Ronald K. Brown and his Evidence company are part of First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum on June 5
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, June 5, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400 www.brooklynmuseum.org
On June 5, the Brooklyn Museum’s monthly First Saturdays program celebrates, well, Brooklyn. And why not? The J. C. Hopkins Biggish Band will be playing at 5:00, Ronald K. Brown’s awesome Evidence a Dance Company will be performing at 5:30 (followed by a Q&A with Brown), chief curator Kevin Stayton will discuss “American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection” at 7:00, Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire will put their dancing shoes on for a screening of Stanley Donen’s FUNNY FACE also at 7:00, Keanan Duffy will give a book club talk on his latest, REBEL, REBEL: ANTI-STYLE, at 9:00, the House of Ninja’s Archie Burnett hosts a vogue dance contest at 9:00, and Friends We Love’s DJ Moni will get everyone’s mojo working at the always hot and sweaty dance party (9:00 – 11:00). All of the exhibitions will be open, including “Kiki Smith: Sojourn,’ “Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair of 1864,” and “Body Parts: Ancience Egyptian Fragments and Amulets.” Everything’s free, although some of the events require advance ticketing available an hour ahead of time, and the lines do get long, so be prepared.
The all-volunteer Arts in Buschwick organization is hosting the fourth annual Bushwick Open Studios this weekend, with more than three hundred shows, art sales, and live performances June 4-6. As you travel through the happening Bushwick hood, you might encounter free glitter, synchronized cycling, light installations, comedy, printmaking, free beer, a fashion show, interactive participatory events, and much more.
Multimedia artist, dancer, and choreographer Bill Shannon took his crutches and skateboards through the streets of Lower Manhattan on June 2, weaving around vehicles, interacting with strangers, dancing on public sculpture, and even hooking up with an old friend while being followed by the audience in a bus in the exhilarating “Traffic: A Transient Specific Performance.” The Pittsburgh-based Shannon, who contracted the degenerative bilateral hip deformity Legg-Calvé Perthes disease when he was a child, is in the midst of a three-month residency at Dance New Amsterdam, where he has given classes and lectures on the Shannon Technique and installed the video project “spatiotemporality: The Evolution of William Foster Shannon.” For “Traffic,” Shannon, who needs crutches, commissioned an original hip-hop score mixed by DJ Brian Coxx that blasts through the air-conditioned Academy bus while VJ Glytch handles the video feed on small monitors so the people on board could always follow Shannon’s movements.
Shannon uses urban landscape of Lower Manhattan as his stage in unique freestyle performance (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Although Shannon, who considers himself a sociological anthropologist, has the route laid out in advance, skating and dancing through the Financial District, in Battery Park, and under the Brooklyn Bridge, among other locations, what he does on the way is completely freestyle, incorporating signature moves as he becomes part of the urban architecture. While people on the bus were running from side to side to watch him out the windows, he completely coincidentally picked up skateboard legend Mike Wright, whom he used to ride with back in 1993 and is now hawking skateboard DVDs on the street; got a jug of iced tea from a construction crew; stopped for a smoke with a man in a suit; had a brief talk with a female MTA bus driver; put on a show for a crowd of tourists who were utterly confused; and got shooed away from one area by a city cop. At one point, he skated around Mark di Suvero’s large, red “Joi de Vivre” sculpture in Zuccotti Park near Ground Zero; coincidentally, di Suvero also needs crutches, the result of a serious elevator accident that left him partially paralyzed. As exciting as it is to watch Shannon perform his remarkable feats with no fear, it’s also fascinating to gauge the public’s reaction, as they shake their head in wonder, shrug their shoulders in disbelief, laugh, reach for their cameras, or, perhaps most often, look away, as if Shannon were invisible – or just another strange thing in New York City. Shannon holds a brief Q&A session back at Dance New Amsterdam following the amazing, insane seventy-five-minute performance, discussing some of the unique aspects of what he just experienced and asking the audience to share their thoughts. “Traffic” will also take place June 3 and 4, with seating limited to thirty-seven; don’t miss this one-of-a-kind thrill that takes advantage of the many joys of life.
The World Science Festival is back, seeking to show people the many wonders of science through lectures, dance, art, music, literature, and other disciplines. High school chemistry and biology might not have been fun, but there are plenty of great things to check out at this annual event. The celebration gets under way June 2 with a gala at Alice Tully Hall featuring Alan Alda, John Lithgow, Rebecca Luker, Yo Yo Ma, and many others honoring genius Stephen W. Hawking and witnessing the world premiere of ICARUS AT THE EDGE OF TIME by Brian Greene, David Henry Hwang, and Philip Glass ($250-$10,000). Through Sunday, a full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope will be on view in Battery Park, along with interactive exhibits and a party scheduled for June 4 (free). The Broad Street Ballroom will be home to “Astronomy’s New Messengers: The Exhibit Listening to the Universe with Gravitational Waves,” where visitors can check out a model LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory; it’s also free, as is the panel discussion on June 3 at 6:30. At the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City students will be creating designs using pigmented E. coli (free, 3:00), Margaret S. Livingstone, Patrick Cavanagh, and Jules Feiffer will discuss “Eye Candy: Science, Sight, Art” at NYU’s Kimmel Center ($30, 7:00), the Moth gathers writers, scientists, and artists to tell stories in “Grey Matter” ($25, 7:30), and Alda, Kip Thorne, and Robbert Dijkgraaf talk about “Black Holes and Holographic Worlds” at the Skirball Center ($30, 8:00). Thursday through Sunday at Cedar Lake, the innovative Armitage Done! Dance troupe will stage the New York premiere of THREE THEORIES, a series of high-speed duets that uses the principles of physics in their movements; several performances will be followed by a special talk-back with a physicist ($30).
On Friday, “Food 2.0: Feeding a Hungry World” is at the Baruch Performing Arts Center ($30, 7:00), “The Science of Star Trek” is evaluated at Galapagos ($30, 7:00), and Oliver Sacks and Chuck Close team up for “Strangers in the Mirror” at the Kaye Playhouse ($30, 8:00). On Saturday, mathemagician Arthur Benjamin will dazzle the mind at the New School ($15, 11:00 am), John Hockenberry leads a panel discussion at the New School that goes inside the Large Hadron Collider ($30, 3:00), and Hockenberry will then head for the Skirball Center for “Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace” ($30, 8:00). On Sunday, the World Science Festival Street Fair takes place in Washington Square Park, several astronauts land at the Kimmel Center for “Astronaut Diary: Life in Space” (free, 11:30 am), and ICARUS AT THE EDGE OF TIME will be staged at the Skirball, with live narration by Liev Schreiber and live music by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. ($30, 7:00). And believe it or not, those are only some of the forty events going on during the festival, which bills itself as “an unprecedented annual tribute to imagination, ingenuity, and inventiveness [that] takes science out of the laboratory and into the streets, theaters, museums, and public halls of New York City, making the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating.”
Japanese women go a little too crazy for Paris in new show at HERE Arts Center
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. by Spring St.
June 3-19
Tickets: $12 before June 3 for shows through June 12, $18 thereafter
212-647-0202 www.here.org www.expgirl.net
Many people are deeply affected by trips to Paris, falling in love with the art, the food, the shopping, and other cultural aspects of the City of Light. But every year a small number of Japanese women are overcome by Paris syndrome, a psychiatric disorder, similar to Stendhal syndrome, in which the women suffer hallucinations as well as physical distress, triggered by unexpected events, and need to be repatriated to their home country. “An encounter with a rude taxi driver, or a Parisian waiter who shouts at customers who cannot speak fluent French, might be laughed off by those from other Western cultures,” BBC News reported in December 2006. “But for the Japanese — used to a more polte and helpful society in which voices are rarely raised in anger — the experience of their dream city turning into a nightmare can simply be too much.” Brooklyn-based dance theater company Ex.Pgirl examines the relatively new phenomenon in its latest work, PARIS SYNDROME, playing at HERE Arts Center June 3-19. Through dance, theater, film, music, video interviews, and even a little vaudeville, the multimedia production, directed by Emma Griffin, follows six women who journey to Paris and are soon battling the syndrome. Ex.Pgirl was founded in 2002 by Bertie Ferdman and Suzi Takahashi with the express purpose of using experimental theater by women to address issues of culture and identity; the cast of PARIS SYNDROME includes Ferdman, Takahashi, Elsa Carette, Valerie Issembert, Kiyoko Kashiwagi, and Soomi Kim, with original music by LaBulo, lighting by Lucrecia Briceno, and sets by Peter Ksander.
Donna Uchizono’s latest goes on the road in the city (photo by Melinda MX Lee)
Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th St., 7:00
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th St., 8:15
Tuesday, June 1, through Saturday, June 5 (June 3 performance reviewed below)
Tickets: $20
212-868-4444 www.donnauchizono.org www.thekitchen.org www.bacnyc.org
New York City-based dancer/choreographer Donna Uchizono is trying something rather different for her newest evening-length work: The first half will be staged at the Baryshnikov Arts Center on West 37th St., with the second half being held at the Kitchen in Chelsea. Examining “proximity, perception, destination, and arrival,” the two-part piece will feature Uchizono, Hristoula Harakas, Anna Carapetyan, and Savina Theodorou, with original music by James Lo, costumes by Wendy Winters, lighting by Joe Levasseur, and set design by Ronnie Gensler and Orlando Soria. It’s been nearly three years since Uchizono, who is currently celebrating the twentieth anniversary of her company, has presented a new piece in New York, the world premiere of THIN AIR at Dance Theater Workshop in October 2007, so we’re extremely excited about longing two. Oh, and don’t worry about getting from one place to another; a bus will take all ticket holders from BAC to the Kitchen.
Donna Uchizono and Hristoula Harakas move to the Kitchen for second part of unique evening-length piece
Update: The show begins at BAC, where the audience is seated in two rows of folding chairs on either side of a fashion-runway-like setup bordered by two three-foot-high horizontal paper sheets. The two younger dancers, Anna Carapetyan and Savina Theodorou, wearing tight-fitting white costumes, move quickly up and down the runway, stopping to make eye contact with audience members, whispering lines from Neil Young’s “When You Dance,” and making swimlike movements to sounds of waves crashing on the shore. Meanwhile, Donna Uchizono and longtime collaborator Hristoula Harakas, standing side by side but facing opposite directions in looser, move flowing outfits, creep forward, almost imperceptibly slowly, down the middle of the runway. Only the top parts of the dancers are visible, the lower halves cut off by the paper border. Following a beautiful short section in which Carapetyan and Theodorou navigate the runway on their hands, only their legs showing, the audience is taken on a bus – with a little bonus to heighten their thirst – to the Kitchen, where everything is more wide open, a paper sheet strewn across the back and sides of the stage, enveloping the dancers along with the crowd. While Uchizono moves on the floor, using her feet and toes like hands and fingers, Harakas does mind-boggling leg lifts, turns, and twists while standing on the other leg. Like the first part at BAC, the pairs only come together near the end, needing one another to go on. Uchizono’s longing two is a fascinating work, incorporating Butoh-like precision, experimental noise, bright fluorescent white lights, and even a little synchronized swimming to examine relationships and distance, both human and environmental. And it is a thrill to see Uchizono onstage again, convinced by Harakas to perform for the first time in ten years to help celebrate the company’s twentieth anniversary.
The Teabaggers will present “The TNC Tea Party” at this year’s Lower East Side Festival of the Arts (photo by Alex Smith)
Theater for the New City
155 First Ave. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Saturday, May 29, and Sunday, May 30
Admission: free www.theaterforthenewcity.net
The fifteenth annual Lower East Side Festival of the Arts continues on Saturday on Sunday with two days of free live performances both inside the Theater for the New City and outside, where a cultural fair will be held. On Saturday from 2:00 to 5:00, magicians, musicians, dancers, and more will entertain children in the Johnson Theater, anchored by Supercute playing at 4:30. Adult entertainment takes over after that, with the Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company, Bleecker Street Opera, David Amram, Joe Franklin, and others. Meanwhile, Yana Schnitzler’s Human Kinetics Movement Arts will perform a site-specific installation in the lobby beginning at 7:00. Films will run from noon to midnight in the Cabaret Theater, including Rome Neal’s BANANA PUDDIN JAZZ, Buck Heller’s THROUGH THEIR EYES, and Roger Corman’s BUCKET OF BLOOD. And the outdoor street festival will feature live music, poetry readings, performance art, dance, and comedy by Jessica Delfino, the Drama Bums, Domingo’s Dominion, the Vox Pop Players, Jessica Friedlander, and others. On Sunday night, KT Sullivan, Tammy Grimes, the Silvercloud Singers & Drummers, Phoebe Legere, Penny Arcade, and Tokyo Penguin are among those scheduled in the Johnson Theater, with theatrical performances taking place in the Cabaret Theater. In addition, the Community Space Theater will host a poetry program at 4:00 with special guest Joan Durant and nearly fifty participants. And all weekend long, the lobby will be home to visual art curated by Carolyn Ratcliffe. It’s a great festival that has something for everyone, and, yes, it’s all free.
