Who:New Camerata Opera What: French opera double bill Where:Irondale Center, 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn When: Friday, September 16 and 23, and Saturday, September 17 and 24, $25-$80, 8:00 Why: New Camerata Opera (NCO) will present a double bill of French one-act operas dealing with time on Friday and Saturday at Irondale Center in Brooklyn to kick off the company’s seventh season. With music director and conductor Kamal Khan and stage director John de los Santos, NCO will perform composer Lili Boulanger and librettist Eugène Adenis’s Faust et Hélène, adapted from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s retelling and focusing on the deal Faust makes with Méphistophélès. That will be followed by Maurice Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, in which clockmaker Torquemada and his wife, Concepción, take stock of her infidelity. The cast features Eva Parr and Tesia Kwarteng as Concepción and Hélène, Victor Khodadad and Chris Carr as Faust and Gonzalve, Markel Reed and Kyle Oliver as Méphistophélès and Ramiro, Gabriel Hernandez and Anthony Laciura as Torquemada, and Angky Budiardjono and Andy Dwan as Don Iñigo Gomez, with a seventeen-person orchestra and costumes by Ashley Soliman, lighting by Joshua Rose, and projections and set design by Atom Moore.
James Caan puffs on a cigar in Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket
THE CAAN FILM FESTIVAL
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
September 16 – October 9
718-777-6800 movingimage.us
“Actors have bodyguards and entourages not because anybody wants to hurt them — who would want to hurt an actor? — but because they want to get recognized. God forbid someone doesn’t recognize them,” James Caan once said. He might not have been after fame and fortune, but he quickly became one of the most recognizable men in Hollywood history.
There was an outpouring of grief when Caan died this past July at the age of eighty-two. The Bronx-born, Sunnyside-raised actor appeared in more than ninety films and two dozen television shows, and when he was onscreen, it was impossible to take your eyes off him; he commanded the audience’s attention whether he was the star or making a cameo. Despite his critical and popular success, he was nominated for only one Oscar, for The Godfather, and one Emmy, for Brian’s Song.
The Killer Elite is part of MoMI tribute to James Caan
The Museum of the Moving Image pays tribute to Caan with its fourth not-quite-annual Caan Film Festival, running September 16 to October 9 and consisting of twelve of his films, from Howard Hawks’s 1966 El Dorado with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum and Curtis Harrington’s 1967 Games to Wes Anderson’s 1996 Bottle Rocket and Jon Favreau’s 203 Elf. Caan is his trademark tough guy with a conscience in Sam Peckinpah’s 1975 The Killer Elite, Michael Mann’s 1981 Thief, and Karel Reisz’s intense 1974 The Gambler while showing other sides of himself in Mark Rydell’s 1977 Harry and Walter Go to New York, Rob Reiner’s 1990 Misery, Rydell’s 1973 Cinderella Liberty, and Graham Baker’s 1988 Alien Nation, in which he teams up with a cop from another planet. It all kicks off with The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece that is as powerful as ever, as is Caan’s blazing performance as Sonny Corleone, the role he will always be most recognized for, entourage or not.
Who:Hew Locke, Tumelo Mosaka, Kelly Baum What: Conversation about “The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt” Where:Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. When: Thursday, September 15, free with RSVP, 6:30 Why: On September 15, Scotland-born, Guyana-raised, London-based sculptor Hew Locke will unveil his Met Museum facade commission, Gilt, which will be on view through May 23, 2023. The four-piece work references the Met collection, focusing on appropriation, power, and colonialism through a theatrical lens.
“Hew Locke creates emotionally powerful and visually striking work that will stop you in your tracks. This site-responsive commission for the museum’s facade will be informed by Locke’s deep knowledge of the Met’s collection and will reference the institution in ways both direct and indirect, recovering and connecting histories across continents, oceans, and time periods,” Met director Max Hollein said in a statement. Curator Sheena Wagstaff added, “Hew Locke uses a delirious aesthetic of abundance and excess to reflect themes of deep urgency in the past and present, including wealth, imperial power, and prestige, astutely critiquing their visual iconography through reclamation.”
The third facade commission, following Wangechi Mutu’s The NewOnes, will free Us and Carol Bove’s The séances aren’t helping, Locke’s aptly titled Gilt will be explored in a panel discussion September 15 at 6:30 with Locke, Columbia University director and curator Tumelo Mosaka, and Met curator Kelly Baum; you can attend in person at the Met’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium or watch the livestream online.
Visitors race for the crown in the “Love & Lust Deity Derby” at the Museum of Sex (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
SUPERFUNLAND: JOURNEY INTO THE EROTIC CARNIVAL
Museum of Sex
233 Fifth Ave. at 27th St.
Through October 23, $36-$39
212-689-6337 www.museumofsex.com www.superfunland.com
In 2015, I had super fun at the Museum of Sex’s interactive “Funland: Pleasures & Perils of the Erotic Fairground,” a kinky collection of participatory installations that reimagined booths at county fairs, with devilishly delightful twists. That theme reaches new heights in the follow-up, “Super Funland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival,” which is, as its name promises, also super fun, even more so than its predecessor.
Continuing through October 23, the exhibition features more than a dozen sensual, risqué, whimsical, and ribald games, rides, and challenges to titillate the senses. But as with most shows at MoSex, it is well curated, with ample history to accompany the bacchanalian revelry. Miniatures from the collection of Al Stencell, former president of the Circus Historical Society and the author of Seeing Is Believing: America’s Sideshows and Girl Show: Into the Canvas World of Bump and Grind, and a fanciful 180-degree short film help put the eroticism of fairs and carnivals into cultural perspective, going back to ancient Rome and Greece and celebrating the carnal boom of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A two-floor slide ushers adventurous participants to more bawdy installations in “Super Funland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Stardust Lane” is a dizzying erogenous kaleidoscope lined with small dioramas playing archival footage from world’s fairs and Coney Island’s heyday. “Tunnel of Love” is a 4D journey into human orifices. “Jump for Joy” is a bouncy castle of massive mammaries, while “Glory Stall” gives visitors the opportunity to, well, “burp the worm” and “yank that plank.” You can put an image of yourself in the middle of the action at the “Porn-a-Matic” screen-test booth, see how passionate you and your partner are at the very public “Lucky Lips Make Out Challenge,” compete for prizes in the “Love & Lust Deity Derby,” get married (complete with rings) at “AutoWed,” or capture your own reward in the “Claw, Pinch, and Grab” games.
The warmly lit, mirrored “Climbx” Ecstatic Climbing Challenge leads to a steamy slide that deposits you through hot lips and out a striped bottom to a lower floor where you can get your fortune told by a superstar in “RuPaul Speaks,” reveal your G-spot skill to win a CBD love elixir in “The Siren,” and grab some “licker” at the “Carnal Carnival Bar,” including such specialty cocktails as Mosex on the Beach, Penis Colada, and several with names that are too raunchy to print here. You can become a “Pole Star” by following the prompts as you dance on a stripper pole, then engage in various positions with a companion — clothes on, please — in “Kama Ultra.”`
Boasting contributions from Bompas and Parr, Droog, Bart Hess, Rebecca Purcell, Snøhetta, and more, “Super Funland” is indeed super fun, but MoSex also has other, more serious exhibitions that are definitely worth your time. The multimedia “Porno Chic to Sex Positivity: Erotic Content & the Mainstream, 1960 till Today” looks at how the use of erotic content in mainstream culture has developed over the last sixty years, divided into “A Pornographic Avant-Garde,” “Sexualized Marketing,” “Scandalous Scenes of Cinema,” and “Music: an Erotic Form.” MoSex has reached into its permanent collection of more than fifteen thousand objects for “Artifact (xxx): Selections from Secret Collections,” comprising a wide array of items, from a blow-up doll, a lotus shoe, and an intriguing sex chair to various toys, magazines, and even a Picasso etching (10 May 1968). And “F*CK ART: the body & its absence” consists of painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation by eighteen artists, including Coyote Park, Alina Perez, Cherry Brice Jr., Justin Yoon, Erin M. Riley, and Pixy Liao. Finally, make sure you have plenty of time to browse in the store, which is an exhibition all its own.
Sarah Cameron Sunde will conclude thirteen-year durational project in New York City on September 14 (photo courtesy Sarah Cameron Sunde)
Who:Sarah Cameron Sunde What: Conclusion of nine-year artistic environmental journey Where:Hallet’s Cove, special viewing areas, and online When: Wednesday, September 14, free, 7:27 am – 8:06 pm Why: Harlem-based interdisciplinary artist and director Sarah Cameron Sunde began 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea back in 2013, in which she stands in bodies of water for full twelve-plus-hour tidal cycles, with the public invited to join her in person or online. The work, which has been performed on six continents, was inspired by the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, to the community, humanity, and artists specifically. The piece comes to its conclusion on September 14 with 36.5 / New York Estuary, when Sunde will be at Hallet’s Cove at 31-10 Vernon Blvd.; you can go in the water with her, watch the livestream at home or with others at Brookfield Place, Manhattan West, Riverside Park Conservancy, Gallatin Galleries at NYU, Mercury Store in Brooklyn, the RISE center in Far Rockaway, or the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor in Staten Island, or check it out from viewing stations on the northern tip of Roosevelt Island or the Upper East Side. There will also be remote participants from Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, the Netherlands, and Aotearoa—New Zealand. In conjunction with the finale, Sunde cofounded Kin to the Cove, a community organization that hosts site-specific workshops, discussions, and other events.
The work has previously been performed in Maine, Mexico, San Francisco Bay, the Netherlands, the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, the Bay of All Saints in Brazil, Bodo Inlet in Kenya, and Te Manukanukatanga ō Hoturoa in Tāmaki Makaurau. Sunde explained in a statement, “36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea is my attempt to translate the seemingly abstract idea of climate change and sea-level rise into our bodies. It’s also about Time on many different scales: a durational work that unfolds over thirteen hours that has taken nearly a decade to complete. The tide tracks time on my body viscerally, which functions as a metaphor for the changing environment. The water is my collaborator, and the risks are real. I stay present in the sensations, attempt to embody the ocean, and find a way to endure the struggle while decentering my human experience and acknowledging potential futures. The public is invited to stand in the water with me for however long they like and to participate in a series of artistic interventions from the shore, creating a human clock that communicates to me each hour as it passes.”
On October 6 at 6:00, NYU dean for the humanities Una Chaudhuri will moderate “Standing with the Sea: Reflections on Sarah Cameron Sunde’s 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea” at Gardner Commons in Shimkin Hall, followed by a screening of an updated video on the outside Bobst Library wall.
Bijayini Satpathy concludes her MetLiveArts residency on September 13 (photo courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Who:Bijayini Satpathy What:MetLiveArts performance Where: Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. When: Tuesday, September 13, $35+ (includes museum admission), 7:00 Why: MetLiveArts artist in residence Bijayini Satpathy concludes her residency with Dohā, taking place September 13 at 7:00 in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. In the evening-length work, the Indian principal dancer, master teacher, and respected scholar explores ritualized prayer while embracing playfulness as she searches for the divine. Satpathy will also give give a talk on Odissi dance at the New York Public Library on September 19 at 6:00 as part of the new Dr. Sunil Kothari Honorary Lecture series; admission is free with advance registration.
Who:Red Bull Theater What: Online benefit reading and free discussions Where:Red Bull Theater online When: Monday, September 12, $25, 7:30 Why: Red Bull Theater kicked off its “Hispanic Golden Age Classics — Lope de Vega” initiative on September 8 with the panel discussion “Lope de Vega & Shakespeare,” exploring how the Bard and Spanish playwright and novelist Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio both wrote works about the Capulets and the Montagues; UCLA professor Barbara Fuchs and UCLA PhD candidate Rhonda Sharrah were joined by actor Dakin Matthews, who wrote the new rhyming translation that is being used. The “Diversifying the Classics” programming is centered by a live, online reading of Lope de Vega’s The Capulets and the Montagues (Castelvines y Monteses) on September 12 at 7:30 (available through September 18 at 11:59 pm), performed by Junior Nyong’o as Romeo and Cara Ricketts as Juliet, along with Anita Castillo-Halvorssen, Christian DeMarais, Carson Elrod, Topher Embrey, Alejandra Escalante, Jake Hart, Paco Lozano, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Timothy D. Stickney, and Matthews, directed by Melia Bensussen. On September 15 at 7:30, members of the creative team will participate in the interactive online Bull Session “The Capulets and the Montagues.”
“Castelvines y Monteses is the sixth comedia I have translated, and my first Lopean adventure — after three Alarcóns, one Tirso, and one Moreto. It was a bracing experience to dip for the first time into the font from which sprang all later comedias,” Matthews explains in an introductory essay. “And it was just as bracing to work with material that so closely accorded with that of Shakespeare, who has been the subject of my lifelong fascination and study. And there, of course, lies the first trap that I — and any translator who comes to Lope’s version of the Romeo and Juliet story — must try to avoid. (Which I did not make any easier on myself, I confess, by my determination to use the equivalent Shakespearean proper names in an effort to make the play more appealing to English-speaking producers and audiences.)” Meanwhile, Sharrah notes, “Miguel de Cervantes, [Lope’s] contemporary and rival, may not have meant it entirely as a compliment when he called Lope a ‘monster of nature’ (monstruo de la naturaleza). Yet Lope’s prodigious output was fundamental to developing the theater of his age, and to our understanding of it today. The monster of nature left us many gifts.”
