Catherine Galasso’s Of Granite and Glass at Winter Garden is part of LMCC River to River Festival (photo by Victoria Sendra)
Multiple downtown locations
June 15-24, free (some events require advance RSVP)
lmcc.net
The seventeenth annual River to River Festival gets under way today, kicking off ten days of free multidisciplinary programs in downtown Manhattan, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. R2R specializes in presenting hard-to-categorize works in unusual locations, and this year is no different. “The River to River Festival transforms the landscape of Lower Manhattan and works with artists and communities to explore lesser known pasts, presents, and futures of our neighborhoods,” curator Danielle King said in a statement. Among the highlights are silent :: partner, a dance piece about memory and exclusion by enrico d. wey in Federal Hall; MasterVoices’ Naamah’s Ark, an oratorio in Rockefeller Park about Noah’s Ark, preceded by a family-friendly art workshop; Cori Olinghouse’s Grandma, about which Olinghouse says, “While looping through the practice of hoarding, discarding, coveting, and display, I excavate a particular formation of white southern middle classness that is built up in my memories”; and the LES Citizens Parade, consisting of a processional and performances by senior citizens in Seward Park. Below is the full schedule.
Friday, June 15
through
Sunday, June 17
Catherine Galasso: Of Granite and Glass, part of Of Iron and Diamonds, based on Boccaccio’s Decameron, with performers Doug LeCours, Jordan D. Lloyd, Ambika Raina, and Mei Yamanaka and music by Dave Cerf, Winter Garden, Brookfield Place, 230 Vesey St. 6/15-16 at 7:00, 6/17 at 6:00
enrico d. wey: silent :: partner, Federal Hall, advance RSVP required, 8:00
Friday, June 15
through
Sunday, June 24
Elia Alba: The Supper Club, art installation, NYC DOT Art Display Cases on Water St. between Wall St. & Maiden Ln. and Gouverneur Ln. between Water & Front Sts.
Friday, June 16
and
Saturday, June 17
Cori Olinghouse: Grandma, performance installation created and directed by Cori Olinghouse, performed by Martita Abril and Cori Olinghouse, with visual design by Dean Moss and Cori Olinghouse, LMCC Studios at 125 Maiden Ln., 6/16 at 1:00 & 5:00, 6/17 at 1:00
Sunday, June 17
MasterVoices: Naamah’s Ark, oratorio composed by Marisa Michelson, with libretto by Royce Vavrek, performed by MasterVoices with Victoria Clark as Naamah and Sachal Vasandani as Merman, conducted by Ted Sperling, Rockefeller Park, 7:00 (preceded by art workshop 1:00 – 5:00)
It’s Showtime NYC! will make a statement on the steps of Federal Hall for R2R Festival (photo by Chloé Mossessian for FIAF)
Monday, June 18
through
Friday, June 22
It’s Showtime NYC!, site-responsive intervention by street dance company, directed by choreographer Marguerite Hemmings, steps of Federal Hall at Broad & Wall Sts. across from New York Stock Exchange, 4:00
Tuesday, June 19
Night at the Museums, free entry to African Burial Ground National Monument, China Institute, Federal Hall National Memorial, Fraunces Tavern Museum, Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, National Archives at New York City, National Museum of the American Indian — Smithsonian Institution, National September 11 Memorial & Museum, 9/11 Tribute Museum, NYC Municipal Archives, Poets House, the Skyscraper Museum, South Street Seaport Museum, and more, 4:00 – 8:00
Thursday, June 21
Tribeca Art + Culture Night, with fine art galleries, art nonprofits, artists studios & residencies, university galleries, design galleries, museums, creative & crafts spaces, and public parks open late, some with special performances and talks, 6:00 – 9:00
Performance parade will feature senior citizens along the waterfront (photo courtesy of Laura Nova)
Friday, June 22, 5:30
and
Sunday, June 24, 4:00
Naomi Goldberg Haas & Laura Nova: LES Citizens Parade, activist processional and performances by senior citizens cocreated by choreographer and Dances for a Variable Population artistic director Naomi Goldberg Haas and visual artist Laura Nova, Seward Park
Saturday, June 23
Engaging LES: Daytime Movement Workshops, movement-based activities including cardio, dance & sweat, Latin, jazz, hip-hop, lindy hop, jazz funk at 10:30 am, Tai Chi workshop at noon, boxing/self-defense at 1:30, and Movement for Life workshop at 3:00, East River Esplanade at Rutgers Slip under the FDR Dr.
Thomas Piper’s Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf is a beautifully composed documentary that unfolds much as flowers and plants grow, evolving over fall, winter, spring, summer, and then fall again. In 2014-15, Piper followed innovative Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf as he visited gardens around the world and developed a brand-new one, Durslade Farm, for the Hauser & Wirth Somerset gallery in Bruton, England, which will ultimately be home to fifty-seven thousand plants. For more than thirty years, Oudolf has taken a unique, radical approach to gardens, as demonstrated in the 1999 book Dreamplants: A New Generation of Garden Plants, which he cowrote with garden designer and writer Henk Gerritsen. “I wanted to go away from traditional planting, [using] plants that were not seen in gardens but were very good garden plants. The more difficult thing was to learn what plants do,” Oudolf tells Hermannshof Garden director Cassian Schmidt in the film. “Your work teaches people to see things they were unable to see,” designer and photographer Rick Darke says to Oudolf as they walk through White Clay Creek Preserve in Landenberg, Pennsylvania. In designing his gardens, Oudolf first creates a multicolored blueprint that is a work of art in itself, like abstract drawings and paintings. He combines plants that would never be together in the wild. “It may look wild, but it shouldn’t be wild. This is what you’d like to see in nature,” he explains in his home base, the lovely Oudolf Garden in Hummelo, where he’s lived with his wife, Anja and their children since 1982. For him, it’s not just about color or size but about character. “I put plants onstage and I let them perform,” he says.
After seeing Jeremy Frindel’s The Doctor from India, you’re going to want to know even more about its remarkable subject, Ayurvedic master Dr. Vasant Lad. And you can get that chance this weekend when the doctor, who is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Pune, India, makes several appearances in New York City, participating in Q&As following the 6:45 shows at the Quad on June 1 and 2 and at Symphony Space on June 2 after the 4:00 Thalia Docs screening. The documentary provides an intimate, inside look at the seventy-five-year-old founder of the Ayurvedic Institute, who nearly single-handedly brought the ancient discipline to America and the rest of the world. “When I went first during 1979, no one even knows [the] word Ayurveda,” Dr. Lad says about his initial visit to the United States. “Now Ayurveda is flourishing, flowering, and it is my mission of my guru [Hammer Baba] to spread and propagate Ayurveda in the Western world.” Frindel shows the doctor — who is not licensed in America, where the medical establishment and insurance companies do not recognize Ayurveda as legitimate medical treatment — tending to patients in Pune, both at his main office during the day with students and in a clinic where people line up every night to be diagnosed for free. “The specialty of Ayurveda is the science of the pulse. Disease can be diagnosed by examining the pulse. I will look into your constitution, your prakruti, your vikruti, and let them know of any abnormalities,” he tells a patient. A kind, gentle, spiritual soul who does yoga and meditates, Dr. Lad describes Ayurveda as “the art of living in harmony with nature, in harmony with the surroundings, and that is a beautiful thing.” Frindel also speaks with Vedic scholar Dr. David Frawley, Doctor of Oriental Medicine Claudia Welch, first American Ayurvedic physician Dr. Robert Svoboda, and layman Len Blank, who sponsored Dr. Lad’s first visit to the West. “Dr. Lad is the most significant person in a sense galvanizing the movement of Ayurveda in the entire world but starting in the United States,” says Dr. Deepak Chopra, who has a fascinating connection to Dr. Lad involving the Maharaja Mahesh Yogi.
