NY Times review: ‘Whistleblower,’ a dance-theater take on Chelsea Manning
When the Army private Chelsea Manning, known at the time as Bradley Manning, leaked more than 700,000 sensitive documents, the possibility of a trial and sentence in a military prison may have been foreseeable. Less easy to predict was that the private’s situation would inspire “Whistleblower,” a piece of dance theater by the writer, director and choreographer Mark Dendy.
This diffuse play eventually argues that Ms. Manning’s experience of gender dysphoria should not be considered separate from the leaking of those documents. Or as the imagined voice of Karen Silkwood, another whistle-blower from the same Oklahoma town as Ms. Manning, says to the audience, “she conjoins the personal and the political in a distinctively queer way.” …
There are songs by the splendid composer Heather Christian, which were a highlight of Mr. Dendy’s last show, “Labyrinth,” but they are too few and diminished by Mr. Dendy’s somewhat callow rhyming lyrics. The dancing is visceral and athletic, but these turns and leaps don’t focus the play. Instead they send it spinning off in new directions, a fact that Ms. Manning, recently stripped of some prison privileges for possessing magazines and an expired tube of toothpaste, might or might not appreciate.
Read the full review here, with location and times:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/theater/review-whistleblower…
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