.: Traveling To Avenue Q

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Traveling To Avenue Q

Saw Avenue Q tonight...Awesome, Awesome, Awesome... Think RENT but with puppets... and not the Team America type but the sesame Street/ Muppet kind! Its hard to explain the smile across my face, a broadway musical of muppets that both made me laugh and cry... Here are some excerpts from the Toronto Star...

Near the beginning of Avenue Q, the Tony Award-winning musical that Dancap Productions is bringing to the Elgin Theatre starting next Tuesday night, the cast of the show – humans and puppets alike – break into a song called "It Sucks to Be Me."

It's a neat way of letting us know several things at once:
1. The show is going to be about the feeling of disenfranchisement that many young people have today.
2. It's got a ribald sense of humour.
3. It's definitely not your grandpa's puppet show.

It's safe to issue a warning: if you don't like your puppets any racier than, say, Lamb Chop, you've stepped into the wrong theatre.

The creation of the songwriting team of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, along with book writer Jeff Whitty, "the little musical that could" has been dazzling audiences for more than five years on Broadway, plus a still-hot run in London (and a disappointing one in Las Vegas). At last, Toronto gets a turn with a production touring North America. It all started because Lopez and Marx wished their friends liked musicals more. "We wanted to figure out why all the people we liked didn't like the same shows we did," says Marx from his New York home.

"We finally figured out that it was when characters started singing that they got turned off."

Since vocalization is a vital part of every musical, that would seem to be an insurmountable problem. Not to these guys.

"Animated cartoons and puppets have inherent permission to sing," explains Marx, "because you know they're fake. Once Miss Piggy starts singing, all rules cease to exist."

"The secret is the transference that the use of puppets allows. It's just like the masks in Greek theatre," he said on a rehearsal break in New York. "To anyone who understands the history of theatre, it's just like it was in ancient Greece, when – if you wanted to insult or satirize the people in power – you did it behind a mask so you could pretend to be innocent."

And so the puppets in Avenue Q can mock George W. Bush, get drunk and have one-night stands with inappropriate partners (like the succinctly named Lucy the Slut) or indulge in watching X-rated videos. In fact, one of the show's funniest numbers is called "The Internet is for Porn," with the unforgettable line, "Grab your dick and double-click."

Performed by puppets, the lyrics are at once more shocking and more acceptable – not to mention hilarious.

But there's a serious side to puppet transference as well, which Marx is anxious to point out. "My favourite part of the show," he says, "is Rod, the gay character, going through his journey of noticing that everyone around him has a partner and admitting to his therapist that he's lonely and wishes he was in a relationship.

"I love that the audience immediately roots for this gay puppet to live his life and wants him to be happy."

And although the second night of its Toronto run will also mark the start of its sixth year on Broadway, the show seems as relevant as ever.

"I'm really proud of this show," boasts producer McCollum, "because as the world gets crazier and crazier it still stays true."

How do you write a musical about racism, homophobia, sex, poverty and porn and also make it screamingly funny?
Create a cast of potty-mouthed puppets to do the dirty work for human writers and stars.

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com