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In The News'Mirrors in Every Corner' at the Intersection for the Arts
San José says the play explores what it means to be black, what a family is and what a neighborhood is, in a way that draws the audience in. "Indictments fall way low on the list of her tactics," he says about Hodge. "I don't know a play I've worked on that has so many question marks in it."
How do we talk about race in contemporary America? President Obama addressed the question in his historic campaign speech in March 2008. Others, like 25-year-old poet and playwright Chinaka Hodge, do it with their art. Her provocative play "Mirrors in Every Corner," which opens tonight at Intersection for the Arts, explores what happens to an African American family in Oakland after the mother gives birth to a Caucasian baby.
Art that engages with the politics of gendered subjectivity frequently references the body. As Margaret Harrison understands fully, there are reasons for the prevalence of this thematic emphasis. ILL-EVENT: MIRRORS IN EVERY CORNER
Joseph directs Hodge's first solo full-length script,Mirrors in Every Corner, which examines what happens when an African-American woman gives birth to a Caucasian baby. Gert rude Stein would have been there opening night to see the stellar cast Daveed Diggs (Sidney Bechet?), hear the original score by Ambrose Akinmusire (Erik Satie), and admire Evan Bissell's (Georges Braque) set installation. Oakland Tech Offers Free Community Event for HAMLET: BLOOD IN THE BRAIN, 3/1
When California Shakespeare Theater embarked on its New Works/New Communities initiative back in 2004, no one dreamed that the project's first new play, Hamlet: Blood in the Brain-having culminated in Oakland following a sold-out run by Campo Santo at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco-would someday play on an international stage. The Bodies Are Back - A Challenge to Cheesecake
We sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between art and pornography, but throw in some bizarre gender-bending imagery and various plays on the depiction of women in art, pornography, and the media and the problem is infinitely compounded. This is perhaps why Margaret Harrison's original 1971 exhibition of many of the works in The Bodies Are Back was shut down after one day. These works are - as the name indicates - back, along with newer works on similar themes at Intersection for the Arts.
'The Bodies Are Back': re-examining Harrison
British artist Margaret Harrison is no stranger to controversy. Granted, the voluptuous men and women who populate her saucy watercolor drawings are stalwarts of sexual ambivalence - superhero-like icons who are simultaneously humorous and starkly reflective of social mores - that wouldn't cause most contemporary art lovers to bat an eyelash. However, Harrison's first solo show as an emerging artist in 1971 was considered far too raunchy and subversive in its time, despite the heyday of the second-wave feminist movement.
The Bodies Are'The Bodies Are Back' reconsiders the figure at Intersection for the Arts
Is satiric cheesecake still cheesecake? Is titillating imagery of voluptuous flesh bursting forth from peek-a-boo bras and garter belts pornographic even when it's delivered with a generous dose of irony and savage humor? This thorny dilemma, replete with alleged assaults on the gender of superheroes (more on that later), caught a 30ish, classically trained, feminist artist named Margaret Harrison in its clutches and threatened to derail her promising career. In 1971, the police shut down her first solo exhibition the day after it opened in London; a show that, in Harrison's words, "tread the fine line between irony, sexuality, transgender, transvestism, power, masculinity, objectification and exploitation."
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