this week in (live)streaming

MOVING BODY – MOVING IMAGE: THE MOVING BODY WITH DISABILITIES

Dancer Kayla Hamilton is not about to let visual impairment get in the way of her career in Vision Portraits (photo by Kjerstin Rossi)

Who: Moving Body — Moving Image
What: ScreenDance Film Festival
Where: Barnard College Department of Dance Movement Lab, Glicker Milstein Theatre in the Diana Center, 3009 Broadway at 116th St., and online
When: Sunday, April 3, free with advance RSVP, noon – 6:00 pm (festival continues through April 11)
Why: The Moving Body — Moving Image Biennale Festival was founded in 2018 by choreographer, dancer, teacher, filmmaker, and curator Gabri Christa to “give voice to social and social justice themes,” two years before dance films began reaching new heights of creativity during the pandemic lockdown, with a concerted focus also on social justice. The third iteration, “The Moving Body with Disabilities,” is underway now at Barnard College, with an international collection of six installation films, eight shorts, one feature, and three online-only works. On Sunday, April 3, Barnard’s Glicker Milstein Theatre will host a full in-person afternoon at its Morningside Heights home, with screenings of all films in addition to a panel discussion. “We are stunned by how much demand there was for the festival films among the global audiences,” Christa, whose now-wheelchair-bound mother was a special ed teacher, said in a statement. “Also, I hope that the pandemic isolation brought greater awareness around social inequity and perhaps more understanding of racism, ageism, and ableism.” The themes of the previous festivals were “Moving Brown Body” in 2018 and “Aging & Othering” in 2020.

The festival begins at noon with welcome remarks, followed by two shorts programs, at 12:30 and 2:00. Part I consists of Robert Dekkers’s Flutter (with AXIS Dance Company and others), Stephen Featherstone’s Stopgap in Stop Motion (with Stopgap Dance Company), Katrina MacPherson’s Uath Lochans (with Marc Brew), and Karina Epperlein’s Phoenix Dance (with Homer Avila, Andrea Flores, and choreographer Alonzo King). The second program comprises Ralph Klisiewicz’s Moods in Three Movements (with Kris Lenzo), Pioneer Winter’s Gimp Gait (with Marjorie Burnett and Pioneer Winter), Alison Ferrao’s From Me (with the Dancer Development Course at Magpie Dance), and Katherine Helen Fisher’s One + One Makes Three (with Jerron Herman, Laurel Lawson, Brandon Kazen-Maddox, Catherine Nelson, and choreographer Alice Sheppard). The feature presentation at 3:00 is Rodney Evans’s 2019 documentary, Vision Portraits, about three artists with vision impairment, made by the blind Evans. Admission is free with advance registration. If you can’t make it to Barnard, all of the films and events will be available online through April 11, including Anna-Lena Ponath’s Eudaimonia, Yannis Bletas’s How to Train an Antihero, and Alexandros Chantzis’s Who Is Honorine Platzer?

Filmmaker Rodney Evans explores his increasing blindness in Vision Portraits (photo by Kjerstin Rossi)

VISION PORTRAITS (Rodney Evans, 2019)
Barnard College, Glicker Milstein Theatre in the Diana Center, 3009 Broadway at 116th St.
Sunday, April 3, free with advance RSVP, 3:00
www.thefilmcollaborative.org

“In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m just looking for guidance in how to be a blind artist,” filmmaker Rodney Evans says in Vision Portraits, his remarkable documentary. Evans follows three artists as they deal with severe visual impairment but refuse to give up on their dreams as he seeks experimental treatment for his retinitis pigmentosa. Manhattan photographer John Dugdale lost most of his eyesight from CMV retinitis when he was thirty-two but is using his supposed disability to his advantage, taking stunning photos bathed in blue, inspired by the aurora borealis he sees when he closes his eyes. “Proving to myself that I could still function in a way that was not expected of a blind person was really gonna be the thing,” he says. “It’s fun to live in this bliss.” Bronx dancer Kayla Hamilton was born with no vision in one eye and developed iritis and glaucoma in the other, but she is shown working on a new piece called Nearly Sighted that incorporates the audience into her story. “How can I use my art form as a way of sharing what it is that I’m experiencing?” she asks.

Canadian writer Ryan Knighton lost his eyesight on his eighteenth birthday due to retinitis pigmentosa, but he teaches at a college and presents short stories about his condition at literary gatherings. “I had that moment where I had a point of view now, like, I realized blindness is a point of view on the world; it’s not something I should avoid, it’s something I should look from, and I should make it my writerly point of view,” Knighton explains. Meanwhile, Evans heads to the Restore Vision Clinic in Berlin to see if Dr. Anton Fedorov can stop or reverse his visual impairment, which is getting worse.

Vision Portraits is an intimate, honest look at eyesight and art and how people adapt to what could have been devastating situations. Evans, who wrote and directed the narrative features Brother to Brother and The Happy Sad, also includes animated segments that attempt to replicate what the subjects see, from slivers of light to star-laden alternate universes. The Moving Body — Moving Image screening at Barnard will be followed by a discussion with Evans and Hamilton.

IN CONVERSATION: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF EDVARD MUNCH

Who: Patricia G. Berman, MaryClaire Pappas, Edward Gallagher
What: Live virtual discussion and exhibition tour
Where: Scandinavia House YouTube
When: Saturday, April 2, free, 1:00 (exhibition continues at 58 Park Ave. at 38th St. through June 4)
Why: Norwegian painter and sculptor Edvard Munch “seems to have been one of the first artists in history to take ‘selfies,’” notes the introductory wall text to the Scandinavia House exhibition “The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch’s Photography.” As the free show — which has been brought back, with some wonderful design changes that provide deeper perspective, for an encore run extended through June 4 — reveals, that statement does not just refer to Munch’s penchant for self-portraiture, as demonstrated in the 2018 Met exhibit “Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed,” which included a detailed look at Munch’s depiction of himself over the years. “Munch painted self-portraits throughout his career, but with increased intensity and frequency after 1900,” Gary Garrels, Jon-Ove Steihaug, and Sheena Wagstaff write in the introduction to the Met catalog. “These ‘self-scrutinies,’ as he called them, provide insight into his perceptions of his role as an artist, as a man in society, and as a protagonist in his relationships with others, especially women. . . . Using himself as subject but always allowing technique to influence effect, Munch was able to powerfully investigate the interplay between depicting external reality and meditating on painterly means.”

Edvard Munch, “Self-Portrait at the Breakfast Table at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic,” gelatin silver contact print, 1908-09 (courtesy of Munch Museum)

At Scandinavia House, this is evident in his fascination with photography, which he took up during two periods of his life that were fraught with physical and health issues. Munch snapped photographs between 1902 and 1910, after his lover, Tulla Larsen, shot him in the left finger, and again from 1927 to the mid-1930s, suffering a hemorrhage in his right eye in 1930. He also took home movies with a camera in 1927. As in his paintings and particularly his prints, Munch experimented with photographic images, playing with exposure length, camera angles, movement, and shadows for his Fatal Destiny portfolio and individual works. He is purposely blurry in “Self-Portrait in Profile Indoors in Åsgårdstrand,” “Self-Portrait at the Breakfast Table at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic,” and “Self-Portrait ‘à la Marat,’ Beside a Bathtub at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic.” He is completely naked, holding a sword in 1903’s “Edvard Munch Posing Nude in Åsgårdstrand,” a kind of companion piece to 1907’s “Self-Portrait on Beach with Brushes and Palette in Warnemünde,” in which he holds a paintbrush. The woman in “Nurse in Black, Jacobson’s Clinic,” from 1908-09, has a lot in common with Munch’s 1891 oil painting, “Lady in Black.” There are multiple, ghostly images of both subjects in 1907’s “Edvard Munch and Rosa Meissner in Warnemünde,” evoking the phantasmic bodies in several prints on view, including “Moonlight II.”

On April 2, American-Scandinavian Foundation president Edward Gallagher will moderate a special live, online presentation with curator Patricia G. Berman giving an up-close look at several photographs in the show, ASF Research Fellow MaryClaire Pappas talking about Munch’s self-portraiture, and a panel discussion on Munch’s relevance to twenty-first-century photography. You can check out the exhibit from home using the new virtual tour here.

Edvard Munch, “Self-Portrait on Beach with Brushes and Palette in Warnemünde,” Collodion contact print, 1907 (courtesy of Munch Museum)

In the Met catalog, in her essay “The Untimely Face of Munch,” Allison Morehead explains, “‘He is not attached to any school or any direction,’ wrote the Norwegian critic and art historian Jappe Nilssen in 1916, ‘because he himself is one of those who advances and creates his own school and forges his own direction.’ Surely with Munch’s complicity, Nilssen described his friend as both stereotypical avant-garde outsider and chronological anomaly, as an art history unto himself, his own school, his own doctrine, and his own teleology. Perhaps then it is little wonder that Munch made so many self-portraits from the beginning to the end of his career, regularly depicting himself in paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, and also little wonder that art historians have found them so preoccupying.’”

The Scandinavia House show, which has added a case of vintage camera equipment and a short video by Berman and is divided into such sections as “Landscape of Healing,” “Munch’s Selfies,” and “The Amateur Photographer,” concludes with a short compilation of home movies Munch shot with a Pathé-Baby camera, in which the artist once again focuses on himself as his subject. “I have an old camera with which I have taken countless pictures of myself, often with amazing results,” he said in 1930. “Some day when I am old, and I have nothing better to do than write my autobiography, all my self-portraits will see the light of day again.” It’s fascinating to consider just what Munch, who died in 1944 at the age of eighty, would have thought of contemporary social media and the selfie, offering new opportunities to shine a light on himself.

I AGREE TO THE TERMS

The audience participates on Zoom and their smartphone in I Agree to the Terms (photo by Giada Sun)

I AGREE TO THE TERMS
The Builders Association
NYU Skirball Zoom
Friday – Sunday, March 25 – April 3, $15, 2:00 & 5:00
nyuskirball.org
new.thebuildersassociation.org

The Builders Association goes back to the beginning of World Wide Web bulletin boards (BBS) in I Agree to the Terms, an uneven but ultimately fun virtual journey into the strange world of MTurks, short for Mechanical Turks. These Amazon microworkers are defined as “a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually.” The program, which began in 2005, well before the pandemic had so many people around the world working from home, offers anyone the opportunity to perform HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks, that computers are unable to do, such as evaluating consumer behavior, reviewing product similarities, and other skills that require more than just 0s and 1s. The employees make a minuscule amount of money as they complete each HIT, mere pennies, but the MTurks say that it has the potential to add up to a decent living.

Moe Angelos and David Pence host the show from MITU580 in Brooklyn; participants, using both a desktop computer and a mobile device, are sent a QR code a few hours before it starts, which offers advance reading material so they will be a bit more familiar with what is about to be experienced. From a room filled with old computer equipment, the earliest forms of online communication are depicted on out-of-date monitors as Angelos and Pence read BBS chats aloud, mostly from early adopters trying to help one another navigate this new environment.

Moe Angelos and David Pence host interactive show from Brooklyn

They also present excerpts from a series of manifestos about the future of the internet by such key figures as Stewart Brand, who predicted in 1985 that “personal ‘computer networking’” was going to “become as widespread eventually as the telephone and television”; Art Kleiner, who also in 1985 claimed that “addiction, for most, is short-lived”; and John Perry Barlow, the internet pioneer and Grateful Dead lyricist, who declared in 1996 that he came “from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.” These sections are clunky, as the text from the chats and manifestos also appears in its original font on your smartphone, so you’re not sure where to look and listen and how much of the material you’re supposed to digest. In addition, the images are lo-fi, which might be the point, but it still feels less than fully formed.

Things pick up significantly when director Marianne Weems, who founded the troupe in 1994, switches over to interviews with four actual Turkers: Adah Deveaux, Noel Castle, Sybil Lanham, and Michelle Brown, who describe what they do and how much they can earn. They’re not actors, so don’t expect a smooth, flowing narrative, but we do get such lines as “Jeff Bezos is my pimp daddy.” The audience is then divided into four breakout rooms led by each MTurk, where you participate in HITs, answering questions on your mobile device.

Before you begin, however, you have to agree to a ridiculously long list of terms and conditions that would probably take hours to read through (longer than a CVS coupon printout), but if you want to play the game, you need to sign off on it regardless, just as we do all the time online these days. There’s a running score that measures your percentage, and you accumulate a tiny amount of money for each completed HIT that isn’t rejected, with a chance to use that cash in a “Builders Marketplace.” Essentially, Amazon has created a virtual company town and store where MTurks are unlikely to get rich as they make Bezos wealthier and wealthier in this unregulated territory.

The Obie-winning Builders Association has previously staged such works as the innovative, interactive Elements of Oz, a unique reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, and House/Divided, a multimedia investigation of the 2008 mortgage crisis as seen through John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Their latest piece, in which just about everything is real — for example, the video with Sharon Chiarella is legitimate, as she was the Amazon VP who launched the MTurks program — is being livestreamed six more times April 1-3; tickets are only $15, but whatever you make on the survey platform will not be applied to that cost. As Barlow wrote for the Dead, “You imagine sipping champagne from your boot / For a taste of your elegant pride / I may be going to hell in a bucket / But at least I’m enjoying the ride.”

On March 30 at 7:00, there will be a free Zoom webinar, Meet the Artists: Office Hours, featuring Builders Weems and James Gibbs, Clay Shirky of NYU, and Turkers Deveaux, Castle, Lanham, and Brown.

THE WETSUITMAN

Five actors portray more than two dozen characters in the Cherry’s hybrid production of The Wetsuitman

THE WETSUITMAN
The Cherry Artists’ Collective
The Cherry Artspace, Ithaca
March 31 – April 3, livestream $20, in-person $25-$35
www.thecherry.org

“It’s only a case,” a detective says in the Cherry’s English-language world premiere of Freek Mariën’s The Wetsuitman. Of course, in police procedurals, especially Scandiavian ones, it’s never only a case.

The Cherry continues its exemplary live and livestreamed productions with The Wetsuitman, running March 31 through April 3 from the Cherry Artspace in Ithaca, directed by Samuel Buggeln. Inspired by a magazine article by Norwegian journalist Anders Fjellberg and translated by David McKay, the hundred-minute crime thriller begins when a decaying body in a wetsuit is found by an old architect in a cove.

It’s 2015, and Inspector Westerman and criminology intern Magnussen are on the case, which has similarities to a previous unsolved murder. Again, evidence is scarce; the dour medical examiner states something many of us have learned by streaming Scandinavian crime dramas during the pandemic: “Norway is a country made for / accidents / we have cliffs / we have storms / we have big ships / we have big rocks / we have all those people / on drilling platforms / and god-knows-where in the Arctic / we freeze to death / we have train crashes / we have plane crashes / we have shipwrecks / terrorists / and remember half the time / this is in total darkness / so whatever can break down / will break down / and if no one else does it to us / we do it to ourselves / Norway / land of alcoholism and suicide / it’s not what the brochures say / but it’s true / we beat the world in drinking and depression / we beat each other to a pulp in the darkness / drunk and depressed / we fall off cliffs / that’s if we don’t get blown up / flattened / sucked into a propeller / which is all to say / we’re the best at identifying bodies / got it down to a science / give me a body / I’ll give you a name / I’m the medical examiner / I smell like formaldehyde / and have a hard time getting into relationships / because women seem to think / ‘those hands of his / were just inside a corpse.’”

The medical examiner (Marc Gomes) discusses death in Norway in The Wetsuitman

When Westerman asks him what the cause of death was, he essentially throws his hands up, admitting, “I couldn’t even tell you / if he’s been dead three days or three weeks.”

Westerman and Magnussen are joined by another detective, Hustvedt, as they interview anyone who might have information on the missing person, but red herrings keep being dangled in front of them. The investigation goes from Norway and France to Syria and the Netherlands as the cops and a journalist speak with Customs and tourism officials, salespeople, a scientist, a lifeguard, a corporate spokesperson, a beachcomber, refugees, and others, trying to figure out who the Wetsuitman is and how he died.

Eric Brooks, Marc Gomes, Karl Gregory, Amoreena Wade, and Sylvie Yntema do a terrific job portraying more than two dozen characters, with only minimal costume changes; sometimes they even argue over who is going to play whom at any moment, taking over a role in the middle of a scene. They often introduce themselves or each other so the audience knows who is who; for example, Hustvedt explains, “I’m on the case now / Hustvedt / head of missing persons / I’m taking over the investigation / bald spot / big mustache / clenching a cigarette / in my gold teeth.”

Sylvie Yntema makes a point in English-language premiere of Freek Mariën’s The Wetsuitman

The actors move folding tables and chairs on and off the set to indicate changes of time and space; still photos are projected onto a back screen to add detail to the story, including the geographic location. The livestream is designed by Karen Rodriguez, with multiple cameras offering closeups as well as views from the audience; several attempts at using split screens are not quite successful, but otherwise it definitely feels like a play and not a movie. And for the record, the comment about Renée Zellweger feels out of place, unnecessarily mean-spirited in an otherwise spirited production.

The narrative starts out as a murder mystery but turns into so much more as such issues as race, corruption, and immigration come into focus. During the lockdown, the Cherry presented such fine works as A Day, And What Happens if I Don’t, Hotel Good Luck, and Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine); I’m glad to see the company is continuing to stream its productions from its upstate home to give us city folk a chance to see it as well.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: AN AFTERNOON OF COMEDIC DELIGHTS

Blythe Danner and Bob Dishy team up again in one-act plays for Food for Thought

Who: Food for Thought Productions
What: In-person and livestreamed performance of three one-act plays
Where: Theatre 80 St. Marks, 80 St. Marks Pl. at First Ave., and online
When: Monday, March 28, free with RSVP for in-person (646-366-9340, info@foodforthoughtproductions.com), 2:00; available online March 28 and April 3
Why: Food for Thought Productions has presented more than a thousand one-act plays since 2000, featuring all-star casts in lesser-known works by major playwrights. Its twenty-second season kicks off March 28 at 2:00 with “An Afternoon of Comedic Delights,” three short plays featuring the incomparable Tony and two-time Emmy winner Blythe Danner and the inestimable Bob Dishy, directed by Antony Marselli, live in person at Theatre 80 St. Marks and online; you can also catch the stream on April 3. The Brooklyn-born eighty-eight-year-old Dishy (Lovers and Other Strangers, Sly Fox, Damn Yankees) and the Philadelphia-born seventy-nine-year-old Danner (Butterflies Are Free, Betrayal, Huff) will first team up for George S. Kaufman and Leueen MacGrath’s Amicable Parting, about a young couple, Bill and Alicia Reynolds, going through their possessions as they plan to separate; in the foreword, the authors explain, “This is meant to be high comedy. It should be played lightly, gayly. Never heavily. Never emotionally. Thank you.”

Early on, Alicia points out a specific painting. “I would like to have this one, if you don’t mind, Bill,” she says. “Suits me,” he replies. “Now, Bill, you’re sure? — I mean, that you don’t want it? Of course, I love it, but then you love it too,” she explains. Bill: “No, Sweetie — you saw it first — I remember very clearly. Paris, ’53. What was the name of the restaurant? Chez Something.” Alicia: “Nico.” Bill: “Chez Nico. Too much to eat, too much to drink, too much for this painting.” Ah, memories.

Bob Dishy and Blythe Danner deal with family issues in Brighton Beach Memoirs

Next up is Peter Stone’s Commercial Break, which has been previously performed by Lauren Bacall and Robert Preston and was initially written for Audrey Hepburn in Charade, then revised for Cary Grant in Father Goose, ending up on the cutting-room floor both times. In the play, Tony, Oscar, Emmy, and Edgar winner Stone (Kean, 1776, Woman of the Year) introduces us to Catherine and Harry Crocker; the couple finds itself in quite a predicament when she accuses him of being unfaithful. Dishy presented Stone’s My Doctor the Box with Judy Graubart at a 2007 FFT tribute to Stone, who passed away in 2003 at the age of seventy-three. The third relationship play is Tallulah Finds Her Kitchen, which Neil Simon, Danny Simon, and Joseph Stein wrote for the one and only Tallulah Bankhead, a monologue that takes place, well, in her kitchen. The festivities conclude with a Q&A with Danner and Dishy, who appeared together in Brighton Beach Memoirs in 1986 and in FFT’s December 2021 production of Arthur Miller’s I Can’t Remember.

ProEnglish THEATRE OF UKRAINE: THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Who: ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine
What: Livestreamed fundraiser
Where: ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine Facebook Live
When: Sunday, March 27, free with RSVP (donations encouraged), 11:00 am
Why: Shortly after the Russians began their invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine converted its black box space into a shelter for members of the theatrical profession and neighbors, creating a safe area where actors, directors, technicians, and others could gather together. The company, which is based in Kyiv, has been collecting food and medicine for the elderly while continuing to make art. It is also supporting an effort to train actors as medical personnel to make videos to show people how to care for injured citizens. As part of Boston-based Arlekin Players Theatre’s #Artists4Ukraine project, “a campaign of hope,” ProEnglish Theatre is presenting a livestreamed version of British playwright Harold Pinter’s 1991 drama The New World Order, which deals with imperialism, totalitarianism, and hegemony. The three-character, ten-minute play involves a blindfolded man about to be tortured for unknown reasons.

ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine has converted its space into a shelter for the cast, crew, and community in Kyiv

Des: Do you want to know something about this man?
Lionel: What?
Des: He hasn’t got any idea at all of what we’re going to do to him.
Lionel: He hasn’t, no.
Des: He hasn’t, no. He hasn’t got any idea at all about any one of the number of things that we might do to him.
Lionel: That we will do to him.
Des: That we will.

After finding out about what ProEnglish Theatre was doing, Arlekin founding artistic director Igor Golyak, who was born in Kyiv, made a video in which he declared, “This could be us. This is us.” The play will be performed live over Facebook on March 27 at 11:00 in the morning; if you can give anything, donations will be accepted to help the cause of ProEnglish Theatre in these dire times, as the people of Ukraine demonstrate a profound resilience to protect their freedom.

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ IN CONVERSATION: PERFORMATIVE (POSTPONED)

Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, MoMA performance, 2010 (photo by Marco Anelli / courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives)

Who: Marina Abramović, Glenn Lowry, Marco Anelli
What: Livestreamed discussions in conjunction with new gallery show, “Performative”
Where: Sean Kelly Gallery YouTube, MoMA online
When: Tuesday, March 15, free with RSVP, 6:15 [now postponed]; Thursday, March 24, free with RSVP, 7:30
Why: In 2010, MoMA staged the widely hailed immersive exhibition “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present,” a chronological career survey highlighted by the re-creation of many of the Belgrade-born artist’s performance pieces, centered by the title work, in which she and a visitor sat across from one another, staring into each other’ eyes for as long as possible as the audience watched. In conjunction with the new Sean Kelly exhibit “Marina Abramović: Performative,” which explores four key turning points in Abramović’s oeuvre, the gallery is presenting a pair of live discussions between and Abramović and special guests, sitting down together but most likely not having a staring contest.

On March 15 at 6:15, Abramović will be at Sean Kelly with Glenn Lowry, the longtime MoMA director who oversaw the 2010 show; the livestream will be available on YouTube. [ed note: This event has been postponed because of the knife attack at MoMA over the weekend.] On March 24 at 7:30, Abramović will be at MoMA for a virtual conversation with Italian photographer Marco Anelli. “Performative,” consisting of photographs, video, objects, and ephemera, is on view at Sean Kelly Gallery at 475 Tenth Ave. through April 16, featuring looks at Abramović’s Rhythm 10, The Artist Is Present, the participatory Transitory Objects, and Seven Deaths.