Friday, April 16, SLAM Studios, 51 North First St., Brooklyn, performance $10-$20, after-party free, 7:00
Tuesday, April 20, KGB Bar, 85 East Fourth St., free, 7:00
Wednesday, April 21, CUNY Graduate School, Proshansky Auditorium, 365 Fifth Ave., free, 6:30
www.streb.org
www.feministpress.org
Celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of her Extreme Action Company, dancer and choreographer Elizabeth Streb has several special events planned surrounding the publication of her new book, STREB: HOW TO BECOME AN EXTREME ACTION HERO (Feminist Press, April 2010, $18.95). In 2003, Streb, who believes in what she calls PopAction and pure movement and stresses the physical, athletic abilities of the human body, established SLAM Studios in Williamsburg, the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics. “The doors of SLAM are never closed,” Streb writes on her website. “Performances at SLAM are not stiff, class-coded, regimented affairs; they are neighborhood happenings where the company’s longtime fans from the high-art crowd mingle with the at-risk kids from the local public schools and their parents. At the heart of this machine is the driving force of art and action, and the belief that art can provide a service to a community such that voters, taxpayers, and consumers will consider it indispensable.” Streb, the Evel Knievel of Dance, will be launching her book April 16 at SLAM Studios, where her company will perform RUN UP WALLS, followed by a reception. Next week she’ll be at KGB Bar on April 20 with Jack Hitt as part of the KGB Nonfiction Series, then participate in a reading and discussion at the CUNY Graduate Center for the CUNY Science & the Arts Series.
After the orchestra in which he plays cello is dissolved, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) leave Tokyo and head back to his hometown in Yamagata. Seeing a classified ad in the local paper listing a job in “departures,” Daigo schedules an interview, thinking it is a travel agent position. But as it turns out, the boss, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), claims it was a typo — it should have read “the departed” — and immediately hires Daigo as his assistant encoffinor. Daigo quickly learns that he and Sasaki attend to the newly dead, picking them up for funeral directors and then preparing the bodies, in front of grieving friends and family, for the coffins and cremation through an elaborate, detailed ceremony. Daigo takes the job out of financial desperation — Sasaki throws money at him to come on board — but doesn’t tell anyone, including Mika, what he is doing, since people who work in businesses involving corpses are shunned in Japan, considered dirty. But as Daigo grows to appreciate the importance of what Sasaki does, everything he has built threatens to fall apart when his secret starts getting out. Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (As well as ten Japan Academy Prizes), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of life and death, told beautifully by director Yojiro Takita (WHENT THE LAST SWORD IS DRAWN, ONMYOJI) and screenwriter Kundo Koyama. Motoki, who had the original idea for the film, gives a wonderfully subtle performance as a Daigo, while Yamazaki is a riot as the stern boss with a sly sense of humor. Despite an embarrassingly unnecessary montage scene and sappy music by Joe Hisaishi (who’s never met an emotion he couldn’t overexploit), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of a man searching for his place in the world — and meeting personal and professional obstacles when he thinks he might have found it.
