**featured image from the Our Carnal Hearts trailer on UMS.org
What: a comedy performance featuring Rachel Mars and four female singers honestly exploring envy across different areas of life
When: Friday, February 3, 8pm
Where: Arthur Miller Theater
Tickets: $12 for students, $25 for adults, available online or by phone at 734-764-2538
I don’t want to sound cheesy, but I really feel like laughter can be the best way to relax when I’m overwhelmed with the stress of everyday life. For that reason, I’m excited to attend Our Carnal Hearts this Friday night, what promises to be a hilarious and thought-provoking dive into the dark realities of human jealousy. The performance was created by British artist Rachel Mars, and based on the trailer I’m expecting music, comedy, and potential audience participation, all in the intimate setting of the Arthur Miller Theater. This is one of the final events in the University Musical Society’s No Safety Net Festival, and it is in conversation with Mars’ other performances and talks at the University this weekend, including Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, another performance which will take place at the same place and same time on Saturday night. I look forward to sharing my notes on this show with you in the coming days.
I confess that I don’t quite know how to review Jen Shyu’s Zero Grasses performance piece. I’m a beginner to performance art. I don’t see it very often, and when I do most of it goes over my head. It’s true that I didn’t understand all of this performance, but what I can say is that I am so, so glad I went to it regardless because it connected with parts of my identity that I didn’t expect it to.
This artist residency was made possible by the Center for World Performance Studies (CWPS) at UM! They connect with students, artists, and scholars all across the globe to advocate for the power of performance for research and for public engagement. They work with lots of great artists, and center on underrepresented, non-Western, and diasporic voices, bodies, and acts. Check out their website to learn more, their next event is coming up on December 8.
Jen Shyu is a vocalist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and dancer. She graduated from Stanford in opera and has
classical violin and ballet training and has studied traditional music and dance from numerous cultures around the world. I went into Jen Shyu’s performance knowing none of this and came out thinking one thing: She is fully, imperfectly, human.
In Zero Grasses, Jen Shyu explores parts of her past that are, as she described in the post-performance Q&A, “icky.” She reenacted the moment she found out about her father’s passing while working abroad. The news came from an email message, cold and stark and impersonal, screenshotted and projected onto the stage. She danced and sang through the story of a relationship she had with a man twice her age. She read a diary entry from her childhood about the time she was called a racial slur as she stepped off the bus. She lay on the floor in grief when, after a lengthy and expensive medical procedure, the doctor only extracted one viable egg.
The performance was not neatly separated. She skips back and forth between chapters of her life, showing how messy they are, showing how a page written in a diary journal when she was 8 has parallels with her job as a salsa dancer at age 23. The creativity of it all blew me away. Numerous different instruments (most of which I can’t remember the names of) were strategically placed around the stage. Jen would fluidly move between them, coaxing music out of each to back up her rich singing like it was as easy as breathing. The main props used were giant cardboard boxes, each with artifacts from her past. At times she would paw through the boxes, fling them across the stage, or stack them on top of each other as a makeshift wall to project media onto.
The projections of pictures and videos that she had taken on her phone made it so REAL. I was looking at history but I was also looking at something that was continuously being created, a picture that could have been taken yesterday. I think it was the perfect way to capture Jen’s journey with grief, how she felt it anew each day. It was very alive.
In the Q&A, I asked how she was able to explore these vulnerable parts of her past and portray herself in a light that isn’t so great while still protecting her mental health. She responded that she is always thinking about who she could be helping with her art. She feels she would be doing more harm if she DIDN’T talk about these uncomfortable topics because they’re already taboo and it’s hard for people to find a safe space to process them. She does this in an attempt to have that connection with somebody in the audience who thinks “You’re not alone, I was there too at one point in my life.”
While perhaps not as informative about their collaborative work as I had hoped, this discussion provided some valuable background and behind the scenes information on Oring and Roland’s individual projects.
Roland was more reserved in talking about The Jumpsuit Project than Oring about I Wish To Say, not surprising given the length of time Oring has spent developing and connecting with her work, which has required a different kind of personal conversation to its audience members. As Roland reflected, in-person commentary to his work has mostly involved either an effort to shape the design of the project (campus and local police, university faculty, professors) or a rather momentary response (students commenting on it while studying at the library, passersby snapping a quick photo). Starting as a thesis project for his MFA, it makes sense: he faced pressures to appeal to a great deal of people, or if not to appeal, then to specifically give a message to many, all at once. There were his thesis advisors, people on the street, people on his campus, the institution that had held him despite his innocence, the entire country’s network of incarceration and justice systems.
While also incredibly impactful, Oring’s project has something to say rather than something to prove. That’s an oversimplified statement, but it compares the current evolutionary state of the two projects in broad terms. Oring, in contrast, speaks to her audience one-on-one as well as peripheral members of her audience (observers by the typewriter stations, people reading about her work online), making space for the content of their letters in an overwhelmingly impersonal world. In the nearly two decades since she began the project (as well as her previous years as a journalist), she has honed her ability to speak simultaneously to an individual subject (an interviewee) and a wider audience (readers).
Both styles of performance art serve a purpose within the political moments in which they exist: Roland seeks to expose widespread flaws in the criminal justice system through bringing his own experience to many in a particularly conspicuous way, contrasting how systemic injustice is often kept away from the public eye. These systems are represented as old, unchangeable institutions central to the function of our society, despite the reality that prisons are an industry, a pipeline, a cyclical system with rehabilitation far from a main focus. Oring, by working one-and-one and over a long period, has allowed citizens to individually be vocal. It’s especially important as polarization and whipsawing between recent presidential administrations causes significant frustration and disillusionment amongst the public.
Future events put on by the Stamps Gallery can be found here, including episodes of the Penny Stamps speaker series and other talks with artists. There are also some upcoming gallery exhibitions as MFA students showcase their theses; do note that entrance into the gallery requires an Mcard.
American systems of justice and incarceration have a disturbing past and present, rife with injustice. Speakers Oring and Roland have worked in performance/social art surrounding the place of art in social change. Over the past few decades, the two have worked together and individually on projects like I Wish To Say and The Jumpsuit Project.
In a conversation put on by STAMPS, the two will discuss the importance of making this kind of art in today’s intense social climate. Join the discussion Thursday, February 25th at 1pm. Register here and you’ll be sent an email with the link to join the meeting.
If your ever wandering around the “big three” Michigan libraries this coming month, you might come across an interesting new set of artistic additions. The Penny Stamps School of Art and Design is hosting an exhibition curated by Dean Guna Nadarajan displayed across the Shapiro Undergraduate Library, Hatcher Graduate Library, and the Art, Architecture & Engineering Library in the Duderstadt. The exhibition will feature a number of site-specific installations, performances, interventions, and events done by Stamps students and staff.
The pieces will on display March 26th to May 26th. As the pieces are completely open and free to the public make sure to spice up your next study break by visiting one, or several of the installations.
On Sunday afternoon, puppets came alive and fools came about.
It was another cold day, but luckily the sun came out to be foolish with everybody. I had been with the FestiFools class (housed by Lloyd Hall Scholars Program) earlier that day — so I rode from the studio to Main Street with the puppets and their makers and then helped them unload those massive papier-mache sculptures. Seeing all them all lining the side road gave them a new element of livelihood an hour later when they took to the stage.
Many puppets this year were politically-charged, which also added a layer of humor to the already-foolish theme. One such sculpture completed in part by the event’s founder, Mark Tucker, was a “scary go-round” featuring giant caricatures of Putin, Trump, and Kim Jong-un. Their realistic facial resemblances added to the scare factor of the piece. It was surrounded by several fish- and Nile-themed sculptures: fantastical underwater creatures, a jellyfish umbrella, a large pyramid, a Sphinx featuring another head of Trump as well as hieroglyph-esque political cartoons of his presidency, and more.
Scary Go-RoundSphinx with head and presidency of Trump (one of its makers and director of LHSP pictured)
I’d like to think the politically-charged pieces were crowd favorites, given the laughs and supportive comments from onlookers around me. The mayor of Ann Arbor also had a puppet head resembling him, which another person wore while he escorted him around the stage (up and down Main Street).
Mayor of Ann Arbor next to mayor of Ann Arbor
Alongside puppets, marching bands (ones with real brass instruments and more FestiFools-esque ones with buckets as drums) add music to the scene; dance groups and jokesters perform and interact with the crowd. A group of belly dancers in particular were fascinating, especially when following a large praying mantis led by several people at once.
Maybe I’m biased after having seen several of these puppets in the studio the week before when they were unfinished, but they all turned out incredible. While yes, some parts fell off during the procession, that’s what they’re made to do.
Hundreds of Ann Arbor fools with and without families lined Main Street for that hour on Sunday afternoon. In fact, they gathered on the sidewalks at least a half-hour before it began and stuck around during the half-hour following, eager and excited for the foolish energy that lingered.
During the event, several puppets also interacted with the crowd — particularly children. I jumped in to assist a friend’s Lego Princess Leia puppet, which had a sad face on one side of the head and a happy face on the other. When Leia got high-fives from kids to her U-shaped lego hands, her happy face would greet them.
Princess Leia as a happy Lego
One of my favorite parts of FestiFools is the last five minutes: all of the puppets and their makers gather in the intersection nearest the trucks in which they came, dancing and smiling as though the catharsis of the event. If FestiFools was a musical, this would be the final number with all cast members present, where any plot issues get resolved. The drummers and musicians don’t necessarily battle but instead give the stage one last, large energetic push, and then the crowd parts to let them dance their way back to the side street.
I highly recommend going to the next FestiFools! It takes place right on Main Street once every April. While a great chance to be your true foolish selves, consider letting that foolishness shine other days of the year, too.
