twi-ny recommended events

TICKET ALERT: THE DREAM-OVER 2016

Dream-Over participants sleep under a specially selected work of art at the Rubin Museum chosen to impact their dreams

Rubin Museum
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Tickets go on sale Tuesday, September 13, $125, 11:00 am
Event takes place October 15, 8:00 pm – 9:00 am
212-620-5000
www.rubinmuseum.org

Tickets go on sale September 13 at eleven o’clock for a uniquely satisfying and rewarding program at the Rubin Museum. The Dream-Over, which began in 2011, offers adults the opportunity to spend a special evening inside the museum, exploring the inner workings of their mind in a fascinating way. Each lucky participant fills out a Dreamlife Questionnaire in advance, giving details about themselves that will help consultants, under the leadership of dream facilitator Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, who curates the “Art and the Occult” series at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, select a specific work of art in the museum under which they will sleep; hopefully the painting, photograph, or sculpture will influence their dreams. The evening will begin with a talk on the significance of dreams with Khenpo Lama Pema Wangdak and Dr. Sinclair and include lullabies and bedtime stories. Dreamers are required to arrive at the Rubin already in pajamas, robe, and slippers and must bring their own bedding. Food and drink are not allowed; there will be a midnight snack and a Tibetan breakfast. Couples can sleep and dream under the same work of art (each paying full price). In the morning, Dream Gatherers and Dream Interpreters will speak individually with the participants to figure out what their dreams might mean. Tickets for the Dream-Over sell out immediately, so don’t hesitate if you want to take part in this ultracool event.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: PHAEDRA(S)

(photo courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe) Avec: Isabelle Huppert, Agata Buzek, Andrzej Chyra, Alex Descas, Gael Kamilindi, Norah Krief, Rosalba Torres Guerrero. (photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt)

Isabelle Huppert appears as multiple Phaedras in Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe production at BAM (photo courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe)

PHÈDRE(S)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
September 13-18, $30-$95
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In 2005, French superstar Isabelle Huppert was devastating in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychose, part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Four years later she returned to the festival in Robert Wilson’s Quartett, a wild adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses for Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe. Huppert and Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe are now back at BAM with Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Phaedra(s), a two-hundred-minute production in which the award-winning Huppert (La Cérémonie, The Piano Teacher) plays three versions of the title character from Greek mythology, taken from Kane’s Phaedra’s Love and writings by Wajdi Mouawad and J. M. Coetzee. Huppert and Warlikowski previously worked together in 2004 on The Dybbuk and 2010 in A Streetcar Named Desire. The dramaturgy is by Piotr Gruszczynski, with sets and costumes by Malgorzata Szczesniak, lighting by Felice Ross, music by Pawel Mykietyn, video by Denis Guéguin, and choreography by Claude Bardouil and Rosalba Torres Guerrero. The show runs September 13-18; in addition, Huppert will participate in a discussion about Phaedra(s) with Simon Critchley on September 17 at the Hillman Attic Studio ($25, 5:00), and Charles Mee, Caridad Svich, and moderator Kaneza Schaal will gather for “Phaedra Interpreted” on September 18 (free, 11:00 am) at Borough Hall Courtroom as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival, in conjunction with BAM and the Onassis Cultural Center New York.

STEINWAY SALON: SIMON MULLIGAN

simon-mulligan

Who: Simon Mulligan
What: A Special 9-11 Memorial Recital
Where: Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th St., 212-864-5400
When: Sunday, September 11, $15, 7:00
Why: In commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, British piano virtuoso Simon Mulligan will perform a special memorial recital at Symphony Space on September 11, consisting of Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Valse No. 1, Franz Schubert’s Four Impromptus, Op. 90 (I. Allegro molto moderato; II. Allegro; III. Andante mosso; IV. Allegretto), and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The concert is part of the monthly “Steinway Salon” series, which continues October 20 with Clipper Erickson, November 3 with Christina McMaster, and December 8 with Jed Distler.

THE ENCHANTED REALM OF RENE MAGRITTE

Georgette Magritte (Anya Krawcheck) receives a balloon from Fantomas (Danny Wilfred) in THE ENCHANTED REALM OF RENE MAGRITTE (Al Rodriguez Photography)

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE MIND OF THE SURREALIST PAINTER
Governors Island
Nolan Park House 17
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through September 25 (except 9/9), $15
www.exquisitecorpsecompany.com

Brooklyn-based Exquisite Corpse follows up last summer’s Secession 2015, which took place in House 17 in Nolan Park on Governors Island and told the story of several artists and their muses in early twentieth-century Vienna, with The Enchanted Realm of Rene Magritte, set in the same building but now following the tempestuous relationship between Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte (Max Henry Schloner) and his wife and muse, Georgette (Anya Krawcheck). The play features ten vignettes, each written by one of eight writers (T. Adamson, Blake Bishton, Simon de Carvalho, Eric Marlin, Matthew Minnicino, Ran Xia, Emily Zemba, and Laura Zlatos), and is set in various rooms featuring Magritte-inspired designs. Forget about the silly, unnecessary frame story in which an annoying Realtor is trying to sell Magritte’s house and instead let yourself get swept up in the surreal love story between Rene and Georgette, from their first meeting, when he was fifteen and she was thirteen, through their later courtship and blatant infidelities. Following his father’s death, Rene is deciding whether to sell the house; the oddball Mr. Fish (Lee Collins) is desperate to buy it, but Rene’s deceased mother, Regina (company producing director Blaine O’Leary), a former milliner, has emerged from the river where she drowned herself years before to return to her son, begging him not to part with the home. After a disappointed Mr. Fish exits, Rene leads approximately fifteen guests on a tour of the house, each room relating to a piece of his personal past.

Rene Magritte (Max Henry Schloner) gets down with new friend Sheila Legge (Blaine O’Leary) in THE ENCHANTED REALM OF RENE MAGRITTE (Al Rodriguez Photography)

In the parlor, Fantomas features no dialogue, instead relying on shadow puppets, masked dancers, WWII sound effects, Paul Simon’s “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War,” and a red balloon to poetically show the couple’s relationship blossoming. In The Surrealist Phantom, Rene introduces Georgette and Paul (choreographer Danny Wilfred), his best friend, to Sheila Legge (O’Leary,), his new girlfriend. For Out of the River, Regina scampers up and down steps, sharing her deepest thoughts with the audience. Day Trip is set in the sun room, where Georgette and Paul are at the beach, talking about their affair. The costumes, dialogue, and design of each room boast little Magritte-like flourishes referencing his paintings, from intersecting empty frames to fish, from an apple to a pipe, from a bowler hat to masks and a tree. Not all of it makes sense; you’ll be scratching your head a lot, trying to figure out just what is happening, but director and creator Tess Howsam maintains a relatively smooth flow from scene to scene. Schloner plays Magritte with a soft-spoken sense of wonder, the artist’s mind always wandering, his words flowing like one of his surreal paintings. “I worry that one day I will look out the window and, instead of the hill and the river below, I will see just a big wall of grey, translucent and covered in scales, like the belly of a giant trout, blocking out everything else,” he says. “So I’ve been keeping the blinds closed, because I never know when I might see the fish instead of the river.” The excellent O’Leary is intense as Regina and playful as the limber Sheila. Krawcheck is a revelation as the dedicated but confused Georgette, giving a tour-de-force performance that should soon have her busting out of the Nolan Park house and into bigger digs. She commands each scene she’s in with a sweetly infectious confidence and a natural artistic grace that is a delight to watch. The ninety-minute show continues September 10-11, 16-18, and 23-25; art lovers might also want to check out the ninth annual Governors Island Art Fair, which takes place in several houses along Colonels Row as well as at Fort Jay and Castle Williams.

MICHAEL RICHARDS: WINGED

Michael Richards’s “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian” stands in the shadows of the World Trade Center across the river, where he lost his life on September 11 (photo by Etienne Frossard)

The Arts Center at Governors Island, Building 110
Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays through September 25
Admission: free, 12 noon – 5:00
212-219-9401
lmcc.net/event/winged

It’s one of the most haunting and memorable works of contemporary art you’re ever likely to see. Michael Richards’s 1999 “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian,” on view weekends through September 25 in the powerful “Winged” retrospective at the LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island, is a life-size rendition of the artist, cast in resin and fiberglass, wearing a gold-painted Tuskegee Airman uniform. The sculpture is suspended a bit off the ground, on a steel shaft, showing Richards with his eyes closed, his hands just below his hips, palms open in a sign of both peace and acceptance of his fate, as a barrage of airplanes crash into him. Two years later Richards died on the morning of September 11, 2001, in his LMCC “World Views” studio on the ninety-second floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center. The title references the Christian saint and martyr who was tied up and lanced with arrows and the controversial character from the Uncle Remus stories that was involved in trapping and escaping, an ever-present battle for survival. It was originally feared that “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian” was destroyed in the terrorist attacks, but it was later discovered in a cousin’s garage. Curators Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin have placed the breathtaking sculpture with its back to the east window, where One World Trade Center, built at Ground Zero to replace the Twin Towers, can be seen in the distance, across the river. It’s utterly unforgettable, especially with the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 taking place this weekend.

Michael Richards stands with “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian” in 1999 (photo by Frank Stewart)

But “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian” is only one of several stunning works by Richards in the one-room exhibition, the largest ever survey of the artist, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and was only thirty-eight when he was killed. “A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo,” cast in 1994, consists of five plaster busts, four on solid bases and featuring a newspaper image of white police officers in the midst of brutality, the sentence “When I was young I wanted to be a policeman” on the plinth, while in the center another bust spins around, a small image of Rodney King on his forehead. In 1998’s “Air Fall 1 (His Eye Is on the Sparrow, and I Know He’s Watching Me),” fifty black airplanes are heading down from a black cloud of hair, spiraling toward a mirrored bull’s-eye on the ground. Hair, which Richards associated with black identity and racist stereotypes, also plays a role in “The Great Black Airmen,” five pilot helmets in which kinky hair peeks out from straightened hair, and “Travel Kit,” in which seven fingers emerge from bronze hairbrushes. “Fly Away O’ Glory” comprises seven pairs of cast-bronze arms on the floor, each hand gripping a spinning feather in a desperate, unsuccessful attempt to fly.

Michael Richards, “A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo,” resin, marble dust, wood, motor, photo transfer, 1994 (photo by Etienne Frossard)

Ephemera including photographs, letters, journal pages, exhibition catalogs and invitations, and testimonials from friends and colleagues paint Richards as both an extraordinary man and artist. “Michael was a poetic soul,” El Museo del Barrio executive director Jorge Daniel Veneciano says. “His interest in metaphors of flight adds a confounding layer of irony to his life and passing. Like Icarus, perhaps he flew too close to the sun — too close to the truth. And the dark poetry of the universe answered in an unforgiving way.” Lowery Stokes Sims, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, adds, “Like the legendary Icarus, artists dare to defy the limitations set by time and gravity. But even if they fall, they allow us to glimpse the possible so that we can soar there with them.” Given the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 and the current debate over the Black Lives Matter movement and systemic racism in general, this is just the right time to take another look at Richards’s awe-inspiring work. “In a lot of my work the metaphor of escape is a recurring one. It’s about societal escape. Trying to transcend the societal boundaries that we set up as an invisible trap around us,” he said in a 1997 interview. “The idea of flight relates to my use of pilots and planes, but it also references the black church, the idea of being lifted up, enraptured, or taken up to a safe place — to a better world.” It’s fascinating to wonder just what he’d be creating today were he still alive, commenting on the state of society in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

BRIDGE OVER MUD

Norway’s Verdensteatret pulls into the BAM Fisher this week with the U.S. premiere of experimental, immersive multimedia production (photo courtesy of the artist)

Oslo’s Verdensteatret combines experimental sound and kinetic imagery in BRIDGE OVER MUD (photo courtesy of the artist)

BROEN OVER GJØRME
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 7-10, $25, 7:30 & 9:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
verdensteatret.com

BAM’s 2016 Next Wave Festival got under way September 7 with the U.S. premiere of Bridge over Mud, a dazzling hour-long audiovisual experience that transforms the Fishman Space into a unique electroacoustic adventure. Oslo-based arts collective Verdensteatret has created an open-ended work that made me imagine what it would be like if Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy were to take over the controls of the Joshua Light Show, combining avant-garde music and live experimental imagery with cutting-edge and DIY technology. Video of abstract gray industrial faces and slow-moving taxicabs are joined with screeching, droning sounds. Model-train-like cars mounted with lights and cameras and Russian Constructivist-inspired geometric cutouts motor across 195 feet of winding tracks, passing by plastic dishes and wiry kinetic sculptures that resemble dogs and dinosaurs, casting bizarre shadows evoking futuristic landscapes onto cardboard screens as a man blasts away on a tuba and a woman mutters hard-to-decipher dialogue.

Perplexing abstruse eyes look back at the audience. Blacks and grays are enlivened with greens, reds, and yellows. Plastic cups rise from the tracks like alien communicators. Thin metal rods descend from the ceiling, forming angular shapes. There’s a frisson of representation in the shadowy movement and the intense sound emerging from sixty speakers, but it’s more atmospheric and suggestive than plaintively narrative, enveloping the audience in a mysterious emotional resonance as it reaches an exciting, thrilling crescendo that explodes in the intimate space. A collaboration between Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Piotr Pajchel, Eirik Blekesaune, Ali Djabbary, Martin Taxt, Espen Sommer Eide, Torgrim Torve, Elisabeth Gmeiner, Niklas Adam, Kristine Sandøy, Thorolf Thuestad, Janne Kruse, Laurent Ravot, and Benjamin Nelson, Bridge over Mud is a captivating multimedia symphony, more performance installation than traditional theatrical presentation, “a work where one sees the music and listens to the images,” as Verdensteatreter (Louder, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing) explains in the program. What’s it all about? It doesn’t really matter. Just sit back and enjoy.

CHAN IS MISSING

American-born Chinese cabdriver Jo (Wood Moy) is searching for more than just two grand in CHAN IS MISSING

CHAN IS MISSING (Wayne Wang, 1982)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
September 9-11
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

Wayne Wang’s debut feature, the 1982 indie landmark Chan Is Missing, opens with a Chinese version of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” but subtitles reveal the Chinese lyrics are all about the bleak economic situation. “Red beans, barbeque sauce, tea leaves, all the prices rise / Encumber the whole family, low salaries are just not enough / Till there is not one drop left in the soy sauce bottle / That’s enough, this price increase has to stop.” That sets the stage for the culture clash at the center of the black-and-white film as Wang focuses on Chinese immigrants and ABCs (American-born Chinese) attempting to establish their own identities in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Jo (Wood Moy) and his nephew, Steve (Marc Hayashi), have pooled together $4,000 to buy their own taxi medallion, but after they give someone cash to process the paperwork, the man, named Chan Hung, disappears, along with their hard-earned money. So uncle and nephew turn into detectives, searching for Chan by tracking down his friends, relatives, and acquaintances, but it seems that no one knows where Chan is — or who he is, as each person shares stories of a very different man. Along the way, there are discussions of Mandarin and Cantonese food, the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, Communism and new Chinese money, immigration and assimilation, and local politics and “the legal implications of cross-cultural misunderstandings.” A cook in a Samurai Night Fever T-shirt laments having to make another order of sweet and sour pork instead of pursuing aeronautical engineering, which he studied in school back in China with Chan. A man who knows Chan from a cultural center finds newspaper articles in Chan’s jacket about a murder. A distinguished gentleman in a three-piece suit thinks Chan returned to Mainland China, explaining to Jo, who was born in the United States, “Here in America, people treat you like a foreigner. You don’t belong here.” And a teacher at a newcomers language center talks about how immigrants should become Chinese-American, pulling out that most American of desserts, an apple pie, that has been made using Chinese techniques. “This is all too confusing,” Jo says.

chan is missing

It’s no coincidence that the man Jo and Steve are trying to track down is named Chan, a direct reference to Charlie Chan, the Honolulu detective, usually portrayed by non-Asian actors, who was a controversial stereotype in numerous Hollywood movies. The missing character of Chan also represents the Chinese experience in America as a whole, emblematic of the entire community as it sets down roots in San Francisco, having to work menial jobs to get started. “This mystery is appropriately Chinese; what’s not there seems to have just as much meaning as what is there,” Jo says. When we first see Jo, immediately after the opening credits, while the rock-and-roll song is still playing, he is initially obscured by glare on the windshield of the cab he is driving through the streets of Chinatown, the buildings reflected in the glass. He eventually comes into focus, leading viewers on a journey for identity that is still relevant today. Wang, who was born and raised in Hong Kong and was named after John Wayne, made Chan Is Missing for a mere $22,000. He has gone on to make such Chinese-American films as Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, Eat a Bowl of Tea, and The Joy Luck Club as well as such non-Chinese fare as Smoke, Because of Winn-Dixie, and The Center of the World, his oeuvre echoing how Chinese immigrants try to balance their heritage and the old ways with assimilation. Chan Is Missing is screening September 9-11 at Metrograph in a new 35mm print.