Hand Foot Fizzle Face
Opening Night: June 19, 2015
Closing: June 27, 2015
Theater: JACK
Performance collective Piehole, helmed by director Tara Ahmadinejad, teams up with sound artist/composer Lea Bertucci to wake up an expensive art-object and give it a workout in a surreal gymnasium of sound, video, dance, and sweat. Inspired by an enigmatic art-book produced from an awkward one-off collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns, Piehole’s Hand Foot Fizzle Face examines the self-defeating impulse to transcend ephemerality, in art and life.
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June 22, 2015
If you have $30,000 to spare, then you, too, can own a first edition of “Foirades/Fizzles,” an unlikely 1976 artist’s book by Jasper Johns and Samuel Beckett. Etchings and aquatints — some playful, some troubling — accompany five gnomic prose works, or “Fizzles,” that Beckett translated from the French. Those with less pocket money can content themselves with “Hand Foot Fizzle Face,” a theatrical adaptation by the young company Piehole at the arts center Jack, in Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. How do you represent an obscure tome composed of nonrepresentational, noncorresponding text and images? Yeah. That’s a tough one. Piehole doesn’t deny the difficulty. Most of the action is staged on and around a blue wrestling mat, and the five actors are dressed in workout sweats, the better to tangle with the material. The director, Tara Ahmadinejad, assisted by the composer, Lea Bertucci, stages five “Fizzles” while a laser printer vomits paper, and a computer-synthesized voice wonders about where to go for drinks after the show.
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