this week in music

ADAM DRESSNER: HELLO STRANGER

Mickey re-creates original pose at Adam Dressner opening in Grand Central Terminal (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

HELLO STRANGER
Grand Central Terminal, Vanderbilt Hall
89 East 42nd St. between Lexington and Vanderbilt
September 24-26, free, 9:00 am – 9:00 pm
www.adamdressner.com
grandcentralterminal.com

One can see a lot of fascinating faces and figures racing through Grand Central Terminal every day, but they seldom stop for close inspection, nor do commuters get to see a full-size portrait gallery of their fellow everyday New Yorkers. Yet that’s exactly what Adam Dressner’s new pop-up show, “Hello Stranger,” running September 24–26 on the east side of Vanderbilt Hall in GCT, provides.

After graduating from Yale Law School, New York City native Dressner briefly practiced as an attorney before turning to painting. He uses his studies of criminology, civil liberties, and facial recognition technology to create colorful, large-scale portraits of individuals he places in whimsical settings. For his latest show, he depicts people he met in Washington Square Park, relatives, and friends of friends; nearly all of them are not models and have never posed before.

Among the more than thirty works are paintings of his father, Robert, sitting cross-legged at a table, reading; the elegant Mr. Love, in hat and bowtie, dangling major bling; ABT dancer Georgia Duisenberg in the middle of a pose; Hannah, in fencing gear; a triptych of three people enjoying themselves in Averill Park in upstate New York; his favorite subject, his grandmother Sonia Segoda Dressner, who died in 2020 at the age of ninety-nine; and collaborations with artists De La Vega and Keion Kopper.

At the opening, I asked Dressner, who was dressed casually and wearing one of his many blue baseball caps, about how he chooses who to paint.

“Well, a lot of them were chance encounters,” he said. “That’s where I met [jeweler] Greg Yüna, who introduced me to many of the people who are in the paintings. It’s random chance. I have this umbrella that’s over here where I paint people from life; it’s self-selecting in the sense that people come over and ask to be painted, and if I think they’re a particularly interesting subject, I’ll ask them if they’d be interested. In some cases people ask me if I’d paint them; in many cases I ask them. I place people in imaginary environments where I think that they might want to be placed.”

He noted that Shar told him that she liked sharks, so he added a hammerhead hovering in the background. At the opening, Shar was sitting behind a table with another subject, Betty, handing out information about the show as well as postcards. Also on the table was a mixed-media cash register with the word Sales on top, although the postcards are free.

Jessie poses in front of one of two portraits of her in “Hello Stranger” show in Vanderbilt Hall (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Several subjects were at the event, posing in front of their paintings, including Mickey, who mimicked his exuberant pose; Wendy, sitting next to her small cart with a stuffed red monkey attached to it; and Jessie, who is in two paintings, one of her reading on the beach, the other standing in a blue dress in front of a pink window.

Jessie said that she found the experience of posing for Dressner in his East Village studio “unnerving,” adding, “I love his work so much that I wanted to see what he would do with me, even though I was a little afraid. It’s a strange thing to see yourself captured on canvas, then against this strange background.”

In the center of the space is a Steinway piano, where live performances will take place during the three-day run of the show. I took a peek at the playlist on the piano and noticed several Christmas songs, “Amazing Grace,” “Ave Maria,” and two Johann Strauss pieces.

Dressner is inspired by classic works he’s seen at the Met and MoMA while also exploring his personal feelings and memory. Talking about his portrait of Shar, Dressner admitted, “It’s a little bit of an absurd painting, but that’s what I do. I draw with paint; I will paint the person on a white canvas, then I’ll figure out some shapes that make sense to me, and then after that I will figure out a story.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BUILDING BRIDGES: JOHN T. REDDICK AND THE BLACK HISTORY OF TIN PAN ALLEY

Curator and cultural historian John T. Reddick will give a talk on Tin Pan Alley on September 11 at the Society of Illustrators (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

ILLUSTRATING TIN PAN ALLEY: FROM RAGTIME TO JAZZ
Society of Illustrators
128 East Sixty-Third St. between Park & Lexington Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday through October 12, $10-$15
Tin Pan Alley Talk & Reception: Wednesday, September 11, $10-$15. 6:30
212-838-2560
societyillustrators.org

Longtime Harlem resident and Yale University School of Architecture graduate John T. Reddick is into bridge building — but in this case, the bridges aren’t physical structures but those that involve the lesser-known history of Tin Pan Alley. The birthplace of American popular music, Tin Pan Alley flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when dozens of music publishers and businesses lined the streets of what is now Chelsea, in the West Twenties.

Born and raised in the integrated Philadelphia neighborhood of Mount Airy, Reddick got involved in trying to save Tin Pan Alley when five buildings on West Twenty-Eighth St. were in danger of being demolished by their owner/developer. In 2019, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated them historic landmarks.

A founding member of Harlem Pride and the director of community engagement projects for the Central Park Conservancy, Reddick has been an avid collector of sheet music art, focusing on songs composed and/or performed by Black and Jewish entertainers. What began as a curiosity and hobby has blossomed into a dazzling exhibition at the Society of Illustrators, “Illustrating Tin Pan Alley: From Ragtime to Jazz,” on view through October 12.

“I felt like these artists were groundbreakers. I see in them many parallels to hip hop, in that ragtime’s innovation for its time was as jarring as hip hop’s,” he said of the composers and performers of the era during a tour of the show. “My journey began after I went to a talk on the Lower East Side given by Jeffery Gurock, who lectured on the period when Harlem was Jewish. That was a revelation to me, that Harlem had once been the second largest Jewish community in New York City. From that point I went to the library, did research, and started buying items on eBay. It was just shocking; as I bought sheet music or got to see the names, I realized they all lived in Harlem during the same time period.”

Arranged chronologically, the exhibit focuses on sheet music and its accompanying art, which reveals the developing connections between American Black and white music, beginning with the cakewalk, a Black dance that originated in America but became a craze when introduced in Europe, advancing its popularity as a hit in the United States. Several photographs and illustrations depict the cakewalk being performed, including two works by French artist Georges-Bertin Scott, sheet music covers for the songs “Darktown Is Out To-Night” and “Cake Walk Neath the Dixie Moon,” and a drawing in which Uncle Sam relaxes while watching dancers’ cakewalk around a tree.

On a nearby wall is the sheet music for “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” a popular 1898 song composed by Ernest Hogan that sold more than a million copies. Hogan, a prominent Black composer and performer, appeared in shows with the leading African American performers of the day. However, the song’s sheet music art, which featured unflattering caricatures of Black men and women, became such a crippling definer of Hogan as an artist that it led to his demise.

Reddick noted, “All of a sudden, this ragtime music is popular, and you want to show and sell us more. What do you use to image that music?” Reddick grouped together the sheet music covers for “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion [Cook], “Cotton: A Southern Breakdown” by Albert Von Tilzer, and “Watermelon Am Good Enough for Mine” by G. Barker Richardson and Von Tilzer. “I have three things in there: cotton, chicken, and watermelon. They’re in the lyrics; they’re in the titles,” Reddick said. “A lot of the signifying, I feel, is coming out of music publishers just trying to meet the commercial market where its mind is at. You don’t cartoon something unless its understanding is pervasive. For me it’s the beginning of bridge building to some identity that’s beyond that becomes an American music.”

Other excellent groupings juxtapose two different sheet music covers for Lew Pollack’s “Vamping Sal the Sheba of Georgia” and three for Shelton Brooks’s “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”

Pointing out that a lot of sheet music was dedicated to songwriter and journalist Monroe Rosenfeld because the performers knew he could talk them up in the newspaper, Reddick zeroed in on the team of Bert Williams and George Walker.

“Rosenfeld has this bridge relationship, so you see a lot of people pandering to him, even Williams and Walker, who coined themselves ‘the two real coons.’ They claimed the tag and the stage to establish their own authenticity and artistry. I realized in many ways it’s just like hip hop. You could have been the greatest hip-hop singer in the world, but if you went to amateur night at the Apollo and started singing in a tuxedo, you would be booed. You wouldn’t even get your mouth open because there’s a certain kind of drag they expect you to be in to perform. Williams and Walker knew they were good, but they realized that more whites were blacking-up and playing Blacks onstage than actual Black performers. It was so much more sophisticated. They could show that there’s parody and all this irony in lot of stuff they did.”

Every element, even the way the show is hung, carries some kind of weight. Reddick explained that for most of the works, a black frame indicates the song was written by a Black composer, a white frame by a white composer.

Perhaps not accidentally, the cover sheet for Jean Schwartz’s 1908 “The Whitewash Man,” depicting a smiling Black man carrying a paint bucket and a broom, is placed over a water fountain, evoking the “Whites Only” signs of the Jim Crow era.

Among the other composers and performers Reddick discussed were James Reese Europe and Ford T. Dabney, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, Irene and Vernon Castle, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Miss Aida Overton Walker, drummer Buddy Gilmore, Fats Waller, Sophie Tucker, Josephine Baker, and W. C. Handy as well as the Clef Club, the Ziegfeld Follies, the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Al Hirschfeld and Sydney Leff, two Jewish artists who attended the Vocational High School for the Arts on 138th Street in Harlem.

“Think of the names of Motown groups,” Reddick said. “The Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Temptations. Nobody’s a gangster. They’re claiming we deserve to be on the other side. Now we have a credential. . . . When the Central Park jogger case happened [in 1989], the term ‘wilding,’ it was just a term for young people being in nature and the park, not being there in the park to victimize people. But that was the first time it crossed over as a term from the Black community to the broader public. . . . So, I always think, what if bling had crossed over, associated with a jewelry store robbery as opposed to the fashions of hip-hop artists. Again, the word already had that meaning in my culture. Bling and jewelry. You got bling on, but at a certain point it crossed over, right? Maybe a hip-hop person, whatever. What was the bridge that made it happen?”

Tin Pan Alley exhibition winds down narrow hallway (photo courtesy of Society of Illustrators)

One of the most striking works is E. Simms Campbell’s gorgeously detailed 1932 “Night-Club-Map of Harlem,” which locates such hot spots as Smalls Paradise, Club Hot-Cha (“where nothing happens before 2 a.m.”), “the nice new police station,” Gladys’ Clam House, the Lafayette Theatre, the Radium Club, and the Savoy Ballroom, with cartoon vignettes of people dancing the lindy hop and the snakehips, men purchasing “marijuana cigarettes,” Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tapping away, and Tillie’s offering “specialties in fried chicken — and it’s really good.”

Reddick, who will give a lecture at the Society of Illustrators on September 11 at 6:30, followed by a reception with pianist/preservationist Adrian Untermyer, then told a story about American composer and violinist Will Marion Cook, who had studied with and influenced Antonín Dvořák’s take on America’s “Negro Music.”

“He performed and got a review that said he was one of the nation’s best colored violinists. And he took his violin to the critic and broke it and said, ‘I’m the best violinist.’ He wanted to start writing for Black shows and other Black players. He wrote with [poet and novelist] Paul Laurence Dunbar. But his family was so embarrassed for writing that ‘n—er’ music that in his first productions, he didn’t use his last name. However, Cook-associated shows such as 1898’s Clorindy and 1903’s In Dahomey served to bring a more diverse African American identity to the stage. What does that mean politically? If people are liking you, then they are seeing you in another light. What’s that going to mean on the political landscape?”

He added, “Now they could be voters. Picking cotton, you weren’t a voter. They’re playing at Madison Square Garden, so they’re at this elevated level. They’re having a life that was unimaginable for most Blacks.”

Above “All Coons Look Alike to Me” is a quote by W. E. B. Du Bois from his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others . . . one ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings.”

In “Illustrating Tin Pan Alley: From Ragtime to Jazz,” Reddick is reconciling those strivings and more, building bridges across race and class through a unique moment in New York City musical history.

[On September 19, the Society of Illustrators will host a happy hour from 5:00 to 9:00, with free admission, drink specials, and live music by Charlie Judkins, Miss Maybell, and Robert Lamont. Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

R.O.S.E.

Park Ave. Armory has been transformed into a rave club for R.O.S.E. (photo by Stephanie Berger)

R.O.S.E.
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
September 5-12, $65
www.armoryonpark.org

Sharon Eyal’s exhilarating R.O.S.E., which opened September 5 for a too-brief seven-show run in Wade Thompson Drill Hall in Park Ave. Armory, ebbs and flows as a participatory dance experience that pulses with a series of slow fuses that explode about half a dozen times over the course of three hot hours.

An armory commission that debuted last year at New Century Hall in Manchester, R.O.S.E. starts off calmer than one might expect. The hall is divided into front and back sections by a floor-to-ceiling side-to-side black fabric wall. As the audience arrived in the first section of the hall, about a half hour before showtime, a DJ spun droning tunes in the space, mostly empty save for a few couches and benches; a projection of a large white rose glowed on the wall behind the DJ.

On opening night, one man moved slowly back and forth to the music as a handful of others relaxed, talked, and checked their phones. Little was going on; excitement was nonexistent. At 7:30, the crowd began entering the main space; staff wearing glow sticks placed a sticker over each person’s phone camera lens, as absolutely no photo or video is allowed inside.

The truncated area lacks the breathtaking awe of the hall’s usual vastness, with walls and curtains on all sides and lights and speakers hanging down, blocking the view of the impressive ceiling. There are four step-platforms, with bars in two corners, the tech crew in a third, and DJ Ben UFO in the fourth. (The set design is by Daphnée Lanternier, who is also credited with creative direction.)

Dancers weave in, through, and around the crowd in Sharon Eyal’s immersive R.O.S.E. (photo by Stephanie Berger)

It was not clear what to do at first as attendees considered where to stand. (I recommend hanging around wherever you see white tape on the floor.) The crowd consisted of people from all age groups (except children), in all types of dress and hairstyles, including small groups that appeared to come straight out of SNL’s old “Sprockets” skits; some swayed to the music, others chattered away, and a few scanned their phones. After about fifteen curious minutes, one gentleman stepped into a spotlight in the middle of the room and clapped his hands over his head several times; that was all it took to get more people to start dancing.

Shortly after eight o’clock, as the packed dance floor was heating up, nine performers (Darren Devaney, Guido Dutilh, Juan Gil, Alice Godfrey, Héloïse Jocqueviel, Johnny McMillan, Keren Lurie Pardes, and Nitzan Ressler) entered the space, making their way through the audience, which parted to let them pass. Wearing postapocalyptic beige costumes by Maria Grazia Chiuri of Christian Dior Couture (that occasionally included cowls and cinch sacks), metal jewelry and makeup by Noa Eyal Behar (that featured streaked black eyeliner, teardrops, and piercings), they moved through the crowd with insectlike precision, their arms and legs forming awkward angles.

Eyal cut her teeth as a member and choreographer of Batsheva Dance Company, and her exciting movement language contains elements of former Batsheva artistic director Ohad Naharin’s Gaga system. The work is codirected by Eyal’s longtime collaborator Gai Behar, whom Eyal met in a club in the late 1990s, and Caius Pawsom of the Young art collective.

While some audience members hung back on the platform risers, others followed the nine dancers around the room as the music thumped, haze wafted over everyone, and Alon Cohen’s propulsive lighting shifted between darkness and light. And then the dancers disappeared.

A team of twelve dancers in black join the fray at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

This pattern happened five or six times during the evening. The dancers would sneak into the area, starting from different corners, and groove for between five and fifteen minutes, sometimes breaking off into stunning solos. If you decide to remain close to them, you have to stay vigilant, as they unpredictably turn, twist, and reach out; you might be touched — one woman stood her ground, so a dancer made contact with her, while another dancer gently put a hand on a man’s shoulder — and you might even be given a black rose.

For one exquisitely choreographed scene, the nine dancers faced off against twelve dancers in black lace (New York–based Julia Ciesielka, Blu Furutate, Antonia Gillette, Michaella Ho, Destinee Jimenez, Nick LaMaina, Natalie Wong, Nina Longid, Julian Sanchez, Luc Simpson, Kailei Sin, and Jeremy Villas) in an epic battle that evoked both West Side Story and The Warriors (as well as a smidgen of Beneath the Planet of the Apes).

It’s a long night, so if you need a break, you can wander back to the first section or even out into the armory’s various period rooms with chairs and couches, and you can get a breath of fresh air outside, but the time between dances gets shorter and shorter as the evening continues, and you don’t want to miss any of them. Part of the fun is anticipating where the dancers will next emerge from and when and where they will exit. Near the end, there are longer solos and, ultimately, a stirring finale where everyone comes together in a rousing celebration bursting with electricity.

The more you put into R.O.S.E., the more you will get out of it. Don’t take off the phone sticker and try to steal a picture or video, which I saw at least two people doing, and don’t obsessively scroll through your cell in between dances. Get into the groove. Bask in the freedom. Join the party and rave on!

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

YANIRA CASTRO: EXORCISM = LIBERATION

EXORCISM = LIBERATION
Multiple locations
September 6-28, free
www.acanarytorsi.org

Yanira Castro is a fearless creator always ready to challenge herself and fully engage the audience. Born in Puerto Rico and based in Brooklyn, Castro and her company, a canary torsi (an anagram of her name), have presented such involving, complex, and entertaining multidisciplinary works as Dark Horse/Black Forest, a dance installation for public restrooms; the Jean-Luc Godard–inspired Paradis, a site-specific performance outdoors at twilight at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; Performance | Portrait, an interactive video installation at the Invisible Dog Art Center; now.here.this, a meditative march of resistance in Prague; and Last Audience, a live communal laboratory at New York Live Arts, a performance manual, and a three-part space-opera podcast.

“Yanira Castro is a structural obsessive. She is an art scientist. She sees the rules and patterns lurking just beneath the surface of things,” Chocolate Factory Theater cofounding artistic director Brian Rogers has written. “The stuff that’s easier not to see . . . chaos staring at itself in the mirror, finding order.”

The Chocolate Factory is one of several venues hosting Castro’s latest project, Exorcism = Liberation, which explores climate change, immigration, land rights, colonialism, and self-determination in activations modeled around political campaigns. Kicking off September 6 and continuing each Saturday this month, the programs, seen through a Puerto Rican lens, include listening sessions, live music, food, and posters, stickers, banners, lawn signs, and pins. (There will also be activations in Chicago, and Western Massachusetts.)

Exorcism = Liberation asks participants to examine three slogans: “I came here to weep,” “Exorcism = Liberation,” and “What is your first memory of dirt?” Conceived, written, and directed by Castro, the project features audio design by Erica Ricketts, graphics by Alejandro Torres Viera and Luis Vázquez O’Neill, voice performances by Melissa DuPrey, josé alejandro rivera, and Steph Reyes, a bomba danced by Michael Rodríguez, and live musical performances by devynn emory and Martita Abril.

In a 2014 twi-ny talk about Court/Garden at Danspace Project, Castro explained, “It is not that I want to challenge the audience. I want to create a scenario for them and to be in conversation with them and I want them to form the picture, craft their experience. Their presence dynamically changes what is occurring. That is what ‘live’ means for me. It is dynamic because of the people in the room.”

In addition to the below events, installations at Abrons Arts Center, the Center for Performance Research (with a November activation date TBD), and the Chocolate Factory will continue into November.

Yanira Castro will present activations of Exorcism = Liberation in multiple locations this month

Friday, September 6, 6:00
I came here to weep: immersive group audio experience with movement score performed by Martita Abril, light refreshments prepared by Castro, stickers and pins available, Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. at Pitt St., Manhattan

Saturday, September 7, 6:00
What is your first memory of dirt?: activation and collective listening session, followed by movement score “Clearing Practice” performed by devynn emory, light refreshments prepared by Castro, stickers and pins available, the Invisible Dog garden, 51 Bergen St., Brooklyn

Saturday, September 14, 7:00
CATCH 76: collective action, followed by a movement score performed by Martita Abril, with ice pops and limbers de coco y limon, the Chocolate Factory Theater (outside), 38-33 24th St., Long Island City

Saturday, September 21, 2:00
I came here to weep: activation and long table discussion with Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Sami Hopkins, and Theodore (ted) Kerr, ISSUE Project Room, 22 Boerum Pl., Brooklyn

Saturday, September 28, 2:00-4:00
Exorcism = Liberation: activation with ice pops, limbers de coco y limon, the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, 107 Suffolk St., Manhattan

Friday, October 25, 1:00 – 9:00
OPEN LAB: What is your first memory of dirt? Aural Archiving with Yanira Castro / a canary torsi, advance RSVP required, the Center for Performance Research, 361 Manhattan Ave., Brooklyn

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

R.O.S.E.

R.O.S.E. premiered last year at the Manchester International Festival (photo by Johan Persson)

R.O.S.E.
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
September 5-12, $65
www.armoryonpark.org

Park Ave. Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall has been turned into a flashy nightclub for the North American premiere of the immersive R.O.S.E., running September 5-12.

There are no seats for the three-hour production, so the audience will be on their feet and on the move, shaking and grooving to the show, which features cutting-edge choreography by Sharon Eyal, direction by Gai Behar and Caius Pawson of the record label Young, musical curation by Mattis With of Young, stage and creative design by Daphnée Lanternier, lighting by Alon Cohen, costumes by Maria Grazia Chiuri, and music by DJ Ben UFO. (Audience members can take a break on lounge seating in adjoining reception rooms.)

An armory commission that previously played at New Century Hall in Manchester, R.O.S.E. explodes with freedom, energy, and intimacy as audience and performers meld together as one.

There are several special programs being held in conjunction with R.O.S.E. On September 7 at 7:00, there will be a SLINK rave ($35) with DJs Currency Audio, Laenz, Simisea, rrao, and Enayet, while on September 8 at 6:00 the STUNT QUEEN!!! rave will be led by DJs Kilopatrah Jones, MORENXXX, madison moore, and TYGAPAW, hosted by Xander C. Gaines Aviance and with a poetry reading by Abdu Mongo Ali. And on September 8 at 3:00, “Day for Night: A Salon on Art and Nightlife” ($35) features “Music and Deejaying” with madison moore, Kevin Aviance, and Xander C. Gaines Aviance; “Dance and Club Culture” with Ariel Osterweis and MX Oops; and “The Art of Queer Worldmaking” with Gage Spex, Raúl de Nieves, Dosha, and Jacolby Satterwhite.

Some shows are already sold out, so act fast if you want to catch what should be one of the hottest shows of the year.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HARLEM WEEK 50: CELEBRATE THE JOURNEY

HARLEM WEEK
Multiple locations in Harlem
August 7-18, free
harlemweek.com

Fifty years ago, actor and activist Ossie Davis cut a ribbon at 138th St. and the newly renamed Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. (formerly Seventh Ave.), opening what was supposed to be a one-day, one-time-only event known as Harlem Day; Davis called it “the beginning of the second Harlem Renaissance.” Among the cofounders were Davis, his wife, Ruby Dee, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Ornette Coleman, Lloyd E. Dickens, David Dinkins, Basil Paterson, Tito Puente, Charles Rangel, Max Roach, Vivian Robinson, “Sugar Ray” Robinson, Hope R. Stevens, Bill Tatum, Barbara Ann Teer, and Rev. Wyatt T. Walker.

The festival has blossomed over the last half century into the annual favorite Harlem Week, a summer gathering packed full of live performances, film screenings, local vendors, panel discussions, a job fair, fashion shows, health screenings, exhibits, and more. This year’s theme is “Celebrate the Journey”; among the highlights are the Uptown Night Market, the Percy Sutton Harlem 5K Run & Health Walk, Great Jazz on the Great Hill, Harlem on My Mind Conversations, a Jobs & Career Fair, the Children’s Festival, the Concert Under the Stars, and the centerpiece, “A Great Day in Harlem.” Below is the full schedule; everything is free.

Wednesday, August 7
Climate Change Conference, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, West 125th St., 6:00

Thursday, August 8
Uptown Night Market, 133rd St. & 12th Ave., 4:00 – 10:00

Harlem Summerstage, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, 5:30

HW 50 Indoor/Outdoor Film Festival, 7:00

Friday, August 9
Senior Citizens Day, with health demonstrations and testing, live performances, exhibits, panel discussions, the Senior Hat Fashion Show, and more, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm

Saturday, August 10
NYC Summer Streets Celebrating Harlem Week’s 50th Anniversary, 7:00 am – 3:00 pm

The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K Run & Health Walk, West 135th St., 8:00 am

Choose Healthy Life Service of Renewal and Healing, noon

Great Jazz on the Great Hill, Central Park Great Hill, 4:00

Harlem Week/Imagenation Outdoor Film Festival: Black Nativity (Kasi Lemmons, 2013), 7:00

Sunday, August 11
A Great Day in Harlem, with Artz, Rootz & Rhythm, the Gospel Caravan, AFRIBEMBE, and Concert Under the Stars featuring the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band, music director to the stars Ray Chew, and special guests, General Grant National Memorial, Riverside Dr., noon – 7:00

Monday, August 12
Youth Conference & Hackathon, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm

Children’s Corner — Books on the Move: “Mommy Moment,” 10:00 am

Tuesday, August 13
Economic Development Day, noon – 3:00

Arts & Culture/Broadway Summit, 3:00

Harlem on My Mind Conversations, 7:30

Wednesday, August 14
NYC Jobs & Career Fair, CCNY, 160 Convent Ave., 10:00 am – 4:00 pm

Harlem on My Mind Conversations, 7:00

Thursday, August 15
Black Health Matters/HARLEM WEEK Summer Health Summit & Expo, with free health screenings, prizes, breakfast, and lunch, the Alhambra Ballroom, 2116 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd., 9:00 am – 3:00 pm

Harlem Summerstage, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building Plaza, 5:00

Banking & Finance for Small Business & Entrepreneurs, Chase Community Banking Center, 55 West 125th St., 6:00 – 9:45

Harlem on My Mind Conversations, 8:45

Saturday, August 17
NYC Summer Streets Celebrating HARLEM WEEK’s 50th Anniversary, 109th St. & Park Ave. – 125th St. & Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd., 7:00 am – 3:00 pm

NYC Children’s Festival, with storytelling, live performances, dance, hip hop, theater, poetry, arts & crafts, double dutch competitions, face painting, technology information, health services, and more, Howard Bennett Playground, West 135th St., noon – 5:00

Summer in the City, with live performances, fashion shows, and more, West 135th St., 1:00 – 6:00

Alex Trebek Harlem Children’s Spelling Bee, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd., 2:00

Harlem Week/Imagenation Outdoor Film Festival, Great Lawn at St. Nicholas Park, West 135th St. 6:00

Sunday, August 18
NYC Health Fair, West 135th St., noon – 5:00

NYC Children’s Festival, with storytelling, live performances, dance, hip hop, theater, poetry, arts & crafts, double dutch competitions, face painting, technology information, health services, and more, Howard Bennett Playground, West 135th St., noon – 5:00

Harlem Day, with live performances, food vendors, arts & crafts, jewelry, hats, sculptors, corporate exhibitors, games, a tribute to Harry Belafonte, and more, West 135th St., 1:00 – 7:00

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

PHILIPPE PETIT: TOWERING!!

Philippe Petit will look back at his historic walk between the Twin Towers at special events at St. John the Divine (photo courtesy Man on Wire)

Who: Philippe Petit, Sting, Anat Cohen, Molly Lewis, Sophie Auster, Tim Guinee, Lorenzo Pisoni, Evelyne Crochet, Shawn Conley, James Marsh, Michael Miles, and students of Ballet Tech
What: Live performances celebrating fiftieth anniversary of Twin Towers high-wire walk
Where: The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St.
When: Wednesday, August 7, and Thursday, August 8, $50-$500 (VIP $1800), 8:30
Why: It was an unforgettable moment in my childhood. On August 7, 1974, French tightrope artist Philippe Petit, six days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, pulled off what he called “le coup”: After six years of secret planning, he snuck up to the top of the South Tower of the recently built World Trade Center and walked on a 131-foot-long wire he had strung to the other, 1,350 feet aboveground, traversing it eight times over forty-five minutes using a balancing pole. The crossing was completely unauthorized; spectators and security officers alike were stunned. It was a spectacular achievement that went viral well before there was anything like social media. It was all over the news, on television and in the papers, and it was all anyone was talking about.

“This is probably the end of my life to step on that wire,” Petit says in James Marsh’s 2008 documentary, Man on Wire. “Death is very close.”

The Twin Towers opened on April 4, 1973, and were destroyed on September 11, 2001.

Petit has also walked the high wire at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Louisiana Superdome, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Paris Opera, the Museum of the City of New York, the Eiffel Tower, and locations in Jerusalem, Tokyo, Vienna, Frankfurt, Belgium, Switzerland, and numerous US cities. In 1982, 1992, and 1996, he performed the feat at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where he has been an artist in residence for more than four decades.

On August 7 and 8, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his World Trade Center walk, called the “artistic crime of the century,” Petit has conceived and directed “Towering!!,” a special two-night multidisciplinary happening consisting of nineteen scenes at the cathedral, where he will be joined by clarinetist Anat Cohen, musical whistler Molly Lewis, singer-songwriter Sophie Auster, actors Tim Guinee and Lorenzo Pisoni, classical pianist Evelyne Crochet, bassist and composer Shawn Conley, musician, author, and educator Michael Miles, and students from Ballet Tech dance school.

Petit, who turns seventy-five on August 13, will walk the high wire and share stories about his WTC adventure. In addition, his good friend Sting will play three songs, including “Let the Great World Spin,” which was written specifically for this event, and Marsh will debut a short film about Petit.

Limited tickets are still available for several sections as well as VIP seating, which comes with Champagne and dessert with Petit after the performance. Part of the proceeds support programs at the cathedral and the preservation of Petit’s archives.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]