John Byrne’s “Facility of Movement” takes place Wednesday afternoons at 1:00 in conjunction with David LaChapelle’s installation in Lever House (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
David LaChapelle: “From Darkness to Light”
Lever House Art Collection, 390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Exhibition continues through September 2, with free performances Wednesdays at 1:00 through July 13
John Byrne: Transcending Form
Theatre 80, 80 St. Marks Pl. at First Ave.
Wednesdays through August 24, $15, 8:00
212-388-0388
www.theatre80.net
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
facility of movement slideshow
Introduced by nightclub fixture Amanda Lepore, photographer and director David LaChapelle and dancer-choreographer John Byrne dated for three years in the mid-2000s and, remaining close friends, are now collaborating in a different way. LaChapelle recently installed “From Darkness to Light” in the glassed-in Lever House lobby gallery, a combination of photographs and collage that references life and death, from Théodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” to the creation of humankind. The display features “Chain of Life,” a series of hundreds of connected photographs of nude men and women, dangling from the ceiling and nearly reaching the floor; “Adam Swimming Under a Microscope” and “Eve Swimming Under a Microscope,” intensely colorful circular configurations of waterborne nudes placed directly on the walls as if stained-glass rose windows in a house of worship; and “Raft of Illusion,” which re-imagines “Raft of the Medusa” as a swarm of swirling naked bodies battling the elements. Every Wednesday afternoon at 1:00 through July 13, Byrne, who has performed with such companies as Paul Taylor, Corbin Dance, and Erick Hawkins, is presenting “Darkness to Light: Facility of Movement,” an evolving site-specific piece in which Debra Zalkind, Ryan Braun, Christine Gerena, Vincent Marra, Farrah Olieri, Lior Shneior, Rob Laqui, and Kimberly Mhoon interact with LaChapelle’s installation, making their way through the Lever House lobby as well as the outside courtyard. Dressed like workers from all walks of life on their lunch hour, wearing suits or uniforms that instantly identify them, the dancers weave in around themselves, the works, and random New Yorkers on their own lunch breaks sitting outside, all set to live classical music (including the Jewish prayer “Kol Nidre”) on cello and violin. Admission is free to this wonderful reason to get away from the office for a little while.
John Byrne’s TRANSCENDING FORM takes place Wednesday nights at 8:00 at Theatre 80 in conjunction with David LaChapelle’s installation in Lever House (photo by David LaChapelle)
Byrne and LaChapelle are also collaborating on Transcending Form, Byrne’s first evening-length dance piece. Held Wednesday night through August 24 at Theatre 80 on St. Marks Pl., where LaChapelle had his first studio back in the 1980s, the seventy-minute work features the “Facility of Movement” performers along with Byrne, singer Gina Figueroa, guitarist Juancho Herrera, and the James Solomon Benn Choir. The disjointed, overly feel-good work, which is ostensibly about the creation of life and exploration of love, consists of such sections as “On Endeavor,” “Factory,” “Dysfunction,” “Before, Love,” “Ascend,” and “Compassion,” with music ranging from printer sound effects and Shirley Brown to Schubert and Elvis Presley. LaChapelle contributes art to the piece, photographic fabric images of each of the characters displayed on a clothing line at the back of the ramshackle set. The community-theater-like production, which focuses on Marra as Bambini and Olieri as the Holy Spirit, has a suggested admission of $15 but you can pay what you wish, will all proceeds going to Education in Dance and the Related Arts, which brings the arts to students in more than sixty metropolitan-area public and private high schools.
A hit at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, Reign of Assassins is a tense, exciting, and deeply romantic wuxia film from Taiwanese writer-director Su Chao-pin and Hong Kong codirector John Woo. During the Ming Dynasty, a secret gang of assassins known as the Dark Stone is trying to capture both halves of the remains of the enlightened monk Bodhi, which are thought will bring the owner great power when reunited. But after a bloody attack on a minister’s residence, Drizzle (Kelly Lin) takes off with half of the desiccated skeleton, leaving her cohorts, including Lei Bin (Shawn Yue), the Magician (Leon Dai ), and their leader, the Wheel King (Wang Xueqi), dead set on finding her. But Drizzle, whose sword specialty is the water-shedding technique that can bend her blade around a person’s body before stabbing them, decides to change her life, getting a new face (and new portrayer, the great Michelle Yeoh) and name, Zeng Jing, and moving to a Nanjing village where she sells cloth at an outdoor market and falls for a local courier, Jiang Ah-sheng (Jung Woo-sung). But her past is always close behind, and after she is forced to display her remarkable martial arts skills during a supposed bank robbery — actually an attempt to capture the other half of the monk’s remains, believed to belong to banker Zhang Dajing (You Liping), the Dark Stone, with new member Turquoise (Barbie Hsu), who has a penchant for using her body to get what she wants, head for Nanjing for a final showdown. Heavily influenced by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Su’s Reign of Assassins is more than just a successful genre exercise; his excellent script features well-drawn characters, intriguing back stories, and, at its heart, a beautiful romance. There are plenty of bloody swordfights, courtesy of action director Stephen Tung, and humor supplied by Zeng Jing and Ah-sheng’s matchmaking landlord, Auntie Cai (Paw Hee-ching). The Malaysian-born Yeoh, the glamorous star of such action films as Butterfly and Sword, Once a Cop, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is resplendent as Zeng Jing, lighting up the screen whether flirting with Ah-sheng or battling an army of evildoers. Su does a marvelous job of keeping the narrative strong and tight despite having to deal with a multitude of languages on the set, from Korean and Mandarin to English and Cantonese. The amiable Su, who previously directed the ghost story Silk (2006) and the comedy Better than Sex (2003) and whose next venture is an alien sci-fi film, is being honored at the 2011 New York Asian Film Festival with showings of BTS as well as several movies that he wrote; he will participate in a Q&A following the July 10 screening of the awesome Reign of Assassins.
