Dax amore

GERMAN ENGINEERING Dax aspires to rebuild a Weimar aesthetic.

Photograph: Ryan Jensen

This past September 11, as the media buzzed over George W. Bush’s visit to Ground Zero, downtown producer Earl Dax chose to sting. The second edition of Dax’s fabulously unruly Weimar New York concert series—inspired by the decadent cabaret of pre-Nazi Germany—was set to take the stage ten days later at the Spiegeltent. In an e-mail blast to his prospective audience, Dax called the Bush coverage “nauseating” and invoked the specter of Hitler’s 1933 rise to power, which channeled national outrage into repression and foreign war. “We make use of the cabaret (or kabarett) format to draw these parallels and ask these questions,” he wrote. “It is, admittedly, a small gesture.”

At a time when most cabaret aspires to perfume the air with rosy nostalgia, Weimar New York—which returns to Joe’s Pub on Friday 19—takes a starkly different approach. The series was born at Joe’s in March 2006, in a sprawling four-hour show that began at midnight and featured dozens of singers, including many stars of the local scene. The idea was to perform songs from, or in the louche tradition of, the Weimar period in Germany: subversive, sexed-up, slashingly political—the kind of material the Nazis called “degenerate art.”

The evening was a hit, but something was missing for the man who put it all together. Since moving to New York from Philadelphia in 2004, the hyperprolific Dax, 35, has produced or curated more than 100 shows; he also throws a weekly club party, Unisex Salon, on the Lower East Side. Back in Philly, however, he worked mainly as a social activist, helping to found the nonprofit news-reform group Media Tank. And the first Weimar night at Joe’s, Dax felt, did not go far enough in pointing up the similarities between America and Weimar Germany.

“People could come away from that show saying, ‘Oh, that was a lovely evening of marathon entertainment,’ ” Dax says. “I wanted to put the ideas closer to the surface.” So the Spiegeltent edition upped the outrageousness. Hosted by the inflammatory Justin Bond—the boozy distaff half of the extreme-cabaret duo Kiki & Herb—the evening’s entertainment ranged from the brilliant postmodern nightclub stylings of international chanteuse Meow Meow to the extravagantly raunchy neoburlesque of Julie Atlas Muz (who performed a bondage striptease) and Tigger! (who, costumed as a priest, pulled a full rosary out of his behind).

While this week’s Joe’s Pub show will be shorter than previous versions—around 100 minutes—it promises a similarly remarkable range of talent. Representing the more classic end of the Weimar genre will be such singers as Sweeney Todd’s brooding Michael Cerveris; Belgium’s Micheline Van Hautem, a first-rate interpreter of her countryman Jacques Brel; and Daniel Isengart, a specialist in retro-Teutonic affectation. Bond, Meow Meow, Muz and Tigger! will all return to push the envelope into naughtier slots; toss in the raw nerves of East Village legend Penny Arcade and the dirty dancing of the Pixie Harlots, and anything can happen.

“I have to ask myself: How does putting up a show where women twirl tassels on their breasts relate to my work as a social-change activist?” Dax says with a laugh. “I’m not one of these people who thinks that the mere fact of performing naked is a political statement—especially in New York City. But people have to draw inspiration from their peers. I often refer to the work that I do as a kind of community organizing, among a community of artists that has been ravaged over the past 30 years by ongoing forces: gentrification, AIDS, defunding of the arts, the culture wars.”

Wiry and wired, Dax can be as intensely passionate and messy as his shows. And while discussing the imperiled state of the East Village performance scene, he suddenly bursts into tears—not just a little misting around the eyes, but all-out choking sobs. After collecting himself, he sloughs the emotion off, but not entirely. “I have these moments where I’m talking about things that are seemingly innocuous, and then I can scarcely continue to speak,” he explains. “It’s just my own barometer for authenticity, I guess. But I try to take note of those moments. They’re some indication that I’m on track: I’m doing something that has meaning for me.”

Weimar New York is at Joe’s Pub on Fri 19.