twi-ny recommended events

BREAKING POINT: THE WAR FOR DEMOCRACY IN UKRAINE

Award-winning film documents the continuing fight for freedom in Ukraine

Award-winning film documents the people’s continuing fight for freedom in Ukraine

BREAKING POINT: THE WAR FOR DEMOCRACY IN UKRAINE (Mark Jonathan Harris, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, March 2
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.breakingpointfilm.com

This past December, I saw Counting Sheep: An Immersive Guerrilla Folk Opera, Mark and Marichka Marczyk’s interactive production about the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv, where they met and fell in love while battling the Berkut. The audience could get as involved as they wanted in order to enhance the experience, including eating with the characters, putting on construction hats, throwing fake rocks, huddling behind wooden signs, and helping build a barrier. While it was obviously far from the real thing, in retrospect I was surprised at how well that work captured the actual events when I began watching three-time Oscar-winning documentarian Mark Jonathan Harris and Oles Sanin’s Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine, a powerful, intimate look at war and politics over the last few years as Ukraine fights for its freedom against corrupt Ukraine president Victor Yanukovych and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “For the Kremlin, the only way to stop something like this is a violent crackdown,” former Ukraine prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk says. “They thought they would terrorize the people. The people would run. And exactly the opposite happened.” The film focuses on how everyday Ukrainian men and women joined in protest and took up arms against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Crimea, conducted by military forces who wore no insignia, allowing Russia to deny involvement in the killings. “I felt like all Kyiv had woken up and gathered together,” lawyer and volunteer medic Eva Yanchenko explains. Self-defense unit leader and former rabbi Natan Hazin declares that Ukraine is “a country worth dying for.” And children’s theater director Andriy “Bohema” Sharaskin says, “I’m the kind of person who thinks that beauty, art, love will save the world. . . . But on February 18, they started killing people. It was the breaking point, when everyone realized that watching, waiting, helping from a distance wasn’t good enough anymore. . . . We’re building a country and we’re fighting for it.”

Harris (Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, The Long Way Home) and Sanin (Mamay, The Guide) include terrifying footage of shootings, an attack on Donetsk Airport, the aftermath of a plane being shot down, and investigative reporter Tetyana Chronovol’s pursuit by mysterious men who beat her. “There is a war for Ukraine’s survival,” says Chronovol, whose husband, Mykola Berezovyi, was part of the ragtag but determined military. The filmmakers also talk with historian Timothy Snyder, writer Andrey Kurkov, Crimea expert Taras Berezovets, first Ukraine president Leonid Kravchuk, television journalist Mustafa Nayyem, radio host Andriy Kulykov, author Anne Applebaum, former US ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, and army doctor Vsevolod Stebliuk, who is seen trying to save lives under extremely difficult circumstances. Propaganda expert Paul Goble shows how Russia uses fake news on social media and television, manipulating photos and employing crisis actors to spread disinformation, which is especially fascinating given Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. And keep reading the text that identifies the speakers in the film; several of the labels change over the course of the movie as citizens enter the political arena in a grassroots effort to make a difference. The score tends to be overly melodramatic, attempting to elicit sympathy that is already up there on the screen, and only one side of the story is told, but the film, written by Paul Wolansky and edited by Jason Rosenfield, manages to overcome that. Since the Maidan revolution in February 2014, thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and nearly two million have become displaced refugees, but that is not stopping the people from defending what is rightfully theirs while preserving their dignity, men and women who are willing to risk their lives and the lives of their families in order to be free.

JEN KIRKMAN: I SEEM FUN LIVE PODCAST

jen kirkman

Who: Jen Kirkman
What: I Seem Fun: The Diary of Jen Kirkman live podcast
Where: The Bell House, 149 Seventh St., Brooklyn, 718-643-6510
When: Friday, March 2, $25, 8:00
Why: New York Times bestselling writer and comedian Jen Kirkman will be at the Bell House on Friday night, March 2, for a special live taping of her weekly podcast, promising her voice will be at full tilt following a bit of necessary rest. In I Seem Fun: The Diary of Jen Kirkman, the Massachusetts-born author of I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales from a Happy Life without Kids and I Know What I’m Doing — Other Lies I Tell Myself: Dispatches from a Life Under Construction and the star of a pair of Netflix specials, Just Keep Livin’? and I’m Gonna Die Alone (and I Feel Fine), shares her thoughts on things both public and private. Among her recent podcasts are “My Own Private I Dunno,” “Einstein Hated Haters,” and “Keep Your Cord Outta My Port.” Tickets are $25, but you can save five bucks by using the code ISEEMBK.

JOHN KELLY: TIME NO LINE

Performance artist John Kelly uses dance, music, drawing, film, photography, and more in Time No Line (photo by Theo Cote)

Ellen Stewart Theatre, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
66 East Fourth St.
Thursday – Sunday through March 11, $21-$26
212-475-7710
lamama.org
johnkellyperformance.org

John Kelly’s latest performance piece, the autobiographical, multimedia, multidisciplinary Time No Line, not only looks back at his long, varied, and highly influential career but also honors those he’s lost along the way; his breakout era of work coincided with the AIDS epidemic, and any artistic biography today must reckon with that immense tragedy. “There are so few of my generation left to tell their stories,” Kelly reads from his journals, which he’s been keeping since 1976. So Kelly shares his own story, citing his heroes, including Egon Schiele, Maria Callas, and Gustav Mahler, while referencing such other downtown fixtures as Karen Finley, David Wojnarowicz, Nan Goldin, Charles Atlas, Ethyl Eichelberger, Tere O’Connor, the Cockettes, John Fleck, Joey Arias, and others. The New Jersey native relates episodes of his life through interpretive dance, video projections, visual text, drawing, photographs, songs, and reading from his journal at a small desk. Pages from his journal in neatly arranged rows cover a screen in back. The narrative goes back and forth through the years; “the past is not linear,” he reads. “In retrospect, it’s a patchwork of emotional triggers — how hard has it been to go back into these journals. I see my missteps — and I see my experience, whether I like it or not.” Fortunately, we get to see his experience as well, and there is a lot to like. Kelly traces his career from the ballet and the opera to creating the drag character Dagmar Onassis, the fictional daughter of Callas and Aristotle Onassis, transforming himself into Joni Mitchell, and dealing with the AIDS crisis as it swept through New York City. Third-person text projected on the screen explains, “He sees the possibility of performing ‘in drag’ as a way to be socially annoying (this is 1979) and to process a lot of youthful rage.”

John Kelly looks back at his life and art in autobiographical one-man show (photo by Theo Cote)

Bullied as a child, Kelly found solace onstage, but he ultimately opted for alternative venues, such as the Pyramid Club, the Kitchen, DTW, and La MaMa. Cultural touchstones play a central part in his work; his previous shows include Diary of a Somnambulist, about Lady Macbeth and Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Obie-winning Love of a Poet, an adaptation of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe song cycle, The Escape Artist, based on the life of Caravaggio, and Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, in which he portrays Schiele. He steps to the side when changing costumes as more text, family photos, and archival footage is shown on the screen; there are also two higher screens where ghostly images occasionally appear. He steps to a center microphone and sings relevant songs by Mitchell, Henry Purcell, and Charles Aznavour. He snakes along the floor and makes chalk drawings that recall Keith Haring’s style and Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. The pacing can be uneven, Kelly is sometimes a little too casual, and he occasionally teeters on the edge of self-indulgence, but when he gets back in the groove, he displays why he has been such a beloved figure for decades. He often talks about mirrors and self-portraits; he calls the former “the stand-in for eventual public scrutiny” and “a tool for establishing a sense of self.” Of course, Time No Line is really a complex, nonlinear self-portrait, a visual diary of the making of a man in which Kelly holds up a mirror and allows us to see the tragedy and comedy that has resulted in his unique brand of art.

In conjunction with Time No Line, which continues at La MaMa through March 11, Kelly’s Sideways into the Shadows exhibition is being held at Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project at 6 East First St. through March 25, featuring hand-rendered transcriptions of journal entries and a memorial wall of portraits. “From this vantage point, it was a challenging time,” Kelly says as a survivor of the AIDS generation. “It’s still hard to get my head around it. This exhibition and Time No Line are my way to process the entire range of how my personal experiences and the arc of my artistic career intertwined into a coherent whole during a time that was both exhilarating and tragic.”

ROBERT INDIANA

Robert Indiana’s Love Wall stands tall at Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Paul Kasmin Gallery
515 West 27th St.
Through March 3, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-563-4474
www.paulkasmingallery.com
robertindiana.com

Letters, numbers, shapes — there is something very basic, very primal, about Robert Indiana’s most popular works, such as the red-and-blue Love sculpture at Sixth Ave. and Fifty-Fifth St. and the similar Hope at Fifty-Third and Seventh. “People don’t stop to think about how beautiful numbers are. Perhaps for the same reason that they don’t stop to think about how beautiful words are,” Indiana has said. “It’s the role of the artist — my particular role, if you will — to make words and numbers very, very special.” In honor of his ninetieth birthday year, the Paul Kasmin Gallery is showing two pieces by the Indiana-born visual artist, who lives and works in Maine and was the subject of a major Whitney retrospective, “Beyond Love,” in 2014. Love Wall, which was originally planned as a painting, sits by itself in a large, open white space, a twelve-foot-high, four-foot deep stacking of the word “Love” in unpainted Cor-ten steel, arranged so that the four tilted “O”s come together diagonally at the center. In 2007, the work was installed on the Park Avenue meridian at Fifty-Seventh St., part of the exhibition “Art in the Parks: Celebrating 40 Years”; it is much more peaceful here, away from the traffic and the noise, just relaxing by itself, giving viewers private moments to contemplate its message. It’s also more abstract when looked at with the naked eye; seeing it through the lens of a camera gives the words and letters more definition.

Robert Indiana’s ONE through ZERO counts up and down at Paul Kasmin (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Meanwhile, in a room at the back is ONE through ZERO, a wall sculpture of the numbers zero through nine, each on its own small base, the first row featuring 1, 2, and 3, the second row 7, 6, 5, and 4, and the third row 8, 9, and 0. “Our very lives are structured around numbers,” Indiana has noted. “Everything we do is reckoned on numbers.” ONE through ZERO has a hypnotic quality as you scan the numbers, follow their order, and consider the different color pairings for each numeral (which were inspired by the work of his friend and colleague Ellsworth Kelly). The numbers and letters go beyond mere Pop art and instead conjure up cultural symbols and language and reference life and death in a world Indiana would “like to cover with Hope,” as he said on the Today show in 2010.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

“Judy Chicago Designing the Entry Banner for ‘The Dinner Party,’” 1978 (courtesy of Through the Flower Archive)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, March 3, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum honors Women’s History Month with its free March First Saturday program, featuring live performances by Leikeli47, DJ Sabine Blaizin (Oyasound) with live percussion by Courtnee Roze, MICHIYAYA Dance (with Anya Clarke and Mitsuko Verdery leading a jam session), and Brown Girls Burlesque, presenting “Act Like a Lady! Strippin’ Fo’ the Culture,” with Hoodoo Hussy, Elektra Taste, Dakota Mayhem, Skye Siren, and Dirty Honey Shake dancers, hosted by Ravenessa; a book launch of Beverly Bond’s Black Girls Rock! Owning Our Magic. Rocking Our Truth. with Bond, Michaela Angela Davis, and Eunique Jones Gibson; pop-up gallery talks by teen apprentices in the “American Art” galleries; a community talk with representatives from THINK!Chinatown; Cave Canem Foundation poetry with zakia henderson-brown, Marwa Helal, and Aracelis Girmay; a hands-on art workshop inspired by Judy Chicago’s banners; a curator tour of “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making” led by Carmen Hermo; and a Feminist Book Club discussion of Janet Mock’s Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me, with Glory Edim of Well-Read Black Girl. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “One Basquiat,” “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making,” “Arts of Korea,” “Infinite Blue,” “Ahmed Mater: Mecca Journeys,” “Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum: The Body in Bronze,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.

THE AMATEURS

A ragtag troupe tries to survive the plague while putting on a play about Noah’s ark in The Amateurs (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Vineyard Theatre
Gertrude and Irving Dimson Theatre
108 East 15th St. between Union Square East & Irving Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 29, $79-$100
www.vineyardtheatre.org

During the first half of Jordan Harrison’s new play, The Amateurs, which opened tonight at the Vineyard, I found myself wondering just what it was I was watching. Basically, it was about a troupe of amateur actors in fourteenth-century Europe putting on a most amateurish production of Noah’s Flood. Led by Larking (Thomas Jay Ryan), who plays God, the company wants to impress their benefactor, the Duke, so much that he will make them his official troupe and allow them to live in his castle, safe from the Black Death that is sweeping across the land and has already taken one of their own, Henry (Greg Keller). “We’re actors,” Larking declares. “They bury us outside the city walls — and that’s if they like us. So we’ve got to be the best they’ve ever seen, if we want to live.” But alas, they are terrible. So is the first act of The Amateurs a farce? A parable? A historical treatise? Is it purposefully scattershot, or is it a bunch of amateurs making a play about a bunch of amateurs? Just when I was looking for Marshall McLuhan to explain it all to me (see Annie Hall), the narrative comes to a halt and Michael Cyril Creighton, who portrays simple-minded but lovable scenic designer Gregory, steps forward in contemporary dress and identifies himself as the playwright.

steals the show twice at the Vineyard (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Michael Cyril Creighton plays several key parts in The Amateurs at the Vineyard (photo by Carol Rosegg)

“Hi. Hello there,” Creighton says, addressing the audience directly. “The Vineyard Theatre thought it might be a good idea if I talked to you for a little while about, well, Why. It seems that a few ticket holders have been, um, voting with their feet, I guess you would say? And I suggested we could just lock all the doors maybe, or like lightly shame people as they’re trying to leave, but they said No. No, they said. We are all adults and it would be better if you could maybe just contextualize things a little.” And contextualize things he does, delivering a fifteen-minute monologue that goes deep into what might or might not be Pulitzer finalist Harrison’s creative process and personal past, from grammar school to the AIDS epidemic, from Bible study to art history lesson, ingeniously relating the inspiration behind the play, bringing its own drama and tension. At one point, Gregory is joined by Quincy Tyler Bernstine, who plays Hollis in the show-within-the-show; she just about tears the roof off the place with her soliloquy, sharing her feminist views comparing Noah’s unnamed wife to Bob Cratchit’s spouse, Emily, in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

And then the magic of theater took complete hold of me. The play travels back to fourteenth-century Europe, where Hollis, Larking, Rona (Jennifer Kim), the Physic (Keller), and Brom (Kyle Beltran) again portray the Seven Deadly Sins, rehearse their terrible show, and meet the Duke’s stalwart major-domo (Beltran). However, whereas in the first act things were bumpy and odd, now every action, every piece of dialogue makes sense. We get the references, we laugh at inside jokes, we applaud the feminist angle, we even care more about the pageant players themselves, as well as the characters they play. We marvel at Harrison’s (Marjorie Prime, Maple and Vine) creative process, we get a kick out of Tony winner David Zinn’s (The Humans, Fun Home) set, which consists of a grassy field, a hill, and a ramshackle cart that serves as the troupe’s mobile stage, and we chuckle knowingly at Raphael Mishler’s strange, Scream-like masks. We appreciate Obie winner Oliver Butler’s (The Light Years, The Open House) tongue-in-cheek direction, guiding us through two time periods and the fourth wall. And we owe it all to Creighton/Harrison, for reminding us of the power of theater, where it comes from, and what it can do for us, especially in dark times.

CONCERT FOR GEORGE

Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Dhani Harrison, and others come together for George Harrison tribute at Royal Albert Hall

CONCERT FOR GEORGE (David Leland, 2002)
Beekman Theatre, 1271 Second Ave., 212-249-0807, Tuesday, February 27
Village East Cinema, 181-189 Second Ave., 212-529-6998, Tuesday, February 27
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St., 212-924-7771, Monday, March 5
www.concertforgeorge.com

On November 29, 2002, on the first anniversary of the death of George Harrison from lung cancer at the age of fifty-eight, friends and relatives of the Quiet Beatle gathered at London’s Royal Albert Hall for a tribute concert and fundraiser. Concert for George was captured on film by director David Leland and hit movie theaters in October 2003; it has now been remastered in 2K and 5.1 Stereo Surround Sound and is being rereleased on February 27 in honor of what would have been Harrison’s seventy-fifth birthday (on February 25). The stellar event was organized by Harrison’s longtime close friend Eric Clapton, with the support of Harrison’s widow, Olivia, and son, Dhani, who was onstage playing the guitar through the whole show. Among other musicians participating were Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Billy Preston, Ravi Shankar, Anoushka Shankar, and Joe Brown, performing songs from Harrison’s career as a Beatle and a solo artist. It’s a real treat because many of these songs had never been played live by Harrison; the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, and Harrison avoided the road except for a problematic tour in 1974 and a brief visit to Japan in 1991. And through it all, large-scale photos of Harrison look down from above, taking in the festivities.

Beautifully photographed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Chris Menges and edited by Claire Ferguson, Concert for George opens with Hindu music, a favorite of Harrison’s, including the traditional prayer “Sarveshaam” and Ravi Shankar’s “Your Eyes” and “Arpan,” the latter composed specifically for the evening. Following a comic interlude featuring Month Python members Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Neil Innes, and bonus guest Tom Hanks — Harrison was a big Python fan and good friends with the troupe — the all-star band turns to Harrison’s music, which is performed with love and admiration and reveals his genius at melody and incorporating nontraditional choruses and guitar lines. Unfortunately, during too many of the songs, Leland (Wish You Were Here, Checking Out) cuts away from what’s happening onstage to show rehearsals and behind-the-scenes footage. While it’s fascinating to hear Petty talk about how Harrison helped write the Traveling Wilburys hit “Handle with Care” and see Ravi and Anoushka Shankar preparing for a special musical presentation, it would have been better to see such things in between songs. And indeed, the songs are revelatory, certifying Harrison’s genius as a songwriter as well as a guitarist. Starr excels on “Photograph,” which he wrote with Harrison and, as Ringo notes, takes on different meaning given the circumstances; McCartney is brilliant performing “For You Blue” on acoustic guitar and “Something” on ukulele, breathing new life into two old chestnuts; Clapton wails away on “Beware of Darkness” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”; and Preston, one of several men referred to as the Fifth Beatle, turns “Isn’t It a Pity?” into a powerful epic. The crack backup band boasts such great musicians as guitarists Andy Fairweather-Low and Marc Mann (who both play some sweet slide), pianists Gary Brooker and Jools Holland, bassists Dave Bronze and Klaus Voormann, percussionists Jim Keltner, Jim Capaldi, and Ray Cooper, and vocalists Katie Kissoon, Tessa Niles, and Sam Brown. It was filmed only a year after Harrison’s passing, but all the men and women onstage are enjoying themselves immensely, their joy extending into the audience as they celebrate an extraordinary man of peace and love. Concert for George is screening February 27 at the Beekman and Village East and March 5 at IFC Center; proceeds from the rerelease and DVD package will benefit the Material World Foundation, which Harrison founded in 1973 “to encourage the exploration of alternate and diverse forms of artistic expression, life views, and philosophies as well as a way to support established charities and people with special needs.”