Who:Source Material Collective What: World premiere of digital play Where: Zoom link sent after registration When: July 25-26, August 1-2, free with advance RSVP, 7:00 Why: “It’s nice to see you again. Do you think love will be able to exist in the new world?” James Cowan asks in a chat during a Zoom meeting. “I think it’s gonna have to,” Annelise Lawson replies. “How?” Cowan wants to know. Source Material Collective addresses that concern in the new Zoom play In These Uncertain Times, made during and about the coronavirus crisis. Based in Los Angeles, New York, and Reykjavík, the multidisciplinary troupe has produced such pieces as Light, Into the Fog, and A Thousand Tongues, pushing the boundaries of what theater is and can do — and now wondering if it can survive the pandemic lockdown. The hourlong In These Uncertain Times will be performed live on July 25-26 and August 1-2, directed by company founder and artistic director Samantha Shay.
Who: Brandon J. Dirden, Andrew Hovelson, Merritt Janson, Roslyn Ruff, Glynn Turman, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Blair Brown, Michael Cumpsty, Oakes Fegley, Bill Irwin, Bebe Neuwirth, Phillipa Soo, Steven Skybell, Sam Waterston What: Two River Rising Series Where:Two River Theater online When: Sunday, July 26, $25, 7:00 (available for free July 27-30 on YouTube); August 5-6, $25, 7:00 Why: Red Bank’s Two River Theater has amassed all-star lineups for its first two live benefit readings. On July 26 at 7:00, most of the original cast will reunite for an updated version of Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s Your Blues Ain’t Sweet Like Mine, which ran at the New Jersey theater in the spring of 2015 and hosted many postshow discussions. The racially charged tale of a polemical dinner party features returning actors Brandon J. Dirden as Zeke, Andrew Hovelson as Randall, Merritt Janson as Judith, and Roslyn Ruff as Janeece, with Glynn Turman taking on the role of Zebedee. “I think this is a conversation we all have long waited for, and now the time is here,” Tony-winning actor, writer, and director Santiago-Hudson (Paradise Blue, August Wilson’s American Century Cycle) says in a promotional video. The reading will be performed live Sunday night and followed by a Q&A, after which it will be available for viewing July 27-30; the presentation is a benefit for the theater and the Ruben Santiago-Hudson Fine Arts Learning Center in his hometown of Lackawanna.
The series continues August 5 and 6 at 7:00 with a two-night reading of Paul Osborn’s On Borrowed Time, directed by Oscar and Tony winner Joel Grey and starring Blair Brown, Michael Cumpsty, Oakes Fegley, Bill Irwin, Bebe Neuwirth, Phillipa Soo, Steven Skybell, and Sam Waterston. Act one will be read August 5, act two on August 6; proceeds benefit the Actors Fund. The 1938 play about death as an older couple raise their orphaned grandson has been revived on Broadway several times and was made into a film with Lionel Barrymore, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Beulah Bondi, and Una Merkel; it ran at Two River in the fall of 2013. Grey made his acting debut in the role of nine-year-old Pud at the Cleveland Play House in 1941. “Though I’m not nine anymore, I’ve revisited this play many times throughout my life, and I’m not sure I ever needed to hear what it has to say as much as I do right now,” he said in a statement.
Who: Dancers from all around the world What: Third annual 92Y Harkness Dance Center festival of works recorded on mobile devices Where:92Y online When: July 25 – August 31, $5 Why: It would be easy to jump to conclusions and assume that the 92nd St. Y’s Mobile Dance Film Festival is the result of the pandemic lockdown, where all of us, artists included, do not have access to studios and stages and professional equipment. But in fact this is third annual event, although there is a new category this year consisting of films made during quarantine: Alexander Dampbell and Anthoula Syndica-Drummond’s Where We Are, Charly Wenzel’s PAUSE, DanielRose Project’s Small Jumps, Davide Arneodo’s Intermission, Diego Funes’s Absence, Kit McDaniel’s BAD DREAM, Laura Ardner’s Working Hard or Hardly Working?, Liz Curtis’s Quarantined Corps, Marta Renzi’s Dancing Is an Old Friend, Maxfield Haynes’s Don’t Rush (feat. A Few of the Black Men of the Concert Dance World), Milie Nelson’s THE RED ZONE, Valentina Cayota’s COVIDEO, and Vashti Goracke’s To Connect.
The four programs total thirty works from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Russia, Sweden, Uruguay, and the US, in addition to the new documentary “Bent But Not Broken,” which will be followed by a discussion with director Paige Fraser, choreographer Rena Butler, and MDFF curator Andrew Chapman, who explained in a statement, “Even as film and dance artists face some of the most difficult times during the pandemic when it comes to creating, they have not let these difficulties stand in the way of their need or ability to work. They have done what creative people do: taken what they have available and made art.” The streams begin on July 25 at 8:00 and will remain available through August 31; $5 gets you in to see everything.
Who: Kes, Lila Downs, Junglepussy, Madison McFerrin, Shantell Martin, ?uestlove, Angelique Kidjo, Yemi Alade, Buscabulla, Glendalys Medina, the Tallest Man on Earth, Common, Robert Glasper, Karriem Riggins, Michelle Buteau What:BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival Where: BRIC Facebook,YouTube When: Saturday, July 25, and Sunday, July 26, free, 8:00 Why: Every summer I make sure to return to the borough of my birth, in the park where my parents used to push me around in a stroller, to revel in the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, a months-long party of music, dance, art, food, and camaraderie. Of course, with New York City in pandemic lockdown, the in-person festival has been canceled; however, you can get a taste of what you’re missing when Celebrate Brooklyn! goes virtual this weekend. A wide-ranging collection of international performers will be taking part, with Kes, Lila Downs, Junglepussy, Madison McFerrin with Shantell Martin, and ?uestlove (DJ set) on Saturday night and Angelique Kidjo, Yemi Alade, Buscabulla with visual artist Glendalys Medina, the Tallest Man on Earth, and Common joined by Robert Glasper and Karriem Riggins on Sunday evening. The event will be hosted live on Facebook, YouTube, and Brooklyn cable channels by comedian and actress Michelle Buteau. In addition, there will be an all-star finale celebrating the greatest borough in the world. The festival is free, but donations will be accepted for the BRIC Creative Future Relief Fund here.
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Labyrinth of Cinema is a highlight of Japan Cuts festival
Who: Koichi Sato, Ken Watanabe, Chigumi Obayashi, Noriki Ishitobi, Yo Nakajima, Takako Tokiwa, Aaron Gerow, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Yuko Iwasaki, Yuichi Watanabe, Noriko Yamasaki, Aiko Masubuchi, Nanako Hirose, Ian Thomas Ash, Kaori Oda, Kaori Sakagami, Amber Noé, Shinichiro Ueda What: Annual Japan Cuts film festival Where:Japan Society online When: Through July 30, film rentals $3-$7, panel discussions free Why: My favorite film festival every summer is Japan Cuts, Japan Society’s annual survey of the state of new Japanese film. One of the joys is the wide range of genres represented, from horror, romance, martial arts, goofy comedies, sci-fi, and crime dramas to anime, family stories, historical epics, musicals, war movies, and, well, the unexplainable. Just about all of them are evident in Labyrinth of Cinema, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s last work, and one that is almost impossible to explain. The legendary auteur behind such films as Hausu,Casting Blossoms to the Sky,Seven Weeks, and Hanagatami died in April at the age of eighty-two, and Labyrinth of Cinema is quite a grand finale. Obayashi wrote, directed, photographed, and edited the three-hour surreal marvel, a colorful, endlessly clever celebration of the movies, made while he was battling cancer. On closing night, July 30, at 9:00, there will be a live Q&A with the yet-to-be-announced recipient of the Obayashi Prize, named in honor of the master.
In addition, you can watch “Nobuhiko Obayashi: A Conversation” at any time, a ninety-seven-minute discussion of the life and legacy of Obayashi, with his daughter, Chigumi Obayashi, journalist Noriki Ishitobi, Theater Kino founder Yo Nakajima, and actress and Obayashi regular Takako Tokiwa, moderated by Yale East Asian Cinema and Culture professor Aaron Gerow, as well as “Shinya Tsukamoto on Nobuhiko Obayashi,” a video tribute from the Tetsuo trilogy director, and the 2019 documentary Seijo Story — 60 Years of Making Films, which traces the personal and professional relationship between Obayashi and his wife, Kyoko Hanyu.
There will also be a live panel discussion on July 23 at 9:00 about the centerpiece presentation, Setsuro Wakamatsu’s fast-paced thriller Fukushima 50, a minute-by-minute suspense yarn that follows the earthquake, tsunami, and deadly disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that occurred on March 11, 2011. Based on the book On the Brink by Ryusho Kadota, the film is a terrific companion piece to the Netflix series Chernobyl; while the latter focuses on the governmental cover-up, Fukushima 50 is all about people coming together bravely to try to do the right thing. The stars of the film and winners of the 2020 Cut Above Award, Koichi Sato, who plays shift supervisor Toshio Izaki, and Ken Watanabe, who portrays plant manager Masao Yoshida, will participate in the talk, which will be archived after its live airing.
The date 3/11 also figures prominently in Taku Tsuboi’s time-twisting debut, Sacrifice, a supernatural tale involving a cult, a college student with unusual abilities, a serial cat killer, and other mysterious elements. It’s dark and creepy, filled with plenty of shocks; make sure your cat isn’t around when you’re watching this Best Picture winner at the Skip City International D-Cinema Festival.
It doesn’t get much stranger than Takuya Dairiki and Takashi Miura’s Kinta & Ginji, a thoroughly charming existential tale in which Beckett’s Waiting for Godot meets Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise by way of The Iron Giant and “Little Red Riding Hood.” In their twelfth film together, Dairiki and Miura (Honane, Fine as Usual, Koroishi) star as the title characters, a robot and a raccoon dog who go for long walks in the woods and across large swaths of land, discussing the absurdities of life and asking such questions as “Why are we here?” The camera never moves as set pieces play out in real time (there are only a handful of cuts within scenes), the two beings often barely visible, hidden in nature as they share their unique worldviews. It’s an absolute hoot, especially when seen during the current pandemic, when so many of us crave even the most mundane of conversations with someone, anyone else.
The festival continues through July 30 with such other films as Natsuki Nakagawa’s Beyond the Night, Kana Yamada’s Life: Untitled, several of Yoji Yamada’s old and new Tora-san films, and a one-day-only preview streaming of Toshiaki Toyoda’s The Day of Destruction.
Diamanda Galás will present work-iin-progress piece from empty Bowery gallery on July 23 (photo by Austin Young, graphic design by Robert Knoke)
Who:Diamanda Galás What: Livestreamed broadcast from empty gallery Where:Fridman Gallery When: Thursday, July 23, $5, 8:00 Why: Fridman Gallery and CT::SWaM (Contemporary Temporary:: Sound Works and Music) continue their SO⅃OS livestreamed performance series on July 23 with experimental musician, lecturer, activist, and visual artist Diamanda Galás. The San Diego-born Galás, who has released such albums as Plague Mass, Defixiones: Orders from the Dead, Vena Cava, Schrei X, and The Refugee, will present Broken Gargoyles, an audiovisual installation recorded in the empty Fridman Gallery on Bowery and offsite and mixed remotely, featuring music, script, video, and photography by Galás and two expressionist poems by Georg Heym, “Das Fieberspital” and “Die Dämonen der Städte”; Galás willl read an excerpt from the latter. (You can see a clip from her 2013 performance of the poem here.) A work in progress made with artist and sound engineer Daniel Neumann, video artist Carlton Bright, and artist Robert Knoke, Broken Gargoyles takes its name from the phrase used in WWI to describe facially disfigured soldiers and includes a war-era photo by Ernst Freidrich. Tickets are five dollars to watch the livestream or any time thereafter; you can also still catch earlier SO⅃OS installments by such artists as Neumann, Luke Stewart, Mendi and Keith Obadike, and Marina Rosenfeld / Ben Vida (solos). The series concludes July 30 with the multidisciplinary Augmentation and Amplification with Janet Biggs, Mary Esther Carter, Richard Savery, and A.I. Anne.
Online MoMI talk will explore relationship between the Apollo 11 lunar landing and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
Who: Todd Douglas Miller, Barry Miller, Bert Ulrich, Eric Hynes, Sonia Epstein What: Illustrated online discussion Where:Museum of the Moving Image online When: Thursday, July 23, free with RSVP(suggested donation $10), 7:00 Why: In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining, young Danny is seen riding his Big Wheel through the hallways of the Overlook Hotel wearing an Apollo 11 sweater. According to Rodney Ascher’s terrific documentary Room 237, that is only one piece of evidence confirming the conspiracy theory that Kubrick was involved in faking the footage of the moon landing. Look for that to come up in the Museum of the Moving Image program “Apollo and the Odyssey: The Shared Orbit of NASA’s Lunar Mission and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” which airs live online on July 23 at 7:00. Held in conjunction with the exhibition “Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey,” which has been closed during the pandemic lockdown, the talk features Apollo 11 director Todd Douglas Miller, NASA chief historian Barry Miller, NASA multimedia liaison Bert Ulrich, MoMI curator Eric Hynes, and associate curator Sonia Epstein. Written by Kubrick and sci-fi legend Arthur C. Clarke, the mindbending 1968 film was a game changer; the discussion will include rare archival footage as it explores elements of the U.S. space program, which has added relevance as President Trump gets Space Force under way.
