On Sunday October 4th, the wall was visited by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who also agreed to sit for an interview with me during the on-air live broadcast on Radio Free Brooklyn I was doing at the site at the time of his arrival.

In the overnight hours of October 7-8, the Wall of Lies was vandalized with Pro-Trump and white supremacist slogans, including “Vote Trump or Die” and “Stand Back and Stand By.” The latter was a phrase, directed at the white supremacist group Proud Boys, uttered by Donald Trump during the first 2020 presidential debate, and subsequently adopted by the group as a rallying cry. Rather than backing down, Phil and I launched a gofundme campaign to have the wall resurrected.

We raised enough money to create a second wall 100 feet long—twice as long as the original—at the corner of Lafayette and Grand Streets in lower Manhattan.

The post Wall of Lies first appeared on Tom Tenney.

The book is available for purchase on Amazon.com, but you can read my chapter below, or download it as a pdf.

The post Crises of Meaning in Communities of Creative Appropriation – A Case Study of the 2010 RE/Mixed Media Festival first appeared on Tom Tenney.

In 1961, Ellen Stewart revolutionized the New York performance scene when she opened Café La MaMa in the basement of an East Ninth Street tenement. The African-American fashion designer-cum-impresario imagined the new space as an alternative to popular Off-Off Broadway venues like Caffe Cino and the Gaslight — small spaces that were relics of, and still very much associated with the Beat coffeehouse scene.

Those early venues had been created with a particular ambiance and with a specific audience in mind. Stewart’s innovation was to create a truly neutral performance venue to serve as a tabula rasa for emerging playwrights, allowing them to create new work on their own terms. La MaMa was truly a “black box” — a theatrical architecture that inspired future generations of underground performance and spawned what might be called a micro-theatre movement in the East Village and the Lower East Side that continues to this day. But the black box wasn’t the only experimental innovation happening in the 1960s New York art world.

Early in that decade, ideas driving the convergence of art with cybernetic and computer technology, being conducted in Europe by Roy Ascott and others, reached the United States. In 1966, American composer and sound-art pioneer Max Neuhaus teamed up with NYC radio station WBAI to create “Public Supply” — an experiment in two-way aural public space in which listeners could contribute to a composition in real time by phoning into the station and having their voices electronically transformed into components of a musical composition. The project is considered one of the first successful artistic collaborations over an electronic network in real-time. The same year, renowned abstract expressionist Robert Rauschenberg met an engineer from Bell Telephone Lab named Billy Klüver. Together, they launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), with the aim of connecting artists and technologists to launch experimental explorations into the intersection of art and technology.

Meanwhile, Ellen Stewart connected La MaMa with theatrical communities worldwide and built a global circuit of independent theatrical practitioners. Networking, collaboration, and technology were all emerging into the cultural zeitgeist — blending, morphing, and generating new art forms and schools of thought.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that in 2009, La MaMa launched CultureHub — its own art and technology incubator, in partnership with Korea’s Seoul Institute of the Arts. The collaboration is dedicated not only to blending technology with performance but also to using tech as a tool to continue the theatre’s long tradition of connecting cultures around the world. The new laboratory’s stated mission is to provide “a shared space for artists to collaborate, share ideas, and create interdisciplinary works of art that explore emerging mediums and technologies.” For the past four years, they have been doing just that. In addition to presenting art/tech hybrids in their wired black box studio on Great Jones Street, CultureHub is equally invested in youth media and educational initiatives, conducting workshops for students, teens, and young artists. Virtualab, one of its flagship programs, connects students and professional artists via distance learning.

One of the core technologies utilized by CultureHub specifically for this purpose is something called telepresence, which might be thought of as a hyper-customized version of teleconferencing. As opposed to participants sitting around a table and projecting to a single screen, telepresence uses live video to build virtual environments, utilizing multi-camera viewpoints and projecting video to an entire wall, creating an atmosphere of virtual “liveness.”

CultureHub Artistic Director Billy Clark says that by incorporating this technology on a larger scale and using multiple cameras, you can “get to a certain level of abstractly feeling like you’re there.” CultureHub has already implemented this technology for several projects, including workshops conducted with students at their partner organization in Korea and a virtual spoken word workshop connecting youth from New Orleans and New York City in collaboration with the Hip Hop Re:Education Project (reeducate.org). The latter experiment was so successful that, after the workshop, the students in Louisiana raised their own money to travel to New York to meet their “classmates” in person.

“It’s never going to be entirely like being physically present,” said CultureHub Managing Director Anna Hayman, “but you do make eye contact, you do hear people breathe.” She also pointed out that the technology seems to increase the engagement of its participants, particularly kids. “They feel like they’re being treated to something special. It’s actually more engaging than a conventional classroom where they’re just sitting there. Kids forge real relationships in that environment.”

Though the young organization represents an exciting new direction for La MaMa, CultureHub recognizes its place in a continuum of artists working with technology — and acknowledges that, while the work they create and support is innovative, it also builds on decades of experimentation by prior artists. Clark concurs, noting, “The ideas aren’t that new. Nam Jun Paik was doing this in the late 70s and early 80s. But now the technology is more ubiquitous, it’s cheaper. High-speed Internet is on all the time.”

That ubiquity has necessitated a cultural space for artists — some of whom have never used technology in their work — to experiment with tech in a low-risk environment. “We’re trying to support artists in their very early stages of development,” Clark said. “We want to give them a space where they have access to technology and can just try something, like a sketch. Some might get developed, and others end up as more of a one-off. It’s a learning experience.”

Having worked on a project-to-project basis since its inception, CultureHub is borrowing a page from the theatrical establishment by launching its first-ever “season” of technologically based works (running until the end of the year). The centerpiece of that season is RE/FEST — a three-day festival of mediated performance, interactive installations, and talks taking place from November 29-December 1 at CultureHub’s Great Jones Street studio.

RE/FEST kicks off on Friday night with an evening of performance curated in collaboration with the annual RE/Mixed Media Festival (which returns in April 2014 at The New School). In addition to performances by Adriano Clemente and David Commander, Friday’s kickoff event will feature a piece called the “Long Table” — a discursive art form pioneered by performance artist Lois Weaver that begins with eight artists seated at a table discussing a topic provided by the curators. As the conversation progresses, audience members are invited to come to the table and add their voices to the discussion. They may even ask for one of the participants’ seats if the table happens to be full.

Saturday and Sunday will continue with work by, Culture Hub says in a press release, revealing “how new technologies are changing performance practices, how networked screens and communications technologies are changing the way artists collaborate and create, what the exhibition/performance venue of tomorrow might look like, and how the nature of storytelling is becoming cross-media, multi-modal, and multi-locational.” Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, will also be on hand to present work he’s been developing with the Seoul Institute which, according to Hayman, will involve “new hardware and software and have a performative element.”

The partnership with RE/Mixed Media Festival in curating the first night of RE/FEST demonstrates the collaborative ethos that CultureHub has inherited from La MaMa. “So often in the not-for-profit world, you’re forced to have your head down,” Clark said, “you don’t have enough resources, you’re always too busy, you’re trying to scramble. But many of us are scrambling in the same direction without taking the time to look up and say, ‘Hey, they’re doing something similar. What if we worked together?’ We certainly can’t solve that whole problem, but the spirit is one of collaboration.”

In recent years, New York’s micro-theatre movement, which was activated by Ellen Stewart’s “black box,” has foundered in the wake of higher rents and aggressive real estate development. Several storefront theaters that flourished in the Lower East Side in the 90s — Surf Reality, Todo Con Nada, and Collective Unconscious, to name just a few — have disappeared. But the loss of physical space doesn’t necessarily mean that those artists have stopped working. Surf Reality has resurfaced as a producing entity that dabbles in the technological, and Collective Unconscious recently collaborated with Three Legged Dog to produce a 3D cinematic adaptation of their 1999 theatrical experiment, “Charlie Victor Romeo,” a film that was lauded at Sundance and other festivals throughout the country. Other organizations exploring the intersection of art and technology, such as Eyebeam and IMC Lab + Gallery, have developed performative works with independent artists.

Perhaps for the performance community, the current circumstance isn’t one of loss but one of transition — one that may require we revisit the ideals of community and collaboration embraced by Ellen Stewart. CultureHub claims they are “transforming the black box for the new century.” Their MaMa would be proud.

The post The new black box has global reach first appeared on Tom Tenney.

Parody, by definition, speaks with two voices – that of the parodist, and that of its target – the former always subverting the latter by an act of redirecting the text from its original context to one more compromising. It implores us to consider its subject through a different lens, one that reframes it in a way that appeals to our common sense and critical judgment. The Ultimate Stimulus, Felipe Ossa’s offering in this year’s NY International Fringe Festival does just that, skewering our contemporary obsession with new “genius” ideas, as presented in the quintessential new-age-genius forum, the TED talk. Ossa pokes fun not just at the ideas themselves, but at all the tropes that we have come to associate with their presentation – the animated bubble charts, the tech-savvy terminology, the reliance on “network models” and, of course, the gratuitous acronyms and buzzwords.

The “Ultimate Stimulus” presentation is given by “renegade economist” Amanda McCloud (Tanya O’Debra) a 21st century thought-leader who has a plan to correct America’s most pressing problem, income inequality. Equipped with an arsenal of convoluted charts and statistics, McCloud kicks off the talk with an assessment of America’s income divide, which is so out of control that it “beats the height of excess during the roaring twenties.” In fact, she asserts, “This is pre-revolutionary France.” This leads McCloud to her revolutionary solution, “a system of culturally-sanctioned master and concubine relationships.” Concubinage, as McCloud calls it, is a quasi-feudal system of sexual patronage in which a person in financial need (cliebkin) may enter into a contract with a member of the elite super-rich (vole) as his or her sexual plaything. McCloud then utilizes the remainder of her presentation to show us how this would work from an economic perspective, walking us through a series of hilarious hypothetical situations with “typical” people. In one case, a down-and-out married restaurant cook named Manuel, meets his sexual mentor via a matchmaking website called “Equal Hearts” where he catches the fancy of none other than Christy Walton, the widow of Walmart founder John Walton, one of the ten richest women in the world. After some digital foreplay on the site, Christy and Manuel enter into a 5-year TTM (Two-Tiered Marriage) and Manuel moves his wife and 2 kids into a cliebkin village on the Walton estate.

Tanya O’Debra is brilliantly funny as McCloud, not flagging for a moment in her 45-minute monologue, and burns through Ossa’s Swiftian script headlong, oozing yuppie smarminess, and punching every comedic moment while maintaining utter believability. She perfectly embodies the persona of the 30-something, modern professional female, complete with a baby-bump that she subtly caresses whenever she mentions the nourishing cliebkin/vole relationship.

But to say this is a one-woman show is to ignore the fact that what we’re really watching is a duet between Ms. O’Debra and her co-star, the 12-foot projection screen that looms behind her, providing the punch lines to many of the show’s funniest moments. Like Stephen Colbert’s “The Word,” we’re watching postmodern parody in action, the anthropomorphizing of technology to the point that the machine becomes the foil of a vaudevillian comedy routine. The slides are such an integral part of the text, in fact, that they even provide the subtitles as O’Debra performs Manuel’s hypothetical dialog with his hypothetical wife – in Spanish. Taking on the task of maintaining a dynamic, comic dialog with an inanimate object would be a challenge to any actor, but under the competent direction of Sara Wolkowitz, O’Debra strikes the perfect balance between taking stage and giving focus to the slides. If we linger a bit longer than we should on a visual, it’s due only to the sheer difference in size between the enormous projection and the comparatively diminutive actress – and perhaps, just a little, to our collective addiction to gazing upon the electronic oracle. Fortunately, O’Debra has enough charisma and skill as an actor to pull our attention right back to her when needed.

Still, for all its sharp writing, energy and humor, I found myself craving a narrative. I wanted this show to take me on a journey, to arrive somewhere different than where it started, and I’m not sure we ever got there. Perhaps we’re not meant to – perhaps the ultimate vindication of Mr. Ossa’s script is that it mirrors its subject so well that the line between theatre and TED talk, between satire and subject, is indelibly blurred. I would love to see this work performed at an actual TED event, as a public intervention, as comedian Sam Hyde did at Drexel University last year. After all, one could say that TED talks themselves never get anywhere, that they are simply an exercise in narcissism, an ego-stroke for the modern professional, allowing anyone to be an “thought leader.” And at the end of the day, how many of those “revolutionary” ideas do we embrace, how many actually cause paradigmatic shifts, how many change the world? Exactly. Maybe that’s the point.

The Ultimate Stimulus. Saturday August 23 at 3PM. Celebration of Whimsey (21a Clinton Street, NYC). Ends Saturday, August 23rd. http://www.fringenyc.org

The post The Ultimate Stimulus at Fringe NYC first appeared on Tom Tenney.

New York is a city that recycles itself, and those who have lived here long enough have become accustomed to the life cycles of landscapes, buildings, businesses, and cultural institutions.  New York is in a constant state of metamorphosis; it’s just how this city rolls, and we either roll right along with it or we leave. As we get older, though, we’re occasionally haunted by a nostalgia for a time that seemed somehow “better,” a time when the city delivered exactly what we expected of it, and it’s just these moments that give us pause to reflect on exactly what our expectations are, and how they may have changed. Radical Vaudeville, Surf Reality’s monthly burlesque/variety shows at the Kraine Theatre feels reflective like that, like a ghost that evinces an intangible vital energy of another time still lingering in the ether.

From 1993-2003, Surf Reality existed as a 2nd floor performance loft on the Lower East Side, and was considered by many to be one of the epicenters of the downtown alternative performance scene. The space was a ramshackle black box that made one feel more like they were crashing a secret kegger in Jeff Spicoli’s garage than attending a night of theatre. Indeed, what came to be called the Art Star scene was an endless party of creative folks of all ages, smearing their DIY blood and guts all over downtown Manhattan. Whether producing dirty sketch shows, performing as perverted priests or gay pimps, or holding proms and pageants, the decade between 1995-2005 was a movable feast of the kind of lurid anarchy that couldn’t have existed anywhere but the LES. Any “respectable” joint would’ve 86’d these punks and barred them for life. But the party sustained these artists, and the bawdiness wasn’t merely juvenile prurience, but an alternative burlesque that made a lot of sense for the times.

 The New York that many of the LES art stars had migrated to in 80’s and early 90’s was a city that promised a sobering shot of reality. It was a New York of drug dealers in the park, of ubiquitous danger and squats and tranny bars and crack dens. It was Lou Reed’s New York, and those artists didn’t come here to “make it,” they came here to live it. When Giuliani came along in 1994, ushering in an era of “quality of life” campaigns, of raids on porn theaters and strip joints, of the homeless and other undesirables being swept under the rug or out of the city entirely – burlesque became an imperative form of cultural critique. Taking off your clothes was an act of political defiance.

Radical Vaudeville does its best to revive the energy of that time, and comes about as close as one could hope. The 90-minutes of rapid-fire music, burlesque, and sketch comedy delighted the audience, which was a slightly older, more restrained crowd than those that partook of the nightly mayhem at Surf Reality, and the Kraine theatre lacks the transient feel of the old venue. But still, as variety shows go in NYC, you won’t find better than this. The performers, running the gamut from puppeteers and poets to full-frontal performance/burlesque artists, might not seem as “radical,” per se, as they might have been considered 10 years ago, but are now professionals with finely polished sets, and the sexual content feels less defiant and contains a self-consciousness that acknowledges that times have changed. The evening was expertly punctuated with interstitial material by the hostess Gabrielle St. Eve and her sidekick Amanda, a grotesquely made-up and scantily clad “burlesque clown” who managed to turn cleaning up in between acts into sublimely titillating performance art.

 But it was the final act of the evening, an improvised participatory set by Fritz Donnelly, that threw open the gates of hell and let those impetuous ghosts of the past come rushing in. Unfiltered, rude and reckless, Donnelly wrangled the entire house into a chaotic, Living Theatre-esque communion, creating a writhing mass of “energy” with the audience – from the back of the house to those who had been dragged onstage – as they chanted self-assigned spirit names. The experience was reminiscent of performance artist Michael Portnoy (of ‘Soy Bomb’ fame) and as the audience thrashed with ecstasy, and the artist, of course, removed his several layers of clothing, the spirit of Surf filled the room.

 Maybe, I thought, the party still has a few stubborn drunks who refuse to leave.

Radical Vaudeville. Every last Thursday of the month at 10:30 PM at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4th Street, NYC). Ongoing. http://www.radicalvaudeville.com

The post Radical Vaudeville: Surf Reality is Still Making Waves first appeared on Tom Tenney.

The Brick Theater produces a lot of festivals – it’s kind of their thing.  But festivals at the Williamsburg experimental venue aren’t your garden-variety observance of artist or genre; they’ve become the theatre’s way of exploring aesthetic and cultural intersections.  Sure, some of the dozens of festivals produced during the theatre’s first decade have had a chimerical bent (The Antidepressant Festival comes to mind), but just as often they examine critical connections between live theatre and other arts or performative elements.  Their annual Game Play festivals, for example, present works that probe the relationship between performance and video gaming.  Others, like the Comic Book Theatre Festival, bring divergent artistic forms to the theatrical table.  It’s what Artistic Director Michael Gardner calls “hybrid theatre,” and it makes one wonder what took them so long to come around to sound design.  But come around they did, and for two weeks starting June 6^th, the Brick Theater will present sound scape: a festival of 12 productions that celebrates the sound designer as a driving creative force.

“‘I’m a huge fan of sound design,” Gardner said,  “It’s an unsung art form, and needed a spotlight. In this festival, the sound designer is the primary artist, and sound design, typically in the background in most theatrical shows, is foregrounded.”

While sound and theatre aren’t exactly incongruous forms – sound, of course, is an integral element in theatre – the aural is normally relegated to the role of servile valet to the mighty image, and this is precisely what makes it cry out for a festival of its own.

Scanning the roster of performances, it’s hard to miss the fact that over half the productions in sound scape are based on past works – a fact that is thrilling to Gardner, who also curated the festival. “There’s a lot of classic text in there, and it spans a wide swathe of time,” he said. “You’ve got Homer, Dante, Beckett, and Virginia Woolf.  It wasn’t intentional, it’s just how it fell out.”

One of the most intriguing of these is a performance of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 recording, I Am Sitting in a Room.  A classic among aficionados of avant-garde composition, Lucier’s piece is as much a scientific experiment as it is a work of art.  In the original, Lucier recorded himself speaking into a tape recorder in an isolated room.  The tape was then rewound, played back, and re-recorded onto a second machine.  This process repeated through several generations, each producing resonant frequencies which harmonized with each other until the artist’s voice was obliterated, and all that remained were reverberating tones.  This was groundbreaking stuff in 1969, and sound designer Ryan Holsopple’s revival as a concert-style performance designed using 2013 technology (the multimedia program Max/MSP) may be considered a scientific experiment in its own right. Holsopple will employ the Brick’s new 5.2 surround sound system, but his use of modern tech is aimed towards maintaining the original piece’s simplicity.  “It’s very stripped down and simple at its core,” he explained, adding that a public performance allows the possibility of the audience becoming part of the composition itself, in the tradition of John Cage.  “If people get up to go to the bathroom, cough, move around, or if a siren goes by, every sound becomes a part of it because the room is constantly being recorded.”

Chris Chappell also plans on exploiting the Brick’s new sound system to the fullest. His piece, ELE↓↑TOR, was developed specifically for the kind of theatrical spacialization that a surround system can provide.  The play takes place in an elevator in the Empire State Building slowly ascending through a sonic spectrum on its way to the 80^th floor.  Elevators are awkward and uncomfortable, and Chappell sculpts his sound to evoke this feeling in the audience. “We’re trying to create a feeling of being pushed into the confinement of a closed space,” he explained. Chappell sites 2 disparate sonic inspirations for the piece – elevator music, and the “noise instruments” developed the Futurist Luigi Russolo a century ago.  He views the former as “a really empty kind of music, with a flattening quality that dampens the sharper emotions” – a perfect soundtrack to the social awkwardness of elevators.  Russolo’s influence is a bit more opaque, with pounding, electrical zapping, and the sounds of “unfathomable technology” providing a counterpoint to the corporate, anxiety-mitigating quality of elevator music. Chappell says this theatrical noise “is not about soothing the modern man, it’s very loud and threatening and unpredictable.”

Another interesting sonic play on the past is Commotion Collage, which appropriates elements from the Dadaist simultaneous poem – a form pioneered in 1916 by Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire, in which multiple voices and other sounds combine in a singular sonic composition.  Director Roger Nasser’s appropriation liberates the original form from of its historic cultural context, and yokes it into service as a building block for a more contemporary version of the acoustic collage.  “I’m going to take fragments of the original poems and weave them throughout, as part of the background,” he explained, but he’ll also include contemporary sounds, such as answering machine messages, white noise, and a riff from the Family Ties theme song – artifacts from an electronic culture that didn’t yet exist in 1916.

Given the number of ways the festival’s producers are demonstrating that a focus on sound can spur such theatrical innovation, it’s unlikely that sound scape will be merely a one-off festival, and may even become a staple of the Brick’s annual offerings.  “I like the idea that theatre began as an auditory experience,” Gardner said, “Today, one thinks of going to see a play, but we want to remind the audience that they’re there to listen.  I hope this is an opportunity for audiences to reinterpret what the stage is to them, and to re-imagine what a theatre-going experience can be.”

The post Brick Up Your Ears first appeared on Tom Tenney.

In a 1913 letter to the composer Francesco Balilla Pratella, Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo declared, “The variety of noises is infinite…today we have perhaps a thousand different machines, and can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.” This letter, which became a known as “The Art of Noises,” advocated a new sonic vocabulary through the imitation of machines and became one of the most important manifestos in the history of sound.

As technological advances at the turn of the century paved the way for a revolution in mass media, they also created new possibilities for individual expression. By mid-century, the computer had opened new sonic territory by permitting unprecedented extension of sounds and scales, pushing the boundaries of music beyond what the Futurists ever imagined. In 1983, seventy years after Russolo’s letter, a British avant-garde electronic group that called itself The Art of Noise (after the manifesto) released a song that mixed sampled sounds of car engines and industrial machinery with time-warped drum beats and orchestral stabs. This song would become one of the most influential instrumentals in the world of hip-hop, sampled by artists from X-Clan to Marky Mark. The name of that song was “Beat Box.” A year later, an 18-year-old rapper from Harlem by the name of Doug E. Fresh pioneered the art of imitating electronic drum machines using only his voice — the art of “beatboxing” was born, and the verity of Russolo’s vision was, once again, affirmed.

As do all musical genres, beatboxing has evolved in the intervening three decades, spawning a variety of techniques, including the “human turntable,” a style invented by Wise of the group Stetsasonic, and “mouth drumming” developed by Wes Carroll. From May 24-26, the Third Annual American Human Beatbox Festival at LaMaMa Theatre will give New Yorkers the opportunity to sample some of the most eclectic beatboxing styles by artists who make percussive rhythms with the human voice.

Now in its third year, this three day exhibition of performances, workshops and film kicks off on Friday night with a battle, not of beatboxers, but beatrhymers, performers who beatbox and rhyme at the same time. Beatrhyming was developed and popularized by the festival’s curator, Kid Lucky, who coined the term, and who characterizes the new style as one that allows the performer to move beyond simply providing a beat. Beatrhyming adds language – poetry, rap, song, spoken word – to the vocal effects, freeing the piece to take off in new directions. “Beatboxers listen to the beat,” Lucky explains, “Emcees listen to the words. With beatrhyming we listen to the whole concept of the song.” Kid Lucky isn’t the first to beatrhyme, and readily acknowledges those who went before him, like Biz Markie, Darren Robinson of the Fat Boys, and Rahzel of the Roots, who astonished hip-hop audiences by beatboxing and singing the chorus simultaneously on “If Your Mother Only Knew.”

For the most part, however, Lucky has seen beatboxers use beatrhyming mainly as a musical machination, a trick for cheap applause. Lucky, who began beatrhyming in the mid 90’s, saw the potential to elevate the style into an art form in its own right. “People used beatrhyming as a trick, or a gimmick,” he says, “I saw it as something much more than that. I saw the possibilities to take the concept and push it beyond the boundaries of what anybody else is doing. That’s how you move from gimmick to art.” He’s also quick to point out that beatrhyming doesn’t necessarily mean rapping, but can include a number of vocal styles including singing and spoken word.

When LaMama approached Kid Lucky to curate the first beatboxing festival in 2010, he saw an opportunity to challenge traditional notions of beatboxing, and bring his innovations to a wider audience who may still maintain rigid definitions of beatboxing as a human emulation of technology. While he recognizes the cultural roots of beatboxing as “man-imitating-machine,” Lucky sees beatrhyming as an opportunity to reintroduce the human element, or “soul,” back into the art. “Beatboxing, which began by imitating the Roland 808 drum machine, is more concerned with the electronic aspect,” he explains, “but as beatboxing moves further, it emphasizes the soul and the feeling as opposed to the technical aspect of it.”

For Kid Lucky, the next step in the advancement of beatrhyming is handing his skills down to a new generation of performers. He teaches weekly beatrhyming workshops at Midtown New York’s famous Funkadelic Studios, and plans to develop them into a school of what he calls “Mixed Vocal Arts” — an institution that will teach not only his signature style, but also an entire array of vocal techniques including humming, whistling, scatting, vocal sound effects, singing, spoken word, yodeling, rapping, and Tuvan throat singing. The concept of the school was born of Lucky’s frustration with the limited number of styles represented in universities and professional training schools. Scat singing, for example, a uniquely American form of jazz vocalization popularized by Ella Fitzgerald in the 1950’s, isn’t taught at most universities. “With scatting, Ella Fitzgerald became a whole entire instrument right there, and people went crazy,” Lucky said. “Why would you stop doing that? Why would you stop pushing that type of situation forward?”

Those who wish to experience this “pushing forward” in person should check out the beatrhyming battle on May 24th, where the performers will include: D-Cross, Kid Lucky, Kaila, Graffiti, Richard, Esalaah, Kenny Urban, Mandibul, Menyu, and Baba Israel. Saturday morning, bring your baby beatboxers to the Kids Beatbox Workshop, and then come back for the emcee/beatboxer team battles at 10. Sunday’s offerings include Nos States, a documentary about French boxer, Priceps, followed by a tribute to the late Steve Ben Israel. It’ll be a unique celebration of music, beats, words, and the art of human noise.

The post Rhyme Machine first appeared on Tom Tenney.

Before we look at the ways in which the Situationists appropriated and incorporated Huizinga’s theory of play into their practices, it’s important to first examine how, exactly, Huizinga defined play and its role in our culture. This can be particularly difficult to nail down because, as Francis Hearn notes, “play refers not to a set of specific activities, but to a context, a set of principles around which personal and collective experience is meaningfully engaged” (Hearn 1977, 150). Still, in the first chapter of Homo Ludens, Huizinga is quite clear about certain characteristics that a context or principle must have in order to be considered play. First, he asserts that play is fun. He also points out that several languages (including French) have no word that translates exactly to ‘fun’ but that nonetheless, it is precisely “this fun element that characterizes the essence of play.” However, despite this defining characteristic, he also states that, for some, it is also a quite serious pursuit. It is bounded by rules, and something that must be quite consciously approached. Another characteristic that is essential to play is that it is irrational and lies beyond morality. He tells us that “play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil. Although it is a non-material activity, it has no moral function” (1980, 3-6).

Finally, a primary characteristic of play, and the one that is most appropriate to a discussion of the Situationists, is that play is free, that it is, in fact, synonymous with freedom itself. Play, Huizinga says, stands outside of the ordinary, outside “real life” (1980, 8). He goes on to say that the world of play is an aesthetic parallel world, which, through use of language and other playful activities, allows man to elevate things into a higher spiritual domain. In this way, play is endowed with an aesthetic quality that allows him to create “a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature” (1980, 4) Play, he says later, “creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary [emphasis added], a limited perfection” (1980, 10). Play may anticipate an ideal social order (Smith 2005, 424) but it stands apart from that order, and should not be confused with it.

In my opinion, it is precisely in this distinction between play and “real life” that the SI loses much of the essence of Huizinga’s argument. As we’ll see, their goal is to create play as real life, as a way of transforming the everyday into a continual play that is seamlessly integrated with quotidian activities, not as something that stands apart.

Perhaps the concept of play extracted from Homo Ludens that was most meaningful to the SI’s theories and practices was that of play being equal to freedom. In ‘New Babylon,’ Constant Nieuwenhuys wrote that “the liberation of man’s ludic potential is directly linked to his liberation as a social being” (1957). The ability to play was an ability that Constant, Debord, and other theorists of the SI felt had been lost, and that the fact that “man has forgotten how to play” (Trocchi 1963) was directly attributed to his passivity in the face of the spectacle. The SI saw the social functions associated with play as “decaying relics” (Debord 1958a) and that these play functions are essential to the ontological freedom of the human being. In order to address this, they proposed that Homo Ludens become itself a “way of life” that would respond to this human need for play, as well as “for adventure, for mobility, as well as the conditions that facilitate the free creation of his own life” (Nieuwenhuys 1957).  In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raol Vaneigem discusses this playful instinct at length, asserting that it must be liberated from its “imprisonment in the categories of permitted games [which] leaves no place for the authentic game of playing with each moment of daily life” (Vaneigem 1965). It is precisely this reading of Homo Ludens as play providing a liberation of each moment of “real life” that I believe constitutes a fundamental misreading of the text. Early in the book, Huizinga is quite clear about his theory that play stands outside of daily life in both space and time, has the limitations of both, and in this way is able to construct its own meaning (Huizinga 1980, 9). In her excellent homage to Constant, Jan Bryant also concedes that this was a problem for the Situationists. She says,

“There was a problem for [the Situationists] in the way the play-mood was thought to be fragile and the way it sat in a separate sphere to the everyday. Huizinga’s thesis perpetuated the division of life in contemporary society, which the Situationists were focused on eradicating. Instead, for the Situationists, play was to flow spontaneously from the desires of each individual so that finally there would be no sense of boredom and no rupture between moments of play and non-play. Rather play and the everyday would move from one to the other in such a way that their separateness would finally disappear in a rich and poetic stream.” (Bryant 2006)

Another way in which I perceive the SI to have misinterpreted Homo Ludens is in the way they deny competition as an important aspect of play. For example, in ‘A Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play,’ Debord condemns the element of competition as a “manifestation of the tension between individuals for the appropriation of goods” (Debord 1958a). This may not be so much a misreading as it is a case of the SI cherry-picking those parts of Huizinga’s theory that suited their agenda. Huizinga’s theory states, fairly explicitly, that competition is part and parcel of play, in particular those romantic aspects that were so attractive to the SI. He says “virtue, honor, nobility and glory fall at the outset within the field of competition, which is that of play” (Huizinga 1980, 64)

Ultimately, Debord and the SI saw the concept of play as having been co-opted by consumer culture, and absorbed by the spectacle. This bastardization of play, they thought, had obviated the dichotomy of work/leisure (Andreotti 2000, 41), turning it into nothing more than amusement that carried the same forms that dominate the working life, and used only to alleviate the tensions created by a mechanized culture (Trocchi 1963; Hearn 1977, 155-156). “Only creativity is spontaneously rich,” Vaneigem wrote in The Revolution of Everyday Life, “it is not from productivity that a full life is to be expected” (1965). Similarly, Debord wrote that play was in danger of being eliminated altogether by functionalism, which he described as “an inevitable expression of technological advance,” (Debord 1958c) even though Constant would later advocate technology as a key component of his new society, as we’ll see.

Whether these problems are a result of a misreading of the text or simply an adaptation to suit the SI’s agenda, there are nonetheless several ways in which Huizinga’s theory of play was effectively utilized by the SI as a revolutionary praxis. Whether or not play is used to transform the “real world” as the SI wanted – or create an alternate, poetic one as Huizinga suggests, it seems as though the egalitarianism and freedom experienced in play have the power to challenge established forms and form a critique that may be interpreted as active resistance (Hearn 1977, 152). In the next sections, I will look at several of the practices utilized by the SI, and the ways in which they utilize the concept of play to advance their utopian vision of a world in which each individual is able to use the power of play to “create a truly passionate life” (Vaneigem 1965).

Dérive

Dérive is the situationist practice that fits most neatly into both Huizinga’s concept of play, and the situationist romantic ideal of play as a practice of adventure and discovery – the “playing at being heroes and warriors” (Andreotti 2000, 39-45). In the first International Situationniste, Debord defined the dérive as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances,” (1958b) an action that involved “playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects” (1958d). It was an undertaking performed in the spirit of play, and aligned with Huizinga’s concept of play in several ways, not the least of which was the temporalization of a defined space. Huizinga wrote, “all play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand”, creating a separate temporary world within the “ordinary” one (1980, 10). Although the dérive allowed the player to create this playspace as she went along, it nonetheless adheres to Huizinga’s concept. Homo Ludens also describes 2 basic aspects of play “in the higher forms” – play as contest and play as representation. It is the second that is most appropriate to a discussion of the dérive. To Huizinga, display connotes a type of performance, a “stepping out of common reality into a higher order […] making an image of something different, something more beautiful, or more sublime, or more dangerous than what he usually is” (1980, 13-14). The dérive did just that, it was an exercise in playfully creating alternative modes of representation. Instead of passively accepting the traditional map, i.e. the social/political/economic boundaries and divisions created by the state – which to the SI implied an acceptance of its cultural domination – the dérive allowed one to chart the city based on affective criteria: ambience and mood, aesthetic, and a personal sense of play. In this way the dérive became a revolutionary praxis that began with liberating the playful spirit and engendering a sense of adventure. In fact, Vaneigem describes the dérive almost entirely in the language of play, saying that it “appropriates mankind’s ancient love of mazes, the love of getting lost solely in order to find one’s way again: the pleasure of the dérive” (1965, 134).

Détournement

“[Détournement is] The integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.” (Debord 1958b)

While Debord’s 1958 definition may seem rather dry, the situationist concept of détournement – a recontextualizing of words and images in a way which subverts their dominant meaning – can be seen to be profoundly playful in a number of ways. In ‘A Users Guide to Détournement,’ written 2 years earlier, Debord and Gil Wolman liken the impulse to détournement to “the need for a secret language, for passwords, [which is] inseparable form a tendency toward play. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite” (Debord and Wolman 1956). In essence, what the practice of détournement does, is create what Huizinga would call a “new poetic language” (1980, 134) which is parallel to our “ordinary” language, in same way that, as we’ve seen, play creates a separate world that engenders order using an alternative, irrational logic. In his chapter on “Play and Poetry,” Huizinga characterizes the language poetry as analogous to this kind of “secret language” mentioned by Debord and Wolman:

“It is based on a meticulous code of rules absolutely binding, but allowing of almost infinite variation […] When the poet says ‘speech-thorn’ for ‘tongue’, ‘floor of the hall of winds’ for ‘earth’, ‘tree-wolf’ for ‘wind’, etc., he is setting his hearers poetic riddles which are tacitly solved” (Huizinga 1980, 134).

This is just the type of play that’s at work in the practice of détournement. By recontextualizing words and images – removing them from their expected milieu and juxtaposing them in new, unexpected ways – détournement creates new meanings, a new “poetic” language endowed with new meaning, creating a kind of “riddle” for its audience to decipher. This type of play not only provides a new sense of agency for the artist who is being playful with these cultural relics, but also for the audience, who is allowed a new sense of freedom in that they are able to create a personal meaning which may or may not be the one intended by the detourner. In this way, détournement creates what can be considered to be a “ludic challenge to the meanings established by authority” (Smith 2005, 424). Additionally, the creation of this poetic language is tantamount to what Debord and Wolman called a “secret language” and this sense of secrecy, the sense of creating something that exists only for the initiated, is something that Huizinga considers to be a key aspect of play. He wrote,

“The exceptional and special position of play is most tellingly illustrated by the fact that it loves to surround itself with an air of secrecy. Even in early childhood the charm of play is enhanced by making a “secret” out of it. This is for us, not for the “others”. What the “others” do “outside” is no concern of ours at the moment. Inside the circle of the game the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count. We are different and do things differently” (Huizinga 1980, 12).

Finally, it’s important to note that the concept of détournement did not limit itself to words and images alone, but could be applied to almost anything. In “The Users Guide to Détournement,” Debord and Wolman are clear that the practice can be used to detourn clothing (1956), and in the events of May-June of 1968, it was used to detourn an entire city.

Situations

The creation of “situations” is perhaps the practice most commonly associated with the Situationists (in no small part because of their name, I would guess) one that can be considered an extension, of sorts, to the practice of détournement (Debord and Wolman 1956). Part of the SI’s credo was dissociation from the art world, which they felt had been too completely absorbed in the spectacle and dependent on commodity relations (Bryant 2006). Instead of the fixed forms of painting and sculpture, the SI believed that liberation would come instead in the performance of spontaneous situations, which, because of their existence ‘in the moment’ would jolt us into a state of awakening and mobility. “Our situations will be ephemeral,” Debord wrote, “Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of anything else” (Debord 1957). In other words, situations were the SI’s way of providing creative resistance to the spectacle.

One of the most interesting distinctions Huizinga makes in Homo Ludens is one between the ‘arts of the Muses’ (music, poetry, and dancing) and the plastic arts. The former, he says, “have to be performed,” whereas “a work of art, though composed, practiced or written down beforehand, only comes to life in the execution of it, that is, by being represented or produced in the literal sense of the word – brought before a public,” and therefore, he concluded, did not fit into his concept of play as neatly as did music and poetry (Huizinga 1980, 165). This exclusion of painting and sculpture from the realm of play seems to be reflected, or at least play a part, in the SI’s antagonism toward the art world and their privileging of situations. Situations are, after all, performative, whereas painting could be more easily (and probably rightly) considered to be a ‘thing,’ a commodity, and thus a part of commodity culture. Huizinga emphasizes that the plastic arts have inherent “limitations of form” and that the artists “all fix a certain aesthetic impulse in matter by means of diligent and painstaking labour.” In other words, artists are laborers who make things, things are devoid of action and, according to Huizinga, “where there is no visible action, there can be no play.” (1980, 166) This is analogous to the situationist goal of re-imagining the world as poets rather than industrialists, privileging poetry over ‘information’ as Jan Bryant points out in Play and Transformation. “One [poetry] is formed on the logic of multiplicity and flow, of becoming, while the other [information] belongs to the deep cavern of fixed forms” (Bryant 2006).

Despite the SI’s theorizing about the creation of situations, it’s worth noting that they didn’t actually execute the practice often. One notable attempt was a project called Cavern of Anti-Matter in which artist Pinot Gallizio made “industrial paintings” using painting machines and sold rolls of them by the meter in the public market. The goal of the project was a merging of art and everyday life that provided a critique of the “professionalism [of the artist] and the sanctioned space of the art gallery” (Andreotti 2000, 49). Despite its reliance on painting as a key element, the whole ‘production’ of the event more resembled a performance than a static art object. The invitations to the opening event promised audiences an “encounter between matter and anti-matter,” and opening night audiences experienced explosions and pyrotechnics, as well as an interactive sound installation in which ‘sound machines’ would be activated as observers moved closer to the walls of the gallery (Andreotti 2000, 47-49).

It’s interesting to note that, even though the SI did not consider themselves to be performers in the theatrical sense, much of the language they use to describe situations uses nomenclature borrowed from the performance world. For example, in ‘Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation’, Debord wrote, “during the initial period of rough experiments, a situation requires one individual to play a sort of ‘director’ role” and should include “a few passive spectators who […] should be forced into action” (Debord 1958c). This latter concept of passive spectators forced into action would later be appropriated by Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal who, in his classic Theatre of the Oppressed would write,

“In order to understand this poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people – ‘spectators’, passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon – into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action.” (Boal 2008, 97)

Finally, it bears mentioning that the SI recognized that they were not the only contemporary avant-garde with an interest in creating playful situations towards revolutionary ends. They made occasional passing reference to other work being done in this area, particularly the ‘happenings’ in the artistic avant-garde in New York, but claimed that those were situations based on poverty (of material, of humanity, of philosophy) while those of the SI must be based on “material and spiritual richness” (Situationist 1963).

Unitary Urbanism

An analysis of the SI’s play tactics wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of one of its most legendary projects, Constant Nieuwenhuys’ work on ‘New Babylon’ – a series of architectural plans for creating a utopian social space which challenged traditional notions of urbanism. While Constant makes reference to Huizinga as a seminal influence on the project (Nieuwenhuys, 1974), there seem to be a number of incongruities between the New Babylon project and Huizinga’s theory. First, we must make a distinction between the work of the architect as play – which Huizinga clearly states it cannot be because “there the aesthetic impulse is far from being the dominant one, as the constructions of bees and beavers clearly prove” (Huizinga 1980, 168) – and the architect as the creator of works of play, as was Constant’s goal with New Babylon.

The decades-long project was a part of the SI’s concept of ‘Unitary Urbanism,’ a theory of reconstructing urban space based more on the dynamic concept of ‘ambiences’ than on commerce, politics, or fixed material environments. The concept, and Constant’s project, adopted the idea of a play-space on a grand scale. “The more a place is set apart for free play,” Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in Formulary for a New Urbanism, “the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater its forces of attraction” (1958).

Unitary Urbanism was a means to an end, a way of “discovering and activating the positive revolutionary potential” of a physical structure (Bryant 2006). New Babylon was an infrastructure for a permanent dérive, and the concept of ambiences allowed Constant to imagine a structure which could have changeable sectors (Andreotti 2000, 51-52), an idea that he believed would radically transform and sustain the subjective quality of life from one of boredom to one of play. New Babylon, Constant believed, would be an environment that would further adventure, where “play and creative change is privileged” (1974), enabling the coming together of “those who are capable of creating and directing their own lives.” Nowhere, however, does Constant allow provision for those who might not subscribe to the same theory of play, or think like a Situationist. In this way, and although Constant thought his vision was practical and achievable (Bryant 2006) we can call New Babylon a utopian ideal, with little grounding in the real world. It paid lip service to ludic theory, but ignored Huizinga’s key concept that play exists outside of ‘real life.’ Huizinga defined play as “an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives […] it adorns life, amplifies it” (1980, 9). As I pointed out earlier, play as an interlude or parallel world wasn’t enough for the SI, their agenda settled for nothing short of a ludic transformation of the real world itself. Like much of SI theory, it takes boredom as a first principle, and sets out to eradicate it by replacing it with play.

Huizinga is also very clear on the voluntary nature of play, going so far as to call it a defining characteristic. “All play is a voluntary activity,” he wrote, “play to order is no longer play (1980, 7). This contradicts Constant’s goal of placing citizens into a structure where ‘play’ is inevitable. Adam Barnard takes this critique even further, claiming that New Babylon simply recreates alienating conditions instead of practically supplanting them with something new. “[New Babylon] may have been big and futuristic,” he wrote, “but lacked a critical coherence and was not commensurate with social practices” (2004, 109).

New Babylon was also based on a certain amount of technical determinism, and the variable ambiences Constant imagined were technologically based. In ‘The Great Game to Come,’ he stated that “the investigation of technology and its exploitation for recreational ends on a higher plane is one of the most pressing tasks required to facilitate creation of a unitary urbanism on the scale demanded by the society of the future” (1957). Technology, Constant believed, was a key factor in creating a ludic society of the future,as automation freed people from productive work, and thus enabled them to develop their creativity (Nieuwenhuys 1974). However, at least in ‘New Babylon,’ Constant never went into any detail about exactly which technology he was referring to, beyond the example of using air conditioning to vary the ambience, as well as the very broad category of ‘telecommunications.’ He was slightly more specific in ‘The Great Game to Come,’ citing the potential of “cinema, television, radio and high-speed travel and communication.” He calls for the “investigation of technology and its exploitation for recreational ends,” (1957) but never elaborates on their specific use, or how they would contribute to the ludic nature of his society.

The Society of the Spectacle

The Society of the Spectacle, written by Debord in 1967 is, of course, the de-facto flagship text of the Situationist International. In many ways, it seems as thought the text is Debord’s final grand détournement – a recombining and recontextualizing of all of the SI’s previous writings as well as those of their literary and intellectual influences. Although teasing out all of the elements of play theory that present themselves in Society of the Spectacle is beyond the scope of this paper, it’s interesting to consider the work in light of one of the recurring concepts of Homo Ludens – that of the “spoil-sport.” Huizinga defines the spoil-sport as one who refuses to play the game and, in so doing, “shatters the play world itself” (1980, 11). Considering this concept in relationship to Debord’s polemic, I wonder if we can begin to think of the spectacle itself as a kind of play, and the SI the “spoil-sports” of its game. Huizinga himself refers to the world of play as consisting of illusion, a quality which is robbed by the spoil-sport (1980, 11). In stanza 20 of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord calls the spectacle, “the material reconstruction of the religious illusion […] the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond” (Debord 1967, 4). It’s interesting that Huizinga spends much of Homo Ludens situating myth and religious practices in the world of play, but it’s this particular play-world that Debord opts out of. Interestingly, Huizinga also states that spoil-sports are the world’s “apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc.” saying that these spoil-sports often go off and create a new community with rules of its own. This is certainly what Debord and the SI have done, what all avant-gardes do. Likewise, the SI had its own spoil-sports – the factions and individuals that disagreed with Debord and were summarily expelled from the SI’s game.

Conclusion

I hope that this paper has adequately demonstrated that, although the Situationists adopted Huizinga’s Homo Ludens as a primary text, their use of it to support their theories did not always conform to the rigorous logic used by Huizinga to craft his brilliant and complex theories of play. Partly as a result of this non-adherence, the SI created an ideal of a world so utopian that it could never be accomplished. In fact, many of their ‘practices’ could not be practiced, as there was no practical way to do so without falling into the catch-22 of having to practice them within a cultural milieu that they wanted no part of. An application of ludic ideals that adhered more closely to Huizinga’s theories may have allowed them to participate in practices that point the way to a more playful culture, without being burdened with the unrealistic demand that the culture change completely, immediately, and for everyone. One of a ways that some of these failures have ostensibly been corrected by such inheritors of the SI’s tradition – such as the ‘culture jammers’ of the 70s and 80s – is that these artists seem to have a more realistic understanding of how change occurs, and are able to work subversively within the system to create change that they know, from experience, is incremental at best. The refusal of the Situationists to allow the ludic any association with the spectacle is summed up concisely by Douglas Smith in his essay, “Giving the Game Away,” where he states, “Situationism views system and play as two diametrically opposed principles and refuses to engage with the complexities of their interdependence” (Smith 2005, 432).

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