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Fun, Seriously
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19520 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
2,082 Words |
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Gary Parks
Gary Parks is the news editor of Dance Magazine. |
You know how they say a camel is a horse designed by committee? That's the way I've always felt about the title Serious Fun!, which is what Lincoln Center calls its annual summer festival of experimental performing arts. In the world of art and entertainment, the title on the marquee is crucial. Serious Fun! is just the sort of clunky label you'd expect from a conservative establishment trying to promote the new and different. I suppose an oxymoron was inevitable.
Yet it would be a mistake to be put off Serious Fun! by the bogus excitement of that built-in exclamation point, which doesn't work any better here than it did with Oklahoma! Or Oh! Calcutta! Experiments are often serious and sometimes fun but they're usually messy, and though Lincoln Center, which is as clean as Disneyland, doesn't do messy very well, it's been trying. This was the fifth installment of the festival. The focus this year was on Americans, of whom the best known was performance artist Laurie Anderson. (The only foreign group represented was the French art-rock ensemble Art Zoyd.) There were more female artists around than usual, as well as more artists from the West Coast, which is usually ignored by New York City.
All five Serious Fun! festivals have been produced for Lincoln Center by International Production Associates, Inc., an artists management organization directed by Jedediah Wheeler. In all, seventeen performances were spread over four weeks in July and August at Alice Tully Hall.
Since one of the things Serious Fun! is designed to do is to get the young, "downtown" audience warming Lincoln Center's uptown seats, moderate ticket prices are vital. Individual tickets for most events were $20 and $25, though buying a book of five tickets lowered the price per performance to $16 each. Anderson's gig was the sole exception; as befits her greater fame, I suppose, her performances were priced at $30, no discount tickets accepted, thank you very much. These are pretty good prices for a city where seeing a movie costs $7.50 and the cover charge at a club can be $15. It will cost you $40 to see Martha Graham's company at New York's City Center this fall, and Dance Theater Workshop, downtown's foremost but tiny (150 seats) performance space, charges $12. Serious Fun! doesn't make any money for Lincoln Center, which turned this year to the Philip Morris Companies, Inc., to make up the slack.
Philip Morris, you may recall, is the firm that manufactures cigarettes and supports Jesse Helms (among other things), a senator who doesn't much like performance
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