Rebecca Lazier adapts Frederic Rzewski’s Attica-related compositions into an immersive, site-specific work at Invisible Dog
The Invisible Dog
51 Bergen St. between Smith & Court Sts.
June 13-15, $20
www.theinvisibledog.org
www.rebeccalazier.com
In 1971, pianist Frederic Rzewski composed a pair of minimalist works inspired by the Attica prison riots in upstate New York, which left more than three dozen people dead and forever changed the public’s view of the treatment of prisoners. Nova Scotia native Rebecca Lazier has used the two pieces — “Coming Together,” which features the slowly repeated sentence “Attica is in front of me,” spoken by a survivor of the riots who had been asked “How does it feel to have Attica behind you?,” and “Attica,” with words taken from a letter written by inmate Sam Melville, who died during the uprising — to create the site-specific Coming Together / Attica, running at the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn June 13-15. The U.S. premiere will be performed by Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener, Asli Bulbul, Jennifer Lafferty, Pierre Guilbault, and Christopher Ralph, with Mellissa Hughes as vocal soloist and live music by Newspeak, conducted by David T. Little for eight instruments. The fifty-minute show takes place on the third floor of the art space, set across four thousand square feet, with lighting design by Davison Scandrett and prison-related costumes by Mary-Jo Mecca. Lazier’s piece is divided into three sections: “Coming Together,” “The Quiet,” and “Attica,” combining music, movement, and text to explore isolation, oppression, memory, and adversity in an immersive presentation that, at one point, switches the relationship between audience and performer, playing with the idea of who is being held captive by whom.
The free Korean Movie Night series “Laughter and Love at the Box Office!” continues June 11 at Tribeca Cinemas with the bittersweet romantic tale Architecture 101. Former architect Lee Yong-zoo’s second feature film, following Possessed, examines the building of personal relationships as well as the construction of homes as a pair of grown-ups consider what might have been. When Seo-Yeon (Han Ga-in) enters the firm where Seung-Min (Uhm Tae-woong) works, the thirty-five-year-old architect appears initially not to know her, but it turns out that they explored the possibility of first love together fifteen years earlier at school. Lee cuts back and forth between the present, in which Seo-Yeon hires Seung-Min to rebuild a house for her, and the past, when Seung-Min (Lee Je-hoon) and Seo-Yeon (Bae Su-ji) are still figuring out what they want out of life and love, trying to understand the desire churning inside them. In the present, Seo-Yeon says she has been married for three years, and Seung-Min is secretly engaged to his assistant, Eun-Chae (Koh Joon-hee). Meanwhile, in the past, Seung-Min doesn’t know what to do about his feelings for Seo-Yeon, who seems to like one of his best friends, Jae-Wook (Yoo Yeon-seok). The past, present, and future meld into one over the musical theme of pop star Jeon Ram-whe’s sappy Korean ballad “Etude of Memory” as true love tantalizingly hangs just out of reach. Architecture 101 is a beautiful yet heartbreaking film with superb performances — Bae and Jo Jung-suk, who plays Nabddeuckyi, a confidant of the younger Seung-Min’s based on the director himself, both won Best New Actor awards for their portrayals — and a compelling narrative structure that builds to a powerfully emotional climax. “Laughter and Love at the Box Office!” concludes June 25 with Jo Sung-hee’s romantic fantasy hit A Werewolf Boy.
Gus Van Sant’s Milk is a solid if surprisingly standard biopic focusing on the last eight years in the life of Harvey Milk, the gay activist and politician who was assassinated in 1978. Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For, Good Will Hunting) follows the eventual unofficial Mayor of Castro Street (Sean Penn) as he moves to San Francisco with his much younger partner, Scottie Smith (James Franco), and sets up a camera shop that soon becomes an important meeting ground for the local gay community, fighting for equal rights and supporting Milk as he continually campaigns for public office. The battle hits its high point in 1978 when Milk takes on John Briggs (Denis O’Hare) and the Briggs Initiative, also known as Proposition 6, which sought to take away existing employment rights from gays and lesbians in the California public school system, eerily reminiscent of the recent battle over Proposition 8 there. Although Milk was a rallying figure — his opening mantra was always “My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you!” — the film never quite takes off the way it wants to, instead becoming too reverential and melodramatic. Penn, who won an Oscar for his portrayal, is good but subdued in the lead role; the best performance comes from Josh Brolin as Dan White, Milk’s main adversary among the SF supervisors. Milk is screening June 9 & 10 at MoMA as part of the series “Harris Savides: Visual Poet,” which pays tribute to the fashion photographer and cinematographer who died in October 2012 at the age of fifty-five; the festival includes a wide range of works on which he served as director of photography, including Noah Baumbach’s underrated Greenberg, Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, James Gray’s The Yards, David Fincher’s Zodiac, and John Turturro’s Illuminata, with Baumbach, Coppola, Fincher, and Turturro on hand to introduce various screenings.