twi-ny recommended events

CUNY DANCE INITIATIVE: 5th YEAR FEST

cdi

Baruch Performing Arts Center
55 Lexington Ave. at 25th St.
March 20 – 23, $11 – $36
www1.cuny.edu
www.baruch.cuny.edu/bpac

Since launching in 2014 in response to the lack of affordable rehearsal space in New York City, the CUNY Dance Initiative (CDI) has supported more than a hundred residencies, totaling nearly six thousand stage and studio hours, for established and emerging choreographers and companies at thirteen CUNY colleges across all five boroughs. CDI is now celebrating its fifth anniversary with a dance festival taking place March 20-23 at Baruch Performing Arts Center, featuring two programs of wide-ranging movement works by eleven choreographers who have been CDI residents. “The CUNY Dance Initiative is a vital part of the performing arts ecosystem, providing space for choreographers to experiment and develop work without the administrative and financial burdens that typically come with making work in New York City,” Howard Gilman Foundation executive director Laura Packer said in a statement.

On March 20 and 22, CDI presents Heidi Latsky Dance (preshow living sculpture court installation ON DISPLAY), Urban Bush Women (the solo Give Your Hands to Struggle, choreographed by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, with music by Bernice Johnson Reagon), Sonia Olla & Ismael Fernandez Flamenco Company (Ella, with an original score and live vocals by Duke Bojadziev), Andrew Nemr (an excerpt from the autobiographical Rising to the Tap), Miki Orihara (the solo Shirabyoshi, created with Noh artist Tanroh Ishida), and Loni Landon Dance Project (For Three). The March 21 and 23 lineup consists of Kinesis Project (a preshow site-specific performance adapted from Breathing with Strangers), Gabrielle Lamb/Pigeonwing Dance (a world premiere in collaboration with composer James Budinich), Parijat Desai (the solo Pardon My Heart, with Hindustani music and verse by poets Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Marcus Jackson), MBDance (the spoken-word trio Up and Down Her Back), and Ephrat Asherie Dance (an excerpt from Odeon, set to music by Ernesto Nazareth).

BABYLON

Brinsley Forde stars as the conflicted Blue in Franco Rosso’s incendiary Babylon

BABYLON (Franco Rosso, 1980)
Expands Friday, March 15
www.kinolorber.com

One of the best, and most important, British films of the last forty years took the long route to reach America, but it’s finally here, and it’s a knockout. In 1973-74, Franco Rosso and Martin Stellman wrote Babylon, a somewhat semiautobiographical story of prejudice and bigotry set around Jamaican sound system culture during the Thatcher era in South London. The BBC rejected it, and after several production companies passed on it as well, it was finally picked up by Mamoun Hassan of the National Film Finance Corporation. The movie was shot in six weeks on location in Deptford and Brixton and received an X rating, despite having limited violence and no sex. It screened at Cannes but was turned down by the New York Film Festival, which considered the subject matter too controversial. The film was restored in 2008, but an old print was shown at BAM in 2012, the only time the film was officially shown in the United States. That is, until now; the scorching tale at last got its American theatrical release March 8 at BAM and has now opened as well at IFC Center, Kew Gardens Cinemas, Nitehawk, and the Magic Johnson Harlem 9. Babylon is a don’t-miss work that is still frighteningly relevant today, even though it was ripped from the headlines of the 1970s.

The Ital Lion crew prepares for a toasting battle in Babylon

Brinsley Forde, a former child actor and founding member and original guitarist for the British reggae group Aswad, stars as Blue, a toaster — a Jamaican dancehall deejay who chants over riddims — whose crew, Ital Lion, is preparing for a bit-time competition against their archrival, Jah Shaka (the real-life legend who plays himself). Blue is a mechanic but would rather spend his time toasting, smoking spliffs, and goofing around with his buddies, including Beefy (Trevor Lair), Dreadhead (Archie Pool), Scientist (Brian Bovell), Errol (David N. Haynes), Lover (Victor Romero Evans), and Ronnie (Karl Howman), the only white man in the group. When a racist Caucasian family living above their hangout starts threatening them, some of the Ital Lion crew want to fight back, but Blue tries to prevent any violence. However, following a harrowing night when he’s chased through the dark streets by white men in a car, Blue packs his bags and reconsiders his future.

Babylon is a blistering film, spectacularly photographed by Chris Menges, who would go on to win Oscars for his cinematography on The Killing Fields and The Mission, and expertly edited by Thomas Schwalm, bringing the rhythm of the crew to the fore. In his first feature film, Rosso, a documentarian who spent his career making works about the underrepresented, captures the energy and the rage, the spirit and the fear experienced by Blue (superbly played by Forde, who was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2015) and his friends as they try to survive amid ever-more-threatening xenophobic danger that is almost begging for revolution and rebellion. It echoes what is happening around the world now, particularly the treatment of refugees and immigrants (legal and illegal) and calls to build a wall to keep out “the other.” Perhaps not surprisingly, cowriter-director Rosso (The Mangrove Nine, Lucha Libre) was the son of an Italian immigrant, cowriter Stellman (Quadrophenia, Defence of the Realm) is the son of a Viennese Jewish immigrant, producer Gavrik Losey (Magical Mystery Tour, Agatha) is the son of blacklisted American director Joseph Losey, and NFCC managing director Hassan is the son of a Saudi immigrant. And of course, the music is simply phenomenal, from Dennis Bovell’s pulsating soundtrack to songs by Aswad, Yabby You, Cassandra, Johnny Clarke, I-Roy, and Michael Prophet. In this intensely realistic and deeply involving masterpiece, Rastaman (Cosmo Laidlaw) identifies Africa, Jamaica, and England as the “Babylonian triangle of captivity,” but forty years later it continues to spread far and wide, ensnaring more and more in its hateful reach.

AMOUR OR LESS — A BLIER BUFFET: GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is part of Bertrand Blier festival at the Quad

Solange (Carole Laure), Raoul (Gérard Depardieu), and Stéphane (Patrick Dewaere) form a unique kind of family in Bertrand Blier’s Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

GET OUR YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS (PRÉPAREZ VOS MOUCHOIRS) (Bertrand Blier, 1978)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
March 15-21
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

French writer-director Bertrand Blier’s Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is no weepy melodrama. If you need hankies while watching, they’ll be for the tears rolling down your face from laughter. A fortieth-anniversary 2K restoration is screening March 15-21 in the Quad series “Amour or Less: A Blier Buffet,” a nine-film celebration of the five-decade career of the controversial auteur, who has been regularly labeled a misogynist. Get Out Your Handkerchiefs has stirred up its share of naysayers through the years, so it’s fascinating to watch it now, in the midst of the #MeToo movement. The film opens in a restaurant where the brutish, doting Raoul (Gérard Depardieu) is eating with his bored, disinterested wife, Solange (Carole Laure). Suspecting that she is stealing glances at a man seated at a table behind him, Raoul approaches him, a schoolteacher named Stéphane (Patrick Dewaere), and practically begs him to sleep with his wife. Raoul, a driving instructor, loves Solange so much that he is willing to go to great lengths to make her happy, even if it means sharing her bed with another man.

Adolescence hits Christian Belœil (Riton Liebman) hard in Oscar-winning romantic comedy

Of course, she has something to say about it and ultimately decides, without much excitement, that the plan is fine with her; she desperately wants to have a baby but has been unable to conceive with her husband. The men begin having quite the bromance themselves as they talk about Mozart while Solange knits, and knits, and knits. (The first scene Blier wrote was when the two men have a less-than-intelligent discussion on Mozart; Blier then built the film around that.) Their green-grocer neighbor (Michel Serrault) starts hanging around as well, concerned about Solange’s search for contentment. Solange, Raoul, and Stéphane spend a summer working together at a camp, where they meet Christian Belœil (Riton Liebman), a thirteen-year-old rich kid who gets bullied by the other boys but takes a liking to Solange as his hormones rage out of control. The film gets more absurdist, and funnier and funnier, as it heads into territory destined to offend politically correct watchdogs everywhere.

A fortieth-anniversary 2K restoration opens at the Quad on March 15

A fortieth-anniversary 2K restoration of Get Out Your Handkerchiefs opens at the Quad on March 15

Named Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics in addition to nabbing the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is a delightful farce that turns traditional family and societal relationships inside out and upside down, whether it be parents and children, mothers and sons, husbands and wives, teachers and students, or just a couple of dudes. Depardieu and Dewaere, who previously teamed up in Blier’s Going Places, are a comic force as a couple of ordinary guys caught up in a crazy riff on Jules et Jim, Raoul a driving instructor who doesn’t know where he’s going, Stéphane a man obsessed with Pocket Books. Laure (Sweet Movie, La Tête de Normande St-Onge) charmingly underplays the enigmatic Solange: Raoul and Stéphane think she might be a simpleton, but is she? The scenes of her knitting are hilariously deadpan, and the matching sweaters she produces eventually show up on nearly everyone, their prosaic patterns sometimes echoed in the walls, floors furniture, and other elements. Meanwhile, the comedy turns poignant as Christian, who can’t stand his parents (Eléonore Hirt and Jean Rougerie) or the other kids, spends more time with his new adult friends, especially Solange. At one point Christian is in bed reading Ralph Dennis’s super-noir On bricole, the cover showing a man torn in half, as if Raoul and Stéphane are two parts of the same human being (or referencing Christian’s growth from boy to man). And Stéphane is reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, a novel about a rather unusual family. Through it all is a wonderfully evocative score by Georges Delerue. “Amour or Less: A Blier Buffet” continues through March 21 with such other Blier works as Beau-père, Merci la vie, Ménage (Tenue de soirée), and Going Places.

ASH IS PUREST WHITE

Qiao (Zhao Tao) how her life is turning out in Jia Zhang-Ke’s Ash Is Purest White

ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Jia Zhang-Ke, 2018)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves., 212-875-5050
Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., 212-255-2243
www.ashispurestwhitemovie.com

Jia Zhang-Ke reaches into his recent past, and China’s, in his elegiac Ash Is Purest White. In the film, which opens today at the Quad and Lincoln Center, the Sixth Generation writer-director’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao, stars as Qiao, a combination of the characters she played in Jia’s 2002 Unknown Pleasures and 2006 Still Life. It’s the spring of 2001, and Qiao is living in style with her handsome, ultracool jianghu boyfriend, well-respected local gangster Guo Bin (Liao Fan). She runs a gambling parlor, where she asserts her power with men who are in awe of her. But when a rival gang attacks Bin and Qiao pulls a gun, their lives take a series of unexpected turns as the story moves first to 2006 and then to 2018, when things are decidedly, and sadly, different for both of them in a China that has changed as well.

Things are about to change for Guo Bin (Liao Fan) in Ash Is Purest White

As in many of his fiction works, Jia includes documentary elements as he touches upon China’s socioeconomic crisis, primarily exemplified by the Three Gorges Dam project, which led to the displacement of families and the literal disappearance of small communities. Working with a new cinematographer, Eric Gautier, who has lensed films for Olivier Assayas, Walter Salles, Leos Carax, Alain Resnais, and Arnaud Desplechin, among others — his longtime cameraman, Yu Lik-Wai, was unavailable — Jia incorporates general footage he shot between 2001 and 2006 of everyday people and architecture that underscores China’s many changes. There are many gorgeous shots of towns and cities, at one point bathed in white volcanic ash, with costumes of bright yellow, red, and blue, as Gautier goes from digital video to Digibeta, HD video, film, and the RED Weapon camera to add distinct textures. (Jia took the title from what was supposed to be Fei Mu’s last work, which was later made by Zhu Shilin.)

Qiao and Bin try to go back, but little is the same, except for some of their old friends, who are still trying to hold on to the way things were. Zhao (A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart) is slow and deliberate as Qiao, her wide eyes telling a story all their own as she wrestles with disappointment, searching for some meaning in her life, while Fan (The Final Master; Black Coal, Thin Ice) is bold and forceful as a proud, powerful man who undergoes a radical shift. “The city is developing fast. It’s ours for the taking,” Bin says early on. But in Jia’s moving, heartfelt epic, there’s nothing for them to grab on to anymore.

KIRSTEIN AND BALANCHINE’S NEW YORK CITY BALLET: FOUR MODERN WORKS

Peter Walker in George Balanchine’s Agon. Photo: Erin Baiano

Peter Walker will be part of NYCB performance at MoMA that includes excerpt from George Balanchine’s Agon (photo by Erin Baiano)

MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
March 16-18, free with museum admission of $14-$25, 12:00 and 3:00
Exhibit runs through June 7, $14-$25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In conjunction with the wide-ranging exhibition “Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern,” MoMA is presenting “Kirstein and Balanchine’s New York City Ballet: Four Modern Works,” a series of dance performances in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday at noon and 3:00. The exhibit, which opens on Sunday and continues through June 7, consists of nearly three hundred paintings, photographs, sculptures, letters, videos, drawings, and ephemera collected by or associated with the Rochester-born Lincoln Kirstein, a polymath, cultural critic, Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, librettist, and writer who cofounded the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine and was part of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives unit during WWII. The presentation, hosted by NYCB corps de ballet member Silas Farley, will include excerpts from 1941’s Concerto Barocco, 1946’s The Four Temperaments, 1948’s Orpheus, and 1957’s Agon, accompanied by Brooklyn-born pianist Elaine Chelton. The works will be performed by Farley, Gonzalo Garcia, Anthony Huxley, Sara Adams, Ashley Laracey, Unity Phelan, Peter Walker, Devin Alberda, Marika Anderson, Eliza Blutt, Meaghan Dutton-O’Hara, Laine Habony, Baily Jones, Olivia MacKinnon, Jenelle Manzi, Miriam Miller, Andrew Scordato, and Mary Elizabeth Sell. It’s free with museum admission, but there is limited seating.

INFRASTRUCTURE ON FILM: SNOWPIERCER

Curtis (Chris Evans) leads a revolt in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer

SNOWPIERCER (Bong Joon-ho, 2014)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, March 16, and Thursday, March 21, 9:00
Series runs March 14-28
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.snowpiercer-film.com

Korean director Bong Joon-ho, who had a huge international hit in 2006 with The Host and a major critical success with 2009’s Mother, made his English-language feature debut with Snowpiercer, a nonstop postapocalyptic thrill ride that takes its place with such other memorable train films as The Great Train Robbery, From Russia with Love, The Train, and Murder on the Orient Express. It’s 2031, seventeen years after the chemical C7, which was supposed to end climate change, instead froze the earth, killing all living beings except for a group of survivors on board a train run by a perpetual motion machine. In the rear of the train, men, women, and children are treated like prisoners, beaten, tortured, dressed in rags, their only food mysterious gelatin blocks. Soldiers led by the cold-hearted Mason (Tilda Swinton) and the yellow-clad Claude (Emma Levie), whose outfit brings virtually the only color to this dark, dank, deeply depressing setting, violently keep the peace as the two women heartlessly dictate orders and abscond with the children. But Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) and Edgar (Jamie Bell) hatch a plan to get past the guards and make their way to the front of the train in order to find out just what is really going on and to meet with Wilford, the wealthy entrepreneur running the engine. With the help of defiant mother Tanya (Octavia Spencer), elder statesman Gilliam (John Hurt), train engineer Namgoong Minsu (Bong regular Song Kang-ho), and Namgoong’s daughter, Yona (Go Ah-sung), Curtis attempts to lead a small revolution that is seemingly doomed to failure.

Mason (Tilda Swinton) has something to say about potential revolution on board train to nowhere

Inspired by the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jean-Marc Rochette and Benjamin Legrand (who both make cameos in the film), Snowpiercer is a tense, gripping thriller that unfolds as a microcosm of contemporary society, intelligently taking on race, class, poverty, drug addiction, education, and corporate greed and power. Evans (Captain America, Push) is almost unrecognizable as Everett, a flawed hero trying to make things right, followed every step of the way by cold-blooded killer Franco the Elder (Romanian star Vlad Ivanov of Police, Adjective and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). The film features splendid production design by Ondrej Nekvasil; each train car offers a completely different look and feel as Curtis heads toward the front, leading to a finale that is everything the conclusion to the Matrix trilogy wanted to be. Bong (Memories of Murder), who cowrote the film with Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), doesn’t shy away from violence in telling this complex story – of course, it doesn’t hurt that one of the producers is Korean master Park Chan-woo (the Vengeance trilogy, Thirst), who had recently made his first English-language film as well, Stoker. A fantastically claustrophobic chase film, Snowpiercer is screening March 16 and 21 at 9:00 in the Anthology Film Archives series “Infrastructure on Film,” which consists of works that involve constructed environments dealing with history, technology, and humanity. Running March 14-28, the series, curated in collaboration with Rebecca Cleman of Electronic Arts Intermix, features such other films as Frederick Wiseman’s Canal Zone, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Path of Oil, Dominic Angerame’s City Symphony, and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and will continue with a second part in the spring.

LOU REED DRONES

Laurie Anderson will be presenting “Lou Reed Drones” March 13 at St. John the Divine (photo by Da Ping Luo)

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St.
Wednesday, March 13, free with advance RSVP, 6:30 – 11:30 pm
212-316-7540
www.stjohndivine.org
www.loureed.com

When punk godfather Lou Reed departed this mortal coil on October 13, 2013, at the age of seventy-one, he left behind a legacy of music, poetry, and good old New York City toughness. His songs and style have so influenced our concepts of “downtown,” “cool,” and “rock,” it’s as if he’s still with us. And that’s how it will feel on March 13, when his longtime partner, musician and artist Laurie Anderson, presents “Lou Reed Drones” in the Crossing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for five hours beginning at 6:30. The soundscape installation features more than a half dozen of Reed’s guitars, each one in front of a large amplifier; his former guitar tech and collaborator Stewart Hurwood fiddles with various knobs and dials as droning feedback noise emerges, a different emanation of Reed’s famed Metal Machine Music. We saw the piece two years ago in the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center, where we could lie on the floor and just let it vibrate in all our cells; it’s a dramatic piece that can take you wherever you want to go, reaching another level as it floats into St. John the Divine’s eight-second echo. (Visitors are encouraged to walk around the space to experience unique sonic perceptions.) That performance offered the bonus of additional live musicians, including Anderson on violin. Free with advance RSVP, the work is part of the exhibition “The Value of Sanctuary: Building a House without Walls,” which continues at the cathedral through June 30.