Tag Archives: bryce dessner

CYRANO

Peter Dinklage struts his stuff in wife’s musical adaptation of Cyrano story (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Daryl Roth Theatre
103 East 15th St. between Irving Pl. & Park Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 22, $107-$252
thenewgroup.org

You don’t need me to tell you that Peter Dinklage is an extraordinary actor. You can see for yourself in the New Group’s world premiere production of Cyrano, Erica Schmidt’s musical retelling of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 novel Cyrano de Bergerac, which opened last night at the Daryl Roth Theatre. Dinklage, who soared above his castmates in winning four Emmys as the wise, debauched Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones, commands the stage from the very start of the play; his eyes and body are so emotive, you cannot take your eyes off him. As opposed to many other stars who have portrayed Cyrano onstage and onscreen — Ralph Richardson, Derek Jacobi, Richard Chamberlain, Christopher Plummer, Gérard Depardieu, Steve Martin, and Kevin Kline among them — Dinklage does not wear a prosthetic nose; he is just himself, as he is. When Cyrano says early on, “I am living proof that God has a sick sense of humor,” it takes on additional meaning, given Dinklage’s achondroplasia. When he’s not onstage, you search for him, whether it’s when you hear his voice booming from the side of the audience or as he waits in the wings, watching the action in character, partially hidden by hanging ropes. Alas, if only the rest of the show were up to the same standards.

Cyrano is a brave, feared member of a company of guards; he is a man of both the pen and the sword, as expert with a blade as he is with a pencil. He is madly, desperately in love; the object of his affection is his childhood friend Roxanne (Hamilton’s Jasmine Cephas Jones), but the object of her affection is the novice guard Christian (Blake Jenner), a handsome man with not much upstairs. “I’m so stupid. It’s shameful,” he acknowledges. Roxanne is also desired by the wealthy and powerful Duke De Guiche (Ritchie Coster), who is charge of the company; he is determined to have Roxanne as his wife. Roxanne is love-starved as well: She sings, “I’d give anything for someone to say / That they can’t live without me and they’ll be there forever / I’d give anything for someone to say to me / That no matter how bad it gets they won’t turn away from me.” She falls for Christian at first sight, but he’s such a dull, dense beauty that he has no idea how to woo her, so Cyrano, who cannot bear to see Roxanne disappointed, starts ghostwriting love letters for Christian and feeding him romantic lines to say to her. It all comes to a head when Cyrano, Christian, and De Guiche are in a fierce battle on the front lines of the war.

Christian (Blake Jenner) makes his case to Roxanne (Jasmine Cephas Jones) with Cyrano’s (Peter Dinklage) help in new musical (photo by Monique Carboni)

Adapted and directed by Schmidt (All the Fine Boys), who is married to Dinklage, Cyrano is all about the poetry and power of words. Cyrano lives to write letters. When his friend Ragueneau (Nehal Joshi), a pastry chef, is being threatened by one hundred men coming to kill him, Ragueneau explains it’s because of a political poem he wrote. When De Guiche is intrigued by Cyrano’s nose but can’t bring himself to be direct about it, Cyrano says, “You seem at a loss for words and, good sir, you are staring.” But Cyrano doesn’t believe his way with words or a sword (oddly, the two words are anagrams of each other) will capture his true love’s heart. Dinklage (The Station Agent, A Month in the Country) sings in his affecting, compelling low register, “Roxanne, what am I supposed to say? / Words are only glass on a string. / The more I arrange them and line up and change them / The more they mean the same thing.” When he makes the deal with Christian, he says, “I am a poet. My words are wasted now — they need to be — to be spoken aloud. I will make you eloquent and you, you will make me handsome.” The battle scene is particularly poetic, beautifully directed by Schmidt and choreographed by Jeff and Rick Kuperman, with snow falling down as the men and women soldiers say farewell to loved ones, perhaps for the last time.

Christian (Blake Jenner) and Cyrano (Peter Dinklage) face off in New Group world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

The supporting cast is solid, led by Josh A. Dawson as Cyrano’s trusted right-hand man, Le Bret; Nehal Joshi as pastry chef and political poet Ragueneau; Grace McLean as Roxanne’s constant chaperone, Marie; Scott Stangland as the actor Montgomery and the cadet Carbon; Christopher Gurr as theater owner Jodelet and the priest; and Hillary Fisher as Orange Girl. Christine Jones and Amy Rubin’s narrow set features a long horizontal wall with sections that open up to reveal a room of chefs baking, a door, and a balcony where Roxanne calls out to Christian, who is coached by Cyrano in his replies. Words cover the wall like it’s a large blackboard; among the only legible phrases is the heartbreaking “And she loved me back,” which also pops up in one of the songs. The music, by twin brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National, and the lyrics, by the National lead singer Matt Berninger and his wife, Carin Besser (who cowrites lyrics for the band), are not as inventive as one might expect from a group with members who specialize in nontraditional melodies and experimentation, whether on an album, in an art installation, or even for an avant-garde opera.

For the show, which was workshopped in 2018 by Goodspeed Musicals in Connecticut, to really grab your heart and soul, the audience has to fall in love with Roxanne in order to understand why the Duke, Christian, and Cyrano do. But that never happens. As played by Cephas Jones, there’s nothing that sets Roxanne apart; she seems to be a nice young woman but not a heartthrob that makes men desire her on sight. And by the treacly ending, you’ll be wondering why the brilliant Cyrano ever wanted her in the first place. However, Dinklage’s gripping, poignant performance rises above everything else, making Cyrano well worth seeing despite its flaws.

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON: DEATH IS ELSEWHERE

Two sets of twins perform in the round in Ragnar Kjartansson’s Death Is Elsewhere (photo courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
Gallery 963, Robert Lehman Wing court
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through September 2, $25 suggested admission
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

Multimedia Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson has an affinity for durational installations that push the boundaries for both the audience and the performers. In A Lot of Sorrow, the Ohio band the National played their song “Sorrow” repeatedly for six hours at one of MoMA PS1’s Sunday Sessions. For his immersive New Museum show My, My Mother, My Father, and I, a group of musicians played the song “Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage” for two months, alongside personal videos involving Kjartansson’s parents. And for his contribution to “Drifting in Daylight” in Central Park, the SS Hangover wooden fishing boat sailed on the Harlem Meer, carrying a brass sextet performing a dirgelike composition by Kjartan Sveinsson. Kjartansson’s latest work, Death Is Elsewhere, premiering at the Met through September 2, combines elements of those pieces in a beautiful presentation in the Robert Lehman Wing court.

A stone fountain sits in the middle of a circular tiled floor, around which seven large screens depict two sets of twins singing the title song, which Kjartansson wrote on a summer solstice with brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the National and sisters Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir from múm. The lyrics take words and phrases from such books as Alexander Dumbadze’s Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere, about the late Dutch performance artist, Anne Carson’s If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and poetry by Robert Lax and uses them to explore poetic ideas of love and the rebirth of spring. The siblings form two couples, each man playing an acoustic guitar, as they walk across a grass-covered landscape surrounded by lava fields near the volcano Laki — which wreaked havoc when it erupted in 1783-84 — singing “Death Is Elsewhere” for seventy-seven consecutive minutes, as if an endless rehearsal of a movie scene. The ballad includes such lines as “In the dark, in the dark, my love, my love” and “By the stream, by the stream, my love, my love.”

death is elsewhere 2

Inspired by cycloramas and a theater production staged by his father, Kjartansson shot the video in real time with seven cameras arranged in a circle, “like a high-tech Stonehenge,” he says in a Met blog post; the film is directed by Kate Ferrell, with cinematography by Rick Siegel. There is empty space between each screen, so sometimes the couples disappear from view, only to appear again on the next screen as if nothing happened. The screens are like paintings come to life, but Kjartansson leaves it up to visitors to flesh out the details. “I’ve never wanted to make a narrative film,” he explains. “I make films that have no stories, but there’s the idea of a story around it. They’re these open, poetic things that you can relate to in an ironic or sentimental way. The audience can create their own narrative around my works. There’s no wrong way to understand the piece.”

Watching Death Is Elsewhere, which Kjartansson dedicates to Carolee Schneemann, the groundbreaking performance artist who passed away in March at the age of seventy-nine, is a lovely, beguiling experience, filled with the beauty of nature, the love of family, the pain of loss, and the innate power of music to invade our soul, all tinged with nihilism. Spend as much time as you possibly can in the installation’s lush yet simple and evocative grandeur; there is no beginning and no end. It just is.

IMPLICIT TENSIONS: MAPPLETHORPE NOW

Self Portrait 1985, printed 2005 Robert Mapplethorpe 1946-1989 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation 2014

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, gelatin silver print, 1985 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; gift, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 1996)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Through July 10, $18-$25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:00-7:00)
Part 2 runs July 24 – January 5
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

There’s only one week left to see the first phase of the Guggenheim’s yearlong, two-part exhibition “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now,” a concise survey in conjunction with the thirtieth anniversary of the death of visual artist Robert Mapplethorpe in 1989 at the age of forty-two. Mapplethorpe’s reputation has been growing since the January 2010 publication of Patti Smith’s award-winning book Just Kids, which details the punk rocker’s relationship with Mapplethorpe, from lovers to best friends and artistic collaborators in the late 1960s and 1970s. More recently, there was the 2016 documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures and the 2018 biopic Mapplethorpe as well as Bryce Dessner’s multimedia Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), which used music and images to focus on several of the controversies surrounding Mapplethorpe’s work, from obscenity charges to questions about racism and his photos of black bodies. “Implicit Tensions” circumvents all of that and concentrates on his immense skill in composition and his immeasurable artistic vision in his photographs of flowers, sadomasochism, male and female nudes, and, most notably, himself, although he’s no mere narcissistic selfie taker.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Ken and Tyler, platinum-palladium print, 1985 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; gift, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 1996)

The Guggenheim show consists of more than fifty photographs and unique objects from the museum’s collection, gifts from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation between 1993 and 1998 that led to the Guggenheim developing and expanding its photography collection and forming its Photography Council. The wholly satisfying exhibit is somewhat of a greatest hits display, with iconic photos as well as pictures of such well-known figures as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Anderson, Candy Darling, Philip Glass with Robert Wilson, David Hockney with Henry Gelzahler, and Smith. Mapplethorpe treated all his subjects equally, whether a celebrity, a lover, a flower, an S&M scene, or himself. “My interest was to open people’s eyes, get them to realize anything can be acceptable,” he said in an interview. “It’s not what it is, it’s the way it’s photographed.”

Using Polaroid and Hasselblad cameras, among others, Mapplethorpe captured a bold intimacy in his work, which, in 2019, seems more revolutionary than shocking, although some photos are still daring and outrageous. Early on, he created such collages as Black Bag, Green Bag, and Red Bag, made of clippings from gay porn magazines arranged behind a mesh screen, placing homosexuality tantalizingly out of reach (and seemingly imprisoned). In Dominick and Elliot, a bound and naked Dominick is upside down, as if in a reverse crucifixion pose, next to the shirtless Elliot, who has a cigarette in one hand, Elliot’s testicles in the other. In Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, Moody’s and Sherman’s heads are seen sideways as they look seriously off into the distance, the former’s blackness and the latter’s whiteness almost blending together. It’s a visual companion piece to Ken and Tyler, with Moody’s and Tyler’s nude bodies — their heads are out of the frame — right behind each other, facing the same direction as Ken’s and Robert’s heads.

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) Thomas, 1987 Gelatin silver print A.P. 1/2 image: 19 1/4 x 19 3/16 inches (48.9 x 48.7 cm); sheet: 23 3/4 x 19 13/16 inches (60.3 x 50.3 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 1993 93.4304

Robert Mapplethorpe, Thomas, gelatin silver print, 1987 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; gift, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 1993)

This theme of dichotomy is central to the bisexual Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre and is fully evident at the Guggenheim. Two of the most telling photos are a pair of 1977 works titled Pictures/Self Portrait, which were invitations to a gallery show. In both, Mapplethorpe’s hand is writing the word “Pictures”; in one, the hand is shown in a conventional man’s shirt and watch, while in the other the hand wears a black leather glove and a brash metal bracelet, equalizing and contrasting so-called normal and S&M costuming. In one gelatin silver print of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, she is dressed in black, as if at a funeral, while in another she is nude except for a white sheet over her face that falls like the train of a wedding dress to the floor.

The implicit tension is also on display in Mapplethorpe’s numerous self-portraits, which range from the angelic to the demonic; he has evil horns in one and holds a skull-topped cane in another, while in a third he is elegant in a lush fur and wearing lipstick. In two 1980 self-portraits, he is shirtless and androgynous in one, smoking a cigarette and wearing a leather jacket in the other, comparing sensitivity with toughness as he addresses gender identity and societal ideas of maleness. And then there’s American Flag, a photograph of a ratty, torn flag that speaks volumes. Mapplethorpe had a very personal way of depicting both the private and the public, and thirty years after his death from HIV/AIDS complications, his pictures still get under your skin, the man behind the camera — and in front of it — as elusive as ever, and just as beautiful and beguiling. The second phase of “Implicit Tensions” opens July 24 and will examine Mapplethorpe’s legacy and influence, combining his works with those of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER)

Bryce Dessner’s Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) runs at BAM June 6-8 (photo by Richard Termine)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
June 6-8, $30-$60, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

I was prepared to be blown away by Bryce Dessner’s Triptych (Eyes of One on Another). I’m a big fan of his artsy rock group, the National; I love (who doesn’t?) Patti Smith, whose text figures prominently in the piece; and I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the Guggenheim’s “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now” exhibit, which includes several images that appear in Dessner’s seventy-minute multimedia work. Perhaps my expectations were too high.

Inspired by the 1990 obscenity case against Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment” exhibit, which took place in Dessner’s hometown of Cincinnati when he was a teenager, Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) explores demons and desire, objectification and beauty, specifically in Mapplethorpe’s XYZ portfolios, which focus on sadomasochism, flowers, and African American male nudes. Accompanying the large-scale projections (by Simon Harding), which appear on a front scrim and/or the back wall, is text from the trial and writings by Smith and poet and activist Essex Hemphill, the latter a critic of Mapplethorpe’s. Dessner’s haunting, ethereal score is performed live by Roomful of Teeth (Cameron Beauchamp, Martha Cluver, Eric Dudley, Estelí Gomez, Abigail Lennox, Thomas McCargar, Thann Scoggin, and Caroline Shaw), joined by soprano Alicia Hall Moran and tenor Isaiah Robinson, the women in silvery white, the men (except for Robinson) in black. (The set and costumes are by Carlos Soto.) Brad Wells conducts, with Jessica McJunkins on violin, Tia Allen on viola, Byron Hogan on cello, Kyra Sims on French horn, Ian Tyson on clarinet and bass clarinet, Laura Barger on piano and harmonium, Donnie Johns and Victor Pablo on percussion, and James Moore on guitar.

A man cannot look up at Robert Mapplethorpe images in Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) (photo by Richard Termine)

Korde Arrington Tuttle’s libretto boasts numerous phrases that stick in the mind as they are sung and projected on walls and screens: “The devil in us all / darkness as beauty”; “Aesthetics can justify desire”; “unsavory things”; “The Artist machetes a clearance.” However, there are also quotes from the trial, which feel trivial and pedantic, especially when juxtaposed with Robinson and Roomful of Teeth’s extensive later repetition of “In america, / I place my ring / on your cock / where it belongs,” from Hemphill’s American Wedding. Among the photographs are “Dominick and Elliot,” depicting a shirtless white man holding the nether regions of a naked white man tied upside down; Mapplethorpe’s famous 1988 portrait of himself gripping a cane with a skull on it; “Jack Walls,” of a black man pointing a gun above his exposed penis; and “Cedric, N.Y.C.,” in which a black man bows his head, the light and shadows making it look like his right side is black and his left side white.

Director Kaneza Schaal is unable to bring the piece together; the words, music, and imagery feel like separate entities. Through it all, a black man wanders across the stage and into the audience, looking up at the projections, a spectator commenting on the images of black bodies by saying nothing. When the audience enters the Howard Gilman Opera House, he is sitting at the front of the stage, watching the people wander in, implicating us all. But I’m not sure in what.

TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER)

Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) takes a unique multimedia look at the work of Robert Mapplethorpe (photo by Maria Baranova)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
June 6-8, $30-$60, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The controversial work of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe has been undergoing a renaissance over the last few years, with documentaries, gallery and museum shows, and, perhaps most influentially, Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir about her life with Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. Now comes composer Bryce Dessner and librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle’s multimedia Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), playing at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House June 6-8. The sixty-minute theatrical oratorio is divided into three sections based on Mapplethorpe’s XYZ portfolios, which explore sadomasochism, flowers, and African American male nudes, respectively. The first part centers on Smith’s poem “The Boy Who Loved Michelangelo,” set to a Monteverdi madrigal; the second on Dessner’s personal reaction to the 1990 Mapplethorpe obscenity trial in Cincinnati, the composer’s hometown; and the third on poet and performance artist Essex Hemphill’s “The Perfect Moment,” which was critical of Mapplethorpe’s depiction of black bodies. “Aesthetics can justify desire, / but desire in turn / can provoke punishment. / Under public scrutiny / the eyes of one man / are focused on another. / Is it desire, equality, / disgust, or hatred?” he writes. Meanwhile, in a program note, dramaturg Christopher Myers asks, “Is it possible to imagine these men who are photographed with the impersonal intimacy of flowers, or bronze sculptures, as full human beings, with desires and pleasures of their own? Can we read the desire of the photographer, his conflicts and self-denials, in his steadfast commitment to a classical language that recasts leather daddies and daddy’s boys into upper middle class living room fantasies? Where in this thorny bramble of gazes, objectification, outrage, and intimacy do our own wants and expectations as an audience live?”

The production, which features giant projections of rarely shown Mapplethorpe photographs, is directed by Kaneza Schaal, with music performed live by Roomful of Teeth (Cameron Beauchamp, Martha Cluver, Eric Dudley, Estelí Gomez, Abigail Lennox, Thomas McCargar, Thann Scoggin, and Caroline Shaw), joined by soprano Alicia Hall Moran and tenor Isaiah Robinson; Brad Wells is the music director and conductor, with Jessica McJunkins on violin, Tia Allen on viola, Byron Hogan on cello, Kyra Sims on French horn, Ian Tyson on clarinet and bass clarinet, Laura Barger on piano and harmonium, Donnie Johns and Victor Pablo on percussion, and James Moore on guitar. The set and costumes are by Carlos Soto, lighting by Yuki Nakase, and video by Simon Harding. On June 7 at 6:00, the talk “Mapplethorpe in Performance with Bryce Dessner, Kaneza Schaal, and Korde Arrington Tuttle” will be held in the BAM Hillman Attic Studio.

L.A. DANCE PROJECT AT THE JOYCE: PROGRAM B

Tyler Peck’s Murder Ballades teems with energy in L.A. Dance Project production (photo by Rose Eichenbaum)

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
June 13-25, $26-$66
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
www.ladanceproject.com

Upon entering the Joyce on Saturday night, June 17, to see Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project, we were sad to hear that the performance of the brand-new duet In Silence We Speak had been canceled due to an injury. However, the three pieces that remained, all very different, made up a program that still worked extremely well. First was New York City Ballet wunderkind Justin Peck’s 2013 Murder Ballades, his debut as a contemporary dance choreographer. The curtain is raised, revealing six pairs of sneakers onstage, in front of Sterling Ruby’s colorful abstract backdrop of vertical and horizontal bars. Stephanie Amurao, Aaron Carr, Julia Eichten, Nathan Makolandra, Robbie Moore, and Rachelle Rafailedes, all in casual modern-day dress (Peck did the costume design), enter, lace on the sneakers, and proceed to run around the stage, the buzz of sudden freedom in the air, as if Peck is breaking free of ballet en pointe, at least momentarily. (He continues to dance and choreograph for NYCB.) Over the course of six sections, the dancers appear to be having a great time as they divide into solos and duets, including a lovely pas de deux between Makolandra and Rafailedes, and intersect in fluid trios and a variety of lines and patterns. At one point, Carr actually pauses to look at Ruby’s painting, making sure we all acknowledge its grandeur. Peck displays an infectious glee with his vigorous movement language, although it can get repetitive and a little too showy, but it works breathlessly with Bryce Dessner’s energetic score and Brandon Stirling Baker’s pinpoint lighting.

L.A. Dance Project performance of Merce Cunninghams MinEvent is exquisite (photo by James Welling)

L.A. Dance Project performance of Merce Cunningham’s MinEvent is exquisitely rendered (photo by James Welling)

Next was Merce Cunningham’s MinEvent, a 2006 majestic collage that is like a Mondrian canvas brought to glorious life. Arranged and staged by Silas Riener, it’s performed by Amurao, Carr, Eichten, Makolandra, Moore, David Adrian Freeland Jr., and Lilja Rúriksdóttir, wearing tight black costumes, designed by Millepied, marked with spare, rectilinear thin stripes of color, the women’s and men’s costumes mirror images of each other. The often staccato, almost mechanical abstract movement, sudden stops and starts that seem to presage voguing but with blank facial expressions, form Mondrian-esque geometric patterns, not just with the shapes of the bodies, but with how the lines on the costumes merge. John Cage’s “Music for Piano” is performed live by Adam Tendler, who is like a seventh dancer, having to stand so he can pluck the strings inside of the instrument in addition to playing the regular keys, the minimalist score balancing sound with silence.

Benjamin Millipied mixes live action with cinema in world premiere of Orpheus Highway at the Joyce (photo by Erin Baiano)

The evening concluded with Millepied’s adventurous, multimedia Orpheus Highway, making its world premiere at the Joyce. The piece is set to Steve Reich’s stirring “Triple Quartet,” played live by PUBLIQuartet, featuring Curtis Stewart and Jannina Norpoth on violin, Nick Revel on viola, and Amanda Gookin on cello. Wearing contemporary clothing and sneakers (the costumes were designed by Millepied), Morgan Lugo, Amurao, Carr, Eichten, Freeland Jr., Makolandra, Moore, Rúriksdóttir, and Janie Taylor (replacing Rafailedes) dance in front of a film of themselves (but with Rafailedes instead of Taylor) that Millepied shot in Marfa, Texas, on the local streets, down a narrow alley, and on an endless highway in the middle of nowhere. Freeland Jr. and Taylor reenact the tragic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as all the live dancers move in opposition to, in unison with, and completely differently from their screen doppelgängers. There’s a lot going on, so you’re not always sure where to look, and your mind can’t help but try to make sense of how the filmed images relate to the live ones, but just let it unfold without thinking too hard about it. In some ways, it’s an innovative combination of the two works that preceded it. The two-week Joyce run continues through June 25; Program A consists of Millepied’s Hearts & Arrows, Ohad Naharin’s Yag, and In Silence We Speak if Carla Korbës has recovered.

L.A. DANCE PROJECT

Sterling Ruby created the scenic design for Justin Peck’s Murder Ballades, part of the L.A. Dance Project’s two-week season at the Joyce

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
June 13-25, $26-$66
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
www.ladanceproject.com

The innovative and exciting L.A. Dance Project follows up its 2016 Joyce debut with a two-week run at the Chelsea institution, performing a pair of what promise to be terrific programs, boasting an impressive array of collaborators. For the first program, the company, which was founded in 2012 by former New York City Ballet principal dancer Benjamin Millepied, will be presenting 2015’s Hearts & Arrows, choreographed by Millepied, with music by Philip Glass performed live by PUBLIQuartet, sets by English conceptual artist Liam Gillick, lighting by Roderick Murray, and costumes by company dancer Janie Taylor; Ohad Naharin’s Yag, a forty-minute piece for six dancers, set to music by John Zorn, Gaetano Donizetti, John Taverner, Ennio Morricone, Ran Slavin, and Maxim Waratt and for which LADP rehearsed with ballet masters from Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company; and the world premiere of Millepied’s In Silence We Speak, a duet, inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, for Taylor and Carla Korbës that you can get a sneak peek at here. The second program consists of New York City Ballet resident choreographer Justin Peck’s 2013 Murder Ballades, with an original score by Bryce Dessner of the National, sets by American artist Sterling Ruby, and lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker; Merce Cunningham’s MinEvent, a collage of excerpts from Cunningham’s oeuvre, with live piano by Adam Tendler; In Silence We Speak; and the world premiere of Millepied’s multimedia Orpheus Highway, set to Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet, played live by PUBLIQuartet. The company also includes Stephanie Amurao, Aaron Carr, David Adrian Freeland Jr., Rachelle Rafailedes, Nathan B. Makolandra, Julia Eichten, Robbie Moore, Morgan Lugo, and Lilja Rúriksdóttir. There will be a Curtain Chat following the June 15 performance of Program 2. LADP’s 2016 season at the Joyce sold out, so you better hurry if you want to see this sizzling hot company.