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SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS AT THE PARK AVENUE ARMORY

RITE OF SPRING kicks off Shen Wei triptych at the Park Avenue Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
November 29 – December 4, $35, 7:30
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
www.shenweidancearts.org

Since its founding ten years ago, Shen Wei Dance Arts has been touring around the world, in traditional venues as well as unique indoor and outdoor locations. Based in New York City, SWDA has performed at the Joyce and the Lincoln Center Festival while also staging site-specific pieces for Judson Memorial Church, the Guggenheim Rotunda, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Engelhard Court, and, last fall, a two-day marathon of Re-(Part III) in Duffy Square, Grand Central Terminal, several parks, outside the New York Public Library, at Columbia, and in the 42nd St. subway station. This week they return to the Park Avenue Armory, where in 2009 artistic director Shen Wei created Behind Resonance, an exciting, involving work set in and around Ernesto Neto’s massive “Anthropodino” sculptural installation. As part of its tenth anniversary celebration, SWDA will perform 2003’s Rite of Spring (with music by Igor Stravinsky), 2000’s Folding (set to music by John Tavener along with Tibetan Buddhist chants), and the new site-specific multimedia commission Undivided Divided (scored by Sō Percussion), created specifically for the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall. All choreography is by Shen Wei and lighting by Jennifer Tipton, with ten lead dancers (Cecily Campbell, Sarah Lisette Chiesa, Evan Copeland, Andrew Cowan, James Healey, Kate Jewett, Cynthia Koppe, Sara Procopio, Joan Wadopian, and Brandon Whited) and nearly two dozen additional dancers (including Shen Wei). Shen Wei favors slow, precise movement and elegant nudity, resulting in intoxicating works that lure you in with their sheer beauty. She Wei’s performances are the first of a triple play of dance at the Park Avenue Armory, followed December 14-22 by STREB’s Kiss the Air and concluding December 29-31 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s grand finale, a series of site-specific Events that will mark the last performances ever by the noted company.

FOLDING brings origami to life in elegant dance (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Update: As he did with Behind Resonance two years ago, New York City-based dancer-choreographer Shen Wei again turns the Park Avenue Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall into an intimate gathering that celebrates his unique movement language, presenting two repertory works and a new site-specific piece as part of Shen Wei Dance Arts’ tenth anniversary. The evening begins with a restaging of 2003’s Rite of Spring, set to Fazil Say’s version of Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet, in which as many as sixteen dancers make their way in and around a crooked chalked grid, running to the edges, moving in formation, pausing for long moments of inactivity, and rolling on the floor, their black and gray costumes streaked with white. That is followed by 2000’s Folding, in which the dancers first appear in long red skirts and odd head extensions (evoking Robert Wilson and Matthew Barney), gliding slowly across a white reflective surface, soon evolving into duets with the performers in black, their powdered bodies folding into each other, leading to a finale that recalls, of all things, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

UNDIVIDED DIVIDED is sure to get the audience’s undivided attention (photo by Stephanie Berger)

After a thirty-minute intermission in which the audience must leave the drill hall, everyone returns for the grand finale, the specially commissioned Undivided Divided, a whirlwind tour-de-force featuring thirty topless male and female dancers situated throughout the space, rolling around in paint on a long canvas, throwing themselves against the walls of a plexiglass box, climbing atop and inside a set of plastic cubes, performing intimate duets confined to a small rectangular area, amid other unique and unusual set-ups enhanced by visual projections on the floor. The audience can remain in their seats but are encouraged to remove their shoes and walk up and down pathways that allow them to come face-to-face with the dancers as they writhe about, some making eye contact, others lost in fantasy, like living sculptures in a museum. Undivided Divided is an exhilarating experience, seemingly for the dancers as much as for the crowd, an exuberant display of physicality that goes beyond mere sexuality and voyeurism, offering an energizing and thrillingly different relationship between audience and performer.

ANARCHIST/ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIRS

NYC ANARCHIST BOOK FAIR
Judson Memorial Church (and other venues)
55 Washington Square South
April 8-10, free
www.anarchistbookfair.net

NEW YORK ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
April 8-10, $20/day, $30/two-day pass, $45/three-day pass (includes catalog)
www.armoryonpark.org
www.sanfordsmith.com

The publishing industry is currently going through revolutionary change as digital ebooks threaten the future of the physical book. Although there are still plenty of people who believe that the thrill of holding a book in their hands, putting it on their shelf in its proper place once finished, will never go away, there is a new generation of readers who might never care about that feeling of accomplishment. You are likely to find a lot more of the former rather than the latter at this weekend’s fifty-first annual NY Antiquarian Book Fair, being held April 8-10 at the Park Ave. Armory. More than two hundred exhibitors will be selling first editions, maps, illustrated books, manuscripts, and other literary treasures that would never be quite the same seen on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad. There’s no telling who will show up at the fifth annual New York City Anarchist Book Fair, which begins today with the Anarchist Film Festival ($10 suggested donation), taking place this afternoon and tonight at the Sixth St. Community Center and promising to “celebrate a global uprising and resistance to state repression.” On Saturday and Sunday, exhibitors will set up at Judson Memorial Church, where attendees can check out such workshops and panel discussions as “Food Not Bombs in New York City and Long Island: Diverse Tactics for a Singular Mission,” “Farmworker Justice, Green Capitalism, and Trader Joe’s: A Presentation on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers,” “Disarm and Hammer: Anarchist Pacifists in Nuclear Direct Disarmament Actions,” and “Sexuality, Surveillance, and Government Infiltrators: Fragmenting the Radical Left Through the Terrorization of Animal Advocacy.” In addition, the Anarchist Art Festival at the Living Theater will feature “Seven Meditations on Political Sado Masochism” today and tomorrow and the Anarchist Art Laboratory “Deconstructing Power, Creating New Routes” on Sunday.

THE ART SHOW 2011

Jaume Plensa, “Endless III,” stainless steel, 2010, Galerie Lelong / Richard Gray Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
March 2-6, $20
212-488-5550
www.artdealers.org/artshow

The twenty-third annual Art Dealers Association of America Art Show is back at the Park Ave. Armory, where nearly seventy galleries will be selling painting, drawing, sculpture, and more, benefiting the Henry Street Settlement. In general, the Art Show is geared more toward collectors than any of the other fairs; at numerous (but by no means all) galleries, the more you look like a potential buyer, the more forthcoming the men and women working in there can be. With that in mind, the ADAA has made available online a free Collector’s Guide, which will help novices and experienced buyers navigate such topics as “What to Look for in a Work of Art,” “Understanding the Art World,” “How to Buy and Sell Through a Dealer,” and “What About Auctions?” But even if you don’t have deep pockets, there is plenty to see at the show, which is highly manageable, not overstuffed and overloaded with too much art and too-narrow aisles. Ameringer / McEnery / Yohe is displaying all twenty-one drawings that comprise Robert Motherwell’s “The Dedalus Sketchbooks,” what he referred to as “artful doodles” inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses, made on Cape Cod during the summer of 1982. David Opdyke’s “Bit Assemblage,” at Ronald Feldman, consists of sculptures and black-and-white drawings anchored by the large-scale Styrofoam landscape “Zenith.” Knoedler & Company’s “Milton Avery and the Figure” consists of a number of outstanding oils, while Jill Newhouse has beautiful drawings, watercolors, and small sculptures by Auguste Rodin.

David Opdyke’s “Bit Assemblage” is at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts booth at the Art Show (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

L&M Arts has a splendid collection of Joseph Cornell boxes that look as fresh as if they were made yesterday. Franz Erhard Walther’s “Gesang des Lagers” sewn dyed canvases line the walls and even the floor at Peter Freeman, while Kathy Butterly’s small ceramic sculptures cover a table at Tibor de Nagy. Paintings by Oscar Bluemner and Charles Burchfield mesh surprisingly well at Debra Force, as do paintings and drawings by Richard Diebenkorn at Greenberg Van Doren. Photography fans will find William Klein at Howard Greenberg, Paul Strand at Zabriskie, Diane Arbus at Robert Miller, William Henry Fox Talbot and Eugene Atget at Hans B. Kraus, twelve of Laurel Nakadate’s “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears” (one from each month) at Leslie Tonkonow, and twenty of Irving Penn’s engaging corner portraits at Pace / MacGill, including Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, John O’Hara, Igor Stravinsky, Jerome Robbins, and Walter Gropius. Among the other featured artists are Rachel Whiteread at Luhring Augustine, Jessica Stockholder at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman, Richard Artschwater at David Nolan, Alice Neel at David Zwirner, and Zhang Huan’s “Ash Paintings” at Pace. There’s also Watteau and Turner at David Tunick, “The Figure: From Old Masters through Contemporary Art” at Odyssia, Picasso at Pace Prints, Schiele at Galerie St. Etienne, and Philip Guston just about everywhere you look.

FASHION WEEK: THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR DANCIN’

Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday, February 15, free with RSVP, 8:00
www.bootsbykora.com

Less than a year after emigrating in the fall of 2001 from her hometown of Bucharest, Romania, where she worked as a painter on Costa-Gavras’s AMEN., artist and designer Coralia Nitu had her first solo show in New York, “ARTectonic,” held at the East-West Gallery of the Romanian Cultural Center in Murray Hill. Back then, Nitu, who was pursuing her MFA at Parsons, told us how she loved working with metal, embracing its coldness while twisting it into unique geometric patterns. She also raved about how she fed off the fast-paced energy of New York. In 2006 she returned to designing footwear; back in Romania, she had started redecorating shoes when she was twelve. All of those elements will come together on February 15 as Nitu, now known professionally as Kora Mancini, will present “These Boots Are Made for Dancin’,” a Fashion Week event being held at the Park Ave. Armory. Mancini will show off her Made in America collection of ten shiny metallic styles, crafted in Italian leather, reminiscent of her early painting and sculpture, with an assist from her friend Kate Jewett, dancer and rehearsal director for Shen Wei Dance Arts, who will perform in the footwear. (Jewett is rather familiar with the armory, as the Shen Wei company previously danced in and around Ernesto Neto’s “Anthropodino” installation in 2009 and will be back in the armory November 30 – December 4 for a world premiere and two repertory pieces.) According to the invitation, “The theme is glam, the season is all year round, and the target is young, athletic, and cosmopolitan women (or admirers of women) with a penchant for the flashy and outrageous.” There are very few remaining spots available, so if you wish to attend, you should RSVP immediately for what promises to be a very different kind of fashion show.

ANTIQUES WEEK 2011

Everything old is new again at winter antiques shows

It’s Winter Antiques Week, with antiques shows all over town. The American Antiques Show celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, running January 20-23 at the Metropolitan Pavilion. A benefit for the American Folk Art Museum, the show features more than forty exhibitors offering up Federal furniture, flags, outsider and primitive art, American Indian basketry and jewelry, portrait miniatures, needlework, Tiffany glass and lamps, toys and banks, vintage photography, and other “unusual and whimsical objects” in addition to book signings and talks. Entrance is $20 and includes a catalog and 2-for-1 admission to the American Folk Art Museum. The fifty-seventh annual Winter Antiques Show, a benefit for East Side House Settlement, will take place at the Park Ave. Armory January 21-30, featuring seventy-five exhibitors selling and displaying twentieth-century fine and decorative arts, American ceramics and glass, Aesthetic Movement and Arts & Crafts furniture and decorative arts, antiquities and pre-Columbian art, Asian works, American and European folk art, arms and armor, clocks, carpets and rugs, jewelry, miniatures, textiles, and English furniture as well as books, manuscripts, autographs, and illuminated manuscripts, paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures, and other specialties. Admission is $20 and includes a catalog. Stella Show Mgmt. has two shows for Antiques Week, beginning with Antiques at the Armory, January 21-23 at the 69th Regiment Armory, consisting of one hundred exhibits focusing on folk art, garden and architectural artifacts, period furniture, and more. Admission is $15, and there is free shuttle service to Americana & Antiques @ the Pier, which runs January 22-23 at Pier 12, featuring more than two hundred dealers selling furniture, folk art, glass, prints, porcelains, quilts, silver, antiquarian books, and much more. Admission is $15, but $20 will get you into both shows.

LEONARDO DA VINCI’S THE LAST SUPPER: A VISION BY PETER GREENAWAY

Peter Greenaway investigates da Vinci’s “Last Supper” and Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana” at Park Avenue Armory

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 6, timed tickets $15 (children ten and under free), 12 noon – 8:00 pm
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

On December 4 at the Park Avenue Armory, iconoclastic British director Peter Greenaway boldly declared that cinema is dead, that all art is elitist, and that we have become a visually illiterate society. The man behind such unique and unusual films as THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989) and THE PILLOW BOOK (1996) was in New York discussing his dazzling multimedia installation “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway,” which continues through January 6 at the armory. Greenaway is in the midst of his Ten Classical Paintings Revisited series, in which he delves deep into the stories behind some of the greatest works of art in the history of the world. He began by turning Rembrandt’s “Nightwatch” into a thrilling murder mystery and has now turned his attention to Leonardo da Vinci and Paolo Veronese. Upon first entering the fifty-five-thousand square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, visitors are greeted by more than a dozen screens of varying sizes, dangling from the ceiling, hiding in the background, and even forming a red carpet of sorts on the floor. Different videos place the viewer in the midst of a Milan piazza as images of tourists whirl past. “I love Italian fascist architecture,” Greenaway noted during his December 4 talk.

The Park Avenue Armory is transformed into a multimedia Italian piazza and refectory for dazzling Greenaway installation (photo by James Ewing)

Following shots of Italian ballet dancer Roberto Bolle’s graceful movement, visitors are taken into a second room, a re-creation of the Refectory of Santa Maria Delle Grazie, featuring a long white table with white place settings leading to an exact copy of da Vinci’s masterful depiction of “The Last Supper.” Greenaway brings the magnificent painting to life using light, shadow, and projection as the work suddenly becomes three-dimensional, glows when hit by apparent sunlight, and is broken down into individual figures and specific elements. The standing audience is then brought back into the first room, where Greenaway investigates Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana,” a work that places Jesus at the center of a Jewish wedding, the married couple way off to one side, as Jesus turns water into wine. Greenaway discusses various characters Veronese included in the painting, his controversial depiction of blood, and the hierarchy of the carefully arranged 126 figures at the banquet, all of whom are given bits of dialogue, some taken from the Gospel of St. John. With voices coming from all directions and classical music by Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli and Antonio Vivaldi echoing through the hall, visitors become guests at the wedding, as if in the middle of it all, as Greenaway offers a new way to look at a painting and cinema, just as he did with “The Last Supper.” The forty-five-minute presentation gets into cosmography, Christian iconography, and apocrypha with a sly sense of humor, integrating living images with a text-based cinema, incorporating art and architecture, film and dance, religion and history into a spectacular experience that should not be missed.

LEONARDO DA VINCI’S THE LAST SUPPER: A VISION BY PETER GREENAWAY

Peter Greenaway will be at the armory on December 4 for a special conversation about his massive installation of “Leonardo’s Last Supper”

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday – Sunday, December 3 – January 6, $15 (children ten and under free), 12 noon – 8:00 pm
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Iconoclastic British director Peter Greenaway has made such films as THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT (1982), THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT (1987), THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989), and THE PILLOW BOOK (1996) over the course of his controversial thirty-year career. Recently he has turned his attention on the art world, making digital documentaries and giving lectures on such masterpieces as Paolo Veronese’s “The Wedding at Cana” and Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” as part of his Nine Classical Paintings Revisited series. Greenaway’s multimedia examination of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” including a life-size re-creation of the work within a clone of its original home, in the Refectory of Santa Maria Delle Grazie, will be on view in the Park Avenue Armory from December 2 through January 6. “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway” will invite visitors into an immersive environment of light, sound, and illusion, offering new ways to look at the famous painting itself within its historical context as well as art in general. On December 1, Adam Lowe, founder and director of Factum Arte, will hold a lecture on “Duplicating da Vinci: The Art of Cloning a Masterpiece,” while Greenaway will participate in a special conversation on December 4 at 10:30 am about the unique installation. (Each event is $15 and does not include admission to the main gallery.)