twi-ny: archive of past events

GALLIM AT THE JOYCE

Brian “HallowDreamz” Henry and GALLIM’s Andrea Miller will present new collaboration at the Joyce (photo courtesy GALLIM)

GALLIM
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
May 31 – June 4, $51-$71
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org
www.gallim.org

Brooklyn-based GALLIM returns to the Joyce this week to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary, presenting new and repertory pieces May 31 – June 4. “After a necessary process of metamorphosis during the last three pandemic years, GALLIM emerges with a new generation of dancers, creativity, diverse perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds that inspire and enrich our work,” founding creative director and Guggenheim Fellow Andrea Miller said in a statement.

The evening begins with state, a short trio that A.I.M by Kyle Abraham debuted at the Joyce in 2018; it will be performed by India Hobbs, Vivian Pakkanen, and Emma Thesing, with music by Reggie “RIVKA” Wilkins. FROM (DESDE) is a 2019 collaboration with Juilliard for eight dancers, set to Nicolas Jaar’s ”John the Revelator” and “Killing Time.” The highlight is likely to be the world premiere of song, a collaboration with Krump master Brian “HallowDreamz” Henry that features live painting by abstract expressionist Sharone Halevy and music by RIVKA; HallowDreamz is a former gang member from Bed-Stuy and now dancer and teacher who explores survival in this solo.

Following intermission, Castles is an abridged reimagining of 2013’s Fold Here, inspired by Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” about a blind man visiting his late wife’s family in Connecticut who asks the narrator to describe cathedrals being shown on a television program they are watching; the company performs to original music by Andrzej Przybyłowski and Will Epstein and songs by Brian Eno, Paul Whiteman, and Tim Hecker. No Ordinary Love is an excerpt from 2022’s Duets for Jim, a duet performed by Chalvar Monteiro from Alvin Ailey and Issa Perez or Thesing and Marc Anthony Gutierrez, with music by Sade.

The finale is 2019’s company piece SAMA, which combines the ancient Greek word for body and the Slovenian word for by herself, with music by Jaar, Vladimir Zaldwich, and Frédéric Despierre, as the body searches for space amid the digital revolution.

“In this first full season following the pandemic, we celebrate our history and our collaborators while pursuing work that honors diversity, inclusion, equity, and access,” GALLIM executive director Erin Fogarty added. “This is the crucial path to creating meaningful art and continuing much needed conversations across generations, genres, and disciplines.”

(The June 1 performance will be followed by a Curtain Chat.)

UPLOAD

Soprano Julia Bullock and baritone Roderick Williams portray a daughter and father dealing with a digital afterlife in Upload (photo by Stephanie Berger)

UPLOAD
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
March 22-30, $45-$150, 7:30 / 8:00
www.armoryonpark.org
www.vanderaa.net

Created specifically for Park Ave. Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Dutch composer Michel van der Aa’s multimedia opera Upload is a haunting adventure into a near-future where people can choose to surrender their corporeal bodies and exist for eternity as digital beings. The process involves scanning the brain to make a map of the mind, implanting in the upload their family, social, and personal identities, pushing pain and trauma into the background.

The ninety-minute production begins in total darkness as a father (baritone Roderick Williams) and his daughter (soprano Julia Bullock) share many of the elements that make life unique; phrases such as “light – smile,” “struggle – grip,” “tingle – cheek,” “seek – calm,” and “carry – loss” emerge from speakers placed all around the drill hall. The darkness lifts to reveal lighting and set designer Theun Mosk’s stunning stage, which features three movable, translucent triptych screens in front of a larger movie screen. In the far right corner sits Ensemble Musikfabrik, an eleven-piece orchestra conducted by Otto Tausk; the powerful, immersive sound design, by Tom Gelissen and Paul Jeukendrup, lets van der Aa’s wonderful score, which often turns into scratchy electronic noise, echo gloriously in the cavernous space.

The daughter, in a red jumpsuit, converses with her father, who appears on the movable screens, wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt; his image is often blurry or pixelated, indicating the transmission is murky. Williams is actually performing from stage right, a camera projecting him onto the screens. The effective motion capture and graphics are by Darien Brito, with special effects by Julius Horsthuis.

A man is getting scanned to become a digital upload in Michel van der Aa’s multimedia opera at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The daughter is furious that her father has chosen to become an upload without consulting her; he assures her that he hasn’t left her. “Sweet smile of my child, / I still hear, / I see without knowing that I see. / It’s easier to feel than to explain. / My sense of touch is gone, / but no matter. / I can still think my own thoughts. I went on a journey to be what I must be. / I made this decision for us; / you can no longer lose me. . . . If you can’t live the way you want, there’s no point in living.” She angrily asserts, “Why didn’t you ask how I would feel about all this?”

The moments between father and daughter, which include footage of their home and garden projected onto the back screen, alternate with prerecorded scenes from the clinic that invented the procedure, from a sterile waiting room and laboratory to a fantastical Lego-like structure in shocking blue. The dialogue at the clinic is spoken, not sung. A psychiatrist (Katja Herbers) explains, “I think that what we do here can be regarded as a form of rebirth, analogous to the afterlife. I mean, haven’t we always tried to cheat death?” The smarmy CEO (Ashley Zuckerman) posits, “In the past, when a generation died, we would lose their collective wisdom. And that’s a great loss. . . . By digitizing the mind, removing it from the body, we’re removing it from these risks. Take one last trip in your biological body, and then you’ll live forever. . . . You just have to die first.”

The key to the transfer is a “memory anchor,” something the person being uploaded can think about to make the procedure go smoothly. The CEO notes that “memories are faulty,” but he believes that, technologically, the anchor “will always be reliable.” But as the daughter later tells her father, “No world they created for you can compete with the real one.”

Previously presented at the Dutch National Opera and the Bregenz Festival in Austria, Upload is like a live production of the popular anthology series Black Mirror directed by Ivo van Hove, along with a dash of the Amazon Prime show similarly titled Upload, which also involves a digital afterlife. Van der Aa previously explored what happens following death in his 2006 piece After Life, adapted from the film of the same name by Hirokazu Kore-eda; the opera featured Williams in a way station between heaven and hell.

Upload features dramatic staging at the armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The interplay between the live and prerecorded flashbacks, shot by cinematographer Joost Rietdijk, builds off the tension being experienced by father and daughter onstage; as the characters, sometimes assisted by others, push the vertical triptychs back and forth, the films depict nonstatic scenes outdoor, indoors, and underwater, the movement in multiple directions resulting in an uneasy 3D-like effect that matches the emotional mood of the narrative.

Bullock (Girls of the Golden West, Doctor Atomic, Zauberland) and Williams (Eugene Onegin, Billy Budd, Madam Butterfly) sound glorious together; I would have loved to have heard more from them. While there are English subtitles, you won’t need them for his vocals, which are sharp and pristine.

Written, composed, and directed by van der Aa — who was last at the armory with 2017’s Blank Out, in which Williams appeared onscreen in a story loosely based on the life and career of bilingual South African poet Ingrid Jonker — Upload can be confusing at times, but the overall production, complete with a breathtaking surprise near the end, is a genuine treat, a thrilling peek at the potential future of humanity while testing the boundaries of what opera can be.

NOW IN PROCESS

NOW IN PROCESS
New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher St.
January 26 – February 6, $15, 7:00
newohiotheatre.org

Previously known as the Producers Club, New Ohio Theatre’s annual Now in Process festival is back with a hybrid edition, consisting of four works in progress taking place at the troupe’s Christopher St. home in the West Village and online. “Now in Process is where artists try out their next great idea — in its earliest stages,” artistic director Robert Lyons said in a statement. “We like to be there at the beginning and watch projects grow. This year we have four very different groups with one thing in common — they are fearless.”

The series kicks off January 26-27 with Claire and Pierce Siebers’s The Forest at Night, a concert version of the tale of Hansel and Gretel, with the creators playing the siblings who go on a dangerous journey. In Who Gets to Be Egyptian? (January 29-30), poet, actor, class mixologist, dancer, salesman, activist, artist, pianist, and teacher Michael Gene Jacobs, aka MikeDriven and M1, directs Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Anna Wulfekuhle, Dylan Gervais, and Lomar Collins, using ancient stories to celebrate Blackness and Black power. On February 2-3, NYC-based performance collective Exiled Tongues presents Kept in the Dark, written by Dena Igusti and directed by Ray Jordan Achan, which follows a journalist exposing rape culture and Title IX abuses in high schools. Now in Process concludes February 5-6 with Sherry Lutken’s The Porch on Windy Hill, written by Lutken, Lisa Helmi Johanson, David Lutken, and Morgan Morse, in which a couple escapes quarantine in Brooklyn and heads to western North Carolina seeking out the history of Appalachian music, encountering such songs as “Down in the Valley,” “Green Corn,” “Blackberry Blossom,” and “Sail Away Ladies.” The second performance of each show will be livestreamed.

NYFF59: THE FIFTY-NINTH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand star in Joel Coen’s NYFF59 opener, The Tragedy of Macbeth

FIFTY-NINTH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, Howard Gilman Theater, Francesca Beale Theater, Alice Tully Hall, Damrosch Park, and other venues
September 24 – October 10, $17-$25
www.filmlinc.org/nyff2021

For its fifty-ninth year, the New York Film Festival, running September 24 through October 10, returns in person, primarily at five venues at Lincoln Center but also with a handful of satellite screenings at Anthology Film Archives downtown, BAM Cinemas in Fort Greene, the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, and the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville.

The opening-night selection is the hotly anticipated The Tragedy of Macbeth, Joel Coen’s Shakespeare adaptation starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the ambitious couple seeking power at all costs. Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, a neo-Western based on a cult novel by Thomas Savage and with Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Benedict Cumberbatch, is the centerpiece choice. The closing-night selection is festival favorite Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, in which two women, played by Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit, meet in a maternity ward in a story about pain and trauma.

The main slate features a wide range of works from international directors; among the highlights are Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, which takes place on Fårö, where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked; Gaspar Noé’s tender Vortex; Futura, an Italian omnibus by Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher; Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, about a real-life seventeenth-century nun; Radu Jude’s Golden Bear winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn; Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, inspired by a Haruki Murakami short story; Rebecca Hall’s Passing, an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel; Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, in which an eight-year-old girl deals with loss; Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s sci-fi punk musical Neptune Frost; and Hit the Road, the debut of Panah Panahi, son of fest fave Jafar Pahanhi.

Fans of Lou Reed can check out Todd Haynes’s new documentary, The Velvet Underground, about the revolutionary band, as well as Songs for Drella, Ed Lachman’s 1990 concert film of Reed and John Cale’s song cycle for Andy Warhol. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is back at the festival with Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton as an ex-pat botanist, and the short film Night Colonies, part of Currents Program 7: New Sensations. And unstoppable South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo has a pair of Main Slate films, In Front of Your Face and Introduction.

Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is part of NYFF59 Revivals

Among the other works in the Currents section, focusing on socially relevant fiction and nonfiction films, are Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters, Denis Côté’s Social Hygiene, Shengze Zhu’s A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces, and Claire Simon’s I Want to Talk About Duras. Revivals include Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street, Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-Up, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Sundance winner Chameleon Street, Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s Rude Boy starring the Clash, and Christine Choy’s Who Killed Vincent Chin?

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune leads the Spotlight section, along with Marco Bellocchio’s Marx Can Wait, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, with Joaquin Phoenix. And finally, NYFF59 pays tribute to the centenary of cofounder Amos Vogel’s birth with a seven-program Spotlight sidebar consisting of cutting-edge, avant-garde, experimental shorts and features Vogel brought to Cinema 16 from 1947 to 1963 and the New York Film Festival between 1963 and 1968.

DEAR FATHER: COLIN HAY AND CITY WINERY PRESENTS A FATHER’S DAY STREAMING SPECIAL

dear father

Who: Colin Hay, Billy Bragg, Joan Osborne, Willie Nile, Dar Williams, Glen Phillips, Rickie Lee Jones, Keb’ Mo’, James Maddock, Nikka Costa, David Bromberg, Jorma Kaukonen, Jackie Greene, Bruce Cockburn, Fantastic Negrito, Martin Sexton, Dida Pelled, Chris Tamwoy, Citizen Cope, Rita Houston
What: Livestreamed concert for Father’s Day
Where: City Winery online
When: Sunday, June 21, $12, 5:00
Why: Last month, City Winery hosted a special livestreamed Mother’s Day concert, centered around Billy Bragg’s new song for his mom, “Can’t Be There Today.” Now the newly relocated club will be serenading dear old Dad, inspired by Colin Hay’s “Dear Father” from his 2011 album, Gathering Mercury. In the song, the former Men at Work leader sings, “Dear father, you’re in my reflection now / As I reach out and touch you now where did you go?” Parts of New York are opening up and some families will be able to gather together on Sunday, but many more won’t be able to. So “Dear Father: Colin Hay and City Winery Present A Father’s Day Streaming Special” seeks to fill at least some of the void, with appearances from wherever they’re sheltering in place by Hay, Billy Bragg, Joan Osborne, Willie Nile, Dar Williams, Rickie Lee Jones, Keb’ Mo’, David Bromberg, Jorma Kaukonen, Bruce Cockburn, Martin Sexton, and others, with Rita Houston serving as emcee. Tickets are $12 for the 5:00 show.

MARTHA MATINEES: CunningGraham

martha matinees

Who: Jennifer Goggans, Daniel Madoff, Virginie Mécène, Janet Eilber
What: Livestream of archival performances, live chat
Where: Martha Graham Dance Company YouTube page
When: Saturday, May 2, free, 2:30
Why: The Martha Graham Dance Company might be sheltering in place, but the troupe is offering a bevy of delights with the livestreaming program “Martha Matinees,” in which the vault is opened up and archived performances are shown on YouTube, with special guest commentators and a live chat. On May 2 at 2:30, “CunningGraham” explores the genius of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham with an excerpt from the series Mondays with Merce, followed by a CunningGraham Technique Comparison from this past February featuring dancers from Graham 2 and the Cunningham Trust, an excerpt from a 1958 performance of Graham’s Embattled Garden, a 1989 production of Cunningham’s August Pace (duet #4), and a 1958 excerpt of Graham’s “Dance of Jubilation” from Clytemnestra. Providing their thoughts via live chat on the relationship between the two dance giants will be Jennifer Goggans and Daniel Madoff from team Cunningham and Janet Eilber and Virginie Mécène from team Graham. You can catch the earlier matinees, along with classes and interviews, here.

RICHARD SERRA: THE COMPLETE FILMS AND VIDEOS

Richard Serra’s 1976 short Railroad Turnbridge is part of complete retrospective at Anthology Film Archives

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
October 17-23
Exhibitions continue through February 1, 2020
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org

In conjunction with Gagosian’s presentation of three fall Richard Serra exhibitions, Anthology Film Archives is screening a full retrospective of the San Francisco-born sculptor and draughtsman’s films and videos, primarily short, silent, 16mm works, from the late 1960s and 1970s and featuring collaborations with Joan Jonas, Gerry Schum, Babette Mangolte, Robert Bell, Philip Glass, and others. Running October 17-23, “Richard Serra: The Complete Films and Videos” is divided into four programs, consisting of: Hand Catching Lead, Hands Scraping, Hands Tied, Hand Lead Fulcrum, Frame, Tina Turning, and Color Aid; Paul Revere, Anxious Automation, Veil, China Girl, Surprise Attack, Television Delivers People, and Boomerang; Match Match Their Courage and Prisoner’s Dilemma, with Spalding Gray, Richard Schechner, Kathryn Bigelow, Leo Castelli, and Bruce Boice; and Railroad Turnbridge and Steelmill/Stahlwerk. Program four on October 19 at 6:00 will be followed by a panel discussion with curators Søren Grammel, Chrissie Iles, and Jeffrey Weiss, moderated by Benjamin Buchloh.

Richard Serra’s Nine is part of “Forged Rounds” exhibit in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Triptychs and Diptychs” is on view at 980 Madison Ave. through November 2, “Forged Rounds” at 555 West 24th St. through December 7, and the gorgeous “Reverse Curve” at 522 West 21st St. through February 1. In addition, Serra, who will turn eighty-one on November 2, is represented at the newly reinstalled Museum of Modern Art with his own room containing “Equal,” four stacked pairs of forged weatherproof steel.