Shen Wei Dance Arts will perform RITE OF SPRING at Fall for Dance Festival at City Center (photo by Stephanie Berger)
City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tickets go on sale September 9 at 11:00 am
Festival runs September 27 – October 13, $15
212-581-1212
www.nycitycenter.org
On your mark, get set . . . Tickets for the ninth annual Fall for Dance Festival at City Center, which runs September 27 through October 13, go on sale September 9 at 11:00 am, but you better not delay if you want to go, because this hotly anticipated event sells out quickly. All seats are only fifteen dollars, with each program featuring multiple works in various disciplines from established and up-and-coming international companies. For example, the first two nights bring together Jared Grimes’s Dancing the Tap (choreographed by Grimes), Fang-Yi Sheu & Artists’ Five Movements, Three Repeats (Christopher Wheeldon), Nederlands Dans Theater’s Shutters Shut (Sol León and Paul Lightfoot), and BalletBoyz’ Void (Jack Cemerek), while September 29-30 consists of Juilliard Dance’s Fortune (Pam Tanowitz), American Ballet Theatre’s Sinatra Suite (Twyla Tharp), the Hong Kong Ballet’s Luminous (Peter Quanz), and Martha Graham Dance Company’s Chronicle (Graham). Among the other groups participating in the festival are the Moiseyev Dance Company, Shantala Shivalingappa, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Jodi Melnick, Shen Wei Dance Arts (Rite of Spring, which they performed last fall at the Park Avenue Armory), and Ballet West. Before and after each show, audience members can relax in Lounge FFD, where they can grab a drink and meet some of the dancers and choreographers. And there will be three special free DanceTalk panel discussions at the City Center Studios during the festival: “Dance and Live Music: How Do Choreographers Work with Composers?” on September 30 at 5:30 with Jodi Melnick, Steven Reker, Pam Tanowitz, and Charles Wuorinen, moderated by Maura Keefe; “For Public Consumption: Shaping Social and Cultural Dance for the Stage” on October 3 at 6:30 with Kumu Kaleo, Eri Mefri, Carlota Santana, and Elena Shcherbakova, moderated by Wendy Perron; and a lecture/demonstration on October 5 with Ka Leo O Laka I Ka Hikina O Ka La.
Danish journalist Mads Brügger risked a lot more than just his career in making The Ambassador; he put his life on the line as well. “If you do it the way we will set you up to do it, you have a very high probability of success,” he is told by Colin Evans, who works for a company that can allegedly make anyone a diplomat of a diamond-rich African nation for the right price. “If you do it any other way, the best that you can hope for is to be arrested and go to jail and lose everything you’ve got. That’s the best you can hope for. The worst you can hope for is that you end up dead in a ditch in Africa.” Using his full name, Mads Johan Brügger Cortzen seeks to become a Liberian diplomat to the Central African Republic, meeting with powerful, important, and dangerous people on his fascinating journey, handing out “envelopes of happiness” filled with cash while claiming to want to build a match factory with the help of native pygmies. As Brügger’s story gets more and more ridiculous, he gains greater access, with soon only President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s signature necessary to achieve his absurd goal. An intriguing mix of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat and Ali G characters and controversial filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, Brügger, whose previous film, The Red Chapel, found him leading a bizarre experimental theater troupe into North Korea, goes about his business with a sly confidence, balancing the serious nature of the proceedings with humorous moments that threaten to reveal his ruse, but nobody seems to catch on as the money keeps flowing. (The film was financed by Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa studio.) Primarily using hidden cameras that he keeps rolling even after being told that filming is not allowed, Brügger employs his unique brand of what he calls “performative journalism,” a blend of performance art and investigative journalism that results in an outrageously entertaining film that exposes surprisingly blatant international corruption and has led to a firestorm of debate. The film opens August 29 at the IFC Center, with Brügger on hand for a Q&A following the 8:20 screenings on August 29 and 30.
Inspired by a book written by his wife, Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell, based on part of her family history, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments captures a pivotal time of change in Sweden. In a small town in 1907, Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) is struggling to keep her growing family together as her brutish oaf of a husband, Sigge (Mikael Persbrandt), regularly comes home drunk, cheats on her, and goes on strike with the rest of the local dockworkers. Maria scrubs floors and sews for extra money, but she dreams of her own independence and freedom. When she enters Mr. Pedersen’s (Jesper Christensen) photography studio one day, she has every intention of selling a camera that she had won in a lottery years before. But Pedersen instead convinces her to try out the camera first, and she is soon documenting the world around her. As Sigge becomes more and more ornery — and more and more dangerous, threatening the future of the family — Maria has discovered a whole new way of looking at things, both literally and figuratively, but still needs to find the inner strength to improve her lot. Seen through the eyes of eldest daughter Maja (first played by Nellie Almgren, then by Callin Öhrvall), Everlasting Moments is a beautiful, bittersweet personal tale told by one of Sweden’s greatest filmmakers. In his late seventies at the time, director Troell (The Emigrants, Hamsun) also cowrote the script with his wife and Niklas Rådström and served as cinematographer with Mischa Gavrjusjov; the film was nominated for a Golden Globe and won five Guldbagge (Golden Beetle) Awards from the Swedish Film Institute, including Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Special Achievement (composer Matti Bye). Everlasting Moments is screening August 24 at 9:30 as part of the Rubin Museum series “Women and Their Cameras,” in conjunction with the exhibition “Candid,” and will be introduced by photographer Victoria Sambunaris. Admission to the Rubin is free on Friday nights, so you should also check out such other exhibitions as “Illuminated,” “Modernist Art from India,” and the outstanding “Casting the Divine.” The series concludes August 31 with Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, introduced by Sophie Elgort.
In conjunction with the eightieth anniversary of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Ron Honsa has made Never Stand Still, a documentary that celebrates the long history of the national historic landmark dedicated to the art of movement. Narrated by 
The closing-night selection of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, Christophe Honoré’s Beloved attempts to be a sweeping romantic epic, but it works best when it when it keeps it simple. In 1964 Paris, Madeleine (Ludivine Sagnier) decides that making a little extra money by selling her body is a better way to afford fancier things than by stealing them, until she falls for Czech doctor Jaromil (Rasha Bukvic). But after they have a child, Soviet tanks invade Prague, and Jaromil takes a lover, they separate. Over the years, as Madeleine (later played by Catherine Deneuve) tries to make a new life for her and Vera (Deneuve’s real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni), Jaromil (Czech director Milos Forman) keeps reappearing in their lives, but while Madeleine seems comfortable being with her former husband again, displaying a free and open sexuality, Vera seems unable to sustain a real relationship, adored by a younger teacher (Louis Garrel) while chasing after a gay American musician (Paul Schneider). A sort of mash-up of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Beloved features characters calmly turning to song to contemplate their inner dilemmas as they walk through the streets, singing such numbers as “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (adapted from the Smiths’ original), then proceeding on. When Honoré (Love Songs, Dans Paris) keeps to the central plotlines, Beloved is an engaging, intimate look at sex, love, and family over a forty-five-year period. Unfortunately, he injects unnecessary sociopolitical elements that sidetrack the story and feel forced. At 135 minutes, the film is also at least a half hour too long. Had Honoré stopped earlier, he would have had quite a film, but instead it seems to go on interminably, passing up what could have been fine endings for additional scenes that quickly become tiresome and repetitive. Beloved does have its moments, but it sadly falls short of what it could have been. The director will be on hand at the IFC Center to discuss the film at the 6:55 screenings on Friday and Saturday night of opening weekend.