KEEP YOUR ELECTRIC EYE ON ME is a mind-numbing conceptual multimedia work running at HERE May 7-10 (photo by Paula Court)
HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
May 7-10, $20, 8:30
212-647-0202
www.here.org
Originally presented at CultureMart 2013 as part of HARP (the Here Artist Residency Program), Keep Your Electric Eye on Me is a mind-numbingly dull multimedia foray into the making of a tuna melt (or something like that). Conceived, created, and directed by Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty, the seventy-minute, two-character show features Madeline Best as a woman who can’t keep her top on and Carlton Ward as a bald voyeur who assists her, collecting the meth-like green candies her body creates after drinking something like absinthe and cleaning up her white throw-up (or something like that). Brad Kisicki’s interesting set includes three large screens in the back, numerous monitors, and a table covered with Amy Mascena’s unusual props, a grouping of glass elements that evoke a lab. To the right of the audience, Irons and Petty mix live and prerecorded sounds and images, ranging from the beautiful (shots of the sea) to the confounding (just about everything else). The music is by the Chocolate Factory’s Brian Rogers, featuring such songs as “Moon (Sitting in the Room Every Day Like a Mustard)” and “I’m Sorry My Face.” According to an Artists’ Note in the program, Keep Your Electric Eye on Me is meant to “conjure notions of transformation, liminality, hysteria, and the desire for the unattainable.” Maybe the cast and crew can explain how in a talkback following the May 7 show, although we won’t be there to find out.
The only real problem with Speak the Music: Robert Mann and the Mysteries of Chamber Music, an engaging look at the violinist extraordinaire, is its brevity, clocking in at just under an hour. Oscar-winning documentarian Allan Miller, who has made films about Isaac Stern, Zubin Mehta, Itzhak Perlman, John Cage, Eubie Blake, and other musicians, gets up close and personal with Robert Mann, a cofounder of the Juilliard String Quartet and an enthusiastic teacher at the Manhattan School of Music. Mann, who was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1920, is shown discussing his love of fishing and how he wanted to be a forest ranger; playing at the White House and the Library of Congress; performing with his wife and son; and talking about how watching waves crash against an Oregon cliff helped him understand “the slow growth of musical intensity.” Among those singing his praises and hailing his influence are Perlman, conductor Seiji Ozawa, composer Elliott Carter, pianist Stephen Hough, and cellist Joel Krosnick. But the film really shines when Mann is seen teaching the Amphion Quartet, the Ars Nova Quartet, and others, flailing his arms about, trying to get the musicians to go deep inside themselves and the music and not to play like they’re pounding on a typewriter. Of course, the film is also filled with lots of beautiful chamber music by Beethoven, Haydn, Bartók, etc., from rare archival footage to more contemporary performances, concluding with Mann in a lovely rehearsal of the third movement of Mozart’s Quintet in G Minor, making sure every note and pause is just right, not merely mechanical but intensely emotional and heartfelt, lovingly putting bow to strings. Speak the Music opens at the Quad on May 2, with Miller participating in Q&As following the 6:30 screenings on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Now: In the Wings on a World Stage, the marvelous new documentary that follows a transatlantic company as it performs Richard III around the globe, did not get its name only because it’s the first word of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy — “Now is the winter of our discontent” — nor simply because it takes place in modern times in modern dress with nods to modern technology, but also because it’s a spine-tingling celebration of the immediacy of live theater. In 2009, Sam Mendes’s Neal Street Productions, the Old Vic under the leadership of Kevin Spacey, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, led by Joseph Melillo, formed a partnership in which British and American actors would present five classic plays over three years. Dubbed the Bridge Project, the wildly successful venture concluded in 2012 with Spacey, an American living and working in London, starring in 
“I need to be kind of weird to photograph people all the time without permission, because it’s very aggressive, and I have to do it,” street photographer Matt Weber says at the beginning of Dan Wechsler’s fun documentary More Than the Rainbow, adding, “And you have to be kind of a psycho.” Wechsler — a filmmaker and rare bookseller who, with George Koppelman, has just claimed to have discovered William Shakespeare’s annotated dictionary — follows Weber around New York, primarily in the subways and Coney Island, as the former taxi driver tries to capture the spirit of the city on film, looking for unique shots that can come and go in a flash. Wechsler speaks with such other photographers as Ralph Gibson, who waxes poetic about the art form, sometimes in French; Dave Beckerman, who gave up a successful business career to shoot on the streets; Philadelphia’s Zoe Strauss, whose “10 Years” exhibition was recently at ICP; Jeff Mermelstein, a street photographer who shoots mostly in color; critic and photographer Ben Lifson, who passed away last year; Cuban-born photographer Julio Mitchel; and, most curiously, San Francisco–based fetish photographer Erik Kroll, who doesn’t care for Weber’s work. Weber, who has been photographing the city since 1978, is also shown collaborating with Todd Oldham, who is designing a book on Weber’s subway series. All of the photographers discuss the relative merits of color versus black-and-white, whether they ask people for permission before taking their pictures, and the inherent differences between analog and digital. The film often strays too far from its main subject, Weber, losing sight of itself in its effort to cover too much in a mere eighty-three minutes, but it usually gets back on track, particularly with lovely 35mm interstitial trips through the city, in color and black-and-white, set to the music of Thelonius Monk and Keith Gurland, courtesy of John Rosenberg, who edited the film and music and shot the documentary with Arlene Muller. Especially in an age when everyone thinks he or she is a photographer, snapping photos with camera phones and posting them on social media sites, More Than a Rainbow shows how it’s really done. The film opens at the Quad on May 2, with Wechsler and Weber participating in Q&As following the 8:30 screenings on Friday and Saturday.