twi-ny recommended events

SATELLITE COLLECTIVE’S ECHO & NARCISSUS

Satellite Collective’s Echo & Narcissus debuts at BAM Fisher this weekend

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
Friday, September 14, 8:00, and Saturday, September 15, 7:30, $25
www.bam.org
satellitecollective.org

New York City–based Satellite Collective is presenting the world premiere of its latest interdisciplinary ballet collaboration, Echo & Narcissus, at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space on September 14 and 15. Some forty artists participated in the creation of the immersive work, which includes music, dance, opera, visual art, digital multimedia, and more, with live music and movement by ShoutHouse. The seventy-minute piece is set in New York City in 1971 and deals with such themes as selfishness, love, madness, and transformation in a world where people are obsessed with their own reflections. It was written by Satellite Collective artistic director Kevin Draper, composed by Aaron Severini, choreographed by Norbert De La Cruz III, and directed by Philip Stoddard, with film by Lora Robertson, projection design by Simon Harding, sets by Libby Stadstad, and production design by Draper. Among the performers are dancers Matteo Fiorani, Timothy Stickney, Joslin Vezeau, and Tara Youngmen and singers Christine Taylor Price and Stoddard. “We work at the intersection of dance, visual art, and music — and we use architects and poets as the glue,” Draper said in a statement. “Echo & Narcissus will be our first, focused, evening-length work where group action has to resonate in service to the story. We’re crafting a pretty high level of intensity for the audience.”

BRILLIANT QUIRKY: JEANNE BALIBAR ON FILM

French star Jeanne Balibar will be at FIAF for three special events during October

French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, September 11 & 18, and Tuesdays in October, $14 (free on September 11), 4:00 & 7:30
Les Historiennes October 13, 30-$60, 7:00
212-355-6100
fiaf.org/events

FIAF pays tribute to French stage and screen star Jeanne Balibar with a two-month retrospective consisting of ten of her films, from 1997’s Mange ta soupe and 1998’s Only God Sees Me to a sneak preview of Barbara, her third collaboration with Mathieu Amalric. Despite the subtitle of the CinéSalon series, “Brilliant Quirky: Jeanne Balibar on Film,” the César Award-winning actress will actually be at FIAF as well, for Q&As following screenings of Jacques Rivette’s Tomorrow’s Another Day on October 2 at 7:30 and Barbara on October 9 at 7:30 — in addition to performing live in the one-woman show Les Historiennes in Florence Gould Hall on October 13, featuring Balibar reading essays by Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini, Charlotte de Castelnau, and Emmanuelle Loyer and discussing the profound impact the works have had on her life and career; the three historians will join Balibar in this Crossing the Line world premiere. The film series, which runs September 11 to October 30, also includes Pierre Léon’s L’Idiot and Raúl Ruiz’s Comedy of Innocence, with all screenings followed by a wine and beer reception. Don’t miss this opportunity to see one of the world’s most exquisite actresses in this exciting FIAF presentation.

JACQUES AUDIARD: THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED

Romain Duris stars in Jacques Audiards The Beat That Skipped My Heart

Romain Duris stars in Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a remake of James Toback’s Fingers screening at MoMA

THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED (Jacques Audiard, 2005)
MoMA Film, Education Center
4 West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, September 12, 4:00
Series runs through September 20
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In a relatively unique change of pace, the French remade a favorite American underground film. Director Jacques Audiard and screenwriter Tonino Benacquista followed up their international hit Read My Lips (2001) with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a creative, moody remake of James Toback’s Fingers (1978), which starred Harvey Keitel as a New York City kid forced to choose between the piano and the mob. Audiard moves the film to the mean streets of Paris, where Tom (Romain Duris) attempts to regain his childhood musical virtuosity, which he gave up after his mother’s tragic death. As he begins to train with a Vietnamese piano student-teacher (Linh-Dan Pham) who does not speak French, his crooked partners continue to reel him into their low-rent, dangerous real estate scams. Ever the antihero, Tom also has a poignant love-hate relationship with his father, played by Niels Arestrup in a marvelous yellow get-up. As Tom’s worlds collide, he is constantly aware of protecting his fingers, which he needs to perform Bach’s Toccata in E Minor at an important audition. The film, which takes a while to really develop, is shot in long takes with a handheld camera, keeping Tom boxed into his claustrophobic situation. Songs by Bloc Party and the Kills keep things on edge, mixing well with Bach and Alexandre Desplat’s evocative award-winning score. Winner of eight César Awards, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is screening September 12 at MoMA’s Education Center as part of “Jacques Audiard,” which celebrates the career of the French filmmaker upon the upcoming release of his first English-language feature, The Sisters Brothers; the series continues September 14 with the director’s 1994 thriller, See How They Fall, starring Jean Yanne, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Matthieu Kassovitz, before concluding with the new work on September 20, with Audiard and costar John C. Reilly participating in a Q&A.

R.R.R.E.D.: A SECRET MUSICAL

Stephanie Hicks (Marissa Rosen), Victoria O’Hara (Katie Thompson), GJ Crockett (Matt Loehr), and Craig (Kevin Zak) are trying to save the future of redheads in R.R.R.E.D.

DR2 Theatre
103 East 15th St. between Irving Pl. & Park Ave.
Saturday – Tuesday through September 11, $39-$79
rrredthemusical.com
www.darylroththeatre.com

In 2005, the Oxford Hair Foundation predicted that the recessive gene that causes red hair will be so diluted by 2060 that redheads will become extinct. (This was later proved false but keeps popping up on the internet every few years.) In the November 2005 South Park episode “Ginger Kids” inspired by that claim, Eric Cartman lambasts redheads (until he seemingly becomes one and wants to save them), saying, “Like vampires, the ginger gene is a curse, and unless we work to rid the earth of that curse, the gingers could envelop our lives in blackness for all time. It is time that we all admit to ourselves that gingers are vile and disgusting. In conclusion, I will leave you with this: If you think that the ginger problem is not a serious one, think again.” The off-Broadway musical R.R.R.E.D. , which stands for the Real Redheaded Revolutionary Evolutionary Defiance, urges us to fight for the preservation of red-haired men, women, and children, holding secret meetings in the DR2 Theatre to spread ways of keeping gingers alive and well across the planet. These gatherings are led by Victoria O’Hara (Katie Thompson, who wrote the music and lyrics and collaborated on the book with Adam Jackman and Patrick Livingston), joined by her energetic, lively assistant, GJ Crockett (Matt Loehr). They are determined to keep red hair flourishing, coming up with a plan in which redheads need to procreate. “Participation is the key to propagation!” she declares, explaining, “Every time a non-redheaded person manages to woo and win a redhead, another baby is born into a world with one fewer redheaded head.”

Victoria O’Hara (Katie Thompson) and GJ Crockett (Matt Loehr) lead a secret meeting at the DR2 Theatre in low-budget musical

A series of “Instructional Tutorial Musical Lessons” (including “Pregnant,” performed by Marissa Rosen as Stephanie Hicks, and “I Like You,” sung by Kevin Zak as Craig) and songs such as “The Rules,” “As Long as It’s Red,” “Revenge,” and “What Good’s a Blonde, Anyway . . .” fight the good fight, but it’s a losing battle. The low-budget, self-effacing show has some very fun moments, but it never comes together to form a cohesive whole. Upon entering the theater, each member of the audience is given a fake name that they must put on their shirt and use instead of their real name — I was Luke Skywalker, while my companion was Elizabeth Perkins — but that conceit just falls by the wayside, never going anywhere. While Thompson (Pump Boys and Dinettes, Big Fish), who evokes a latter-day Kathleen Turner, sports fiery red hair, the other characters don’t. Other elements also lack sense, from wigs to a monitor in the back that depicts photographs and text to support various theories. Director Andy Sandberg (Straight, Application Pending) can’t bring much focus to the show, which has been around since 2008, when an earlier, longer version was presented at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. About twenty-five minutes has been cut from that iteration, but it still is too long. And weekly celebrity guests — Kristen Mengelkoch (Forbidden Broadway) Kate Rockwell (Mean Girls), Christopher Sieber (Shrek the Musical, Tovah Feldshuh (Irena’s Vow) — who sing “Redheaded Stepchild,” feel out of place and gimmicky. In 1988, Tom Robbins wrote in GQ, “Whether they spring from genes disarranged by earthly forces or are ‘planted’ here by overlords from outer space is a matter for scholarly debate. It’s enough for us to recognize that redheads are abnormal beings, bioelectrically connected to realms of strange power, rage, risk, and ecstasy.” Like Robbins, I happen to be a redhead, and, as several characters say in R.R.R.E.D., “My blood bleeds red.” But just as Victoria and GJ are not having much luck saving redheads, it looks like the show itself can’t be saved, as the original closing date of October 21 has been moved up to September 11.

GIACOMETTI

Albert Giacometti, “The Chariot,” bronze, 1950 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through September 12, $25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:00-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

In his catalog essay “The Quest for the Absolute” for Alberto Giacometti’s 1948 solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, Jean-Paul Sartre began, “I know no one else so sensitive as he is to the magic of faces and gestures. He views them with a passionate desire, as though he were from some other realm. But at times, tiring of the struggle, he has sought to mineralize his fellow human beings: he saw crowds advancing blindly toward him, rolling down the avenues like rocks in an avalanche. So each of his obsessions remained a piece of work, an experiment, a way of experiencing space.” Humanness and space are key to the Guggenheim’s outstanding current retrospective, simply titled “Giacometti,” where large crowds are expected in its final days; the exhibition ends September 12. Although Giacometti, who was born in Switzerland in 1901, spent most of his working life in Paris, and died in 1966, came to New York only once, for a MoMA show in 1965, he has had a long and important relationship with the city.

Two versions of “Spoon Woman” (1927) are side by side, bronze in black, plaster in white (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Following gallery shows at Pierre Matisse and Julien Levy, Giacometti was given a major exhibition at the Guggenheim’s temporary space in 1955, and nineteen years later the institution mounted a posthumous retrospective in its Frank Lloyd Wright building. The new show is beautifully curated by the museum’s Megan Fontanella and Fondation Giacometti director Catherine Grenier and smartly installed by Derek DeLuco, with the artist’s large and small bronze and plaster sculptures, paintings, drawings, notebooks, and more unfolding chronologically up the Guggenheim’s spiral pathway, revealing a fascinating array of humanity and artistic styles (Surrealism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Egyptian and African), with plenty of room for both the visitor and the work to breathe.

A group of small busts line one bay at the Guggenheim (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The High Gallery provides a kind of amuse-bouche, a tantalizing look at Giacometti’s designs for an unrealized 1958 project at the Chase Manhattan Bank plaza downtown. Back on the ramp, bays feature black bronze and white plaster versions of the abstract “Spoon Woman,” an early gestation of the more familiar sculptures to come. “Suspended Ball” is a piece of Surrealist illusion. “Woman with Her Throat Cut” and “Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object)” offer compelling narratives. “Very Small Figurine” is just that, not even two inches tall, in contrast to, for example, “Man Pointing,” which reaches nearly six feet. (If it looks like the man’s left arm is cradling a missing figure, that’s because it is; Giacometti destroyed it, preferring to have the man be more lonely, particularly in the aftermath of WWII.) “City Square” brings together a handful of eight-inch figures that form a little community, while “Four Women on a Base” comprises a quartet of narrow figures who are so thin they nearly disappear. “In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture and painting,” Giacometti said. “They form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity. It’s the totality of this life that I want to reproduce in everything I do.”

Guggenheim retrospective begins with Giacometti’s 1962 oil painting of his wife, titled “Black Annette” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In “The Nose,” the lengthy proboscis of a figure in an open box pokes outside the plane. “Figurine Between Two Houses” resembles a man in a console television set. A woman stands tall on a small platform with two large wheels in “The Chariot,” which casts stunning shadows below it. Oil paintings such as “Standing Nude,” “Black Annette,” “Diego Standing in the Living Room in Stampa” (Diego was his brother and longtime model as well as a sculptor and designer), and “Jean Genet” prove Giacometti’s intense skill with canvas. The show is so well laid out that a visitor eagerly looks forward to what awaits in the next bay rather than tiring of so many elongated figures; they can seem like a sequence of musical notes, rising and falling as one proceeds through the show. “In space, there is too much,” Sartre quotes Giacometti, but that is not true of this thrilling, must-see retrospective.

KUSAMA: INFINITY

Documentary explores fascinating life and career of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (photo © Tokyo Lee Productions, Inc. / courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

KUSAMA: INFINITY (Heather Lenz, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, September 7
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.kusamamovie.com

I remember the buzz in the room back in July 2012 at the press preview for the “Yayoi Kusama” retrospective at the old Whitney. Even among all the jaded art critics, there was palpable excitement at the rumor that Kusama herself might be attending the event. Alas, it was not to be. But now everyone can feel like they’re in the same room as the iconoclastic Japanese artist when watching Heather Lenz’s infinitely entertaining documentary, Kusama: Infinity, opening September 7 at Film Forum. Over the course of her seven-decade career, Kusama has explored the concepts of infinity and eternity through painting, sculpture, performance art, film, and installation, highlighted by an obsession with endless circles and mirrored reflections. “I convert the energy of life into dots of the universe. And that energy along with love flies into the sky,” she explains. Traumatic childhood experiences deeply influenced her life and art; she began painting when she was eight years old in rural Matsumoto City, where her unhappy parents ran a wholesale seed business (and her mother would tear up her drawings). Now eighty-nine, she still works every day, going from the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she has lived voluntarily since 1977, to her studio, which is filled with her captivating works-in-progress. Lenz zooms in for extreme close-ups of the artist surrounded by canvases, as if she is the biggest dot (or seed?) in her universe. “So much of Kusama’s art seeks to re-create that [childhood] experience in one form or another,” notes Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim. “It is literally an experience of being lost into her physical environment, of losing her selfhood in this space that is moving rapidly, and expanding rapidly.”

Artist Yayoi Kusama in the Orez Gallery in the Hague, Netherlands (1965) in KUSAMA - INFINITY. Photo credit: Harrie Verstappen. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Artist Yayoi Kusama poses in the Orez Gallery in the Hague in 1965 (photo by Harrie Verstappen / courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

Kusama was determined to be successful and to stand out from the crowd, as shown in dozens of color and black-and-white photographs of her in various kimono, dot-covered outfits, revealing apparel, and great hats, always sporting that unique bang hairstyle. “I promised myself that I would conquer New York and make my name in the world with my passion for the arts and my creative energy,” she explains. She was not about to let anything stop her, least of all her gender and her heritage. She was angry when it appeared that such artists as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Lucas Samaras copied specific aspects of her work and gained greater notice for it. She sought advice from Georgia O’Keeffe. She got involved in an odd relationship with reclusive artist Joseph Cornell. She was shunned in her home country because of her penchant for nudity. She occasionally gets teary looking back at her life. The film features sensational archival video and photographs from some of Kusama’s seminal happenings and exhibitions, from “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show” to “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective” at CICA, from her “Narcissus Garden” intervention at the 1966 Venice Biennale, where she was selling individual mirror balls she had arranged on a lawn, to 1969’s “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead,” in which the fiercely antiwar artist read “Thoughts on the Mausoleum of Modern Art” as eight participants ran around naked in MoMA’s sculpture garden. (This summer, Kusama brought “Narcissus Garden” to New York for MoMA PS1’s biannual Rockaway! show.) There are also clips from the revolutionary 1967 psychedelic art film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, made by Jud Yalkut and Kusama.

Portrait of Yayoi Kusama in her studio. Image © Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.

At the age of eighty-nine, Yayoi Kusama still works in her studio every day (Image © Yayoi Kusama / courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)

Lenz, who will participate in a Q&A at Film Forum on September 7 after the 7:45 screening, talks to a wide range of people who provide intriguing perspectives on the artist and her work, including Kusama dancer Jeanette Hart Coriddi, former Matsumoto City mayor Tadashi Aruga, David Zwirner director Hanna Schouwink, psychoanalyst and art collector Judith E. Vida, MD, longtime best friend Akira Iinuma, artists Carolee Schneemann, Ed Clark, and Frank Stella, curators Marie Laurberg and Lynn Zelevansky, Joshua Light Show founder Joshua White, and Yayoi Kusama Museum director Akira Tatehata. CUNY Kingsborough art history professor Midori Yamamura says, “Her diagnosis is of obsessive-compulsive neuroses. Once something enters into her mind, she cannot get rid of it.” Former art dealer Beatrice Perry of the Gres Gallery adds of Kusama’s Infinity Net series, “I’d never seen anything like it. They had some kind of magic. You couldn’t stop looking at them, and you didn’t know where they were going. They were hypnotic.” And gallery owner Richard Castellane remembers, “She was taking away your ability to focus, breaking all boundaries of space. . . . This was the great breaking point in art. No longer are you the viewer the master; she’s the master.” Kusama’s mastery is still evident today, as prices paid for her artwork continue to skyrocket — she’s recognized as the top-selling woman artist in the world — and fans wait on long lines for hours and hours to spend thirty seconds inside one of her Infinity Mirrored Rooms. In addition, Lenz has done a masterful job giving us a Kusama we have never seen before. Despite her difficult, challenging life, the extraordinary Kusama declares, “I want to live forever.” And in the very personal, intimate, and infinite world she has created and Lenz has masterfully revealed, who’s to say she won’t?

FERRAGOSTO 2018

More than twenty thousand guests are expected to descend on Arthur Ave. on Saturday for the annual Ferragosto festival

More than twenty thousand people are expected to descend on Arthur Ave. on Saturday for the annual Ferragosto festival

Arthur Ave. between Crescent Ave. & 187th St.
Saturday, September 9, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
www.ferragosto.com

The Ancient Roman festival known as Ferragosto dates back to August 15 in 18 BC, celebrating summer, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the end of the harvest season, and various gods and goddesses (Diana, Vertumnus, Opis). Here in New York City, Ferragosto is taking place this year on September 9 along one-hundred-year-old Arthur Ave., which was named for Chester A. Arthur, the Vermont-born New York lawyer and politician who became the twenty-first president of the United States. Belmont Business Improvement District executive director Philip Marino will give the opening remarks at 11:30, followed by Elio Scaccio performing “Inno di Mameli,” the Italian National Anthem, and Nick Vero delivering “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There will be live performances by Scaccio and JulieAnna at 11:45 and 2:15, Natalie Pinto at 12:45, Frankie Sands at 3:15, and Rock Steady at 4:45. Among the many merchants with booths will be Arthur Avenue Cigars, Artuso Pastry Shop, Bronx Dance Theatre, Casa Della Mozzerella, Catania’s Pizza, De Lillo’s Pastry Shop, Dominick’s Restaurant, Gerbasi, Liberatore’s Garden, Madonia Bros. Bakery, Mario’s, Peter’s Meat Market, Randazzo’s, Sacred Heart Gifts & Apparel, St. Barnabas Hospital, Terranova Bakery, and Zero Otto Nove. It doesn’t get much more Italian than this, so divertiti!