The talented, the painfully earnest, the weird… and the really, really boring: they’re all out at the Lower East Side Festival of the Arts, a 3-day free event at the Theater for The New City.
The sampler nature of the program makes it exceptionally interesting and maddening at the same time. It includes local legends (think Penny Arcade, Taylor Mead, Steve Ben Israel…) and new talent,a mix of pleasant discoveries and moments of sheer disbelief at the corny or pedantic nature of the work presented.
The line-up don’t seem to follow any logic – as for example in the “cabaret”, on opening night, the excellent performance of Poez (original spoken word) was followed by the general anaesthesia of the excerpt of “Dr. Noguchi”, itself followed by an unexpectedly nice duo of voices called “Kitsch” (when was the last time something announced as “work coming from an organic place that is sure to captivate the audience” actually did that?). And there are the crowd-pleasers, in the major venue space, on their way to become regulars at this Festival – the Japanese dancers of 10Tecomai are certainly amongst those- , as well as the veterans of the local scene – Joe Bendik, for one… Just a few photos to capture the mood…
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