Yanira Castro’s beautiful PARADIS returns to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden July 8-10 (photo by Kevin Kwan)
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Desert House in the Steinhardt Conservatory and the Cherry Esplanade
1000 Washington Ave.
July 8-10, $30, 8:00
www.newyorklivearts.org
www.acanarytorsi.org
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is already one of New York City’s paradises, but on July 8-10, choreographer Yanira Castro will make it even more so. The Puerto Rican-born, Brooklyn-based Castro, who specializes in site-adaptable dance installations, is bringing her a canary torsi “organism” back for Paradis, the first site-specific dance project to ever be held at the century-old botanic garden. If you missed its debut last summer, get your tickets now for this beautiful piece of paradise. Presented by New York Live Arts, Paradis is the follow-up to 2010’s Wilderness, a performance and audio installation that took place at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn. For Paradis, the audience of approximately sixty people first meets in the visitor center (be sure to go to the 1000 Washington St. entrance), then is led to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Steinhardt Conservatory, where they surround the outside of the Desert House. Inside, Peter Schmitz, dressed all in white with white face paint, stands still before slowly making his way around the cactus plants and trees, using herky-jerky motion, then moving faster, stopping to mime eating an apple, then erupting in off-key song, dancing and singing to tinny, lo-fi, scratchy piano music that pipes out of security guards’ walkie-talkies.
Expanding his work with Castro on Wilderness, Schmitz evokes Adam in the Garden of Eden as well as Frankenstein’s monster and the Supreme Being as he learns to walk, talk, and eat. At the end of the solo, the audience is led in the dark to the wide expanse of the resplendently green Cherry Esplanade, where they come upon Michael Dauphinais on the piano (sounding much better in person than over the walkie-talkies), playing an evolving score that is impacted by the presence of the crowd. Four huge spotlights illuminate the lawn as Peggy Cheng, Simon Courchel, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Luke Miller, Daniel Clifton, Darrin Wright, Pamela Vail, and Kimberly Young emerge in the distance, frolicking across the grass and eventually weaving through the crowd, who can sit or stand wherever they want. After being selected to follow a particular dancer, the audience segments into groups that end up watching a deeply intimate, thrillingly erotic duet. Inspired very directly by the “Paradis” section of Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique, Castro’s Paradis feels like it grew organically out of the ground (or descended from the heavens), like the lovely trees and flowers that cover the garden’s fifty-two lush acres. No mere spectacle, the piece invites the viewer to become part of a magical experience, a fitting tribute to the beauty of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the endless imagination of Castro and her company.
A must-see for fans of loud, fast, angry music circa 1980-86, American Hardcore looks at one of the smaller but nonetheless influential movements in American music. A basic doc in the classic do-it-yourself sensibility that informed so much of the music scene it chronicles, American Hardcore features interviews with Henry Rollins, lead singer of Black Flag; H.R., the mercurial, difficult, but brilliant lead singer for the Bad Brains; Mike Watt of the Minutemen; and various personnel from the Circle Jerks, Minor Threat, and 7 Seconds. Tommy Stinson of the Replacements and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers weigh in as well. The abundance of old concert footage is fabulous, but director Paul Rachman and writer Steve Blush discovered much of it in shoeboxes in basements during their low-budget cross-country trip while making the movie, so the overall production quality is not high ― which in some ways works better overall. The film does a good job of lovingly showing just how home-grown and amateurish the scene was and debating the importance of the scenes in Houston, Minneapolis, DC, Boston, and Southern California. The finale with a graphic artist and cover designer calling for the next generation of hardcore is a riot. American Hardcore is screening July 5 at 4:00 at Landmark Sunshine Cinema as part of the inaugural CBGB Festival and will be followed by a Q&A with Rachman and Blush. The festival runs July 5-8 at venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn and includes a bevy of concerts, film screenings, panel discussions, and other special events being held in honor of the classic Bowery club that hosted cutting-edge, alternative, punk, and indie bands from 1973 to 2006. Among the groups participating in the festival are the Dirty Pearls, Agnostic Front, Richard Llloyd, Tuff Darts, David Johansen, Glen Matlock, Tommy Ramone, Sic F*cks, Eric Ambel, Xylos, Popa Chubby, Dayna Kurtz, and Mike Peters of the Alarm, and that’s just on Thursday.
