Press

RAVENOUS
Review: Queer Life
By Sura Faraj

The jarring sight of stillness greeted the audience during the half hour prelude of the Performance Art Showcase presented the evening of Nov. 12 at Vogel Hall. Chicago artist Joseph Ravens, seated on a stool and bent over his own knees, his hands holding an upside-down bowl at his feet, maintained this still posture the entire 30 minutes. He fully engaged many audience members simply by doing nothing, a feat which drew peak attention during the last five to 10 minutes as Ravens' muscle-twitching increased as he attempted to sustain his motionlessness.

In his other piece, "Ravenous" we were treated to a delicious dose of intellectual teasing and pleasure, as Ravens, acting the raven, presented us with definitions and displays of insatiability and desire along with compelling and high-contrast visual, audio and movement performance. One hopes that this artist visits Milwaukee more often.

RAVENOUS
Review: Columbia Chronicle
By Megan Diaz

Ravenous, the second piece, is a signature solo piece written and performed by Ravens. Now, to be honest, this piece was a little bit harder to “get.” It is based on the myth of Apollo, who in anger turned the feathers of the raven from white to black, due its endless hunger.

During this piece, Ravens worked with two stainless steel bowls, two steel spoons, and two small steel balls. He wore only a flesh-colored thong, and sat Indian-style on a stool. He flexed his body as he hit the bowl against his head. It gave off the most precise, beautiful tone. Then, he held the two spoons over his eyes, and blindly looked around. Later, he spit out the steel balls into the spoons, with a confused facial expression. He then stood up, and recited a poem about the raven, while dressed in a white robe, and finishing draped in a black one. He finished by returning to his stool, wearing a piece of steel mesh shaped to look like a bird’s beak. It was different, but very stunning.

EAT ME! DRINK ME!
Review: Milwaukee Sentinel
By Jay Joslyn

The evening's richest ideas were revealed in the images evoked by Joseph Ravens in his performance piece, "Eat Me! Drink Me!" It started with a parody of communion - hence the title - and swept through food suggested procreation, an atavistic association with meat, a satirical look at television culture and finally a celebration of cream "painlessly whipped," all aided by the Durfee twins, Christine and Cynthia, and David Figueroa.

EAT ME! DRINK ME!
Review: Milwaukee Journal
By James Auer

The evening's most elaborate set piece, Joseph Ravens' intentionally impish "Eat Me! Drink Me!" Contained so many elements - religious, psychological, polemic, humanitarian - that it seemed episodic and just a trifle overblown by comparison. Still, several of Ravens' more outrageous ideas struck sparks with the small but attentive audience. He had a knack for hitting on issues that intersect with the concerns of today's worried, value hungry, gender-obsessed world.

THE ALCHEMY OF TULIPS
Review: New City
By John Beer

Joseph Ravens' "The Alchemy of Tulips," at the Storefront Theater is undoubtedly fearless. An abstract blend of dance and performance based upon the seventeenth-century Dutch craze for tulips might strike lesser hearts as dangerously close to self-parody. And if Ravens and his performers ultimately head off a cliff, their commitment in doing so should nonetheless be recognized. The spare white set and vaguely Sufistic costumes set a promising, meditative tone. But the performance suffers throughout from a rampant conceptual overdetermination: The word "tulip" comes from the Turkish for turban? We'll have a turban-winding sequence! Tulips have DNA? We'll have a pair of women repeatedly, inexplicably fold and unfold a sheet during their conversation! Like a demented episode of "Zoom," the performance juxtaposes energetic and mystifying visual tableaus with scenes that seem to dramatize encyclopedia entries. A team of technology artists (Ben Chang, Silvia Ruzanka, and Dima Strakovsky) contribute new media elements: visually striking, they confirm my suspicion that almost no one knows what new media are supposed to contribute to a performance.

BETWEEN DOORS
Review: Chicago Citysearch.com
By Lawrence Bommer

At its best, performance art lets us dream with our eyes open. After you've seen it, "Between Doors" may still make little more sense than a dream does when we awaken. But while you watch it, it can hold your interest even as you doubt your senses. In the ambitious title scene, five people come in and out of rooms, their lives as fragmented as the action. The actors who change clothes, expressions and lives as they enter and exit with stopwatch timing look just like a lot of lives on fast-forward.

BETWEEN DOORS
Review: Chicago Reader
By Kerry Reid

This trio of pieces curated by Joseph Ravens focuses on identity, transience, and stasis, with limited success. In the title piece, inspired in part by Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep, Ravens creates a challenging premise and set for his cast of five. Two doors separated by a raked corridor serve as the backdrop for tantalizing snatches of dialogue and movement and Jorge Hohagen's engaging monologue about the secrets behind a tenant's door in his childhood home in Peru. But the cast lacks the vocal and physical variety to make this piece hit on all cyclinders, and the farcical device wears thin.

BETWEEN DOORS
Review: Columbia Chronicle
By Megan Diaz

"Between Doors," the title piece was written and directed by Ravens. The program read: "'Between Doors' explores the spaces between places, and the conclusions and narratives that we derive from witnessing transient moments."

I'm not quite sure what that meant, but what I saw was intensely interesting. The piece started out with two people knocking on two different doors, and talking to people on the other side. Then two different people came out, and they were answering someone who was knocking on their door. I was such a simple idea, but I was curious to see more.

Only five characters made up the cast. Any more would have overpowered the concept. The theme of the piece went on to show all the different ways we carry on, concerning doors: walking in and out of doors to different rooms and talking on the phone at the same time; standing by your front door, trying to find your house keys while juggling your groceries; pounding on the bathroom door, begging your roommate to let you in so that you can go pee, and walking around from room to room during a house party. It was all so common, and so brilliant.

INSEXCIETY
Review: Milwaukee Journal
By Tom Strini

In Joseph Ravens, "Insexciety," a butterfly and a spider (Christi Durfee and Rachel Winkley) console and menace the author-hero as he recounts his insect obsession. He fears, among other horrors, spiders breeding in his brain. To make matters worse, the insect obsession is wrapped up with sex. Ravens - small, muscular, crew cut, with big, credulous eyes - is an eccentric but commanding stage presence and a crafty writer. The words and images ("Insexciety" is more performance art than dance) are between camp and surrealism, an interesting, off-balance place.

INSEXCIETY
Review: Milwaukee Sentinel
By Leon Cohen

The most effective work was "Insexciety," with movement and text by Joseph Ravens, who was also one of the five performers. This startling piece of performance art began as a surreal and half-comic paranoid fantasy about insects. By its end, it had changed into a gripping expression of anger at the human condition.

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