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SELF-REALIZING PROGNOSES: LOST IN SPACE WHILE STUCK IN A CLOSET

The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [Redux] is a dazzling multimedia theatrical experience (photo by Maria Baranova)

THE 7th VOYAGE OF EGON TICHY [REDUX]
New York Theatre Workshop Fourth Street Theatre
83 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Through February 2, $30-$50 (Sunday livestreams $19)
utrfest.org
www.nytw.org

During the pandemic, Joshua William Gelb transformed his eight-square-foot closet in the East Village into a pristine white digital stage, where he presented awe-inspiring productions he christened Theater in Quarantine, using cutting-edge digital technology for such livestreamed shows as Heather Christian’s I Am Sending You the Sacred Face: One Brief Musical Act with Mother Teresa, Footnote for the End of Time based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges, and Nosferatu: A 3D Symphony of Horror in addition to smaller works that displayed the wide range of performance he and his collaborators could do with the space.

It was an ingenious concept that captured the feelings so many of us experienced when theaters were closed and many of us started working remotely from home, cut off from seeing friends and relatives for long periods of time. One of the shows, The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, adapted from sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries, explored that loneliness in the extreme, introducing the audience to an astronaut on a solo mission who needs to repair his ship’s rudder, a two-person job. Along the way he encounters vortices that result in multiple versions of himself who have to team up if the spacecraft is to be fixed.

Created by director Jonathan Levin, playwright Josh Luxenberg, and actor Gelb, the thirty-six-minute online Tichy has now been reimagined as The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [Redux], a staggeringly inventive hourlong multimedia play running through February 2 at New York Theatre Workshop’s intimate Fourth Street Theatre, as part of the Under the Radar festival.

Joshua William Gelb plays multiple versions of an astronaut in technological marvel (photo by Maria Baranova)

Peiyi Wong’s set consists of two large screens on either side of a replica of Gelb’s closet, with various small doors that open and close inside. A smartphone on a tripod focuses on the closet, which has a slit in the back that allows outer space to be visible via a green screen. Marika Kent’s lighting setup and M. Florian Staab’s sound and original music immerses the audience in the action. All of the technical elements may be visible, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have any idea how they pull off their dazzling magic, mastered by video designer Jesse Garrison.

Tichy’s ship has been damaged by a meteor the size of a lima bean, putting him parsecs off course, and he is unable to repair it by himself. Thinking he is having a dream, he encounters a second version of himself, but he has traveled through a time vortex and it is actually him one day in the future. “I need your help,” Tuesday Tichy tells Monday Tichy, who says, “You look so realistic.” Tuesday explains, “I am! This is all real.” Monday: “This room looks just like my room.” Tuesday: “It is! I was you yesterday. And I didn’t listen. But if you do exactly what I —”

The scene is startling for several reasons. First, the real Gelb is in the closet, standing against the wall, his head on a pillow, but on the screens, he is lying down on the floor, as the video has turned the closet horizontal. Second, the real Gelb is interacting with a prerecorded Gelb; while there are two Gelbs in the video closet, only one is live, and it quickly becomes clear that it requires precision timing to make it work, including the use of such props as a wrench, pliers, the spacesuit, a frying pan, and a bloody towel. And third, it echoes the solitary nature of the pandemic, when we often lost track of time and ached to be with others, an emotion that is furthered when the vortex adds more future Tichys and the plot moves from the sleeping quarters and the kitchen to the vestibule, bathroom, and main cabin.

Lem, who also wrote such novels as Solaris, The Invincible, and Fiasco, constructed a fantastical universe for Tichy that spans numerous tales. Gelb is hilarious as multiple Tichys, using the doors to magically disappear, go up and down between floors, and angle his body so it might be awkward in the vertical closet but makes sense in the horizontal video. He never misses a beat as more and more Egons (spelled Igons by Lem) join him in the cramped space. It’s a tour de force for everyone involved, both as it relates to the pandemic and the world finally getting on with life outside and lending insight into how each of us tries to understand and substantiate our identities and our place with others in a forever-changed environment that we cannot survive on our own.

In an introduction to one of the Tichy books, Professor A. S. Tarantoga of the Associated Institutes of Tichology, Tichography, and Tichonomics Descriptive, Comparative, and Prognostic posits, “In conclusion I should like to announce the establishment in our Association of a special futurological section, which, in keeping with the spirit of the times, will make available — using the method of so-called self-realizing prognoses — those star journeys of I. Tichy which as yet he has not undertaken, nor indeed intends to.”

It’s an uncanny way to meld past, present, and future, which forms the core of who we are as humans, in print, online, and in person.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MANDALAS: SYMBOLISM AND INTERDEPENDENCY AT THE MET

Tenzing Rigdol at work on Biography of a Thought (photo courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

MANDALAS: MAPPING THE BUDDHIST ART OF TIBET
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through January 12, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org
biography of a thought online slideshow

This is the last weekend to see the Met’s “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet,” a stunning collection of mandalas, symbolic geometric diagrams of the universe that relate spiritual stories of unity, balance, and inner harmony, so it is appropriate that the exhibit is in the downstairs octagonal galleries of the Robert Lehman Wing. The works go back as far as a thousand years, ranging from portraits of masters to manuscripts and manuscript covers, from fragmentary leaves of sutras to small statues of bodhisattvas, from glittering crown ornaments to dance robes and stage masks.

Highlights include the “Thousand-Armed Chenresi, a Cosmic Form of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara,” a gilt copper alloy statue with multiple arms and heads; the dizzying “Vajradhatu (Diamond Realm) Mandala,” in which the Buddha Vairochana is surrounded by celestial realms; a Bhutanese skeleton mask placed atop a Tibetan dance costume; and “Chest with Scenes of Tantric Offerings,” populated by gory depictions of animals and skeletons amid hellish violence.

In the center of the exhibit, in the atrium, is Tenzing Rigdol’s Biography of a Thought, an installation with no beginning or end that invites visitors to place themselves in the center, like a buddha in the middle of a thangka. Commissioned specifically for the exhibition, the immersive, colorful work features four walls of murals in addition to a box exploring interdependency and handwoven carpeting with symbolic imagery.

Rigdol, who was born in Kathmandu in 1982, calls it “the journey of a single thought that gathers momentum and produces many thoughts that cluster and form ideas.” Among those ideas are climate change (roiling seas, a lone polar bear), environmental pollution (smokestacks), social injustice (George Floyd), government whistleblowers (a Mount Rushmore–style depiction of Frances Haugen, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange that resembles a country rock band), terrorism (the Twin Towers), and Western art (Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon reimagined as five taras representing the five sensory faculties). Rigdol also puts himself in the work, in a series of figures with a wrapped head, carrying burdens and expressing his ignorance.

In addition, Rigdol incorporates ASL mudras and poetry in Braille that are not translated, part of the artist’s mission to communicate “without belonging to any nation, race, class, group, tribe, club, or creed.”

The Braille poem sums up Rigdol’s vision: “I see the sun / I see cloud / I see river / I see soil / I see the universe / within interdependency.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE JOY OF YIDDISH THEATER: IN DIM SUM PORTIONS

Steve Sterner, Yelena Shmulenson, and Allen Lewis Rickman share the joys of Yiddish in The Essence (photo by Jonathan Melvin Smith)

THE ESSENCE: A YIDDISH THEATRE DIM SUM
Theatre 154
154 Christopher St. between Greenwich & Washington Sts.
January 7-12, $52.37
www.everyonesyiddish.com
www.congressforjewishculture.org

If you believe that everything sounds better in Yiddish — as I do — then The Essence: A Yiddish Theatre Dim Sum is for you.

For more than ten years, this eighty-five-minute presentation has been staged in the northeast and Europe, offering a vaudeville-influenced history of Yiddish theater through comedy sketches, songs, and informational background inspired by Nahma Sandrow’s 1977 book, Vagabond Stars. The play’s subtitle works in multiple ways: dim sum means “touch the heart” in Chinese, and Yiddish certainly touches the heart (as well as the soul and the gut); dim sum is a meal made up of small dishes, like skits; and there is a long connection between Jews and Chinese food.

But most of all, it’s a celebration of a language that goes back a thousand years and has supposedly been on its deathbed time and time again but still keeps going. As Leo Rosten wrote in his introduction to his classic 1968 dictionary, The Joys of Yiddish, this book “illustrates how beautifully a language reflects the variety and vitality of life itself; and how the special culture of the Jews, their distinctive style of thought, their subtleties of feeling, are reflected in Yiddish; and how this in turn has enhanced and enriched the English we use today.”

Originally presented by the New Yiddish Rep and now by the Congress for Jewish Culture (CJC), The Essence, the follow-up to CJC’s Bashevis’s Demons at Theater 154, is a tasty chronological performance lecture starring actor, pianist, silent film accompanist, and cruciverbalist Steve Sterner, a native New Yorker who also serves as musical director; actor, audiobook narrator, and pianist Yelena Shmulenson, who was born in Belarus and raised in Ukraine; and Queens native Allen Lewis Rickman, who also wrote and directed the show. All three have worked with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, which has dazzled audiences with Yiddish productions of The Golden Bride, The Sorceress, Fiddler on the Roof, and more. Rickman (Relatively speaking, The Big Bupkis! A Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville) and Shmulenson (The Megillah for Itzik Manger, The Golem of Havana) previously teamed up in the CJC’s The Dybbuk and Tevye Served Raw and portrayed the nineteenth-century shtetl couple in the prologue of the Coen brothers’ film A Serious Man.

They take the audience on a rollicking journey through such Yiddish songs as “A Shtetele,” “Nit Bashert,” and “Dona, Dona” and scenes from such early Yiddish shows as Di Kishufmakherin, Moshiakh in Amerike, and Dem Shuster’s Tokhter. Some bits work better than others, but there’s plenty here to make you smile, laugh, and nod in agreement. “Yiddish is an amazing language for expressing emotion, and it’s an incredible language for humor,” Shmulenson says.

Yelena: You see, in Yiddish you can’t just say something, you have to make it interesting. You can’t say —
Steve: “To be or not to be . . . that is the question.”
Yelena: You have to say “Zayn oder nit zayn . . . du ligt der hint bagrubn.”
Steve: “To be or not to be . . . that’s where the dog is buried.”

They gleefully discuss how colorful Yiddish curses are and list the many Yiddish words for son, unfortunately, and imbecile. “When the going gets tough, the Yiddish start cursing,” Rickman explains. “It’s opera, it’s poetry . . . Yiddish cursing is sculpture made from hate.”

The cast tells stories about Avrom Goldfadn, the failed newspaper publisher, failed medical student, failed teacher, failed ladies’ hat shop manager, and successful poet who was the Father of Yiddish Theater; describe how amateur groups put on Yiddish plays in concentration camps during WWII; delve into the German Jews known as the Yekes, who wanted to assimilate in America and actively campaigned against Yiddish theater coming here; and how John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, Orson Welles, Al Capone, Cole Porter, and kings and queens were enthralled with Yiddish theater. “In Paris even antisemites went to Yiddish theater,” Sterner points out. Rickman adds, “None of those people understood Yiddish, but they all went, anyhow.”

You don’t have to know any Yiddish to find the joy in The Essence, as English supertitles are projected on a small, framed horizontal screen above a red curtain, behind which the actors change costumes as they move from shtick to shtick, proving that, as Rickman writes in the program, “Yiddish theater is not any one thing, and it never was. It was naturalistic, expressionistic, melodramatic, and intimate. It was — and is — bombast and nuance, singing and silence, art and trash. It’s been around for a century and a half, and it’s been absolutely everything. The only thing that ties it together is its history of innovation, and, of course, the language.”

And as Rosten writes, “What other language is fraught with such exuberant fraughtage?”

Hobn a groys moltsayt!

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BLACK LODGE: DAVID T. LITTLE AND THE FUTURE OF OPERA

Timur Bekbosunov stars onstage and onscreen in David T. Little’s Black Lodge (photo by Matthew Soltesz)

BLACK LODGE: LIVE MULTIMEDIA EXPERIENCE
BRIC Arts Media House
647 Fulton St., Brooklyn
January 11-15, $35-$150
bricartsmedia.org
prototypefestival.org

“Art is not a mirror with which to reflect society but a hammer with which to shape it” is a popular quote attributed to Bertolt Brecht — and a favorite of contemporary composer David T. Little’s. Born and raised in the New Jersey countryside, Little is a renaissance man when it comes to opera. He was inspired to become a composer after being enthralled by Danny Elfman’s gothic score for The Nightmare Before Christmas, which he saw when he was fifteen; he later played drums in a rock band and got into musical theater and the avant-garde before turning to classical music.

He incorporates these elements and more into each of his works, which explore sociopolitical issues in unique and subtle ways. JFK is a two-hour grand opera that takes place the day before JFK’s assassination; Soldier Songs tells the story of a young veteran suffering from PTSD; and What Belongs to You is based on Garth Greenwell’s novel about an American teacher obsessed with a hustler in Sofia, Bulgaria.

In these and other pieces, Little, a two-time Grammy nominee, reshapes expectations of what opera is and can be while working with a wide range of impressive collaborators in multiple genres of music, movement, and film. This weekend, his seventy-minute industrial opera Black Lodge makes its New York debut, running January 11–15 at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn; it’s part of the Prototype festival, a coproduction of Beth Morrison Projects and HERE that focuses on new multidisciplinary opera and musical theater works.

The live multimedia experience, set in a bardo where a writer (Timur Bekbosunov) struggles with his demons and encounters a mysterious woman (Jennifer Harrison Newman), features a libretto by poet Anne Waldman, sound by Garth MacAleavey, lighting by Matthew Steinberg, film written and directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken and photographed by Daniele Sarti, and performances by tenor Timur and the Dime Museum and the Isaura String Quartet, who present such songs as “Electric Cerberus,” “The Hungry Ghost Who Sings in Lamentation,” and “Premonition of the Worm.” Timur and his band appeared at the inaugural Prototype in 2013, as did Little’s Soldier Songs; the opening night of Black Lodge includes an immersive concert by Timur and the Dime Museum, while the January 12 show at 5:00 will be followed by an artist conversation.

In a twi-ny talk, Little discussed his eclectic taste in music, collaboration, bearing witness, and grappling with big questions.

David T. Little navigates through the world of opera in unique and inventive ways (photo courtesy David T. Little / Instagram)

twi-ny: You have composed works for string quartets, percussion quartets, contemporary ensembles, solo cello, church choirs, and others, with music styles ranging from classical and operatic to rock, goth, metal, and punk. What type of music did you listen to growing up? How did your taste become so eclectic?

david t. little: I grew up in a house that was full of music. For one, classic musicals, so music theater was in my DNA from the start. Also in heavy rotation at the time was ’50s/’60s pop (aka “oldies” at the time), Johnny Mathis, the Ink Spots, Dave Brubeck, Peter, Paul, & Mary, and the Kingston Trio. Then a little later — through my stepparents — Harry Chapin, Willie Nelson, and Garth Brooks crept in, all great musical storytellers.

Around age ten or so I started to discover harder/heavier music: Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, the Cure, and hair metal; then Led Zeppelin; then through friends: Public Enemy, Megadeth, Guns n’ Roses, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry . . . then Pantera, then Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, etc. I also had an aunt who made a copy for me of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which was life-changing. And when I was fifteen I went to a summer program at Berklee to study jazz drumming, where I heard a Naked City cover band (seriously) which blew my mind. The Rite of Spring came not long after, as would a period of intense obsession with Oingo Boingo, and a few years later a similar obsession with Ani Difranco, Dar Williams, and Utah Phillips.

And this whole time I was also playing in a fife and drum corps, playing Revolutionary and Civil War–era tunes, performing onstage in musicals, and exploring classical music. My grandfather was a great lover of classical music and played the organ. I heard a lot of music for the first time through him. My stepfather also had a lot of records of classical music, which I’d listen to: one that had [Charles Ives’s] “The Unanswered Question” and [Sergei Prokofiev’s] “The Love for Three Oranges Suite” was especially transformative.

So I don’t know, I think I just always loved music! If there was music to be heard, I wanted to hear it. I certainly had likes and dislikes, but it was never about genre per se. It was just about what spoke to me and didn’t — that’s still how I listen, and I still listen to a really wide range.

twi-ny: That wide range is also evident in many of the famous figures who have influenced and/or inspired your work, from JFK, Iggy Pop, and Spalding Gray to Robert Johnson and the Freedom Riders. In the case of Black Lodge, it’s David Lynch, William S. Burroughs, and Antonin Artaud. Do you see any commonalities in these people, specifically the last three?

dtl: Writing a piece of music provides a great opportunity to think about big questions, and I think for me each of these figures you mentioned poses some kind of a big question through their life or their work about something that felt really important to me at the time.

I also want to mention a few others whose names might not be as widely known: Last Nightfall was inspired by Rufina Amaya, the only survivor of the massacre at El Mozote. and the sky was still there was inspired by the story of my friend Amber Ferenz separating from the US military. And of course there are all of the people who lent their voices to Soldier Songs: Amber, of course, but also Justen Bennett, Rich Girardin, my grandfather Joe Little, uncle Gene Little, and stepfather Gene Woznicki. And of course Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Lou Harrison (in “The Conjured Life”) and Utah Phillips (in “Valuable Natural Resources”). I think some of this may be about documentary, about bearing witness to events, and people, what they did and how they lived.

But sometimes it is less clear. This was definitely the case with Lynch, Burroughs, and Artaud. I was initially drawn to what I saw as common threads in their work, which made me ask whether there was any influence between them. Not finding evidence of that, the really interesting questions started to emerge: If they hadn’t influenced each other, what accounted for the commonalities? This then became about the psychological and the spiritual. That, to me, is where the piece really lives.

These are three figures whose work stares the dark and difficult squarely in the face, and they were doing so — I believed — in search of some kind of spiritual balm. This was something I was grappling with at that time myself, which stemmed from questions to do with depression, escape, transcendence, spirituality, and the darker parts of life, including processing trauma. I found that Lynch, Burroughs, and Artaud all grappled with some versions of these issues (and others) through their work.

As I wrote the piece, winnowing my way through a dark and strange ten-year-long path, I was trying to move toward some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, which I thankfully found. I think those who have traveled a similar road will feel this story in the piece, even as the narrative itself is more abstract.

twi-ny: During the pandemic, you virtually reimagined Soldier Songs with Johnathan McCullough for Opera Philadelphia, where Black Lodge premiered online. What was it like turning Black Lodge into an in-person live presentation in front of an audience — and essentially doing the opposite with Soldier Songs?

dtl: It has been a really thrilling process full of discoveries! It is amazing to see how the brain tries to parse what it is seeing and hearing during the live show. Like, you know that Timur is singing live, but he is so synced with his image on the screen, you start to hear the live sound as recorded. Similarly with the visual world — the live image and the film somehow blur in your perception, making you doubt your senses. It really messes with you in a terrific way that feels totally perfect for what Black Lodge is exploring.

twi-ny: Timur is remarkable in it. Did you always have him and his band in mind when you were putting the show together?

dtl: My partner in crime! Yes — Timur was the voice of the piece from the beginning, absolutely! He’s so amazing. I first heard them perform at Prototype, actually, all the way back in 2013. His performances of both Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” and Klaus Nomi’s “Total Eclipse” just blew my mind, and I knew immediately that I needed to work with him and the band, who are equally amazing. It has been a real pleasure to build this piece for and with him.

twi-ny: You are program chair at Mannes at the New School, where you teach New Opera Labs. What are your thoughts about the future of opera, based on what your students are doing and the success of such festivals as Prototype? A lot has changed over the last twenty-five years in the world of opera.

dtl: I think the opera world right now is also full of big questions. During the pandemic, there was such an eruption of inventiveness and creativity, because we needed to pivot somehow just to survive. To me that was the “shock doctrine” moment our field really needed, and I had high hopes. But since things reopened, a big part of the field has just gone back to their prepandemic plans, as if pretending that we hadn’t been permanently altered by what we experienced in those years! Add to this the fact that things have become very expensive to produce and you have an industry that has grown more risk averse, which are not great conditions for new work.

The good news is that most artists don’t tend to think or care about this stuff. We’re going to make the work we need to make, that feeds our souls, and then we’ll figure out how to put it onstage. My students at Mannes (and our alums) are doing tremendous work in this area — rethinking what opera can (and will) be moving forward — and, like always, we will find a way to make those pieces happen as a community.

All this to say, the operatic future I imagine is, by and large, the same as the world I came up in: a DIY scene where artists make work they love and make performances happen despite impossible odds. This, to me, is where the most interesting work has always originated, work that then gets taken up by forward-looking opera companies and producers. I’m grateful for festivals like Prototype and producers like Beth Morrison who continue to provide vital support to the artists who really see the future and insist on taking us there.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MURIELLE BORST-TARRANT: TELLING TIPI TALES

Murielle Borst-Tarrant will perform Tipi Tales from the Stoop at PAC NYC this week (photo by Justin Barbin)

Who: Murielle Borst-Tarrant
What: Tipi Tales from the Stoop
Where: Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC), 251 Fulton St., Manhattan
When: January 9-11, $20-$40
Why: “New York City has always been a gathering and trading place for many Indigenous peoples, where Native Nations intersected from all four directions since time immemorial. It was a place to gather and sometimes to seek refuge during times of conflict and struggle,” Jersey-based Murielle Borst-Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock Nations), who was born and raised in Red Hook, writes about her solo show Tipi Tales from the Stoop, running at PAC NYC from January 9 to 11. “My family first came to New York City in the late 1800s from Virginia and bought a house in Brooklyn and raised four generations. This story is about my family’s blood flow that is here on this land of New York City. How we as a family had to keep tradition alive. The survival of genocide, relocation, the boarding school system, and the outlaw by the United States government that we could not practice our cultural traditions. The story is about my family’s triumph of will, dysfunction, and historical trauma through laughter. My personal tapestry of stories being brought up in Brooklyn in a Mafia-run neighborhood when we were the only Natives on the block. And this is just one Tipi Tale of the city.”

Borst-Tarrant (More than Feathers and Beads, Don’t Feed the Indians — A Divine Comedy Pageant!), an author, playwright, director, producer, cultural artist, educator, and human rights activist, was influenced by such comedians as Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, and Charlie Hill, who all interspersed sociopolitical issues into their performances. In a talkback following a workshop presentation of Tipi Tales from the Stoop at Brown, where she is the 250th Anniversary Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice and Visiting Fellow, she explained about audience members who might not like some of the things she brings up: “You’re offended by this, I get it, but Native people spend their whole lives being offended, no matter what. People don’t know we exist.” The sixty-minute piece is directed by Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp (Purgatory, UniSon) and coproduced with Safe Harbors NYC, where Borst-Tarrant is the founding artistic director, and Spiderwoman Theater, where she started her career. There are five chances to catch the show; Borst-Tarrant will participate in a discussion after the January 9 show.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MORGAN LIBRARY GOES KAFKAESQUE FOR FRANZ CENTENNIAL

Andy Warhol, Portrait of Franz Kafka, silkscreen print, 1980 (courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York © the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York)

FRANZ KAFKA: PROGRAMS
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 13, $13-$25
www.themorgan.org

There are not a lot of authors whose name has been acknowledged as a legitimate adjective in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, and even fewer of those adjectives have been used as the name of a musical. In fact, the only one might be Kafkaesque, which is used for anything that relates to Czech-born German-language writer Franz Kafka and has “a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.”

Last fall, James Harvey’s musical comedy Kafkaesque! opened off-off-Broadway at Theatre 154 in the West Village, about one American family experiencing predicaments inspired by Kafka’s writings. The first song gets right to the point when Kafka sings, “By age forty I was dead / never had kids and I never wed / the words I wrote were hardly read / but now I’m an adjective.”

Kafka and his work have grown in stature since his passing in June 1924 at the age of forty from tuberculosis, leaving behind a literary legacy that includes the novels The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika and such influential stories as “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “The Metamorphosis.”

The Morgan Library is celebrating that legacy with the simply titled exhibition “Franz Kafka,” continuing through April 13. The show features original notebooks and manuscripts, letters about vegetarianism and his first hemorrhage, postcards, illustrated pages, family photos, handwritten aphorisms, first editions, architectural models, a diary, and other ephemera, primarily from the Bodleian Library, organized into such sections as “Life and Times: Health and Illness,” “Life and Times: Jewishness,” “Journeys: Around Europe,” and “Journeys: Of the Imagination.”

In his catalogue essay “Kafka’s Life and World,” British editor Ritchie Robertson writes, “Even during his final illness he kept writing. In March 1924 he wrote his last story, ‘Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse-People,’ and on his death-bed he corrected the proofs of the volume, A Hunger Artist: Four Stories, in which the story was included. ‘Josefine’ is a masterpiece of Kafka’s gentle, self-deprecating humour, and ends with the unexplained disappearance of the heroine and the narrator’s reflection that she will not be much missed. She ‘will lose herself happily in the numberless host of our people’s heroes, and, since we don’t go in for history, she will soon, redeemed and transfigured, be forgotten, like all her brethren.’”

Kafka often wrote about the unexplained, but he never disappeared from the public consciousness and will not soon be forgotten. The Morgan exhibition, held in conjunction with the centennial of Kafka’s death, is supplemented by a series of programs that delve further into Kafka’s life and world, ranging from panel discussions to special tours, workshops, lectures, and live music; below is the complete schedule.

Postcard to Ottla Kafka, Schelesen (Želízy), December 1918. MS. Kafka 49, fol. 79r (jointly owned by the Bodleian Library and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach © the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

Thursday, January 9
Kafkaesque: Creative Responses to Kafka, with Joshua Cohen, Maira Kalman, and Josh Luxenberg, Gilder Lehrman Hall, $25, 7:00

Friday, January 10
Virtual Spotlight Tour | Franz Kafka: The Making of an Icon, Zoom, sold out, 12:30

Wednesday, February 5
Virtual Lecture | Benjamin Balint: Kafka’s Last Trial, with author Benjamin Balint, Zoom, free with advance RSVP, noon

Gallery Tour | Franz Kafka with Benjamin Balint, Engelhard Gallery, free with museum admission, 2:00

Wednesday February 19
Winter Break Family Program | Franz Kafka Storytime and Artmaking, with readings of author Larissa Theule and illustrator Rebecca Green’s Kafka and the Doll, free with museum admission, 2:00

Thursday, March 6
Concert | Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis,” with pianist Jenny Lin, actor Saroi Tsukada, and bassist Lindsay Rosenberg, followed by a discussion with music publisher Richard Guerin, Gilder Lehrman Hall, $40, 7:00

Friday, March 14
Lecture | “Daylight at the Exit”: Women Translating Kafka, with Michelle Woods, Gilder Lehrman Hall, free (advance RSVP recommended), 6:00

Wednesday, April 9
Lecture | Nahma Sandrow: Kafka and the Vagabonds, with playwright and Yiddish theater scholar Dr. Nahma Sandrow, J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library, $20, 6:00

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE VIVID UNKNOWN: REIMAGINING KOYAANISQATSI THROUGH INTERACTIVE AI TECHNOLOGY

The Vivid Unknown uses generative AI and immersive sound to reimagine Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

TECHNE: THE VIVID UNKNOWN
Under the Radar Festival / BAM Next Wave
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-7, $10
Series continues through January 19
utrfest.org
www.bam.org

“I like people to break things. I’m always interested in how kids interact with things because they’re going to do things that someone else might not do,” artist John Fitzgerald told me at the inaugural presentation of TECHNE: The Vivid Unknown at BAM’s Fishman Space, a multimedia reimagining of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi, which means “life out of balance,” “life disintegrating,” and “a state of life that calls for another way of living” in the Hopi language.

Fitzgerald was not referring to the hardware but “the rules of engagement” that he’s designed with an expert team. “Anyone can bring their own story to it. That’s something I learned from Godfrey, who calls it the autodidactic experience of watching Koyaanisqatsi,” he said. “He’s not telling you, ‘technology bad, humans good — the natural world is safe.’ He’s giving you the opportunity to have thoughts about things, to experience things. Everyone will always watch it differently. I’ve seen that movie dozens and dozens of times; there are a lot of different ways that you can interpret it. So I’m excited to see how this evolves and unfolds. People might want to come in here and sit down on the floor, they might want to go out and get some fresh air and come back in; it’s an open experience.”

There are numerous ways to experience The Vivid Unknown, and it’s left up to each individual to decide, mimicking how we approach life. AI-generated images speed across three large screens as immersive AI sound envelops the room. You can sit on the floor right in front, move around, or take a regular seat in the back. If you decide to participate — and I highly recommend you do — you will discover that when you are in an oval of light, the shape of your body will be picked up by sensors behind you and your onscreen silhouette will eventually be filled by an image different from what is already being projected.

For example, amid slow-motion and time-lapse shots of beachgoers, mountains, metropolitan cities, airplanes, waterfalls, clouds, traffic, the demolition of a housing project, and other scenes, a rocket taking off fit into my outline and followed me onscreen as I walked across the room. Meanwhile, a woman stood near the middle, moving like a dancer. Couples posed together. A few kids jumped up and down. Humanity fused together with technology and the environment as some of us participated and others merely watched from the back.

Almost all the young boys and girls chose to become involved with the art, which brought out the child in the adults who got up from their seats and interacted with it as well. Noticing that, Fitzgerald, who has a five-year-old and a four-month-old, said that the older one is “the best product tester out there. He’s the first to be, like, ‘That’s too long,’ or ‘I want to see more of that.’ He speaks without a filter.”

Curated by Onassis ONX, TECHNE consists of four digital installations that are part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival and Under the Radar; it begins January 4-7 with The Vivid Unknown and continues January 8-11 with Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser’s The Golden Key, January 12-15 with Margarita Athanasiou’s Voices, and January 16-19 with Stephanie Dinkins’s Secret Garden. (Tickets for each is $10; a series pass is $35.) BAM Rose Cinemas will be showing Koyaanisqatsi on January 7 at 7:30, with Fitzgerald and Vivid Unknown codirector Reggio on hand for the conversation “Terra techno firma” afterward.

Onassis ONX NY program director Jazia Hammoudi shared information with me about how it all works, but I opted to discover much of The Vivid Unknown on my own, which was extremely satisfying. In the program, she writes, “The refined interactivity of the work’s music and visuals subverts the source material’s linear minimalism and subtly engages the body in epic vistas from mountainscapes to oil fields. Within The Vivid Unknown’s zone of immersion, the connection between individual and collective action reflects the complex relationships between human agency and planetary outcomes.” In addition to TECHNE, Onassis ONX is presenting Christiana Kosiar’s RUNWAY and Viola He’s A {room} of one’s own January 10-14 at the Olympic Tower on Fifth Ave. as part of Under the Radar’s Under Construction series.

Fitzgerald met Reggio about two years ago, when he went out to Santa Fe to visit the now-eighty-four-year-old filmmaker, who also made the sequels Powaqqatsi in 1988 and Naqoyqatsi in 2002; all three films in the series feature original soundtracks by Philip Glass.

Audience participation enhances experience of multimedia The Vivid Unknown by John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Since this was the first public presentation of the work at BAM, I asked Fitzgerald what he thought about the audience’s response.

“It’s exceeding expectations on all levels,” he said. “We’ve never had this many people in it. One of the things about making creative technology art is that it’s always half broken until it’s not, until you have to press play and make sure everything comes together. The idea was that Koyaanisqatsi is a depiction of the state of the world in the latter half of the twentieth century as chaos unfolded. So I was just playing around with this idea of how you don’t really control anything but you do have an impact on this.”

That concept is also represented by a video sculpture off to one side, a refurbished slot machine that was transformed into an interactive artwork by the fabrication studio Chateau Brooklyn. When you pull down the S2000 lever, images speed by a trio of small monitors; it offers an additional moment of connection, but it has no effect on the film. It exists on its own, but it offers a sense of power and involvement even though the results are random. One boy was having a blast with it, pulling the lever a few dozen times, too young to consider the metaphor of how we gamble in life, taking or avoiding risk.

At several points, the barrage of images dropped out and the screens went dark; only the shapes of the audience members standing in the oval of light could be seen. “I want people to feel like they’re making an impact on the images,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s why the last state is left this way; the film disappears, and it’s fuel to give a reflection of your presence.”

He was also quick to share credit. “This is a project made by a dozen artists; it’s truly a collaborative effort,” Fitzgerald explained. “Everyone is unified behind Godfrey and his vision to show humans where we are right now. It’s like a mirror into ourselves.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]