Showing posts with label happening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label happening. Show all posts

Monday, December 15, 2025

Natalie Palamides offers herself in sacrifice in "Weer" at the Cherry Lane Theater

This is not a review. Why not? Because it's fast and furious, and a review (I've written them too) takes time and thinking and researching.
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Last night I saw Weer at The Cherry Lane Theater in New York City. Natalie Palamides plays both the woman and the man in this comedy, each half of her body mascarading as a gender.
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The word that came spontaneously to my mind after experiencing this show was propitiation. This according to the dictionary is the act of satisfying God's wrath against sin through a sacrifice. I was puzzled myself, and here's how I make sense of it:
I had definitely witnessed a sacrifice on stage, just as I might have seen one 2500 years ago on a Peloponasian stage. It might have been a lamb or a calf and the audience watched breathless as the creature went from being alive to being dead, something that awaits us all. In Weer, what was being sacrificed? That was fairly easy to answer: comfort, modesty, decency, ego, elegance, feminine dignity, masculine dignity, all these things that constrain my life (OK, not so much masculine dignity unless it's to avoid challenging it) on a daily basis, and clearly also constrains the life of the other people in the audience from their reaction to the bacchanale going onstage. In the French school of clowing with which she apprenticed, our fear of failure is staged for the benefit of the audience. This comes into play here as well as a brilliant mind.
Palamides sacrifices all these goals we usually strive for particularly in the company of others, for our benefit, with generosity and courage, and an astounding flow of energy. She repeatedly dousee herself in what must be cold water and other unidentified liquids on a freezing winter night, she fell, she banged her head hard on the floor, she whined, she strutted, she stripped, she fondled her own breasts, she faked sex and orgasm.
Weer is a deformation of the word deer. Sounds like dear too. Her lover has a speech impediment he tries to hide. All these attributes which she trampled on for our sake might obstruct the true expression of love, as a kind of speech impediment. In the end he is able to stutter: I wove you, I wove you.
Yes, the story is that of a romcom: girl meets boy, there are lies, there is seduction, there is deception, and a man who will not commit enough emotionally to his partner to tell her he loves her. Every aspect is taken to extremes as in a greek tragedy where Medea will kill her own children to exact vengeance on the man who has betrayed her. It's a romtradjcom. A new genre. Some of her speech and actions are improvised as she interacts with the audience which she involves in the performance. The audience is haphazardous and by consequence the performances will slightly differ every night. There are no safety nets here when she walks the tight rope.
She wrote, directed and acts in the show, which was conceived with an astounding richness of imagination. The scene where she hits a deer with her car is just about one of the funniest, most imaginative scenes I have ever seen in the theater.
Palamides is a Greek name, and her performance is truly Herculean. Greeks were big on sacrificial rituals. Propiation is a concept both in Judaism and Christianism - whichever religion Palamides grew in. But who is the God that she needs to propitiate? Maybe the god of norms and of TV shows and of social media where one flaunts one's best side and one's successes and best looking photos and sexy photos and enviable vacations and glamorous parties and tender love. Weer is no Instagram fodder with its smudged makeup, its menstruation coming out of the mouth, its sperm spouting into the audience.
We left exhilarated and liberated after the show. Maybe we'll carry into our daily life a bit of that freedom for which Palamides sacrificed herself on stage.
As the audience stood up for a well deserved ovation, she stayed just for a few minutes before disappearing backstage. I imagine she collapsed, completely drained from her mental/physical/emotional blood (there was a lot of raspberry colored blood throughout the performance). She does this 6 times a week. (Clearly) not written with AI by Arabella Hutter von Arx
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Thursday, November 7, 2013

I PAID $20 TO BE AN EXTRA IN AN EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO

Sounds like a rip off? The Performa program stated "Audiences are invited to embark on a bus tour around Red Hook harbor in Brooklyn led by Philippe Quesne, who uses his position as tour guide to encourage the group to shift their attention to the poetic or strange elements in the landscape ... the group is invited to take part in a series of tableaux vivants orchestrated by the artist". Quite an intriguing program for which I was happy to fork out $20.


There is always an unspoken deal struck between the people responsible for the show and the audience. The audience expects to marvel, to feel, to be entertained, amused, intrigued by what goes on on stage, and in exchange they pay a ticket price and give their attention and some amount of praise usually in the form of hand clapping.

At Performa, we as an audience come ready to experience a different deal, as promised by Philippe Quesne's promoted "tableaux vivants". We were ready to be asked to do more than clap our hands: interact with the landscape or with the other spectators of with the performers.

 We embarked on a coach bus that drove to Red Hook in the sunset. A
video of a mole constructing a wall with a narrow entrance was playing on the bus monitor. A good start. The bus was full, everyone was excited. It was downhill from there. Philipe Quesne made clear once we had signed a release form that we were to act as extras in his production.  The bus stopped near the water. The director gave us instructions: walk to the fence at a regular pace then back to the bus. You can take pictures. We did. We were filmed.


 At the second and final stop an alluring mole, or a performer in an alluring mole costume crossed the road in front of the bus, which then followed the performer, in spite of the fact that the driver, probably from NJ, looked deeply aggravated by the whole thing. A large door to an old industrial loft opened slowly. Lots of  carbon dioxide smoke came through an opening in a wall which seemed narrow, but was large enough, just about, to let the bus through. Intriguing. Then we got off the bus and the director gave us more instructions: we were to form a group between the bus and the car, which was parked with its lights on. He said we would later move toward the back where we would discover the "concept".

I thought maybe the concept was that we were offered the chance to disobey his directives, which I did, but that didn't seem to be the intention. A beautiful blond woman dressed in fetching clothes played the thimerin. It was striking, but I couldn't enjoy it because I wasn't listening to the music, I was playing someone listening to music.
A whisper got around: t"hey're offering whiskey at the front near the bus". I rushed back hoping to get some return on my $20, which I did, whiskey in a glass made out of glass. About half of the audience of 60 was also enjoying drinks around me. We couldn't see the other half of the audience, still listening to music, because of the fog. A cry was heard above our heads: 'Action!". Everyone went quiet. Then out of the smoke emerged the other group, marching toward us with the musician and the mole at the front. What were they going to do to us? The moment carried a lot of potential for drama. But nothing happened, they joined us and the whole thing was over. Some people clapped, before we were driven back to the original spot. At a nearby pizza place, a number of spectators went for nourishment. When I asked, most of them thought the experience had been cool. But a group of four people, who looked different from the rest of the hipsters in their 30s, echoed my complaint: "Not only did we pay to be extras, but it wasn't even a good film".

Published by  - -  Arabella Hutter
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