#Performance Riting

[vampirecatprince]

THIS

IS THE SAME CHARACTER AS MR MY BACK SOUNDS LIKE POP ROCKS

The dichotomy of Rat Man

[serpentface]

Faiza performing the Kagnoma Odo (pretty literally 'lion dance'), a weapons dance and one of the more important ritual duties of Odonii priestesses. A relatively new addition to this traditional dance involves the musket as the primary weapon, which is fired mid-twirl into the ground at the climax of the dance. Faiza is experiencing an 'oh fuck' moment because her shot is more than ideally diagonal, but she’s being so cool with it.

This is a wholly ceremonial performance at the onset of the pilgrimage, performed in full regalia and lion skin (of the small, semi-domesticated strain) but no armor. It’s also distinctly a display of political allegiance between the powerful and beloved Odonii priesthood (and its loyal military) with the increasingly reviled and destabilized imperial family, with Faiza prominently wearing a bracelet of the royal serpent, which was gifted (along with the musket) by the usoma Stavis Amanti himself (Usoma is the Wardi word for king, which has been retained in the context of emperors).

The Kagnoma Odo is the ultimate demonstration of the Odonii as an embodiment of the Lion Face of God and living vessel of military might and sovereignty, demonstrating her fitness and proficiency with weapons and as a spiritual unifier for soldiers. It is accompanied by drumming and occurs in stages, running through the three keymost weapons used in war- the spear, the sword, and the musket. The musket is of the most significance, given the weapon has developed a particular esteem as the ultimate embodiment of might and superiority. Assistants (almost always other priestesses, occasionally high ranking soldiers) load and prime the musket to be fired at the climax of the dance, where it is shot into the ground as the priestess leaps out of range of the shot. The firing signals the end of the dance and the rite itself.

While not the utmost exemplar of trigger discipline, only fully inducted and senior (and therefore very thoroughly trained) Odonii are permitted to perform the dance, and injuries during actual performances are quite rare (though are known to occur during training, more than a few Odonii have burns and wounds on their feet).

The most important renditions of this dance are performed upon declarations of war and before battles (in this case, generally done in full armor along with the lion pelt). It is also done during some trainings (while a dance, it is carefully choreographed to include naturalistic maneuvers of the weapons involved and helps soldiers limber up and learn to move their weapons). It is regarded as an impressive and motivating sight and a morale booster, and, seen at a distance, potentially intimidating to enemies.

A special variant of this dance is performed as means of fully incarnating the Odomache, which is done in full nudity with the body covered in the blood of the freshly sacrificed lion and cloaked in its raw pelt (the lion has become the corpse of Odomache in the moment of death, as part of its recreation of God's sacrifice). Her public, full nude appearance once (and only once) in this act is what allows the Lion Face of God to incarnate within her. Those in attendance see the spiritually vulnerable, naked human body obscured with the sanctified and deified blood and cloaked in the sanctified and deified skin. It is a merger of the contradictions of mortality and divinity, the boundaries between the two indistinct in flickering firelight and the flash of musketfire. She is witnessed by her people, dangling in between humanity and divinity and leading them in dance, and and is thus transformed.

[phladydoor]

Can’t believe Dan and Phil are going to individually bring every TIT attendee on stage and then activate the trap door that sends each one directly to hell.

[thatgaywizardoverthere]

a million deaths upon you gay boy

[genshinmp3]

The Sanctification of Tao Dou from Azure Lantern, Jade Inkstone Yang Yang, Dou, Arcangelo Chen, HOYO-MiX

[ahollowgrave]

-- mourner.

[sebthesmoll]

Imagine a Tranquil mage in the Mourn Watch 🤔

That would be a interesting concept, since Tranquil mages are cut off from the Fade and their emotions

[greenbirdtrash]

...You guys probably shouldn't have trusted me with them skeletons. Just saying.

[wip]

[clarisse-doodles]

Cass + ballet 🩰 (ft. supportive siblings and good dad Bruce)

I love the idea of Cass enjoying dance. It's an outlet that allows her to express herself without words, and I think she would enjoy the highly technical aspect of ballet combined with its storytelling and emotional side. and as a former dancer I always have fun imagining my fav characters do ballet :)

[riting]

Bad Stars True West by Amanda Horowitz

DJ Hills on Bad Stars True West

Two images have stuck, like pin art, in my memory.

The first is Jess Barbagallo as Cricket, knife in hand, toaster between his legs. Despite the chord, dangling, obviously unplugged, I still flinched when Jess dropped the knife into the toaster. A fear leftover from childhood. There was a time when I was sure a toaster would kill me.

The other image is of an open briefcase, wet pasta spilling out into a bathtub. Wild and so earned it felt inevitable, this moment comes after a verbal tennis match in which Arne Gjelten performs both mother and father, voice and body contorting to fit an idea of gender that is as slippery as it is ever-present.

Bad Stars True West is a game—like the ones I hope we all once played with friends—where a train track-rug bears very real possibilities for travel. This game-nature allows danger to lurk so innocently at the edges of the play.

We are all in danger. We are all having fun. Anything can happen. Every moment is a surprise.

Boundaries are fuzzy in Amanda’s world. Images and words bend around us, reshaping themselves, beat by beat, into familiar things made unfamiliar.

Outside the gallery, Hollywood, too, feels even less tethered to reality than before. I’m still in child’s play mode. Each person I pass on the street has a little cowboy inside them. There could be spaghetti in anyone’s briefcase.

DJ Hills is a writer for the page, stage, and screen. They are the author of Leaving Earth (Split Rock Press) and their play TRUNK BRIEF JOCK THONG was shortlisted for the Yale Drama Series.

Stacy Dawson Stearns on Bad Stars True West

Sam Shephard holds a wiggly warm spot in my dirt. In the 80’s, I was a young teen and already starting to feel out of place in the creative boxes available to me. The play Cowboy Mouth showed up. Shepard and his unique troping of the American West plus asphalt and addiction tripped my switch so I tried it on, acting out scenes and making costume designs for characters I didn’t understand. I was just a kid and had no idea what addiction and love do to each other, no idea about the thin line between obliteration and inspiration, no idea how hard it is to stay free when you cross the threshold from childhood to the big A. But I learned that Sam and Patti Smith were lovers who had written and acted that play out together, so maybe the line between fake and real was a dotted line. Is it a coincidence that Patti Smith made her public debut as a poet at St. Marks Church on the same day I was born? Funny that I would debut artistically there, too, 20 years later performing on the 2nd floor at the Ontological Hysterical Theater. Dotted lines on road maps worn thin from thumbing connect disconnected folk to one another. Ghosts of the living and dead love churches that act as theaters.

I moved to NYC 6 years after my first exposure to Shepard and saw a flyer wheatpasted to a mailbox for a production of Cowboy Mouth. The theater was a basement in the East Village. Ghosts love basements, too. The mythical Lobster Man character was played by a guy with no clothes on- very unlike the Lobster Man costume design I had drawn years before, but much more honest and economical. I couldn’t believe how weird and normal the play was and how easy and hard it all seemed at the same time and how it made sense without making sense. I figured that Shepard was my uncle and these folks were my cousins: children of an America made of narcotics, disfunction, TV, and asphalt. It felt good to sit without lies for a while.

30 +years later I’m in a small gallery space in Hollywood seeing a play by a playwright named Amanda Horowitz that spawned somehow from Shepard’s True West. Ghosts are ok with galleries. Sam wrote True West 9 years after Cowboy Mouth- but with Uncle Sam it’s all just one play, really. Different acts. I came because I wanted to see Jess Barbagallo, who is a rock star of an actor just like Malcovitch or Shepard himself but braver, more vulnerable, tougher, softer. Shepard no longer lives in flesh- he is a ghost grampa who passed out and left the car keys on the dresser next to his drumsticks. He is sitting with me on these metal bleachers a block away from the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, fading in and out of vision depending on the angle of my glasses. On the stage, wild ones with their hearts pushing through their shirts are taking his car on a joyride into new territory: a wormy place of what we do when fucked up romance and being sad about wasted people is no longer enough. They run off the road in a town called Almost Hope, population 3.

Bad Stars True West is a beautiful evolution of Shepard Country where surviving the death of relationships is worth trying. Where the threat of being run over by a train is no worse than the threat of not being run over by a train because worms survive and thrive. Where mother and father are an actor who has noodled himself into a Mobius strip: self-contained yet unwieldy, feral yet capable of being studied. Jess is not the only star in this trio; Arne Gjelten and Sophia Cleary end up rocking my world, too.

On the sidewalk after the show, Jess and I talk for a minute about the ways we all put out for our own art, and how great it is when projects feel necessary and fullfilling. Part of me feels like saying “feels like old times,” but I don’t want to. Nostalgia sits too close to atrophy for me, so I choose gratitude for this hijacking of Sam’s direction, saying in my mind: “Thank you for acknowledging that we are way beyond the era of hopelessness as a statement. Thank you for not being snarky and guarded. Thank you for discussing platonic love and heartbreak.” In his day, Shepard did not write to celebrate abuse and codependence per se, but at some point in the rotation his plays stopped being exposed wounds and started becoming reliquaries. I am not saying these plays have lost their prescience, I am saying we have a hard time being present*. Sometimes textual legacies need not be revivals. Enter Horowitz et al on the dusty horizon of Shepard Country. Having eaten the old plays like worms in a corpse, they split in two and regenerate their own heads. They fill a bathtub with spaghetti, they lay down on the tracks. Mom becomes an artist but maybe she always was and we didn’t notice. As still night falls on Almost Hope, USA, we don’t know where this is going, but we feel like we just might get there.

*Say a little prayer for Buried Child to erupt through the floor of the Supreme Court soon in a showdown of the undead! We can dream, can’t we?

Stacy Dawson Stearns (she/they) believes that artists support societal well-being by modeling and instigating collective creative practice. A Bessie Award-winning artist known for her work with Big Dance Theater, David Neumann, Hal Hartley, and Blacklips Performance Cult, Stacy has choreographed for pop icons Debbie Harry and Ann Magnuson, House of Jackie, and The Vampire Cowboys, and has performed and presented in 10 countries in venues ranging from NYC’s Lincoln Center to Tblisi’s Teatr Griboyedov. Stacy develops new media with Channel B4 and uses her curation and programming to serve communities and further social justice, representation, and accessibility initiatives as a CultureHub LA 2023 Fellow.

Bad Stars True West by Amanda Horowitz was presented at STARS Gallery in Los Angeles on July 13-16, 2023. It was performed by Jess Barbagallo, Sophia Cleary, Arne Gjelton, and Beaux Mendes as the "plein-air-painter." All photos by Jonathan Chacón.

Amanda Horowitz is an interdisciplinary artist working between performance and sculpture. She writes and directs theater projects with experimental and collaborative methods. Past performance projects include: The Plumbing Tree (co-written & directed with Bully Fae Collins, 2018-19), Suddenly, This Summer (2019) and Bad Water True West (2022). She is currently a 2022-2024 Playwright-in-Resident at Rutgers University. 

[stardustdiiving]

See I get overwhelmingly genshin is designing its women to appeal to straight men but often I don’t feel this fanservice seeps into their character execution to the point where I feel it radiating from the screen in a way I can’t ignore . But sometimes they will just have like that one woman in the cast who I feel just gets subjected to such obvious fanservice so much it kills me

[blackswaneuroparedux]

There is no beauty in Music itself, the beauty is within the listener.

- Igor Stravinsky

“The idea of The Rite of Spring came to me while I was still composing Firebird,” Igor Stravinsky recalled, 45 years after the ballet’s first performance in 1913, in his book Conversations. “I had dreamed of a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death.” If Stravinsky is to be believed, this dream marked the beginning of a process that culminated in the premiere of one of the 20th century’s most important musical works.

Stravinsky’s music was meant to capture the spirit of the scenario, which he had outlined with the help of painter and ethnographer Nikolai Roerich and dancer and choreographer Mikhail Fokine during the spring and summer of 1910. Roerich had filled Stravinsky’s head with tales about all sorts of rituals from ancient Russia – divinations, sacrifices, dances, and so on – involving a variety of characters. The ballet that resulted revolves around the return of spring and the renewal of the earth through the sacrifice of a virgin. In his handwritten version of the story, Stravinsky described The Rite as “a musical choreographic work. It represents pagan Russia and is unified by a single idea: the mystery and the great surge of the creative power of spring….”

Stravinsky completed the score on 29 March 1913, and exactly two months later, the ballet premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where it caused the famous scandal that ushered in modern music. Nijinsky’s choreography and the wild, unchecked power of Stravinsky’s score were something wholly new. Stravinsky wrote for one of his largest orchestras ever in The Rite of Spring, and he used it with an assurance and confidence one would hardly expect from a composer just out of his twenties and with only two big successes - The Firebird and Petrushka - behind him.

But those two scores, for all of their individuality and accomplishment, did not seem like they were leading to The Rite of Spring. What Stravinsky did was totally unexpected.

The stage action during the ballet’s second half, leading up to the sacrifice, was enough to capture the attention of even that raucous audience at the first performance. Finally quiet, they could hear Stravinsky’s score and watch as Maria Piltz, the dancer who played the sacrificial victim, stood motionless as the ritual unfolded around her, gradually coming to life to perform her dance, with its angular contortions and tortured motions.

What actually happened on that scandalous night will always be a mystery to some degree, because the reports contradict each other. Was it the choreography that annoyed people, or the music? Were the police really called? Was it true that missiles were thrown, and challenges to a duel offered? Were the creators booed at the end, or cheered?

The dancer Dame Marie Rambert remembered that right at the beginning ‘a shout went up in the gallery: “Un docteur!" (Call a doctor!). Somebody else shouted louder, “Un dentiste!" (a dentist!)’. The aristocrat Harry Kessler said that people started to whisper and joke almost immediately. Stravinsky himself was so angry that he stormed out and went backstage to help the dancers keep time.

What is certain is that the audience was shocked - and with good reason. Stravinsky’s score for The Rite of Spring contradicted every rule about what music should be. The sounds are often deliberately harsh, right from opening Lithuanian folk melody, which is played by the bassoon in its highest, most uncomfortable range. The music was cacophonously loud, assaulting the ears with thunderous percussion and shrieking brass. Rhythmically it was complex in a completely unprecedented way. In the ‘Ritual of the Rival Tribes’ the music unfolds in two speeds at once, in a ratio of 3:2. And it makes lavish use of dissonance, i.e. combinations of notes which don’t make normal harmonic sense. ‘The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect,’ wrote one exasperated critic.

Then there was the dance, choreographed by Nijinsky. According to some observers this was what really caused the scandal at the first night. When the curtain rose the audience saw a row of ‘knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down’ as Stravinsky called them, who seemed to jerk rather than dance. Classical dance aspired upwards, in defiance of gravity, whereas Nijinsky’s dancers seemed pulled down to the earth. Their strange, stamping movements and awkward poses defied every canon of gracefulness.

Both the music and the dance of The Rite of Spring seemed to deny the possibility of human feelings, which for most people is what gives art its meaning. As Stravinsky put it, ‘there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring’. This is what separates it so decisively from Stravinsky’s hit of 1911, Petrushka. There we’re immersed in a human world, which exudes the very specific cultural ambience of Russia. It’s true that the main characters are puppets, rather than rounded human beings. But they have characters, even if they’re somewhat rudimentary, and at the end there’s even a suggestion that Petrushka might have a soul.

* Pina Bausch's interpretation of Stravinksy's Rite. A masterpiece of modern dance.

[copia]

can't listen to twenties ever again without picturing in hd quality like i'm back in the cinema that move papa does on the final line

[duskspring]

HIGH QUALITY GHOUL FOOTAGE!

WE’RE GETTING HIGH QUALITY GHOUL FOOTAGE!!!

[illarian-rambling]

I love it when Astra is making mad lovey eyes at Mashal and he manages to say the stupidest possible thing in the moment and her heart melts even more

[jelzorz]

thinking about Opeli and Hestia/Vesta again and if there is one thing I am absolutely dead certain about, it's this