twi-ny recommended events

GILDING THE LONELY: AN EVENING OF CABARET

Raquel Cion will be gilding the lonely in one-woman cabaret show at Dixon Place this week

The Lounge at Dixon Place
161A Chrystie St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
December 14-16, $5
212-219-0736
www.dixonplace.org

Last year sexy chanteuse Raquel Cion performed the one-woman show Pour Vous at Dixon Place in the guise of her alter ego, Cou-Cou Bijoux, who is also a member of the Magnetic Cabaret. Cion is now back at Dixon Place to present Gilding the Lonely, an evening of original cabaret directed by Luke Harlan, with musical direction by Matthew Leonard and percussion by Bill Gerstel. Cion, a powerful, engaging performer who exerts high energy and a burning sexuality, will be wearing what should be daring costumes by David Quinn in what she promises to be “three nights of glitter-ball performance, wry humor, open-hearted pathos, passion, and lots of singing. I’m going to face down that wall of loneliness through song.” Indeed, it’s impossible to be lonely when Cion is around, so if you’re in need of a little extra love this holiday season, you’re sure to find plenty of it at Dixon Place this week.

STREB: KISS THE AIR!

ASCENSION is part of STREB Extreme Action’s special presentation at the Park Avenue Armory (photo by Tom Caravaglia)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
December 14-22, $35, 7:30
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
www.streb.org

There’s good reason New York-based choreographer Elizabeth Streb calls her company Extreme Action: The diversely talented troupe is known for performing daring acrobatic feats that push the boundaries of contemporary dance. From December 14 to 22, STREB Extreme Action will be at the Park Avenue Armory displaying their vast skills in Kiss the Air!, a program that includes two dazzling pieces that were previewed this summer in special free outdoor presentations. In “Ascension,” nine dancers take individual turns and team up on a twenty-one-foot moving ladder, risking life and limb as it circles around and around to a score by master percussionist David Van Tieghem. The breathtaking piece debuted this summer in Gansevoort Plaza as part of Whitney on Site: New Commissions Downtown; for the indoor version, Robert Wierzel’s lighting design will add another aspect to the work. This summer Streb, a MacArthur Genius, also premiered the eye-popping “Human Fountain” as part of the River to River Festival’s Extraordinary Moves program at the World Financial Center, in which sixteen daredevils — er, dancers — took swan dives off a thirty-foot, three-story structural installation. Inspired by the Bellagio fountain in Las Vegas, they fly through the air (with the greatest of ease?) in tandems, sometimes crossing one another’s path, landing on an inflatable mat that cushions their fall. “Human Fountain is another thrilling example of how STREB Extreme Action goes for, well, the extreme in its challenging repertoire. Streb and several of her dancers will participate in an artist talk following the December 15 performance, moderated by Kristy Edmunds. Kiss the Air! is the second of three dance presentations at the Park Avenue Armory, following Shen Wei Dance Arts and concluding with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s farewell December 29-31.

KISS THE AIR! is a one-of-a-kind experience at Park Avenue Armory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Update: The STREB Extreme Action Heroes announce their arrival in the Park Avenue Armory in typically extreme fashion, individually riding an overhead wire and slamming face-first into a vertical mat, letting the audience know right from the start that they are in for a very different kind of performance, one filled with impressive feats of daring and plenty of good humor. A unique melding of modern dance, ballet, gymnastics, cheerleading, aerial arts, and stunt work, Kiss the Air! is a five-ring circus that tests the limits of the human body over the course of seventy thrilling minutes, supplemented by large screens displaying live close-up footage and action architect and choreographer Elizabeth Streb’s original layouts. As the dancers make their way across five architectural set-ups, the crowd is encouraged to scream out with enthusiasm, take photographs and video, and tweet away, knocking down the barrier between viewer and performer. Action engineers Jackie Carlson, John Kasten, Sarah Callan, Zaire Baptiste, Samantha Jakas, Leonardo Giron Torres, Cassandre Joseph, Felix Hess, Daniel Rysak, and associate artistic director Fabio Tavares da Silva, along with seven additional performers, manipulate one another in swinging harnesses, climb over a moving ladder, bounce their bodies up and down on mats, dive off a thirty-foot structure, and splash about in a shallow pool, getting some audience members wet (ponchos are provided) as they run nonstop through eleven numbers, including “Swing,” “Popaction,” “Falling Sideways,” “Drop,” “Catch,” “Wave,” and “Kiss the Water.” The abovementioned showpieces, “Ascension” and “Human Fountain,” turn out to be not quite as dazzling in the armory as they were outside last summer, as the dancers (understandably) take longer pauses to catch their breath and the audience is seated farther away, but they still are impressive, enhanced by Robert Wierzel’s lighting and David Van Tieghem´s sound design and music. A one-of-a-kind experience for children and adults of all ages, Kiss the Air! continues through December 22.

POPGUN AND NEW AMSTERDAM PRESENT LAUREL HALO, FORMA, CORPS EXQUIS, LORNA DUNE

Glasslands Gallery
289 Kent Ave.
Tuesday, December 13, $10, 8:30
www.newamsterdampresents.com
www.glasslands.blogspot.com

Cosmic avant-pop, chamber music, and cutting-edge electronic soundscapes will take center stage on December 13 at Glasslands as a collection of local composers gather for a night of twenty-first-century orchestrations. Presented by PopGun and New Amsterdam Records, the evening includes performances by Lorna Dune, FORMA (George Bennett, Sophie Lam, and Mark Dwinell), Laurel Halo, and Daniel Wohl, who will be teaming up with TRANSIT for the multimedia Corps Exquis, inspired by the Surrealists’ artistic parlor game Exquisite Corpse.

MEETING, IMPORTANT

MEETING, IMPORTANT mixes actors and audience members in interactive presentation

305 Seventh Ave. between 28th & 29th Sts.
11th floor conference room
Monday – Friday through December 20, 6:30, 8:00 & 9:30
Tickets: $12-$30 (discount available by using code “teambuilding”)
www.artpartytheatercompany.com

Perhaps the last thing you want after finishing another exhausting day at work is finding yourself back at the corporate table, engaged in an urgent discussion about the future of your company. Live theater is supposed to offer an escape from the drudgery of the nine-to-five world, not overtime, but art.party’s Meeting, Important, fresh off residencies at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center and Harvard University, is an engaging little twist on the business of business. Held in a nondescript conference room on Seventh Ave., the interactive show features five actors and as many as fifteen audience members, each given a specific role to play, from intern to regional director. As the meeting goes on, you turn the pages of a binder that includes facts about the company as well as post-its that give details about your character’s personal and professional life and prompts about what to say. Thus, your enjoyment of the sixty-minute production is enhanced by your participation. The more you and the other audience members get involved, the more fun the whole thing is. Just remember that this meeting of the family-owned Limits company is taking place in 1995; don’t get ahead of yourself as we did by making a reference that would have been lost on everyone some sixteen years ago. And yes, coffee and donuts are served, along with a healthy dose of backstabbing. Conceived by art.party, which staged Starbox in Bryant Park in August 2010, and gleefully directed by art.party founder and artistic director Mary Birnbaum, Meeting, Important is a playful take on corporate culture that depends on your involvement to make it, well, work.

THE BIRTHDAY MASSACRE / DIR EN GREY

The Birthday Massacre will have the audience on pins and needles at Irving Plaza

Irving Plaza
17 Irving Pl. at East 15th St.
Monday, December 12, $41.50 – $63.50 ($29.50 – $51.50 without fees), 7:00
www.thebirthdaymassacre.com
www.irvingplaza.com

Touring behind their first album in three years, Dum Spiro Spero (the End, August 2011), Japanese heavyweights Dir En Grey arrive in New York City on Monday night to headline Irving Plaza, but you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t get there early to catch the opening act, Toronto goth rockers the Birthday Massacre — and not only to get the biggest bang for your buck, since the relatively high ticket prices reach up to $63.50 for VIP access. On such discs as 2004’s Violet, 2007’s Walking with Strangers, and last year’s Pins and Needles, Chibi, Rainbow, M. Falcore, Rhim, O.E., and Owen play it hard and loud. Their latest EP, Imaginary Monsters (Metropolis, August 2011), features three new tracks, the soaring power ballads “Burn Away,” “Forever,” and “Left Behind,” along with five remixes of older tunes: Tweaker’s “Control,” Kevvy Mental & Dave Ogilvie’s “Pale,” Skold’s “Pins and Needles,” and Combichrist’s and Assemblage 23’s dueling versions of “Shallow Grave.” As we’ve said before, TBM know how to rock out live; just don’t be put off by the gothic metal makeup, black costumes, black hair, tattoos, and demonic signage. At heart, they’re just a bunch of pussycats. Well, maybe.

MACY’S HOLIDAY WINDOWS: BELIEVE

Virginia O’Hanlon seeks the truth about Santa Claus in Macy’s holiday window display (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Macy’s Herald Square
151 West 34th St. at Broadway
Through early January, free
212-494-4495
www.macys.com

A few weeks ago, a second-grade teacher at George W. Miller Elementary School in Nanuet, New York, had the gall to tell her students that there is no Santa Claus, setting off a panic in the community. In reporting the scandal, the New York Post spoke with Mary Blair, the granddaughter of Virginia O’Hanlon, the eight-year-old girl who famously wrote a letter to the New York Sun in 1897 asking if there really was a Santa Claus. Blair said, “The most real things in the world are things that you don’t see or touch, and they are the things that mean the most — love, kindness, and generosity.” The story of Virginia O’Hanlon and her family, her friend Ollie, newspaper editor Francis Pharcellus Church, and Kris Kringle is retold in Macy’s holiday window display, designed using animatronic dolls, LED screens, and laser-cut paper by Paul Olszewski and PRG Scenic Technologies. It’s all part of Macy’s holiday campaign, which is simply titled “Believe.” Other windows feature a series of gears, which seems to be a department-store theme this year, as the Saks’s projected display includes a gear countdown in between its light show.

MAURIZIO CATTELAN: ALL

Maurizio Cattelan says farewell to the art world in spectacular retrospective (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through January 22, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
Book signing Monday, January 9, 6:00
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org
maurizio cattelan: all slideshow

Throughout his career, Italian visual artist and provocateur Maurizio Cattelan has been giving the middle finger to anyone and everyone he can, both literally and figuratively. He regularly stands convention — and policemen — on its head in conceptual works that range from putting a sign on a gallery door that says “Be back soon” (“Torno subito”) to placing a thirty-six-foot-high middle finger, titled “L.O.V.E.,” in front of the Milan Stock Exchange, courting controversy wherever he goes. For a career retrospective that also supposedly represents his retirement from the art world, the fifty-one-year-old Cattelan vetoed a chronological arrangement of his oeuvre situated in the Guggenheim’s bays and instead opted to have 128 of his pieces hung from the museum’s ceiling to create a brand-new, 129th work, a kind of mass execution in the form of a child’s deranged mobile (or should that be “a deranged child’s mobile”?) that offers a fond farewell, one final middle finger saying goodbye. And what a goodbye it is.

Maurizio Cattelan hangs himself in effigy in Guggenheim retrospective (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

As visitors make their way up the Guggenheim’s winding path, they are greeted by a vast collection of taxidermied animals (including a squirrel that has committed suicide, various sleeping dogs, and a horse with a wooden sign reading “INRI” above it), children hanging from their necks, Nazi salutes, the pope crushed by a meteorite, a woman clutching her breasts, a miniature man sitting atop a safe, a kneeling Adolf Hitler, an elephant draped in a KKK hood, a shopping cart, a barefoot JFK in his coffin, a chessboard composed of heroes and villains, a boy sitting at a desk with pencils pierced through his hands, an elderly woman in a refrigerator, a giant foosball table, and, yes, the enormous hand in which all fingers but the raised middle one have been cut off. Cattelan is also physically present in the installation, hanging in effigy wearing a Joseph Beuys suit on a Marcel Breuer clothing rack and with his last name shining in white neon script. Each turn offers museumgoers a fresh perspective on Cattelan’s work, with revolving juxtapositions placing the seemingly chaotic arrangement into continually changing contexts, resulting in an endless array of new comparisons that dazzle and delight. Even the interactive app associated with the show is unusual and offbeat, hosted by John Waters and featuring interviews with artists, critics, gallerists, and curators. Although “All” is filled with so many references to death, at its heart it is really a celebration of the oddity of life, an exciting and dare we say, fun retrospective that only a character like Cattelan could have put together. The exhibition closes on January 22 with the pay-what-you-wish panel discussion “The Last Word,” in which approximately twenty artists from a multitude of disciplines, including writers, comedians, philosophers, filmmakers, and many others, will gather together to talk about Cattelan’s impending career shift from 6:00 pm through 1:00 am. In addition, Cattelan will be at the Guggenheim on January 9 at 6:00 to sign copies of the exhibition catalog and celebrate the release of the new issue of Toilet Paper, with the museum remaining open until 7:45 and the store until 8:15 that night.