Drama. MONTGOMERY PARK, OR OPULENCE is an essay in the form of a building, a performance text in the form of a series of tales out of the archive of a fictional asylum, stories of combination with forms of consciousness beyond the human. Poet Gregory Pardlo writes: "Keithley erodes, through stunning diction and unconventional syntax, our comfort with language. In MONTGOMERY PARK, she describes a painting that 'continually interrupts itself.' This is apropos of the language laid bare throughout the entire work, stripped of its decoration and of its decorum, to reveal the rudimentary architecture, the humanity we rarely acknowledge. There is an ethics in doing so, of course. Her writing is vital and unnerving, a lesson in the varieties of awareness the human animal can achieve."
Author Hometown: BROOKLYN, NY USA
About the author: Karinne Keithley is a playwright, audio-video essayist, and scholar. Her work in dance, text, sound and video has been seen around New York since 1995, as well as on the web since 2001. A member of the playwrights posse JOYCE CHO, she is dedicated to experimentation in radical presence of mind. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studies American poetics as ethical practice.
Reviews:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/arts/dance/23here.html
