twi-ny recommended events

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE NEW NOW? 40 ARTISTS IN DIALOGUE

Allen Ruppersberg, Who’s Afraid of the New Now?, from the series Preview Suite, 1988. Lithograph, image: 21 3/8 × 13 1/4 in (54.1 × 33.5 cm), sheet: 22 × 13 7/8 in (56 × 35.1 cm). Edition of thirty. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

Allen Ruppersberg, “Who’s Afraid of the New Now?” from the series Preview Suite, lithograph, 1988 (courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Saturday, December 2, and Sunday, December 3, $5 per conversation, 10:00 am – 8:00 pm
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

The New Museum continues its fortieth anniversary celebration with “Who’s Afraid of the New Now? 40 Artists in Dialogue,” two days of free admission to the downtown institution and a fab series of five-dollar artist conversations that require advance purchase here. On Saturday beginning at ten o’clock, every hour on the hour (except for the two o’clock lunch break), you can catch Judith Bernstein and Linda Montano, Paweł Althamer and Cally Spooner, Ragnar Kjartansson and Carolee Schneemann, Hans Haacke and Carsten Höller, Donald Moffett and Nari Ward, George Condo and Jeff Koons, Paul Chan and Carroll Dunham, Thomas Bayrle and Kerstin Brätsch, Raymond Pettibon and Kaari Upson, and Simone Leigh and Lorraine O’Grady. Sunday’s lineup features Cheryl Donegan and Mary Heilmann, Jeremy Deller and Martha Rosler, Paul McCarthy and Andra Ursuta, Elizabeth Peyton and Allen Ruppersberg, Nicole Eisenman and Neil Jenney, Howardena Pindell and Dorothea Rockburne, Bouchra Khalili and Doris Salcedo, Camille Henrot and Anri Sala, Sharon Hayes and Faith Ringgold, and Carol Bove and Joan Jonas. It’s a crazy-good roster of artists who have shown at the museum, which was founded in 1976 by Marcia Tucker and opened at C Space in 1977 before moving to the New School and then 583 Broadway before its grand reopening at 235 Bowery on December 1, 2007. Currently on view are “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” “Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play,” “Petrit Halilaj: RU,” “Helen Johnson: Ends,” “Alex Da Corte: Harvest Moon,” and “Pursuing the Unpredictable: The New Museum 1977–2017” in addition to a special window reinstallation of Bruce Nauman’s 1987 video No, No, New Museum from his Clown Torture series.

VOYEUR

Gerald Foos and Gay Talese discuss voyeurism and journalistic ethics in eye-opening documentary

VOYEUR (Myles Kane & Josh Koury, 2017)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, December 1
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.netflix.com

“I’m a natural person to write about a voyeur because I’m a voyeur myself,” award-winning, bestselling journalist Gay Talese says in Myles Kane and Josh Koury’s Voyeur. The documentary makes a voyeur of the viewer as well as it follows the thirty-five-year journalistic relationship and offbeat friendship between Talese, longtime New York Times and Esquire writer and author of such books as Honor Thy Father and Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and Gerald Foos, the owner of a Colorado motel who claims he spent decades spying on people from a special crawl space he built above the rooms. In January 1980, Foos, owner of the Manor House Motel, wrote a letter to Talese, offering him a story about what he was doing; Foos considered himself a researcher, not a pervert or a peeping Tom. Using archival footage, news reports, and new interviews, Kane and Koury follow Foos, his second wife, Anita, and Talese as the journalist prepares to write a major piece for the New Yorker in advance of the release of his latest book, The Voyeur’s Motel. New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison considers Foos a disturbed sociopath in need of attention, while Grove/Atlantic senior editor Jamison Stoltz and publisher Morgan Entrekin have their doubts about the veracity of Foos’s eerily specific tale. So as questions arise about key facts and Talese’s professional ethics, Foos wonders if he should have remained silent — “I’m used to private spaces, places that nobody could see me and I could see them,” he explains — and an angry Talese faces a potentially tarnished legacy.

Gerald Foos turned the Manor House Motel in Colorado into a research facility where he spied on couples having sex

Kane and Koury, who previously collaborated on such documentaries as Journey to Planet X, We Are Wizards, and We Will Live Again, often use a model of the Manor House to depict certain events while also re-creating scenes of Foos watching couples having sex — including one time when Talese joins him in the snooping and experiences a wardrobe malfunction. (Kane and Koury also let the camera lovingly follow Talese as he impeccably dresses himself, every detail crucial to his overall appearance, much like a journalist getting every single fact right.) Over the years, Talese and the Fooses developed a unique kind of bond that is unusual for a writer and his subject, but the erudite Talese, now eighty-five, defends his actions. “My life has pretty much been living through other people’s experiences and to be a very accurate chronicle, an observer, watching other people, listening,” he says. “I take my time, and I am genuinely interested in the people I am writing about because there’s something about them that I feel I can identify with.” It is fascinating to watch the reactions of Foos and Talese as the article comes out, the book is published, and all hell breaks loose. Voyeur raises significant issues about truth in journalism, the writer’s ethical responsibilities, and the lure of salaciousness. Early on, Talese, in his writing bunker filled with decades and decades of carefully organized files — in a way similar to the collections of baseball cards and other objects Foos keeps in his basement — says, “The story never ends. Stories never die. A lot of reporters think when they leave a story, it’s all over. Sometimes it’s just beginning.” Kane and Koury stick with the story and end up with quite a tale, something that is not about to die anytime soon. On December 1, Voyeur starts streaming on Netflix and opens at IFC Center, where Kane and Koury will participate in a Q&A following the 6:05 screening on Friday night.

FIRST SATURDAY: FROM ANCIENT EGYPT TO THE AFROFUTURE

(photo by Gavin Ashworth / Brooklyn Museum)

“Ibis Mummy,” animal remains, linen, from the Ibis cemetery at Abydos, Egypt; excavated by the Egypt Exploration Fund. Late Period to Ptolemaic Period, 410–200 BCE (photo by Gavin Ashworth / Brooklyn Museum)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, December 2, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum honors World AIDS Day and looks at what’s to come in the African diaspora in its monthly free First Saturday program in December with “From Ancient Egypt to the Afrofuture.” There will be live music by Daví, Everyday People featuring DJ mOma and Jade de LaFleur, and Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, performing a Sun Ra tribute; a curator tour of “Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt” with Edward Bleiberg; an artist talk and tour of “Ahmed Mater: Mecca Journeys” with Ahmed Mater and Catherine Morris; a hands-on art workshop in which participants will create headdresses inspired by the museum’s ancient Egyptian collection; the scholar talk “Everything in the Future Is Black” with Makeba Lavan exploring the work of Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, George Clinton, Janelle Monae, Erykah Badu, and others; teen pop-up gallery talks on Ancient Egyptian art; screenings of Terence Nance’s short films They Charge for the Sun, Swimming in Your Skin Again, and Univitellin, followed by a talkback with Nance; “Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings” short films by Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye and Ellen Spiro, Reina Gossett, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia Labeija, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Brontez Purnell, curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett and commissioned for Visual AIDS’ annual Day With(out) Art in honor of World AIDS Day; and a feminist book club discussing Angela Y. Davis’s “Working Women, Black Women, and the History of the Suffrage Movement,” hosted by Glory Edim of Well-Read Black Girl in conjunction with “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making.” In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party,’” “Soulful Creatures,” “Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum: The Body in Bronze,” “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo,” “Arts of Asia and the Middle East,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: HARUKI MURAKAMI’S SLEEP

Ripe Time reimagines Haruki Murakamis Sleep in inventive theatrical adaptation (photo ©Julieta Cervantes)

Ripe Time reimagines Haruki Murakami’s Sleep in inventive theatrical adaptation at BAM (photo ©Julieta Cervantes)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
November 29 – December 2, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
ripetime.org

In February 2016, Japan Society presented Ripe Time’s work-in-progress adaptation of Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s 1993 short story Sleep as part of the “Women on the Rise” series. The final version is now making its New York City premiere November 29 through December 2 at the BAM Fisher as part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival. The seventy-five-minute experimental, fantastical production is based on Murakami’s (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore) tale of a Japanese housewife who is “both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake”; the story begins, “This is my seventeenth straight day without sleep. I’m not talking about insomnia.” The multimedia, multidisciplinary show is adapted by Naomi Iizuka (36 Views, Tattoo Girl) and directed and devised by Rachel Dickstein (The World Is Round, Septimus and Clarissa) and Ripe Time, with set design by Susan Zeeman Rogers, projections by Hannah Wasileski, lighting by Jiyoun Chang, sound by Matt Stine, costumes by Ilona Somogyi, and music by NewBorn Trio. The cast features Akiko Aizawa, Brad Culver, Takemi Kitamura, Paula McGonagle, Jiehae Park, and Saori Tsukada. In a program note, Dickstein explains, “In an era where difference is under siege, we hope Sleep’s vision of an ordinary woman tearing down the prison walls of her life as a wife and mother offers a necessary rally cry for us all.”

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE FOUNTAINHEAD

Ivo van Hoves adaptation of Ayn Rands The Fountainhead runs at BAM November 28 to December 2

Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead runs at BAM for only five performances

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
November 28 – December 2, $35-$140
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
tga.nl/en

Since he joined Toneelgroep Amsterdam in 2001, Belgian director Ivo Van Hove has presented wildly unusual and unique versions of such films and plays as Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and After the Rehearsal / Persona, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and The Crucible, Shakespeare’s Othello and The Taming of the Shrew, John Cassavetes’s Husbands, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Jean Cocteau’s La Vox Humaine, and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Obsession. Among his productions to appear at BAM are the Shakespeare compilations Roman Tragedies and Kings of War, Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Cassavetes’s Opening Night, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and Sophocles’s Antigone. It’s a vast, diverse, and staggering output, one that continues this week with the BAM Next Wave Festival New York premiere of his 2014 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, the beloved tome of such Republicans as Paul Ryan. Taking place in an open-office plan, the show features set and lighting by Jan Versweyveld, music by Eric Sleichim, video design by Tal Yarden, and costumes by An D’Huys. Ramsey Nasr plays Howard Roark, with Halina Reijn as Dominique Francon, Hans Kesting as Gail Wynand, Aus Greidanus jr. as Peter Keating, and Bart Slegers as Ellsworth Toohey. The book was turned into a 1949 film directed by King Vidor starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal that lasted less than two hours; Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s version, adapted by Koen Tachelet, translated by Erica van Rijsewijk and Jan van Rheenen, and directed by van Hove, lasts four hours. It begins, “Howard Roark laughed.” There’s no telling what will come after that in the hands of van Hove, but strap yourself in for what should be at the very least a rather unconventional evening.

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER: NEW YORK CITY WINTER SEASON 2017

Linda Celeste Sims in Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section . Photo by Paul Kolnik.

The exquisite Linda Celeste Sims will perform in a new production of Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section in annual Ailey winter season at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
November 29 – December 31, $25-$200
212-581-1212
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

“When I think about why people should come to see the company right now, this is a moment in time where it is important to take a stand, and sometimes taking a stand means taking a seat to see something that represents the best of humanity,” Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director Robert Battle says in a video about the troupe’s upcoming season at City Center. “When Alvin Ailey says that dance comes from the people, and should always be delivered back to the people . . . he wanted this company to be a mirror to society so that people could ultimately see how beautiful they are.” The season kicks off November 29 with a special opening-night “Modern American Songbook” gala program consisting of George Faison’s Suite Otis, two parts of Judith Jamison’s Love Stories, the Ray Charles section of Camille A. Brown’s The Groove to Nobody’s Business, the central duet in David Parsons’s Shining Star, and Revelations with live music. This year’s world premieres are Gustavo Ramirez Sansano’s Victoria and longtime Ailey dancer Jamar Roberts’s Members Don’t Get Weary, with company premieres of Battle’s Mass and Johan Inger’s Walking Mad, while there are new productions of Talley Beatty’s Stack-Up, Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter. Other highlights include Battle’s Ella and In/Side, Billy Wilson’s The Winter in Lisbon, Ailey’s Night Creature, Mauro Bigonzetti’s Deep, Ulysses Dove’s Episodes, Ronald K. Brown’s Four Corners, and Ailey dancer Hope Boykin’s r-Evolution, Dream. On December 17 at 7:30, “Celebrating the Men of Ailey” features Clifton Brown, Vernard Gilmore, Yannick Lebrun, Glenn Allen Sims, and Roberts performing works by Ailey, Battle, and Gilmore. In addition, the Saturday family matinees will be followed by Q&As with Ailey dancers. The season comes to a close with a New Year’s Eve party boasting a one-night-only, to-be-announced program that concludes with Revelations.

AYAD AKHTAR: JUNK

junk

Who: Ayad Akhtar, Tom Santopietro, Steven Pasquale, and others
What: Discussion and performance
Where: Barnes & Noble, 150 East 86th St. at Lexington Ave., 212-369-2180
When: Tuesday, November 28, free, 4:00
Why: Pulitzer Prize winner and Tony nominee Ayad Akhtar’s latest play, Junk, is currently on Broadway, running at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater through January 7. On November 28, Akhtar, who has previously written the plays Disgraced, The Invisible Hand, and The Who & the What and the novel American Dervish as well as cowriting and starring in the film The War Within, will be at the B&N on Lexington and Eighty-Sixth St. in conversation with author, media commentator, and Broadway theater manager Tom Santopietro, discussing Junk, set during the 1980s junk-bond phenomenon. In addition, Junk star Steven Pasquale (The Good Wife, reasons to be pretty) and other cast members will perform scenes from the play, which has just been published in paperback by Little, Brown.