twi-ny recommended events

DIVINALE

WOMEN OF WINE WEEK
City Winery
155 Varick St.
March 8-13, $40-$75
212-608-0555
www.citywinery.com
www.divinale.com

We regularly feature great music events at City Winery, but we shouldn’t forget about how the venue got its name. From March 8 through 13, City Winery will be celebrating the women of wine with a festival of tastings, talks, dinners, and other special events. Today, International Women’s Day, features Cristina Mariani-May leading a tasting of Castello Banfi, Italy’s four-time International Winery of the Year that was started by Mariani-May’s grandfather in 1919. On March 9, winemaker Melissa Stackhouse helms a tasting of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from La Crema in Sonoma; on March 10, sommelier and wine director Mollie Battenhouse hosts a Women of Wine World Wine Tour with wine coaches and Cathy Corison, Laura Brunelli, Isabel Ferrando, and Brigitte Roch; March 11 is Working Women’s Evening, featuring food by Anne Burrell and Lee Anne Wong and wine poured by Master of Wine Lisa Granik; Alessia Antinori takes oenophiles on an afternoon Tuscan Wine Tour for lunch, followed at night by a BYOB Dinner Celebrating the Wines of Helen Turley, hosted by Granik, during which you can bring your own wine with no corkage fee; and the party concludes on March 13 with a Charity Grand Tasting of more than seventy wines produced by women, along with seminars, benefiting the Global Fund for Women.

DAN GRAHAM: WORK BETWEEN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Dan Graham, seen here last year at the Whitney, will discuss art and architecture March 7 at the Cooper Union (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Great Hall at the Cooper Union
7 East Seventh St.
Sunday, March 7, free, 6:00
www.cooper.edu

Last year the Whitney celebrated the career of iconoclastic, influential artist Dan Graham with a superb career retrospective that we called “a comprehensive survey that includes film and video, photographs, writings, a sound piece, and Graham’s complex architectural installations that play with perception and reality. Graham was an early conceptualist involved in performance art, examining mechanical reproduction and suburban repetition while expanding the relationship between artist and viewer.” Graham will be making a very special appearance at the Cooper Union tonight, discussing the intersection of art and architecture in his wide-ranging work. Graham is a quirky, quixotic speaker who can get very excited about his topics, so this should be a fascinating, unique event, even better because it’s free.

ARMORY ARTS WEEK: SITE FEST ’10

sitefest2

Multiple locations in Bushwick
March 6-7, 1:00 – 9:00 (music continues past midnight)
Suggested donation for certain events $5, day pass $10, weekend pass $20
www.artsinbushwick.wordpress.com

For something a little different during Armory Arts Week, head out to Brooklyn for two days of open studios, gallery openings, live performances, and more at the second annual SITE Fest. Organized by Arts in Bushwick, the festival has three primary theater, dance, and performance art hubs — 3rd Ward on Morgan Ave., Chez Bushwick on Boerum St., and the Grace Exhibition Space on Broadway — while Goodbye Blue Monday will be home base for much of the live music, curated by ionSOUND. Among the performers scheduled to appear are Kung Fu Crimewave, Larkin Grimm, Meng-Hsuan Wu, Homunculus Mask Theater, Yoo & Dancers, Jenny Vogel, Synthesis Dance Project, HoverBound, the Movement Farm, Ling-Fen Chien, and the Omen Project. There will also be site-specific installations, interactive performances, artist talks, film screenings, sketch comedy, and panel discussions at such satellite sites as the Bushwick Starr, English Kills Gallery, the Petri Space, Bushwick Music Studios, House of Yes, Brooklyn Fireproof Gallery, and many others.

VICTOR FLEMING

Clara Bow reveals all in Victor Fleming’s HULA (courtesy Photofest)

Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
March 5-18
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

For years, one of our favorite trivia questions has involved naming the director of GONE WITH THE WIND and THE WIZARD OF OZ. Not only do most people not know who made those classic films, but when we tell them that they were both credited to the same man, Victor Fleming, the answer usually is accompanied by a shrug. (Interestingly, he was called in to take over both of those epics following situations with other directors.) Fleming is among the least well known and studied filmmakers despite a resume that also includes CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, A GUY NAMED JOE, THE VIRGINIAN, TREASURE ISLAND, JOAN OF ARC, and DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. Film Forum will be screening twenty-three of his films through March 18, from 1919’s WHEN THE CLOUDS ROLL BY to 1948’s JOAN OF ARC, with enticing double features of RED DUST (1932) and BOMBSHELL (1933), THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) and CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS (1937), A GUY NAMED JOE (1943) and TEST PILOT (1938), and others. Fleming worked with the best in the business; among the stars in this series are Douglas Fairbanks, Myrna Loy, Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Gary Cooper, Carole Lombard, Henry Fonda, Clara Bow, John Garfield, Janet Gaynor, and Spencer Tracy.

POSTPONED: THE BLACKTOP CIRCUS

Abandon, aka Susan Voyticky, will dazzle audiences from above at the BlackTop Circus

Paradise Theater
2403 Grand Concourse, Bronx
Opens March 12, $20-$30
718-220-1015
www.blacktopcircus.net
www.paradisetheaterevents.com

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus might be touring the metropolitan area this month, but the supposed Greatest Show on Earth has nothing on the BlackTop Circus. The BlackTop Circus presents acts discovered on the streets and playgrounds of urban communities, including basketball legends the King Charles Unicycle Troupe, magician Elliot Zimet, hip-hop dancers Tic and Tac, the African Acrobats from Kenya, street dancer Kenichi Ebina, aerialist Abandon, and ring master (not ringmaster) Ricardo Sosa. The ninety-minute show, billed as “where the Big Top meets the street,” will be at the beautiful, landmarked Paradise Theater in the Bronx beginning March 12.

Tickets are $20-$30, but twi-ny has four coveted passes to opening night, March 19, to experience the first family event to play the Paradise. To enter the contest, please send your name and daytime phone number to contest@twi-ny.com by Monday, March 8, at 3:00 pm; all entrants must be at least twenty-one years of age. One winner will be chosen at random to attend what should be a spectacular evening.

Update: The BlackTop Circus has been postponed as of March 9, with no rescheduled date as of yet.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Tim Burton reimagines ALICE IN WONDERLAND in thrilling new 3D adventure

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (Tim Burton, 2010)
Opens Friday, March 5
www.adisney.go.com

Screenwriter Linda Woolverton and director Tim Burton reimagine Lewis Carroll’s Victorian era children’s classics, ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE, in their thrilling version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Combining elements from both stories, Woolverton (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, THE LION KING) and Burton (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, SLEEPY HOLLOW) turn Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) into a modern-thinking nineteen-year-old young woman facing a very public proposal from the wealthy but insipidly snobbish Hamish (Leo Bill). Instead of answering his question, she takes off after an odd white rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) and falls down a hole, plummeting into a colorful but dangerous world known as Underland, where she might or might not be the same Alice who had been there years before and was destined to come back as their savior. There she encounters a slyly smiling cat (Stephen Fry), a wise, hookah-smoking blue caterpillar (Alan Rickman), a pair of goofy twins (Matt Lucas), a truly mad milliner (Johnny Depp), and other strange talking creatures and weird personalities. Alice soon finds herself in the middle of an epic battle between the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, with an unusually large head) and her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, with unusually red lipstick), a fight that also involves the smarmy Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover), the terrifying Bandersnatch, and the murderous Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee). Filmed in 2D and converted to 3D, ALICE IN WONDERLAND is one of Burton’s most imaginative and exciting films. Although Carroll purists might be upset by the plot tweaks, Burton manages to stay true to the spirit of the books, creating an ALICE in which viewers are continually surprised, never knowing quite what is going to happen next. And Wasikowska (IN TREATMENT) makes a terrific Alice, a confused teenager on the cusp of adulthood who is not yet ready to give up being a child.

ARMORY ARTS WEEK: THE INDEPENDENT

Be sure to take a page from Michael Dean as part of “The Floor Is the Object” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

548 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
March 4-7, free
www.independentnewyork.com

Elizabeth Dee and Darren Flook have joined forces to bring the free Independent art fair to Chelsea during Armory Arts Week, examining the way art shows are curated and viewed. The fair will take over the West 22nd St. space previously occupied by Dia and then the X Initiative, featuring work from more than forty galleries along with special installations, including Claire Fontaine’s neon “Please God Make Tomorrow Better,” which will be project on the outside doors. There will also be book signings, panel discussions, film screenings, and a live performance Saturday night by Dirty Mirrors.

UPDATE: The Independent is an extremely well organized fair, with plenty to see and do. Feel free to play Ping-Pong on Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “The Future Will Be Chrome” installation, accept a torn page from Michael Dean’s “The Floor Is the Object,” take a seat in the cage in Ryan Trecartin’s “P.opular S.ky (section ish),” create your own dialogue while investigating the artistic dialogues created by moss and Westreich-Wagner, and enjoy the milk-filled soda bottles marching their way through Jordan Wolfson’s twenty-minute CON LECHE film, but don’t enter Eve Sussman’s meticulous re-creation of Yuri Gagarin’s office.