Using the View-Master as her medium, Portland-based artist Vladimir weaves intriguing “28-picture tales of train chases, missing steam shovels, disastrous dinner parties, and overly adventurous cockroaches.” She crafts each scene using teeny toys, objects, and random paraphernalia.  When set to music and narration, a Vladmaster performance has more potential for magic than any movie theater. Instead of staring at a screen, audience members click through the story as one, each using their very own View-Master.

Vladimir is not currently touring, but you can experience the whimsy at home. Visit her website for information on how to buy reels of her Franz Kafka parables and other thoughtful tales.

(Thanks, NUVO.) 

Source: Vladmaster.

Images courtesy of  Vladimir .

It’s not that it hasn’t been said before, it’s that it bears repeating: It’s not about the photograph. In an essay that bears that title, written for Matrix, Ian Orti laments the intrusion of Flickr culture into the live music experience, and indeed, into life on the whole:

For some reason these days it’s not enough to get onstage and rock out with your favourite band; instead this experience has to be documented at the expense of the experience itself. Strike a pose. Of course there was the stretched arm snap of his face in the foreground while the band played on in the background. And then came the snaps with his girlfriends who stopped their dancing to pose for that perfectly candid shot, followed by the painful few seconds of waiting for the photo to load on the viewfinder so he could show them and then maybe pose for another one just in case that one perfectly candid shot wasn’t candid enough.

Souce: Matrix

Image by Byflickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

Of all the “curious undertakings” of performance artists, none have been as striking as Tehching Hsieh’s lifeworks, observes the Chronicle Review, in a review of Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, newly available from MIT Press. In 1986, the artist dropped out of the public eye to begin his final performance piece, “Thirteen Year Plan,” a period during which he would make art but not show it publicly. He emerged in 1999 with a ransom note bearing a simple message: “I kept myself alive.”

In addition to “Thirteen Year Plan,” the dedicated Hsieh did a series of one-year pieces, which included spending a year in communication blackout (no reading or writing, either), a year spent in a room punching a worker’s clock on the hour, repeatedly, and a year of total artistic abstention. “Although [Hsieh’s works] attracted a cult following in New York and Taiwanese performance-art circles, they took place out of view of the art world, which barely mentioned them,” reports the Chronicle. But the mainstream art world has “finally clocked in,” with Hsieh’s works earning exhibits at the Guggenheim and MoMA.

Source: Chronicle Review (article not available online).

For poets Bassey Ikpi and Giles Li, spoken utterance has the undeniable power to create bonds between people across physical and social divides. These two artists came up during the re-emergence of the contemporary spoken word scene, when groups like the Nuyoricans and programs like HBO's Def Poetry Jam brought the art form to a wide audience. Like many performance artists, Boston-based Li and D.C.-based Ikpi developed their craft as a means for expression, a way to share in a commonality of viewpoint and emotion with a live audience. And now, even as Ikpi has graced Def Poetry Jam five times and Li has established the Boston Progress Arts Collective and toured the country, their success hasn't deterred them from that original impulse. They still write from that place of wanting to be heard.

Read the entire piece: Spoken-Word Artists Bassey Ikpi and Giles Li Tell It Like It Is 

Photo of Giles Li by FireBox Photography

Listen Now:
Giles Li performs his spoken-word poetry

Poet Bassey Ikpi on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam:

"When starting a play, I ask myself, 'What's the last play in the world I would ever want to write?'  Then I force myself to write it." That is how playwright and director Young Jean Lee describes her process. Since The Appeal debuted at SoHo Rep in 2004, Lee has been considered a leading new voice in American theater. Determined to shake both herself and her audience free from complacency, she states, "I want to create work that disarms audiences with humor and then excoriates them … until they are left disturbed, exhilarated, and without answers." 

Church, which premiered in 2007 at P.S. 122 and was recently performed at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, is a provocative exploration of religion that straddles the line between earnestness and irony so delicately as to leave its audience in a constant state of unease. Structured as a religious service complete with preaching, testimonials, singing, and dancing, Church works on its audience like its namesake. Through its cast of liberal Christian characters, the show calls people out on their ego-based, petty worries and challenges them to meaningful action. What makes it all tolerable, and indeed compelling, is Lee's ability to balance piercing social satire with disarming sincerity. At various moments in the show, you may feel uplifted, moved, amused, ashamed, or devastated. But you will never feel complacent.     

Image by Ryan Jensen, courtesy of Young Jean Lee Theater Company and Walker Art Center.

Spend much time contemplating positron emission tomography? Or asymmetric mutant hybrids? Yeah, me neither. Science magazine, sensing a disconnect between scientists and the general public, dreamed up a novel way to make the researchers' jargon more accessible. It challenged them to translate the dense language of their work—into dance.

Science announced the winners of the second-annual “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest last week. The results, it acknowledges, are “not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article,” but they’re infinitely more entertaining. Here’s the winning video from the graduate student division, which explains the role of vitamin D in beta cell function with headlamps, bubbles, and a lot of flailing around:

The budding choreographers won the chance to work with real ones, who will help each winner transform a second article into a new dance. The fruits of these collaborations will debut at a “This Is Science” performance in February.

(Thanks, Daily Beast.)

Kate Bornstein didn’t go through with her sex change operation with the intention of tackling gender theory.  “No, I went through my gender change with the intention of being pretty,” the artist and author said at a performance last year at Virginia Commonwealth University. “I never set out to deconstruct a gender binary. I didn’t have a clue of what that is. I just wanted to be a pretty girl.”

But 22 years after going under the knife, Bornstein has four books, countless performances, an entire system of postmodern gender theory, and a new coalition of sex positivity to show for her work, as highlighted in the Summer/Fall issue of Shameless.

Bornstein’s performances focus heavily on pleasure and joy, and avoid excluding those of us who might not relate too closely to a “transsexual polyamorous sadomasochistic dyke pornographer,” as she calls herself. Though her entire audience isn't always queer, Bornstein acknowledges everyone's identity despair in her perfomances and books, most notably in Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws, now in its third printing.

The article’s author and Shameless editor Megan Griffith-Greene tames the tone of Bornstein’s lectures for the magazine aimed at teenage girls, and focuses mostly on the artist’s credo: “Don’t be mean.”

“The world needs more kind people in it, no matter who or what they do,” Bornstein writes on her blog. “The world is healthier because of its outsiders and outlaws and freaks and queers and sinners. I fall neatly into all those categories.”

Shameless took a chance in celebrating such a subversive figure among essays about summer camp and female inventors, but it’s a positive sign that the indie publication is filling a much-needed niche, and that Bornstein’s refuse-to-be-silent words are being heard.

“I’m giving myself permission to feel sexy,” Bornstein said at the VCU performance. “and that’s making life a whole lot more worth living for me right now. It’s giving me some time for myself that’s not all about politics and art. It’s just about joy. So do you feel sexy?”

Image courtesy of Kate Bornstein.

For nearly ten years, Jennifer Ilse and Paul Herwig have been staging productions in their own backyard—literally. The Off-Leash Area Contemporary Performance Works is headquartered in the couple’s garage, which they converted into a 38-seat theater.

But there’s nothing amateurish about the company’s production values, and with more than a dozen original productions to their name featuring luminaries of the Twin Cities theater scene, Ilse and Herwig are garnering acclaim for their performances and set designs.

The garage shows are still intimate, informal affairs: “While we have the full support of our neighbors, to minimize neighborhood disturbance, attendance to events at Our Garage is by reservation only,” the Off-Leash Area website reads. “After each performance the audience is invited to Our Backyard to visit with their fellow patrons and the artists for an evening by the fire pit and for refreshments.”

I suppose it’s this sort of ingenuity that has allowed the Twin Cities to boast more theater seats per capita than any American city outside New York.

The Jury opens next month in the Off-Leash garage; check the website for showtimes.

Image by dmealiffe, licensed by Creative Commons.