Who: Ato Blankson-Wood, Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Ryan, Bill Camp, Marjolaine Goldsmith, Eduardo Jany, Latoya Lucas, Craig Manbauman, Bryan Doerries What: Live dramatic reading and discussion from Theater of War Productions Where:FDR Four Freedoms Park, Roosevelt Island When: Wednesday, September 27, free with RSVP, 5:00 Why: On January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in his annual speech to Congress, “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”
That quote is embedded in s block of marble in FDR Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. On September 27 at 5:00, Theater of War will present its latest production, performing scenes from Sophocles’s Ajax, a fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy about the warrior who played a key role in Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War. The event is free; audiences can watch the show in the park or virtually as a Zoom webinar. The impressive cast features actors Ato Blankson-Wood, Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Ryan, and Bill Camp, company manager Marjolaine Goldsmith, and retired military veterans Eduardo Jany, Latoya Lucas, and Craig Manbauman, with Theater of War artistic director and translator Bryan Doerries serving as facilitator of a panel discussion and open dialogue exploring the physical and psychological wounds of war on individuals, families, and the community.
“I pity him in his misery for all that he is my foe, because he is bound fast to a dread doom,” Ajax says in the play. “I think of my own lot no less than his. For I see that we are phantoms, all we who live, or fleeting shadows.”
Battery Dance will perform The Wind in the Olive Grove at annual outdoor summer festival
BATTERY DANCE FESTIVAL
Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City
75 River Terr., North Esplanade
August 12-18, free with advance RSVP, 7:00 batterydance.org
The forty-second annual Battery Dance Festival goes hybrid this summer, with live presentations of works from more than forty companies from around the country and the globe, including numerous New York City and world premieres and US debuts. Free performances take place August 12-18 at 7:00 at Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City — a move from its previous home in Robert Wagner Jr. Park — and will be livestreamed as well.
“When Super Storm Sandy flooded lower Manhattan, Battery Park City Authority reached out a helping hand, providing a beautiful site for the Battery Dance Festival which we’ve all enjoyed every summer since 2013,” Battery Dance founding artistic director Jonathan Hollander said in a statement. “With the prospect of rising seas in the future, BPCA is enacting a proactive resiliency plan, lifting Wagner Park up to twelve feet, making it inaccessible this summer. But fear not! BPCA has invited us to move to Rockefeller Park this summer, where we’ll benefit from the large lawn and riverfront views as we bask in the glow of performances by local and international companies.”
As always, the Battery Dance Festival offers dance fans the chance to see multiple disciplines all in a single evening, for free, with a wide range of pieces from international troupes that explore original movement and celebrate unique culture while often taking on contemporary issues and sharing personal stories. Among this year’s special programs are “Young Voices in Dance” on August 12, “India Independence Day” on August 15, and “Tribute to Turn of the 20th Century American Modern Dance Pioneers” on August 17, honoring Isadora Duncan and Jennifer Muller, who passed away in March at the age of seventy-eight.
In addition, $1 community workshops are being held every morning at 10:30 at Battery Dance Studios (380 Broadway #5), led by festival choreographers, artistic directors, and company members; advance registration is required. Below is the full dance schedule.
Saturday, August 12: Young Voices in Dance
The Bowery Mission, Dancing to Connect
Marley Poku-Kankam, All Four
Aliyah Banerjee & Shashank Iswara, Taraana
Dareon Blowe, How Do Five Parts Construct a Whole?
Mateo Vidals, There Is Always Something Happening
Luke Biddinger, La Vie en Rose
Cameron Kay, Interface
Samanvita Kasthuri, Krtaghna
Micah Sell, Outline
Queensborough Community College, Discovering
Willem Sadler, Soullessly Flying
Tulia Marshall, A fraction of a true self
Joanne Hwang, Static State of Perfection
Sunday, August 13
Battery Dance, A Certain Mood
Reuel Rogers, Power
Keturah Stephen, A Yearning Desire
Circumstances, ON POINT
Nu-World Contemporary Danse Theatre, The Called and the Chosen
Trainor Dance Inc., Courante
IMGE Dance, (no)man
Monday, August 14
SOLE Defined, SOLE Defined LIVE
Teatr Nowszy, Close (excerpt)
Erv Works Dance, Veiled from the Womb
Jiemin Yang, Here We Root (excerpt)
Teodora Velescu and Lari Giorgescu, Special People
Circumstances, ON POINT
Fanike! African Dance Troupe, UPLIFTED!
Tuesday, August 15: India Independence Day
Rudrakshya Foundation, Kali Krishna
Durgesh Gangani, The Legacy
Amarnath Ghosh, Maragatha Manimaya
Wednesday, August 16
Julian Donahue Dance, Displacement
Citadel + Compagnie, Soudain l’hiver dernier
Tabanka Dance Ensemble, Progress
Teatr Nowszy, Close (excerpt)
Teodora Velescu and Lari Giorgescu, Special People
Jerron Herman, Lax
Carolyn Dorfman Dance, NOW
Dancers Unlimited, Edible Tales (excerpts), Soul Food & Kanaloa
Dances by Isadora will honor Isadora Duncan at Battery Dance Festival (photo by Melanie Futorian)
Thursday, August 17: Tribute to Turn of the 20th Century American Modern Dance Pioneers
Dances by Isadora, Isadora Duncan: Under a New Sky
Time Lapse Dance, American Elm and Piece for a Northern Sky
Denishawn, Denishawn (excerpts)
In memoriam: Jennifer Muller (1944-2023), Jennifer Muller/The Works, Miserere Nobis
Friday, August 18
Adriana Ogle & Toru Sakuragi, Softly as in a Morning Glow
Amanda Treiber, Wind-Up
Bruce Wood Dance, In My Your Head
Citadel + Compagnie, Soudain l’hiver dernier
Boca Tuya, Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight
Tabanka Dance Ensemble, Progress
Reuel Rogers, Power
Battery Dance, The Wind in the Olive Grove
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Who: Jessie Eisenberg, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Chad Coleman, David Strathairn What: Live dramatic reading and discussion from Theater of War Productions Where:The Greene Space, 44 Charlton St. When: Monday, July 31, free with RSVP, 7:00 Why: In his May 22 New Yorker article “The Revolving Door,” titled “The System That Failed Jordan Neely” online, Adam Iscoe uses the incident between Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny to examine mental health issues, homelessness, and law enforcement in New York City. On May 1, the thirty-year-old Black Neely died after being put into a chokehold for several minutes by twenty-four-year-old White former marine Daniel Penny on a northbound F train. Iscoe writes, “The N.Y.P.D. questioned Penny, then released him. (His lawyers say that he was acting in self-defense.) ‘We don’t know exactly what happened here,’ Mayor Eric Adams said, afterward. ‘We cannot just blanketly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that.’ Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, said, ‘There’s consequences for behavior.’ Was she talking about Neely, or the man who killed him?”
On July 31, the Greene Space will kick off its new series, “Theater of War Productions: Live from the Greene Space,” with a dramatic reading of Iscoe’s article, featuring the all-star cast of Jessie Eisenberg, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Chad Coleman, and David Strathairn. That will be followed by an in-depth guided community discussion with paramedics, psychiatric nurses, case workers, law enforcement, transit workers, the unhoused, those who serve them, and concerned citizens. There is limited in-person seating for the free event at the Greene Space, but everyone is invited to watch the program over Zoom.
Since 2009, Theater of War has been presenting dramatic readings and discussions, pairing classical and modern works with hot-button topics, including Sophocles’s Oedipus, the King with the pandemic and the climate crisis, William Shakespeare’s King Lear with caregiving and death, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound with incarceration, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night with addiction and substance abuse, and Sophocles’s Antigone with racialized police violence. The organization, founded by Bryan Doerries, was active during the pandemic, hosting dozens of programs with such participants as Bill Murray, Oscar Isaac, Taylor Schilling, John Turturro, Samira Wiley, Ato Blankson-Wood, Frances McDormand, Keith David, Jeffrey Wright, Kathryn Erbe, and Frankie Faison.
“In and out. Around and around. One institution to the next: 7-Eleven, Kirby Forensic, Atlantic Armory, Manhattan Psychiatric, Maimonides, Lincoln, Kings County, Bellevue,” Iscoe writes. “Tonight, there are more than seventy thousand people without beds of their own sleeping in homeless shelters and temporary-housing programs and other places, too. Some shelters have kitchens that serve freshly stewed chicken thighs and homemade strawberry pie; others serve chicken that is undercooked and mealy apples for dessert. Many shelter beds are seven inches off the ground and bolted to the floor. For the mentally ill, there are forty-nine hundred beds in mental-health shelters, but more than forty-nine hundred people want to sleep in them. And so tonight mentally ill men and women are sleeping in large intake shelters, on the street, in the trains. Tomorrow, they will wake up and go about their day.”
A Graham Nash self-portrait from 1972 is one of two dozens works on view at City Winery (photo courtesy City Winery / Graham Nash)
Who:Graham Nash,Anthony DeCurtis What: Live and livestreamed conversation Where:92nd St. Y Center of Culture & Arts, 1395 Lexington Ave. between 91st & 92nd St., Buttenwieser Hall at the Arnhold Center and online When: Thursday, June 1, $25 online, $35 in person, 8:30 Why: On “A Better Life,” the second song on Now, his first album of new material in seven years, two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Graham Nash sings, “Let’s make it a better life, leave it for the kids / It’s a lovely place, welcome home to the human race / We can make it a better life — one we can be proud of / So that at the end of the day, I hope we hear them say / that we left them a better life.” In his most recent book, A Life in Focus: The Photography of Graham Nash (November 2021, Insight Editions, $60), the musician, visual artist, and social activist explains, “I’ve been taking photographs longer than I’ve been making music.”
Coming off three shows at City Winery in which he played songs from throughout his long and distinguished career, the eighty-one-year-old Nash will be at the 92nd St. Y on June 1 at 8:30, in conversation with Rolling Stone contributor Anthony DeCurtis. Now contains such other tracks as “Right Now,” “Golden Idols,” and “I Watched It All Come Down”; meanwhile, two dozen of his pictures are on view through July 11 at City Winery in the exhibition “Graham Nash: Enduring Images,” including photos of Columbus Circle, David Crosby, Balboa Park, Johnny Cash, Jerry Garcia, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and an old house in Santa Cruz. At the 92nd St. Y talk, which can be attended in person or online, Nash will also perform some songs from the new record, demonstrating once again how he’s made this life better for all of us.
Who: Julie Benko, Andréa Burns, Carolee Carmello, Nikki Renée Daniels, Laura Darrell, Ali Ewoldt, Marina Kondo, Emilie Kouatchou, Bryce Pinkham, Scarlett Strallen, Jessica Vosk, Sally Wilfert, more What:Tribute to Broadway favorite Rebecca Luker Where:Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at Ninety-Fifth St. When: Monday, May 22, $35-$250, 8:00 Why: On May 10, 2018, Alabama-born Broadway star Rebecca Luker presented “Project Broadway: The Rebecca Luker Songbook” at Symphony Space, a concert featuring the world premiere of eighteen songs written specifically for her by such composers as Deborah Abramson, Sam Davis, Stephen Flaherty, Jenny Giering, Sheldon Harnick, Henry Krieger, Andrew Lippa, Matthew Sklar, and Joseph Thalken. The three-time Tony nominee (Show Boat,The Music Man,Mary Poppins) announced in 2020 that she had ALS, and she died on December 23 of that year, survived by her husband, Tony winner Danny Burstein, and his two sons.
On May 22, a wonderful collection of Broadway stars will honor Luker and the fifth anniversary of “The Rebecca Luker Songbook” when they gather at Symphony Space and debut twenty-four different songs written for Luker, by Carmel Dean, Scott Eyerly, Giering, Mike Heitzman and Ilene Reid, Krieger, Lippa, David Loud, Martin Lowe, Joshua Rosenblum, Sam Willmott, and others. (The project included more than eighty original numbers.) Among those performing will be Julie Benko, Andréa Burns, Carolee Carmello, Nikki Renée Daniels, Laura Darrell, Ali Ewoldt, Marina Kondo, Emilie Kouatchou, Bryce Pinkham, Scarlett Strallen, Jessica Vosk, and Sally Wilfert; Thalken will serve as music director, with Deborah Avery on clarinet, Katherine Cherbas on cello, Craig Magnano on guitar and ukulele, and Benny Koonyevsky on percussion. The concert will raise funds for Project ALS, which “identifies and funds the most promising scientific research that will lead to the first effective treatments and a cure for ALS. We recruit the world’s best scientists and doctors to work together — rationally and aggressively — to develop a better understanding of the ALS disease process and, in parallel, better therapeutic strategies.” Tickets range from $35 to $250; the concert, directed by producer Annette Jolles, will also be livestreamed for $35.
Ryan Dickie and Abigail Horton’s Blow Up My Life opens the 2023 Harlem Film Festival
THE 2023 HARLEM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
AMC Magic Johnson Harlem 9 Theatres, 2309 Frederick Douglass Blvd.
The Forum, 601 West 125th St.
Maysles Documentary Center, 343 Malcolm X Blvd.
May 18-28 harlemfilmfestival.org
The eighteenth edition of the Harlem International Film Festival kicks off May 18 with the New York premiere of Ryan Dickie and Abigail Horton’s Blow Up My Life, a pharmaceutical thriller starring Jason Selvig, Kara Young, Ben Horner, Davram Stiefler, and Reema Sampat, followed by a filmmaker Q&A and preceded by Eunice Levis’s InVade, a short that mixes undocumented immigration and environmental disaster. InVade is one of four films in the Harlem Spotlight section, along with Hans Augustave’s eight-minute I Held Him, with Brian Teague Williams, Alphonso Walker Jr., and Malik Yoba; Ryan Fenson-Hood’s twenty-one-minute The Obituary of Jasper James, about an unhoused man who moves into a mausoleum; and Patrick Heaphy’s feature-length documentary The Sacred Space Between Earth and Space, about Harlem Stage’s Afrofuturism series produced during the pandemic.
“This year we are celebrating over a century of Harlem Renaissance and Resilience with an amazing slate of films from the area,” HI program director Nasri Zacharia said in a statement. “Music runs throughout our schedule with amazing documentaries, very special honorees, culminating in a big day of music films and a special live performance. This film festival has always emphasized the idea of being a festival with exciting and entertaining events inspired by the films we screen, and this year really underlines that idea.”
Reggie Austin will perform live following NC Heikin’s Life & Life documentary about Austin’s experience in prison; other music docs look at bluesman James Cotton, jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and double bassist Ron Carter, who will be honored with the Renaissance Award.
On May 20, Columbia University’s Forum presents free showings of Ashwin Chaudhary’s documentary Blind Eye Artist, about painter Justin Wadlington, whose art will be on display; Jenny Mackenzie’s documentary The Right to Read, about an NAACP activist, a teacher, and two American families dealing with literacy issues; and a special collection of Harlem shorts by local filmmakers.
Other in-person films include Tamika Miller’s Honor Student, David Bell and Mecca Medina’s #Brokeboi paired with William Alexander Runnels’s The Closet B!tch, Clayton P. Allis and Doug E. Doug’s In the Weeds with Doug in person, and Christina Kallas’s Paris Is in Harlem. In addition, STARZ will host the world premiere of the first two episodes of season two of Run the World, with stars Amber Stevens West, Bresha Webb, and Corbin Reid participating in a panel discussion after the Friday Night Spotlight screening. There will also be an extensive virtual section of the festival; keep watching this space for more information.
Beyond the Visible profiles the life and work of master abstractionist Hilma af Klint
BEYOND THE VISIBLE: HILMA AF KLINT (Halina Dyrschka, 2019)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, May 19 metrograph.com zeitgeistfilms.com
In 2013, a new hero burst onto the art scene, despite being dead for nearly seventy years. First came “Hilma af Klint — A Pioneer of Abstraction,” by all accounts an eye-opening show that toured Europe, followed five years later by the smash Guggenheim exhibit “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” which propelled the extraordinary work of the Swedish abstractionist into the mainstream. I fondly remember making my way through the show, mouth agape at the many wonders I was seeing. German director Halina Dyrschka continues the celebration of this previously little-known painter in the documentary Beyond the Visible — Hilma af Klint, which is screening May 19-25 at Metrograph, with art historian Max Rosenberg, contributor to the book Hilma af Klint: Tree of Knowledge, on hand for an extended introduction to the 3:00 screening on May 21.
In her debut full-length film, Dyrschka digs deep into who af Klint was, what inspired her unique achievements, and why she had been overlooked until the 2010s. “Now we have a real scandal,” German art critic and af Klint biographer Julia Voss says. “Suddenly, more than fifty years after history was written, completely out of the blue, at least for the general public, we discover this woman who painted abstract works before Kandinsky, creating this huge oeuvre, fully independently, and by a kind of miracle it’s all stayed together. It’s like finding a time capsule in Sweden. And now we have to ask: How should we integrate it?”
Born in Stockholm in 1862, af Klint incorporated physics, mathematics, the natural world, and spiritualism into her paintings, abstract canvases that predated Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, who both, like af Klint, died in 1944. She didn’t exhibit any of her work until 1906, and after that only sparingly. Upon her death, her estate was not permitted to show anything for twenty years; her first posthumous exhibition was held in LA in 1986.
“We are not here forever,” Dyrschka narrates early in the film. “So it is not at all astonishing that someone once wondered about what it means to be in the world and how everything fits together — and came up with a huge answer. The strange thing is I only found out about it more than one hundred years later. Art history has to be rewritten.” Among the others lobbying for af Klint’s ascension into the art canon are artists Josiah McEhleny and Monika von Rosen, novelist Anna Laestadius Larsson, art historians Ernst Peter Fischer and Anna Maria Bernitz, Eva-Lena Bengtsson of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, collector Valeria Napoleone, and gallerist Ceri Hand, offering different perspectives of the value and legacy of her her work. Lending more personal insight are Ulla af Klint, the widow of Hilma’s nephew Erik (from a 2001 interview); Johan af Klint, Ulla’s son, who ran the Hilma af Klint Foundation, which oversees the artist’s 1,500 paintings and 26,000 pages in notebooks; and Marie Cassel and Brigitta Giertta, descendants of two of Hilma’s closest friends. Together they paint a compelling portrait of the iconoclastic af Klint, who filled her work with cutting-edge and fringe philosophy and science. But you don’t have to agree with her offbeat world view to fall in love with her gorgeous canvases, many of which are displayed in the film.
The extraordinary canvases of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint are on view in Beyond the Visible
Curator Iris Müller-Westermann explains, “Never in her lifetime did she put any of her abstract work on show. Hilma af Klint’s project was something much grander than what we today call ‘art.’ It was all about seeing the world we live in in a larger context, to understand who we really are in a cosmic perspective.”
Cinematographers Alicja Pahl and Luana Knipfer often let the camera linger on peaceful shots of water, flowers, the sky, and other natural elements that morph into Klint’s paintings and reenactments of af Klint working on a large-scale painting on the floor of her studio. Petra van der Voort reads excerpts from af Klint’s writings in voice-over, narrating from books that we can follow along with, zooming in on her penmanship, while Damian Scholl supplies a wide-ranging, eclectic score.
“She was well educated, she had a mind of her own, and she painted like nobody else,” Johan af Klint says. McElheny points out, “In order to tell the history of abstraction now, you have to rewrite it.” Beyond the Visible confirms that it’s time for a new history.
