Who:Ric Burns,James Sanders What: An Evening with Ric Burns and James Sanders Where:National Arts Club Zoom When: Friday, January 14, free with advance RSVP, 8:00 Why: This past November, documentarian Ric Burns and architect, author, and filmmaker James Sanders released a revised and expanded version of their 1999 book, New York: An Illustrated History (Knopf, $75), a companion volume to PBS’s eight-part, seventeen-hour TV series that ran from 1999 to 2003. On January 14 at 8:00, Burns and Sanders will discuss the third edition of the book in a free, livestreamed National Arts Club discussion over Zoom.
“Especially in the past year — a defining crossroads in the life of the city and the planet — the eyes of much of the world have turned to New York City, which has found itself, yet again, at the epicenter and leading edge of increasingly momentous global experiences,” they write in the new preface. “In the coming years, as the world emerges from the worst of the pandemic, and New Yorkers themselves try to comprehend what has happened to their city and their lives, the example of New York — its history, its perspective, its setbacks, and perhaps above all its capacity for innovation, resilience, and adaptation — will be looked to as a kind of vanguard in which, in many ways, the lineaments of the future of all cities may be discerned.” The third edition goes up to the present day, with two new chapters, 128 new illustrations, and contributions from Adam Gopnik, Suketu Mehta, and Ester Fuchs, in conjunction with new episodes of the series.
CONTEMPORARY DANCE FESTIVAL
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 14, and Saturday, January 15, $30, 7:30
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
Following last year’s cancellation because of the pandemic, Japan Society’s “Contemporary Dance Festival: Japan + East Asia” (previously known as “Contemporary Dance Showcase”) returns for its nineteenth installment, albeit slightly changed because of the omicron surge. Two of the presenting companies will perform in person, while a third will be seen in a prerecorded video because of travel restrictions. The biennial event takes place January 14 and 15, beginning in the lobby at 6:45 with FreeSteps — NiNi, a thirty-minute site-specific solo choreographed by Wei-Chia Su, founder of the Taiwanese troupe HORSE, and performed by Yu-Ting Fang that is open to the first one hundred people, including those without tickets for the rest of the show.
The festival then moves into the theater at 7:30 with a video of A HUM SAN SUI, a duet choreographed and performed by Japanese butoh artists Kentaro Kujirai and Barabbas Okuyama. Subtitled in English Mountains and Rivers from Alpha to Omega, the piece features an electronic score by FUJIIIIIIIIIIITA, set design by T O J U, and costumes by Mika Tominaga and is divided into three chapters: “The Reincarnation Michinoku, the Back Country,” “The Soul of the Dead,” and “Mountains and Rivers in Tokyo.” The screening is followed by the live North American premiere of Choi x Kang Project’s Complement, a playful work with props and live video from Korean creators Choi Min-sun and Kang Jin-an. The evening concludes with the North American premiere of Hao “Demian” Cheng’s Touchdown, in which Hao, the founder of the Taiwanese company Incandescence Dance, incorporates his mathematical background and knowledge of quantum physics into a solo of movement and monologue set on a stage that mimics a school blackboard on which he draws in chalk, with lighting by Ke-Chu Lai and sound by Chao-En Cheng. The Friday night show will be followed by a reception with the artists, while the Saturday performance will be followed by a Q&A.
WHO IS QUEEN? READING GROUP
January 12, 19, 25, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Exhibition continues through February 21 at MoMA
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium www.moma.org
“It has been said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, but what about the people the master treated as tools?” Adam Pendleton writes in his 2017 Black Dada Reader. “That is, the ‘tools’ that were themselves capable of practicing abstraction, those three-fifths? Before the question about tools can be asked, there must already be an understanding about what a tool is and what it is not. . . . One day there are masters and tools, and the next, only people.”
Pendleton’s multimedia installation, Who Is Queen?, on view in MoMA’s Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium through February 21, is a unique neighborhood built of various tools, where visitors walk in the middle of three five-story black scaffold towers made of timber, laden with paintings, drawings, text, graffiti-style screenprints, speakers, and a large screen that shows new and archival footage involving the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia (the city where Pendleton was born in 1984); Resurrection City, a forty-two-day encampment protest on the National Mall in 1968 that was part of the Poor People’s Campaign for civil rights; and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam, a film about author, professor, and gender theorist Jack Halberstam, the latest in a series by Pendleton that follows works about Kyle Abraham, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Lorraine O’Grady, and Yvonne Rainer. Among the text that can be made out on the canvases are such phrases as “But now I am,” “We are not,” “Everything,” and “They will love us all,” accompanied by a sound collage that includes American violinist Hahn Rowe’s “Yellow Smile,” a poem read by Amiri Baraka, excerpts from the 2014 Ferguson solidarity protest in New York City, and music by Jace Clayton, Julius Eastman, Laura Rivers, Frederic Rzewski, Linda and Sonny Sharrock, and Hildegard Westerkamp.
Adam Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? includes sculpture, painting, film, drawing, sound, and text (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The scaffolding resembles fire escape ladders with platforms, but the public is not permitted to walk up and get closer to some of the pieces, which can reach sixty feet high. You might also have trouble making out all the words on the lower works as a parade of museumgoers pose in front of them foor pictures without even reading what they say about politics, race, inequality, gender, and the social contract. Pendleton has previously explored those concepts in such exhibitions as “what a day was this” at Lever House, detailing his manifesto, and his lobby piece As Heavy as Sculpture welcoming visitors to the New Museum’s instantly seminal “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” show.
Adam Pendleton uses black-and-white text and imagery in multimedia MoMA installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Who Is Queen? is undergirded by a kind of Afro-optimism balanced by an abiding Afro-pessimism,” Pendleton explained in a statement. “It is optimistic in a deeply American sense of the word, and pessimistic along those same lines. That is to say, it is not black or white, and locates each within the other. It articulates the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas.” The articulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which has been ten years in the making, expands with a series of livestreamed Zoom reading groups and recorded podcast dialogues that are all free; snippets of the conversations will be added to the overall sound collage in the atrium.
Wednesday, January 12, 6:00 Reading Group with Harmony Holiday and Jasmine Sanders, inspired by Adam Pendleton’s idea of “poetic research” and focusing on Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and an interview between Ornette Coleman and Jacques Derrida, “The Other’s Language”
Wednesday, January 19, 6:00 Reading Group with Che Gossett and Jules Gill-Peterson, focusing on a 2011 interview between cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and political philosopher Michael Hardt, “No One Is Sovereign in Love”
Tuesday, January 25, 6:00 Reading Group with Jace Clayton and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, focusing on “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” by James A. Snead
Adam Pendleton installation reaches sixty feet high in MoMA atrium (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Special FIAF program looks at new book and exhibition about Christian Dior
Who: Marie-France Pochna, Matthew Yokobosky What: Discussion about new book and art exhibition on Christian Dior Where:FIAF Skyroom and online, 22 East 60th St. between Park & Madison Aves. When: Thursday, January 13, online or in person, $25, 7:00 Why: “Women have instinctively understood that I dream of making them not only more beautiful but also happier,” fashion revolutionary Christian Dior once said. If you didn’t get tickets for the special scent tour the Brooklyn Museum is hosting on January 19 in conjunction with its exhibition “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,” you can still get a behind-the-scenes taste of the popular show with the January 13 FIAF Talk between Marie-France Pochna and Matthew Yokobosky, “Dreaming of Dior,” taking place in person at the French Institute Alliance Française’s Skyroom and online. Pochna is the author of the new book Christian Dior: Destiny: The Authorized Biography (Rizzoli, October 2021, $35), which includes the above quote, while Yokobosky, the senior curator of Fashion and Material Culture at the museum, collaborated with Denver Art Museum curator Florence Müller on the exhibit, which continues in Brooklyn through February 20. Depending on the nature of the omicron variant, the discussion will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.
Reggie Wilson’s Power explores Black Shakers and spirituality (photo by Christopher Duggan / courtesy Jacob’s Pillow)
POWER
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Harvey Theater at BAM Strong
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
January 13-15, $25-$55, 7:30
718-636-4100 www.bam.org/power
Reggie Wilson and his Fist & Heel Performance Group — “Not Just Your Mama’s Post-Modern Dance Company” — return to their home borough of Brooklyn for the New York City premiere of Power, running January 13-15 at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong. Held in conjunction with BAM’s annual celebration of MLK Day,Power is an exhilarating seventy-minute piece about freedom and spirituality set in the world of the Shakers, asking the questions “What would the worship of Black Shakers actually have looked like?” and “How were the general, core Shaker tenets of ‘heaven on earth’ realized (social activism, pacifism, gender equality, celibacy, and the confession of sin)?”
Choreographed by Wilson and inspired by Black Shaker Eldress Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shaker foundress Mother Ann Lee, the First Great Awakening (the Evangelical Revival), and American Utopianism and Binary Opposition (as well as Wilson’s 1995 The Littlest Baptist), the work is performed by eight dancers and three vocalists, with costumes by Naoko Nagata and Enver Chakartash and lighting by Jonathan Belcher, featuring songs by the Staple Singers, Bessie Jones & St. Simon’s Island Singers, Meredith Monk, Craig Loftis, Omar Thiam with Jam Begum & Khady Saar, and others. Power was developed at Danspace Project, then Jacob’s Pillow and the nearby Hancock Shaker Village.
“The idea of spirituality, religiosity, being able to be manifested with the body in relationship with other bodies is something really kind of exciting, so when I heard specifically about Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson in Philadelphia having a Black Shaker community, it seemed like there were two worlds that I had never actually put together in my imagination,” Wilson says in the above BAM behind-the-scenes video. “It also seemed parallel to my eternal and ongoing obsession with thinking about Black and Africanist traditions in relationship to white or postmodern performance or religions.”
Power is part of BAM’s program “A New York Season,” which continues with Pam Tanowitz Dance’s Four Quarters and Kyle Abraham’s An Untitled Love in February and SITI Company’s The Medium and Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in March.
The set for The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is designed by John Farrell
THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS
New York City Opera / National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene
Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
Edmond J. Safra Hall, 36 Battery Pl.
January 27 – February 6, $50-$125
855-449-4658 nycopera.com/shows/finzi nytf.org/finzi-continis
Giorgio Bassani’s semiautobiographical 1962 novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, opens ominously enough with a description of the elaborate Finzi-Contini crypt, followed by an evaluation of their home. Bassani writes, “If the tomb of the Finzi-Contini family could be called a ‘horror,’ and smiled at, their house, isolated down there among the mosquitoes and frogs of the Panfilio Canal and the outlets of the sewers, and nicknamed enviously the magna domus, at that, no, not even after fifty years could anyone manage to smile.” The story, about a wealthy Jewish family that is more concerned with playing tennis than noticing the Fascism and anti-Semitism swirling around them in 1930s Italy, was turned into an Oscar-winning film by Italian director Vittorio De Sica starring Dominique Sanda and Helmut Berger.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage will be hosting the world premiere of a new American opera based on the book, running January 27 to February 6 in Edmond J. Safra Hall. A coproduction of New York City Opera and National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the show features a score by Ricky Ian Gordon (The Grapes of Wrath, the upcoming Intimate Apparel) and libretto by Michael Korie (The Grapes of Wrath, Harvey Milk), direction and choreography by Richard Stafford, and James Lowe conducting. “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis not only continues New York City Opera’s mission to produce new and important works by American composers, it will also continue NYCO’s tradition of showcasing outstanding talent,” NYCO general director Michael Capasso said in a statement. “I am very excited about our cast, which includes many young and emerging artists in leading roles alongside established NYCO stalwarts.” Rachel Blaustein and Brian James Myer star as Micól and Alberto Finzi-Contini, respectively, with Grammy winner Mary Phillips as Mama, Franco Pomponi as Papà, and Anthony Ciaramitaro as Giorgio; the sets are by John Farrell, with costumes by Ildiko Debreczeni and lighting by Susan Roth.
Ildiko Debreczeni designed the costumes for world premiere opera
“This important new work illuminates an important part of Italian Jewish history, and sadly, its themes of discrimination and anti-Semitism still resonate in our world today,” NYTF artistic director Zalmen Mlotek added. [Ed. note: The run has been pushed back a week because of the current omicron surge; the above dates have been adjusted.]
Berlin-based composer and sound artist Dorit Chrysler ingeniously activates MoMA’s “Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start” exhibition with “Calder Plays Theremin,” a gorgeous eight-minute suite, “Written for Theremin Orchestra in Four Movements.” Invented by Russian-Soviet Leon Theremin around 1920, the theremin is an electronic instrument that creates music without touch, from being in close proximity to a moving object, usually a human hand. Chrysler, cofounder of the NY Theremin Society, set up four theremins (Moog, Hobbs, Moog Etherwave, and Claravox Centennial) to interact with two of Calder’s kinetic mobiles, the gentle 1948 Snow Flurry, I, which hangs from the ceiling in the corner of the third floor surrounded by three large-scale black sheet steel works, including 1959’s Black Widow, and the significantly heavier 1945 Man-Eater with Pennants, which sits in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, across the street from Theremin’s 1930s studio. Chrysler also incorporates a Moog Model 15 analog synthesizer to pay tribute to the first concert to use that instrument, performed in 1969 by Robert Moog in the sculpture garden.
Working with effects producer Rachael Guma, sonic consultant Joe McGinty, filming director Michael Tyburski, cinematographer Eric Teti, and sound recordist Daniel Neumann, Chrysler collected audio from the movement of the sculptures, whether from the blowing of the wind outdoors or a hair dryer inside. The final composition consists of four sections, “Embrace,” “Fractals,” “Brute,” and “Mesmerism,” that form a narrative as the sculptures and the theremins meet each other, engage in a dialogue, and face conflict, leading to a finale in which the other Calder sculptures become spectators.
“Alexander Calder himself really spawned the idea,” Chrysler tells associate curator Cara Manes in a MoMA interview. “When I was first invited by the Calder Foundation to visit their New York offices, I found myself surrounded by many of the artist’s large-scale works. Calder’s mobiles have strong character and personality and I envisioned them instantly as active performers. The technology of theremins allows for sound production through moving objects, so it made sense to me having a moving mobile play a theremin. The potential of the intricate movements of some of Calder’s sculptures translated into microtonal sounds seemed very exciting. Placing a theremin instrument within its calibrated range close enough to moving elements of Calder’s sculpture should make this possible. What would happen? What would it sound like? It felt like this exploration of a musical dialogue between two modernist masters of sculpture and music, through their creations, demanded to be heard.”
“Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start” continues through January 15, featuring approximately seventy works from throughout the career of MoMA’s unofficial “house artist,” from wire sculptures and drawings to painted sculptural reliefs and jewelry, supplemented with photographs and other archival material.
