MAMI BY MARIO BANUSHI AT NYU Skirball :UNDER THE RADAR

 MAMI, CONCEIVED AND DIRECTED BY MARIO BANUSHI AT NYU Skirball

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

Mami is a visually stunning and incredibly poetic surrealistic poem about the mother-child

relationship. It hardly has any dialogue and it's a slow moving and majestic tableau of memory,

and grief.

According to the program,"Mami" (mother) and "mam" (Food) reflects the neglect and the attention

towards survival and tender care. This visual poem of a play explore-life's cycle and history

through slow movement, dance and a stream of consciousness.

The surreal images being created out of very little, a little house upstage, dimly lit, darkness surrounding

wast grounds, a lonely pregnant woman coming out of that little house, carrying a bag, walking slowly

eventually disappearing in the darkness, then an old woman starving and in the need of assistance and

many more beautifully haunting images of young men and women intertwined naked in search of

intimacy and love wander away into the wilderness. It's a very rare image of a poem in any theater.

There are dim lights and haunting silences and rhythmic slow and melodious movements which are

to be remembered for very long time.

The fascinating silence in this intimate and tender play is much more important then any words

to tell such a deeply human story.

Mami is the highlight of under the radar festival.

BINA SHARIF

ATCA MEMBER

Editor/Publisher: artsinternational.blogspot.com

Email: binashariff@gmail.com

Mobile: 212-260-6207

DARK MATTER BY CHERISH MENZO AT PS 122, UNDER THE RADAR

 DARK MATTER BY CHERISH MENZO AT PS 122; UNDER THE RADR

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

The incredibly talented team, creating this unique performance/dance play is based in

Amsterdam/Brussels.

Cherish Menzo alongside her stage dance partner, Camilo Mejia Cortes explores

through the amazing dance movements which are, intense, challenging, aggressive,

frightening and tender at the same time.

These mesmerizing movements explore the reality of the body and it's public perception

as well as it's (afro) futuristic body.

The set has strips of white fabric smudged with black paint which hangs upstage behind

the dancers and is lit in blue color creating the effect of water dancing in the pool.

Their dance and the movements are at times intense and frightening turning abruptly

into intimacy, tenderness and love.

The dancer's silver teeth gleam and creates an out of body experience.

At one point the dancers pour buckets of black paint on the floor and then roll around

almost naked all over the paint creating haunting images of terror and bodily strength.

They twist and turn, run around sometime very close to the audience wearing black boots 

with high heels and incredible strength and confidence.

I have never seen such ferocious dance of intimacy, tension and fear.

It could have been called, "Dance of near death." It certainly keep the audience in awe

and amazement at the same moment.

Brilliant play.

A Tribute To Big Mama Thornton at Joe's Pub: Under The Radar

 A Tribute To Big Mama Thornton at Joe's Pub

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARI

A Tribute To Big. Mama is Conceived and Performed by the Poet/Performer/Singer/Visual Artist

Pamela Sneed.

Set list

They call me big Mama

Hound dog

Little red rooster

Summer time

Go down Mosses

BAND

David Barnes: harmonica

Viva De Concini: Guitarist and musical director

Mara Rosenbloom: Piano

It is an enormously moving Cabaret (Queer-Focused) about the Black blues-legend Big Mama Thornton.

The story is being told through music, spoken word and monologue which explain the history of the

 birth of blues. That music was often stolen by the white singers/performers such as Janis Joplin and

 Elvis Presley and many more.

 Pamela Sneed's dynamic performance and rhythmic singing and the revelation

of the historical facts about racism towards black artists set the record straight. Most of them never

 made money and died broke.

We learn the personal history of Big Mama Thornton  and of her early life,  how she started to sing.

Big Mama learned to sing from her mother who was a gospel singer and her father who was a preacher

in the church. She sang in small venues as the opening act for Big stars and eventually won a prize and

 became the feature performer. 

After singing a few melodious songs, Pamela breaks the fourth wall, take her hat off and tell us  about

 her own history.

  She came to New York from Boston to study and reclaim her roots and Identity as well as Big

 Mama's struggle through the times and reclaimed Big Mama and herself as proud lesbian who were

 bold and thrilled to reclaim the origin of being queer black singers who gave birth to the blues long

 before it was considered the part of a politically correct list.

The most brilliant performance by Pamela Sneed with great humor, honesty and energy excited the

whole house. Audience were with her all the way rocking and roaring.

Wonderful band and songs to die. I loved the songs, all of them but can't seem to get, Hound Dog

out of my mind.

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

ATCA MEMBER

Editor/Publisher: artsinternational.blogspot.com

Email: binashariff@gmail.com

Mobile: 212-260-6207

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL 2026: ALL THAT FALL

 ALL THAT FALL

BY

SAMUEL BECKETT

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

ALL THAT FALL is a one act Radio play written in 1957.

It's produced by the experimental company, MABOU MINES at PS122. 

Directed by: JoAnne Akalaitis and lit by Jennifer Tipton

Though Radio Plays are always an auditory experiences, here the director decided to stage it

with an enormous set design.

The photo graphs of the actors are shown in the beginning and then quickly removed.

The enormous and complicated set represents a rugged Irish town is by scenic designer

Thomas Dunn.

The houses in this town are tiny, like doll houses, beautifully lit. There is also a junk yard full

of broken bicycle, dirt filled tires which has been collapsed somewhere near a railway track.

One can see a beautiful blue river running through the town from the huge windows where the light

 shows the time of dawn and the dusk and the changing mood of the play.

One of the town dweller, Maddy Rooney (Voiced by Randy Danson) goes to meet her elderly blind

husband (Tony Torn) at the railway station and on her way she encounter other people from the town 

in an old automobile making crazy sounds. They offer her a ride.

The train has been delayed for some unknown reason but her husband Dan had not informed her of the

 delay and on the way back, the dark road and the expected thunder adds to their miserable conversation

during their trip back. They discuss loudly in a ferocious manner the idea of God-who-is the creator

of all that fall and end up in hysterics.

I throughly enjoyed the design, couldn't keep my eyes off the cute little houses lit like diamonds and the

beautiful river flowing outside the windows and the haunting shadows created by light which kept

 distracting me from the words. I tried very hard to concentrate but my mind kept wandering around.

Some words got lost though visually All That Fall is a marvel.

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

ATCA MEMBER

Editor/Publisher:artsinternational.blogspot.com

Email: binashariff@gmail.com

Mobile: 212-260-6207