Here’s the press release from the MCA:

2009-10 MCA STAGE SEASON

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, announces the 2009-10 MCA Stage Season of contemporary theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances. Additional theater and music programs will be announced at a later date. All MCA performance tickets also include free museum admission for up to a week following the performance. Tickets are available mid-July at the MCA Stage Box Office, 312.397.4010 or www.mcachicago.org.

Nora Chipaumire; photo by Mkrtich Malkhasyan, from the film Nora by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton

Nora Chipaumire with Thomas Mapfumo and The Blacks  Unlimited: lions will roar, swans will fly, angels will wrestle heaven, rains will break: gukurahundi
October 1, 3-4, 2009
As exiles from Zimbabwe, dancer/choreographer Nora Chipaumire and master musician and poet Thomas Mapfumo challenge the accepted African branding – war-torn, tribal, and exotic. Known as the “Lion of Zimbabwe,” Mapfumo created and made popular the Chimurenga style of Shona music from Zimbabwe that mixes African rhythms and instruments with politically charged lyrics, which landed him in a  Zimbabwean prison camp in 1979. Chipaumire, a contemporary dancer rooted in African traditions, fuses her powerful and raw movement with Mapfumo’s music and incendiary writing to examine the migrant experience of Africa and the art of Zimbabwe over the course of that country’s downward economic and political spiral. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

One of the most memorable moments from last summer’s Global Rhythms festival was a solo performance by a musician from Brazilian body-percussion troupe Barbatuques. Slapping, snapping, yawping and stomping, the artist gave a performance full of humor and charm, producing more simultaneous polyrhythms than should be possible with only one set of arms and legs. The piece was a teaser for an upcoming evening-length show by the entire company (imagine this times fourteen!) scheduled for the Harris Theater later in the season. It was to be Barbatuques’ U.S. debut, arranged thanks to the Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s artistic director (and Chicago’s unofficial percussion ambassador to the world) Lane Alexander. Sadly, the performance was postponed due to last-minute visa complications.

Now the paperwork is straightened out and Barbatuques will perform instead at the more intimate MCA Stage as a part of the CHRP National Tap Day concerts. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The Museum of Contemporary Art has a stiff one for the innovative use of sound these days and I’m loving it.  Fresh off last weekend’s engagement by imaginative pop duo The Books, this week the MCA will present the North American premiere of Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin’s “Strange News,” performed by the Grammy-nominated Chicago Chamber Musicians.  In 2006 Wallin, along with director Josse de Pauw, took a reporter and cameraman to Uganda and The Democratic Republic of Congo to meet with child soldiers.  The result is a kind of chamber opera telling one boy’s story through video footage, war audio and electro-acoustic landscapes.  Wallin describes the work as, “An artistic parallel to a TV or radio documentary: a small, but informative window onto a particular matter, where the empathy with those involved is more important than dry information.”  The piece is anything but dry.  Bone-chilling might be a better description if images of children with automatic weapons make you squirm. Sharing the bill with “Strange News” will be George Crumb’s 1970 anti-Vietnam War quartet “Black Angels for Electric String Quartet.” (William Scott)

May 8 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, (312)397-4010.

By Sharon Hoyer

The creation of experimental ensemble dance is frequently credited as a group effort, assembled from the personal perspectives of multiple dancers and unified under the direction of one or two choreographers. The theatrical dances presented by Compagnie Marie Chouinard, on the other hand, seem very much to spring from the singular imagination of a lone provocateur with a reputation for uncompromising work. Chouinard first gained fame as a somewhat controversial solo artist whose performances earned as much or more critical ink for their shock (e.g. onstage urination, masturbation and the like) as their artistic value. When Chouinard started a dance company in 1990, her choreography continued to bear the mark of an experimental dissenter, only now working with a new medium—the dancers’ bodies the material from which a visionary artist would mold small universes. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Bethanie Hines

By Valerie Jean Johnson

“Audiences should bring all their expectations of hip-hop culture and put them in one pocket,” says poet/performer Marc Bamuthi Joseph of his widely acclaimed performance piece “the break/s.” “And then, those same expectations,” he continues with a warm and infectious laugh, “they should throw out over their shoulder.”

Sound advice from an artist whose enormously successfully career is marked by constant evolution. Joseph began his life in performance at the age of five, acting in television commercials, then moved on to the Broadway stage [“The Tap Dance Kid”] when he was just ten. In early adulthood he became an English teacher, the vocation whereby he became involved with slam poetry and spoken word performance. Within the last ten years his solo devised work has taken the theater/dance/poetry worlds by storm and, in turn, taken Joseph around the world. This week he brings his act to the MCA with “the break/s: a mixtape for the stage,” his “travel diary across planet hip-hop.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) is surely one of the ballsiest presenters in town, even if their latest show is all about the absence of said balls. Here comes “Monsters and Prodigies: The History of the Castrati.” Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, the Mexico City-based troupe, brings a play/opera that explores the eighteenth-century practice of castrating boys before puberty to preserve the soprano ranges of their voices and promises a “witty and sarcastic spin on Baroque opera.” Sounds pretty funny, right? I’m in for any show that describes itself as “madcap” and boasts a centaur, Napoleon Bonaparte and Siamese twins, one an opera critic and one a surgeon specializing in castration. Performed in Spanish with English supertitles, the show’s castrato is played by Javier Medina. Childhood leukemia resulted in a damaged larynx for Madina and left him with a soprano vocal range. With or without all its parts, this production has a lot of nerve. (William Scott)

March 20-22 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, (312)397-4010.

RECOMMENDED

Toshiki Okada’s cutting-edge theater/performance company chefitsch has been turning heads in the Tokyo performance scene for the last few years, recently winning the prestigious Kishida Kunio Drama Award for “Five Days in March,” a show that takes place in the spring of 2003, at the beginning of American military strikes in Iraq and the moment when Japan found itself involved in international conflict for the first time since World War II. Though Okada calls the piece anti-war, its characters seemingly remain fundamentally distant from current events and political concerns, sequestered in a love hotel and practicing vices and escapism of various kinds.

What makes “Five Days in March” and Okada’s theater unique is its challenge to representational theater, taking the form of abstracted yet dramatic narrative that fills in the often empty gap between theater and performance art. Both the show’s choreography, consisting of movement disintegrated from speech, and its language, which has been dubbed “super real” Japanese for its fragmentary, abbreviated and often incomplete speeches, are anchored in Okada’s sense that our reality resembles realism onstage much less than we imagine. “I reproduce the real, inarticulate way that average people actually speak, because one of the things I want to express is what lies within that ineptness… and in reality it is extremely rare for body movements to complement or reinforce the words we are speaking,” he explained in a 2005 interview.

As for the disconnect between the characters’ experience and the war abroad, Okada argues for the expression of our relationship to the political as one characterized by both distance and personal connection: “I feel that committing ourselves to anti-war movements doesn’t seem to fit us… we have this attitude that involves concern with some degree of distance, but it is not that we are not concerned. Some people see this as a work showing young people who have no concern at all about the war and are only interested in sex, but I personally think of this as a firm anti-war play.” For those in search of this kind of emotional honesty, as well as those interested in abstracted theater and hybridity between genres of performing arts, “Five Days in March” should provide a provocative springboard for thought. (Monica Westin)

February 20-22 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, (312)397-4010.

Laura Scheinbaum (Hedvig Ekdal)

There is a lot to like about the aesthetic impulses that drive Court Theatre’s artistic director Charles Newell. The guy is unafraid to tinker with the classics; everything “proper” is given the heave-ho and suddenly a play you thought you had all figured out seems uncommonly new and unexpectedly urgent.

I had high hopes for Newell’s take on Henrik Ibsen, and yet behold his current production of “The Wild Duck” (at the MCA). To say this staging left me cold is an understatement.

Ibsen’s drama of secrets and lies has always been tricky, with its insistently self-centered men and the women yoked to them. Ibsen himself anticipated “plenty to quarrel about, plenty to misinterpret.” The personal losses pile up like so many felled logs, that much is certain.

But if anything, the Court production exposes the play for what it really is: the proto family sitcom, easy on the com. Dad as infantile idiot; Mom as Practical Patty; Grandpa as eccentric; plus the requisite Preteen Kid and a Neighbor who drops in for a bon mot or two. It’s “The King of Everybody Loves Yes, Dear,” nineteenth-century Norway version. It’s not that Ibsen’s script isn’t funny (in its own way), but you’ll find little of that here.

Something about Newell’s approach has a pile-driving affect. Jay Whittaker is Gregers—the pot-stirrer who inadvertently destroys an entire family in a deranged sense of honesty and morality—and Whittaker is perhaps too obvious in his physical manifestation of the character. The hair is greasy, the body language full of tics. Everything about this man suggests trouble and I wonder if Newell had pushed for something more internal and composed, it might have created a much-needed elusive quality. Gregers’ motives should tap uncomfortable nerves—who among us hasn’t been blinded by principle?—but as it is, you just hate the guy on sight.

So what of the family he splinters like so much wood in the chopper? Kevin Gudahl’s Hailmar is appropriately childlike; Mary Beth Fisher, as his doting spouse, gives the role that frozen stare seen in the wives of stunted men.

But their cozy life is anything but. Leigh Breslau’s set design is gorgeous—a gaping warehouse loft straight out of “Rent”—and yet it exposes an emptiness in the production.  The family sits on the sofa clasped together in a Norman Rockwell embrace and it’s all you can do to not to roll your eyes. The artifice is stultifying, which may be the point. The fantasy must give way.

Ignorance is bliss, but what of the unexamined life? I’m not sure Ibsen was entirely convinced one way or another about the question of honesty versus delusions. Both have to exist to propel you out bed every morning—I’ll pretend my life isn’t as bad as it is in the hopes of making room for things that are genuinely pleasurable. Isn’t that what we call growing up?

It is only Timothy Edward Kane as the doctor—a dangerous man in his own right, with little patience for the artificially induced tragedy before him—who offers something to grab onto. Kane’s performance commands your attention, his voice low and pissed off and full of brine. Fuck you, he all but tells this group. Fuck you and figure out a way to live your lives. The alternative is to sink irretrievably to the bottom of the sea like so many ducks shot from the sky. (Nina Metz)

At The MCA Stage, Museum of Contemporary Art,220 East Chicago,(773)753-4472 or courttheatre.org. Wed-Thu/7:30p, Fri 6p, Sat 3p & 8p, Sun 2:30p & 7:30p. $32-$60. Through Feb 15.

What makes Chicago’s theater world special? We picked up the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly for clues. In the cover story, “CSI” star William Petersen explains his decision to leave his role as one of the top paid actors in television, earning a rumored $600,000 an episode, to move back to Chicago and Chicago theater: “It was too safe for me at this point. So I needed to try and break that, and the way to do that, for me, is the theater.” EW went on to credit Petersen for much of the show’s success, notably bringing a theatrical ensemble philosophy to play in its production. Or consider the runaway success of Steppenwolf’s “August: Osage County,” which transferred to Broadway,  receiving critical acclaim and multiple Tony Awards, not by shaking it up with Broadway “names” but instead by virtually transferring the Steppenwolf production intact, with the addition of lead producer and fellow Chicagoan Steve Traxler. What makes Chicago theater—or for that matter, Chicago dance or any other form of performance practiced on our stages—special? We’d contend it’s the power of the ensemble, the spirit of collaboration that champions artistic risk-taking and subordinates the commercial. And so, in that spirit, the critical ensemble responsible for Newcity’s ongoing stage coverage presents our take on the most influential people on and offstage in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

By Valerie Jean Johnson

“In the puppet theater, the text is important, but not as important as the performance itself,” says Blair Thomas, founder and artistic director of the eponymous Blair Thomas & Company, the puppet theater he established in 2002. For six years, the Chicago-based company has focused primarily on touring shows, traveling the globe with their highly unique, multi-dimensional productions. 2008, however, marks the year that Thomas and company have decided to establish new roots in Chicago, launching their premiere season in the city. Following their inaugural show at DCA Theatre this fall, “Cabaret of Desire,” a comedic look at poet Frederico Garcia Lorca (directed by Hypocrites’ Sean Graney), Thomas moves his crew to the Museum of Contemporary Art this week with the Zen Buddhist parable, “The Ox-Herder’s Tale.”

The decision to initiate a home-city season, Thomas explains, “is to establish a regular presence in the city, and to participate in the dialogue that exists in the creation of new work in Chicago.” Founder of the lauded Chicago spectacle theater, Redmoon, Thomas left the company in 1998 to follow other artistic pursuits, including teaching at the School of the Art Institute and co-curating the Chicago International Puppet Festival. Interested in puppet theater from a young age, Thomas is a self-taught puppeteer and puppet maker, combining his background in the traditional actors’ theater with his interest in visual art and performance to explore the unique possibilities of a staged world where puppets are hardly pawns, they are the stars of the show.

“[Most important] is what is said by the presence of the puppets onstage, what gets said by the other visual elements that are incorporated. So the language that is being used in the puppet theater is innately more collaborative because its got the elements of actors’ theater—dramaturgy, story—that are going on, but you also have the physical properties of the kind of puppet you’re working with and the fabricated environment that its functioning under. And then I choose to incorporate music as a primary component as well. I want to find text that allows these other forms to come to fruition.”

And so Thomas was drawn to the story of “The Ox-Herder,” a fable told through a series of ten paintings, each accompanied by a short verse that, while not well-known in the general Western culture, has inspired various interpretations and distinctive depictions from a slew of visual artists throughout its history. While the texts that correspond to the images, which are not attributed to a single author, certainly play their part in Thomas’ world of “The Ox-Herder’s Tale,” the story is primarily based in the visual images. “The script for ‘The Ox-Herder’s Tale’ is only about fifteen pages long, so it’s a very short  piece of text—though that’s actually a lot of text for the puppet theater. It’s a lot to contend with. For me the source of the primary material for creating work has ranged from musical compositions to poems to, in this case, a collection of paintings. I’m also interested in things that have some sort of resonance in our culture,” says Thomas.

In “The Ox-Herder’s Tale,” music is unquestionably a central element, driven by a continuous live percussion score performed by renowned musicians Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake. But it is, of course, the puppets who take center stage. Utilizing the traditional Japanese puppet style bunraku, which uses life-sized human-doll puppets manipulated by performers masked all in black, as well as a a towering bull, guided by a stilt-walking performer, Thomas’ elaborate creations require the skills and commitment of extremely well-rounded artists to bring them to life. “I look for performers who can deliver lines like an actor, but can also think conceptually like a director in the process as well as have physical skills like a dancer, in some cases be a musician as well,” he explains. “The nexus point of interest in the contemporary puppetry movement is the relationship between the puppeteer and the puppet—it’s a defining characteristic of what’s going on today. The reality is that you can kind of conceive some ideas, but you’ve got to get the puppet in the room, and you’ve got to get the actors in the room, and then the text if there’s text and the music, and you’ve got to find out what kind of convention is going to be believable. It’s a process of discovery.  The puppets are easily cast, then we have to find out who are we in relation to them, rather than who are they in relation to us.”

At Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, Through November 30.