this week in film and television

CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS

Documentary explores the creation and legacy of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s D-Man in the Waters (photo courtesy Rosalynde LeBlanc)

CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS (Rosalynde LeBlanc & Tom Hurwitz, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 16
212-727-8110
www.d-mandocumentary.com
filmforum.org

In 1989, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presented the world premiere of D-Man in the Waters at the prestigious Joyce Theater in New York City, a physically demanding, emotional work born out of the AIDS crisis, dealing with tragedy and loss in the wake of the death of Zane, Jones’s personal and professional partner, at the age of thirty-nine in 1988. Directors Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz take a deep dive into the history of the dance and its lasting impact more than thirty years later in the captivating documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters, opening July 16 at Film Forum.

“What is D-Man? Is it alive now? Is it a cautionary tale? Is it one of inspiration?” Jones tells fifteen Loyola Marymount dancers who are staging the piece under the direction of LeBlanc, a former company member who runs the Jones/Zane Educational Partnership at the school, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Dance. Jones continues, “Makes you want to get all your shit together, your community together, take responsibility, be beautiful, be fierce — is that what it is? I don’t know what it is. . . . What do they share that is so big, so tragic that you need a piece like this to move it and give it body?”

LeBlanc, who also produced the film, and two-time Emmy-winning cinematographer Hurwitz, the son of longtime Martha Graham dancer, choreographer, and teacher Jane Dudley, talk to most of the original cast of D-Man, many of whom have gone on to form their own companies: Arthur Avilés, Seán Curran, Lawrence Goldhuber, Gregg Hubbard, Heidi Latsky, Janet Lilly, and Betsy McCracken, who, along with Jones and his sister Johari Briggs, share intimate stories of working with Jones and Zane and the importance of the piece as the arts community was being ravaged by AIDS. Sometimes holding back tears, they speak lovingly of Zane and Demian Acquavella, nicknamed “D-Man,” who died at the age of thirty-two in 1990. “He was always a boy, but always a bit of a devilish boy, and the dancing was also that way,” Jones remembers.

Through new and old interviews, home video and archival photographs, and exciting footage from the dance’s original rehearsals and Joyce premiere, LeBlanc, Hurwitz, and editor Ann Collins choreograph a gracefully flowing, compelling narrative as the documentary participants discuss specific movements — Latsky’s attempts at a jump and Curran’s memories of a duet with Acquavella in which their foreheads have to keep touching are wonderful — and LeBlanc tries to reach inside the Loyola Marymount performers to motivate them. They might have the movement down, but D-Man requires more than that to be successful. “Do you dare to let the stakes really be high?” she asks as they search for contemporary issues that impact them similarly to how AIDS affected the creation of the work, which is set to Felix Mendelssohn’s 1825 Octet for Strings, which the German composer wrote at the age of sixteen. “There was some healing, cathartic ritual in the making and the doing of this dance that sustained us,” Curran says, a feeling LeBlanc wants to instill in the college students.

“This work is not about anybody’s epidemic,” Jones, a Kennedy Center Honoree, MacArthur Grant awardee, and Tony winner who is the artistic director of New York Live Arts, said in a statement about the film. “It is about the dark spirit of what is happening in the world and how you push back against it.” Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters gets to the heart of that spirit by revealing the legacy, and the future, of a seminal dance piece that continues to find its place on an ever-evolving planet.

LeBlanc and Hurwitz will be at Film Forum to discuss the film at the 7:00 shows on July 16 and 17 and will participate in a live, virtual Q&A with Jones at 8:00 on July 21. Jones, whose riveting Afterwardsness at Park Avenue Armory in May explored the Covid-19 pandemic, isolation, and racial injustice, will return to the space this fall with Deep Blue Sea, a monumental work for more than one hundred community members and dancers that begins with a solo by Jones and incorporates texts by Martin Luther King Jr. and Herman Melville, with water again playing a critical role.

COUSINS

Cousins follows a Māori family over more than half a century

COUSINS (Ainsley Gardiner & Briar Grace-Smith, 2021)
Angelika Film Center
18 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 2
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
www.arraynow.com/cousins

The Māori film Cousins is a heart-wrenching story of an indigenous family in New Zealand (Aotearoa) torn apart by colonialism and bigotry as they try to hold on to their traditions. The film, directed by the award-winning Māori duo Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith, opens in the mid-twentieth century with Mata (Te Raukura Gray) in green, Makareta (Mihi Te Rauhi Daniels) in blue, and Missy (Keyahne Patrick-Williams) in red playing on a lush landscape of rolling hills and a twisting river. “Three cousins,” a narrator says in Māori. “Their paths woven across time. Their lives separate. Their lives converge. They separate again. This is how it must be.”

The scene cuts to the modern day, as Mata (Tanea Heke), walking down a city street, stops at a corner, waits for the light to turn green, slowly removes her shoes while reciting a nursery rhyme in her head, and begins to cross only when the red walk sign starts flashing, as if she is inviting danger. Wandering through an outdoor market, she appears to be homeless and broke. Meanwhile, Markareta (Grace-Smith, who also wrote the screenplay) and Missy (Rachel House) are fighting the government’s attempts to take some of their land — and wondering where Mata is. Sent to an orphanage by her father (Jack Sergent), Mata was “adopted” by a white New Zealander, Mrs. Parkinson (Sylvia Rands), who changed her name to May Parker and used her as a servant, keeping her away from her family, who have been searching for her for fifty years.

Gardiner and Grace-Smith go back and forth between three central time periods, following the cousins as children, young adults (with Ana Scotney as Mata, Tioreore Melbourne as Markareta, and Hariata Moriarty as Missy), and in the present as they try to maintain their heritage in a world that wants to pass them by. Awarded the 2021 People’s Choice for Best Feature Drama at the Māoriland Film Festival in New Zealand, Cousins, adapted from the 1992 novel by Patricia Grace, is infused with many elements of the Māori way of life, including whakapapa (unbreakable genealogical links), kaupapa (philosophy), whānau (family), kaitiaki (guardianship of the land), Te Ao Māori (world view), whenua (land), and Tikanga Māori (cultural practice), treating them with honesty and respect, not othering them. It was shot in Te Waiiti Marae on Lake Rotoiti with the guidance of Muriwai Ihakara, who plays Wi, and the local Ngāti Hinekura and Ngāti Pikiao people, many of whom appear in small roles.

Raymond Edwards’s cinematography is gentle and beautiful, accompanied by composer Warren Maxwell’s subtly emotional score. The nine actresses who portray the three cousins are exceptional, but Gray, Scotney, and Heke stand out as Mata, who rarely speaks, overwhelmed by her childhood trauma; Heke’s eyes are particularly haunting. By the end of the film, which runs July 2–9 at the Angelika, you’ll feel like you’re part of the family, feeling their pain and love as tears well up.

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX: FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI

Hou Hsiao-hsien gem Flowers of Shanghai explores complex relationships between wealthy patrons and courtesans

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (HAI SHANG HUA) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998)
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
July 2-20, $15
www.filmlinc.org

Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hsiao-hsien might be the best filmmaker whose work you’ve never seen. For more than thirty-five years, he has been telling intimate, meditative stories about life, family, and relationships with a gentle, deeply intuitive style, infused with gorgeous visuals and subtly beautiful soundtracks. Film at Lincoln Center’s wide-ranging “Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” continues with one of the New York Film Festival staple’s most elegant tales, Flowers of Shanghai. The 1998 film, being shown in a dramatic 4K restoration, is set in brothels, known as flower houses, in 1884 in the British Concession, where men and women congregate for social interaction and develop long-term bonds and responsibilities to one another based on much more than just sex. The men play drinking games, smoke opium, and buy the women gifts. The story, told in a series of vignettes as Mark Lee Ping Bin’s camera slowly moves through dark, lush, reddish gas-lit interiors, focuses on Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has promised to be the sole patron of Crimson (Michiko Hada) but who has also been secretly seeing the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and lavishing her with presents. The elder Master Hong (Luo Tsai-erh) and Auntie Huang (Rebecca Pan), the madam, discuss the situation, bringing up issues of responsibility and honesty, attempting to come to some kind of understanding in an exchange that shows respect for both the men and women who are a far cry from the Western conception of johns and prostitutes.

Most scenes end by fading quietly to black, then introducing the woman protagonist of the next section — Crimson, Jasmin, Pearl (Carina Lau), Jade (Shuan Fang), and Emerald (Michelle Reis) — as the women gossip and Crimson and Hong, and other pairs, try to figure out what they want out of life and from one another. In Flowers of Shanghai, Hou explores class differences, gender roles, the Asian notion of saving face, and intimacy with grace and sophistication. When the film fades out for the final time, viewers are left knowing they’ve just experienced something special, a stunning work that uses the technologies of cinema to delve into the very nature of humanity.

“Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” runs through August 26 with such other 2020 film festival favorites as Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, Eugène Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats, John Gianvito’s Her Socialist Smile, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Nuria Giménez’s My Mexican Bretzel, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, an epic conversation between Welles and Dennis Hopper.

KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

Min Sanchez, Kenny Scharf, and Oliver Sanchez pose in front of Scharf’s artwork in Bahia, Brazil (photo by Tereza Scharf)

KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (Malia Scharf & Max Basch, 2020)
Available on demand
www.kennyscharfmovie.com

“I have a balancing act between being a responsible adult and the Peter Pan syndrome because I just feel like life is so much about the moment, so I want every moment fun and beautiful,” Kenny Scharf says in the new documentary Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide. “It’s not reality.” Codirectors Max Basch and Malia Scharf — one of the artist’s daughters — try to make every moment of the film, now streaming on demand, fun and beautiful, often reaching that goal.

Shot over a period of eleven years, When Worlds Collide follows Scharf, who was born in 1958 in Los Angeles and moved to Manhattan to attend SVA, from his early days as a graffiti artist and muralist, when he met and became great friends with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and hung out with Andy Warhol at the Factory, to his vast popularity creating fantastical, colorful creatures in paintings and sculptures, from the lean years to his current obsession with recycling. “Use everything,” he says, extolling us to ”not waste precious plastic when you can turn it into bathroom sculpture” as he adds a plastic cup and straw to an ever-evolving work above his toilet.

Scharf and Basch, who also served as editor and one of the cinematographers, speak with former Ferus Gallery owner Irving Blum, art collector Peter Brant, gallerists Jeffrey Deitch and Tony Shafrazi, writer and poet Carter Ratcliff, art historian Richard Marshall, Whitney curator Jane Panetta, former Scharf assistant Min Sanchez, author and psychologist Gabor Maté, collectors Andy and Christine Hall, real estate developer Tony Goldman, and curator Dan Cameron, who all offer unique perspectives on Scharf as a person and an artist. “There’s no separation between Kenny and his art,” his friend and fellow artist Kitty Brophy says. There are also old and new interviews with such artists as Bruno Schmidt, Ed Ruscha, Samantha McEwen, Robert Williams, Marilyn Minter, KAWS, Dennis Hopper, and Yoko Ono as well as Scharf’s mother, Rose; wife, Tereza; daughters, Zena and Malia; and grandkids Jet and Lua, who share their thoughts and are seen in home movie footage.

“He just created a family where we felt we were understood and accepted for who we are,” actress and performance artist Ann Magnuson says. “The main way to communicate was to get out on the street, and the message got out there and of course the attention came, and then it started to unravel a bit when the success, the money, the fame, and the uptown world started paying attention to the downtown world. Some of that wonderful, naïve idealism was lost.”

The film doesn’t shy away from the devastation of the AIDS crisis or Scharf’s dry periods, when his style of surreal Pop art was out of favor, but he continues to create and is a fan favorite at international art fairs with his eye-catching work. He gets tearful when talking about Haring, shares his love of nature and cartoons (especially The Flintstones and The Jetsons), collects trash on the beach, remembers the influential Club 57, discusses his breakthrough painting, 1984’s When the Worlds Collide, and describes his penchant for pareidolia, seeing faces everywhere. It’s fascinating to watch him stand in front of a canvas, painting right from his imagination, without preparatory sketches. He comes off as a driven artist and dedicated family man who can be an endearing mensch. “Many people think I’m crazy, and I think that’s okay,” he says with a laugh.

AGAINST THE CURRENT

AGAINST THE CURRENT (Óskar Páll Sveinsson, 2020)
Quad Cinemas
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through July 1
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

After watching Óskar Páll Sveinsson’s Against the Current, you may not want to kayak around the entire island of Iceland, but you’ll probably want to start planning a trip to this extraordinary Scandinavian nation. In May 2019, Veiga Grétarsdóttir set off from her picturesque hometown of Ísafjörð on a three-plus-month, 1,250-mile journey circumnavigating the entire country in a sixteen-foot solo kayak, paddling counterclockwise, against the current, something that had never been done before. Following her along the coastline, in a fishing boat, and using drones, director and cinematographer Oskar Pall Sveinsson documented the hazardous expedition in vivid detail in the new documentary Against the Current, a film that features a barrage of spectacular shots not only of the sea and the topography of Iceland but of humanity’s tiny place in the world, set to a score by Högni Egilsson.

Along the way, Sveinsson also tells the story of Grétarsdóttir’s recent transition to becoming a woman; born male, she participated in rugged sports when she was younger but also hid what she considered a shameful secret: a compulsion to wear women’s clothing. As a man, she married a woman and had a daughter, but she ultimately decided to go through the surgery to change her gender and then prove to herself and others her physical and emotional strength by kayaking around Iceland. Sveinsson cuts between the treacherous trip and photographs and videos from Grétarsdóttir’s childhood and marriage, with her parents, friends, daughter, and doctors sharing stories about her; every single one accepts her transition, although it was perhaps most difficult for her ex-wife. “I often say that switching your gender like that is the biggest and most complex change you can make in your life,” psychiatrist Óttar Guðmundsson, who was part of Grétarsdóttir’s transgender team, explains. “You can’t change your life more drastically than that.”

Against the Current documents Veiga Grétarsdóttir’s remarkable story

Grétarsdóttir was initially joined by three kayakers, including Örlygur Sigurjónsson, who stuck around the longest, but ultimately she was left on her own, as expected. She would paddle for as many as thirteen hours a day, then pull over onto the coast, eat, and sleep in a tent, occasionally coming into contact with local people. One such supporter was sheep farmer Elisabet Petursdottir, who says, “I feel, regarding all the prejudice, that you’re not supposed to discuss things. All talk is shut down. It would be better to talk about things and solve the problems instead of creating them. In my opinion, everybody should have an open mind. Thank God we are all not made from the same mold. People must be allowed to be as they are.”

Grétarsdóttir holds nothing back, delving deep into aspects of her life that involved depression and even suicide attempts. She hopes that completing the circumnavigation will help her as well as others dealing with issues of personal identity. “I’ve dreamed of it for a long time, but having gone through everything, the transitioning, I decided to live my life, make my dreams come true,” she says. And every step of the way, there are visuals that will take your breath away. The film continues at the Quad through July 1; you can watch a Zoom interview with Grétarsdóttir and Sveinsson (Under the Surface, Ransacked) hosted by the Gene Siskel Film Center here.

ANIMAL WISDOM

Heather Christian bares her heart and soul in glorious online show Animal Wisdom

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company / American Conservatory Theater
Through June 27, $19-$49
www.animalwisdomfilm.com

A few minutes into Woolly Mammoth’s stream of Heather Christian’s pandemic-filmed Animal Wisdom, I grew terribly upset with myself: How in the world did I miss this remarkable show when it premiered at the Bushwick Starr in 2017?

Extended on demand through June 27, this new iteration of Animal Wisdom is an intimate and rapturous confessional of music and storytelling, an ingenious journey into the personal and communal nature of ritual and superstition, of grief and loss, of ghosts and, most intently, the fear of death. Presented by DC’s Woolly Mammoth and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, the 135-minute show is a movie/theater/concert hybrid and a melding of public séance and stirring revival meeting, with film direction by Amber McGinnis and stage direction by Emilyn Kowaleski. They create a unique and special experience that the audience can feel a part of even though they are at home watching a recording, which is especially enhanced if they follow Christian’s request that each viewer gather four elements so they can participate in the proceedings.

“This performance was never supposed to happen on film,” Christian says directly into the camera early on. “I guess that’s obvious. But contrary to what it looks like, it wasn’t supposed to happen in a theater either. It was supposed to happen in a defunct church or holy space, but houses of any kind are deconsecrated and reconsecrated all the time, so I guess we’re not so far off. Anyways, maybe at least yours is already haunted.”

Animal Wisdom was filmed onstage at DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Singer-songwriter and pianist Christian is joined by her band, guitarist and cellist Sasha Brown, bassists Fred Epstein and B. E. Farrow, percussionist Eric Farber, and violinist Maya Sharpe, as she travels back to her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, sharing tales about her deceased grandparents amid original songs that range from country and blues to folk and gospel, with such titles as “Well Made Fish,” “Wild Thing’s Daughter,” “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”), and “Libera Me,” eschewing conventional hook-laden sing-along pop and standard theatrical orchestrations. She makes regular comparisons between her relatives and such animals and insects as mosquitoes, birds, coyotes, elephants, cicadas, and cats, which explains the name of the work.

“When I say ‘Love is in the garden,’” she says after singing that song, “I mean that. I mean that because: When my grandma Heloise died, she up and put herself in the plants, and so I go to the garden to talk to her and rip up weeds when I am heartbroken. When I say ‘Grandmother’s a red bird’ — I mean that too. When my grandmother Geraldine died, she threw her ghost into a cardinal. As a bird, she was hard to pin down for conversation so I tattooed a red feather on my arm. Hasn’t totally worked if Imma be honest. When I say Grandaddy’s in the car, he is, and when I say ‘Praise be the wrecking ball,’ I mean my brain. That one’s a metaphor. I don’t know about you but my brain is a wrecking ball.”

She later admits, “The women in my matrilineal line are New Orleans Catholics who are also musicians who suffer migraines and talk to dead people. There are three of us. Ella, Heloise, Heather. Skipped my mom. Don’t know what that’s about.”

Director of photography Aiden Korotkin follows Christian — primarily wearing a “Lux Aeterna” T-shirt, the communion antiphon for the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass — as she moves about Christopher Bowser’s intricately designed stage, from pianos to a carousel slideshow with theater seats, from a small table with an old telephone (with a cord) to a shrine to her grandma Ella, from various lamps and candles to a soda vending machine and other unexpected items, centered on a circle of overlapping rugs to give it a homey feel. She and the band also wander through Woolly Mammoth’s hallways and lobby, reminding us of the physical space of theater.

An NYU grad, film composer, and leader of the band Heather Christian & the Arbornauts, Christian is spellbinding in Animal Wisdom, capturing our attention from the very beginning and never letting go as she openly and honestly details critical moments in her life, her dark eyes and round face captivating. Christian is a multitalented creator who has recently released the audio work Prime: A Practical Breviary for Playwrights Horizons and the video collaboration I Am Sending You the Sacred Face for Theater in Quarantine on YouTube, and she will premiere the Covid-delayed Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova next spring. She leaves nothing behind in Animal Wisdom, one of the best virtual shows to come out during the pandemic, baring her heart and soul, a magnetic force in full command of the stage, her supporting cast, and her bewitched audience.

“I’m gonna tell you what I think about the soul,” she says to us. “So we should make friends real quick, ’cause that’s heavy. Hum with me like this?” I dare you not to listen to her and hum along; it’s impossible to not join Christian on this fabulous interactive ride through metaphorical and metaphysical ghosts that haunt us all.

STAGE DOOR MIXER

Who: Kathryn Allison, Jacqueline B. Arnold, DeMarius R. Copes, Robyn Hurder, Clyde Alves, Ashley Loren, Isabelle McCalla, Alise Morales, Stephanie Park, Demi Remick, Jelani Remy, Daniel Quadrino, Jessica Vosk, Olivia Puckett
What: Live music benefit for the Actors Fund
Where: Watermark Bar, 78 South St., Pier 15
When: Monday, June 21, $40, 8:00
Why: The outdoor Watermark Bar, jutting out on Pier 15 on South St., celebrates the return of live music and theater to New York City with a benefit concert on June 21 at 8:00, raising funds for the Actors Fund, which has done an extraordinary job helping the entertainment community during the Covid-19 crisis. “Stage Door Mixer” will feature performances by Kathryn Allison, Jacqueline B. Arnold, DeMarius R. Copes, Robyn Hurder and Clyde Alves, Ashley Loren, Isabelle McCalla, Alise Morales, Stephanie Park, Demi Remick, Jelani Remy, Daniel Quadrino, and Jessica Vosk, with Olivia Puckett serving as host. In addition, the audience will be treated to a sneak peek screening of Australian dancer and choreographer Reed Luplau’s short film Places, Please, starring Danny Burstein, Krysta Rodriguez, Pixie Aventura, Ben Cook, Deborah S. Craig, Joseph Haro, and Bahiyah Hibah in a story about a therapy session for artists struggling during the pandemic.