Longtime CBGB regulars Futurex have emerged from the Kennel (recording studio) with their latest album, a twenty-six-minute epic featuring such songs as “Basement,” “Monotone,” and “Road Closed.” With ex-wives Sue on guitar and Mary on bass, along with Paul on drums, the trio will premiere the disc in its entirety at a record release party on June 4 at the Local 269 on East Houston St., where they’ll be giving away a four-song sampler they’re calling “Guzzinta.” We’re big fans of their oldie but goodie “Shit Blue Van,” so we’re looking forward to checking out the new stuff, and so should you.
Multimedia artist, dancer, and choreographer Bill Shannon took his crutches and skateboards through the streets of Lower Manhattan on June 2, weaving around vehicles, interacting with strangers, dancing on public sculpture, and even hooking up with an old friend while being followed by the audience in a bus in the exhilarating “Traffic: A Transient Specific Performance.” The Pittsburgh-based Shannon, who contracted the degenerative bilateral hip deformity Legg-Calvé Perthes disease when he was a child, is in the midst of a three-month residency at Dance New Amsterdam, where he has given classes and lectures on the Shannon Technique and installed the video project “spatiotemporality: The Evolution of William Foster Shannon.” For “Traffic,” Shannon, who needs crutches, commissioned an original hip-hop score mixed by DJ Brian Coxx that blasts through the air-conditioned Academy bus while VJ Glytch handles the video feed on small monitors so the people on board could always follow Shannon’s movements.
Shannon uses urban landscape of Lower Manhattan as his stage in unique freestyle performance (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Although Shannon, who considers himself a sociological anthropologist, has the route laid out in advance, skating and dancing through the Financial District, in Battery Park, and under the Brooklyn Bridge, among other locations, what he does on the way is completely freestyle, incorporating signature moves as he becomes part of the urban architecture. While people on the bus were running from side to side to watch him out the windows, he completely coincidentally picked up skateboard legend Mike Wright, whom he used to ride with back in 1993 and is now hawking skateboard DVDs on the street; got a jug of iced tea from a construction crew; stopped for a smoke with a man in a suit; had a brief talk with a female MTA bus driver; put on a show for a crowd of tourists who were utterly confused; and got shooed away from one area by a city cop. At one point, he skated around Mark di Suvero’s large, red “Joi de Vivre” sculpture in Zuccotti Park near Ground Zero; coincidentally, di Suvero also needs crutches, the result of a serious elevator accident that left him partially paralyzed. As exciting as it is to watch Shannon perform his remarkable feats with no fear, it’s also fascinating to gauge the public’s reaction, as they shake their head in wonder, shrug their shoulders in disbelief, laugh, reach for their cameras, or, perhaps most often, look away, as if Shannon were invisible – or just another strange thing in New York City. Shannon holds a brief Q&A session back at Dance New Amsterdam following the amazing, insane seventy-five-minute performance, discussing some of the unique aspects of what he just experienced and asking the audience to share their thoughts. “Traffic” will also take place June 3 and 4, with seating limited to thirty-seven; don’t miss this one-of-a-kind thrill that takes advantage of the many joys of life.
The World Science Festival is back, seeking to show people the many wonders of science through lectures, dance, art, music, literature, and other disciplines. High school chemistry and biology might not have been fun, but there are plenty of great things to check out at this annual event. The celebration gets under way June 2 with a gala at Alice Tully Hall featuring Alan Alda, John Lithgow, Rebecca Luker, Yo Yo Ma, and many others honoring genius Stephen W. Hawking and witnessing the world premiere of ICARUS AT THE EDGE OF TIME by Brian Greene, David Henry Hwang, and Philip Glass ($250-$10,000). Through Sunday, a full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope will be on view in Battery Park, along with interactive exhibits and a party scheduled for June 4 (free). The Broad Street Ballroom will be home to “Astronomy’s New Messengers: The Exhibit Listening to the Universe with Gravitational Waves,” where visitors can check out a model LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory; it’s also free, as is the panel discussion on June 3 at 6:30. At the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City students will be creating designs using pigmented E. coli (free, 3:00), Margaret S. Livingstone, Patrick Cavanagh, and Jules Feiffer will discuss “Eye Candy: Science, Sight, Art” at NYU’s Kimmel Center ($30, 7:00), the Moth gathers writers, scientists, and artists to tell stories in “Grey Matter” ($25, 7:30), and Alda, Kip Thorne, and Robbert Dijkgraaf talk about “Black Holes and Holographic Worlds” at the Skirball Center ($30, 8:00). Thursday through Sunday at Cedar Lake, the innovative Armitage Done! Dance troupe will stage the New York premiere of THREE THEORIES, a series of high-speed duets that uses the principles of physics in their movements; several performances will be followed by a special talk-back with a physicist ($30).
On Friday, “Food 2.0: Feeding a Hungry World” is at the Baruch Performing Arts Center ($30, 7:00), “The Science of Star Trek” is evaluated at Galapagos ($30, 7:00), and Oliver Sacks and Chuck Close team up for “Strangers in the Mirror” at the Kaye Playhouse ($30, 8:00). On Saturday, mathemagician Arthur Benjamin will dazzle the mind at the New School ($15, 11:00 am), John Hockenberry leads a panel discussion at the New School that goes inside the Large Hadron Collider ($30, 3:00), and Hockenberry will then head for the Skirball Center for “Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace” ($30, 8:00). On Sunday, the World Science Festival Street Fair takes place in Washington Square Park, several astronauts land at the Kimmel Center for “Astronaut Diary: Life in Space” (free, 11:30 am), and ICARUS AT THE EDGE OF TIME will be staged at the Skirball, with live narration by Liev Schreiber and live music by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. ($30, 7:00). And believe it or not, those are only some of the forty events going on during the festival, which bills itself as “an unprecedented annual tribute to imagination, ingenuity, and inventiveness [that] takes science out of the laboratory and into the streets, theaters, museums, and public halls of New York City, making the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating.”
Japanese women go a little too crazy for Paris in new show at HERE Arts Center
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. by Spring St.
June 3-19
Tickets: $12 before June 3 for shows through June 12, $18 thereafter
212-647-0202 www.here.org www.expgirl.net
Many people are deeply affected by trips to Paris, falling in love with the art, the food, the shopping, and other cultural aspects of the City of Light. But every year a small number of Japanese women are overcome by Paris syndrome, a psychiatric disorder, similar to Stendhal syndrome, in which the women suffer hallucinations as well as physical distress, triggered by unexpected events, and need to be repatriated to their home country. “An encounter with a rude taxi driver, or a Parisian waiter who shouts at customers who cannot speak fluent French, might be laughed off by those from other Western cultures,” BBC News reported in December 2006. “But for the Japanese — used to a more polte and helpful society in which voices are rarely raised in anger — the experience of their dream city turning into a nightmare can simply be too much.” Brooklyn-based dance theater company Ex.Pgirl examines the relatively new phenomenon in its latest work, PARIS SYNDROME, playing at HERE Arts Center June 3-19. Through dance, theater, film, music, video interviews, and even a little vaudeville, the multimedia production, directed by Emma Griffin, follows six women who journey to Paris and are soon battling the syndrome. Ex.Pgirl was founded in 2002 by Bertie Ferdman and Suzi Takahashi with the express purpose of using experimental theater by women to address issues of culture and identity; the cast of PARIS SYNDROME includes Ferdman, Takahashi, Elsa Carette, Valerie Issembert, Kiyoko Kashiwagi, and Soomi Kim, with original music by LaBulo, lighting by Lucrecia Briceno, and sets by Peter Ksander.
Christian Boltanski’s “No Man’s Land” will be open on Memorial Day (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 13, 12 noon – 7:30 (Thursday 2:00 – 9:30) (open Memorial Day)
DAWN: June 2 at 6:00, June 3 at 7:30 (advance registration required)
Admission: $12 (children under twelve free)
347-463-5143 www.armoryonpark.org www.mariangoodman.com installation slideshow
French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski has filled the Park Ave. Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall with thirty tons of clothing, laying them out in rectangular piles that evoke such tragedies as the Holocaust, the earthquake in Haiti, and the Katrina disaster, each shirt, jacket, dress, and pair of pants representing an anonymous person who might or might not be alive. The hooded sweatshirts are particularly eerie, especially when turned upside down. The rows and rows of clothing recall scenes from Alain Resnais’s Auschwitz-set NIGHT AND FOG documentary as well as news shots of people seeking refuge in the Superdome after the devastation of hurricane Katrina. In the center of the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot space, a sixty-foot-high crane scoops up and then drops individual items on top of a large mountain of clothing, like the children’s carnival game in which kids use a claw to pick up a toy, except in this case the crane is like the hand of God, deciding who will live and who will die. That feeling is amplified because of the location of the installation itself, in a military armory with walls containing plaques dedicated to men and women who died in the service of their country. Visitors can both wander through the rows to get a more personal view and also climb the stairs to see the massive piece as a whole, offering a different perspective.
Boltanski’s multifaceted, multimedia installation will feature special performances June 2-3 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
When people first walk into the drill hall, they are met by a long, rusted, monolithic file cabinet with numbers on small drawers, a card catalog of the dead similar to Boltanski’s “The Reserve of Dead Swiss,” except in the latter he collected photographs of the dead instead of the random, out-of-sequence numbers displayed here. As Boltanski, who was born at the end of the Nazi occupation of France, notes in one of the display’s accompanying hand-outs, “The question is about destiny — why one person and not another?” But it’s not all about death; “No Man’s Land” also includes the sound of an enormous heartbeat echoing through the cavernous space, demonstrating that life goes on. Boltanski has been collecting heartbeats for years, creating Les Archives du Coeur, which he plans to maintain on Japan’s isolated Teshima Island; visitors to “No Man’s Land” can add the sound of their own heartbeat in a temporary “doctor’s office” in the outer hallway. It takes only a few minutes, and for $3 you can bring home a CD of your heartbeat. In another room, Heinz Peter Schwerfel’s documentary LES VIES POSSIBLES DE CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI gives great insight into the life and career of the enigmatic artist. And the gift shop is called “The Book as Witness,” offering rare copies of Boltanski’s artist books, going back to the early 1970s. Although the installation is usually closed on Mondays, it will be open on Memorial Day, a fitting way to honor the holiday. In addition, composer Franck Krawczyk’s DAWN will take place June 2-3 within “No Man’s Land,” performed by the Argento Chamber Ensemble conducted by Michel Galante; there will be a public rehearsal on June 2 at 6:00, followed by the premiere on June 3 at 7:30. Although the special musical event is free with general admission, advance registration is required.
The Teabaggers will present “The TNC Tea Party” at this year’s Lower East Side Festival of the Arts (photo by Alex Smith)
Theater for the New City
155 First Ave. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Saturday, May 29, and Sunday, May 30
Admission: free www.theaterforthenewcity.net
The fifteenth annual Lower East Side Festival of the Arts continues on Saturday on Sunday with two days of free live performances both inside the Theater for the New City and outside, where a cultural fair will be held. On Saturday from 2:00 to 5:00, magicians, musicians, dancers, and more will entertain children in the Johnson Theater, anchored by Supercute playing at 4:30. Adult entertainment takes over after that, with the Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company, Bleecker Street Opera, David Amram, Joe Franklin, and others. Meanwhile, Yana Schnitzler’s Human Kinetics Movement Arts will perform a site-specific installation in the lobby beginning at 7:00. Films will run from noon to midnight in the Cabaret Theater, including Rome Neal’s BANANA PUDDIN JAZZ, Buck Heller’s THROUGH THEIR EYES, and Roger Corman’s BUCKET OF BLOOD. And the outdoor street festival will feature live music, poetry readings, performance art, dance, and comedy by Jessica Delfino, the Drama Bums, Domingo’s Dominion, the Vox Pop Players, Jessica Friedlander, and others. On Sunday night, KT Sullivan, Tammy Grimes, the Silvercloud Singers & Drummers, Phoebe Legere, Penny Arcade, and Tokyo Penguin are among those scheduled in the Johnson Theater, with theatrical performances taking place in the Cabaret Theater. In addition, the Community Space Theater will host a poetry program at 4:00 with special guest Joan Durant and nearly fifty participants. And all weekend long, the lobby will be home to visual art curated by Carolyn Ratcliffe. It’s a great festival that has something for everyone, and, yes, it’s all free.
Boston-based singer and guitarist Thalia Zedek, who previously was part of such bands as Dangerous Birds, Live Skull, and Come before branching out on her own a decade ago, is back in New York City touring behind her most recent album, 2008’s brash, brawling LIARS AND PRAYERS. A former heroine addict who evokes the sounds of Marianne Faithfull, Patti Smith, P. J. Harvey, and Kim Gordon, Zedek holds nothing back as she examines the wreckage left behind by eight years of the Bush administration. “Does the fear make you stay inside?” she asks on “lower allston.” A searing guitar solo drives the eight-minute epic “Next Exit,” in which Zedek declares in her raspy, worn voice, “There is now way out but out.” She has expanded the size of her band, adding David Curry on viola and Mel Lederman on piano to her regular rhythm section of Winston Braman on bass and Daniel Coughlin on drums, resulting in a richer, more emotional landscape, particularly on such songs as “We Don’t Go,” which features a beautifully haunting piano line, and “Body Memory,” which includes a long, stirring instrumental break. Zedek will be at the Knitting Factory on May 29, on a bill with the Chrome Cranks and Clockwork Mercury.
