twi-ny recommended events

HITO STEYERL: DRILL

Drill is centerpiece of extensive Hito Steyerl exhibition at Park Avenue Armory (photo by James Ewing)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through July 21, $20
armoryonpark.org

“Spare no expense to make war beautiful,” historian Anna Duensing says in Drill, referring to military history. Drill, a three-channel, twenty-one-minute video, is the centerpiece of German artist Hito Steyerl’s site-specific, wide-ranging multimedia installation of the same name at Park Ave. Armory, where it continues through July 21. Projected on both sides of three large screens in the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Steyerl’s film delves into the history of the armory, from its time as the headquarters of the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard, known as a silk-stocking regiment, to its exclusive use by the wealthy and its direct relationship to the founding of the National Rifle Association. Steyerl goes to the armory basement, formerly a shooting range, where bullet holes can still be seen in the walls; includes clips of speeches by antigun activists at a Washington, DC, rally; and follows the Yale University Precision Marching Band as it makes its way through the drill hall, playing music by Jules Laplace based on data sonification from casualty statistics of AR-15 violence and mass shootings, with choreography by Thomas C. Duffy. Among the participants are Nurah Abdulhaqq of National Die-In, Kareem Nelson of Wheelchairs Against Guns, retired school principal and proud gun owner Judith Pearson, and gun violence prevention activist Abbey Clements. A series of interconnected bulbs on the floor occasionally light up in white and red, linking the viewer to what is happening onscreen.

In her 2013 e-flux article “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” Steyerl wrote, “Data, sounds, and images are now routinely transitioning beyond screens into a different state of matter. They surpass the boundaries of data channels and manifest materially. They incarnate as riots or products, as lens flares, high-rises, or pixelated tanks. Images become unplugged and unhinged and start crowding off-screen space. They invade cities, transforming spaces into sites, and reality into realty. They materialize as junkspace, military invasion, and botched plastic surgery. They spread through and beyond networks, they contract and expand, they stall and stumble, they vie, they vile, they wow and woo.” That statement relates to several of the other works in the show, spread throughout the armory’s period rooms and hallway.

Sandbags offer an uncomfortable place to sit while watching Hito Steyerl’s videos Duty Free Art and Is the Museum a Battlefield? (photo by James Ewing)

In the Parlor, Is the Museum a Battlefield? is an illustrated lecture projected on two screens and a box of white sand as Steyerl investigates the fascinating relationship between art museums and war, starting with a bullet that killed a friend of hers. The audience sits on sandbags, immersed in the narrative that involves the Louvre, the Hermitage, and other arts institutions. “Museums are of course battlefields. They have been throughout history,” she says. “They have been torture chambers, sites of war crimes, civil war, and also revolution.” Although the illustrated lecture was produced for the thirteenth Istanbul Biennial, it feels right at home at the armory, a building initially constructed for the military that now is an arts institution itself. That is followed by Duty Free Art, in which Steyerl delves into income inequality through art, business, and war via freeports, where collectors store their art holdings without having to pay taxes, impacting the global economy.

In the Veterans Room and Library, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, named for the five most-used English words in songs on the Billboard charts, features concrete and neon sculptures of those words along with video of product testing on robots, while Robots Today ties together narration from Muslim polymath Al-Jazari’s 1205 Automata with shots of a Kurdish city destroyed by the Turkish military in 2016.

ExtraSpaceCraft offers comfy chairs to watch the Iraqi National Observatory become the Autonomous Space Agency (photo by James Ewing)

Broken Windows is shown at both ends of the central hallway; one end depicts Chris Toepfer and other community activists painting canvases and placing them over broken windows in abandoned buildings in Camden, New Jersey, while at the other end researchers in London test the sound of breaking glass for artificial intelligence. The title of the video takes on added meaning here in New York City given the NYPD’s controversial use of broken windows policing, which believes that targeting smaller crimes will prevent bigger ones.

The show also includes The Tower in the Mary Divver Room and ExtraSpaceCraft in the Board of Officers Room, which are like watching virtual reality video games, while Prototype 1.0 and 1.1 in the Field and Staff Room is a pair of blue robots made of foam-and-aluminum, one standing, the other lying on the floor, as if they had come out of Hell Yeah We Fuck Die after undergoing brutal testing. And in the Colonels Reception Room, Freeplots offers hope for the future amid all the technological mayhem, a collaboration with El Catano Community Garden in East Harlem that consists of flowers blooming in wooden planters filled with horse-manure compost, turning the crates that store art in the freeports into something positive for everyone. The exhibition requires a significant investment of time and concentration; the works are complex, and the videos run more than two hours in total, but Steyerl has a lot to say that is worth paying attention to, even if some of the delivery is less inspiring than others. On July 20 at 3:00 and 5:00 ($10), there will be a performance lecture by Anton Vidokle, Adam Khalil, and Bayley Sweitzer, “The Dead Walk into a Bar,” which promises: “As a staff of identical ushers draws back layers of confusion and pain, the freshly resurrected gradually become aware of the reality of their corporeal reinsertion: perhaps the world of the living is not a world at all; to be alive in this place may merely be an exhibit.”

DRAGON SPRING PHOENIX RISE

Lone Peak (David Patrick Kelly) leads a ritual for his daughter, Little Lotus (PeiJu Chien-Pott), in Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise at the Shed (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The McCourt at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 27, $25-$99
646-455-3494
theshed.org

In 1999, Chen Shi-Zheng presented his widely hailed twenty-hour production of The Peony Pavilion at Lincoln Center. Perhaps the China-born, New York-based director is used to longer spectacles, because it takes quite a while for his hundred-minute Shed commission, Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise, to get cooking at the McCourt, where it continues through July 27. The final twenty minutes of the kung-fu musical are everything audiences hoped for, an exhilarating combination of martial arts and movement (choreographed by Zhang Jun and Akram Khan), sound (by Brandon Wolcott) and music (by Bobby Krlic and Arca), acrobatics, and storytelling; what comes before is a treacly narrative with mundane songs (by Sia) right out of a Disney movie; in fact, the show was co-conceived and written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, the duo behind the DreamWorks family film series Trolls and Kung Fu Panda.

World premiere Shed commission features some awe-inspiring stagecraft (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The story shuttles between modern-day Flushing, Queens, and the near future, although you can’t really tell that from Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s set, which features a very cool ancient boulder on one side, a ladder that leads to a walkway in a silly, glitzy nightclub on the other, and hanging cloths that rise and fall, beautifully illuminated by lighting designer Tobias G. Rylander and Leigh Sachwitz’s colorful, swirling projections. In the mostly senseless fable, aging kung fu master Lone Peak (David Patrick Kelly) is not happy when his daughter, Little Lotus (Jasmine Chiu), is being courted by flashy billionaire Doug Pince (David Torok, a martial artist who needs more acting lessons). Pince is after the Dragon Spring, which is rumored to offer eternal life. When Lone Peak’s protégé, Lee (Dickson Mbi), turns traitor, evil rears its ugly head. Eighteen years later, Little Phoenix (Jasmine Chiu) and Little Dragon (Ji Tuo) meet, leading to a grand finale.

Thrilling final battle elevates Chen Shi-Zheng’s kung-fu musical at the McCourt (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Chen (Orphan of Zhao, Monkey: Journey to the West) was inspired to make Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise by Bruce Lee’s 1964 audition for The Green Hornet, and much of the show has the simplicity of a run-of-the-mill 1960s television series. Plot twists don’t fit, character motivation comes out of nowhere, and set pieces are random and repetitive. But then the last scenes save it from a fate worse than death as the many elements coalesce into a gratifying whole. In a program note, Chen explains, “I wanted to create an allegory for the immigrant experience, transforming iconic Chinese images, movement, and ideas into an American context.” It never reaches that ideal — he dumbed it down too much — and it takes too long to gel, but when it finally does, it’s worth the wait.

FRANKIE AND JOHNNY IN THE CLAIR DE LUNE

Michael Shannon and Audra McDonald star in Broadway revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (photo by Deen van Meer, 2019)

Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 28, $49-$159
www.frankieandjohnnybroadway.com

Obie-winning director Arin Arbus, six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald, and two-time Oscar and Tony nominee Michael Shannon deliver a lovely eightieth birthday present to four-time Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally — and a splendid gift to theatergoers in the process — with a scorching Broadway revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, heating up the summer at the Broadhurst through July 28. Originally presented by Manhattan Theatre Club in 1987 featuring Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham as the title characters, then debuting on Broadway in 2002 with Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci (replaced by Rosie Perez and Joey Pantaliano) — it was also made into a 1991 movie by Garry Marshall with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino — the play is clearly all about the actors; its one and only subject is about making connections in a world that can be cold and lonely. Arbus’s version remains true to the original, set in the 1980s in a New York City walkup in the West Fifties during the AIDS crisis. There are no cell phones and no internet, no 24/7 news cycle, no Facebook, no Spotify playlists, just two people involved in a one-night stand, then grappling with the question of whether it may be more.

The show takes place in a well-rendered studio apartment designed by Riccardo Hernández, with the bed at the center of the stage. Frankie (McDonald), a waitress at a local diner, and Johnny (Shannon), a short order cook there, are in the midst of raw, passionate sex while Bach’s Goldberg Variations plays on the radio. “God, I wish I still smoked. Life used to be so much more fun,” Frankie says after they have finished making love. It’s not exactly what you expect to hear after such a sexual experience, but it instantly establishes Frankie as a nervous, worried, negative woman who thinks the best part of her life is over. The more upbeat and positive Johnny responds with a funny story about flatulence that exposes a wry sense of humor and a clear lack of boundaries. She wants him to leave, but he won’t; he’s determined to convince her that this was no mere onetime tryst. While he heaps praise on her and doesn’t hesitate to open up, she is fearful of revealing too much of herself. He also discovers a series of coincidences that he thinks means they are meant to be together, but she is not buying it.

Frankie (Audra McDonald) and Johnny (Michael Shannon) explore connections in eightieth birthday present for Terrence McNally (photo by Deen van Meer, 2019)

“I want to ask you to quit sneaking up on me like that,” she says. “We’re talking about one thing, people who teach, and wham! you slip in there with some kind of intimate, personal remark. I like being told I’m fabulous. Who wouldn’t? I’d like some warning first, that’s all. This is not a spontaneous person you have before you.” He replies, “You’re telling me that [the sex] wasn’t spontaneous?” She responds, “That was different. I’m talking about the larger framework of things. What people are doing in your life. What they’re doing in your bed is easy or at least it used to be back before we had to start checking each other out. I don’t know about you but I get so sick and tired of living this way, that we’re gonna die from one another, that every so often I just want to act like Saturday night really is a Saturday night, the way they used to be.”

His insistence on sticking around and getting extremely personal is more creepy in this #MeToo era, but his stalkerish behavior wasn’t exactly exemplary in 1987 either. After all, McNally does name the characters after an old song that first declares, “Frankie and Johnny were lovers,” then has her pulling out a gun after he “done her wrong,” so her trust issues are understandable. Before this night, Frankie and Johnny had communicated at the restaurant only as fellow employees, with her calling out orders (probably in abbreviated diner-speak) and him making the food. Now they’re potentially laying bare their souls — after laying bare their bodies, as the play famously requires substantial nudity in the first act.

Former TFANA associate artistic director Arbus (The Skin of Our Teeth, The Father) heightens the emotional and psychological cat-and-mouse aspects of the narrative as Frankie and Johnny try to figure out what just happened between them. McDonald (Master Class, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess) again proves herself to be one of the finest theater actors of her generation with a brave, sizzling display of rough-hewn vulnerability, while Shannon (Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Killer) portrays Johnny with a jittery, menacing kindness. McNally (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Love! Valour! Compassion!) includes numerous references to music and the moon, classic inspirations for romance — the title of the play itself refers to Claude Debussy’s movement based on Paul Verlaine’s 1869 poem, which in part reads, “All sing in a minor key / Of victorious love and the opportune life, / They do not seem to believe in their happiness / And their song mingles with the moonlight.” Many of the scenes are so graphic and exposing that intimacy director Claire Warden was brought in to make the actors more comfortable. Fortunately, that did not remove the general level of discomfit and unease the audience is meant to feel as they watch a man and a woman examine their fate face-to-face, and body to body.

UNBOUND: DAPPER DAN IN CONVERSATION WITH ELAINE WELTEROTH

dapper dan

Who: Dapper Dan, Elaine Welteroth
What: Book launch with talk and signing
Where: BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave., 718-636-4100
When: Wednesday, July 10, $20 event only, $40 with book, 7:00
Why: “It was a midnight like any other at the store. The lights were on out front, the door unlocked, the grate rolled halfway up. Dapper Dan’s Boutique was open. My night crew of tailors was in the back filling orders. Jackets, jumpsuits, parkas. Their sewing machines hummed into the wee hours. I was lying on my bed in the little apartment I’d built in back for myself. Most nights, you could find me there, rereading a book of philosophy or spirituality or trying to sneak in a nap,” begins fashion icon Daniel “Dapper Dan” Day’s memoir, Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem. “I had good reasons for never closing the shop and rarely leaving it. For one, a lot of my customers preferred late-night visits, for anonymity during the week or for the after-hours vibe of the weekends. I also had to keep an eye on my employees, who were backdooring my designs. It was my name on the awning out front, and in my world, your name means everything. It was my reputation, my brand, and people came from all over the city and beyond—from Philly and Chicago, Houston and Miami—because they wanted a Dapper Dan. I was the store, and the store was me.” On July 10, the seventy-four-year-old Dapper Dan, who has helped dress such figures as Eric B. and Rakim, Salt-N-Pepa, Big Daddy Kane, Mike Tyson, LL Cool J, Jam Master Jay, Diddy, Naomi Campbell, and Jay-Z, will launch his book with a talk and a signing at BAM Rose Cinemas, presented with Greenlight Bookstore as part of the Unbound series. He will be interviewed by journalist, magazine editor, Project Runway judge, and influencer Elaine Welteroth, author of the new book More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are. Tickets are $20 for the event and $40 for the event and a copy of Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem.

JANET BIGGS AND SCOTT MacDONALD IN CONVERSATION — THE SUBLIMITY OF DOCUMENT: CINEMA AS DIORAMA

sublimity

Who: Janet Biggs and Scott MacDonald
What: Panel discussion and book launch
Where: Cristin Tierney Gallery, 219 Bowery, second floor, 212-594-0550
When: Thursday, July 11, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: In his new book, The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Oxford University Press, August 1, 2019, $125), author and film history professor Scott MacDonald writes of visual artist Janet Biggs, “I first became aware of Biggs when she visited Hamilton College in the spring of 2017 to present a talk about her work. As she showed stills and clips from recent videos, I was struck by the fact that Biggs had traveled to and filmed particular far-flung locations that I had been introduced to by other filmmakers. . . . I was interested not only that multiple artists would be drawn to these precise locations, but also that, in somewhat different ways, these locations can be dangerous to visit. As I became familiar with Biggs’s work, I came to wonder why an artist would go through the considerable difficulties of visiting distant, potentially dangerous locations, not in order to produce films that might have substantial audiences, but to offer relatively brief visual experiences to comparatively smaller audiences within gallery and museum spaces. I came to realize that my experiences with Biggs’s work offered an opportunity to explore, at least in a small way, the issue of installation cinema versus theatrical cinema.” The book continues with an interview between MacDonald and Biggs that was conducted online.

On July 11, MacDonald and Biggs will be together in person at the Cristin Tierney Gallery for a discussion on film and art in conjunction with the publication of The Sublimity of Document and Biggs’s most recent exhibition, “Overview Effect,” the second part of which, Seeing Constellations in the Darkness between Stars, continues at Cristin Tierney through August 2. MacDonald’s book features interviews with Biggs and more than two dozen other “avant-doc” filmmakers, including Ron Fricke, Laura Poitras, Frederick Wiseman, Bill Morrison, Abbas Kiarostami, and James Benning. Biggs has also contributed the article “Fragility Curve” to the current edition of the Brooklyn Rail, writing about her experiences making her latest films, which deal with Mars. “The earth will remake itself and survive the legacy of its human inhabitants, but will we?” she asks. The conversation with Biggs and MacDonald will be followed by a book signing; in addition, Biggs, who has participated in two twi-ny talks, will be presenting the multimedia performance piece How the Light Gets In July 18 at the New Museum.

MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL

Boy Blue’s Blak Whyte Gray makes a special return engagement at 2019 Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center (photo by Carl Fox)

Multiple venues at Lincoln Center
July 10 – August 9, free – $120
www.lincolncenter.org

With the demise of the Lincoln Center Festival last year, the institution’s Mostly Mozart Festival has filled in many of the gaps, expanding its breadth to cover much more than classical music and related events. Thus, its fifty-third season is a multidisciplinary affair with a wide variety of dance, theater, music, and film that is mostly non-Mozart. The summer festival begins July 10-13 with the world premiere of Mark Morris Dance Group’s Sport at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, set to Erik Satie’s “Sports et divertissements,” along with the company’s Empire Garden and V. Other dance programs include a special return engagement of Boy Blue’s Blak Whyte Gray August 1-3 at the Gerald Lynch Theater at John Jay College, with Kenrick “H2O” Sandy and Margo Jefferson participating in a talk after the August 2 performance, and the US premiere of Yang Liping Contemporary Dance’s Under Siege August 8-10 at the David H. Koch Theater, a lavish dance-theater production inspired by historic events in Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine, the 1993 epic that will be screened July 28 at the Walter Reade Theater. The festival will also be showing Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on August 4, which features Oscar-winning production design by Tim Yip, the set and costume designer of Under Siege.

Yang Liping Contemporary Dance’s Under Siege makes its US premiere at Mostly Mozart Festival (photo by Ding Yi Jie)

Of course, there is plenty of Wolfgang Amadeus and other classical programs at the festival. The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will present Beethoven’s “Eroica Symphony” July 23-24, Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” July 26-27, “Mozart & Brahms” July 30-31, “Beethoven & Schubert” August 2-3, “Joshua Bell Plays Dvořák” August 6-7, and “Mozart à la Haydn” August 9-10, all at David Geffen Hall. British theater group 1927’s production of The Magic Flute July 17-20 at the Koch features the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, a cast from Komische Oper Berlin, colorful animation, and imaginative set design. The intimate series “A Little Night Music” in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse includes performances by cellist Kian Soltani and pianist Julio Elizalde; pianist Michael Brown; vocalist Nora Fischer and guitarist and vocalist Marnix Dorrestein; violinist Pekka Kuusisto and bassist Knut Erik Sundquist; soprano Susanna Phillips and pianist Myra Huang; pianist Martin Helmchen; pianists Lucas and Arthur Jussen in their New York debut; Brooklyn Rider; and pianist Steven Osborne. And on August 4, the Budapest Festival Orchestra will play works by Haydn, Handel, and Mozart at the Geffen, with soprano Jeanine De Bique, conducted by Iván Fischer.

Mostly Mozart Festival features New York production premiere of The Magic Flute by British theater group 1927 (photo by Michael Daniel)

One of the highlights of the festival is sure to be Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter’s The Black Clown July 24-27 at the Gerald Lynch, a musical theater piece based on Langston Hughes’s 1931 poem, with Tines as the title character, choreography by Chanel DaSilva, and set and costumes by Carlos Soto; the July 25 show will be followed by a talk with Tines, director Zack Winokur, and DaSilva. In addition, there are several free, first-come, first-served events: the panel discussion “Mozart’s Magic Flute: In His Time and Ours” July 20 at 3:00 at the Kaplan Penthouse; the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) performing works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, and Ashley Fure at the David Rubenstein Atrium on July 25 at 7:30; the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted by Louis Langrée, playing Mozart’s “Gran Partita” July 27 at 3:00 at St. Paul’s Chapel; ICE’s “Composer Portraits” program of works by Iranian composers Anahita Abbasi, Aida Shirazi, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh at the atrium August 5 at 7:00; and violinist Tessa Lark and bassist Michael Thurber at the atrium August 8 at 7:30.

IN PERSON EVENT: NO HOME MOVIE

Chantal Akerman creates a unique profile of her mother in deeply personal No Home Movie

NO HOME MOVIE (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, July 9, 7:30
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
icarusfilms.com

Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie was meant to be a kind of public eulogy for her beloved mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, who died in 2014 at the age of eighty-six, shortly after Chantal had completed shooting forty hours of material with her. But it also ended up becoming, in its own way, a public eulogy for the highly influential Belgian auteur herself, as she died on October 5, 2015, at the age of sixty-five, only a few months after the film screened to widespread acclaim at several festivals (except at Locarno, where it was actually booed). Her death was reportedly a suicide, following a deep depression brought on by the loss of her mother. IFC is presenting a special screening on July 9, introduced by Akerman translator Corina Copp, who will read from Akerman’s final book, My Mother Laughs.

No Home Movie primarily consists of static shots inside Nelly’s Brussels apartment as she goes about her usual business, reading, eating, preparing to go for a walk, and taking naps. Akerman sets down either a handheld camera or a smartphone and lets her mother walk in and out of the frame; Akerman very rarely moves the camera or follows her mother around, instead keeping it near doorways and windows. She’s simply capturing the natural rhythms and pace of an old woman’s life. Occasionally the two sit down together in the kitchen and eat while discussing family history and gossip, Judaism, WWII, and the Nazis. (The elder Akerman was a Holocaust survivor who spent time in Auschwitz.) They also Skype each other as Chantal travels to film festivals and other places. “I want to show there is no distance in the world,” she tells her mother, who Skypes back, “You always have such ideas! Don’t you, sweetheart.” In another exchange, the daughter says, “You think I’m good for nothing!” to which the mother replies, “Not at all! You know all sorts of things others don’t know.”

Shots of a tree fluttering in the Israeli wind enhance the peaceful calm of No Home Movie

Later they are joined by Chantal’s sister, Sylviane, as well as Nelly’s home aide. The film features long sections with no dialogue and nobody in the frame; Akerman opens the movie with a four-minute shot of a lone tree with green leaves fluttering in the wind in the foreground, the vast, empty landscape of Israel in the background, where occasionally a barely visible car turns off a far-away road. Akerman returns to Israel several times during the film, sometimes shooting out of a moving car; these sections serve as interludes about the passage of time as well as referencing her family’s Jewish past. At one point, Akerman makes potatoes for her mother that they eat in the kitchen, a direct reference to a scene in Akerman’s feminist classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai due Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Knowing about what happened to both mother and daughter postfilming casts a shadow over the documentary, especially when Chantal tells her mother, “I’m in a very, very good mood. . . . Let’s enjoy it; it’s not that common.” As the film nears its conclusion, there is almost total darkness, echoing the end of life. Through it all, Akerman is proud of her mother; reminiscing about kindergarten, she remembers, “And to everybody, I would say, this is my mother.” No Home Movie achieves that very same declaration, now for all the world to see and hear.