Bobbi Jene Smith and Keir GoGwilt team up for A STUDY ON EFFORT at Invisible Dog Center as part of COIL festival
The always exciting winter performance festival season gets under way right after New Year’s, with a slew of popular programs occurring all over town and in multiple boroughs. PS122’s COIL 2017 festival, the last under artistic director Vallejo Gantner, consists of fourteen events, with a dozen performances, a sewing bee, and the Red + White Party. The Public Theater’s fourteenth annual Under the Radar fest includes twenty-one programs, centering on experimental music, theater, and dance, along with postshow discussions and the Incoming festival within a festival. The NYC Winter Jazzfest will celebrate the centennial of Thelonius Monk’s birth while also concentrating on social justice. Focusing on “socially and aesthetically marginal and subversive artists tearing at the boundaries of form and wrestling with the realities of identity,” American Realness was founded in 2010 by Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor and Abrons Arts Center in 2010, directly modeled after the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival; the eighth annual event comprises more than two dozen performances, readings, workshops, discussions, installations, and a party. The fifth annual Prototype festival, which presents cutting-edge opera-theater and music-theater, hosts seven productions, an anniversary party, panel discussions and talkbacks, and the Out of Bounds series of free performances in public spaces. Below are a handful of recommendations for each of the above January festivals.
COIL
Multiple venues
January 3-22
www.ps122.org/coil-2017
January 3, 4-7, 10-15
CVRTAIN, by Yehuda Duenyas, immersive virtual reality experience, 151 Gallery, 132 West 18th St., $10
January 5-8
Custodians of Beauty, by Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo, dance-theater piece exploring beauty, La MaMa, the Downstairs, 66 East Fourth St., $20
January 7-10
Basketball, by Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith, dance exploring past shames, Howard Gilman Performance Space, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th St., $20
January 8
Umyuangvigkaq: PS122 Long Table and Durational Sewing Bee, by Emily Johnson/Catalyst, featuring breakfast, “This Is Lenapehoking: Countering Perceived Invisibility,” “Indigenizing the Future: The Continuance of Aesthetic, Invention, Ceremony,” “My Dad Gives Blueberries to Caribou He Hunts: Indigenous Process and Research as Ceremony,” and “Radical Love: Indigenous Artists and Our Allies,” Ace Hotel New York, 20 West 29th St., free with advance RSVP, 11:30 am – 6:00 pm
January 12-14
A Study on Effort, by dancer and choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith in collaboration with violinist Keir GoGwilt, Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen St., $20
Tania El Khoury’s GARDENS SPEAK give voice back to dead Syrian activists and protesters (photo by Jesse Hunniford)
UNDER THE RADAR
Public Theater and other venues
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 4-15
publictheater.org
January 4, 6, 10
Erin Markey: Boner Killer, words and music by Erin Markey, directed by Ellie Heyman, starring Markey and Emily Bate, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, $25
January 6-9
Gardens Speak, interactive sound installation about ten deceased Syrian activists, by Tania El Khoury, NYU Tisch School of the Arts Abe Burrows Theatre, 721 Broadway, $25
January 9
Incoming! They, Themselves and Schmerm, written and performed by Becca Blackwell, directed and developed by Ellie Heyman, the Robert Moss Theater at Playwrights Downtown, 440 Lafayette St., $25, 5:00 & 8:30
January 11, 12, 14, 15
Latin Standards, written and performed by Marga Gomez, directed by David Schwizer, Martinson Hall, the Public Theater, $25
January 12-15
Time of Women by Belarus Free Theatre, about a trio of women (Maryia Sazonava as Iryna Khalip, Maryna Yurevich as Natalya Radina, Yana Rusakevich as Nasta Palazhanka) fighting for a free and democratic Belarus, written by Nicolai Khalezin and Natiala Kaliada and directed by Khalezin, NYU Tisch School of the Arts Shop Theatre, 721 Broadway, $25
NYC Winter Jazzfest will celebrate one hundredth birthday of Thelonius Monk (photo by William P. Gottlieb)
NYC WINTER JAZZFEST
Multiple venues
January 5-10
www.winterjazzfest.com
January 6, 7
NYC Winter Jazzfest Marathon, multiple venues, $45-$55 per day, $80-$90 for both
Sunday, January 8
Thelonious Monk Makes a Hundred, panel discussion, the New School, Fifth Floor Theater, 55 West Thirteenth St., 3:00
Thelonius Monk 100th Birthday Improv Show, with Kris Davis, David Virelles, Shabaka Hutchings, Sam Newsome, Marc Ribot, Charlie Burnham, Erik Friedlander, Linda Oh, Trevor Dunn, Hamid Drake, Andrew Cyrille, and Deva Mahal playing Solo Monk, Littlefield, 622 Degraw St., $20-$25, 8:00
Tuesday, January 10
Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra: A Concert for Social Justice, with special guest Geri Allen and arrangements by Carla Bley, Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St., $30-$40, Social and Environmental Justice panel at 6:00, show at 8:00
Meg Stuart will present an evening of solo works as part of American Realness festival (photo by Giannina Urmeneta Ottiker)
AMERICAN REALNESS
Abrons Arts Center and other venues
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 5-12
americanrealness.com
January 5-7
An Evening of Solo Works by Meg Stuart, including XXX for Arlene and Colleagues and Signs of Affection, Abrons Arts Center, Playhouse, $20
January 6, 7
Étroits sont les Vaisseaux, by Kimberly Bartosik / daela, duet for Joanna Kotze and Lance Gries, inspired by Anselm Kiefer’s large-scale sculpture, Gibney Dance, Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, $15
January 6, 7, 10
Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (s), solo by Trajan Harrell, first work in series, Abrons Arts Center, Playhouse, $20
January 7, 8, 9, 10
Adult Documentary by Juliana F. May, piece for five dancers about trauma and form, Abrons Arts Center, Experimental Theater, $20
January 8
In the Works: Dance in Process Resident Artists & Guests, with performances by Melinda Ring, Anna Sperber, Michelle Boulé, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Gibney Dance Company, Antonio Ramos, Katie Workum, Bjorn Safsten, Yanira Castro, iele paloumpis, Gibney Dance Choreographic Center, 890 Broadway, free, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
FUNERAL DOOM SPIRITUAL will have its New York premiere at National Sawdust as part of Prototype festival (photo by M. Lamar)
PROTOTYPE
Multiple venues
January 5-15, $25 unless otherwise noted
www.prototypefestival.org
January 5
Out of Bounds: Amirtha Kidambi, inspired by Nina Simone’s performance at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, 60 Wall St. Atrium, free, 1:00
January 5-14
Mata Hari, composed by Matt Marks, directed and with libretto by Paul Peers, conducted by David Bloom, and starring Tina Mitchell, HERE, 145 Sixth Ave., $30
January 6
Out of Bounds: Leah Coloff, inspired by Patti Smith’s Kimberly and a set at CBGB’s, 60 Wall St. Atrium, free, 1:30
January 6, 7, 9
Breaking the Waves, New York City premiere of opera based on Lars Von Trier film, composed by Missy Mazzoli, directed by James Darrah, conducted by Julian Wachner, with libretto by Royce Vavrek, and starring Bess McNeill and Jan Nyman, NYU Skirball Center, 566 LaGuardia Pl., $30-$75, 7:30
January 13, 14
Funeral Doom Spiritual, multimedia concert by composers M. Lamar and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix and librettists Lamar and Tucker Culbertson, with Lamar on piano and vocals, string arrangements by Hunt-Hendrix, and additional arrangements by James Ilgenfritz & the Anagram Strings, National Sawdust, 80 North Sixth St., $30, 7:00 & 10:00
Iconoclastic writer-director Terrence Malick had made only five feature films in his forty-plus-year career when The Tree of Life came out in 2011, and it might very well be his best. And now you can see it like never before, as the BAM Next Wave Festival presents it in the Howard Gilman Opera House with a live score performed by more than one hundred singers and musicians from New York City’s Wordless Music Orchestra playing works by Mahler, Berlioz, Brahms, Górecki, Mozart, Tavener, Smetana, Couperin, and others, conducted by Ryan McAdams and featuring Robert Fleitz on piano and sopranos Charles Love and Jennifer Zetlan. Following Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005), The Tree of Life is an epic masterpiece of massive proportions, a stirring visual journey into the beginning of the universe, the end of the world, and beyond. The unconventional nonlinear narrative essentially tells the story of a middle-class Texas family having a difficult time coming to grips with the death of one of their sons in the military. Malick cuts between long flashbacks of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) in the 1950s and 1960s, as they meet, marry, and raise their three boys, to the present, when Jack (Sean Penn), their eldest, now a successful architect, is still searching for answers. The sets by production designer Jack Fisk transport viewers from midcentury suburbia to the modern-day big city and a heavenly beach, all gorgeously shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Every frame is so beautiful, it’s as if they filmed the movie only at sunrise and sunset, the Golden Hour, when the light is at its most pure. The Tree of Life is about God and not God, about faith and belief, about evolution and creationism, about religion and the scientific world. The film opens with a quote from the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Early on, Mrs. O’Brien says in voice-over, “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: The way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow.” Malick leaves those questions open, displaying the miracles of life and death and everything in between as perhaps the only response.
