Woyzek and ETHEL

This weekend we had back to back shows to kick off this season of the Next Wave Festival at BAM. And it started off great. Friday night we saw Woyzeck, a reinvention of the German 19th century play by an Icelandic theater group with a score by Nick Cave. I didn't know what to expect really, but the result was great. A morality play about a worker who is driven insane by his superiors and by jealousy, the music by Nick Cave worked great with the play (see above for an example), as well as trapeze work and water tanks that were worked in to the show. It sounds really odd but it was great.

And yesterday, after spending the day painting a school up in The Bronx for New York Cares Day, we saw ETHEL's TruckStop. This was another unexpected show in a good way. ETHEL is a classically trained string quartet, but they were performing with a bunch of guests, featuring a Hawaiian slack key guitar, a Mexican style accordion, a banjo and bunch of traditional Native American instruments. It was a really interesting melding of sounds, and they were recording the show as well - I'd recommend it if it ends up getting released.

Hopefully, the rest of our shows are as good as the first two!