Helen Herbertson immerses herself and the audience into a dreamlike state in MORPHIA SERIES
Baryshnikov Arts Center, Howard Gilman Performance Space
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
January 12-16, $20
866-811-4111
bacnyc.org
Eighteen minutes. Twelve audience members in custom-created bleacher seating. An artisanal amuse bouche with a shot of sweet Muscat. Pitch blackness. Slowly, dozens and dozens of yards away, at the other side of the room, a cube becomes illuminated, and a figure can be seen silhouetted against swirling smoke. She moves ever so slightly, primarily shifting her hands and arms, as the sounds of nature seep in. After a few minutes, a sudden shock and back to utter darkness, not even an Exit sign glowing. The lights gently fade in and the cube now feels as if it’s underwater, where the woman is moving her full body elegantly and fluidly to the sounds of the sea. In the third section — well, for the third section, you’ll need to buckle your seat belt, because you’re in for a very different kind of ride. One of Australia’s most important and influential choreographers over the past four decades, Melbourne-based Helen Herbertson pushes creative boundaries once again with Morphia Series, a stark, startling work, both tender and tense, dream and nightmare, made with lighting designer and longtime collaborator Ben Cobham. The 2002 piece, inspired by Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, is making its New York premiere at the Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of PS122’s COIL festival. “My work has focused on the dynamic flow between people and place — the interaction of body and landscape or situation — interior life with light, form, place — person and place,” Herbertson, who essentially bares her soul in performing Morphia Series, told Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance in October 2010. “The approach fuses an expressive, physical language with a detailed exploration of the performance site, emphasizing the integration of lighting and design while working collaboratively, from inception with performers and creative teams.” You can add the audience to that collaborative summation, twelve people who are very much part of this unusual experience.
The twenty-fifth annual New York Jewish Film Festival gets under way January 13 with a look at a little-known part of the U.S. propaganda effort during WWII. In Projections of America, director Peter Miller details how the U.S. Office of War Information used specially made short documentary films to show the rest of the world the positive aspects of the American way of life, particularly as U.S. soldiers helped liberate many cities and countries in Eastern and Western Europe. “The films were idealized versions of what America could be, created by politically engaged filmmakers who, while fighting tyranny abroad, wanted also to fundamentally change America itself,” narrator John Lithgow explains. At the center of it all was Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin, who had written eight Frank Capra films, including It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe. Riskin, fellow scribe and chief of production Philip Dunne (How Green Was My Valley, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir), and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, and FDR speech writer Robert E. Sherwood (The Petrified Forest, Abe Lincoln in Illinois) enlisted such directors and producers as John Houseman and Josef von Sternberg and such stars as Ingrid Bergman in making such short propaganda films as Swedes in America, Cowboys, Steel Town, The Valley of the Tennessee, and Watchtower over America, which people flocked to in Europe, North Africa, and even Germany. “It all came together as the greatest collection of filmmakers working toward one common goal that we will ever see,” notes film historian Cecile Starr.
Film Forum follows up its two-week presentation of the restored version of Orson Welles’s spectacular Shakespearean adaptation, 
The spectacularly gorgeous Catherine Deneuve and the ruggedly handsome Yves Montand play it for outrageous laughs in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s screwball romantic comedy, Le Sauvage, aka Lovers Like Us. Deneuve is mesmerizing as Nelly, an unpredictable woman who lives by her wits, as if she is a feral child raised by wolves. She acts out instantly on her id, without concerning herself with the consequences and effects on other people. She is engaged to marry Vittorio (Luigi Vannucchi), a hot-blooded Italian who is none too happy when she bolts in the middle of the night. In need of money, Nelly goes to the nightclub where she worked for a year without getting paid, demanding her salary, but when slick manager Alex Fox (Tony Roberts) refuses to give her a dime, she takes off with his prized possession, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge.” She tries to sell the painting to the stranger in the hotel room next to hers, Martin (Montand), but when Vittorio wrongly assumes he is his fiancée’s lover, Martin gets caught up in the middle of some crazy silliness as well as legitimate danger. Soon Martin and Nelly are living on a deserted island, she on the run from Vittorio, he hiding from his mysterious past.