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

RIVER TO RIVER 2017

Maria Hassabi presented an informal preview of her latest work this summer on the High Line (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The latest iteration of Maria Hassabi’s Staged series will move be performed in City Hall Park as part of the River to River Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Multiple locations downtown
June 14-25, free
www.rivertorivernyc.com
lmcc.net

The best free multidisciplinary arts festival of the summer, River to River packs a whole lot into a narrow amount of time. Sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, this year’s activities, which, as always, focus on more experimental presentations, take place June 14-25 at such locations as Governors Island, Federal Hall, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Fulton Center, City Hall Park, and other downtown areas. While everything is free, some performances require advance registration because of space considerations. In addition to the below events, Katja Novitskova’s “EARTH POTENTIAL” Public Art Fund exhibition opens June 22 in City Hall Park, photographer Kamau Ware’s “Black Gotham Experience” interactive storytelling project will pop up at various places throughout the fest, LMCC’s Open Studios allows visitors the chance to meet with dozens of artists, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s “A Supple Perimeter” will be on view at LMCC’s Arts Center and Movie Theater Exterior on Governors Island.

Wednesday, June 14, 6:00
Wednesday, June 21, 8:00
Sunday, June 25, 7:00
The Dance Cartel: R2R Living Rooms, with DJ Average Jo and special guests, Pier A Harbor House
One of the most energetic companies around, the Dance Cartel will host a trio of live music and dance performances at the River to River Festival hub, with plenty of audience participation.

Thursday, June 15, 3:00 & 6:00
Monday, June 19, 3:00
Netta Yerushalmy: Paramodernities #2 and #3, National Museum of the American Indian
South Carolina–born choreographer and performer Netta Yerushalmy’s “Paramodernities” series deconstructs landmark dance works within the framework of modernity. For River to River, she will present Paramodernities #2, examining Martha Graham’s Night Journey, and Paramodernities #3, investigating Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, accompanied by scholars who will take part in public discussions. The seventy-five-minute production will move around inside the National Museum of the American Indian.

Thursday, June 15, 7:00
Saturday, June 17, 7:00
Sunday, June 18, 7:00
A Marvelous Order, Fulton Center
Joshua Frankel, Judd Greenstein, Will Rawls, and Tracy K. Smith have collaborated on the multimedia opera A Marvelous Order, which delves into the famous fight between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs over the future development of New York City. For the River to River Festival, they will present a twenty-five-minute excerpt at the Fulton Center, with Eliza Bagg, Tomás Cruz, Lucy Dhegrae, Christopher Herbert, and Dashon Burton as Robert Moses and live music by NOW Ensemble, conducted by David Bloom.

Friday, June 16, 6:00
Amir Elsaffar: Rivers of Sound — Not Two, the Plaza at 28 Liberty
American jazz trumpeter and composer Amir Elsaffar celebrates the release of his latest record, Not Two (New Amsterdam, June 16), with a two-hour performance at the Plaza at 28 Liberty featuring his seventeen-piece Rivers of Sound orchestra.

Friday, June 16, 3:30
Saturday, June 17, 3:30
Sunday, June 18, 3:30
Jodi Melnick: Moat, Fort Jay, Governors Island
Choreographer, dancer, and teacher Jodi Melnick, who has said, “I am truly, madly, deeply in love with movement,” has teamed up with visual artist John Monti for Moat, a sixty-minute site-specific performance taking place in the moat that surrounds historic Fort Jay on Governors Island.

Beth Gill’s Catacomb will be performed in Federal Hall for the River to River Festival (photo by Brian Rogers)

Saturday, June 17, 8:00
Sunday, June 18, 8:00
Monday, June 19, 8:00
Beth Gill: Catacomb, Federal Hall
In May 2016, Bessie Award–winning choreographer Beth Gill presented the site-specific Catacomb at the Chocolate Factory, a dreamlike physical and psychological exploration of what we see and who we are. For River to River, the aching sixty-minute performance moves to historic Federal Hall.

Saturday, June 17, 12 noon – 6:00
Sunday, June 18, 12 noon – 6:00
Saturday, June 24, 12 noon – 6:00
Sunday, June 25, 12 noon – 6:00
The Set-Up: Island Ghost Sleep Princess Time Story Show, the Arts Center at Governors Island
For five years, Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey have been collaborating with men and women from multiple dance disciplines, presenting unique performances that push the boundaries of the movement arts. Their project now culminates in a grand finale on Governors Island, with dance masters I Nyoman Catra (Balinese Topeng), Proeung Chhieng (Cambodian), Junko Fisher (Okinawan), Saya Lei (Mandalay-style, classical Burmese), Jean-Christophe Paré (French baroque), Kapila Venu (Indian Kutiyattam), and Heni Winahyuningsih (Javanese refined) and musicians Jonathan Bepler, Reiko Fueting, and Megan Schubert. “Many dances on an ISLAND, a GHOST of what they were, having lost details during a long SLEEP but nevertheless the PRINCESS of their destiny. This TIME it is one STORY, full of fortuitous meetings, grave errors, and happy misunderstandings. It’s a SHOW, folks!” Cardona and Lacey explain. You can see the complete schedule here.

Monday, June 19, 6:00
Tuesday, June 20, 2:00
Wednesday, June 21, 2:00
Faye Driscoll: Thank You for Coming: Play, Broad and Wall Sts.
At last year’s LMCC Open Studios on Governors Island, the endlessly inventive Faye Driscoll offered a work-in-progress showing of the second part of her participatory “Thank You for Coming” series, which began in 2014 with Thank You for Coming: Attendance Play later moved to the BAM Fisher. She now revisits Play, staging a forty-minute version at the intersection of Broad and Wall Sts.

Tuesday, June 20, 4:00 – 8:00
Night at the Museums
Many Lower Manhattan museums and cultural institutions will stay open late on June 20, offering free entry to historic sites along with special programs. Among the participants are the African Burial Ground National Monument, China Institute, Federal Hall National Memorial, Fraunces Tavern Museum, Museum of American Finance, Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, National Archives at New York City, National Museum of the American Indian, National September 11 Memorial Museum (advance RSVP required), 9/11 Tribute Center, NYC Municipal Archives, Poets House, the Skyscraper Museum, and the South Street Seaport Museum.

Wednesday, June 21, 5:00
Thursday, June 22, 3:00
Friday, June 23, 3:00
Marjani Forté-Saunders: Memoirs of a . . . Unicorn, Melville Gallery, South Street Seaport Museum
Pasadena-born, Harlem based dancer and choreographer Marjani Forté-Saunders, who previously was in the Urban Bush Women Dance Company, brings her solo Memoirs of a . . . Unicorn to the South Street Seaport Museum, a collaboration with media designer Meena Murugesan and sound designer Everett Saunders that relates to the history of Black American magic.

Thursday, June 22, 7:00
Friday, June 23, 7:00
Saturday, June 24, 7:00
Sunday, June 25, 5:00
En Garde Arts: Harbored, Winter Garden, Brookfield Place, 230 Vesey St.
En Garde Arts, which was founded by Anne Hamburger to “catalyze social change” through immersive theater, will stage the sixty-minute site-specific collage play Harbored, about Willa Cather, Lewis & Clark, and Cather’s character Ántonia. The piece, featuring more than fifty performers, is written and directed by Jimmy Maize, with an original score by Heather Christian sung by the Downtown Voices Choir and movement by Wendy Seyb. During the day, you can share your immigration story with them and it just might be incorporated into that night’s show.

Friday, June 23, 6:00
Sunday, June 25, 6:00
Maria Hassabi: Staged? (2016) — undressed, City Hall Park
Last summer, Maria Hassabi presented Movement #2 on the High Line, a dance performed by Simon Courchel, Hristoula Harakas, Molly Lieber, and Oisín Monaghan as people passed by. That morphed into Staged, which ran at the Kitchen in October. Now Hassabi is bringing Staged? (2016) — undressed to City Hall Park, where four dancers will move around Katja Novitskova’s “EARTH POTENTIAL” exhibition.

L.A. DANCE PROJECT

Sterling Ruby created the scenic design for Justin Peck’s Murder Ballades, part of the L.A. Dance Project’s two-week season at the Joyce

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
June 13-25, $26-$66
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
www.ladanceproject.com

The innovative and exciting L.A. Dance Project follows up its 2016 Joyce debut with a two-week run at the Chelsea institution, performing a pair of what promise to be terrific programs, boasting an impressive array of collaborators. For the first program, the company, which was founded in 2012 by former New York City Ballet principal dancer Benjamin Millepied, will be presenting 2015’s Hearts & Arrows, choreographed by Millepied, with music by Philip Glass performed live by PUBLIQuartet, sets by English conceptual artist Liam Gillick, lighting by Roderick Murray, and costumes by company dancer Janie Taylor; Ohad Naharin’s Yag, a forty-minute piece for six dancers, set to music by John Zorn, Gaetano Donizetti, John Taverner, Ennio Morricone, Ran Slavin, and Maxim Waratt and for which LADP rehearsed with ballet masters from Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company; and the world premiere of Millepied’s In Silence We Speak, a duet, inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, for Taylor and Carla Korbës that you can get a sneak peek at here. The second program consists of New York City Ballet resident choreographer Justin Peck’s 2013 Murder Ballades, with an original score by Bryce Dessner of the National, sets by American artist Sterling Ruby, and lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker; Merce Cunningham’s MinEvent, a collage of excerpts from Cunningham’s oeuvre, with live piano by Adam Tendler; In Silence We Speak; and the world premiere of Millepied’s multimedia Orpheus Highway, set to Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet, played live by PUBLIQuartet. The company also includes Stephanie Amurao, Aaron Carr, David Adrian Freeland Jr., Rachelle Rafailedes, Nathan B. Makolandra, Julia Eichten, Robbie Moore, Morgan Lugo, and Lilja Rúriksdóttir. There will be a Curtain Chat following the June 15 performance of Program 2. LADP’s 2016 season at the Joyce sold out, so you better hurry if you want to see this sizzling hot company.

MUSEUM MILE FESTIVAL 2017

museum mile

Multiple locations on Fifth Ave. between 82nd & 105th Sts.
Tuesday, June 13, free, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
www.museummilefestival.org

The fortieth annual Museum Mile Festival will take place on Tuesday, June 13, as seven arts institutions along Fifth Avenue between 82nd and 105th Sts. open their doors for free between 6:00 and 9:00. There will be live outdoor performances by Fogo Azul Bateria Feminina, DJ Shabbakano, Carlos Jesus Martinez Dominguez & Leslie Jimenezin, Banda de lost Muertos, Silly Billy, and Sarah King and the Smoke Rings in addition to face painting, art and dance workshops, chalk drawing, and more. The participating museums (with at least one of their current shows listed here) are El Museo del Barrio (“Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón,” “uptown: nasty women / bad hombres”), the Museum of the City of New York (“New York at Its Core,” “AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism”), the Jewish Museum (“Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry,” “The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin”), the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (“The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s,” “Esperanza Spalding Selects”), the Guggenheim (“Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim,” “The Hugo Boss Prize 2016: Anicka Yi, Life Is Cheap”), the Neue Galerie (“Austrian Masterworks from the Neue Galerie New York”), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“Irving Penn: Centennial,” “Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms”), along with presentations by the Little Orchestra Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, the 92nd St. Y, the Church of the Heavenly Rest, and Asia Society. Don’t try to do too much, because it can get rather crowded; just pick one or two exhibitions in one or two museums and enjoy.

THE LOWER EAST SIDE FILM FESTIVAL: MIND F*CK SHORTS

War is hell in Morgan Miller’s There’s Too Many of These Crows

War is hell in Morgan Miller’s Alfred Hitchcock homage, There’s Too Many of These Crows

Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Wednesday, June 14, 7:00
Festival runs June 8-15
www.lesfilmfestival.com
www.landmarktheatres.com

“People make choices that are not good for them. The right choice is not always easy, but the answer is always clear,” Caren (Samia Akudo) tells her two boys (David Schallipp and Matthew Schallip) in Adam R. Brown and Kyle I. Kelley’s creepy Fluffernutter, one of seven flicks that make up “Mind F*ck Shorts,” which, depending on your sense and sensibility, might or might not be good for you. “Mind F*ck Shorts” is being shown June 14 at 7:00 at the seventh annual Lower East Side Film Festival, which runs through June 15 at Landmark Sunshine. The odd evening also includes Maya Margolina’s “Birdsong” video, focusing on a strange ecofeminist battle between Lake7 (Bunny Michael) and Lou (Nire), with guest appearances by various living creatures, and L.A. rapper Old Man Saxon’s video for “Sunday Saxon,” which displays a rather offbeat sense of humor. In Justin Ulloa and Jamie Dwyer’s animated Pizza Face, a vain waitress gets her comeuppance, while Morgan Miller’s animated There’s Too Many of These Crows takes Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds to a whole new level. Duck puppeteer Mike Crane (Clayton Farris) has a pretty rough birthday in Marcus C. W. Chan’s Everything’s Gonna Be OK, while in Zachary Fleming’s Staycation a sad man’s (Rob Malone) lonely vacation on Sullivan St. has a revealing mystery guest (Joanna Arnow).

This year’s jury consists of Sasheer Zamata of SNL, Jeremy Allen White of Shameless, documentarian Paola Mendoza, Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, Stephen Schneider from Imaginary Mary and Broad City, cinematographer Sam Levy, Entoptic founder Andrew Lim, and P.O.V. creator and executive producer Marc Weiss. Started in 2013 by Roxy Hunt, Shannon Walker, Damon Cardasis, and Tony Castle, the Lower East Side Film Festival hosts a mix of shorts, full-length films, and special events; also on the 2017 schedule is the U.S. premiere of Evan Beloff’s Kosher Love, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers (June 11, 6:00); the panel discussion “Writing the Documentary Screenplay” with David Riker, Sarah Burns, Jeremy Chilnick, and Nelson George, moderated by Michael Winship (June 13, 6:00); “Queer Shorts: Best of Newfest,” with a Q&A (June 13, 9:00); and the closing-night world premiere of Aaron Feldman’s Poop Talk, followed by a Q&A with executive producers Jason and Randy Sklar. Film festival season is upon us; among the other ongoing, upcoming, or just completed festivals are the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, the Brooklyn Film Festival, the Soho International Film Festival, and the Israel Center Film Festival, but we’re pretty sure that the Lower East Side Film Festival is the only one claiming it will f*ck with your mind.

DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME

Bill Morrison follows the boom and bust of a Yukon gold-rush town in Dawson City: Frozen Time

DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME (Bill Morrison, 2016)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 9
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
billmorrisonfilm.com

“What power has gold to make men endure it all?” a title card asks in William Desmond Taylor’s 1928 silent film, The Trail of ’98, based on a novel by Robert Service. Both Taylor and Service were at one time residents of Dawson City, the town in the Yukon in Canada that was at the center of the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1890s. In June 1978, while construction was just under way to build a new recreation center behind Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Gambling Hall in Dawson, Pentecostal minister and city alderman Frank Barrett uncovered a treasure trove of motion picture stock, hundreds of silent films that had been believed to have been lost forever. Writer, director, and editor Bill Morrison uses stunning archival footage from those films in his elegiac, beautiful documentary, Dawson City: Frozen Time, which brilliantly tells the story of greed, perseverance, and the growth of the entertainment industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After gold was discovered in Dawson, the indigenous Hän people were relocated to Tr’ochëk and some hundred thousand prospectors stampeded in, the gold mining destroying the Hän’s fishing and hunting grounds. Morrison also follows the invention of film itself, celluloid stock that would end up causing many fires, including one every year in Dawson for nine years. Bookended by an original interview with Michael Gates, Parks Canada curator of collections, and his wife, Kathy Jones-Gates, director of the Dawson Museum, the film traces the boom-and-bust fortunes and misfortunes of Dawson, as gambling casinos, movie theaters, hotels, and restaurants are built, including the Arctic, a hotel and restaurant owned by Ernest Levin and Fred Trump, the president’s grandfather, that might have served as a brothel as well. The film is supplemented with photographs by Eric A. Hegg, a giant in the field who left behind glass plates when he ultimately departed Dawson. Among others making their way through Dawson at one time or another are newsboy Sid Grauman, who went on to build Grauman’s Chinese Theatre; New York Rangers founder Tex Rickard; comic superstar Fatty Arbuckle; and Daniel and Solomon Guggenheim, who dominated the mining there.

Discovery of long-lost silent films tells a fascinating story in Dawson City: Frozen Time

Morrison, whose previous films, including Decasia, The Miners’ Hymns, and The Great Flood, employ archival footage to often tell historical tales, uses thousands of clips in Dawson City: Frozen Time, from newsreels to such films as Temperance Town, The Half Breed, The End of the Rainbow, and The Frog. Footage from the found clips, identified as “Dawson City Film Find” on the screen, also delves into the evolving battle between workers and owners, the deportation of political radicals, and the Black Sox scandal, all of which Morrison relates to the upstart movie industry. The film is a tour de force of editing, as Morrison streams together scenes of actors going through doorways, kissing, or moving in vehicles, not just a torrent of random images, all set to Alex Somers’s haunting experimental score. (Somers’s brother, John, is the sound designer.) The film also sets a new personal high for Morrison, clocking in at 120 minutes, by far his longest work; all of his previous features are less than 80 minutes, but this latest one further establishes that Morrison’s mesmerizing but unusual visual approach is not time-sensitive. With Dawson City: Frozen Time, Morrison has created a magical ode to the history of film, to preservation, to pioneers, and to perseverance, told in his hypnotic, unique style. It opens at IFC Center on June 9, with Morrison and Alex Somers participating in a Q&A at the 6:00 shows on June 10 and 11, moderated by NYU Cinema Studies assistant professor Dan Streible.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL: THE RESISTANCE SAGA

Pamela Yates’s 500 Years concludes her Guatemalan trilogy; all three films are screening June 11 in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival

WHEN THE MOUNTAINS TREMBLE (Pamela Yates, 1983)
GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR (Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy & Paco de Onís, 2011)
500 YEARS (Pamela Yates, 2017)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, June 11, 1:30, 3:15, 5:15, $20
Festival runs through June 18
212-875-5601
ff.hrw.org
www.hrw.org

The 2017 Human Rights Watch Film Festival is paying tribute June 11 to Pamela Yates’s Guatemala trilogy with “The Resistance Saga,” with screenings of all three films, a Q&A with the filmmakers and Mayan activists, and a reception featuring a live performance by Mayan singer Sara Curruchich. The opening-night selection of the twenty-second Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is an illuminating, if at times overly self-referential, examination of the power of documentary filmmaking. In 1982, Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel made When the Mountains Tremble, which told the inside story of civilian massacres of the indigenous Maya people as government forces and guerrilla revolutionaries fought in the jungles of Guatemala; one of the film’s subjects, Rigoberta Menchú, became an international figure and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. “When I made that film, I had no idea I was filming in the middle of a genocide,” Yates says at the beginning of Granito, which Yates directed with Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onís. A quarter-century after When the Mountains Tremble, Yates was contacted by lawyer Almudena Bernabeu, who asked Yates to comb through her reels and reels of footage to find evidence of the Guatemalan genocide and help bring charges again dictator Ríos Montt, whom Yates had met with back in 1982. In researching the case, Yates speaks with Menchú, forensic archivist Kate Doyle, journalist liaison Naomi Roht-Arriaza, forensic anthropologist Fredy Peccerelli, Spanish national court judge Santiago Pedraz, victims’ rights leader and genocide survivor Antonio Caba Caba, and Gustavo Meoño, a founding member of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, each of whom sheds light on the proceedings from various different angles, from digging up bones in mass graves to discussing redacted documents that reveal U.S. involvement in Guatemala. Several of them are risking their lives by both continuing to fight the government and appearing on camera. Yates has now completed the trilogy with 500 Years, her seventh film to be shown at the festival, documenting the Mayan resistance that has led to crucial court cases as racism and corruption are brought to light and the Mayan people seek to regain control of their society. “The Resistance Saga” begins in the Walter Reade Theater at 1:30 with When the Mountains Tremble, followed at 3:15 by Granito: How to Nail a Dictator and 5:15 by 500 Years; tickets for all three films, the Q&A, and the reception/concert are $20.

TICKET ALERT — LEE FRIEDLANDER WITH GIANCARLO T. ROMA: PASSION PROJECTS

Lee Friedlander, who has revived his self-publishing company with his grandson, Giancarlo T. Roma, will mare a rare public speaking appearance at the New York Public Library on June 20 (photo © Lee Friedlander)

Who: Lee Friedlander, Giancarlo T. Roma
What: Live from the NYPL
Where: New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 476 Fifth Ave. at 42nd St., 917-275-6975
When: Tuesday, June 20, $40, 7:00
Why: Legendary Washington-born photographer Lee Friedlander will make an extremely rare speaking appearance on June 20, his first in more than thirty years, when he comes to the New York Public Library, sharing the stage with his grandson, Giancarlo T. Roma, who describes himself on his Twitter page as a writer, stockbroker, business partner, guitar player, and more. Now eighty-two, Friedlander’s work over the last sixty years has included such series as “America by Car,” “Mannequin,” “Letters from the People,” and “Sticks & Stones,” capturing the social landscape of the country. Roma, whose mother is Friedlander’s daughter, has been collaborating with his father, photographer Thomas Roma, since the boy was in single digits, and he has now revived his grandfather’s self-publishing company, Haywire Press. The conversation, titled “Passion Projects,” will focus on Friedlander’s life and career, which he continues to do his way, not following any conventional methods.