A mother (Essie Davis) and her young son (Noah Wiseman) must get past terrible tragedy in The Babadook
THE BABADOOK (Jennifer Kent, 2014)
Industry City, Courtyard 5/6, 51 Thirty-Fifth St., Brooklyn
Tuesday, September 17, $22.15, 7:45 rooftopfilms.com www.ifcfilms.com
A hair-raising sleeper hit at Sundance that was named Best First Film of 2014 by the New York Film Critics Circle, The Babadook will be celebrating its tenth anniversary with a special Rooftop Films screening in Industry City on September 17, followed by a Q&A with director Jennifer Kent and a vodka-infused afterpaty.
The Babadook is a frightening tale of a mother and her young son — and a suspicious, scary character called the Babadook — trapped in a terrifying situation. Expanded from her 2005 ten-minute short, Monster, writer-director Kent’s debut feature focuses on the relationship between single mom Amelia (Essie Davis), who works as a nursing home aide, and her seemingly uncontrollable six-year-old son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who is constantly getting into trouble because he’s more than just a little strange. Sam was born the same day his father, Oskar (Ben Winspear), died, killed in a car accident while rushing Amelia to the hospital to give birth, resulting in Amelia harboring a deep resentment toward the boy, one that she is afraid to acknowledge. Meanwhile, Sam walks around with home-made weapons to protect his mother from a presence he says haunts them. One night Amelia reads Sam a book that suddenly appeared on the shelf, an odd pop-up book called Mister Babadook that threatens her. She tries to throw it away, but as Sam and the book keep reminding her, “You can’t get rid of the Babadook.” Soon the Babadook appears to take physical form, and Amelia must face her deepest, darkest fears if she wants she and Sam to survive.
Writer-director Jennifer Kent explores classic horror tropes in her feature debut, the sleeper hit The Babadook
The Babadook began life as a demonic children’s book designed by illustrator Alex Juhasz specifically for the film — and one that was initially available for purchase from the movie’s official website, although anyone who bought the book hopefully thought twice before inviting the twisted tome into their house. The gripping film, shot by Polish cinematographer Radek Ladczuk in subdued German expressionist tones of black, gray, and white with bursts of other colors, evokes such classic horror fare as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, where place plays such a key role in the terror. The Babadook itself is a kind of warped combination of the villains from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Hideo Nakata’s The Ring. Kent, a former actress who studied at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art with Davis and has made one other feature, 2018’s The Nightingale, lets further influences show in the late-night television Amelia is obsessed with, which includes films by early French wizard Georges Méliès. But the real fear comes from something that many parents experience but are too ashamed or embarrassed to admit: that they might not actually love their child, despite trying their best to do so. At its tender heart, The Babadook is a story of a mother and son who must go through a kind of hell if they are going to get past the awful way they were brought together.
Greta (Betsy Aidem) and Tanner (Colleen Litchfield) face off in Matthew Freeman’s The Ask (photo by Kent Mesiter)
THE ASK
the wild project
195 East Third St. between Aves. A & B
Wednesday – Sunday through September 28, $58.59 thewildproject.com
In a two-minute television commercial for the American Civil Liberties Union that has been running since the fall of 2022, comedian, author, and actor W. Kamau Bell explains, “As Americans, there’s one thing we can all agree on: the promise of our Constitution — and the hope that liberty and justice is for all people.” In the ad, Bell, an ACLU ambassador, asks viewers to become members of the civil rights organization for $19 a month, a fee also requested to join No Kid Hungry, the World Wildlife Fund, St. Jude’s, the ASPCA, and other charitable institutions. (The amount is both for tax purposes and perception, keeping it under $20.)
In Matthew Freeman’s stimulating new play, The Ask, making its world premiere through September 28 at the wild project, an ACLU fundraiser is asking for a whole lot more from a longtime donor who is on the fence about her future support of the nonprofit that started in 1920 and “is committed to fight for freedom and the protection of constitutional rights for generations to come.”
Greta (Betsy Aidem) is a wealthy seventysomething widow and lifelong feminist, a successful photographer who lives in Florida and the Upper West Side (and just sold her home in Maine). Tanner (Colleen Litchfield) is an adopted nonbinary millennial who resides in Bushwick and is a gift planning officer for the ACLU.
It’s set in December 2022, five months before the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 pandemic no longer a public health emergency. The characters’ first discussion is about Tanner’s presence; they’ve replaced Greta’s longtime ACLU contact, Carol, under unclear circumstances. Greta is unhappy that she wasn’t notified of Carol’s departure, nor has she been told the reason, although she suspects Carol was part of recent layoffs, which the ACLU executive director referred to as “right-sizing.”
Tanner dances around the answer, which annoys Greta. It’s a theme that runs throughout the play: Greta feels free to share anything about herself and her views, while Tanner is stiff and reserved, careful what they say about the ACLU and, more critically, about themself as they delve into the First Amendment, hate speech, student debt, the Founding Fathers and slavery, the Supreme Court, hunger, high-speed internet for underserved communities, and reproductive rights. Greta is upset by the number of emails she gets from the ACLU and some members’ references to the Constitution as a white-supremacist document, while Tanner keeps trying to convince Greta that the ACLU’s purpose is as consequential and necessary as ever.
“You do plenty of good in the world,” Tanner says. Greta replies, “Thank you, you’re the one who does good. I just write proverbial checks.” Tanner encourages her, “Well, they matter.” To which Greta shoots back, “Yes yes, you have to say that.”
But the tide turns on Tanner’s inability to say one word, the very term that is most important to Greta.
Tanner (Colleen Litchfield) has an impossible mission on their hands in world premiere at the wild project (photo by Kent Mesiter)
At its core, The Ask is about personal and professional identity. Greta not only speaks her mind but makes her living as a photographer, taking pictures of other people and places that shape her view of the world. Her apartment is cluttered with books piled on and under tables, including art tomes on Vincent van Gogh, Alice Neel, Paul Gauguin, and Ninth Street Women in addition to such feminist and left-leaning literature as Gloria Steinem’s Revolution from Within; Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years; Amy Goodman and David Goodman’s Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times, about what one can do to fight for what they believe in; and Jodie Patterson’s The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation, about a mother whose toddler tells her that she is not a girl but a boy.
Greta’s cozy, intimate apartment is filled with photographs hung on black-and-white scallop-shell wallpaper, both her own and several taken by Pictures Generation artist Cindy Sherman, who reimagines herself as different personae in cinematic self-portraits that explore gender and identity. Tanner, who is clearly uncomfortable sharing certain personal information with Greta, expresses their admiration of Sherman. “I love her too; I think she’s a scream,” Greta says. Tanner responds, “I think she’s terrifying.”
Tanner is also enamored with a photograph of a dinosaur, which Greta refers to as her self-portrait, an ancient creature surrounded by real life. Tanner points out, “Except for Cindy Sherman. She’s not real life.” Greta, keeping their cat-and-mouse game going, counters, “She’s a little more real than a Brontosaurus.”
The play is intricately directed by Jessi D. Hill (Small,Ushuaia Blue), who makes the most of Craig Napoliello’s almost claustrophobic set, which has a small hallway in the back that leads to the unseen kitchen and bathroom, bringing some kind of respite to the tense proceedings occurring in the study, where Greta, in black pants, a loose-fitting purple blouse, and clogs, sits comfortably in a chair while Tanner, in brown pants, a V-neck sweater, a dark blazer, and sneakers, is rigid and uneasy in an opposite chair. (The costumes are by Nicole Wee, with sharp sound by Cody Hom and bright lighting by Daisy Long.)
Freeman (Silver Spring,Why We Left Brooklyn) writes with a refreshing assuredness, creating dialogue that could have become pedantic and self-serving but instead is through-provoking and, often, very funny even as it deals with serious situations. Tony nominee Aidem (Prayer for the French Republic,All the Way) is energetic and appealing as Greta, a wholly believable feminist who doesn’t want to see everything her generation accomplished just slip away, while Litchfield (The Summoning,The Heart of Robin Hood) stands firm as a much younger individual who has their own vision of the future but cannot say it out loud. (Both actors were in the original Broadway cast of Leopoldstadt, Aidem as Grandma Emilia, Litchfield as Hanna.)
Even at eighty minutes, the play is a bit too long, repeating several points and including one gratuitous monologue, but otherwise it expertly captures the changes that are evolving primarily on the left in today’s society. Greta and Tanner are battling each other instead of the other side, unwilling to compromise their values.
“I imagine in your life. Your individuality is important to you. Asserting your identity, your uniqueness, that’s been important to you. It might have even been a struggle. I don’t want to assume anything, but I imagine that’s true for you?” Greta says, adding, “But you see, I also want to be treated as an individual. As a woman, I mean, as a woman I’ve had to fight against the perception that I am a certain way, that I am defined by all these stereotypes about women.”
Tanner wants to change the subject, understanding that Greta might not like what they have to say — and it’s about a lot more than a charitable donation, whether $19 a month or a much higher figure.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The film career of French artist Daniel Pommereulle is being celebrated at Metrograph this month
SIX MORAL TALES: LA COLLECTIONNEUSE (Eric Rohmer, 1967)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, September 14, 2:30
Sunday, September 15, 11:00 am
Series runs September 13-29
212-660-0312 metrograph.com
On September 12, the exhibit “Daniel Pommereulle: Premonition Objects” opens at Ramiken on Grand St. On September 13, Metrograph kicks off the two-week series “One More Time: The Cinema of Daniel Pommereulle,” consisting of seven programs featuring the French painter, sculptor, filmmaker, performer, and poet who died in 2003 at the age of sixty-six. First up is “Daniel Pommereulle X3,” bringing together Pommereulle’s shorts One More Time and Vite and Anton Bialas and Ferdinand Gouzon’s 2021 Monuments aux vivants, which documents the artist’s sculptural work; curators Boris Bergmann and Armance Léger will take part in a postscreening Q&A moderated by filmmaker Kathy Brew. “Pommereulle was one of those people who could stand firm against the all-consuming metropolis: someone who never compromised, who never sold his soul — even to America. We joyously return Pommereulle to New York: a necessary encounter, a poetic reward,” Léger and Bergmann said in a statement. The festival also includes Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, Marc’O’s Les Idoles, Jackie Raynal’s Deux Fois, serge Bard and Olivier Mosset’s Ici et maintenant and Fun and Games for Everyone, and Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse.
“Razor blades are words,” art critic Alain Jouffroy tells painter Daniel Pommereulle (Daniel Pommereulle) in one of the prologues at the start of La Collectionneuse, the fourth film in French master Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (falling between My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee). Words might have the ability to cut, but they don’t seem to have much impact on the three people at the center of the film, which offers a sort of alternate take on François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Needing a break from his supposedly strenuous life, gallerist Adrien (Patrick Bauchau, who also appeared in La Carrière de Suzanne, Rohmer’s second morality tale) decides to vacation at the isolated St. Tropez summer home of the never-seen Rodolphe. Daniel is also at the house, along with Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a beautiful young woman who spends much of the film in a bikini and being taken out by a different guy nearly every night. Adrien decides that she is a “collector” of men, and the three needle one another as they discuss life and love, sex and morality, beauty and ugliness. Adrien might claim to want to have nothing to do with Haydée, but he keeps spending more and more time with her, even though he never stops criticizing her lifestyle. He even uses her as a pawn when trying to get an art collector named Sam (played by former New York Times film critic Eugene Archer under the pseudonym Seymour Hertzberg) to invest in his gallery.
While everybody else in the film pretty much knows what they want, Adrien, who purports to understand life better than all of them, is a sad, lost soul, unable to get past his high-and-mighty attitude. Rohmer crafted the roles of Daniel and Haydée specifically for Pommereulle and Politoff, who improvised much of their dialogue; Bauchau opted not to take that route, making for a fascinating relationship among the three very different people. La Collectionneuse is beautifully shot in 35mm by Néstor Almendros, the bright colors of the characters’ clothing mixing splendidly with the countryside and ocean while offering a striking visual counterpoint to the constant ennui dripping off the screen. His camera especially loves Politoff, regularly exploring her body inch by inch. The film is both Rohmer’s and Almendros’s first color feature; Almendros would go on to make more films with the director, as well as with Truffaut, even after coming to Hollywood and shooting such films as Days of Heaven, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice. Winner of a Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 1967 Berlinale, La Collectionneuse is screening September 14 and 15 at Metrograph.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Barbara Loden wrote, directed, produced, and stars in Wanda
WANDA (Barbara Loden, 1970)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, September 13, 8:20 (with introduction)
Sunday, September 15, 2:50
Thursday, September 19, 3:00
212-660-0312 metrograph.com
“If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, then you’re as good as dead,” Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) tells Wanda Goronski (Barbara Loden) in Wanda, which is screening September 13, 15, and 19 in the continuing Metrograph series “One-Timers.” The first theatrical feature written, directed, produced by, and starring an American woman, Wanda is a raw, naturalistic road-trip movie about an emotionally vacant woman who walks through life in a kind of stupor, wandering into situations to avoid being alone yet still trapped in an unrelenting alienation. Loden, who won a 1964 Tony for her portrayal of Maggie in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall — the play was directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan, whom she would marry four years later and remain with through her tragic death in 1980 — doesn’t try to turn Wanda into a feminist antihero, but she does take all the power away from her, making her completely dependent on other people, primarily men, an excellent counterpoint to Loden herself, who has all the power. Staying on her sister’s (Dorothy Shupenes) couch in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country, Wanda is almost zombielike as she slowly heads to court in curlers and a housecoat and lets the judge award custody of her two children to her soon-to-be-ex-husband (Jerome Thier). “I’m just no good,” she mumbles. Broke and apparently with no faith or hope in her future, she proceeds to get involved with some sketchy losers, including Mr. Dennis, who takes her on a minor crime spree that is a far cry from Bonnie and Clyde. All along the way, she rarely has anything of any interest to say to anyone; the only time she speaks clearly and definitively is when she explains that she likes onions on her hamburgers.
Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) takes Wanda Goronski (Barbara Loden) for quite a ride in Wanda
Shot in a cinéma vérité style by documentary cinematographer Nicholas T. Proferes, Wanda — named Best Foreign Film at the Venice International Film Festival — is a riveting and infuriating exploration of the death of the American dream as the 1960s come to an end and the country reexamines itself, not necessarily liking what it sees. Apathy competes with melancholy as Wanda is unable and unwilling to take control of her life, dressed in the same white outfit and carrying the same white pocketbook throughout nearly the entire film, but she is more disconsolate than angelic. Much of the film is improvised and most of the characters are portrayed by nonprofessional actors or people who just happened to be in the area, like the scene in which Mr. Dennis and Wanda encounter a family flying a remote-control model airplane. (Higgins would go on to make more than fifty films, including The Conversation, The Stepford Wives, and The Seduction of Joe Tynan.) Coming on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement, Wanda is about a pouty sad-sack who barely ever changes emotion, always wearing the same blank stare. It’s not that she’s promiscuous, adventurous, or even unpredictable; she just is. You desperately want her to take action, to care about something or someone, but it’s just not going to happen. It’s almost as if Loden is setting the groundwork for such future films as Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, which feature such strong, decisive female characters as Alice (Ellen Burstyn) in the former and Iris (Jodie Foster) in the latter, who at least attempt to take matters into their own hands; elements of Wanda can also be found in Aki Kaurismäki’s Match Factory Girl and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.Wanda would end up being Loden’s only film as writer and director; she died in 1980 of cancer at the age of forty-eight. The September 13 screening will be introduced by Caryn Coleman, founder of the Future of Film Is Female.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
John Wayne looks better than ever in new 4K restoration of The Searchers
THE SEARCHERS (John Ford, 1956)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 13-19
212-727-8110 filmforum.org
That’ll be the day when someone tries to claim there’s a better Western than John Ford’s ethnocentric look at the dying of the Old West and the birth of the modern era — and not it looks better than ever, in a 4K restoration opening at Film Forum September 13. Essentially about a gunfighter’s attempt to find and kill his young niece, who has been kidnapped and, ostensibly, ruined by Indians, The Searchers — based on the 1954 novel by Alan Le May — is laden with iconic imagery, inside messages, and not-so-subtle metaphors. Hence, it is no accident that John Wayne’s son, Patrick, plays an ambitious yet inept officer named Greenhill. The elder Wayne stars as Ethan Edwards, a tough-as-nails Confederate veteran seeking revenge for the murder of his brother’s family; he’s also out to save Debbie (Natalie Wood) from the Comanches, led by a chief known as Scar (Henry Brandon), by ending her life, because in his world view, it’s better to be dead than red.
In iconic Western, Jeffrey Hunter and Ethan Edwards search for Natalie Wood, with very different motives
Joining him on his trek is Debbie’s adopted brother, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), who wants to save her from Edwards. The magnificent film balances its serious center with a large dose of humor, particularly in the relationships between Ethan and Martin and Ethan with his Indian companion, Look (Beulah Archuletta). And keep your eye on that blanket in front of the house. Born in Maine in 1894, Ford made some of the most dazzling Westerns and literary adaptations ever put on celluloid; he passed away in 1973 at the age of seventy-nine, having won four Best Director Oscars among his nearly 140 pictures.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Curator and cultural historian John T. Reddick will give a talk on Tin Pan Alley on September 11 at the Society of Illustrators (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
ILLUSTRATING TIN PAN ALLEY: FROM RAGTIME TO JAZZ
Society of Illustrators
128 East Sixty-Third St. between Park & Lexington Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday through October 12, $10-$15
Tin Pan Alley Talk & Reception: Wednesday, September 11, $10-$15. 6:30
212-838-2560 societyillustrators.org
Longtime Harlem resident and Yale University School of Architecture graduate John T. Reddick is into bridge building — but in this case, the bridges aren’t physical structures but those that involve the lesser-known history of Tin Pan Alley. The birthplace of American popular music, Tin Pan Alley flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when dozens of music publishers and businesses lined the streets of what is now Chelsea, in the West Twenties.
Born and raised in the integrated Philadelphia neighborhood of Mount Airy, Reddick got involved in trying to save Tin Pan Alley when five buildings on West Twenty-Eighth St. were in danger of being demolished by their owner/developer. In 2019, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated them historic landmarks.
A founding member of Harlem Pride and the director of community engagement projects for the Central Park Conservancy, Reddick has been an avid collector of sheet music art, focusing on songs composed and/or performed by Black and Jewish entertainers. What began as a curiosity and hobby has blossomed into a dazzling exhibition at the Society of Illustrators, “Illustrating Tin Pan Alley: From Ragtime to Jazz,” on view through October 12.
“I felt like these artists were groundbreakers. I see in them many parallels to hip hop, in that ragtime’s innovation for its time was as jarring as hip hop’s,” he said of the composers and performers of the era during a tour of the show. “My journey began after I went to a talk on the Lower East Side given by Jeffery Gurock, who lectured on the period when Harlem was Jewish. That was a revelation to me, that Harlem had once been the second largest Jewish community in New York City. From that point I went to the library, did research, and started buying items on eBay. It was just shocking; as I bought sheet music or got to see the names, I realized they all lived in Harlem during the same time period.”
Arranged chronologically, the exhibit focuses on sheet music and its accompanying art, which reveals the developing connections between American Black and white music, beginning with the cakewalk, a Black dance that originated in America but became a craze when introduced in Europe, advancing its popularity as a hit in the United States. Several photographs and illustrations depict the cakewalk being performed, including two works by French artist Georges-Bertin Scott, sheet music covers for the songs “Darktown Is Out To-Night” and “Cake Walk Neath the Dixie Moon,” and a drawing in which Uncle Sam relaxes while watching dancers’ cakewalk around a tree.
On a nearby wall is the sheet music for “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” a popular 1898 song composed by Ernest Hogan that sold more than a million copies. Hogan, a prominent Black composer and performer, appeared in shows with the leading African American performers of the day. However, the song’s sheet music art, which featured unflattering caricatures of Black men and women, became such a crippling definer of Hogan as an artist that it led to his demise.
Reddick noted, “All of a sudden, this ragtime music is popular, and you want to show and sell us more. What do you use to image that music?” Reddick grouped together the sheet music covers for “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion [Cook], “Cotton: A Southern Breakdown” by Albert Von Tilzer, and “Watermelon Am Good Enough for Mine” by G. Barker Richardson and Von Tilzer. “I have three things in there: cotton, chicken, and watermelon. They’re in the lyrics; they’re in the titles,” Reddick said. “A lot of the signifying, I feel, is coming out of music publishers just trying to meet the commercial market where its mind is at. You don’t cartoon something unless its understanding is pervasive. For me it’s the beginning of bridge building to some identity that’s beyond that becomes an American music.”
Other excellent groupings juxtapose two different sheet music covers for Lew Pollack’s “Vamping Sal the Sheba of Georgia” and three for Shelton Brooks’s “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”
Pointing out that a lot of sheet music was dedicated to songwriter and journalist Monroe Rosenfeld because the performers knew he could talk them up in the newspaper, Reddick zeroed in on the team of Bert Williams and George Walker.
“Rosenfeld has this bridge relationship, so you see a lot of people pandering to him, even Williams and Walker, who coined themselves ‘the two real coons.’ They claimed the tag and the stage to establish their own authenticity and artistry. I realized in many ways it’s just like hip hop. You could have been the greatest hip-hop singer in the world, but if you went to amateur night at the Apollo and started singing in a tuxedo, you would be booed. You wouldn’t even get your mouth open because there’s a certain kind of drag they expect you to be in to perform. Williams and Walker knew they were good, but they realized that more whites were blacking-up and playing Blacks onstage than actual Black performers. It was so much more sophisticated. They could show that there’s parody and all this irony in lot of stuff they did.”
Every element, even the way the show is hung, carries some kind of weight. Reddick explained that for most of the works, a black frame indicates the song was written by a Black composer, a white frame by a white composer.
Perhaps not accidentally, the cover sheet for Jean Schwartz’s 1908 “The Whitewash Man,” depicting a smiling Black man carrying a paint bucket and a broom, is placed over a water fountain, evoking the “Whites Only” signs of the Jim Crow era.
Among the other composers and performers Reddick discussed were James Reese Europe and Ford T. Dabney, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, Irene and Vernon Castle, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Miss Aida Overton Walker, drummer Buddy Gilmore, Fats Waller, Sophie Tucker, Josephine Baker, and W. C. Handy as well as the Clef Club, the Ziegfeld Follies, the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Al Hirschfeld and Sydney Leff, two Jewish artists who attended the Vocational High School for the Arts on 138th Street in Harlem.
“Think of the names of Motown groups,” Reddick said. “The Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Temptations. Nobody’s a gangster. They’re claiming we deserve to be on the other side. Now we have a credential. . . . When the Central Park jogger case happened [in 1989], the term ‘wilding,’ it was just a term for young people being in nature and the park, not being there in the park to victimize people. But that was the first time it crossed over as a term from the Black community to the broader public. . . . So, I always think, what if bling had crossed over, associated with a jewelry store robbery as opposed to the fashions of hip-hop artists. Again, the word already had that meaning in my culture. Bling and jewelry. You got bling on, but at a certain point it crossed over, right? Maybe a hip-hop person, whatever. What was the bridge that made it happen?”
Tin Pan Alley exhibition winds down narrow hallway (photo courtesy of Society of Illustrators)
One of the most striking works is E. Simms Campbell’s gorgeously detailed 1932 “Night-Club-Map of Harlem,” which locates such hot spots as Smalls Paradise, Club Hot-Cha (“where nothing happens before 2 a.m.”), “the nice new police station,” Gladys’ Clam House, the Lafayette Theatre, the Radium Club, and the Savoy Ballroom, with cartoon vignettes of people dancing the lindy hop and the snakehips, men purchasing “marijuana cigarettes,” Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tapping away, and Tillie’s offering “specialties in fried chicken — and it’s really good.”
Reddick, who will give a lecture at the Society of Illustrators on September 11 at 6:30, followed by a reception with pianist/preservationist Adrian Untermyer, then told a story about American composer and violinist Will Marion Cook, who had studied with and influenced Antonín Dvořák’s take on America’s “Negro Music.”
“He performed and got a review that said he was one of the nation’s best colored violinists. And he took his violin to the critic and broke it and said, ‘I’m the best violinist.’ He wanted to start writing for Black shows and other Black players. He wrote with [poet and novelist] Paul Laurence Dunbar. But his family was so embarrassed for writing that ‘n—er’ music that in his first productions, he didn’t use his last name. However, Cook-associated shows such as 1898’s Clorindy and 1903’s In Dahomey served to bring a more diverse African American identity to the stage. What does that mean politically? If people are liking you, then they are seeing you in another light. What’s that going to mean on the political landscape?”
He added, “Now they could be voters. Picking cotton, you weren’t a voter. They’re playing at Madison Square Garden, so they’re at this elevated level. They’re having a life that was unimaginable for most Blacks.”
Above “All Coons Look Alike to Me” is a quote by W. E. B. Du Bois from his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others . . . one ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings.”
In “Illustrating Tin Pan Alley: From Ragtime to Jazz,” Reddick is reconciling those strivings and more, building bridges across race and class through a unique moment in New York City musical history.
[On September 19, the Society of Illustrators will host a happy hour from 5:00 to 9:00, with free admission, drink specials, and live music by Charlie Judkins, Miss Maybell, and Robert Lamont. Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Park Ave. Armory has been transformed into a rave club for R.O.S.E. (photo by Stephanie Berger)
R.O.S.E.
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
September 5-12, $65 www.armoryonpark.org
Sharon Eyal’s exhilarating R.O.S.E., which opened September 5 for a too-brief seven-show run in Wade Thompson Drill Hall in Park Ave. Armory, ebbs and flows as a participatory dance experience that pulses with a series of slow fuses that explode about half a dozen times over the course of three hot hours.
An armory commission that debuted last year at New Century Hall in Manchester, R.O.S.E. starts off calmer than one might expect. The hall is divided into front and back sections by a floor-to-ceiling side-to-side black fabric wall. As the audience arrived in the first section of the hall, about a half hour before showtime, a DJ spun droning tunes in the space, mostly empty save for a few couches and benches; a projection of a large white rose glowed on the wall behind the DJ.
On opening night, one man moved slowly back and forth to the music as a handful of others relaxed, talked, and checked their phones. Little was going on; excitement was nonexistent. At 7:30, the crowd began entering the main space; staff wearing glow sticks placed a sticker over each person’s phone camera lens, as absolutely no photo or video is allowed inside.
The truncated area lacks the breathtaking awe of the hall’s usual vastness, with walls and curtains on all sides and lights and speakers hanging down, blocking the view of the impressive ceiling. There are four step-platforms, with bars in two corners, the tech crew in a third, and DJ Ben UFO in the fourth. (The set design is by Daphnée Lanternier, who is also credited with creative direction.)
Dancers weave in, through, and around the crowd in Sharon Eyal’s immersive R.O.S.E. (photo by Stephanie Berger)
It was not clear what to do at first as attendees considered where to stand. (I recommend hanging around wherever you see white tape on the floor.) The crowd consisted of people from all age groups (except children), in all types of dress and hairstyles, including small groups that appeared to come straight out of SNL’s old “Sprockets” skits; some swayed to the music, others chattered away, and a few scanned their phones. After about fifteen curious minutes, one gentleman stepped into a spotlight in the middle of the room and clapped his hands over his head several times; that was all it took to get more people to start dancing.
Shortly after eight o’clock, as the packed dance floor was heating up, nine performers (Darren Devaney, Guido Dutilh, Juan Gil, Alice Godfrey, Héloïse Jocqueviel, Johnny McMillan, Keren Lurie Pardes, and Nitzan Ressler) entered the space, making their way through the audience, which parted to let them pass. Wearing postapocalyptic beige costumes by Maria Grazia Chiuri of Christian Dior Couture (that occasionally included cowls and cinch sacks), metal jewelry and makeup by Noa Eyal Behar (that featured streaked black eyeliner, teardrops, and piercings), they moved through the crowd with insectlike precision, their arms and legs forming awkward angles.
Eyal cut her teeth as a member and choreographer of Batsheva Dance Company, and her exciting movement language contains elements of former Batsheva artistic director Ohad Naharin’s Gaga system. The work is codirected by Eyal’s longtime collaborator Gai Behar, whom Eyal met in a club in the late 1990s, and Caius Pawsom of the Young art collective.
While some audience members hung back on the platform risers, others followed the nine dancers around the room as the music thumped, haze wafted over everyone, and Alon Cohen’s propulsive lighting shifted between darkness and light. And then the dancers disappeared.
A team of twelve dancers in black join the fray at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)
This pattern happened five or six times during the evening. The dancers would sneak into the area, starting from different corners, and groove for between five and fifteen minutes, sometimes breaking off into stunning solos. If you decide to remain close to them, you have to stay vigilant, as they unpredictably turn, twist, and reach out; you might be touched — one woman stood her ground, so a dancer made contact with her, while another dancer gently put a hand on a man’s shoulder — and you might even be given a black rose.
For one exquisitely choreographed scene, the nine dancers faced off against twelve dancers in black lace (New York–based Julia Ciesielka, Blu Furutate, Antonia Gillette, Michaella Ho, Destinee Jimenez, Nick LaMaina, Natalie Wong, Nina Longid, Julian Sanchez, Luc Simpson, Kailei Sin, and Jeremy Villas) in an epic battle that evoked both West Side Story and The Warriors (as well as a smidgen of Beneath the Planet of the Apes).
It’s a long night, so if you need a break, you can wander back to the first section or even out into the armory’s various period rooms with chairs and couches, and you can get a breath of fresh air outside, but the time between dances gets shorter and shorter as the evening continues, and you don’t want to miss any of them. Part of the fun is anticipating where the dancers will next emerge from and when and where they will exit. Near the end, there are longer solos and, ultimately, a stirring finale where everyone comes together in a rousing celebration bursting with electricity.
The more you put into R.O.S.E., the more you will get out of it. Don’t take off the phone sticker and try to steal a picture or video, which I saw at least two people doing, and don’t obsessively scroll through your cell in between dances. Get into the groove. Bask in the freedom. Join the party and rave on!
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
