[STAGE]
EXPRESSED LIVE
“WE’RE TOTALLY GOING TO GET TO THAT SOON.”
{BY STEVE SUCATO}
INFO@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
TRANS-Q LIVE! 8 p.m., Fri., Sept. 18. The Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky St., North Side. $8-10. 412-237-8300 or www.warhol.org
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[ARCHITECTURE]
UNPAID DEBTS Musician Bell’s Roar {PHOTO COURTESY OF BELL’S ROAR}
Much like the first edition of Trans-Q Live! at The Andy Warhol Museum, in 2013, this year’s edition at the 100-seat Warhol Theater will retain a pop-cabaret/varietyshow feel. Essentially a live version of the Pittsburgh-produced online variety show Trans-Q Television, the 90-minute Sept. 18 production offers an eclectic mix of music, dance and spoken-word and visual artists for an adult evening of entertainment. The show is produced by Scott Andrew, Adil Mansoor and Suzie Silver, but its title can be somewhat misleading, acknowledges Silver, who’s an art professor at Carnegie Mellon University. While the program has a queer-community focus, she says, “We are interested in more radical expressions of gender and desire as an artist than [in] someone’s sexuality.” Hosted by Joseph Hall, this year’s lineup of local performers include bawdy sketch-comedy troupe The Bang Gang; brash and funny drag performer Cindy Crotchford (Billy T. Sharp); Trinidadian spoken-word artist Bekezela Mguni; and a collaborative performance by multimedia artist Mario Ashkar and theatrical drag performer Moonbaby. A last-minute replacement for hip-hop soul singer Blakk Rapp Madusa is New York-based indie synthpop singer/songwriter Bell’s Roar (Sean Desiree). Bell’s Roar will perform selections from her soon-tobe-released Firebrand Records EP SECOND CHANCES Vol. 1. Silver says she lucked out that Bell’s Roar was already going to be in Pittsburgh that day to perform at Bunker Projects as part of her 11-city Midwest tour. Also on the program are performances by dancers Anna Thompson and Taylor Knight (a.k.a. slowdanger), their work eXchange, in which the dancers take turns generating sounds with their bodies and responding through movement. And in a collaboration between dancer/ choreographer Jasmine Hearn and visual artist Alisha Wormsley, the pair will explore themes of transitioning and otherness using dance, video and song. “With Trans-Q Live! we are really trying to provide a venue and a platform for local artists to experiment and collaborate with fellow artists that they might not otherwise get,” says Silver. Intermixed with the live performances of eight to ten minutes each will be video excerpts from upcoming Trans-Q Television episodes and a video by Portuguese video artist/dancer Daniel Pinheiro that references the 1968 Andy Warholproduced film Flesh.
{BY CHARLES ROSENBLUM}
B
ARACK OBAMA was recently in Alas-
ka talking about dangerous climate change even as he announced plans to allow Shell to begin major Arctic drilling. This seemingly stark hypocrisy is likely more complex than it looks. Doubtless, the president dislikes but cannot stop oil drilling, while he admires but cannot fully implement environmental sustainability. The world’s most powerful man is stuck in the historical moment, where momentum and inertia are sadly reversed. This is how I understand the recent announcement by developers McCormack Baron Salazar, accompanied by Mayor Peduto, that Bjarke Ingels Group will be the lead architectural designer for the redevelopment of the Lower Hill around the old Civic Arena site. (I avoid saying “BIG,” a name that emits cliché headlines like radioactivity). Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect, is barely 40 and already a superstar, author
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 09.16/09.23.2015
{PHOTO BY THEO SCHWARZ}
Grounds for discussion: The former Civic Arena site, now a parking lot.
of a thick architectural treatise in comicbook format and the subject of a New Yorker profile, even as his international projects proliferate. He has sustainable projects in his portfolio, such as the proposed Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy power plant in Copenhagen, which emits stylish steam instead of smoke. It will also serve, notoriously, as a ski slope. Still, Ingels is, more broadly, the thing that we think will make the future better. The unstoppable undesirable momentum, however, is the Penguins’ ownership of the development site and, more broadly, publicly supported development of privately owned real estate. If Penguins owner Mario Lemieux and his partners are considering selling the site or taking on investors at a profit, as has been widely reported, they should surely pay back all of the public subsidies that made the whole enterprise possible. Even Peduto has publicly hinted at such a thing.
The Lower Hill is not an asset for the Penguins to sell, it is a debt for them to repay. Meanwhile, for all the great achievements in the city, we’ve also just been named one of the most racist cities in America. Accusing website insidermonkey. com is obscure, but similar published indictments of this city proliferate. The usual chirpy cheerleading websites are notably silent on the matter. So it’s particularly bad timing to announce that your white developers have chosen a really white architect (albeit a really good one) to work in an overwhelmingly African-American neighborhood, especially when the published response from McCormack Baron Salazar about minority-developer participation is, effectively, “We’re totally going to get to that soon.” It’s notable that a Community Benefits Agreement, guaranteeing financial payments and employment participation for