twi-ny talks

TWI-NY TALK: FRANÇOIS PAYARD ON MACARON DAY

Master chef François Payard is once again spearheading Macaron Day in New York City

MACARON DAY 2012
Multiple locations
Tuesday, March 20, one free macaron per person at each location
www.macarondaynyc.com

Held in conjunction with Jour du Macaron in Paris, which is now in its seventh year, the third annual Macaron Day in New York City celebrates all things macaron, the meringue-based delicacy that dates back to Catherine de’Medici’s wedding in 1533. Not to be confused with the glutinous mass of stickiness known as macaroons that come out every Passover, macarons are small, round, delicate, and colorful dessert cookies that feature crisp, airy almond flour, egg, and sugar shells surrounding such ganache flavors as chocolate, vanilla, pistachio, lemon, almond, salted caramel, coconut, and coffee as well as red velvet, Nutella, yuzu, s’more, tahini sesame, pumpkin spice latte, dark chocolate with cocoa nibs, dulce de leche, candied bacon with maple cream cheese, smoked salmon with dill and fruit coulis, prune Armagnac orange, cinnamon pistachio with Morello cherries, foie gras with fig and speck, and other concoctions. High-quality macarons generally run between $2.25 and $2.75 apiece, although you can find good ones for $1.50 as well as extraordinary larger and denser ones for as much as $6 (at La Maison du Chocolat).

New York’s Macaron Day is the brainchild of award-winning Nice-born third-generation pastry chef François Payard, who operated his own highly acclaimed restaurant on Lexington Ave. for twelve years and now has a pair of more casual FPB (François Payard Bakery) spots, one on West Houston St., the other on Murray St. Fifteen patisseries, including FPB, are participating in Macaron Day this year. Start by visiting any one of them, tell them you are there for Macaron Day, and receive one free macaron, a punch card, and a sticker (no punch card or sticker at Macaron Café). Visit the others to sample more free macarons and collect stickers for the card (one macaron and sticker per location). Once filled with twelve different stickers, the card is good for a free six-piece gift box of Payard macarons at FPB. Chef Payard recently shared with us what makes macarons so special.

twi-ny: What is the single most important element in creating the perfect macaron?

François Payard:The perfect macaron should be crunchy yet be soft in the center. The ganache filling should be the dominant flavor. The almond flavor in the shell also needs to come out. It is very important to use a high-quality almond flour so the almond flavor comes through in the macaron shell.

twi-ny: What’s the easiest way to make a lousy one?

François Payard:The easiest way to make a bad macaron is to have a chewy shell or an overcooked shell that dries out the macaron.

twi-ny: Over the last few years, New York City has gone cupcake crazy, there’s a building donut fanaticism, and now macarons have entered the dessert frenzy. Where do you see macarons fitting in this triumvirate? Do you think the growing love affair with macarons will be a long-lasting one or a fad?

François Payard: I think macarons will be long lasting. When people are tired of the sweet macarons, they can discover how versatile they really are. You can have sweet or savory macarons. Many pastry chefs are now making savory ones. Macarons will be long lasting because they are bite size and people don’t feel as guilty eating one compared to a large cupcake or donut. You can eat a few and not feel as guilty.

Macarons are made fresh daily at such bakeries as Mille-feuille in the Village (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: What is the correct serving size for macarons? While it would be possible to sit down and eat five or six (or more) at a time, that could get rather expensive.

François Payard: I think for everyone two or three is enough. Only if you want to taste and compare should you try more, but only eat half of each. Two macarons are perfect along with a cup of coffee or afternoon tea instead of a pastry.

twi-ny: Is there a competition between patisseries such as FPB and the many dessert trucks that are now hitting the streets of the city?

François Payard: I think New York is big enough for everyone. People need to be open-minded. Food trucks cannot be in the same place every day, so it is not as steady a business.

twi-ny: Do you think the food trucks are good or bad for business in general?

François Payard: The trucks encourage creativity among pastry chefs. They allow people who are starting out to test the market.

More than a dozen New York City bakeries are participating in Macaron Day, including both locations of François Payard Bakery, one on West Houston and the other on Murray, as well as at Bisousciao on Stanton, Bosie Tea Parlor on Morton, Bouchon Bakery in Rockefeller Plaza and the Time Warner Center, Butterfield Market on Lexington, Cannelle Patisserie in Queens, Chantilly Patisserie in Bronxville, Desserts by Michael Allen at the Fresh Fanatic Organic Market on Park, Dominique Ansel Bakery on Spring, Épicerie Boulud on Broadway, FC Chocolate Bar at the Plaza, La Maison du Chocolat at Rock Center and on Madison Ave. and Wall St., Macaron Café on West 36th St. and on Madison Ave., Macaron Parlour on St. Marks, Mad-Mac at Bernardaud on Park, and Mille-Feuille Bakery and Café on La Guardia Pl., with ten to fifteen percent of macaron sales going to City Harvest.

GEOFF DYER ON TARKOVSKY, CINEMA, AND LIFE: THE MIRROR

Geoff Dyer will discuss his obsession with Andrei Tarkovsky in a special program at the Museum of the Moving Image that includes a screening of the Russian master’s MIRROR

SEE IT BIG! THE MIRROR (ZERKALO) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, March 11, free with museum admission, 3:00 & 6:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.geoffdyer.com

“Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert.” So says Andrei Tarkovsky’s dream-filled, surreal masterpiece The Mirror, which features long scenes with little or no dialogue. Tarkovsky turns the mirror on himself and his childhood to tell the fragmented and disjointed story of WWII-era Russia through his own personal experiences with his family. Tarkovsky was obsessed with film as art, and this nonlinear film is his poetic masterpiece; he even includes his father’s poems read over shots that are crafted as if paintings. Many of the actors play several roles; have fun trying to figure out who is who and what exactly is going on at any one moment. The Mirror is screening on March 11 at 6:00 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the special program “Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky, Cinema, and Life” and the ongoing “See It Big!” series and will be introduced by award-winning author Dyer, whose latest nonfiction tome is Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Pantheon, February 21, $24), an obsessively detailed examination of Tarkovsky’s Stalker in which he makes it very clear that the Russian filmmaker’s work must be seen on the big screen. At 3:00, Dyer will participate in a conversation with the museum’s chief curator, David Schwartz. For more on Dyer and his other local appearances, check out our twi-ny talk with him, which you can find here.

TWI-NY TALK: CANDIDATE

Brooklyn-based Candidate will be celebrating Valentine’s Day at Mercury Lounge

Tuesday, February 14, Mercury Lounge, $10, 9:30
Monday, February 27, Spike Hill, free, 8:00
www.candidatesound.com

Brooklyn-based trio Candidate embraces four decades of American and British rock and roll and wraps it up in a sweet little twenty-first-century indie package. Guitarists Laurence Adams and Cedric Sparkman, who hail from Hazard, Kentucky, bonded over a Smiths album and eventually went on to form the Poor Richards. They soon added Cincinnati native Jason Matuskiewicz, who learned the bass for their new trio, Varsovia. The band changed its name to Candidate and played its first show ever in their original hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, in November 2010, followed seven months later by the release of its debut disc, A New Life, a delightful collection of pop hooks that includes such infectious songs as “I’d Come Running” and “Never Get Enough.”

Not to be confused with the UK band of the same name, Candidate then moved to Brooklyn, where it is currently putting the finishing touches on its sophomore effort, which features a dramatic leap forward on such powerful tunes as “April Again,” “Brutal,” and the horn-laden “NYC or Bust,” on which Sparkman declares, “One day I will die / and wish I’d given it a try / I will not just survive / I will thrive / So as fast as I can run / You will see me, here I come.” Hot on the heels of its February 3 appearance at the Cameo Gallery, Candidate is coming to Mercury Lounge on Valentine’s Day, playing with Brother Reverend, followed by a free gig at Spike Hill on February 27 with I Anthem, American Restless, and the Matt Albeck Group. Matuskiewicz, who handles much of the band’s blogging, recently discussed Brooklyn, bromance, earboners, and more in our latest twi-ny talk.

twi-ny: You recently moved from Lexington, Kentucky, to Brooklyn. How is the Borough of Kings treating you?

Candidate: We love it!!! Laurence and I live on the outskirts, near the Wastes, at the border of Midgar and Megaton. So, we get to lug our gear around after forever-long train rides on the Killer L, hoping its robot overlords are not particularly displeased with humanity that day — if its running at all. Our building was billed as containing “artist’s lofts,” but they forgot to append “with forever leaking ceilings” to their description of these fine abodes. And yet, with all that being true, it is still incredible to be here. We’ve met a lot of really great people, ridiculously talented musicians, and gotten a drummer [Chris Infusino] who is a real live music professional.

twi-ny: You played your second New York City gig ever at Cameo Gallery in Brooklyn on February 3 as part of Amy Grimm’s Whatever Blog Party. How did that come about?

Candidate: Superproducer (and genius) Justin Craig played a DJ set with his cohort, Jesse Elliott, both of rock supergroup These United States, while we were recording our new album. He introduced us to Amy at the show. After that we followed up with her with what I am sure was a super-professional introduction that probably didn’t contain any quotes along the lines of “if after listening to this you wonder how it is possible to pee on yourself and have a boner at the same time, please know that it is because the source of these jams is real-life heartbreak, by far the greatest source of earboners in the history of the world.”

Candidate will break out their new songs at a pair of upcoming local shows

twi-ny: Did the show live up to that hard-to-top introduction?

Candidate: The show was incredible. Big shout-out to the Yoni Gordon Orchestra, Elliot and the Ghost, and Howth, all of whom put on a great show.

Our new album is much more lush in terms of production than the first one, so for the live setting the new songs were stripped down and much more raw than their recorded counterparts. I’m told by the aforementioned genius, Justin Craig, that the crowd was feeling us, but I felt as if there was some confusion in the audience. Here is my impression of their internal monologue: “Uhm. Why are these dudes throwing their instruments around, and why is their singer running around like a crazed maniac, and what are these ‘feelings’ and these ‘emotions’ they seem to exude? Why, I don’t think these songs are winking at me at all!!! Swoon.” So, we were a little bit more sloppy than normal, but full of energy.

twi-ny: As you mentioned, your upcoming record is indeed more lush, with a bigger, broader sound than A New Life. Craig played on the previous album, but now he’s behind the boards. What were the recording sessions like?

Candidate: Despite being behind the boards, Justin played more parts on the new record than the last one. The sessions were great. We recorded the album at Translator Audio in Park Slope. It was engineered by Andrew Gerhan, who also plays in the Lupine Chorale Society, with Adam Arcuragi — who also happens to be pretty great. The people at Translator were very helpful. So, I want to thank them for that.

As you can tell from the previous answer, I have mixed feelings about Mr. Craig’s abilities. I jest. He’s amazing. The sessions followed a pretty traditional method of recording. Drums first, then bass, then guitar, keyboard, found sounds, and vocal overdubs from my dog, Lu-Lu. And of course, no song is complete until something is pitch shifted. Justin brought a lot of ideas to the songs. They were pretty uniformly great ideas. Beware: Trite musical comparison ahead. I would liken Justin’s role to that of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’s role in the production of U2 albums. He had a very large part in shaping the sound of the album.

Allow me to digress a bit. With the last one, we were very purposefully 100% independent, and not at all self-righteous about it. Just kidding; we were a tiny bit self-righteous about it. We were enamored with the idea that, given the reach of the internet and what have you, it is viable to be totally independent and do everything yourself. It isn’t. What you wind up doing is creating an organizational structure that mimics a label, which you pay for out of pocket, or you neglect integral functions because you just don’t have enough time to do everything. For instance, Laurence and I have been planning on doing a self-administered college radio campaign for a while. There is, however, no way for us to update our list of program directors that will not take about twenty hours. Seriously. So, we’re probably more proud than we should be with what we’ve managed to do with no publicist, no label, nothing but ourselves. But we’re ready to move on from that. We’ve recently signed on some licensing reps, so if we can get some of that sweet, sweet corporate cash, we’ll put that to some good, tirelessly self-promotional enterprise. We’ve also been talking to some labels about the album a bit. Plus, we’ve sent off some exemplar tracks to labels that still accept unsolicited demos. (Labels that still do this, thank you for not being stuck-up douches.) So, we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping sooner than later, but I am prepared to exercise a novel virtue — patience.

twi-ny: You’ll be at Mercury Lounge on Valentine’s Day, promising “an evening of romance and bromance.” Got anything special planned for that?

Candidate: Anytime the fellas in Candidate get together, there is more than enough bromance to go around. The excellent folks in Brother Reverend are giving away a special limited edition collector’s item in the form a fantastic T-shirt to commemorate the occasion. Plus, our first album, A New Life, is “pay what you want” on Bandcamp until after the show — meaning that it is essentially free, if you want it to be. We’re also playing a bunch of the new songs, which is always very exciting.

TWI-NY TALK: DAN EFRAM — BRIAN ENO’S “HERE COME THE WARM JETS” LIVE

Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette St.
Sunday, January 8, $15, 9:30
212-967-7555
www.joespub.com
www.facebook.com

Brian Eno might be best known today for such ambient albums as Music for Films and Music for Airports and his production work for a diverse range of artists (U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Coldplay), but in the 1970s he made a series of seminal records that served as a kind of bridge between glam and prog rock and avant and experimental pop. After three years as a member of Roxy Music, Eno released the solo LPs Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science, all within a remarkable four-year period. On January 8 at Joe’s Pub, a group of musicians will gather together to pay tribute to Here Come the Warm Jets by doing something that Eno never did: Play every song from the album live. Initiated by recording engineer Rob Christiansen, produced by Dan Efram, and hosted by WNYC’s John Schaefer, the event features an all-star band consisting of Vernon Reid, Travis Morrison, Sohrab Habibion, Paul Duncan, Joan Wasser, Dom Cipolla, and others re-creating Eno’s masterpiece, which was recorded with such guest musicians as Robert Fripp, Chris Spedding, Phil Manzanera, John Whetton, and Andy Mackay. The scorching guitars of “Baby’s on Fire” and “Blank Frank,” the electronic fun of “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch” and “Driving Me Backwards,” and the sweet harmonies of “Cindy Tells Me” and “Some of Them Are Old” should fill Joe’s Pub with beautiful sounds, but don’t look for important messages in the lyrics, about which Eno, who came up with the words via scatlike nonsense syllables, has said, “Essentially all these songs have no meaning that I invested in them.” In preparation for what should be a great night, we’ve been listening to Here Come the Warm Jets repeatedly, just as we did in our college years, taking us back and lifting us away all over again. Efram, the founder and president of Tractor Beam and an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, also has been having a blast with the record, as evidenced by this twi-ny talk.

twi-ny: What kind of personal associations do Here Come the Warm Jets and Brian Eno have for you?

Dan Efram: My first introduction to Eno was through his production work and only then became aware of his ambient compositions — à la Music for Airports and Music for Films. It was only when I started studying audio engineering myself that some of my musician friends turned me on to Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain, and Another Green World. Finding out that he had these extremely broad sensibilities was fascinating — with Warm Jets perhaps the most whimsical ear candy that I had come across.

twi-ny: So many amazing musicians played on the original record; how did you come up with the lineup that will be at Joe’s Pub? How closely will they be re-creating HCTWJ?

Dan Efram: Rob Christiansen, the musical director and a terrific, knowledgeable musician and engineer in his own right, has done a great job in trying to analyze the sounds of the original album. He’s taken great pains in order to figure out the sounds on the album, when the band should experiment and when to replicate. This balance is fun to watch!

We chose our lineup with the goal to represent the many different generations of musicians that are hardcore fans of the album and wanted to celebrate this album in the best spirit possible. As a coincidence, we realized that its fortieth anniversary was nearing and that we could help celebrate its legacy by giving fans this unique chance to experience it for themselves in a live setting. We can only hope that those in attendance get as much of a kick out of listening to it live as the musicians will have performing it for them.

twi-ny: Are there other classic albums, either by Eno or other artists, that you might want to tackle next?

Dan Efram: In early 2011, I was fortunate to produce Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers album live with musical director Chris Stamey, which really introduced me to the idea that some of these wonderful albums could have a life beyond their vinyl grooves, that people really wanted to experience some of these adventurous albums live — if the program was approached with the correct spirit. If all goes well on Sunday, we are hoping to try to perform Here Come the Warm Jets in selected markets in North America and Europe in 2013. With some good fortune, we have a shot.

TWI-NY TALK: GRINGO STAR

Gringo Star rocks out at Fontana’s at the 2010 CMJ Music Marathon (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Thursday, December 1, Mercury Lounge, 217 East Houston St., $10-$12, 7:30
Saturday, December 3, Cameo Gallery, 93 North Sixth St., $8, 8:00
www.gringostar.net

On the second song on their sophomore album, Count Yer Lucky Stars (Gigantic Music, October 2011), Atlanta band Gringo Star proclaims, “You want it,” followed on the next tune by “You got it.” Originally known as A Fir-Ju-Well, Pete DeLorenzo and brothers Pete and Nicholas Furgiuele have been delivering great music since 2001. They added Matt McCalvin and became Gringo Star in 2007, and the next year their self-released debut, All Y’all (My Anxious Mouth, November 2008), was making a major impact on the indie music scene. Their 2009 tour of Europe was captured in Justin Malone’s 2011 documentary Hurry Up and Wait, and the band, with Chris Kaufmann replacing McCalvin, are back on the road again, supporting Count Yer Lucky Stars, an infectious collection of such 1950s- and ’60s-infused nuggets as “Shadow,” “Beatnik Angel Georgie,” “Jessica,” and “Light in the Sky,” featuring lilting harmonies, jangling guitars, and classic pop melodies. Gringo Star will be playing Mercury Lounge on December 1 with J. Roddy Walston & the Business and Gunfight and Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg on December 3 with Hammer No More the Fingers and Bird Hand. With their latest tour winding down, Nick took some time to answer some questions about the past, present, and future of the band.

twi-ny: It’s been three years between the initial release of All Y’all and Count Yer Lucky Stars. Why so much time between records?

Gringo Star: The reason we took three years to follow up All Y’all was mostly because we were so busy touring and taking opportunities that our “self-release” of that album created that we didn’t have a chance to get back in the studio. We just kept getting offered tours. We got to go to the UK and Europe eight times during those years, supporting Best Coast, …and You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Wavves, Black Lips, as well as doing our own headlining dates. Then this German label, Cargo Records, signed us to put out All Y’all in Europe, so the album’s life got extended another year, and we went back to tour on it again. It was an amazing time, but we were so busy that we didn’t have a chance to stop and record. When we finally got back from that last Best Coast tour, we pretty much immediately went into preproduction with producer Ben Allen again and rehearsing/refining the new stuff.

twi-ny: ForLucky Stars, did you set out to make something consciously different from All Y’all ?

Gringo Star: When we started recording CYLS it wasn’t so much making something consciously different from All Y’all as it was to just create the greatest album ever made.

You can count yer lucky stars if you get to see Gringo Star this week at Mercury Lounge and Cameo Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: Well, you’ve certainly made a damn fine record. Early in Hurry Up and Wait, Matt McCalvin says that he hopes that the documentary will open a lot of doors for the band. What kind of impact has the film had on your career?

Gringo Star: We never really had expectations for how the documentary would affect our “career.” The Malone Pictures guys who made it we had never met until a couple weeks before we did the tour, and they saw us play in Dallas and were looking for the next documentary they were gonna do and just decided we were it. They really dug what we were doing and just called us up a few weeks before the tour and asked if we would mind them coming and filming.

twi-ny: What was it like being followed around by a camera night and day, capturing every warts-and-all moment, including a lot of outdoor tooth-brushing?

Gringo Star: It was a really fun time. You know, it’s always kinda weird to see yourself, on camera, talking about a bunch of dumb shit, walking around, like, “Oh . . . I look like THAT, or “I sound like THAT,” but it’s kind of cool to have a sliver of that time recorded. Those were some amazing shows, and we had a blast . . . outdoor teeth-brushing, bench-sleeping, armed robberies, and all. People that have seen the movie usually seem to react to us and our music in an even more positive way, I think, because they had some insight into the band and us as people. We played the premiere at the USA Film Festival [this past April], after they showed the movie to a sold-out theater, and it was crazy how much people were into us. They were so excited by the band and the songs. It was total uproar. Then after it was a little strange when random folks we’ve never met were calling us by first name.

twi-ny: Speaking again of playing, you, Pete, Pete, and Chris are known for your relentless touring and energetic live shows. Does it ever get overwhelming?

Gringo Star: Life can get overwhelming playing two hundred shows a year, not playing any shows a year, driving in traffic, wrecking your car, stuck at some dead-end job, loading and unloading the van, doing homework, studying for tests, or whatever if you let it. We love playing shows and staying busy playing and recording music that we love and try to roll with the punches. . . . Sometimes it does get a little overwhelming, especially in California, when it’s like, “Do I go with the Sour Diesel? Or Grand Daddy Purp? Or the Earwax? OK, I’ll take them all.”

twi-ny: Earlier this year, we asked your fellow Atlanta band Today the Moon, Tomorrow the Sun what was in the water down there that has led to so many great new bands over the last few years, including Deerhunter, Black Lips, and you, and they thought that it was because the water was laced with PBR. What do you think it might be?

Gringo Star: PBR is the worst. Clearly it’s the grits and cotton fields . . . and the gospel according to Lightnin’ Ray Jackson that all fine southern boys are brought up on.

TWI-NY TALK: ROBERT BATTLE

New Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director Robert Battle (c.) poses with dancers he has invited to join the company (photo by Andrew Eccles)

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
November 30 – January 1, $25-$150
212-581-1212
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

Founded in 1958, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater had only two artistic directors over the course of its first fifty-two years, beginning with Ailey himself, who led the company until his death from AIDS in 1989, followed by Judith Jamison, who continued in the role through this summer, when in July she named her successor, Robert Battle. The thirty-eight-year-old Miami native has had a long affiliation with AAADT, having been an artist-in-residence since 1999, and he has had several works performed by the company, including “The Hunt,” “In/Side,” and “Love Stories,” a collaboration with Jamison and Rennie Harris.

Battle, who studied at Juilliard, danced with Parsons Dance Company, started his own group, Battleworks Dance Company, and was named a “Master of African American Choreography” by the Kennedy Center in 2005, is presenting his inaugural City Center season as AAADT artistic director from November 30 through January 1. The annual five-week event will feature Paul Taylor’s “Arden Court” (in his Ailey debut), Ohad Naharin’s interactive “Minus 16,” Jamison’s “Forgotten Time,” the world premiere of Harris’s AIDS-related “Home,” new productions of Joyce Trisler’s “Journey” and Alvin Ailey’s “Streams,” and several pieces by Battle, most notably the Ailey premiere of “Takademe.” Select performances of a number of works will include live music by such special guests as John Legend, Naren Budhkar, the Knights, and others. With the City Center season just a few weeks away, Battle talked with twi-ny about legacy, responsibility, and the precipice of discovery.

twi-ny: You are now only the third artistic director in the history of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. What is your greatest fear?

Robert Battle: I think that’s an unknown. Fear is not for me something that I turn on and off. Anybody, especially an artist, always has a healthy dose of fear mixed with optimism, because those two opposing forces is what creates energy, the energy that is the creative force. So I think it’s a healthy mixture of both of those things.

twi-ny: What are you looking forward to the most?

Robert Battle: I’m looking forward to watching and reveling at the dancers and the delights of the work that is coming in to the repertory and watching and being a part of taking the company into the future. That’s what I look forward to the most.

twi-ny: How did you go about selecting and grouping the dances for this year’s City Center season, which includes the company premiere of your own “Takademe”? Were you looking for an overriding theme?

Robert Battle has taken over the reins of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from Judith Jamison (photo by Andrew Eccles)

Robert Battle: Yes, the overriding theme is past, present, and future. We’re a repertory company — in a way, we’re a repository for great modern dance works — so, of course, looking back at Mr. Ailey’s work, Joyce Trisler’s “Journey,” created in 1958, all of these works are part of looking back and new productions of those works. Being in the present, looking at Rennie Harris’s work and his commission [“Home”] — he’s a hip-hop choreographer, so he uses hip-hop as his language. That is a part of the present; hip-hop is on everybody’s mind, radio, whatever it may be, but dealing with hip-hop to tell the stories of people who are surviving and thriving with HIV/AIDS is a wonderful tribute because it’s about the celebration of life. And then looking at works to me that echo the future, like Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16,” which breaks the fourth wall: It invites the audience onto the stage, it has audience participation, it has a whole new way of moving for the dancers. So in that way we’re looking at the future. So we’re looking at all three of those things.

twi-ny: Who are some of the new choreographers you’d like to bring into the extended Ailey family?

Robert Battle: Aha — that, I cannot say [laughs], with deference to all choreographers who may want to be a part of this. I can’t just list one or two, but I really want the work to express the complexity of the world, society. It should be a reflection of that, so that you have choreographers of different races and backgrounds and approaches and themes bringing their voice to our voice. That’s what Mr. Ailey wanted, what Ms. Jamison continued, and what I will continue, to look far and wide, and to keep the audience and the dancers on that precipice of discovery.

twi-ny: With that in mind, how are you balancing the Ailey tradition with, perhaps, the urge to bust things wide open and initiate potential change under your leadership?

Robert Battle: I think that question could have a period at the end. That is what I am doing, balancing the traditional with the sometimes nontraditional. I think the notion of doing something without it having some connection to what is already here is not something I’m interested in. I’m really interested in blending the two. And that’s because this is a repertory company; that’s why I’m able to do that. If it’s one choreographer’s work, it’s harder to do that, but when you’re choosing works from many different choreographers in one season you get the sense of that yin and yang, that stretching forward of busting the whole thing wide open but yet keeping the traditional so that the company stays rooted. That’s why it began in the first place; celebrating the African American tradition and culture and experience in this country but also expanding on that idea is what I’m trying to do.

TWI-NY TALK: GUY MADDIN

Eclectic Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin will be taking part in a pair of special Performa 11 presentations on Friday and Saturday

Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed
November 18-19, Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St., $25-$30, 7:00 & 9:00
www.11.performa-arts.org/event

“The Power of a Continuity-Free Cinema”
Saturday, November 19, Performa Hub, 233 Mott St., $10, 3:00
www.11.performa-arts.org/event

During a career that has now reached a quarter of a century, iconoclastic Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has made ten feature films and more than two dozen shorts, many of them harkening back to the early days of silent black-and-white cinema. His eclectic tales often blend fact with fiction, the past with the present (and the future), as evidenced in such critical successes as Careful (1992), The Heart of the World (2000), and My Winnipeg (2007). He has also expanded the notion of cinema with such works as Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), which was initially shown in ten segments screening at individual stations, and Brand upon the Brain! A Remembrance in 12 Chapters (2006), which debuted with live music and narration. For Performa 11, Maddin is going back to his first feature film, 1988’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital, adding a new score by Matthew Patton that will be performed live by an Icelandic supergroup, electronics engineer Paul Corley, and Seattle-based collective Aono Jikken Ensemble, along with new narration sung and spoken by Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir. The exciting program takes place at the Walter Reade Theater on November 18-19, directed by Maddin, who will also be teaching the film class “The Power of a Continuity-Free Cinema” on Saturday afternoon. We corresponded with Maddin via e-mail as he prepared to participate in Performa 11.

twi-ny: What made you want to revisit your first film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, for Performa 11?

Guy Maddin I thought, of all the films of mine that might actually thematically justify a revisiting from the director (something that truly ought not to be done under almost any circumstances!), then this was the title. The movie, if it’s about anything, seems to play with the Icelandic proclivity for making personal lives into timeless myths. I chose to use the project to help us timid Canadians take up the task of doing the same thing for our smaller-than-life selves. There’s a serious national myth debt in Canada. Back in 1988, when I completed the movie, I tried to right that wrong by myself, using the great vocabularies of early Hollywood dream factories and the sassitudes of the ancient Icelandic sagas. We have a wondrous and perverted history up here in Canada, but our temperament is too weak, our storytelling flare too pallid, to impart to these stories the bigger-than-life lineaments required to elevate a person or incident to mythic dimensions. Americans can do this stuff in their sleep, so you might be puzzled to hear of a country struggling with such things.

Anyway, myths are the product of a long process of telling and retelling, word-of-mouth burnishings into canonical permanence that can take decades, centuries, or even millennia to complete. I wanted to do it overnight, using artificial means aided by methods borrowed from Hollywood, and now, twenty-three years later, I get to artificially update this saga of Icelanders struggling as delirious pioneers in the Canadian north by speed-composting twenty-three years’ worth of word-of-mouth retellings all in one night at Lincoln Center. I feel a bit like a mad scientist, but with my Petri dishes brimming with narrative gelatins instead of the usual sneeze-cultures. It’s crazy. If I’d tackled any other movie of mine, I’d simply be trying to reduce the humiliations produced by a dated filmography, but here I can use this mad process of allowing the stories to evolve in ways beyond my control to actually increase my humiliation!

Guy Maddin will be reframing his feature-length debut at Lincoln Center as part of Performa 11 (photo courtesy Guy Maddin)

twi-ny: How did you go about selecting the diverse range of musicians for this event?

Guy Maddin: Some of these were people located by Matthew Patton, the composer originally commissioned to create the new score. He’s a fervid Icelandophile and collected the phone numbers of some of the most talented musicians in that country. Incredible, unearthly, and eerie music is their coin of the realm. One gets the feeling their music would play the same backward as forward, that they waft out melodic palindromes on warm breezes of helium, that the actual source of these strains is the elf king’s adamantine face fixed and hidden somewhere in the Icelandic lava canyons. The other musicians are my friends from the Seattle-based Aono Jikken Ensemble, who performed for my Brand upon the Brain show that I mounted here in New York a few years ago. I love these equally mysterious alchemists. I have no idea how they even make some of the sounds they send out into the theater, although the audience will be able to watch them and perhaps divine for themselves.

I love making the component parts of a film visible to the public. It’s boredom insurance. I’m not thrilled about the vivisection of animals, but of films — I’m all for it!

twi-ny: We have to say that we’re for it too. That’s part of the reason why we’ll be attending the class you’ll be leading on Saturday afternoon, “The Power of a Continuity-Free Cinema.” What can people expect from that class? And what exactly is “Continuity-Free Cinema”?

Guy Maddin: Good question. I’ll be bluffing my way through that class. I guess I plucked the title out of my past, the early days of my career when everyone on set was a continuity expert. It drove me nuts when everyone pointed out to me, or refused to perform because of, the continuity errors I was making. I grew to hate these literal-minded people and to love bad continuity. No one really utters this vilest of c-words anymore. Terrence Malick hasn’t had two consecutive shots cut to continuity in his entire career. It’s gone. Maybe I’ll just show Tree of Life on DVD and dismiss the class when the credits roll. Maybe I’ll show some early examples of flagrant discontinuity from film history and try to share with my students the gooseflesh these incidents produce.

twi-ny: Sounds like it should be fun. Much of your work is not only about cinema itself but the physical and psychological experience involved with watching and listening to a film. With more and more people watching movies on computers and tiny handheld devices, is cinema as we knew it, as Peter Greenaway has announced, dead?

Guy Maddin: Nah, there’s still no better first date than a movie in a theater with popcorn. And we’ll always need first dates, or something like them. On a second date couples can meet up in some motel and watch my stuff on some lurid handheld device. Until we eliminate the first date, cinema is alive.