ROBERT LEPAGE: LIPSYNCH/BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC

Robert Lepage's eight and a half hour Lipsynch running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this Fall is searing and funny.  Drawing upon formal elements very resonant of Arianne Mnouchkine's piece earlier this year, Lepage deploys vignettes, frames of storytelling, multiple interlocking narrative structures, mobile sets, flashbacks, mother and child themes, and the return to childhood as an overarching preoccupation.  There is startling similarity to both Lepage and Mnouchkine's shows this year: both open with the death of the mother, and the search for her story.  In Lepage's epic journey, the audience is made to commit to a theater of endurance.  You have to stay with the text's intricate flows to comprehend the confluence of random lives connected by six degrees of seperation.  In Lipsynch, the exquisite investigation of the structure of voice, speech, intonation, pitch, timbre, scale, magnitude and silence is a thrill to watch.  One is drawn into the mechanics of speech experimentation, led into the neural workings of the brain, while also being drawn deeper into the unresolved death and violence of crossed lives.  Dream like sequences transport the audience to the galactical spheres of Lepage's genius, while the excessive irony about filmmaking and its workings, distracted from the intensity of the long immersion into the pathways of memory and forgetting.

CHRISTOPHER STREET PIER/HARMATTAN THEATER/OCT.2

Harmattan Theater performed Mannahatta Yatra today at Christopher Street Pier. Marking Gandhi's birthday, Harmattan Theater performed a walking journey from Christopher Street Pier to the South of Hudson River Park along the waterfront. Sea Salt, Hudson River water, the Ekhtara and Cymbals were the props of the nomadic theater piece. The philosophical imperative behind Mannahatta Yatra is the idea of walking as a means of reclaiming territory. Walking along the 2009 Manhattan waterline is a way of citing the 1609 waterline, which is now hidden by landfill. The use of salt is to both signify the importance of salt in anti-colonial struggles, of which Mannahatta is implicated, as well as the symbolic shift away from the colonial references of the Dutch in Manhattan. The Dutch East India Company, of which much celebration was invoked in September 2009, traded in salt along with other spices, in their colonial outposts. Salt is a metaphor for cleansing, transformation, symbolic rerouting. The principles of Tantric Trance performance as well as the physical practice of endurance in Marina Abramovic's work were inspirations for this environmental performance. The performers in this hour long performance comprised of: James Cascaito, Carole Nicoli-Smith, Victor Marshall, Ariel, Jose de Jesus, Dil and May Joseph. The piece was choreographed and directed by May Joseph.