live performance

TICKET ALERT: THE NEW YORKER FESTIVAL 2021

Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac will talk about their new HBO series at New Yorker Festival

Who: Jessica Chastain, Oscar Isaac, Dave Grohl, Aimee Mann, Stanley Tucci, Jelani Cobb, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jonathan Franzen, Tara Westover, Liza Donnelly, Roz Chast, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jane Goodall, Andy Borowitz, Beanie Feldstein, Jayne Houdyshell, Richard Jenkins, more
What: Hybrid New Yorker Festival
Where: Skyline Drive-In, 1 Oak St. in Brooklyn, and online
When: October 4-10, free – $180, virtual all-access pass $59
Why: Tickets for the in-person outdoor events at this year’s New Yorker Festival go on sale September 14 at noon, along with the specially curated culinary meals, which will be delivered to your door (as long as you live in New York City). Among those appearing live at the Skyline Drive-In on the Brooklyn waterfront are Aimee Mann and Dave Grohl (separately), who will talk and sing, as well as Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, who will discuss their new HBO series, Scenes from a Marriage, and Beanie Feldstein, Jayne Houdyshell, and Richard Jenkins, who will screen and discuss their new film, Stephen Karam’s The Humans, an adaptation of his hit play. The virtual programs, featuring Jane Goodall, Stanley Tucci, Emily Ratajkowski, Amy Schumer, Jonathan Franzen, Tara Westover, Roz Chast, and others, will be available September 20, including an all-access pass for $59. As always, you can expect tickets to go fast, especially for the free events and the food deliveries. Below is the full schedule.

Monday, October 4
Dining In with the New Yorker Festival: Yellow Rose, three-course vegan menu delivered, with on-demand access to Helen Rosner’s interview with the chefs, Dave and Krystiana Rizo, $50

Tuesday, October 5
Dining In with the New Yorker Festival: Dacha 46, three-course vegetarian meal delivered, with on-demand access to Helen Rosner’s interview with the chefs, Jessica and Trina Quinn, $50

Wednesday, October 6
Dining In with the New Yorker Festival: Reverence, three-course vegetarian meal delivered, with on-demand access to Helen Rosner’s interview with the chef, Russell Jackson, $50

Thursday, October 7
Dining In with the New Yorker Festival: Kimika, three-course meal delivered, with on-demand access to Helen Rosner’s interview with the chef, Christine Lau, $50

Friday, October 8
Jessica Chastain, Oscar Isaac, and Hagai Levi talk with Esther Perel about Scenes from a Marriage, free, 6:30

Dave Grohl talks with Kelefa Sanneh about his upcoming memoir and performs, $90-$180, 9:00

Saturday, October 9
Aimee Mann talks with Atul Gawande and performs, $60-$120, 6:30

Drive-In: The Humans, preview screening of Stephen Karam’s debut film, followed by a conversation with Karam, Beanie Feldstein, Jayne Houdyshell, and Richard Jenkins, moderated by Michael Schulman, $25-$50, 9:00

Liza Donnelly, Roz Chast, Liana Finck, and Amy Hwang will celebrate the history of women cartoonists at the New Yorker at virtual event (illustration by Liana Finck)

Virtual Events, available September 20

Jane Goodall talks with Andy Borowitz

The Matter of Black Lives, with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Jamaica Kincaid, moderated by Jelani Cobb

Stanley Tucci talks with Helen Rosner about his TV series and his new book, Taste: My Life Through Food

Politics and the Novel, with Yiyun Li, Valeria Luiselli, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, moderated by Parul Sehgal

Emily Ratajkowski and Amy Schumer talk with Michael Schulman

Globalism’s Legacy, with Esther Duflo, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, moderated by Evan Osnos

Jonathan Franzen and Tara Westover talk with Henry Finder

Some Very Funny Ladies, with Liza Donnelly, Roz Chast, Liana Finck, and Amy Hwang, celebrating the history of women cartoonists at the New Yorker, moderated by Emma Allen, free

Rachel Cusk and Patricia Lockwood talk with Deborah Treisman

How to Accelerate Climate Action, with Katharine Hayhoe, Bill Ulfelder, and Allegra Kirkland, free

GREGG BORDOWITZ: I WANNA BE WELL / BENYAMIN ZEV’S SUCCOS SPECTACULAR!

Gregg Bordowitz, Pestsäule (after Erwin Thorn), mixed media, 2021 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

GREGG BORDOWITZ: I WANNA BE WELL
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens
Virtual performance lectures September 17-19, free with advance RSVP
Exhibition continues Thursday – Monday through October 11, $5-$10 (free for NYC residents)
www.moma.org
www.greggbordowitz.com

At the heart of the MoMA PS1 exhibition “Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well” are two disparate images. On your way into the building itself and in the gallery, you will see a large banner declaring, “The AIDS Crisis Is Still Beginning.” Meanwhile, at the top of Bordowitz’s 2021 mixed-media sculpture Pestsäule (after Erwin Thorn), inspired by a seventeenth-century plague monument in Vienna as well as the murder of George Floyd, the AIDS epidemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic, is a blank protest sign, raised up by a man in a medical mask surrounded by a maelstrom of bodies, a murderous cherub, and sandbags on the floor, like a warped scene from Les Miz. “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” Mildred (Peggy Maley) asks Johnny (Marlon Brando) in the 1954 film The Wild One. “Whadda you got?” Johnny replies.

Born in Brooklyn in 1964 and raised in Queens — home base for the Ramones, whose 1977 song “I Wanna Be Well” from the Rocket to Russia album gives the exhibit its name — Bordowitz, who has been living with HIV/AIDS for more than three decades, was an early member of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which was founded in 1987. He has been documenting his own life and the global AIDS crisis through film and video, poetry, sculpture, lectures, and poetry, much of which is on view at MoMA PS1 through October 11. His 2014 twenty-four-part poem Debris Fields lines the walls of the galleries, amid such works as self-portraits in mirror, Tom McKitterick’s black-and-white photographs of Bordowitz and others at AIDS protests in the late 1980s, the corner wall drawing and sculpture installation Kaisergruft (centered by the word Sympathy), and Drive, a repurposed vintage derby car stickered with Big Pharma logos.

The show also features several of Bordowitz’s films, including the 1993 autobiographical documentary Fast Trip, Long Drop, which deals with his contracting HIV, coming out to his parents, a friend getting breast cancer, and the tragic deaths of his grandparents; the 2001 documentary Habit, about the AIDS epidemic in South Africa; the five-minute The Fast That I Want video he made last year with Morgan Bassichis for his family’s virtual Yom Kippur; and the vastly entertaining Only Idiots Smile, a 2017 lecture commissioned for the New Museum presentation “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” and that, at only twenty-two minutes, is far too short as Bordowitz discusses his relationship with his father, Judaism, Eastern European men kissing on the lips, and homophobia.

You can see much more of Bordowitz this week when MoMA hosts several special events held in conjunction with “I Wanna Be Well.” On September 13 (and available on demand through September 27, for members only), “Modern Mondays: An Evening with Gregg Bordowitz and Jean Carlomusto” consists of a live discussion between the longtime friends, artists, collaborators, and activists, along with videos they made in the late 1980s for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City. From September 14 to 28, MoMA Film will stream Bordowitz’s 1996 reimagination of Nicolai Erdman’s 1932 long-banned play The Suicide, also for members only.

From September 17 to 19, Benyamin Zev’s Succos Spectacular! comprises a trio of livestreamed performances, free with advance RSVP, specifically taking place after Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), the ten Days of Awe (meditation and reflection), and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and before Sukkot (the Harvest Festival and the Feast of Tabernacles). The three shows — “The Rock Star” on Friday at 7:00, “The Rabbi” on Saturday at 7:00, and “The Comedian” on Sunday at 4:00 — feature Bordowitz as his alter ego, Benyamin Zev (his Hebrew name), a Jewish entertainer, stand-up comic, and tummler, hanging out in a Sukkah, joined by special guests and the klezmer ensemble Isle of Klezbos. “Any laughter is purely accidental,” Bordowitz says on the MoMA website. “My performances disturb, upset, and resist the pressures to conform and align genders and ethnicities within a fascist phantasy of American nationalism.” And finally, on October 2 at 5:00, in person and online, Bordowitz will launch his new book from Triple Canopy, Some Styles of Masculinity, at the Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore, where he will speak with poet, professor, and cultural theorist Fred Moten.

A SNAIL’S TALE: A PERFORMANCE BY KRIS LEMSALU AND KYP MALONE ON THE HIGH LINE

Kris Lemsalu Malone and Kyp Malone Lemsalu will perform on the High Line this week (photo by Eric Martin)

Who: Kris Lemsalu, Kyp Malone, others
What: Live performance in seven parts
Where: The High Line, between Fourteenth & Thirtieth Sts.
When: September 13-15, free, 6:30
Why: For the 2017 Performa Biennial, Estonian multidisciplinary artist Kris Lemsalu and New York–based musician and artist Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio, Rain Machine) collaborated on Going, Going, which took place on a kinetic bed. In February 2020, they collaborated on the exhibition “Love Song Sing-Along” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The two are teaming up again for A Snail’s Tale, a seven-part site-specific performance installation that runs the length of the High Line, from Fourteenth St. to the Thirtieth St. Spur.

Admission is free and no advance RSVP is necessary; the audience will walk across the gorgeous park, making seven stops, each offering a chapter in the story, featuring musicians Lara Allen, Kate Farstad, Forrest Gillespie, Andi Maghenheimer, and Katy Pinke as well as Lemsalu and Malone, in celestial costumes designed by Malone, and joined by a mobile snail shell fabricated by Tarvo Porroson. “A Snail’s Tale is a never-before-heard fairy tale,” High Line Art associate curator Melanie Kress said in a statement. “Kris Lemsalu and Kyp Malone’s phantasmagorical performance is an invitation to slow down and connect to the natural world during this moment of global instability and transition.” Along the way, you will also encounter the current High Line exhibition “The Musical Brain,” consisting of pieces by Rebecca Belmore and Osvaldo Yero, Vivian Caccuri, Raúl de Nieves, Guillermo Galindo, David Horvitz, Mai-Thu Perret, Naama Tsabar, and Antonio Vega Macotela, in addition to commissions by Ibrahim Mahama, Hannah Levy, and Sam Durant.

IN REMEMBRANCE OF 9/11: TWENTY YEARS

Eiko Otake returns to Belvedere Plaza in Battery Park City for twentieth anniversary of 9/11 (photo by William Johnston)

EIKO OTAKE: SLOW TURN
Belvedere Plaza, Battery Park City
Saturday, September 11, free with advance RSVP, 7:00 am & 6:00 pm
lmcc.net
www.eikootake.org

In 2000, Eiko & Koma were artists in residence on the ninety-second floor of the World Trade Center, in the North Tower. In July 2002, they presented Offering: A Ritual of Mourning in six city parks, starting at the Belvedere in Battery Park City, just west of where the towers stood. The meditation on loss ultimately toured the world. On September 11, Eiko Otake, who has been performing solo for several years, returns to the Belvedere for Slow Turn, consisting of movement, a monologue of personal memories of 9/11, and music by clarinetist and composer David Krakauer. Presented in partnership with NYU Skirball, the Battery Park City Authority, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Slow Turn takes place at 7:00 am, as the sun reaches the plaza, and again at 6:00 pm, as the sun sets over the Hudson River. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

BUGLISI DANCE THEATER: TABLE OF SILENCE PROJECT 9/11
Josie Robertson Plaza, Lincoln Center
65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, September 11, free, 8:00 am
www.tableofsilence.org
www.lincolncenter.org

Every September 11, there are many memorial programs held all over the city, paying tribute to those who were lost on that tragic day while also honoring New York’s endless resiliency. One of the most powerful is Buglisi Dance Theatre’s “Table of Silence Project,” a multicultural public performance ritual for peace, inaugurated in 2011, that annually features more than one hundred dancers on Josie Robertson Plaza at Lincoln Center. Because of the coronavirus crisis, it has been reimagined for the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as part of Lincoln Center’s “Restart Stages” programming. The event will begin with artistic director Jacqulyn Buglisi’s 2001 piece Requiem, her response to 9/11, with costume designer Elena Comendador transforming the original ten-foot-long red, gold, and green silk costumes into white and silver, representing ashes, purity, and sacredness.

Thirty-two dancers will gather around the Revson Fountain for Table of Silence Prologue, joined by bell master and principal dancer Terese Capucilli, electric violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain, and spoken-word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph delivering “Awakening.” The performance will be livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube, and will also include the world premiere of Nel Shelby Productions’ short film Études II and the full 2019 performance of Table of Silence Project 9/11.

Tadej Brdnik will come out of retirement to honor the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 with Battery Dance (photo courtesy Battery Dance)

BATTERY DANCE MEMORIAL
Traffic island bordered by Varick and Franklin Sts. and West Broadway
Saturday, September 11, free, 8:46 am
facebook.com/BatteryDance

On September 11, 2001, shortly after the towers fell, Tadej Brdnik of Tribeca-based Battery Dance performed a solo on the traffic island bordered by Varick and Franklin Sts. and West Broadway, accompanied by four musicians. For the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, Brdnik will come out of retirement, joined on the same location by company members Sarah Housepian, Jill Linkowski, and Vivake Khamsingsavath, who will direct the piece, set to a composition by violinist Yu-Wei Hsiao. There will be no speeches, no fanfare, just a peaceful memorial of movement and music, occurring at the exact moment the first tower was hit on that fateful day. “We welcome passersby, neighbors, and anyone who may feel inspired to join us as a way of marking this tragic, life-changing occasion with the beauty and solemnity of this performance,” Battery Dance founding artistic director Jonathan Hollander said in a statement.

New York City AIDS Memorial Park will honor twentieth anniversary of 9/11 with special gathering

A VILLAGE GATHERING: HONORING AND REMEMBERING 9/11
New York City AIDS Memorial Park
76 Greenwich Ave.
Saturday, September 11, free with advance RSVP, 5:00
villagepreservation.force.com

Art2Action, Greenwich House Music School, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, and Village Preservation are joining forces on September 11 at 5:00 for a twentieth-anniversary remembrance at New York City AIDS Memorial Park, a safe space where people can participate in sharing stories, singing songs, and expressing themselves in other ways to honor those lost on 9/11 as well as celebrate the resiliency of the city.

THIRD RAIL PROJECTS: RETURN THE MOON

Screenshots from Zoom presentation Return the Moon by Third Rail Projects

RETURN THE MOON
Third Rail Projects
Select nights on Zoom through December 11, $15, $42, $67, 8:00
thirdrailprojects.com

Brooklyn-based Third Rail Projects specializes in site-specific immersive productions in unique locations, from a Bushwick warehouse to a former parochial school to backstage at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater. That’s not feasible during a pandemic lockdown, so the company has devised an interactive piece for Zoom, Return the Moon. Presentations over the platform have been slowing down dramatically now that theaters are opening and Zoom fatigue has more than set in, but Third Rail is forging ahead with the seventy-five-minute show, a melding of celebratory toast, ritual, and folktale made for a maximum of sixty audience members at a time.

Conceived and directed by Zach Morris and created by Morris, Alberto Denis, Kristin Dwyer, Joshua Gonzales, Sean Hagerty, Justin Lynch, Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, Tara O’Con, and Edward Rice, the live, online gathering is guided by a set of prompts that include being sent to a breakout room and sharing personal thoughts and memories in the chat. (Everyone renames themselves identically, ensuring anonymity.) The centerpiece is a tale about the New Moon told using a small shadowbox constructed of white paper. “Once upon a time, you, me, all of us, we found ourselves in a village,” the story begins. “Now, this was a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that the sun hadn’t been born yet. And all we knew was night. And the Moon. Who back then didn’t wax and wane but instead always moved through the sky full and luminous. And the Moon shone on our village.”

As opposed to such previous Third Rail shows as Then She Fell, Ghost Light, and The Grand Paradise, this one takes place mostly in your mind, using your imagination to generate the shared space. It can get a bit twee and treacly, lacking the exciting cutting-edge twists and turns so prominent in Third Rail’s in-person stagings, but as the narrator says in the story, “For some of us, the village felt like a homeplace. For others, it did not. For some of us, it felt good and safe, but others longed to be somewhere else. Nonetheless, this is where we all were.” As a bonus, participants get a little package in the mail a few days after the show that lets them relive the tale as well as make their own, which is a lovely touch.

5 INDICES ON A TORTURED BODY

5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body will conclude performance series on October 24 (photo by Bones)

5 INDICES ON A TORTURED BODY
Bronx Museum
1040 Grand Concourse
September 8 – October 24, free with advance RSVP
718-681-6000
www.bronxmuseum.org

Since July, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has been hosting “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” a series of five live performances held in conjunction with the excellent exhibition “Wardell Milan: Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You.” The small but powerful show by Harlem-based artist Wardell Milan, continuing through October 24, is part of the institution’s special fiftieth anniversary programming, focusing on social justice. “Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You” consists of collages, photographs, and works on paper that address white supremacy and ask the question “What do terrorists do when they’re not terrorizing?” One end of the exhibit contains a ritual room inspired by the Rothko Chapel in Houston; for “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” Milan is collaborating with Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Zachary Tye Richardson and sculptor and designer Billy Ray Morgan to present the live events, which explore the disenfranchised and marginalized in search of a place of refuge. “The Chapel of Five Indices serves as a ‘Safe Space’ for these tortured bodies — interlinked through histories of violence, to be affirmed and celebrated,” Milan explains in a museum brochure. “Within this chapel, these irrepressible bodies cannot be flattened but must be reckoned with.” Below is the remaining schedule (“The Black Male Body” had its last performance September 4, with Richardson and Milan, written by Casey Gerald); admission is free with advance RSVP.

Wednesday, September 8
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Female Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, Catherine Fisher, and Trinity Dawn Bobo, written by Fisher, 6:00

Saturday, September 25
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Trans Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, B. Hawk Snipes, and Mae Eskenazi, written by Snipes and Richardson, 2:00

Wednesday, October 13
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Migrant Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, DJ Chappel, and Brittany Bringuez, written by Jabu Ndlovu, 6:00

Sunday, October 24
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, written by Noah Wertheimer, 2:00

“Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” features dazzling work by Chitra Ganesh, Saya Woolfalk, Huma Bhabha, and others (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Also on view at the Bronx Museum, through September 26, is the phenomenal “Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” inspired by Lizzie Borden’s seminal 1983 underground classic film, Born in Flames, which is shown on a loop along with recent works by Caitlin Cherry, Chitra Ganesh, Clarissa Tossin, Firelei Baez, Huma Bhabha, Maria Berrio, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rose B. Simpson, Saya Woolfalk, Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin), Shoshanna Weinberger, Tourmaline, and Wangechi Mutu.

STREB EXTREME ACTION: MANHATTAN WEST / JACOB’S PILLOW

STREB’s August performance at Jacob’s Pillow is streaming for free through September 16 (photos by Christopher Duggan and Jamie Kraus, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow)

STREB ONSTAGE
Digital on demand from Jacob’s Pillow, September 2-16, free with RSVP
Live at Manhattan West: September 17-19, free with advance RSVP
www.jacobspillow.org
streb.org

In July 2020, STREB Extreme Action shared Best Zoom Dance (with Martha Graham Dance Company) in twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards for Body Grammar, an inventive way to utilize dancers’ body parts to play with ideas of community and movement online, especially for a troupe used to working with unique action machines that often place the performers in physical danger. The Brooklyn-based company, founded in 1985 by Elizabeth Streb, maintained a continuous virtual presence during the lockdown, but you can now catch the troupe in person when they perform five outdoor shows September 17-19 at Manhattan West. (Admission is free with advance RSVP.)

The bill includes Molinette, in which three STREB action heroes have their feet affixed to a twenty-foot-high horizontal swivel pipe designed by Noe España, commissioned for the 2019 reopening of Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; Add, a 1983 solo piece in which the dancer must stay within a cross taped to the floor; Plateshift, featuring six action heroes on a sprung floor that incorporates centrifugal force; and the world premiere of Kaleidoscope, in which eight action heroes are fastened to LERU (London Eye Rehearsal Unit), a solid steel circle that has them defying gravity, a STREB tradition.

To get in the mood, you must check out STREB’s return to Jacob’s Pillow last month after twenty years, streaming for free through September 16. The show consists of twelve repertory works from 1978 to 2006, performed on the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage in front of a matinee audience by Jackie Carlson, Daniel Rysak, Tyler DuBoys, Justin Ross, Kairis Daniels, Luciany Germán, Leonardo Girón Torres, and associate artistic director Cassandre Joseph, wearing tight-fitting blue superhero costumes. The technical direction is by company emcee and DJ Zaire Baptiste, who knows how to rile up a crowd.

It shows the range of Streb’s choreography and her spirited use of existing and invented objects that often put the action heroes in danger, an astonishing melding of acrobatics, gymnastics, modern dance, and circuslike peril set to original music by technoaxe and compilations produced by Voodo Fé and Freshbeatz. Streb introduces each work with a quote from a review of the piece (from the Village Voice, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Examiner, and the New York Times) and a snippet about where the idea originated.

It begins with 2006’s Tip, in which seven dancers move precariously on a tipping machine, a twelve-feet-in-diameter wheel cut in half, able to achieve complete verticality. Carlson twirls a wooden dowel like a baton in 1978’s Pole Vaults, Rysak brandishes a rope in 1983’s Whiplash, Carlson, Rysak, Daniels, and Germán toss around a heavy twelve-foot-long, three-inch-wide dowel in 1990’s Log, Daniels is trapped in a box modeled for Streb’s size in 1985’s Little Ease, Germán plays with a hula hoop in 1983’s Target, Joseph and Ross turn a long dowel into a third dancer in 1992’s Link, the troupe pays homage to the Three Stooges and Buster Keaton with a long dowel and a ramp with a cut-out window in 2002’s Buster, and the company does miraculous things with a pair of rectangular doorlike plywood slabs in 1984’s Surface.

There are also two brief pieces with no props, Ross honoring Merce Cunningham in 1978’s 7′ 43″ and DuBoys re-creating Streb’s 1983 solo, Add, which she remembers as being “the most painful two minutes of my life.” The show concludes in a big way with 2003’s breathtaking Air, in which all eight action heroes jump off a trampoline, landing on a large mat over and over again. As with so many of Streb’s works, you can’t help but wait for disaster to occur, but it never does, at least not in the numerous times I’ve been fortunate to see the endlessly brave and talented troupe perform, at such diverse locations as Park Ave. Armory, Gansevoort Plaza, and the World Financial Center as well as in the documentaries Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity and One Extraordinary Day. Be sure to stick around for the postshow talk with Streb, Joseph, and Baptiste, moderated by Pillow scholar-in-residence Maura Keefe.