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

PERFORMANCE SPACE NEW YORK EAST VILLAGE SERIES: AVANT-GARDE-ARAMA

Performance Space New York is reborn in the East Village

Performance Space New York
150 First Ave. at East Ninth St.
Sunday, February 18, free, 6:00 pm – 1:00 am
212-352-3101
performancespacenewyork.org

After a major renovation, one of downtown’s best and most diverse venues is back, as Performance Space New York, formerly known as PS122, celebrates its return with a free event on Sunday night, “Avant-Garde-Arama.” Kicking off the East Village Series, the festivities will feature live performances from six to nine on several stages by a vast array of creators, including Adrienne Truscott, Erin Markey, Hamm, Holly Hughes, John Kelly, John Zorn, La Bruja of Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Penny Arcade, Pharmakon, Reggie Watts, and Sister Jean Ra Horror, among many others. At nine, a dance party takes over, with JD Samson, Justin Strauss, and more. The evening’s hosts are the Factress (Lucy Sexton), Carmelita Tropicana, and Ikechukwu Ufomadu. On its website, the venue declares, “Performance Space New York was born in the East Village in 1980 as Performance Space 122 when a group of local artists occupied the empty building that had been home to Public School 122 and started making performance work as a passionate rejection of corporate mainstream culture. Today, almost forty years later, Performance Space New York is faced with a radically transformed neighborhood unaffordable for young artists and a national political climate that feeds off social inequity more than ever. Moving back into our newly renovated spaces, the inaugural East Village Series asks what kind of art organization we need to become in light of this ever-more-exclusionary social and political context.” The East Village Series continues through June with such presentations as “Focus on Kathy Acker,” “Women’s History Museum,” Diamanda Galás and Davide Pepe’s Schrei 27, a world premiere by Sarah Michelson, Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s CLUB, Penny Arcade’s Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, and Chris Cochrane, Dennis Cooper, and Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Them.

STEFAN FALKE — MOKO JUMBIES: THE DANCING SPIRITS OF TRINIDAD

Stefan Falke will be at Deutsches Haus at NY for special conversation about his moko jumbies photos on February 12 (photo © Stefan Falke)

Who: Stefan Falke, Laura Anderson Barbata
What: Exhibition opening and artist talk
Where: Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews
When: Monday, February 12, free, 6:00
Why: From 1997 to 2004, German-born, New York-based photographer Stefan Falke photographed Trinidadian stilt walkers, known as moko jumbies, collecting his pictures in the book Moko Jumbies: The Dancing Spirits of Trinidad (Pointed Leaf Press, 2005, $65). Falke will be at NYU’s Deutsches Haus on February 12 at 6:00 for the opening of his latest exhibition, featuring photos of the Dragon Keylemanjahro School of Art & Culture in Cocorite, which have never been on view in New York City before. Falke, who has also published La Frontera, portraits of artists on either side of the US-Mexico border, will be speaking with Mexico City native Laura Anderson Barbata, a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works there and in Brooklyn and who has also photographed moko jumbies for her project “Transommunality.” “Moko Jumbies: The Dancing Spirits of Trinidad” continues at Deutsches Haus through March 31.

TICKET ALERT: FORCE MAJEURE / THE SQUARE DOUBLE FEATURE WITH RUBEN ÖSTLUND

A close-knit Swedish family is about to face a serious crisis in Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure

FORCE MAJEURE (Ruben Östlund, 2014)
THE SQUARE (Ruben Östlund, 2017)
Scandinavia House
58 Park Ave. at 38th St.
Tuesday, February 20, $20, 4:00
212-847-9740
www.scandinaviahouse.org
www.magpictures.com

After three skiing films and two documentaries, Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund experienced near-instant success with his fiction work, which has included five features and two shorts since 2004, earning him numerous international awards. Scandinavia House will be honoring the Styrsö native on February 20 with a double feature of his two latest gems, Force Majeure, which was shortlisted for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and The Square, which is competing for the award at this year’s Oscars. Östlund will be at the Park Ave. cultural institution for a Q&A following The Square, which won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes. First up at 4:00 is Force Majeure, one of the best films you’ll ever hear. Not that Fredrik Wenzel’s photography of a lovely Savoie ski resort and Ola Fløttum’s bold, classical-based score aren’t stunning in their own right, but Kjetil Mørk, Rune Van Deurs, and Jesper Miller’s sound design makes every boot crunching on the snow, every buzzing electric toothbrush, every ski lift going up a mountain, every explosion setting off a controlled avalanche a character unto itself, heightening the tension (and black comedy) of this dark satire about a family dealing with a crisis. On the first day of their five-day French Alps vacation, workaholic Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) and his wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), are enjoying lunch on an outdoor veranda with their small children, Harry (Vincent Wettergren) and Vera (Clara Wettergren), when a potential tragedy comes barreling at them, but in the heat of the moment, while Ebba instantly seeks to protect the kids, Tomas runs for his life, leaving his family behind. After the event, which was not as bad as anticipated, the relationship among the four of them has forever changed, especially because Tomas will not own up to what happened. Even Harry and Vera (who are brother and sister in real life) know something went wrong that afternoon and are now terrified that their parents will divorce. But with Tomas unwilling to talk about his flight response, Ebba starts sharing the story with other couples, including their hirsute friend Mats (Kristofer Hivju) and his young girlfriend, Fanni (Fanni Metelius), who are soon arguing in private about what they would do in a similar situation.

There might be no going back in beautiful-looking and -sounding Swedish satire

Winner of the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival and the Swedish entry for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Force Majeure is a blistering exploration of human nature, gender roles, and survival instinct. The often uncomfortable and utterly believable tale, inspired by a real-life event in which friends of Östlund’s were attacked by gunmen, recalls Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet, in which an engaged couple encounter serious trouble and their immediate, individual reactions change their dynamic. Östlund (Play, Involuntary), who was also influenced by statistics that show that more men survive shipwrecks than women and children on a percentage basis, often keeps dialogue at a minimum, revealing the family’s growing predicament by repeating visuals with slight differences, from the way they sleep in the same bed to how they brush their teeth in front of a long mirror to the looks on their faces as they move along a motorized walkway in a tunnel at the ski resort. The ending feels forced and confusing, but everything leading up to that is simply dazzling, a treat for the senses that is impossible not to experience without wondering what you would do if danger suddenly threatened you and your loved ones.

Ann (Elisabeth Moss) and Christian (Claes Bang) discuss more than just art in Ruben Östlund’s The Square

The plot of Östlund’s 2014 absurdist satire, Force Majeure, turns on a man’s momentary act of surprising cowardice when an avalanche threatens him and his family at a ski resort. In the Swedish writer-director’s absurdist satire The Square, screening at 6:30 at Scandinavia House, the plot is set in motion when a man’s momentary act of surprising bravery leads him into a spiral of personal and professional chaos. The Tesla-driving chief curator of the fictional X-Royal contemporary art museum in Sweden, Christian (Claes Bang) is walking through a busy plaza when he hears a woman crying for help as bystanders do nothing. After his initial hesitation, Christian intervenes and is ultimately quite pleased with himself and his decision to do the right thing — until, a few moments later, he realizes he’s been robbed. Back at the museum, Christian listens to a pair of millennial marketers pitching their campaign for the institution’s upcoming exhibit, “The Square,” which is highlighted by a four-meter-by-four-meter square positioned on the cobblestones in the museum’s front courtyard. An accompanying plaque reads, “‘The Square’ is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.” As the museum contemplates a cutting-edge ad campaign for the exhibit, Christian has to deal with an arts journalist, an angry kid, the museum board, and his own moral decisions.

Oleg (Terry Notary) takes performance art to another level in The Square

The film opens as Christian is being interviewed by Ann (Elisabeth Moss) in a gallery, in front of a neon wall sign that says, “You have nothing.” Later, the sign says, “You have everything.” This dichotomy is central to Christian’s inner dilemma; he seemingly does have everything, but his world is slowly shattering, just like the artworks heard crashing to the ground later while he is in a deep personal discussion with Ann. Östlund skewers the art world, political correctness, class conflict, freedom of speech, privileged social groups, and the concept of “safe spaces” in the film, which was inspired by a real exhibition by Östlund and producer Kalle Boman that ran at the Vandalorum Museum in Sweden in 2015. Immediately following the opening interview, which reveals Ann has no feel whatsoever for contemporary art, workers remove the statue of King Karl XIV Johan that stands in front of the museum; on the base is his royal motto, “The love of the people my reward.” As the monument is being taken off its plinth, the crane drops it and the king’s head falls off. “The Square” takes its place, signaling the old being replaced by the new, physical objects replaced by lofty ideals, with an utter disregard for what has come before. Östlund (The Guitar Mongoloid, Incident by a Bank) is not above making such obvious analogies and references, including naming his protagonist Christian, a man who spends much of the film attempting to do what he considers the right thing. (Östlund, who also edited the film with Jacob Secher Schulsinger, has said that “The Square” installation is a place where the Golden Rule and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should take precedence.)

Wriet-director Ruben Östlund (standing) on the set of The Square

Writer-director-editor Ruben Östlund (standing) on the set of The Square

The film focuses on the issue of trust, and particularly how humans lose their ability to have faith in others as they mature. At the entrance to the “Square” installation, visitors are given the option of deciding between two paths, one marked “I Trust People,” the other “I Mistrust People.” Christian’s two daughters both take the former. The older daughter is a cheerleader, showing trust in her teammates as the girls are tossed high in the air and wait to be caught — but not without several men hovering right behind them to try to prevent any possible falls. The difference between childhood and adulthood is also evident in how Christian deals with a determined young boy in trouble because of the divorced curator. Bang is stoic as Christian, a man who feels more at home among works of art than with other people. He wants so desperately to be good, but it’s getting harder and harder to make the right decision in the current politically correct atmosphere, and he is so self-absorbed that he even fights over possession of a used condom, in one of the film’s most bizarrely comic moments. Those choices come to the fore in two wildly uncomfortable scenes involving an American artist named Julian (Dominic West), first at a public Q&A where he is bedeviled by an audience member with Tourette syndrome, and later at a gala fundraiser where a bare-chested performer (motion-capture actor Terry Notary) moves around the luxurious room, acting like an ape, but as he begins breaking physical and socially acceptable boundaries, no one knows how to react. (His acting like an ape is in direct contrast to Ann’s roommate, an ape who is far more civilized and is never commented on.) Both situations frustrate the viewer as well, as we are as hamstrung as the people in the film, all of us experiencing the bystander effect together. And the mood is further joyfully complicated by the lighthearted, satiric music. Despite a few minor missteps, The Square is a searingly intelligent exploration, and condemnation, of where humanity stands as a society in the twenty-first century, fearful of our every move, searching for that imaginary safe space where we can live and breathe freely with our fellow beings, consequences be damned.

LIFE IS A DREAM — THE FILMS OF RAÚL RUIZ: NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET

Raúl Ruiz’s final film, Night Across the Street, is an abstract, surreal examination of time and memory

THE NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (LA NOCHE DE ENFRENTE) (Raúl Ruiz, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center: Francesca Beale Theater, Howard Gilman Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, February 11, 8:00; Sunday, February 18, 6:15
Series runs February 9-18
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

In December 2016, the Film Society of Lincoln Center held the first of its two-part tribute to Chilean-French auteur Raúl Ruiz, a prolific writer and director who passed away in 2011 at the age of seventy. “Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz” is now back for the second half of the celebration, from February 9 to 18, consisting of fourteen more works by Ruiz, highlighted by a week-long run of a new digital restoration of his 1999 magnum opus, Time Regained, a dramatization of Marcel Proust on his deathbed, thinking back on his own life as well as the fictional life of his characters. The festival also includes Ruiz’s last film, Night Across the Street, which proves to be a fitting finale for Ruiz, who left behind a legacy of more than one hundred movies and one hundred plays. An adaptation — or as Ruiz explained it, “adoption” — from a pair of short stories by Imaginist writer Hernán del Solar, Night Across the Street follows the odd meanderings of Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez), an old man about to retire from his office job. Past, present, and future, the real and the imagined, merge in abstract, surreal ways as Don Celso goes back to his childhood, where he (played as a boy by Santiago Figueroa) takes his idol, Beethoven (Sergio Schmied), to the movies and gets life lessons from Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra). As an adult, he hangs out with the fictional version of French teacher and writer Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), whose real self and family appear to be elsewhere. And he visits a haunted hotel run by Nigilda (Valentina Vargad) where he believes he will meet his doom.

Memories and hallucinations mingle in front of obviously fake backgrounds, strange, unexplained characters appear then disappear, and Don Celso (and Ruiz, of course) has fun with such words as “Antofagasta” and “rhododendron” in a film that Ruiz created to be shown only after his death. (He made the film after being diagnosed with liver cancer, which he survived by getting a transplant, only to die shortly thereafter of a lung infection.) And at the center of it all is one of Ruiz’s favorite themes, time — Don Celso is regularly interrupted by an annoying alarm clock that signals him to take unidentified medication, keeping him alive even as the end beckons. Screening at Lincoln Center on February 11 and 18 (the first show will be introduced by actress Chamila Rodríguez), Night Across the Street is an elegiac swan song by a master filmmaker. The series continues with such other Ruiz films as Klimt, starring John Malkovich as the Austrian artist, the American thriller Shattered Image, with Anne Parillaud and William Baldwin, the deeply personal improvised Dutch film On Top of the Whale, and the haunting Comedy of Innocence, with Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Balibar.

IN THE BODY OF THE WORLD

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Tuesday – Sunday through March 25, $90
212-581-1212
bodyoftheworldplay.com
www.nycitycenter.org

In the wake of losing my mother to lung cancer just after Thanksgiving, one of the last things I wanted to do was see a play about a woman fighting the cursed disease. But Eve Ensler’s daring, delightful one-woman show, In the Body of the World, which opened tonight at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage I at City Center, is bursting with the affirmation of life and the celebration of joy. In 2010, the Tony- and Obie-winning writer of The Vagina Monologues and The Treatment was diagnosed with cancer; she first wrote about it in her 2013 memoir, In the Body of the World, which she has now successfully adapted for the stage. Ensler divides the eighty-minute performance, directed with flair by two-time Tony winner Diane Paulus (Pippin, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess), into three sections, “Somnolence,” “Burning,” and “Second Wind,” as she honestly and often poetically talks about her childhood and her family and relates her cancer to things much bigger than herself. “A mother’s body against a child’s body makes a place. It says you are here. I have been exiled from my body. I was ejected at a young age and I got lost,” she says at the beginning. “For years I have been trying to find my way back to my body, and to the earth. I guess you could say it’s a preoccupation.” Ensler strides about Myung Hee Cho’s set, consisting of a wooden chair, a credenza with an altar/cabinet on top, and a chaise longue, which serves as Ensler’s loft, her hospital room, and her hotel room in what she calls Cancer Town, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Ensler, a twice-divorced vegetarian and activist who was fifty-six at the time of her diagnosis, had stopped drinking in her twenties and quit smoking in her thirties, so the cancer came as somewhat of a shock, especially when she learned she would have to have her “mother parts,” her uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, ovaries, and some of her vagina, removed. “Do you have any idea who I am? Do you have any fucking sense of irony?” she tells the doctor.

Ensler exposes her body and her soul as she goes through chemo and becomes involved in the creation of City of Joy, a community of women survivors of rape and violence in Bukavu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, run by Dr. Denis Mukwege and Mama C, aka Christine Schuler-Deschryver. (The amazing work they do is documented in Madeleine Gavin’s extraordinary 2016 film, City of Joy.) Ensler says that Dr. Mukwege “was literally sewing up the vaginas of rape survivors as fast as the militias were tearing them apart. . . . There were hundreds of these stories. They all began to bleed together. The destruction of vaginas. The pillaging of minerals. The raping of the earth. But inside these stories of unspeakable violence, inside the women, was a determination and a life force I had never witnessed.” Refusing to feel sorry for herself, Ensler reexamines her place in the greater world, continually working to teach people to stop sleepwalking through life and start taking responsibility for themselves and others, using this stage as a wake-up call for all of us.

Occasionally projections by Finn Ross cover the stage and the back wall, depicting protests, scenes of nature, people at City of Joy, certain key words, and a tree that deeply impacts Ensler’s recovery. She sometimes flirts with new agey ideas and twelve-step jargon — and she tries to get everyone up and dancing at one point in a rather goofy moment — but, being Eve Ensler, she also finds time to briefly fire away at political and social injustice. And then, at the end, she offers a magical surprise that every audience member should experience instead of rushing to get home; I wouldn’t dare give it away, but you can get a look at what it is here if you can’t help yourself. Ensler, a New York City native, is also a founder of V-Day, “a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls” that in 2018 is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Vagina Monologues with special events on and around Valentine’s Day. This year’s V-Day motto is “Rise, Resist, Unite,” which is also the route Ensler took in her fight against cancer, as depicted in this warm and very funny performance. I wish my mother were around to have experienced it for herself.

RONALD K. BROWN, EVIDENCE: DEN OF DREAMS / DANCING SPIRIT

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
February 6-11, $10-$46
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
www.evidencedance.com

It’s always a thrill to see Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, a Dance Company, bring its electrifying work to the Joyce, or anywhere, for that matter. Founded by Brown in 1985, the Brooklyn-based troupe dazzles audiences with its unique and inspired integration of traditional African dance with contemporary movement while emphasizing a strong sense of community and a social conscience. Evidence will be at the Joyce February 6-11, highlighted by the world premiere of Den of Dreams, a duet performed by Brown and Bessie winner Arcell Cabuag in celebration of Cabuag’s twentieth anniversary as associate artistic director, a job that includes teaching master classes and working with dance schools around the globe. Evidence will also present the company premiere of Dancing Spirit, a 2009 work Brown choreographed for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in honor of Judith Jamison’s twentieth anniversary as AAADT artistic director, featuring music by Duke Ellington, Wynton Marsalis, Radiohead, and War and melding Afro-Cuban and Brazilian styles. Also on the bill are 2002’s Come Ye, a call for peace set to the music of Nina Simone and Fela Kuti, and March, a duet, excerpted from 1995’s Lessons, set to a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., being performed as a tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the reverend’s assassination. Opening night will also feature Upside Down, an excerpt from Brown’s 1998 Destiny, with music by Wunmi. The season is part of Carnegie Hall’s wide-ranging festival “The ’60s: The Years that Changed America” and will include a curtain chat following the February 7 show, a master class on February 9, and a family matinee on February 10. The dynamic company includes rehearsal director Annique Roberts, assistant rehearsal director Keon Thoulouis, Shayla Caldwell, Kevyn Ryan Butler, Courtney Paige, Demetrius Burns, and Janeill Cooper.

THEATER OF WAR: THE DRUM MAJOR INSTINCT

drum major instinct

Brooklyn Public Library — Central Library
10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
Sunday, February 4, free, 2:00
www.bklynlibrary.org
theaterofwar.com

The Brooklyn Public Library and Theater of War Productions pay tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s final sermon, “The Drum Major Instinct,” with a free dramatic reading at the Central Library branch at Grand Army Plaza on February 4 at 2:00. Inspired by the tenth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel and J. Wallace Hamilton’s 1952 homily, “Drum-Major Instincts,” Dr. King delivered the speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on February 4, 1968; he would be assassinated exactly two months later. “There is deep down within all of us an instinct. It’s a kind of drum major instinct — a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life,” Dr. King said. The piece will be performed by American actress Samira Wiley, who starred as Moira in The Handmaid’s Tale and Poussey Washington in Orange Is the New Black, accompanied by the Phil Woodmore Singers, the gospel choir that performed in Theater of War’s adaptation of Antigone in Ferguson, Missouri, in response to the shooting of Michael Brown. Among the members of the choir are Duane Foster, a former teacher of Brown’s, and Lt. Latricia Allen, commander of the Community Engagement Unit of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, in addition to other musicians, educators, activists, and police officers. The sermon will be followed by a guided audience discussion about racism and social justice, led by choir member and Ferguson social worker DeAndrea Blaylock-Johnson and Theater of War artistic director Bryan Doerries. “Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life’s final common denominator — that something that we call death,” King preached. “We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral. And I don’t think of it in a morbid sense. And every now and then I ask myself, ‘What is it that I would want said?’ And I leave the word to you this morning.”