twi-ny recommended events

DR. DU BOIS AND MISS OVINGTON

Miss Mary White Ovington (Kathleen Chalfant) and Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois (Timothy Simonson) discuss the state of the NAACP and more in world premiere play (photo by Ronald L. Glassman)

Castillo Theatre
543 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Thursday – Sunday through February 16, $25
212-941-1234
www.castillo.org
www.newfederaltheatre.com

On an early summer Sunday morning on Fifth Ave. in 1915, a white woman and a black man both unexpectedly show up at their place of employment, unable to rest from their crusade for justice and equality. Clare Coss’s slight but affecting Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington, presented by Woodie King Jr.’s New Federal Theatre at the Castillo, offers the unique opportunity of spending ninety minutes with social activists Mary White Ovington (Kathleen Chalfant) and Dr. William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois (Timothy Simonson) as they discuss racism, politics, war, family, and more in the office of the NAACP, which they helped cofound and where Dr. Du Bois writes and edits The Crisis, the organization’s controversial magazine. Angered once again by disagreements with the board, Dr. Du Bois has come to the office to revise his resignation letter, while Miss Ovington is there because she was troubled as well by the previous evening’s board meeting. Ever determined, she says, “Fate has thrown us together now. Let us take advantage of this propitious moment.” And take advantage they do, often speaking in pedagogical, resolute phrases as Miss Ovington tries to convince Dr. Du Bois that he must stay with the NAACP. “Here, we unite against the greatest odds, because we value the worth of every single human being, We must not fail,” she says. “We must not fail, for our task is to transform three hundred years of alienation between black and white in our country,” he replies poetically, “and stir a great awakening in the American Negro — an inner revolution.” As they continue sharing their passions, they grow closer physically as well. Directed by longtime Castillo veteran Gabrielle L. Kurlander (Sally and Tom [The American Way]), the play is anchored by solid performances from Chalfant (Wit, Angels in America) and Simonson (Adam), who instill their characters with an endearing grace and warm familiarity, although Simonson includes an additional dose of earnestness. Chris Cumberbatch’s set is an office torn in half; on the left is Miss Ovington’s desk, with a typewriter and a window that looks out onto the city, while on the right is Dr. Du Bois’s darker, more claustrophobic space, with a dictaphone and a record player with an old horn speaker, echoing their respective roles in changing America’s views on racism. Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington is an intimate look at a critical moment in time whose ultimate impact can still be felt today.

12 O’CLOCK BOYS

Tough-talking teen Pug is determined to become a Twelve O’Clock Boy

12 O’CLOCK BOYS (Lotfy Nathan, 2013)
AMC Empire 25, 234 West 42nd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves., 212-398-2597
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Opens Friday, January 31
www.12oclockboys.com

For twenty years, Baltimore has been defined by such television series as Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, and The Wire, shows filled with rampant violence and drugs. This past November, the U.S. Census Bureau released data showing that the poverty rate from 2010 to 2012 in the city of Baltimore was more than twenty-five percent. During that same period, debut filmmaker Lofty Nathan embedded himself with a group of teens and young twentysomethings who ride two- and four-wheel dirt bikes through the streets and parks of Charm City, popping vertical wheelies that point up at the sky. Nathan documents their activities in 12 O’Clock Boys, offering an inside look at this dangerous phenomenon (which has spread to other inner cities as well). “This is our tradition, our culture, this is what we do. Can’t nobody take it from us. This is our release,” one rider says as he puts on a mask. “Baltimore City Sunday: F@ck city council, f@ck the police. I pity them that try to stop us. This is our sh*t.” Indeed, the police are rarely far away, either in marked cars or helicopters, but they are limited in how they can chase the riders because of public safety concerns. Nathan focuses in on twelve-year-old Pug, a tough-talking, smart street kid who starts skipping school, instead dedicating his every waking moment to trying to become a Twelve O’Clock Boy. Meanwhile, there’s little his mother, Coco, a former exotic dancer raising five children on her own, seems to be able to do to stop him. It’s sad to see Pug make this choice, turning his back on education while declaring the police to be the enemy, but Nathan makes no moral judgments about him or any of the other boys and men who take part in this illegal activity, which seems to exist primarily to fight authority. He also doesn’t delve into the political, socioeconomic, and racial factors that have impacted the rise of such a scenario. Instead, he lets Pug, Superman, Shawn Sean, Wheelie Wayne, and Albert Lemon — a former copy now running a regional security outfit — speak for themselves. And it’s a scary story, one that, regardless of which side you’re on, can only have a tragic outcome if something isn’t done about it.

JAZZ: “FAME”

Last year’s “Jazz Fame” honoree, Justin DiCioccio, will conduct this year’s LaGuardia High School tribute to Gabriel Kosakoff, featuring an impressive list of alumni performers

LaGuardia Concert Hall
100 Amsterdam Ave. at 65th St.
Monday, February 3, $35-$75, 7:30
212-595-1301
www.laguardiahs.org
www.alumniandfriends.org

Last year, the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts paid tribute to its longtime jazz teacher, Justin DiCioccio, with a special “Forty Years of Jazz Fame” concert that included performances by such former students as Kenny Washington, Don Byron, and Marcus Miller. This year DiCioccio will be conducting another collection of jazz greats honoring trombonist, WWII veteran, and class of 1944 alum Gabriel Kosakoff, who chaired the Fame school’s instrumental music department from 1969 to 1991. Among the LaGuardia graduates and parent musicians participating in the February 3 celebration at the 1,100-seat LaGuardia Concert Hall are Clifton Anderson, Larry Bustamante, Paquito d’Rivera, Bob Franceschini, Jon Gordon, Charles Gordon, Carolyn Leonhart Escoffery, Arturo O’Farrill, Jimmy Owens, Marcus Rojas, Mark Sherman, Buddy Williams, and Miller. It should be quite a treat to see so many jazz greats come together, showing what a difference music and arts education in schools can make.

THALIA DOCS: THE GREAT FLOOD

THE GREAT FLOOD (Bill Morrison, 2011)
Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Sunday, February 2 (3:00), 9 (8:00), 16 (8:00), $14
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
www.icarusfilms.com

Sound and image meld together beautifully in Bill Morrison’s meditative, elegiac The Great Flood. Inspired by John M. Barry’s 1997 book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, Morrison teamed up with improvisational musician Bill Frisell on the project. The two had previously worked together on a pair of short works, The Mesmerist and The Film of Her, after meeting at the Village Vanguard when Morrison was a dishwasher at the jazz club where Frisell was playing. Morrison, who specializes in using deteriorated and degraded archival footage and experimental scores, scoured the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Hoover Presidential Library, and other sources to come up with remarkable scenes of the flooding of the Mississippi in 1927. Divided into such chapters as “Sharecroppers,” “Swollen Tributaries,” “Evacuation,” “Aftermath,” and “Watershed,” with snippets of informational text but without narration, the film follows the southern blacks who were most affected by the massive flood, being forced to shore up the levees around white areas, losing their own homes, and ultimately heading north as part of the Great Migration, bringing the Delta blues with them. Guitarist Frisell, joined by Ron Miles on cornet, Tony Scherr on guitar and bass, and Kenny Wollesen on drums and vibes, has composed a gorgeous, moving score, heavily influenced by a trip his band and Morrison took in early 2011 up the Mississippi, with the group playing in multiple cities while the river threatened to flood again. Each chapter, from an overhead view of a computerized map that details the 1927 flood to a fast and furious foray through the Sears Roebuck catalog, from a Baptist church procession to a series of rare clips of such bluesmen as Big Bill Broonzy, Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Robert Lockwood, features a different piece of music, highlighted by Frisell’s always inventive guitar and Miles’s deeply expressive horn. Of course, as the images pass by, it’s impossible not to think of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and be awed by the devastating power of nature, as well as realize how little has changed with regard to the reaction of politicians and who the victims tend to be. But the film is rarely mournful; instead, there’s often a celebratory quality about it, centered on people’s natural instinct to survive. Following its recent theatrical release at the IFC Center, The Great Flood is next scheduled to run February 2, 9, and 16 as part of the Symphony Space series Thalia Docs, with Morrison, who has also created such other unique cinematic experiences as Spark of Being, Decasia, and The Miners’ Hymns, on hand for a Q&A after the February 9 show.

FIRST SATURDAY: LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD

Shukree Hassan Tilghman’s MORE THAN A MONTH is part of free Black History Month celebration at Brooklyn Museum on February 1

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, February 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The February edition of the Brooklyn Museum’s free First Saturdays honors Black History Month with programs related to African American art and culture. The evening will include pop-up gallery talks focused on works by African American artists currently on view at the museum, a camera phone workshop by Instagram activist Ruddy Roye, a Hands-On Art workshop in which participants learn how to hand-color historical photographs, a screening of Shukree Hassan Tilghman’s 2012 documentary More Than a Month about Black History Month, live music by Tysmé, Honey Larochelle, and Chris Faust, a dance performance by Niles Ford Urban Dance Collective, a movement workshop led by the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory, a fashion show hosted by Global Village, and a talk by transgender activist Janet Mock about her new book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More, moderated by Michaela Angela Davis. In addition, the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey,” “War / Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” “Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to ‘The Ladder,’” “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt,” “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas,” “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” and other exhibits.

MIKE KELLEY — SUNDAY SESSIONS: KIM GORDON AND JUTTA KOETHER

Mike Kelley, “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites,” plush toys sewn over wood and wire frames with styrofoam packing material, nylon rope, pulleys, steel hardware and hanging plates, fiberglass, car paint, and disinfectant, 1991/1999 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Sunday, February 2, $18 in advance, $20 day of show, 4:00
Exhibition continues through February 2, suggested admission $10 (free with paid MoMA ticket
within fourteen days), 12 noon – 6:00 (9:00 on Saturday)
718-784-2084
www.momaps1.org

A few weeks ago, an art-world friend who was at MoMA PS1 posted on Facebook, “OK, sell me on Mike Kelley.” Most of the respondents agreed with her that they just didn’t get all the hullabaloo over the influential multimedia artist who committed suicide on February 1, 2012, while in the midst of participating in his career retrospective, which posthumously took over all of the Long Island City institution on October 13, 2013. The show, the largest at MoMA PS1 since 1976, features more than 250 works by the Detroit-born Kelley, who was an original member of the punk band Destroy All Monsters while at the University of Michigan before moving to Los Angeles and studying at CalArts under such teachers as John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Borofsky, and Douglas Huebler. On February 2, the last day of the show, Sonic Youth cofounder and visual artist Kim Gordon and German artist, musician, and critic Jutta Koether are creating a special farewell event in the VW Dome that may or may not help sell yet more people on Kelley. The two women have previously collaborated on such projects as “Her Noise”; Kelley created the cover image for Sonic Youth’s Dirty album, while the band contributed music to his “Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile” performance piece. “Mike dug a huge hole, but his sculptures, videos, recordings, writings, and drawings fill it in, heaped so high that they stand like a formidable mountain of gifts, rewards, like a monument to getting out from under,” Gordon, a close friend of Kelley’s, wrote in Artforum a few months after his death.

Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether will bid farewell to Mike Kelley exhibit with special performance at MoMA PS1

The sprawling exhibition contains sculptures, videos, recordings, writings, drawings, and more, offering many different types of rewards. It all begins in the courtyard VW Dome, where Kelley’s nearly-three-hour epic, Day Is Done, screens continuously, a subversive spectacle that sets the tone for the rest of the show, highlighting Kelley’s obsessions with childhood imagery and pop culture, his unique spirituality, his repurposing of found objects, and the low-budget, DIY nature of his work, which can often have an amateurish feel that turns off viewers. Inside the former school, there is art everywhere, from the hallways to the boiler room, displaying Kelley’s vast range. His Kandor series consists of numerous multicolored, glowing versions of the Krypton city from the Superman comics, each one existing in a glass bottle hooked up to a kind-of life-support system, with accompanying video. “Pay for Your Pleasure” is a narrow corridor with banners on either side containing portraits of writers and philosophers, along with a quote from each one about art, crime, law, and civilization; at the end is an artwork by a local murderer.

Mike Kelley, “John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle),” mixed media, 2001 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

One large gallery space is dedicated to several of Kelley’s “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction” installations, in which he starts with a photograph from a high school yearbook and turns it into a short film, screened on a set with architectural elements echoing what is happening in the imagined story. (“Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 [A Domestic Scene]” is also being shown at MoMA in Midtown.) “John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project” is centered by a tall mosaic statue of astronaut John Glenn made out of broken glass, pottery, plates, ceramic figures, and other detritus, delving into another regular subject of Kelley’s, repressed memory syndrome. In “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites,” colorful stuffed animals have been formed into orbs that hang from the ceiling like a planetary system as futuristic wall pieces shoot out disinfectant. Two small crawlspaces allow non-claustrophobics to wind their way to a peephole where they can see the famous locker-room peeping scene from Porky’s. And “Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms” consists of videos of traumatic scenes taken from the internet, then shown on monitors attached to the back of a wall of fence posts of different colors and sizes. Not everything will work for everyone, but there’s bound to be at least a handful that any person would at least find fascinating and intriguing, thought-provoking and challenging. In response to our friend’s Facebook request, we proffered, “The Michigan-born multimedia artist created fantastical worlds using found objects that reexamined mass culture through DIY installations that can be playful and nonsensical as well as cutting and poignant.” At the end of the thread, she readily admitted that having seen the show, she has a greater appreciation for his work. And sometimes, that’s all one can ask for.

DANCE ON CAMERA 2014: “ONE DAY PINA ASKED…”

Rarely screened 1983 documentary delves into Pina Bausch’s creative process (photo courtesy Icarus Films)

“ONE DAY PINA ASKED…” (UN JOUR PINA A DEMANDÉ) (Chantal Akerman, 1983)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, February 1, 11:00 am
Series runs January 31 – February 4
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

In 1982, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman followed Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal on a five-week tour of Europe as the cutting-edge troupe traveled to Milan, Venice, and Avignon. “I was deeply touched by her lengthy performances that mingle in your head,” Akerman says at the beginning of the resulting documentary, “One Day Pina Asked…,” continuing, “I have the feeling that the images we brought back do not convey this very much and often betray it.” Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; Je tu il elle) needn’t have worried; her fifty-seven-minute film, made for the Repères sur la Modern Dance French television series, is filled with memorable moments that more than do justice to Bausch’s unique form of dance theater. From 1973 up to her death in 2009 at the age of sixty-eight, Bausch created compelling works that examined the male-female dynamic and the concepts of love and connection with revolutionary stagings that included spoken word, unusual costuming, an unpredictable movement vocabulary, and performers of all shapes, sizes, and ages. Akerman captures the troupe, consisting of twenty-six dancers from thirteen countries, in run-throughs, rehearsals, and live presentations of Komm Tanz Mit Mir (Come Dance with Me), Nelken (Carnations), 1980, Kontakthof, and Walzer, often focusing in on individual dancers in extreme close-ups that reveal their relationship with their performance. Although Bausch, forty at the time, is seen only at the beginning and end of the documentary, her creative process is always at center stage. At one point, dancer Lutz Förster tells a story of performing Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” in sign language in response to Bausch’s asking the troupe to name something they’re proud of. Förster, who took over as artistic director in April 2013, first performs the song for Akerman, then later is shown performing it in Nelken. (Bausch fans will also recognize such longtime company members as Héléna Pikon, Nazareth Panadero, and Dominique Mercy.)

Documentary includes inside look at such Tanztheater Wuppertal productions as CARNATIONS (photo courtesy Icarus Films)

Documentary includes inside look at such Tanztheater Wuppertal productions as NELKEN (photo courtesy Icarus Films)

Akerman often leaves her camera static, letting the action unfold on its own, which is particularly beautiful when she films a dance through a faraway door as shadowy figures circle around the other side. It’s all surprisingly intimate, not showy, rewarding viewers with the feeling that they are just next to the dancers, backstage or in the wings, unnoticed, as the process unfolds, the camera serving as their surrogate. And it works whether you’re a longtime fan of Bausch, only discovered her by seeing Wim Wenders’s Oscar-nominated 3D film Pina, or never heard of her. “This film is more than a documentary on Pina Bausch’s work,” a narrator says introducing the film. “It is a journey through her world, through her unwavering quest for love.” ”One Day Pina Asked…” is screening February 1 at 11:00 am as part of the 2014 edition of the annual Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Dance on Camera,” which runs January 31 to February 4 and includes such other works as Kate Geis’s Paul Taylor: Creative Domain, Toa Fraser’s Giselle, and Jackie Paré’s Tap or Die in addition to a talk with British photographer Sebastian Rich and a Meet the Artist event with Jonathan Demme and Annie-B Parson, both of which are free.