DENNIS
YUEH-YEH
LI
director / playwright / performer
DENNIS
YUEH-YEH
LI
director / playwright / performer
DENNIS
YUEH-YEH
LI
director / playwright / performer
CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Judson Memorial Church
January 2015
Meet the Enemy: It Is Us — Psychology Today
January 5, 2015
The event was directed by Dennis Yueh-Yeh Li(link is external) of The Living Theatre(link is external) who said humans too easily forget the power of what Freud called Eros. We loose sight of our instinct for love and our basic need to be loved. We then succumb to the lament of the lone wolf: feelings of aloneness in an alienating world.
Yueh-Yeh Li described the production as a “performative reading.” Performative words are words that do something in the social sphere, according to the philosopher J.L. Austin(link is external). This recitation was psychoanalysis that did something: it created an intervention reaching beyond the consulting room into a shared public arena. The event was psychology for the people, inviting homeless people in from off the street.
Freud Gets Marathon Reading Treatment — New York Times
December 22, 2014
The event, intended as a response to the beheadings, school shootings and other violence that have “defined 2014,” will be directed by Dennis Yueh-Yeh Li of The Living Theatre “in the avant-garde style long associated with the church,” according to a release. Among the readers will be the novelist Michael Cunningham, the philosopher Simon Critchley, the war correspondent Elizabeth Rubin and Rabbi Andy Bachman.
After the Holidays, Ponder Man’s Inhumanity to Man — New York Magazine
December 22, 2014
To read Civilization and its Discontents in 2015,” says New School philosopher Simon Critchley, who will also read, “is to bear witness to the deadly violence whose daily presence is all-too-familiar to us and imagine the conditions that might provide a loving counterweight to that violence.” Let’s hope!
Marathon reading of Sigmund Freud’s ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ will shed light on human violence — New York Daily News
December 18, 2014
“To America, Islam is the infidel — we are liberators ... even as we invade a sovereign country,” he says. “Freud reminds us that we are all implicated in human violence.”
Sounds heavy. Fortunately, refreshments will be served at the six-hour event, which will include some big-name readers, such as novelist Michael Cunningham (“The Hours”) and philosopher Simon Critchley, and an interesting staging that will involve a ladder, we’re told.
