twi-ny talks

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.

TWI-NY TALK: EMILY JOHNSON

Emily Johnson explores home and heritage in THE THANK-YOU BAR (photo by Cameron Wittig)

THE THANK-YOU BAR
New York Live Arts
Bessie Schönberg Theater
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
November 9-12, $15-$20
212-691-6500
www.newyorklivearts.org
www.catalystdance.com

“I want to make work that looks at identity and cultural responsibility — that is beautiful and powerful — full of myth and truth at the same time,” choreographer Emily Johnson explains in her mission statement. “I want to be grounded in my heritage, supported by my community, and giving back — always.” Born in Alaska of Yup’ik descent and based in Minneapolis, Johnson has been creating site-specific dance installations in collaboration with visual artists and musicians since 1998, exploring ideas of home, identity, and the natural world through different modes of storytelling. Her latest multimedia performance piece is The Thank-you Bar, running at New York Live Arts from November 9 to 12. A collaboration with musicians James Everest and Joel Pickard of BLACKFISH, who will play a special set on the final night, the performance installation also includes beadwork by Karen Beaver and paper sculptures by Krista Kelley Walsh. The extremely eloquent and thoughtful Johnson carefully considered our questions for our latest twi-ny talk; she will also participate in a preshow chat on November 9 with NYLA artistic director Carla Peterson as well as a discussion on November 11 with dancer-choreographer Reggie Wilson following the 9:30 show.

twi-ny: In her Context Notes about The Thank-you Bar on the New York Live Arts blog, Biba Bell is taken by your voiceover “What is becoming more clear to me is what I’m missing,” asking the questions “How many moments are passed, paused or pregnant with the sense of what is missed — something, someone, someplace? What do they sound like, smell like, and how do they feel?” What are some of the things you are missing, and how do they drive your artistic creation?

Emily Johnson: I said that — about the missing — because I am feeling years accumulate. What is absent is becoming an acute pain and it makes me feel old, most simply because of what has already gone by. I have missed my niece and nephew growing up because I was in Minneapolis, making dance, while they were in Alaska. I miss many, many mornings with my grandma — casual mornings of coffee, where we sit around, she doing crosswords until a story comes out. If I’m not around, I simply miss the story and I miss the time. And this creates the yearning — or heightens it, at the very least. I long for these stories. I long for the time with my elders, the time with my niece and nephew and rest of my family. And it points to what might not be: How much longer can I wait to learn the Yup’ik language, helped along by my grandma — the only one in my family who speaks it? How much longer can my body make do without feeling the ground of Alaska beneath my feet on a regular, day in and day out basis? What disservice do I do my life when I let these things pass me by?

Eventually, time runs out. Every summer I go home for the salmon run and I am trying to imprint the process of putting the salmon up (cleaning, smoking, kippuring, freezing . . .) into my brain so that when it comes my time to take charge of making it happen I will be able to do so. These are some of the things I am missing, and the absence and the longing are so real that it creates a new version of life. Biba’s questions about sounds, smell, feel — this is exactly what drives me. As I created The Thank-you Bar, a work very much about missing home/land, I thought about how our bodies miss, how our minds remember — not a scientific how, but a how related to our own perceptions of our experiences. When a thread of a Crystal Gayle song comes on, I am brought back to the jukebox at my grandma’s bar; when I think about the mountains near my Alaskan home, my chest aches and for some reason it also feels like I am diving into a very cold lake, exhilarating my being. And the thoughts about where and when also make me think of the future.

When I make dances, I try to imagine the future. I get curious about what images, reactions, or stories the audience might remember four days after seeing a performance. This leads me to structure dances with a focused attention on the smallest of details: what the audience might walk on as they enter the space, what they might smell during a particular story. . . . It makes me consider what I can leave out of the equation so as to let conjecture and interpretation have a role in the room.

Emily Johnson has teamed up with James Everest and Joel Pickard of BLACKFISH and others in THE THANK-YOU BAR (photo by Cameron Wittig)

twi-ny: The Thank-you Bar and its companion exhibit, “This Is Displacement,” explore the idea of home. You were born in Alaska, you’re based in Minneapolis, and you’re now presenting the New York premiere of a work that has previously been performed in Oklahoma, Houston, and other locations. Where is home for you?

Emily Johnson: The most specific, locating answer is that I have two homes: one in Minneapolis, the other in Alaska. I love both places, and the home in Minneapolis is actually more concrete: it has my stuff in it. The home in Alaska feels expansive and like it goes on for thousands of years, probably because it doesn’t actually have any walls. I don’t have a living space in Alaska, but it’s where I come from and where I continually return to.

To be honest, I try to build another home for myself and audiences in The Thank-you Bar. Does this mean I am searching? Does this mean I believe we can adapt to any longing, and dislocation? I build the home by trying to bring attention to the building we are in and the people who are gathered in the room. I try to imagine the walls gone; I try to imagine what was here before the current incarnation. I want the feeling of “home” to lead to a kind of intimacy so that people feel comfortable, responsible even, for it. I think we tend to look at things as static when, in reality, our bodies and places house past, present, and future, at once. It’s anything but static and it’s kind of exciting to tap into.

twi-ny: You collaborated with James Everest and Joel Pickard of BLACKFISH on The Thank-you Bar, and the duo will be playing a special concert on November 12. What is it about their music that draws you to them and made you want to work with them?

Emily Johnson: BLACKFISH music is dramatically mind altering for me. When James [Everest], Joel [Pickard], and I started work, part of our process was to improvise together in a room, daily. We’ve continued that process, as much as we can when we tour, and out of it James and Joel created their project, BLACKFISH. As BLACKFISH, they perform improvised concerts in conjunction with our tours. I love their concerts — and I love that they’ve developed this entire project out of The Thank-you Bar. On the twelfth, they’re releasing a gorgeous limited edition, letter-pressed, eight-CD collection of some of the concerts they’ve recorded over the past two years. John Scott heard their concert in Vermont this summer and has since worked with them for music for his new work. He very endearingly asked my permission first.

In The Thank-you Bar, they don’t play as BLACKFISH; they play as James and Joel. What I most appreciate about them is their specificity and dedication to improvisation. The music they composed for The Thank-you Bar is set; it came from improvisations, from bouts of memory and discussions of the jukebox I mentioned (that at my grandma’s was filled with classic country). The sound of dislocation and rerouting to find home is what they built for The Thank-you Bar. It makes me want to work with them again and again.

One day, early in the process, I was rehearsing in a separate studio. I came down and they told me to sit on the floor. They proceeded to play music that layered inch by inch and sound by sound, as they appeared and disappeared, until a reverberating chorus echoed off the walls. I remember slapping the floor and exclaiming/laughing at the genius of it. Them: missing. Music: building. We’ve kept it. They basically choreographed the beginning of the dance.

TWI-NY TALK: LAURA PETERSON

Laura Peterson goes environmental with WOODEN (photo by Steven Schreiber)

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
November 4-12, $20
212-647-0202
www.here.org
www.lpchoreography.com

Last January, Laura Peterson Choreography presented Wooden as part of HERE’s annual Culturemart festival. The work-in-progress, which uses real grass and trees in creating living environments in which a quartet of dancers — Peterson, Kate Martel, Edward Rice, and Janna Diamond — perform, officially opened this past Friday, beginning an eight-show run that continues at HERE through November 12. Consisting of three parts, “Ground,” “Trees,” and “Corridor,” Wooden examines time and nature, inspired by earthworks and taking place on a biodegradable set. There will be a special panel discussion, “Dance, Installation, and Repurposing,” following the November 9 performance, in which Peterson will talk about her creative process. Just as she prepared for opening night, Peterson, who teaches classes at Dance New Amsterdam, answered some questions for twi-ny as curtain time beckoned.

Edward Rice, Laura Peterson, and Janna Diamond in WOODEN (photo by Steven Schreiber)

twi-ny: When we first met back in January, you were extremely nervous, putting together Wooden for Culturemart. How are the nerves as the piece is ready for its first official performances this week at HERE?

Laura Peterson: I am so happy with Wooden. When we performed the dance on the grass at Culturemart in January, I had no idea how it would behave, what it would be like to install a living lawn or what it would feel like for our bodies to dance on. We learned that it lives and grows and needs water every night. Dancing on the grass is so much more difficult that dancing on a normal floor. Sliding doesn’t really happen, turning is very precarious, and the effort of moving on an uneven terrain is very intense. We figured all of these things out through Culturemart and everyone is much calmer.

twi-ny: How has Wooden changed since then?

Laura Peterson: Most of the choreography that we performed in January 2011 has been reworked. Because HERE provides the opportunity of the Culturemart festival to workshop the pieces by members of the HERE Artist Residency Program, we are able to see the problems in a piece before full production and address them. The sound score is very different, the costumes are a little different, and we are also performing part of the dance we developed in 2010. This section is performed in a barren landscape with hanging driftwood trees while the audience is sitting on the lawn in the second half of Wooden. There is an installation and a soloist as the audience enters, which is brand new as well. It’s called “Corridor,” and it is performed by several different dancers throughout the performance run.

twi-ny: You incorporate environmentally friendly earthwork into Wooden. How did you go about selecting the material? Did you have any primary influences when designing the installation itself?

Laura Peterson: I was first inspired to create this dance in 2009 when I was looking at outdoor installation work and natural architecture. I am often influenced by visual art, and I started seriously looking at earthwork and pieces made from natural materials. I found myself thinking that those pieces are meant to change, as they are subject to time and weather. This was around the time that my dance called Forever was being performed on a large set consisting of a white circular platform made from forty-eight triangles. After the performances of Forever ended and we were loading out, I thought about how much I was throwing away after a show closes and it really bothered me. Luckily, some of those triangles became tables in our friend’s restaurant, but only using something for a week and letting it go into a Dumpster stuck with me. I decided that using biodegradable materials was going to be part of my concept in Wooden. I wonder if the audience will consciously realize they are sitting on and among natural and ecologically sensitive materials. We are going to find out.

TWI-NY TALK: RED GROOMS

Red Grooms, “Spy Cab,” acrylic on paper, 2011 (courtesy of Marlborough Gallery)

“RED GROOMS, NEW YORK: 1976-2011”
Marlborough Gallery
40 West 57th St.
Through October 22, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-541-4900
www.marlboroughgallery.com

In the playful noir short story that opens the catalog of his latest exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, Red Grooms’s alter ego, Gunslinger, says, “Ya see, I wanted to show the public how low it gets sometimes, down under the belly of the beast.” For more than fifty years, Grooms has been revealing the belly of the beast that is New York, but it turns out that Grooms’s world is filled with colorful caricatures living it up in the maelstrom he refers to as “the city that never snores.” In “Red Grooms, New York: 1976-2011,” Grooms, who was born and raised in Nashville and has lived in New York City since 1957, collects some of his finest work of the last thirty-five years, including paintings, mixed-media constructions, sculpto-pictoramas, and such walk-in installations as “The Bus” and “42nd Street — Porno Bookstore.” Grooms has an innate sense of life in the Big Apple, capturing the essence that lies at the heart of the city in such pieces as “The Funny Place,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Small Hot Dog Vendor,” and “Tattoo Parlor.” We recently spoke with Grooms, a tall, engaging, and quite forthcoming fellow, at the exhibit’s opening, where he was surrounded by admiring fans who could not wipe the huge smiles off their faces, and later by phone.

twi-ny: There’s a timeless quality to your work, in which you display a unique view of New York. The city has gone through some major changes during the period covered in this exhibition. How do you see the New York of 1976, or even the 1950s, as different from today?

Red Grooms: I think it’s great right now. It just seems very vibrant to me. It seems like there are twice as many people as there used to be. I’m down here below Canal St., almost in Chinatown and near the courts. We’re getting a tremendous amount of tourists —Chinatown, Little Italy, and then going on downtown, down Broadway. That vibrancy and energy, I enjoy it; it’s fun. So I would hope I get some of that now with what I’m doing.

I have a few late works in the show — “Count Tribecula” is one of them — to get the funny quality of the TriBeCa area. I’ve always done a lot on Chinatown. I’ve been in the same studio on Walker St. for forty-two years, so I have seen a bunch of different things. It used to be the hardware center; that actually influenced my work a lot. It took me two minutes to go out and get whatever I needed. There’s still some plastic stores. In the ’70s, plastic was kind of a fashionable medium for a while, and I indulged in it myself. Those different media influenced the work. Right here there’s always been a fabric center as well.

twi-ny: Speaking of different media, in several works from 2010, you have incorporated digital imagery. What made you start doing that?

Red Grooms: I consider myself absolutely not a photographer, and so I used the throwaway cameras, and I’ve literally taken hundreds, if not even thousands, of pictures. About two years ago, I looked through the pictures of ten or so years ago, and they had sort of settled in, so some of them looked kind of special just because it was a particular moment. I started to make collages with them.

This one scene called “Lunchtime on Broadway,” which is panoramic, I took a whole bunch of pictures and glued them together — you know, cut and paste — and made a fairly large composite, and I used that to make that dimensional work, and in doing that, I discovered that if you cut out a figure, it leaves a hole in putting it on a white piece of paper; it got a very strong jump to it between the silhouette and the photographic background. So in that process, I made a whole bunch of four-by-six cards, cut out elements that I wanted to, and then I water-colored in the same thing that was in there. In doing that was when I enlarged them more and did the works you see in the show now.

Red Grooms enjoys the opening of his latest exhibit at the Marlborough Gallery on 57th St. (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: With regard to technology, you don’t have a cell phone or e-mail, and you don’t use a computer, is that right?

Red Grooms: I’m pathetically old school in that way. My wife is capable. You know, it’s really hard to work with people without it. It’s very difficult. I think it will be impossible soon.

twi-ny: Another of the places that you have always captured is Times Square and Broadway. What do you think of the new Times Square?

Red Grooms: When I did the early works from ’76, ’77, I did do research up there, and it was funny because after “Ruckus Manhattan” opened, it was very popular and got a lot of press, so they called me in, some of the people who were trying to clean up Times Square at the time, to see if I had any ideas. I had this weird duality about it. I actually wanted to do something, but in the end, I couldn’t really think of anything. Nothing panned out.

twi-ny: It’s probably best that way.

Red Grooms: So I was there when they were starting to do it. They had a lot of trouble, actually, a lot of starting and stopping on that project before it really got going and became what it is now. We don’t have those places like “Porno Bookstore” anymore. They were so prevalent at that time.

twi-ny: Well, it’s great to now have it on 57th St. at the Marlborough.

Red Grooms: That was a little daring. It hadn’t been up for thirty-four years. It ran well when “Ruckus” showed at the Marlborough in ’77; we didn’t really get any complaints. But in ’82 I had a show with the “Ruckus” stuff on 54th St. and Sixth Ave., and when we were unpacking the stuff, the superintendent of the building took a look at the porno store and said he was going to close the whole show down if we tried to put that up.

twi-ny: In the catalog, you open with a short noir story in which you work many of the pieces’ names into it. Is this writing something you’re exploring more?

Red Grooms: I wrote it together with my wife, Lysiane Luong, and it was a lot of fun. In fact, it was so much fun that we were going to jump right in to an actual full-length detective story, but we didn’t get very far. You’re one of the first persons right now talking about it. I very much liked doing it.

twi-ny: You’ve used the word “fun” several times, and that’s a good way to describe what people experience when they see your work. At the opening, everyone was laughing and smiling. What kind of satisfaction does that bring you?

Red Grooms: It’s great, it’s exciting. You know, I’m quite isolated when I do it. . . . But my dreams of monetary success never panned out.

TWI-NY TALK: MARIA HASSABI

Maria Hassabi premiered SOLO at FIAF’s 2009 Crossing the Line Festival

Saturday, September 17, Crossing the Line Festival: Fiction & Non-Fiction, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, 972 Fifth Ave., free, 212-355-6100, 2:30 – 6:00
SHOW: The Kitchen, 512 West 19th St., November 3-5, $15, 212-255-5793, 8:00
www.fiaf.org/crossingtheline
www.thekitchen.org
www.mariahassabi.com

In such recent productions as Solo and SoloShow, dancer and choreographer Maria Hassabi has displayed a remarkable dexterity, her lithe body interacting with a rolled-up carpet or dangling off the edge of a black platform. When we saw her listed on the French Institute Alliance Française’s website as one of the participants of the free “Fiction & Non-Fiction” kickoff to the 2011 Crossing the Line Festival on September 17, we immediately scheduled an interview with her. Alas, in checking the website later, her scheduled site-specific performance around the Cultural Services of the French Embassy building on Fifth Ave. had disappeared. Does that mean the Cyprus-born Hassabi won’t be participating? Even without her, the lineup is extremely impressive, with works by Trajal Harrell & Perle Palombe, Kimberly Bartosik, Raimund Hoghe & Takashi Ueno, Roderick Murray, and others. (Be sure to get a drink at Prune Nourry’s “Spermbar.”) We’re still holding out hope that Hassabi, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a New Yorker since 1994, has something special planned for the afternoon, which runs from 2:30 to 6:00.

This year’s Crossing the Line Festival, which continues through October 17, also features Nick van Woert’s “Terra Amata” exhibition at the FIAF Gallery, Xavier le Roy’s “More Mouvements für Lachenmann” at Florence Gould Hall, Bartosik’s “i like penises: a little something in 24 acts” at Danspace Project, Sophie Calle’s free site-specific “Room” installation at the Lowell Hotel, and Rachid Ouramdane’s “Ordinary Witnesses” and “World Fair” at New York Live Arts. Hassabi is definitely scheduled to present the world premiere of her latest piece, SHOW, November 3-5 at the Kitchen. Whether or not she’ll be part of tomorrow’s fête, we’re still delighted that she answered some questions for us, even if she did skip over the one about what she was planning for “Fiction & Non-Fiction.”

twi-ny: What is it that draws you to the Crossing the Line Festival?

Maria Hassabi: What draws me to this festival primarily is the two curators (Lili Chopra and Simon Dove). I admire and respect both of them. I love working and being in conversation with them, feel lucky to be part of what they do, and excited to see what they’ve curated.

twi-ny: Are there any particular performances you’re looking forward to seeing at the festival?

MH: The usual suspects, which in this case, performance-wise, means pretty much all. Sadly, I will be missing many of them as I will be out of town.

twi-ny: You premiered SOLO and SOLOSHOW at PS122, and in November you’ll be premiering SHOW at the Kitchen with frequent collaborator Hristoula Harakas and Will Rawls. What is it about Hristoula that makes her so compatible with your choreography?

MH: There are many of my frequent collaborators in SHOW, including Hristoula, Marcos Rosales, Scott Lyall, Joe Levasseur. I like working with the same people. With Hristoula, we have worked together since 2002. I treasure such a long-term collaboration, and Hristoula’s ethics of work are irreplaceable. Of course, she’s undoubtedly a gorgeous performer.

twi-ny: You are a remarkably flexible dancer. Do you have a special exercise regimen or a secret you’re willing to share?

MH: I was born flexible! Then I slept all the way until I went onstage! You know, muscle atrophy helps!