Anna Halprin, “The Branch,” 1957. Performed on the Halprin family’s Dance Deck, Kentfield, California, 1957. Performers, from left: A. A. Leath, Anna Halprin, and Simone Forti (Photo by Warner Jepson. Courtesy of the Estate of Warner Jepson)
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
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Through February 3, $25
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On April 24, 2010, I was observing revolutionary dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin lead a workshop at Judson Memorial Church when she saw me sitting by myself, came over to me, grabbed my hand, and playfully demanded that I participate. Soon I was making a drawing, running around in circles, and sliding across the floor. Halprin, who is ninety-eight, is one of numerous artists being celebrated in the wonderful MoMA exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done,” which continues through February 3. The wide-ranging show consists of approximately 275 photographs, videos, posters, scores, sketches, instructions, programs, announcements, audio clips, newspaper articles, and other ephemera detailing the history of the arts institution that began in the lovely and historic Judson Memorial Church, located on Washington Square South, in 1962, five years after the church started hosting gallery shows by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. Throughout the run of the show, there have also been live performances in MoMA’s Marron Atrium.
Lucinda Childs, Interior Drama, 1977. Performed in “Lucinda Childs: Early Works, 1963–78,” as part of “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done,” performed by Katie Dorn, Sarah Hillmon, Sharon Milanese, Caitlin Scranton, and Shakirah Stewart (Digital image © 2018 the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Paula Court)
“So, what was Judson? It was a place. It was a group of people. It was a movement,” MoMA media and performance art curator Ana Janevski says on the audio guide. Associate curator Thomas J. Lax adds, “Judson was a group of emerging choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers. A new kind of avant-garde. They rehearsed, experimented, argued, collaborated, and in the process transformed the world of dance together.” The exhibition highlights choreographers Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, David Gordon, and James Waring, composers La Monte Young, John Cage, and Philip Corner, dancers Fred Herko, Rudy Perez, and Judith Dunn, visual artists Carolee Schneemann, Stan Vanderbeek, Robert Morris, Robert Whitman, Rosalyn Drexler, Fred McDarrah, Oldenburg, and Rauschenberg, and dance critic Jill Johnston. There’s an entire section devoted to Halprin and her architect husband, Lawrence Halprin, including photographs, exercises, a letter from Young, a Cunningham lecture, and more centered around their Dance Deck summer workshop.
Installation view of “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done” (© 2018 the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Peter Butler)
Just as I took part in one of Halprin’s workshops at Judson Memorial Church, you can participate in a class or workshop in MoMA’s atrium being taught by Movement Research, which has been based at the church since 1991. There will be morning classes taught by Nial Jones, Joanna Kotze, Bebe Miller, and Paloma McGregor, afternoon somatics classes with mayfield brooks, iele palooumpis and Jaime Ortega, Bradley Teal Ellis, and K. J. Holmes, and workshop manifestations with Ellis, brooks, and Jennifer Monson, in addition to a reading group, the “Tracing Beyond” Studies Project with panelists Ambika Raina, Miguel Gutierrez, Parijat Desai, Tara Aisha Willis, and David Thomson on January 24, and Fun Friday on January 25 with Antonio Ramos. All events are free with advance registration and will give you an inside look at what has made Judson Dance Theater so influential and critical in the history of dance and performance in New York City and around the globe. “Judson is Open Arms, Judson is Big Momma,” dancer, choreographer, and teacher Aileen Passloff explains on the audio guide. “Judson is come in whatever you need we’re gonna try to give it to you. You will need a shower, come here. There’s a shower, there’s a toilet, there’s a place to eat your lunch. You want to practice, there’s a place to practice. You know the thing about those guys is, well, they believed in us, and they believed in the world.”
One of the most brilliant and revered storytellers in the world, Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi proves his genius yet again with his latest cinematic masterpiece, the tenderhearted yet subtly fierce road movie 3 Faces. The film, which made its US premiere this past fall at the New York Film Festival and won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, is screening January 13 as part of IFC Center’s inaugural Iranian Film Festival New York. As with some of Panahi’s earlier works, 3 Faces walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction while defending the art of filmmaking. Popular Iranian movie and television star Behnaz Jafari, playing herself, has received a video in which a teenage girl named Marziyeh (Marziyeh Rezaei), frustrated that her family will not let her study acting at the conservatory where she’s been accepted, commits suicide onscreen, disappointed that her many texts and phone calls to her hero, Jafari, went unanswered. Deeply upset by the video — which was inspired by a real event — Jafari, who claims to have received no such messages, enlists her friend and colleague, writer-director Panahi, also playing himself, to head into the treacherous mountains to try to find out more about Marziyeh and her friend Maedeh (Maedeh Erteghaei). They learn the girls are from a small village in the Turkish-speaking Azeri region in northwest Iran, and as they make their way through narrow, dangerous mountain roads, they encounter tiny, close-knit communities that still embrace old traditions and rituals and are not exactly looking to help them find out the truth.
Inspired by his brief stint as a suburban New Jersey garage-band drummer with rock-and-roll dreams, Sopranos creator David Chase made his feature-film debt with the 2012 musical coming-of-age drama Not Fade Away. Written and directed by Chase, the film focuses on Douglas (John Magaro), a suburban New Jersey high school kid obsessed with music and The Twilight Zone. It’s the early 1960s, and Douglas soon becomes transformed when he first hears the Beatles and the Stones — while also noticing how girls go for musicians, particularly Grace (Bella Heathcote), whom he has an intense crush on but who only seems to date guys in bands. When his friends Eugene (Jack Huston) and Wells (Will Brill) ask him to join their group, Douglas jumps at the chance, but it’s not until he gets the opportunity to sing lead one night that he really begins to think that music — and Grace — could be his life. Not Fade Away has all the trappings of being just another clichéd sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll movie, but Chase and musical supervisor (and executive producer) Steven “Silvio” Van Zandt circumvent genre expectations and limitations by, first and foremost, nailing the music. Van Zandt spent three months teaching the main actors how to sing, play their instruments, and, essentially, be a band, making the film feel real as the unnamed group goes from British Invasion covers to writing their own song. Even Douglas’s fights with his conservative middle-class father (James Gandolfini) and his battle with Eugene over the direction of the band are handled with an intelligence and sensitivity not usually seen in these kinds of films. Not Fade Away does make a few wrong turns along the way, but it always gets right back on track, leading to an open-ended conclusion that celebrates the power, the glory, and, ultimately, the mystery of rock and roll.