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BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: PORTRAITS AT THE FRICK

Barkley L. Hendricks, Lagos Ladies (Gbemi, Bisi, Niki, Christy), oil, acrylic, and Magna on canvas, 1978 (private collection / © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: PORTRAITS AT THE FRICK
Frick Madison
945 Madison Avenue at Seventy-Fifth St.
Thursday – Sunday through January 7, $12-$22, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.frick.org

My favorite specific spot in New York City museums right now is near the center of the larger of the rooms at Frick Madison containing the stunning exhibition “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick.” Facing south, about ten or twelve steps from an inner doorway, you can see a pair of James McNeill Whistler full-size portraits in the small space, Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux, from 1881–82, and Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, from 1871–74.

But on either side of the entrance to the Whistler room are two works by Hendricks, who was born in 1945 in Philadelphia and died in Connecticut in 2017 at the age of seventy-two. (Whistler was born in 1834 in Massachusetts and died in London in 1903 at the age of sixty-nine.) To the right is Ma Petite Kumquat, a 1983 portrait of Hendricks’s wife, Susan, while on the left is Miss T, a 1969 portrait of Hendricks’s girlfriend at the time, Robin Taylor. (Lady Meux was a working-class woman who married a brewery fortune heir and was never accepted by his family; Mrs. Leyland was a close friend of Whistler’s who was married to a Liverpool shipping magnate.)

The differences among these four large-scale vertical portraits are striking; grouping them together this way at the prestigious Frick, home to myriad masterpieces from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, is an ingenious decision by curator Aimee Ng and consulting curator Antwaun Sargent.

“The Frick Collection was one of [Hendricks’s] favorite museums, to which he returned again and again to visit paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Bronzino, and many others. All three floors of Frick Madison are the context for this special exhibition; though Hendricks’s paintings are installed only here, on the fourth floor,” Ng said in a statement.

Sargent added, “When Aimee and I first began speaking about the Frick and its place in today’s world, I suggested an exhibition on Barkley L. Hendricks — obviously because of his interest in historic art as he developed his own style of portraiture of Black subjects, but also because the quality, dignity, and visual impact of his paintings are what I would think Henry Clay Frick might be drawn to if he were collecting now, thinking of future visitors to the museum in another hundred years. . . . Presenting Hendricks’s art at a storied institution like the Frick pays due tribute to the historic significance of Barkley L. Hendricks, and it also honors the evolving role of the Frick in modern American culture.”

Mrs. Leyland and Lady Meux each wear long, light-colored elegant gowns that spread onto the floor: The former stands with her back to us, hands clasped, the flower designs on her dress matching the flowers in front of her as she looks wistfully off to the side; the latter, in a hat with a flower on it, is looking right at the viewer as her body faces away, one hand grasping her dress, making sure we understand her station.

About one hundred years later, Taylor, in all-black except for a metallic chain around her waist, is looking wistfully off to the side, her body facing us, hands behind her back, her afro a modern contrast to Mrs. Leyland’s up-do. Meanwhile, Susan is also facing us, but her eyes are closed; she is wearing a black outfit with a red flower on it, a bow tie, a green curtain pull across her shoulder (evoking the background of Hans Holbein’s Frick masterwork, his portrait of Sir Thomas More), woolly leg warmers, and red and green bows on her open-toed shoes, her nails painted, a leopard skin pillbox muff in her left hand.

The two pairs of paintings encapsulate hundreds of years of art history dominated by race, gender, and class, as Hendricks uses his early influences to capture a more honest present. “I wasn’t a part of any ‘school,’” he said in 2017. “The association I had with artists in Philadelphia didn’t inspire me in any direction other than my own. I spent my time looking to the Old Masters.” He also insisted, “It had to be done Barkley Hendricks style — no copies.”

Barkley L. Hendricks, Woody, oil and acrylic on canvas, 1973 (Baz Family Collection / © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

The exhibition features five canvases in which the Black subjects — October’s Gone . . . Goodnight, Steve, Lagos Ladies (Gbemi, Bisi, Niki, Christy), Slick, Omarr — are wearing white against a white background so their skin and hair color seem to be floating in space; in Woody, Jamaican American dancer Woodruff (Woody) Wilson has his two arms and one leg stretched out, in yellow leotards against a yellow background. In Lawdy Mama, Hendricks sets his relative Kathy William against a gold-leaf background with a rounded top, echoing Italian Renaissance gold-leaf works, of which many are currently on view at the Frick.

In conjunction with the exhibit, Nasher Museum of Art director Trevor Schoonmaker has compiled a special 1960s/1970s playlist, with a specific song for each painting as well as intro and outro tunes; for example, Rotary Connection’s “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun” for Lawdy Mama, Don Cherry’s “Birdboy” for Woody, Gil Scott-Heron’s “I Think I’ll Call It Morning” for Miss T, Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” for October’s Gone . . . Goodnight, and Bob Marley’s “Natural Mystic” for Omarr.

The Frick has been moving into the twenty-first century for several years now, beginning with “Elective Affinities: Edmund de Waal at the Frick Collection” in 2019, in which the author and ceramicist created site-specific vitrines of objects made of porcelain, steel, gold, alabaster, and aluminum and placed them throughout the museum, and continued during the pandemic at Frick Madison with “Olafur Eliasson and Claude Monet,” “Propagazioni: Giuseppe Penone at Sèvres,” “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters,” and the current “Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera.” Here’s hoping the trend continues once the Frick moves back to its renovated home on Fifth Ave. later this year.

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

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN
MoMA, the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions, sixth floor
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 13, $15-$28
www.moma.org

“I Dont Want No Retro Spective,” Omaha-born artist Ed Ruscha wrote in a pastel-on-paper work in 1979. Oof — well, he’s got one heckuva retrospective continuing at MoMA through January 13.

There are many joys to be experienced in MoMA’s revelatory “Ed Ruscha / Now Then,” the most comprehensive survey of his seven-decade career, featuring more than two hundred works, including painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, artist’s books, and installation. As eye-opening as the show is, what lifts it to another level for me is the audioguide, in which Ruscha, a longtime LA resident who turned eighty-six earlier this month, offers his personal perspective on thirteen of the pieces.

Talking about the 1962–63 OOF, a large canvas with the title word painted in a sans-serif yellow on a blue background, Ruscha explains, “My first paintings were of words that were monosyllabic, guttural utterings, like ‘oof’ and ‘smash.’ Words that had some kind of vocal power to them and also had a social discord. These words came out of sound investigation. It’s almost like you walk into a butcher store and ask for a pound of bacon and they take a pound of bacon and slam it down on the counter. It’s the slam that I was after.” His good friend, architect Frank Gehry, adds, “He’s very interested in the mundane and the stupid. A painting that says ‘OOF?’ It says everything about the place and time he was living in.”

“Ed Ruscha / Now Then” is filled with such slams, and not only in his word-based paintings, such as Boss, Won’t, and Honk, and such branding and product re-creations as Actual Size, a depiction of a can of Spam, and Annie, the logo for the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. Ruscha, who spent a lot of time on Route 66 and other highways, particularly in Oklahoma, Texas, and California, captures the heart and soul of America in such striking works as The Back of Hollywood (the other side of the Hollywood sign), Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (the 20th Century Fox logo), and Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, a spectacularly angled gas station in bold red, white, black, blue, and yellow).

Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, oil on canvas, 1964 (private Collection / © 2023 Edward Ruscha / photo by Evie Marie Bishop, courtesy of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth)

Discussing the nearly six-feet-high 1963 oil-and-wax Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western, in which the word “Noise” is tucked into the upper right corner, Ruscha says, “The word ‘Noise’ and all words to me, they have really no size at all. You can see it a hundred feet high, you can see it in four-point type.”

In Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–68), flames are shooting out one side of LACMA. Ruscha notes, “About this time that I was painting this picture, I had some, oh, maybe personal gripes about the art world in general. And I felt like the museums were not really doing their jobs as far as opening their doors to contemporary art. I didn’t have a hatred for museums, but maybe, like, I had a healthy distrust for museums. And so I guess part of this painting grew out of that. I didn’t know how this painting would be perceived. The museum actually had a notion to possibly buy that painting, which really surprised me, and then didn’t surprise me so much when they didn’t.” The exhibit moves to LACMA in April 2024.

And Ruscha says about 2022’s Metro, Petro, Neuro, Psycho, in which the four title words are shown above one another in decreasing size against a background of tall grass, “And finally, it comes down to selecting things that sometimes lead you down strange roads, sometimes they’re nonsequiturs, sometimes they’re odd word combinations. But they have to have some sort of power or some strangeness to them for me to get on board.”

It’s easy to get on board with Ruscha’s dazzling output; other highlights are his gunpowder drawings; Spread, a two-sided work made with tobacco stain; Our Flag, an acrylic painting of a disintegrating Old Glory; Evil, in which Ruscha used his own blood on satin; a trio of exceptional graphite and pencil drawings of LA residences; a series of canvases in which Ruscha replaces words with empty spaces or redaction, taking away people’s voices; and books such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Edward Ruscha (Ed-werd Rew-shay) Young Artist, and Flipping Kicking Howling Rolling Sitting Standing Climbing Telling.

In 1998, Ruscha told Tracy Bartly, “Seeing things age is a form of beauty.” Time is a constant element in Ruscha’s oeuvre, from changing landscapes to a painting of a segment of a clock, from a canvas that declares, “It’s Only Vanishing Cream” to a portfolio of liquid stains on paper. The walls of Chocolate Room are covered with decaying chocolate on paper, meaning it will look slightly different as the chocolate decays and accumulates bloom. Three large-scale horizontal paintings of LA industrial buildings from 1992 are paired with how Ruscha imagined, in 2003–5, they will look in the future; for example, the gray Blue Collar Trade School becomes the blue, white, and yellow The Old Trade School Building, now resembling a prison or hospital behind barbed wire, as if capitalism has failed.

The exhibit takes its name from a 1973 shellac on moiré rayon piece that melds past, present, and future, saying, “Now Then, as I Was About to Say . . .”

As long as Ruscha keeps talking, the world will continue to listen.

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

UNDER THE RADAR 2024: TOP FIVE

Get tickets to such shows as Volcano at the Under the Radar festival before time runs out (photo by Emijlia Jefrehmova)

UNDER THE RADAR 2024
Multiple venues
January 5-21
utrfest.org

There was quite an uproar in June when Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis announced the cancellation of the widely popular Under the Radar festival, which the Public had hosted since 2006. Held every January, the series featured a diverse collection of unique and unusual international theatrical productions, discussions, and live music and dance, from the strange to the familiar, the offbeat to the downright impossible to describe. Eustis followed that outcry with another message:

“Last week, difficult news was shared that the Under the Radar festival would not return for the Public’s 23–24 season. We made the painful decision to place the festival on hiatus. I understand and share the hurt that those who participated in and loved the festival have expressed over the past few days. . . . Unfortunately, these are exceptionally challenging times in our field. The Public, like almost every other nonprofit theater in the country, is facing serious financial pressure. . . . In the certainty that better times will come, we continue to work to preserve the health and mission of the Public. We look forward to a time when we can fully expand back into the robust and expansive theater we need to be.”

Festival founder and director Mark Russell was determined that the show must go on, and he brought it back to life. “Festivals are celebrations. They mark harvests and other moments of abundance or recognition,” he said in a statement. “Under the Radar is a festival that each year celebrates the vibrancy of new theater, in New York and internationally. At this moment, even in very challenging times, there is still innovative work rising from communities around New York and in far-reaching parts of the globe. Under the Radar aims to spotlight this work for audiences — not only those ‘in the know’ but from a wider stretch of communities, diverse in all respects, that could benefit by engaging with these creative leaders.”

The 2024 program includes two dozen presentations at seventeen venues, taking place from January 5 to 21. Below are my top five choices, which do not include two highly praised and strongly recommended works that are making encore appearances in New York, Dmitry Krimov/Krymov Lab NYC’s Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: In Our Own Words at BRIC and Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s bilingual Public Obscenities at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. In addition, the UFO sidebar of works in progress consist of Matt Romein’s Bag of Worms at Onassis ONX Studio, Zora Howard’s The Master’s Tools at Chelsea Factory (with Okwui Okpokwasili as Tituba from The Crucible), Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon’s How does it feel to look at nothing at National Sawdust, Theater in Quarantine and Sinking Ship Productions’ live debut of the previously streamed The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy at the Connelly Theater, Jenn Kidwell and *the Blackening’s We Come to Collect [A Flirtation, with Capitalism] at the Flea, and Penny Arcade’s The Art of Becoming — Episode 3: Superstar Interrupted [1967-1973] at Joe’s Pub. In addition, a free symposium at NYU Skirball Center on January 12 at 9:30 am features Inge Ceustermans, Hana Sharif, Sunny Jain, Taylor Mac, Jeremy O. Harris, Ravi Jain, and Kaneza Schaal, hosted by Edgar Miramontes, looking at the future of independent theater.

A book club offers unique insight into Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (photo by Ros Kavanagh)

THE FIRST BAD MAN
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Samuel Rehearsal Studio, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza
January 5-13, choose-what-you-pay (suggested admission $35)
www.lincolncenter.org
www.panpantheatre.com

Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre has staged unique versions of Beckett’s Embers and Cascando as well as Gina Moxley’s The Patient Gloria. The company now turns its attention on a unique aspect of literature; for The First Bad Man at Lincoln Center’s Samuel Rehearsal Studio, audience members watch a book club dissect Miranda July’s wildly original 2015 novel, as characters and story lines intersect with reality.

A bouncy castle becomes more than just a fun children’s place in Nile Harris’s this house is not a home (photo by Alex Munro)

this house is not a home
Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 6-14, $30.05
www.abronsartscenter.org

A bouncy castle helps Nile Harris explore how the world has changed over the last two years, with the assistance of Crackhead Barney, Malcolm-x Betts, slowdanger, and GENG PTP along with a gingerbread minstrel, vape addicts, a movie cowboy, and others, in this house is not a home. Afropessimism is on the menu in this collaboration between Abrons Art Center and Ping Chong Company.

Hamlet | Toilet makes its NYC debut at Japan Society (photo courtesy Kaimaku Pennant Race)

HAMLET | TOILET
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 10-13, $35
japansociety.org

In 2019, Yu Murai and Kaimaku Pennant Race blew our minds with the outrageous Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, a bizarrely entertaining mashup of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. They’re now back with another mad mix at Japan Society; I’m not sure there’s much more to say that what’s in the press release: “Notoriously iconoclastic and scatological director Yu Murai’s Hamlet | Toilet runs the Bard’s highbrow tale of existential woe through the poop chute.” Each ticket comes with free same-day admission to the exhibition “Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus.”

VOLCANO
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
January 10-21, $54
stannswarehouse.org

Melding theater, dance, and sci-fi, Irish writer, director, and choreographer Luke Murphy (Slow Tide, Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte) introduces audiences to the mysterious Amber Project in this four-part miniseries of forty-five-minute multimedia segments starring Murphy and Will Thompson, exploring their past as they face an uncertain future.

OUR CLASS
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 12 – February 4, $68-$139
www.bam.org
ourclassplay.com

During the pandemic, Igor Golyak and Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theatre broke through with innovative, interactive livestreamed productions, attracting such stalwarts as Jessica Hecht and Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the troupe. Following shows at BAC and Lincoln Center, the company brings a timely new adaptation of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class to BAM, about a 1941 pogrom in Poland that severely impacts the relationships of a group of students. Broadway veterans Richard Topol, Alexandra Silber, and Gus Birney star, alongside Jewish and non-Jewish cast and crew members from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Israel, Germany, and the US.

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

DRACULA, A COMEDY OF TERRORS

The count makes a grand entrance in Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors (photo by Matthew Murphy)

DRACULA, A COMEDY OF TERRORS
New World Stages
340 West Fiftieth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through January 7, $134-$154
draculacomedy.com
newworldstages.com

Rocky Horror meets What We Do in the Shadows and Dracula: Dead and Loving It in Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s deliciously frightful farce, Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. Channeling Mel Brooks, Charles Ludlam, and Monty Python, they reimagine the terrifying tale of Count Dracula, written by closeted Irish homosexual Bram Stoker in 1897, as a hilarious low-budget send-up of horror tropes, gender identity, and theater itself.

The nuts and bolts of the story stick to the classic narrative, with clever twists and turns: English solicitor Jonathan Harker (Andrew Keenan-Bolger) ventures to Transylvania to finalize a deal with Dracula (James Daly) in which the count is purchasing five properties in London and the abandoned Withering Manor. Following a shipwreck, Dracula shows up unexpectedly at an engagement party for Harker and his fiancée, Lucy Westfeldt (Jordan Boatman). The count is instantly enraptured with Lucy’s beautiful skin and lovely neck, but it’s her sister, Mina (Arnie Burton), who is desperate for the count’s attention.

The party is being held at the Westfeldt home in Whitby, where the siblings’ father, Dr. Westfeldt (Ellen Harvey), treats mental patients, including kleptomaniac maid Kitty Rutherford (Boatman) and insect-eating butler Renfield (Ellen Harvey). Soon Renfield is doing Dracula’s bidding, the ailing Mina is being drained of blood, and Dr. Jean Van Helsing (Burton) from the University of Schmutz is hot on the vampire’s trail, which leads right to Lucy.

Dracula (James Daly) shows a special interest in Jonathan Harker (Andrew Keenan-Bolger) in hilarious farce at New World Stages (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Cowriter and director Greenberg and cowriter Rosen, who previously collaborated on The Secret of My Success, Ebenezer Scrooge’s BIG San Diego Christmas Show, and Crime and Punishment, A Comedy, go for the jugular every chance they can, sinking their teeth into every likely — or unlikely — pop culture trope around. When the carriage driver (Boatman) is taking Harker to the count’s castle, the horses neigh at precise moments, à la Young Frankenstein, in which they whinny at each mention of Frau Blücher’s name. When the count arrives at the party with babka, Dr. Westfeldt lets him know that his son-in-law-to-be has dietary restrictions, but Dracula is prepared, noting, “It’s gluten free, cruelty free, vegan, non-GMO, and certified organic. I also brought one for the rest of us that tastes good.” When Dracula declares his desire to Lucy and grabs her, Lucy says, “But . . . but . . .” as her hands clutch the count’s taut bottom.

This smashingly handsome Dracula is all-access: The homoerotic subtext isn’t very sub. The scene where the count leans in for a possible kiss with the nerdy, weaselly Harker goes wonderfully over the top. “You’re joking, right?” Harker asks. Dracula answers, “Not even a little. Are you not curious?” Harker responds, “Somewhat. But I could never see myself actually doing anything about it. . . . Do I have a choice?” Dracula asserts, “You always have a choice.”

The biggest laughs in the ninety-minute show are saved for Mina, who looks like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz if the lion were a drag barrister. Mina is the ugly duckling to Lucy’s beautiful swan, desperate for any man. When she is introduced to Lords Cavendish, Windsor, and Havemercy (Keenan-Bolger and two puppets), they tell Dr. Westfeldt, “We prefer your other daughter. / Lucy. / The hot one.” When Lucy is concerned that Mina is looking “haggard and sickly,” Harker says, “Looks the same to me.”

Sisters Lucy (Jordan Boatman) and Mina (Arnie Burton) share a playful moment in horror comedy (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Daly (Damn Yankees, Grand Hotel) has a feast as the count, reveling in his bisexual gorgeousness while the other actors all play multiple roles, often with seemingly impossibly fast costume changes, sometimes accompanied by a knowing wink or nod at the audience. Tristan Raines’s costumes are a riot, from the count’s Village People black leather outfit to Harker’s professorial vest and bow tie and the Victorian splendor of Lucy’s and Mina’s dresses. Mina’s hair, courtesy of wig and hair designer Ashley Rae Callahan, is practically a character unto itself. Tijana Bjelajac’s gothic set features neon-framed windows, elegant bookshelves, and large double doors at the center back through which characters and objects, including a bed and a coffin, enter and leave. Rob Denton’s lighting and Victoria Deiorio’s original music and sound keep the atmosphere playfully eerie (along with numerous spray cans of fog).

Boatman (Medea, The Niceties) is cheerfully lovely as Lucy, Keenan-Bolger (Newsies, Tuck Everlasting) is adorably persnickety as Harker (Taylor Trensch will take over the role December 27 to January 2), Harvey (Little Women, Present Laughter) brings a firm dignity to Dr. Westfeldt and a touching indignity to Renfield, but Burton (The 39 Steps, The Government Inspector) steals the show, leaving no part of the scenery unchewed and digested. It’s a dazzlingly hysterical performance yet one that questions beauty, sexuality, and gender with an implicit understanding.

Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors was originally produced by Maltz Jupiter Theatre in 2019 and adapted into an all-star radio play for the Broadway Podcast Network with Annaleigh Ashford, Laura Benanti, Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Richard Kind, Rob McClure, Ashley Park, Christopher Sieber, and John Stamos. This iteration, extended at New World Stages through January 7, is a must-see for lovers of camp, vamps, double and triple entendres, and pure, unadulterated fun.

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

ALVIN AILEY: ALL NEW 2023

Caroline T. Dartey and James Gilmer team up in world premiere of Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish’s Me, Myself and You (photo by Paul Kolnik)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through December 31, $42-$172
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual all-new programs at City Center are among my favorite events of the year, and the 2023 edition, the troupe’s sixty-fifth anniversary, is no exception. The evening began with a new production of Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream, which the choreographer calls “a piece about how to return to joy”; the original debuted at City Center in 2000. The twenty-two-minute work unfolds in a series of vignettes featuring, on December 23, Patrick Coker, Isaiah Day, Caroline T. Dartey, Coral Dolphin, Samantha Figgins, Jacquelin Harris, Yannick Lebrun, Corrin Rachelle Mitchell, and Christopher Taylor, who perform to silence, a storm, chiming bells, and other sounds by Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain, American electronics composer Miguel Frasconi, and the late South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba (a gorgeous duet to “Unhome”). At one point a dancer is alone onstage, like a music box ballerina, two horizontal beams of smoky light overhead; the lighting is by Al Crawford based on Axel Morgenthaler’s original design, with tight-fitting, short costumes by Robert Rosenwasser, the men in all black, the women in black and/or yellow.

Former Ailey dancer Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish’s world premiere, Me, Myself and You, is a seven-minute duet that recalls Jamar Roberts’s 2022 In a Sentimental Mood, about a young couple exploring love and desire. Here Roxas-Dobrish uses Damien Sneed and Brandie Sutton’s version of the Duke Ellington classic, “In a Sentimental Mood,” as Dartey, in a sexy, partially shear black gown, sets up a three-paneled mirror in the corner and shares tender moments with James Gilmer, bare-chested with black pants, combine for some awe-inspiring moves. The costumes are by Dante Baylor, with lighting by Yi-Chung Chen that makes the most of the couple’s reflections in the mirror while calling into question whether it is actually happening or a memory or fantasy.

A new production of Hans van Manen’s Solo, originally performed by the company in 2005 and staged here by Clifton Brown and Rachel Beaujean, is seven minutes of playful one-upmanship as Renaldo Maurice, Christopher Taylor, and Kanji Segawa strut their stuff in a kind of dance-off, their costumes (by Keso Dekker) differentiated by yellow, orange, and red; as each finishes a solo, they make gestures and eye movements inviting the next dancer to top what they have just done. But this is no mere rap battle; instead, it’s set to Sigiswald Kuijken’s versions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Partita for Solo Violin No. 1 in B minor, BWV 1002 — Double: Presto” and “Partita for Solo Violin No. 1 in B minor, BWV 1002 — Double: Corrente.”

A new production of Ronald K. Brown’s Dancing Spirit honors Judith Jamison’s eightieth birthday (photo by Paul Kolnik)

In 2009, AAADT presented the world premiere of by Ronald K. Brown’s Dancing Spirit, which Brown choreographed as a tribute to former Ailey dancer Judith Jamison’s twentieth anniversary as artistic director of the company. Now, in honor of Jamison’s eightieth birthday, Brown revisits the work in a lovely new production. The half-hour piece, danced by Hannah Alissa Richardson, Deidre Rogan, Yazzmeen Laidler, Harris, Solomon Dumas, Taylor, Christopher R. Wilson, Jau’mair Garland, and Coker, builds at a simmering pace as the cast, in blue and white costumes designed by Omatayo Wunmi Olaiya that evoke Jamison’s performance of the “Wade in the Water” section of Revelations, move in unison and break out into solos, duets, and other groups to Stefon Harris’s and Joe Temperley’s versions of Ellington’s “The Single Petal of a Rose,” Wynton Marsalis’s “What Have You Done?” and “Tsotsobi — The Morning Star (Children),” the Vitamin String Quartet’s cover of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” and War’s “Flying Machine (The Chase).” Brown incorporates Afro-Cuban and Brazilian movement into his rhythmic language; the work is highlighted by Dumas and Richardson celebrating Ailey and Jamison, respectively, with stunning solos as the moon arrives for a glowing conclusion.

Also debuting at City Center in 2023 is a new production of Roberts’s Ode and the world premiere of Amy Hall Garner’s CENTURY.

In her 1993 autobiography, Dancing Spirit, Jamison writes, “Dance is bigger than your physical body. When you extend your arm, it does not stop at the end of your fingers, because you’re dancing bigger than that; you’re dancing spirit.” AAADT has been maintaining that spirit for sixty-five years, with more to come.

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

MANET / DEGAS

Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker), oil on canvas, 1875–76 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris); Edouard Manet, Plum Brandy, oil on canvas, ca. 1877 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon)

MANET / DEGAS
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through January 7, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

In 2003, MoMA hosted the revelatory exhibition “Matisse Picasso,” a dramatic exploration of the documented, nearly half-century rivalry between the French Henri Matisse and the Spanish Pablo Picasso.

The Met is now taking a similar approach with “Manet/Degas,” a deep dive into the personal and professional relationship between French artists Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), albeit with far less direct evidence. “Each was incredibly ambitious, and their sustained, thoughtful, and at times competitive observation of one another and their contemporaries would become vital to their enterprise,” Met director and CEO Max Hollein says in the below video. However, wall text points out, “Attempts to assess the relationship between Manet and Degas are complicated by the sparse record of their exchanges,” and the narrator on the audioguide explains, “Manet and Degas would continue to push each other to take the risks that would define their careers. But they left little evidence of their relationship in their papers. For example, though Degas speaks of Manet in his many letters to others, none of his letters is addressed to Manet. And for his part, Manet left just a few letters to Degas.”

The show opens with Manet’s Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette) and Degas’s Portrait of the Artist next to each other, setting up the side-by-side nature of the exhibit, which comprises more than 160 paintings and works on paper. The men, born two years apart, met in the Louvre in 1861–62 and both became friends with artist Berthe Morisot, who later married Manet’s younger brother, painter Eugène Manet. They both copied Diego Velázquez’s depiction of Infanta Margarita. Before they met, they had each made a self-portrait in the style of Filippino Lippi. Manet’s The Madonna of the Rabbit, after Titian hangs next to Degas’s The Crucifixion, after Mantegna. At the 1865 Salon, Manet’s Olympia created a furor, as opposed to Degas’s relatively unrecognized Scene of War in the Middle Ages; the paintings hang nearby each other at the Met.

In 1868–69, Degas made a series of drawings of Manet in addition to a painting of Manet relaxing on a couch, looking at Degas as Manet’s wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, played the piano. He gave the canvas to Manet, who quickly slashed off the right side so his wife’s face and the piano were no longer visible. Degas ended up keeping the work and hanging it on his wall, eventually adding a blank strip that perhaps signaled that he was going to restore the missing section, but he never did. Manet never drew or painted Degas, but he did paint Suzanne at the piano, perhaps as a response to Degas’s work. While Degas collected paintings and drawings by Manet, Manet did not seem to return the favor. Degas helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874, while Manet decided not to participate.

Edouard Manet, Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), oil on canvas, ca. 1878–79 (private collection); Edgar Degas, Portrait of the Artist, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 1855 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

Other telling pairings at the Met include Manet’s Standing Man, after del Sarto and Degas’s Study of a Draped Figure, Manet’s Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas and Degas’s Music Lesson, Manet’s The Dead Toreador and Degas’s Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, Manet’s The Races in the Bois de Boulogne (in which the figure at the lower right might be Degas) and Degas’s The False Start, Manet’s Plum Brandy and Degas’s In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (which feature the same model, actress Ellen Andrée), Manet’s On the Beach, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Marine and Degas’s Beach Scene and Fishing Boat at the Entrance to the Port of Dives, Manet’s Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet and Degas’s Hilaire Degas, and Manet’s Woman with a Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair and Degas’s Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair.

The show is divided into such sections as “An Enigmatic Relationship,” “Artistic Origins: Study, Copy, Create,” “Family Origins and Tensions,” “Challenging Genres at the Salon,” “The Morisot Circle,” and “At the Racecourse,” tracing the many intersections of Manet’s and Degas’s personal and professional lives, which continued after Manet’s death in 1883 at the age of fifty-one, as Degas, who died in 1917 at eighty-three, purchased more of Manet’s work, highlighted by his unsuccessful attempt to bring together all fragments of Manet’s masterpiece The Execution of Maximilian.

But the Met, in collaboration with the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, has done a marvelous job of bringing together the work of the these two giants, friends and rivals whose lives overlapped in captivating ways.

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

LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K

Life & Times of Michael K tells a heart-wrenching story set in war-torn South Africa (photo by Richard Termine)

LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Through December 23
718-254-8779
stannswarehouse.org

Lara Foot’s extraordinary adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 Booker Prize–winning novel, Life & Times of Michael K, begins with a group of people huddling around a figure wrapped in a blanket on the ground of a dark, bombed-out area, like an infant left on its own to face a harsh struggle. The figure is lifted up to reveal a wooden puppet of a young man with a harelip, seemingly born from the earth. For the next two hours, he goes on an adventure that takes him across poor and desolate sections of South Africa during a fictional civil war in the time of apartheid.

He is part Josef K from Kafka’s The Trial, part Chauncey Gardiner from Jerzy Kosiński’s 1970 novel, Being There, and subsequent Hal Ashby film, with a bit of Jack Crabb from Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel, Little Big Man, made into a 1970 film by Arthur Penn. On his journey, he faces bureaucratic red tape, tragic loss, severe hunger, and violence as he survives scene after scene in which it is hard to tell the good people from the bad, all the while just wanting to tend to a garden, bringing new life to a dangerous world. “It is because I am a gardener, he thought, because that is my nature,” one of several narrators says. “The impulse to plant had been reawakened / now, in a matter of weeks, he found his waking life bound tightly to the patch of earth / he had begun to cultivate / and the seeds he had planted there.”

It’s a haunting tale told through puppetry — Michael K is a life-size wooden puppet operated by Markus Schabbing, Craig Leo, and Carlo Daniels, who voices the character, while Michael K’s mother, Anna K, is animated by Faniswa Yisa, Roshina Ratnam, and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe. Designed by Adrian Kohler, who cofounded Handspring Puppet Company with puppetry director Basil Jones, the puppets are magically imbued with emotion by the handlers, who are out in the open, not hidden from the audience; when Michael K is given a pie, the handlers actually eat it. However, the handlers also represent how Michael K and his mother are controlled, never free; when left to himself, Michael K crumples on the floor, unable to move. As he says, “I do not know what is going to happen. The story of my life has not been an interesting one; there has usually been someone to tell me what to do next; but now there is no one, and the best thing seems to be to wait.”

The journey starts with Michael K determined to bring his ailing mother back to their home in Prince Albert, a trip for which he constructs a special rickshaw cart for her. Along the way he encounters bullies, armed soldiers, a goat, work camps, thieves, children playing, and extreme poverty and hunger, which is made palpable when Michael K removes his shirt, revealing bones with nothing inside. Although race is never mentioned specifically, Michael K is treated differently, and often negatively, because of his harelip, a physical manifestation that makes him feel less than, a metaphor for his color.

The other, nonpuppet characters are portrayed by Sandra Prinsloo, Andrew Buckland, Wessel Pretorius, Billy Langa, Ntshuntshe, Yisa, and Ratnam, including cyclists, soldiers, bus passengers, guards, police officers, bullies, nurses, clerks, and others; Ntshuntshe excels making baby noises. They also serve as narrators, relating important plot developments with Coetzee’s poetic language: “Michael did not miss his mother. No, he did not miss her, he found, except insofar as he had missed her all his life.” “Because of his face Michael did not have women friends. He was easiest when he was by himself.” “The problem that had exercised him all those years ago behind the bicycle shed at Huis Norenius, namely, why had he been brought into the world, had finally received its answer: He had been brought into the world to look after his mother.”

The effective, naturalistic costumes are by Phyllis Midlane, with sound by Simon Kohler and lighting by Joshua Cutts that puts you right in the middle of the action on Patrick Curtis’s war-torn set, enhanced by Kyle Shepherd’s original music. Video projections feature extreme close-ups of Michael K in which his face and body dominate the back wall; the photography and film are by Fiona McPherson and Barrett de Kock, with videography and editing by Yoav Dagan and projection design by Kirsti Cumming.

In such recent shows as The Jungle, Into the Woods, Life of Pi, and Wolf Play, puppets have been used ingeniously; Michael K continues that welcome trend.

Michael K encounters a goat in unique adaptation of novel by J. M. Coetzee (photo by Richard Termine)

One characters sums it up when he tells Michael K, “Why should we run away if we have nowhere to run?”

A collaboration between Foot’s Baxter Theatre Centre (Mies Julie, The Inconvenience of Wings), Handspring Puppet Company (Little Amal, War Horse), and the Dusseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Life & Times of Michael K is about trying to find one’s place in a world that is overwhelmed by sociopolitical ills, where one individual can get trapped in a system that refuses to acknowledge who he is and what his needs are. It might be set in South Africa, but it is a timeless, universal story, told here in a moving and poignant way.

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