Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through October 4, $60
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
For twenty-five years, Robert “3D” Del Naja has been half of the British trip-hop group Massive Attack, along with Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, releasing such seminal records as Blue Lines, Protection, Mezzanine, and 100th Window. For thirty years, BBC journalist and filmmaker Adam Curtis has been making such award-winning documentaries and nonfiction series as Pandora’s Box, Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh, The Century of the Self, and The Power of Nightmares. Del Naja and Curtis have now teamed up to create the immersive multimedia production Massive Attack v Adam Curtis, co-commissioned by the Manchester International Festival, the Ruhrtriennale International Festival of the Arts, and the Park Avenue Armory. Former graffiti artist Del Naja and Curtis are joined by United Visual Artists, which has been providing LED installations for Massive Attack’s live shows since 2003, set designer Es Devlin (Howie the Rookie, The Master and Margarita), and vocalists Liz Fraser and Horace Andy as they delve into what Del Naja calls “a collective hallucination” and Curtis refers to as “a musical entertainment about the power of illusion and the illusion of power.” In the general admission show, multiple screens project a dizzying array of images examining the global sociopolitical culture of the last fifty years, declaring that “you are the centre of everything” while also including stories of individuals trying to find some hope for a better future. Massive Attack v Adam Curtis runs through October 4 in the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall; the October 3 performance will be preceded by the ticketed panel discussion “Viewing Media Through an Artistic Lens” with Simon Critchley, Joyce Barnathan, and Alexis Goldstein, moderated by Graham Sheffield.
Massive Attack and Adam Curtis fight the power in multimedia show (photo by James Medcraft)
Update: The title Massive Attack v Adam Curtis might suggest that the trip-hop band and the controversial experimental filmmaker are locked in some kind of competition, but instead Robert Del Naja and Curtis come together in exciting ways in their thrilling multimedia show. The ninety-minute production takes place in an elongated rectangular section of the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where fifteen hundred people squeeze in, with four large screens to the right and left and three more in the front, behind which Massive Attack plays a wide variety of cover songs (as well as a few snippets of their own tunes), joined by the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser and Jamaican singer Horace Andy, both of whom have collaborated with the British band before. Curtis’s Everything Is Going According to Plan flashes across the eleven screens, as archival news footage, superimposed text, and narration by David Warner focus in on such figures as Donald Trump, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, economist Fischer Black, Jess “the Automat” Marcum, and others who Curtis believes have contributed to the economic and political downfall of the world. He also tells the powerful, tragic stories of British painter Pauline Boty and Russian postpunk musician Yegor Letov. Meanwhile, Massive Attack performs the Shirelles’ “Baby, It’s You,” the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar,” Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” Dusty Springfield’s “The Look of Love,” This Mortal Coil’s “Dreams Are Like Water,” “Yanka’s Song,” “Safe from Harm,” and other songs, accompanying Curtis’s brutal, funny, cynical, and ironic images that portend the end of the world as we know it. The finale implores people to take action and save the planet from certain destruction, but you might be too dizzy and depressed by that point to care.
“Tanny’s body created inspiration for choreographers,” one of the interviewees says in Nancy Buirski’s documentary Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq. “They could do things that they hadn’t seen before.” The American Masters presentation examines the life and career of prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, affectionately known as Tanny, who took the dance world by storm in the 1940s and ’50s before tragically being struck down by polio in 1956 at the age of twenty-seven. Le Clercq served as muse to both Jerome Robbins, who made Afternoon of a Faun for her, and George Balanchine, who created such seminal works as Western Symphony, La Valse, and Symphony in C for Le Clercq — and married Tanny in 1952. In the documentary, Buirski (
Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? meets Richard Linklater’s “Before” series in Roger Michell’s bittersweet romantic black comedy, Le Week-end. Professor Nick Burrows (Jim Broadbent) and teacher Meg Burrows (Lindsay Duncan) are celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary by returning to Paris, where they spent their honeymoon. But whereas their first visit was filled with love, hope, and dreams of a bright future, they have come to the realization that their life together didn’t quite turn out as planned. While Nick still seems to be in love with his wife, Meg is reevaluating their relationship, continually lashing into him and spending what little money they have with reckless abandon. When they unexpectedly bump into an old colleague of Nick’s, the self-absorbed chatterbox Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), they are invited and go to a party where they imagine what could have been, forcing them to face some brutal truths.
