A CELEBRATION OF 15 YEARS IN SOHO
The Puffin Room
435 Broome St. between Broadway & Crosby St.
Saturday, April 3, $5, 6:00 – 9:00
212-343-2881
www.puffinroom.org
After fifteen years, the Puffin Room will be saying goodbye to SoHo, but not without one last send-off. On Saturday night, their final exhibition, “The Last Loft Show,” which will indeed be the last show in the loft space, kicks off with special events celebrating the history of the alternative performance venue. Using as its guiding theme the Walt Whitman quote “Resist much, obey little,” the show will include photos from the Spanish Civil War, “Shocked and Awed” children’s drawings from Iraq, political posters, Dorothea Lange’s dramatic “Photos of the Japanese American Internment,” and pictures from Allan Tannenbaum’s “John Lennon in NYC” series. There will also be pieces by such loft artists as Barbara Thomas, Gene Thompson, Christa Grauer, Louis Mendez, Marion Pinto, and Puffin Room director and curator Carl Rosenstein. The opening party, on April 3 from 6:00 to 9:00, will feature live performances by Cui Fei, Ilse Schreiber-Noll, Irving Epstein, Margaret Silverman, Miriam Rosenstein, Song Xin, and Yana Schnitzler’s Human Kinetics troupe, which specializes in site-specific dance installations. On April 10, Steve Ben Israel, Michael Schwartz, Ngoma, and others will participate in “The Last Word,” while things promise to get funky on April 17 with “The Last Dance” party the day before the exhibit closes. The three Saturday events are $5 each, with proceeds benefiting Greenpeace. (Above photo by Harry Schnitzler: Human Kinetics will be performing the site-specific movement “Poem #3” at the opening party for the Puffin Room’s closing exhibition)
After the orchestra in which he plays cello is dissolved, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) leave Tokyo and head back to his hometown in Yamagata. Seeing a classified ad in the local paper listing a job in “departures,” Daigo schedules an interview, thinking it is a travel agent position. But as it turns out, the boss, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), claims it was a typo — it should have read “the departed” — and immediately hires Daigo as his assistant encoffinor. Daigo quickly learns that he and Sasaki attend to the newly dead, picking them up for funeral directors and then preparing the bodies, in front of grieving friends and family, for the coffins and cremation through an elaborate, detailed ceremony. Daigo takes the job out of financial desperation — Sasaki throws money at him to come on board — but doesn’t tell anyone, including Mika, what he is doing, since people who work in businesses involving corpses are shunned in Japan, considered dirty. But as Daigo grows to appreciate the importance of what Sasaki does, everything he has built threatens to fall apart when his secret starts getting out. Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (As well as ten Japan Academy Prizes), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of life and death, told beautifully by director Yojiro Takita (WHENT THE LAST SWORD IS DRAWN, ONMYOJI) and screenwriter Kundo Koyama. Motoki, who had the original idea for the film, gives a wonderfully subtle performance as a Daigo, while Yamazaki is a riot as the stern boss with a sly sense of humor. Despite an embarrassingly unnecessary montage scene and sappy music by Joe Hisaishi (who’s never met an emotion he couldn’t overexploit), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of a man searching for his place in the world — and meeting personal and professional obstacles when he thinks he might have found it.
