“The most winning humorist was Stacy Makishi; funny yet incisive…a truly amazing performance.”
The Independent (Performance at Royal Albert Hall)
“Her performance takes us past the borders that separate the comedic and the tragic…full of energy, intimacy and vitality.”
LibrePensadores (Bull: The True Story)
“Her witty use of language and simple props make experiencing her work a comic journey into the secrets of everyday life.”
Umelec International (Bull: The True Story)
“Stacy Makishi combined tightly controlled floods of beautiful, poised and unnerving verse with strong, bold elements of physical theatre to produce a dark kaleidoscope of blood-and-sweat-stained stories.”
Epigram Poetry Festival
“Stacy Makishi combines poetic narrative, movement and a bone-dry humour. Makishi delivers a powerful narrative which cooks the theme of culinary colonialism in a sauce of health-hazard imagery.”
The Independent
Full review: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/slam-spam-and-snakes-1161659.html
100 Greatest Poems by Living Poets to Read Before You Die
It is a text which manages to convey sentiments simultaneously hilarious and devastating
in their excoriation of the near-infinitely lethal consequences of the USA’s series
of nuclear bomb tests on the Pacific island of Bikini Atoll in 1954. A photograph
of one of these tests dis/graces the front cover dust-jacket of A New Waste Land.
Stacy’s poem brings the kind of heartfelt passions articulated in Martin Luther King’s
“I have a dream” speech together with an indomitable light touch, stand-up comic
rhythms and understated phrasing reminiscent of the mind-stilling portrayals of wounded
personalities smiling through by Giuletta Masina in the Fellini films.
Michael Horovitz
Ledbury Poetry Festival 2009 http://www.poetry-festival.com/100greatestpoems.html
I've been meaning to ask..Should I stay or should I go? For Stacy Makishi's black comedy Stay! think less of the late dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse's crisp commands and more the masochistic sentiments expressed by Iggy Pop in The Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog.
MetroLife ( Stay!)
Stacy Makishi was simply astounding… she ruptured the building…bringing the audience to creative climax. Makishi took us on a journey through a rollercoaster excavation of modern anxieties and ironies. Makishi’s piece was a preview of poetry’s future and testament to her individual greatness as an artist, or at the very least one that is willing to explore what art can achieve in a real way if pushed beyond divisionary labels.
Review of Around The World In A Lunar Day - London Liming
EAR - Southbank
Full review: http://ear.typepad.com/blog/2008/12/a-review-of-london-liming-and-talking-in-tongues-.htmlStacy Makishi
STAY!
Chelsea Theatre, London | Sacred Festival
November 2009
One sharpened the knife. The other wet herself. One barked like a dog. The other stole the ukulele. Both ate from a dog food bowl. The other stole the food...
STAY! is a brutal blur between human lovers, dog and owner, performer and understudy. Two performers appear to live in a black box studio and explore a sadomasochistic relationship of dominance, dependence and subversion.
Rich with poetic word battles, the show whips its way through a series of fast, rhythmic exchanges of language, silence and visual violence. Pillows are slashed, mouths and words are drowned, smothered and bashed, and two minds suffer in a constant barrage of spits, quips and slams.
The setting is simple and clinically clean, and each action and word pierces like a knife. The live dimension is crucial and clearly articulated. There are constant references to the audience and to the performers themselves as artists. At one point, one of the performers justifies her crap acting by the fact that she ' s an artist, not an actor - reminding us that if she is not acting then their play could be real and therefore the threat, the violence and the presented torture could also be real. As a result the action only had to go so far for it to be disturbing, and it did just that, teetering on the edge; always threatening the irreversibly perverse.
Alexander Roberts - Total Theatre