Yearly Archives: 2011

ADG PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL 2011

Jane Dudley’s HARMONICA BREAKDOWN will be featured at ADG Festival (photo by Irven Lewis)

Manhattan Movement & Arts Center
248 West 60th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
February 24-27, $22 (Festival Pass $50, Thursday gala $30)
646-385-8493
www.americandanceguild.org
www.manhattanmovement.com

Founded in 1956 at the 92nd St. Y, the American Dance Guild, originally called the Dance Teachers Guild, has been supporting the art of dance for more than fifty years. This week the organization will be holding its annual ADG Performance Festival at the Manhattan Movement & Arts Center, consisting of works by more than three dozen emerging and established choreographers. The festivities begin on Thursday night with the opening-night gala “Past to Present,” honoring dancer Jane Dudley, choreographer Paul Sanasardo, and writer and professor Linda Tarnay with an all-star presentation of Tina Croll and Jamie Cunningham’s From the Horse’s Mouth, featuring such special guests as Mary Anthony, Janis Brenner, Jacqulyn Buglisi, Diana Byer, Christine Dakin, Carmen deLavallade, Douglas Dunn, Deborah Jowitt, Don Redlich, Gus Solomons jr, and Martine van Hamel. Friday night includes pieces by Michele Cuccaro, Mariah Maloney, Amy Cova, Judith Moss, Bill Evans, and others in addition to a tribute to Dudley with performances of her Time Is Money and Harmonica Breakdown solos and a new work by Sanasardo, who will participate in a postperformance discussion with writer Mark Franko. Saturday and Sunday’s programs include works by Andrew Jannetti, Sally Hess, Hyonok Kim Dance Art, Claire Porter, Linda Lehovec, Kathy Diehl, Einy Am, Rebecca McArthur, and others, with Betsy Fisher performing Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz, Verb Ballet taking on Sophie Maslow’s Dust Bowl Ballads, and encores of Time Is Money and Harmonica Breakdown.

RAW SHOWCASE

Dawn Toledo Walsh will feed RAW artists to a hungry city on February 24 at 3Ten lounge on Bowery

RAW:natural born artists
3Ten lounge
310 Bowery
Thursday, February 24, $10, 8:00
www.rawartists.org
www.3tenlounge.com

Based in Southern California, independent nonprofit DIY organization RAW:natural born artists was founded in March 2009 by Heidi Luerra “to provide up-and-coming artists of all creative realms with the tools, resources, and exposure needed to inspire and cultivate creativity so that they might be seen, heard, and loved.” The grassroots collective travels across the country holding showcases, workshops, seminars, and other special events with handpicked local artists in the fields of film, fashion, music, art, photography, performing arts, hair and makeup, and design accessories. On February 24, Raw comes to the 3Ten lounge on Bowery for a multidisciplinary evening featuring film, live music and dance, a fashion show, and more, with such artists as JT Lotus Dance Company, Jessica Noe, Sarah Valeri, Ness Ros-Zeppelin, Aljosa Daumerie, Crayongirl, Brian DePinto, Lyle Thomas, Jon Epstein, Fabylosa, and others. Cocktail attire is suggested. “The city is hungry,” notes RAW New York City location director Dawn Toledo Walsh. “I intend to give it all it can eat.”

ARTPROJX CINEMA

Jesper Just’s SIRENS OF CHROME is one of the many free screenings at the SVA Theatre being held in conjunction with Armory Week

SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
March 1-6, 10:00 am – late
Admssion: free, RSVP strongly suggested
www.artprojx.com/cinema

In conjunction with VOLTA and the Armory Show, Artprojx, which defines itself as “a marketing, event production, virtual space, fundraising, and audience development and creative strategic consulting agency,” will be presenting six days of free screenings of works by artists and galleries associated with the two fairs. More than sixty screenings are scheduled, and advance RSVP is strongly suggested, especially considering some of the names involved. Among the presentations likely to fill up quickly are Marie Losier’s Tony Conrad: DreaMinimalist, Terry Smith’s Broken Voices, Jessica Voorsanger’s The Woody Allen Show, Simon Pope’s Memory Marathon, Matthew Day Jackson’s In Search Of, Alfred Leslie’s The Cedar Bar, Jesper Just’s Sirens of Chrome, and George Kuchar’s “Legendary Potboilers & Melodramas.”

PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS is part of annual Paul Taylor season at City Center (photo by Paul B. Goode)

City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
February 22 – March 6, $10-$150
www.ptdc.org
www.nycitycenter.org

Called the “naughty boy” of dance by Martha Graham more than fifty years ago, Paul Taylor has been pushing the envelope for some six decades. The Washington, DC, native has taken his company to more than five hundred cities in sixty-two countries, and today the Paul Taylor Dance Company kicks off its annual season at City Center with a gala performance and dinner at Cipriani 42nd St. with a bill that includes Esplanade, the New York premiere of Three Dubious Memories, and Oh, You Kid!, with live music by Rick Benjamin’s Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. The season continues through March 6 with another New York premiere, Phantasmagoria, in addition to such repertory pieces as The Word, Brief Encounters, Cloven Kingdom, Promethean Fire, Company B, Orbs, Also Playing, and Dust. On March 1, they will present a Great Depression Special, pairing Black Tuesday with Speaking in Tongues; tickets are still available in the $5 and $19.29 seats. While most of the post-1987 works feature costumes by longtime Woody Allen set designer Santo Loquasto, Alex Katz designed the set and costumes for 1966’s Orbs, while John Rawlings handled the costumes for 1975’s Esplanade, Rawlings and Scott Barrie were responsible for 1976’s Cloven Kingdom, and Gene Moore took care of Dust. The lighting is by the inimitable Jennifer Tipton, with the pieces set to a wide range of music, from Beethoven, Bach, and Donizetti to Poulenc, Debussy, and the Andrews Sisters.

DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO IS AN OVERPROTECTIVE PARENT? (MAYBE EVEN YOU? OR YOUR SPOUSE?)

Last April, we conducted a twi-ny talk with Lenore Skenazy, the longtime New York City columnist and creator of Free-Range Kids, a book and website that she considers “a commonsense approach to parenting in these overprotective times.” She was staging the controversial Take Our Children to the Park . . . and Leave Them There Day, meant to “start giving our kids the freedom and fun that helps them grow up happy, healthy, and maybe even a little sunburnt,” she explained. Then, in July, she offered free Free-Range tutorials in which she’d come into families’ homes to give advice on how to not be such overprotective helicopter parents. Now Skenazy, a frequent guest on television news programs, is putting together her own reality show “for a popular TV network,” and she’s seeking anxious, overprotective parents in New York City and Toronto to participate. Here’s the criteria: “Do you know someone who is constantly worried about their child? Worried about whether their child is safe and/or whether they are doing well enough academically, socially, or athletically? Do you know any helicopter parents who hover over their child constantly, ready to swoop in if anything remotely ‘bad’ happens? Most parents do worry, but is it so severe that it is affecting their relationship with their children or with their family? If so, we can help them! Or you!” Just send your — or their — name, phone number, and brief description to slee@cineflix.com or call Sylvia Lee at 1-416-504-7317 ext 618. Good luck!

RED DOT ART FAIR 2011

Red Dot will move into SoHo this year and will host benefit for West Harlem Art Fund (photo courtesy of Kyle Dean Reinford)

82Mercer
82 Mercer St. between Spring & Broome Sts.
March 3-6, Day Pass $10, Week Pass $20
917-273-8621
www.reddotfair.com

Armory Week is heading to New York for its annual visit, paving the way for all kinds of art fairs all over town March 3-6. Over the course of the next ten days, we’ll be featuring every one of them, beginning with Red Dot New York, which this year moves into 82Mercer in SoHo, where approximately fifty international exhibitors will be presenting works, including Art Charlotte, Chung Jark, Galerie Edel, Gana Art, Independent Press, Brenda Taylor, and Wellside. Founded by George Billis, who has galleries on La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles and West 26th St. in Chelsea, Red Dot’s mission is to “create a venue for art galleries seeking to present work of lasting value and beyond current trends.” The opening reception on March 3 ($20) will benefit the West Harlem Art Fund; on March 4, Red Dot will host a cocktail party at the Strand Hotel, and on Saturday it will unveil Patrick Singh’s “Bridging Stone Figures,” which will be digitally projected onto the Manhattan Bridge. Red Dot also hosts the Korean Art Show, which made an impressive debut last year, at no extra admission charge.

CAROLE BOUQUET: LETTRES À GÉNICA

Carole Bouquet will be reading Antonin Artaud’s letters to Génica Athanasiou in special FIAF presentation (photo © Fuerte)

French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Thursday, February 24, $50, 8:00
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

French actress and model Carole Bouquet, who has starred in such films as That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977), Blank Generation (Uli Lommel, 1980), For Your Eyes Only (John Glen, 1981), and Lucie Aubrac (Claude Berri, 1997), will be making a rare stage appearance in New York City on February 24 for a one-night-only presentation of Lettres à Génica at the French Institute Alliance Française. Bouquet will be reading love letters sent from innovative poet, actor, mystic, and Theatre of Cruelty provocateur Antonin Artaud to his girlfriend, Romanian actress Génica Athanasiou. Artaud, who suffered most of his life from psychological problems, and Athanasiou teamed up on such projects as 1928’s La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), which was written by Artaud and starred Athanasiou; directed by Gemaine Dulac, it is considered to be the first surrealist film. Bouquet will read the letters in French, with English supertitles. Tickets are $50, but FIAF is offering a special two-event package for $85, pairing Lettres à Génica with the March 3 New York premiere of Francis Huster’s La Peste, in which the French actor presents his one-man performance of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, The Plague.