twi-ny recommended events

THIRD RAIL PROJECTS: RETURN THE MOON

Screenshots from Zoom presentation Return the Moon by Third Rail Projects

RETURN THE MOON
Third Rail Projects
Select nights on Zoom through December 11, $15, $42, $67, 8:00
thirdrailprojects.com

Brooklyn-based Third Rail Projects specializes in site-specific immersive productions in unique locations, from a Bushwick warehouse to a former parochial school to backstage at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater. That’s not feasible during a pandemic lockdown, so the company has devised an interactive piece for Zoom, Return the Moon. Presentations over the platform have been slowing down dramatically now that theaters are opening and Zoom fatigue has more than set in, but Third Rail is forging ahead with the seventy-five-minute show, a melding of celebratory toast, ritual, and folktale made for a maximum of sixty audience members at a time.

Conceived and directed by Zach Morris and created by Morris, Alberto Denis, Kristin Dwyer, Joshua Gonzales, Sean Hagerty, Justin Lynch, Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, Tara O’Con, and Edward Rice, the live, online gathering is guided by a set of prompts that include being sent to a breakout room and sharing personal thoughts and memories in the chat. (Everyone renames themselves identically, ensuring anonymity.) The centerpiece is a tale about the New Moon told using a small shadowbox constructed of white paper. “Once upon a time, you, me, all of us, we found ourselves in a village,” the story begins. “Now, this was a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that the sun hadn’t been born yet. And all we knew was night. And the Moon. Who back then didn’t wax and wane but instead always moved through the sky full and luminous. And the Moon shone on our village.”

As opposed to such previous Third Rail shows as Then She Fell, Ghost Light, and The Grand Paradise, this one takes place mostly in your mind, using your imagination to generate the shared space. It can get a bit twee and treacly, lacking the exciting cutting-edge twists and turns so prominent in Third Rail’s in-person stagings, but as the narrator says in the story, “For some of us, the village felt like a homeplace. For others, it did not. For some of us, it felt good and safe, but others longed to be somewhere else. Nonetheless, this is where we all were.” As a bonus, participants get a little package in the mail a few days after the show that lets them relive the tale as well as make their own, which is a lovely touch.

PHILADELPHIA FRINGE FESTIVAL: ADJUST THE PROCEDURE

Adam Files, Nicholas Miles Newton, Meagan Moses, and Ed Altman (clockwise from top left) get into a tense Zoom meeting in Adjust the Procedure

ADJUST THE PROCEDURE
Philadelphia Fringe Festival
Available on demand through October 4, $10
fringearts.com
spincyclenyc.com

Note: The following review was written in March 2021, when Adjust the Procedure debuted online. It is now back for an encore presentation during the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

A new genre of theater has arisen during the pandemic lockdown: Zoom plays about Zoom gatherings, both personal and professional. I’m not talking about Zoom benefits with actors reading Shakespeare and Sophocles or Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Princess Bride but new works written for Zoom, performed on Zoom — and set on Zoom. For the Public, Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need to Talk About? reunited the familiar Apple family with the original cast — Jon DeVries (Benjamin Apple), Stephen Kunken (Tim Andrews), Sally Murphy (Jane Apple Halls), Maryann Plunkett (Barbara Apple), Laila Robins (Marian Apple Platt), and Jay O. Sanders (Richard Apple) — holding a Zoom family meeting. Rough & Ready Productions’ seven-minute Brown, an early entry from April 2020, imagines a Zoom brainstorming session about the color of cruise line swimwear, particularly prescient given the status of cruises over the last year. And Jordan E. Cooper’s Mama’s Got a Cough (with the wonderful Danielle Brooks) is fourteen of the funniest minutes you’ll ever spend on Zoom, as a family convenes an emergency online meeting to figure out what to do about their elderly matriarch.

Spin Cycle and JCS Theater Company take it to the next level with Adjust the Procedure, which delves deep into the psychological impact the coronavirus crisis is having on individuals as well as institutions, in this case a university. Written and directed by Jake Shore, the play is built around several Zoom meetings dealing with the school’s Counseling and Wellness center and what might have gone wrong in the case of student David De La Cruz. Director of academic development Kyle (Adam Files) first discusses the issue with assistant dean of student achievement Ben (Nicholas Miles Newton), relating a call he received from the suicidal undergraduate.

“In most circumstances I wouldn’t have pressed him on it at all, I would’ve just followed the procedure, but I felt I had a responsibility to deal with it on my own for some reason,” a concerned Kyle says.

Ben initially seems more interested in following the rules than facing the reality of the situation. He replies, “I would advise against intervening. . . .” That conversation ends with Ben’s advice:

“You need to know your role, Kyle, and it’s going to help a great deal in the long run. The life of this student is not on your back. It does not hang in the balance due to anything that you’ve done or will do. That’s just not the way it is. You talking to him, interfering, it’s just not going to matter that much in the grand scheme of things. It’s brutal, I’m sorry to say it, but it’s the truth. You don’t have that type of responsibility to him, or to any other student. It’s just not your job.”

On another call they are joined by director of enrollment management Aimee (Meagan Moses), who appears to only care about the numbers on her spreadsheet rather than the students themselves. She explains with robotic precision, “As you both know, for the most part, we weathered the storm caused by the international student problem, and in addition to that, we’ve made up for the additional students who either dropped out, transferred, or exited for reasons directly tied to the pandemic.” Those reasons include deportation.

Despite Ben’s pleas for Kyle to stop, the latter continues to press the issue as they discover more about Counseling and Wellness and where the De La Cruz case failed. Soon Kyle, Ben, and Aimee are on a Zoom call with executive dean Frank (Ed Altman), who is all about protecting the university’s reputation and avoiding any kind of legal trouble, no matter the truth. The four of them get into it, ascertaining things about themselves and their colleagues they might not like, leading to a surprise ending.

Available on demand through October 4 as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Adjust the Procedure gets off to a slow start, just talking heads Zooming in from wherever they are sheltering in place, but Shore (The Devil Is on the Loose with an Axe in Marshalltown, Down the Mountain and Across the Stream) picks up the pace as he brings up pertinent issues that address how the pandemic has been handled from multiple perspectives. Kyle represents the person who wants to do right but is thwarted by rules and procedures that need to be reevaluated. Ben is the earnest employee who might agree with Kyle but is not about to rock the boat. Aimee is the efficiency expert who can’t see the human component. And Frank claims that he is “worried about society unraveling,” but his beliefs about just what that society is don’t necessarily gel with the others’.

No one comes out unscathed in this trenchant Covid-19 parable; it might be specifically about a university, since education has been so hard hit during the pandemic, but it could also be about corporations and local, state, and federal governments as they face the reality of mounting death tolls and economic collapse and decide how they are going to proceed, choosing whose interests to put first amid the bureaucracy and numbers crunching.

At one point the four characters are discussing a new class at the school, “Free Will: The Big Lie.” Frank pounces on the subject, declaring, “Do you know what an immature adolescent is going to think when he finds out that free will doesn’t exist? He’ll misconstrue it. All of a sudden, there’s no accountability for one’s actions. If there’s no free will, then there’s no control.”

As has been made all too clear during this crisis, control is all about power — control of information, of the media, of statistics, of money, of scientific interpretation — primarily at the expense of the individual, the poor schnooks trying to do right by themselves, their family, their school district, and their community, attempting to assert whatever free will is supposed to exist in a representative democracy. And as we have learned, procedures need to be adjusted, and fast.

5 INDICES ON A TORTURED BODY

5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body will conclude performance series on October 24 (photo by Bones)

5 INDICES ON A TORTURED BODY
Bronx Museum
1040 Grand Concourse
September 8 – October 24, free with advance RSVP
718-681-6000
www.bronxmuseum.org

Since July, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has been hosting “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” a series of five live performances held in conjunction with the excellent exhibition “Wardell Milan: Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You.” The small but powerful show by Harlem-based artist Wardell Milan, continuing through October 24, is part of the institution’s special fiftieth anniversary programming, focusing on social justice. “Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You” consists of collages, photographs, and works on paper that address white supremacy and ask the question “What do terrorists do when they’re not terrorizing?” One end of the exhibit contains a ritual room inspired by the Rothko Chapel in Houston; for “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” Milan is collaborating with Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Zachary Tye Richardson and sculptor and designer Billy Ray Morgan to present the live events, which explore the disenfranchised and marginalized in search of a place of refuge. “The Chapel of Five Indices serves as a ‘Safe Space’ for these tortured bodies — interlinked through histories of violence, to be affirmed and celebrated,” Milan explains in a museum brochure. “Within this chapel, these irrepressible bodies cannot be flattened but must be reckoned with.” Below is the remaining schedule (“The Black Male Body” had its last performance September 4, with Richardson and Milan, written by Casey Gerald); admission is free with advance RSVP.

Wednesday, September 8
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Female Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, Catherine Fisher, and Trinity Dawn Bobo, written by Fisher, 6:00

Saturday, September 25
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Trans Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, B. Hawk Snipes, and Mae Eskenazi, written by Snipes and Richardson, 2:00

Wednesday, October 13
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Migrant Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, DJ Chappel, and Brittany Bringuez, written by Jabu Ndlovu, 6:00

Sunday, October 24
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, written by Noah Wertheimer, 2:00

“Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” features dazzling work by Chitra Ganesh, Saya Woolfalk, Huma Bhabha, and others (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Also on view at the Bronx Museum, through September 26, is the phenomenal “Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” inspired by Lizzie Borden’s seminal 1983 underground classic film, Born in Flames, which is shown on a loop along with recent works by Caitlin Cherry, Chitra Ganesh, Clarissa Tossin, Firelei Baez, Huma Bhabha, Maria Berrio, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rose B. Simpson, Saya Woolfalk, Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin), Shoshanna Weinberger, Tourmaline, and Wangechi Mutu.

STREB EXTREME ACTION: MANHATTAN WEST / JACOB’S PILLOW

STREB’s August performance at Jacob’s Pillow is streaming for free through September 16 (photos by Christopher Duggan and Jamie Kraus, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow)

STREB ONSTAGE
Digital on demand from Jacob’s Pillow, September 2-16, free with RSVP
Live at Manhattan West: September 17-19, free with advance RSVP
www.jacobspillow.org
streb.org

In July 2020, STREB Extreme Action shared Best Zoom Dance (with Martha Graham Dance Company) in twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards for Body Grammar, an inventive way to utilize dancers’ body parts to play with ideas of community and movement online, especially for a troupe used to working with unique action machines that often place the performers in physical danger. The Brooklyn-based company, founded in 1985 by Elizabeth Streb, maintained a continuous virtual presence during the lockdown, but you can now catch the troupe in person when they perform five outdoor shows September 17-19 at Manhattan West. (Admission is free with advance RSVP.)

The bill includes Molinette, in which three STREB action heroes have their feet affixed to a twenty-foot-high horizontal swivel pipe designed by Noe España, commissioned for the 2019 reopening of Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; Add, a 1983 solo piece in which the dancer must stay within a cross taped to the floor; Plateshift, featuring six action heroes on a sprung floor that incorporates centrifugal force; and the world premiere of Kaleidoscope, in which eight action heroes are fastened to LERU (London Eye Rehearsal Unit), a solid steel circle that has them defying gravity, a STREB tradition.

To get in the mood, you must check out STREB’s return to Jacob’s Pillow last month after twenty years, streaming for free through September 16. The show consists of twelve repertory works from 1978 to 2006, performed on the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage in front of a matinee audience by Jackie Carlson, Daniel Rysak, Tyler DuBoys, Justin Ross, Kairis Daniels, Luciany Germán, Leonardo Girón Torres, and associate artistic director Cassandre Joseph, wearing tight-fitting blue superhero costumes. The technical direction is by company emcee and DJ Zaire Baptiste, who knows how to rile up a crowd.

Molinette will be part of STREB presentation at Manhattan West (photo © Dan Lubbers)

It shows the range of Streb’s choreography and her spirited use of existing and invented objects that often put the action heroes in danger, an astonishing melding of acrobatics, gymnastics, modern dance, and circuslike peril set to original music by technoaxe and compilations produced by Voodo Fé and Freshbeatz. Streb introduces each work with a quote from a review of the piece (from the Village Voice, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Examiner, and the New York Times) and a snippet about where the idea originated.

It begins with 2006’s Tip, in which seven dancers move precariously on a tipping machine, a twelve-feet-in-diameter wheel cut in half, able to achieve complete verticality. Carlson twirls a wooden dowel like a baton in 1978’s Pole Vaults, Rysak brandishes a rope in 1983’s Whiplash, Carlson, Rysak, Daniels, and Germán toss around a heavy twelve-foot-long, three-inch-wide dowel in 1990’s Log, Daniels is trapped in a box modeled for Streb’s size in 1985’s Little Ease, Germán plays with a hula hoop in 1983’s Target, Joseph and Ross turn a long dowel into a third dancer in 1992’s Link, the troupe pays homage to the Three Stooges and Buster Keaton with a long dowel and a ramp with a cut-out window in 2002’s Buster, and the company does miraculous things with a pair of rectangular doorlike plywood slabs in 1984’s Surface.

There are also two brief pieces with no props, Ross honoring Merce Cunningham in 1978’s 7′ 43″ and DuBoys re-creating Streb’s 1983 solo, Add, which she remembers as being “the most painful two minutes of my life.” The show concludes in a big way with 2003’s breathtaking Air, in which all eight action heroes jump off a trampoline, landing on a large mat over and over again. As with so many of Streb’s works, you can’t help but wait for disaster to occur, but it never does, at least not in the numerous times I’ve been fortunate to see the endlessly brave and talented troupe perform, at such diverse locations as Park Ave. Armory, Gansevoort Plaza, and the World Financial Center as well as in the documentaries Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity and One Extraordinary Day. Be sure to stick around for the postshow talk with Streb, Joseph, and Baptiste, moderated by Pillow scholar-in-residence Maura Keefe.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FREUD’S DAUGHTER

“Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter” continues at the Jewish Museum through September 12 (© The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Ron Amstutz.)

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FREUD’S DAUGHTER
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Monday through September 12, $12-$18 (free on Saturdays)
212-423-3200
thejewishmuseum.org

To paraphrase something Dr. Sigmund Freud most likely never said, sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis. In the exhibition “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” continuing at the Jewish Museum through September 12, curator Philip Larratt-Smith attempts to explore the French-American artist’s work through a psychoanalytic lens based on her thirty-three years of analysis with Freud disciple Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, beginning in 1952, shortly after the death of her father. The exhibit reverses the standard setup; most of the fifty pieces by Bourgeois are in vitrines, while excerpts from her extensive notes — from personal thoughts to dream diaries — are framed and hanging on the walls. Above the facsimiles and original sheets are dual quotes from Bourgeois and Freud.

“Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings profoundly recalibrate our understanding of her artistic trajectory and motivational impulses,” Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s literary archivist, said in a statement. “They do not explain or demystify her art but rather represent a freestanding corpus of writing that display her unusual literary gifts and underline her enduring engagement with analysis. They highlight the centrality of her Oedipal deadlock as the traumatic kernel of her psychic organization. And they complicate the narrative of early childhood trauma which the artist herself fostered, encouraging instead a more nuanced appreciation of this relationship which she often spoke about.”

Bourgeois’s writings are extraordinary. “The fear of success is a misconception of the fear of responsibility. Perhaps fear of men. Refusal to accept to grow up / Refusal to accept reality / Refusal to accept what I am / Refusal to accept my lot / Refusal to look at oneself to measure, judge / Refusal to grow up. Refusal to accept being a woman. I accept on my own terms,” one begins. “Guilt is the Product of envy,” she writes in another. “There is essentially no difference between the Penis envy and the Oedipus complex . . . it is not him that I love it is what he has — it is not him that I love it is his money — The only thing that gives me hope is that millions of people women have suffered from this mystery.” And in a screed against her father and the family’s British au pair, Sadie Gordon Richmond, who became her father’s mistress (and was only six years older than Louise), Bourgeois declares, “I can prove that he loves me / that he loves me more than anybody else / that his wife is unbearable / that he doesn’t love her / that I deserve to be loved / that I deserve him more than Sadie does / that Sadie loves me / that Sadie loves him / that Sadie doesn’t want him any longer / so he is free / so there is hope.” You can listen to actress Rachel Weisz reading eighteen of Bourgeois’s selected writings here.

The works on view are equally extraordinary. Couple III entwines two people in fabric and leather, one with a steel prosthetic arm. (“The prosthesis recalls a theme that was important to Louise. Louise saw herself as a survivor but also as radically incomplete,” Larratt-Smith says on the audioguide.) Hysterical is a small sculpture of a nude woman with three heads looking off in different directions. The tomblike Venthouse (Cupping Jar) features two slabs of dark marble, with glass cupping jars on the top one, lit with lights from within, a manifestation of the procedure Louise would perform on her mother to help ease her back pain. (Bourgeois’s mother, Joséphine, died in 1932 when Louise was twenty.) The Destruction of the Father is a large tableaux in a wall, bathed in hellish bloodred lighting, that is essentially the aftermath of a cannibalistic feast, made in 1974, a year after the death of Bourgeois’s husband, Robert Goldwater, at the age of sixty-five. The hanging sculpture Janus Fleuri is a bronze melding of male and female genitalia.

The centerpiece of the show is Passage Dangereux, the largest of Bourgeois’s Cells, a room-size installation that explores memory and desire, with dozens of elements representing sex and death incorporating all five senses, a journey into deep-seated trauma locked behind the bars of a physical and psychological prison. And finally, there’s Sleep II, a 1967 white marble sculpture that strongly resembles the top of an enormous penis, above which hangs Fillette (Sweeter Version), a biomorphic latex-over-plaster depiction of genitalia about which Bourgeois said, “From a sexual point of view I consider the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate. They’re objects that the woman, myself, must protect.” She was famously photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe carrying the sculpture in her right arm, like a treasured pet.

“Life is so funny. Life is so ridiculous,” Bourgeois once said. Throughout her life and career, she revealed a dry sense of humor and had fun with how she was categorized as an artist and a person. “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter” delves into the impact decades of psychoanalysis had on her and her art, particularly exposing her writings that emerged from deep inside her soul. But don’t get too caught up in trying to find answers for all her words and images. “Her writings reveal the extent to which Freudian concepts and practices — whether directly or indirectly, whether through his own writings, those of his followers, or Bourgeois’s longstanding analysis — informed and enriched her art making,” Larratt-Smith argues. “To call Bourgeois ‘Freud’s daughter’ is thus to invoke filiation and resistance, likeness and dissent, and to highlight the central importance of psychoanalysis in the making of her mysterious and idiosyncratic oeuvre.” And sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis.

(For more on the exhibit, you can watch the related lectures “Elisabeth Bronfen: Family Entanglements,” “Gary Indiana: The Artist as Writer and Analysand,” and “Jamieson Webster: Louise Bourgeois’s Hysterical Love of Psychoanalysis.”)

MOGUL MOWGLI

Riz Ahmed plays a rapper searching for his identity in Mogul Mowgli

MOGUL MOWGLI (Bassam Tariq, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, September 3
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

There may be no more riveting, multidimensional actor, rapper, and activist working today than Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Riz Ahmed. Born and raised in London in a British Pakistani family, Ahmed rose to prominence as a suspected murderer in the HBO series The Night Of and made a major breakthrough playing a drummer who suddenly loses his hearing in the Academy Award–nominated Sound of Metal. For more than fifteen years, Ahmed has been releasing music, with his band, Swet Shop Boys (as Riz MC, with Heems), and as a solo act. It all comes together in his latest film, Mogul Mowgli, which opens September 3 at Film Forum.

Ahmed stars in and cowrote the tense drama with Karachi-born American director Bassam Tariq. Ahmed plays Zaheer, a rapper who goes by the name Zed and has just scored a huge gig opening for a popular rapper. But shortly before the tour kicks off, he gets hit with a baffling debilitating illness. With his career in jeopardy, he battles his hardworking religious father, Bashir (Alyy Khan); receives unconditional tenderness from his caring mother, Nasra (Sudha Bhuchar); is criticized by his brother, Bilal (musician, poet, and activist Hussain Manawer); reaches out to an ex-girlfriend, Bina (Aiysha Hart); argues with his friend and manager, Vaseem (Anjana Vasan); and is stupefied by the rising success of fellow rapper RPG (Nabhaan Rizwan), whose silly video “Pussy Fried Chicken” has gone viral.

All the while, Zed is haunted by memories from his childhood and hallucinations of a mysterious figure known as Toba Tek Singh (Jeff Mirza), whose face is covered by a ritual crown of rows of colorful fabric flowers. “People pay attention,” Toba Tek Singh tells him. “They drew a line in the sand. India and Pakistan. East and West. Us and them. I was born from this rupture. And I am the sickness from this separation. I am Toba Tek Singh!” The name refers to a city in Punjab and the title of a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, about the troubles between India and Pakistan and a “Sikh lunatic” with a “frightening appearance” who “was a harmless fellow.” Ahmed also has a song called “Toba Tek Singh” on his March 2020 album, The Long Goodbye, in which he declares, “She wanna kick me out / but I’m still locked in / What’s my fucking name? / Toba Tek Singh.”

Riz Ahmed is a force to be reckoned with in Bassam Tariq’s debut narrative feature

Named after the Swet Shop Boys’ 2016 song “Half Moghul Half Mowgli,” Mogul Mowgli is a gripping film that deals with various dichotomies as laid out by Toba Tek Singh as Zed tries to find his place in a world that keeps letting him down. “The song’s about being torn between different sides of your identity, being descended from moguls and rich heritage, but living as Mowgli, lost in the urban jungle far away from the village that was once home,” Ahmed says in the film’s production notes. “That’s our experience in diaspora.”

In a concert scene, Zed raps, “Legacies outlive love,” which is at the center of his search for personal meaning, a concept he also explored in his arresting one-man show The Long Goodbye: Online Edition, livestreamed by BAM and the Manchester International Festival last December. (“I don’t belong here,” he says in the piece.) In addition, Ahmed gave a 2017 speech to the House of Commons on the importance of diversity and representation and has written about being typecast as a terrorist and profiled at airports.

Ahmed (Nightcrawler, ) and Tariq (These Birds Walk, Ghosts of Sugar Land), in his debut narrative feature, don’t make room for a lot of laughs in Mogul Mowgli, which passes the five-part Riz Test evaluating Muslim stereotypes in film and on television. It’s a powerful, personal work, made all the more poignant by Ahmed’s semiautobiographical elements and Tariq’s background as a documentary filmmaker. Ahmed is a force to be reckoned with; Anika Summerson’s camera can’t get enough of him, from his dark, penetrating eyes to his shuffling bare feet. Ahmed delivers a monumental performance that avoids clichés as it blazes across the screen. The 6:45 show at Film Forum on September 3 will be followed by a Q&A with Tariq in person and Ahmed on Zoom, moderated by filmmaker, critic, and curator Farihah Zaman; Tariq will also be at the 6:45 show on September 4 (moderated by Oscar nominee Shaka King) and the 4:40 screening on September 5.

ART ALIVE IN THE FISHER DOLLHOUSE

The Chocolate Genius will lead an interactive demonstration at MAD in conjunction with new chocolate bar inspired by Fisher Dollhouse (photo courtesy Museum of Arts & Design)

Who: Paul Joachim, the Chocolate Genius
What: Chocolate-making demonstration and hands-on activity
Where: Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle
When: Saturday, September 4, free with museum admission of $12-$18, noon–2:00
Why: Paul Joachim, the Florida-based artist known as the Chocolate Genius, has a simple but critical mission: “to transform one billion people or more through chocolate.” Joachim believes that “chocolate creates a visceral, personal response in everyone. It’s a bridge between classes, gender, religion, races — all labels of culture. In other words, chocolate creates a deep human connection — often missing in our divisive world.” Joachim will increase that deep human connection on September 4 when he he will lead an in-person, interactive chocolate-making demonstration at the Museum of Arts & Design, launching a new chocolate bar in conjunction with the exhibition “The Fisher Dollhouse: A Venetian Palazzo in Miniature.”

Chocolate demo takes place in Fisher Dollhouse exhibit at MAD (photo by Jenna Bascom)

On view through September 26, the dollhouse was created by New York–based arts patron and collector Joanna Fisher during the pandemic as a place of refuge; it was designed and built by dozens of craftspersons, with miniature works of art by Dustin Yellin, Ryan McGinness, Hunt Slonem, and others. On September 4 at noon, Joachim will show visitors how to make silicone molds, cast edible works, and temper chocolate at home, along with discussing the history of chocolate and cacao. The milk chocolate bars feature the facade of the dollhouse on their front. “When most people think of chocolate, it’s simply a chocolate bar,” Joachim’s mission statement continues. “I have the gift of transforming chocolate into a mystifying, inspirational experience, live and in front of audience’s eyes. Inspiring them with joy, awe, and love, disrupting the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible within each viewer’s point of view and own life.” Entry to this “Art Alive” presentation is free with museum admission. Also on view at MAD are “Craft Front & Center,” “Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times,” “Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy,” and “45 Stories in Jewelry: 1947 to Now.”