My Barbarian "Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT)"

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My Barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT). 

My Barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT) is a series of workshops in which the collective works with local artists, musicians, and actors to develop an original work.   The Post-Living Ante-Action Theater, or PoLAAT, continues My Barbarian's self-conscious translation of what is thought of as 1960s countercultural theatre into a performance of the present. In excavating theatrical tropes associated with that era, including resistance and radicalism, we situate a contemporary quest for agency against a backdrop of previous struggles. A critical view of the late 1960s and early '70s illuminates a range of performance practices that share a hybridized approach to leftist politics, disciplinarity, artistic authorship, racial and sexual identity, and the positioning of the self among cultural fields inherited from Modernism. The successes and failures of previous countercultural movements offer models from which we may organize our own lives in the face of an increasingly powerful hegemony. The title Post-Living Ante-Action Theater references two radical avant-garde performance collectives of the '60s: the Living Theatre, which originated in New York, and Munich's Action Theater, which became known as antiteater under Rainer Werner Fassbinder's direction. The Living Theatre's Paradise Now (1968) leads the audience through a series of ritualistic improvisations, using group encounters with Kabbalistic and Hindu texts to conjure a lived experience outside of the artificiality of traditional theater. Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now(1969) is antiteater's response to that work: a series of randomly sequenced scenes of bourgeois life intersected with readings from the diary of a child murderer. The Action Theater started after members saw the Living Theatre perform in Munich, reinterpreting the collective ethos as a means of addressing their own cultural moment in West Germany. Both groups were dependent upon collectivity as a mode of production, a model for action, but while the Living Theatre sought radical liberation, antiteater performed radical critique.  

http://mybarbarian.com/

My Barbarian is a Los Angeles-based performance collective founded in 2000 by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. The trio performs in site-specific plays, musical concerts, theatrical situations and produces video installations that play with the spectacular while engaging viewers critically. Their interdisciplinary projects explore and exhume cross-cultural mishaps and misadventures drawn from history, mythology, art and popular culture.

My Barbarian has performed and exhibited widely in Los Angeles: LACMA, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, MOCA, LAXART, Schindler House, LACE; in New York: Whitney Museum, New Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Participant, Inc., Joe's Pub; and elsewhere at Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Aspen Art Museum; Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Samson Projects, Boston; The Power Plant, Toronto; De Appel, Amsterdam; Peres Projects, Berlin; Torpedo, Oslo; El Matadero, Madrid and Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy; Lui Velazquez, Tijuana. My Barbarian was included in the 2005 and 2007 Performa Biennials, the 2006 and 2008 California Biennials and the 2007 Montreal Biennial. In 2008, the group performed commissioned works for the New Museum and Galleria Civica, Trento. They also presented an durational performance installation at Art Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2008, My Barbarian recieved an Art Matters grant to make a new performance and video project at the Townhouse Gallery, in Cairo, Egypt. They will have their first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery in May 2009, at Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.