Review: In ‘Chasing Andy Warhol’, Street Theater Goes Pop


It’s that easy. A Breton shirt, a silver wig, acetate-framed sunglasses – and suddenly Andy Warhol is there. There on a Citi Bike and there again on roller skates. Playing chess, posing for ballet, gliding through the drizzle. In “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a snapshot of pop artist Bated Breath Theater Company’s street performance, those who died in 1987It repopulated select blocks of Manhattan’s East Village.

Bated Breath’s previous exhibition, “Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec”, a tribute to French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, made the flâneur’s way in the West Village during the first winter of the pandemic, with mostly positive gains. comments. So maybe epidemic fatigue can blame the wet spring weather or Warhol’s apparent ability to avoid attempts to capture him—in life, in art—but the quirks of “Chasing Andy Warhol” are mostly recorded as blank canvases, offering little insight. to a man or a job.

Created and directed by Mara Lieberman, the only hour-long show kicks off at Astor Place. A tour guide in a jean jacket (Fé Torres at the show I attended) straps himself into a daffodil airplane seat. Andy Warhol (Kyle Starling, one of many Warhols) emerges from the back of his seat. Warhol then leads the guide – and ticketed spectators – through the streets, through plazas, to the window of a gym. Throughout, Torres offers biography hacks that are almost completely unintelligible if you’re not familiar with Warhol’s history (“Was he Charles? Was it before he went to Hawaii? I thought you didn’t fall in love afterwards.”) and is not illuminating. If you.

If the images were more dynamic, the text would be less important. But despite a few witty touches, such as the framing of the Empire State Building in tribute to Warhol’s long-running film “Empire,” the staging and design feel chaotic, and Rachel Leigh Dolan’s choreography is rarely inspired. The setting is upbeat, rigid, and sharply amateur, as in a scene where the actress playing Edie Sedgwick falls onto the pavement. Edie died of an overdose; The actress is very clearly still breathing.



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