Maria Hassabi’s PREMIERE will have its world premiere at the Kitchen as part of Performa 13
PREMIERE
The Kitchen
512 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
November 6-9, $12-$15, 8:00
Performa 13 continues through November 24
212-255-5793
www.thekitchen.org
www.13.performa-arts.org
Like her titles, Maria Hassabi’s performances might seem minimalist on the surface, but there’s a whole lot more lurking underneath. In such works as 2009’s SOLO at P.S. 122 for FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, that same year’s SoloShow at P.S. 122 for Performa 09, and 2011’s Show at the Kitchen (and later held outdoors on the Broad St. cobblestones for the River to River Festival), Hassabi usually appears by herself or with one other dancer (most often the magical Hristoula Harakas), utilizes few if any props (a carpet, a single platform), and moves not to music but to live and prerecorded local sounds that can even incorporate the audience’s own preshow murmurings. This week the Cyprus-born, New York-based dancer and choreographer returns to the Kitchen for the world premiere of the aptly titled Premiere, a copresentation with Performa 13. Featuring Hassabi, Harakas, Robert Steijn, Biba Bell, and Andros Zins-Browne, with sound design by Alex Waterman and visual art and dramaturgy by Scott Lyall (both Hassabi regulars), Premiere explores that moment when a new piece and the public first come together, as performers and the performance meet viewer and critic. It’s sort of like a blind date, neither side quite knowing how things will go but hoping to make a connection. It’s a situation rife with fear, anticipation, and promise, and it should be fascinating to see how Hassabi brings that to life. Premiere runs at the Kitchen from November 6 to 9; Performa 13 continues through November 24 with such other shows as Molly Lowe’s Hands Off at Temp Arts Space, Cally Spooner’s And You Were Wonderful, on Stage at the National Academy, Einat Amir’s Our Best Intentions at Affirmation Arts, Pete Drungle’s Dream Sequences for Solo Piano at Roulette, and Katarzyna Krakowiak’s free The Great and Secret Show at the James A. Farley Post Office.
A huge critical and financial success in its native China, Zhao Wei’s romantic epic, So Young, will open the fourth annual New York Chinese Film Festival on November 5 at Alice Tully Hall. Adapted by screenwriter Li Qiang (Peacock) from Xin Yiwuit’s novel To Our Youth That Is Fading Away, the film follows a group of young women who meet at college, fall in and out of love with various young men, then look back at what could have been ten years later. The central focus is on Zheng Wei (Yang Zishan), an impulsive civil engineering freshman who is incensed by how she is treated by fellow architecture student and loner Chen Xiaozheng (Mark Chao). But soon her very public hatred simmers down as she tries to convince the very private Chen to be her boyfriend. Meanwhile, her roommates, campus beauty Ruan Guan (Jiang Shuying), clean freak Li Weijuan (Zhang Yao), and the butch Zhu Xiaobei (Liu Yase), go through their own problems as they all grow close. Award-winning actress and singer Zhao (So Close, Shaolin Soccer) makes a solid directorial debut with So Young, which takes its name from the song by Suede, although the film is overly long at more than two hours and gets confusing as it jumps around in time. But as the girls mature, so does the film itself, exploring social class, education, love, loyalty, ambition, and the many trials and tribulations that accompany the journey from childhood to adulthood. Zhao will attend the red carpet opening and participate in a postscreening Q&A. The festival continues November 6-7 at the AMC Empire 25 on Forty-Second St. with Larry Yang’s Sorry, I Love You, Xue Xiaolu’s Finding Mr. Right, Joe Ma’s Love Undercover, Pang Ho-Cheung’s Love in the Buff, Wilson Yip’s IP Man, and Clarence Fok Yiu-leung’s Special ID; among those taking part in Q&As after the screenings are Yang, Wesley Wong, Miriam Yeung, and Donnie Yen.
Polish writer-director Władysław Pasikowski digs up a deeply disturbing and controversial part of his country’s past in the gripping drama Aftermath. When Franek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop), who left his family’s small farming village twenty years earlier, in 1980, comes home to spend the summer helping out his brother, Józek (Maciej Stuhr), he is surprised to find that his younger sibling has become a hated outcast. It turns out that Józek has been uncovering Jewish gravestones, which the townspeople and even the church have been using to pave roads and for various other architectural purposes. He’s been gathering them in the middle of his wheat field, building a cemetery that has outraged the villagers. They become even angrier — and more dangerous — when Franek, who, like his brother, has never before shown any sympathy for the Jews, starts investigating what really happened there sixty years ago, a dark, dirty secret that everyone else is determined will remain buried. In Aftermath, Pasikowski (Kroll, Pigs) adds horror-genre tropes to a Holocaust tale not seen on film before while evoking such wide-ranging fiction and nonfiction works as Marian Marzynski’s Shtetl, Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. Aftermath is a thriller that is not so much about good and evil but about guilt, responsibility, and the choices people make, and then have to live with. Inspired by a true story documented by historian Jan T. Gross in Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, which stirred up major controversy when it was published in 2000, Aftermath has led to a heated polemic battle between the right and the left in Poland, as well as death threats against Stuhr, who was named Best Actor by the Polish Film Academy for his portrayal of the conflicted Józek. An important, well-made film that is able to avoid being swallowed by the swirling debate surrounding it, Aftermath opens November 1 at Lincoln Plaza and Cinema Village.