twi-ny recommended events

KAREN HARVEY DANCES: WETLANDS

Center for Performance Research
361 Manhattan Ave.
February 22-23, $12-$15, 7:30
www.karenharveydances.org
www.cprnyc.org

New York-based Karen Harvey Dances is dedicated to creating organic performances that integrate community and environment, incorporating the natural world into multimedia dance-theater projects. On February 22-23, artistic director Karen Harvey will lead the company in the world premiere of its first evening-length work, Wetlands, at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn. Investigating global interconnectedness and environmental responsibility, Wetlands is directed and choreographed by Harvey, who performs in it along with dancers Jin Ju Song-Begin, Elisa Vazquez, Andrew Broaddus, Thea Little, and Rachel Watson, set to music by Benjamin Garner, Little, and Broaddus and with a cappella vocals by René Kladzyk. The piece also features videos by an international group of dance artists, including Vazquez, Song-Begin, Emily Athena Abrahams, Anna Asplind, Silvia Balvin, Miguel Angel Guzman, Carolina Tabares Mendoza, Lina Puodziukaite, and Harvey. Movement, sound, visuals, and humanity come together to celebrate personal freedom and biodiversity as the company examines interdependence in today’s ever-more-complex world.

5 BROKEN CAMERAS

Emad Burnat displays the cameras he used to make Oscar-nominated documentary

5 BROKEN CAMERAS (Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi, 2009)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
www.kinolorber.com

In February 2005, Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat bought a camera to capture the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. But he also began filming the dangerous events taking place in and around his home in Bil’in, one of many West Bank villages that were being separated from much of their land by a fence and then a wall, as Israeli settlers moved into newly constructed buildings. Over the course of the next five years, Burnat went through five cameras as he documented the mostly peaceful demonstrations, led by two of his friends, Adeeb Abu-Rahma and Phil, against the Israeli military, with many of the scuffles turning violent on the part of the soldiers. Burnat follows the growth of his children, particularly Gibreel, who gets lessons on how to be careful at the protests from his mother, Burnat’s Brazilian-born wife, Soraya. Much of what he exposes is disturbing, as Israeli soldiers burn down olive trees, lob in tear gas, and shoot an unarmed captive in the leg. However, there is an overriding feeling that Burnat, who teamed up in 2009 to structure the film with Israeli codirector Guy Davidi, has cut out some essential parts, deleting valuable information that might better explain some of what was going on. (More than five hundred hours of footage were edited down to ninety minutes for the final film.) At one point Burnat is arrested for throwing rocks; although he never shows himself taking such action, he also does not claim he was wrongly imprisoned. And another scene in which Soraya begs for him to stop filming because it is hurting the family feels staged. Still, the footage does exemplify the intense battle going on between Palestinians and Israelis over the West Bank settlements, resulting in so much unnecessary violence and destruction. The fight even continues over the film itself, as Palestinians are boycotting it because of the involvement of Israeli financing, while Israelis consider it a pro-Palestinian film and are avoiding it as well. In the end, the Oscar-nominated 5 Broken Cameras is a deeply personal look at one man’s experience of a political crisis that has no resolution in sight.

DANCE UNDER THE INFLUENCE 2013

John Heginbotham (photo by Liza_Volll, courtesy Jacobs Pillow Dance)

Dance Heginbotham will perform this weekend as part of Dance Under the Influence series at the Museum of Arts & Design (photo by Liza Voll, courtesy Jacobs Pillow Dance)

MOLISSA FENLEY, JOHN HEGINBOTHAM, DORMESHIA SUMBRY-EDWARDS, AND ZACK WINOKUR
Museum of Arts & Design, the Theater at MAD
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Broadway
Monthly weekends February 22-23 through May 18, $20, 7:30
800-838-3006
www.madmuseum.org

The third season of the Museum of Arts and Design “Dance Under the Influence” series begins this weekend, as a diverse mix of contemporary dancers and choreographers gather at the Columbus Circle institution to perform works and then discuss them with the audience, sharing their artistic processes. Guest-curated by journalist, teacher, and writer Valerie Gladstone, the programs starts February 22-23 with Molissa Fenley, who will premiere Horizon, inspired by her recent trip to Hawaii, with music by Pauline Oliveros; Dance Heginbotham, the new company founded in 2011 by Brooklyn-based John Heginbotham, a veteran of Susan Marshall & Company and the Mark Morris Dance Group; Michael Jackson choreographer and swing and tap-dancer Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, who is part of Divine Rhythm Productions; and Zack Winokur, codirector of the Troupe with Michelle Mola. Next month’s installment takes place March 22-23 with ABT Studio Company, Decadence Theatre, David Neumann, and Basil Twist, while Jared Angle, Pontus Lidberg, Susan Marshall & Company, and Sara du Jour will be at MAD April 26-27. The series concludes May 17-18 with Doug Elkins, Rashaun Mitchell, Ramya Ramnarayan, and Blakely White-McGuire.

BROOKLYN / MONTRÉAL: JANET BIGGS / AUDE MOREAU

Aude Moreau’s installation at Smack Mellon contains two tons of refined sugar (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

AUDE MOREAU: SUGAR CARPET
JANET BIGGS: SOMEWHERE BEYOND NOWHERE
Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth St. at Washington St.
Wednesday – Sunday through February 24, free, 12 noon – 6:00
www.smackmellon.org
www.brooklynmontreal.com

This past fall, Brooklyn-based visual artist Janet Biggs showed four of her video works — her Arctic Trilogy, made during an extraordinary trip to the far North, and A Step on the Sun, about a sulfur miner in the Ijen volcano in Indonesia — at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal as part of the “Brooklyn/Montréal” cultural exchange, which involves forty artists and sixteen institutions. In conjunction with that, French-born Montréal installation artist Aude Moreau presented her film of the New York City skyline, Reconstruction. The two have joined forces again for the second part of the exchange, a pair of solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon in DUMBO. Although Biggs’s and Moreau’s pieces reinforce each other so well it seems they might have planned the shows together, actually each artist had no idea what the other was going to do at the Brooklyn gallery. Biggs is very familiar with the area, however; Smack Mellon is just steps from the East River where Biggs staged the impressive Wet Exit for the DUMBO Arts Festival in September 2011. Moreau’s “Sugar Carpet” is a large-scale rectangular Persian rug made from two tons of refined sugar, bordered by an intricate black and red floral design. The piece is installed in the center of the gallery, incorporating eight of Smack Mellon’s structural posts, which pierce into the sides of the sugar, adding to the industrial feel referencing mass production. “Sugar Carpet” also evokes the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, a memorial to a past era, and serves as a splendid introduction, fittingly a white carpet rather than a red one, to the brilliantly bright expanse of Biggs’s latest video.

Janet Biggs fires a flare across a vast white landscape in SOMEWHERE BEYOND NOWHERE (photo courtesy of Janet Biggs)

Somewhere Beyond Nowhere, Biggs’s six-minute, two-channel follow-up to the Arctic Trilogy, which consists of Fade to White, Brightness All Around, and In the Cold Edge, was made during a 2010 art and science expedition aboard a hundred-year-old schooner. Over an electronic score by Will Martina, the camera-shy Biggs, in voice-over, narrates the tale of an early journey gone wrong as she shoots flares across an empty, vast white horizon that immediately makes one think of climate change and the melting of the glaciers. “The act of shooting off a flare became both an aggressive assertion of my presence and a cry for help that implied a condition of emergency,” she explains in an artist statement. “My efforts to either establish power or seek assistance failed as a thousand miles from civilization, I was too far north for anyone to see or respond to my act.” The nearly blinding whiteness of Somewhere Beyond Nowhere echoes that of “Sugar Carpet,” the frozen landscape Biggs walks across providing a stark contrast to the fragility of Moreau’s sugar sculpture, which would be ruined by the trampling of people’s feet. In addition, the pieces work particularly well in tandem during what has been an extremely cold winter, which has featured several powerful snowstorms. Biggs’s and Moreau’s installations continue through February 24; you can also catch Biggs’s In the Cold Edge through March 10 at Present Company as part of the group show “Through This to That,” which also features Biggs’s lightboxes from her Kawah Ijen series. For our 2011 twi-ny talk with Biggs, go here.

THE MASTER

Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman form a unique bond in Paul Thomas Anderson’s THE MASTER

THE MASTER (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
Village East Cinema
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
212-529-6799
www.villageeastcinema.com
www.themasterfilm.com

One of America’s most daring and adventurous filmmakers, California native Paul Thomas Anderson, who has dazzled, amazed, challenged, and confused audiences with such previous gems as Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood, has done it again with his latest, The Master. The film is built around the fascinating relationship between Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a WWII vet struggling to fit into the real world after seeing so much violence and death overseas, and the Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the leader of a cultlike organization known as the Cause that believes in past-life regression and invasive questioning known as Processing to help people deal with personal trauma. The Master essentially adopts Quell, intrigued by his distorted outlook on life, making him a member of the family, which also includes his wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), his son, Val (Jesse Plemons), and his daughter, Elizabeth (Ambyr Childers). Inspired by the real-life tale of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology — and incorporating war stories he was told by Jason Robards on the set of Magnolia, elements from the life of John Steinbeck, and discarded scenes from the script for There Will Be Blood — Anderson crafts a, dare we say, masterful cinematic experience built around a pair of extraordinary performances. Phoenix absolutely inhabits the role of Quell, staggering about with an awkward gait, with impossibly deep lines on his face and eyes that seem to be able to look through lead. Hoffman is his equal as the much cooler and calmer spiritual leader, until he is faced with sudden turmoil. The scenes in which the two men sit across from each other, going through a Processing session, are mesmerizing, the most powerful moments to be found onscreen last year. (Both Phoenix and Hoffman received Oscar nods, along with Adams.) But despite the title, the focus remains on Quell, a lost soul searching for somewhere to belong in a changing postwar America. Anderson’s first film in four years, The Master is a bold, audacious work that is as unsettling as it is exhilarating.

MY NAME IS ASHER LEV

Ari Brand stars as the title character being torn in opposing directions in MY NAME IS ASHER LEV

Westside Theatre
407 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 26, $39-$85
www.asherlevtheplay.com

Aaron Posner’s theatrical adaptation of Chaim Potok’s highly regarded 1972 novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, is a moving, powerful story of art and tradition as a young man tries to find his way in a complex world. The story takes place in 1950s Brooklyn, where Asher Lev (Ari Brand) lives with his father, Aryeh (Mark Nelson), and mother, Rivkeh (Jenny Bacon). From the time he was virtually a baby, Asher has shown a natural talent for drawing, but as he grows up and considers becoming a professional artist, his father, who works for the Rebbe (Nelson), the spiritual leader of the community, is deeply disturbed, afraid that Asher will turn his back on Judaism. Meanwhile, his supportive mother goes through a dramatic change when she suffers a tragic loss. But Asher is in fact determined to become a successful painter while also maintaining his responsibilities as a Hasidic Jew, something that is harder and harder to do as he is mentored by older artist (and lapsed Jew) Jacob Kahn (Nelson) and celebrated by Manhattan gallerist Anna Schaeffer (Bacon), for whom he creates a startling work that threatens to tear his family apart. Directed by Long Wharf Theatre artistic director Gordon Edelstein (The Road to Mecca, The Glass Menagerie), My Name Is Asher Lev insightfully captures the tug-of-war going on inside of Asher. Posner, who has previously adapted such novels as Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion and Potok’s The Chosen, tends go get right to the point, without a lot of nuance, but he cleverly steers clear of potential clichés as he develops the characters. Nelson and Bacon are excellent playing a series of roles, while Brand is likable even if a little overly eager and wide-eyed as Asher. At approximately one hundred minutes without intermission, My Name Is Asher Lev is, well, like a good book you can’t put down, an involving tale that raises intriguing questions about family, responsibility, and artistic desire, and it remains ever-relevant today as religions around the world continue to try to balance modern needs with fundamentalist tradition. (On March 28 at 12 noon, the cast will take part in a special conversation at 92YTribeca with New York Drama Critics’ Circle president Adam Feldman and perform excerpts from the play.)

FABIO VIALE: STARGATE

Fabio Viale, “Thank you and Goodbye,” detail, white marble, 2012, and “Infinite,” white marble, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Sperone Westwater
257 Bowery
Tuesday – Saturday through February 23, free
212-999-7337
www.speronewestwater.com
stargate slideshow

A child prodigy, Italian sculptor Fabio Viale has been working in marble since he was sixteen years old. Now thirty-seven, the Cuneo-born Viale is having his first solo show in New York, “Stargate,” a diverse collection of marble works on two floors of Sperone Westwater that are all about juxtaposition and recontextualization, combining the modern world with the art historical. Upon entering the vestibule, visitors are greeted by “Souvenir Gioconda,” a marble casting of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa that appears to be made out of Styrofoam and looking like pieces have been picked off of it. The sculpture is part of Viale’s Souvenir series, which references people’s desire to own great works of art, either in replica, like a souvenir from a gift shop, or by actually taking part of the original, a practice that has become widespread in Italy, with the nose being a particularly favorite target. The gallery’s main space on the first floor contains three statues that form a kind of Pop art trio: “Ahgalla III” is a life-size canoe that Viale has actually taken out on the water; “Stargate” is made up of stacked fruit crates that form a larger crate standing on its side, almost as if a doorway into the commercial world; and “Linea schiacciata” is a twenty-foot-long I-beam that calls into question the very structure of objects. In the back room, bathed in a religious glow, is “Souvenir (Pietá) III,” a gorgeous sculpture of Jesus removed from the arms of his mother, based on Michelangelo’s iconic “Pietá,” instead now spread across a black platform, to be experienced in a completely different way. “I never look back to the past. If you want to run fast, you must never turn around,” the Torino-based Viale tells interviewer Alessandra Galasso in the exhibition catalog. “My main aim is to go beyond tradition. As they are, my sculptures can be interpreted as being academic or nostalgic because they are made of marble, and it is therefore fundamental that I avoid any nostalgic references to the past. For example, when I look at the ‘Pietá,’ I am interested in understanding how Michelangelo managed to achieve certain effects using marble — rather than what this work represents in art history — in order to represent the same semantic values.”

Fabio Viale, “Souvenir (Pietá) III,” white marble, 2006 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The works upstairs continue Viale’s goal of transcending tradition. “Infinite” is a pair of impossibly interlocked white marble Michelin tires cast in great detail. “Anchor” is a fifty-five-inch anchor screw turned into a totem pole. And “Thank you and Goodbye” — made using a computer-controlled robot, while all the other sculptures were made by Viale’s own extremely talented hands — consists of two giant paper bags, one with a pair of eyeholes, the other with a circle for a mouth, on situated on either side of “Infinite,” taking an everyday mundane object and transforming it into something that recalls KKK hoods as well as Klan-like figures found in the work of Philip Guston. A paper bag is also something people use to carry items in, perhaps referencing bags from gift shops where one can buy iconic souvenirs of the Mona Lisa, the “Pietá,” and other classic works of art and take them home, but alas, there are no such objects for sale at Sperone Westwater. “Stargate” is on view through February 23, joined by “A Picture Gallery in the Italian Tradition of the Quadreria (1750 – 1850),” which includes paintings and drawings from the Italian figurative tradition, providing an interesting complement to Viale’s thrilling show.