Relational Aesthetics by Hennesy Youngman

Anat sent me this lovely guy a few days ago.

People vs. Art

I love it when art causes "Violent and disgusting outburst[s] of emotion"



Maybe she was playing too much of this game:

Also it made me think about this lovely series of painting by Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky:

And this action carried out by Gadi Sprukt and Jack Faber, with Tel Aviv museum's hysterical response

Haifa Gymanstics, July 2011

I guess some nights are meant for blogging. I just found this video on YouTube, so I have to add one more post. It's us doing Samuel Beckett's piece "Quad" in Haifa Museum in Israel this July. The video, apparently uploaded by the museum, shows Amit Hadari, Osnat Kelner, Subi and myself performing 1/8 of the play, and then me desperately trying to talk to the audience, explaining the piece's structure and trying to get some volunteers to join and perform it with us. What I didn't really consider when I decided to do that, was the sound from numerous video and audio installations that were working all around the museum, as well as the museum visitors, who weren't really into listening to what I had to say... So at some point I just did what sometimes a man's gotta do: shut up and keep walking.

Israel tour, here we go

10 more days til we depart to a hot July in TLV city, followed by an even hotter August in NYC. Somehow it happened that this month in Israel became kind of a little performance tour, where I have three different gigs:

Immediately upon arrival, on Wednesday 29/6 there will be an improv show at Ilan volkov's "Hafarot Seder" festival. It will be a kind of an improvisational sketch for something I've been wanting to do for a very long time now: a piece for drumming and drummers. So my beautiful performers will be joined by the wonderful musicians Hagai Freshtman and Alex DROOL Yanovich, and as if this isn't enough, we are also truly privileged to have in our show an amazing artist who puts the D in diva, my hero and a rare inspirational force in Israeli theater. I'm talking about the one and only Smadar Yaaron. Together, we will make something we decided to call "who gave you a license":

And here is the program for the entire festival:

Later that week, on Saturday 2/7, the Schub, Yos Kelner, Mitzi Hadari and me will perform a new-ish thing called "Haifa Gymnastics". The occasion is the opening of an exhibition at Haifa Museum of Art, which is now being re-opened with new chief curator Ruti Direktor. The exhibition is titled "a line made by walking" after the famous work by artist Richard Long, made in 1967, and will explore different ways in which movement and image making are entangled. In the opening, we will present Samuel Beckett's 1982 composition "Quad", offer our services to whomever is interested in learning it, and hopefully create an interactive version of the piece with the audience. The play, which is the most abstract Beckett wrote, is actually a set of very detailed instructions for four performers walking in a square. It looks like this:  

And this the original version, produced in germany and directed by Beckett himself:



Since you don't really need any special skills to perform this thing, you just to know how to plan where you're walking, we will hopefully get the public's cooperation and make a new, interactive version of this play. I already did something with this play while I was in school, so I'm very much looking forward to dealing with it again, and if the audience will be responsive it should be fun. Here's the invitation:



The third thing will be a restaging of "Shlager", a musical-theatrical piece by Musica Nova group, created by Amnon Wolman, Avigail Arnheim, Noa Frenkel and myself. We made it last year and will present it again at the lovely "City House" (beit hair) in Bialik Square in Tel Aviv. The piece is based on texts that avigail wrote, following her experiences producing, curating, initiating and promoting musical events for the Tel Aviv municipality music department. It's naturally a bureaucratic hell so the materials invite many absurd, viciously funny moments. I'm sure that the location, being the official Tel Aviv history museum, will help contextualize the piece and will make it readable in a new way. The shows are 18-20/7.

Then we're going to New Jersey for a month to work/think/hang out with Keren Rosenbaum. But that's a whole different story.

short visit to Londres

So we just got back from 4 adventurous days in Landan town, where we went to celebrate two occasions: Romm's Birthday and the last concert in Maya's series "Hit & Run" in Dalston's Experimental music venue Cafe Oto. The gig was a proper free-form impro featuring some musicians that Maya invited, including the sweet, brazilian born amsterdam based Saxophonist Yedo Gibson and my dear beloved friend Keren Rosenbaum, who just came back with Maya from Amsterdam where they performed Keren's new composition, as part of the Notations 21 festival, exhibition and book launch. Check it out:

At the Barbican, there is a historical, retrospective-ish exhibition featuring three pioneers of the NY 70's scene: Gordon Matta Clarck, Trisha Brown (they love her in London - last year there was a huge tribute in Dance Umbrella Festival - probably because the UK's dance scene is somewhat dull, not to say lame) and one of my all time favorites, Laurie Anderson. Some of the works that ms. Anderson made in the 70's remained beautifully relevant, and also some of them bear funny resemblance to stuff that Maya, Reshef and me did recently, when we worked on "Chikos" and "Friday". And actually this makes me think it's a good opportunity to put some of these stuff here in the blog.
So here is a short clip from Chikos:


And here's a little moment from Friday (also Spartacus Chetwynd's performance which I'm mentioning down here reminded me how much I actually enjoyed that thing we did last year in the CCA in Kalisher and made me realize we should definitely explore it more):

"The way you moved through me" is the text that Anderson assigned to the installation, which consists of a table that upon placing one's elbows on plays music through the wood up the hands to the ears

the schub listening to the table

And here is a later thing by Anderson, from her seminal "Home of the Brave" (1984):



Continuing the line of sound-art, one morning Dus showed me this amazing video:


Another dear friend I was very happy to meet again was the lovely James Unsworth, artist whose responsible, among many other scandals, to the initiation of the world's first Ninja Turtle Sex Museum:


James invited us to join him to the opening of Spartacus Chetwynd's exhibition @ Sadie Coles Gallery. Chetwynd makes very cool performances and this was definitely one of them. A clearly cool factor was the fact that the gallery's smoke detectives couldn't really deal with the smoke machines she brought in and the opening was accompanied by the alarm. This and the huge rubber slide you could use to get to the lower level were the highlights. And the free beer.

Here are images and vids from other performances by Chetwynd, made in recent years and selected randomly:

A Tax Haven Run by Women from Charlottenborg on Vimeo.

The BFI at Southbank is having a Russian season this year, and we were there as they screened Eisenstein's "The Old and The New", a very weird, almost surrealist in style and approach, epic about the collectivization and mechanization of agriculture in Russian Villages in the 1920's. Filmed in various villages around Moscow from 1927, the work on the film was interrupted when Eisenstein was called to shoot his well known "October" that marked the 10th anniversary of the revolution. Being aware of the new sound technologies introduced during the 20's talking era, Eisentsein wrote instructions to what he thought would be a suitable soundtrack for his film, but he couldn't find the funding to record this score. The BFI gave these instructions to two british composers and commissioned the score from them. So far so good, only thing that went wrong is that these guys are slightly too boring and their music was way behind of this exceptional film. Here you have the entire thing, next time you have free 120 min. I especially liked the bride-cow scene.


And here's just a nice pic, showing Romm, Omer and Iris performing their signature personas:



All in all it was fun, and it's also very nice to be back "home". Funny this word is.