within each of us. And Rachelle Dart, within a space of silvery curtains, purges herself of a dark liquid substance in a dance which is both unnerving as well as cleansing.

Ostensibly, the performance language of En: 2021 is within the lineage of butoh. Gestures within the body twist, torsos convulse and arch, and faces silently howl or beg for peace. But perhaps it is because the performance is virtual, performed live yet screen to screen, that the depictions of desolation and horror seem to strike deeper. The impact of En: 2021, though brief, is a connection which resounds long after the screen returns to black.

Brendan McCall is a writer and movement artist whose work with dance, theater, opera, and performance art has appeared in over 40 countries on 5 continents. Originally from California, he spent 18 years of his professional life in New York, and since 2008 has lived in Turkey, Australia, Norway, and France. 

A member both of  Actors Equity Association (USA) and the Norwegian Actors Union, Brendan has performed professionally in both languages in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Norway, India, Russia, and Japan. Recent acting performances include Henrik Ibsen´s Svanhild (winner, 2014 Oslo Prize for Best Performance) at Teater Ibsen & Den Norske Opera (Norway), the Platonov International Arts Festival (Russia), and Theater X (Japan); and What a Glorious Day! at the 1st Ashirwad International Theater Festival (India), both directed by Lars Øyno. He has also performed professionally for Alexandra Beller, Maureen Fleming, David Gordon, Sin Cha Hong, Moisés Kaufman, Helena Lambert, Paul Langland, Mary Overlie, Stephen Petronio, Aki Sato, Keith Thompson, among others.

His theater direction has been produced internationally in the United States, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Armenia, Turkey, Morocco, and Australia. Recent projects include #OccupyOpera, a new opera-in-progress composed by Kristin Norderval developed during multiple residencies at Den Norske Opera (Norway): Rabbit Hole (California, USA); As You Like It for the annual Shakespeare On The Plaza festival (New Mexico, USA); the Norwegian & Moroccan premieres of Open House, a site-specific play by Guggenheim Fellow Aaron Landsman (USA), presented by Nordic Black Theatre; and Visions of Kerouac, which he also wrote & produced, in association with Grusomhetens Teater (Norway).

As a producer, Brendan has represented a number of innovative independent artists around the world.  Current collaborators include contemporary dance artists Haugen Productions & Kari Hoaas Productions (Norway) and danceTactics (USA). He was Director of Production for Tulsa Ballet (USA) in 2019, in charge of their collaboration with the Royal New Zealand Ballet, TBT´s European tour, as well as their world premiere by award-winning Broadway choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler; was the Producer for Grusomhetens Teater (2014-17), bringing the group to Japan, Turkey, and the USA for the first time; and served as Manager of the Cummins Theatre (Australia) from 2012-14, creating their playwright-in-residence program in partnership with Stages WA. He is currently a member of the Mary Overlie Legacy Project and a co-founder and co-director of the Allan Wayne Work Alliance.

As an educator, Brendan has taught a range of courses for conservatories and university programs (both Bachelor and Masters) since 1994. Previous long-term appointments include the Yale School of Drama, the New School for Drama, New York University, the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (United States); Danshôgskolan, Ballettakademien, Danscentrum, and Operalabb (Sweden), Bilkent University (Turkey), and The International Theater Academy Norway, where he served as Rektor (2008-10). Since 2019, he has taught movement and solo performance courses at Pace University in New York. His areas of expertise include Allan Wayne Work, the Jean Hamilton Floor Barre Technique, Mary Overlie´s Six Viewpoints, physical theater and ensemble training, and nurturing the creation of original performance-based work.

His award-winning articles have appeared in English, French, Norwegian, Russian, and Belarusian in publications such as Contemporary Theatre Review (UK), HowlRound, Contact Quarterly Dance Journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Dance Magazine, Cultural Weekly (USA), pARTisan, ARCHE (Belarus), Regard Sur ĺ Est (France), and Klassekampen, Aftenposten, and The Nordic Page (Norway). He has presented at international conferences in Russia, England, and the United States on topics such as contemporary stagings of Samuel Beckett and Henrik Ibsen, to fundamental business practices into contemporary performing arts education.

BFA with Honors in Acting, New York University; MFA in Dance, Bennington College.

Welcome to the Conversation
Review by Brendan McCall

Language Reversal: Move Past What We Know
Organized by Aaron Landsman, Clarinda Mac Low, and Ogemdi Ude with Milan Vračar

Abrons Arts Center
1 February 2021 (virtual)

Two men, each in different countries on separate continents, communicate in real-time through Zoom. One is teaching the other how to make a distinct kind of coffee called sikterusa–a kind of bitter coffee one makes when you want your guests to go home. The ingredients are simple: tap water, a small cup, a lit candle, and patience.

As they wait for their water to heat, the two men begin to talk (mostly in English) about autocracy, and about what it is like to lose one’s country.

Language Reversal: Move Past What We Know (Abrons Arts Center) resists categorization. After settling in to this virtual performance while listening to Eastern European punk music, followed by a land-acknowledgement, the four collaborating artists introduce themselves, creating a real-time, interactive “bookend”. Ogemdi Ude (Brooklyn, US) takes the audience through a guided meditation, and after the succinct yet complex performance concludes, she prompts a rich dialogue with questions and observations about circling around what language we use to articulate the world we are currently experiencing, why it is often so inferior, and what (if anything) we can do to change it.

Experiencing Language Reversal is more than simply listening to a series of spontaneous conversations between writer, theater artist, community organizer Aaron Landsman (New York, US) and cultural producer Milan Vračar (Novi Sad, Serbia). Dramaturg and collaborator Clarinda Mac Low (New York, US) has approached these verbal recordings like a choreographer would phrases of movement, giving them shape and form into a kind of collage of sound. Sometimes the conversations dance like a duet, between these two minds; other times, multiple conversations occur simultaneously.

As the water slowly boils, the talk shifts into the difference between a “state of emergency” and “martial law”.

Visually, Language Reversal also features still and moving images from the two countries, making a clear link between the war in then-Yugoslavia in the late 1990s to the violent insurrection of the United States Capitol building on January 6th by supporters of the former President. Images of dragons also recur frequently–sometimes as a montage with NATO helicopters flying over the Danube River, and sometimes breathing fire on a lone warrior while the two try to recollect a joke from two years ago involving the winged creature. And yet, Language Reversal is not quite a narrative film nor a documentary.

We see footage of performers´ feet walking in a circle, backwards. We see maps of the region dissolve, merge, and shift. A dragon flies over a city.

Eventually, the candle has sufficiently warmed the water to make the coffee. The two men toast one another through their screens.

This piece struck a number of personal chords for me, notwithstanding the exceptional ingenuity and intelligence displayed by this dynamic creative team. I have visited Serbia a number of times since 2003, first as a performer for a dance festival in Novi Sad and later to visit my former father-in-law, who lives in Belgrade. When seeing the images of the destroyed bridges and buildings during the war, or listening to Milan Vračar describe hiding in basements to avoid the bombs or living without plumbing, reminds me of staying in homes whose walls were still cracked years after the cease-fire.

Abrons will present two more installments of the work this spring, the next being Ogemdi Ude will be in conversation with Amrita Hepi (Melbourne, Australia) on March 8th.

Multi-Film Review by Lew Antoine

Film director and editor, Muyun Zhou, has made a name for herself serving up short films about familial relationships.

A pattern formed in two films – of which she directed and edited and one featuring her editing work alone.

The two standouts concern modern children dealing with their fathers. In To Be A Father, (written, directed and edited by Ms. Zhou) we meet young go-getting career woman played with all the bells and staccato whistles of an executive by Wanyoo Zhang making an uncomfortable visit to her father. One can see in the regal showing by Weiwei Meng, that she inherited the “headstrong” from him.

The film opens with dad paying a graveside visit to his wife. In something as simple as his posture, we see great grief and great power. A perfect juxtaposition occurred thanks to his dippy grin when he sees his daughter’s number on the phone and the conversation about her impending visit. One get the impression there was tension between them. One also gets the impression that both regret that tension. One also gets the impression that they both have no idea how to fix it. Zhou offers up some simple yet deeply moving imagery that – while only touching on the situation at hand – perfectly exemplifies it. The father in a frilly apron preparing far too much food; the daughter not taking her face out of her phone; lack of eye contact; small criticisms about onions prompting father to pick them off the food. Real exposition is released by chit-chat and through the deft lens of Zhou engrossing us in a heartbreaking reconciliation being attempted. A simple shot of an ashtray and the addition of an extra chair on the patio; dad explain a dream, daughter watching him walk down a staircase, and a whispered ending salutation, were all we needed to hold back tears.

The second, called Father – for which served exclusively as editor is a parable about a gay son and his father. Again, lots of tension and no exposition. Again, a mother passed away and a father trying his – albeit inept – best. Again, no deep discussion about sexuality, no preachy dialogue. Frankly, no actual admission that his son is gay. Simply a father trying his best to raise his child. This short film centered around a trip proposed by the son to go with a friend and how the father handles it. This film should be part of every LGBTQ film festival as what a caring parent should look like. In this case, it is in the clever rapid close-ups and cutaways and interesting eye-contact shots that offer insight into the relationship. The ending again offered up a caring connection between generations.

Both films offered no huge great panoramic moments; no soaring anything. Just the simple, deeply moving family dynamic done brilliantly by a young filmmaker and editor.

It would be a shame to not mention Zhou’s The Hole. This comedic O. Henry-style short film brings us to a common 9-to-5 style office and features a junior accountant with a secret. A barren full or red herrings lead us to a final scene that is both uproarious and unexpected. Here, again, clever cuts and close-up lead us quickly into this mystery with a gasp-inducing ending.

Muyun Zhou offers up no nonsense, deeply moving and engrossing works in a styles streamlined way. The film community should be watching her star rise.