Jack Ferver brings an updated version of MON, MA, MES to American Realness and Gibney Dance’s Making Space (photo by Scott Shaw)
MAKING SPACE
Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway between Chambers & Reade Sts.
January 13-16, $20, 9:30
646-837-6809
americanrealness.com
www.gibneydance.org
If Jack Ferver is an acquired taste, then he’s a taste you need to acquire. The Wisconsin-born, New York City–based dancer, actor, choreographer, and performance artist returns to American Realness with Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité), a revised and updated version of a work he originally presented at FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival in 2012 and American Realness the next year. It’s an hour-long confessional in which you never quite know whether anything Ferver says is actually true, as he performs as “Jack Ferver,” talking about his childhood, his parents, his career, his husband, and his kids while wearing a black shirt, tight black shorts, and high black socks. He sings, dances to Schubert and Chopin, gets sexy, and discusses loneliness, fame, control, love, and collaboration; he skewers various people he’s worked with, including Liz Santoro and composer Roarke Menzies, who was part of the previous iteration of Mon, Ma, Mes, and costumer and occasional coperformer Reid Bartelme. Bartelme had an onstage role in the original production but on opening night at Gibney Dance he was in the audience — where Ferver reminded him again and again that he had been cut from this new edition. Collaboration and its unease, both in private life and the professional world, is perhaps the primary theme of Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité). Ferver repeatedly reveals his ambivalence about and fear of collaborators as he performs a piece that is impossible without them: Even the audience plays a crucial role in his unique storytelling, beginning with the packed house participating in a riotous Q&A; audience members are seated on three sides of the small room while the fourth side is the long rehearsal room mirror where they can see themselves and everyone else — and where Ferver can revel in reflections of himself, since this is all about self-reflection anyway. Part of the fun is being able to watch other people’s reactions as Ferver, often sitting on a chair, talking into a microphone in the fully lit room, goes about his business of melding personal success and failure with hysterical pop-culture references, making direct eye contact every step of the way. As fresh and exciting as it was four years ago, Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité) was well worth bringing back, in this case for both American Realness and Gibney Dance’s Making Space program. Ferver (Rumble Ghost, Chambre) can next be seen this summer at the Kitchen with I Want You to Want Me, a piece for ADI about which Ferver says, “I consider myself a populist, but some people really hate my work. They even hate me they hate my work so much. . . . Oh, I also just wanted to say that not everyone is going to make it. I don’t mean make it to the show. I mean make it out of the show alive.”
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.