twi-ny recommended events

NYC BROADWAY WEEK SUMMER 2017

Phil Connors (Andy Karl) is trapped in Punxsutawney, PA, forced to relive Groundhog Day over and over again (photo by Joan Marcus)

Phil Connors (Andy Karl) is excited that Broadway Week is back once again (photo by Joan Marcus)

BROADWAY WEEK: 2-for-1 Tickets
September 4-17, buy one ticket, get one free
www.nycgo.com/broadway-week

Tickets are on sale for the late-summer edition of Broadway Week, which runs September 4-17 and offers theater lovers a chance to get two-for-one tickets in advance to see new and long-running shows on the Great White Way. Twenty-three shows are participating, with one already sold out — The Lion King, as usual — so you need to act fast. You can still grab seats, however, for 1984, Aladdin, Anastasia, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, A Bronx Tale, Cats, Chicago, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, A Doll’s House Part 2, Groundhog Day, Hello, Dolly! Kinky Boots, Michael Moore: The Terms of My Surrender, Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, The Play That Goes Wrong, Prince of Broadway, School of Rock, Waitress, War Paint, and Wicked. You can also get $20 upgrades by using the code BWAYUP.

LOOK NOW: THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING TO NICOLAS ROEG

John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) cradles his dead daughter (Sharon Williams) in Nicolas Roeg’s psychological horror masterpiece, Don’t Look Now

DON’T LOOK NOW (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
September 1, 9:00, September 3, 5:45, September 5, 6:55, September 7, 9:10
Series runs September 1-7
quadcinema.com

The Quad invites film lovers into the very strange cinematic world of eighty-nine-year-old British writer, director, and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg in the one-week series “Look Now: The Universe According to Nicolas Roeg,” beginning September 1. The eleven works in the series celebrate Roeg’s spectacular visual sense as well as his love of celebrity, the supernatural, and pop culture. The centerpiece of the Quad presentation is Roeg’s 1973 masterpiece, the haunting and harrowing psychological horror tale Don’t Look Now. Written by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant and based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the film is an extraordinarily rich and detailed study of a family trying to regain itself following the tragic loss of a young daughter. “Nothing is what it seems,” John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) says, alerting the viewer early on. In the opening, scene, Christine (Sharon Williams) and her brother, Johnny (Nicholas Salter), are playing outside, he in a blue jacket, riding his red bike over the green grass and through trees, she playing with a talking doll and red-striped white ball while wearing a red raincoat even though the sun is shining bright on a nearly cloudless day. Over Pino Donaggio’s gentle piano score, Anthony B. Richmond’s camera zeroes in on a puddle next to a pond, then editor Graeme Clifford cuts to a fire raging in a fireplace in front of which the children’s mother, Laura (Julie Christie), is reading about Lake Ontario and their father, John (Donald Sutherland), is looking at glass slides of a church in Venice he has been asked to restore. In one image of a stained-glass window, Christ, in a red robe, is cradling the lamb symbolizing sinners, while a figure in a red hood sits in a front pew, gazing up at it. The scene then shifts back to Christine in her red mac, seen reflected upside down in the pond. Johnny rides over a pane of glass, breaking it and falling to the ground. John looks up, sensing something. Laura reads aloud from her book. She innocently puts her hand to her mouth. Christine puts her hand to her mouth. John smiles at Laura. Johnny tries to fix one of the wheels on his bicycle. Christine throws the ball in the air. John tosses a pack of cigarettes to Laura. The ball splashes in the pond. John knocks over a glass. The ball swirls in the water. Red liquid oozes from the figure in the church slide. John feels something is wrong and heads outside. Johnny runs toward him. Christine, lying on her back, slowly submerges under the water. John rushes into the pond. Laura looks at the bloody slide. With a gasp, John dives under the water. Laura tosses the slide onto her book, Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space. The blood spreads further across the slide as Donaggio’s music turns ominous. John lifts the lifeless body of his daughter out of the pond, letting out a heartbreaking howl. John is too late to save Christine. Laura sees what is happening and screams. Roeg cuts to a power drill marked with a red panel drilling into the wall of the church in Venice that John is renovating. It’s a spectacular scene, every second critical to the rest of the film and how it’s photographed and edited, dominated by the color red (along with sharp blues and greens), shattering glass, people falling, and water representing death as John and Laura try to put together the pieces of their devastatingly fractured life.

Laura (Julie Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) try to get their fractured life back on track in Venice in Don’t Look Now

In a restaurant in Venice, the City of Canals, a pair of elderly sisters, Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania), stare at Laura and John. Heather, a blind woman with second sight, tells Laura that she can see Christine and that she is happy. Laura wants to believe her, but John is skeptical. The couple soon return to their hotel, where they engage in one of the most graphic sex scenes of its time, as Roeg cuts between their lovemaking and John and Laura getting dressed matter-of-factly afterward, the fiery emotion of their passion underscored by their practical desire to create another child. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose in Venice, the victims being pulled from the canals. And John becomes obsessed with a figure in red he spots in the corners of the narrow streets and bridges of the city, wondering whether his dead daughter is trying to contact him. It all leads to an unforgettable finale of sheer genius. Viewers mustn’t look away from the screen for even a split second, as Roeg imbues each shot with power and meaning, from music and color to dialogue and cross-cutting, metaphorical clues and red herrings melding together, leaving nothing to chance.

Even the making of the film is filled with fascinating intrigue and classic stories. Wandering through Venice, Roeg came upon a church that was actually being renovated; coincidentally, it was named St. Nicolo dei Mendicoli, and there was already a sign on it that read “Venice in Peril.” When a stuntman refused to do a dangerous scene inside the church, Sutherland hesitantly did it himself, not knowing that the wire he was told would protect him was liable to break at any moment. For a long time it was rumored that the sex scene between Christie and Sutherland, which was added at the last moment, was not simulated but real, a claim vehemently denied by the participants (and one that did not make Warren Beatty too happy). Renato Scarpa, who plays the police inspector, could not speak English, so he performed his lines phonetically, not knowing what he was saying. And Roeg discovered Donaggio, a singer who had never composed a film score before, working on a gondola; Donaggio went on to compose the soundtrack for dozens and dozens of movies, including several for Brian De Palma. (Donaggio had already had a big hit with “Lo Che Non Vivo [Senza Te],” which Dusty Springfield turned into “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.”) But all of that merely enhances what is already a remarkable film, one of the greatest psychological horror movies of all time, and one that begs to be watched over and over again because of its many intricacies and nuances. Roeg might be telling us not to look, but we can’t help ourselves. You’ll also never think of the color red again in quite the same way. In addition to Don’t Look Now and the below films, the Quad is also screening Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, Castaway, Far from the Madding Crowd, Insignificance, Eureka, and Petulia, with such stars as George C. Scott, Theresa Russell, Tony Curtis, Gene Hackman, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Harvey Keitel, and Art Garfunkel, all either directed and/or photographed by Roeg.

Runaway siblings (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg) learn about life from an Aborigine (David Gulpilil, later to be seen in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave) in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout

WALKABOUT (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)
Quad Cinema
September 1, 4:50, and September 2, 3:10
quadcinema.com

Nicolas Roeg’s first solo project, as director and cinematographer, is a beautiful film about a teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her young brother (Roeg’s real-life son, Luc Roeg) lost in the Australian outback after their father (John Meillon) tries to kill them. The full ninety-six-minute version soars when the siblings encounter an Aborigine (David Gulpilil, later to be seen in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave) on a walkabout, living off the barren land to prove his manhood. The film was written by Edward Bond, based on James Vance Marshall’s novel. Agutter went on to star in such films as Logan’s Run, Equus, and An American Werewolf in London.

Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg show off their acting chops in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s very strange Performance

PERFORMANCE (Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
Quad Cinema
Friday, September 1, 6:50, Sunday, September 3, 1:00, and Wednesday, September 6, 9:10
quadcinema.com

A British gangster on the run hides out with a psychedelic rock star in this strangely enticing film from writer-director Donald Cammell (The Demon Seed) and Nicolas Roeg (making his big-screen directorial debut as well as serving as cinematographer). James Fox didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed on to play Chas, a mobster who finds sanctuary with mushroom-popping rock-diva has-been Turner, played with panache by Mick Jagger. Throw in Anita Pallenberg, a fab drug trip, and the great “Memo to Turner” scene and you have a film that some consider the real precursor to MTV, some think a work of pure demented genius, and others find to be one of the most pretentious and awful pieces of claptrap ever committed to celluloid.

Anjelica Huston has a wicked blast in Nicolas Roeg’s Roald Dahl adaptation, The Witches

THE WITCHES (Nicolas Roeg, 1990)
Quad Cinema
Saturday, September 2, 1:15, and Tuesday, September 5, 5:00
quadcinema.com

Executive producer Jim Henson’s feature-film swan song is an enchanting tale of a young boy who, upon encountering a witches convention led by the evil Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston), is given a tail — well, actually, he’s turned into a cute little mouse. The witches have come up with a plan to rid the world of children by turning them all into rodents, and little Luke (Jasen Fisher) and old Helga (Mai Zetterling) are the only ones who can stop them. However, this is no Stuart Little (Rob Minkoff, 1999); based on a wicked story by Roald Dahl and directed by Nicolas Roeg (whose 1973 stunner, Don’t Look Now, dealt with a couple’s agony over their dead child), The Witches is definitely not for little kids. The cast also includes turns by such British faves as Rowan Atkinson, Jane Horrocks, and Brenda Blethyn.

David Bowie made his feature-film debut in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
Quad Cinema
Saturday, September 2, 5:15, and Sunday, September 3, 8:00
quadcinema.com

Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Walter Nevis’s 1963 science-fiction novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, is a nearly unwatchable unmitigated mess, with gorgeous visuals and beautiful individual scenes getting lost in a narrative nightmare. Written by Paul Mayersberg, the 1976 film served as a vehicle for androgynous pop star David Bowie, in his movie debut, playing television-addicted Thomas Jerome Newton, a soft-spoken alien who has come to Earth to figure out a way to save his water-starved planet. He enlists the aid of attorney Oliver V. Farnsworth (Buck Henry, in hysterically thick bottle glasses) and college professor and scientist Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) as he builds up his World Enterprises Corporation and develops an awkward, volatile relationship with hotel employee Mary-Lou (Candy Clark). Editor Graeme Clifford can’t assemble the many hackneyed scenes into any kind of intelligible narrative; even the numerous sex scenes, in which we get to see various naked women as well as Torn’s schvantz and Bowie’s thin white duke, get confusing fast. Shortly before his death in January 2016 at the age of sixty-nine, Bowie participated in a musical adaptation of the film and novel, Lazarus, that was equally strange if somewhat more successful.

HOMAGE TO JEANNE MOREAU: THE TRIAL

Anthony Perkins stars as Josef K. in Orson Welles’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial

THE TRIAL (Orson Welles, 1962)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 1-7
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

“The Trial is the best film I have ever made,” Orson Welles told the BBC in a 1962 interview. While that might not be quite true — Welles already had Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Macbeth, Othello, and Touch of Evil on his resume — his free-form adaptation of Franz Kafka’s posthumously published 1925 novel is an extraordinary work that has only been increasing in critical stature since its 1962 release. The absurdist drama now can be seen in a new restoration playing September 1-7 as part of a two-movie Film Forum tribute to Jeanne Moreau that also includes Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels; Moreau passed away on July 31 at the age of eighty-nine. Welles reordered the narrative and changed the ending in telling Kafka’s harrowing tale of Josef K. (Anthony Perkins), a low-level bureaucrat who suddenly finds himself in the midst of a mysterious existential ordeal, under arrest for an unnamed crime and facing an unknown fate. Welles begins the film with Kafka’s “Before the Law” parable, told by the auteur over “pin-screen animation” by Alexander Alexeïeff and Claire Parker. Later, Welles, as Albert Hastler, known as the Advocate, repeats the story to Josef, confirming that Welles the filmmaker is fully in control, serving as judge, jury, and executioner of everything we see and hear — and we indeed hear a lot of Welles, who dubbed the voices for many of the characters himself. At the end of the opening parable, Welles explains, “’Tis been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream . . . of a nightmare,” and the camera then focuses in on Josef in bed, where he’s about to be roused and placed under arrest.

Josef has no idea what he’s done, shocked to find Inspector A (Arnoldo Foà) hovering over him and three of his coworkers searching the room of his landlady, Mrs. Grubach (Madeleine Robinson). His teenage cousin, Irmie (Naydra Shore), is concerned for him, and his uncle, Max (Max Haufler), takes him to see Hastler to beg the powerful Advocate to handle Josef’s case. As he gets more caught up in the puzzling conundrums, he meets such oddball characters as the pitiful Bloch (Akim Tamiroff), another Advocate client; the Chief Clerk (Fernand Ledoux); the Examining Magistrate (Max Buchsbaum); the Courtroom Guard (Wolfgang Reichmann); a priest (Michael Lonsdale); and painter Titorelli (William Chappell), whose bizarre tree-house-like studio is surrounded by giddy young girls. The locations are spectacular; lacking the necessary budget to build sets, Welles was going to use vast, empty spaces, but instead he accidentally came upon the abandoned Gare d’Orsay train station in Paris, which featured immensely large rooms that evoked an endless Baroque warehouse. He also shot in a Stalinist apartment complex in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, which evoked the cold uniformity of the lives of its citizenry. Each set offers surprises for the viewer, beginning with Josef’s bedroom, which cinematographer Edmond Richard (Chimes at Midnight, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeisie) shoots at skewed, low angles, keeping everything off balance while the tall Perkins struggles to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling, trapped from the very start.

Jeanne Moreau and Anthony Perkins play neighbors in Orson Welles’s The Trial

Josef goes on a metaphysical journey, accompanied by Tomaso Albinoni’s grand, emotional Adagio for Organ and Strings and jazzy noir, that takes him to Hastler’s bedroom, where the Advocate seems to spend most of his time sleeping, smoking, eating, and drinking instead of tending to his clients; a room stuffed with stacks of old, decaying files, as if there’s no longer any past; and an office with perfectly arranged rows and rows of robotic workers at desks. In a large courtroom, Josef picks up a law book, but it is thickly covered with dust, as if it hasn’t been opened in a long time, letting him know that justice is going to be hard to come by in this surreal world. He might think he is guilty of nothing, but in Welles’s conception of Kafka’s tale, anyone living within the constructs of this society is automatically implicated. Josef is also guilty of a certain kind of sexual misconduct with women; he is attracted to nearly every female he meets, whether single, married, or involved with another, including Burstner, Leni (Romy Schneider), Hilda (Elsa Martinelli), Miss Pittl (Suzanne Flon), and the court archivist (Paola Mori), stopping his supposedly desperate search for the truth to snag a kiss, a hug, or a possible quick roll in the hay, even if it complicates his mission. In so doing, Josef — and Welles, of course — condemns us all. “It’s the most autobiographical movie that I’ve ever made, the only one that’s really close to me,” Welles wrote of the film. “It’s much closer to my own feelings about everything than any other picture I’ve made.” That quote might indeed be true; despite all of the surreal absurdity in The Trial, there is something inherently frightening and believable about it, especially when viewed today, in a world dominated by surveillance, the surrender of private space, and a system of government with a rapidly deteriorating rule of law.

4 BY TERI GARR: ONE FROM THE HEART

Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) try to hold on to their love in One from the Heart

ONE FROM THE HEART (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, September 2, 7:20, and Sunday, September 3, 4:30
Series runs September 1-4
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

New York, New York meets La La Land in Francis Ford Coppola’s romantic musical fantasia, One from the Heart. The film, which famously bankrupted the director and his Zoetrope Studios when it was released in 1982, is screening September 2 and 3 in the four-day BAMcinématek series “4 by Garr,” a quartet of movies starring one of the best actresses of the 1970s and 1980s, Teri Garr. Garr, who will turn seventy in December, got her start as a backup dancer in a bunch of Elvis Presley movies, then went on to make such popular pictures as Mr. Mom with Michael Keaton, Oh, God! with George Burns and John Denver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind with Richard Dreyfuss, and The Black Stallion with Mickey Rooney. But her career was cut short when she became ill in 1999 and was later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She has made very few public appearances in the last ten years, since suffering a brain aneurysm, but she continues to fight the disease. This series reminds us all what a terrific actress Garr was, her quirkiness and infectious charm ever-present onscreen. In One from the Heart, she plays Frannie, who works at the Paradise Travel agency with her best friend, Maggie (Lainie Kazan). Frannie lives with Hank (Frederic Forrest), a would-be musician who owns a surreal junkyard, called Reality Wrecking, with his best friend, Moe (Harry Dean Stanton). With their dreams drifting further and further out of reach, Frannie and Hank spend the Fourth of July separately; Frannie is intrigued by local piano player Ray (Raúl Juliá), while Hank has the hots for circus girl Leila (Nastassja Kinski). Fireworks are on the way, just not necessarily what was expected. Written by Coppola and Armyan Bernstein, the film is lushly photographed by Vittorio Storaro, who previously worked extensively with Bernardo Bertolucci and won an Oscar for his cinematography on Apocalypse Now. Storaro drenches the screen in oversaturated blues, reds, greens, and pinks, creating a dreamlike neon atmosphere in which scenes sometimes converge in unusual ways.

Frannie gets carried away by in famous Francis Ford Coppola disaster

Frannie (Teri Garr) gets carried away by Ray (Raúl Juliá) in famous Francis Ford Coppola disaster

Tom Waits’s lounge-music score features duets with Crystal Gayle that both enhance the mood and propel the plot, which could use a little help. Coppola re-created the Vegas strip at Zoetrope, with no location shooting; production designer Dean Tavoularis and art director Angelo P. Graham transformed Sin City into a dazzlingly fake place, as if existing only in the main characters’ minds. The film cost $26 million to make and took in less than $1 million at the box office, a disaster that puts it firmly in the pantheon with Cleopatra and Heaven’s Gate. But seen thirty-five years later, One from the Heart is not quite the failure it is usually believed to be. The sets are spectacularly over the top, Storaro’s use of color — on Forrest’s face alone — is otherworldly, and Waits’s songs can serve as a good distraction at just the right times. There are still a whole lot of cringeworthy moments that make no sense — let’s not get started on the airport mess — but, as with Heaven’s Gate, it’s not nearly as bad as legend would have it. And some of it is downright delightful. Garr owns her role from start to finish, whether putting up a window display or being carried naked through the streets. Keep a look-out for cameos by Waits and Rebecca de Mornay, along with Coppola’s parents in an elevator. The BAM series runs September 1-4 and also includes Mel Brooks’s classic Young Frankenstein, in which Garr plays the sexy Inga; Martin Scorsese’s cult fave After Hours, with Garr as a retro waitress; and Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, in which Garr earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress as actress Sandy Lester, who competes for the same role as her friend and teacher, Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman).

TICKET ALERT: CURIOSITIES

Many curiosities are in store fro new immersive theater production in Brooklyn

Many curiosities are in store for new immersive theater production in Brooklyn

CURIOSITIES
The Menagerie
627 Fifth Ave. at Seventeenth St., Brooklyn
Wednesday – Sunday, October 4 – November 26, $100
www.curiositiesnyc.com

The parade of immersive theatrical productions continues in October and November with Curiosities, in which the audience in invited so see a performance of Professor Mysterium’s Menagerie of Wonder, an illegal sideshow with misfits and deviants taking place in the subterranean jazz club known as the Menagerie, which is surrounded by secret passages demanding investigation. Fifty visitors, encouraged do dress in 1930s duds, each night get to create their own adventure by following whatever path they choose. Along the journey, they will encounter movement, music, and whispered dialogue and will be touched. The show was created by actor, designer, and director Anthony Logan Cole; Bryan Knowlton is codirector and choreographer, with lighting and sound by Christina Verde, costumes by TJ Burleson, and sets by Roberto Garcia. Tickets for the multisensory show, which runs Wednesdays to Sundays from October 4 to November 26 with an official opening of Friday, October 13, are available now and are expected to go fast, especially to fans of Sleep No More, Queen of the Night, The Grand Paradise, Then She Fell, Speakeasy Dollhouse, Empire Travel Agency, and the like. In addition, the Menagerie will be open as a club on Monday and Tuesday nights, with guest performers.

WEST INDIAN AMERICAN DAY CARNIVAL AND PARADE 2017

Spectacular costumes are all part of the fun of annual West Indian American Day Carnival on Labor Day in Brooklyn (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Eastern Pkwy. from Schenectady Ave. to Grand Army Plaza
Monday, September 4, free, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
718-467-1797
www.wiadca.com

Every Labor Day, millions of people line Eastern Parkway, celebrating the city’s best annual parade, the West Indian American Day Carnival, waving flags from such nations as Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, the Cayman Islands, Antigua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Aruba, Curaçao, and many more. This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the parade, with a tribute to reggae legend Bob Marley. The festivities actually begin on August 31, with special events (listed below) every day leading up to the parade. The Labor Day partying commences at 6:00 am with the traditional J’Ouvert Morning, a precarnival procession featuring steel drums and percussion and fabulous, inexpensive masquerade costumes, marching from Grand Army Plaza to Flatbush Ave. and on to Empire Blvd., then to Nostrand Ave. and Midwood St.; there will be more of a police presence to prevent the violence that has occurred the last several years. The Parade of Bands begins immediately after, around 11:00 am, as truckloads of blasting Caribbean music and groups of ornately dressed dancers, costume bands, masqueraders, moko jumbies, and thousands of others bump and grind their way down Eastern Parkway to Grand Army Plaza, participating in one last farewell to the flesh prior to Lent. Don’t eat before you go; the great homemade food includes ackee and saltfish, oxtail stew, breadfruit, macaroni pie, curried goat, jerk chicken, fishcakes, rice and peas, and red velvet cake. The farther east you venture, the more closed in it gets; by the time you get near Crown Heights, it could take you half an hour just to cross the street, so take it easy and settle in for a fun, colorful day where you need not hurry. In addition, be prepared to see a whole lotta twerkin’ going on.

Thursday, August 31
Reggae Unda Di Stars, with Wunmi, Stonebwoy Dajah, Cocoa Tea with Derrick Barnett & Statement Band, Stephen “Ragga” Marley, Road International, Cali B, Max Glazer and Kenny Meez, and more, hosted by DJ Roy, Brooklyn Museum grounds, $60, 7:00 pm – 1:00 am

Friday, September 1
Brassfest: Panorama Competition, with the Allstars, Blaxx, Ricardo Drue, Teddyson John, Tizzy, Lyrikal, Farmer Nappy, Problem Child, Lavaman, MX Prime, Motto, Sedale, Elizabeth Watley & the Outta Limitz Band, Rayzor & the Request Band, and King Bubba, hosted by MC Wassy and Vibezman Redman, Brooklyn Museum grounds, $65, 7:00 pm – 1:00 am

Saturday, September 2
Junior Carnival Parade, with music by DJ One Plus, hosted by Jemma Jordan, St. John’s Place between Kingston & Brooklyn Aves. to Brooklyn Museum at Washington Ave., $5, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm

Sunday, September 3
Dimanche Gras, with the Mighty Sparrow, Rose King, David Rudder, Lord Nelson, Swallow, Ras Iley, Natasha Wilson, Dane Gulston and the Sunshine Band, Ole Mas competition, Boodoosingh Tassa Drummers, and more, hosted by MC Wassy and Jemma Jordan, Brooklyn Museum grounds, $35, 7:00 pm – 1:00 am

LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE: UNDER-SONG FOR A CIPHER

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s site-specific “Under-Song for a Cipher” speaks volumes at New Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Through Sunday, September 3, $16
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

Upon entering the fourth floor of the New Museum, visitors join a fascinating gathering already taking place, sixteen figures in stunning canvases, beautifully arranged across three walls as if the black and brown men and women in the paintings are in conversation with one another, the chatter nearly audible, each with a different story to tell. But it turns out that British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s site-specific “Under-Song for a Cipher,” created specifically for this space, is a completely fictional world. Despite their realistic nature, none of the figures is based on real people; instead, 2013 Turner Prize finalist Yiadom-Boakye, who was born in London in 1977, works from her imagination, making each composite canvas in one day, finishing it before the paint dries (and discarding paintings she doesn’t like). “The term ‘imaginary’ is perhaps a little misleading. It suggests I pull everything out of the air. I don’t,” she tells curators Natalie Bell and Massimiliano Gioni in a catalog interview. “By composite I mean that they’re a combination of different sources: scrapbooks, drawings, photographs, etc. In many ways, I think less about the figures than I do about how they are painted. I ceased to see the paintings as portraits a long time ago. Thus, I don’t really see them as ‘characters’ in the individual sense, as personalities or people with specific traits. I always think of them as somehow beyond these things. They exist entirely in paint.” Yiadom-Boakye, who is of Ghanaian descent and is inspired by such masters as Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Walter Sickert, boasts a bold, firm brushstroke, including just enough abstraction to place her figures in an indefinable time and space, evoking but not specifically referencing art history, in which classic portraiture is heavily associated with white people.

Installation view. “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song For A Cipher,” 2017. New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio

“Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song for a Cipher” places paintings in dialogue with one another as well as with viewers at the New Museum (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)

In “Medicine at Playtime,” a man sits on a chair in the middle of a room, the floor composed of black and white square tiles, his left elbow on his knee, his left hand on his head. In “The Much-Vaunted Air,” a woman stands in front of a window, facing off to the left, in a sly way the mirror image of Edward Hopper’s “A Woman in the Sun.” Yiadom-Boakye references Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” in “8am Cadiz,” but instead of a white girl looking across a grassy yellow field, her back to us, a black man in a green field faces the viewer. The gaze of both the viewer and the figures are central to Yiadom-Boakye’s process; earlier in life, she even considered becoming an optician. In “The Women Watchful,” a tall woman looks through binoculars, as if peering at a painting off to the right, “Of All the Seasons,” in which a woman with penetrating white eyes stares back suspiciously. Yiadom-Boakye, who had her first solo museum show, “Any Number of Preoccupations,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2010-11, is also a voracious writer of essays, poems, and short stories, but she leaves it up to the viewer to determine what tale her figures have to tell, even seeing her titles as another stroke on the canvas rather than an informational description. “It’s all there, thoughts about race, masculinity, femininity, what is to be human and in the world alongside everyone else,” she says in the interview. “But it is complex, joyful, miserable, infuriating, and overwhelming — so not easily put into words. That is why it is painted. The marks, the light, the dark, the color, the composition, the form, the scale: All of these things take on meanings to me, like a language to speak. And beauty is there too, unabashed and brazen.” One of her most unabashed and brazen works is “Light of the Lit Wick,” a lush, sensual depiction of a dancer in a white top and black leggings stretching her torso, arms raised, large light and dark circles on the back wall, mimicking her clothing. It’s a magisterial piece, demanding of extended viewing to absorb its subtle immensity. But don’t get lost in the beauty of the individual canvases, which also include the triptych “Vigil for a Horseman,” of a man in black and red posing on a red-and-white bed. They are in dialogue with one another as much as they are speaking to us. “As I’m working on a painting, I’m looking at and responding to whatever else is hanging near it in the studio,” Yiadom-Boakye tells Bell and Gioni. “That’s inevitable. It’s an immersive process with precious little logical planning, but plenty of magic, rumination, and deviation. Madness can take on a logic of its own sometimes.” It would be madness to miss this ecstatic show, one of the most involving and dynamic of the year.