RUTH ASAWA: A RETROSPECTIVE
Museum of Modern Art
The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through February 7, $17-$30 www.moma.org ruthasawa.com
“To watch you at work on a wire sculpture is to see how a single line is transformed into a network of interconnectedness. It’s an expression of the Heart Sutra: form is emptiness, and emptiness is form,” author, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki writes in a letter to the late Ruth Asawa in the catalog of the outstanding MoMA exhibition “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective.” She continues, “It’s a performance of eternal and infinite nonduality, in which inside is out, and outside is in, and there is no start, no finish, and no separation between these continuous and continually related moments of being.”
“Let the medium express itself.”
On view through February 7, the show features approximately three hundred wire sculptures, bronze casts, drawings, paintings, prints, class notes, a Guggenheim fellowship application, a letter of patent, and public projects. Asawa was born in California in 1926, was sent to an internment camp in Arkansas in 1942 (her parents were Japanese immigrants), studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina with Josef Albers, Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and Buckminster Fuller, and helped create the San Francisco School of the Arts, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010. That background led to a career making wide-ranging works that combine movement, architecture, color, and music into something wholly new. She died in 2013 at the age of eighty-seven.
“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”
Among the pieces to watch out for are the oil on masonite We Five and Fourteen, the ink and crayon on paper Untitled (MI.121, Chair with Straw Bottom), the ink on paper Untitled (PT.128, Plane Tree), clay life masks, a glazed ceramic plate and persimmon, gentle watercolors, carved doors, lithographs of children, the ceramic Untitled (S.806d, Everyone’s Favorite City: The Golden Gate Bridge, the Cable Car, and the San Francisco Victorian House), bronze body parts, a series of flower lithographs from 1965, index cards, sketchbooks, archival photographs, and a wedding ring made for Asawa by Fuller. There are also works by Albers, Hazel Larsen Archer, Elizabeth Jennerjahn, Imogen Cunningham, Ray Johnson, Merry Renk, and Marguerite Wildenhain.
“I am able to take a wire line and go into the air and define the air without stealing it from anyone. A line can enclose and define space while letting the air remain air.”
But mostly there are Asawa’s dazzling wire sculptures, mounted on bases and walls and hanging from above, intricate constructions of interlocking spheres and continuous organic forms within forms based on nature. They cast shadows as you walk around them, and some spin ever so slowly, but they all nimbly dance between positive and negative space.
“An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
On January 29 and 30, Weems will be at Alice Tully Hall for her latest gathering, “Contested Sites of Memory.” Produced in collaboration with Shore Art Advisory and Lincoln Center, it will feature live music, video art screenings, spoken word, and more, with trombonist, composer, sonic shaman, and musical director Craig Harris, British-born Brooklyn-based playwright, radio host, author, and Armah Institute of Emotional Justice CEO Esther Armah, singer, songwriter, producer, and activist Nona Hendryx, Grammy-winning violinist Jennifer Koh, poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, composer, pianist, professor, and writer Vijay Iyer, and recording artist Carl Hancock Rux, and emcee, trumpeter, composer, producer, educator, and social activist Jawwaad Taylor. The focus is on the purpose and meaning of American monuments and how they relate to the past, present, and future of the country.
Born in Portland, Oregon, and based in Syracuse, Weems is best known for such highly influential photographic projects as “The Kitchen Table Series,”“Family Pictures and Stories,”“The Louisiana Project,”“Constructing History,” and “Museums.” A National Academician and MacArthur Genius, she was busy during the pandemic, making the hypnotic short film The Baptism with Rux and hosting a podcast for the Whitney, “Artists Among Us,” in which she spoke with a wide range of artists, curators, and writers, including Glenn Ligon, Bill T. Jones, Lucy Sante, Jessamyn Fiore, An-My Lê, and Adam Weinberg.
“Contested Sites of Memory” should be another unique and fascinating high point in the career of one of America’s genuine treasures, who has been documenting the shape of things for more than four decades.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
On January 26, they are following that up with “We the People: An Assembly of New York Artists,” a town-hall-style gathering at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery where the focus will be more local. The panel features Classical Theatre of Harlem producing artistic director Ty Jones, award-winning playwright and performer Lisa Kron (Fun Home,Well), the People’s Theatre executive artistic director and cofounder Mino Lora, former Creatives Rebuild New York executive director Sarah Calderon, New York Philharmonic vice president of education and community engagement Gary A. Padmore, and playwright and author Sara Farrington (CasablancaBox,A Trojan Woman). Farrington, who writes the indispensable Substack Theater Is Hard, will make her way through the audience with a microphone, giving members of the community the chance to speak their mind for sixty seconds (and maybe more); it is pointed out that “everyone who comes will already know that art is good, so be specific.”
The presentation will be recorded for online viewing, and a detailed report will be sent to Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul. Attendance is free with advance RSVP, although it is all dependent on the weather.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
John Wilson, Maquette for Martin Luther King, Jr. (United States Capitol, Washington, DC, bronze, 1985 (collection of Julia Wilson / courtesy of Martha Richardson Fine Art, Boston / photo by twi-ny/mdr)
WITNESSING HUMANITY: THE ART OF JOHN WILSON
Met Fifth Avenue
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through February 8, $17-$30 www.metmuseum.org
“I wanted people to recognize him, but also I wanted to suggest the intangible energy and strength, this sense of dogged strength he had that allowed him to carry out these impossible campaigns,” John Wilson (1922–2015) said of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “He was able to use his verbal skills to convince masses of ordinary people to do these extraordinary things . . . all of that is what I’m trying to put into a head.”
Several depictions of Dr. King are included in the revelatory and necessary exhibition “Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson,” featuring more than one hundred paintings, lithographs, drawings, sculptures, and children’s books by artist and educator John Wilson, on view at the Met through February 8. Talking about his monumental bust of Dr. King, Wilson further explained, “King’s head is titled forward — not bowed — so that someone standing below will have a kind of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with him. I wanted to show that kind of brooding, contemplative, inner-directed person that’s the essence of the man.”
Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1922, Wilson was driven by community activism against racial injustice, creating works that detailed the Black experience in America. “An artist is ipso facto critical of society . . . constantly dissecting,” he noted. “I want my art to reach people. I want people to get the message that my art has. I want their social attitudes to change as a result of the things I do.”
The exhibition is splendidly curated by the Met’s Jennifer Farrell, Maryland Institute College of Art’s Leslie King-Hammond, and the MFA’s Patrick Murphy and Edward Saywell, with detailed information and lots of powerful quotes by Wilson, who died in Brookline in 2015, leaving behind a remarkable legacy that is finally reaching people, getting the attention it deserves. On January 23 at 6:00, printmaker Karen J Revis will present an “Artists on Artworks” talk on the exhibit, and on February 3 at 6:00, the Met is hosting the free program “A Celebration of John Wilson” in Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium with Lisa Farrington, Lowery Stokes Sims, Derrick Adams, and King-Hammond.
Below are Wilson’s own words accompanying several important works.
John Wilson, study for the mural The Incident, opaque and transparent watercolor, ink, and graphite, 1952 (Yale University Art Gallery [courtesy the Estate of John Woodrow Wilson] / licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
“He put into words what I wanted to express visually, the struggle of African Americans to maintain their human dignity in an oppressive world,” Wilson said of Richard Wright.
John Wilson, My Brother, oil on panel, 1942 (Smith College Museum of Art / courtesy the Estate of John Wilson)
“I am a Black artist. I am a Black person. To me, my experience as a Black person has given me a special way of looking at the world and a special identity with others who experience some injustices. . . . Themes I have dealt with are not because I sat down and said I wanted to make a political statement but because of emotional experiences.”
John Wilson, Streetcar Scene, lithograph, 1945 (the Metropolitan Museum of Art / courtesy the Estate of John Wilson)
“I drew scenes of the world around me which reflected the sense of alienation I felt as a Black artist in a segregated world. I saw no examples of art that depicted the people and the realities of the Black neighborhood I lived in.”
John Wilson, Adolescence, lithograph, 1943 (courtesy the Estate of John Wilson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Adolescence is “an imaginative interpretation of the street I lived on . . . [an attempt to express] the bewilderment and search for understanding of a Negro boy growing up in the midst of the inconsistencies, the squalor, and the cramped poverty-stricken confusion of life in a typical North American Negro ghetto. . . . I don’t even know if I was conscious of that boy in the foreground as a self-portrait or not. But I look back on it, [and] clearly it’s a self-portrait.”
“The aim of the Mexican muralist movement was to be spokespeople for the common man. They wanted to create works of art expressing the reality of the forgotten ones, revealing their history, their celebrations, and struggles. . . . Through Mexican art I began to experience a sense of how to depict my reality.”
John Wilson, Oracle, ink, chalk, and collage on paper, 1965 (courtesy the Estate of John Wilson / licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
“As a Black art student in 1940–41, I became increasingly aware that the illustrations in art history books and the great works in this museum which were statements of profound truth and beauty did not include images of Black people. By omission this seemed to be saying that Black people were not significant. I lived in a world in which the only public images of Blacks were stereotypical, dehumanized caricatures. These were the only images that I saw of Blacks in the newspapers and films and all public media of that time.”
John Wilson, Deliver Us from Evil, lithograph, 1943 (courtesy the Estate of John Wilson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
“I was an idealistic young African American art student, struggling to find a way to express my fears and anger about the oppression of African American people in America. For me, the ruthless, efficient, invincible German storm troopers became a symbol of all-powerful forces of oppression, in which individuals were modeled into collective killing machines, fueled by ideologies of hate and racial superiority. I identified with the victims of this [Nazi] army, and [War Machine] is my attempt to make a graphic image of the terror engendered by these troops.”
“This business of the terror that was used to keep Black people in their place really worked. I wasn’t born in the South, but the South was a microcosm. There was actual physical lynching in the North. . . . I heard someone make a speech once in which he said, ‘Well, this lynching and the threat of lynching is what keeps Black people in their place.’”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Juxtapose brings the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell to life (photo by Leah Huete)
JUXTAPOSE
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 25, $44 www.59e59.org
“Shadow boxes become poetic theater or settings wherein are metamorphosed the elements of a childhood pastime,” Nyack-born artist Joseph Cornell wrote. “The fragile, shimmering globules become the shimmering but more enduring planets — a connotation of moon and tides — the association of water less subtle, as when driftwood pieces make up a proscenium to set off the dazzling white of sea foam and billowy cloud crystallized in a pipe of fancy.”
Or, as a character declares in Happenstance Theater’s Juxtapose: A Theatrical Shadow Box, which advertises itself as being inspired by the art of Cornell and the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Jacques Tati, “Sacre bleu! What a mess.”
You can say that again.
You have to look hard to find those art and film references in the final product, a confusing seventy-five minutes in which five actors wander around an abstract rooming house doing odd, repetitive things that don’t make much sense, psychologically or geographically. They consist of an unnamed collector (Mark Jaster), concierge Rosabelle (Sabrina Selma Mandell), Spilleth, a bird-woman who falls from the sky and through the roof (Gwen Grastorf), Étoile, a ballerina (Sarah Olmsted Thomas), and Blue, a childlike juggler-magician (Alex Vernon). The set and props, by Vernon and codirectors Jaster and Mandell, are centered by a large, empty white frame that is occasionally filled with various objects, from a laundry clothing line and a ladder to a window and a white scrim on which a circular image is projected. The stage also includes an old phonograph, a coat rack, a wrapped package, a conch shell, and a globe. Étoile makes weird noises when she locks and unlocks her door. Blue bounces a ball. The collector toys with his hat. Rosabelle puts on a scratchy record. Étoile tries on a new costume. Spilleth — well, I’m not sure what she does.
Among the Cornell works that served as inspiration were Observatory: Corona Borealis Casement,Toward the Blue Peninsula, and Andromeda: Grand Hôtel de l’Observatoire, but the show never fully captures the surreal nature of Cornell’s constructions, the quirky atmosphere of Jeunet’s films (Amélie,Delicatessen), or the comic genius of Tati’s Monsieur Hulot (Mon Oncle,Playtime). However, the soundtrack is a highlight, featuring songs by Irving Berlin, J. S. Bach, Hoagy Carmichael, George Frideric Handel, and Jacques Offenbach.
When the pandemic lockdown took effect, Happenstance reimagined the in-progress piece as Juxtapose Tenement, an interactive website in which you click on each character’s key to enter their unique shadow box and follow their narratives. I found that far more charming, inventive, and engaging than what is brought to life onstage, which failed to stir the audience the night I saw the play.
If this whets your appetite for more Cornell online, it’s worth checking out The House on Utopia Parkway, Wes Anderson’s Paris re-creation of the artist’s Queens studio; interestingly, Cornell never left America, and he traveled outside New York only to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Elevator Repair Service’s Ulysses is a highlight of the January performance festival season (photo by Maria Baranova)
Every January, many of us begin the new year with resolutions to make positive changes in our lives; I find the best way to start that is by checking out the latest in cutting-edge and experimental theater, music, dance, opera, film, and other forms of entertainment. Performance festivals abound this month, at tiny venues you’ve never heard of, places you’ve always wanted to go to but haven’t yet, and well-known spaces you haven’t been to in years.
You now have the chance to fill those voids at such festivals as Under the Radar, Prototype, Exponential, Out-Front!, Live Artery, Winter Jazzfest, New Ear, the Fire This Time, and PhysFestNYC, none of them costing nearly as much as a Broadway show. As sound designer Mark Anthony Thompson says in the below video, “Get out of your house and be with people.”
Here are only some of the highlights of this exhilarating time to try something that might be outside your comfort zone — or right up your alley.
UNDER THE RADAR: IN HONOR OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday, January 7–18, $35 www.nytw.org utrfest.org
Obie-winning actor, playwright, rapper, and director Roger Guenveur Smith has staged such solo shows as A Huey P. Newton Story, about the founder of the Black Panthers, Frederick Douglass Now, in which he embodies the nineteenth-century abolitionist and orator, and Juan and John, which explored the real-life 1965 fight between Major League pitcher Juan Marichal and catcher John Roseboro. For the 2026 Under the Radar festival, he will perform In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, about his friendship and collaboration with the highly influential Brooklyn-born artist and musician who died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven. Smith and Basquiat met during their LA club years in the 1980s; Smith created the character of Smiley, inspired by Basquiat, for the 1989 Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing. The sixty-minute piece features live sound design by Mark Anthony Thompson; the January 8 and 15 performances will be followed by a Q&A.
UNDER THE RADAR: KANJINCHO
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 8–11, $63 japansociety.org utrfest.org
Yuichi Kinoshita reimagines the 1840 Kabuki classic Kanjincho (“The Subscription List”) as a contemporary hip-hop and pop-culture-infused theatrical experience, making its North American premiere at Japan Society January 8–11 as part of Under the Radar. The eighty-minute show is set in the twelfth century, around the Genpei War, a civil clash between the Taira and Minamoto clans. The work is performed by the Kyoto-based Kinoshita Kabuki, all dressed in black, and directed by Sugio Kunihara on a runway-like hanamachi (“flower path”) platform that juts into the audience, with the first two rows on the stage itself. The story concerns war, betrayal, race, and class as refugees attempt to cross borders, giving it a modern-day relevance. The company’s previous works include Musume Dojoji,Shinju Ten no Amijima, and Sannin Kichisa. The 7:30 show on January 8 will be followed by a reception; the 7:30 performance on January 9 will conclude with an artist Q&A. Ticket holders are invited to visit the immersive exhibition “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries” with complementary same-day admission.
UNDER THE RADAR: ALL THAT FALL
Mabou Mines@122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
January 8–26 www.maboumines.org utrfest.org
“It is our desire to create, as Beckett says, ‘a text written to come out of the dark,’” director JoAnne Akalaitis says about Mabou Mines’s tenth production of a work by Samuel Beckett, the absurdist black comedy All That Fall, following such presentations as Cascando,Happy Days,Play, and Worstward Ho over the course of the company’s fifty-six-year history. The seventy-five-minute one-act radio play will be performed by Randy Danson, Jesse Lenat, Steven Rattazzi, Tony Torn, Tẹmídayọ Amay, Wendy vanden Heuvel, Lila Blue, and Sylvan Schneiderman as part of Under the Radar. “What have I done to deserve all this, what, what?” the frail Mrs Maddy Rooney moans to bill broker Mr Tyler, later adding, “Have you no respect for misery?” I saw Trevor Nunn’s splendid version in 2013 starring Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins and can’t wait to see what Akalaitis (Beckett’s First Love,BAD NEWS! I was there . . .) has in store for us this time around, with a set by Thomas Dunn, lighting by Jennifer Tipton, sound by Bruce Odland, costumes by Andreea Mincic, and projections by Jeri Coppola. Expect the unexpected.
Founded in 2005, “Winter Jazzfest celebrates the music as a living entity, wherein history collides with the future in every note. Creative improvisation in the digital age continues to stimulate thought and emotion of its listeners, embracing innovation, defying instrumental boundaries and the old cliches of ‘What is Jazz?’” The festival runs January 8–13 and is highlighted by the Manhattan Marathon on January 9, boasting forty-five shows at Le Poisson Rouge, Nublu, DROM, City Winery, Close Up, Zinc, and the Bitter End, featuring Nels Cline’s “Songs from Lovers,” the Getdown, James Carter, David Murray, Lady Blackbird, and many more.
Drita Kabashi stars in Sara Farrington’s Euripides adaptation at the Tank (photo by Carol Ostrow)
APAP: A TROJAN WOMAN
Theater 98 at the Tank
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
January 10-11, $23-$42 apap365.org/conference thetanknyc.org
“A Trojan Woman exists inside an act of modern warfare, inspired by an early moment in the Russian war against Ukraine that affected me deeply,” playwright Sara Farrington explains in a note about her adaptation of Euripides’s 415 BCE Greek tragedy The Trojan Women. Originally performed at the outdoor Theatro Attikou Aldous/Katina Paxinou Attica Grove Theater in Athens, Greece, in July 2023, A Trojan Woman will be at the Tank January 10-11 as part of the APAP (Association of Performing Arts Professionals) festival, directed by Meghan Finn and starring Drita Kabashi as Irina; the costumes are by Suzanne Bocanegra, with video by Ana Veselic. Farrington has previously collaborated with her husband, Reid Farrington, on such productions as BrandoCapote,CasablancaBox, and Dora Maar, always providing a unique take on the world and theater itself; Sara is currently working on Dr. Uncanny Presents: Moreau ’96, a musical based on the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. She is also the author of the popular Theater Is Hard. on Substack.
Ian Andrew Askew and Johnnie Cruise Mercer will present world premieres at Out-FRONT! Fest (photos by Maria Baranova and Johnnie Cruise Mercer)
OUT-FRONT! FESTIVAL: IAN ANDREW AND JOHNNIE CRUISE MERCER
Judson Memorial Church
243 Thompson St. at 55 Washington Square South
Saturday, January 10, and Sunday, January 11, free with advance RSVP (suggested donation $28.52) pioneersgoeast.org www.judson.org
Pioneers Go East Collective’s multidisciplinary Out-FRONT! Fest “champions the voices of LGBTQ and Feminist artists for a lively exchange of art and culture.” Curated by Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Remi Harris, Philip Treviño, and Joyce Isabelle, the 2026 edition runs January 5–11, with works by such performers as Dominica Greene, Suzzanne Ponomarenko, Alexa Grae, Sugar Vendil, Jo Warren, Owen Prum, and Corentin JPM Leven at Judson Memorial Church. On January 10 and 11, Ian Andrew Askew will present the world premiere of SLAMDANCE punk lessons, which explores sociopolitical aspects of moshing and violence, followed by the world premiere of Johnnie Cruise Mercer’s Mercies of a Butterfly, “a movement allegory about resilience.” All tickets are free with suggested donation and are going fast.
Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber restage David Gordon’s 1975 duet in original SoHo loft (b&w photo by Babette Mangolte; color photo by Daqi Fang)
LIVE ARTERY: TIMES FOUR / DAVID GORDON: 1975/2025
New York Live Arts / Pick Up Performance Co. Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts.
January 11–13, $33.85 newyorklivearts.org
Two of my favorite dancer-choreographers, Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber, have teamed up for Times Four / David Gordon: 1975/2025, an adaptation of David Gordon’s 1975 duet with his wife and muse, Valda Setterfield, that will run January 11–13 as part of New York Live Arts’ Live Artery festival. The work will be presented in the same SoHo loft where Obie and Bessie winners Gordon and Setterfield debuted it fifty years ago; Times Four has not been seen in its entirety since then. In 2021, Gordon asked Cardona, who is married to playwright Ain Gordon, David and Valda’s son, if he wanted to perform something from his archives. Cardona was instantly interested in Times Four, an unusual, relatively unknown piece, but Gordon rejected that. However, after both Gordon and Setterfield died, the former in 2022 at the age of eighty-five, the latter in 2023 at eighty-eight, Cardona decided to resurrect Times Four in their honor. “I think that they, especially Valda, would be very happy that we are doing this piece and that we are performing something,” Cardona told choreographer, dancer, director, and NYLA head Bill T. Jones in an online interview. Cardona (Interventions,The Set Up) and Lieber (Rude World,Gloria) reconstructed the piece from a video rehearsal, Setterfield’s handwritten notes, photographs, and other ephemera, as no footage of the full original duet, which is done in silence, exists. The audience will sit in folding chairs on all four sides of the loft.
Eric Berryman shares African American toasts in Wooster Group’s Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (photo by Marika Kent)
UNDER THE RADAR: GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME
Joe’s Pub, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Monday, January 12, and Tuesday, January 13, $36 utrfest.org publictheater.org
In 2019, the Wooster Group production of The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” a Record Album Interpretation earned a Drama Desk nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience for Eric Berryman’s multimedia adaptation of a 1965 LP compiled by Bruce Jackson, consisting of performances by inmates of color on segregated agricultural prison farms. Writer and actor Berryman and director Kate Valk followed that up with Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, which is having an encore presentation at Joe’s Pub as part of Under the Radar. This time Berryman dives deep into Jackson’s 1974 book and 1976 disc, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, a collection of folktales known as toasts, made for heroes and antiheroes in the Black storytelling canon. The tales are filled with tawdry sex and extreme violence — bullets are flying everywhere — but as funny as they are, there’s also an underlying sense of discomfort, particularly with a primarily white audience, as the stories contain stereotypes reminiscent of minstrelsy. Berryman compares over-the-top characters to Greek myths, where such figures as Hercules and Jason “would do stupid shit because they knew it would help them uh, uh, more quickly achieve kleos, and get kleos . . . A community creates the heroes that they need.” Berryman (Primary Trust,Toni Stone) is not just sharing old fables but exploring Black identity then and now. At one point he digresses into a discussion of his own name, how disappointed he is to be anchored with the plain “Eric” when he has relatives called Qasim, Idris, Indira, Akeem, Alenka, and Adia. (He does note that there is a Gary but does not share that it’s his uncle, Grammy-winning jazz saxophonist Gary Bartz.) The show concludes with the all-time favorite “Stackolee,” a tale of murder and mayhem that has been recorded in different versions by Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Wilbert Harrison, Long Cleve Reed, Lloyd Price, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, among others, its familiarity spotlighting the centrality rather than the marginalization of the Black experience in American popular culture.
PhysFestNYC: BILL BOWERS: IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING
Stella Adler Center for the Arts
65 Broadway
Tuesday, January 13, $20, 7:30 & 9:00 www.physfestnyc.org
PhysFestNYC was started in 2024 as “a community-focused festival that celebrates, enriches, and envisions our field of physical theater . . . [which] tends to be experimental, innovative, and genre-breaking.” The third annual event, taking place January 8–18 at the Stella Adler Center for the Arts, consists of workshops, panel discussions, masterclasses, and live performances. On January 13, Bill Bowers will present the one-man show It Goes without Saying, which delves into his life and career from his childhood in Montana to studying with Marcel Marceau and appearing in several Broadway productions.
Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, Vin Knight, and Scott Shepherd rehearse for NYC premiere of ERS’s Ulysses (photo by Joan Marcus)
UNDER THE RADAR: ULYSSES
Martinson Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
January 13 – February 15, $109 publictheater.org utrfest.org
Elevator Repair Service follows up its farewell performance of the eight-hour Gatz at the Public with its adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, clocking in at a mere two hours and forty minutes. Directed by John Collins, who has previously tackled such literary biggies for ERS as The Sound and the Fury and The Sun Also Rises in addition to Gatz, the show stars Dee Beasnael, Kate Benson, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, Stephanie Weeks, and codirector and dramaturg Scott Shepherd, with sets by dots, costumes by Enver Chakartash, and projections by Matthew Deinhart. Joyce is having a bit of a renaissance onstage recently, with a rare revival of Joyce’s only play, Exiles, last winter and Colin Murphy’s The United States vs. Ulysses at the Irish Arts Center last spring; ERS’s Ulysses, part of Under the Radar, promises to be the best of the bunch.
Writer Jay Stull (The Capables,Rantoul and Die) and director Jillian Jetton have put together a fantastic cast for my utopias, running at the Loading Dock Theatre as part of the Exponential Festival: Brittany Bradford, Ugo Chukwu, Fernando Gonzalez, Melissa Hurst, Jon Norman Schneider, Colleen Werthmann, and Julyana Soelistyo. The show is about a kind of postapocalyptic nightmare in New York City as a group of survivors wonder what the future holds.
Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson stage first revival of Richard Foreman’s What to wear at BAM (photo by Scott Groller)
PROTOTYPE: WHAT TO WEAR
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
January 15-18 www.bam.org www.prototypefestival.org
“Don’t finish what you start,” reads one of ninety-four notecards collected in experimental theater maestro Richard Foreman’s posthumously published book No Title. Fortunately, Foreman, the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater who died last January at the age of eighty-seven, finished much of what he started, including more than eighty plays, operas, films, and books. The seven-time Obie winner and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow turned the theater and opera community inside out and upside down with such influential avant-garde works as Sophia = (Wisdom) Part 3: The Cliffs,Pandering to the Masses, and Elephant Steps. In the past year and a half, Object Collection presented the world premiere of Foreman’s Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, the Wooster Collective staged 1987’s Symphony of Rats, and the Segal Center Film Festival on Theater and Performance held a retrospective of Foreman’s movies and videos. Big Dance Theater’s Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson are now reviving, for the first time since its premiere, Foreman and Michael Gordon’s 2006 surreal post-rock opera What to wear, running January 15–18 at the Harvey as part of the Prototype and BAM’s Next Wave festivals. Foreman wrote the libretto and directed the original; Gordon composed the music, which will be performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars. The cast is highlighted by St. Vincent, sopranos Sarah Frei and Sophie Delphis, mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn, and tenor Morgan Mastrangelo, along with an ensemble of more than a dozen vocalists and dancers.
NEW EAR FESTIVAL: NIGHT 02
Fridman Gallery
169 Bowery between Delancey & Broome Sts.
Saturday, January 17, $22.46–$43.57, 8:00 withfriends.events
The Fridman Gallery’s annual New Ear multimedia festival showcasing “time-based art in all its forms” is highlighted by an impressive roster of performers on January 17, consisting of dancer and choreographer Jade Manns, artist and biohacker Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and the live debut of the trio of sound artist Stephen Vitellio, Fugazy drummer Brendan Canty, and multi-instrumentalist and producer-engineer Hahn Rowe, supporting their sophomore LP, Second. Talullah Calderwood, Sue Huang, and Konjur Collective open the three-day fest on January 16, while La Frae Sci, Ben Shirken x Dorothy Carlos, and Lucky Dragons close things out on January 18.
Fire This Time fest features ten-minute works by six playwrights
THE FIRE THIS TIME FESTIVAL: TEN-MINUTE PLAY PROGRAM
The Apollo Stages at the Victoria
233 West 125th St. between Frederick Douglass & Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvds.
January 23–31, $51.25 www.firethistimefestival.com
Founded in 2009 by Kelley Nicole Girod, the Fire This Time Festival, now in its seventeenth year, “provides a platform for early career playwrights of African and African American descent.” The 2026 iteration comprises six ten-minute shows at the Apollo Stages at the Victoria: Teniia Micazia Brown’s Everything But–, Preston Crowder’s Black to Save the Day, Mo Holmes’s Clumsy, Naomi Lorrain’s DNR, DeLane McDuffie’s Goose, and Donathan Walters’s White Diamond.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Who:Jimin Seo,Diana SeoHyung What: An evening of special readings Where: Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space, 529 West Twentieth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves. When: Wednesday, December 17, free with advance RSVP, 6:00 Why: “I am a child of nothing / that is to say / I am a child of books and the voice they sang / into my body, and like a ghost stole my voice / to sing whatever they have to say to you / in my first language, in every language, not for sale, not for sale, 사라지는 팔짜,” Jimin Seo writes in his debut poetry collection, September 2024’s OSSIA. On December 17 at 6:00, the Seoul-born, New York City–based poet will be at Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space in Chelsea to participate in a special evening of readings in conjunction with the exhibition “Park Hyunki: Pass Through the City,” which features video and photographic installations, alongside archival material, by the late Korean minimalist video pioneer who passed away in 2000 at the age of fifty-seven. It was originally presented in 1981 on a fifty-foot-long trailer truck moving through the streets of Daegu in southeast Korea. Jimin will read from Park’s writings in Korean as well as from OSSIA. He will be joined by writer and translator Diana SeoHyung, who will share her translation of Park’s text in English. Admission is free with advance RSVP.
“It may have been vague then, but at that time, I wholeheartedly put my energy into moving towards anything but technology. I became fully absorbed in and moved towards various facets of our past – our images, the videos of our past, and their paradigms,” Park wrote in 1978. “Once I decided to see it this way – our ways, my ways – I felt at ease, as there was no need to consider or worry about our neighbors. Therefore, that is when I began to experiment by using past footage with ponds, rivers, and springs as the stage of my work, near the Nakdong river.” The gallery exhibition continues through February 14.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
