Archive for January 2025
David Burliuk’s Legacy Celebrated in SLAP Performance
photo: Steven Pisano
Stepping into the East Village Basement Theatre to see SLAP is a time traveler’s delight. You carefully walk down icy stairs and find yourself in a space that is infused with the feeling of the sixties…because that’s what it is. Ellen Stewart had her first La Mama theatre here and now it is used for all sorts of artistic events. For the show Slap, the living room feel is transformed into a very basic theatre where once during the show, the lighting designer, Watoku Ueno, had to leave the back of the theatre to fiddle with plugs next to my left foot.
Time is a theme here…David Burliuk, Ukranian born and the subject of the show, was a painter, poet and organizer of the movement called Futurism, performing through Europe, Siberia and Japan, before landing in New York in 1922. He is interpreted by the great poet impresario, Bob Holman of Bowery Poetry Club fame, lending a little W.C. Fields to the madness of this strange and wonderful show. His co-horts on stage include Susan Hwang, as a Scythian goddess and viper, playing so many stringed instruments, you cannot keep count. On stage is narrator Julian Kytasty with his beautiful impregnated lute, the bandura. He keeps the story moving along as Burliuk travels the steppes of time in pursuit of something, though one is never quite sure what that is.
All of the music and movement madness makes this show a delight and is a reminder of when theatre was less concerned with box office and had real fun with itself. The paintings made by Burliuk are projected on the wall…they, too, are wonderful, a sort of Fauve/Cubism that really helps carry the travelogue along. The players have co-created on Slap with director Virlana Tkacz who is terrific at molding story material as well as finding extra chairs for late comers.
I won’t give any of the audience participation moments away…just rest assured that yelling out is encouraged. And don’t we have a lot to yell about these days?
The Yara Arts Group is behind this confection… step into the future and the past at the same time—delight in the poetry, music, art and fun of one of East Village’s earliest genius residents, David Burliuk. There’s a reason they all landed here for a moment or two. And Veselka is across the street in case you find you’re hungry after so much travelling.
Unpacking the Tensions in ‘Armand’
Armand, the film creation by Scandinavian film royalty Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann’s grandson of Halfdan Ullmann Tondel is uncomfortable but offers up a feast of realizations about our lives
Elizabeth, played by the risk-taking actress Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person In the World), finds herself confronting the school board of her six-year-old son. What could such a young boy do to warrant the condemnation from the parents of another boy, his friend, and why do the principal educators though uncomfortable, still feel its their duty to accuse. The victim’s parents are at first patent with Elizabeth’s shocked response to the accusation. They are all from the same community and have history; so why would this sensitive issue be put in such a formal setting? This is where the real mystery begins.
Small towns have secrets and judgments and memories of its citizens that go back to their own student days. Elizabeth’s husband is recently deceased and the judging teachers at first want to be sensitive with her because of the loss, but Elizabeth is out there emotionally and doesn’t fall into the shaming that the system seems to need to put on her. Much is made of her laughing scene which for me was a bit long…but everything else she does is so beautifully strange and at same time, familiar, as if we are watching her and ourselves in our private spaces. She reveals herself through public through outbursts, and dancing…she is beautiful and they all want to judge her and it seems also be her or be with her. As an audience we want to condemn the condemners for their inability to probe themselves and project their fears and insecurities on the single woman… the societal witch, who is bursting with real life.
There is much to explore in an educational documentary on what is normal child play…here though we see adults acting like they did in their own childhoods, gossiping, having nosebleeds and wanting to avert responsibility.
I spoke briefly to the director wondering if he had seen the film Suddenly Last Summer, where Tennessee William”s character, Sebastian Venable, played by Julian Ugarte, is seemingly cannibalized by a culture that need pieces of him for themselves. Elizabeth’s world is like that. As the town’s actress, she serves as the vessel for all their unrequited impulses and we see how dangerous non actualization can be. Only when the truth is revealed, and the ‘children’ re draw the lines on the playground, do we experience the tension leaving our own bodies. The rain purifies and she, with Buddhist equanimity, moves on.
The director who has worked in an elementary school has much talent for showing the everyday intimate responses that is part of the human experience. He’s got the genes for it.
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