Explorations in the language of the living at SFAI and NOHspace

Long before I moved to San Francisco, there were already certain things I’d learned to associate as being quintessentially San Franciscan via some kind of cross-cultural osmosis: the Castro, the cable-cars, Critical Mass, and George Kuchar. Read more »

On March 11, 2011, hot on the heels (so to speak) of a devastating 9.0 earthquake and resultant tsunami, the world’s largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl made Fukushima, Japan a household name. And just like previous mega-disasters such as the Sumatran tsunami of 2004, and the 2010 quake in Haiti, Japan’s unexpected and devastating crisis drew attention and support from across the globe.

One year later, with an estimated 300,000 people still homeless from the combined natural and unnatural disasters that shook the Fukushima prefecture, it appears that the crisis is far from being over. Inspired by an impromptu fundraising effort spearheaded by New York-based, Japanese-born actor James Yaegashi, a unique memorial will take place Sun/11 in theaters across the United States.

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Bodies and words collide in 'this.placed'

It’s easy to overlook them, two dancers, still as mannequins, positioned near the entrance to the performance space, a silent video of a wet fleshy mouth, open wide as if ready for a filling, projected onto their motionless bodies. Just before the lights go down, they disappear, as does the fleshy mouth. Onstage a much larger projection of mouth, nose, cheek, fills the back wall, as the sounds of kissing, mumbling, chewing, and lip popping create a fanfare for the two dancers (Jill Randall and Amanda Whitehead), who enter while stretching their own faces into humorously exaggerated positions. Finally, Whitehead opens her mouth normally, to recite the jumbled text of Britta Austin’s Flash Fiction “Bite Marks,” which substitutes for music in their energetic duet. Read more »

Read Nicole Gluckstern's interview with documentary filmmaker Marie Losier about her new film, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, here. Below, extended thoughts from Losier and film subject and musician-performance artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

On serendipity:
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: It was Lady Jaye, when we started to take the whole idea of pandrogeny more seriously and dedicate our lives to it, she immediately said, "We really need to find somebody to just follow us around and film us." And within a week we'd met Marie. We call it the "of course" factor. "Of course" we met Marie, because we were supposed to meet Marie, and it's amazing how often that comes up, the "of course" thing. So from then on it wasn't conscious anymore, it was just that Marie was around whenever she felt there was something to film, or she would say "I have this idea that I would like you to dress as a mermaid and pretend to swim with a house on your back...."

On influence:
Marie Losier: Mike [Kuchar] is the person who taught me how to make films, just to make them. He's actually the first person I made a film with, ever ... the person who taught me how to load a roll of film in my camera. And he's so clumsy, and everything always falls apart ... so I didn't think twice, like "Oh, ok, if I can make a film that way I don't have to think too much [about the process], no worry." And it works. It's also a joy. Mike and George [Kuchar] were always like, "filmmaking is a hobby, just enjoy it."

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“Celestial Observatories for Cyanobacteria” illuminate the knowledge gap at the San Francisco Arts Commission

“The purpose of our lives is to celebrate the grandeur of the cosmos" -- William Kotzwinkle, Dr. Rat

At the age of eight, possibly inspired by my first encounter with Madeleine L'Engle’s A Wind in the Door, the notion occurred to me that just as individual cells were undetectable (to the naked eye) in the human body, so were individual human beings virtually undetectable on the great organism that is the world, and just as the planet earth was virtually undetectable in the vastness of a single galaxy, that single galaxy was virtually undetectable within the infinite scope of the universe.

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Boxcar Theatre gets hardcore with Sam Shepard

Every year it feels like it’ll be impossible for the ever-inventive Boxcar Theatre company to top their last season, and somehow each year they pull it off. After launching an ultra-ambitious repertory program of four Sam Shepard plays, to be performed in two separate locations over the course of the next two-and-a-half months, artistic director Nick A. Olivero -- who isn’t just producing the festival, but also directing “Fool For Love,” and co-starring in “True West” -- still made time for an internet interview about “Sam Shep in Rep.”

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“City of Lost Souls” at ATA, and “Awkward Dinner Party” at the EXIT Theatre, subverted the Valentine spirit.

Talk about a hot mess. The florid, fluid, City of Lost Souls (1983), Rosa von Praunheim’s seldom-screened, "transgendered ex-pat food-fight sex-circus musical extravaganza" begins with a motley cast of unapologetic misfits sweeping up a trashed-out Berlin burger joint, the “Hamburger Königin” (Burger Queen). Shimmying on the counter, falling out of her lingerie, punk rock’s first transwoman cult darling, Jayne County, belts out “The Burger Queen Blues” while her fellow wage slaves, Loretta (Lorraine Muthke), Gary (Gary Miller), and Joaquin (Joaquin La Habana) gyrate suggestively across the linoleum until the boss-lady, Angie Stardust (as herself), a regal, “old school” transsexual wrapped in an enormous fur coat, curtails their goofy antics with a whistle and megaphone.

In stern German she orders them back to work—preparing for the next round of abusive food fights, which characterize the “service” at her uniquely unappetizing restaurant. A Theatre of the Ridiculous-style foray into the secret lives of gender outlaw ex-pats in flirty, dirty Berlin, “Lost Souls” isn’t your typical romance—but it’s a love story all the same.

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The Phenomenauts and Alley Cat Books shoot for the moon.

Trapped in a world they didn’t create, the spacecraft-garage band known to us as The Phenomenauts must surely come from a more evolved time and place, as evidenced by the spiffiness of their natty uniforms -- and the electric jolt of their stage shows. As refinement and heroism (the band motto is “Science and Honor”) are qualities in tragically short supply among your run-of-the-mill rock groups, bands which contain both are bound to stand out, with or without the additions of attention-grabbing technical flourishes such as pinpoint lasers, billows of stage fog, and the custom-built Streamerator 2000, which shoots festive streamers of toilet paper out onto the frenetic crowd. Speaking of frenetic, I love a band that can make San Franciscans dance as if possessed by dervishes with hyperkinesis. For that feat alone, they deserve an intergalactic medal for courage in the face of cosmic indifference.

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Dan Carbone and Kitka resculpt old terrain

From the dark corner of the stage throbs the low rhythm of a skin-clad, Celtic-style drum and the strum of acoustic guitar, while in the light a man clad in a white dress shirt sways in hypnotic time, eyes shut tight, arms flung wide. “Sleeping, sleeping,” he croons softly, “I’m only sleeping.” Still swaying, he begins to tell the tale from the beginning, about a little baby boy whose “brain is knitting itself in an unusual way.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking in this first moment that the man is speaking of his own infancy, after all, brains don’t come knit much more unusually than that of East Bay-based avant-gardian Dan Carbone. But the infant’s name is not Dan’s, and though his brief and tragic backstory reverberates through much of the rest of the play, the infant soon yields the spotlight to his younger brother, the creator of the piece, “Father Panic,” which made its stage debut at the Garage on Friday. 

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