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

DANISH PAINTINGS FROM THE GOLDEN AGE TO THE MODERN BREAKTHROUGH: COPENHAGEN AND VANGUARD EUROPE

Harald Slott-Møller, “Summer Day,” oil on canvas, 1888 (collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr.)

COPENHAGEN AND VANGUARD EUROPE
Scandinavia House
58 Park Ave. at 38th St.
Monday, January 13, free, 6:30
Exhibit continues Tuesday-Saturday through January 25, free, 12 noon – 6:00
212-847-9740
www.scandinaviahouse.org

More than three dozen works by two dozen artists who were part of the tremendous surge in painting in Denmark from the early eighteenth to early twentieth centuries are on view in the Scandinavia House exhibit “Danish Paintings from the Golden Age to the Modern Breakthrough: Selections from the Collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr.” On January 13 at 6:30, Dr. Patricia G. Berman, who cocurated the exhibition with Dr. Thor J. Mednick and is the author of In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century, will deliver the free illustrated lecture “Copenhagen and Vanguard Europe,” focusing on Denmark’s capital city as a center for avant-garde artists in the 1890s, particularly while the nation tried to redefine its identity during the social, financial, and political upheaval that followed the Napoleonic wars. Professor Berman has lectured often at Scandinavia House; her clarity and charm make the enormous amount of fascinating information she’s able to deliver all the more enlightening. The lovely show has been extended through January 25 and is highlighted by such beautiful canvases as Harald Slott-Møller’s “Summer Day,” in which two women delicately stand in shallow water on a beach; Bertha Wegmann’s “Interior with a Bunch of Wild Flowers, Tyrol,” a still-life with several surprising items; P. S. Krøyer’s “Self-Portrait, Sitting by His Easel at Skagen Beach,” with its earth-toned foreground colors set off against the blue of the sky and sea; and Vilhelm Hammershøi’s “Interior with a Woman Standing,” a stunning composition featuring open and closed doors, a shadowy woman, and a mysterious silence, as if the viewer is being invited in to something they will never learn anything more about. The show also includes works by Ludvig Find, Christen Købke, Otto Bache, Jens Juel, and husband and wife Anna Ancher and Michael Ancher, among others. The paintings are all from the collection of New York City native John Langeloth Loeb Jr., who served as the U.S. ambassador to Denmark from 1981 to 1983 and then as a delegate to the United Nations.

HAMLET

Hamlet (director and star Bruce Ramsay) contemplates his bleak future in streamlined version of the Bard

HAMLET (Bruce Ramsay, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, January 10
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.facebook.com

Director and star Bruce Ramsay strips down and condenses the Bard in his 1940s-set noirish update of Hamlet, but in doing so he also drains one of Shakespeare’s most powerful tragedies of all its poetry and emotion. Trimming the tale down to a far-too-lean eighty-seven minutes, Ramsay cuts out characters and reinterprets scenes to focus on the family-related aspects of the story of betrayal, madness, murder, and revenge, using the original text for the most part while setting the entire film in one large house (actually the University Women’s Club in Vancouver). He fills the cast with veterans of Canada’s Bard on the Beach series, including Gillian Barber as Gertrude, Duncan Fraser as Polonius, Haig Sutherland as Laertes, Martin Sims as Guildenstern, Russell Roberts as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Lara Gilchrist as Ophelia; Welsh actor Peter Wingfield plays Claudius, with Stephen Lobo as Horatio and Bret Stait as Rosencrantz. The bare-bones film was shot in three days (for a mere — and rather admirable — $27,000), but it’s taken nearly three years for it to get a U.S. theatrical release, and it’s easy to see why. Ramsay’s Hamlet is more like a failed episode of Masterpiece Theatre, sort of Agatha Christie meets Downton Abbey in postwar London, than a fresh new look at the extremely familiar play, though it is a noble attempt. Indeed, “I must be cruel to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” Hamlet opens at Cinema Village on January 10, with Ramsay taking part in Q&As following the 7:10 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.

THE GREAT FLOOD

THE GREAT FLOOD (Bill Morrison, 2011)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
January 8-16
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.icarusfilms.com

Sound and image meld together beautifully in Bill Morrison’s meditative, elegiac The Great Flood. Inspired by John M. Barry’s 1997 book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, Morrison teamed up with improvisational musician Bill Frisell on the project. The two had previously worked together on a pair of short works, The Mesmerist and The Film of Her, after meeting at the Village Vanguard when Morrison was a dishwasher at the jazz club where Frisell was playing. Morrison, who specializes in using deteriorated and degraded archival footage and experimental scores, scoured the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Hoover Presidential Library, and other sources to come up with remarkable scenes of the flooding of the Mississippi in 1927. Divided into such chapters as “Sharecroppers,” “Swollen Tributaries,” “Evacuation,” “Aftermath,” and “Watershed,” with snippets of informational text but without narration, the film follows the southern blacks who were most affected by the massive flood, being forced to shore up the levees around white areas, losing their own homes, and ultimately heading north as part of the Great Migration, bringing the Delta blues with them. Guitarist Frisell, joined by Ron Miles on cornet, Tony Scherr on guitar and bass, and Kenny Wollesen on drums and vibes, has composed a gorgeous, moving score, heavily influenced by a trip his band and Morrison took in early 2011 up the Mississippi, with the group playing in multiple cities while the river threatened to flood again.

Each chapter, from an overhead view of a computerized map that details the 1927 flood to a fast and furious foray through the Sears Roebuck catalog, from a Baptist church procession to a series of rare clips of such bluesmen as Big Bill Broonzy, Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Robert Lockwood, features a different piece of music, highlighted by Frisell’s always inventive guitar and Miles’s deeply expressive horn. Of course, as the images pass by, it’s impossible not to think of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and be awed by the devastating power of nature, as well as realize how little has changed with regard to the reaction of politicians and who the victims tend to be. But the film is rarely mournful; instead, there’s often a celebratory quality about it, centered on people’s natural instinct to survive. The Great Flood is scheduled to run January 8-16 at the IFC Center, with Morrison, who has also created such other unique cinematic experiences as Spark of Being and The Miners’ Hymns, on hand to talk about the film at the 8:05 screenings on January 9 and 11. In addition, the IFC Center will screen Morrison’s masterpiece, Decasia, in an HD digital projection daily at 2:40 and 6:20.

AMERICAN REALNESS 2014

Adrienne Truscott moves from her day job at the Kitchen to live performance at Abrons Arts Center in …TOO FREEDOM…

Abrons Arts Center and other venues
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 9-19, $20
212-598-0400
www.americanrealness.com
www.abronsartscenter.org

January in New York City is a veritable feast of live performance festivals, including PS 122’s Coil, the Public’s Under the Radar, Here’s Prototype, and Winter Jazzfest. Over at Abrons Art Center, American Realness will be celebrating its fifth anniversary with seventeen new movement-based shows and encore presentations as well as several off-site events. Tina Satter’s House of Dance (also part of Coil) follows a tense tap-dance competition. Ishmael Houston-Jones and Emily Wexler team up for the world premiere of 13 Love Songs: dot dot dot, which involves deconstructing romantic lyrics by Bryan Adams, Mary J. Blige, Ja Rule, Stephen Merritt, Nina Simone, Madonna, and others. Miguel Gutierrez explores gay sex and lost love in the intimate myendlesslove. Eleanor Bauer combines text, music, and movement in Midday and Eternity (The Time Piece); she’ll also lead the “Dancing, not the Dancer” class and host the anything goes Bauer Hour on January 19. Choreographer Juliana F. May and dancers Benjamin Asriel, Talya Epstein, and Kayvon Pourazar explore the physical and emotional naked body in Commentary=not thing. The Kitchen house manager Adrienne Truscott delves into day jobs and artistic creativity in . . . Too Freedom . . . , which also features Neal Medlyn, Gillian Walsh, Laura Sheedy, and Mickey Mahar. Lucy Sexton (the Factress), Anne Iobst (the Naked Lady), Scott Heron, and DANCENOISE join forces for Prodigal Heroes: An Evening of Legendary New York. Moriah Evans and Sarah Beth Percival play with human-connection tropes in Out of and Into (8/8): Stuff. Medlyn’s King concludes his seven-part foray into iconic stars, this time taking on Michael Jackson. And Melinda Ring’s Forgetful Snow and Roseanne Spradlin’s Indelible Disappearance — A Thought not a Title will be presented together for free on January 12.

Moriah Evans and Sarah Beth Percival team up in OUT OF AND INTO (8/8): STUFF for American Realness festival

Also on the schedule are Adam Linder’s Cult to the Built on What, Michelle Boulé’s Wonder (Boulé will also lead a “Persona & Performance” class on January 17), Rebecca Patek’s ineter(a)nal f/ear, Jillian Peña’s Polly Pocket, and Dana Michel’s Yellow Towel. The festival heads to MoMA PS1 on January 10-12 for Mårten Spångberg’s four-and-a-half-hour La Substance, but in English and to MoMA’s main Midtown location on January 15-16 for Eszter Salamon’s Dance for Nothing, based on John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing. In addition, there will be art exhibits throughout Abrons (Sarah Maxfield’s “Nonlinear Lineage: Over/Heard,” Ian Douglas’s “Instant Realness,” Medlyn and Fawn Krieger’s “The POP-MEDLYN Hall of Fame,” and Ann Liv Young’s interactive “Sherry Art Fair”), and Coil, Under the Radar, Prototype, and American Realness will be copresenting free live concerts every night from January 9 to 19 in the Lounge at the Public Theater, including Invincible, Christeene, Ethan Lipton, Heather Christian & the Arbonauts, Sky-Pony, Timur and the Dime Museum, the Middle Church Jerriesse Johnson Gospel Choir, M.A.K.U. Sound System, DJ Acidophilus, and Nick Hallett, Space Palace, and Woahmone DJs.

UNDER THE RADAR 2014

The Public Theater and other venues
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 8-19, $20-$28 (UTR Packs $75 for five shows)
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com

The tenth edition of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is another diverse collection of unique and unusual international theatrical productions, roundtable discussions, and free live music, from the strange to the familiar, the offbeat to the downright impossible to describe. Among the sixteen shows, most of which take place at the Public, are 600 Highwaymen’s The Record, a dance-theater work that brings together a roomful of strangers to comment on the relationship between performer and audience; John Hodgman’s one-man piece, I Stole Your Dad, in which the Daily Show “resident expert” shares intimate, personal stories about his family and technology while baring himself onstage; psychiatrist Kuro Tanino and his Niwa Gekidan Penino company’s The Room Nobody Knows (at Japan Society), about two brothers getting ready for the older one’s birthday party; Andrew Ondrejcak’s Feast, in which a king and his court (starring Reg E. Cathey) have a farewell dinner as Babylon collapses; and the American premiere of hip-hopper Kate Tempest and Battersea Arts Centre’s Brand New Ancients (at St. Ann’s Warehouse), a multidisciplinary show about everyday life in a changing world. Also on the roster is Sacred Stories, Toshi Reagon’s thirtieth annual birthday celebration with special guests; Roger Guenveur Smith’s one-man improvisation, Rodney King; a reimagining of Sekou Sundiata’s blessing the boats with Mike Ladd, Will Power, and Carl Hancock Rux; Cie. Philippe Saire’s Black Out (at La MaMa), Edgar Oliver’s Helen and Edgar, Lola Arias’s El Año en que nací / The year I was born (at La MaMa), SKaGeN’s BigMouth, tg STAN’s JDX — a public enemy, Sean Edward Lewis’s work-in-progress Frankenstein (at the Freeman Space), excerpts from ANIMALS’ The Baroness Is the Future, and Daniel Fish’s Eternal, the last three also part of the Incoming! Festival within a Festival.

Kate Tempest will rap about the state of the world in BRAND NEW ANCIENTS (photo by Christine Hardinge)

In addition, there will be numerous postshow talkbacks, a pair of workshops with Sara De Roo and Jolente De Keersmaker of tg STAN on January 10-11, four noon Culturebot conversations January 11-12 and 18-19, and Coil, Under the Radar, Prototype, and American Realness have joined forces to present free live concerts every night from January 9 to 19 in the Lounge at the Public, including Invincible, Christeene, Ethan Lipton, Heather Christian & the Arbonauts, Sky-Pony, Timur and the Dime Museum, the Middle Church Jerriesse Johnson Gospel Choir, M.A.K.U. Sound System, DJ Acidophilus, and Nick Hallett, Space Palace, and Woahmone DJs.

FIRST SATURDAY: ART ON THE EDGE

Screening of HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD is part of free First Saturday program at Brooklyn Museum

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, January 4, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum kicks off its 2014 monthly free First Saturdays program with a diverse collection of events centered around the theme “Art on the Edge.” The evening will include pop-up gallery talks, the Visual AIDS discussion “What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Museum: Art, AIDS, Activism, and the Institution,” an arts workshop with Pioneer Works on innovation and collaboration and another in which participants can make a mosaic tile inspired by the exhibition “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” a Center for Urban Pedagogy talk on unique design, Purring Tiger performing excerpts from the multimedia dance work Mizaru, a screening of Suroosh Alvi’s 2007 documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, live music by Dendê and Band, Idgy Dean, and ScienZe (aka Jamal Monsanto) + the EllaVators, and a book club talk led by Barbara Browning about her dance novel, I’m Trying to Reach You. In addition, the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey,” “War / Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” “Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to ‘The Ladder,’” “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt,” “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas,” “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” and other exhibits.

COIL 2014

Multiple venues
January 3 – February 1, $15-$20
212-352-2101
www.ps122.org

PS122’s East Village home might be under renovation, but that isn’t stopping the organization from presenting the ninth annual incarnation of its winter performance festival, Coil. This year’s festivities comprise nine cutting-edge works in various disciplines, with tickets for all shows only $20, so there’s no reason not to check out at least one of these unique, unusual productions. Reid Farrington stages the ultimate heavyweight match in the world premiere of Tyson vs. Ali at the 3LD Art & Technology Center (January 3-19), in which live action and multiple screens pit Mike Tyson against Muhammad Ali. Mac Wellman’s Muazzez at the Chocolate Factory (January 7-17), from “A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds,” transports the audience, and actor Steve Mellor, into outer space. Heather Kravas’s a quartet at the Kitchen (January 8-12) consists of four dancers performing four dances in four parts each. Director Phil Soltanoff, systems designer Rob Ramirez, and writer Joe Diebes boldly go where no one has gone before in An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk at the New Ohio Theatre (January 9-12), creating a hybrid work highlighted by humans interacting with video clips of words spoken by Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek but strung into new thoughts and statements. Tina Satter’s highly stylized House of Dance at Abrons Arts Center (January 9-13) investigates a tap-dance contest and the relationship between a teacher and his student. The performance series CATCH 60 celebrates its tenth anniversary with the one-night-only CATCH Takes the Decade at the Invisible Dog Art Center (January 11), with works by Cynthia Hopkins, Molly Lieber & Eleanor Smith, Anna Sperber, Ivy Baldwin, and others. Okwui Okpokwasili’s solo Bronx Gothic at Danspace Project (January 14 – February 1) is a song-and-movement-based coming-of-age story about two eleven-year-old girls. All three parts of Jeremy Xido’s solo piece The Angola Project will take place at the Invisible Dog (January 14-17). And family tragedy lies at the center of Brokentalkers’ Have I No Mouth at Baryshnikov Arts Center (January 14-26), with company director Feidlim Cannon and his mother trying to put things back together. In addition, the Red + White Party will get folks mingling as SPIN New York on January 12 ($30 and up) with Elevator Repair Service, and the SPAN conversation series will be held at NYU on January 18.