I was honored when my two young nieces shared their favorite toy with me, a figurine of Princess Cadance (a unicorn from the My Little Pony stories) that flaps her wings and talks. And I was horrified when I heard the three things that she says in an endless loop: “I’m happy because I’m getting married today!”, “My dress is soooo pretty!”, and, finally, after a giggle fit, “Everybody, it’s time to dance now!”, at which point she plays a disco song and flashes bright lights. Each time the music started my nieces squealed and bounced around her. This figure is a cunning mash-up of all the things that little girls love: horses, unicorns, princesses, tiaras, pink, purple, rainbows and sparkles. Its less like a toy than a sociologically engineered composite.

The unicorn’s chatter is mindlessly girlish, and I wondered how this was shaping my nieces’ unformed, agile young minds. I remember when I was young my mother, to her great credit and my great annoyance, refused to buy me a Barbie doll, not because she was a feminist, but because she thought the doll was ridiculous. Princess Cadence, a six-inch-high electrified pink plastic unicorn, is also ridiculous. She has none of the surreal animal grace of a unicorn; she’s a cartoon. I ended up acquiring a hand-me-down Barbie doll, and also a banged-up blonde Barbie styling head, from a sympathetic babysitter. I can reveal here that I enjoyed them heartily, and also that they did nothing to shape my ideas about what a woman should look like and how a woman should behave. Similarly, I’m confident that when my two nieces finally grow tired of playing with Princess Cadance, they will remember little of what she said.

Image courtesy of Hasbro.

March 27, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Kirsten Greenidge’s play Luck of the Irish at LCT3 takes the single family house as a lens through which to examine race and class. Its story begins in the 1950’s, when an Irish American handyman “ghost buys" a house for an African American doctor and his family in a posh suburb of Boston. The play’s writing is admirably even-handed, exploring each character’s point of view. The play's set, designed by Mimi Lien, is at once incredibly suggestive and incredibly elegant. It gives us the house itself, a clapboard colonial with a pitched roof and brick chimney, as a full-size clear plexiglass cut-out at the back of the stage, tethered to the ceiling with wires. This ghost-bought house is appropriately spectral, more of an idea than a thing. The house’s back yard is expressed as a stretch of artificial turf that covers the entire stage, spilling over its front edge to the floor below. Its sumptuous texture and crazy green color are indelible; they overwhelm the house itself and all the other furniture on stage.

None of the characters seems entirely happy about the house. The handyman’s wife is resentful she can’t live in a home this grand ("This is not the order of things – I got passed over.”) and the doctor is disappointed that the house doesn’t bring him satisfaction (“I don’t feel lifted.) The handyman and the doctor’s wife, however, kindred spirits, are drawn more powerfully to the land than the house. The doctor’s wife rushes through her chores each morning to spend her afternoons lounging dreamily in the back yard. One day the handyman meets her here and observes that the grass "curls up to your toes like the sea." The house promises stability and status while the lawn promises freedom, both physical and imaginative. It’s a tribute to the play that, at the end, we’re not sure what matters most.

Image courtesy of Rose Brand.

March 26, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The most vivid element of anthropologist Mick Taussig’s multi-media happening Berlin Sun Theater, performed at the Whitney Museum last month, were the dances by Kyle Bukhari. Taussig’s goal was "the re-enchantment of nature in the age of global meltdown.“ Specifically, he examined ways our diminished experience of the sun has ruptured elemental physical and mythological connections. The piece unfolded around a personal, poetic text that Taussig read out loud on stage. Enriching the narrative were musical passages, film clips, project images from Taussig’s notebooks, and Bukhari’s dances. Cutting through the shadowy, ground-floor atrium of the Museum, Bukhari enacted routes, rotations and repetitions that recalled planetary motion. At certain moments, moments explosive with feeling, the dancer illustrated specific details from Taussig’s stories. He became, fleetingly, a tree wrestling upwards from the ground, a cloud of fireflies interrupting the darkness, and, in a big bubble-headed mask, the moon.

I had always thought that dance was inevitably tied to human stories because of its dependence on the body, that it was, essentially, about a person moving through the world. But Bukhari’s remarkable transformations showed otherwise. The ease with which he made himself a moon, spooking and enchanting audience members as he emerged among them, got at the majesty of that celestial body. It made clear that a dancer isn’t limited to human actions – he can be anything he imagines.

March 25, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process. In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles. By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives. Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.

In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism. And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table. In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things. In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain. In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint. Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window. It makes a poetry of the concrete.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

March 19, 2013 by Nalina Moses