7:30pm doors / 8–9pm performance
Tickets $20 (discounted or free for members)
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By purchasing a ticket, you agree that you and all guests are fully vaccinated. Masks will be required inside. The Lab will be limiting attendance to half capacity for all events and providing full refunds / live streaming options for guests who experience symptoms of illness of any kind. Email us at thelabsf@thelab.org with questions.
Written and Directed by Asher Hartman
Performed by Gawdafful National Theater
Disavowal, disgust, dissociation, delectation and death, the slime nectar of change, are the material of a performance that teeters between a theatrical work and a vigil for theater that can no longer hold our grief. Five actors eat the sick body of their sprawling film and performance series The Dope Elf, a satiric trek through the ordinary enactments of white supremacy, power, and delight in harm. Now the select parts are chosen. The belly, the groin, and the underarm are consumed in an agreement to tear at the gelatinous surface that protects actor from character. Asking “Why theater now?” Gawdafful National Theater allows for the seepage of the actors’ lived experience into the theater company’s rehearsed text, risking a theatrical experience that cannot be contained.
The Dope Elf: Organized Around the Erotics of Doing You In is one part of Asher Hartman’s commissioned project. Click here for The Dope Elf presented as six films and an essay and here to read about a prior theatrical presentation at Yale Union.
Asher Hartman is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work centers on the exploration of self through Western histories and ideologies. He is the founder and chief beneficiary of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of artist-actors for whom he has written since 2010. He is also one half of the performative duo Krystal Krunch (with Haruko Tanaka), who teach intuition-building to artists, activists, and interested others. Recent theatrical works include “Lost Privilege Company” in “Archive Fever: Lost Words, Buried Voices” as part of USC’s Visions and Voices series and Pieter Performance Space (2018); “Sorry, Atlantis, Or Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge” at Machine Project, LA (2017); “Mr. Akita,” Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, (2017) and at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2017); the Tang Museum, New York (2015) “The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance,” LACMA (2016).
Gawdafful National Theater is a loose cabal of highly trained, strongly gifted actor-artists-insects committed to making complex, poetic, crass, and finely crafted theater. Through the rarified magic of "gawdafful" (high class god-awful), we risk confounding, disorienting, and piquing audiences while insisting on intellectual rigor, exploration, and emotional depth. Gawdafful is devoted to the beautiful, the ugly, the out of line, the old and awkward in theater and its traditions, while inviting in ideas from performance and intuitive practices. We are interdisciplinary, intergenerational, architecturally minded, sensual beings, with a deep love for expansive performance.
The Dope Elf was commissioned by Yale Union and The Lab with support from The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and VIA | Wagner Incubator Grant Fund.
Photos: Ian Byers-Gamber