this week in (live)streaming

SHAKESPEARE SONNET SLAM

Who: Gingold Theatrical Group
What: Virtual open mic Shakespeare birthday celebration
Where: Gingold Zoom and Facebook
When: Friday, April 23, free with RSVP, 6:00
Why: This month marks William Shakespeare’s 457th birthday as well as the 405th anniversary of his death, and New York City’s Gingold Theatrical Group, which specializes in works by George Bernard Shaw, will be paying tribute to the Bard with a free, virtual Shakespeare Sonnet Slam open mic on April 23 at 6:00. Among those who will be reading from Shakespeare’s writings are Stephen Brown-Fried, Robert Cuccioli, Tyne Daly, George Dvorsky, Melissa Errico, Alison Fraser, Tom Hewitt, Daniel Jenkins, John-Andrew Morrison, Patrick Page, Maryann Plunkett, Tonya Pinkins, Laila Robins, Jay O. Sanders, Renee Taylor, and Jon Patrick Walker — and the general public, who is invited to offer their own favorite pieces either by or inspired by Will, kept to less than three minutes. “We’re eager to celebrate as much as we can with whatever we can these days,” GTG artistic director David Staller said in a statement. “And since nobody has contributed more to the world of the theater than William Shakespeare, we’re going to celebrate like mad. He wrote more than 150 magnificent sonnets and I doubt we’ll get through them all but we’ll give it our best shot.” In order to be part of the interactive festivities, you must register by April 22 at 4:00.

BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS

The life and art of Bill Traylor are the subject of illuminating documentary (photo courtesy Jean and George Lewis / Caroline Cargo Folk Art Collection)

BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS (Jeffrey Taylor, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opened April 16
filmforum.org
www.billtraylorchasingghosts.com

“I think Traylor is probably the greatest artist you’ve never heard of, but he’s getting heard of more and more,” art critic Roberta Smith says at the beginning of Jeffrey Taylor’s Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, an insightful documentary that runs April 16–22 at Film Forum — both virtually and in person at the West Houston St. theater.

I well remember the first time I truly encountered the scope of Bill Traylor’s art, at a pair of 2013 exhibits at the American Folk Art Museum. I had seen his work before, but these two shows opened my eyes to his immense self-taught skill and his poignant and personal view of the world he had experienced, becoming, in his later years, a unique chronicler of the American South, from slavery and the Civil War through the Great Migration and the Great Depression to Jim Crow and WWII. He passed away in 1949 at the age of ninety-six, leaving behind some 1,500 drawings, all made between 1939 and 1942; it would still be decades until he would be duly recognized him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

Director, producer, and editor Taylor and writer-producer Fred Barron tell Traylor’s uniquely American tale through archival photos, commentary from art connoisseurs and historians, members of Traylor’s family, and, most important, images of hundreds of his works. Born into slavery in Benton, Alabama, in 1853, Traylor was a slave on a cotton plantation, a field hand, a tenant farmer, a shoe repairman, and an ill homeless man while fathering nine children with multiple women before spending three years sitting behind a small refrigerated soda case on Monroe St. in Montgomery, Alabama, drawing both from memory and observation of the bustling Black community in front of him. Using anything he could find — torn paper, stained cardboard with logos on one side — Traylor would draw flat, silhouetted objects, primarily in black but with flourishes of blue, red, and occasional yellows, imbued with a musicality that breathes life into them while also exploring race and class; today, his art evokes elements of both Jacob Lawrence and Kara Walker. Taylor often juxtaposes Traylor’s drawings with photographs of places that might have served as inspiration, which offer further understanding of the art and the man.

“There are certain elements in the work — the use of animal spirits and plant spirits, and there’s hybrid people, there’s were-people — that all of these speak to someone operating intentionally with the desire to render the fantastic. So he’s giving us a whole enchanted, magical realm,” writer, musician, and producer Greg Tate says, adding, “The mystery prevails throughout.” Artist Radcliffe Bailey notes, “When I look at Traylor’s work, I see this freedom of expressing, or seeing what’s going on around him but also being very lyrical about it.” Among the others celebrating Traylor with a deep reverence are archivist Dr. Howard O. Robinson II, professor Richard Powell, and curator Leslie Umberger. Taylor includes readings by actors Russell G. Jones and Sharon Washington, songs by Willie King, Lead Belly, Buddy Guy, and Chick Webb, and tap dances by Jason Samuels Smith, along with the words of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes as well as the white painter and teacher Charles Shannon, who championed and represented Traylor.

The film’s latter section focuses on Traylor’s descendants, including his great-grandson Frank L. Harrison, who tears up when talking about his ancestor. Some knew of Traylor, and some didn’t, which is all part of his legacy. Umberger, who curated the major 2018-19 Smithsonian retrospective “Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor,” sums it up when she states, “He put down this entire oral history in the language that was available to him, which was the language of pictures.” What pictures they are, and we now know more about where they came from, thanks to Chasing Ghosts.

ASK THE EXPERTS: STEFAN FALKE

Who: Stefan Falke
What: Illustrated discussion live on Zoom
Where: Coney Island USA online
When: Wednesday, April 21, $5, 7:00
Why: We have known photojournalist Stefan Falke for several decades and have enjoyed watching his career soar. The award-winning German-born, NYC-based photographer travels the world, documenting stilt walkers in the Caribbean (“Moko Jumbies: The Dancing Spirits of Trinidad”), artists on either side of the southern border (“LA FRONTERA: Artists along the US–Mexico Border”), film shoots, and, for his latest project, New Yorkers during the time of Covid in Keep Going New York!, celebrating the spirit of the city as it battles a pandemic, economic distress, and sociopolitical rage. On April 21 at 7:00, Falke, whose work is represented in “The Flag Project” at Rockefeller Center through the end of the month, will talk about his work in the popular Coney Island USA series “Ask the Experts,” which used to take place at the Coney Island Museum but is currently being held over Zoom. The series continues April 28 with lover-of-the-unusual Marc Hartzman, May 5 with visual artist and Wild Style director Charlie Ahearn, and May 12 with Sideshows by the Seashore painter Marie Roberts.

YIDDISH WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL: THE BIRD OF THE GHETTO (DER FOYGL FUN GETO)

NYTF’s Yiddish Women Playwrights Festival gets under way with The Bird of the Ghetto

Who: Rachel Botchan, Rebecca Brudner, Spencer Chandler, Motl Didner, Kirk Geritano, Avi Hoffman, Maya Jacobson, Daniel Kahn, Lea Kalisch, Rebecca Keren, Avram Mlotek, Lauren Schaffel, Dylan Seders Hoffman, Tatiana Wechsler, Hy Wolfe, Mikhl Yashinsky
What: Inaugural production in NYTF’s Yiddish Women Playwrights Festival
Where: Folksbiene Live!
When: April 18-22, free
Why: At one point in The Bird of the Ghetto (Der Foygl fun Geto), a bird has fallen from a bathhouse roof. “A bird! Look, we found a bird, ” Falke exclaims. When she looks closer, she adds, “I think it’s sick.” Picking up the bird, Sholemke says, “It has broken wings. Look how it trembles. It’s frightened. Do you know how to heal sick birds, Yoyne?” Yoyne responds, “Ask Borukh, he might know.” Falke: “Do you know how to heal sick birds?” Shlemke: “Look, it can’t fly.” Yoyne: “You see, mister? A ghetto bird. You ought to pin the Star of David on it.” Borukh finally chimes in, “A real bird could fly in the ghetto too.” Sholemke: “You mean this is not a real bird? It’s alive. Look, it moves.” Borukh: “A bird should be able to fly. If it can’t fly, it’s not alive even if it lives.” Sholemke: “It’s sick.” Borukh: “So it is.” Falke: “Tell us what to do.” Borukh: “There isn’t much you can do. Be kind to itself, let it help itself.”

Written in 1958 by Holocaust survivor Chava Rosenfarb, The Bird of the Ghetto tells the true story of Jewish resistance fighter Itsik Vitenberg and the 1943 Vilna uprising. Although the play was written in Yiddish, it has never been performed in that language until now, in a virtual reading by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, directed by Suzanne Toren and translated by Goldie Morgentaler. The two-hour work is streaming for free April 18-22, in conjunction with the seventy-eighth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It features Rachel Botchan as Edzshe, Rebecca Brudner as Ester, Spencer Chandler as Vitenberg (commander of the United Partisan Organization, known as the FPO), Motl Didner as Shloyme, Kirk Geritano as Yoyne, Avi Hoffman as Judenrat head Yakov Gens, Maya Jacobson as Freydke, Lea Kalisch as Tea, Rebecca Keren as Dine, Avram Mlotek as Borukh, Lauren Schaffel as Falke, Dylan Seders Hoffman as Sholemke, Tatiana Wechsler as Sorke, Hy Wolfe as the doctor, and Mikhl Yashinsky as Yehude. Nearly all the characters wear a large yellow star on their clothing, identifying them as Jewish. The production kicks off NYTF’s Yiddish Women Playwrights Festival, which celebrates Yiddish plays by women writers. “As we commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the true story behind The Bird of the Ghetto is a moving testament to the bravery and resilience of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust,” NYTF artistic director Zalmen Mlotek said in a statement.

WE PERSIST! I CAN’T REMEMBER ANYTHING

Who: Penny Fuller, Bob Dishy, James Naughton, Susan Charlotte
What: In-person and livestreamed play reading
Where: Theatre 80 St. Marks and Zoom
When: Monday, April 19, live and on Zoom, 2:00 (available on demand April 24-25, 646-366-9340 / info@foodforthoughtproductions.com)
Why: Food for Thought Productions is now in its twenty-first season of presenting all-star readings of little-known and classic one-act plays by major writers. Its current series, “We Persist!,” kicked off with Christopher Durang’s For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and Tennessee Williams’s Life Boat Drill, presented live at Theatre 80 St. Marks to a limited, masked audience. The award-winning company is now back for Arthur Miller’s I Can’t Remember Anything, directed by Antony Marsellis and starring Penny Fuller and Bob Dishy as an elderly widow and her late husband’s best friend, respectively; FFTP previously presented the play two decades ago with Elaine Stritch and Dishy, with Miller in attendance. (Miller would later go on to direct shows for the troupe.) The play will be followed by a Q&A with the cast, moderated by FFTP founder Susan Charlotte, with a special appearance by James Naughton, who directed Dishy in Miller’s The Price at the 1999 Williamstown Theatre Festival. In addition, FFTP regular Tony Roberts will read from his 2015 memoir, Do You Know Me? Free tickets to see the show in person are first come, first served, for those who agree to be part of a documentary being made about the company; the recording will be available for a small fee April 24-25. Next up for FFTP is Charlotte’s The Hairdresser on May 24.

TELEPHONE 2021

Telephone connects artists from around the world (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)

TELEPHONE
Opened April 10, free
phonebook.gallery
satellitecollective.org

In April 2015, New York City–based Satellite Collective launched its unique take on the game of Telephone; instead of people forming a line and whispering phrases to one another to see how much the words change, the project connected more than 300 artists from 42 countries, each developing a new piece based on multiple works they were sent, inspired by the sentence “O god, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” Five years later, Telephone is back, bringing together 950 artists from 70 countries and 5 continents during a pandemic that has seen arts venues shuttered and travel decreased significantly. Starting on March 23, 2020, a message was given to one artist; the text of that message has not been revealed. It was passed via multiple art forms — painting, photography, music, film, dance, poetry, sculpture, prose — creating a vast network of artists primarily selected by word-of-mouth. An online grid allows viewers to explore one work, complete with image/video, artist bio and statement, and map placing where they are from. You can then follow the branch in one of two directions to see what each piece inspires or navigate the game by artist, discipline, or location.

“It took me a while to let the message reach me. I listened again and again. But I heard an echo, and the work I created is exactly that: a soft, natural response to what was sent my way. I hope it keeps moving and changing,” explains Elizabeth Schmuhl of Detroit, whose watercolor is connected to artists from Helsinki, Los Angeles, and Ulster County. “Translating another’s work is harder than expected, especially from a field different from the one you practice. I translated a written work into an illustrator after a lot of sketching and reading between the lines, and then, when making my own drawing, I had to make sure with myself between time to time that I’m still on the right track and conveying the message I believed I have been given,” writes Keren-or Radiano of Tel-Aviv, whose black-and-white piece links to Lauren Baines of San Jose and Timothy Ralphs of Vancouver, who in turn says about his song, “I have to admit that my own work can sometimes be a bit dark and brooding, but because I wanted to honor the spirit of the works that were forwarded to me, I knew I’d have to (at least temporarily) put that pessimism aside. As I meditated on the works, I began to see them as not only being about inspiration but as being an inspiration in themselves. There was a real sense of delight in creation in those works, and I felt touched by the artists’ generosity of spirit. I only hope I was able to pass on some of that to those that come after me.”

Multidisciplinary artists gain inspiration from participants in online game of Telephone (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)

Poet Rebecca Williams of Fort Collins describes, “Writing this piece was in some ways challenging. Usually, I don’t write given a prompt. I normally avoid it. Having participated in a similar telephone game recently for which I wrote a song, I was eager to participate in this one of a global scale. I participated because creating in the circumstances which we face (a global pandemic) has been challenging. My band has been forced to a complete standstill and it puts you face-to-face with the question of why you are actually creating in the first place. Of course, in the end, it is the love and passion for creation, and without it, I truly feel empty. I think my apprehension comes from a kind of distaste for mediocrity. Something which I have always battled and struggled with. I was given such a beautiful work of art to be inspired by, and while I looked at it, and studied it, I asked myself what it meant to me, then the words came easily. Perfection doesn’t exist. Mediocrity does, but beautiful things are always a bit imperfect.” And writer, musician, and Torah teacher Alicia Jo Rabins of Portland, Oregon, points out, “All art is translation, transcription, and transmission. It was fun to collaborate with a mysterious fellow translator/transcriber/transmitter — at the risk of sounding totally woo, it made me feel more grounded in the source of the great flowing stream of art and consciousness that happens at all times. It’s easy to feel alone and it was nice to have company. I think I got what the previous artist was trying to convey. I hope I get to meet them someday.”

Conceived, developed, designed, edited, directed, engineered, and curated by Kevin Draper, Katelyn Watkins, Matt Diehl, Ben Sarsgard, Kelly Jones, Ramon M. Rodriguez, Jennifer Spriggs, Sergio Rodriguez, Madeline Hoak, Sean Tomas Redmond, and Nathan Langston, Telephone can occupy you for hours on end, looking at different ekphrastic works or visualizing it as one giant multidisciplinary, collaborative canvas that expresses our never-ending deep desire for creativity, inspiration, and connection, especially in times of isolation and doubt.

THE WANDERING

THE WANDERING
April 15 – May 15, $24.99 – $29.99
experiencethewandering.com

Every spring for more than forty years, the Schubertiade has celebrated the work of Austrian composer Franz Schubert through concerts, exhibitions, lectures, and discussion. Overlapping with the 2021 Schubertiade, which runs April 28 to May 2, is an unusual, immersive hybrid production called The Wandering, available online April 15 through May 15. The multimedia presentation uses film, music, props, postcards, and photography to explore Schubert’s creativity and sexual orientation.

In his 1992 New York Times article “Critic’s Notebook: Was Schubert Gay? If He Was, So What? Debate Turns Testy” about a 92nd St. Y symposium on the composer, Edward Rothstein wrote, “As for the issue of homosexuality, Mr. [Maynard] Solomon’s case is compellingly argued, but I defer to scholars for a final verdict. The most vexing problems arise in judging the musical importance of the composer’s sexuality. Mr. Solomon asserts, for example, that Schubert’s homosexuality demonstrated a ‘resistance to compulsion’ and that it revealed a ‘heroic region in Schubert’s personality.’ But while Schubert obviously possessed a profound knowledge of suffering and isolation, heroism seems alien to his compositions, imported from some contemporary views of sexual ‘unorthodoxy.’”

Conceived by actor and curator Calista Small, baritone and actor Jeremy Weiss, designer Charlotte McCurdy, theater artist Christine Shaw, filmmaker Lara Panah-Izadi, and animator Zach Bell, The Wandering, which delves into Schubert’s suffering, isolation, heroism, and sexuality in abstract ways, is meant to take place over four days, although you can proceed at your own pace. Each day features a short film starring Weiss as the Wanderer, a curious man traversing a strange landscape, with music by Schubert played by pianist Marika Yasuda and German lyrics sung by Weiss. (English translations by Julian Manresa are available.)

Jeremy Weiss portrays the Wanderer in hybrid immersive production about Franz Schubert

In the Matthew Barney–like films, which can be viewed only once — there’s no going back after you start each one — cinematographer Frank Sun follows the Wanderer as he encounters a series of mysterious characters out on the road, in a forest, in the historic Tivoli Theatre in Downers Grove, Illinois, and at the landmark Wright in Kankakee home in the Illinois woods: Bambi Banks Couleé as the Performer, Ethan Kirschbaum as the Doppelgänger, Daria Harper as the Crow, Small as the Crystallography Denizen, and Josh Romero as the Gardener Denizen. Directed by Panah-Izadi, the films, ranging between six and ten minutes apiece, are beautifully shot tone poems incorporating music, theater, and dance, with choreography by Craig Black, sound by Jared O’Brien, costumes by Casey Wood (the Doppelgänger outfit is particularly impressive), sets by Rachel Cole, and hair and makeup by Erica Martens.

After watching each individual film, you open a packet you received in the mail (well worth the additional $5 cost) containing an object for you to interact with, poetry, letters, pre-addressed stamped postcards you can fill with drawings and/or words and send, QR codes for augmented reality (by Sahil Gupta), and various prompts surrounding your personal “wunderlich,” which can mean “wondrous,” “queer,” “odd,” “fantastical,” or “whimsical.” Several tasks involve going outside, taking a photo, and posting it to the gallery on the main site, known as the Prism (the web design is by TanTan Wang), which features a perennial meditative soundscape. There’s also a page where you can listen separately to the songs, which include “Wandrers Nachtlied,” “Die Krähe,” “Die Gebüsche,” “Nacht Und Träume,” and “Ganymed.”

Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797 and died there at the age of thirty-one, having produced more than 1,500 works, from orchestral overtures, operas, and symphonies to lieder, cantatas, and song cycles. In an 1822 letter the composer sent to his friend and maybe lover, Austrian actor, poet, and librettist Franz von Schober (and which is excerpted in the show’s packet), he describes a dream he had, explaining, “I wandered into a distant land. . . . For long, long years, I sang songs. When I wanted to sing about love, it turned to pain. When I wanted to sing of pain, it turned to love. Thus, love and pain divided me.”

Weiss responds with his own letter to Schubert, writing, “Your music was the first thing I turned to in a moment of crisis during a pandemic. Thank you for writing of your pain, and of your love. Did you ever learn not to let them divide you? Might we?” It’s a question a lot of us have been asking, especially during this last, tumultuous year.