this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

UNZIPPED WITH ISAAC MIZRAHI IN PERSON

Isaac Mizrahi contemplates his future in UNZIPPED

Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi contemplates his future in fab documentary, Unzipped

UNZIPPED (Douglas Keeve, 1995)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Thursday, June 13, 8:30
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.miramax.com

About halfway through Unzipped, Douglas Keeve’s thrilling 1995 documentary, which follows fashion designer extraordinaire Isaac Mizrahi as he puts together his fall 1994 collection following a critical disaster, Mizrahi says, “Everything’s frustrating; every single thing is frustrating. Except designing clothes. That’s not frustrating. That’s really liberating and beautiful. I don’t know, being overweight and not being able to lose weight, you know, that’s a problem. Anything you’re really working hard at and that’s not working, that’s a problem. But frankly, designing clothes is never a problem.” Of course, the statement doesn’t exactly ring true as Mizrahi, usually with his trademark bandanna wound around his wild, curly hair, encounters his fair share of difficulties as he meets with Candy Pratts and André Leon Talley from Vogue and Polly Mellen from Allure, expresses his hopes and fears with Mark Morris, Sandra Bernhard, Eartha Kitt, and his mother, and works with such supermodels as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Shalom Harlow, Linda Evangelista, Carla Bruni, Christy Turlington, and Amber Valletta. Along the way he makes endless pop-culture references, singing the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, citing scenes from The Red Shoes, Marnie, Valley of the Dolls, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and using Nanook of the North and The Call of the Wild as creative inspiration.

Mizrahi is a ball of neuroses throughout as he consults Ouija boards and Tarot cards to peek into his future and plays classical piano (Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”) to calm himself down. “I’m not that stressed out,” he says. “I hate when people tell me I’m stressed out.” In his first film, director Keeve (Seamless, Hotel Gramercy Park), who was dating Mizrahi at the time, and Oscar-winning cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Betrayal) switch from grainy black-and-white to color to sharp b&w as Mizrahi’s big show approaches, in which the major point of conflict is the designer’s desperate desire to use a scrim that will allow the high-powered audience to see the backlit silhouettes of the models as they change backstage, something not all the women, or his colleagues at Mizrahi & Co., are in favor of. The film opens with Mizrahi devastated by the reviews of his previous show and closes with him quietly examining the reviews for his fall collection; in between is a delightful look inside the crazy world of fashion. And then Mizrahi will have to do it all over again for the next season. Winner of the Audience Award at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, Unzipped is having a special Pride Month screening at Film Forum on June 13 with Mizrahi present for a Q&A.

AILEY AT LINCOLN CENTER

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Rennie Harris' Lazarus. Photo by Paul Kolnik

Rennie Harris’s Lazarus is part of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater season at Lincoln Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center
20 Lincoln Center Plaza
June 12-16, $29-$159
212-496-0600
www.alvinailey.org
www.davidhkochtheater.com

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual Lincoln Center season might be short but it’s packed with highlights. From June 12 to 16, AAADT will feature three programs (that all conclude with Revelations), in addition to the gala, at the David H. Koch Theater, as part of the troupe’s sixtieth anniversary celebration. On June 12 at 7:30 and June 14 at 2:00, “Bold Visions” includes the world premiere of Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Ounce of Faith; Ronald K. Brown’s The Call, “a love letter to Mr. Ailey” set to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Mary Lou Williams, and Asase Yaa Entertainment Group; and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter, with music by Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn and Victor See Yuen and poetry by Hattie Gossett and Laurie Carlos. (The Saturday Family Matinee will be followed by a Q&A with some of the dancers.) On June 13 at 7:00, the Ailey Spirit Gala Performance features works by several choreographers in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Ailey School, in addition to a one-night-only presentation of a new ballet choreographed by Ailey II artistic director Troy Powell featuring former AileyCampers, current students from the Ailey School, and members of Ailey II and AAADT.

On June 14 and 15 at 8:00, “Trailblazers” is highlighted by Rennie Harris’s two-act, sixty-minute Lazarus (inspired by the life and career of Alvin Ailey), with music by Darrin Ross, Nina Simone, Terrence Trent D’Arby, Michael Kiwanuka, and Odetta and the voice of Ailey. On June 16 at 3:00, “Timeless Ailey” is a potpourri of excerpts from Blues Suite, Streams, Mary Lou’s Mass, The Lark Ascending, Hidden Rites, Night Creature, Cry, Phases, Opus McShann, Pas de Duke, For “Bird” – With Love,” Love Songs, and Memoria. The season comes to a big finish on June 16 at 7:30 with “An Evening Honoring Carmen de Lavallade,” a tribute to the exquisite dancer with excerpts from pieces she performed in (John Butler’s Portrait of Billie, Lester Horton’s Sarong Paramaribo, and her own Sweet Bitter Love), followed by The Call, Ounce of Faith, and Revelations. The engagement also welcomes five new dancers: Renaldo Maurice, Yazzmeen Laidler, Corrin Rachelle Mitchell, Jessica Amber Pinkett, and Patrick Coker.

PRIDE MONTH: SAVING FACE

Alice Wu’s Saving Face breaks the chains of conventions in LGBTQ love story

REPRESENTATION: SAVING FACE (Alice Wu, 2004)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Thursday, June 6, 7:00
718-384-3980
nitehawkcinema.com
www.sonyclassics.com

Nitehawk is celebrating Pride Month with a trio of films honoring the LGBTQ experience, beginning June 6 with a screening of 2004’s Saving Face, followed by a Q&A with writer-director Alice Wu. While much of this independent first feature is entertaining enough, the last scenes are so much fun, so heartbreaking, and so charming that the film leaps to the next level, so stay with it. The captivating Michelle Krusiec (One World, Knife Fight) stars as Wilhelmina, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor trying to balance her career with her family in Flushing. Every Friday night she goes to the community dance, where her mother (Joan Chen) and the other Chinese yentas try to fix her up with a guy. Little do they know that she’s gay and strongly attracted to the boss’s daughter, Vivian (Lynn Chen), a ballerina dabbling in modern dance. Things get a little wacky when it turns out that Wil’s mother is pregnant and won’t tell anyone who the father is, leading to her banishment from her parents’ home and her friends’ inner circle. Suddenly Wil finds herself struggling to take care of her mother while also exploring a blossoming relationship that she hides from nearly everyone except her best friend, Jay (Ato Essandoh).

Tradition battles modern life, generation battles generation, sexual preference battles gossip and scandal, and conventional roles get turned upside down and inside out in this film-festival favorite that will leave you smiling. The Pride Month series continues June 7 with A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and June 8 with a NewFest Brunch screening of Punks. Saving Face, which earned Krusiec a Best Actress nomination at the Golden Horse Film Festival, is also part of Nitehawk’s Representation series, which continues June 8 with Dominga Sotomayor Castillo’s 2019 Too Late to Die Young.

TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER)

Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) takes a unique multimedia look at the work of Robert Mapplethorpe (photo by Maria Baranova)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
June 6-8, $30-$60, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The controversial work of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe has been undergoing a renaissance over the last few years, with documentaries, gallery and museum shows, and, perhaps most influentially, Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir about her life with Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. Now comes composer Bryce Dessner and librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle’s multimedia Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), playing at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House June 6-8. The sixty-minute theatrical oratorio is divided into three sections based on Mapplethorpe’s XYZ portfolios, which explore sadomasochism, flowers, and African American male nudes, respectively. The first part centers on Smith’s poem “The Boy Who Loved Michelangelo,” set to a Monteverdi madrigal; the second on Dessner’s personal reaction to the 1990 Mapplethorpe obscenity trial in Cincinnati, the composer’s hometown; and the third on poet and performance artist Essex Hemphill’s “The Perfect Moment,” which was critical of Mapplethorpe’s depiction of black bodies. “Aesthetics can justify desire, / but desire in turn / can provoke punishment. / Under public scrutiny / the eyes of one man / are focused on another. / Is it desire, equality, / disgust, or hatred?” he writes. Meanwhile, in a program note, dramaturg Christopher Myers asks, “Is it possible to imagine these men who are photographed with the impersonal intimacy of flowers, or bronze sculptures, as full human beings, with desires and pleasures of their own? Can we read the desire of the photographer, his conflicts and self-denials, in his steadfast commitment to a classical language that recasts leather daddies and daddy’s boys into upper middle class living room fantasies? Where in this thorny bramble of gazes, objectification, outrage, and intimacy do our own wants and expectations as an audience live?”

The production, which features giant projections of rarely shown Mapplethorpe photographs, is directed by Kaneza Schaal, with music performed live by Roomful of Teeth (Cameron Beauchamp, Martha Cluver, Eric Dudley, Estelí Gomez, Abigail Lennox, Thomas McCargar, Thann Scoggin, and Caroline Shaw), joined by soprano Alicia Hall Moran and tenor Isaiah Robinson; Brad Wells is the music director and conductor, with Jessica McJunkins on violin, Tia Allen on viola, Byron Hogan on cello, Kyra Sims on French horn, Ian Tyson on clarinet and bass clarinet, Laura Barger on piano and harmonium, Donnie Johns and Victor Pablo on percussion, and James Moore on guitar. The set and costumes are by Carlos Soto, lighting by Yuki Nakase, and video by Simon Harding. On June 7 at 6:00, the talk “Mapplethorpe in Performance with Bryce Dessner, Kaneza Schaal, and Korde Arrington Tuttle” will be held in the BAM Hillman Attic Studio.

HEINER GOEBBELS: EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AND WOULD HAPPEN

everything that happens

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
June 3-9, $40-$95
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

In 2009, German composer and artist Heiner Goebbels brought Stifter’s Dinge to Park Avenue Armory, a work for five pianos, sans performers, an architectural, musical, kinetic collage with the voices of William S Burroughs, Malcolm X, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 2016, his multidisciplinary De Materie featured a lighted zeppelin and a flock of sheep. His latest spectacle to come to the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is Everything that happened and would happen, running June 3-9. Originally staged in a former railway station in Manchester, the 160-minute intermissionless piece, reconfigured for the armory, combines unedited footage from Euronews’s No Comment, music from John Cage’s “Europeras 1&2,” and text based on Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. “Heiner Goebbels is an artist who defies classification. Composer, visual artist, theatrical pioneer, philosopher, and poet of the stage, he has for decades created compelling productions using a wide variety of performers,” armory artistic director Pierre Audi said in a statement. “The Drill Hall thrives on art forms flirting with each other, teasing us, provoking us, challenging us. Goebbels is the ring master par excellence who offers us a production especially inspired by the armory space. The result is an immersive experience that leaves each of us, the spectators, with our own experience and interpretation.”

The work, which was co-commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, 14—18 Now, Artangel, and Ruhrtriennale and explores a century of world history, is conceived and directed by Goebbels, with lighting by Goebbels and John Brown, sound by Willi Bopp, and video by Rene Liebert, with five musicians (Camille Emaille, Gianni Gebbia, Cécile Lartigau, Léo Maurel, Nicolas Perrin) and twelve performers and dancers (Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez, Sandhya Daemgen, Antoine Effroy, Ismeni Espejel, Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Freddy Houndekindo, Tuan Ly, Thanh Nguyễn Duy, John Rowley, Annegret Schalke, Ildikó Tóth, Tyra Wigg). On June 6 at 5:30, Goebbels will take part in an artist talk with Gelsey Bell.

RENEGADE DREAMERS

Documentary follows new generation of protest singers and spoken word activists in New York City

RENEGADE DREAMERS (Karen Kramer, 2019)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, May 31
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.renegadedreamers.com

Filmmaker Karen Kramer spent seven years on Renegade Dreamers, including four years following a group of young contemporary spoken word artists and protest singers. She could have done something better with her time. A longtime downtown New Yorker who made The Ballad of Greenwich Village in 2005, Kramer initially set out to make a documentary about the coffeehouse scene around MacDougal and Bleecker Streets in the 1950s and ’60s, and the sections of Renegade Dreamers about the post–World War II Beat poets and folk singers, including Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Len Chandler, and others, as well as Woody Guthrie, are terrific, with rarely seen archival footage that is stirring and exciting. She speaks with such key figures as Wavy Gravy, Hettie Jones, Eric Andersen, Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers, Maria Muldaur, David Amram, Izzy Young, Tom Paxton, and Richie Havens (some interview footage was completed for her previous film), who share intimate stories about their struggle against McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, anti-unionism, consumerism, and conformity. “They considered progressive thinking to be anti-American,” Peter Yarrow says of 1960s mainstream America, something that is true again today.

But that’s also where the documentary falls apart. The new generation of protest singers and spoken word activists Kramer focuses on are Matt Pless, Saroya Marsh, Gio Andollo, Tiffani Hillin, and Jeremy (Germ) DeHart, most of whom she discovered during the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park; unfortunately, these quirky young people fighting the status quo with their mouths and their guitars are not particularly compelling or even that interesting. While it’s great that they’re directly influenced by their forebears, they’re preaching to tiny choirs, a sliver of political music connoisseurs, and they don’t seem to be adding anything to the already vigorous and inclusive twenty-first-century discourse battling Wall Street, the Iraq War, racism, economic inequality, police brutality, and other societal ills. It’s hard to see these determined artists making any kind of real difference outside of their very limited circle. “We have to question everything. We can’t just take for granted what we’ve been handed,” one of them says. They should keep fighting the power and spreading the word every way they can, as we all should. But that doesn’t make them worthy of a documentary, or anywhere near as influential as the coffeehouse renegades of fifty years ago; instead they seem quaint, obsessed with a bygone style. Renegade Dreamers opens May 31 at Cinema Village, with daily Q&As following the 5:10 and 7:10 shows through June 6.

FIRST SATURDAYS: STONEWALL 50

The Queer Houses of Brooklyn and the Three Towns of Boswyck, Breukelen and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era. (Based on the drawing by Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky and with illustrations by Buzz Slutzky.) Crank-Knit Yarn, fabric, thread, sequins, poly-fil, 1" pins (free to the public and replenished endlessly). 9' x 9' x 14'. 2011

LJ Roberts, The Queer Houses of Brooklyn and the Three Towns of Boswyck, Breukelen and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era (based on the drawing by Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky and with illustrations by Buzz Slutzky), crank-knit yarn, fabric, thread, sequins, poly-fil, 1″ pins (free to the public and replenished endlessly), 2011 (photo courtesy of the artist)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, June 1, free (some events require advance tickets), 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum honors Gay Pride and the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in the June edition of its free First Saturday program. There will be live performances by New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, Linda LaBeija, Amber Valentine, and Madame Gandhi as well as teen staff members presenting an intersextions variety show inspired by “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” and artists Morgan Bassichis, TM Davy, DonChristian Jones, Michi Osato, Una Osato, and special guests celebrating the updated edition of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions; a book club talk with Jodie Patterson discussing her latest, The Bold World, with Elaine Welteroth; a curator tour of “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow” led by Lindsay C. Harris and Carmen Hermo; a hands-on workshop in which participants can design buttons based on LJ Roberts’s The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Boswyck, Breukelen, and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era; a community talk on radical queer histories with Audre Lorde Project; and an “Archives as Raw History” tour focusing on the museum’s LGBTQ+ histories. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Garry Winogrand: Color,” “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall,” “Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room,” “Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha,” “One: Egúngún,” “Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” “Kwang Young Chun: Aggregations,” and more.