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“HELLZAPOPPIN’: WHAT ABOUT THE BEES?”

Yvonne Rainer’s “last dance” includes a pillow fight at New York Live Arts

Who: Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, Kathleen Chalfant
What: World premiere
Where: New York Live Arts Theater, 219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
When: October 5-8, $15-$85
Why: Legendary dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, author, and activist Yvonne Rainer asks, “What about the bees?” in what she has announced will be her “last dance.” Premiering October 5-8 at New York Live Arts, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” takes on systemic racism through text, movement, and live projections, including excerpts from the 1941 Hollywood musical Hellzapoppin’, a reality-busting movie melding film and theater starring Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, Martha Raye, Mischa Auer, Shemp Howard, Slim and Slam, and Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and Jean Vigo’s highly influential 1933 antiestablishment film about boarding school, Zero for Conduct. The evening begins with a screening of Rainer’s 2002 half-hour film After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid, which expands on a piece she choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project incorporating texts by Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein and rehearsal footage shot by Charles Atlas and Natsuko Inue.

“HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” runs October 5-8 at NYLA

A coproduction of NYLA and Performa, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” will be performed by a mix of dancers and actors, featuring Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, and Kathleen Chalfant. Rainer also harkens back to her fictional character Apollo Musagetes, leader of the muses, who in 2020 presented “Revisions: A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies: A Rant Dance, Lecture, and Letter to Humanity.” “I’m going to be veering back and forth between various topics: my aging self-pity, my ‘permanently recovering racism,’ my sometimes evasive appropriation of the notion that not all white people, and not all white women, are racists, and various historical and cultural reflections,” Rainer, who is now eighty-seven, said in a statement. Rainer will participate in a Stay Late conversation with Bill T. Jones following the October 6 show.

BURNING BRIGHT — NEW FRENCH FILMMAKERS 2022: ZERO FUCKS GIVEN

Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as a flight attendant going nowhere in Zero Fucks Given

CinéSalon: ZERO FUCKS GIVEN (RIEN À FOUTRE) (Julie Lecoustre & Emmanuel Marre, 2021)
French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)
FIAF Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 4, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through October 25, 4:00 & 7:30
fiaf.org

Adèle Exarchopoulos is magnetic as a flight attendant with a loose grip on her life in Zero Fucks Given, the debut directorial collaboration between Paris- and Brussels-based cowriters and producers Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre. The film is screening October 4 at 4:00 and 7:30 in the FIAF CinéSalon series “Burning Bright: New French Filmmakers 2022,” consisting of nine features and three shorts from up-and-coming and emerging French directors.

Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Color, Mandibles) stars as Cassandre, a twentysomething woman who’s unable to commit to anything, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She considers herself a free spirit, but she doesn’t do much with that freedom. She is based at an airport in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and wants to get a better airline job in Dubai; she might travel the world, but she spends most of her time in airport hotels and nightclubs, swiping right and left on her cellphone for company. “I like people for two hours and then it’s goodbye,” she tells friends.

As a flight attendant for Wing, she downs vodka before takeoff, usually does the bare minimum at work, and regularly breaks the rules, which she thinks don’t apply to her; when she is offered a promotion, she asserts that she doesn’t want any more responsibilities. After partying, she often wakes up in a blackout about the night before. She might claim to not care, but she is clearly haunted by the death of her mother, who died in a horrific car crash. She has trouble communicating with her father, Jean (Alexandre Perrier), who was devastated by the loss and is trying to sue someone, anyone. When Cassandre — whose name references the Greek mythological figure who was cursed with the ability to prophesize doom that no one listens to — eventually has to return home, suppressed emotions bubble to the surface.

Zero Fucks Given has an infectious, freewheeling atmosphere; the cast includes nonprofessional actors and actual airline personnel, and Perrier, who plays Cassandre’s distraught dad, is one of the associate producers. Marre and Lecoustre (Castle to Castle) eschew rehearsals and encourage significant improvisation while shooting on location with extended breaks in between filming scenes. Exarchopoulos even does her own hair and makeup and wears her own clothing to give the film a more realistic feeling.

Cinematographer Olivier Boonjing zooms in on Cassandre’s face and body as she pretends not to care about what she’s doing, but there’s more to her than she’s allowing herself to acknowledge. “I’m rather lucky,” she says, but she’s going nowhere. She rarely has time to experience the ritzy cities she flies to, traveling back and forth in the enclosed space of airplanes, breathing recycled air. Her mother died in a roundabout, unable to get out of a traffic circle, a stark metaphor for how Cassandre is stuck in life. You might not give a fuck about Cassandre at the beginning, but by the end you’ll be giving more than a few.

“Burning Bright: New French Filmmakers 2022” continues on Tuesdays through October 25 with Audrey Diwan’s Happening, Martin Jauvat’s Grand Paris, and Lina Soualem’s Their Algeria.

NYFF60 MAIN SLATE: TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson) just want to keep enjoying the good life in Triangle of Sadness

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund, 2022)
New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
Saturday, October 1, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00
Sunday, October 2, Alice Tully Hall, 2:15
Monday, October 3, Walter Reade Theater, 2:30
Monday, October 3, Museum of the Moving Image, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

About halfway through Ruben Östlund’s brilliant Palme d’Or–winning satire Triangle of Sadness, I let out a sharp, loud laugh that made the people sitting around me wonder if I was okay. I was fine, and there were many more chuckles, snickers, giggles, guffaws, howls, and snorts to come, and not just from me.

In his previous films, Force Majeure and Palme d’Or winner The Square, the Swedish auteur has shown that he never lacks for subtlety as he skewers the lifestyles of the rich but not necessarily famous, mixing fear with farce, pushing both about as far as they can go without breaking.

In Triangle of Sadness, named for the small frown of worry wrinkles between a person’s eyebrows, Östlund channels Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (the “Autumn Years” segment with Mr. Creosote), and Lina Wertmüller’s romantic class comedy Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, resulting in an outrageously over-the-top condemnation of the privilege born of war and colonialism.

The protagonists are semi-successful male model Carl (Harris Dickinson) and female model and social media influencer Yaya (Charlbi Dean), two extremely beautiful people who are at the center of each of the three parts of the 149-minute film. In the first section, Carl auditions for a runway job and the couple argue over who is going to pick up the check after a fancy dinner. In the second chapter, they mostly enjoy their free luxury cruise aboard a yacht even when all hell breaks loose. And in the finale, they have to figure out how far they will go just to stay alive.

Along the way, they meet a fantastic mélange of characters, including vacuous fashion reporter Lewis (Thobias Thorwid), gluttonous Russian capitalist Dimitry (Zlatko Burić), toilet cleaner Abigail (Dolly de Leon), chief ship steward Paula (Vicki Berlin), ridiculously rich single man Jorma Björkman (Henrik Dorsin), ridiculously rich single woman Vera (Sunnyi Melles), ridiculously rich and demure British couple Clementine (Amanda Walker) and Winston (Oliver Ford Davies), the mysterious Nelson (Jean-Christophe Folly), and alcoholic yacht captain Thomas Smith (Woody Harrelson).

Darius (Arvin Kananian) and Captain Smith (Woody Harrelson) try to keep their balance in Palme d’Or winner

Dickinson (See How They Run, Where the Crawdads Sing) and Dean (Spud, Black Lightning) are magnetic together as flawed glitterati who exist in their own reality, until they don’t. (A star in the making, South African actress and model Dean died tragically this past August at the age of thirty-two.) Burić and Harrelson are a riot as their friendship blossoms amid booze and debates over Karl Marx, capitalism, and socialism. As a bonus, the yacht in the film is the Christina O, which was formerly owned by Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy. The rest of the large cast plays the dark humor with exquisitely calm, mannered demeanors.

Östlund, who has also written and directed Gitarrmongot, Involuntary, and Play, holds nothing back in Triangle of Sadness; the film could use a bit of trimming here and there, but that’s not his style. He puts it all out there, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes. (The French title is Sans filtre, or “Without Filter.”) Both Force Majeure and The Square left indelible images in my head, and the same is true with his latest film, which still has me breaking out into laughter when I recall several key moments, such as Dimitry boasting, “I sell shit”; ship steward Alicia (Alicia Eriksson) trying not to say no to a demanding passenger; Captain Smith leaning sideways right before the captain’s dinner, next to his stable second in command, Darius (Arvin Kananian); and Abigail asking fellow survivors who’s in charge. It’s all so much unrelenting madness even as it hits you over the head with its political philosophy.

Triangle of Sadness screens October 1-3 at the New York Film Festival, with Östlund, de Leon, and Burić participating in Q&As following the shows on the first two days at Alice Tully Hall. The film opens in theaters October 7.

THEATER TALKS — DEATH OF A SALESMAN: A CONVERSATION WITH WENDELL PIERCE, SHARON D. CLARKE, ANDRÉ DE SHIELDS, AND MIRANDA CROMWELL

Who: Wendell Pierce, Sharon D. Clarke, André De Shields, Miranda Cromwell, Salamishah Tillet
What: Panel discussion on new Death of a Salesman revival
Where: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NYPL), 515 Malcolm X Blvd., and online
When: Monday, October 3, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy, and Philip Seymour Hoffman have all starred as Willy Loman in Broadway productions of Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1949 American classic, Death of a Salesman. You can now add to that prestigious list Wendell Pierce, in the latest Broadway revival, now in previews for an October 9 opening at the Hudson Theatre. The cast features Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke as Willy’s wife, Linda — both won Oliviers for their performances in the West End production — along with André De Shields as Ben, Khris Davis as Biff, and McKinley Belcher III as Happy, the first all-Black Loman family on the Great White Way.

On October 3 at 7:00, Pierce (The Wire, The Piano Lesson), Clarke (Holby City, Caroline, or Change), and Tony and Emmy winner De Shields (Hadestown, The Full Monty) will be joined by director Miranda Cromwell (Magic Elves, Pigeon English) and moderator and Pulitzer Prize winner Salamishah Tillet for a discussion at the NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; presented in conjunction with the 92nd St. Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, the free event is being held in person and online, and advance registration is required. “So many of the elements of the play are fundamentally questioning of the American dream, and when you put that through the perspective of the Black experience, that enriches it,” Cromwell said in a statement. “The obstacles are harder, the stakes become higher.”

TAMING THE GARDEN

Taming the Garden follows the uprooting of a mighty oak across land and sea

TAMING THE GARDEN (Salomé Jashi, 2021)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St.
Opens Friday, September 30
newplazacinema.org
tamingthegarden-film.com

“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree,” Joyce Kilmer wrote in the beloved “Trees,” concluding, “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.”

Eccentric billionaire and former Georgia prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili is a kind of unseen god hovering over Salomé Jashi’s profoundly poetic documentary, Taming the Garden. The gorgeously shot film, which evokes the large-scale landscape photography of Edward Burtynsky, is a cinéma verité work that follows the moving of a glorious oak from its native home in the Caucasus to Shekvetili Dendrological Park, where Ivanishvili collects and replants trees that he likes.

Jashi, a former journalist born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1981, tells us virtually none of this; she traces the journey with no commentary, no interstitial text, no detailed information about what we are watching. Instead, Jashi, serving as director, writer, producer, and cinematographer (with Goga Devdariani), has us accompany the mighty tree as it ventures across land and sea, first carefully dug up by a somewhat ragtag group of workers, then transported by flatbed and a barge to its ultimate destination.

The beautifully photographed Taming the Garden features scenes that evoke painting and still photography

But in order to arrive there, the tree leaves behind a controversial wake. It is so tall and wide that it often can’t make it through the streets of small towns without other trees that line the blocks having to be severely trimmed or cut down themselves. Ivanishvili offers those trees’ owners money in exchange for chopping down the living, breathing trees; he also improves the quality of the roads the tree travels over. The residents of these villages argue over the decisions they are faced with, mostly speaking Mingrelian.

“Why do these trees have to suffer? Just so Ivanishvili can have his tree!” one declares. “They’re forcing me to do something bad,” another says, feeling he has no choice but to take the cash and let a tree on his property be chainsawed into timber. “They say they’d rather have a tree than a road!” a man complains. “Who gives a fuck about trees!”

“What is there to cry about?” a villager says to an elderly woman who remembers having planted a sapling more than half a century before; she is now in tears as she watches it come down. Someone else shouts out in wonder, “That man really likes trees!”

Beautifully edited by Chris Wright and featuring a natural soundscape by Philippe Ciompi accompanied by music by Karlheinz Stockhausen (“Waage”), Solage, Clément Janequin, and Ute Wassermann (“Strange Songs for Voice and Bird Whistles”), Taming the Garden is a visual and aural marvel. It is filled with images you are likely not soon to forget: the oak floating on a barge in the distance on the Black Sea; rusty piping being pushed into the dirt below the tree; dripping water that evokes the shadows of roots and branches growing; men clearing a path in a lush green landscape reminiscent of a Dutch painting; and the leaves at the top of the tree blowing in the breeze as it is driven down a street, as if moving from Great Birnam Wood to Dunsinane Hill at the end of Macbeth.

At one point a woman, standing in the street as others take cellphone video of the chopping down of a tree, makes the sign of the cross. “A tree that looks at God all day, / And lifts her leafy arms to pray,” Kilmer wrote in his 1914 poem. With Taming the Garden, Jashi (The Dazzling Light of Sunset, Bakhmaro) has created a deeply sensitive and eloquent cinematic experience that deals with one man’s power as it relates to the concepts of home and displacement. “Everything we do in this life will be weighed up in the next life,” one man philosophizes. Joyce Kilmer couldn’t have said it any better.

ARCHER ELAND: TEXTPLAY

Textplay imagines a digital conversation between Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard

TEXTPLAY: TOM STOPPARD AND SAMUEL BECKETT IN CONVERSATION
NYU Skirball digital
Through December 3, $20
nyuskirball.org

During the pandemic lockdown, when companies did not have access to theaters, I experienced numerous cutting-edge live presentations made for laptop, desktop computer, telephone, and smartphone, over Zoom, Instagram, and various new interactive digital platforms, many of which were eye-opening, ingenious ways for creators to connect with one audience member at a time. The latest attempt at this solo virtual magic is Archer Eland’s Textplay, an NYU Skirball production that takes place on your smartphone or desktop device, a real-time imagined, prerecorded texting conversation between absurd theater masters Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard. Unfortunately, it is not virtual magic, although it borders on the absurd.

In a 2019 article in the Guardian about Beckett, Robert McCrum writes of a late-1960s gathering at which Stoppard, a young journalist, encounters the Irish playwright for the first time. Stoppard confides, “I was at that time in a strange state of [Beckett] worship, and it hadn’t occurred to me that you could actually meet him. To me, he was a kind of spiritual presence. So I was incapacitated. I was at this party, feeling like a yokel from Bristol. . . . Someone said ‘Would you like to meet Sam?’ ‘Sam?’ ‘Samuel Beckett.’ Apparently, ‘Sam’ was in the kitchen. So I was led off and introduced to ‘Sam.’ Of course I hadn’t the faintest equipment to exploit this meeting. I have no idea what I should have said, and what he might have said in reply, and after a few minutes I backed away.”

While Beckett was a major influence on Stoppard, I can’t find evidence that they were close friends, close enough to, were Beckett still alive (he died in 1989 at the age of eighty-three), be chatting buddies. I also don’t know if the eighty-five-year-old Stoppard is a digital gossiper. But in Textplay, which in the Urban Dictionary is defined as “simulated foreplay,” Beckett and Stoppard engage in a thirty-five-minute nonsexual chat about art and theater (and hair), goading and chiding each other, complete with emojis and typos.

“We made great discoveries, landed on the moon, cured disease, defeated injutice [sic],” Stoppard claims. Beckett rebuffs, “NO! No we didn’t . . . nice try. We wrote nothing and tricked people into thinkng [sic] it meant everything. All we did was tart up a hole and claim it was an abyss . . .”

Upset that Harold Pinter gets Pinteresque but they get Beckettian and Stoppardian, Tom writes, “Stoppardian sounds like a train station in Wales,” while Sam complains, “Beckettian sounds like a disease.”

Alas, those are among the only memorable exchanges in the play, which, once it begins, can’t be paused or rewound without starting again from the very beginning. The viewer watches the conversation from the point of view of Stoppard; we see his posts as he types them, including much rewriting as his thought process is revealed. That is interesting at first but quickly becomes tedious, especially one long message about the meaning of art in which Stoppard types several responses but deletes them (argh, letter by letter) before deciding on what to send to Beckett. The pacing is also off in Beckett’s replies, which are instantaneous and appear to know exactly when Stoppard’s are done; there is just no way he could have physically written many of them in the time it takes for him to post them.

When I sit in the theater, I never check the time, but I found myself doing so on my smartphone over and over to see how close to the end we were. The idea of making the phone the primary vehicle that delivers this story is a good one, since the object itself is anathema in theaters, where people are told over and over to power their phones down — yet invariably someone’s phone goes off at just the wrong dramatic moment. In addition, the phone constantly begs for our attention no matter what else we are doing; it seems like some people just can’t sit in a theater for two hours without obsessively checking it. But with Textplay, that pull is even stronger, since you won’t be bothering anyone around you if you sneak a peek at social media or your email while Beckett and Stoppard chatter on. And you won’t miss a thing.

LUNDAHL & SEITL: SYMPHONY OF A MISSING ROOM PERFORMANCE AND DISCUSSION

Lundahl & Seitl, Symphony — Tunnel Vision, performed in 2015 at Momentum 8 (photo courtesy of the artists)

Who: Lundahl & Seitl, Barbara London
What: Performance and discussion
Where: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave. at 38th St.
When: Sunday, October 2, free with advance RSVP, performances 11:30 am – 1:30 pm and 4:00 – 5:30, discussion at 1:30
Why: “In times of challenge, how to find a good balance between resilience and resistance when adapting to a changing environment? How can we stay sensible for subtle yet powerful shifts in our being together? What is an acceptable level of reality, and for who/what do we make the sacrifice?” So ask immersive art duo Lundahl & Seitl in regard to their 2009 piece, Symphony of a Missing Room, which they reimagined as an app during the pandemic. On Sunday, October 2, Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl will be at Scandinavia House to perform the work, in half-hour increments between 11:30 and 1:30 and 4:00 to 5:30; in addition, there will be a discussion at 1:30 moderated by curator and writer Barbara London, host of the Barbara London Calling podcast.

The free event is being held in partnership with the Consulate General of Sweden in New York; Lundahl & Seitl have previously performed Symphony of a Missing Room at the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm, the Akropolis Museum in Greece, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, and the Temple of Alternative Histories at Staatstheater Kassel in Germany, among other venues. The ever-evolving work involves white goggles as participants must reconsider their inner and outer relationships with the environment and the space they are in. Admission is free with advance RSVP.