The one-and-only Karen Finley came to see Nicky Paraiso's now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories at La MaMa this weekend and shared her thoughts on Facebook:
My reflection on Nicky Paraiso 'snow my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories – BRAVO! Brilliant!La Mama Theatre – NYC till April 7 Go Now!
Nicky Paraiso’s new performance, now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories is breathtaking, offering his life story as sail to illuminate matters of heart, mind, body and spirit. All along, he takes us to meet his family, friends, soul mates, teachers, art boss’s, students, collaborators, lovers, and us, the audience. This journey isn’t a skip through memory lane, but rather a time-travel kaleidoscope that reassembles a fractured remembrance. Paraiso, on stage, with twinkle wit, takes compassionate leadership, handing his life over as evidence. As tender and loving, as sacred and profane, as humorous and wicked, as known and confused, all while uncovering the messy hubris of those you love and live with. All while he experiences internal and external racism, the pains and promise of immigration, homophobia in all shapes and sizes, identity, genderqueer and the greying of age. Paraiso as impresario, shows us his humanity/humility as he faces his own soul journey amidst a series of life’s consequences, and within an outer world of continued oppressive policy that allows cracks for kindness. Paraiso does not give up, he holds court with the complexity-challenged, the emotional-toll aftermath and maintains his loyalty to the potential of the empowerment of creative expression. Just keep dancing. Keep singing. Make a show. Make something. Keep making art somehow.
There is a reason to review the years, for in looking back at the repeated traumas where there is no-time-allowed for recovery, of losing the many loved ones to AIDS and coming to terms of the cruelties of those you love, related to and trust. Paraiso demonstrates life and art as a process of becoming, a creative transformation, and that is what he was trained and supported for all along. And that is what Paraiso offers us here- that he is our artist NOW, he is an artist NOW, that art is the only constancy NOW. Art is his shared strength and connection proclaimed. And for us who have intersected on this journey of artmaking, the performance resonates profoundly where we wonder aloud - are we all trying our best to make meaning and purpose with this damn thing called art?
The story of his life is a page turner – from being an only child to older parents who immigrated from the Philippines, to his early life as a musical prodigy, to his adventures in an era-gone-bye New York, to his loss of friends and loves to AIDS and surviving. Paraiso has 4 decades of impressive theatrical accomplishments in both performing and curating dance and theater works. He endures the effects of stereotyping roles and exclusion in his personal and professional world. He has had close relationships with many artistic geniuses, legends in close collaboration and proximity – including Ellen Stewart. One such heart-wrenching moment is when Stewart, who vehemently protested to Jeff Weiss in the dressing room while Paraiso is having the makeup applied to perform in Blackface and Weiss responding with dismissive laughter to Stewart’s objections. The show went on.
The complexity of the relationship and the intimate scenarios of truth to power/ racism within the very building Stewart herself founded, Paraiso relays the double consciousness of race, and his Asian identity, the simultaneous fetish, abjection and desire that is held for him, and the place he holds in between black and white. He reveals the different parts he is positioned within his own racial and sexual identity in many encounters – such as with his own mother – who refused Paraiso to be able to play a record of an African American male musical artist. That “no Black music would play” in her house. As a child, he struggles in that moment but ultimately obeys, yet he feels disturbed by his obedience and is left confused with the complicity within the obedient gesture. Those memories fill his childhood home, that later, when he inherits from his parents, he sells, left as is. The refusal to move in, to abandon the interior contents, or to transfer the goods – suggests defiance, not to be taking on/holding onto-/a disinheriting the family legacy. Although not spoken is inferred with his denouncement and questioning of what is home and deciding on a new direction, a family, a new home, the theater as a family, curator, authority. And working for /with a new mother, La Mama.
The ethereal and inspired direction by John Jesrun transports the life-mapping-text away from a literal memoir. Instead the staging is a psychic, poetic portal/ portrayal by removing the limits of the proscenium. A sheer, flexible, fabric, curtain-sail cuts the stage in half with "whiteness" the audience on either side. Therefore, when the curtain is drawn, the audience looks out onto itself, a mirror of self, audience. And the projection is also doubled in reverse. The double in reverse is the insignia of this performance chimera beast. The stage is more of a floating memory carousel, a promenade, a boardwalk. With Paraiso, moving through as if on a street, entering and stopping on the thoroughfare, the audience sits on either side of the performance street– with images from his past projected onto the curtain. Onstage with Paraiso are four dancers, choreographers who move slowly with improvisational, embodied, intrigue-asking questions to Paraiso in breezy non-confrontational asides. They act as familiars, wind sprites amongst the memory conjuring.
Also sharing the stage is a piano – or should I say pain-o, for it is here that Paraiso is simultaneously-immersed, performing- emotionally transfixed, steady, magnificent in his elevated singing and demonstrates his yearning/years of training, his dedication and patience in his playing to give the best performance possible. And he does. This command also allows for a space of authority, an allowed drive, ambition, allowed aggressiveness within the narrative. Paraiso knows all the music-muscle by heart, going back to when his beloved teacher created a concerto for him as a child “to play onstage at Carnegie Hall” embraces his being loved, and the promise, and genuine impulse of loving through his playing.
Paraiso transcends his own quest and graces us with art bliss, the inspiration of performance as possibility to go beyond ordinariness. It is within that possibility, to reimagine the constraints of the harsh reality, to a reimagining that Paraiso takes us to the long tradition of theatrical performance as impossible as possible. And that is why we are all in the room, and why he commands our whole- hearted attention, that there remains hope and agency within the bittersweet for those who sing and play.
As an audience, we stood up and gave a standing ovation to "now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories" and it never felt so good. Bravo
now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories plays La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theater through April 7, 2019 only.
To quote Karen: "Go Now!"
_____
La MaMa
in association with Mount Tremper Arts
presents
Written by Nicky Paraiso
Directed by John Jesurun
With Nicky Paraiso, Irene Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Vicky Shick, Paz Tanjuaquio
now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories is the newest work from Nicky Paraiso, an award-winning 40-year veteran of the New York City performance community. In a deep exploration of an artist’s life, Paraiso investigates aging, identity, sexuality, class and race. Directed by MacArthur Fellow John Jesurun, this world premiere is a multi-disciplinary celebration of an artistic community as it grows older and continues to make work, both individually and with each other. Paraiso is joined by choreographer / dancers Irene Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Vicky Shick, and Paz Tanjuaquio in performance and as collaborators.
Thursday - Saturday at 7pm; Sunday at 3pm
The Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
66 East 4th Street
New York, NY 10003
Tickets: $30 Adults; $25 Students/Seniors
For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE
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