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

THE ROAD TO FREEDOM: FAITH RINGGOLD’S FOR THE WOMEN’S HOUSE

Formerly incarcerated women Enid “Fay” Owens, Nancy Sicardo, and Mary Baxter check out Faith Ringgold’s For the Women’s House in Paint Me a Road Out of Here

PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HERE (Catherine Gund, 2024)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, February 7
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

“No one and nothing is safe at a prison, including the guards, the inmates, the walls, the furniture, and especially that painting,” author and activist Michele Wallace says in Catherine Gund’s moving and passionate documentary Paint Me a Road Out of Here, opening February 7 at Film Forum.

Author of such books as Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman and Dark Designs and Visual Culture, Wallace is the daughter of children’s book writer, painter, sculptor, and performance artist Faith Ringgold. The work she is referring to is her mother’s 1972 For the Women’s House, an eight-foot-by-eight-foot mural that was commissioned for the New York City Correctional Institution for Women on Rikers Island.

Before starting the mural, Ringgold visited the institution and met with some of the women. “I knew that each one wanted to be inspired, to renew their life,” she says in the film. “They wanted to be out of there, of course. And it was obvious to me that the reason why many of them were there was because they had a lack of freedom. I asked the women, ‘What would you like to see in this painting that I’m going to do to inspire you?’ And one girl said, ‘I want to see a road leading out of here.’”

The large canvas is divided into eight triangular sections depicting women in nontraditional roles, including as professional basketball players, a bus driver, a police officer, a priest, a lawyer, a construction worker, and US president, accompanied by quotes from Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King.

“Almost every single profession in that painting was not open to women in 1971,” curator Rujeko Hockley points out. She also equates prisons with museums, noting, “Black people were held captive in one institution and excluded from the other.”

Gund traces the history of For the Women’s House, delving into its conception, detailing how it was painted over in white by prison employees in 1988, and examining its restoration and the very strange journey it took as the Brooklyn Museum attempted to acquire it in order to save it from potential oblivion. She also places it in context within Ringgold’s career, looking at her seminal 1967 breakthrough gallery show, featuring such powerful and important works as Die, The Flag Is Bleeding, and The American People Series #19: US Postage Commemorating the Advent of Black Power. She meets with Ringgold in her studio, on her porch, and at the New Museum, which eventually hosted her revelatory career retrospective, “American People,” in 2022.

The director balances that narrative with the inspirational tale of Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, who gave birth while incarcerated and fought to right her life through art and activism after serving time. Baxter returns to the Riverside Correctional Facility in Philadelphia in 2022 and installs a mural comprising multiple affirmations, providing hope for the women there through art. She also developed a friendship with Ringgold.

Gund (Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity, Chavela), who participated in freeing the painting after first encountering it in late 2021, speaks with Michael Jacobson, who was the commissioner of the Dept. of Corrections in the mid-1990s when the painting virtually disappeared; artist and author Michelle Daniel Jones, who teamed up with Baxter to put on an exhibition; curators Hockley and Catherine Morris, who staged “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017; Rikers corrections officer Barbara Drummond, who led the fight to preserve For the Women’s House; and ACA gallerist Dorian Bergen, who explains about Ringgold’s early work, “These are among the most important paintings of the twentieth century. History had to catch up with Faith.”

The artworks shown in the film will be eye-opening to viewers who are not familiar with Ringgold’s oeuvre, from the aforementioned pieces to Childhood, The Fall of America, Sojourner Truth Tanka: Ain’t I a Woman, Uptight Negro, and Flag Is Bleeding. “I became an artist so that I could tell my story,” Ringgold, who dressed in splashy outfits with sparkling accoutrements, says, and what a story it is.

A New York City native, Ringgold passed away in New Jersey in 2004 at the age of ninety-three. Her remarkable legacy will live on in the hearts and minds of her many fans, fellow artists, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women who find freedom in what she stood for.

As curator and author Nicole R. Fleetwood declares, “I think art is disruptive, and I think art disrupts lazy thinking.”

There is no lazy thinking when it comes to Faith Ringgold.

[There will be a series of postscreening discussions at Film Forum, presented by the New Museum and the Women’s Community Justice Association on February 7 at 7:00, the Center for Art & Advocacy on February 8 at 7:00, the Vera Institute of Justice and Silver Art Projects on February 13 at 7:00, the New York Women’s Foundation and the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center on February 18 at 6:30, and the Guggenheim on February 20 at 6:30.]

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

GONE FISHING: ROB TREGENZA BRINGS UNIQUE WWII DRAMA TO MoMA

Anna Kristiansen (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Adam Honderich (Andreas Lust) are caught up in WWII intrigue in Rob Tregenza’s The Fishing Place (courtesy Cinema Parallel)

THE FISHING PLACE (Rob Tregenza, 2024)
MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art
The Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
February 6-12
www.moma.org

Rob Tregenza’s The Fishing Place is a tour de force of filmmaking, and the writer-director isn’t shy about making sure the audience knows it. The movie, divided into three sections that Tregenza refers to as “flows,” opens with a shot of a boat out at sea, shown in the negative, a ghostly white in a gray, gloomy seascape that slowly reverses into color over Earecka Tregenza and Jason Moody’s melancholic score. We are then introduced to the three protagonists via superimpositions and fades that point toward memory, as well as through mysterious, virtually impossible camera movements forward.

It’s 1945 in a small Norwegian town, and Anna Kristiansen (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) is a Nazi prisoner working as a housekeeper for Klaus (Eindride Eidsvold), a wealthy collaborator. Adam Honderich (Andreas Lust) is a newly arrived German Lutheran priest. Nazi officer Aksel Hansen (Frode Winther) orders Anna to work for Honderich for three days and spy on him, as it’s suspected that the priest is part of the resistance.

Anna becomes the focus in a stunning six-and-a-half-minute scene at a small party being thrown by Klaus for Aksel; Anna works with the cook (Lena Barth-Aarstad) and a maid (Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes), serving Klaus and Aksel in addition to Willie (Peder Herlofsen), a young man who would rather be reading his book; a man (Jonas Strand Gravli) trying to convince Klaus to invest in his electronic gadgets; the elegant, wheelchair-bound Margit (Gjertrud L. Jynge) and her doctor (Ola Otnes); among others. It’s intense and almost interminably slow-paced; every sound — a footstep, a glass being put on a tray, background music — feels as if we’re on a precipice, every element desperate to break free. The stunning sound design, also highlighted by boots in the snow, a crackling fire, and gunshots, is by Øyvind Rydland.

Soon after the party, Anna finds a frightened child named Ada (Ella Maren Alfsvåg Jørgensen) hiding out in a shack on Honderich’s property. Later, a local man visits Honderich, bringing him a fish that seems to be more of a threat than a gift, and comments on his priestly dress. Honderich says, “Unfortunately, I didn’t have much choice.” The man responds in an ominous tone, “We all have a choice, don’t we?”

Margit makes a surprising confession to the priest. The doctor takes Anna for a ride in his automobile and shares his suspicions of who she is and what she is doing there. In his church, which bursts with colors that stand out in the otherwise bleak but beautiful snowy winter landscape, Honderich suddenly is filled with fire and brimstone. As the camera circles an old fishing boat where Honderich and Aksel have cast out their lines, the colors morph into a hellish red. “Are you happy with yourself?” the priest asks. The Nazi officer replies, “No. And you know it.”

In another dazzling sequence, the camera goes down a horizontal row of characters who one at a time share brief thoughts and then appear again at the other end, with no cuts. “Don’t look back,” the priest prophetically warns us.

Later, after a fadeout, we can hear talking behind-the-scenes as a scene is readied; a man claps the slate and we see the cast and crew in action in a virtuosic twenty-minute crane shot that starts with indoor close-ups before heading outside and almost flying away. Tregenza is the cinematographer, but camera operators Pål Bugge Haagenrud and Art Eng deserve huge kudos, as does editor Elise Olavsen.

Kansas native Tregenza (Talking to Strangers, Gavagai) mixes in a little Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard in The Fishing Place, which was partly inspired by the work of philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. “The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities,” the latter wrote in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as well as “Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”

The Fishing Place is making its North American theatrical premiere February 6–12 at MoMA; Tregenza will be at the museum for a Q&A following the 6:30 show on opening night.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SILENCE IS GOLDEN: PICO IYER AT ASIA SOCIETY

Who: Pico Iyer, William Green
What: Book launch and conversation
Where: Asia Society, 725 Park Ave. at Seventieth St.
When: Wednesday, January 22, $15, 6:30
Why: Pico Iyer dedicates his new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead, January 14, 2025, $30), to “the monks and nuns, in every tradition, who have sustained so many of us, visibly and invisibly, through so many lifetimes.” The Oxford-born Iyer, who has written such books as The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, and The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, will be at Asia Society on January 22 to launch Aflame, in conversation with William Green, author of Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. In the book, Iyer traces three decades of silent retreats at a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur as he faces the ups and downs of life, from glorious successes to personal tragedy. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has praised the work, offering, “Reading Aflame may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind.” Tickets for the event, which is copresented with the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), are only $15. Below is an excerpt from chapter two.

—————————————————————————

The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable. And part of its beauty—what deepens and extends it—is that it belongs to all of us. Every now and then I hear a car door slam, or movement in the communal kitchen, and I’m reminded, thrillingly, that this place isn’t outside the world, but hidden at its very heart.

In the solitude of my cell, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they’re in the same room, reminded in the sharpest way of why I love them; in silence, all the unmet strangers across the property come to feel like friends, joined at the root. When we pass one another on the road, we say very little, but it’s all we don’t say that we share.

***

Coming out one afternoon into the singing stillness, I pass a woman, tall and blond, looking like she might be from the twenty‑fifth‑floor office in Midtown where my bosses await my essays. She smiles. “You’re Pico?”

“I am.”

“I’m Paula. I wrote you a letter last year to see if you could come speak to my class.”

She’s a novelist, I gather—complete with agent, good New York publisher, grant from the National Endowment for the Arts—and she teaches down the road, two hours to the south. She fled Christianity as a girl, growing up in Lutheran Minnesota, but now—well, now she’s been brought back into silence and a sense of warm community.

“Do you write while you’re here?” she asks.

“All I seem to do is write! But only for myself. This is the one place in life where I’m happy not to write in any public way.”

She smiles in recognition. The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing.

***

The others I pass along the way, or see in the shared kitchen, are not at all the solemn, stiff ones I might have expected. One greets me with a Buddhist bow, another with a Hindu namaste. On the cars outside the retreat‑house I read i brake for mushrooms, notice a fish that announces, darwin. We’re not joined by any doctrine, I realize, or mortal being or holy book; only by a silence that speaks for some universal intimation.

“What do you think of this?” an older man asks as we pass one another near a bench.

“Nothing,” I say, and he looks puzzled until he sees what I’m about.

“That’s the liberation, don’t you find?” I go on. “There’s nothing to think about other than oak tree and ocean. Nothing to smudge the wonder of . . .” and then I say no more.

We look out together at the tremble of light across the water.

[Excerpted from Aflame by Pico Iyer. Copyright © 2025 by Pico Iyer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.]

DUKE BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE IS “SO THRILLING!!!” AT JAPAN SOCIETY

Sujin Kim reimagines Shūji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle as macabre Harajuku burlesque at Japan Society (photo © Ayumi Sakamoto)

DUKE BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 15-18, $36-$48
www.japansociety.org
utrfest.org

Korean-Japanese director Sujin Kim’s macabre Harajuku burlesque adaptation of Shūji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is an exhilarating two hours of nonstop fun, a wildly imaginative celebration of all that angura, or Japanese underground, unconventional theater, has to offer. For the show, which runs January 15–18 at Japan Society as part of the Under the Radar festival, Kim has brought together an inspiring multidisciplinary cast of more than thirty, including the tantalizing cabaret duo Kokusyoku Sumire, consisting of soprano vocalist and accordionist Yuka and violinist Sachi, who wear adorable outfits with light-up rabbit ears; magician Syun Shibuya, who, in a sharp-fitting tux, does card tricks, pulls doves out of a hat, and dazzles with mind-boggling costume changes; the delightful aerialist Miho Wakabayashi, who has been detailing her New York City trip here; and the experimental Japanese company Project Nyx, which was founded in 2006 by Kim’s wife, Kanna Mizushima, and specializes in “entertainment Bijo-geki, all-female cross-dressing theater.”

We get a taste of what’s to come when, early on, the stage manager (Misa Homma) tells Judith (Rei Fujita), who is portraying Bluebeard’s prospective seventh wife and closely checking the script, “You know what? — Things don’t always follow the script, y’know? Let’s see your improv muscles!”

The narrative regularly pops in and out of the Bluebeard fairy tale, which was written in 1697 by French author Charles Perrault; the self-referential story of the staging of the show; and the acknowledgment that it is being held at Japan Society, maintaining an improvisatory feel throughout.

“Wait, you’re saying the stage manager is doubling as the costume designer’s assistant in this production?” Bluebeard’s first wife (Miki Yamazaki) says to the stage manager while Carrot the Prompter (Ran Moroji) rubs her feet. Carrot had just amateurishly spoken a stage direction out loud: “Whistles dramatically and pretends to be a bird flying away.”

The play unfolds at a furious pace, so fast that it’s sometimes difficult to read the English surtitles, which are projected on small, raised monitors at the left and right sides; it can get a little frustrating, as you don’t want to miss a second of what’s happening onstage.

Asuka Sasaki’s kawai costumes and the far-out, colorful wigs are spectacular, like the best cosplay comic-con contest ever, with circuslike lighting by Tsuguo Izumi + RISE and enveloping sound by Takashi Onuki. Choreographer Taeko Okawa takes advantage of every piece of Satoshi Otsuka’s set, highlighted by seven white doors that flip to seven mirrors held by the seven wives in slinky black. As they dance with the mirrors, reflections shimmer throughout the space.

Kokusyoku Sumire’s songs are charming and engaging, including “[Doppelgänger],” in which they explain, “Even if I hide perfectly / There are times when misfortune finds me. / If I were to suppress this tormenting pain, / Would I be allowed to wish for your happiness?,” and poetic, as when they sing, “Walking in shadows, careful not to stumble, counting to nine, who are you? / The moonlight is full, playing the song of joy. If I close my eyes, I should be able to see everything.”

Dance with seven door-mirrors is a highight of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (photo © Ayumi Sakamoto)

The scene titles in the script are not projected on the monitors but give a good idea of what audiences are in store for, including “The Bride in the Bathtub,” “A Goblin Peeks from Behind the Curtain,” “Don’t ruin my script with your life,” and “The Maestro of the Puppet Killers.” In “A Pig and a Rose,” which features some of the most hilarious dialogue in the play, Copula the Attendant (Chisato Someya) complains to the second wife (Yoshika Kotani) that the seventh wife has been miscast: “Her expressions are our hand-me-down, her heart is like a plastic trash can, and oh, her face — is the stuff that splashes out from an overflowing pit latrine. . . . She is Madam’s used tampon! Madam’s vomit — her face is fit for a manhole cover in a sewer!” The second wife is overjoyed, proclaiming, “So thrilling!!! Insults are divine, don’t you agree, Judith?”

Fujita and Homma stand out in the fantastic cast, which also features Ruri Nanzoin as Coppélius the puppeteer, You Yamagami as the costume designer, Haruka Yoshida as the debt collector, Nozomi Yamada as the actor, Yume Tsukioka as Aris, Hinako Tezuka as Teles, Kaho Asai as the magician’s assistant, Wakabayashi as the fourth wife, Mizushima as the fifth wife, Sayaka Ito as the third wife, and Mayu Kasai as wife number six. Don’t worry if you can’t keep it all straight; just let the extravaganza dazzle you time and time again.

Kim has a dream of presenting Terayama’s work in a tent along the New York City waterfront. Here’s hoping that’s next for this immensely talented creator.

[There will be a preshow lecture on Terayama by UCLA professor emerita Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei at 6:30 on January 17. Ticket holders on January 17 and 18 are invited to see the current exhibit, “Bunraku Backstage,” in the Japan Society Gallery; there is also a display of rare Terayama artifacts on view, including scripts, letters, photos, and more from the La MaMa Archive.]

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TALKING RICE COOKERS EXPLORE TWENTY YEARS OF KOREAN HISTORY

Jaha Koo teams up with Hana, Duri, and Seri in Cuckoo (photo by Radovan Dranga)

CUCKOO
Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC)
251 Fulton St.
January 16-18, $78-$82
pacnyc.org
utrfest.org

On its website, the Korean appliance and electronics company known as Cuckoo explains that it “hopes to continue to reach diverse audiences and captivate them with products that make life simpler.”

For nearly eight years, South Korean artist Jaha Koo has been reaching diverse audiences and captivating them with his inventive play Cuckoo, in which he traces the last twenty years of Korean history with the help of three talkative Cuckoo rice cookers, Hana, Duri, and Seri, who speak to him in the isolation, or golibmuwon, that he is experiencing.

Cuckoo, which debuted in 2017, is the middle section of Koo’s Hamartia Trilogy, which began with Lolling and Rolling in 2015 and concluded with The History of Korean Western Theatre in 2020.

“Conceptually, it focuses on how the inescapable past tragically affects our lives today,” the forty-year-old Koo says about the three works in total.

Koo is now bringing the fifty-five-minute Cuckoo to PAC NYC for four shows January 16–18 as part of the Under the Radar festival; the 7:00 performance on January 17 will be followed by a discussion moderated by South Korean playwright Hansol Jung, whose daring works include Wolf Play and Merry Me.

Koo is responsible for the concept, direction, music, text, and video and performs with the cookers; the Cuckoo hacking is by Idella Craddock, with scenography and media operation by Eunkyung Jeong.

In case Cuckoo makes you hungry, Cuckoo the company promises, “Whether you enjoy sticky rice, soft grains, or the ability to whip up an array of dishes with minimal effort — we’ve got a rice cooker to meet any need!”

Update: Jaha Koo’s Cuckoo is an intimate, deeply personal investigation of grief and loss, as seen through the lens of colonialist capitalism. Divided into four sections, “Cuckoo,” “Jerry,” “Robert Rubin,” and “Screen,” the fifty-five-minute multimedia performance focuses on the $55 billion bailout of South Korea by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1997, orchestrated in part by Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. In a press release at the time, Rubin wrote, “South Korea and the IMF reached an agreement today on an economic reform program that commits Korea to important policy adjustments aimed at restoring stability.”

It didn’t turn out quite as planned.

Jaha Koo links rice cookers, the financial crisis, isolation, and suicide in Cuckoo (photo by Radovan Dranga)

One of the results of the bailout was the success of the Cuckoo brand rice cooker, as well as a rising suicide rate. After video of social and political unrest is projected on a large screen, Koo sits down at a table with three Cuckoo rice cookers: Hana, Duri, and Seri, which have been hacked so they can play music and, in the cases of Duri and Seri, talk to Koo and each other, including hilarious insults, complete with four-letter words.

Switching between English and Korean, Koo discusses the tragic death of his best friend, Jerry; “The Happiness Project” espoused by Robert Rubin’s daughter-in-law, Gretchen Rubin; a solitary worker responsible for fixing broken protective screens in the Seoul Metropolitan Subway; his relationship with his father, who asks, “Hello, my son, did you have a good meal?”; and the vast number of suicides in South Korea, with graphic footage of actual attempts.

He also shares the term “golibmuwon,” which essentially means helpless isolation.

It’s a bittersweet tale that blends in a strong dose of humor until a haunting darkness prevails, sadly as relevant today as it was when Koo first performed it in 2017, with South Korea currently experiencing economic and political distress, its highest suicide rates ever, and even, for a moment, martial law.

The best rice cooker in the world might be able to provide a consistent, dependable base for a good meal, but it can’t build a strong-enough foundation to guarantee a solid future for a nation in turmoil.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SAILING UNDER THE RADAR: BLUEBEARD AT JAPAN SOCIETY

Sujin Kim reimagines Shūji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle at Japan Society (photo by Yoji Ishizawa)

DUKE BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 15-18, $36-$48
www.japansociety.org
utrfest.org

In his 1697 book Histoires ou contes du temps passé, French author Charles Perrault adapted such famous folktales as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Though not quite as well known, particularly when it comes to children, Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” about a duke who has a penchant for moving on from wife to wife in not the most legal of ways, has been turned into plays, short stories, novels, ballets, operas, and movies.

Multidisciplinary Japanese artist Shūji Terayama, who died in 1983 at the age of forty-seven, was obsessed with the story of Bluebeard. “The Japanese countercultural icon Terayama Shūji produced three projects in the years 1961–1979 that rework the legend of Bluebeard, often intermixing the folkloric narrative with contemporary lived reality,” Steven C. Ridgely wrote in Marvels & Tales in 2013. “This was a countervailing tendency to the tide of texts emerging at the time that demythologize Bluebeard by means of historical figures such as Gilles de Rais. Terayama’s work on Bluebeard might best be understood as an effort to frustrate the mapping of folklore and legend to practices of the past and to insist on the liberational potential of taking possession of narratives in the folkloric mode.”

Adding a macabre Harajuku burlesque touch to the proceedings, which take place backstage at a Japanese theater, Korean-Japanese director Sujin Kim has reimagined Terayama’s version in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, running January 15–18 at Japan Society as part of the Under the Radar festival. The North American premiere of this new production is performed by Project Nyx, an all-female avant-garde ensemble led by Kanna Mizushima; avant-garde cabaret duo Kokusyoku Sumire; and magician Syun Shibuya.

There will be a reception following the January 15 show, an artist Q&A after the January 16 performance, and a preshow lecture on Terayama by UCLA professor emerita Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei at 6:30 on January 17. Ticket holders on January 16, 17, and 18 are invited to see the current exhibit, “Bunraku Backstage,” in the Japan Society Gallery; there is also a display of rare Terayama artifacts on view, including scripts, letters, photos, and more from the La MaMa Archive.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FORTY YEARS OF EVIDENCE: RONALD K. BROWN AT THE JOYCE

Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE returns to the Joyce for the company’s fortieth anniversary

Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, a Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 14–19 (curtain chat January 15), $52-$72
www.joyce.org
www.evidencedance.com

One of the highlights of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s recently completed winter season at New York City Center was a new, even more exhilarating twenty-fifth anniversary production of Ronald K. Brown’s 1999 Grace The piece will now be performed by Brown’s Brooklyn-based Evidence, a Dance Company, as part of its winter season at the Joyce — and the troupe’s fortieth anniversary. Running January 14-19, it consists of two programs, both beginning with the company premiere of 2001’s Serving Nia, a sequel to Grace, set to music by drummer Roy Brooks and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and performed by eight dancers. That will be followed by 2005’s Order My Steps, a work for nine dancers, with music by Terry Riley, Bob Marley, and David Ivey and text by the late actor Chadwick Boseman, delivered live by his brother Kevin.

Program A concludes with the spectacular Grace, which features twelve dancers moving to a melding of modern dance and West African idioms as only Brown and co-choreographer Arcell Cabuag can do, with music by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis Jr., and Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti and live vocals by Gordon Chambers; the beats will stay with you long after the show is over. Program B ends with 2001’s High Life, a work for eight dancers, set to music by Oscar Brown Jr., Nikki Giovanni, Nikengas, Kuti, and Wumni.

Evidence’s spectacular costumes, by Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya, are always a treat all their own, as is the lighting, by Tsubasa Kamei, helping make every evening with Ronald K. Brown a special event, as it has been across its forty-year history.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]