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Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size In mere months – March, to be exact – cult comedian Kate Berlant will complete her first-ever trip to Australia to perform. What she’ll perform when she gets here, though, she’s not yet sure. At this stage, she doesn’t even have the title. “What is the show?” Berlant deadpans, looking skyward as though contemplating a philosophical quandary she has no literal answer to. “That’s a really good question ... I mean, it’s just standup. I’m really just going to be doing standup.” Anyone familiar with Berlant’s comedy – her taped special Cinnamon in the Wind , for example; or her decade-long partnership with outlandish foil John Early (including their sketch special Would It Kill You To Laugh? ); even her podcast POOG (a play on GOOP) with fellow comedian Jacqueline Novak, and its spin-off Berlant & Novak – would understand that “just standup” is a loaded concept with Berlant. Although well-recognised from her acting work – she’s starred in films including Don’t Worry Darling , Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Dream Scenario , and on TV in A League of Their Own , The Other Two and Search Party – her cerebral comedy, an act of onstage pomposity that folds the form in on itself with absurdist, and delightfully silly, abandon (“intellectual vaudeville”, a critic once branded it), has made Berlant a beatified icon of alt-comedy. If the fact she hasn’t got her new show sorted four months out from her booked dates fills you with secondhand anxiety, fear not: this is how Berlant works, working bits out on stage with the improvisational acuity of a surgeon. Since February, she’s been regularly taking the stage at Largo’s in Los Angeles, her hometown club, to riff on “themes of contemporary alienation”, with the goal of putting together a new hour. “Relying so much on improvisation is terrifying and oftentimes I’ve been doing standup and thought, wow, it would be so nice to just know what you’re gonna say every night,” says Berlant of her process. “But so much of standup is about hiding the work, hiding the fact that you’ve said this thing a million times, and I’ve always struggled with that because it’s just hard to keep up that performance in a way that feels authentic.” Advertisement It’s a dry autumn afternoon in Los Angeles when we speak over Zoom, and the twilight sun splashes through Berlant’s bedroom window (not to mention her incredible curls) like Cheezel dust. She’s spent the day dealing with a sudden and, at 37, completely unexpected allergic reaction to tomatoes and nightshade. “If I sound a little weird it’s because my mouth is inflamed,” she offers apologetically. And yet, she’s eager to discuss her return to standup because for the past couple of years she’s been focused entirely on her play, Kate . Berlant ended Kate in February after a string of sold-out runs across New York, Los Angeles and London. A one-woman show about a flailing actor’s desperate bid to be taken seriously, the conceit went deep. Shows reportedly featured Berlant herself mingling in crowded foyers before doors opened, holding a sign saying “Ignore me”. It premiered off-Broadway in September 2022, and earned rave reviews for its metatextual skewering of artistic self-indulgence. The Guardian labelled it the “one-woman show to end all one-woman shows”. Berlant says it was her biggest success yet. Which begs the question: why did she end it? Why is she not just bringing Kate to Australia? “Again, a really good question,” Berlant jokes. “It’s not that I’ll never do it again, but I do think it’s healthy to step away from things. I think things ripen and they absolutely rot. It just felt to me like it was time to do something else, just for my own brain.” “I just wanted to step away from it for a second”: Berlant during the opening night performance of her acclaimed play Kate in Pasadena in January. Credit: Getty Images She very well could have kept Kate going, Berlant concedes. But her hope is that, as the show operates in a separate universe to her standup, she can revive it a year from now, or two years from now, or even five years from now, and the material will organically grow with her. In the meantime, she’s been in discussions with her director, Bo Burnham, to potentially film and release it. “But that’s something for down the line. Because the show is extremely meta, it’s not just a show you throw a camera in front of,” says Berlant. “I just wanted to step away from it for a second and get back to what I really love doing the most, which is standup.” Advertisement When I speak to Berlant, it’s the week after Donald Trump’s crushing win in the US election – a desolate new landscape in America made real. “It’s scary, it’s dark, it’s intensely depressing, and kind of just surreal. It’s such a bizarre time to be alive,” Berlant says, staring into the camera, eyes like saucers to underscore the understatement. “It’s a really bizarre, rather depressing time.” Is that mood already affecting her new standup? “I’m reacting to it maybe in, like, a subtextual way, but not directly,” says Berlant. “No, certainly the show I’ll be doing will not be about me wrestling with, like, how to live in America under Trump. Like, I would sooner die.” It’s for the best. Because if there’s a through line to Berlant’s work, it’s that her performances have always been about the act of performing. Onstage, whether in a scripted play or in a standup set, she’s Kate, but she’s also “Kate”. The persona she’s made her own is of the self-serious artist desperate for attention, for fame, to be noticed as special. A piss take of the narcissism inherent in showbiz, it’s also a well-wrought personification of today’s wider condition, where social media has given everyone main character syndrome. “It just turns out that way with everything I do. My comedy is often about comedy and my performance is usually about performance, and so inevitably with my standup it’s hard for me to ignore how bizarre standup is when I’m doing standup, and it’s hard for me to not kind of call out how inherently strange the dynamic is and how strange it is as a form,” says Berlant. ‘Performing is inherently embarrassing and, I would say, something to be avoided if you can.’ “The idea of a person standing there and just talking about what’s on their mind, it denies that standup is such a highly constructed persona and performance, down to the shoes you wear. I’ve always looked at the conditions of performance as being really bizarre and also funny. And also just the fact that performance is, of course, a naked plea for attention and adoration. I can’t pretend that that’s not what’s going on in the room, you know?” The focus on performance is never far from Berlant; she’s been thinking about it forever (she even has degrees in the cultural anthropology of comedy and performance studies from New York University). A child actor, she scored her first onscreen gig at 15, playing Student #2 in an episode of Lizzie McGuire , and believed it would set her on a path to screen stardom (it didn’t). There was enough self-awareness in her failure to fuel another mode of expression: when she started doing comedy at 17, she quickly found that her standup landed on a self-referential conceit. Advertisement “I would end up kind of talking about standup in the standup. Which sounds awful,” Berlant laughs. “But, I mean, just talking about the encounter between performer and audience, and how performing is inherently embarrassing and, I would say, something to be avoided if you can.” She’d experienced something similar to that indescribable ick in her upbringing, too, as the only child of two artists – her father Tony Berlant is a prominent US sculptor; her mother Helen Mendez performed in experimental theatre before becoming a set designer. In an episode of Netflix’s The Characters , she portrayed an insufferable Marina Abramović type, lampooning the pretentious art world egos she’d witnessed growing up. “The self-importance of the art world, like the self-importance of Hollywood, there’s almost nothing to comment on because it’s so in plain sight,” Berlant says. “From an early age, I think I was aware of performance as not just being something people do on stage, but just as a child watching adults perform: perform being smart, perform being interesting, perform the performance of being an artist. “I mean, if you call yourself an ‘artist’ ...” she glances into the camera with an are you serious? stare. “That’s quite a part to play.” Berlant with her comedy partner John Early at this year’s Creative Arts Emmys, where their sketch special was nominated. Credit: Getty Images Is she never not aware of the performance? Like, even in this interview: me, playing the role of the politely probing interviewer, trying to dig at some defining childhood trauma; she, the subject, playing at being revealing, as if she’s never considered these stories before. “Yeah, it’s hard to separate, I think I’m always aware of it,” says Berlant. “But what I really find funny are people who don’t know that we can see them performing. We live in a world now where everyone’s a performer, even people who aren’t performers are used to performing for social media. So there’s been a huge breakdown in those terms and in their definitions.” Advertisement Complicating Berlant’s obsession with the artifice of authenticity in comedy and theatre is a sincere love of live performance. In a world where standup careers can thrive exclusively through crowd-work clips on TikTok, she still craves the sacredness of the club. Loading “When I started standup, the only way to get good or build a career was to perform, do shows, as many shows as you could do. Even just, like, spiritually, I feel so lucky that was how I came up,” she says. “So I do think that in today’s world, it’s still very exciting when people show up physically to see a show. I think that’s something that will persist, but it is feeling more and more rarefied and less valued.” It’s why Berlant is excited for the set she’ll be bringing to Australia, whatever shape it ends up taking. After her journey with Kate , a return to the spontaneous possibilities of her standup has been calling. “There’s something that feels good about just being like, okay, this is where I am right now in my life, this is how I’m reacting to it, and not being too precious about it or spending years crafting it. I think that’s what makes it feel alive, for me and the audience.” Kate Berlant will be performing at Melbourne Recital Hall on March 7 and at Sydney Opera House as part of All About Women on March 9. To read more from Spectrum , visit our page here .
Messi's departure was a significant blow to Barcelona, both on and off the pitch. The team struggled to cope without their talismanic captain, and they finished the 2020-2021 season without winning any major trophies. The financial impact of losing Messi was also severe, as his departure led to a significant drop in revenue for the club.
The Bitcoin rally sparked by US President-elect Donald Trump ’s election victory in early November is stalling as 2024 draws to a close. The digital asset wavered at $93,678 as of 7:53 a.m. on Monday in Singapore, about $15,000 below the record high set in mid-December. Smaller tokens like Ether and meme-crowd favorite Dogecoin also struggled for traction. Trump’s preference for crypto friendly regulations and support for the idea of a national Bitcoin reserve lifted digital assets. But scaled back expectations for interest-rate cuts by the Federal Reserve have cooled the speculative frenzy. Also read: Montenegro to extradite crypto entrepreneur Do Kwon to US More clarity on the US crypto regime is likely to emerge after Trump assumes power on Jan. 20. The Republican’s stance contrasts with President Joe Biden’s administration, which cracked down on the scandal-prone sector. Chris Weston, head of research at Pepperstone Group, said “the momentum has come out of the post-election move” in Bitcoin, partly due to outflows from exchange-traded funds for the token. Meanwhile, software maker turned Bitcoin accumulator MicroStrategy Inc. has been on a buying spree in the past few weeks. Traders are waiting to see if the company — which owns more than $40 billion of the digital asset — will continue a pattern of announcing Bitcoin purchases on Mondays. Also read: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin? The original cryptocurrency has climbed roughly 120% this year, outstripping traditional investments such as global stocks and gold. Bitcoin also more than doubled in 2023 in a comeback from a deep bear market.Title: The Legal Aspects of Detective Zhang Kehan's CaseColumbia Financial, Inc. Announces Appointment of New Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
The expulsion of Wu Yingjie and the investigations into his subordinates mark a turning point in the fight against corruption in Tibet. It is a clear signal that the CPC is resolute in its commitment to stamp out corruption and promote good governance. By holding corrupt officials accountable and promoting a culture of integrity and honesty, Tibet can move towards a brighter and more prosperous future for its people.
Moving forward, The Mail must reassess its editorial practices and decision-making processes to regain the public's trust and restore its reputation as a reputable journalistic institution. This requires a commitment to transparency, accountability, and ethical reporting standards that prioritize accuracy, fairness, and integrity in all aspects of journalism.The post-match analysis was dominated by discussions of Mbappé's offside record and Real Madrid's struggles to break down Barcelona's defense. Questions were raised about the effectiveness of their training methods and whether they had underestimated the tactical astuteness of their opponents. Ancelotti, usually calm and composed, was seen visibly frustrated in his post-match interviews, acknowledging that they would need to go back to the drawing board to address their shortcomings.
In conclusion, the arrests of the two "tigers" from the Political and Legal Affairs Commission serve as a wake-up call to reevaluate our approach to poverty alleviation and ensure that decisions are made responsibly and with the best interests of the people in mind. Let us not repeat the mistakes of the past but strive towards a more just and prosperous society for all.Which Stock Will Soar Higher? AI Champions Face Off
