Heather Kravas battles a pillow and more in angry, provocative DEAD, DISAPPEARS
Abrons Arts Center, Studio 1
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 7-11, $20
Festival continues through January 17
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org
In a 2011 Movement Research conversation with Jodi Bender, choreographer and performer Heather Kravas said, “I’ll work on a solo because I feel like I need to ask a pretty intimate question. Not even one that is necessarily something I can articulate. But, I need to go to a pretty internal place or I need to investigate something that is not as defined.” It does not get a whole lot more intimate and undefined than dead, disappears, a solo work making its New York premiere at the American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center. The sixty-minute piece takes place in Studio 1, a rehearsal room for dancers that includes barres at two levels along one wall and mirrors of varying size on the other walls. Using Richard Serra’s “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself” as a jumping-off point, Kravas, a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Artist, incorporates spoken word, dance, music, technology, and performance art to create often uncomfortable, sometimes very funny situations in which she covers herself with a plastic garbage bag and walks on her tiptoes shouting out such words as “bimbo” and “peephole”; rolls around the floor attacking a pillow; asks an audience member for help when trying to pull off a particularly difficult body position; and puts a small bucket near the center of the room, hovers over it, and — well, we’ll let you experience that yourself. It’s an angry, emotional, provocative work with a lot of loud, violent acts resulting in nervous laughter, a little fear, and plenty of unexpected twists. Sitting in folding chairs on three sides of the room, the crowd of forty — including many dance professionals at the 5:30 show on January 9 — ate it all up, celebrating the bold, raw nature of the work and Kravas’s brave performance, putting herself out there as both subject and object. Perhaps what was most impressive is that Kravas was scheduled to do it all over again at 8:30.
In the 1960s, a small group of experimental artists rejected the gallery system and the traditional art market by turning the planet into their canvas, creating monumental, often apocalyptic “earthworks” in far-off locations in the American Southwest that were nearly impossible to find. Director James Crump explores who these iconoclastic pioneers were and what they accomplished — and, in some cases, are still doing — in Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. “The idea of land art is to relate to the idea of the globe, especially after the spaceship, the first picture of the earth, [gave] you the idea that earth is an object, so the idea for these artists after 1963 is that you can shape something, which is a sphere,” explains arte povera expert and art historian Germano Celant, who goes on to talk about the influence of airplane flight and Marcel Duchamp. “So the idea of looking from a high level is changing the perspective, your knowledge about art. And you can design it, you can draw. The area of view is a change in the history of art. It’s all this kind of convergence of information — technology, information, and history — that makes land art.” Crump (Black White + Gray) concentrates primarily on three artists, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Walter De Maria, combining rarely shown archival footage, photographs, and film clips with old and/or new interviews of artists Carl Andre, Vito Acconci, Charles Ross, Willoughby Sharp, Lawrence Weiner, and Nancy Holt (Smithson’s widow) and gallerists Paula Cooper and Virginia Dwan.
Japan Society’s January edition of its Monthly Classics series harkens back to its past with Teinosuke Kinugasa’s lush, vibrant jidaigeki film, Gate of Hell; the society sponsored the movie’s U.S. premiere at the Guild Theatre in December 1954, the first Japanese color film ever to be shown in America. Set during the twelfth-century Heiji Rebellion, the samurai drama, based on a play by Kan Kikuchi, focuses on Morito Endo’s (Kazuo Hasegawa) dark, absurd obsession with Lady Kesa (Machiko Kyō), a married woman who is very much in love with her husband, Wataru Watanabe (Isao Yamagata). After protecting Lady Kesa and helping defend his lord, Morito is offered whatever he wants by Kiyomori the Monk (Koreya Senda). The court laughs at Morito when he asks for Lady Kesa’s hand in marriage, but when Kiyomori decides to humor him, Morito opts to pursue his goal, no matter the cost, or the humiliation.
“Now look, you cats may know more about junk, see,” square film director Jim Dunn (William Redfield) says midway through The Connection, “but let me swing with this movie, huh?” Adapted by Jack Gelber from his play and directed and edited by Shirley Clarke, The Connection is a gritty tale of drug addicts awaiting their fix that was banned for obscenity after only two matinee screenings back in October 1962. In 2013, it was released in a sharp new fiftieth-anniversary print, beautifully restored by Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which you can see January 8 as it kicks off the Museum of Arts and Design’s new “Eye of a Director” series. The inaugural program, which continues on Friday nights through February 26, focuses on the work of Clarke and her daughter, documentary filmmaker Wendy Clarke. The Connection takes place in a New York City loft, where eight men are waiting for their man: Leach (Warren Finnerty), the ringleader who has an oozing scab on his neck; Solly (Jerome Raphael), an intelligent philosopher who speaks poetically about the state of the world; Ernie (Garry Goodrow), a sad-sack complainer who has pawned his horn but still clutches tight to the mouthpiece as if it were a pacifier; Sam (Jim Anderson), a happy dude who tells rambling stories while spinning a hula hoop; and a jazz quartet consisting of real-life musicians Freddie Redd on piano, Jackie McLean on sax, Larry Richie on drums, and Michael Mattos on bass. Dunn and his cameraman, J. J. Burden (Roscoe Lee Browne), are in the apartment filming the men as Dunn tries to up the drama to make it more cinematic as well as more genuine. “Don’t be afraid, man,” Leach tells him. “It’s just your movie. It’s not real.” When Cowboy (Carl Lee) ultimately shows with the stuff, Bible-thumping Sister Salvation (Barbara Winchester) at his side, things take a decidedly more drastic turn.