Clown Masterpiece (mess-terpiece)

Alex Tatarsky’s solo work Sad Boys in Harpy Land is a tour de force, a definition defying experience that will literally take you on a journey, leaving you in a wasteland in it's wake. If you do not get to see it, I feel for you, because it is an amazing experience.  Self aware, with  no safety net, Tatarsky weaves Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship with the contemporary apocalypse, Wagnerian opera, a series of every tinier pianos, a solo as an earthworm and the archetype of the Wandering Jew into a work about identity in art, and an acknowledgement of the existential angst that we all are feeling right now. It is non linear but yet a satisfying looping structure that brings us back again and again to leitmotifs of an artist’s creative meandering. Tatarsky is a fearless performer who over and over again “goes there” in this show, willing to nearly come apart at the seams and bare all.  They are also extremely gifted as a physical clown and singer who is highly literary. They are also very funny. Tatarsky finds so much humor and irony in tragedy that it will make your head spin. The takeaway is that to be an artist in times like these is to live in hell.  Especially a certain level of Dante’s hell……

I got a chance to touch base with Laura Paige Kyber, the Assistant Curator of Performance and Public Programs for the Museum of Contemporary Art just as the MCA kicked off this new season of performance events.  As a former dance person who put in time at Jacob’s Pillow, Kyber has deep connections to the field of time based performer centered contemporary art and is always on the lookout for performers we Midwesterners need to experience.  Tatarsky is such an artist. (There is even an acknowledgement of Ono’s show upstairs in Tatarsky’s improvisational riffing, which is why you want to should strive to see performance art in a contemporary art museum) 

There are more not to be missed contemporary performers upcoming this winter, so be sure to get on the MCA mailing list. The evenings will be like nothing else available in Chicago: interdisciplinary work that presents unexpected relevance, shimmers with excellence and features artists grappling with what it is to be a human in these times surrounded by a lot of very thought provoking art work. There's a good restaurant in the building too. 

Sad Boys in Harpy Land is playing this weekend only at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 East Chicago Avenue. For more information and tickets go to https://visit.mcachicago.org/events/alex-tatarsky-sad-boys-in-harpy-land/

 No part of this article was created using AI

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