(Oh yeah: This whole business is being streamed live here, if you're curious.)

2:23 pm—And here something pretty great happens: Mike Daisey loses his shit, breaking character and pushing himself back from his table, laughing hard for a long spell, his big chest shaking, he's giddy and enthusiastic and looking—for the first time in like I don't know a dozen-and-a-half hours—like he's having a genuinely great time. The thing that caused this reaction was a joke about raping Jonathan Ames' corpse.

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I'm not going to lie; I had a hard time with this performance. I hardly know what to make of it. Sure, at times I could see themes of nationalism, political oppression, and maybe rebellion, but it was all so conceptual, I could not connect with any of it.

As the audience trickled in to fill the Winningstad Theatre, dancer/choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, who comes to us from France, stood silently on a slowly spinning platform. Once the house lights went down, he started off the piece with a section of increasingly complex semaphore gestures accompanied by only a metronome on a starkly lit, minimal, industrial set... and it never got any more accessible than that. There was just no narrative through-line, and no appreciable attempt to involve or even acknowledge the audience. At some points it felt like Ouramdane was just freestyling in a basement with his buddy jamming on guitar, which is why I felt myself wondering why I was watching this.

Speaking of jamming on guitar, though, I was often more interested in watching composer Jean-Baptiste Julien's performance. His haunting piano melodies, mixed and engineered live and on-the-fly (as far as I could tell), were the best part for me, particularly when Ouramdane spent several minutes lying flat on the floor.

Granted, I may not be worldly or educated enough (how much is enough?) to properly appreciate or decipher this high-minded piece—and your counterpoints and illuminations are welcome in the comments—but I'm betting a lot of you would have also been staring at this puzzling production wondering, "what is this? What is the point?"

• PICA
• Press photo for A Crack in Everything

Prior to the show last night, I caught zoe | juniper’s A Crack in Everything Installed. If you’ve seen it (it’s free), you’d probably agree, it’s totally bizarre and unnerving. There’s a series of women, standing in a line with tubetops on; their hair is up and they’re covered in silver glitter; their mouths are oozing some kind of golden bathballs, and red pieces of string drape down the walls. It’s a lot of discordant elements, and I couldn’t help but feel like I had stumbled on some kind of portal, and that I was seeing something I just shouldn’t be seeing. (The Boston Globe called the performance, “A crazy dream you just can’t shake.” Seems apt.)

Then the show started. I knew A Crack in Everything would be intense, but I wasn’t expecting this intense. Obviously the dancers of zoe | juniper are insanely skilled. I talked with choreographer Zoe Scofield about a month ago, on the phone, and she informed me the work is inspired by memory and non-linear aspects of time, and how our minds reconstruct and revisits traumatic events: this is a challenging proposition when the art of dance is, well, “time-based,” and sequential.

Struggling to put the pieces together of last night’s performance, my mind keeps coming back to the work of Matthew Barney. Since Taylor Mac has taught us that “comparison is violence,” yaddayadda, I’ll try and break it down, after the jump.

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Hey demographic, you're about my age, right? Which means we're too young to remember Andy Warhol's experimental art scene of the 60s but old enough to have died of an overdose by now if we'd been a part of it.

And so it went for several of the silent Screen Tests subjects chosen by Dean & Britta (from some 500 filmed by Warhol) as the 13 Most Beautiful.

The idea of playing songs in front of projected film doesn't sound like anything novel or experimental, but there was actually something unusual about this show: it's an equal marriage of film and rock show. I kept trying to figure out whether the focus was really on the film or the music. Andy Warhol is a bigger name than Dean & Britta, but the musicians were the live performers here. After a while I had to tell myself to stop trying to classify it and accept that it was both.

The films in question, from Warhol's Screen Tests series, are each a few minutes of very subtle black and white footage of young, beautiful people doing nothing much. Staring at the camera, blinking, smoking, drinking, looking around, you get the idea—all starkly lit, and with Dean & Britta playing a live score of very chill, psychedelic folk-rock. But the finale was the most erotic teeth-brushing scene I've ever witnessed. Here is a clip that is all too short:

Aside from that, though, the part I was most fascinated by were the stories that Dean and Britta told in between songs/films, filling in the backstory of these mysterious people: their relationship with Andy Warhol and their strange and untimely demises, such as, "he got out of the bath and danced naked out of his fifth floor window."

I'm sitting at a coffeeshop, working on this very post, when I get a text from Mike Daisey:

"Surprising development: there will be a tremendous amount of bacon cooked live when least expected."

Daisey, a New York-based monologuist who's gained a considerable local fanbase over the past few years (including just about every writer at this publication), is following up on an interview we did a few days ago about his upcoming All the Hours in the Day. All Hours is easily TBA's most ambitious, talked-about project: It's a 24-hour monologue, beginning at 6 pm on Saturday and closing out the festival on Sunday night. A few nights ago, Daisey and I sat down in a quiet(ish) corner at Washington High to talk about what inspired the performance, how he's preparing, and why everybody planning to see the show needs to calm the fuck down.

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Following his company's weekend run of The Radio Show, the multi-talented Kyle Abraham performed last night a solo preview of Live! The Realest MC, a work in development that will eventually be an ensemble piece. Here's a clip:

I predicted this piece would be really relevant to our community, with its focus on the tensions and dynamics of gender, racial, and sexual identity, and it was (boy, am I good). But one raw, emotional section in particular, wherein Abraham cowers, stammering into the mic about having been attacked simply for holding hands with someone, hit home the most. Sound familiar? I just wish that the kind of people who commit hate crimes like that were the kind of people who would come see a show like this.

As a dancer, Kyle Abraham seems convinced he has wings, and here we get to see lots of his birdlike stretching, preening, pecking, and attempts at flight. At times funny, always athletic and impressively articulate, the man is a master of his body as a storytelling medium.

I had two minor quibbles with the show as it was last night, which will hopefully be worked out in the next few months before the ensemble production debuts at The Kitchen. The first has to do with the microphone, the only object onstage with Abraham. I just wish it was used more, or out of the way when it wasn't being used. Some of the most electric moments of the piece came when Abraham used his voice as well as his body, so I wanted more of that. My hope is that there's a lot more MC action in the final product to back up the "Realest MC" claim.

The other thing was similar to what Jenna noted about The Radio Show: pacing issues. There were a couple repetitive lulls that leaked momentum, sharply contrasting with the more explosive sections that came in sudden bursts. The narrative line got muddy in spots.

Overall though, I found this preview performance very poignant, intimate, and promising.

It's rare that a show at TBA is as easy to summarize as Andrew Dinwiddie's Get Mad at Sin: a Message to the Young People of Today by Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart . I bet I can do it in ten words: Andrew Dinwiddie re-enacts a 1971 sermon by preacher Jimmy Swaggart. Bam.

Now, I've spent most of my adult life avoiding situations in which people shout at me about God. I never expected to find myself skipping dinner to sit in a tent and listen to an artist do just that. The show is set in a white revival tent next to Washington High—a low platform stretches the length of the tent, surrounded on either side by rows of folding chairs. It's dusty. (Take a Claritin.) Dinwiddie, clad in a brown suit, brown tie, and showy gold wedding ring, re-enacts the entirety of Swaggart's "message to the young people of today," taking a recording of Swaggart's original sermon as his source material.

Dinwiddie settles comfortable into the patter of a revival preacher, hitting his Ts hard and punctuating phrases with rhythmic "unh"s, and the crowd seemed to find the whole performance quite funny. I didn't, particularly, and I actually found the laughter of people around me pretty distracting. (Dick thing to say, I know.) But I don't think Get Mad at Sin is very interesting if it's viewed as an ironic or mocking sendup—if it's just supposed to make us laugh at how outrageous religious values can be. More interesting to me is a how all the elements of Swaggart's original performance were calibrated to elicit a specific reaction from an audience. The hypnotic cadence; the menacing references to wild girls whose godless behavior led to untimely deaths; the rise and fall of his speech, now berating, now cajoling; the winding up, the letting down. The performative aspects of preaching are a worthy subject, and one I probably wouldn't investigate in any other context—it's a chance to observe, even secondhand, a preacher's well-honed tricks and tools. Of course, there are probably 14 cable networks offering the same chance at this very minute—but Dinwiddie's show also functions as a time capsule, a peek at what fundies were preoccupied with 40 years ago. (Pre-marital sex, rock 'n' roll, miniskirts, the Beatles, homosexuality, prescription drugs.)

As compelling as certain elements of this show were, however, it had done everything it was going to do by about the 40 minute mark, and I found myself fidgety and checking my watch well before it actually concluded. In some ways, it's more rewarding to sit at arms length and discuss this show than it is to actually experience it—although, the audience members who thought it was so hilarious would probably disagree.

The show runs daily at 6:30 pm, through Saturday, $15-20

I saw Taylor Mac's Comparison is Violence, or The Ziggy Stardust Meets Tiny Tim Songbook last night. It was much, much funnier than I expected, and Mac did some of the best crowd work I've ever seen, through a combination of provocation, bullying, and an implied "you're not a fully actualized person unless you're willing to get onstage and make a fool of yourself." Mac disarmed the crowd by first explaining why he hates audience participation—because it feels like a performer trying to impose their own definition of fun on the audience; because if you play along you feel like a conformist and if you don't you feel like an asshole—and then proceeded to force everyone to play along. At one point, he asked all the audience members who were there with their "lovers" to raise their hands, promising he wouldn't embarrass anyone. And once hands were up, he promptly clambered into the audience and picked on some folks. As he put it, "I'm a drag performer. I don't dress this way so you'll trust me." I'm not sure I've ever seen a performer work a crowd so effectively. Plus, he does a mean Bowie cover.

Now, in a way it's a tough show to come to a consensus about—Mac's clearly working from a general structure and improvising some of the details pretty wildly. I saw it yesterday, and Mac incorporated a handful of references to the 9/11 anniversary; plus, it was outrageously hot at Washington High, and he encouraged audience members to take off items of clothing over the course of the show. (I can safely say it's the only theater performance I've ever seen that ended with audience members in their underwear.) But I've taking some issue with the comments of other Merc writers who saw the show:

Noah wrote:

Apparently there was a year or two in his career in which almost every journalist he either talked to or who reviewed his work compared him both to David Bowie (because of his love for glam) and to Tiny Tim (because of Mac's use of a ukulele). Finding this both offensive and hilarious Mac then decided to create a piece that would not only embrace these assumptions, but by doing so, show how we as a thinking society use comparisons to lazily judge and degrade one another. A poignant point to make, one that Mac calls back to throughout the night while dissecting personal anecdotes and discussing theater history, but one that I thought was ultimately diminished by the format of the evening; that being cabaret. Now I don't have anything against cabaret, I think it an authentic take on performance, and one (as Mac points out) that has been around for ages, but for Mac's purposes it felt as though cabaret created too casual of an atmosphere to say anything of real gravity.

I'd agree, Noah, that when all was said and done it felt... I dunno. Kind of slight? Mac made a lot of good, clever, and sometimes very moving points, but the overall performance didn't cohere so much as it felt like a lot of kickass Bowie covers interspersed with some really smart, surprising, engaging stage banter.

I don't agree with either of these criticisms, which isn't to say I don't have one of my own. My problem with the show was that Mac felt the need to explain so clearly what he was up to: "Comparison is violence," he said at one point. Yes, we know, it's in the title of the show. Mac himself drew attention to the fact that he did some lecturing last night, noting its appropriateness since he was performing in a school, after all. A good teacher, though, lets a student make connections for themselves; Mac provided those connections for us, and I kind of wish he hadn't.

That being said, however, I found a lot to think about in Comparison Is Violence. While the place he started from is unique to his experience of being compared to both Tiny Tim and Ziggy Stardust, he successfully universalized that experience (no small feat) to argue that comparisons are often a facile way of avoiding authentic emotional or intellectual engagement. At one point—the show's cutest moment—he picked a couple out of a the audience, and asked the man to compare his wife/girlfriend to something found in nature. The dude picked "cool water"—which, given that it was a million degrees in that auditorium, was incredibly sweet. Here, I think, he's demonstrating that metaphorical comparisons are more resonant and artful than literal ones. Or, to paraphrase a point he made later: The realism of Law and Order is much newer and stranger than the language of the theater. Replacing verisimilitude (you remind me of my ex-girlfriend) with poetry (you remind me of a cool drink of water)—well, at the very least it probably got that dude laid.

And as for whether cabaret is the appropriate medium to communicate something significant—or whether Mac occasionally busting into Bowie covers diminished the gravity of the evening—I don't even really understand the question. That razor's edge between comedy and tragedy (which Rude Mechs almost literally address, in that gag where their actors pretend to cry) is one of my favorite places to be; I wish serious things were discussed in unserious contexts more often. Plus, I really enjoyed/appreciated Mac's capsule history of drag and transgressive performance art; and I thought the weaving together of songs by all the artists discussed in the show made for a pretty cool auditory timeline.

I think that's all I have to say about that.

Powerful, gripping, challenging; adjectives can only tell you so much about tEEth's Home Made.
In many ways the piece defies definition, beckoning the audience to grapple with its themes in a very experiential way. Which is what ultimately makes Home Made a successful work; it communicates, engages, questions, and specifies without words. Which for all intents and purposes is the challenge at the heart of all contemporary dance, and the reason it can be such a fickle craft to create and to see. tEEth has bridged this gap though and created what could be one of the most thrilling performances in TBA:11.

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• Oops, there goes his shirt. Up over his head. Oh, MY.

Yup. No doubt about it, Kyle Abraham is a beautiful, beautiful specimen. So are his six dancers. Abraham is the choreographer and emotive mastermind behind The Radio Show (which has received a fair amount of press, deservedly). It only makes sense that the troupe is stacked with gorgeous folk; the show's main ideas surround desire and passions.

Possibly you’ve already read about the show, but if you need a quick recap, go here. Abraham and his company are young, and the performance is packed with energy. It’s ambitious, and, just like the WAMO radio station (the partial inspiration for the show), it's wide ranging. There’s Aretha and Beyonce, plus all the music in between. Sometimes the work gets a little too loose, a little confusing in its scope (it's trying to tackle Alzheimer's and the abstract effect of music on a community), and a bit jagged in its pace, with some unnecessarily jarring and sudden emotional outbursts. But by and large it’s really moving: a reflection on loss, how to build a community, and the stages of intimate relationships.

Check out the promo for the show; it captures the mood pretty well:

Click the jump for a few highlights.

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