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“Questions of community, spirituality, and cultural history seem to have captured the attention of innovators in American theater recently,” says Philip Bither, the Walker’s William and Nadine McGuire Senior Curator of Performing Arts. “At the same time, Out There has always been a barometer of what’s on artists’ minds and where performance is heading.”
As quintessentially American phenomena, the Chautauqua and the evangelical church service have many things in common. Still, it’s surprising that they have directly inspired two cutting-edge theater works being performed in this year’s Out There series. Chautauqua!, from the National Theater of the United States of America (Thursday-Saturday, January 8–10), and Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company’s CHURCH (Thursday–Saturday, January 29–31) were both created as Walker commissions and open and close this year’s annual festival of alternative, genre-defying performance.
In keeping with 20 years of Out There performances, there’s a strong element of unpredictability with Chautauqua! and CHURCH. Both are new commissions, which means “you’re not buying off the shelf,” Bither says, but rather “investing in a future idea because you believe in the potential of the artist and the idea—and we’re asking the audience to believe, too.”
Out There 2009 also showcases new international work—Japanese director/playwright Toshiki Okada and his company chelfitsch in Five Days in March, (Thursday–Saturday, January 15–17), a darkly humorous work about the daily lives of four adolescents in Tokyo’s trendy neighborhoods of Shibuya and Roppongi during the first five days of the U.S.–Iraq war in 2003.
The remaining Out There performance of the season, Tim Crouch’s England, (Thursday–Saturday, January 22–24), launches the UK Performance Now! series that surveys the rich and diverse “live art” scene in England and Wales. Minimalist and mesmerizing, England is performed in the Walker’s Burnet Gallery by two “guides” (Crouch and actress Hannah Ringham) who disregard the distinction between audience and actor, theater and life, telling the tale of an England of a different kind. -- press.walkerart.org
Posted January 5th, 2009 by ruzik_tuzik
