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

FIRE MUSIC: THE STORY OF FREE JAZZ

Sun Ra is one of the free jazz pioneers featured in Fire Music (photo by Baron Wolman / courtesy of Submarine Deluxe)

FIRE MUSIC: THE STORY OF FREE JAZZ (Tom Surgal, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, September 10
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.firemusic.org

College is supposed to be a life-changing, career-defining experience. For me, there were two specific seminal moments, both of which took place in the classroom: discovering avant-garde film in a course taught by New York Film Festival cofounder Amos Vogel, author of Film as a Subversive Art, and being introduced to the free jazz movement, the radical response to bebop, in the History of American Music. Without those two flashpoints, it’s unlikely I would be writing a review of Tom Surgal’s Fire Music: The Story of Free Jazz all these years later.

Opening on September 10 at Film Forum, Fire Music takes a deep dive into free jazz, told with spectacular archival footage and old and new interviews with more than three dozen musicians who were part of the sonic upheaval, with famed jazz writer Gary Giddins adding further insight. Writer-director Surgal, who is also a drummer and percussionist, traces the development of free jazz chronologically, focusing on such groundbreaking figures as saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Sam Rivers, pianist Cecil Taylor, and keyboardist and synth maestro Sun Ra. “It was terrifying for people,” Giddins says about the original reaction to free jazz, from audiences and musicians. “A lot of people were just, What the hell is this? This isn’t even music.”

There are snippets of live performances by Charlie Parker, Sun Ra Arkestra, Dolphy, Coltrane, Ayler, Max Roach, Don Cherry, Marion Brown, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, M’Boom, the Sam Rivers Trio, Globe Unity Orchestra, and others that set the right mood; this is not swing or bop but something wholly different — and dissonant — that requires an open mind and open ears, but it’s pure magic. “It was like a religion,” pianist Carla Bley remembers. Saxophonist John Tchicai explains, “Each individual could play in his own tempo or create melodies that were independent, in a way, from what the other players were playing. We had to break some boundary to be able to create something new.”

Surgal talks to the musicians about improvising without following standard chord progressions, the four-day October Revolution at the Cellar Café, trumpeter Bill Dixon starting the Jazz Composers’ Guild, pianist Muhal Richard Abrams cofounding the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago, the formation of the Black Artists Group in St. Louis, the loft scene in New York City, the development of free jazz in New York, Los Angeles, the Midwest, and Europe, and the importance of the 1960 record Free Jazz by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, featuring Coleman, Cherry, Scott LaFaro, and Billy Higgins on the left channel and Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell on the right. Sadly, sixteen of the artists in the film have passed away since Surgal started the project; many others seen in clips died at an early age.

For these players, it was more than just fame and fortune; they were constantly called upon to defend free jazz itself. Taylor, who came out of the New England Conservatory, explains, “It seems to me what music is is everything that you do.” Pianist Misha Engelberg admits, “I am a complete fraud.” Meanwhile, Coleman trumpeter Bobby Bradford says of Ayler, “Here’s a saxophone player, man, that we all are thinking, we just broke the sound barrier — wow — and here’s a guy that’s gonna take us to another planet. Is that what we want to do?” As far as outer space is concerned, Sun Ra claims to be from Saturn.

John Coltrane is highlighted as the spiritual father of the free jazz movement (photo by Lee Tanner / courtesy of Submarine Deluxe)

Among the others who chime in are saxophonists Gato Barbieri, John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Anthony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Noah Howard, Prince Lasha, and Archie Shepp, trombonists Roswell Rudd and George Lewis, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, pianists Burton Greene and Dave Burrell, drummers Rashied Ali, Barry Altschul, Thurman Barker, Warren Smith, Han Bennink, and Günter “Baby” Sommer, and vibesmen Karl Berger and Gunter Hampel, each musician unique and cooler than cool as great clips and stories move and groove to their own offbeat, subversive cacophony, brought together in a furious improvisation by editor and cowriter John Northrop, with original music by Lin Culbertson. Producers on the film include such contemporary musicians as Thurston Moore, Nels Cline, and Jeff Tweedy.

Surgal made Fire Music because he felt that the free jazz movement is largely forgotten today; his documentary goes a long way in showing how shortsighted that is. You don’t have to be in college to love this incredible music, and the film itself, which is a crash course in an unforgettable sound like no other.

(Film Forum will host an in-person Q&A with Surgal, Moore, and Smith at the 7:00 show on September 10 and with Surgal, Barker, and jazz writer Clifford Allen at the 7:00 screening on September 11.)

STREB EXTREME ACTION: MANHATTAN WEST / JACOB’S PILLOW

STREB’s August performance at Jacob’s Pillow is streaming for free through September 16 (photos by Christopher Duggan and Jamie Kraus, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow)

STREB ONSTAGE
Digital on demand from Jacob’s Pillow, September 2-16, free with RSVP
Live at Manhattan West: September 17-19, free with advance RSVP
www.jacobspillow.org
streb.org

In July 2020, STREB Extreme Action shared Best Zoom Dance (with Martha Graham Dance Company) in twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards for Body Grammar, an inventive way to utilize dancers’ body parts to play with ideas of community and movement online, especially for a troupe used to working with unique action machines that often place the performers in physical danger. The Brooklyn-based company, founded in 1985 by Elizabeth Streb, maintained a continuous virtual presence during the lockdown, but you can now catch the troupe in person when they perform five outdoor shows September 17-19 at Manhattan West. (Admission is free with advance RSVP.)

The bill includes Molinette, in which three STREB action heroes have their feet affixed to a twenty-foot-high horizontal swivel pipe designed by Noe España, commissioned for the 2019 reopening of Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; Add, a 1983 solo piece in which the dancer must stay within a cross taped to the floor; Plateshift, featuring six action heroes on a sprung floor that incorporates centrifugal force; and the world premiere of Kaleidoscope, in which eight action heroes are fastened to LERU (London Eye Rehearsal Unit), a solid steel circle that has them defying gravity, a STREB tradition.

To get in the mood, you must check out STREB’s return to Jacob’s Pillow last month after twenty years, streaming for free through September 16. The show consists of twelve repertory works from 1978 to 2006, performed on the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage in front of a matinee audience by Jackie Carlson, Daniel Rysak, Tyler DuBoys, Justin Ross, Kairis Daniels, Luciany Germán, Leonardo Girón Torres, and associate artistic director Cassandre Joseph, wearing tight-fitting blue superhero costumes. The technical direction is by company emcee and DJ Zaire Baptiste, who knows how to rile up a crowd.

Molinette will be part of STREB presentation at Manhattan West (photo © Dan Lubbers)

It shows the range of Streb’s choreography and her spirited use of existing and invented objects that often put the action heroes in danger, an astonishing melding of acrobatics, gymnastics, modern dance, and circuslike peril set to original music by technoaxe and compilations produced by Voodo Fé and Freshbeatz. Streb introduces each work with a quote from a review of the piece (from the Village Voice, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Examiner, and the New York Times) and a snippet about where the idea originated.

It begins with 2006’s Tip, in which seven dancers move precariously on a tipping machine, a twelve-feet-in-diameter wheel cut in half, able to achieve complete verticality. Carlson twirls a wooden dowel like a baton in 1978’s Pole Vaults, Rysak brandishes a rope in 1983’s Whiplash, Carlson, Rysak, Daniels, and Germán toss around a heavy twelve-foot-long, three-inch-wide dowel in 1990’s Log, Daniels is trapped in a box modeled for Streb’s size in 1985’s Little Ease, Germán plays with a hula hoop in 1983’s Target, Joseph and Ross turn a long dowel into a third dancer in 1992’s Link, the troupe pays homage to the Three Stooges and Buster Keaton with a long dowel and a ramp with a cut-out window in 2002’s Buster, and the company does miraculous things with a pair of rectangular doorlike plywood slabs in 1984’s Surface.

There are also two brief pieces with no props, Ross honoring Merce Cunningham in 1978’s 7′ 43″ and DuBoys re-creating Streb’s 1983 solo, Add, which she remembers as being “the most painful two minutes of my life.” The show concludes in a big way with 2003’s breathtaking Air, in which all eight action heroes jump off a trampoline, landing on a large mat over and over again. As with so many of Streb’s works, you can’t help but wait for disaster to occur, but it never does, at least not in the numerous times I’ve been fortunate to see the endlessly brave and talented troupe perform, at such diverse locations as Park Ave. Armory, Gansevoort Plaza, and the World Financial Center as well as in the documentaries Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity and One Extraordinary Day. Be sure to stick around for the postshow talk with Streb, Joseph, and Baptiste, moderated by Pillow scholar-in-residence Maura Keefe.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FREUD’S DAUGHTER

“Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter” continues at the Jewish Museum through September 12 (© The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Ron Amstutz.)

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FREUD’S DAUGHTER
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Monday through September 12, $12-$18 (free on Saturdays)
212-423-3200
thejewishmuseum.org

To paraphrase something Dr. Sigmund Freud most likely never said, sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis. In the exhibition “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” continuing at the Jewish Museum through September 12, curator Philip Larratt-Smith attempts to explore the French-American artist’s work through a psychoanalytic lens based on her thirty-three years of analysis with Freud disciple Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, beginning in 1952, shortly after the death of her father. The exhibit reverses the standard setup; most of the fifty pieces by Bourgeois are in vitrines, while excerpts from her extensive notes — from personal thoughts to dream diaries — are framed and hanging on the walls. Above the facsimiles and original sheets are dual quotes from Bourgeois and Freud.

“Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings profoundly recalibrate our understanding of her artistic trajectory and motivational impulses,” Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s literary archivist, said in a statement. “They do not explain or demystify her art but rather represent a freestanding corpus of writing that display her unusual literary gifts and underline her enduring engagement with analysis. They highlight the centrality of her Oedipal deadlock as the traumatic kernel of her psychic organization. And they complicate the narrative of early childhood trauma which the artist herself fostered, encouraging instead a more nuanced appreciation of this relationship which she often spoke about.”

Bourgeois’s writings are extraordinary. “The fear of success is a misconception of the fear of responsibility. Perhaps fear of men. Refusal to accept to grow up / Refusal to accept reality / Refusal to accept what I am / Refusal to accept my lot / Refusal to look at oneself to measure, judge / Refusal to grow up. Refusal to accept being a woman. I accept on my own terms,” one begins. “Guilt is the Product of envy,” she writes in another. “There is essentially no difference between the Penis envy and the Oedipus complex . . . it is not him that I love it is what he has — it is not him that I love it is his money — The only thing that gives me hope is that millions of people women have suffered from this mystery.” And in a screed against her father and the family’s British au pair, Sadie Gordon Richmond, who became her father’s mistress (and was only six years older than Louise), Bourgeois declares, “I can prove that he loves me / that he loves me more than anybody else / that his wife is unbearable / that he doesn’t love her / that I deserve to be loved / that I deserve him more than Sadie does / that Sadie loves me / that Sadie loves him / that Sadie doesn’t want him any longer / so he is free / so there is hope.” You can listen to actress Rachel Weisz reading eighteen of Bourgeois’s selected writings here.

The works on view are equally extraordinary. Couple III entwines two people in fabric and leather, one with a steel prosthetic arm. (“The prosthesis recalls a theme that was important to Louise. Louise saw herself as a survivor but also as radically incomplete,” Larratt-Smith says on the audioguide.) Hysterical is a small sculpture of a nude woman with three heads looking off in different directions. The tomblike Venthouse (Cupping Jar) features two slabs of dark marble, with glass cupping jars on the top one, lit with lights from within, a manifestation of the procedure Louise would perform on her mother to help ease her back pain. (Bourgeois’s mother, Joséphine, died in 1932 when Louise was twenty.) The Destruction of the Father is a large tableaux in a wall, bathed in hellish bloodred lighting, that is essentially the aftermath of a cannibalistic feast, made in 1974, a year after the death of Bourgeois’s husband, Robert Goldwater, at the age of sixty-five. The hanging sculpture Janus Fleuri is a bronze melding of male and female genitalia.

The centerpiece of the show is Passage Dangereux, the largest of Bourgeois’s Cells, a room-size installation that explores memory and desire, with dozens of elements representing sex and death incorporating all five senses, a journey into deep-seated trauma locked behind the bars of a physical and psychological prison. And finally, there’s Sleep II, a 1967 white marble sculpture that strongly resembles the top of an enormous penis, above which hangs Fillette (Sweeter Version), a biomorphic latex-over-plaster depiction of genitalia about which Bourgeois said, “From a sexual point of view I consider the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate. They’re objects that the woman, myself, must protect.” She was famously photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe carrying the sculpture in her right arm, like a treasured pet.

“Life is so funny. Life is so ridiculous,” Bourgeois once said. Throughout her life and career, she revealed a dry sense of humor and had fun with how she was categorized as an artist and a person. “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter” delves into the impact decades of psychoanalysis had on her and her art, particularly exposing her writings that emerged from deep inside her soul. But don’t get too caught up in trying to find answers for all her words and images. “Her writings reveal the extent to which Freudian concepts and practices — whether directly or indirectly, whether through his own writings, those of his followers, or Bourgeois’s longstanding analysis — informed and enriched her art making,” Larratt-Smith argues. “To call Bourgeois ‘Freud’s daughter’ is thus to invoke filiation and resistance, likeness and dissent, and to highlight the central importance of psychoanalysis in the making of her mysterious and idiosyncratic oeuvre.” And sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis.

(For more on the exhibit, you can watch the related lectures “Elisabeth Bronfen: Family Entanglements,” “Gary Indiana: The Artist as Writer and Analysand,” and “Jamieson Webster: Louise Bourgeois’s Hysterical Love of Psychoanalysis.”)

MOGUL MOWGLI

Riz Ahmed plays a rapper searching for his identity in Mogul Mowgli

MOGUL MOWGLI (Bassam Tariq, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, September 3
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

There may be no more riveting, multidimensional actor, rapper, and activist working today than Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Riz Ahmed. Born and raised in London in a British Pakistani family, Ahmed rose to prominence as a suspected murderer in the HBO series The Night Of and made a major breakthrough playing a drummer who suddenly loses his hearing in the Academy Award–nominated Sound of Metal. For more than fifteen years, Ahmed has been releasing music, with his band, Swet Shop Boys (as Riz MC, with Heems), and as a solo act. It all comes together in his latest film, Mogul Mowgli, which opens September 3 at Film Forum.

Ahmed stars in and cowrote the tense drama with Karachi-born American director Bassam Tariq. Ahmed plays Zaheer, a rapper who goes by the name Zed and has just scored a huge gig opening for a popular rapper. But shortly before the tour kicks off, he gets hit with a baffling debilitating illness. With his career in jeopardy, he battles his hardworking religious father, Bashir (Alyy Khan); receives unconditional tenderness from his caring mother, Nasra (Sudha Bhuchar); is criticized by his brother, Bilal (musician, poet, and activist Hussain Manawer); reaches out to an ex-girlfriend, Bina (Aiysha Hart); argues with his friend and manager, Vaseem (Anjana Vasan); and is stupefied by the rising success of fellow rapper RPG (Nabhaan Rizwan), whose silly video “Pussy Fried Chicken” has gone viral.

All the while, Zed is haunted by memories from his childhood and hallucinations of a mysterious figure known as Toba Tek Singh (Jeff Mirza), whose face is covered by a ritual crown of rows of colorful fabric flowers. “People pay attention,” Toba Tek Singh tells him. “They drew a line in the sand. India and Pakistan. East and West. Us and them. I was born from this rupture. And I am the sickness from this separation. I am Toba Tek Singh!” The name refers to a city in Punjab and the title of a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, about the troubles between India and Pakistan and a “Sikh lunatic” with a “frightening appearance” who “was a harmless fellow.” Ahmed also has a song called “Toba Tek Singh” on his March 2020 album, The Long Goodbye, in which he declares, “She wanna kick me out / but I’m still locked in / What’s my fucking name? / Toba Tek Singh.”

Riz Ahmed is a force to be reckoned with in Bassam Tariq’s debut narrative feature

Named after the Swet Shop Boys’ 2016 song “Half Moghul Half Mowgli,” Mogul Mowgli is a gripping film that deals with various dichotomies as laid out by Toba Tek Singh as Zed tries to find his place in a world that keeps letting him down. “The song’s about being torn between different sides of your identity, being descended from moguls and rich heritage, but living as Mowgli, lost in the urban jungle far away from the village that was once home,” Ahmed says in the film’s production notes. “That’s our experience in diaspora.”

In a concert scene, Zed raps, “Legacies outlive love,” which is at the center of his search for personal meaning, a concept he also explored in his arresting one-man show The Long Goodbye: Online Edition, livestreamed by BAM and the Manchester International Festival last December. (“I don’t belong here,” he says in the piece.) In addition, Ahmed gave a 2017 speech to the House of Commons on the importance of diversity and representation and has written about being typecast as a terrorist and profiled at airports.

Ahmed (Nightcrawler, ) and Tariq (These Birds Walk, Ghosts of Sugar Land), in his debut narrative feature, don’t make room for a lot of laughs in Mogul Mowgli, which passes the five-part Riz Test evaluating Muslim stereotypes in film and on television. It’s a powerful, personal work, made all the more poignant by Ahmed’s semiautobiographical elements and Tariq’s background as a documentary filmmaker. Ahmed is a force to be reckoned with; Anika Summerson’s camera can’t get enough of him, from his dark, penetrating eyes to his shuffling bare feet. Ahmed delivers a monumental performance that avoids clichés as it blazes across the screen. The 6:45 show at Film Forum on September 3 will be followed by a Q&A with Tariq in person and Ahmed on Zoom, moderated by filmmaker, critic, and curator Farihah Zaman; Tariq will also be at the 6:45 show on September 4 (moderated by Oscar nominee Shaka King) and the 4:40 screening on September 5.

ART ALIVE IN THE FISHER DOLLHOUSE

The Chocolate Genius will lead an interactive demonstration at MAD in conjunction with new chocolate bar inspired by Fisher Dollhouse (photo courtesy Museum of Arts & Design)

Who: Paul Joachim, the Chocolate Genius
What: Chocolate-making demonstration and hands-on activity
Where: Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle
When: Saturday, September 4, free with museum admission of $12-$18, noon–2:00
Why: Paul Joachim, the Florida-based artist known as the Chocolate Genius, has a simple but critical mission: “to transform one billion people or more through chocolate.” Joachim believes that “chocolate creates a visceral, personal response in everyone. It’s a bridge between classes, gender, religion, races — all labels of culture. In other words, chocolate creates a deep human connection — often missing in our divisive world.” Joachim will increase that deep human connection on September 4 when he he will lead an in-person, interactive chocolate-making demonstration at the Museum of Arts & Design, launching a new chocolate bar in conjunction with the exhibition “The Fisher Dollhouse: A Venetian Palazzo in Miniature.”

Chocolate demo takes place in Fisher Dollhouse exhibit at MAD (photo by Jenna Bascom)

On view through September 26, the dollhouse was created by New York–based arts patron and collector Joanna Fisher during the pandemic as a place of refuge; it was designed and built by dozens of craftspersons, with miniature works of art by Dustin Yellin, Ryan McGinness, Hunt Slonem, and others. On September 4 at noon, Joachim will show visitors how to make silicone molds, cast edible works, and temper chocolate at home, along with discussing the history of chocolate and cacao. The milk chocolate bars feature the facade of the dollhouse on their front. “When most people think of chocolate, it’s simply a chocolate bar,” Joachim’s mission statement continues. “I have the gift of transforming chocolate into a mystifying, inspirational experience, live and in front of audience’s eyes. Inspiring them with joy, awe, and love, disrupting the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible within each viewer’s point of view and own life.” Entry to this “Art Alive” presentation is free with museum admission. Also on view at MAD are “Craft Front & Center,” “Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times,” “Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy,” and “45 Stories in Jewelry: 1947 to Now.”

NI MI MADRE

Stephanie Osin-Cohen’s set design is a highlight of new play at Rattlestick (photo by Andrew Soria)

NI MI MADRE
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 19, $40
866-811-4111
www.rattlestick.org

“Gender’s confusing in our family,” Bete (pronounced “BET-chi”) says in Arturo Luís Soria’s one-person show, Ni Mi Madre, performed live at Rattlestick and streaming online through September 19. In the sixty-minute play, writer-star Soria portrays his domineering Brazilian mother, zeroing in on their complicated relationship.

Ni Mi Madre, which means “not (or “nor”) my mother,” begins with Soria, in a long white gown (by Haydee Zelideth) that bares his hirsute chest, walking onstage carrying a row of ritual candles and flowers. He puts the objects down carefully and pulls the top of the dress over his chest and voilà, he is now his mother. He spends the remainder of the show acting and speaking like her as she discusses life and love, family and children, with a particular focus on her queer Latino son, Arturo.

“You know, he had the right idea going gay,” she says. “I just don’t think he executed it properly, because when he came out . . . He. Came. Out! I mean, it was like the Fourth of July on New Year’s, okay. Then he tells me he’s not just gay, he’s bisexual. So I say, ‘Listen, bisexuals are greedy, okay. The world is gay and it’s straight; it’s black and it’s white; it’s in and it’s out, so figure it out.’”

Arturo Luís Soria portrays his mother in one-person show (photo by Andrew Soria)

Elegant and proud, Bete talks about her three marriages, to Inebriated Jew, Ecuadorian Commie, and Gay Dominican; how it’s okay for her to beat her children; her dedication to Meryl Streep; and her own difficult mother. “My mother never wanted to be a mother. Never,” she explains. “You only get one mom. And my mother didn’t want me.” However, she’s not seeking sympathy but instead defends her treatment of her children.

“My kids don’t know how lucky they are to have a mother like me. I am their inspiration and they don’t even know it and I went through a lot of trouble to raise them,” she says. “I was a good mother to them. And I never abandoned them nor shipped them off to boarding school. I thought about it. Arturo was such a maniac as a kid I used to pray to God that he would go to sleep and not wake up until college, but those were only empty prayers. Kind of. Arturo thinks I was a bad mother to him. I wasn’t bad. He was a fuckin’ lunatic.” She might be harshly critical of him, but she also loves and supports him. “He’s following his dreams,” she adds. “He’s doing what I always wanted but never could because I didn’t have a mother like me.’

The night I saw the show, it was followed by a talkback with Soria and director Danilo Gambini (The Swallow and the Tomcat, An Iliad), a native Brazilian who has been working with Soria on the play since their Yale days going back to 2017 (in addition to other collaborations); Soria began writing Ni Mi Madre in 2008, and it has gone through numerous iterations before opening in New York City on August 25, when Soria’s mother was present in the audience. The postshow discussion lent further insight into mother and son, especially how the latter came to better understand and humanize the former through forgiveness and love as the play developed and he grew in the role. (There will be a free Zoom community conversation with Soria, Gambini, and Sam Morreale on September 2 at 5:00, and if you bring your own mother to the play, you can use code HIMOM to get her in for free September 2-6.)

The show, which features songs by Cher, Cyndi Lauper, Gloria Estefan, and Maria Bethania, lip-synced in drag finery by Soria, takes place on Stephanie Osin-Cohen’s gorgeous stage, a kind of shrine room with ritual objects, including candles galore, a bedecked vanity, and a large depiction of Iemanjá, the Umbanda (Candomblé) goddess of the sea, protector of fishermen and pregnant women — and who looks suspiciously like Cher. The floor is patterned like an Ipanema sidewalk of twisting black-and-white designs in the style of Roberto Burle Marx, which was highlighted in 2019 at the New York Botanical Garden. The walls are “persuasive papaya,” as Bete believes that “you have to paint the colors of your walls something that has to do with suggestive foods.” Krista Smith’s lighting shines brightly on Soria and casts long shadows on either side of the stage in one scene when Bete confronts her own parents.

Bold and barefoot, Soria (The Inheritance, Hit the Wall) fully inhabits the character of his mother. Too many of the lines fall flat and it can feel a bit repetitive even at only an hour, but Ni Mi Madre is a potent and poignant observation of first-generation immigrants, queer Latinidad, and the importance of family, despite the headaches.

“No matter how hard I try / You keep pushing me aside / And I can’t break through / There’s no talking to you,” Cher sings in “Believe,” which Bete mistakenly thinks is by Madonna. With Ni Mi Madre, Soria has taken a very public platform and touching way to break through to his mother.

WU TSANG: ANTHEM

Beverly Glenn-Copeland bares his heart and soul in Guggenheim installation Anthem (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

RE/PROJECTIONS: VIDEO, FILM, AND PERFORMANCE FOR THE ROTUNDA
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Thursday – Monday through September 6, $18 – $25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org
anthem online slideshow

Philly-born Canadian composer and Black trans activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland has had quite a wild ride the last few years. In 2017, his 1986 cassette, Keyboard Fantasies, melding ambient, jazz, classical, folk, world, and New Age sounds, was rediscovered and rereleased, followed by his 2004 album, Primal Prayer, originally recorded under the name Phynix. In 2019, Posy Dixon’s documentary Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story came out, followed by a brief tour that brought Glenn-Copeland and his band, Indigo Rising, to MoMA PS1 that December. Despite the newfound popularity, in 2020, shortly after the pandemic lockdown began, Glenn-Copeland — the musician added the last part of his name in honor of American composer Aaron Copland, and he prefers to go by Glenn — and his wife, artist Elizabeth Paddon, were nearly homeless, resorting to a GoFundMe page to raise nearly $100,000.

This year, a projection of the seventy-seven-year-old musician is appearing on an eighty-four-foot diaphanous curtain hanging from the top of the Guggenheim Museum to nearly the base of the rotunda, like an enormous living tapestry. Glenn-Copeland, a Buddhist, performs the century-old spiritual “Deep River” along with additional a cappella vocalizations; he also plays percussion and keyboards in the film-portrait, titled Anthem. A live version of the song appears on his 2020 compilation, Transmissions; it has previously been sung by Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Johnny Mathis, Bobby Womack, and many others — Chevy Chase delivered an excerpt in the first Vacation movie, and Denyce Graves sang an operatic version at the Capitol memorial service for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Anthem is one of several projects in the Guggenheim series “Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda,” which has also featured works by Ragnar Kjartansson, Christian Nyampeta, and others as the institution reconsiders how to present shows to the public during the coronavirus crisis and beyond.

Tsang bathes Glenn-Copeland in a warm blue light as she depicts the performer in full view as well as in close-up, singing into an old-fashioned microphone, playing the piano, and holding out his hands as if trying to embrace us. The Guggenheim’s bays are empty except for occasional small vertical speakers, which broadcast different sections of the music, and in a few places the projection passes through the translucent curtain and can be seen against the back wall. (Musician Kelsey Lu and DJ, producer, and composer Asma Maroof collaborated on the piece, with assistant curator X Zhu-Nowell.) Thus, as you make your way up and down the Guggenheim’s twisting path, you get different audio and visual perspectives, like Glenn-Copeland is wrapping his arms around you with a spiritual lullaby: “Deep River / My home is over Jordan / Deep River, Lord / I want to cross over into campground,” he sings.

“When I first heard Glenn’s music, I remember thinking to myself, it sounded like an anthem. And then I was — I immediately corrected myself,” Tsang, who calls the installation a “sonic sculptural space,” says in a Guggenheim video. “Like, oh, what kind of — it’s not that I’m so patriotic. It’s just his voice was sort of conjuring a place I wish I lived. It was giving me this tonal quality of, like, I wish that there was an anthem of a place that we could all exist in. And that, for me, is the world that Glenn kind of puts out there as a possibility.”

Continuing through September 6, Anthem is accompanied by a documentary that concentrates on the intimate personal relationship between Glenn and Elizabeth, but it doesn’t feel organic in conjunction with the installation. Also on view at the Guggenheim are “Off the Record,” consisting of works by Sarah Charlesworth, Glenn Ligon, Lisa Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and others inspired by official documentation; “The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy,” featuring the Rochester native’s sculpture, holograms, and photography exploring the African diaspora; and “Away from the Easel: Jackson Pollock’s Mural,” anchored by Pollock’s 1943 Mural, his largest painting ever, commissioned for Peggy Guggenheim for her East Sixty-First St. townhouse.