twi-ny recommended events

SUPER SÁBADO: CARNAVAL!

carnaval

FREE THIRD SATURDAYS
El Museo del Barrio
1230 Fifth Ave. at 104th St.
Saturday, February 20, free, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
212-831-7272
www.elmuseo.org

El Museo del Barrio celebrates carnaval with the February edition of its free third Saturdays Super Sábado program. There will be a Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert featuring Nation Beat; a meet-and-greet with NYC family ambassador Dora the Explorer; an arteXplorers Family Corner activity card; Colorín Colorado . . . with Something Positive Inc. bringing the story “Come Dance with Me” to life with carnaval characters Jab Molassie and Dame Lorraine and a participatory procession; a Movement Workshop with dancers from Conjunto Nuevo Milenio teaching traditional dances from El Palenque; a Manos a la Obra art workshop in which kids can make their own vejigante mask; and guided tours of the exhibitions “The Illusive Eye” and “Figure and Form: Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection.”

MARIA HASSABI: PLASTIC

(photo by Julieta Cervantes / (c) Museum of Modern Art)

Maria Hassabi rehearses PLASTIC at MoMA on October 30, 2015 (photo by Julieta Cervantes / © Museum of Modern Art)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
February 21 – March 20, free with museum admission ($14-$25)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
mariahassabi.com

In a 2011 twi-ny talk, Cyprus-born, New York City–based dancer and choreographer Maria Hassabi declared, “I was born flexible!” That statement is true not only of the remarkable things she can do with her body but also of where she performs her impressive, often painfully slow movement. We’ve seen her wrestle with a carpet at PS122, maneuver through a packed house seated on the floor at the Kitchen, and crawl down the cobblestoned path of Broad St. Ever investigating the relationship between performer and audience as well as dance and object — in 2012, Hassabi collaborated with Lutz Bacher and Tony Conrad on “Chandeliers,” in which more than a dozen light fixtures descended from floor to ceiling over the course of the day at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève — Hassabi next will set up shop at the Museum of Modern Art, where she will present Plastic for one month. Every day from February 21 to March 20, Hassabi and her team of dancers will be at several locations in MoMA, moving among the visitors, so watch out where you walk, because there will be no barriers separating them from you. You’ll find Simon Courchel, Jessie Gold, Neil Greenberg, Elizabeth Hart, Kennis Hawkins, Niall Jones, Shelley Senter, RoseAnne Spradlin, and David Thomson in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, Hassabi, Hristoula Harakas, Molly Lieber, Paige Martin, and Oisín Monaghan on the Marron Atrium and Agnes Gund Garden Lobby staircase, and Jones, Michael Helland, Tara Lorenzen, and Mickey Mahar on the staircase between the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries. The sound design is by Morten Norbye Halvorsen, with song fragments by Marina Rosenfeld. “Taking place underfoot in the transitional spaces of a museum known for its crowds, the work can be seen from multiple vantage points and inverts the typical relationship between performer and viewer so that it is the dancer who appears static and the onlooker who moves,” writes MoMA associate curator Thomas J. Lax in the brochure for the living installation, which was co-commissioned by MoMA, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. On February 24 at 7:00 ($8-$12) in the atrium, Hassabi will discuss the work with Philip Bither of the Walker Art Center.

STEVE McCURRY SELECTS: LIMELIGHT

Charlie Chaplin looks back on his life and career in the melancholic classic LIMELIGHT

LIMELIGHT (Charles Chaplin, 1952)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, February 19, $10, 9:30
Series continues Friday nights through February 26
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“You will feel closer to Charlie the man, seeing this film, than in any of the other films where he plays a character, magnificently, but this is different. This is him,” Claire Bloom said before a sixtieth anniversary screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight. In what was intended to be his farewell film, Chaplin bids adieu to his Little Tramp character and laments the end of an era in this deeply personal work, which features five of his children, his brother, his half-brother, and silent film comedians Snub Pollard and Buster Keaton. Though made in Hollywood in 1951, Limelight is set in Chaplin’s native London in 1914, the year he began his movie career at Keystone Studios. Chaplin is Calvero, a former vaudeville-style music hall star — modeled on himself as well as comedian Frank Tinney, Spanish clown Marceline, and his father — who is now a down-on-his-luck forgotten drunk. He comes home one day, smells gas, and breaks down the door of a neighbor’s apartment, saving a beautiful young ballerina, Thereza “Terry” Ambrose (Claire Bloom), from suicide. As the kind and gentle Calvero nurses her back to health, determined that she resume her career (in a way, as a surrogate for his current failures), Terry falls in love with him. Calvero tells her that it is not a real, romantic love; the character is partially based on Chaplin’s mother, whom he cared for while she suffered from mental illness, although there are obvious age parallels to his real-life wife, Oona O’Neill, whom he married in 1943 when he was fifty-four and she was eighteen. (Chaplin was sixty-three when Limelight was released, Bloom twenty-one.) But Terry insists her love is genuine and true, and soon they are both restarting their careers, with very different results.

Calvero (Charles Chaplin) cares for suicidal ballerina Terry (Claire Bloom) in LIMELIGHT

Aptly called “a sublime exorcism” by Bernardo Bertolucci, Limelight is overly long, too melodramatic, frustratingly repetitive, and often absurdly sentimental, but it’s impossible not to become engrossed in its touching magic, especially when considering its autobiographical nature. At the time, Chaplin, whose previously film was 1947’s much-maligned Monsieur Verdoux, was being investigated by the U.S. government for suspected communist ties and questionable morality; when he went overseas for Limelight’s British premiere, he was barred from returning to America, and he would not come back to the States until 1972, when he was awarded an honorary Oscar; even then, he was allowed only a temporary stay. Chaplin, who wrote, directed, produced, and choreographed the film and composed the score, fills Limelight with emotional statements that range from philosophical and psychological to quaint and treacly, though relevant to both the fictional Calvero and the real-life comedian. Cinematographer Karl Struss (The Great Dictator, Some Like It Hot) regularly zeroes in on Calvero’s often pitiable face, eyes occasionally turned directly into the camera and at the viewer; the sadness Chaplin expresses particularly when removing stage makeup is heartbreaking. “I believe I’m dying, Doctor,” he says at one point. “Then, I don’t know. I’ve died so many times.” The melancholic film, which intelligently deals with art and aging in changing times, also stars Nigel Bruce, best known as Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, as the ballet company owner, Norman Lloyd as the company manager, Marjorie Bennett as Calvero’s landlady, Canadian ballerina Melissa Hayden as Terry’s dance double, and André Eglevsky as the male ballet dancer. The sketch performed by Chaplin and Keaton, the only time they worked together on film, is, of course, a gem, as painful as it is funny. Perhaps the most telling line is when Terry says to composer and pianist Neville (Sydney Earl Chaplin, Charlie’s brother), “What is more eloquent than silence?” Chaplin would go on to make only two more pictures, 1957’s A King in New York and 1967’s A Countess from Hong Kong, his only film in which he didn’t have a major role. He died on Christmas Day in 1977, at the age of eighty-eight, still married to Oona. Limelight is screening February 19 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Steve McCurry Selects,” held in conjunction with the photo exhibition “Steve McCurry: India,” and will be introduced by Teva Bjerken. The series concludes February 26 with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, introduced by journalist Phil Zabriskie.

TIBET HOUSE US BENEFIT CONCERT 2016

Who: Artistic director Philip Glass, Basia Bulat, Dechen Shak Dagsay, FKA twigs, Foday Musa Suso, Gogol Bordello, Iggy Pop, Lavinia Meijer, Sharon Jones, the Patti Smith Band, Scorchio String Quartet, and more performers to be announced, with honorary chairs Chuck Close, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, and Arden Wohl
What: Twenty-sixth annual concert raising funds for the nonprofit Tibet House US, celebrating the Year of the Monkey and Tibetan New Year
Where: Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, 881 Seventh Ave. at 57th St., 212-247-7800
When: Monday, February 22, $35-$200 (special packages with meet-and-greets and dinner reception start at $500), 7:30
Why: Tibet House US was founded in 1987 at the request of the Dalai Lama, “dedicated to preserving Tibet’s unique culture at a time when it is confronted with extinction on its own soil”; the annual benefit concert is always one of the cultural highlights of the year in New York City.

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT takes viewers on an extraordinary journey into the heart of darkness and beyond

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (EL ABRAZO DE LA SERPIENTE) (Ciro Guerra, 2015)
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Opens Wednesday, February 17
embraceoftheserpent.oscilloscope.net

Colombian writer-director Ciro Guerra takes viewers on a spectacular journey through time and space and deep into the heart of darkness in the extraordinary Embrace of the Serpent. Guerra’s Oscar-nominated film, the first to be shot in the Colombian Amazon in thirty years, opens with a 1909 quote from explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg: “It is not possible for me to know if the infinite jungle has started on me the process that has taken many others to complete and irremediable insanity.” Inspired by the real-life journals of Koch-Grünberg and botanist and explorer Richard Evans Schultes, Guerra poetically shifts back and forth between two similar trips down the Vaupés River, both led by the same Amazonian shaman, each time guiding a white scientist on a perilous expedition in a long, narrow canoe. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, ailing white ethnologist Theo (Jan Bijvoet) and his native aid, Manduca (Yauenkü Migue), seek the help of Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), a shaman wholly suspicious of whites and who believes he is the last of his tribe. However, Theo claims he knows where remnants of Karamakate’s people live and will show him in return for helping him find the magical and mysterious hallucinogenic Yakruna plant that Theo thinks can cure his illness. Forty years later, white botanist Evan (Brionne Davis) enlists Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar Salvador) to locate what is thought to be the last surviving Yakruna plant, which he hopes will finally allow him to dream in order to heal his soul. Evoking such films as Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Embrace of the Serpent makes the rainforest itself a character, shot in glorious black-and-white by David Gallego (Cecilia, Violencia) in a sparkling palette reminiscent of the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. As the parallel stories continue, the men encounter similar locations that have changed dramatically over time, largely as a result of rubber barons descending on the forest and white missionaries bringing Western religion to the natives. It’s difficult to watch without being assailed by imperialist concepts of the “noble savage,” mainly because the Amazon — and our Western minds — have been so profoundly affected by those ideas. “Before he can become a warrior, a man has to leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams,” the older Karamakate says. “In that journey he has to discover, completely alone, who he really is.”

Guide Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar Salvador) and botanist Evan (Brionne Davis) explore dreams in Ciro Guerra’s EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT

Winner of the Directors’ Fortnight Art Cinema Award at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, Embrace of the Serpent is an unforgettable spiritual quest into the ravages of colonialism, the evils of materialism, the end of indigenous cultures, and what should be a sacred relationship between humanity and nature. Written by Guerra (2004’s Wandering Shadows, 2009’s The Wind Journeys) and Jacques Toulemonde (Anna), it is told from the point of view of the indigenous people of the Amazon, whom Guerra worked closely with in the making of the film, assuring them of his intentions to not exploit them the way so many others have. Aside from the Belgian Bijvoet and the Texan Davis, the rest of the cast is made up of members of tribes that live along the Vaupés. Guerra actually brought along a shaman known as a payé to perform ritual ceremonies to ensure the safety of the cast and crew and to protect the jungle itself. “What Ciro is doing with this film is an homage to the memory of our elders, in the time before: the way the white men treated the natives, the rubber exploitation,” Torres, in his first movie, says about the film. “I’ve asked the elders how it was and it is as seen in the film; that’s why we decided to support it. For the elders and myself it is a memory of the ancestors and their knowledge.” Salvador, who previously had bad experiences with filmmakers, notes, “It is a film that shows the Amazon, the lungs of the world, the greater purifying filter, and the most valuable of indigenous cultures. That is its greatest achievement.” Embrace of the Serpent is a great achievement indeed, an honest, humanistic, maddening journey that takes you places you’ve never been. Embrace of the Serpent opens February 17 at Lincoln Plaza and Film Forum; Guerra will participate in a Skype Q&A at Film Forum following the 6:40 screening on February 20.

GUIDO VAN DER WERVE: NUMMER ZESTIEN, THE PRESENT MOMENT

Three-channel audiovisual installation by Guido van der Werve explores the id, ego, and superego in provocative ways (photo © Guido van der Werve / courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through February 17, free, 10:00 am — 6:00 pm
212-206-9100
www.luhringaugustine.com

Locations for Dutch artist, triathlete, and classically trained pianist Guido van der Werve’s previous films have included Mount St. Helens, the San Andreas Fault, the summit of Aconcagua in the Andes, the North Pole, and the Arctic Ocean, where he walked across an iceberg while being trailed by a huge ship. For his latest work, Nummer zestien, the present moment, making its debut at Luhring Augustine in Chelsea through February 17, van der Werve, a classically trained pianist who is based in Finland, Amsterdam, and Berlin, takes viewers inside his head, where he explores characters relating to his id, ego, and superego. The three-channel installation follows a trio of groups, one depicting older, naked men and women as they go through such daily activities of waking up, eating, and napping; a second consisting of a mixed-age collection of men and women barefoot and dressed in black, doing yoga and meditating; and the third comprising younger men and women (professional porn actors) engaging in ever-more-intimate acts of sex, with nothing (and we mean nothing) held back. In the center of the gallery is a player piano, which plays a lovely score written and performed by van der Werve, who is not appearing in one of his films for the first time; there’s not even a piano bench for visitors to contemplate his physical presence. The film is divided into twelve sections, each dedicated to a different sign of the zodiac and time of year; the camera movement on all three screens slowly traces the outline of the constellation in the sky. The action on each screen is set in a black room with a soft floor, a kind of visual psyche that highlights the whiteness of the all-Caucasian cast. In addition to relating to Freud’s theories about personality, Nummer zestien, the present moment also brings up issues of life and death as the three groups of people continue their own explorations of the mind and/or body. Van der Werve, who specializes in making films that portray durational activities, has created yet another involving, provocative work, one that will have you considering your own place in the universe, at the present moment.

NITEHAWK CABIN FEVER MIDNITE SCREENINGS: THE THING

A crew of scientists in Antarctica can’t believe its latest discovery in John Carpenter’s THE THING

THE THING (John Carpenter, 1982)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Friday, February 19, and Saturday, February 20, 12:10 am
Series continues through February 27
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com

“What were they doing flying that low, shooting at a dog, at us?” meteorologist Bennings (Peter Maloney) asks Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) after watching a Norwegian helicopter pilot pursue a dog in the Antarctic, at the beginning of John Carpenter’s The Thing. “Stir crazy. Cabin fever. Who knows?” the doc answers, more than justifying Nitehawk Cinema’s inclusion of the cult film in its February Midnite series Cabin Fever. Carpenter’s 1982 remake of Christian Nyby’s 1951 Cold War sci-fi classic, The Thing from Another World, adds touches of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien, with Kurt Russell leading an all-star cast of familiar character actors set up like a Vietnam War platoon. Russell is the cowboy-hat-wearing R. J. MacReady, part of a group of men at U.S. National Science Institute Station 4 in the frozen Antarctic. The crew also includes soft-spoken biologist Dr. Blair (Wilford Brimley), pot-smoking hippie assistant mechanic Palmer (David Clennon), nice guy geophysicist Vance Norris (Charles Hallahan), dedicated dog handler Clark (Richard Masur), funkster cook Nauls (T. K. Carter), assistant biologist Fuchs (Joel Polis), excitable communications officer Windows (Thomas G. Waites), serious station commander M. T. Garry (Donald Moffat), and skeptical chief mechanic Childs (Keith David). Soon some kind of monster from outer space is on the loose, able to disguise itself as other living creatures, making everyone suspicious of one another, the paranoia growing along with the terror and violence.

Kurt Russell fights a foreign terror in John Carpenter’s remake of Cold War classic

Based on John W. Campbell Jr.’s novella Who Goes There?, The Thing was the third of former child star Russell’s four films with Carpenter, following Elvis and Escape from New York and preceding Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from L.A. The film was shot by longtime Carpenter and Robert Zemeckis cinematographer Dean Cundey (Halloween, Back to the Future) and written by Bill Lancaster, Burt’s son, who died in 1997 at the age of forty-nine after penning only three scripts: the first two Bad News Bears movies along with The Thing. Carpenter composed the creepy, pulsating music for most of his films, but he got spaghetti Western genius Ennio Morricone to write the score this time around. (Carpenter is about to set out on his first-ever concert tour, coming to New York City in July, playing music from his films as well as songs from his recent albums.) Carpenter’s wife at the time, Adrienne Barbeau, is the voice of the fantastically old-fashioned Chess Wizard computer game that frustrates MacReady. The special effects, by Rob Bottin (The Fog, RoboCop) and Oscar winner Stan Winston (Aliens, Jurassic Park), hold up pretty well, as does the general feeling of peril, although, like with many Carpenter films, the plot doesn’t always make sense. But Carpenter is nothing if not a master of dark mood, and he nails it again in this thriller. The first of Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy (to be followed by Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness), The Thing is being shown February 19-20 at 12:10 am as part of Nitehawk Cinema’s February Midnite: Cabin Fever series, which concludes February 26-27 with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.