twi-ny recommended events

LINCOLN CENTER OUT OF DOORS: ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO’S REMAIN IN LIGHT / IBIBIO SOUND MACHINE

Angélique Kidjo performs Talking Heads’ Remain in Light at Bonnaroo last month

Damrosch Park Bandshell
60 Lincoln Center Plaza
Wednesday, August 2, free, 7:30
www.lincolncenter.org
www.kidjo.com

In October 1980, Talking Heads released its fourth studio album, Remain in Light, which was heavily influenced by African rhythms and melodies and specifically the music of Nigerian star Fela Kuti. The record was a big hit, featuring such songs as “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” “Crosseyed and Painless,” “Houses in Motion,” “The Great Curve,” and the classic “Once in a Lifetime.” (The reissued CD contained the bonus track “Fela’s Riff.”) Were Remain in Light released today, it likely would have been condemned by many as blatant cultural appropriation, but not everyone might agree. “It was a record that was ahead of its time, and it was radically different from other pop music around,” Vernon Reid told the BerkshireWeb in 2001, shortly before his band, Living Colour, played the entire album at Mass MoCA. “It was an evolution of the coming together of African music, electronics, funk, and a kind of post-punk new wave, a culmination of things that had already been in the air.” This past May, the Benin-born, Brooklyn-based singer Angélique Kidjo reclaimed the record at Carnegie Hall, reinterpreting it song by song, joined by Talking Heads leader David Byrne, the Antibalas Horns, and Nona Hendryx, who appeared on the original LP.

On August 2, the Grammy-winning Kidjo, who has released such albums as Logozo, Oremi, Black Ivory Soul, and Djin Djin over the course of her twenty-five-year career, will perform the record again in a free show at the Damrosch Bandshell as part of the annual summer Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival. In 2013, she staged a fabulous free live River to River show in Rockefeller Park, inviting dozens of fans (yours truly among them) onstage to dance with her during a smokin’ hot version of Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up.” Opening at Damrosch Park is Ibibio Sound Machine, making its U.S. debut; the group was founded by London-born Nigerian singer Eno Williams. Lincoln Center Out of Doors continues through August 13 with such other events as a silent screening of the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski on August 3, Nick Lowe’s Quality Rock ‘n’ Roll Revue with Los Straitjackets and Cut Worms on August 5, and The Jayhawks: A Celebration of Chuck Berry (with Reid as music director) on August 12 as part of AmericanaFest NYC.

NAPOLI, BROOKLYN

Three sisters (Lilli Kay, Elise Kibler, and Jordyn DiNatale face unexpected tragedy in Napoli, Brooklyn (photo by Joan Marcus)

Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 3, $99
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Right before intermission in Meghan Kennedy’s Napoli, Brooklyn, director Gordon Edelstein stages a spectacular, shocking event, made all the more surprising because it’s based on a little-remembered occurrence that took place in Park Slope in 1960. What came before intermission is not nearly as exciting, and what comes after might not be as fascinating as it could have been, but the event itself and its revolutionary effect on the characters’ approach to life makes it worth a trip to the downstairs Laura Pels Theatre at the Roundabout, where the show is running through September 3. The Muscolino family is led by the emotionally and physically abusive Nic (Michael Rispoli) and his worried and frightened wife, Luda (Alyssa Bresnahan), who cuts up onions to induce the tears she can’t let flow: “Why does He not let me cry? He knows I need to,” she says about God as she chops away. One of their daughters, twenty-year-old Vita (Elise Kibler), has been sent to live in a convent. Another, sixteen-year-old Francesca (Jordyn DiNatale), wants to run away with her girlfriend, Connie Duffy (Juliet Brett). And the third, twenty-six-year-old Tina (Lilli Kay), works hard in a tile factory. “What’s it like, bein’ loved?” Tina asks one of her coworkers, Celia Williams (Shirine Babb). Meanwhile, Connie’s father, Albert (Erik Lochtefeld), can’t help but flirt with Luda whenever she comes into his butcher shop. As everyone except Nic considers some kind of change in their life, a tragedy befalls the neighborhood that has each person rethinking their future.

The Feast of the Seven Fishes turns into a brawl in new Meghan Kennedy play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Napoli, Brooklyn is, for the most part, a fairly standard family drama, with not enough twists and turns aside from the major one at the end of the first act. The relationship between Francesca and Connie doesn’t feel real, and Nic is too much of a caricature. Kennedy, whose Too Much, Too Much, Too Many ran at the Roundabout Underground in 2013, doesn’t give quite enough depth to the characters as they explore their lives and debate the existence of God in the second act when they come together for the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Long Wharf artistic director Edelstein (Satchmo at the Waldorf, My Name Is Asher Lev) makes good use of Eugene Lee’s functional set, in which nearly all the locations are always onstage. But the first-set closer is a doozy, so you’re likely to forgive the syrupy, message-laden narrative and leave the theater wanting to find out more about that real-life devastating catastrophe in Brooklyn that, before this play, wasn’t even a historical footnote to the vast majority of us.

PRISMATIC PARK: NETTA YERUSHALMY

Netta Yerushalmy continues her site-specific Paramodernities series in Madison Square Park in conjunction with Josiah McElheny installation (photo by Paula Lobo)

PARAMODERNITIES #5/FOSSE/EXPERIMENTS
Madison Square Park Oval Lawn
Twenty-Fourth St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday, August 1-13, free, 10:00 am – 9:00 pm
www.madisonsquarepark.org
www.nettay.com

From August 1 to 13, New York City–based dancer and choreographer Netta Yerushalmy will continue her ambitious Paramodernities series in Madison Square Park, inhabiting Josiah McElheny’s “Prismatic Park” installation. In June at the National Museum of the American Indian, Yerushalmy presented the second and third parts of the series, in which she reinterprets classic works of dance in multidisciplinary programs: Paramodernities #2 / Trauma, Interdiction, and Agency in “The House of Pelvic Truth,” collaborating with dancer Taryn Griggs and art historian Carol Ockman and featuring a video of Martha Graham’s Night Journey ballet (with Graham as Jocasta, Bertram Ross as Oedipus, and Paul Taylor as Tiresias), and Paramodernities #3 / Revelations — The Afterlives of Slavery, exploring Alvin Ailey’s classic work, joined by Stanley Gambucci, Jeremy Jae Neal, Nicholas Leichter, and Duke University professor Thomas DeFrantz. “Paramodernities is a series of dance experiments that I generate through systematically deconstructing landmark modern dance choreographies,” Yerushalmy, who was born in South Carolina and raised there and in Israel, explained in a statement. “Performed alongside contributions by scholars from different fields in the humanities, who situate these iconic works within the larger project of modernity, Paramodernities explores foundational tenants of modern discourse — such as sovereignty, race, feminism, and nihilism — and includes public discussions as integral parts of each installment.”

Netta Yerushalmy will inhabit Josiah McElhenys Prismatic Park August 1-13 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Sponsored by Danspace Project, Yerushalmy’s “Prismatic Park” residency will begin each day (starting at different times) with Paramodernities #5, examining the movement in Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity, with Megan Williams, Michael Blake, Hsiao-Jou Tang, J’nae Simmons, and Joyce Edwards. That will be followed in the late afternoon or early evening by an experimental group dance with Emily Rose Cannon, Marc Crousillat, Brittany Engel-Adams, Maddie Schimmel, and Gambucci that focuses on the choreographers Yerushalmy has researched for Paramodernities so far (Vaslav Nijinsky, Merce Cunningham, Graham, and Ailey). “For this track, I am choosing to inhabit the park in a way that is perhaps more attuned to the modernist gestures of Josiah’s sculptures and to the park as architecture than to the organic matter there. I’ll be thinking of the determined shape of the lawn as the container for a layered dance-object filled with traces of legacy, gesture, culture,” she explained. And on August 12 at 6:00, the park will host the panel discussion “How Many Modernities Are There?” with McElheny, DeFrantz, Ockman, David Kishik, Judy Hussie-Taylor, and others. All events are free and first come, first served. “Prismatic Park,” which comprises an open red vaulted-roof pavilion, a reflective green dance floor, and a blue sound wall, continues with concerts by Shelley Hirsch (August 22-27), Matana Roberts (September 5-10), and Limpe Fuchs with poet Patrick Rosal (October 3-8), dance by Jodi Melnick (September 12-17, 19-24), and poetry by Joshua Bennett (August 15-20), Donna Masini (August 29 – September 3), and Mónica de la Torre (September 26 – October 1).

THE LAST DALAI LAMA?

Documentary celebrates the eightieth birthday of the Dalai Lama while looking at the future of the lineage

THE LAST DALAI LAMA? (Mickey Lemle, 2016)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, July 28
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.thelastdalailamafilm.com

“So long space remains, so long sentient beings remain, so long suffering remains, I will remain. In order to serve. That is the real purpose of our life,” His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama says at the beginning of Mickey Lemle’s documentary, The Last Dalai Lama. For nearly 450 years, the spiritual leader of Tibet has been known as the Dalai Lama, reincarnated to continue the lineage and guide the Tibetan people through his wisdom and compassion. But China, in its ongoing suppression of Tibet, has now decided it will choose the next Dalai Lama, so His Holiness, born Tenzin Gyatso in 1935, has vowed that if necessary, he will reincarnate as someone other than a Dalai Lama, bringing an end to the chain. Lemle introduced the world to the 14th Dalai Lama in 1993 with the release of Compassion in Exile: The Story of the 14th Dalai Lama; the new film, which Lemle wrote, produced, directed, and coedited, was made in conjunction with His Holiness’s eightieth birthday, which was celebrated with a Long Life Ceremony at the Javits Center in New York City (that we attended). The film reveals the Dalai Lama, a Buddhist meditation practitioner who escaped Tibet in 1959 and set up a new home in Dharamsala, India, to be both a mensch and a superstar, a man of deep, philosophical wisdom and great compassion for all sentient beings, as well as a very funny man with an infectious laugh. Lemle (The Other Side of the Moon, Ram Dass Fierce Grace) investigates the history of Tibetan relations with China while exploring the biography of the Dalai Lama, including interviews he made with him in the early 1990s.

Lemle speaks with Richen Khando Choegyal of the Tibetan Nuns Project about the self-immolation of young monks as a protest to Chinese policies, visits two classrooms in New York, and meets with HH’s younger brother, Tendzin Choegyal; HH’s personal physician, Tenzin Choedrak; chant master and longtime political prisoner Thupten Chokdhen; Dr. Daniel Goleman, author of A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for Our World; the Very Reverend James Parks Morton and the Very Reverend James A. Kowalski of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where Philip Glass, who composed the film’s score with Tenzin Choegyal, plays the pipe organ; Ling Rinpoche, the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama’s childhood teacher; Buddhist monk Dr. Mathieu Ricard, author of The Monk and the Philosopher: Buddhism Today; and HH’s translator, Dr. Thupten Jinpa. George W. Bush, who was the first U.S. president to make a public appearance with the Dalai Lama, awarding him the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007, shows off his portrait of HH. There’s also an intriguing section, with colorful animation, about the Dalai Lama’s interest in cutting-edge brain science, as he’s funding a project in which Dr. Eve Ekman and her father are creating an “atlas of emotions,” mapping enjoyment, ecstasy, fear, sadness, anguish, disgust, anxiety, and many others. Despite the problems with China, which are only getting worse, the Dalai Lama even has compassion for his enemies. He also discusses how this is not just about Buddhism. “We are working for seven billion human beings,” he tells Dr. Ekman. “That’s my view.” Meanwhile, the Very Reverend Kowalski asks, “Can human beings be this special?” According to His Holiness, every one of us has the potential to reach selfless levels of compassion, empathy, and peace of mind. The film can be scattershot and bumpy, jumping around too much, but the message is clear: Together we can change the world, but we must change ourselves first. The Last Dalai Lama? opens July 28 at IFC, with Lemle participating in Q&As following the 7:25 screenings on Friday and Saturday.

BLOW-UP

Thomas (David Hemmings) focuses on Veruschka in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up

BLOW-UP (BLOWUP) (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
July 28 – August 3
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni calls into question everything we see and hear, in photographs, on film, and in real life, in his 1966 counterculture masterpiece, Blow-Up, which is being shown July 28 to August 3 in a new DCP restoration at Film Forum. Antonioni’s first English-language film — part of a three-picture deal with producer Carlo Ponti that would also include the disappointing Zabriskie Point and the quirky existential suspense thriller The Passenger — lets viewers know from the very start that their eyes and ears are going to be tested as the letters of the opening credits frame indecipherable action, frustrating the viewer’s desire to understand what is going on. David Hemmings stars as Thomas, a successful fashion photographer in 1960s Swinging London who is tired of the phoniness and artifice inherent in his profession and instead has ambitions to become a black-and-white documentary photographer, as he and his agent, Ron (Peter Bowles), put together a book focusing on the many ills of society. Of course, he does so while riding around in a Rolls-Royce convertible and in between shooting such models as Veruschka (von Lehndorff), whom he practically makes love to during their session but doesn’t give a hoot about once he puts down the camera. He also gets fed up easily with a quartet of fabulously dressed models (the makeup and clothes come courtesy of costume designer Jocelyn Rickards), telling them to shut their eyes as he leaves, controlling what they see and don’t see, much like a film director. Thomas eventually heads out to lush, green Maryon Park, where he takes pictures of two people, a younger woman (Vanessa Redgrave) cavorting with an older man (Ronan O’Casey), apparently in the midst of a secret tryst. The woman, Jane, rushes over to Thomas and demands he give her the film; he invites her to his studio, where she is willing to do just about anything to get back the negatives. Wondering what was so incriminating about the photographs, Thomas soon makes blow-up after blow-up, examining them closely and ultimately believing that he has captured a murder on film. He also finds out that getting to the truth isn’t going to be easy, especially when he keeps allowing himself to become distracted by his wild lifestyle.

Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) is worried about photos Thomas (David Hemmings) took in Blow-Up

Blow-Up, which was parodied in Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety, reimagined by Brian De Palma as Blow Out, and a direct influence on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, was inspired by Julio Cortázar’s short story about a translator, “Las babas del diablo” (“The Devil’s Drool”), and written by Antonioni and regular collaborator Tonino Guerra (L’avventura, L’eclisse, The Red Desert), with English-language dialogue by poet and playwright Edward Bond. Antonioni dances all over the line between fiction and reality: Thomas’s studio belongs to photographer Jon Cowan; many of Thomas’s pictures were taken by photojournalist Don McCullin; Thomas himself is based on London photographer David Bailey; the abstract paintings by Thomas’s neighbor, Bill (John Castle), are by Ian Stephenson; the band in the club scene is the Yardbirds; and the tennis-playing mimes are husband and wife real mimes Claude and Julian Chagrin. Herbie Hancock’s groovy score is primarily heard when Thomas turns on a radio or puts on a record, ambient sound instead of soundtrack music coming from nowhere. Meanwhile, Antonioni challenges the viewer again and again to think twice about what they see and hear. At one point Antonioni follows Thomas’s gaze up into the trees, but when the camera returns to Thomas, he is looking elsewhere. While Thomas is studying the photos he took in the park, trying to uncover what happened as if editing a film, the wind from the park can impossibly be heard. Thomas is often peering through blinds, not sure of what he is seeing. A pair of wannabe models (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills) tear apart Thomas’s fake photographic background as if breaking the boundaries between the real and the fabricated. When Thomas shows one of the park photographs to Bill’s girlfriend, Patricia (Sarah Miles), she says, “It looks like one of Bill’s paintings.”

And when Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck gets frustrated with one of the speakers behind him, he destroys his guitar as bandmates Jimmy Page and singer Keith Relf continue playing “Stroll On” as if nothing is happening. Meanwhile, the crowd stands still like a bunch of zombies, refusing to stroll on or move at all, until Beck throws the broken neck of his guitar, now an object that can no longer emit sounds, into the audience, where it’s up to others to determine its value. The stagnation also relates to a huge propeller Thomas buys from an antiques store, as if he’s desperate to propel his life forward. Does Antonioni really get that literal? It’s hard to tell, but nearly every shot is ripe for interpretation, every directorial decision a careful choice imbued with meaning. When Thomas drives through an antiwar march, two protesters put a sign saying “Go away!” in his backseat, where the propeller will be put later. Blow-Up concludes with one of the most creative finales in the history of cinema. The troupe of mimes seen earlier returns, playing tennis in the park, but without a ball. Just follow the gazes of the mimes and Thomas, and listen closely as well, then watch what he does with his camera. It ingeniously encapsulates everything that has come before, but without a single word being spoken. It’s an absolutely bravura ending to an absolutely bravura film.

PANORAMA NYC VIDEO OF THE DAY: “RAN” BY FUTURE ISLANDS

Who: Future Islands
What: Panorama festival
Where: Randall’s Island Park
When: Friday, July 28, Panorama Stage, $125, 5:15
Why: Baltimore trio Future Islands has a special connection to New York City; their video for “Cave,” from their latest album, April’s The Far Field, features Jonathan Lamberton, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s rather expressive sign-language interpreter, signing the lyrics to the song. Perhaps Lamberton will be onstage with the band on July 28 when they play the Panorama festival on Randall’s Island. Future Islands was formed in North Carolina in 2006 by high school friends Gerrit Welmers and Samuel Herring along with William Cashion and Erick Murillo; Murillo left the next year, and since 2014 lyricist and lead singer Herring, keyboardist Welmers, and guitarist Cashion have been joined on tour by drummer Michael Lowry. The new album also includes such heartfelt, synth-driven songs as “Ran,” “Aladdin,” “Time on Her Side,” “North Star,” and “Shadows,” with special guest Debbie Harry. And yes, in December 2015 they covered WHAM!’s “Last Christmas.” Future Islands will be on the huge Panorama Stage at 5:15, after Vance Joy and before MGMT. The full Friday schedule is below.

IRVING PENN: CENTENNIAL

Irving Penn, “Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Cannes, 1957,” platinum-palladium print, 1985 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation / © The Irving Penn Foundation)

Met Fifth Avenue
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 199
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through July 30, $12-$25
212-535-7710
metmuseum.org
www.irvingpenn.org

One of the twentieth century’s most influential and innovative photographers, Irving Penn would have turned one hundred this past June. The Met more than does justice to his legacy in the sparkling exhibition “Irving Penn: Centennial,” continuing at the Met Fifth Avenue through July 30. Both Irving and his younger brother, Arthur, knew how to tell stories visually; while Penn did it through still photography, Arthur was a successful stage and screen director, helming such films as Bonnie and Clyde and The Miracle Worker and such Broadway productions as Wait Until Dark and Golden Boy. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Irving Penn tried his hand at drawing, painting, and designing before making a name for himself as a fashion photographer at Vogue, shooting 165 covers from 1943 to 2009, when he died at the age of ninety-two. In addition to fashion, Penn photographed celebrities and working people, cigarettes and other trash he found on the street, nudes, flowers, vessels, and people from Dahomey, New Guinea, Peru, and Morocco. The Met show features nearly two hundred photos, arranged in series, that reveal the breadth of Penn’s remarkable ability to capture the essence of his subject with exquisite simplicity while treating them all with equal weight, whether a Hollywood star, an Issey Miyake staircase dress, a muddy glove, a naked body, or a shoe. In a 1939 silver gelatin print, Penn, who did not like being the focus of attention himself, rarely giving interviews and spurning self-portraiture, is seen in shadow, taking a photo of the shadows of a key and a gun on a New York City street. In his Corner Portraits, he asked famous subjects to do whatever they wanted in a makeshift tight corner in his studio, resulting in iconic shots of Marcel Duchamp, Joe Louis, Truman Capote, and Elsa Schiaparelli. In “Balenciaga Sleeve,” model Régine Debrise’s face is starkly cut off at the top of the frame, breaking with tradition. In “Rochas Mermaid Dress,” model Lisa Fonssagrives, Penn’s wife of forty-two years, stands just off-center on a backdrop that Penn doesn’t hide; in fact, the backdrop is on view in the exhibit, along with one of Penn’s Rolleiflex cameras. Penn reveals his experimental side with four prints of “Girl Drinking,” taken of Mary Jane Russell in 1949 but not printed until 1960, 1976, 1977, and 2000, each slightly different.

Irving Penn, “Cigarette No. 37, New York, 1972,” platinum-palladium print, 1975 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation / © The Irving Penn Foundation)

As you make your way through the show, you’ll also come upon pictures of men, women, and children from Cuzco, Peru, including a porter, two Quechuan Indians, and a street vendor wearing multiple hats; a spread-eagled Salvador Dalí; a hand in a white glove holding a black shoe; a color still-life of parts of after-dinner games, with a die, playing cards, a chess horse, and a poker chip; a group of fleshy nudes in which the folds of the bodies form abstract shapes, taken in the 1950s but not printed until 1980 because of pornographic concerns; stunning portraits of Richard Burton, Colette, Pablo Picasso, Ingmar Bergman (with his fingers pressing down on his closed eyes), and Audrey Hepburn; a New Guinea tribesman with a large nose disc; covered women from Morocco; a 1986 color print of a mouth with numerous shades of lipstick, shot for a L’Oreal campaign, that seems to prefigure the main advertising image for Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of the Lambs,; and even a 1999 ink drawing reminiscent of Morandi. The exhibition also includes a rare video taken by Fonssagrives-Penn showing her husband in Morocco in 1971, shooting portraits in his portable studio. Through it all, Penn never complicates the background, instead focusing on the object itself. “A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it; it is in one word, ‘effective,’” Penn once said. The Met show, held in conjunction with a promised gift of 187 photographs from the Irving Penn Foundation, accomplishes all that and more.