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KAREN FINLEY: COVID VORTEX ANXIETY OPERA KITTY KALEIDOSCOPE DISCO

Karen Finley performs latest show at the Laurie Beechman Theatre (photo by Max Ruby)

COVID VORTEX ANXIETY OPERA KITTY KALEIDOSCOPE DISCO
The Laurie Beechman Theatre
West Bank Cafe, 407 West Forty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Select Saturdays through June 24, $27 general admission, $39 reserved VIP seating (plus $25 food and drink minimum), 7:00
www.westbankcafe.com
spincyclenyc.com

In such works as Shut Up and Love Me, Deathcakes and Autism, Written in Sand, Make Love, Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, and Sext Me If You Can, Chicago-born, New York–based performance artist, musician, poet, author, and activist Karen Finley has explored such topics as AIDS, rape culture, suicide, rampant consumerism, politics, censorship, 9/11, sexual and societal taboos, and the power of art in deeply personal ways that have included chocolate, honey, yams, and nudity. In her latest show, Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco, continuing on Saturday nights through May 6 at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, Finley turns her attention to the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on trauma, loss, loneliness, Zoom, masks, and human connection.

Finley takes the stage to rapturous applause, wearing a hazmat suit and dancing to the 1976 disco hit “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” with Thelma Houston singing, “I can’t survive / I can’t stay alive, / without your love, oh baby.” She proceeds to deliver thirteen poem-monologues from behind a microphone and music stand. To her right is a rack of sequined costumes, where she changes between each number, putting on different masks, shawls, boas, and dresses. To her left is a screen divider with mask-scarves draped over it; sparkling glitter and sequins are everywhere. At the back of the stage is a screen on which are projected news reports, advertisements, video of New Yorkers cheering and banging pots and pans for health-care workers, and, primarily, still photos of pages from old books (encyclopedias, science texts, religious doctrine), music scores, calendars, and magazines she has written over in black marker, including such phrases as “It will get worse before it gets worse,” “It’s called war porn,” and “There is no happy ending.”

For sixty-five minutes, Finley rails against racial injustice, Zoom gatherings, the Catholic church, school shootings, anti-abortion laws, the fatigue and exhaustion the lockdown brought, and the closing of St. Vincent’s. She finds much-needed respite in baking and watching videos of interspecies love and friendship (complete with sing-along).

“Can I just pretend this isn’t happening?” she asks. “Oh grief / Here we go again / Oh loss / I am your constant companion,” she says. Addressing the goddess Venus, she demands, “Provide and support our empowerment / to transform this hate with all our creative imaginative strength / and change this oppressive senseless system forever.” When she opines, “I will try my best today / even in the smallest ways,” it is tentative as she battles despair and sorrow. A segment showing gay men dancing in a club asks us to look at how we viewed AIDS and how we view the coronavirus in what she calls her “Zoom Disco.”

Karen Finley prepares to bake while TV experts discuss hand washing (photo by Max Ruby)

But Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco is often as funny as its title. “I do not want to have a Zoom family reunion,” she proclaims. Asking a stranger on an elevator to put on a mask, Finley says, “The mask is your friend / Really, it is a very friendly mask. Trust me.” Making a cake, she declares, “Give me amaranth flour liberty or give me breath!” Watching a pair of experts discuss hand washing, she acknowledges, “Turns out none of us really knew how to wash our hands / We were doing it all wrong.” Referencing how we dressed during the lockdown, she states, “You do not know where you are / What day it is / What day you are on / What planet you are on / When you changed your clothes / Before or after Tiger King? / How long you have been wearing . . . anything . . . or nothing!”

Finley herself gained notoriety for occasionally wearing nothing onstage; we attended the show with two longtime fans, one of whom had poured honey over Finley’s naked body during one interactive performance. But this time around, the edible items remained on the table, as there is a $25 food and drink minimum in addition to the ticket price.

The production has a DIY feel to it; when Finley is done with an item of clothing, she just tosses it to the floor, the projections are not exactly HD, and a large prop at center stage blocks the bottom of the screen so all the words are not always legible, depending on where you’re sitting. (The technical director is JP Perraux, with sound by Jasmine Wyman; Becky Hubbert is the costume and prop consultant, and the production design is by Violet Overn, Finley’s daughter.)

Don’t expect a polished sheen, but that is a significant part of the show’s charm. Finley plays off the audience, which is in her corner every step of the way. The night I went, she was upset that she forgot a veil for her penultimate piece, “Eulogy,” and asked the crowd to give her a moment to prepare herself psychologically; she was warmed by shouts of encouragement and proceeded with a replacement for the veil as she related, “So many have left us — / the loss and the sorrow of never having a place to mourn. / Here is our eulogy for the lost and left. . . . Let us heal / Let us restore / Let us love / Let us forgive.”

With Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco, Finley once again explores difficult, controversial topics while helping us all heal, restore, love, and forgive.

PUBLIC ART FUND TALKS: JACOLBY SATTERWHITE

Jacolby Satterwhite’s An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time is on view at Lincoln Center (photo by Nicholas Knight)

Who: Jacolby Satterwhite
What: Public Art Fund Talk
Where: The Cooper Union’s Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq., Third Ave. at Seventh St.
When: Wednesday, April 26, free with advance RSVP for in-person or livestream, 6:30
Why: In a 2021 “Meet the Artist” interview with the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich, multimedia artist Jacolby Satterwhite explains, “The influences I draw on are from pop culture, politics, my family, my personal histories, queer theory, art history, postructuralism and design, gaming. It’s sort of like, you know, the simulacra of the universe.” Born in 1986 in Columbia, South Carolina, the New York–based Satterwhite’s latest installation is An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time, on view on the fifty-foot-long Hauser Digital Wall in the Karen and Richard LeFrak Lobby in David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic.

Commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem and Public Art Fund, the nearly half-hour work explores the past, present, and future of Lincoln Center, featuring more than seventy-five dancers and more than fifty musicians from local performing art schools amid HD color video and 3D animation incorporating real-life figures, archival footage, trees, buildings, text, paintings, and photographs. On April 26 at 6:30, Satterwhite will be at the Cooper Union’s Frederick P. Rose Auditorium to discuss An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time and place it within the context of his career as well as the arts community it celebrates. “I wanted to describe time and history through a vehicle of abstraction, using color, shape, landscape, horizontality, and movement as a way to kind of reorient the history in a way that it hasn’t been normally told,” he says in the above Lincoln Center video. You can hear more on April 26 either at the Cooper Union or via livestream, both free with advance RSVP.

A DOLL’S HOUSE

Jessica Chastain remains seated for most of A Doll’s House revival on Broadway (photo by Emilio Madrid)

A DOLL’S HOUSE
Hudson Theatre
141 West Forty-Fourth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 10, $70-$357
adollshousebroadway.com
www.thehudsonbroadway.com

The beginning and ending of Jamie Lloyd and Amy Herzog’s Broadway revival of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Hudson Theatre are unforgettable, for significantly different reasons. What happens in between is fairly memorable as well.

About fifteen minutes prior to showtime, the curtain rises, revealing Oscar-winning actress Jessica Chastain, alone on a barren stage, the lower part of the back brick wall behind her painted white, the wings visible. Arms folded, legs crossed, wearing a long black dress and black heels, Chastain is elegantly seated in a chair on a set that slowly revolves, staring out directly at the audience, making as much eye contact as possible as people file into the theater, chatter away, and check their phones. Most of the crowd pays little attention to what’s happening onstage, except for those eagerly snapping photos and taking video, then turning away to do other things.

I have to admit that I took a few photos and a video, but then I put my smartphone in my pocket and couldn’t look away from Chastain, playing Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, as she continued her seemingly endless circling. She occasionally crosses and uncrosses her legs, but otherwise she resembles a life-size doll, the rotation out of her control, being manipulated by unseen forces.

It’s an intense performance, every slight body move and eye shift a work of art while preparing the audience for what they are about to experience. One by one, the rest of the cast takes a chair and begins rotating on one of several other circles. They’re all dressed in Soutra Gilmour and Enver Chakartash’s mournful black costumes; Gilmour also designed the empty set, which, as Chastain rotates, includes the year “1879” projected on the back wall, the only signifier of when the play takes place, although it soon becomes clear that it could be any time in the past, present, or future.

Nora, a wife and mother of three unseen but heard children, is slowly joined onstage, one at a time, by her husband, Torvald (Arian Moayed), a lawyer who has just been named manager at his bank; Dr. Otto Rank (Michael Patrick Thornton), a close family friend; Kristine Linde (Jesmille Darbouze), a schoolmate of Nora’s; Nils Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan), a lawyer with secretive ties to several other characters; and Anne-Marie (Tasha Lawrence), the Helmers’ devoted nanny.

A Doll’s House cast is dressed in black and cast in shadows and silhouettes throughout (photo by Emilio Madrid)

About seven years prior, when Nora was pregnant with her first child, Torvald became seriously ill, and Nora financed a trip to Italy that doctors said would cure him. Everyone assumed she got the money from her dying father, but she’s been hiding an ugly truth while scrambling to pay back her debt. She’s been treated like a kid her entire life, so no one believes she can fend for herself or is responsible for any of her family’s success.

“Nora, you’re basically still a child,” Kristine tells her. Torvald calls Nora his “baby” and his “headstrong little bird,” but it’s not spoken like a loving, amorous husband. Dr. Rank suggests she dress for next year’s Halloween as Fortune’s Child. And Nora recalls how her father referred to her as “his little doll and he played with me just like I played with my dolls,” comparing that to how Torvald treats her, particularly when he makes her put on a fisher girl costume and dance like a young fairy at a party. But she wants more, even if she doesn’t know how to express her adult desires.

“You can see how being with Torvald is a lot like being with Papa,” she tells Dr. Rank.

Explaining to Kristine how she has been paying off her debt, she says, “I’ve had some jobs here and there, like I said. Last Christmas I got a big copying job; I stayed up late writing every night for weeks. It was exhausting, but it was also fun, to work hard and make money! I felt kind of like a man.”

As Kristine and Nils jockey for a position at the bank and Torvald worries about how his wife’s actions could jeopardize his reputation, Nora comes to an understanding about who she is and what she wants out of life in a dramatic turnabout that is a statement for women and marginalized people everywhere.

Pulitzer finalist Herzog’s (Mary Jane, 4000 Miles) adaptation focuses directly on Nora, who sits front and center nearly the entire play. Tony nominee Lloyd knows what to do with movie stars on spare sets; his recent productions of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac at BAM, starring James McAvoy, and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the Jacobs on Broadway, with Tom Hiddleston, were both compelling, unique character-driven interpretations that mostly eschewed bombast. In A Doll’s House, all of the actors speak in an even-keeled manner free from sentimentality, save for one outburst by Moayed that feels out of place.

Jon Clark’s superb lighting casts long shadows across the stage and against the back wall, where he illuminates only part of it in a long white horizontal bar, keeping the rest in darkness. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound is highlighted by the offstage voices of Nora’s three children, Ivar, Bob, and Emmy, which emphasizes the kind of pretend world Nora has been thrust into and might not be able to escape from. When Dr. Rank asks Torvald for one of his good cigars and Nora offers to light it for him, there is no cigar and no lighter; a later exchange of objects is also made without actual props. It’s like Nora is play-acting in a doll house. The eerie score, by Alva Noto and the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, keeps an intriguing mystery hanging over everything.

Oscar winner Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Zero Dark Thirty), whose only previous appearance on Broadway was in 2012’s The Heiress, is mesmerizing as Nora, commanding the stage with her bold presence for each of the 105 minutes; her character’s ultimate transformation is a bit sudden but powerful nonetheless. The rest of the cast is strong, but this is Chastain’s show, from its unusual start to its radical climax, which will leave some audience members cheering, some laughing, and others gasping.

“After all these years I still haven’t been able to teach Nora how to make a dramatic exit,” Torvald says to Kristine.

Well, she knows now.

DOUGLAS DUNN + DANCERS: GARDEN PARTY

Alexandra Berger, Janet Charleston, and Christopher Williams rehearse Douglas Dunn’s Garden Party (photo by Mimi Gross)

GARDEN PARTY
Douglas Dunn Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts., third floor
April 24-30, $15-$20
www.douglasdunndance.com
www.mimigross.com

All dancer and choreographer Douglas Dunn needed to do was give Mimi Gross the title of his new production and the painter, set and costume designer, installation artist, and teacher was off to the races.

Born in California in 1942, Dunn has been collaborating with Gross, a native New Yorker born in 1940, since Dunn presented Foot Rules in 1979; they’ve worked together some two dozen times since, including on 1980’s Echo, 1981’s Skid, 1988’s Matches, 1995’s Caracole, 2007’s Zorn’s Lemma, and 2017’s Antipodes. They met quite serendipitously.

“I’d been working with Charles Atlas on film, video, and costumes for several years. Being then in a moment unavailable, he suggested Mimi,” Dunn explained via email. “She made wonderful apparel for an hour-long duet for Deborah Riley and me called Foot Rules. What I noticed right away was her love of color.”

“Charlie Atlas was presenting live performances which he made up and directed. That is how I first met Charlie, and then I met Douglas,” Gross added. “They had been making dances and videos together. When Douglas asked Charlie if he could make some costumes for a new dance he was choreographing with Deborah Riley, Charlie was super busy — he was working with Merce Cunningham full-time — and recommended me to do it. I had made many costumes for movies with cardboard and hot glue . . . nothing to be washed! Or worn many times! Quite a challenge. Of course, I said sure. And then through the decades on and off we have shared many projects, sets and costumes, sometimes sets, sometimes costumes, sometimes both — very open, warm, clear mutual caring to work within our shared possibilities, never knowing how it will come out.”

Douglas Dunn emerges from his pulpit in Mimi Gross’s fantastical Garden Party installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Dunn and Gross are currently at work on their latest project, Garden Party, which runs April 24-30 at Douglas Dunn + Dancers’ SoHo loft studio. Last week I attended a rehearsal of the sixty-minute piece, which features Dunn, Grazia Della-Terza, Alexandra Berger, Janet Charleston, Vanessa Knouse, Emily Pope, Paul Singh, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Timothy Ward, and Christopher Williams moving through the spectacular space created by Gross, consisting of lushly painted trompe l’oeil walls and ceiling and a long horizontal mirror, covered with pink, yellow, and green flowers, plants and trees, clouds, raindrops, and more. While the plants at the right are fake — Dunn told me at the rehearsal that he had “planted” some of them himself — the greenery at the left is real, repurposing the plants that were already in the studio.

There’s also a colorful pulpit where Dunn spends much of the show; he had specifically requested it, asking for it to be based on the design at Grace Church on Broadway. The dancers glide across the floor like blossoming flowers, in solos, pas de deux, and trios, celebrating birth, life, and growth; however, the soundtrack of pop and classical songs (Robert de Visée, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Bach, Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris, more), birdsong, and poetry (by John Keats, Anne Waldman, Molière, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Milton, Stephanie Jacco, and others, read by Dunn, Waldman, Jacco, and Della-Terza) touch on loss and loneliness. A few of the dancers occasionally sit on an inviting white park bench, and Dunn clutches a plush bird named April.

“Mimi always helps me see color; I always see line first,” Dunn explained. “We got along just fine and knew right away how much to interact and how much to let the other alone. She often saw historical references in the dancing and she’d take off from there. We’re both dead serious but also insistent on having a good warm time relating when preparing for a new dance show. The feel of this evening was clear to me the day the title hit me (about three years ago, the pandemic postponing the project). The lavish beauty of Mimi’s set completely fulfills my initial intuition . . . as if she’d read my dancing mind.”

Douglas Dunn’s Garden Party runs April 24-30 in SoHo loft studio (photo by Jacob Burckhardt, 2023)

“The new dance had been talked about a long while ago,” Gross noted. “All of 2021-22, I made many landscape drawings, and then, when the pandemic seemed to subside, I painted these flowers last summer and called them ‘Feel Good Flowers.’ When Douglas asked me if I would make a garden and sets about ‘Early Spring,’ he said, ‘Fill up the studio.’ That was just what I was doing anyway. I asked him if I could paint it with this stylization, and that I didn’t know exactly how I would do it. He was fine with that. I made a big drawing of a bird and discussed the texture and color with Sue Julien, who fabricated it. Both Sue and David Quinn made an amazing contribution fabricating the costumes from my drawings. Douglas wanted each dancer to be different, with different leg lengths. That is all he had said. I pored over my Ballet Russe books, and Charles James and I made drawings. The only common link is the fluorescent yellow in each costume.”

The collaboration extends to Lauren Parrish, who designed the lighting and projections, and sound designer Jacob Burckhardt. The show will be preceded by live music from guitarist and composer Tosh Sheridan, who has released such albums as Tosh, Tosh Sheridan Trio, and solo/duo.

“All of these plain facts are fine and good and relate our collaborating history, but it is the depth of poetic reality where we really collaborate,” Gross concluded, “by dance and by making an atmosphere for the dance.”

And what an atmosphere Dunn and Gross have created for Garden Party.

PENNY ARCADE: LONGING LASTS LONGER

Who: Penny Arcade
What: One-night only engagement
Where: The Players NYC, 16 Gramercy Park South
When: Thursday, April 27, $35, 8:00
Why: “There is a gentrification that happens to neighborhoods and cities, but there is also a gentrification that happens to ideas,” Penny Arcade says in her solo show Longing Lasts Longer. On April 27, the legendary performance artist and activist will deliver what she calls a “refutation of nostalgia” at the Players NYC for one night only, mixing stand-up comedy, rock and roll, and memoir as she tackles zombie tourists, bookstores, advertising, cupcakes, hipsters, and how the world has changed during her lifetime, and not necessarily for the better.

Born in Connecticut in 1950, she has performed the show more than two hundred times in more than forty cities, including at Joe’s Pub and St. Ann’s Warehouse here in New York. At the Players, where it is being presented by the White Horse Theater Company, she will be joined as always by her longtime collaborator, director, designer, and filmmaker Steve Zehentner, who will create a live soundscape. “Look, people, thinking is hard work,” she says in the eighty-minute piece. “That’s why so few people do it.” Priority table seating is already sold out, but general admission tickets are still available to see this force of nature take on our contemporary society like no one else can.

BROOKLYN BY THE BOOK: LUCINDA WILLIAMS IN CONVERSATION WITH STEVE EARLE

Who: Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle
What: Book launch
Where: Congregation Beth Elohim, 271 Garfield Pl., Brooklyn
When: Monday, April 24, $36.84, 7:00
Why: “Yes, my family was dysfunctional, fucked up. But that’s not what really matters to me. What matters is that I inherited my musical talent from my mother and my writing ability from my father,” Louisiana-born singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams writes in her new memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You (Crown, April 25, $28.99). She also admits about choosing not to attend the 1994 Grammy Awards, where her tune “Passionate Kisses” won for Best Country Song, “The truth is that I was not just self-conscious but also scared. I feared that I didn’t belong. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to shake my entire life.” She has proved she belongs over the last twenty-nine years, being nominated for a total of seventeen Grammys and winning twice more, for Best Contemporary Folk Album for the amazing Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for “Get Right with God.” Her next album, Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, featuring such songs as “Stolen Moments” and “New York Comeback,” the latter with background vocals by Bruce Springsteen, is due out June 30.

On April 24, Williams, who finishes up a four-show run at City Winery on Tuesday night, will be at Congregation Beth Elohim with another Bruce collaborator, Steve Earle, to discuss her life and career. Williams and Earle have been longtime friends who joined forces on Earle’s “You’re Still Standin’ There” in 1996, on Williams’s “Joy” in 2004, and for a New Yorker interview with performances during the pandemic, so it promises to be an intimate evening, which is organized by Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore. Tickets are $36.84 and come with a copy of Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.

OLD SCHOOL KUNG FU FEST: SWORD FIGHTING HEROES EDITION

US premiere of 2K remaster of Chang Peng-yi’s The Night Orchid is part of Metrograph series

OLD SCHOOL KUNG FU FEST: SWORD FIGHTING HEROES EDITION
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
April 21-30
metrograph.com

When I was a kid, I spent many a rainy Saturday afternoon watching Kung Fu Theater, a weekly serving of wuxia films, poorly dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong that were among the coolest movies I’d ever seen, filled with indecipherable plots and fantabulous weapons. It didn’t get much better than The Story of Drunken Master, Five Fingers of Death, and Bruce Lee squaring off against Chuck Norris and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Last year the RZA and DJ Scratch joined forces for the tribute song “Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu Theatre,” in which the RZA declares, “Can we watch another movie next Saturday? / Be sure to tune in next week / for The Masked Avengers and Heroes of the East.”

You don’t have to wait for next week, as Metrograph is currently showing the tenth “Old School Kung Fu Fest: Sword Fighting Heroes Edition” through April 30. The tenth festival consists of fifteen flicks, little known and classic, including the US premiere of Lin Jing-jie’s three-and-a-half-hour documentary The King of Wuxia, about King Hu; Hu’s 1969-71 A Touch of Zen, 1973 The Fate of Lee Khan, and 1975 The Valiant Ones; Yang Shih-ching’s 1970 The Grand Passion, made by A Touch of Zen’s production manager during downtime of that film; a 2K remaster of Chang Peng-I’s 1983 The Night Orchid; Sung Tsun-shou’s 1969 Iron Mistress; and Chris Huang’s 2000 The Legend of the Sacred Stone.

Below are some of the other highlights of the series, which is presented by Metrograph and Subway Cinema in association with Taipei Cultural Center in New York.

THE GHOST HILL (Ting Shan-hsi, 1971)
Sunday, April 23, 3:00
metrograph.com

The Swordsman of All Swordsmen trilogy concludes with Ting Shan-hsi’s fantastically mad The Ghost Hill. You don’t need to have seen Joseph Kuo’s The Swordsman of All Swordsmen or Lung Chien’s The Bravest Revenge — although the former is screening at Metrograph April 22-23 and the latter is available virtually on Metrograph at Home — to get instantly sucked into the grand finale, in which Tsai Ing-chieh (Tien Peng) might at last avenge the murder of his father by Yun Chung-chun (Chen Bao-liang). The wuxia epic begins with a high-flying battle between Tsai and Feng Chun-ching (David Tang Wei), aka Black Dragon Hero, on a rocky beachfront, overseen by the Grand Master (Kao Ming), who will present to the winner the coveted Purple Light Sword, bestowing upon him the title of Master Swordsman.

Tsai takes home the trophy, but it is immediately stolen from him by thieves who also slay his master. Tsai and his goofy but loyal brother head out to regain the sword and kill Yun, but it turns out that someone has already beaten them to it, although Yun’s daughter, Fei Yen-tzu (Polly Shang-kuan), an accomplished assassin known as Flying Swallow, blames Tsai for the evil deed. But soon Tsai, his brother, Fei, and Feng are teaming up to defeat the evil King Chin (Hsieh Han) and the girl he raised, Chin Man-chiao (Han Hsiang-chin), aka Princess of the Underworld, who he is grooming to be his bride.

As the men fight over the women and the women fight over the men, the action moves into Chin’s fortress, where Tsai and his merry band of homeless beggars must make it through ten boobytrapped hells in order to face Chin and his dangerous left arm.

Writer-director Ting, cinematographer Lin Tsan-ting, art director Tsao Nien-lung, and set decorator Chen Shang-lin add fab touches to every scene, from character names — Green Demon Judge, Misty Light Master, Iron Bull, and the Murdering Wonder Child to the Black and White Wuchang, the Ox Head Demon, the Yanluo Wang, and the Soul-Hunting Yaksha — to colorful costumes, lavishly cheesy sets, a boiling oil bath, epic sound effects and music (with Theremin!), ultracool weapons, and plenty of fire and blood, along with watermelons and a special beheading.

There are also a number of awesome quotes. “We can never understand the grievances of the previous generation,” Yen-tzu posits. “The gates of heaven are open but you choose to knock on hell’s door,” King Chin warns Tsai.

The Ghost Hill evokes such later films as Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Chang Cheh’s Five Venoms, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it’s in a class all by itself. And it should be special watching it not alone on a rainy day but in a theater packed with wuxia fans likely to be hooting and hollering all the way.

Shu Qi is an expertly trained killer with a conscience in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s gorgeous period drama

THE ASSASSIN (刺客聶隱娘) (NIE YINNIANG) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015)
Saturday, April 29, 7:00, and Sunday, April 30, 9:15
metrograph.com

Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film in eight years is a visually sumptuous feast, perhaps the most beautifully poetic wuxia film ever made. Inspired by a chuanqi story by Pei Xing, The Assassin is set during the ninth-century Tang dynasty, on the brink of war between Weibo and the Royal Court. Exiled from her home since she was ten, Nie Yinniang (Hou muse Shu Qi) has returned thirteen years later, now an expert assassin, trained by the nun (Fang-Yi Sheu) who raised her to be a cold-blooded killer out for revenge. After being unable to execute a hit out of sympathy for her target’s child, Yinniang is ordered to kill Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen), her cousin and the man to whom she was betrothed as a young girl, as a lesson to teach her not to let personal passions rule her. But don’t worry about the plot, which is far from clear and at times impossible to follow. Instead, glory in Hou’s virtuosity as a filmmaker; he was named Best Director at Cannes for The Assassin, a meditative journey through a fantastical medieval world. Hou and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing craft each frame like it’s a classical Chinese painting, a work of art unto itself. The camera moves slowly, if at all, as the story plays out in long shots, in both time and space, with very few close-ups and no quick cuts, even during the martial arts fights in which Yinniang displays her awesome skills. Hou often lingers on her face, which shows no outward emotion, although her soul is in turmoil. Hou evokes Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Ang Lee, and Zhang Yimou as he takes the viewer from spectacular mountains and river valleys to lush interiors (the stunning sets and gorgeous costumes, bathed in red, black, and gold, are by Hwarng Wern-ying), with silk curtains, bamboo and birch trees, columns, and other elements often in the foreground, along with mist, fog, and smoke, occasionally obscuring the proceedings, lending a surreal quality to Hou’s innate realism.

There are long passages of silence or with only quiet, barely audible music by composer Lim Giong, with very little dialogue, as rituals are performed, baths are prepared, and a bit of black magic takes place. The opening scenes, set around a breathtaking mountain abbey in Inner Mongolia, are shot in black-and-white with no soundtrack, like a silent film, harkening to cinema’s past as well as Yinniang’s; when it switches over to color, fiery reds take over as the credits begin. Throughout the film, the nun wears white and the assassin wears black, in stark contrast to the others’ exquisitely colorful attire; however, the film is not about good and evil but something in between. Shu and Cheng, who played a trio of lovers in Hou’s Three Times, seem to be barely acting in The Assassin, immersing themselves in their characters; Hou (The Puppetmaster, Flowers of Shanghai) gives all of his cast, professional and nonprofessional alike, a tremendous amount of freedom, and it results here in scenes that feel real despite our knowing better. Sure, a touch more plot explication would have been nice, but that was not what Hou was after; he wanted to create a mood, an atmosphere, to transport the actors and the audience to another time and place, and he has done that marvelously. The Assassin is a treasure chest of memorable moments that rewards multiple viewings. I’ve seen it twice and can’t wait to see it again — but I’ve given up trying to figure out exactly what it’s about, instead reveling in its immense, contemplative beauty. Hou’s previous full-length film was 2007’s Flight of the Red Balloon; it’s now been eight years since The Assassin, so here’s hoping his next film is on its way.

King Hu’s A Touch of Zen is a trippy journey toward enlightenment

A TOUCH OF ZEN (King Hu, 1969/1971)
Sunday, April 30, 1:00
metrograph.com

King Hu’s 1969 highly influential wuxia classic, A Touch of Zen, is a three-hour epic that features an impossible-to-figure-out plot, a goofy romance, wicked-cool weaponry, an awesome Buddhist monk, a bloody massacre, and action scenes that clearly involve the overuse of trampolines. Still, it’s great fun, even if it is way too long. (The film, which was initially shown in two parts, earned a special technical prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.) Shih Jun stars as Ku Shen Chai, a local calligrapher and scholar who is extremely curious when the mysterious Ouyang Nin (Tin Peng) suddenly show up in town. It turns out that Ouyang is after Miss Yang (Hsu Feng) to exact “justice” for the corrupt Eunuch Wei, who is out to kill her entire family. Hu (Come Drink with Me, Dragon Gate Inn) fills the film with long, poetic establishing shots of fields and the fort, using herky-jerky camera movements (that might or might not have been done on purpose) and throwing in an ultra-trippy psychedelic mountain scene that is about as 1960s as it gets. Winner of the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes, A Touch of Zen is ostensibly about Ku’s journey toward enlightenment, but it’s also about so much more, although I’m not completely sure what that is.