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Saturday, September 3, 2011

Review: Zon-Mai

 
By Merilyn Jackson

  Zon-Mai. It means home in French slang – maison backwards, but (appropriately) it also sounds like my zone in reverse. Everything about this film installation is turned inside out and upended with 21 dancers from 10 countries allowing us a peek at their intimate domains.

  Each is an emigrant from somewhere else, and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui set dances on them in their current places, to perform in their bedrooms and bathrooms, under their tables, on their windowsills. Larbi and cameraman Gilles Delmas try to discover what home means when you have to set up far away from the home you knew.  

 The installation is shaped like a house made of screens, and the projections on it are like windows through which we can spy.  

  Akram Khan, who now lives and choreographs in the UK, and who was seen in Live Arts in 2003, dances in his narrow foyer, spinning tightly within its confines. Shantala Shivalingappa’s arms can’t cut through the glass doors to her balcony. A contortionist in green gym shorts tears up his living room floor. A dancer with long black hair combed over her face slices through the veil with her hands. Some screens are cut into quadrants so you can view four dancers at a time. On others, you can watch just one, but those larger-than-life images overwhelm and lose their intimacy.

  Fittingly, this is your chance to see the new, permanent home of Live Arts Festival in the former Pumping Station across from Race Street Pier Park on Columbus Blvd. No more nomadic life for Live Arts.  

 Free. Through Sept. 17. Noon-8 p.m. weekends & Labor Day; 5-8 p.m. weekdays. Gallery opening 5--8 p.m. Pumping Station, 140 N. Columbus Blvd.  
Posted by Rebecca Klock @ 9:49 AM  Permalink | Post a comment
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About Philly Stage
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.


Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.


Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.

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