Hey! This weekend is one of those totally packed full of stuff weekends. Here's my plans.
First: all weekend i will be regretting that (due to the following activities) i will be unable to attend Beggar's Opera at Theatre Gigante and the We're Anonymous event at The Armoury. Please go see them for me and tell me what i'm missing!
Thursday: SDS is bringing Tom Hyaden to UWM. 7pm Zelazo. Radical politics lecture somethin somethin.
Friday: PAINT THE TOWN at the CCC. If you don't know what this is but you're reading my blog, then you must be some kind of weirdo.
Sat AM: Early Morning Vegan Cafe, also at the CCC 10am
Sat evening: going to chicago to see the amazing people at the amazing Rooms Gallery do the amazing Caryl Churchill's new play, 7 Jewish Children as an looping interactive installation. Rooms kicks ass. Then we might go see TMLMTBGB, cuz it's fun!
Sun Noon: Anarchist Discussion, topic: Paint the Town!
Sunday afternoon: Ultimate Frisbee!!
13 hours ago
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Status on these plans.
The Tom Hayden lecture was worth going to, so that i could see how the student activist community, while apparently more organized, is also more ineffectual and moderate than when i was in school. Big fucking hurns.
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Paint at the CCC was GREAT. not having performed it, or even done a full dress-and-props rehearsal since january didn't hurt our performance terribly, and the audience was as big as the space would allow and super responsive. Great times. Viva la Riverwest!
Seven Jewish Children was one of my top 3 theatre experiences ever. This is how good theatre works: You start with honest meaningful relevant text, Caryl Churchill's script about what Jews tell their children has been accused of being anti-semetic, but actually, it shows a variety of voices and historical perspectives, always in conflict with each other. Then you present it uniquely, Rooms performed all seven scenes simultaneously and consecutively as a looping installation, incorporating different communication technologies (from phone to typewriter to laptop to webcam) to establish the different time periods. This looping created the most powerful moment for me, when I went from hearing scene 7 (set in modern ultra-conservative israel) to scene 1 (set in nazi germany) i cried. Then, you take this script, this staging, and you involve the audience in it intimately. Rooms set up one long table, actors sitting with their communication devices, all performing at once. The audience moves around in the space, sits at the table next to the actors, or accross from them, and chooses which ones to listen to when. Then everything becomes unexpectedly silent and the seven scenes happen consecutively, you see and clearly the historical progression that results in the caccophony you were just listening to and it comes together in your head in a really intense active-listening kind of way. Seeing something this good makes it hard to understand and frustrating to think about what passes for art or entertainment in our society.
Too much light was also excellent, as usual. They incorporate all the lessons of good brechtian theatre in a totally accessible and often hilariously funny way.
The discussion at the CCC rocked too. My ideas were well received, and their responses were enlightening. Left with some reading reccomendations and an enthusiastic self-taught man who come to our frisbee game, i think mainly so he could talk about nietzsche with me some more. Very good stuff.
The frisbee game was cut short for a hollywood movie i'd planned to see with my family. This movie was a racist peice of shit that pretended to be about human trafficing, but was actually about how badly muslim sheiks wanna fuck our virginal california daughters and how torturing and assassinating them is heroic. It was fucking gross, and also boring.
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