Diana Szeinblum: Alaska
Last night I went to the fabulous REDCAT theater to see Diana Szeinblum’s performance, Alaska. It is hard to summarize into words just how moving this performance was. So I will let a reviewer from when it was performed at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art talk of the work:
Danced by two women and two men to an original, tensely cinematic score, the evening-length work charts the terra incognitae of bodies rising and falling apart, stolen snapshots exposing intimacy, dominance, and obsession. From the comedic to the cathartic, the piece is brutal and fiercely seductive. Szeinblum successfully exploits many of Pina Bausch’s hallmark devices—angst, alienation, frailty of human connection, the blurring and loss of self—and tempers them with her own wickedly dark humor, extremes of movement (from the pedestrian, workaday to mechanized, operatic violence), a minimalist/conceptual mise-en-scène, and shards of hope producing a pandemonium of “interior spaces,” disturbing little lonelinesses. Some of the best unsettling movement poetry you’ll see this season.
Here from You Tube are highlights from the piece, which do it no justice, but gives you some idea of the performance. I highly recommend it if you have a chance to see it live. Truly amazing.
Last night I went to the fabulous REDCAT theater to see Diana Szeinblum’s performance, Alaska. It is hard to summarize into words just how moving this performance was. So I will let a reviewer from when it was performed at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art talk of the work:
Danced by two women and two men to an original, tensely cinematic score, the evening-length work charts the terra incognitae of bodies rising and falling apart, stolen snapshots exposing intimacy, dominance, and obsession. From the comedic to the cathartic, the piece is brutal and fiercely seductive. Szeinblum successfully exploits many of Pina Bausch’s hallmark devices—angst, alienation, frailty of human connection, the blurring and loss of self—and tempers them with her own wickedly dark humor, extremes of movement (from the pedestrian, workaday to mechanized, operatic violence), a minimalist/conceptual mise-en-scène, and shards of hope producing a pandemonium of “interior spaces,” disturbing little lonelinesses. Some of the best unsettling movement poetry you’ll see this season.
Here from You Tube are highlights from the piece, which do it no justice, but gives you some idea of the performance. I highly recommend it if you have a chance to see it live. Truly amazing.