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EITHER/OR: TIME | AGAIN

TIME | AGAIN
Speyer Hall at University Settlement
184 Eldridge St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
Friday, December 8, $12.71-$23.41, 8:00
www.eitherormusic.org
www.universitysettlement.org

New York City–based flexible chamber ensemble Either/Or (EO) looks to the past and the future with its next performance, December 8 at 8:00 at Speyer Hall at University Settlement. The evening begins with the world premiere of the EO commission It only has shelves by Bronx-based multidisciplinary composer Victoria Cheah. Written for violin, cello, trombone, and electronics, the piece explores layering, depth, ritual, and preparation. “To know you have a place to put something, where something can belong, where the fact of its emptiness suggests its readiness to receive instead of impose, to me suggests the possibility of belonging,” Cheah said in a statement. The work will be performed by Pala Garcia on violin and John Popham on cello — the cofounders of progressive trio Longleash — Cheah on electronics, and event curator Chris McIntyre on trombone. Cheah, a Hunter and Brandeis graduate who is assistant professor at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory and director of production of Talea Ensemble, has previously scored commissions or had pieces featured by Non-Event, Switch Ensemble, andPlay, Yarn/Wire, Wavefield Ensemble, Guerilla Opera, Ensemble Dal Niente, PRISM Quartet, and others, with such enigmatic titles as “Ocean into wire,” “We drank wine from the bottle on a rooftop next to god,” and “I watched her smile her hand.”

Either/Or presents Time | Again on December 8 at Speyer Hall at University Settlement

It only has shelves will be followed by the late Danish composer and visual artist Henning Christiansen’s 1973 Requiem of Art (NYC) (fluxorum organum II), a Fluxus “tape piece” realized for live ensemble by British-Lithuanian cellist, composer, and visual artist Anton Lukoszevieze for Ultima Festival New York in 2014. The work will be performed by the full ensemble, consisting of the aforementioned Garcia, Popham, and McIntyre joined by EO director Richard Carrick and Anthony Coleman on keyboards, Margaret Lancaster on voice and percussion, Dennis K. Sullivan on percussion, and sound technician Alex Lough on electronics as each minute provides unique experimental shifts in what we’re hearing.

Henning Christiansen (rear, left) collaborates with Joseph Beuys (in hat) at 1970 “Strategy: Gets Art” festival (photo courtesy Demarco Digital Archive)

In 2015, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Henning’s widow — the Danish composer died in 2008 at the age of seventy-six — wrote of the work, “In the summer of 1969 we made a collective film, The Search, on the heath in Jutland, Denmark. Henning Christiansen made on site field recordings for the individual scenes with Peter Sakse as sound master. The music was first used during the performance at the festival ‘Strategy: Gets Art’ exhibition organised by Richard Demarco at Edinburgh College of Art, on August 21, 1970, with Joseph Beuys and Henning Christiansen. Henning Christiansen sampled the field recording into the organ music from [Beuys’s 1968 performance film] Eurasienstab. He gave this composition subsequently the title Requiem of Art fluxorum organum II Opus 50. That means a requiem over the role of art in the 1960s.” McIntyre adds that the original Requiem was “a sort of portrait of the sound world Christiansen conjured for Beuys’s real-space rituals.” Tickets to the event are $12.71 to $23.41 and available here.

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

ARTIST FOR ACTION PRESENTS SHERYL CROW, PETER FRAMPTON, KEVIN BACON + SPECIAL GUESTS: A FATHER’S PROMISE FILM LAUNCH CONCERT

Who: Jimmy Vivino, Mark Barden, Sheryl Crow, Peter Frampton, Kevin Bacon, Bernie Williams, Rozzi, the Dumes, the Alternate Routes, Jen Chapin, Aztec Two-Step 2.0, more
What: Benefit concert for Sandy Hook Promise celebrating film launch
Where: NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 La Guardia Pl. between Third & Fourth Sts.
When: Thursday, December 7, $81-$256, 7:30
Why: “Music succeeds when politics and religion fail,” Darryl “DMC” McDaniels says in A Father’s Promise: The Story of a Father’s Promise to End Gun Violence, a documentary opening December 8 at LOOK Dine-In Cinema W57. Directed by Rick Korn and executive produced by Sheryl Crow, the film follows musician Mark Barden as he takes action after his seven-year-old son Daniel was one of twenty-six people murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.

Barden, cofounder of Sandy Hook Promise, and filmmaker Korn teamed up with Matthew Reich and Neal Saini to form Artist for Action to Prevent Gun Violence. On December 7 at NYU Skirball, Barden and the Promise Band will join musical director Jimmy Vivino and a group of all-stars to celebrate the launch of the film; among the special guests performing live will be Crow, Peter Frampton, Kevin Bacon, Bernie Williams, Rozzi, the Dumes, the Alternate Routes, Jen Chapin, and Aztec Two-Step 2.0. The evening will be filmed for a future documentary, continuing to raise funds and awareness about the horrors of gun violence, the leading cause of death for children and teens in America.

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

CECILY BROWN: DEATH AND THE MAID

Cecily Brown, Maid in a Landscape, oil on linen, 2021 (private collection / © Cecily Brown)

CECILY BROWN: DEATH AND THE MAID
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
Gallery 913
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through December 3, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

London-born, New York City–based artist Cecily Brown creates paintings of deep, swirling colors that combine abstraction with figuration, echoing specific works by Jackson Pollock, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, François Boucher, Diego Velázquez, and others, in addition to double imagery and classical still-lifes, with objects and subjects slowly coming to life as viewers spend time with the canvases. This weekend is the last chance to catch the revelatory exhibition “Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid,” continuing at the Met through December 3. “The woman looking in a mirror is a subject I’ve returned to so many times over and over again. It’s the world reflected back at you, but you also feel like you’re seeing into another world,” Brown explains in the below Met video. “It is that sense of looking into another world that’s so fascinating about art in the first place.”

The show consists of approximately fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes from throughout Brown’s more than twenty-five-year career, including pieces made for the exhibition. Among the highlights are Maid in a Landscape, Death and the Maid, Nature Morte, Untitled (Vanity), Selfie, and Aujourd’hui Rose. The utter beauty of the works are intense and rewarding, each one unfolding to reveal its multiple layers; for example, do not miss the black cat in Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries, and Pearls. Several of the larger paintings are simply staggering; this exhibition is not one that should be hustled through but instead savored, a fascinating look into other worlds as only Brown can see them.

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

DRAWING DIALOGUES: MEL CHIN AND SHELLYNE RODRIGUEZ

Left, Shellyne Rodriguez, BX Third World Liberation Mixtape No. 2 (Esquire Strikes Empire), colored pencil on paper, 2021; right, Mel Chin, detail, Elements of a Trophy Frame for Leopold II, graphite on vellum, gold leaf, drafting dots, 2007 (photos courtesy of the artists)

Who: Mel Chin, Shellyne Rodriguez
What: Artist conversation
Where: National Academy of Design, 519 West Twenty-Sixth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., second floor
When: Tuesday, December 5, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: Formerly located in the Archer Milton Huntington House on Museum Mile, the National Academy of Design has moved to Chelsea, where it is hosting its inaugural exhibition in the new space, “Drawing as Practice,” a group show featuring work by such artists as Richard Artschwager, Judith Bernstein, Cecily Brown, Mark di Suvero, Jim Dine, Frank Gehry, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Christine Sun Kim, Sol LeWitt, Ana Mendieta, Robert Mangold, Mary Mattingly, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Clifford Owens, Renzo Piano, Judy Pfaff, Howardena Pindell, Jenny Polak and Dread Scott, Liliana Porter, Joel Shapiro, Arlene Shechet, Kiki Smith, Billie Tsien, Rafael Viñoly, and many others. On December 5 at 6:30, National Academician Mel Chin and Shellyne Rodriguez, both of whom are represented in the show, will sit down for an artist talk, part of the series “Drawing Dialogues.” The exhibit, which continues through December 16, includes Chin’s Elements of a Trophy Frame for Leopold II and Convo Pool Mood Board and Rodriguez’s India and Bangladesh on Pugsley Avenue and BX Third World Liberation Mixtape No. 2 (Esquire Strikes Empire).

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

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: ON PHOTOGRAPHY AND JAPANESE ART

Hiroshi Sugimoto will be at Asia Society on November 30 to discuss his latest work (photo courtesy Sugimoto Studio)

Who: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dr. Yasufumi Nakamori
What: Artist talk about the photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto
Where: Asia Society Museum, 725 Park Ave. at Seventieth St.
When: Thursday, November 30, $15, 6:30
Why: You’ll have to travel to London to catch the largest survey to date of the work of Japanese photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto, on view through January 7 at Hayward Gallery. But Asia Society on the Upper East Side is offering the next best thing: Seeing Sugimoto himself. On November 30 at 6:30, the seventy-five-year-old Tokyo-born artist, who is based in Tokyo and New York City, will be at Asia Society for an artist talk, “On Photography and Japanese Art,” speaking with Asia Society museum director Yasufumi Nakamori, focusing on Sugimoto’s latest series, “Brush Impression,” featuring calligraphic brushstrokes on photographic paper, started during the coronavirus crisis.

“When I finally returned to my New York studio after the three-year-long disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, I discovered that I was in possession of a large amount of photographic paper which had passed its expiry date. Rather like fresh food, this special paper for photographic printing deteriorates over time,” Sugimoto explains in his artist statement. “The defining feature of my prints is the subtle expression of different shades, something that is very hard to achieve with photographic paper that is even slightly degraded. What I therefore did was to flip my thinking, Copernicus-style. My idea was not to accept deterioration as deterioration per se but to treat it as a form of beautification instead. When ancient works of art are exposed to the operations of time, deterioration usually causes an aesthetic improvement. The white of photographic paper looks rather like albumenized paper, while black tones acquire a certain softness on it. I decided to bring the calligraphy skills I had mastered during three years of enforced leisure into the dark room. In the dim room suffused with pale orange light, I spread out a sheet of photographic paper, then dunk my brush into the developer. In the darkness, I gropingly draw the characters which I cannot actually see. Then, just for a fleeting moment, I expose the paper to a burst of light like a flash.

“Just the areas which are touched by the brush metamorphose into Japanese characters and float to the surface in black. Having shown that it was possible to do calligraphy using a developer, I then tried dipping my brush in photographic fixer. I plied my bush surrounded by the stench of acid; this time it was white characters appearing on a jet-black ground. As I wrote, I tried to concentrate on the invisible characters, focusing my mind on the place where the meaning of the characters would manifest itself. Protean and shapeshifting, fire is an extraordinary thing. Gaze at it and you will feel yourself being drawn into another world. This planet of ours was originally born from the fires of the sun. A blazing flame is at once a sacrament of birth and an echo of a burned-out death. Sometimes, as here, the burning flame flings out its arms and legs to be transcribed as the kanji character for fire.”

Sugimoto has proved himself to be a genius with such exhibitions as “History of History,” “Still Life,” “Gates of Paradise,” and “Sea of Buddha” as well as such performances as Rikyu-Enoura and Sanbaso, divine dance, so be ready for a fascinating evening.

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

SCENE PARTNERS

Meryl Kowalski (Dianne Wiest) is haunted by her father (Josh Hamilton) in Scene Partners (photo © Carol Rosegg)

SCENE PARTNERS
Vineyard Theatre
Gertrude and Irving Dimson Theatre
108 East 15th St. between Union Square East & Irving Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 17, $37.80-$160.92
www.vineyardtheatre.org

The confusion begins with Scene Partners at the Vineyard even before the show starts. The program says it’s set in 1985, and the script explains, “And make sure it really feels that way,” but one of the songs playing over the speakers as the audience enters is the theme to Charlie’s Angels, a TV series that ran from 1976 to 1981. A confounding puzzlement continues through the entire play, where plot, dialogue, projections, screens, sound, lighting, and acting are all over the place, never coming together as a solid whole.

And that’s a shame, because it wastes a terrific performance by the wonderful Dianne Wiest, who has won two Oscars and two Emmys and has been nominated for three Drama Desk Awards. Wiest’s lilting, ethereal voice is as intoxicating as ever, but the narrative is like a poorly chopped salad put through an unbalanced spinner, a little Beckett and Pinter here, too much van Hove there, with more than a sprinkling of silly sitcom / soap opera and a dose of Joseph Beuys. It’s nearly impossible to tell what is happening in real time — what are memories, what are fantasies, what are dreams or nightmares, and what are clips from rehearsals or films.

Wiest plays Meryl Kowalski, a seventy-five-year-old woman whose husband just passed away three days ago. The first time she appears in person, not onscreen, only part of her is visible; she’s sitting in a chair, stuck in a kind of elevator shaft / dumbwaiter in the center of the back wall, and we can only see her from the neck down. She starts speaking, and there’s an uncomfortable moment when the audience tries to figure out whether they should applaud Wiest’s entrance. Not being a fan of entrance applause, I was rather content with it; plus, I loved the visual of the character trapped in the middle of nowhere.

Meryl has just come from a grief meeting and has stumbled upon a group that deals with “a bevy of emotional, physical, and mental traumas, trials, and tribulations.” The counselor (Eric Berryman) encourages her to get out of the shaft before the cables supporting her break. He says, “I encourage you to receive those snapping cables as a natural sign!” She asks, “A natural sign of what?!” He replies, “That your mass exceeds the safety-load of your pulley system!” She says, “In other words I’m fat and I don’t stand a chance.” He offers, “Not without sure footing and solid ground, which we offer in spades. Come! Join us once and for all. It only requires a minor injurious leap.”

Thrilled that she has a new lease on life, Meryl tells her daughter, Flora (Kristen Sieh), that her father “was a monster who ruined our lives. But now with that motherfucker dead and gone, I’m free, I’m finally free!” She explains that she is going to Hollywood to become a movie star, a goal that her husband failed at. A grown woman without a job and on drugs, Flora doesn’t want her mother to go, mostly because she needs her to take care of her. “You’ll play nothing but diaper-shitters, you hear me? Retirement-home background work!” Flora cries out. Meryl boldly replies, “I will play queens and matriarchs. Lawyers and judges, powerful women with pockets full of benzedrine pills and deep dark secrets to boot.”

On her Hollywood journey seeking fame and fortune, Meryl meets a Marxist train conductor (Berryman) who might be the ghost of her dead husband; pulls a gun on high-powered agent Herman Wassermann (Josh Hamilton); joins an acting class taught by Australian director Hugo Lockerby (Hamilton), with snarky wannabe actors Cassie (Carmen M. Herlihy), Pauline (Sieh), Maxine (Sieh), and Chuck (Berryman), who tell Meryl that she must change her name, which she doesn’t want to do because she is finally establishing her own identity, even if it will be by portraying other people; visits Dr. Noah Drake (Berryman), who may or may not be the doctor from General Hospital; is haunted by her father, who appears as a floating hat and trench coat; and reconnects with her sister, Charlize (Johanna Day), whom she hasn’t seen in ten years and who was unable to make it as an actress herself. “I’m happy with life now. I volunteer, I sing at this little dive,” Charlize says. “I don’t miss the rejection. The constant judgment. There’s no harm in being ordinary.”

But Meryl is not about to give up on this second chance at life.

Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, and Carmen M. Herlihy play multiple characters in Dianne Wiest–led Scene Partners (photo © Carol Rosegg)

Wiest (Rasheeda Speaking, Happy Days) is marvelous as Meryl, a dreamer with an infectious smile and a tenuous grasp of reality. You can’t help but root for her, no matter how high the barriers are to her potential success. Two-time Tony nominee and Obie winner Day (Sweat, Des Moines) is in her usual excellent form as Charlize, who has come to grips with who she is and now wants to help her sister. Berryman (Primary Trust, Toni Stone), Hamilton (The Antipodes, Dead Accounts), Herlihy (Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie, A Delicate Balance), and Sieh (Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, The Band’s Visit) are all fine in multiple roles, although the merry-go-round of characters can get bewildering, even with set designer Riccardo Hernández’s costumes, which end up battling against David Bengali’s video and projections.

Tony-winning director Rachel Chavkin, who has successfully steered such shows as Hadestown, Small Mouth Sounds, and Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, can’t seem to find her way into John J. Caswell Jr.’s (Wet Brain) meandering narrative, throwing too much at the wall, with not enough sticking. Every time I found myself just about ready to accept what was happening onstage, the presentation veered off track yet again.

I did, however, appreciate the music in the play, which includes Steve Perry’s “Oh Sherrie,” Corey Hart’s “Never Surrender,” and Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere,” the last of which ends up being a metaphor for the play.

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

ISABELLE HUPPERT AT THE QUAD

Isabelle will be in person — not on the phone — at the Quad for Q&As following screenings of Jean-Paul Salomé’s La Syndicaliste

Who: Isabelle Huppert
What: Screenings followed by Q&As
Where: Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
When: December 1-2 (festival continues all month)
Why: For more than half a century, French actress Isabelle Huppert has been one of cinema’s brightest stars. She’s appeared in more than 130 films, working with a who’s who of international directors, including Claude Chabrol, Márta Mészáros, Jean-Luc Godard, Diane Kurys, Bertrand Tavernier, David O. Russell, Joachim Trier, Hal Hartley, Ursula Meier, Bertrand Blier, Curtis Hanson, Hong Sang-soo, Ira Sachs, Paul Verhoeven, Wes Anderson, Michael Cimino, and Michael Haneke. She’s also done more than thirty plays, including 4.48 Psychose, The Maids, and The Mother in New York.

Huppert will be back in New York on December 1 and 2, participating in Q&As following screenings of Jean-Paul Salomé’s Venice Film Festival selection La Syndicaliste, a thriller in which Huppert plays real-life Irish trade unionist and whistleblower Maureen Kearney. Huppert will be at the Quad for the 7:15 show on December 1 and the 4:15 and 7:15 shows on December 2. The Quad will also be presenting “Restorations Starring Isabelle Huppert,” part of its ongoing “From the Vault: The Cohen Film Collection” series, on three Wednesdays in December: Benoît Jacquot’s 1999 Keep It Quiet on December 6, André Téchiné’s 1979 The Brontë Sisters on December 13, and Maurice Pialat’s 1980 Loulou on December 20. Finally, her latest film, François Ozon’s The Crime Is Mine, a murder mystery adapted from a 1934 play, opens exclusively at the Quad on December 25. Huppert, who turned seventy this past March, is as resplendent as ever, so these Q&As are must-see events.

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