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

MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY AT THE JOYCE

Anne Souder and Lloyd Mayor perform in Martha Graham’s “Dark Meadow Suite.” (photo by Hibbard Nash Photography)

Anne Souder and Lloyd Mayor perform in Martha Graham’s “Dark Meadow Suite,” which will be part of two-week season at the Joyce this month (photo by Hibbard Nash Photography)

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
February 14-26, $10-$60
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org
marthagraham.org

The Martha Graham Company will explore various aspects of magical thinking in three separate programs in its winter season at the Joyce, taking place February 14-26. Program A consists of a world premiere by Annie-B Parson, inspired by Graham’s Punch and the Judy and with text by playwright Will Eno, and Pontus Lidberg’s Woodland, both of which were created for the company, and Graham’s Dark Meadow Suite and Maple Leaf Rag. Program B comprises a new work by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui dealing with Sufi mysticism, Nacho Duarte’s Rust, and Graham’s Primitive Mysteries and Diversion of Angels. Program C features the new Parson and Cherkaoui works in addition to Graham’s Clytemnestra Act II and Maple Leaf Rag. There will be an All-City Panorama University Partners Showcase on February 18 at 2:00, with Graham classics Helios, Panorama, Plain of Prayer, Prelude to Action, and Steps in the Street performed by high school and college dancers from around the country, and the February 22 show will be followed by a Curtain Chat. The company, which began life as the Martha Graham Studio in 1926, is currently made up of dancers So Young An, PeiJu Chien-Pott, Laurel Dalley Smith, Abdiel Jacobsen, Lloyd Knight, Charlotte Landreau, Jacob Larsen, Lloyd Mayor, Ari Mayzick, Marzia Memoli, Anne O’Donnell, Lorenzo Pagano, Ben Schultz, Anne Souder, Leslie Andrea Williams, Konstantina Xintara, and Xin Ying, under the artistic direction of former principal dancer Janet Eilber.

COMEDY ON FILM: WHAT MAKES THE FRENCH LAUGH? APNÉE

Céline (Céline Fuhrer), Thomas (Thomas Scimeca), and Maxence (Maxence Tual) take a bath together in riotously silly anarchic French farce

CINÉSALON: APNÉE (Jean-Christophe Meurisse, 2016)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 14, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

FIAF’s “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” series continues on Valentine’s Day with Jean-Christophe Meurisses’s Apnée, a riotous, ludicrous, hysterical, and often cringeworthy absurdist fable about an anarchic trio of friends/lovers who flit about France doing anything they want, unaware of the consequences of their actions. Céline (Céline Fuhrer), Thomas (Thomas Scimeca), and Maxence (Maxence Tual) are all id, no ego and superego, as they live in their own reality, separate from the rest of what is considered conventional society. Wearing wedding dresses, they try to get married; seeking to relax, they take a bath together in a storefront window; in search of a family, they storm in on an older, empty nest couple. Indeed, they are like three children who don’t know any better, who haven’t reached basic levels of adulthood, but at their core, they just want to be happy, and what’s wrong with that? Writer-director Meurisses’s feature debut, which was nominated for Best First Film at the Cannes Film Festival (the Golden Camera) and the Lumière Awards as well as the Queer Palm, is extremely silly, essentially a series of crazy vignettes, some that work a whole lot better than others, with lovely cinematography by Javier Ruiz Gomez, from Céline, Thomas, and Maxence (well, body doubles, anyway) ice skating naked while wearing Mexican wrestler masks to the three of them dressed in white in a rowboat on a beautiful lake. Apnée — the title refers to both sleep apnea as well as the French phrase “la plongée en apnée,” or “free-diving” — is screening February 14 at 4:00 and 7:30 in Florence Gould Hall, with the later show introduced by actor Edward Akrout; both screenings will be followed by a party and prize drawing. “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” concludes February 21 with Quentin Dupieux’s Reality, with writer and photographer Calypso introducing the 7:30 show.

TICKET ALERT — AGNÈS VARDA: VISUAL ARTIST

French legend Agnès Varda will discuss her life and career as a visual artist at FIAF

French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 28, $30, 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Over the years, FIAF has shown many films by Nouvelle Vague master Agnès Varda, the celebrated auteur behind such classics as Vagabond, Cléo from 5 to 7, The Gleaners and I, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Beaches of Agnès. Now the French Institute Alliance Française is bringing Varda herself to Florence Gould Hall for the special talk “Agnès Varda: Visual Artist,” taking place on February 28 at 7:30, moderated by art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clément. The Belgium-born, France-based Varda, who was married to Jacques Demy for nearly thirty years, will be focusing not only on her film career but her upcoming gallery show at Blum & Poe, which runs March 2 to April 15. The discussion also kicks off FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Agnès Varda: Life as Art,” which consists of Varda’s Daguerréotypes on March 7, with the 7:30 screening followed by a talk with Varda and curator Laurence Kardish, Jacqot de Nantes on March 14, and Lola on March 21. This is a very special chance to see the remarkable eighty-eight-year-old Varda, so get your tickets now.

ARTISTIC UPRISING: A CALL FOR REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

artisticuprising-vday

Who: Ryan Amador, Donna Auston, BETTY, R. Emery Bright, Great Caesar, Staceyann Chin, Kate Clinton, Julissa Contreras, Michael Cunningham, Lea DeLaria, Eve Ensler, Laura Flanders, Dan Fogler, Alixa Garcia, Suzanne Gardinier, Valarie Kaur, James Lecesne, Amy León, Mickey Love, Ian Pai, Mack Royal, Ally Sheedy, Casey Spooner, Elizabeth Streb, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Imani Uzuri, more
What: V-Day protest gathering as part of annual One Billion Rising campaign
Where: Washington Square Arch, north side of Washington Square Park at Fifth Ave.
When: Tuesday, February 14, free, 6:00 – 9:00
Why: On Valentine’s Day, you can join the solidarity movement to end the exploitation of women at what is expected to be a huge gathering in Washington Square Park led by V-Day, the nonprofit organization cofounded by Eve Ensler. On February 14 from 6:00 to 9:00, a group of activists and artists will lead “a day of revolutionary love & resistance,” continuing the protests that included the Women’s March on Washington on January 21 and the airport protests against the Muslim ban. According to its Facebook page, “The event is being called in a response to the current racist, misogynist, xenophobic political climate where the rights of women, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQIAGNC people, African Americans, the indigenous, and the poor are at serious risk.” There will be performances and speeches by writers, actors, musicians, dancers, and others, and audience members will get a chance to take the stage too and let loose as part of Where We Meet’s Ranting Box. The protest will take place on Valentine’s Day in two hundred countries around the world, so people can feel the love around the globe as they rise up, disrupt, incite, mobilize, arouse, awaken, inspire, resist, connect, and come together “to hold our governments and other patriarchal institutions accountable.”

SPEED SISTERS

SPEED SISTERS follows first all-woman racecar team in Middle East

SPEED SISTERS (Amber Fares, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, February 10
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
speedsisters.tv

Documentarians are always in search of unusual stories, and producer-director Amber Fares has found a real winner in Speed Sisters. The Lebanese Canadian cofounder of SocDoc Studios heads to the Middle East to share the tale of five brave and ambitious Palestinians who have formed the region’s first all-women racecar driving team. Noor Dauod, Marah Zahalka, Betty Saadeh, Mona Ali, and captain Maysoon Jayyusi defy gender stereotypes by participating in professional races driving heavily modified regular cars. Competing against men, they roar around makeshift tracks in Ramallah, Jenin, Jericho, and other locations, racing against the clock to put up the fastest time as they follow complicated courses with very specific rules. The film is photographed by Fares and Lucy Martens (Out of the Ashes, Voices from Inside: Israelis Speak) and edited by Rabab Haj Yahya (Bed and Breakfast, Beyond Blue and Gray) for maximum impact, putting viewers right in the middle of the exciting action. Rather than being shunned by their patriarchal society, the women are cheered on by fans and their male colleagues, led by Palestinian Motor Sport and Motorcycle Federation founder Khaled Qaddoura, as well as most, though not all, of their family members. Each of the women feels the need for speed, but they also have different motivations. “I don’t race for the trophies; I do it for the release,” Mona explains, while Noor says, “In the car, everything I need to feel is there. The car completes me.”

Marah Zahalka gets ready for action in Amber Fares’s high-octane SPEED SISTERS

The five women discuss their hopes and dreams in addition to their fears, often concerned for their safety as they go through Israeli checkpoints monitored by armed military guards; at one point, Betty gets hit in the lower back by a tear-gas canister, leaving a scary bruise, a sharp contrast to scenes in which she carefully applies nail polish and puts on lipstick right before a race. Fares doesn’t delve too deeply into Mideast politics, but she doesn’t let it take a backseat either; the powderkeg that is the never-ending battle over settlements in the West Bank and the ongoing troubled relationship between Israel and Palestine is ever present, always bubbling under the surface, as the women burn rubber and the soundtrack pulsates with songs by Palestinian indie bands. “How much will we let the occupation affect our lives?” Marah says. “What are we supposed to do, stop living?” Speed Sisters opens February 10 at Cinema Village, with Fares and producer Jessica Devaney (My Neighbourhood, Home Front) participating in Q&As following the 7:15 screenings February 10, 11, and 12.

NAN GOLDIN: THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL / THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY

Nan Goldin (American, born 1953). Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City. 1983. Silver dye bleach print, printed 2006, 15 1/2 × 23 3/16" (39.4 × 58.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Jon L. Stryker. © 2016 Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, “Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City,” silver dye bleach print, 1983, printed 2006 (the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Jon L. Stryker. © 2016 Nan Goldin)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, February 8, free with museum admission, 11:30 am
Exhibition continues through April 16, $14-$25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read. My written diaries are private; they form a closed document of my world and allow me the distance to analyze it. My visual diary is public,” Nan Goldin wrote about her seminal 1985-86 multimedia exhibition and book. “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.” Goldin and the Museum of Modern Art are currently inviting everyone to the party, showing The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in its complete audiovisual form through April 16. Consisting of nearly seven hundred portraits set to music by James Brown, Maria Callas, the Velvet Underground, Nina Simone, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Ballad is set primarily amid the heroin subculture of downtown New York from 1979 to 1986, just as AIDS started ravaging the city, as well as in Berlin, Paris, Boston, Provincetown, and Mexico. Born in Washington, DC, in 1953, Goldin, who left home when she was just fourteen, took intimate photos of her chosen family — friends, lovers, junkies, drag queens, and others, including artists Greer Lankton and Vivienne Dick, actress and writer Cookie Mueller, Andy Warhol, Jim Jarmusch, and performer Suzanne Fletcher. Deeply affected by her sister Barbara’s suicide — she killed herself in 1964 at the age of eighteen, when Nan was eleven — Goldin sees the photos as a way to hold on to her memories. The photos are not chic glamour shots but instead captured moments of real life, with natural lighting and what would technically be considered imperfect composition. Yet they have an immediacy and emotion that overstaging and multiple takes would ruin. Although reminiscent of the work of Larry Clark and Diane Arbus, Ballad finds Goldin boldly revealing her life, particularly in two of the most famous shots, one of her boyfriend Brian sitting on the edge of a bed, smoking a cigarette, as sunlight pours in over Goldin’s face on a pillow, her eyes slyly looking at him, while in the other, a horribly beaten Goldin — the culprit was Brian —looks into the camera, her left eye nearly swollen shut, her red lipstick, dangling earrings, and pearl necklace defining her feminism and strength.

Nan Goldin, “Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984,” silver dye bleach print, printed 2008 (the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase)

Nan Goldin, “Nan One Month After Being Battered,” silver dye bleach print, 1984, printed 2008 (the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase)

On February 8 at 11:30 am, independent educator Diana Bush will lead a Gallery Session at MoMA, “Nan Goldin: The Personal Is Political,” exploring the relationship between photography, memory, and diary, elements that are central to Goldin’s entire oeuvre, which also includes such books and series as “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “The Devil’s Playground.” (You can find out more about Goldin in Sabine Lidl’s 2013 documentary, Nan Goldin — I Remember Your Face.) Named after a song in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 classic, The Threepenny Opera (“They’re all the same / In meeting love’s confusion / Poor noble souls / Get blotted in illusion”) — The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is in its own viewing room at MoMA, where visitors feel like guests at this decades-old party, watching photos of acquaintances pass by, each one a not-so-distant memory tinged with joy and sadness. The central slide show is supplemented by numerous posters from the early versions of Ballad as well as silver dye bleach prints of more than a dozen of the photos, including “The Parents’ Wedding Photo, Swampscott, Massachusetts,” “Trixie on the Cot, New York City,” “Nan One Month After Being Battered,” and “Philippe H. and Suzanne Kissing at Euthanasia, New York City.” Goldin also wrote in the Ballad book, “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.” Extended through April 16, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is hard to forget.

DARK NIGHT

Tim Sutton explores the shadowy underbelly of America in DARK NIGHT

DARK NIGHT (Tim Sutton, 2016)
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn
445 Albee Square West
Opens Friday, February 3
718-513-2547
drafthouse.com/nyc

There’s an ominous cloud hanging over Tim Sutton’s deeply poetic Dark Night, a grim, gripping journey into the dark night of America’s soul. The title of Sutton’s third film, following Pavilion and Memphis, also references Christopher Nolan’s 2012 Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, for reasons that become apparent about halfway through. Dark Night opens with a close-up of a young woman’s disbelieving eyes, red, white, and blue lights flashing across her face; the camera then pulls back as the woman, wearing an American flag top, lowers her head, taking stock of an unrevealed tragedy. For the next eighty-five minutes, Sutton goes back to the beginning of this fateful day, following the lives of a small group of men, women, and children in a suburban Florida community as they go about their usual business. They play on computers, put on makeup, pet animals, and head over to the mall. One concerned mother and her detached son speak with an off-screen interviewer as if searching for reasons in the aftermath of a horrific event, but in this case it hasn’t happened yet. In many of the vignettes, there is little or no dialogue, as the characters, all nonprofessional actors mostly found on the streets of Sarasota, speak with their actions, particularly when several of the males, including a military vet and a teen with dazzling blue eyes, load firearms. In this Blue Velvet-like town, danger lurks just below the surface.

A cast of nonprofessional actors play realistic characters facing tragedy in DARK NIGHT

Dark Night is photographed by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Pina, The Beaches of Agnès) in a documentary style, with fly-on-the-wall shots occasionally broken up by stunning aerial views of perfectly trimmed green lawns and cookie-cutter rooftops that look like video-game targets, static shots of light poles as if they are living creatures, and a striking scene of a woman walking along the outdoor hallway of one of Florida’s ubiquitous motel-like apartment complexes. Canadian singer-songwriter Maica Armata’s (Caro Diaro, MaicaMia) score features five haunting songs, including “Om,” “Oh Well,” and a gloomy, reimagined version of the old standard “You Are My Sunshine,” her ethereal vocals utterly frightening. Evoking such indie works as Larry Clark’s Kids, Gus van Sant’s Elephant, Lance Hammer’s Ballast, and Harmony Korine’s Gummo, the Brooklyn-based Sutton paces the unsettling film with a delicate, disquieting subtlety, the community overwhelmed by an unspoken ennui that’s representative of the dissatisfaction and disconnection being felt all across the country. He might not offer any answers, but he asks many of the right questions, giving the riveting tale an uncomfortable, beguiling immediacy. Dark Night opens February 3 at the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Brooklyn, with Sutton participating in Q&As following the 6:30 screenings on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.