Monday, March 10, 2014

NY TIMES References "SUNNY" on March 7, 2014


"Sunny in the Furnace,” the nearly 90-minute show that debuted at the Kitchen on Thursday March  6, 2014.
_________________________________________
It's by performance and installation artist Aki Sasamoto

_____________________________________________________________

Dance|Dance Review

Stilts Aren’t the Only Way to Rise Above It All

Aki Sasamoto’s ‘Sunny in the Furnace,’ at the Kitchen

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/arts/dance/aki-sasamotos-sunny-in-the-furnace-at-the-kitchen.html?_r=0


That’s especially unfortunate because the show does have an emotional core. Ms. Sasamoto tells a story — possibly true, possibly not — about a friend who killed himself. Her musings are about why different kinds of people — optimists, pessimists; dumb people, smart people — react to life differently. Intelligence, she suggests, isn’t necessarily a blessing. “Work on your idiocy,” she advises.

She shows a YouTube video of Bobby Hebb performing “Sunny,” a hopeful song he wrote after the death of his brother, and “Sunny in the Furnace” can also be taken as a response to grief. The key words she writes to elucidate her muddled thinking, along with the blackboard lecture with equations and diagrams that the mathematician Pau Atela gives to us on catastrophe theory, could be a parody of the false comfort in rational explanations of human behavior. But “Sunny in the Furnace” feels half-baked.

No comments: