Geoffrey Gatza

Apollo Geoffrey Gatza

Poetry. Drama. Art. Music. It has often been said that Marcel Duchamp gave up art for chess. Geoffrey Gatza has reversed the process, and produced a sumptuous 'souvenir program' of a performance of Stravinsky's ballet Apollo, framed by an elaborately-plotted chess game between Duchamp and his female alter-ego, Rose Selavy. The results are stunning.--John Ashbery

With APOLLO, Geoffrey Gatza has created a unique Surrealist romp with assemblages (both visual and myriad-genre) of various tropes and delights: mythology, ballet, chess, tableau, theatre, documentation, image, memoir, sound. Amazing! This is a tremendously ambitious weave, truly a meditation on various slices of belletristic-artistic power that have shaped his (and our) ethos and consciousness in ways that come alive here with determination and grace. 'The word smithereens does not exist in the singular.' He pulls the fragments together, as they perform and re- enfold with a deeply performative flare. Bravo.--Anne Waldman

I've played many games of chess but none like this. Modernist art plays its gambit. As we journey through the game the ways of seeing multiply. Win or lose, it's a wild ride. The fetish of board, pieces, hands... players. Listen and learn. Let Geoffrey Gatza's textuality lift you out of your 'addled tranquility.' Pas de deux with one of Duchamp's 'madmen of a certain quality', watch the choreography of the corps de ballet unfold. Pause for the deeply humane and human interstices in passages of real tenderness and poignancy. Herein is the new surrealism. Entrez!--John Kinsella