Page Text: Standup Comedy & Performance Art Miscellany
Stand-up Workshop Showcase, Hollywood Improv (2010)
As part of my research on humor in performance art, I studied at the Standup Workshop in Los Angeles. Here’s my final project: a performance at the Hollywood Improv. Featuring appearances by the Pythagorean Theorem, the Post-Post Modernists, and few more.
Middle Aged Woman plays “Pick Up the Pieces” on the drums for no apparent reason (2013/2015)
As if expectations toward what young women can and should be doing weren’t enough, middle-aged women face an entirely different set of limited expectations. Activities like programming and playing the drums may have seemed marginally acceptable for younger women a generation ago. Yet a middle aged woman who did these things in her teens or twenties will be greeted with surprise or disbelief when she mentions that she can do them, as though women somehow lose their capabilities as they get older. I wrote a little bit about this phenomenon in Tap Dancing Drummers and Other Female Percussionists. And I’ve made some videos. Here’s one:
Hermit and/or Narcissist Harlem Shake (2013)
The Harlem Shake meme flew in the face of the notions that the Internet diminishes face to face contact: multitudes joined with friends, acquaintances, or strangers in meatspace to create group YouTube videos with seemingly endless variations on the meme. I decided to rebel by creating a version that represented a hermit and/or narcissist’s take:
The Typewriter (2004)
Übergeek (Amy Alexander) has long been a fan of Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter (1950), a composition for typewriter and orchestra. Intrigued with the relationship between computers’ business, art and leisure functions, Übergeek has arranged Anderson’s classic for contemporary office equipment: acoustic computer keyboard and Windows. Debuted at the Read_Me festival, Aarhus, Denmark, 2004.
You can see Übergeek in her usual role as VJ Übergeek in CyberSpaceLand . And then there was the time in 2009 Übergeek was asked to do a simple live streamed CyberSpaceLand VJ performance from San Diego for a live audience in Switzerland. Somehow, we ended up in the basement of the ÜberLabs…