Who: Awol Erizku, Daniel S. Palmer
What: Public Art Fund talk
Where: The Cooper Union on Zoom
When: Monday, May 10, free with RSVP, 5:00
Why: For his first public solo exhibition, Bronx-raised Cooper Union alum Awol Erizku has created New Visions for Iris, consisting of thirteen photographs taken during the pandemic and installed at 350 JCDecaux bus shelters around New York City and Chicago. “Certain images just need to be made, for them to be out in the world,” Erizku says in a video about the Public Art Fund project. “It’s an offering, sort of a dismantling and reconstruction of certain visual language I have seen and want to see. I think of these as like intellectual snapshots, ideas that I’m processing at that particular moment, and these things manifest in the image.” The snapshots are meant to begin dialogues, initially between the artist and his daughter but now among everyone. The exhibit continues through June 10; on May 10 at 5:00, Erizku will take part in a live conversation with Public Art Fund curator Daniel S. Palmer, presented in partnership with the Cooper Union.
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MONDAY MEDITATION AT THE ROTHKO CHAPEL
Who: Dr. Alejandro Chaoul, Marc Glimcher, David Leslie
What: Virtual guided meditation
Where: Pace Gallery Zoom webinar
When: Monday, May 10, free with RSVP, 2:00
Why: I’ve spent much time standing in front of paintings by Mark Rothko, drawn into their sheer beauty and psychological and emotional depth. Next week we can all do so virtually in a special presentation from Pace Gallery. In 1964, Dominique and John de Menil commissioned Rothko to create murals for what would become known as the Rothko Chapel in Houston; the Russian-born artist completed a suite of fourteen paintings in 1967 but died before the chapel opened to the public in 1971. “The Rothko Chapel is oriented towards the sacred, and yet it imposes no traditional environment. It offers a place where a common orientation could be found – an orientation towards God, named or unnamed, an orientation towards the highest aspirations of Man and the most intimate calls of the conscience,” Dominique de Menil said of the ecumenical space. Rothko previously wrote to his benefactors, “The magnitude, on every level of experience and meaning, of the task in which you have involved me, exceeds all of my preconceptions. And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me.” In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the space, Pace Gallery is hosting a Monday meditation led by Tibetan meditation teacher Dr. Alejandro Chaoul, recorded in the chapel. The meditation will be followed by a conversation between Pace president and CEO Marc Glimcher, Rothko Chapel executive director David Leslie, and Dr. Chaoul. Admission is free with advance RSVP.
CRY 50th ANNIVERSARY
Who: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
What: Fiftieth anniversary performance of Cry
Where: Ailey All Access
When: Sunday, May 9, free, 3:00
Why: On May 4, 1971, at New York City Center, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater premiered the sixteen-minute solo Cry, which Ailey choreographed on Judith Jamison as a birthday present for his mother, Lula Cooper. The piece, set to Alice Coltrane’s “Something about John Coltrane,” Laura Nyro’s “Been on a Train,” and the Voices of East Harlem’s “Right On Be Free,” has now been recorded for online viewing, featuring Jacqueline Green, and will make its debut as a Mother’s Day Matinee on May 9 at 3:00. “Exactly where the woman is going through the ballet’s three sections was never explained to me by Alvin,” Jamison writes in her autobiography, Dancing Spirit. “In my interpretation, she represented those women before her who came from the hardships of slavery, through the pain of losing loved ones, through overcoming extraordinary depressions and tribulations. Coming out of a world of pain and trouble, she has found her way — and triumphed.” The piece will be followed by a discussion between Green and Ailey dancer Constance Stamatiou about the work, which Ailey dedicated to “all Black women everywhere — especially our mothers.” The next day, AAADT will present the livestreamed panel “Celebrating Judith Jamison” on Jamison’s seventy-eighth birthday, with Jamison, Sarita Allen, Linda Denise Fisher Harrell, Renee Robinson, Linda Celeste Sims, Dwana Smallwood, Nasha Thomas, and Lisa Johnson-Willingham.
BLESSED UNREST: TOUCH
Touch takes place on the sidewalk, with Madison Square Park in the background (photo by Maria Baranova)
TOUCH
Blessed Unrest; NYC Open Culture Program
Saturday, May 8, 7:00, and Sunday, May 9, 3:00 & 5:00
Admission: free with RSVP (suggested donation $25)
East 26th Street (between 5th and Madison Avenue, NYC)
www.blessedunrest.org
www1.nyc.gov
The Manhattan-based Blessed Unrest company explores our deep-seated need for physical and emotional connection in Touch, a dance-theater piece performed guerrilla-style just outside Madison Square Park. Part of the city’s Open Culture Program, the forty-five-minute work takes place on the sidewalk near the southwest corner of East Twenty-Sixth St. and Broadway, the park right behind them. Wearing masks, Michael Gene Jacobs, Tatyana Kot, Ariel Polanco, and Anna Wulfekuhle nimbly move across a long bench and interact with a lamppost, a circular bike rack, and a low railing around a tree as overlapping stories are broadcast from two small, portable speakers. The narratives, based on personal stories of isolation shared by the performers and edited and expanded by Keith Hamilton Cobb (American Moor) and Teddy Jefferson (One Inch Leather, The Insomniac), involve Oedipus, a horse, and a mysterious neighbor. The socially distanced audience, also wearing masks, stand or sit in the street, which is blocked off to vehicular traffic but not to pedestrians and bicyclists, who sometimes walk or pedal right through the performance, lending an unpredictable quality to the proceedings.
Performers make use of a bench, a bike rack, a lamppost, and more in site-specific Touch (photo by Maria Baranova)
“When we finished working on our 2015 show Body: Anatomies of Being, which was also built around personal testimonials from the performers, we felt strongly that the idea of touch hadn’t been explored fully in the final work,” director Jessica Burr (The Snow Queen, Eurydice’s Dream), who founded the company in 1999, said in a statement. “It seemed particularly fitting to revisit this subject now, as the months of detachment and related touch deprivation began to take a toll on all of us. When workshopping this piece remotely, each in our own isolated bubble, we spoke about research on mirror neurons and the emotional brain. That research suggests that our witnessing of the authentic corporeal experiences of others can stimulate the very same visceral response in our own brains, as though the experience were ours. It’s the forging of literal compassion through neural growth in our audiences.”
Touch, which features music composition, arrangement, and sound design by Adrian Bridges and costumes by Sohn Plenefisch, continues May 8 and 9; admission is free with RSVP. (There is a suggested donation of $25.) Be sure to also take a walk through Madison Square Park, where Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest, consisting of forty-nine bare trees representing impending environmental calamity, is on view through mid-November.
FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD
A stream winds through the center of naturalistic indoor environment at Performance Space New York (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Performance Space New York
150 First Ave., fourth floor
Wednesday-Sunday through May 9, free with RSVP, noon – 6:00
performancespacenewyork.org
online slideshow
As the pandemic lockdown in New York City begins to ease up and arts institutions slowly open, Precious Okoyomon has brought the outside inside in the beautifully meditative and welcoming Fragmented Body Perceptions as Higher Vibration Frequencies to God. The installation, in the Keith Haring Theatre on the fourth floor of Performance Space New York, offers a naturalistic ecosystem where one can grieve and reflect on the events of the past year, during which the country has been immersed in overlapping crises, from the coronavirus to police injustice to growing income inequality, all of which disproportionately affects Black men, women, and children. Continuing through May 9, Fragmented Body consists of gravel, small Delaware River rocks, boulders, soil, insects, anoles, and wildflowers, with an algae-laden stream running down the middle and kudzu ash, sourced from Okoyomon’s recent Earthseed exhibit in Germany, falling from the ceiling in a kind of wake, a ritual burning of the invasive Japanese vine that was used to prevent soil erosion in the cotton-growing south and became a metaphor for the suppression of Blacks after slavery ended.
Boulders piled like cairns evoke rituals as well as spirits in immersive exhibition (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“The creation of Earthseed started this ever-flourishing garden of kudzu, which was allowed to evolve and escape and be truly wild,” Okoyomon explains in a statement. “At the end, it had to be killed: It couldn’t be transplanted to a new environment because it’s a monster. And the way I had to burn it all and the way that ash gets to have a new life here, it seemed the only reconcilable wake we could do for it, and one that would reflect the timeline of death we’ve been in. 2020 was the reckoning of death, and we’re still living in it. We have to face it and live in it and allow it to change us and be changed by it.”
Timed, limited fifteen-minute admission is free with advance RSVP; we were fortunate to go on a rainy afternoon and spend more than a half hour by ourselves in the space, sitting by the trickling stream, following the paths laid out on the gravel, and gently touching the hollow boulders, piled like cairns, in order to feel the vibration of the soundtrack, which features such found noises as construction. The haunting sound design is by Dion McKenzie, with lighting by Jørgen Skjaervold.
Precious Okoyomon’s installation offers visitors an opportunity to reflect, grieve, and revive (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The work also features a poem, “Weather report,” by the Brooklyn-based Okoyomon (Ajebota, But Did U Die?) that begins, “Today i wake up still the assemblage associated distortions bewilder me / IN THIS WORLD I AM A SHAPESHIFTER / FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD / In the supernatural sky / I was restful as I had reached my place of salvation / The surface as a material structure neither heaven nor solace / Only the wind / Only quenched light / Lulled into covering until everything was the same / soul object well formed / the irreducible always already truth / Hidden in the trees / It is nothing i am here i am still here.” Visitors are encouraged to leave a little token behind as part of a community garden of objects, a reminder of solace and salvation.
REP ON-AIR: THE WAVES IN QUARANTINE
The cast of The Waves in Quarantine comes together over Zoom in Berkeley Rep live discussion on May 6
Who: Raúl Esparza, Alice Ripley, Nikki Renée Daniels, Carmen Cusack, Darius de Haas, Adam Gwon, Manu Narayan, Johanna Pfaelzer
What: Live discussion about six-part The Waves in Quarantine
Where: Berkeley Rep Zoom
When: Thursday, May 6, free with RSVP, 8:30 (presentation available on demand through May 28)
Why: In 1990, New York Theatre Workshop presented The Waves, a musical adaptation by director Lisa Peterson and composer and lyricist David Bucknam of the 1931 novel by Virginia Woolf about six friends, portrayed by Catherine Cox, Diane Fratantoni, Aloyisius Gigl, John Jellison, Sarah Rice, and John Sloman. During the pandemic lockdown, Berkeley Rep has taken a deep dive into the novel and adaptation, exploring the characters, the settings, Woolf’s life, and the making of the musical. Conceived by Esparza and Peterson and directed by Peterson, The Waves in Quarantine: A Theatrical Experiment in 6 Movements is streaming for free through May 28, with songs, reflections, recitations, and memories shared by actors Raúl Esparza, Alice Ripley, Nikki Renée Daniels, Carmen Cusack, Darius de Haas, and Manu Narayan in addition to Adam Gwon, who wrote additional music and lyrics for the show. The actors film themselves at home and outside and meet over Zoom over the course of ninety minutes, covering “Memory,” “Those We Love,” “The Female Gaze,” “Absence,” “The Sun Cycle,” and “Reunion,” paying special tribute to Bucknam, who passed away in 2001 at the age of thirty-two. On May 6 at 8:30 EST, members of the cast will reunite over Zoom for a live discussion about The Waves in Quarantine, moderated by Berkeley Rep artistic director Johanna Pfaelzer. Admission is free with RSVP.
SIGNATURE THEATRE 30th ANNIVERSARY GALA: THREE DECADES TOGETHER, ONE FUTURE FOR US ALL
Who: Anna Deavere Smith, Katori Hall, Samuel D. Hunter, Dominique Morisseau, Lynn Nottage, Dave Malloy, Abraham Kim, Jane Lui, Joe Ngo, Courtney Reed, more
What: Gala celebration and fundraiser
Where: Signature Theatre YouTube
When: Thursday, May 6, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: One of the theaters I have missed the most during the pandemic lockdown has been the Signature, home to four unique spaces in addition to a bar with live music on far west Forty-Second St. Founded in 1991 by James Houghton, the Signature is a playwright-driven company, having dedicated seasons to a wide range of established and emerging writers, from Edward Albee, Horton Foote, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, August Wilson, and A. R. Gurney to Paula Vogel, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Suzan-Lori Parks, Will Eno, María Irene Fornés, and Annie Baker. During the pandemic, Signature has been posting live discussions, behind-the-scenes videos, and clowning challenges by Bill Irwin. On May 6, the theater will host its thirtieth anniversary gala, paying tribute to resident playwright Anna Deavere Smith, who was in the midst of a season that included revivals of Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 when the coronavirus crisis shut down the city. Among those making appearances at the free event, titled “Three Decades Together, One Future for Us All” and directed by Lila Neugebauer, are resident playwrights Katori Hall, Samuel D. Hunter, Sarah Ruhl, and Lynn Nottage, with performances by Dave Malloy and members of the cast of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band (Abraham Kim, Jane Lui, Joe Ngo, and Courtney Reed).