“Doria Dee Johnson at her home in Chicago, Illinois, 2017” (photo by Melissa Bunni Elian for the Equal Justice Initiative)
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, August 5, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
The Brooklyn Museum starts preparing for the West Indian American Day Carnival events over Labor Day weekend with the August edition of its free First Saturday program. (First Saturdays is skipped in September.) There will be live performances by RIVA & Bohio Music and the Drums and Bugles International Bands Association; the mobile art center caribBEING House, where visitors can share their own stories; a gallery tour of “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” with Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art curatorial assistant Allie Rickard; pop-up gallery talks of “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas” with teen apprentices; a screening of Matt Ruskin’s Sundance Audience Award winner Crown Heights, introduced by actress Natalie Paul and followed by a Q&A with film subject Colin Warner, community activist Rick Jones, and attorney Ames Grawert; a sneak peek of Cori Wapnowska’s documentary Bruk Out!, followed by a talkback with Wapnowska and Dancehall Queen Famous Red, moderated by Hyperallergic editor Seph Rodney; a Book Club event with Oneka LaBennett reading and discussing her new book, She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn, followed by a signing; an Artist’s Eye talk by Melissa Bunni Elian on her contribution to “The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America”; a wukkout! movement workshop based on high-energy soca dancing; a hands-on workshop in which participants can make paintings with watercolor and salt; and a Flag Fete in which visitors can bring their own national flag, joined by female-identified Caribbean artists Sol Nova, Young Devyn, and Ting & Ting featuring Kitty Cash and special guests.
“Welcome to Biophilia, the love for nature in all her manifestations, from the tiniest organism to the greatest red giant floating in the farthest realm of the universe. . . . In Biophilia, you will experience how the three come together: nature, music, technology. Listen, learn, and create. . . . We are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovations. Until we get there, prepare, explore Biophilia.” So announces British naturalist Sir David Attenborough at the beginning of Björk: Biophilia Live, Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland’s lovely film of Icelandic musician Björk’s final show of her Biophilia tour, a more-than-two-year journey in which she presented a dazzling multimedia concert experience based on her 2011 album and genre-redefining interactive app. Filmed at the Alexandra Palace in London, the cutting-edge in-the-round show features Björk performing such complex songs as “Thunderbolt,” “Moon,” “Crystalline,” and “Virus” from the hit record, accompanied by the twenty-woman Icelandic chorus Graduale Nobili and a group of visually dramatic instruments built and/or adapted specifically for her, including a pendulum-swinging gravity harp, the percussive hang, a gameleste, and a Tesla coil. In addition, most songs have related animation that ranges from the far reaches of space to deep inside the human body. Fenton, a longtime documentary editor, and Strickland, the writer-director of such fiction films as Berberian Sound Studio and Katalin Varga, often splash the animation on the front of the screen, immersing the viewer in a vast array of shapes, colors, and scientific imagery, like a turned-around Joshua Light Show.
