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

DAVID BOWIE IS

Heroes contact sheet, 1977 (photograph by Masayoshi Sukita. © Sukita/The David Bowie Archive)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, fifth floor
Daily through July 15, $20-$35
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

Any major career survey of gender-bending, genre-redefining, multidisciplinary, intergalactic superstar David Bowie must be innovative, unique, cutting-edge, and unusual, for nothing less would do justice to the man born David Jones in Brixton in 1947. The Brooklyn Museum’s “David Bowie is,” the most successful exhibition in the institution’s history, is just that, an illuminating exploration of the actor, musician, singer-songwriter, fashion icon, painter, video artist, husband, father, and more. Given unprecedented access to Bowie’s personal archive, the wide-ranging, highly ambitious, immersive multimedia presentation collects hundreds of items, from sketches of his parents to his baby pictures, from handwritten lyric sheets to books that influenced him, from posters of his early bands to drawings of his costumes and sets for live performances, among a multitude of other memorabilia and paraphernalia. One section is devoted to a single song, “Space Oddity,” with video, photographs, screenprints, album artwork, music sheets, related toys, and more, another looks at his various stage personas (the Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust, Hamlet), and another explores his work in film and theater, including Labyrinth, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Elephant Man, The Last Temptation of Christ, Basquiat, and The Image. A five-minute clip from the 1969 promotional film Love You till Tuesday features “The Mask (A Mime),” in which Bowie performs as a mime.

Original lyrics for “Ziggy Stardust,” by David Bowie, 1972 (Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum)

Organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the show gets everything right that MoMA’s 2015 disaster, “Björk,” got wrong. Purchasing timed tickets in advance, visitors traverse the exhibition at their own pace and in whatever order they would like, wearing headphones that, in a move of genius, react to where they are physically. Thus, when you’re in front of a video screen depicting Bowie performing “The Man Who Sold the World” on Saturday Night Live, that is what you are hearing. Turn around and take a few steps in any direction and the audio will switch to whatever you are now looking at, whether it’s an interview with designer Kansai Yamamoto, Bowie’s preparations for the never-made Diamond Dogs film, or a small room dedicated to his final record, Blackstar. There is something to experience in almost every nook and cranny, so sometimes it is fun to let the audio guide you, attracted by what you hear instead of what you see.

David Bowie with William Burroughs, February 1974 (Photograph by Terry O’Neill with color by David Bowie. Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum)

Among the items to watch out for are a series of line drawings that serves as an artistic conversation between Bowie and Laurie Anderson; Guy Peellaert’s original painting for the Diamond Dogs album cover; the original lyrics to “Rebel, Rebel”; a Bowie painting of Iggy Pop in a Berlin landscape; a letter from Jim Henson to Bowie about Labyrinth; a John Lennon sketch (“For Video Dave . . .)”; Bowie’s script for the Lazarus musical; a Bowie doodle on a cigarette pack; a telefax from Elvis Presley; and Bowie’s charcoal drawing of his adopted home, New York City. The exhibition culminates in high style in a room blasting the original “Heroes” video and live footage of “Rebel, Rebel” from the Reality Tour and “Heroes” from the Concert for New York City, headphones off, everyone experiencing transcendence as one. “Though nothing, nothing will keep us together / We can beat them, forever and ever / Oh, we can be heroes just for one day,” Bowie declares, leaving behind a remarkable legacy that will continue to keep people together, believing that every one of us has the possibility of being a hero. On July 7 (exhibition ticket required, 8:00), Resonator Collective will perform a Bowie tribute, on July 14 ($16, 2:00), there will be a conversation between Daphne Brooks and Jack Halberstam about Bowie’s lasting influence, and on July 15 ($16, 2:00), the final day of the exhibit, the museum hosts the discussion “The Soulfulness of David Bowie” with Carlos Alomar, Robin Clark, and Christian John Wikane. After seeing the exhibit, you’ll have yet more ways to end the already tantalizing sentence fragment “David Bowie is . . .”

LOVE, CECIL

Documentary reveals Sir Cecil Beaton to be an ambitious dandy with many talents (courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sotheby’s)

LOVE, CECIL (Lisa Immordino Vreeland, 2017)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Opens Friday, June 29
212-875-5600
www.filmlinc.org
zeitgeistfilms.com

Love, Cecil is a refreshing, invigorating documentary about Oscar- and Tony-winning fashion and war photographer, diarist, production designer, painter, portraitist, costume designer, illustrator, and one of the most influential dandies of the twentieth century, Sir Cecil Beaton. Writer-director Lisa Immordino Vreeland has followed up her first two feature-length films, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, and Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict — she is Diana Vreeland’s granddaughter-in-law — with another behind-the-scenes journey into the art world and high society, this time explored through the lens of Beaton, who was on a neverending quest to find beauty and success in every part of his life and career. “I started out with very little talent, but I was so tormented with ambition. Once you’ve started for the end of the rainbow, you can’t very well turn back,” he wrote in one of his numerous published diaries, quotes from which are read in voiceover by Rupert Everett throughout the film. The rather self-effacing Beaton, who was born in Hampstead in 1904, was never satisfied, always wanting more. “I exposed thousands of rolls of film, wrote hundreds of thousands of words, in a futile attempt to preserve the fleeting moment,” Everett narrates.

Cecil Beaton catches up on some news in fab documentary, Love, Cecil (courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sotheby’s)

A member of Britain’s aristocratic Bright Young Things in the 1920s, Beaton went on to photograph such celebrities as Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Judy Garland, Sugar Ray Robinson, Mick Jagger, and, perhaps most prominently, Queen Elizabeth and the royal family — and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind about some of his subjects and acquaintances, saving his finest vitriol for Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He was taken with patrons Stephen Tennant and Peter Watson, artist and designer Oliver Messel, Olympic fencer Kin Hoitsma, and Greta Garbo, some of whom became his lovers. His tempestuous relationship with Garbo is one of the highlights of the film. Vreeland, cinematographer Shane Sigler, and editor Bernadine Colish maintain a slow, witty, stylish pace, matching Beaton’s general comportment. In addition to home movies, personal photographs, newspaper articles, and archival footage of Beaton on talk shows, the film includes new, revealing interviews with designer Isaac Mizrahi, actors Leslie Caron and Peter Eyre, Vogue international editor at large Hamish Bowles, auctioneer and historian Philippe Garner, model and writer Penelope Tree, Beaton’s sisters Nancy Lady Smiley and Baba Hambro, former museum director Sir Roy Strong, designer Manolo Blahnik, dance critic Alastair Macaulay, interior designer Nicky Haslam, artist David Hockney, and Beaton’s longtime butler, Ray Gurton. There’s a wonderful scene with Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote, and photographer David Bailey gives fabulous insight into his 1971 film, Beaton by Bailey, which Beaton was not very fond of. “There is scarcely a flattering self-portrait, yet truth begins with oneself,” Everett recites from a diary.

“His life was a stage,” notes biographer Hugo Vickers, while photographer Tim Walker explains, “He had a relationship with the idea of the person, not actually the person. There’s truth in fantasy.” Beaton, who redefined fashion layouts while working at Vogue and Vanity Fair, likely would feel right at home in today’s world of selfies and social media, where everyone can create and flaunt their fame. Beaton won four Tonys and three Oscars (including Best Costume Design for the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady and Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction for the movie) and is shown to be both vain and insecure, proud and melancholic, because of and despite his success. Vreeland often cuts to calming shots of Ashcombe House and Reddish House, where Beaton found peace in his garden and with his beloved cat, away from all the hubbub of high society. A splendidly dandy doc, Love, Cecil opens June 29 at the Francesca Beale Theater at Lincoln Center, with Vreeland participating in Q&As after the 7:15 show on June 29 and the 1:15 screening on June 30 (with Sigler) and introducing the 9:45 show on June 29 and the 3:30 screening on June 30.

IN THE SOUP

Steve Buscemi stars as a New York City nebbish with big dreams in Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup

IN THE SOUP (Alexandre Rockwell, 1992)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 29
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.factorytwentyfive.com

The 2018 Tribeca Film Festival might have hosted gala anniversary screenings of Scarface and Schindler’s List at the Beacon with impressive rosters of superstar guests and high price tags, but the one to see was Alexandre Rockwell’s 1992 black-and-white indie cult classic, In the Soup. If you missed that reunion, you have another chance to catch the film on the big screen when it opens June 29 at IFC Center. The twenty-fifth-anniversary screening is a case of life imitating art (imitating life): The black comedy is about the fabulously named Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi), a ne’er-do-well New Yorker living in a run-down apartment building, working on his master opus, a five-hundred-page screenplay called Unconditional Surrender that he believes will change the face of cinema itself. A familiar New York story? Perhaps, but the film was largely unfamiliar to almost everyone but the most dedicated enthusiasts, since it has been out of circulation for most of its existence. A few years ago, In the Soup was down to one last, damaged archival print, but distribution company Factory 25 began a Kickstarter campaign to restore the film in time for its quarter-century anniversary, somewhat mimicking Adolpho’s efforts to get his movie made — which, in turn, is based on Rockwell’s attempts to make In the Soup in the first place, as many of the characters and situations in the film are based on real people and actual events.

With wanna-be gangster brothers Louis Barfardi (Steven Randazzo) and Frank Barfardi (Francesco Messina) breathing down his neck for the rent, Adolpho decides to sell the last thing of value (at least in his mind) that he owns, his screenplay. (In real life, Rockwell sold his saxophone to help get In the Soup financed.) His first offer is not quite what he imagined, involving a pair of cable TV producers played by Jim Jarmusch and Carol Kane. But next he meets Joe (Seymour Cassel), an older, white-haired teddy bear of a man who may or may not be connected. Joe is so excited about making a movie that he can’t stop hugging and kissing — and even getting in bed with — a confused Adolpho, who really has nowhere else to turn. Adolpho wants his next-door neighbor, Angelica (Jennifer Beals, who was married to Rockwell at the time), to star in his film, but she wants nothing to do with him, although he does succeed in making Angelica’s estranged, and plenty strange, husband, Gregoire (Stanley Tucci), mighty jealous. Adolpho is also terrified of Joe’s mysterious, apparently rather dangerous, brother, Skippy (Will Patton). Little by little, the money starts coming in, but Adolpho and Joe start having creative differences about fundraising and moviemaking, leading to a series of even odder situations with more bizarre characters.

Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi) meets a strange bedfellow (Seymour Cassel) in indie cult classic

A kind of cousin to Jarmusch’s 1984 gem, Stranger than Paradise, Rockwell’s third feature (following Hero and Sons) was made on a shoestring budget, shot in color by cinematographer Phil Parmet but then transferred to black-and-white to obtain a stark, drenched look. Veteran character actor and Cassavetes regular Cassel and up-and-coming actor/fireman Buscemi form a great comic duo, Cassel filling Joe with an unquenchable thirst for all life has to offer, Buscemi imbuing Adolpho with a rigid, sheltered view of existence, a young man lost in his own warped reality. “My father died the day I was born. I was raised by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche,” Adolpho says, as if that’s a good thing. Patton is a riot as the menacing Skippy, while Beals and Tucci have fun with their accents. The fab cast also includes Debi Mazar as Suzie, Elizabeth Bracco as Jackie, Sully Boyar as the old man, Pat Moya as Joe’s companion, Dang, Ruth Maleczech as Adolpho’s mother, Michael J. Anderson as a drug dealer, and Sam Rockwell (no relation to Alexandre) as Angelica’s brother, Pauli. In the Soup is also a great New York City film, with several awesome locations. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, beating out Allison Anders’s Gas Food Lodging and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (Cassel also won for acting), but the distribution company handling the picture went bankrupt shortly after releasing it, resulting in its scarce availability, which was a shame, because it’s an absolute treasure. But now it’s back and looking better than ever. (Coincidentally, Rockwell, Anders, and Tarantino were three of the quartet of directors who made the 1995 omnibus Four Rooms, along with Robert Rodriguez.) Buscemi and Alexandre Rockwell, who went on to make such other films as Somebody to Love, 13 Moons, and Pete Smalls Is Dead (with many of the actors from In the Soup), will take part in a Q&A following the 7:15 show on opening night at IFC.

BRIC CELEBRATE BROOKLYN! FESTIVAL: THE BLUES PROJECT FEATURING DORRANCE DANCE WITH TOSHI REAGON & BIGLovely

Dorrance Dance will be joined by Toshi Reagon & BIGLovely at Prospect Park Bandshell June 28 (photo by Christopher Duggan)

Prospect Park Bandshell
Prospect Park
Ninth St. & Prospect Park West
Thursday, June 28, free, 7:00
www.bricartsmedia.org

In 2011, North Carolina–raised tap-dancer, choreographer, director, and teacher Michelle Dorrance founded the New York City–based Dorrance Dance, focusing on the past, present, and future of tap dancing, pushing the limits of the discipline in such works as Myelination, ETM: Double Down, and SOUNDspace. For more than three decades, Atlanta-born, DC-raised, longtime Brooklynite Toshi Reagon has been performing her unique mix of folk, blues, gospel, rock, and funk, joined by her band, BIGLovely, since 1996. Dorrance, a MacArthur Genius, onetime STOMP cast member, and former bassist with Darwin Deez, and Reagon, an activist whose mother is Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon and father was Cordell Hull Reagon, both founders of the Freedom Singers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and whose godfather is Pete Seeger, joined forces in 2013 to create The Blues Project, a sixty-five-minute piece for nine dancers and five musicians, choreographed by Dorrance, Derick K. Grant, and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards and featuring original music composed by Reagon, who has previously written music for the Jane Comfort Dance Company and Urban Bush Women.

The work is being presented for free June 28 at the Prospect Park Bandshell as part of the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, with Toshi Reagon & BIGLovely performing the score live. After the show, there will be a special reception with New York–based Peruvian artist Grimanesa Amorós, whose light sculpture, Hedera, was recently unveiled on the grass at the bandshell, commissioned by BRIC specifically for the fortieth anniversary of the Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. Amorós will talk about her work with BRIC contemporary art VP Elizabeth Ferrer, followed by an audience Q&A.

DRAGON BOAT FAMILY FESTIVAL 2018

dragon boat festival

端午节
Museum of Chinese in America
215 Centre St.
Saturday, June 23, $10, noon – 4:00
www.mocanyc.org

The big Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival doesn’t take place until August 12-13 in Flushing Meadows Park, but you can get ready for the festivities with the Museum of Chinese in America’s Dragon Boat Family Festival, taking place at the downtown institution on June 23. The afternoon includes arts and crafts, workshops, live performances, storytelling, special food, Chinese board games, and more. Kids can make a good-luck fabric sachet known as a xiang bao, summer solstice sun catchers, team banners, and miniature floatable dragon boats and race them. There will also be a bug hunt, a yo-yo performance by eleven-year-old champion Alex Tai, ink brush painting with the NY Chinese Cultural Center, a double watercolor workshop with Jian Zhong, and a zongzi wrapping and tasting with Sophia Hsu.

FRUIT TRILOGY

Liz Mikel and Kiersey Clemons play items on a shelf in Eve Ensler’s Pomegranate (photo by Maria Baranova)

Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 23, $65-$85
212-352-3101
abingdontheatre.org/fruit-trilogy

Activist and writer Eve Ensler follows up her powerful, intimate one-woman show, In the Body of the World, with the New York premiere of Fruit Trilogy, three short experimental pieces that are still in need of some ripening. The Abingdon Theatre Company production, running at the Lucille Lortel through June 23 — coincidentally, Ensler was just given a lifetime achievement honor at last month’s Lucille Lortel Awards — explores major themes from throughout Ensler’s oeuvre, investigating female oppression and empowerment and the body itself, beginning with her 1986 international hit, The Vagina Monologues. Fruit Trilogy opens with the Beckett-like Pomegranate, in which Item 1 (Liz Mikel) and Item 2 (Kiersey Clemons) portray a pair of women on a shelf in a warehouse, only their heads visible in small black boxes. On display for men to purchase and do with what they want, they discuss their situation: “Women? We are items that they want to buy,” Item 1 says. “We are women more willing to be vile receptacles than we are willing to be dead,” Item 2 explains. Discussing hope, Item 1 declares, “My body will not live without possibility.” Item 2 sarcastically replies, “You have a body?”

Kiersey Clemons is a young sex slave trapped in a cage in Eve Ensler’s Avocado (photo by Maria Baranova)

In Avocado, Clemons plays a sex slave slithering across a raised narrow platform in a container that serves as a cage, though the bars are unseen. She prowls about like a wild animal, speaking directly to the audience. At one point, she says, “Do you see them? Such naughty angels, jokester angels, protecting me, protecting all the girls who lost their bodies.” She goes into graphic detail about her victimization, brutalization, and enslavement, her story lightened only by an unexpected connection in one encounter, with a deaf, nonverbal boy who treats her more like a person, than a prostitute. The woman has sold herself one last time for passage in the container to a place called Asylum, the kind of freedom offered by City of Joy, a securely walled and guarded safe space cofounded by Ensler in Bukavu in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo where survivors of rape and sexual violence come to get their life back, learning to reclaim their bodies and their minds.

Liz Mikel treats herself special in Coconut, the conclusion of Fruit Trilogy (photo by Maria Baranova)

And in Coconut, Mikel invites the audience into her bathroom, lit by candles, where she luxuriously and ceremonially rubs coconut oil onto her right foot, taking control of her body in ways that the characters in the previous two tales could not. “Like everything else, this body only existed in relationship to the person who was touching it, as a thing that might be touched,” she says. Now that person is her, rejecting all the ways she previously didn’t “measure up” to others, being a large black woman judged by her size, gender, and race. “We’re engaged in a transformative process of emollient change,” she says as she rubs the pain of memory and shame out of her body. When she disrobes, she takes pride in her naked body, daring the audience to look at her, to experience her, to join her in a happier world. Clemons (Dope, The Only Boy Living in New York) and Mikel (Lysistrata Jones, Friday Night Lights) are engaging, fearless performers, but director Mark Rosenblatt (The Country, Animal Wisdom) can’t get a firm enough grasp of the material or of Mark Wendland’s (Significant Other, Next to Normal) dark, low-budget sets, which are indeed somewhat confusing. Although it takes on some tough, serious topics, the trilogy is too long at eighty minutes, with too much repetition in the overly clever dialogue that continues well after the point has been made. It feels like Fruit Trilogy is still at the workshop stage, requiring additional care and nurturing before being picked and served to the public. Several of the remaining performances will be followed by talkbacks with Ensler (The Good Body, Emotional Creature) and special guests, focusing on not only the play itself but Ensler’s work with V-Day, “a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls” that she cofounded in 1998.

THE MEAT IN MEATBALLS: SOURCING AND CREATING AT THE MEATBALL SHOP

Daniel Sharp will talk meatballs and more at MoFad on June 21

Museum of Food and Drink
62 Bayard St., Brooklyn
Thursday, June 21, $25, 6:30
718-387-2845
www.mofad.org

We’ve come a long way since “Mamma mia, that’s a spicy meatball.” On June 21, the Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn will host “Sourcing and Creating the Meatball Shop,” a discussion and tasting with executive chef Daniel Sharp of the Meatball Shop Group. Cofounded by childhood best friends Daniel Holzman and Michael Chernow downtown in 2010, there are now six city locations for the eatery, which allows diners to create their own bowls or hero sandwiches, choosing among such balls as classic, pork, chicken, veggie, and special and such sauces as tomato, spicy meat, parmesan cream, pesto, and mushroom gravy. The restaurant also serves salads, pasta, ice-cream sandwiches, and banana splits. California native Sharp will discuss with moderator Emily Pearson of Heritage Foods his business model, the concept of nose-to-tail eating, and how he sources his ingredients and comes up with his recipes; the talk will be followed by a cooking demonstration and tasting.