The Lastmaker


The Lastmaker was Goat Island’s last performance ever.  It had a few really really great moments but (once again) there were members of the audience falling asleep.  Ordinarily that is the last thing I would use as a marker of how good something is, but I was ready to doze off, myself.  There have been plenty performances that with their methodical slowness have tried to lull me to sleep but I still loved them, sadly, this was not one of these performances.

Maybe the goats are tired, or sometimes the stars just don’t align.  Even though this is your final performance and you would like to go out with a bang, things weren’t meant to be?  I could tell they are seasoned performers, they deconstruct what a performance is, they are studied and methodical in their actions but the whole thing did not come together.  They failed to construct the Haga Sophia for me, even if, they managed to put together a model of it.

Highlights:  a short snippet of (the lengthy) intricate dance; an odd repeated phrase (in a foreign language?); repeating a moment in it’s mirror image; an “old” man hunched over speaking in a horse voice; constructing something so that you litertally place the support underneath yourself while you are (sort of) levitating above it [the kind of thing that only happens in cartoons and dreams].

Goat Island
Performance Space 122
New York City
Nov 6-16 2008
venue or group