twi-ny recommended events

RED SPEEDO

Ray (Alex Breaux) and his coach (Peter Jay Fernandez) discuss strategy in RED SPEEDO (photo by Joan Marcus)

New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 3, $69
www.nytw.org

Upon entering the theater at NYTW to see Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, you are met with the familiar smell of chlorine; at the foot of the stage is a horizontal tank filled with water, the glow from its soft, calming waves glistening on the back wall of Riccardo Hernandez’s spare but comfy locker-room set. Over the speaker system, the soft, calming waves of Roy Orbison’s glorious voice, singing his posthumous 1989 hit single, “You Got It,” repeat on a loop (that might leave you not wanting to ever hear the song again, no matter how much you think you love it). Soon Peter (Lucas Caleb Rooney), a bearded lawyer, is threatening a swimming coach (Peter Jay Fernandez) that if he doesn’t flush the cooler-full of performance-enhancing drugs he found in his refrigerator — which swimmer Ray (Alex Breaux), Peter’s younger brother, says belongs to one of his teammates, Tad — Peter will take Ray to another swim club, even with the Olympic trials scheduled for the next day. Tall and impossibly sinewy and wearing nothing but a red Speedo, Ray, who is expected to compete for a medal in the Olympics, is standing between the two men as they talk at each other in an almost Mamet-like barrage of unfinished thoughts and sentences. “It is my responsibility to inform the officials, the powers that be, that one of my swimmers has been taking performance-enhancing drugs,” the coach says. “It’s an ethical responsibility.” But Peter, a middling lawyer who sees representing Ray as his way to financial success, starting with an endorsement deal with Speedo, threatens, “Yes, you should do what you need to do. I’m just trying to remind you of what you need.” When Ray informs Peter whom the drugs really belong to, it sets in motion a series of confrontations in which ethics and morality face off against fame and fortune and everyone, including Ray’s former girlfriend, Lydia (Zoë Winters), has to make life-changing decisions that affect more than just themselves.

Ray (Alex Breaux) does what he does best in RED SPEEDO at New York Theatre Workshop (photo by Joan Marcus)

Red Speedo plays out like an individual medley race; its pacing and story aligns with the competition in which the swimmer goes from the butterfly to the backstroke to the breaststroke to freestyle. The start of each new act is signaled by the same kind of air-horn blast that kicks off races — while also making sure the audience has not dozed off. The action might take place in the world of sports, but the story, at its core, is about addiction. People can be addicted to winning just as they are addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, porn, and even shopping. The day I saw the show, there was an added buzz in the theater, as news was breaking that tennis champion Maria Sharapova had admitted to using PEDs and was facing a major ban, making the show’s central topic even more relevant. It’s almost impossible to take your eyes off of Breaux (The Real Thing, Bushwick), who’s onstage virtually the entire show, always in his absurdly tight red Speedo, displaying a stupendously large black serpent tattoo running down his back and leg; he injects amiability and even a little sympathy into a not-very-bright character who seems harmless enough but is imbued with a raging selfishness. Breaux, who played football at Harvard and is a Juilliard graduate, works well with Rooney (Love and Information, The Orphans’ Home Cycle), who lends older brother Peter a worried desperation, as if Ray’s potential success is his only way out of his mundane, average existence.

Breaux does not have that same connection with Winters (Love and Information, 4000 Miles); there is no, er, chemistry between the two — who both appeared in the 1994 Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing — and it is hard to believe that the street-smart Lydia, who used to deal in elicit pharmaceuticals, could really fall in love with the dimwitted athlete who might be a wiz underwater but is a rather dull tool on firm ground. Fernandez (All the Way, Father Comes Home from the Wars) is effective as the conflicted coach who is determined to do the right thing but is caught up in something that is new for him. Hnath (The Christians, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney) and director Lileana Blain-Cruz (Hollow Roots, A Guide to Kinship and Maybe Magic) leave some gaping plot holes, primarily never satisfactorily addressing how the guilty swimmer has not gotten caught despite being tested regularly, and they sometimes settle for the lowest common denominator instead of challenging the audience more. Perhaps Red Speedo, which has plenty of merit, would have been better if it were built with more, shorter races rather than with several longer ones, with a more concrete focus instead of trying to rush too many elements into an already overlong eighty minutes. And then, when it’s all done, Orbison comes back, promising, “Anything you want, you got it. / Anything you need, you got it. / Anything at all, you got it. / Baby!”

A SPACE PROGRAM

Lt. Sam Ratanarat is one of two astronauts going to Mars in A SPACE PROGRAM (photo by Josh White)

A SPACE PROGRAM (Van Neistat, 2015)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, March 18
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
zeitgeistfilms.com

In the late spring of 2012, I wandered through the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, accumulating experiences so I could become officially indoctrinated into artist Tom Sachs’s massive DIY installation, “Space Program Mars.” I was unable to attend the actual lift-off and exploration of the Red Planet that concluded the month-long show, but Sachs and his longtime collaborator, Van Neistat, have captured that special event in the new film A Space Program. With his crack team of artisans, New York City native Sachs, whose inaugural “Space Program” in 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles went to the moon, has built nearly all the functional (if not precisely space-worthy) elements needed to send two women to Mars. But Sachs’s method is as much about process than anything else, insisting that the labor reveals itself, that his decidedly low-tech practice be evident everywhere. “Our space program is handmade, guided by the philosophy of bricolage,” deadpan narrator Pat Manocchia explains early on. Sachs’s method relies on bricolage, which he defines as “repair or creation with available resources.” The first part of A Space Program reveals how it all was built, using found materials, items bought in a regular hardware store, metal, and lots and lots of plywood. Then the team — consisting of Echo Mike (Evan Murphy), Charlie Bravo (Chris Beeston), Poppa Mike (Pat McCarthy), November Delta (Nick Doyle), Kilo Hotel (Dr. Kevin Hand), Juliet Lima (Jeff Lurie), Juliet Victor (Jared Vandeusen), Gulf Mike (Gordon Milsaps), Bravo Poppa (Bill Powers), and Sierra Victor (Sarah Vasil), each of whom has a very specific job to do — comes together to send Lt. Sam Ratanarat and Cmdr. Mary Eannarino into space in the life-size Lunar Excursion Module. The attention to detail borders on the obsessive as well as the whimsical, but Sachs has made sure to include every possible element, from a working toilet to a shelf of booze. In his first feature film, Neistat, who has made many shorts with his brother, Casey, and Sachs — Sachs also appeared on several episodes of the brothers’ wildly inventive HBO show, The Neistat Brothers, including those involving the cult-favorite miniature boat races — follows all the action centered around Sachs’s fully operational (yet forever grounded) Mission Control setup, where multiple monitors track the women’s progress, and emotions heat up when problems arise.

It all plays out like a real mission with real consequences, and that’s exactly how Sachs and Neistat see it, and want you to see it. But as much as it’s about the space program — as you watch the film, you’ll find it hard not to think about how much the government has cut funding for NASA, even though that’s not the point Sachs is trying to make — it’s also about the creation of art, about the handicraft of making things. Sachs previously worked as a welder and an assistant to Frank Gehry, so he demands that his art be functional as well as artistic. In the past, his work has concentrated on branding, merging high-tech and low-tech ideals and culture in such pieces as “Chanel Guillotine,” “Prada Toilet,” and “Hermés Value Meal” (okay, those might not have been fully functional) as well as his “Bronze Collection” series, consisting of large-scale bronze sculptures of Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Miffy, painted white to look as if they’re made purely of lightweight foamcore. With A Space Program, Sachs, who cowrote the film with Neistat, who serves as director, cinematographer, and coeditor (with Ian Holden), took all of those methods and put them to fascinating use, immersing the viewer firmly into NASA’s world of space exploration, with all the same fears and hopes as if you’re observing an actual mission, complete with the requisite potential danger. On the film’s official site, there’s a twelve-point list titled “How to Watch This Film.” Number 1 says, “This movie proves that you don’t need an education to understand — or to make — art,” number 3 explains, “This movie is NOT A DOCUMENTARY. It’s an INDUSTRIAL film like the safety videos they make you watch in high school shop class so you don’t cut your fingers off. Some say it’s a comedy,” and number 10 points out, “This movie is a love letter to the analog era.” It’s also a love letter to the power of the imagination and just what you can accomplish when you put your mind — and your bare hands — to it. A Space Program launches March 18 at the brand-new Metrograph movie theater on Ludlow St., where Sachs and Neistat will be on hand for opening-night screenings at 7:00, 9:00, and 11:00. Starting next week, you can catch Sachs’s “Tea Ceremony,” which developed out of “Space Program,” March 23 through July 24 at the Noguchi Museum, the first solo show there by an artist other than Isamu Noguchi, while “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2016” comes to the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through August 14.

CHANTAL AKERMAN: NEW YORK REMEMBERS

Chantal Akerman’s life and career will be celebrated at free event at Lincoln Center

Who: Jonas Mekas, Babette Mangolte, Andrew Bujalski, more to be announced
What: Tribute to Chantal Akerman
Where: Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
When: Saturday, March 19, free, 10:00 am
Why: The Film Society of Lincoln Center and City College of New York are teaming up for a memorial tribute on March 19 for Belgian-born, Paris-based pioneer, writer, director, teacher, and artist Chantal Akerman, who died on October 5 of last year at the age of sixty-five, apparently by suicide. For “Chantal Akerman: New York Remembers,” friends and colleagues will gather at the Walter Reade Theater for a free tribute to the longtime New Yorker; admission is first come, first served. The scheduled guests so far include Anthology Film Archives cofounder Jonas Mekas, longtime Akerman cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and mumblecore master Andrew Bujalski, with more to be announced. Whether making short films, a Hollywood movie, documentaries, or cutting-edge experimental works, Akerman always did things her way; among her major triumphs were I, You, He, She; News from Home; and the one and only Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The presentation will feature film clips, personal memories, music, and more, followed by a reception in the Furman Gallery. In 2013, Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation), in an interview with Vulture’s Jennifer Vineyard, cited Akerman as one of his influences: “I studied film as an undergrad at Harvard, and she was my thesis adviser. She gave me two pieces of advice, which I haven’t taken yet. She told me girls wouldn’t like me until I stopped dressing like a fourteen-year-old, and that I should stop being pretentious and just make comedies. I think of Computer Chess as a comedy, but it probably behooves me to go out and make a real one sometime.” More guests are expected to be announced for this two-and-a-half-hour special event. (In addition, BAMcinématek will be hosting a career retrospective of Akerman’s work in the series “Chantal Akerman: Images between the Images,” running April 1 through May 1, while Film Forum will be presenting Marianne Lambert’s I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman for free March 30 through April 1, followed by Jeanne Dielman April 1-7 for $14.)

BURIED CHILD

Dodge (Ed Harris) and Tilden (Paul Sparks) have a complicated father-son relationship in New Group revival of Sam Shepard’s BURIED CHILD (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 3, $30-$115
www.thenewgroup.org

At a talkback following a recent performance of the New Group’s powerful, involving revival of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child at the Pershing Square Signature Center, actor Paul Sparks, who plays Tilden, said, “This is a play you learn about as you do it,” and several of the other actors nodded in agreement. Shepard won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for this deep-rooted exploration of the decline of the American dream, but he has not stopped tinkering with it, and he has never explicated its many intricacies, not even to the actors themselves. In the preface to the 2006 revised edition of the play, Shepard explained that he made major changes for the 1995 Steppenwolf production because “enough time had elapsed for me to clearly see the holes in the play. . . . Finally, the language began to settle in and take hold. There were fewer gaps between the actors, the characters, and the words.” Shepard has revisited the play — which was nominated for five Tony Awards for that Steppenwolf version, including nods for director Gary Sinise, actors Lois Smith and James Gammon, and Best Play — once again for this latest edition, helmed by New Group founding artistic director Scott Elliott. Shepard didn’t make any huge alterations this time around, but he has done some nipping and tucking here and there. Perhaps the most critical change is that the play, which has always had three acts and two intermissions, is now being performed in a smooth-flowing 110 minutes without break; in addition, Ed Harris, who plays dying alcoholic patriarch Dodge, is already onstage as the audience enters the cozy Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, spending upwards of a half hour drinking, dozing, and staring off into space as he sits uncomfortably on a ratty couch, an old baseball cap on his head. It’s a superbly effective introduction to Buried Child, a complex play about a dysfunctional family nonpareil, each member more wounded, physically and/or psychologically, than the next. Although their problems are primarily tied to a long-buried secret that has shattered them, it doesn’t appear that they had much happiness prior to that either. Dodge has given up on life, eking through a sickly, shriveled existence, trying to forget who he once was and what might have been. His wife, Halie (Amy Madigan), is in perpetual mourning for their dead son, Ansel, perhaps the family’s only hope at bettering its lot. Halie henpecks Dodge when she’s not out gallivanting around with Father Dewis (Larry Pine) and lording it over her husband. Meanwhile, son Bradley (Rich Sommer) stumbles on the periphery, a bear of a man who lost one of his legs in a chainsaw accident, and another son, Tilden, has returned after being thrown out of New Mexico for unspecified reasons. Tilden, an empty shell of a man, seems more ghost than human, making very little sense in those rare moments he speaks.

Family secrets threaten to implode a disillusioned clan in BURIED CHILD (photo by Monique Carboni)

Tilden keeps showing up with vegetables he has dug up in the backyard, even though Dodge and Halie insist that nothing has been planted in their dilapidated Illinois farm in decades. If things weren’t already crazy enough, Tilden’s college-age son, Vince (Nat Wolff), suddenly shows up with his girlfriend, Shelly (Taissa Farmiga), after disappearing for six years, and at first neither Dodge nor Tilden recognizes him, which makes Shelly want to leave. Vince is determined to become part of a family again, however, no matter how difficult and challenging that may be. But this is Shepard, so a happy ending may not exactly be on the horizon. It rains throughout much of the play, and occasional drops of water trickle down from the ceiling into a metal pail near the front of the stage, like a metronome interacting with the dialogue, or like a countdown clock ticking its way toward impending doom. Shepard injects lots of dark humor into the work, emphasizing the surreal nature of what is going on, even though the family is surrounded by a heavy shroud of death. As the play opens, Halie is unseen for several minutes as she screams down at Dodge from upstairs. “What’re you watching? You shouldn’t be watching anything that’ll get you excited!” she calls out, to which he responds, “Nothing gets me excited.” Dodge soon refers to himself as “the corpse” and “an invisible man,” claiming, “I don’t enjoy anything!” But he gets a little kick out of Shelly, who is not afraid to speak her mind. “It’s like a Norman Rockwell cover or something,” she says when she first enters, making fun of the house. “I thought it was going to be turkey dinners and apple pie and all that kinda stuff,” she adds once she’s sure that is not quite the case. (The wonderfully run-down living-room set is by Derek McLane.) Mysteries pervade, questions go unanswered, and subplots fade away even as revelations are made, all anchored by a mesmerizing performance by Oscar nominee Harris (Pollock, Wrecks), a Shepard veteran who won an Obie in 1984 for his portrayal of Eddie in the original off-Broadway production of Shepard’s Fool for Love and a 1995 Lucille Lortel Award for playing Carter in Shepard’s Simpatico. The decision to have Harris onstage from the time the doors open — and he never leaves — immediately bonds the audience to Dodge, as if he’s one of us, a bystander watching all the absurdity and chaos exploding around him. (It also gets rid of the dreaded entrance applause.) In fact, although he occasionally watches television, no glow or noise ever emanates from the TV, as if the actual show is what the rest of the characters are doing, which he is watching just as we are. Harris’s real-life wife, Oscar nominee Madigan (Twice in a Lifetime, Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind) — the couple costarred in the New Group’s production of Beth Henley’s underappreciated The Jacksonian in 2013 — is beautifully shrill as the nasty, deeply wounded Halie, playing her like a classic Tennessee Williams femme fatale. (Madigan played Stella opposite Alec Baldwin’s Stanley in Gregory Mosher’s 1992 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.)

Sommer (The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin, Harvey) provides fear and danger as Bradley, the ever-dependable Pine (Casa Valentina, A Public Reading of an Unpublished Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney) is effectively neutral as the priest, and Sparks (Boardwalk Empire, The Killer) creates a zombielike Tilden exuding a dread that you can practically cut with a knife. Both Farmiga (American Horror Story, The Bling Ring) and Wolff (Heartbeat to Baghdad, The Fault in Our Stars) appear to have shown up from the current day (except for Wolff’s porn stache), although the play takes place at an inexact time during 1970s and there are no specific cultural references. (And for those of you keeping score at home, Pee Wee Reese never played for the Chicago White Sox, but he did hit three home runs for the Brooklyn Dodgers against the Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field.) Farmiga, in her stage debut, is a little too chipper as the perky Shelly, but Wolff is strong as a young man desperate to reconnect with his family, regardless of what they have become. Themes of disillusionment, ennui, aging, love, lies, and loss permeate Buried Child, a tense, bitterly funny, heartbreaking tragedy that has been reimagined for this must-see revival that feels right at home at the Signature, imbued with freshness and vitality by Elliott (Mercury Fur, Hurlyburly); Shepard was the playwright-in-residence in 1996-97 for the Signature Theatre (but not at this location) and more recently was part of the company’s legacy program, and his large-scale portrait is on the wall alongside that of so many other Signature Theatre playwrights (such as August Wilson, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and Paula Vogel). Buried Child is a production of the New Group, not the Signature, but it’s an extremely satisfying sort of homecoming nonetheless, particularly for a show about home.

EMOTIONS / EMOTICONS: REBECCA

Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier play lovers haunted by the past in REBECCA

CABARET CINEMA: REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, March 18, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The opening line of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood picture, instantly sends chills down the spine of anyone who has seen the film or read the book on which it is based, Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of the same name. The line is spoken in voice-over by the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), so haunted by the first Mrs. de Winter, the recently deceased Rebecca, that she never even gets a first name, depriving her of her own identity. While serving as a paid companion to snooty wealthy matron Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates) on a trip to Monte Carlo, the orphaned young woman meets the dapper but dark Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), an elegant widower who takes a liking to her. Following a whirlwind courtship, they are married, and Maxim takes his mousey bride to his castlelike Cornwall estate, Manderley, where she is constantly compared to and overshadowed by the ghost of Rebecca, idolized as the perfect woman by the large staff, in particular the grim housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who relentlessly tortures the second Mrs. de Winter. “You wouldn’t think she’d been gone so long, would you?” Mrs. Danvers tells her. “Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor, I fancy I hear her just behind me. That quick light step, I couldn’t mistake it anywhere. It’s not only in this room, it’s in all the rooms in the house. I can almost hear it now.” But just as the second Mrs. de Winter finally tries to establish herself — “I am Mrs. de Winter now” she declares to Mrs. Danvers — Maxim shares a shocking truth about the first Mrs. de Winter that turns her world inside out.

The second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) is mercilessly tortured by Manderley housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson)

Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of two (for Best Picture and Best Black and White Cinematography, by George Barnes), Rebecca is a gripping Gothic thriller about fear, obsession, love, identity, and memory. Although the film is filled with Hitchcockian touches, producer David O. Selznick had a large hand in the final version, reediting and supervising several reshoots to keep closer to du Maurier’s novel. From the script, written by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison based on Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan’s adaptation, to Franz Waxman’s dramatic score, Joseph B. Platt and Howard Bristol’s interiors, and the uncredited costumes, Rebecca is a masterpiece of precision, with fascinating undertones of incest (Olivier is more like a father to Fontaine than a lover; George Sanders plays a cad who is supposedly a cousin of Rebecca’s) and lesbianism (Mrs. Danvers’s devotion to Rebecca appears to be more than just that of a loyal employee). It’s also hard not to watch it today without thinking of such later 1940s films as Gaslight and Citizen Kane, especially that ending. An oft-delayed, financially troubled Broadway musical version has been in the works for several years, promising “the Manderley Experience,” but it’s going to be tough to top du Maurier’s book and Hitchcock’s film when it comes to telling this multilayered story of mystery and romance. Rebecca, which also stars Nigel Bruce as Maxim’s brother, Giles, Gladys Cooper as Giles’s wife, Beatrice, Reginald Denny as the manager of Manderley, and Leo G. Carroll as Rebecca’s doctor, is screening March 18 at 9:30 in the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Emotions / Emoticons” and will be introduced by Caitlin Leffel and Jacob Lehman, authors of The Best Things to Do in New York: 1001 Ideas. The nine-week festival is being held in conjunction with the Brainwave series “Emotion,” with each film focused on a different state of mind. Rebecca is happiness (happiness?!?); future screenings include Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (anger), Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (love), Charles Chaplin’s The Kid (sadness), and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (disgust).

SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED: A GUIDED HANDS-ON WORKSHOP INSPIRED BY EBONY G. PATTERSON / DANCEHALL QUEEN / SHINE

Ebony G. Patterson’s “Dead Treez” examines dancehall and bling culture and the changing ideals of masculinity and gender in Jamaica (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Socially Constructed: Thursday, March 17, free with pay-what-you-wish admission, 6:30
Dancehall Queen: Friday, March 18, $10, 7:00
Shine: Thursday, March 24, free with pay-what-you-wish admission, 7:00
Exhibit continues through April 3
212-299-7777
madmuseum.org
dead treez slideshow

Upon first seeing the Ebony G. Patterson’s “Dead Treez” at the Museum of Arts & Design, you get sucked in by the artist’s use of distinct colors, shiny accouterments, and sense of humor. But look deeper and you’ll find a lot more to consider in her first solo New York museum show. Patterson, who lives and works in Kingston, Jamaica, and Lexington, Kentucky, explores shifts in male gender identity and power that have become prevalent in dancehall culture, which has embraced a kind of metrosexuality that includes skin bleaching. Utilizing methods generally associated with women, Patterson has created five floor tapestries, wallpaper, and a tableau of male mannequins that could have been pulled from a window on Fifth Ave. Heavily adorned with floral patterns and bling, the tapestries actually depict murder victims, while the mannequins are surrounded by toys, bricks, liquor bottles, and other objects that send mixed messages. Meanwhile, in the Tiffany Jewelry Gallery, Patterson’s “. . . buried again to carry on growing . . .” comprises large glass cases filled with dazzling flowers that are all actually poisonous, while hidden in the vitrines are dead bodies and pieces of jewelry that evoke violence, combining beauty and turmoil in intriguing ways.

On March 17 at 6:30, MAD is hosting a special hands-on workshop concentrating on the social aspects of making tapestries and textile works, long considered women’s work, while also evolving into a way to share important stories; the event takes place in a sixth-floor classroom and is free with pay-what-you-wish admission. On March 18 at 7:00 ($10), MAD will screen Rick Elgood and Don Letts’s Jamaican classic Dancehall Queen in conjunction with the exhibit. And on March 24 at 7:00 (free with pay-what-you-wish admission), Northwestern University art history professor Krista Thompson will discuss her 2015 book, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice, putting it in context with Patterson’s exhibition, which continues through April 3. “Krista Thompson’s work was very important to me; she was researching the use of light in diasporic cultures, and as I began to think about my work more critically, I started to see glitter for what it is: It is light, it is illumination,” Patterson explains.

DE MATERIE

Heiner Goebbels’s multidisciplinary reimagining of Louis Andriessen’s DE MATERIE runs at the Park Avenue Armory March 22-30 (photo by Wonge Bergmann)

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
March 22–30, $85-$195
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s four-part magnum opus, De Materie, makes its North American stage debut this month at the Park Avenue Armory, in a wildly inventive production directed by Heiner Goebbels, whose Stifters Dinge had its U.S. premiere at the armory in December 2009. Andriessen’s visionary work weaves in dance, spoken text, choral singing, jazz, science, philosophy, poetry, Renaissance music, and more, with Goebbels adding, among other things, one hundred sheep. Among those being referenced in the piece, which explores the relationship between matter and spirit, are Madame Curie, Piet Mondrian, Hadewijch, David Gorlaeus, and the De Stijl art movement. The work will be performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), conducted by Peter Rundel, with the ChorWerk Ruhr, more than two dozen actors and dancers, and others; tenor Pascal Charbonneau is Gorlaeus, soprano Evgeniya Sotnikova is Hadewijch, and Catherine Milliken is Madame Curie. The stage and lighting design is by Klaus Grünberg, with costumes by Florence von Gerkan, sound by Norbert Ommer, and choreography by Florian Bilbao. “This highly imaginative collaboration asks us to appreciate the inherent connections between all manner of innovation throughout society — from the discovery of radioactivity to the creation of a work of art,” new Park Avenue Armory artistic director Pierre Audi said in a statement. In addition to the six performances, there will be four special programs to shed more light on this monumental undertaking. On March 23 at 8:00 ($60), Andriessen will team up with pianist Jason Moran for “Improvisations: Louis Andriessen and Jason Moran,” an exploration of how jazz is used in De Materie while discussing improvisation in general. On March 24 at 6:00 ($15), WNYC’s John Schaefer will host “De Materie: Matter & Spirit,” a conversation with Goebbels, Columbia music professor and musician and composer George E. Lewis, and composer Missy Mazzoli. On March 25 at 6:00 ($15), Schaefer will moderate “Four Different Ways: Celebrating Louis Andriessen,” with Bang on a Can cofounder Julia Wolfe, electronic experimental musician and composer Nathan Michel, and Princeton music professor Donnacha Dennehy. And finally, on March 26 at 6:00 ($15), Audi will lead an artist talk with Goebbels, Rundel, and Andriessen.