Let There Be Monsters

(From left to right) Furnie Yokoo, Riki Takeda, and Saho Ito in Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech, written and directed by Toshiki Okada. Photo: Julie Lemberger. Courtesy Japan Society.

In gathering artists (with their sets and costumes and hangers-on) from around the world, the curator of a theatre festival must confront unique problems as compared to curators in the fine arts; he cannot finely tune the thematics of his various performance objects, nor set up a rough path for the attendee to follow. He cannot build a narrative. This creates similar problems for a critic. We are asked to make connections from happenstance, from a collection of curiosities brought together by taste, but more so by the vagaries of time, space, and funding.

So what was this a collection of, the Under the Radar Festival of 2012? The promotional material advertises it as a "festival tracking new theatre," and more specifically a festival of international, "unexpected," contemporary productions "meant to clash and bump up against each other." I cannot know the problems of time, space, and funding UTR 2012 confronted. But I can question the taste.

This Kunstkammer of performance, assembled by Mark Russell, former long-time artistic director of Performance Space 122, has become awfully cozy. These are productions without unusual or grating aesthetics, and worse, productions that flatter their audiences, that want to be liked, and generally are. And the performances are unusually old: several of the works premiered years ago (Super Night Shot in 2003, for example). There are virtuosic performances by actors (The Bee) and puppeteers (The Table). There are international controversies (the banned-in-Turkey Lick But Don't Swallow), productions that gently trouble video and liveness (Super Night Shot), and that play to our craving for bourgeois revolution in the Lower East Side (Alexis. A Greek Tragedy). This is a collection of theatre that generally makes us feel good to be who we already are. And many of these artists feel quite familiar, even expected: scanning their bios, you can see why. They appear regularly at festivals similar to Under the Radar around the world, performing at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin or Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels, for example.

Before continuing, I must apologize for dismissing or simply disregarding so much of the work presented at Under the Radar. (Naturally, I did not see all of the productions, only ten of the fourteen, and cannot speak of what I missed.) Some of the productions are frankly not worth dismissing (The Bee and The Table). Please see them if you would like; but there's nothing there for a critic to analyze. You can find out what you need to know by reading the reviews.

Much of what I saw at Under the Radar is in fact worth dismissing, especially for what it says about what we bring to New York under the banner of "unexpected" theatre. The amateurishness and sophomoric simplicity of Lick But Don't Swallow (angel becomes porn star), reveals more about New York audiences' desire to see the censored art of developing nations than it does about performance in Turkey. The solipsism of The Builders Association's Sontag: Reborn, or more, the worship of the title character's solipsism, with her nascent and competitive intellectualism, quickly becomes boring, a checklist of books and albums and sexual experimentation we in the audience can feel good for also having knowledge of, and bad for not having acquired such knowledge by sixteen years old. In hearing Sontag's youthful journals read to us do we really understand her later published essays better? Why not challenge her a bit? Much could be written about El pasado es un animal grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal ), a sprawling chronicle of ten years in the lives of four young people, written and directed by Argentine theatre artist Mariano Pensotti, staged on a turntable set (divided into four rooms) by Mariana Tirantte. But the repetitiveness and...