twi-ny recommended events

RISK + REWARD: PERFORMANCE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

John Kelly will welcome MAD visitors into open rehearsals of his updated version of FIND MY WAY HOME

Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Broadway
Through December 8
212-299-7777
www.madmuseum.org

The Museum of Art & Design’s extremely promising inaugural Risk + Reward performance series kicked off last Saturday with Sarah Maxfield’s all-day site-specific “Knowing the Score: An Investigation of Improvisational Structures” and continues this week with John Kelly presenting a work-in-progress reexamination of his 1988 piece Find My Way Home, which was previously revised in 1998. On September 28 from 3:00 to 6:00 and September 29 from 7:00 to 9:00, museumgoers will be able to watch Kelly conduct open rehearsals for the multimedia dance-theater project, which moves the Greek myth of Orpheus, the god of music, to the Great Depression. On September 30 at 7:00, Kelly will stage a ticketed ($15-$18) concert version of the production. Last December, Kelly, whose many risks always lead to myriad rewards, revisited his wonderful Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, at La MaMa, so we can’t wait to see what he does with Find My Way Home, which will be presented in full October 21-29 at New York Live Arts. Risk + Reward continues October 10 with the social-intervention-based performance “A New Discovery: Queer Immigration in Perspective”; on November 11-12 with Me, Michelle, a new duet about Cleopatra by choreographers Jack Ferver and Michelle Mola in conjunction with Performa 11; and concludes December 8 with “Benjamin Fredrickson, Artist,” a first-ever one-man show by the photographer dealing with his life and work.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL SPECIAL EVENTS: 10th ANNIVERSARY SCREENING OF SPIRITED AWAY

SPIRITED AWAY is celebrating its tenth anniversary at the New York Film Festival with two special screenings

SPIRITED AWAY (SEN TO CHIHIRO NO KAMIKAKUSHI) (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St.
Saturday, October 1, Howard Gilman Theater, $20, 7:00
Friday, October 14: Francesca Beale Theater, $20, 4:00
Festival runs September 30 – October 16
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Prepare to have your spirits lifted up and away in this sensational animated feature from Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki. Ten-year-old Chihiro is unhappy about moving to a new home despite her parents’ best efforts to convince her otherwise. When her father takes a wrong turn on the road, the family ends up in an oddly deserted village that ten-year-old Chihiro soon finds out is a lot more than it seems. Chihiro’s adventures through this dreamlike, surreal, magical place filled with bizarre characters and evil beings are unforgettable, with nuances and references from such diverse works as The Wizard Of Oz and The Seventh Seal. The sheer visual beauty of the animation is staggering; many of the backgrounds are reminiscent of Impressionism. The film includes the voice talents of Daveigh Chase (Chihiro), Jason Marsden (Haku), Susan Egan (Lin), Michael Chiklis (Chihiro’s father), Lauren Holly (Chihiro’s mother), Suzanne Pleshette (Yubaba and Zeniba), John Ratzenberger (assistant manager), David Ogden Stiers (Kamaji), and Tara Strong (baby Boh). Joe Hisaishi’s maudlin music is way overpraised, as usual, but this Japanese box-office champ deservedly won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and was named Best Asian Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have also made such adult-friendly animated treasures as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki’s Dleivery Service (1989), and Porco Rosso (1992). Spirited Away is having two special screenings at the New York Film Festival this year in honor of the marvelous fairy tale’s tenth anniversary; if you’ve never seen it, the big screen is definitely the way to go.

CSS: “HITS ME LIKE A ROCK”

Brazilian sensation CSS has just released the video for their bouncy pop song “Hits Me Like a Rock,” from their latest release, La Liberación (Fontana, August 2011). You can catch Lovefoxxx, Adriano Cintra, Luiza Sá, Ana Rezende, and Carolina Parra at Webster Hall on October 22, on a bill with MEN and EMA.

BERNHARD SCHLINK: THE WEEKEND

BookCourt
163 Court St. between Dean & Pacific Sts.
Tuesday, September 27, free, 7:00
718-875-3677
www.bookcourt.org

German writer Bernhard Schlink, whose 1995 novel, The Reader, was turned into a 2008 film directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet, will be at BookCourt in Brooklyn on September 27 for a reading and signing of the paperback edition of his latest book, The Weekend (Vintage International, September 27, 2011, $15). A different kind of Big Chill, the novel is set in a rural estate where a group of old friends have gathered to celebrate the early release of Jörg, who has spent more than two decades in prison for having committed murder related to the group’s revolutionary terrorist activities. But everyone is much older now and has gone their separate ways, leading to crises of conscience, reevaluating past relationships, dealing with suicide, and reexamining their lives individually and as a whole, with each chapter seen through a different character’s eyes. “Henner didn’t know what to make of the weekend they were about to spend together, and what he should expect from it: from meeting Jörg again, along with Christiane and his other old friends,” Schlink writes at the beginning of the second chapter. “When Christiane’s call had come, he had said yes right away. Because he had heard a plea in her voice? Because a friendship formed in youth can claim a lifelong loyalty? Out of curiosity?”

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL MASTERWORKS: BEN-HUR

New digital restoration of BEN-HUR will have special screening at the New York Film Festival

BEN-HUR (William Wyler, 1959)
Alice Tully Hall
1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Saturday, October 1, $24, 10:30 am
Festival runs September 30 – October 16
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

One of the grandest epics ever made, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur is screening October 1 at Alice Tully Hall as part of the New York Film Festival’s Masterworks sidebar, which also includes Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Sara Driver’s You Are Not I, and the thirty-seven-film “Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses: Celebrating the Nikkatsu Centennial.” The digital restoration of Wyler’s remake of Fred Niblo’s 1925 silent version starring Ramón Novarro and Francis X. Bushman (there was also a fifteen-minute Ben Hur made in 1907, all adapted from Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel) celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the eleven-time Oscar winner, which garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur), Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith as Sheik Ilderim), Best Score (Miklós Rózsa), Best Cinematography, Best Set Decoration, Best Costume Design, and Best Special Effects, among other trophies. The $15 million blockbuster tells the story of two childhood friends, Judah Ben-Hur and Messala (Stephen Boyd), who get caught up in religion, politics, and slavery in first-century Rome and eventually have a magnificent showdown on the chariot course. As cinema spectacles go, they don’t get much better than this. The special screening at the New York Film Festival will be introduced by Wyler’s daughter Catherine and Heston’s son Fraser.

GLENN JONES

West Park Presbyterian Church
165 West 86th St.
Sunday, September 25, $15, 7:00
www.thrilljockey.com

Glenn Jones is a god of the guitar, so it’s only fitting that he’s holding his record release party for the extraordinary The Wanting (Thrill Jockey, September 13, 2011) in a place of God, the West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th St. in a program tonight with Hauschka: A Prepared Piano Performance. On the gorgeous new disc, Jones, who came of age in the late ’60s and acknowledges that his “head was blown off by Jimi Hendrix’s second album,” leading to getting his first guitar at the age of fourteen, plays acoustic steel string, six-string, ten-string, and bottleneck guitars and a five-string open-back banjo on The Wanting, which features such dazzling sonic forays as “A Snapshot of Mom, Scotland, 1957,” “The Great Swamp Way Rout,” “Anchor Chain Blues,” and “Twenty-three Years in Happy Valley, or Love Among the Chickenshit,” each with its own unique tuning. Recorded in his apartment in Massachusetts, the album reveals the continuing influence of John Fahey on Jones, who in 1997, in the liner notes to Fahey’s The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, wrote, “I was introduced to the music of John Fahey in the early ’70s by my high school art teacher, who played me ‘The River Medley’ from the first of his two Reprise albums, Of Rivers and Religions. The first album I bought myself was Fahey’s fourth for his Takoma label, The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party. It was, for me, one of those life-changing albums, important as only the right album at the right time is to a curious kid with a growing interest in esoteric music.” Jones has also just edited John Fahey: Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You (The Fonotone Years 1958-1965), an eighty-eighty-page book with five CDs that comes out on October 11. The Wanting concludes with the seventeen-minute duet “The Orca Grande Cement Factory at Victorville,” with Chris Corsano on drums, a tour de force for Jones and his remarkable mastery of his instrument. The show tonight with Hauschka at the West Park Presbyterian Church should be, as one of Jones’s new songs says, “Of Its Own Kind.”

PARTY ON THE INTREPID

Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum
Pier 86, 12th Ave. & 46th St.
Thursday, September 29, free with RSVP, 7:00
www.intrepidmuseum.org

Pandora internet radio, the music service based on the Music Genome Project to serve each individual’s particular tastes, and State Fare are teaming up to sponsor a free concert on board the Intrepid on Thursday, September 29, a cool lineup featuring DJ Vice, the Hold Steady, and the Roots, playing on a stage on the aircraft carrier’s flight deck. Although admission is free, you must RSVP to get on the first come, first served guest list RSVP, which does not guarantee entrance, but you won’t be able to get in at all without it. There will also be vendors, food trucks, and more on hand for what should be a very hot show.