twi-ny recommended events

A VERY SORDID WEDDING

Sissy Hickey (Dale Dickey) and Latrelle Williamson (Bonnie Bedelia) fight for LGBTQ rights in A Very Sordid Wedding

A VERY SORDID WEDDING (Del Shores, 2017)
SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Monday, October 2, $20, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.averysordidwedding.com
svatheatre.com

You don’t have to know anything about the Sordid Lives phenomenon to be tickled pink by the latest entry in the series, A Very Sordid Wedding. In 1996, Del Shores’s fourth play, Sordid Lives, debuted in Los Angeles, a very personal work about his coming out to his Southern Baptist family. He turned the play into a 2000 film with an all-star cast, including Bonnie Bedelia, Delta Burke, Beau Bridges, and Olivia Newton-John. That was followed in 2008 by a twelve-episode prequel series on Logo, with Caroline Rhea, Rue McLanahan, Jason Dottley, and a few others taking over some of the roles. And now comes A Very Sordid Wedding, a sequel set in 2015, right after same-sex marriage is made legal throughout the United States. But in Winters, Texas, the Supreme Being trumps the Supreme Court, so the new minister, Reverend Jimmy Ray Barnes (Levi Kreis), has decided to throw an “Anti-Equality Revival” to keep gay marriage out of the county. Latrelle Williamson (Bedelia), however, has had a change of heart since learning that her son, Ty (Kirk Geiger), is gay and in love with Kyle (T. Ashanti Mozelle), so she has decided to fight the church on this issue. Meanwhile, Latrelle’s long-estranged sibling, aging drag performer Brother Boy (Emmy winner Leslie Jordan), meets up with escaped serial killer Billy Joe Dobson (producer Emerson Collins); the divorced Noleta Nethercott (Rhea) strikes up a passionate affair with the hunky, hospitalized Hardy (Aleks Paunovic), making her ex-husband, G.W. (David Steen), jealous; Sissy Hickey (Dale Dickey) has read the Bible cover to cover; Latrelle’s ex-husband, Wilson (Michael MacRae), has settled down with the much younger Greta (Katherine Bailess); Jesus-loving convenience store owner Vera Lisso (Lorna Scott) has helped form a homosexual-hating group; and the saucy Juanita Bartlett (Sarah Hunley) continues to share whatever is in her crazy mind. Also back are Ann Walker as LaVonda Dupree, David Cowgill as Odell Owens, Newell Alexander as bar owner Wardell Owens, Rosemary Alexander as Dr. Eve, and Scott Presley as hairdresser Roger. Things come to a head when a memorial party for Latrelle’s mother (McLanahan) is scheduled to take place at the same time as the antigay service.

Sissy Hickey (Dale Dickey), Noleta Netercott (Caroline Rhea), and LaVonda Dupree (Ann Walker) can’t believe what they see in latest chapter of cult phenomenon

A kind of alternate version of Steel Magnolias without the weeping, A Very Sordid Wedding is charming and engaging from the get-go. Except for a treacly finale that is overly preachy, the film treats its timely subject matter with laugh-out-loud humor and a touch of elegance. Two-time Emmy nominee Bedelia (Heart Like a Wheel, Parenthood) is in fine form as the graceful Latrelle, who is the heart and soul of the film, a woman who is more complex than one might initially think as Shores (Southern Baptist Sissies, The Trials and Tribulations of a Trailer Trash Housewife) plays with stereotypes. Of course, she changes her mind about homosexuality and the LGBTQ community primarily because her son is gay, not because of any sudden empathy and compassion for all human beings, but at least she’s willing to stand up for what’s right. There’s plenty of wackiness to go around as well, with lots of lovable characters and some rather poignant moments about love and acceptance of all kinds. In advance of its October 17 release on DVD, Blu-ray, and iTunes, A Very Sordid Wedding is making its red carpet New York City premiere, presented by NewFest, on October 2 at 8:00 at the SVA Theatre and will be followed by a Q&A with Jordan, Rhea, Shores, Collins, Walker, and Blake McIver, who plays Peter in the film and sings “This Is Who We Are” on the soundtrack; there will also be a reception.

NYFF55: FACES PLACES

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast in the masterful Faces and Places

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast with people and animals in the masterful Faces and Places

FACES PLACES (VISAGES VILLAGES) (Agnès Varda & JR, 2017)
New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
Sunday, October 1, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 12:30
Monday, October 2, Francesca Beale Theater, $25, 8:30
Festival runs September 28 – October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
cohenmediagroup.tumblr.com

“We’ll have fun making a film,” legendary eighty-eight-year-old Belgian-born French auteur Agnès Varda tells thirty-three-year-old French photographer and street artist JR in Faces Places (Visages Villages), a masterful road movie that may very well be the most fun film you’ll see all year. The unlikely pair first met when Varda, who has made such classics as Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Gleaners and I, accepted an invitation from JR, whose practice involves wheat-pasting giant black-and-white photos of men, women, and children on architectural structures, to visit his Paris studio. (JR brought his “Inside Out” art project to Times Square in 2013.) When Varda saw JR’s blow-up of a 1960 self-portrait Varda shot of herself standing in front of a Bellini painting in Venice, the two instantly hit it off and decided to make a film together, heading out in JR’s small photo-booth truck to team up with people in small towns throughout France, including coal miners, dockworkers, farmers, a church-bell ringer, and factory workers. The reactions of the villagers — shrewd, curious, flattered — to JR’s enormous wheat-pasted blow-ups of themselves on their neighborhood walls, barns, abandoned housing, containers, water towers, and other locations are fascinating. “JR is fulfilling my greatest desire. To meet new faces and photograph them, so they don’t fall down the holes of my memory,” Varda, who edited the film with Maxime Pozzi-Garcia, says. Varda and JR make a formidable duo, finding a childlike innocence in their collaboration that is simply captivating to watch.

Cinematic collaboration between Agnès Varda and JR results in stunning visions of humanity

Varda continually tries to get JR to remove his ever-present dark glasses, remembering how her friend and colleague Jean-Luc Godard once let her take pictures of him without glasses, but JR prefers to maintain his mystery, a man who photographs tens of thousands of people’s faces around the world while never fully showing his own. Varda, who relies on the “power of imagination,” even sets up an afternoon with Godard at his home in Switzerland, preparing by having JR roll her furiously through the same Louvre galleries the protagonists run through in Godard’s Band of Outsiders, but of course nothing with Godard ever goes quite as planned. “Chance has always been my best asset,” Varda proclaims in the film, and it is chance, and the willingness to enthusiastically embrace every moment of life, that helps give Faces Places its immeasurable charm. The film, which features a playful score by Matthieu Chedid (‑M-) and was executive produced by Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda-Demy, subtly tackles socioeconomic issues but is primarily a marvelous celebration of genuine humanity. Faces Places is screening at the New York Film Festival on October 1 at Alice Tully Hall and October 2 at the Francesca Beale Theater, with both shows followed by a Q&A with Varda and JR.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE PRINCIPLES OF UNCERTAINTY

Maira Kalman looks on as her online graphic diary is brought to life at the BAM Fisher (photo by Rebecca Greenfield)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 27-30, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The audience at the BAM Fisher isn’t the only one smiling throughout The Principles of Uncertainty, the lovely multimedia collaboration between choreographer John Heginbotham and author-illustrator Maira Kalman; the musicians and dancers seem to be having just as much fun, if not more. Based on Kalman’s 2006-7 online graphic diary, the hour-long dance-theater piece is infectiously gleeful from start to finish. The sixty-eight-year-old Kalman is onstage the entire show, reciting text, calmly watching from the back, and, yes, dancing with Lindsey Jones, John Eirich, Courtney Lopes, Weaver Rhodes, Amber Star Merkens, and Macy Sullivan (several of whom are from Dance Heginbotham). The baroque and carnivalesque songs are played by music director Colin Jacobsen on violin and viola, Caitlyn Sullivan on cello, Nathan Koci on accordion, and Alex Sopp on flute and vocals. The lively staging puts Kalman in a large movable box, where she’s joined by assistant director Daniel Pettrow for some literary surprises and acerbic comedy; meanwhile, Todd Bryant projects (not enough of) Kalman’s words and drawings on a back wall, and a classical framed painting lies on the floor. (Kalman also designed the set and the costumes.) Heginbotham’s choreography includes repeated pairings: dancers’ foreheads rest against each other, and gentle fists press against knuckles and palms. The set is reconfigured — nearly everything is on wheels — while Nicole Pearce has a ball with different colored lights, and the band, members of the chamber ensemble the Knights, plays works by Bach, Villa-Lobos, Schubert, Beethoven, and Mexican ranchera king José Alfredo Jiménez. “John and I are trying to make something that feels like nothing,” Kalman writes in the program. “Well, not nothing, of course, but the kind of nothing that is full of the sad sweet funny uncertain life we lead.” As an added touch, each seat is covered by a two-sided cloth printed with words from the serious to the silly, the practical to the mundane. But there is nothing mundane about The Principles of Uncertainty, which indeed is a unique look at “the sad sweet funny uncertain life we lead.”

A LOVE SUPREME

Four dancers play the roles of four musicians in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Salva Sanchis’s revisiting of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (photo © Anne Van Aerschot)

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
September 27-30, 7:30
212-924-0077
newyorklivearts.org
www.rosas.be/en

Bill T. Jones’s New York Live Arts strives to encompass more than just dance, a goal achieved with their stunning production of A Love Supreme, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Spanish dancer and choreographer Salva Sanchis’s newly rewritten version of their 2005 evening-length piece, which continues at NYLA through September 30. Thirty minutes before the piece begins onstage in the theater, saxophonist Tony Jarvis and bassist Nathan Peck move about the waiting audience in the lobby space and head out into the street of passersby and onlookers as they perform excerpts from John Coltrane’s masterful, boundary-breaking 1965 album, the original recording of which serves as the soundtrack of De Keersmaeker and Sanchis’s collaboration. You don’t need a ticket to just hang out, get a drink, and watch Jarvis and Peck interact with each other in a way that only jazz allows, creating a spiritual conversation of dissonance and beauty. This prelude serves as an ingenious introduction to what follows inside the theater, as four male dancers embody the roles of the four main musicians on the record. The show begins in silence, with Thomas Vantuycom as saxophonist Coltrane, Jason Respilieux as bassist Jimmy Garrison, Bilal El Had (or Robin Haghi) as pianist McCoy Tyner, and José Paulo dos Santos as drummer Elvin Jones. They are all barefoot, dressed in black, with black tape dividing the black floor into a flurry of geometric patterns.

Tony Jarvis and Nathan Peck (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Tony Jarvis and Nathan Peck perform a Coltrane overture to get the audience in just the right mood for A Love Supreme (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

After several minutes, the music starts, the glorious four-part suite consisting of “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm,” which Coltrane performed only once live in its entirety. “You see, one thing about that music is that it showed you that we had reached a level where you could move the music around,” Tyner told NPR in 2012. “John had a very wonderful way of being flexible with the music, flexing it, stretching it. You know, we reflected that kind of thing. He gave us the freedom to do that.” That idea translates beautifully into De Keersmaeker and Sanchis’s choreography, in which the dancers follow the general progression of the “sheets of sound,” as Coltrane described it, ranging from solos to duets to trios to quartets but never just mimicking what is being played. When a musician takes a solo, that respective dancer improvises. Meanwhile, the other dancers stand aside and watch, just as jazz musicians do. All four performers are outstanding, with Vantuycom brilliant in the lead, swirling with his elongated arms, making angular gestures, and gliding across the floor as Coltrane soothes the soul.

HÉLIO OITICICA: TO ORGANIZE DELIRIUM

Whitney retrospective offers a journey into Hélio Oiticica’s colorful “Éden” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Through October 1, $18-$25
212-570-3600
whitney.org

In 1971, Brazilian artist and activist Hélio Oiticica proposed “Subterranean Tropicália Projects,” a participatory public artwork for Central Park. While it never was realized, the extensive Whitney retrospective “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium” is a kind of indoor interactive park, offering visitors entry into a communal, collaborative space in New York City. The exhibition, which continues through October 1, comprises painting, sculpture, film, writings, installation, and paraphernalia documenting Oiticica’s too-brief career, which included a seven-year period in the Lower East Side in Manhattan that initially fueled his artistic desires but ultimately left him frustrated and disappointed. “I feel as if I’m in prison in this infernal island,” he wrote to Lygia Clark regarding immigration problems related to his homosexuality. A Neo-Concretist who was also a member of Grupo Frente, he died in Brazil in 1980 from a massive stroke at the age of forty-two. However, “To Organize Delirium” is filled with life, and the more you put into the show, the more you can understand Oiticica’s methods — while having a great time. You can take your shoes off and walk barefoot through water, sand, and gravel in “PN27 Penetrable, Rijanviera” and greet parrots, watch an infomercial, and read poems by Roberta Camila Salgado in “Tropicália,” Oiticica’s groundbreaking 1967 installation that gave its name to the Brazilian musical, artistic, and sociopolitical movement that emerged from South America in the 1960s. You can wave a flag, take a rest on an enclosed mattress, and walk through sand, dry leaves, water, foam flakes, crushed bricks, and straw in “Éden,” while in another room you can put on any of numerous politically tinged Parangolé capes and dance with dissidents in a digital slideshow.

Hélio Oiticica. Installation view. CC5 Hendrix-War,1973.Thirty-three 35mm color slides transferred to digital slideshow, sound, and hammocks. Site Specific Collections of César and Claudio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y. Photograph by Oto Gillen

Hélio Oiticica, installation view, “CC5 Hendrix-War,” thirty-three 35mm color slides transferred to digital slideshow, sound, and hammocks, 1973 (Site Specific Collections of César and Claudio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y. Photograph by Oto Gillen)

You can play a game of pool as part of “Appropriation — Snooker Room, after Van Gogh’s ‘Night Café.’” For “Block Experiments in Cosmococa, Program in Progress: CC1 Trashiscapes,” you are encouraged to sit on a mattress or pillow in a large room and file your nails while watching slides and listening to music, combining creativity and leisure, what Oiticica called “creleisure,” which references the artist’s use of cocaine. You can gently swing in a hammock and groove to Jimi as part of “CC5 Hendrix — War,” a collaboration with Neville D’Almeida. Unfortunately, you no longer can interact with such architectural works as “NC1 Small Nucleus 1” and “PN1 Penetrable” because they are too fragile, but you can marvel at how they evoke the geometric patterns Oiticica used in his painting series “Metaesquema” and his plywood “Spatial Reliefs.” There are also unedited films of the Gay Pride Parade, the Fillmore East, the South Bronx, drag performer Mario Montez, and artist Lee Jaffe playing on small monitors. It’s a revelatory show about an important, utterly original twentieth-century artist who immersed his oeuvre in social and political concerns while inviting everyone into a playful world where art is everywhere. To get in the mood for the exhibition, the Whitney has a Tropicália playlist, with music by João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Os Mutantes, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and others that you can listen to here.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: BEYOND BORDERS

Robert Longo, “Untitled (Dividing Time),” nylon and polyester poplin, hand appliqué, 2017 (courtesy of Creative Time’s “Pledges of Allegiance”)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, October 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum’s monthly free First Saturday program returns after its annual September Labor Day weekend break with “Beyond Borders,” an exploration of the immigrant crisis. There will be live performances by Locos por Juana, Batalá New York, and DJ Geko Jones with La Chiquita Brujita and DJ Big Nito; poetry with Cave Canem’s Darrel Alejandro Holnes and Jessica Lanay Moore; an immersive screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mind-bending The Holy Mountain with live performances; a salsa party with lessons by Balmir Latin Dance Company; a hands-on workshop in which participants can make clay vessels; pop-up gallery talks with teen apprentices focusing on works that honor Latinx history; a curator tour of “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo” led by Sara Softness; and a community talk with Movimiento Cosecha about immigrant rights. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Arts of Korea,” “The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” and more.

CROSSING THE LINE: CORBEAUX (CROWS)

Bouchra Ouizguen’s Compagnie O Marrake will perform the New York premiere of Corbeaux (Crows) at the Brooklyn Museum this weekend (photo © Hasnae-El-Ouarga)

Brooklyn Museum, Beaux-Arts Court
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, September 30, 12 noon & 4:00, and Sunday, October 1, 3:00, free with museum admission of $6 to $20
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
crossingthelinefestival.org

Moroccan dancer and choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen returns to FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival this weekend with the New York premiere of the site-specific Corbeaux (Crows), reconfigured for the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court. Ouizguen, who previously presented Madame Plaza at CTL 2010 and HA! at CTL 2013, made the piece for her Compagnie O as a one-time-only performance at the Marrakech train station for the 2014 Biennale of Contemporary Art, but it proved so popular that it has since made its way across the globe and finally comes to Brooklyn. “Corbeaux is one of the shows that enchants me the most because everything remains to be done. That is, even if it has been created, I have the impression each time that there are still things beyond my control. I wanted to give the sensation that it was taking place here in front of you and that it had not been prepared,” Ouizguen said in an October 2016 interview with Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. The work will feature an all-women ensemble in tight-fitting black costumes and white cloths knotted around their heads, weaving through the columns of the grand court, initially in silence, as human conceptions of time and space disappear. A kind of living sculpture, Corbeaux (Crows) is being staged September 30 at 12 noon and 4:00 and on October 1 at 3:00, free with museum admission.