River to River Festival (Mid-June–Mid-July)

 This was a free festival in lower Manhattan encompassing music, dance, and theater (some of it experimental). Not exactly my comfort zone. When I printed out their schedule, I highlighted five choices and made reservations for two of them. All performances were free, but some required reservations. I figured that if I actually made a reservation, I’d actually go. And it sort of worked. Of the five I highlighted, I ended up attending only two, and I canceled one reservation for July 9, the evening I went to the Naumburg concert and got drenched!

At any rate, the two performances I saw were indeed experimental in nature. So Percussion’s Where (we) Live had the percussion quartet joined by a guitarist, an accordionist, and a note giver. I’m not making this up, you know! The performance had percussion, songs, video installations, etc. The note giver would periodically get up from her computer keyboard and hand out slips of paper to various performers. They would then follow her instructions—sometimes leaving the room for a while; sometimes picking up a set of children’s bells, taking them to a new area of the performance space, and playing the bells while sitting on the floor; and sometimes just getting up and running in circles. I did not find the performance interesting or enjoyable. Several people got up and left early on, middle on, and later on. Since the performance space (an empty storefront at South Street Seaport) was bathed in daylight, I couldn’t bring myself to join them. If I could have slunk out in the dark, I probably would have.

As luck would have it, the other performance I saw was in the exact same space, though with a reconfigured staging and seating area. 600 Highwaymen’s This Great Country, from Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, was a modern, updating deconstruction/reconstruction of Salesman. It included choreographed movements that were not quite dance, a declamatory style of acting, at least a half dozen actors assuming the role of Willy at various times (adults, children, males, females) as well as young actors playing the young counterparts of the main actors portraying Willy’s sons, Biff and Happy. To me, it was a performance that held some interest. In this case, some equaled not very much.

At least I experimented with experimental. I’ll try to choose more carefully, if I commit to R2R in 2014.

ConcertMeister