twi-ny recommended events

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER NY CITY CENTER SEASON

Robert Moses’s THE PLEASURE OF THE LESSON will makes its Ailey company premiere at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
December 3 – January 4, $25-$150
212-581-1212
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has something extra special to celebrate this year, as the company prepares for its annual holiday season at City Center. Their founder, Alvin Ailey, who started the troupe in 1958 and passed away in 1989, will be posthumously honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 24, to be accepted by current AAADT artistic director Robert Battle. In addition, longtime chairman of the board Joan H. Weill is retiring, going out with a bang, as more than $40 million has been raised in her honor so far for in the Campaign for Ailey’s Future. The season begins December 3 with an opening-night gala featuring Battle’s Unfold, with live music by Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu, the company premiere of Hofesh Schechter’s Uprising, and the Ailey classic Revelations, also with live music. Making its world premieres over the course of the month are Matthew Rushing’s Odetta, a tribute to the singer-songwriter and activist, and Robert Moses’s The Pleasure of the Lesson, while the other company premieres are Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain (Pas de Deux), Asadata Dafora’s Awassa Astrige / Ostrich, and Jacqulyn Buglisi’s Suspended Women.

Matthew Rushing’s ODETTA honors the singer-songwriter and activist on the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act (photo by Steve Wilson)

Continuing through January 4, the season also includes new productions of Ulysses Dove’s Bad Blood and Hans van Manen’s Polish Pieces; the always popular “Ailey/Ellington” program, consisting of Night Creature, Pas de Duke, The River, and Revelations; Saturday afternoon family matinees followed by Q&As with the dancers; and “Celebrating the Women of Ailey,” a presentation on December 16 honoring the fabulous Linda Celeste Sims, Hope Boykin, and the rest of the Ailey women with Cry, Night Creature, an excerpt from Vespers, and Revelations. Among the returning favorites are David Parsons’s blinding Caught, Ronald K. Brown’s elegant Four Corners and Grace, Ohad Naharin’s rapturous Minus 16, Battle’s dizzying Takademe, and Bill T. Jones’s D-Man in the Waters (Part 1). And for New Year’s Eve, Revelations will be performed by past and present members of the company.

NEGATIVE IS POSITIVE

David (Joshua Zirger) and Simone (Karen Eilbacher) deal with a surprise medical diagnosis in Christy Smith-Sloman’s NEGATIVE IS POSITIVE (photo by Magali Charron)

Theater for the New City
155 First Ave. between Ninth & Tenth Sts.
Thursday – Sunday through November 30, $15
212-254-1109
www.negativeispositivetheplay.com
www.theaterforthenewcity.net

It’s rarely a good sign when you go to the theater and there are as many people in the audience as there are actors in the cast. It doesn’t help when the stage is surrounded by sheets of plastic that make it look like it is still under construction, not ready for the public yet. And then you have to sit through an opening scene that is so dreadful you’re looking for the emergency exits, wondering how you can sneak out without being noticed. (You can’t.) But then something happens, and you remember why you love going to the theater in the first place. In this case, it’s the entrance of Joshua Zirger, who commands his role with such a genuineness that you’re willing to forgive many of the shortcomings of Negative Is Positive, a new work by Christy Smith-Sloman, directed by Andreas Robertz, running at the Theater for the New City through November 30. The play is set in 2010, with Simone (Karen Eilbacher) getting diagnosed with HIV by a dentist (Fulton C. Hodges) using a rather questionable experimental procedure. Instead of seeking a second opinion — a serious flaw in the story — Simone rails against her husband, David (Zirger), accusing him of cheating and attacking him unmercifully, reevaluating their life together no matter how much he swears he’s innocent and that he loves her. When their best friends, Brianna (Vivienne Jurado) and George (David M. Farrington), arrive for dinner, Simone gets in an even fouler mood, with fireworks flying that get only more intense in the second act.

Negative Is Positive made headlines recently when former New York Rangers forward, Vogue intern, and model Sean Avery, who was originally supposed to play George, abruptly quit the show amid an argument over pizza. Smith-Sloman, who is also a journalist, and Robertz, the artistic director of OneHeart Productions, have, dare we say, turned a negative into a positive with Avery’s last-minute replacement, Farrington, who displays a natural ease in the role and clearly works well with others. Eilbacher is at her best when she unleashes several massive screams, but it’s Zirger who’s the one to watch here, even during the last moments of intermission, as his character examines his board of notes — David’s taken a year off from his sports job to write a screenplay — trying to decide what comes next. For Zirger, hopefully it’s bigger and better things onstage.

GENOCIDE AND THE JEWS: A NEVER-ENDING PROBLEM

The Great Hall of the Cooper Union
7 East Seventh St. at Third Ave.
Monday, November 17, $25, 7:00
www.thisworld.us
www.cooper.edu

College campuses have been a hotbed of activity in the ongoing battle between the Israelis and the Palestinians. On September 22, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union, discussing his June meeting with Shimon Peres and Pope Francis in the Vatican, explaining, “I prayed that Israel will finally, after a long wait, live next to Palestine as a good neighbor and not as an occupier. So we Palestinians can continue to build our institutions for a modern and open state and society.” (You can watch the speech here.) Three days later, Abbas spoke at the UN and demanded that Israel pay for what he called “war crimes carried out before the eyes of the world.” In response to those speeches, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is hosting “Genocide and the Jews: A Never-Ending Problem” in the historic Great Hall on November 17, bringing together Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman to provide an alternate view to Abbas’s. “Three days before he went before the UN and accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinians, Abbas spoke at Cooper Union’s Great Hall to a crowd comprised mostly of NYU students,” Rabbi Boteach writes on his website. “Many gave him a standing ovation as he repeated his blood libel about the Jewish state. And this in a university with more than 8,000 Jewish students. Only one protest was staged outside the building on the night. It was organized by my son Mendy, an NYU undergraduate, who wisely focused on the positive message of the American values of democracy, racial harmony, and freedom of expression and how Abbas contravenes all three.” The discussion will be introduced by U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, inspired Edet Belzberg’s 2014 documentary Watchers of the Sky, which details the efforts of Raphael Lemkin, the coiner of the word “genocide,” to make mass killings a crime against humanity recognized by the world court. “When genocide is trivialized it is not just the six million of the Holocaust who suffer,” Rabbi Boteach continued. “It is the 1.5 million Armenians slaughtered by the Turks. It is the 2.5 million Cambodians murdered by the Khmer Rouge. It is the 800,000 Tutsis slaughtered by the Hutu. And it is all the innocent victims in Croatia, Serbia, and Kosovo.” It should be very interesting to see what kind of protests there might be outside the Cooper Union for this program.

THE EPIC OF EVEREST

Striking document of 1924 attempt to climb Mount Everest has been restored by the British Film Institute

THE EPIC OF EVEREST (Captain John Noel, 1924)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Select days November 14 – December 21
212-620-5000
www.rubinmuseum.org
www.bfi.org.uk

In 1924, two British men, among the most famous mountaineers of their time, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, set out with a large team to climb to the summit of Everest. Their amazing journey was documented by Captain John Noel, who used a hand-cranked camera with an impressive telephoto lens and sent the footage via yak to a lab in Darjeeling to be developed. The resulting black-and-white film, The Epic of Everest, is a poetic document of the third attempt to scale Everest, a mountain the Tibetans called “Chomo-Lung-Ma,” or Goddess Mother of the World. The eighty-seven-minute silent film has been digitally restored by the British Film Institute in a beautiful version that is making its New York premiere November 14 at the Rubin Museum, where it will be shown more than a dozen times through December 21, with most screenings introduced by a special guest and some followed by Q&As. The Epic of Everest, which is also ethnographically important for its (at times ethnocentric) depiction of local Tibetan culture, includes several scenes of Mount Everest tinted in blue, red, and violet; the ice-blue Fairyland section is especially breathtaking. Meanwhile, the restored intertitles display such dramatic text as “There is nowhere here any trace of life or man. It is a glimpse into a world that knows him not. Grand, solemn, unutterably lonely, the Rongbuk Glacier of Everest reveals itself.” and “Nor can one wonder at the invention that has clothed this extraordinary peak with a sacred character. What a terrifying thing it is! What an immensity of size, height and power it possesses!”

Irvine and Mallory — the latter famously answered “Because it’s there” when asked why he wanted to climb Everest — are joined by Sherpas and donkeys; mountaineer and artist Howard Somervell, who is seen smoking a pipe while sketching in his notebook; Alpine climbers John de Vars Hazard and Edward Norton; mountaineer Geoffrey Bruce, who is described as “the Expedition’s right hand man”; and geologist Noel Odell as they attempt to do what no human had done before. The 4K restoration, done in collaboration with Noel’s daughter, Sandra, also features a haunting new score by Simon Fisher Turner that incorporates both Western and Nepalese sounds. The Epic of Everest is particularly fascinating when compared to such recent mountaineering adventures as K2: Siren of the Himalayas, revealing how little has changed, except technology, as fearless men and women seek to climb toward the heavens. Among the experts who will be at the Rubin for select screenings are AFAR executive vice president and publisher Ellen Asmodeo-Giglio on opening night, Everest climbers Robert Anderson and Phillip Trimble, Columbia Modern Tibetan Studies director Dr. Robert Barnett, Outward Bound USA executive director Steve Matous, The Alpinist magazine editor in chief Katie Ives, The Summits of Modern Man author Peter H. Hansen, and British Consul General to New York Danny Lopez.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “PLEASE DON’T TELL MY LOVER” BY EMPIRES

“And so I killed my idols / They’re dead in the vinyl / Oh, the piece came out of my soul / It’s a recital / Now she won’t understand / the dark side of my heart / all the part-time wonders,” Sean Van Vleet sings on Empires’ “Please Don’t Tell My Lover,” one of eleven tracks on the band’s major label debut, Orphan (Chop Shop / Island, September 2014). For the follow-up to 2012’s Garage Hymns, the Chicago four-piece headed to Texas to work with Grammy-nominated producer John Congleton, resulting in an anthemic record of power pop that pays tribute to such late-1980s/early 1990 idols as My Bloody Valentine, U2, Talking Heads, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and even Chris Isaak. The album, which can currently be streamed here, also features such big-sounding songs as “Silverfire,” “Hostage,” “Honeyblood,” and “Stay Lonely.” Lead singer and songwriter Van Vleet, guitarists Tom Conrad and Mike Robinson, and drummer Max Steger will be at Baby’s All Right on November 14 with Cold Fronts and NGHBRS; admission is free with RSVP.

OXBOW

Ivy Baldwin Dance makes its BAM debut with OXBOW (photo by Andy Romer)

2014 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
November 13-16, $20
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.ivybaldwindance.org

Brooklyn-based choreographer Ivy Baldwin is having quite a year. While celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of her company, Ivy Baldwin Dance, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow, and this week she will make her BAM debut with Oxbow, an evening-length work she made as the 2014 Harkness Foundation Artist in Residence at the BAM Fisher. The work was created in collaboration with dancers Anna Carapetyan, Lawrence Cassella, Eleanor Smith, and Katie Workum and features a live-mixed score by Justin Jones and additional music by Ryan Tracy. The twisted-paper set is by installation artists Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen, with lighting by Michael O’Connor and costumes by Alice Ritter. In such previous pieces as Ambient Cowboy and Here Rests Peggy, Baldwin has displayed a unique visual flair and compelling sense of narrative likely to continue with Oxbow, described as “exploring the inexorable nature of the two forces that contain us all: space and time, geology and chronology.” The piece runs November 13-16, with tickets only twenty dollars.

DOC NYC SHORT LIST: FINDING VIVIAN MAIER

Documentary turns the camera on mysterious street photographer Vivian Maier (photo by Vivian Maier / courtesy of the Maloof Collection)

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER (John Maloof & Charlie Siskel, 2013)
Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas
260 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Friday, November 14, 12:30, and Saturday, November 15, 12 noon
Series runs November 13-20
www.docnyc.net
www.findingvivianmaier.com

By their very nature, street photographers take pictures of anonymous individuals, capturing a moment in time in which viewers can fill in their own details. In the wonderful documentary Finding Vivian Maier, codirectors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel turn the lens around on a street photographer herself, attempting to fill in the details of the curious life and times of Vivian Maier, about whom very little was known. “I find the mystery of it more interesting than her work itself,” says one woman for whom Vivian Maier served as a nanny decades earlier. “I’d love to know more about this person, and I don’t think you can do that through her work.” In 2007, while looking for historical photos for a book on the Portage Park section of Chicago, Maloof purchased a box of negatives at an auction. Upon discovering that they were high-quality, museum-worthy photographs, he set off on a mission to learn more about the photographer. Playing detective — while also developing hundreds of rolls of film, with thousands more to go — Maloof meets with men and women who knew Maier as an oddball, hoarding nanny who went everywhere with her camera and shared little, if anything, about her personal life. “I’m the mystery woman,” Maier says in a color home movie. Her former employers and charges, including talk-show host Phil Donahue, debate her background, the spelling and pronunciation of her name, her accent, and how she might have felt about a documentary delving into her secretive life.

Street photographer Vivian Maier captured a unique view of the world in more than 100,000 pictures (Vivian Maier / courtesy of the Maloof Collection)

Street photographer Vivian Maier captured a unique view of the world in more than 100,000 pictures (photo by Vivian Maier / courtesy of the Maloof Collection)

Maloof also discusses Maier’s work with such major photographers as Joel Meyerowitz and Mary Ellen Mark. “Had she made herself known, she would have become a famous photographer. Something was wrong. . . . A piece of the puzzle is missing,” Mark says while comparing Maier’s work to such legends as Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, and Diane Arbus. Maloof tries to complete what becomes an ever-more-fascinating puzzle in this extremely enjoyable documentary that gets very serious as he finds out more about the mystery woman who is now considered an important twentieth-century artist. Finding Vivian Maier also has an intriguing pedigree; codirector and producer Siskel (Religulous) is executive producer of Comedy Central’s Tosh.0, executive producer Jeff Garlin (I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With) is a comedian who played Larry David’s best friend and agent on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Kickstarter contributor and interviewee Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Lie to Me) is an Oscar-nominated actor who collects Maier’s work. Maloof and Siskel will be on hand when Finding Vivian Maier is presented November 14 & 15 at Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas in the Short List section of the 2014 DOC NYC festival, which runs November 13-20 and consists of more than 150 documentaries being shown at Bow Tie, the IFC Center, and the SVA Theatre. To experience Maier’s work in person, be sure to check out the photography exhibit “Vivian Maier: In Her Own Hands,” continuing at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Midtown through December 6.