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

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL 2021

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL
FIAF and other locations
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
October 20 – November 6, free – $25
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Igbo-Nigerian American multidisciplinary artist Okwui Okpokwasili has not let the pandemic lockdown slow her down. After appearing in the Public’s outstanding revival of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf in the late fall of 2019, Okpokwasili has taken part in Danspace Project’s Platform series, the New Museum exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” and numerous online discussions and special presentations. Her 2017 film, Bronx Gothic, was screened virtually by BAM. In June, she led a procession through Battery Park City for the River to River Festival. And in May, I caught her captivating project On the way, undone, in which she and a group of performers walked across the High Line wearing futuristic head gear made of light and mirrors, vocalizing as they headed toward Simone Leigh’s Brick House sculpture.

Okpokwasili is now the centerpiece of FIAF’s 2021 Crossing the Line Festival, taking place at multiple locations from October 20 to November 6. Throughout the festival, her video installation Before the whisper becomes the word, made with her regular collaborator, director, and husband, Peter Born, will be on view in the FIAF Gallery, exploring remembrance, community mourning, and history. On October 20 at 7:00, she will speak with festival curator Claude Grunitzky in the FIAF Skyroom about the show. “This installation is a crossroads, a midpoint, a caesura. A place caught between worlds,” she said in a statement. “Can we remember what came before while imagining the shape of a future landscape? We enter mid-song, a song that marks a singular moment in time while also expressing an entire lineage. The song is a container for an unreliable memory. From whose mouth is history born? Whose words are trusted when it comes to the telling of what happened? If the history we learn is that which is spoken aloud, what is learned by listening to the whispers that have not been written?”

Christopher Myers’s Fire in the Head will make its world premiere at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival

Okpokwasili will also be presenting On the way, undone at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn October 21-23 ($25). In a High Line video, she says about the work, “I hope it’s a kind of medicine . . . an architecture of sound, light, that is in some way trying to imagine a portal, an opening through space and time, and it’s imagining a woman’s future self, a young girl’s future self singing back to her.”

In addition, the festival includes nora chipaumire’s Nehanda, an opera that was excerpted for River to River at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and for FIAF will be broadcast in two cycles both online ($15) and in person ($25) at FIAF’s Tinker Auditorium, divided into eight “days”: natives, whites, pungwe, thinkers, komuredhi judhas nemajekenisheni, white verdict, killings, and manifesting, with an artist talk on October 30 at 5:00; a concert by Grammy nominee Somi in Florence Gould Hall on October 28 ($25); Christopher Myers’s Fire in the Head, a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky with shadow puppets taking place October 29 and 30 ($25, 7:30) at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association; and Kaneza Schaal’s work-in-progress KLII, November 4-6 in Florence Gould Hall ($25), an exorcism of colonialism and the ghost of King Leopold II, incorporating archival footage and texts by Mark Twain and Patrice Lumumba.

PERICLES 2021

Who: Red Bull Theater
What: Online reading and discussions about Shakespeare’s Pericles
Where: Red Bull Theater YouTube and Facebook
When: Livestreamed events October 4, 11, 18, 25, 28, free with advance RSVP
Why: Last year Red Bull Theater presented “Othello 2020,” a deep dive into the Shakespeare tragedy through performances and discussions. This year Red Bull is digging into one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works, Pericles, about the Prince of Tyre, who sets out on a series of adventures when the answer to a riddle goes awry. In a statement, Red Bull founding artistic director Jesse Berger explains, “Shakespeare’s Pericles is at the heart and soul of Red Bull in many ways: our founding play, Jacobean in period, hopeful in spirit, and about the power of imagination at its core. ‘It hath been used as restoratives,’ the poet Gower says right at the beginning of the play. To me, this play is about restoring hope and peace after a period of turmoil and tragedy. I’ve always loved the idea of this play as a hero journey, and a play about the healing power of storytelling itself. As the play that began the life of our theater company, it seems most appropriate that we explore this play anew, continuing our journey — toward our twentieth year of existence as a company, reemerging out of the pandemic shutdown, and inviting new voices to be in creative conversation with the play and the Western classical canon.”

Red Bull’s inaugural production, in 2003, featured Daniel Breaker in the title role, with Raphael Nash Thompson as Gower and Cerimon; on October 4, Thompson, who also portrayed Gower in Sir Trevor Nunn’s version at TFANA in 2016, performed the prologue “To sing a song that old was sung” and discussed the play in a RemarkaBULL Podversation with Red Bull associate artistic director Nathan Winkelstein that you can watch here. “Exploring Pericles in 2021” began on October 11 and continues October 18, with BIPOC artists Grantham Coleman, Kimberly Chatterjee, Callie Holly, Mahira Kakkar, Jordan Mahome, Anthony Michael Martinez, Clint Ramos, Kenny Ramos, Madeline Sayet, and Craig Wallace delving into what Pericles means today. On October 25, Kent Gash will direct a livestreamed benefit reading of the play, with Coleman as Pericles. The programming concludes October 28 with an interactive Bull Session featuring Gash, scholar Noémie Ndiaye, and members of the company.

“Over the last two decades, Pericles has been produced around the world more often than in the entire twentieth century,” writes Ndiaye, an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. “The play was wildly popular in its own time, and it is now poised to become one of the twenty-first century favorite rediscovered Shakespearean plays. It may have caught the attention of contemporary theatermakers invested in diversifying Shakespeare in part because its geographical location, which moves between ancient Lebanon, Turkey, Libya, and Greece, makes it suitable for cross-cultural multiracial casting. And, certainly Pericles is a fertile terrain for racial investigation. Yet at the same time, the play’s consistent characterization of ‘fairness’ (a word used twenty-three times) as the feminized object of Pericles’s desire and the curative means of his salvation frames his journey as a romantic quest for whiteness and white world-making at the dawn of modernity. It is that fraught and complex racial terrain with which contemporary theatermakers must reckon when they stage Pericles today, finding new creative ways of doing Shakespeare better, Shakespeare with us and for us.”

RECLAMATION

Breton Tyner-Bryan will premiere Reclamation in Jefferson Market Library Garden on October 16 (photo by James Jude Johnson)

Who: Breton Tyner-Bryan, Hugh Ryan, Dajuan Harris, James Jude Johnson, Tatiana Stewart
What: World premiere of site-specific work honoring the Women’s House of Detention
Where: Jefferson Market Library Garden, 10 Greenwich Ave. at Tenth St.
When: Saturday, October 16, free with advance RSVP, 5:00
Why: From March 1932 to June 1972, the Women’s House of Detention held female prisoners, including Ethel Rosenberg, Afeni Shakur, Grace Paley, Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Andrea Dworkin; it was an art deco building in which inmates facing the street could speak with passersby. The structure was demolished in 1973 and replaced with a lovely garden behind the Jefferson Market Library, designed by Pamela Berdan with a wide range of colorful plants and flowers.

On October 16 at 5:00, dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and teacher Breton Tyner-Bryan will activate the space with the world premiere of Reclamation, a piece directed, choreographed, and performed by Tyner-Bryan, joined by three members of the Breton Follies, Dajuan Harris, James Jude Johnson, and Tatiana Stewart, and featuring an original score by Brooklyn-based composer and pianist Ai Isshiki. The work explores the metaphysical energy and spiritual freedom of the garden and the location’s history, particularly as they relate to the local LGBTQIA+ community. In addition, writer, historian, and curator Hugh Ryan (When Brooklyn Was Queer) will read from his upcoming book, The Women’s House of Detention. The library itself is currently closed; when it reopens, Tyner-Bryan will present her latest films, Invicta and West of Frank, as part of the celebration.

TODD HAYNES: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Todd Haynes tells the true story of the Velvet Underground in new documentary opening at Film Forum

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (Todd Haynes, 2021)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, October 13
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

The Velvet Underground was more than just a music group; they electrified a generation, and continue to do so today, half a century later. Todd Haynes, whose 1998 Velvet Goldmine was set in the world of glam rock and whose 2007 I’m Not There explored the career of Bob Dylan through six characters and a nonlinear narrative, now turns his attention to the true story behind the Velvets. Haynes details the history of the band by delving into leaders John Cale and Lou Reed’s initial meeting, the formation of the Primitives with conceptual artists Tony Conrad and Walter DeMaria, and the transformation into the seminal VU lineup at the Factory under Pop icon Andy Warhol’s guidance: singer-songwriter-guitarist Reed, Welsh experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, drummer Maureen Tucker, and German vocalist Nico. Much of Haynes’s documentary focuses on Warhol’s position in helping develop and promote the Velvets. “Andy was extraordinary, and I honestly don’t think these things could have occurred without Andy,” Reed, who died in 2013, says. “I don’t know if we would have gotten the contract if he hadn’t said he’d do the cover or if Nico wasn’t so beautiful.”

Haynes and editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz pace the film like VU’s songs and overall career, as they cut between new and old interviews and dazzling archival photographs and video, frantic and chaotic at first, then slowing down as things change drastically for the band They employ split screens, usually two but up to twelve boxes at a time, to deluge the viewer with a barrage of sound and image. Among the talking heads in the film are composer and Dream Syndicate founder La Monte Young, actress and film critic Amy Taubin, actress and author Mary Woronov, Reed’s sister Merrill Reed-Weiner, early Reed bandmates and school friends Allan Hyman and Richard Mishkin, filmmaker and author John Waters, manager and publicist Danny Fields, composer and philosopher Henry Flynt, and avant-garde filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas. “We are not part really of the subculture or counterculture. We are the culture!” Mekas, who passed away in 2019 at the age of ninety-six, declares.

Haynes also talks extensively with Cale and Tucker, who hold nothing back, in addition to Morrison’s widow, Martha Morrison; singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who opened up for the Velvets back in their heyday; and big-time fan Jonathan Richman (of Modern Lovers fame). While everyone shares their thoughts about Warhol, the Factory, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows, and the eventual dissolution of the band, Haynes bombards us with clips from Warhol’s Sleep, Kiss, Empire, and Screen Tests (many opposite the people who appear in the film) as well as works by such artists as Maya Deren, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Barbara Rubin, Tony Oursler, Stan Brakhage, and Mekas and paintings by Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark Rothko. It’s a dizzying array that aligns with such VU classics as “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin,” “White Light / White Heat,” “Sister Ray,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “Sweet Jane.”

Several speakers disparage the Flower Power era, Bill Graham, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, with Tucker admitting, “This love-peace crap, we hated that. Get real.” They’re also honest about the group’s own success, or lack thereof. Tucker remembers at their first shows, “We used to joke around and say, ‘Well, how many people left?’ ‘About half.’ ‘Oh, we must have been good tonight.’” And there is no love lost for Reed, who was not the warmest and most considerate of colleagues.

The Velvets still maintain a remarkable influence on music and art today despite having recorded only two albums with Cale (The Velvet Underground and Nico and White Light / White Heat) and two with Doug Yule replacing Cale (The Velvet Underground and Loaded) in a span of only three years. (For example, the tribute album I’ll Be Your Mirror was released in September, featuring VU covers by Michael Stipe, Matt Berninger, Andrew Bird & Lucius, Kurt Vile, St. Vincent & Thomas Bartlett, Thurston Moore & Bobby Gillespie, Courtney Barnett, Iggy Pop & Matt Sweeney, and others.) Haynes (Far from Heaven, Safe) sucks us right into their extraordinary orbit and keeps us swirling in it for two glorious hours of music, gossip, art, celebrity, and backstabbing. The documentary, which premiered earlier this month at the New York Film Festival, opens at Film Forum on October 13 and begins streaming on Apple+ two days later. If you end up watching the film at home, turn it up loud. No, louder than that. Even louder. . . .

[Film Forum will be hosting Q&As with Gonçalves and Kurnitz on October 14 and 16 following the 7:50 shows, and Taubin will introduce the 7:50 screening on October 15. In addition, Haynes will join Gonçalves and Kurnitz at Film Forum for the 7:50 screening on November 12.]

MATRIARCH: SHE’S WIDE AWAKE SHINING LIGHT . . .

Morgan Danielle Day delivers one of six monologues about motherhood in Matriarch

Who: The Roots and Wings Project
What: Livestream of six monologues
Where: Houston Coalition Against Hate online
When: Friday, October 8, free (donations accepted), 7:00 (available on demand through October 30)
Why: The Roots and Wings Project and the Houston Coalition Against Hate have teamed up to present Matriarch, a collection of six monologues and a song exploring the complex relationship between mothers and children in a patriarchal society. Filmed in front of a live, masked audience in the small backyard of the MKM Cultural Arts Center in Los Angeles, the show begins with Lioness, in which writer and Roots and Wings co-executive producer Jesse Bliss rails at an unseen man chastising her for breastfeeding in her parked car. “Fuck that,” she argues. “I’ll feed my baby wherever we need to handle it and it should elicit no kind of reaction and cause no kind of problem. . . . I birthed her, care for her, feed her. I could scream loud as fuck right now and it won’t bother her because we are a team. She wants me to chew your ass out. . . . . You’re trying to make shame out of something beautiful,” immediately establishing motherhood as a nurturing necessity and connection.

In The Truth about Perfecta, written by Obie winner Diane Rodriguez, who died of lung cancer in April 2020, Cristina Frias plays a mother defending herself against racist stereotypes. “I bet when you people look at me, you make assumptions about who I am, where I come from, who I belong to, who I love, how I love, where I live, how I live, who my friends are, how I manage my life, how much money I make, how I treat my kids. Well, don’t do that; you don’t know who I am, and you don’t know how I was raised.”

Some Things You Should Know about My Mom is a eulogy written by Gabriel Diamond and Tamar Halpern and performed by Diamond in front of a music stand. “You’ve been talking about Sandy the friend, the playwright, the sister, the calligrapher, the painter, the poet, all these things,” he says. ”I’m gonna talk about her as the mommy,” proceeding to tell stories about her decision to be a single mother and detailing her death.

Morgan Danielle Day is explosive as a young woman fighting the system in Taylor Lytle’s The Formula. Wearing a durag and face tattoos, Day fiercely proclaims, “I was criminalized long before I was ever incarcerated. I remember it like it was yesterday.” She recounts how her drug-addicted, sexually abused mother sent her off to foster care. “Now, it may be to you all a surprise that I was actually happy to get a foster home. Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I had a beautiful mother. I admire this woman for her strength. She was loving and caring and did what she could with what she had, period. . . . But there wasn’t a lot of room in this world for a single mother of twelve on welfare.”

Bahni Turpin sits down for Sigrid Gilmer’s Remember This . . . in which she portrays Margaret, a mother who is preparing her daughter for her impending death. “Oh, Angela. Please, dear,” she pleads. “Please, don’t. No tears, my darling. Stop it. I’m not going to discuss it. It is just dying. . . . I will not suffer any more than I have to. I will not waste away. You know, you don’t have to be here when I go.” She also admits, “I should have never had children.”

The evening concludes with Roger Q. Mason’s Age Sex Location, in which a fab Ramy El-Etreby dances onstage in glittery drag and proclaims, “Fat bitch / Black queen / Mixed breed mishap / Round nosed fag hoe / That’s what you think of me / As I walk down the street / My wide hips waddling / My fleshy neck obscuring a too-soft jawline.” He goes on to tell how he was rejected by his mother, father, and doctor, none of whom even tried to understand who he was, who he needed to be. The show also features a song by Sheila Govindarajan in which she sings, “Let me go / set me free,” along with snippets from Lizzo, Talking Heads, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Roberta Flack.

Created and directed by Bliss and photographed by Ivan Cordeiro, Matriarch debuts online October 8 at 7:00, followed by a panel discussion with several of the performers and Houston-area domestic violence prevention advocates, including Dr. Nusrat Ameen of Daya and Barbie Brashear of the Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, moderated by HCAH executive director Marjorie Joseph, and will be available on demand on YouTube and Facebook through October 30.

DEEP BLUE SEA

Bill T. Jones’s Deep Blue Sea is set within an illuminating, immersive environment at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

DEEP BLUE SEA
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
September 28 – October 9, $40
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Bill T. Jones is in the midst of yet another well-deserved moment, culminating in the spectacular Deep Blue Sea, continuing at Park Avenue Armory through October 9. During the pandemic, the legendary dancer, choreographer, Kennedy Center honoree, and activist, along with his troupe, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, streamed a reimagined version of 1991’s Continuous Replay. In May, after a one-month delay because of a Covid outbreak in the company, they staged Afterwardsness at Park Ave. Armory, a socially distanced and masked production that addressed racism, police brutality, classism, and the pandemic itself. In July, the documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters was released, a thrilling look at Jones’s seminal 1989 piece, D-Man in the Waters, exploring intergenerational tragedy and loss while drawing comparisons between AIDS and other crises.

Delayed a year and a half due to the pandemic, Deep Blue Sea is a one-hundred-minute multimedia meditation on being Black in America. As the audience enters the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which features a large, rectangular central space with ten rows of rafters, starting about ten feet high, on all four sides, Jones, dressed in his trademark black, is moving determinedly across the floor, almost robotically. Some people recognize him; others walk right past him to their seats, oblivious. It’s Jones’s return to performing for the first time in ten years, when he appeared (nude) in a 2011 iteration of Continuous Replay at New York Live Arts. On every seat is a long sheet of paper with writing on both sides, in Jones’s handwriting; it reads in part: “Thank you, Mr. Melville! / Thank you for the Pip / Thank you for his music / Thank you for his fragile fear / Thank you for his loneliness in the ocean . . . / Thank you for not letting him drown. / Thank you for this floor we are moving on. Thank you for the ocean just now pretending to be a stage. / Thank you, Dr. King! . . . Thank you for words that I can shred, misunderstand, mangle and still they meet the air like singing.”

Bill T. Jones stands in the middle of it all in multimedia Deep Blue Sea (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The sixty-nine-year-old Florida native soon starts a long monologue in which he explains that he was disturbed to discover that, upon revisiting Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, he had completely forgotten about Pip, the young Black cabin boy aboard the Pequod. “Pip was invisible to me,” he recalls. Using that as a metaphor, Jones, joined by ten dancers, delves into the lack of inclusivity in the word “we” in contemporary society. He incorporates text from W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Kendrick Lamar’s “Never Catch Me,” and Moby-Dick, with live gospel, blues, and hip-hop performed by vocalists Philip Bullock, Shaq Hester, Prentiss Mouton, and Stacy Penson in red costumes and Jay St. Flono in more colorful African-inspired dress. (The costumes are by Liz Prince.) The dramatic score was composed by musical director Nick Hallett, accompanied by an electronic soundscape by Hprizm aka High Priest, Rena Anakwe, and Holland Andrews.

Choreographed by Jones, Janet Wong, and the company — Barrington Hinds, Dean Michael Husted, Jada Jenai, Shane Larson, s. lumbert, Danielle Marshall, Nayaa Opong, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Jacoby Pruitt, and Huiwang Zhang — Deep Blue Sea immerses the audience in a breathtaking visual environment designed by Elizabeth Diller, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with award-winning projection designer Peter Nigrini (Here Lies Love, Beetlejuice); the superb lighting is by Robert Wierzel. (You can watch an artist talk with Diller, Nigrini, and Hinds here.) I suggest wearing a white or light-blue mask for an added bonus when it gets dark.

The surprises are many, from a black spotlight following Jones to white spotlights on the other dancers that merge into amorphous bubbles, from mirrors that turn the space into a kind of three-dimensional infinity room to the appearance of a calming, gently rolling ocean. Snippets of text roll beneath the dancers. The face of a boy representing Pip dominates the floor, blinking up at us. Jones refers to the dancers by name several times, giving each their own identity and voice. Wearing everyday clothing, they run across the stage, form into a tight group, and line up on their backs, asserting themselves as individuals and a close-knit group. Jones expands the idea of community with an overly long though visually engaging conclusion in which ninety-nine local people share personal statements that begin, “I know . . . ,” after which the audience is encouraged to come down and mingle, becoming an ever-expanding “we.”

“[Pip] saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad,” Melville writes in Moby-Dick. “So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” At one point in Deep Blue Sea, the phrase “You can’t turn back” is projected onto the floor, Jones’s uncompromising approach to providing a way forward through indifference.

MOVEMENT WITHOUT BORDERS: A DAY OF PERFORMANCE TO CELEBRATE NEW YORK IMMIGRATION COALITION, UNLOCAL, AND GENTE UNIDA

Wladimiro Politano, The Expression of the Soul XLIX, 2010

Who: Mariana Valencia, Jimena Paz, Shamel Pitts, Francesca Harper, Francisco Cordova, Ernesto Breton/Rudy Perez, Edivaldo Ernesto, Horacio Macuacua, Emilio Rojas, Claudia Rankine, Margo Jefferson, Antonio Sánchez Band, Jonathan Mendoza, Gina Belafonte, Xaviera Simmons, Enrique Morones, Roger H. Brown, Raoul Roach, Adelita-Husni-Bey, Reverend Micah Bucey
What: Dance, poetry, music, film, and activism at historic location
Where: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South between Thompson & Sullivan Sts.
When: Saturday, October 2, free with RSVP (suggested donation $20), 11:00 am – 6:30 pm; ninety-minute recorded version the next day at the Jersey City Theater Center
Why: An all-star lineup of artists and activists are coming together October 2 at Judson Memorial Church for “Movement without Borders: A Day of Performance to Celebrate New York Immigration Coalition, UnLocal, and Gente Unida,” honoring three organizations fighting for immigration rights. From 11:00 am to 6:30 pm, dancers and choreographers, musicians, poets, authors, visual artists, and more will honor the work being done by New York Immigration Coalition, UnLocal, and Gente Unida. Among the presenters are dancer/choreographers Mariana Valencia, Ernesto Breton/Rudy Perez, Jimena Paz, Francisco Cordova, Horacio Macuacua, Francesca Harper, Edivaldo Ernesto, and Shamel Pitts/TRIBE, multidisciplinary artist Emilio Rojas, the Antonio Sánchez Band (with Sánchez, Thana Alexa, Jordan Peters, Carmen Staaf, Noam Wiesenberg), Adelita Husni-Bey (who will screen her film Chiron), visual artist Xaviera Simmons, poets Jonathan Mendoza and Claudia Rankine, Gente Unida founder and director Enrique Morones, Sankofa executive director Gina Belafonte, music producer and activist Raoul Roach, and others. Conceived, directed, and produced by Richard Colton, “Movement without Borders” will also be available in a ninety-minute recorded version on October 3 at the Jersey City Theater Center as part of the third annual Voices International Theater Festival.