Why January Is the Coolest Month Onstage

Why January Is the Coolest Month Onstage

Here’s an exclamation you will probably never hear: “Great news — I just got tickets to see experimental theater!”
That’s because the only thing that sounds less appealing than “experimental theater” might be “avant-garde,” which evokes a turtlenecked Frenchman approaching with a sword. Moreover, to those not versed in this fertile genre, of which New York could be the world capital, these labels — and I’m guilty of using them, for lack of better alternatives — can be both outdated and off-putting.

“It makes people think of actors rolling around in their bodily fluids,” says Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of P.S. 122, a longtime home for adventurous theater artists. Those ghosts of theater past are still around, but the experimental scene is far more accessible, diverse and dynamic than its popular image suggests. Especially this month.

January is for experimental theater what the holiday season is for prestige movies. That’s largely because the Association of Performing Arts Presenters helped raise money to create the Under the Radar festival eight years ago to do stagings at the same time as its annual conference in New York. This became a marketplace for producers from around the world to see new work they might want to program at home.

Other downtown groups followed suit with January showcases, and this year stands out as the busiest yet, with three other festivals. Along with the consistently exciting Under the Radar, which Mark Russell organizes out of the Public Theater, there is the Coil Festival, produced by P.S. 122; Other Forces, at the Incubator Arts Project at St. Marks Church; and American Realness, at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side. Mr. Russell said it was becoming something like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the summer.

The shows this month may seem remote or bizarre to some audiences. That said, like any genre with decades of tradition dominated by brilliantly influential artists (Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, Spalding Gray, Richard Maxwell), experimental theater has its own conventions that have hardened and evolved.

Take these typical elements: Nonlinear narrative, multimedia, abstraction, fractured language, fourth-wall breaking, colorblind casting, stylized acting, drama-interrupting dance, site-specific settings, confessional performance art, politically incorrect provocation, irreverent updating or deconstruction of classic texts, mixing of high and low culture.

These have been the building blocks for many ingenious, entertaining shows, but they are no longer new.

It’s difficult to generalize about a genre, but what unites this disparate work, more than its content, is the process by which it is made and presented. There is great continuity: these artists infrequently leave for TV or film. (No one sees Under the Radar as a springboard to HBO.) They present more regularly than mainstream playwrights, gradually develop loyal followings and, since they are working with low budgets, they are allowed to fail and to refine their aesthetic. Spend enough time sampling these shows, and the strange quickly becomes familiar.

Coil, featuring an interdisciplinary diet of theater, dance and performance art, has its most impressive lineup ever. The playfully intellectual ensemble called the T.E.A.M. mounts “Mission Drift,” a musical about the evolution of global capitalism that pairs a current narrative with one about 14-year-old employees of the first multinational corporation. Young Jean Lee, a cult button pusher, has a nearly wordless production with a generic name, “Untitled Feminist Show,” co-presented with Baryshnikov Arts Center. And the visually ingenious company Temporary Distortion (“Americana Kamikaze”) juxtaposes portrayals of police officers in popular culture with firsthand accounts by real New York City police officers in “Newyorkland.”

Other Forces is more modest, featuring just two shows, one directed by a veteran (Robert Cucuzza) and the other by an emerging experimental star (Tina Satter). Mr. Cucuzza (“Speed Freaks”) delivers a modern update of “Miss Julie” with the decidedly non-Strindberg-like title “Cattywumpus.” And Ms. Satter, artistic director of Half Straddle, follows last year’s football-themed “In the Pony Palace: Football” with a sequel, “Away Uniform,” starring Pete Simpson, a familiar downtown face from, among other shows, Ms. Lee’s “Lear.”

Highlights in American Realness include a new piece about climate change by Cynthia Hopkins, who specializes in genre-defying autobiographical work, and “Broke House,” a spin on Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” by the flashy pop-art troupe Big Art Group.

Under the Radar shows off its usual wide range of international talent, from the technologically pioneering Builders Association (mounting “Sontag: Reborn,” a play based on that critic’s journals) to the rugged physical performance of Motus, the vigorous Italian company that is following last year’s riff on Greek tragedy (“Antigone: Contest #2”) with a docudrama about the Greek debt crisis, “Alexis: A Greek Tragedy.”

With so much happening this month, might the market for experimental theater be oversaturated? Outside these festivals, for example, is “World of Wires,” the director Jay Scheib’s adaptation of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder television film, opening at the Kitchen on Thursday.)

After suggesting that the density of shows will bring more attention for everyone, Mr. Russell of Under the Radar adds some concern. “I am frustrated that there might be so much great work that audiences can’t see it all,” he says. “I have heard complaints from international guests, producers and such, that there’s too much.” (Because of audience demand, he’s bringing back a piece by the British-German troupe Gob Squad from last year’s festival, along with a new piece from it.)

Whether the four festivals can flourish depends on the size of the audience for nontraditional theater. Yet increasingly there are breakout hits, like Elevator Repair Service’s Fitzgerald adaptation, “Gatz,” which the Public Theater is staging again in March; and “Sleep No More,” the English troupe Punchdrunk’s wordless immersive journey through a Shakespearean haunted house. Rooted in ideas from the 1960s avant-garde and mounted in a downtown warehouse, it shows no signs of closing after nine months.

The best reason to see major experimental theater today is not that it’s radical or shocking, but that it’s good. Or, at least, more frequently successful at what it aims to do than its more prominent siblings uptown. It’s also much cheaper. The average ticket price at Under the Radar is $20, and you can get 10 tickets at Coil for $100. That means the cost to go to the theater is about that of a movie (especially in the age of 3-D).

That might sound like a prosaic pitch, but consider this: Spending hundreds of dollars to go to Broadway to see an over-amped derivative musical or a play compromised by star casting when there are reasonably priced, intimate and vital alternatives that belong to an illustrious New York tradition? Now that’s a risk.

Under the Radar runs Wednesday through Jan. 15; tickets, $20 to $25, at publictheater.org or (212) 967-7555. Coil Festival runs Thursday through Jan. 29 at Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village; tickets, $15, at ps122.org or (212) 352-3101. Other Forces runs Thursday through Jan. 21 at the Incubator Arts Project, St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village; tickets, $15 to $18, at incubatorarts.org or (212) 352-3101. American Realness runs Thursday through Jan. 15 at the Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side; tickets, $10 to $20, at henrystreet.org.

Chipper Remnants of a Life Turned Sour

Chipper Remnants of a Life Turned Sour
She didn’t leave much behind. That’s the inescapable fact of Amy Winehouse‘s posthumous collection, “Lioness: Hidden Treasures.”

The album’s 12 songs are the leftovers from a singer and songwriter who was promising on her 2003 debut album, “Frank”; fully herself and even more promising on her 2006 album, “Back to Black”; and then a long, sad story until her death from alcohol poisoning this year. The transformation from the confident, sly, sweet-and-sour-voiced 18-year-old in 2002 to the scratchy, ravaged latter-day star is the album’s back story, even as the music stays chipper.

Like her two previous albums, “Lioness,” made with the same producers (Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson), wraps retro arrangements — 1960s soul, girl groups, old reggae — around a bluntly modern persona. The idea was already full-blown in 2003, when Winehouse recorded the acerbic big-band ballad “Best Friends, Right?,” which finally surfaces here.

Other previously unreleased tracks add to the pathos of Winehouse’s decline. The tabloid-ready one is “Between the Cheats,” recorded in 2008. It’s a defiant vow of loyalty to her husband at the time, Blake Fielder-Civil, recorded a few months before he was imprisoned for assault on a bar owner. The backup is four-chord doo-wop as she sings, “I would die before I’d divorce you/I’d take a thousand thumps for my love.” Her vocal is jazzy, jumpy and improvisational, with the flutter she picked up from Erykah Badu and the flintiness she learned from Dinah Washington. It’s also thin, slurred and sometimes unintelligible.

“Like Smoke,” a 2008 song about being proudly fickle, stretches out two shaky verses and some scat singing that Winehouse left behind with a present-day rap by Nas that alludes to Occupy Wall Street. “A Song for You,” the Leon Russell anthem of a musician’s prideful self-pity, wraps an overelaborate post-facto arrangement around a fitful, scattered vocal from 2009: shards of musicianship, straining to cohere.

By contrast, “Half Time,” a neo-soul track from 2002 that sways like a song from Ms. Badu, is a budding songwriter’s tribute to the healing power of music: “The melody it feeds my soul/the tune tears me apart and it swallows me whole.” For Winehouse, its promise of hope and bliss in music didn’t come true.

“Lioness” ekes out all it can from the archives. It has cover songs recorded in 2002, back when Winehouse was getting started, like “The Girl From Ipanema” with a slightly forced hip-hop beat. It has preliminary versions of songs from “Back to Black,” including a slower, less sardonic take on “Tears Dry” (later “Tears Dry on Their Own”), and a one-take run-through of “Wake Up Alone” that’s nonchalantly bluesy.

A 2011 version of the Gerry Goffin-Carole King song “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” is different from the one Winehouse recorded for the 2004 soundtrack of “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” — trading acoustic rhythm guitar for a booming 1960s soul production — but is built around the same Winehouse vocal track. “Lioness” also includes the duet she recorded with Tony Bennett in March 2011, “Body and Soul,” which was recently released on his album and has been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her phrasing is savvy, her voice tattered.

Had she survived, Winehouse might have had new insights into private turmoil, and a voice with eloquent scars. “Lioness” is just the scraps of what might have been.

Long Lines and Scalpers: Rock Star? No, Leonardo

Long Lines and Scalpers: Rock Star? No, Leonardo
LONDON — It’s hard to think of anything that Alexander McQueen and Leonardo da Vinci have in common. One made clothes out of feathers, flowers, shells and lace. The other painted intensely naturalistic religious scenes and animated portraits. But both, it seems, have the rare power to please modern crowds.

Working five centuries apart, McQueen, the British fashion designer who committed suicide last year when he was 40, and Leonardo, the Renaissance inventor, scientist, draftsman and painter whose Mona Lisa and “Last Supper” are the most famous paintings in the history of art, have been the subject of two wildly popular museum shows this year, captivating the public to a degree no one anticipated.

Crowds waited up to four hours to see “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” until it closed in August at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. An event like few others at the Met, the show was extended twice, finally staying open until midnight its last two days. By the time the show closed on Aug. 7, attendance had hit 661,509, putting it among the Met’s 10 most popular shows, with McQueen right up there with Tutankhamen, the Mona Lisa and Picasso.

Now lines are forming at dawn outside the National Gallery here with a tenacious public patiently hoping to get the only 500 tickets a day not sold in advance for its blockbuster exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan,” which opened last month and focuses on that artist’s years as court painter to Ludovico Maria Sforza, the duke of Milan, in the 1480s and 1490s. Because the works are so fragile, the show cannot travel and is on view only through Feb. 5. Museum officials say they do not have an estimate of how many people will have seen the show by the time it closes.

The advance tickets, which went on sale online in May, sold out the first week the show opened, prompting box-office Web sites to start scalping $25 tickets for up to $400. Luke Syson, the exhibition’s curator, said he knew the show would be a hit, but he was still amazed by the public’s response. “I am struck by how we invent this figure for the 21st century,” he said one recent morning, sipping a cappuccino in the National Gallery’s cafeteria. “These pictures communicate something that’s just out of reach. There’s always more than meets the eye.”

On view are 7 of Leonardo’s 14 extant paintings, along with works by artists in the school of Leonardo da Vinci as well as Giampietrino’s reproduction of “The Last Supper,” on loan from the Royal Academy in London. There are also 60 Leonardo drawings, 33 of which are from the Royal Collection. (About 10 of the show’s drawings relate to the apostles depicted in “The Last Supper.”)

Five years in the making, the exhibition is not only a feat of scholarship but also of diplomacy, with loans from museums in St. Petersburg, Krakow, Paris, New York, Rome and Milan.

Even though the exhibition has been billed as a once-in-a-lifetime event and has received rave reviews, Mr. Syson said he “wanted to make sure this wouldn’t be a Marx Brothers moment where we tried to cram as many people into the show as possible.” Adamant that there be crowd control so people can actually see the works properly, officials have limited the visitors admitted to 180 every half-hour, although people may stay as long as they like. That figure is under the 230-person maximum capacity of the galleries.

Taking a page from the Met, the National Gallery has extended the show’s hours. It now stays open until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays (it generally closes at 6 p.m.) and two more hours on Sundays, now closing at 7. For the show’s last two weeks the museum will be open until 10 every night, Michelle Gonsalves, a National Gallery spokeswoman, said. And for the first time ever it will be open on New Year’s Day.

“We advised people to book early,” Ms. Gonsalves said. And while the museum is aware of the frenzy to get the remaining tickets, it was surprised to learn that they were being scalped. She said the National Gallery’s security officers could tell if tickets had been scalped, and that visitors found with such tickets would not be allowed into the show. “We can’t say how we can tell, but we are doing spot checks,” she explained.

Despite all the madness Mr. Syson, who is leaving the National Gallery to become curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Met in January, has a message he hopes the exhibition is delivering: Realizing that Leonardo has recently been prized more as a scientist than as an artist, he wants the public to see how painting was actually central to the master’s way of thinking. Judging by the show’s popularity, that point is getting across.

“I don’t mean to sound like a mystical priest, but on some level these paintings communicate soul to soul,” he said. “Great art does work on people in mysterious ways.”