twi-ny recommended events

PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS is part of annual Paul Taylor season at City Center (photo by Paul B. Goode)

City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
February 22 – March 6, $10-$150
www.ptdc.org
www.nycitycenter.org

Called the “naughty boy” of dance by Martha Graham more than fifty years ago, Paul Taylor has been pushing the envelope for some six decades. The Washington, DC, native has taken his company to more than five hundred cities in sixty-two countries, and today the Paul Taylor Dance Company kicks off its annual season at City Center with a gala performance and dinner at Cipriani 42nd St. with a bill that includes Esplanade, the New York premiere of Three Dubious Memories, and Oh, You Kid!, with live music by Rick Benjamin’s Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. The season continues through March 6 with another New York premiere, Phantasmagoria, in addition to such repertory pieces as The Word, Brief Encounters, Cloven Kingdom, Promethean Fire, Company B, Orbs, Also Playing, and Dust. On March 1, they will present a Great Depression Special, pairing Black Tuesday with Speaking in Tongues; tickets are still available in the $5 and $19.29 seats. While most of the post-1987 works feature costumes by longtime Woody Allen set designer Santo Loquasto, Alex Katz designed the set and costumes for 1966’s Orbs, while John Rawlings handled the costumes for 1975’s Esplanade, Rawlings and Scott Barrie were responsible for 1976’s Cloven Kingdom, and Gene Moore took care of Dust. The lighting is by the inimitable Jennifer Tipton, with the pieces set to a wide range of music, from Beethoven, Bach, and Donizetti to Poulenc, Debussy, and the Andrews Sisters.

DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO IS AN OVERPROTECTIVE PARENT? (MAYBE EVEN YOU? OR YOUR SPOUSE?)

Last April, we conducted a twi-ny talk with Lenore Skenazy, the longtime New York City columnist and creator of Free-Range Kids, a book and website that she considers “a commonsense approach to parenting in these overprotective times.” She was staging the controversial Take Our Children to the Park . . . and Leave Them There Day, meant to “start giving our kids the freedom and fun that helps them grow up happy, healthy, and maybe even a little sunburnt,” she explained. Then, in July, she offered free Free-Range tutorials in which she’d come into families’ homes to give advice on how to not be such overprotective helicopter parents. Now Skenazy, a frequent guest on television news programs, is putting together her own reality show “for a popular TV network,” and she’s seeking anxious, overprotective parents in New York City and Toronto to participate. Here’s the criteria: “Do you know someone who is constantly worried about their child? Worried about whether their child is safe and/or whether they are doing well enough academically, socially, or athletically? Do you know any helicopter parents who hover over their child constantly, ready to swoop in if anything remotely ‘bad’ happens? Most parents do worry, but is it so severe that it is affecting their relationship with their children or with their family? If so, we can help them! Or you!” Just send your — or their — name, phone number, and brief description to slee@cineflix.com or call Sylvia Lee at 1-416-504-7317 ext 618. Good luck!

RED DOT ART FAIR 2011

Red Dot will move into SoHo this year and will host benefit for West Harlem Art Fund (photo courtesy of Kyle Dean Reinford)

82Mercer
82 Mercer St. between Spring & Broome Sts.
March 3-6, Day Pass $10, Week Pass $20
917-273-8621
www.reddotfair.com

Armory Week is heading to New York for its annual visit, paving the way for all kinds of art fairs all over town March 3-6. Over the course of the next ten days, we’ll be featuring every one of them, beginning with Red Dot New York, which this year moves into 82Mercer in SoHo, where approximately fifty international exhibitors will be presenting works, including Art Charlotte, Chung Jark, Galerie Edel, Gana Art, Independent Press, Brenda Taylor, and Wellside. Founded by George Billis, who has galleries on La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles and West 26th St. in Chelsea, Red Dot’s mission is to “create a venue for art galleries seeking to present work of lasting value and beyond current trends.” The opening reception on March 3 ($20) will benefit the West Harlem Art Fund; on March 4, Red Dot will host a cocktail party at the Strand Hotel, and on Saturday it will unveil Patrick Singh’s “Bridging Stone Figures,” which will be digitally projected onto the Manhattan Bridge. Red Dot also hosts the Korean Art Show, which made an impressive debut last year, at no extra admission charge.

CAROLE BOUQUET: LETTRES À GÉNICA

Carole Bouquet will be reading Antonin Artaud’s letters to Génica Athanasiou in special FIAF presentation (photo © Fuerte)

French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Thursday, February 24, $50, 8:00
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

French actress and model Carole Bouquet, who has starred in such films as That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977), Blank Generation (Uli Lommel, 1980), For Your Eyes Only (John Glen, 1981), and Lucie Aubrac (Claude Berri, 1997), will be making a rare stage appearance in New York City on February 24 for a one-night-only presentation of Lettres à Génica at the French Institute Alliance Française. Bouquet will be reading love letters sent from innovative poet, actor, mystic, and Theatre of Cruelty provocateur Antonin Artaud to his girlfriend, Romanian actress Génica Athanasiou. Artaud, who suffered most of his life from psychological problems, and Athanasiou teamed up on such projects as 1928’s La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), which was written by Artaud and starred Athanasiou; directed by Gemaine Dulac, it is considered to be the first surrealist film. Bouquet will read the letters in French, with English supertitles. Tickets are $50, but FIAF is offering a special two-event package for $85, pairing Lettres à Génica with the March 3 New York premiere of Francis Huster’s La Peste, in which the French actor presents his one-man performance of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, The Plague.

FRIGID NEW YORK

Christel Bartelse takes the audience on a very different kind of wedding and honeymoon in Frigid New York show ONEymoon

Kraine Theater, 85 East Fourth St.
Red Room, 85 East Fourth St.
Under St. Marks, 94 St. Marks Pl.
February 23 – March 6, $10-$16
www.frigidnewyork.info

The fifth annual Frigid New York offers lovers of indie experimental theater the chance to come in from the cold on the Lower East Side to experience short bursts of low-budget productions, with all tickets a mere $10-$16. Taking place at the Kraine Theater, the Red Room, and Under St. Marks, the official Fringe Festival presentation features thirty shows all running less than an hour, from emerging and established artists who will garner all the profits. Under St. Marks is home to the most provocatively titled shows, including Kevin J. Thornton’s I Love You (We’re F*#ked), Bricken Sparacino’s I’m Not Sure I Like the Way You Licked Me, Dutch Girl’s ONEymoon (A Honeymoon for One), and Tania Katan’s Saving Tania’s Privates. The Kraine Theater is getting in on the action as well, with Matthew Wells’s femme fatale noir homage Scarlet Woman, Ben Thompson’s bromance Fucking Girls, and Una Aya Osato’s one-woman show JapJAP; even Scott Durwood’s tamer-sounding Hi, How Can I Help You? is about dominatrixes. Not wanting to be left out in the cold, the Red Room is offering Jennifer Lieberman’s one-woman show, Year of the Slut. But not all of the productions deal with sex and sexuality or contain double-entendre titles; there’s also My Pal Izzy — The Early Life and Music of Irving Berlin, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wonder Woman: A How to Guide for Little Jewish Girls, Fate, Fury, and Musical Theatre: A Kind of Cabaret, and Yippie! Founded in 2007 by Horse Trade and EXIT Theatre, Frigid New York proclaims, “New York City is an indisputable hotbed of groundbreaking talent. We’re proud to once again provide this opportunity for ingenuity to thrive in a venue that values freedom of expression and artistic determination.”

HOLIDAY MONDAYS: QUEENS MUSEUM

Luis Márquez, “Untitled,” exhibition print from original negative, 1940 (courtesy Luis Marquez Archive, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Monday, February 21, free, 11:00 Am – 4:00 pm
718-592-9700
www.queensmuseum.org

The Queens Museum of Art, which is usually closed on Mondays (and Tuesdays), will open its doors on Presidents’ Day, offering free admission from 11:00 to 4:00. Among the special programs will be family-friendly tours and arts & crafts workshops as well as free refreshments. Currently on view through March 6 is “Luis Márquez in the World of Tomorrow: Mexican Identity and the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair,” comprising more than eighty photographs taken by Luis Márquez, who served as the Mexican Pavilion’s official photographer and art adviser, in addition to costumes that were displayed at the pavilion and other historical artifacts and memorabilia. The Queens Museum also has several long-term installations, including “The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass,” “A Watershed Moment: Celebrating the Homecoming of the Relief Map of the New York City Water Supply System,” and “The Panorama of the City of New York,” a spectacular up-to-date, nearly ten-thousand-square-foot architectural rendering of all five boroughs, containing approximately nine hundred thousand individual models of apartment buildings, parks, cultural institutions, bridges, airports, and other structures.

JIM CAMPBELL

Jim Campbell, “Scattered Light,” approximately 2,000 LED lights, wire, custom electronics, 2010 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)


“Scattered Light/Broken Window”: Madison Square Park, 23rd St. & Fifth Ave., free, extended through March 7
“4 Works”: Hosfelt Gallery, 531 West 36th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., Wednesday – Saturday 10:00 am – 6:00 pm, free, extended through March 19
www.hosfeltgallery.com
www.madisonsquarepark.org/art

An MIT grad with dual degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics, Chicago-born digital-media artist Jim Campbell has been creating complex light sculptures built around the subjects of perception and memory for more than twenty years. Since October 21, his three-dimensional “Scattered Light” has been dazzling the public on the oval lawn in the middle of Madison Square Park, a twenty-foot-high, eighty-foot-wide hanging grid consisting of nearly two thousand LED lights that depict people passing by in shadows. Although one might assume that it is relaying actual movement — many of his previous works have incorporated live processing — in this case, it is all preprogrammed by computer, adding an extra layer of mystery. Be sure to walk all around the sculpture to get its full impact. “Scattered Light” is supplemented by “Broken Window,” a six-foot-by-six-foot glass-brick wall near the corner of 23rd St. & Fifth Ave. that appears to be a blurry window showing live movement of people and cars making their way through the Flatiron Triangle but is actually composed of previously shot video, and “Voices in the Subway Station,” a series of rhythmically modulated lights on the ground that seem to be holding their own conversation. Campbell’s largest public installation ever — he’s also had commissions in Phoenix, Battery Park, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Berlin, Paris, San Diego, Montreux, and his longtime hometown of San Francisco — “Scattered Light” will remain on view through March 7.

Jim Campbell, “Scattered 17,” 17 panels of 192 LED lights each, plexiglass, custom electronics, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In conjunction with the Madison Square Park installation, Campbell is also having a solo show indoors at Hosfelt Gallery on West 36th St., featuring four new technology-based works from 2010-11 spread around the dark space. “Scattered 17” consists of seventeen LED panels of 192 lights apiece that appear to be jutting out from a black wall but are not as they show what look like birds flying across the lighted rectangles that recall television sets. Visitors can walk into “Tilted Plane,” a room in which 256 doctored LED lightbulbs hang from the ceiling at an incline; although it is fun wandering around the lights, you’ll get a better feel for the piece as a whole by standing in one of the corners. “Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio” is composed of one row of wires filled with LEDs that takes you on a short trip through the city; as with “Scattered Light,” look through your camera lens for the best viewing experience. And “Home Movies (Glimpse)” is gimmicky but intriguing, confounding visitors by appearing to click through a series of family slides that include movement within them. The show also includes the red “Reconstruction #9 (Ganges)” next to the office, in which you’ll find the blue and white “Reconstruction #3” and “Fundamental Interval (Tourists),” a plexiglass box of 1,728 LEDs depicting people and ghostly shadows moving through a train station. There’s something innately satisfying in Campbell’s work, especially if you don’t get caught up in the technology and just let the intoxicating, often dreamlike visuals take you away.