Poetry Electric: Sign Felt! (A Show About Nothingness) | Parts 1 & 2
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By ALEXANDRA TATARSKY
An improvisational bildungsroman for an idiot exploring madness, despair, fugues states, word plays, the associative logic of the loony, language falling apart, quarter life crisis, the abyss, and the (de)construction of identity as told by a young Jewish girl who wants to be a theatre artist pretending to be a young German boy who wants to be a theatre artist. Young Wilhelm is beginning to lose faith in himself and the possibility that art can offer anything to a world as damaged as ours.
Will this sad clown ever figure anything out?
This project was made possible, in part, through The Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program, funded, in part, by the Jerome Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Davis/Dauray Family Fund, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Called “a hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” (TheatreJones) and “an East Village relic” (Vogue), Alexandra Tatarsky performs in the unfortunate in-between zone of comedy, dance, and deluded rant. Her work often incorporates absurdist characters and improvised wordplay. It is fueled largely by anxiety. Interests include the performance of identity, humor and the abyss, self-loathing and psychoanalysis, late-capitalist despair and meaninglessness, hybridity and liminal spaces, madness, parades, and acrylic nails. Basically, how worlds and selves come together and fall apart. Tatarsky’s one-woman-shows Beast of Festive Skin and Americana Psychobabble have been described as “Brecht… with a buttplug” and “like someone took acid with too much speed in it.” She has recently performed at MOMA/PS1, Bronx Art Space, New Museum, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, The Brick, Maccarone, Metro Pictures/83 Pitt, US Blues, Entrance, 47 Canal and many bars. She writes on experimental language practices such as spambot poetry, multi-lingual psalms, and the shanzhai lyric for publications including The New Inquiry, Hypocrite Reader, Weekday, ArtReview Asia and Garlands. She plays “apothecary chick” on cult webseries Zhe Zhe and got famous for two days as Andy Kaufman’s daughter. Alexandra Tatarsky is thrilled to be a 2016-17 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence.
Poetry Electric
The Poetry Electric fuses music, movement, sound, and dance with the spoken word and presents artists working in a wide range of styles including beatboxing, jazz and hip-hop theatre. This series has presented over 200 emerging poets from diverse cultural backgrounds.