revolutions

Courtesy of Tricklock

Theater from Albuquerque to Armenia

Winter is cold and dark and sleepy. It turns people into marshmallow-shaped hermits, wrapping and zipping themselves into enough layers to survive brief intervals of the outside world before retreating back into their slightly warmer caves. But for three weeks in January, Revolutions International Theatre Festival brings a load of light and warmth.

Revolutions International Theatre Festival 2011 Schedule of Events

So we didn't spend a whole article (at right) listing the times and places for the plethora of cool theater stuff during Revolutions, this week’s Culture Shock space had to pay the ultimate price.

The 10th annual Revolutions International Theatre Festival

The mark of brilliance may just be that it stays with you. It affects the way you think about something or, perhaps, the way you look at everything. You contemplate it after you’ve engaged with it. Your future actions and interactions are, in some regard, altered by having experienced it. As it so happens, this is also the mark of revolution. Coincidence? Certainly not in the case of the Revolutions International Theatre Festival.

Pollock

If you want to see probable greatness, you should probably see Pollock. Joe Peracchio, founding artistic director of Tricklock Company and Revolutions, stars in this one-man show inspired by the frenetic genius of artist Jackson Pollock. Written by David D’Agostino, directed by Broadway veteran Moni Yakim and set to the brilliant jazz compositions of Ornette Coleman, this multimedia performance aims to illuminate the complex evolution of America’s pre-eminent abstract expressionist painter. And, in case that’s not profound enough, it examines the role and status of art and expression in American life. Long story short: Pollock is poised to take your breath away.

Excavations New Works Series: Four Interludes

See “Week One” description.

It’s Hell In Here

A prodigy named Max, the Secret Service, parallel universes, car chases, apologia, J.D. Salinger and Sen. Larry Craig. This is the fantastic stuff of It’s Hell In Here, a play written and directed by Tricklock (when Tricklock was still Riverside Ensemble) alum Abigail Browde, who developed the work during her present residency at Brooklyn Art Exchange in New York. Fusing elements of dance and theater to invent a curiously potent, seemingly allegorical reality, It’s Hell In Here provides an examination of modern uncertainty and, says Browde, a “meditation” on the blur between public and private. Talk about timely.