twi-ny recommended events

PRIDE MONTH: SAVING FACE

Alice Wu’s Saving Face breaks the chains of conventions in LGBTQ love story

REPRESENTATION: SAVING FACE (Alice Wu, 2004)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Thursday, June 6, 7:00
718-384-3980
nitehawkcinema.com
www.sonyclassics.com

Nitehawk is celebrating Pride Month with a trio of films honoring the LGBTQ experience, beginning June 6 with a screening of 2004’s Saving Face, followed by a Q&A with writer-director Alice Wu. While much of this independent first feature is entertaining enough, the last scenes are so much fun, so heartbreaking, and so charming that the film leaps to the next level, so stay with it. The captivating Michelle Krusiec (One World, Knife Fight) stars as Wilhelmina, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor trying to balance her career with her family in Flushing. Every Friday night she goes to the community dance, where her mother (Joan Chen) and the other Chinese yentas try to fix her up with a guy. Little do they know that she’s gay and strongly attracted to the boss’s daughter, Vivian (Lynn Chen), a ballerina dabbling in modern dance. Things get a little wacky when it turns out that Wil’s mother is pregnant and won’t tell anyone who the father is, leading to her banishment from her parents’ home and her friends’ inner circle. Suddenly Wil finds herself struggling to take care of her mother while also exploring a blossoming relationship that she hides from nearly everyone except her best friend, Jay (Ato Essandoh).

Tradition battles modern life, generation battles generation, sexual preference battles gossip and scandal, and conventional roles get turned upside down and inside out in this film-festival favorite that will leave you smiling. The Pride Month series continues June 7 with A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and June 8 with a NewFest Brunch screening of Punks. Saving Face, which earned Krusiec a Best Actress nomination at the Golden Horse Film Festival, is also part of Nitehawk’s Representation series, which continues June 8 with Dominga Sotomayor Castillo’s 2019 Too Late to Die Young.

HUDSON RIVER DANCE FESTIVAL 2019

Ballet Hispánico will perform Sombrerísimo at Hudson River Dance Festival June 6-7 (photo courtesy Susan Bestul)

Who: Dormeshia, Taylor 2, doug elkins choreography, etc., Ballet Hispánico, Camille A. Brown & Dancers
What: Hudson River Dance Festival
Where: Pier 63 Lawn Bowl at West Twenty-Third St., Hudson River Park
When: Thursday, June 6, and Friday, June 7, free, 7:00
Why: On June 6 and 7, the fifth annual Hudson River Dance Festival takes place at Pier 63 in Hudson River Park, two free evenings of performances while the sun sets over the water. This year’s lineup features another terrific cast, with Dormeshia’s improvisatory Rhythm Migration… from her larger work, And Still You Must Swing; Taylor 2’s Aureole, the 1962 favorite set to music by George Frideric Handel; doug elkins choreography, etc.’s O, round desire, inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera; Ballet Hispánico’s Sombrerísimo, informed by the bowlers associated with surrealist painter René Magritte; and Camille A. Brown & Dancers’ New Second Line, a celebration of the rebirth of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Note that blankets are allowed, but chairs are not. And make sure to bring sunglasses and a hat, because depending on how the stage is arranged, the sun might be right in your eyes as it sets beautifully over the Hudson.

TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER)

Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) takes a unique multimedia look at the work of Robert Mapplethorpe (photo by Maria Baranova)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
June 6-8, $30-$60, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The controversial work of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe has been undergoing a renaissance over the last few years, with documentaries, gallery and museum shows, and, perhaps most influentially, Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir about her life with Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. Now comes composer Bryce Dessner and librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle’s multimedia Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), playing at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House June 6-8. The sixty-minute theatrical oratorio is divided into three sections based on Mapplethorpe’s XYZ portfolios, which explore sadomasochism, flowers, and African American male nudes, respectively. The first part centers on Smith’s poem “The Boy Who Loved Michelangelo,” set to a Monteverdi madrigal; the second on Dessner’s personal reaction to the 1990 Mapplethorpe obscenity trial in Cincinnati, the composer’s hometown; and the third on poet and performance artist Essex Hemphill’s “The Perfect Moment,” which was critical of Mapplethorpe’s depiction of black bodies. “Aesthetics can justify desire, / but desire in turn / can provoke punishment. / Under public scrutiny / the eyes of one man / are focused on another. / Is it desire, equality, / disgust, or hatred?” he writes. Meanwhile, in a program note, dramaturg Christopher Myers asks, “Is it possible to imagine these men who are photographed with the impersonal intimacy of flowers, or bronze sculptures, as full human beings, with desires and pleasures of their own? Can we read the desire of the photographer, his conflicts and self-denials, in his steadfast commitment to a classical language that recasts leather daddies and daddy’s boys into upper middle class living room fantasies? Where in this thorny bramble of gazes, objectification, outrage, and intimacy do our own wants and expectations as an audience live?”

The production, which features giant projections of rarely shown Mapplethorpe photographs, is directed by Kaneza Schaal, with music performed live by Roomful of Teeth (Cameron Beauchamp, Martha Cluver, Eric Dudley, Estelí Gomez, Abigail Lennox, Thomas McCargar, Thann Scoggin, and Caroline Shaw), joined by soprano Alicia Hall Moran and tenor Isaiah Robinson; Brad Wells is the music director and conductor, with Jessica McJunkins on violin, Tia Allen on viola, Byron Hogan on cello, Kyra Sims on French horn, Ian Tyson on clarinet and bass clarinet, Laura Barger on piano and harmonium, Donnie Johns and Victor Pablo on percussion, and James Moore on guitar. The set and costumes are by Carlos Soto, lighting by Yuki Nakase, and video by Simon Harding. On June 7 at 6:00, the talk “Mapplethorpe in Performance with Bryce Dessner, Kaneza Schaal, and Korde Arrington Tuttle” will be held in the BAM Hillman Attic Studio.

HEINER GOEBBELS: EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AND WOULD HAPPEN

everything that happens

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
June 3-9, $40-$95
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

In 2009, German composer and artist Heiner Goebbels brought Stifter’s Dinge to Park Avenue Armory, a work for five pianos, sans performers, an architectural, musical, kinetic collage with the voices of William S Burroughs, Malcolm X, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 2016, his multidisciplinary De Materie featured a lighted zeppelin and a flock of sheep. His latest spectacle to come to the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is Everything that happened and would happen, running June 3-9. Originally staged in a former railway station in Manchester, the 160-minute intermissionless piece, reconfigured for the armory, combines unedited footage from Euronews’s No Comment, music from John Cage’s “Europeras 1&2,” and text based on Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. “Heiner Goebbels is an artist who defies classification. Composer, visual artist, theatrical pioneer, philosopher, and poet of the stage, he has for decades created compelling productions using a wide variety of performers,” armory artistic director Pierre Audi said in a statement. “The Drill Hall thrives on art forms flirting with each other, teasing us, provoking us, challenging us. Goebbels is the ring master par excellence who offers us a production especially inspired by the armory space. The result is an immersive experience that leaves each of us, the spectators, with our own experience and interpretation.”

The work, which was co-commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, 14—18 Now, Artangel, and Ruhrtriennale and explores a century of world history, is conceived and directed by Goebbels, with lighting by Goebbels and John Brown, sound by Willi Bopp, and video by Rene Liebert, with five musicians (Camille Emaille, Gianni Gebbia, Cécile Lartigau, Léo Maurel, Nicolas Perrin) and twelve performers and dancers (Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez, Sandhya Daemgen, Antoine Effroy, Ismeni Espejel, Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Freddy Houndekindo, Tuan Ly, Thanh Nguyễn Duy, John Rowley, Annegret Schalke, Ildikó Tóth, Tyra Wigg). On June 6 at 5:30, Goebbels will take part in an artist talk with Gelsey Bell.

BROOKLYN FILM FESTIVAL: USE ME

Humiliatrix Ceara Lynch and filmmaker Julian Shaw play fictionalized versions of themselves in Use Me

USE ME (Julian Shaw, 2019)
Sunday, June 2, Wythe Hotel, 80 Wythe Ave. at North Eleventh St., 7:00
Monday, June 3, Windmill Studios, 300 Kingsland Ave., 8:30
Festival runs May 31 – June 9
www.brooklynfilmfestival.org

Fiction and reality collide in kinky ways in Julian Shaw’s thriller Use Me, making its world premiere at the twenty-second annual Brooklyn Film Festival. New Zealand-born director Shaw initially set out to make a documentary about Ceara Lynch, a professional humiliatrix who welcomes people to her website by proclaiming, “Here you will find a wide array of fetish and femdom POV videos specially designed to exacerbate your inexplicable urge to have a pretty girl ruin your life.” Ultimately, he decided to create a fictionalized tale in which it is often difficult to tell what is real and what is not. Lynch makes her living by humiliating men, who pay for the privilege; the film’s original title was Ruin Me. Shaw and Lynch, and various other characters, play themselves as he delves into her salacious business of sexual obsession. She has a clear set of guidelines, but when they breach a few key ground rules, Shaw finds himself trapped in a dangerous nightmare involving Lynch, her client Luke Adore (Joseph Reitman), and her protégée Princess Cassie (Jazlyn Yoder).

Shaw (Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story, Cup of Dreams) keeps the viewer off balance all the way, both through the use of shaky handheld cameras and his appropriately uncomfortable performance; he has noted in interviews that even he sometimes didn’t realize what scenes were completely made up and what was more real. The twists pile up, leading to a surprising conclusion as Shaw examines various forms of addiction, including the director’s need to film everything; he never turns the camera off, no matter what commitments he’s made to himself or others. Use Me is screening June 2 at 7:00 at the Wythe Hotel and June 3 at 8:30 at Windmill Studios, followed by Q&As with Shaw and others. The Brooklyn Film Festival continues through June 9 with such other works as Dustin Feneley’s Stray, Kristian Gianfreda’s Only Good Things, and Zhang Zhonghua’s The Home in the Tree.

ELECTIVE AFFINITIES: EDMUND DE WAAL AT THE FRICK COLLECTION / MORONI: THE RICHES OF RENAISSANCE PORTRAITURE

Edmund de Waal, that pause of space, porcelain, gold, alabaster, aluminum, and plexiglass, on view in the North Hall; photo: Christopher Burke

Edmund de Waal, that pause of space, porcelain, gold, alabaster, aluminum, and plexiglass, on view in the North Hall (photo by Christopher Burke)

The Frick Collection
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Moroni through June 2, de Waal through November 17, $12-$22
212-288-0700
www.frick.org

The brief confluence of two shows at the Frick, “Elective Affinities: Edmund de Waal at the Frick Collection,” which opened May 30, and “Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture,” which closes June 2, offers an unexpected, unanticipated bonus. For “Elective Affinities,” author and ceramicist Edmund de Waal has created site-specific vitrines of objects made of porcelain, steel, gold, alabaster, and aluminum and placed them throughout the museum, interacting with individual paintings, sculptures, and furniture, resulting in intriguing dialogues involving form, shape, color, balance, and space while exploring such concepts as wealth, power, elegance, and industry. The Moroni show focuses on the Italian painter’s portraits, many of which are accompanied by vitrines of objects relating to elements found in the work. De Waal’s an alchemy is embedded in the bottom of a table on which resides André-Charles Boulle’s “Barometer Clock,” John C. Johansen’s portrait of Henry Clay Frick looming in the background; below Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville is sub silentio, which dramatically interacts with the painting’s composition; and the temptation of Christ on the mountain echoes the architectural structures in Duccio di Buoninsegna’s tempera on poplar panel depiction of Satan attempting to entice Jesus to the dark side. A mid-sixteenth century rapier stands by Moroni’s Gabriel de la Cueva, a sword on the subject’s left side; sixteenth-century shears hover by The Tailor, in which a man is cutting fabric; and a bejeweled “Marten’s Head” resembles one of the precious accessories adorning the portrait of Isotta Brembati. Each of the exhibitions is worth seeing on its own merits, but for a few days, they can be experienced together in an unintended yet fascinating way, in lovely dialogue with each other.

FIRST SATURDAYS: STONEWALL 50

The Queer Houses of Brooklyn and the Three Towns of Boswyck, Breukelen and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era. (Based on the drawing by Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky and with illustrations by Buzz Slutzky.) Crank-Knit Yarn, fabric, thread, sequins, poly-fil, 1" pins (free to the public and replenished endlessly). 9' x 9' x 14'. 2011

LJ Roberts, The Queer Houses of Brooklyn and the Three Towns of Boswyck, Breukelen and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era (based on the drawing by Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky and with illustrations by Buzz Slutzky), crank-knit yarn, fabric, thread, sequins, poly-fil, 1″ pins (free to the public and replenished endlessly), 2011 (photo courtesy of the artist)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, June 1, free (some events require advance tickets), 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum honors Gay Pride and the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in the June edition of its free First Saturday program. There will be live performances by New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, Linda LaBeija, Amber Valentine, and Madame Gandhi as well as teen staff members presenting an intersextions variety show inspired by “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” and artists Morgan Bassichis, TM Davy, DonChristian Jones, Michi Osato, Una Osato, and special guests celebrating the updated edition of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions; a book club talk with Jodie Patterson discussing her latest, The Bold World, with Elaine Welteroth; a curator tour of “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow” led by Lindsay C. Harris and Carmen Hermo; a hands-on workshop in which participants can design buttons based on LJ Roberts’s The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Boswyck, Breukelen, and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era; a community talk on radical queer histories with Audre Lorde Project; and an “Archives as Raw History” tour focusing on the museum’s LGBTQ+ histories. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Garry Winogrand: Color,” “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall,” “Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room,” “Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha,” “One: Egúngún,” “Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” “Kwang Young Chun: Aggregations,” and more.