this week in (live)streaming

36.5 / A DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE WITH THE SEA: NEW YORK ESTUARY

Sarah Cameron Sunde will conclude thirteen-year durational project in New York City on September 14 (photo courtesy Sarah Cameron Sunde)

Who: Sarah Cameron Sunde
What: Conclusion of nine-year artistic environmental journey
Where: Hallet’s Cove, special viewing areas, and online
When: Wednesday, September 14, free, 7:27 am – 8:06 pm
Why: Harlem-based interdisciplinary artist and director Sarah Cameron Sunde began 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea back in 2013, in which she stands in bodies of water for full twelve-plus-hour tidal cycles, with the public invited to join her in person or online. The work, which has been performed on six continents, was inspired by the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, to the community, humanity, and artists specifically. The piece comes to its conclusion on September 14 with 36.5 / New York Estuary, when Sunde will be at Hallet’s Cove at 31-10 Vernon Blvd.; you can go in the water with her, watch the livestream at home or with others at Brookfield Place, Manhattan West, Riverside Park Conservancy, Gallatin Galleries at NYU, Mercury Store in Brooklyn, the RISE center in Far Rockaway, or the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor in Staten Island, or check it out from viewing stations on the northern tip of Roosevelt Island or the Upper East Side. There will also be remote participants from Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, the Netherlands, and Aotearoa—New Zealand. In conjunction with the finale, Sunde cofounded Kin to the Cove, a community organization that hosts site-specific workshops, discussions, and other events.

The work has previously been performed in Maine, Mexico, San Francisco Bay, the Netherlands, the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, the Bay of All Saints in Brazil, Bodo Inlet in Kenya, and Te Manukanukatanga ō Hoturoa in Tāmaki Makaurau. Sunde explained in a statement, “36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea is my attempt to translate the seemingly abstract idea of climate change and sea-level rise into our bodies. It’s also about Time on many different scales: a durational work that unfolds over thirteen hours that has taken nearly a decade to complete. The tide tracks time on my body viscerally, which functions as a metaphor for the changing environment. The water is my collaborator, and the risks are real. I stay present in the sensations, attempt to embody the ocean, and find a way to endure the struggle while decentering my human experience and acknowledging potential futures. The public is invited to stand in the water with me for however long they like and to participate in a series of artistic interventions from the shore, creating a human clock that communicates to me each hour as it passes.”

On October 6 at 6:00, NYU dean for the humanities Una Chaudhuri will moderate “Standing with the Sea: Reflections on Sarah Cameron Sunde’s 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea” at Gardner Commons in Shimkin Hall, followed by a screening of an updated video on the outside Bobst Library wall.

HISPANIC GOLDEN AGE CLASSICS | LOPE DE VEGA: THE CAPULETS AND THE MONTAGUES

Who: Red Bull Theater
What: Online benefit reading and free discussions
Where: Red Bull Theater online
When: Monday, September 12, $25, 7:30
Why: Red Bull Theater kicked off its “Hispanic Golden Age Classics — Lope de Vega” initiative on September 8 with the panel discussion “Lope de Vega & Shakespeare,” exploring how the Bard and Spanish playwright and novelist Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio both wrote works about the Capulets and the Montagues; UCLA professor Barbara Fuchs and UCLA PhD candidate Rhonda Sharrah were joined by actor Dakin Matthews, who wrote the new rhyming translation that is being used. The “Diversifying the Classics” programming is centered by a live, online reading of Lope de Vega’s The Capulets and the Montagues (Castelvines y Monteses) on September 12 at 7:30 (available through September 18 at 11:59 pm), performed by Junior Nyong’o as Romeo and Cara Ricketts as Juliet, along with Anita Castillo-Halvorssen, Christian DeMarais, Carson Elrod, Topher Embrey, Alejandra Escalante, Jake Hart, Paco Lozano, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Timothy D. Stickney, and Matthews, directed by Melia Bensussen. On September 15 at 7:30, members of the creative team will participate in the interactive online Bull Session “The Capulets and the Montagues.”

“Castelvines y Monteses is the sixth comedia I have translated, and my first Lopean adventure — after three Alarcóns, one Tirso, and one Moreto. It was a bracing experience to dip for the first time into the font from which sprang all later comedias,” Matthews explains in an introductory essay. “And it was just as bracing to work with material that so closely accorded with that of Shakespeare, who has been the subject of my lifelong fascination and study. And there, of course, lies the first trap that I — and any translator who comes to Lope’s version of the Romeo and Juliet story — must try to avoid. (Which I did not make any easier on myself, I confess, by my determination to use the equivalent Shakespearean proper names in an effort to make the play more appealing to English-speaking producers and audiences.)” Meanwhile, Sharrah notes, “Miguel de Cervantes, [Lope’s] contemporary and rival, may not have meant it entirely as a compliment when he called Lope a ‘monster of nature’ (monstruo de la naturaleza). Yet Lope’s prodigious output was fundamental to developing the theater of his age, and to our understanding of it today. The monster of nature left us many gifts.”

LIKE A ROLLING STONE: JANN WENNER IN CONVERSATION WITH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

Who: Bruce Springsteen, Jann S. Wenner
What: Virtual and in-person discussion
Where: 92nd St. Y, Kaufmann Concert Hall, 1395 Lexington Ave., and online
When: Tuesday, September 13, $60 (includes book), 7:00
Why: “I went to the Rolling Stone offices on a Monday morning in mid-May 2019. My assistant met me downstairs to take my attaché case, as I was still walking with two canes. It was a gray day in New York, one of rain, with a forecast for more all week. When I got to our second-floor lobby, workmen were putting up plywood to protect the walls from the movers,” Jann S. Wenner writes in “The Last Days,” the prologue to his new memoir, Like a Rolling Stone (Little, Brown, $35). Cleaning out his office, he writes, “I took down Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of a young Pete Townshend, his hands bloody from playing his guitar. . . . I packed up the small wood and metal sculpture of a skier that Patti Scialfa sent for my birthday.” Describing the memoir itself, he posits, “Our readers often referred to Rolling Stone as a letter from home. This is my last letter to you.”

On September 13, Wenner will be at the 92nd St. Y to discuss his memoir with his longtime friend Bruce Springsteen, who has appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone by himself fourteen times and another eight with others; the conclusion to Wenner’s prologue is a reference to Springsteen’s most recent album, Letter to You. Bruce, whose wife is Patti Scialfa, has been the subject of numerous RS interviews, but this time he turns the tables, interviewing Wenner about the new book, delving into the New York City native’s often controversial life and career. Springsteen says of the memoir, “If you were young, alone, and in the far lands of New Jersey, Rolling Stone was a dispatch from the front, carrying news of a bigger world and another life awaiting. Like a Rolling Stone is a touchingly honest memoir from a man who recorded and shaped our times and of a grand life well lived. It is a wonderfully deep and rewarding reading. I loved it.”

The book features seventy-seven chapters that explore the counterculture, politics, family, and such journalists, musicians, and pop-culture icons as Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph J. Gleason, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, John Belushi, Jackie Onassis, Tom Wolfe, the Dalai Lama, and the Grateful Dead. In addition to being the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone, Wenner, a cofounder of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has interviewed such figures as Bono, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Jerry Garcia, John Lennon, and Townshend for the magazine; Jagger and music executive Ahmet Ertegun inducted Wenner into the hall in 2004. Tickets are $60 and come with a copy of the book, which will be signed for those attending the event in person.

TABLE OF SILENCE PROJECT: A CALL TO ACTION FOR PEACE

Annual “Table of Silence Project” performance ritual of peace returns for twelfth year to Josie Robertson Plaza (photo courtesy Lincoln Center)

TABLE OF SILENCE PROJECT
Josie Robertson Plaza, Lincoln Center
65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, September 11, free, 8:10 – 8:46 am
www.tableofsilence.org
lincolncenter.org

Every September 11, there are many memorial programs held all over the city, paying tribute to those who were lost on that tragic day while also honoring New York’s endless resiliency. One of the most powerful is Buglisi Dance Theatre’s “Table of Silence Project,” a multicultural public performance ritual for peace that annually features more than one hundred dancers on Josie Robertson Plaza at Lincoln Center. It had to be reconfigured during the pandemic but is now back in a hybrid format, available to be experienced in person or streaming live here.

On Sunday morning from 8:10 to 8:46, the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center, BDT will present the full piece, around the Revson Fountain. “The strength of the work is found in the gestures, patterns, and repetition that mirrors our daily lives and is accesssible to all. We would not return to the work each year if it were not so universally meaningful as a tool for storytelling through which the audience can recognize itself,” BDT artistic director Jacqulyn Buglisi, who recently received the President’s Medal from Juilliard, said in a statement. “Your passionate belief makes this ritual a powerful testimonial of freedom for all people suffering oppression and is an imperative at this time in our history.”

LAVENDER MEN

Pete Ploszek, Alex Esola, and Roger Q. Mason star in Lavender Men (photo by Jenny Graham)

LAVENDER MEN
Streaming from Skylight Theatre in Los Angeles
August 27, 28, 29, September 3, 4, $25-$38
skylighttheatre.org

The Civil War might be known as the battle between the Blue and the Gray, but Black Filipinx playwright and actor Roger Q. Mason turns to a different color in the world premiere of Lavender Men, continuing at the Skylight Theatre in Los Angeles and streaming online through September 4, in conjunction with Playwrights’ Arena.

During the pandemic, I watched virtual presentations of Mason’s The Duat, about a Black man (Gregg Daniel) searching for his place in a world of racial injustice, and Age Sex Location, part of the omnibus Matriarch: She’s Wide Awake Shining Light . . . , in which Ramy El-Etreby dances onstage in glittery drag and proclaims, “Fat bitch / Black queen / Mixed breed mishap / Round nosed fag ho / That’s what you think of me / As I walk down the street / My wide hips waddling / My fleshy neck obscuring a too-soft jawline.”

In the prologue of Lavender Men, Taffeta (Mason) says those same words, adding, “No fats, no fems, no blacks. / Well, kiss my black, fat, fem ass to the red! / I am more than that.” Taffeta, identified in the script as a “biracial, male assigned gender nonconforming fabulous queer creation of color,” is both narrator and participant in a reimagining of the relationship between Abe Lincoln (Pete Ploszek), who has just lost his 1858 Senate campaign to unseat Stephen A. Douglas and has returned to his law practice, and Elmer E. Ellsworth (Alex Esola), a soldier who has left the army — after being deemed too short to gain the promotions he thought he deserved — to work as Lincoln’s clerk.

Lincoln’s friend John Hay, later secretary of state for both William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that Lincoln “loved [Ellsworth] like a younger brother,” but Mason reinterprets that intimacy as a magnetic sexual attraction. Lavender Men doesn’t merely hint at their homosexuality but digs into it full force. Taffeta speaks with Lincoln and Ellsworth as if she is a kind of spirit from the future, offering them a second chance, while they understand that they are in a play being performed in front of an audience. “This is a fantasia, honey!” she declares.

Taffeta (Roger Q. Mason) watches intently as Elmer E. Ellsworth (Alex Esola) and Abe Lincoln (Pete Ploszek) grow close in streaming play (photo by Jenny Graham)

As Lincoln considers running for office and Ellsworth wants to reenlist, they explore their feelings for each other. Taffeta also shows up as Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd; his servant, Sadie; as well as a cadet, an officer, a lamppost, a chandelier, and a tree. Mason avoids putting Lincoln on a pedestal. At one point Abe asks Ellsworth, “What do you think of Negroes? . . . What should we do with them?” Ellsworth responds, “I haven’t really formulated an opinion, to be honest.” Lincoln says, “Well, they are the taste on everybody’s tongue — and it ain’t sweet. I’ll tell you that.” Ellsworth asks, “What about you, sir?” Lincoln answers, “We oughta send them back.”

Taffeta gives them multiple chances to change their fate, but they’re not sure if they want to. “It could be different this time. We can make it whatever we want,” Taffeta explains early on. “Can we change the ending?” Lincoln asks. “Sure, start wherever you like. We can even make it up — they’ll believe it,” Taffeta promises, speaking about the audience. But changing history doesn’t come easily.

Stephen Gifford’s set is filled with archival photographs and documents on the walls, along with an analog-pixelated image of Lincoln hovering over it all in the back. A wardrobe serves as an entrance and exit for Lincoln and Ellsworth, but it’s not quite Narnia awaiting them on the other side. The sharp lighting is by Dan Weingarten, with original music by David Gonzalez and sound by Erin Bednarz that includes whispered voices that occasionally taunt Taffeta. Wendell Carmichael’s costumes range from the men’s straightforward attire to Taffeta’s far more fabulous looks.

The show is smartly directed by Lovell Holder, who helmed Mason’s 2020 virtual performance piece The Pride of Lions for Dixon Place and cohosts the podcast Sister Roger’s Gayborhood with Mason; the stream is filmed with multiple cameras from different angles, but there are a few noticeably shaky moments.

Lavender Men is an intimate tale that touches on such issues as slavery, racism, trans hate, white saviors, and, primarily, being who one truly is inside. “We all have voices — goddamnit, let’s use them!” Taffeta proclaims, talking not only to Abe and Elmer but to Mason and everyone watching, in the theater and at home.

STAND WITH SALMAN: DEFEND THE FREEDOM TO WRITE

Who: Paul Auster, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tina Brown, Kiran Desai, Andrea Elliott, Amanda Foreman, A. M. Homes, Siri Hustvedt, Hari Kunzru, Colum McCann, Douglas Murray, Andrew Solomon, Gay Talese, more
What: Public reading of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
Where: The New York Public Library, Fifth Ave. and Forty-Second St., and online
When: Friday, August 19, free, 11:00 am
Why: “‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Ta-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . .’”

So begins Salman Rushdie’s 1988 Booker Prize finalist and Whitbread winner, The Satanic Verses, which famously led the Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa on the Indian-born British-American novelist, calling for his death, complete with a multimillion-dollar bounty. While others associated with the publication of the book have indeed been murdered (Italian translator Ettore Capriolo, Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi; Norwegian publisher William Nygaard and Turkish translator Aziz Nesin survived attacks), Rushdie spent years in hiding but ultimately emerged to become a leading international literary figure. But on August 12, Rushdie was stabbed ten times as he prepared to give a talk and lecture at the Chautauqua Institution; the alleged assailant, twenty-four-year-old Hadi Matar, claims to have read only two pages of The Satanic Verses but decided to try to kill Rushdie after watching numerous speeches of his on YouTube.

Rushdie, who has been writing and speaking about human rights and free speech around the world for decades, will be celebrated on August 19 at 11:00 am when a group of his friends and colleagues gather on the steps of the New York Public Library in Midtown for a public reading of his most famous book; there was also a public reading of the work a few days after the fatwa was declared, some thirty-three years ago. Organized by PEN, the NYPL, PenguinRandom House, and House of SpeakEasy, “Stand with Salman: Defend the Freedom to Write” will include such authorial stalwarts as Paul Auster, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tina Brown, Kiran Desai, Andrea Elliott, Amanda Foreman, A. M. Homes, Siri Hustvedt, Hari Kunzru, Colum McCann, Douglas Murray, Andrew Solomon, and Gay Talese. The grassroots event is open to all and will be livestreamed as well; in addition, you can post your own reading of a short passage on social media using #StandWithSalman and tagging @penamerica.

“We are again facing a watershed moment,” Foreman wrote in a statement. “The war against freedom of expression is gaining strength. Globally, over two thousand writers and journalists have been murdered since Rushdie was sentence to death by Iran. On August 19 we have an opportunity to make a stand: courage breeds courage.”

HARLEM WEEK: A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM AND MORE

Who: Uptown Dance Academy, Unveiled Unlocked, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, Mama Foundation’s Sing Harlem! Choir, the Isn’t Her Grace Amazing! Choir, Lord Nelson, Shemar Levy, Lorenzo Laroc, the Bengsons, Kenny Lattimore, Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band
What: Annual Harlem Week celebration
Where: U.S. Grant National Memorial Park, West 122nd St. at Riverside Dr.
When: Sunday, August 14, free, noon – 7:00 pm
Why: One of the centerpieces of Harlem Week is “A Great Day in Harlem,” which takes place Sunday, August 14, as part of the opening weekend of this ten-day summer festival. There will be an international village with booths selling food, clothing, jewelry, and more, as well as live music and dance divided into “Artz, Rootz & Rhythm,” “The Gospel Caravan,” and “the Concert Under the Stars.” Among the performers are the Uptown Dance Academy, Kenny Lattimore, Unveiled Unlocked, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, the Sing Harlem! Choir, the Isn’t Her Grace Amazing! Choir, and electric violinist and composer Lorenzo Laroc. In addition, the Bengsons will play songs from their show Where the Mountains Meet the Sea; there will be a tribute to Tobago-born calypsonian Lord Nelson, with Shemar Levy and Nelson himself; and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album will be honored by Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band.

Harlem Week runs August 12-21 with such other events as the Percy Sutton 5K and 1.5-mile Harlem Health Walk (August 13, 8:00 am), Great Jazz on the Great Hill in Central Park with the Jimmy Heath Legacy Band, the Antonio Hart Quartet, and Tammy McCann (August 13, 4:00), the livestreamed Charles B Rangel Systemic Racism Summit (August 16, noon), the ImageNation Outdoor Film Festival (Marcus Garvey Park, August 17, 6:00; St. Nicholas Park, August 20, 6:00), the livestreamed talk “Ta-Nehisi Coates and Dr. Julius Garvey: A Harlem on My Mind Conversation” (August 17, 7:30), the livestreamed Arts & Culture/Broadway Summit (August 18, 3:00), Harlem SummerStage (August 18, 5:30), Summer in the City with the Jeff Foxx Band, Donnell Jones, EPMD, Freddie Jackson, and others (August 20, 1:00), and the grand Harlem Day with Dru Hill, Slick Rick, Doug E Fresh, Levell, Grandmaster Caz & Melle Mel, MJ the Musical, and more. All events are free.