Rebecca Lazier makes NYLA debut with world premiere of THERE MIGHT BE OTHERS (photo by Maria Baranova)
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
March 16-19, $15-$40, 7:30
212-924-0077
www.newyorklivearts.org
www.rebeccalazier.com
On the back cover of the new book There Might Be Others, which contains the music and dance score for Rebecca Lazier’s New York Live Arts commission along with collaborator notes, instructions, principles, and more, NYLA director of programs Tommy Kreigsmann says, “Seminal works of the avant-garde become so when the inherent risk at the heart of the experiment catalyzing the vision to its fruition pushes the work’s sphere of influence beyond its original form and often its intended meaning. Intrepid choreographer Rebecca Lazier [has a] penchant for musical interpretation and the infinite aesthetic and physical languages in its breadth, making her among the very best of her generation.” New York-based dancer, choreographer, and teacher Lazier will be making her NYLA debut with the world premiere of There Might Be Others on March 16-19, inspired by Terry Riley’s 1964, fifty-three-part composition, “In C,” one of the first major minimalist works. The live score will be performed by fiddler Dan Trueman and SŌ Percussion and Mobius Percussion (March 16-18) and members of Mantra Percussion (March 19). The piece features dramaturgy and design by Naomi Leonard, Davison Scandrett, and Mary Jo Mecca and will be danced by Simon Courchel, Natalie Green, raja feather kelly, Cori Kresge, Christopher Ralph, Anna Schön, Saúl Ulerio, Agnieszka Kryst, Jan Lorys, Ramona Nagabczynska, Pawel Sakowicz Rhonda Baker, Sara Coffin, and Tan Temel. On March 13 ($20, 1:30), Lazier (Coming Together/Attica, Terminal) and Trueman will host the Shared Practice workshop “Choreographing Being in Action — Staging Negotiation and Interaction,” while the March 17 show will be followed by a Stay Late Discussion with Neil Greenberg.
Daniel Day-Lewis gives a spectacular, Oscar-winning performance as an independent oil man in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Day-Lewis, in remarkable voice, absolutely embodies Daniel Plainview, a determined, desperate man digging for black gold in turn-of-the-century California. His first strike comes at a heavy price as he loses one of his men in a tragic accident, so he adopts the worker’s infant son, raising H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as his own. The growth of his company leads him to Little Boston, a small town that has oil just seeping out of its pores. But after not allowing Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), the charismatic preacher who runs the local Church of the Third Revelation, to say a prayer over the community’s first derrick, Plainview begins his descent into hell. Using Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! as a starting point (and employing echoes of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons in addition to the obvious reference, George Stevens’s classic 1956 oil flick Giant), writer-director Anderson (Boogie Nights, The Master) has created a thrilling epic about greed, power, and corruption as well as jealousy, murder, and, above all, family, where oil gushes out of the ground with fire and brimstone. Robert Elswit’s beautiful, Oscar-winning cinematography is so gritty and realistic, audiences will be reaching for their faces to wipe the oil and blood off. The piercing, classically based score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, builds to a mind-blowing crescendo by the end of the film — which concludes with a controversial finale. Shot in the same location — Marfa, Texas — where Giant was set, There Will Be Blood is an unforgettable journey into the dark heart of one man’s soul. There Will Be Blood is being shown March 5 & 6 at the rather ungodly hour of eleven in the morning as part of the Nitehawk Cinema series “Country Brunchin’” and “Nitehawk Brunch Screenings” and will be preceded by a live performance by New York duo 
You might think that the phrase “the French Touch,” which is part of the title of FIAF’s March-April edition of its CinéSalon series, refers to the unique style of such French auteurs as François Truffaut, Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Jean Cocteau, Éric Rohmer, and others whose films are often included in these Tuesday-night festivals. But the term actually describes a group of DJs and bands associated with electronic dance music, or EDM, in France. So it is rather appropriate for the series, “EDM Anthems: French Touch on Film,” to kick off with Daft Punk Unchained, a thumping documentary about the patron saints of that movement, the iconoclastic duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, better known as Daft Punk. Director Hervé Martin Delpierre, who cowrote the film with Marina Rozenman, had his work cut out for him, as he had to make the film without the participation of Daft Punk itself, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, who have not shown their faces in public this century and rarely give interviews of any kind. But Delpierre gets just about everyone else who has ever worked with them to open up, allowing others to interpret the band’s musical evolution and cultural impact as he traces DP’s career from 1992, when they were in the somewhat more traditional bass-guitar-drum combo Darlin’, to the worldwide sensation of their 2013 album, Random Access Memories, as they melded American disco, German techno, and Manchester industrial into something wholly new. A special focus is placed on their mind-blowing show at Coachella in 2006, which single-handedly changed the future of EDM.
