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Event
Performance Art in Front of an Audience Ought to be Entertaining
Nearly 25 years after performance artist Ana Mendieta plunged to her death from her husband Carl Andre's 34th floor New York City apartment, two Bay Area conceptual artists are breathing new life into the sordid art-world drama.
Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert, known for their tabloid-style approach to making art, wrote and are now producing a theatrical portrait based on their interpretation of what the last argument between Andre and Mendieta might have been. Performance Art in Front of an Audience Ought to be Entertaining (a title borrowed from a line in the script) stars veteran actors Carla Pauli and Phillipe Coquet. The play appears in an exclusive East Bay performance at 21 Grand, an arts and contemporary performance space in Oakland, California, on April 23rd and 24th.
Carla Pauli, playing the Cuban-born performance artist, Ana Mendieta, studied acting at American Conservatory Theater Studio, and is a current on-going student at the Shari Carlson Studio. She has appeared in several productions around the Bay Area including Woman's Will gender bending production of Taming Of The Shrew, and Drama Mamas' Low Hanging Fruit. Her film appearances include the feature Canary (2009), which has screened internationally at festivals in Europe, Canada and the United States.
Phillipe Coquet, playing the poetic minimalist sculptor, Carl Andre, made his Broadway debut at the age of 8 playing Ptolemy, the King of Egypt. More recently, Coquet has played the stage at various venues in Los Angeles, including appearances in films and revolutionary theatre. For many years he has contributed his talents as an acting teacher and coach. He most recently appeared in "The Bacchae" at Mama Calisto's, and is currently studying Performance with Shari Carlson Studios.
Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta both lived and met in New York City in 1979. They fell in and out of love over the course of six years, maintaining a volatile relationship marked by public outbursts and passionate arguing often fueled by excessive drinking. Less macabre than poetic, Fletcher and Reichert's drama focuses on their final argument, conspicuously leaving out the details surrounding Mendieta's death. This leads the audience through an imagined conversation that reveals as much about the authors as it does about Andre and Mendieta.
Fletcher and Reichert have collaborated for more than 12 years on edgy performances that blur the boundary between art and life. Other projects by Fletcher and Reichert include Paparazzi Photographs, in which the artists hired a paparazzo to follow them for a day; Proceedings, a short video work that tracks the artists' obsession with the murder trial of Scott Peterson; Selling Yourself and Not Your Art, which involved hiring a Dale Carnegie instructor to coach artists on the business etiquette of marketing their wares; and Death & Taxes, Inc., a corporation run by an independent board that assumed fiduciary responsibility over the artists' lives for an entire year.
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Location21 Grand
416 25th Street
Oakland, CA 94612
United States
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Categories
| Minimum Age: 18 |
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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