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MIGUEL GUTIERREZ: SUEÑO

Miguel Gutierrez and others will perform sueño on the High Line next week (photo by Marley Trigg Stewart)

Who: Miguel Gutierrez, Justin Faircloth, Estado Flotante, Johnnie Cruise Mercer Jr, Seta Morton, Angie Pittman, Christopher Ralph, Kim Savarino, Santiago Venegas, Rosana Cabán
What: Live musical performance of sueño
Where: The High Line at Fourteenth St.
When: September 12-14, free with RSVP
Why: Queens-born, Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Miguel Gutierrez brings his newest work, sueño, to the High Line for three special performances September 12 and 14 at 7:00 and September 13 at 6:00. Gutierrez, whose previous pieces include Sabotage, SADONNA, Age & Beauty, I as another, Unsustainable Solutions: Duet with Dead Dad, and Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us), will play keyboards and sing in both English and Spanish, accompanied by dancers Justin Faircloth, Estado Flotante, Johnnie Cruise Mercer Jr, Seta Morton, Angie Pittman, Christopher Ralph, Kim Savarino, and Santiago Venegas. Rosana Cabán joins Gutierrez with the arrangement, production, and sonic transitions; the lighting is by Alexandra Vásquez Dheming.

The dreamy project features churchlike harmonic songs that explore melancholy and longing, with movement inspired by such choreographers as Ted Shawn and Harald Kreutzberg. Gutierrez also hosts the podcast Are You for Sale? and performs music as the Belleville, explaining, “i make sad songs in weird ways.” With sueño, you can expect the unexpected, in a terrific space.

LIKE A ROLLING STONE: JANN WENNER IN CONVERSATION WITH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

Who: Bruce Springsteen, Jann S. Wenner
What: Virtual and in-person discussion
Where: 92nd St. Y, Kaufmann Concert Hall, 1395 Lexington Ave., and online
When: Tuesday, September 13, $60 (includes book), 7:00
Why: “I went to the Rolling Stone offices on a Monday morning in mid-May 2019. My assistant met me downstairs to take my attaché case, as I was still walking with two canes. It was a gray day in New York, one of rain, with a forecast for more all week. When I got to our second-floor lobby, workmen were putting up plywood to protect the walls from the movers,” Jann S. Wenner writes in “The Last Days,” the prologue to his new memoir, Like a Rolling Stone (Little, Brown, $35). Cleaning out his office, he writes, “I took down Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of a young Pete Townshend, his hands bloody from playing his guitar. . . . I packed up the small wood and metal sculpture of a skier that Patti Scialfa sent for my birthday.” Describing the memoir itself, he posits, “Our readers often referred to Rolling Stone as a letter from home. This is my last letter to you.”

On September 13, Wenner will be at the 92nd St. Y to discuss his memoir with his longtime friend Bruce Springsteen, who has appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone by himself fourteen times and another eight with others; the conclusion to Wenner’s prologue is a reference to Springsteen’s most recent album, Letter to You. Bruce, whose wife is Patti Scialfa, has been the subject of numerous RS interviews, but this time he turns the tables, interviewing Wenner about the new book, delving into the New York City native’s often controversial life and career. Springsteen says of the memoir, “If you were young, alone, and in the far lands of New Jersey, Rolling Stone was a dispatch from the front, carrying news of a bigger world and another life awaiting. Like a Rolling Stone is a touchingly honest memoir from a man who recorded and shaped our times and of a grand life well lived. It is a wonderfully deep and rewarding reading. I loved it.”

The book features seventy-seven chapters that explore the counterculture, politics, family, and such journalists, musicians, and pop-culture icons as Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph J. Gleason, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, John Belushi, Jackie Onassis, Tom Wolfe, the Dalai Lama, and the Grateful Dead. In addition to being the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone, Wenner, a cofounder of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has interviewed such figures as Bono, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Jerry Garcia, John Lennon, and Townshend for the magazine; Jagger and music executive Ahmet Ertegun inducted Wenner into the hall in 2004. Tickets are $60 and come with a copy of the book, which will be signed for those attending the event in person.

DAKOTA MODERN: THE ART OF OSCAR HOWE

Oscar Howe, Dance of the Heyoka, casein on paper, 1954 (Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma)

DAKOTA MODERN: THE ART OF OSCAR HOWE
National Museum of the American Indian
George Gustave Heye Center, One Bowling Green
Through Sunday, September 11, free
212-514-3700
americanindian.si.edu

In April 1958, after Oscar Howe’s work had been rejected by the Philbrook Art Center, the Yanktonai Dakota artist wrote a letter to curator Jeanne Snodgrass: “Who ever said that my paintings are not in the traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian Art indeed. There is much more to Indian Art than pretty, stylized pictures. There was also power and strength and individualism (emotional and intellectual insight) in the old Indian paintings. Every bit in my paintings is a true studied fact of Indian paintings. Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting that is the most common way? We are to be herded like a bunch of sheep, with no right for individualism, dictated as the Indian has always been, put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the White Man knows what is best for him. . . . Well, I am not going to stand for it.”

Born in 1915 on the Creek Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, Howe (his tribal name was Mazuha Hokshina) had a distinguished career as an artist, teacher, advocate, and activist. His life and work are explored in the sensational exhibit “Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe,” which continues at the National Museum of the American Indian through September 11. Howe’s canvases evoke the color and angular graphic style of Jacob Lawrence, but they depict the American Indian experience, particularly his Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux) culture, instead of that of African Americans. Many of the works, in watercolor, gouache, tempera, and casein on paper, require longer viewing as their subjects emerge from an initially abstract image.

“We are finally at a point in the twenty-first century where we can recognize the impact and complexity of Oscar Howe’s incredible work as both Native American and modern American art,” curator Kathleen Ash-Milby said in a statement. “This project is a long overdue recognition of his contribution to the field that we hope will establish Howe’s place as a twentieth-century modernist.”

Sensational Oscar Howe exhibit continues through September 11 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The show follows Howe from his high school years up to his death in 1983 at the age of sixty-eight. The paintings are supplemented with substantial biographical information, including archival film footage, highlighted by a 1960 appearance on This Is Your Life, the television series hosted by Ralph Edwards; Howe collector Vincent Price introduced the artist, who came to regret his participation because it only furthered stereotypes.

In Fleeing a Massacre, an Indian on horseback is caught within a swirling storm of ghosts and the American flag. Wounded Knee Massacre features armed American soldiers on land in the top half, with Indians flailing below in a bloody pit. At first, Fighting Bucks looks like a kind of acid trip until the antlers and bodies of two deer become evident. Dance of the Heyoka comes at you in a barrage of complex geometric shapes and bold colors.

“Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe” is an exceptional, revelatory show, arriving right on time as a reckoning is underway in the art world, reexamining work done by underrepresented and misrepresented creators. The rediscovery of Howe is nothing less than thrilling; the exhibition is accompanied by a deluxe catalog with essays by Janet Catherine Berlo, Christina Burke, Philip J. Deloria, Erika Doss, Emil Her Many Horses, John Lukavic, Inge Dawn Howe Maresh, Anya Montiel, Denise Neil, and Joyce Szabo that shed new light on this extraordinary artist.

TABLE OF SILENCE PROJECT: A CALL TO ACTION FOR PEACE

Annual “Table of Silence Project” performance ritual of peace returns for twelfth year to Josie Robertson Plaza (photo courtesy Lincoln Center)

TABLE OF SILENCE PROJECT
Josie Robertson Plaza, Lincoln Center
65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, September 11, free, 8:10 – 8:46 am
www.tableofsilence.org
lincolncenter.org

Every September 11, there are many memorial programs held all over the city, paying tribute to those who were lost on that tragic day while also honoring New York’s endless resiliency. One of the most powerful is Buglisi Dance Theatre’s “Table of Silence Project,” a multicultural public performance ritual for peace that annually features more than one hundred dancers on Josie Robertson Plaza at Lincoln Center. It had to be reconfigured during the pandemic but is now back in a hybrid format, available to be experienced in person or streaming live here.

On Sunday morning from 8:10 to 8:46, the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center, BDT will present the full piece, around the Revson Fountain. “The strength of the work is found in the gestures, patterns, and repetition that mirrors our daily lives and is accesssible to all. We would not return to the work each year if it were not so universally meaningful as a tool for storytelling through which the audience can recognize itself,” BDT artistic director Jacqulyn Buglisi, who recently received the President’s Medal from Juilliard, said in a statement. “Your passionate belief makes this ritual a powerful testimonial of freedom for all people suffering oppression and is an imperative at this time in our history.”

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL 2022

Fouad Boussouf’s Näss will be performed at the Joyce as part of FIAF fest (photo © Charlotte Audureau)

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL
FIAF and other locations
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 9–October 28, free – $75
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

FIAF’s fifteenth annual Crossing the Line Festival is another journey into exciting, challenging, and experimental music, dance, and theater from the French-speaking world. Running September 9 through October 28, the programs take place at such venues as Abrons Arts Center, New York Live Arts, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, the Joyce, and BAM in addition to FIAF’s Gallery, Florence Gould Hall, and Skyroom.

“For our first year curating this festival, we wanted to honor its founding principles: presenting compelling multidisciplinary art forms throughout the city, bringing acclaimed cutting-edge French and Francophone productions to our shores, and nurturing dialogue between international and New York-based artists,” curators Mathilde Augé and Florent Masse write in a program note. “The fifteenth edition of the festival features a diverse group of audacious artists engaging with the most pressing issues of our time — including gender, sexuality, human connection, race, and climate change — and exploring new territories in performing arts.”

None of the nine live performances — there were supposed to be ten but Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s FRATERNITY, A Fantastic Tale had to be canceled because of visa problems — has ever been seen before in New York, including several North American, US, and world premieres. The mix of dance, theater, art, music, and literature hails from Senegal, France, South Africa, Rwanda, the United States, and Morocco, examining societal change, Vaslav Nijinsky, science, Cheikh Anta Diop, intergenerational culture, the political views of René Char and Frantz Fanon, and a Detroit rave.

In addition, FIAF is hosting the fall open house celebration Fête de la Rentrée, highlighted by an opening reception for Omar Ba’s “Clin d’oeil” art exhibition on September 9 at 6:00 (free with RSVP) and a Sunset Soirée at Le Bain on October 12 at the Standard Hotel (free with RSVP). Below is the full Crossing the Line schedule.

Helena de Laurens stars in Marion Siéfert’s _ jeanne_dark _ at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival (photo © Matthieu Bareyre)

September 9 – October 28
Exhibition: “Clin d’oeil,” by Omar Ba, FIAF Gallery, free

Wednesday, September 14, and Thursday, September 15
Theater: _ jeanne_dark _, by Marion Siéfert, starring Helena de Laurens, North American premiere, FIAF Florence Gould Hall, $40, 7:30

Wednesday, September 21
Theater: Traces – Speech to African Nations, by Felwine Sarr and Étienne Minoungou, with Étienne Minoungou and Simon Winsé, New York premiere, Abrons Arts Center, $25, 8:30

Thursday, September 22, through Saturday, September 24
Dance: And so you see… our honourable blue sky and ever enduring sun… can only be consumed slice by slice…, by Robyn Orlin, performed by Albert Ibokwe Khoza, US premiere, New York Live Arts, $15-$35, 7:30

Saturday, September 24
Theater: Freedom, I’ll have lived your dream until the very last day, by Felwine Sarr and Dorcy Rugamba, featuring Marie-Laure Crochant, Majnun, Felwine Sarr, and T.I.E., North American premiere, Florence Gould Hall, $40, 7:30

Thursday, September 29, and Friday, September 30
Performance: Fire in the Head, by Christopher Myers, world premiere, Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, $20, 7:30

Thursday, October 6, through Saturday, October 8
Dance: The Encounter, by Kimberly Bartosik, performed by Kimberly Bartosik, Claude “CJ” Johnson, Burr Johnson, Joanna Kotze, Ryan Pliss, Kalub Thompson, Mac Twining, River Bartosik-Murray, Logan Farmer, and Ellington Hurd, world premiere, FIAF Skyroom, $30, 7:30

Thursday, October 13, through Saturday, October 15
Dance: CROWD, by Gisèle Vienne, US premiere, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, $35-$75, 7:30

Tuesday, October 18, through Sunday, October 23
Dance: Näss, by Fouad Boussouf, New York premiere, the Joyce Theater, $20-$55

Thursday, October 27, and Friday, October 28
Theater: The Terrestrial Trilogy, a Performance in Three Parts: Inside, Moving Earths, and Viral, by Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati, with special guest Bruno Latour, North American premiere, FIAF Florence Gould Hall, $40

MILOŠ FORMAN 90

MILOŠ FORMAN 90
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 9-22
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Upon the death of master Czech filmmaker Miloš Forman in 2018 at the age of eighty-six, film curator and producer Irena Kovarova wrote in Czech Film magazine, “When Miloš Forman was a young boy, he and his parents dressed up in their Sunday best and headed over to the cinema in Čáslav for the future filmmaker’s first moviegoing experience. They took their seats and the opera Bartered Bride began on screen — as a silent film. In Forman’s telling of this story, he would always pause when delivering the paradox of this moment. Then he would continue, revealing that to his great delight, the audience, knowing the opera by heart, began to sing along. From that moment on, cinema was forever fixed in his mind as a communal experience. Miloš Forman was a remarkable storyteller. For the screen and in person. You’d hear him tell the same stories from his career on many occasions, but you’d never see him bored with his own words. They were perfectly crafted and he was incredibly generous with his audience. He knew the story worked and he was there to bring his listeners joy with his delivery, which in turn warmed his heart. He was a man larger than life: his baritone voice strong, and his r’s rolled and resounding. One believed when in his presence that his first love was for people, and he made sure that everyone around him could feel it.”

Miloš Forman celebration at Film Forum takes off with Taking Off

Kovarova is serving as the consultant on the Film Forum series “Miloš Forman 90,” celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the director’s birth in Caslav. The two-week festival consists of all twelve of his feature films, from 1964’s Black Peter to 2006’s Goya’s Ghosts, in addition to several documentaries (Czechoslovakia, 1967) and Alfréd Radok’s 1956 Old Man Motor Car, in which Forman makes a brief appearance. Radok was a major influence on Forman; the two went on to work together at the multimedia theater company Laterna Magika.

The series boasts such beloved classics as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ragtime, and Amadeus in addition to Man on the Moon, Hair, and Valmont. Kovarova will introduce the September 15 showing of Audition, the September 17 screenings of Old Man Motor Car The Firemen’s Ball, and the September 20 screening of Věra Chytilová’s 1982 documentary, Chytilová versus Forman. Producer Michael Hausman will introduce the 1968 counterculture favorite Taking Off (starring Buck Henry!) on September 9 at 8:30; screenwriter Michael Weller will introduce Ragtime on September 11 at 3:40; screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski will introduce the 6:00 screening of Man on the Moon on September 12 and, on the same day, participate in a Q&A following the 8:30 screening of The People vs. Larry Flynt; producer Paul Zaentz will introduce the September 16 screening of Amadeus and the September 19 screening of Goya’s Ghosts.

THE BENGALI

Fatima Shaik searches for a critical piece of family history in The Bengali

THE BENGALI (Kavery Kaul, 2021)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, September 9
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.thebengalifilm.com

“Why would anybody come from the other side of the world to find somebody who doesn’t even exist anymore?” author Fatima Shaik says at the beginning of The Bengali. “Why not?” asks Kolkata-born American director Kavery Kaul. Armed with a partial ship’s registry and a photograph of her grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, who left his small village in India in 1893 to make a new life in the United States, in New Orleans, where he married a Black woman, Fatima travels to her ancestral country, wanting to know more about where she came from and to see a patch of land that he owned. Joined by Kaul, who is Bengali, and cinematographer John Russell Foster, who is white, they have very little information and face roadblock after roadblock until success is in reach, but everywhere she goes, Fatima is met with resistance, as Indians view her with suspicion, thinking that she, a Christian in a Muslim community, might be there to reclaim her grandfather’s land.

The Bengali is an emotional, deeply personal search for identity, almost to the point of obsession, of seeking out one’s family history in a land where you don’t speak the language and are not immediately welcome. The film opens at the Quad on September 9, with Kaul (Cuban Canvas, Long Way from Home) participating in Q&As following the 7:00 screenings on September 9 and 10 and after the 5:10 show on September 11.