My Barbarian’s Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater at Human Resources

…kicked off last night at LA’s Human Resources in Chinatown (where, despite the crowd, I managed to get real Doris Day parking – right at the front door) with an opening for the big exhibition of new work and videos plus an audience participation performance of ‘personification’ where about 15 spectators were pulled up on ‘stage,’ dressed in ‘My Barbarianesque’ stage attire, and instructed to pull a paper from a hat with a term to personify – first all at once and then one by one….revealing motivations such as ‘adjunct pedagogy,’ ‘Iran and Afghanistan,’ ‘Summer,’ ‘psychiatry,’ ‘success,’ and ‘condescension.’  (website)

Human Resources presents My Barbarian’s Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater, a residency in the form of a gallery installation that includes new videos, sculptures, and a performance environment.  The project highlights the paradoxes of an art practice founded in critique, which nonetheless relies on economic forces that are worthy of serious criticism.  In this time of spectacle and disparity, excess and poverty, the baroque figures as an ornate frame that contains all of these extremes.  My Barbarian performs a variety of styles within this frame; camp drag, baroque opera, communist drama, countercultural performance and world theater all accumulate into a set of narratives that assimilate too much information.  Enacting this accumulation, the group developed characters such as “Shakuntala DuBois” and “Cassandra Wasserstein Shakespeare,” masked figures who are trapped within cyclical forces they can foresee but cannot change.