Music legend Bezerra da Silva, the father of Gangsta Samba, is profiled in Márcia Derraik and Simplício Neto’s documentary STRAIGHT TO THE POINT at the Brazilian Film Festival at Tribeca Cinemas
The eighth annual Brazilian Film Festival takes place at Tribeca Cinemas June 5-12, featuring fifteen films that both celebrate and take a hard look at Brazil and its vibrant history and culture. Felipe Hirsch and Daniela Thomas’s SUNSTROKES portrays unrequited love, Fernana Tornaghi and Ricardo Bruno’s QUEEN OF BRAZIL follows a small-town boy’s attempt to become Miss Gay Brazil, Jorge Bodanzky’s WITHIN THE RIVER, AMONG THE TREES heads into the Alto Solimões region to bring photography workshops to the native people, and José Joffily’s BLUE EYES delves into the growing worldwide immigration problem and racial profiling. Throughout the festival, DJ Marcelo Brasil will be spinning tunes in the Lounge Inffinito, with the free June 12 closing night and awards show being held at SummerStage in Rumsey Playfield, with live music and more.
Ronald K. Brown and his Evidence company are part of First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum on June 5
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, June 5, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400 www.brooklynmuseum.org
On June 5, the Brooklyn Museum’s monthly First Saturdays program celebrates, well, Brooklyn. And why not? The J. C. Hopkins Biggish Band will be playing at 5:00, Ronald K. Brown’s awesome Evidence a Dance Company will be performing at 5:30 (followed by a Q&A with Brown), chief curator Kevin Stayton will discuss “American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection” at 7:00, Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire will put their dancing shoes on for a screening of Stanley Donen’s FUNNY FACE also at 7:00, Keanan Duffy will give a book club talk on his latest, REBEL, REBEL: ANTI-STYLE, at 9:00, the House of Ninja’s Archie Burnett hosts a vogue dance contest at 9:00, and Friends We Love’s DJ Moni will get everyone’s mojo working at the always hot and sweaty dance party (9:00 – 11:00). All of the exhibitions will be open, including “Kiki Smith: Sojourn,’ “Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair of 1864,” and “Body Parts: Ancience Egyptian Fragments and Amulets.” Everything’s free, although some of the events require advance ticketing available an hour ahead of time, and the lines do get long, so be prepared.
Coming out of the Elephant 6 collective, Nana Grizol is pretty much just what they advertise on their MySpace page: “a bunch of friends having a whole lot of fun making the music they love with each other.” The brainchild of Theo Hilton, the Athens, Georgia, band has recently released its sophomore disc, the engaging, infectious RUTH (Orange Twin, January 2010), the follow-up to their DIY 2008 debut, LOVE IT, LOVE IT. “Cynicism isn’t wisdom / It’s a lazy way to say that you’ve been burned / It seems, if anything / you’d be less certain after everything you ever learned,” Hilton sings in the album opener, “Cynicism,” but there’s little that’s cynical about Nana Grizol. Heck, several of the members even run a 155-acre conservation community that’s seeking self-sustainability. Composed of a changing roster of musicians from such bands as Neutral Milk Hotel, Hot New Mexicans, the Music Tapes, and Elf Power (with whom they run Orange Twin Records), Nana Grizol is like the Hold Steady without the Springsteenian bombast, Arcade Fire without the orchestral pomposity. Hilton writes poetic, personal lyrics about the beauty of love, the inevitability of death, and sleep filled with dreams on such folk-punk gems as “Blackbox,” Gave On,” “For Things That Haven’t Come Yet,” and “Sands.” Jared Gandy, Robbie Cucchiaro, Matte Cathcart, Laura Carter, and Patrick Jennings are among those who add often unique and unusual instrumentation, taking the songs into another dimension. “The best trapeze artists perform with no nets / No one ever won a jackpot on a gentleman’s bet / Yeah, you wake up from your best dream just to find your bed wet / What life ever comes without a hint of regret?” Hilton asks on “Grady and Dubose.” You’re likely to regret it if you don’t catch Nana Grizol tonight at the Silent Barn in Queens, with DJ Bees Knees, What Cheer? Brigade, Greg Mullen, and the Eskalators.
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.
