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

KYLE MARSHALL: BAC / THE SHED

Kyle Marshall (right) has a busy June with Stellar at BAC (above) and two live performances at the Shed

Who: Kyle Marshall, Charmaine Warren
What: Dance film, virtual discussion, live performance
Where: BAC online, the Shed
When: BAC Zoom talk Wednesday, June 16, free with RSVP, 7:00; Shed performances Friday, June 25, 7:00, and Saturday, June 26, 8:00, free with RSVP
Why: In a May 2018 Movement Research Critical Correspondence talk with performer, historian, consultant, and dance writer Charmaine Warren, dancer, teacher, and choreographer Kyle Marshall said about working with Myssi Robinson, Mimi Gabriel, Nick Sciscione and Dare Ayorinde, “So it’s the five of us and we’ve known each other for a long time and so coming together, that sense of community I’m realizing is important to my work. The people in the room and that personal investment has to be there and that’s something I’m realizing going into new projects. But with Wage as opposed to Colored, which was a celebration of a black identity, I think with Wage I’m looking at white supremacy and capitalism and how it kind of fits within our bodies and how our bodies are victims of that cycle and perpetrators of that cycle. And how through making Colored I realized I had white supremacist thinking in my own body, about myself, about other people. And so this work came out of that thinking. I’m working with two male-identified dancers, two female-identified dancers, two black dancers, and two white dancers. I’m interested in how these binary things collide and the tension of these things. I’m curious about how bodies are seen and how bodies learn things, and how that history and learning comes into the room and also as a viewer, how do you see a performer as an archetype, as a stereotype. And also themselves because we’re both but we see each other as both and that kind of messy gray area, it’s a lot.”

Marshall continues to explore “that kind of messy gray area” in his Baryshnikov Arts Center commission Stellar, streaming for free through June 21. In the twenty-two-minute piece filmed at BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater, Marshall, Bree Breeden, and Ariana Speight, in colorful, artistically designed hoodies (by Malcolm-x Betts), float about the space, lifting their arms, kneeling on the ground, clapping, running in circles, and staring into an ominous darkness, set to an electronic score that incorporates jazz, Afrofuturism, and percussive and other sounds by Kwami Winfield. Filmed and edited by Tatyana Tenenbaum, who previously shot Holland Andrews’s meditative Museum of Calm at BAC, it’s a poignant piece that furthers what Marshall was talking about with Warren three years ago.

Marshall and Warren, who last July spoke about creating dance during the pandemic in a “Black Dance Stories” episode, will be back in conversation on June 16 at 7:00 in a BAC Zoom discussion about Stellar. Marshall, who released the dance film Hudson in January, is also part of the Shed’s “Open Call” exhibition, performing live at the Hudson Yards venue on June 25-26, presenting a “dance honoring the spirit of humanity and sacredness of gathering”; limited free tickets are available, and the first show will be livestreamed as well.

BLOOMSDAY ON BROADWAY AT 40

Who: Diana Abu-Jaber, Michael Chabon, Regina Porter, Colm Tóibín, Daphne Gaines, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, April Matthis, Scott Shepherd
What: Fortieth anniversary celebration of “Bloomsday on Broadway”
Where: Symphony Space online
When: Wednesday, June 16, $15, 7:00
Why: Symphony Space’s fortieth annual salute to James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Bloomsday on Broadway,” will take place virtually on the 117th anniversary of the day the novel is set, June 16, 1904. The online presentation begins with a discussion and audience Q&A between Diana Abu-Jaber, Michael Chabon, Regina Porter, and Colm Tóibín about the legacy of the work, followed by performances by Daphne Gaines, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, April Matthis, and Scott Shepherd from experimental immersive theater experts Elevator Repair Service (Gatz, Measure for Measure). As a bonus, there will be a link to clips from last year’s virtual show, which featured a vast array of celebrities reading sections of the tome. Produced in cooperation with Irish Arts Center, the event is directed by John Collins and dedicated to Symphony Space cofounder Isaiah Sheffer, who passed away in 2012 at the age of seventy-six. Last week I bumped into Shepherd on the street and he was excited about what they were planning for this edition of “Bloomsday on Broadway,” which only got me more pumped. You should be too. Tickets are $15, and the recording will be available through June 30.

STATE OF DARKNESS AT THE JOYCE

STATE OF DARKNESS
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
June 16-20, $500-$1,000 for one-to-four-seat pods
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org/state-darkness

Last October, the Joyce presented a digital version of Molissa Fenley’s State of Darkness, in which seven dancers performed Fenley’s thirty-five-minute solo onstage, the first shows to take place at the Joyce since the pandemic lockdown began, albeit without an audience. Now, from June 16 to 20, six of those dancers will be back onstage, playing to a socially distanced crowd organized in pods of one to four people who paid between $250 to $2,000 in a benefit for the theater. The lineup features Annique Roberts on June 16 at 8:00, Jared Brown on June 17 at 8:00, Sara Mearns on June 18 at 8:00, Lloyd Knight on June 19 at 2:00, Michael Trusnovec on June 19 at 8:00, and Cassandra Trenary on June 20 at 2:00. Each performance, set to Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”), will be followed by a Q&A with the dancer and Fenley, along with a Champagne toast.

In October, Joyce executive director Linda Shelton said, “It has been truly inspiring and uplifting to see the dancers and Molissa tackle State of Darkness during this difficult and unprecedented interruption to our lives. To me, this piece is about emerging from the darkness we have been coping with since March.” Fenley added, “In 1988, environmental, political, and social unrest inspired me to create State of Darkness. Today, a response to similar influences affecting us feels even more urgent and necessary.” With theaters back open and audiences allowed in, “urgent” and “necessary” only begin to tell the story.

RED BULL THEATER: VOLPONE, or THE FOX

Who: Red Bull Theater company
What: Livestreamed benefit reading of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, or The Fox
Where: Red Bull Theater website and Facebook Live
When: Monday, June 14, free with RSVP (donations accepted), 7:30 (available on demand through June 18 at 7:00)
Why: In December 2012, Red Bull Theater presented a stellar version of Ben Jonson’s classic 1606 English Renaissance satire, Volpone, or The Fox, at the Lucille Lortel Theater, which I called “a deliriously entertaining streamlined version . . . a frenetic farce fraught with fanciful flourishes.” Red Bull is bringing the play back for a live benefit reading on June 14 at 7:30, starring Grammy, Emmy, and Tony winner André De Shields as the title character and Hamish Linklater as Mosca, with Peter Francis James, Roberta Maxwell, Kristine Nielsen, Mary Testa, Jordan Boatman, Sofia Cheyenne, Franchelle Stewart Dorn, Clifton Duncan, Amy Jo Jackson, and Sam Morales. The reading, which will be available on demand through June 18 at 7:00, is directed by Jesse Berger, who explains, “Human greed and con artists appear to be timeless parts of human nature – damnable in life, but hilarious onstage! We had so much fun with this delicious satire in our 2012 production, and I am excited to share the material again in this new way with a wholly new stellar cast of great comic actors. Plus there’ll be fun new nips, tucks, and comic wrinkles by the brilliant Jeffrey Hatcher and some design surprises and delights from our terrific creative team. Oh – this and all of Red Bull’s online events are performed live. Nothing is prerecorded – And just like with live theater: Anything can happen. With this hilarious cast, I think that’s truer than ever.” The visual design is by John Arnone, with costumes by Rodrigo Muñoz (based on original designs by Clint Ramos), original music and sound by Scott Killian, and props by Faye Armon-Troncoso.

On June 17 at 7:30, Berger, members of the company, and scholar Jean E. Howard will participate in a live Bull Session discussion. “The play opens with the main character, Volpone, making a rapturous speech to his gold. Nearly every other character is also in thrall to this ‘dumb god,’ and to attain more and more wealth these Venetians are ready to prostitute their wives, disinherit their sons and defile their honor. The action of Volpone exposes and satirizes the actions of its avaricious characters, but it does so with dazzling ingenuity. The play is dominated by a magnificent con artist, Volpone, and his tricky servant Mosca. Together they dupe the well-off doctors, lawyers, and merchants of Venice into giving rich gifts to Volpone, who pretends to be near death, in the hope that one of them can become his heir,” Howard notes. “Volpone, more perhaps than any other Jonsonian comedy, takes risks in its concluding scenes, stretching comedy to its limit as the tricksters dangerously overreach themselves and slam up against the harsh strictures of Venetian law.”

BLOOMSDAY REVEL 2021

Who: Terry Donnelly, Fiona Walsh, Una Clancy, Ed Malone, Aidan Redmond, Fiona Walsh, Gina Costigan, Sarah Street, Alan Gogarty
What: In-person and livestreamed Bloomsday celebration
Where: Blooms Tavern, 208 East 58th St., and online
When: Sunday, June 13, $45, 3:00
Why: For nearly one hundred years, people have been celebrating Bloomsday, when James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place, June 16, 1904. Yes, the seven-hundred-plus-page novel about Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus is set during one day in Dublin. On Sunday, June 13, at 3:00, Origin Theatre Company is presenting its eighth annual “Bloomsday Revel,” happening both live at Blooms Tavern on East Fifty-Eighth St. as well as online. The socially distanced afternoon features dramatic readings by such New York-based Irish actors as Terry Donnelly, Fiona Walsh, Una Clancy, Ed Malone, Aidan Redmond, Fiona Walsh, Gina Costigan, and Sarah Street, musical interludes from Alan Gogarty, and a juried costume contest. Tickets for the in-person show, cocurated by Paula Nance and Michael Mellamphy, are $45 and include Bloomsday-inspired hors d’oeuvres and an open bar. “Luckily we didn’t miss a year in 2020,” new Origin artistic director Mellamphy said in a statement. “We were fully virtual last year, in a program packed with great performances and heartfelt messages. But this year we are creating an all-new hybrid that celebrates the many ways we share experiences like this unique and important literary holiday. James Joyce after all was all about setting new rules in art. . . . We’re immensely pleased to continue that tradition in 2021.”

GLOBAL PILLOW: A VIRTUAL GALA SUPPORTING JACOB’S PILLOW

Who: Jacob’s Pillow
What: Virtual gala and dance party
Where: Jacob’s Pillow online and Zoom
When: Saturday, June 12, free with RSVP, 7:00 (available through June 19 at 7:00)
Why: Evolving from “Tea Lecture Demonstrations” begun in 1933 by Ted Shawn’s Men Dancers on a farm in Becket, Massachusetts, Jacob’s Pillow developed into one of the most important places for dance in the world. The annual gala is being held virtually on June 12 at 7:00, with performances by New Zealand’s Black Grace, England’s Candoco Dance Company, Brazil’s Companhia Urbana de Dança, Senegal’s Germaine Acogny, Hong Kong’s Hong Kong Ballet, the Netherlands’ Nederlands Dans Theater, India’s Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, and France’s Paris Opera Ballet in addition to a premiere from 2021 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award winner Dormeshia. The gala, which will be available on demand through June 19 at 7:00, will be followed by a live Zoom dance party at about 8:20 hosted by Christal Brown and DJ DP One. Donations will be accepted to continue the Pillow’s mission and to renovate the Ted Shawn Theatre; sadly, the Doris Duke Theatre was destroyed in a fire in November. Part of the proceeds will also go to the Ohketeau Cultural Center in Ashfield.

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX: SMALL AXE

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe consists of five powerful stories of racism and harassment of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s (photo courtesy BBC One)

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center / Walter Reade Theater
144 / 165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
June 11 – August 26, $10-$15
www.filmlinc.org

One of the joys of fall, and the signal that the summer blockbuster movie blitz is over, is the New York Film Festival. Since 1963, the NYFF has been presenting a wide range of works from around the world, often with postscreening discussions with members of the cast and crew. The 2020 edition was completely virtual because of the pandemic lockdown, so Film at Lincoln Center (FLSC) is bringing much of the festival back with “Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux,” featuring nearly three dozen films now being shown the way they’re supposed to be seen, on large screens at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and the Walter Reade Theater. Running June 11 to August 26, “NYFF58 Redux” gets under way with two weeks of Steve McQueen’s mammoth five-part epic about West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s through the 1980s, Small Axe, which was actually made for television; it screens with a newly recorded interview with McQueen, who started as an experimental filmmaker and has made such previous films as Hunger, Twelve Years a Slave, and Shame, and FLSC director of programming Denis Lim.

The multi-award-winning anthology, which premiered on BBC One in the UK and Amazon in the US, begins with Mangrove (June 11-17), the true story of Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes) and the Mangrove Nine, Trinidadian immigrants who were harassed mercilessly by Notting Hill police for establishing a peaceful community at Crichlow’s Mangrove café. The second film, one of the best of 2020, is the exhilarating Lovers Rock (June 11-24), a seventy-minute reggae house party in London in 1980, where a group of men and women dance, sing, and fall in love in a cramped space to such songs as Dennis Bovell’s “Silly Games.” (If you’re wondering who the lone old man is, it’s Bovell himself, making a cameo.) But even as Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and Franklyn (Micheal Ward) hit if off, the spectre of racism is not far away. Intimately photographed by Shabier Kirchner, Lovers Rock is an unforgettable experience.

In Red, White and Blue (June 11-17), John Boyega stars as the real-life Leroy Logan, a frustrated West Indian man who joins the London Metropolitan Police department, hoping to change its fundamental racism from the inside, much to the chagrin of his father (Steve Toussaint). Boyega is riveting as Logan discovers that achieving his goal is going to be a lot harder than he ever imagined. Sheyi Cole makes his film debut in the true story Alex Wheatle (June 12-16) as the title character, a teenager caught in England’s discriminatory social services structure and then arrested for participating in the 1981 Brixton uprising, a protest against poor socioeconomic conditions for the African-Caribbean community that included “Bloody Saturday.” The remarkable anthology concludes with Education (June 11-17), an hourlong exploration of institutionalized segregation in the British school system through the eyes of Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy), who is sent to a “special” school where West Indians are purposely kept undereducated, their potentials squashed early in life. A grand achievement by a master filmmaker, Small Axe is no mere historical document of what happened in London decades ago; it is a powerful examination of systemic racism and anti-immigrant biases that is still alive and well in the twenty-first century, especially here in America.

“Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” continues through August with such other 2020 film festival favorites as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, C. W. Winter’s The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), Eugène Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats, Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento’s The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, an epic conversation between Welles and Dennis Hopper.