twi-ny recommended events

JOANNA GRUESOME

Joanna Gruesome come to town for a pair of Halloween weekend shows in Brooklyn (photo by Rachel Hodgson)

Who: Joanna Gruesome
What: Pair of Halloween weekend shows
Where: Rough Trade, 64 North Ninth St. between Wythe & Kent Aves., Williamsburg; Shea Stadium, 20 Meadow St. between Bogart & Waterbury Sts., Bushwick
When: Friday, October 30 (Rough Trade), $12, 8:30; Saturday, October 31 (Shea Stadium), $12, 8:30
Why: If Cardiff noise punks Joanna Gruesome look and sound slightly different at two Halloween weekend shows than they do on their sophomore album, the fab ten-track Peanut Butter (Slumberland, May 2015), it isn’t necessarily because they are wearing costumes. This past spring, vocalist Alanna McArdle announced she was leaving the group, which first got together at an anger-management class, for personal reasons. She explained on the band’s Facebook page, “Lately, my mental health problems have become a lot worse and I’ve gone through a pretty shitty time. I’ve realised I need to actually take some time out to focus on some kind of ‘recovery,’ so I won’t be singing in Joanna Gruesome anymore. I hate to sound cheesy but the time I had in jgro was life-changing.” Joining guitarist Owen Williams, bassist Max Warren, guitarist and keyboardist George Nicholls, and drummer David Sandford are vocalists Kate Stonestreet of Pennycress and Roxy Brennan of Two White Cranes. Peanut Butter is slathered in postpunk-pop glory, as screams and shouts, furious guitars and drums give way to sweetly melodic moments at the turn of a dime, as on the propulsive “Last Year,” “Psykick Espionage,” and the aptly titled “I Don’t Wanna Relax.” Joanna Gruesome — yes, their name is a riff on American musician and actress Joanna Newsom — will be playing Rough Trade in Brooklyn on October 30 with Aye Nako and King of Cats, followed on Halloween night with a show at Shea Stadium with Aye Nako and King of Cats again as well as PWR BTTM.

MATHIEU AMALRIC — RENAISSANCE MAN: KINGS AND QUEEN

The always-engaging Mathieu Amalric is being feted by Anthology Film Archives and the French Institute Alliance Française

KINGS AND QUEEN (ROIS ET REINE) (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, October 31, 6:00, and Saturday, November 7, 8:30
Series runs October 29 – November 8 (companion series at FIAF runs November 3 – December 15)
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org

Award-winning French actor-director Mathieu Amalric is celebrating his fiftieth birthday with an exciting invasion of New York City, where he is being honored in a pair of terrific companion film series and will also star in a theatrical production. FIAF’s CinéSalon tribute runs on Tuesday nights through December 15, beginning November 3 with a screening of his 2014 film The Blue Room, followed by a Q&A with Amalric and costar and cowriter Stéphanie Cléau, who is also his real-life partner; Amalric will also star in Fight or Flight (Le Moral des Ménages), Cléau’s stage adaptation of the novel by Eric Reinhardt. But the big festivities begin at Anthology Film Archives, where “Mathieu Amalric: Renaissance Man” runs October 29 through November 8, featuring ten of his films, including Otar Iosseliani’s 1984 Favorites of the Moon, in which he makes his film debut, and 2001’s Eat Your Soup, his first directorial effort.

Mathieu Amalric won a César for his starring role in KINGS AND QUEEN

Mathieu Amalric won a César for his starring role in Arnaud Desplechin’s KINGS AND QUEEN

Amalric has made several films with Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale, My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument), and one of the best is being shown October 31 and November 7 at Anthology. In Kings and Queen, Emmanuelle Devos is spectacular as Nora, a divorced single mother with a ten-year-old son (Valentin Lelong), an ailing father (Maurice Garrel), a troubled sister (Nathalie Boutefeu), a straitlaced, boring fiance (Olivier Rabourdin), a dead ex-husband who appears as a ghost (Joachim Salinger), a manic, tax-evading ex-husband who is institutionalized (a fabulous Amalric), and a deep-seated survival instinct that is infectious. Throw in a suicidal woman (Magalie Woch) who can’t get enough sex, an alluring doctor (Catherine Deneuve), a drug-addicted lawyer (Hippolyte Girardot), a remarkably calm, gun-toting convenience-store owner (Jean-Paul Roussillon), and other unusual characters and plotlines and you have one highly entertaining, complex, and marvelously original French drama that will fly by much faster than its two-and-a-half-hour length would lead you to believe. Amalric won his first César for the role; he won his second three years later for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Amalric will be at Anthology to introduce the October 31 screening of Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur.

KEEN ON KATE!

Kate Baldwin will perform benefit concert for Keen Company on November 2

Who: Kate Baldwin, with special guests Katie Thompson and Graham Rowat, accompanied by Georgia Stitt, Michael Croiter, and Brian Hamm
What: Benefit performance for Keen Company
Where: The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
When: Monday, November 2, $60-$150, 7:00
Why: Tony- and Drama Desk-nominated actress Kate Baldwin, who has starred in such shows as Big Fish and Finian’s Rainbow on Broadway and Giant and John & Jen off Broadway, will be giving a special concert on November 2 benefiting Keen Company, which is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. The show is taking place at the Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row, where Keen is performing Giles Havergal’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt. Baldwin, who has recorded such albums as Let’s See What Happens: Songs of Lane & Harburg and She Loves Him: Kate Baldwin Live at Feinstein’s, is currently starring in Songbird, a Tennessee Fiction, at 59E59. General admission is $60, while $150 tickets come with with premium seating and a Champagne toast with the performers.

WOOSTER GROUP ADVANCE SHOWINGS: THE ROOM

The Wooster Group is presenting advance showings of Harold Pinter’s THE ROOM at the Performing Garage

THE WOOSTER GROUP
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
October 28 – November 21, $25-$50
212-966-9796
thewoostergroup.org

The Wooster Group is doing something a little different as it kicks off its trilogy of works by Harold Pinter. The SoHo-based troupe is performing what it’s calling “advance showings” of Pinter’s first play, the 1957 “comedy of menace” The Room. The short run of the short play (less than an hour) is really a three-week sneak peek at a work-in-progress, before the show goes to Los Angeles February 4-14, after which it will return home for its official New York City opening. The Room, which examines communication, language, and the concept of home in existential ways, will be followed by A Kind of Alaska and a work adapted from Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize lecture. For The Room, founding member and director Elizabeth LeCompte has turned to the Chinese comedic form known as xiansheng, or crosstalk, as the actors wear earphones that are playing the dialogue from a xiansheng performance being shown on several monitors scattered around the theater, to encourage a specific flow and nuance to dialogue and movement. “We have often gravitated toward Asian theater because its style encompasses all forms of the arts and has an architecture that isn’t located in a naturalistic place. Music, dance, and text are integrated into the storytelling and play equal parts in the final art form,” the group explains. “We are always trying to find new ways to tell stories, and putting ‘crosstalk’ into conversation with Pinter’s text takes us in new directions.” The cast of The Room features Ari Fliakos as Mr. Kidd and Mr. Sands, Philip Moore as Riley, Scott Renderer as Bert Hudd, Suzzy Roche as Mrs. Sands, and Kate Valk as Rose, with lighting by Jennifer Tipton and Ryan Seelig, sound, video, and projections by Max Bernstein, and original music by Omar Zubair.

ERNESTO PUJOL: 9 – 5

Eleven performers dressed in white take notes on passersby in Ernesto Pujol’s “9 – 5” at Brookfield Place (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brookfield Place
230 Vesey St.
October 26-28, free, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
brookfieldplaceny.com
9-5 slideshow

Social choreographer Ernesto Pujol takes the concept of the open office plan to a whole new level with 9 – 5, a site-specific durational performance running October 26 to 28 just inside the fifty-five-foot-tall front windows of the Pavilion at Brookfield Place. The Havana-born, New York–based Pujol has situated eleven performers, all dressed in white, at small desks, where they take notes, silently and calmly reflecting on what they observe as some thirty-five thousand people swirl about, on their way to Le District, Hudson Eats, the Winter Garden, the subway, or back to their own desks in their own offices. Meanwhile, outside and behind the eleven people, West St. is a whirlwind of activity, with massive construction, speeding cars, and the building of the new World Trade Center train station. There is a heavenly, meditative feeling in the air around the performers (Dillon de Give, Kate Harding, Young Sun Han, Sara Jimenez, Bess Matassa, James Rich, Valarie Samulski, Catilin Turski, Michael Watson, Joy Whalen, and Jayoung Yoon), almost as if they are guardian angels watching out for us as they jot things down in their notebooks; then again, they could also be spying on us in a very public form of surveillance. But mostly, Pujol is trying to get all of us — commuters, tourists, office workers, shoppers, passersby, etc. — to just slow down: “Close your eyes / Take a deep breath / Open your eyes and look around / (Repeat this if necessary) / Take a deep breath with eyes wide open / Begin to see.”

Ernesto Pujol’s “9 – 5” continues at the Brookfield Place Pavilion through October 28 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

There’s a Zen-like philosophy to what Pujol does, particularly as he examines the monotony of the 9 – 5 world. On his website, he explains, “I perform as a form of ephemeral, collective, and psychic portraiture. My public, durational, group performances seek to reveal the unseen, the intangible, the invisible, and the lost. It is performance practice as a form of perception, reclamation, and mourning. To memorialize and to mourn may result in transformative experiences, in steps toward forgiveness, reparation, and healing.” A collaboration with Brookfield Place and More Art, 9 – 5 is that much more powerful with the Freedom Tower standing outside, reminding viewers of the invisible and the lost, of what isn’t there — and what has arisen in its place, phoenix-like. Pujol, who has previously staged such works as Speaking in Silence in Hawaii in 2011, Farmers Dream in Kansas in 2010, and Baptizing a Garden in South Carolina in 2008, will be leading a free workshop, “Embodied Meditation,” on November 2 & 4 at 12:30 with body practice teacher Samulski and will deliver a free lecture, “The Art of Mindful Presence,” on November 4 at 6:30; advance RSVPs are required.

STEPHEN PETRONIO: LUMINOUS MISCHIEF

Spoken-word performances will take place under Teresita Fernández’s “Fata Morgana” installation in Madison Square Park on September 17 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Stephen Petronio will be staging free-form, improvised, and participatory music and dance event under Teresita Fernández’s “Fata Morgana” installation in Madison Square Park on October 30 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: Stephen Petronio Company
What: “Luminous Mischief” under Teresita Fernández’s “Fata Morgana”
Where: Madison Square Park, 23rd to 26th Sts. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
When: Friday, October 30, free, 6:00
Why: “Let’s cause some mischief,” New York City–based dancer and choreographer Stephen Petronio declares about his one-time-only site-specific piece “Luminous Mischief,” taking place under Teresita Fernández’s “Fata Morgana” installation in Madison Square Park on October 30. The participatory dance and music event will feature nine members of Petronio’s company, along with a brass band led by clarinetist Mike McGinnis, who is inviting horn players to sign up in advance and join in the fun. The dancers and musicians will be interacting with the five-hundred-foot-long sculpture — a series of canopies of mirror-polished discs with small sections cut out of them resembling clouds or leaves — as well as passersby, so anything can happen, as this is a free-form, improvised party. Of course, that is always the case with Petronio, who staged his own New Orleans–style funeral at the Joyce in 2013 and walked down the old Whitney Museum building in homage to Trisha Brown in 2010.

LUNCH WITH MIMI SHERATON AND MICHAEL GROSS

Mimi Sheraton will be interviewed by Michael Gross at special lunch event at Rotisserie Georgette

Rotisserie Georgette
140 East 60th St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Saturday, October 31, $59 (plus tax, tip, and book purchase), 12 noon
212-390-8060
www.rotisserieg.com

Brooklyn-born restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton will be at Rotisserie Georgette on October 31 at 12 noon, interviewed by Manhattan-born author Michael Gross, focusing on Sheraton’s most recent book, 1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover’s Life List. As they discuss food and real estate — quite a healthy topic, as so many New York City eateries have closed or moved because of skyrocketing rents — guest will dine on Barigoule d’Artichauts and Brandade de Morue as an appetizer, Poulet Rôti “Farnèse” and Pomme Aligot for the main course, and Chocolate Pot de Crème for dessert, all taken from the book. Afterward, there will be a book signing with both Sheraton, who has also written such tomes as From My Mother’s Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences and The Bialy Eaters, and Gross, author of such nonfiction works as 740 Park and House of Outrageous Fortune.