My Barbarian via mybarbarian.com

My Barbarian: Post-Paradise, Sorry Again
Thursday and Friday, July 3 and 4, 2008 - 7:30 pm
New Museum , $8 Members, $10 everybody else

The Living Theatre is one of those strange, anachronistic beasts that has steadfastly refused its consignment to the pages of history - its actually still around and kicking. It's a quirk proper to the medium that the theater everyone talks about after the fact is so very rarely vital in its own right, Beckett being perhaps the greatest exception. This was never more apparent than in the work of the Living's patron saint, Antonin Artaud, who, though a luminously brilliant thinker and writer, was a pretty disastrous theater-maker. Indeed, were it not for the Living's considerable achievements in the sixties, one could easily argue that Artaud's greatest legacy is the work of Jacques Derrida. In any case, whatever remains of the Living Theater is certainly most relevant as history; something they tacitly acknowledged by bringing back The Brig the other day. Yet their dogged, commendable persistence produces situations like the one this Thursday and Friday at the New Museum, where a young performance tribe with a cool name tucks in to its still twitching corpse. My Barbarian's piece Post-Paradise, Sorry Again, is at least partially a riff on the Living's most widely known work, Paradise Now which included, get this, nudity and the examination of social taboos. I suspect My Barbarian's work is a bit more complicated, times being what they are, but you'll have to hit the Bowery to be sure.