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Ligia Lewis at American Realness: Forceful Celebrations

by Paddy Johnson on January 10, 2017
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It took me about 15 minutes to notice that the performers in Ligia Lewis’s “minor matter” were wearing black contacts that obscured the white of their eyes. That’s probably because for the duration of the piece, I was preoccupied by the worry that performers Jonathan Gonzalez, Ligia Lewis, and Hector Thami Manekehla might accidentally break a partner’s vertebrate. “minor matter” is approximately 65 minutes of these dancers slamming each other on the floor, climbing on top of one another and basically beating the shit out of each other. I loved it.

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In Review: American Realness at the Abrons Art Center

by Paddy Johnson on January 22, 2016
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Once a year “American Realness” takes over the Abrons Art Center to present two weeks of new and experimental dance-cum-performance. Last year, the pervasive theme running through the festival told a story of survival. It’s hard out there for an artist. This year, curator Ben Pryor assembled a group of performances focused on identity and institutional critique with a bit of self-reflexive formalism thrown in.

I saw too many performances to review, so what follows is a brief recap of my viewing, along with a few thoughts and reflections.

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At American Realness, the Nervous Wreckage of Jeremy Wade and Jibz Cameron

by Whitney Kimball on January 20, 2015
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Is there any anxiety worse than that of the liberal empowered self-aware non co-depending politically correct BFA’ed? Based on Jeremy Wade and Jibz Cameron at the American Realness Festival, no.

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Ni’Ja Whitson’s “A Meditation On Tongues” Conjures The Dead At Abrons

by Emily Colucci on January 11, 2017
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Sitting in Ni’Ja Whitson’s A Meditation On Tongues Sunday night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching ghosts. Part of the American Realness festival, their moving performance (Note: Ni’Ja identifies as gender non-specific and prefers the pronouns “they/their”) reinterpreted Marlon Riggs’s seminal 1989 film Tongues Untied, which explored the fraught intersection of black and gay male identity during the critical years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

More than an ode to an important cultural object, A Meditation On Tongues seemed like a raising of the dead. By appropriating the film’s dialogue and imagery, Whitson and their fellow performers channeled the lost generation of black gay men depicted in the film through the bodies of today’s gender nonconforming and queer artists of color. This allowed Whitson to not only address a wider range of gender presentations, but also powerfully represent the ongoing legacy of Riggs and other late poets, writers and dancers in Tongues Untied.

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M. Lamar Brings Down the House at Abrons

by Paddy Johnson on January 15, 2016
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There are times when the apocalypse may be warranted. That’s a statement I never thought I’d even consider making, but after seeing M. Lamar’s stunning operatic masterpiece, “Destruction” at Abrons Art Center, I’ve come around on it. (The show runs tomorrow at 10 pm and is part of the American Realness Festival.) The libretto (co-written by Lamar and Tucker Culbertson) tells a retribution story from the perspective of a black descendent of slaves. Distraught over the loss of life that occurred during times of slavery, segregation and neo-segregation, he calls the dead back to life. When they wake, they are very, very unhappy.

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This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Gallery Armageddon

by Paddy Johnson Michael Anthony Farley Rea McNamara on January 4, 2016
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Those who thought they’d ease into the work week after the holiday break will be sorely disappointed. Nearly every gallery in the city has an opening. Between the Abrons Art Center’s American Realness Festival opening this week and a rash of Chelsea and Lower East Side shows, your calendar will be full. And not just with the usual crap. Painter Jane Corrigan will debut fresh new figurative paintings at Feuer/Mesler—it’s her first solo show in two years. Grids, systems and minimalism take over The Kitchen, Cheim & Read and Lesley Heller, all in unrelated shows. And for those following all the climate change stories, Dana Sherwood’s exhibition at Denny Gallery focuses on our destruction of the earth. Assuming we survive long enough to see the show, it should be illuminating.

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Must Like Loud: Neal Medlyn’s Explosive Seven Part Opus 

by Paddy Johnson on February 2, 2015
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When a performer spends several nights grinding his dick in your face for art, you want to find something good to say about the performance. It takes a lot of guts to put your junk out there, let alone create a seven part opus. That’s especially true in the case Neal Medlyn’s uneven performance marathon “Pop Star Series: The 2015 Emerald Edition,” which ran over the course of three days at the American Realness festival. Throughout the course of his pop-star based series, I watched Medlyn’s dick fly out of beaded candy briefs, hump a staircase, and air grind through saggy white underwear.

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At Abrons, Avant-Garde With Bear Costumes

by Paddy Johnson on January 16, 2015
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By the end of this weekend, the AFC staff will have seen a total of 15 out of 21 performances at the “American Realness” festival at the Abrons Art Center– which, so far, has been defined by a mix of blow jobs, spray blood, DIY aesthetics, and self-referential institutional critique. On the messier fringes of these performances is Keith Hennessy’s “Bear Skin”.

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