this week in art

MODERN MONDAYS: AN EVENING WITH CAO FEI

Cao Fei’s HAZE AND FOG is part of Modern Mondays presentation at MoMA on April 4

Who: Cao Fei, Klaus Biesenbach
What: Modern Mondays presentation of films and conversation
Where: MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., 212-708-9400
When: Monday, April 4, $8-$12, 7:00
Why: As an appetizer to her first U.S. solo museum show, opening April 20 at MoMA PS1, Beijing-based Chinese artist Cao Fei will be at MoMA in Midtown on April 4 for the Modern Mondays presentation “An Evening with Cao Fei.” The program features excerpts from several of her films, including 2004’s Cosplayers, 2006’s Whose Utopia?, 2007-11’s RMB City, 2013’s Haze and Fog, and 2014’s La Town. In addition, Fei will sit down with MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, who organized the exhibition, for a conversation about her work, which is part of a young generation of Chinese artists concerned with contemporary sociocultural and economic challenges in a rapidly changing China. “I try to find different ways to connect and interact with society,” the thirty-seven-year-old multimedia artist has said. “At the same time, I am trying to construct a new model of society.” The Modern Mondays series continues April 11 with Rosa Barba, April 18 with Tony Conrad, and April 25 with Lynette Wallworth.

FIRST SATURDAY: A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

Maya Azucena will perform for free at Brooklyn Museum First Saturday program on April 1

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, April 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum celebrates spring with the April edition of its free First Saturday multidisciplinary program. There will be live music by Falu, the Brown Rice Family, and Maya Azucena; a dance performance and workshop by Earl Mosley’s Diversity of Dance; poetry readings by Desiree Bailey and Laura Lamb Brown; screenings of Guy Reid’s Planetary, followed by a talkback, and Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon’s BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, followed by a talkback with Gordon and Imani Uzuri; an art workshop led by Steven and William Ladd for a community mural project in City Point; a dance break hosted by WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money podcast; and pop-up gallery talks. In addition, the galleries are open late so you can check out such exhibitions as “Stephen Powers: Coney Island Is Still Dreamland (to a Seagull),’” “This Place,” and “Agitprop!”

TICKET GIVEAWAY: LEONARD NIMOY’S VINCENT

vincent

LEONARD NIMOY’S VINCENT
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 5, $59-$89
starrynighttheater.com/vincent

Leonard Nimoy lived long and prospered before passing away last February at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind a legacy that includes two children, two marriages of more than twenty years, major roles on and off Broadway (Equus, Fiddler on the Roof, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and this little television and movie franchise known as Star Trek. But one of his most important personal projects was a one-man show called Vincent, which he adapted from Phillip Stephens’s Van Gogh and toured in beginning in 1981. In the play, Vincent’s younger brother, Theo, talks about life with his older sibling, an artist whose talent and innovation was only recognized after his death. The thoroughly researched text is based on hundreds of letters between the brothers; Nimoy also traveled to Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers while preparing the show. The play is now being revived by the Starry Night Theatre Co. starting April 1 at the Theatre at St. Clement’s. Company artistic director James Briggs plays Theo, with Dr. Brant Pope directing. “Last week when we buried my brother, there was so much I wanted to say, I couldn’t do it,” Theo says at the start. “You see, I simply couldn’t speak. I didn’t express myself. It’s been a burden on my soul . . . what I wanted to say and I couldn’t . . . what I needed to say, what you need to hear. So I thank you for this second opportunity.”

James Briggs stars as Theo van Gogh in revival of Leonard Nimoy’s VINCENT at the Theatre at St. Clement’s

James Briggs stars as Theo van Gogh in revival of Leonard Nimoy’s VINCENT, coming to the Theatre at St. Clement’s

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Vincent begins previews April 1 and opens April 7 at Theatre at St. Clement’s, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and favorite van Gogh painting to contest@twi-ny.com by Wednesday, March 30, at 3:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.

RELATION: A PERFORMANCE RESIDENCY BY VIJAY IYER

Resident artist Vijay Iyer inaugurates the Met Breuer with “Relation” (photo by Paula Lobo)

The Met Breuer
Tony and Amie James Gallery, lobby
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 31, free with suggested museum admission of $12-$25
212-731-1675
www.metmuseum.org
vijay-iyer.com

Jazz musician and native New Yorker Vijay Iyer continues his stint as the Met Breuer’s inaugural resident artist with one more week of specially curated events, through March 31. Iyer, a pianist and composer who has released such albums as Tragicomic, Historicity, and Mutations, has put together a wide range of artists who will perform with him or present their own works all day in the lobby gallery. “Relation” also features the sound installation “Fit (The Battle of Jericho)” by Mendi + Keith Obadike, which is activated in between live performances. For the final week, Iyer will perform with Heems (Himanshu Suri), Rafiq Bhatia, and Kassa Overall (THUMS UP) on March 25 at 2:00 and 3:15 and Prasanna and Nitin Mitta (Tirtha) at 6:30, with Liberty Ellman and HPrizm on March 26 in the morning and Grégoire Maret and Okkyung Lee in the afternoon, with Marcus Gilmore and Matt Brewer (Trioing) on March 27 in the morning and Gilmore, Brewer, Elena Pinderhughes, and Adam O’Farrill in the afternoon, and with Craig Taborn (Radically Unfinished) on March 29. Other performers include Courtney Bryan, Brandee Younger, and Fieldwork with Tyshawn Sorey and Steve Lehman. In addition, Prashant Bhargava’s captivating thirty-five-minute film, Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, will be shown every day. Bhargava and Craig Marsden, armed with DSLR cameras, capture the Indian festival of spring known as Holi, celebrated with bonfires, dancing, and wild crowds dousing each other with vividly colored powdered dyes and water. The film was commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts in honor of the centennial of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” so Iyer asked Bhargava to collaborate on a work about the Hindu ritual, built in twelve arcs that alternate between footage of the real Holi taking place in Mathura and a fictional imagining of the myth of Radha and Krishna, in which actress Anna George portrays an erotically charged version of Princess Radha, waiting to make love with Krishna. Divided into sections called “Adoration” and “Transcendence,” the film, which gets its title from a traditional Hindu greeting, is a visual and aural delight, with a beautiful score by Iyer. Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi screens daily at 12:45 and 4:00 in the gallery, which is arranged with two rows of chairs on three sides of a narrow horizontal space; the setup works well for the music, but some of the seats do not offer prime viewing for the film.

KING AND COUNTRY: SHAKESPEARE’S GREAT CYCLE OF KINGS

David Tennant stars as Richard II in Royal Shakespeare Company production at BAM (photo by Keith Pattison)

David Tennant stars as Richard II in Royal Shakespeare Company production coming to BAM (photo by Keith Pattison)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
March 24 – May 1, $30-$200
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In a letter to his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton, in 1800, Admiral Horatio Nelson wrote, “My greatest happiness is to serve my gracious King and Country, and I am envious only of glory; for if it be a sin to covet glory, I am the most offending soul alive.” BAM references that famous quote in its glorious program “King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings,” and it would be a sin not to covet it. In honor of the quadricentennial of the passing of William Shakespeare, who died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, BAM has teamed up with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Ohio State University to present the Henriad, four Shakespeare plays in repertory at the BAM Harvey over the course of thirty-nine days, concentrating on Kings Henry IV and V. All four works are directed by RSC artistic director Gregory Doran, with sets by Stephen Brimson Lewis, lighting by Tim Mitchell, music by Paul English, sound by Martin Slavin, movement by Michael Ashcroft, and fights by Terry King. David Tennant (Doctor Who, Broadchurch, Jessica Jones), who played the title character in Doran’s 2008 staging of Hamlet with Patrick Stewart as his father, has the lead role in Richard II, with Julian Glover as John of Gaunt, Leigh Quinn as the queen, Oliver Ford Davies as the duke of York, Sarah Parks as the duchess of York, and Jasper Britton as John of Gaunt’s son, later to become Henry IV. Britton continues his role in Henry IV, Part I, and Henry IV, Part II, with Alex Hassell as Prince Hal, Martin Bassindale as Peto and Prince John, Antony Sher (Doran’s longtime partner) as Sir John Falstaff, Parks as Mistress Quickly, and Sam Marks as Ned Poins. And Hassell then takes the throne in Henry V, with Jim Hooper as the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Thorp as King Charles VI of France, Jane Lapotaire as Queen Isobel, Quinn as lady-in-waiting Alice, and Marks as the French constable.

HENRY IV, PART I is one of four RSC plays running at BAM through May 1 (photo by Keith Pattison)

“The Henriad plays are a contemplation of power and leadership — how they are acquired, maintained, and lost,” BAM publicist Christian Barclay writes in a program essay. “A host of historical and fictional characters — both high- and lowborn — revolve around the monarchs in shifting alliances. . . . The Henriad is a study of the difficult personal and ethical choices that accompany political life.” In conjunction with the plays, the Mark Morris Dance Center is hosting the master class “Embodying Shakespeare” on April 5 with Owen Horsley, Hassell, and Quinn ($25, 2:00), Doran will be in conversation with Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro on April 7 at BAMcafé ($20, 6:00), Neil Kutner, Ryan Gastelum, and Ben Tyreman will participate in the seminar “Behind the Scenes: King and Country” at BAM Fisher on April 20 ($35, 5:00), astronomer Summer Ash will lead guided tours of the sky with telescopes in “A Look at the Stars: Shakespeare and the Cosmos” April 15-17 on the BAM Fisher rooftop terrace (free, 8:30 or 9:30), and the exhibition “King and Country: Treasures from the Folger,” consisting of rare paper artifacts from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, will be on view at the Harvey during the run of the performances. Tickets for the shows and the special events are going quickly, so act now if you want to catch any or all of what should be a glorious Shakespeare spectacle to covet.

BETTY TOMPKINS: WORDS ON WOMEN

Betty Tompkins, “A Woman’s Greatest Weapon Is Her Tongue,” acrylic on canvas, 2015

Who: American artist Betty Tompkins
What: Performance piece in conjunction with Women’s History Month and the exhibition “WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories: 1,000 Paintings by Betty Tompkins”
Where: The FLAG Art Foundation, 545 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., tenth floor, 212-206-0220
When: Wednesday, March 23, free with RSVP, 6:00
Why: Washington, DC, native Betty Tompkins is best known for her controversial, large-scale photorealistic paintings, drawings, photographs, and video of intimate sexual acts. On March 23 at 6:00, she will be at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea for the performance “Words on WOMEN,” held in conjunction with her exhibition there, which continues through May 14. The exhibition consists of one thousand small-scale, hand-painted acrylic on canvas works that feature words and phrases used to describe women, including “Total Babe,” “Epic Bitch,” “Girly Girl,” “Arm Candy,” “Put a Bag over Her Head,” and “Will She Ever Shut Up?” (In her request for words and phrases from others, Tompkins explained, “They can be affectionate [honey], pejorative [bitch], slang, descriptive, etc.”) On March 23, Tompkins will be at the Chelsea gallery with fifty friends and colleagues, each of whom will select twenty words from the paintings to “speak, yell, sing, and perform however they wish.” The performance, which should be empowering as well as scary and funny, will begin at 6:45. Tompkins will be back at FLAG on April 6 for an artist talk with curator and writer Alison Gingeras.

EMOTIONS / EMOTICONS: REBECCA

Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier play lovers haunted by the past in REBECCA

CABARET CINEMA: REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, March 18, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The opening line of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood picture, instantly sends chills down the spine of anyone who has seen the film or read the book on which it is based, Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of the same name. The line is spoken in voice-over by the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), so haunted by the first Mrs. de Winter, the recently deceased Rebecca, that she never even gets a first name, depriving her of her own identity. While serving as a paid companion to snooty wealthy matron Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates) on a trip to Monte Carlo, the orphaned young woman meets the dapper but dark Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), an elegant widower who takes a liking to her. Following a whirlwind courtship, they are married, and Maxim takes his mousey bride to his castlelike Cornwall estate, Manderley, where she is constantly compared to and overshadowed by the ghost of Rebecca, idolized as the perfect woman by the large staff, in particular the grim housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who relentlessly tortures the second Mrs. de Winter. “You wouldn’t think she’d been gone so long, would you?” Mrs. Danvers tells her. “Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor, I fancy I hear her just behind me. That quick light step, I couldn’t mistake it anywhere. It’s not only in this room, it’s in all the rooms in the house. I can almost hear it now.” But just as the second Mrs. de Winter finally tries to establish herself — “I am Mrs. de Winter now” she declares to Mrs. Danvers — Maxim shares a shocking truth about the first Mrs. de Winter that turns her world inside out.

The second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) is mercilessly tortured by Manderley housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson)

Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of two (for Best Picture and Best Black and White Cinematography, by George Barnes), Rebecca is a gripping Gothic thriller about fear, obsession, love, identity, and memory. Although the film is filled with Hitchcockian touches, producer David O. Selznick had a large hand in the final version, reediting and supervising several reshoots to keep closer to du Maurier’s novel. From the script, written by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison based on Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan’s adaptation, to Franz Waxman’s dramatic score, Joseph B. Platt and Howard Bristol’s interiors, and the uncredited costumes, Rebecca is a masterpiece of precision, with fascinating undertones of incest (Olivier is more like a father to Fontaine than a lover; George Sanders plays a cad who is supposedly a cousin of Rebecca’s) and lesbianism (Mrs. Danvers’s devotion to Rebecca appears to be more than just that of a loyal employee). It’s also hard not to watch it today without thinking of such later 1940s films as Gaslight and Citizen Kane, especially that ending. An oft-delayed, financially troubled Broadway musical version has been in the works for several years, promising “the Manderley Experience,” but it’s going to be tough to top du Maurier’s book and Hitchcock’s film when it comes to telling this multilayered story of mystery and romance. Rebecca, which also stars Nigel Bruce as Maxim’s brother, Giles, Gladys Cooper as Giles’s wife, Beatrice, Reginald Denny as the manager of Manderley, and Leo G. Carroll as Rebecca’s doctor, is screening March 18 at 9:30 in the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Emotions / Emoticons” and will be introduced by Caitlin Leffel and Jacob Lehman, authors of The Best Things to Do in New York: 1001 Ideas. The nine-week festival is being held in conjunction with the Brainwave series “Emotion,” with each film focused on a different state of mind. Rebecca is happiness (happiness?!?); future screenings include Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (anger), Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (love), Charles Chaplin’s The Kid (sadness), and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (disgust).