Tag Archives: the Shed

PHASES AND THE IN-BETWEENS

Phases and the In-Betweens features animation, text, and video incorporating the phases of the moon into caregiving during the pandemic

PHASES AND THE IN-BETWEENS
The Shed
Through February 11, free
theshed.org

Phases and the In-Betweens is a collaborative intervention on the website of the Shed, the Hudson Yards performance center that opened in 2019 and hosts music, theater, dance, art, and other programs and exhibitions. The ongoing multimedia piece changes with the phases of the moons; it began with the new moon on January 13 and was updated for the first quarter January 20; next up is the last quarter on February 4, followed by the new moon on February 11, which will signal the end of the project. Phases and the In-Betweens is created by Brothers Sick, consisting of artist, educator, and curator Ezra and photographer Noah Benus; interdisciplinary media artist Yo-Yo Lin; and poet, curator, and critic DJ Queer Shoulders (danilo machado). Incorporating animation, text, and video, the work examines issues of caregiving, disability, and lockdown as they relate to the “phases of reopening” and the inevitable return to whatever “normal” might be on the other side of the Covid-19 crisis. “For this project, at its core, we really wanted to think about what care looks like in private and public and how that relationship of care is enacted during a global pandemic,” Brothers Sick said in a statement. “From there, we reference different elements of care in isolation and public, layering and blurring the intimacy of illness and public life during precious and precarious outings. We layer and blur hierarchies of material, media, and experience. For the format, we really wanted to explore these ever-present ideas of care and sickness through a broadened presentation of digital art sharing and making, across sick, disabled, Crip time, pandemic time, celestial space and time, and across ourselves in our care networks with our collaborators.”

They accomplish that with bold imagery, words that jump out at you, and detailed medical information. They narrate, “squirm fingers / nitrile disposable sanitary / a map of new york city has joined / the right side of frame / colors change from shades of green to blue / metrics and mappings / testing and cases / patches of pink and purple and orange / we move faster to the left passing more fans, / a worker and a uniformed soldier, who waves / sterling silver ringed finger / scroll touch screen questionnaire / how much pain / how severe.” Phases and the In-Betweens is part of the Shed’s “Up Close” digital series, which has previously presented House or Home: 690 Wishes with the HawtPlates and Charlotte Brathwaite, Revelation of Proverbs by Reggie ‘Regg Roc’ Gray and the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, Go Off! Joy in Defiance with DJ April Hunt, Rashaad Newsome, Legendary Monster Mon_Teese, and Precious, Solo B by Mariana Valencia, and other programs.

FREE: MEET AT THE SHED

the shed

The Shed, the Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Saturday, January 11, free with RSVP, 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
646-455-3494
theshed.org

If you haven’t been to the Shed yet, the entertainment hub at Hudson Yards, this Saturday offers you a pretty good reason to finally head over. From 11:00 am to 8:00 pm, admission to the two current art exhibits, “Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates” and “Manual Override,” which usually require $10 tickets each, is free. There will also be several special programs as well as food trucks in the McCourt, a photo booth on level six, and music and dance. There will be tours of the wide-ranging Agnes Denes retrospective, which consists of more than 150 works from throughout the career of the eighty-eight-year-old Budapest-born American artist (including newly commissioned pieces), at 2:30 with artists Bahar Behbahani, Tattfoo Tan, Avram Finkelstein, Moko Fukuyama, and Janani Balasubramanian and astrophysicist Dr. Natalie Gosnell, at 3:15 with curatorial assistant Adeze Wilford, at 3:45 with senior curator Emma Enderby, and at 5:00 with John Hatfield and artist Torkwase Dyson. “Manual Override” brings together the work of Morehshin Allahyari, Simon Fujiwara, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sondra Perry, and Martine Syms, which combines social and ethical issues with cutting-edge technology. In addition, DJ Synchro will be spinning in the lobby from 2:00 to 4:00, DJ April Hunt from 4:00 to 6:00, and DJ Bembona from 6:00 to 8:00; Dance Battle: It’s Showtime NYC! vs. the D.R.E.A.M. Ring will get under way in the lobby at 2:15 and 4:30; the two dance teams will be hosting workshops around the building at 3:00 and in the Tisch Skylights at 5:00 and 5:15; and Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter J Hoard will perform in the Tisch Skylights at 5:30.

WILLIAM FORSYTHE: A QUIET EVENING OF DANCE

Jill Johnson and Brit Rodemund in A Quiet Evening of Dance. (photo © Mohamed Sadek / courtesy the Shed)

Jill Johnson and Brit Rodemund in William Forsythe’s A Quiet Evening of Dance (photo © Mohamed Sadek / courtesy the Shed)

The Shed
The Griffin Theater in the Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Through October 25, $42-$92
646-455-3494
theshed.org

In May 2018, William Forsythe presented a site-specific work as part of “A Prelude to the Shed,” a preview of what New Yorkers could expect from the new arts center at Hudson Yards. The free collaboration, Tino Sehgal: This variation and William Forsythe: Pas de Deux Cent Douze, put visitors right in the middle of the action as near-total darkness evolved into a cappella singing and an energetic duet as the walls of a temporary facility opened to the street. Choreographer and visual artist Forsythe, the former head of Ballet Frankfurt who has worked independently after ending the Forsythe Company in 2015, is back at Hudson Yards with A Quiet Evening of Dance, a lovely evening-length piece continuing through October 25 at the Shed’s Griffin Theater. Consisting of new and reimagined repertory works, the hundred-minute performance is divided into two main sections, taking place on an empty stage at floor level, putting the ten dancers on equal footing with the audience.

William Forsythe’s A Quiet Evening of Dance (photo © Mohamed Sadek / courtesy the Shed)

William Forsythe’s A Quiet Evening of Dance focuses primarily but not exclusively on a series of duets (photo © Mohamed Sadek / courtesy the Shed)

The first half consists of four parts, focusing primarily on duets that are almost like a primer for Forsythe’s choreographic language, which relies heavily on the deconstruction of classical ballet, emphasizing the movement of the arms and hands and upper body. “Prologue,” featuring Parvaneh Scharafali and Ander Zabala, and “Catalogue,” with Jill Johnson and Brit Rodemund, are set in near silence, the only sounds coming from bird tweeting and the dancers’ breathing — some breathe significantly harder than others, like different sounds that emerge from tennis players in the midst of a match, though not as forceful and urgent — and their feet, which glide across the black floor in sneakers covered in wooly socks whose colors sometimes are similar to the wrist-to-biceps gloves they wear that give yet more weight to their arm movement. (The playful costumes are by Dorothee Merg.) Johnson and Rodemund’s duet also has them exploring their entire bodies in a thrilling kind of anatomy lesson. “Epilogue” follows, a series of duets in which Scharafali, Zabala, Johnson, Rodemund, Brigel Gjoka, Riley Watts, Rauf “RubberLegz” Yasit, Jake Tribus, and Roderick George (whom I saw perform a sizzling solo last year when his Pas de Deux Cent Douze partner was unable to dance with him) rotate onstage to Morton Feldman’s soft “Nature Pieces from Piano No. 1,” each dancer establishing their unique personalities: Scharafali with her casual elegance (with her hands at times in her pockets), Johnson with her stoic presence, Watts with his emotional facial gestures, Yasit with his body-twisting (though repetitive) contortions. Gjoka and Watts, moving in rare unison, conclude with “Dialogue (DUO2015)” before intermission.

Rauf “RubberLegz” Yasit and Parvaneh Scharafali in A Quiet Evening of Dance (photo © Mohamed Sadek / courtesy the Shed)

A co-commission with Sadler’s Wells, where it debuted in October 2018, A Quiet Evening of Dance continues after intermission with “Seventeen / Twenty One,” which is not quite as quiet though just as winning as the dancers, now on a white floor, use the language they explored earlier in a more complexly structured work, set to Jean-Phillippe Rameau’s Baroque “Hippolyte et Aricle: Ritrounelle” from Une Symphonie Imaginaire. The title links the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries — Rameau was born in 1683 — as all ten dancers whirl about the stage, ranging from solos to duets to trios and then everyone coming together for a grand finale.

DRAGON SPRING PHOENIX RISE

Lone Peak (David Patrick Kelly) leads a ritual for his daughter, Little Lotus (PeiJu Chien-Pott), in Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise at the Shed (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The McCourt at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 27, $25-$99
646-455-3494
theshed.org

In 1999, Chen Shi-Zheng presented his widely hailed twenty-hour production of The Peony Pavilion at Lincoln Center. Perhaps the China-born, New York-based director is used to longer spectacles, because it takes quite a while for his hundred-minute Shed commission, Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise, to get cooking at the McCourt, where it continues through July 27. The final twenty minutes of the kung-fu musical are everything audiences hoped for, an exhilarating combination of martial arts and movement (choreographed by Zhang Jun and Akram Khan), sound (by Brandon Wolcott) and music (by Bobby Krlic and Arca), acrobatics, and storytelling; what comes before is a treacly narrative with mundane songs (by Sia) right out of a Disney movie; in fact, the show was co-conceived and written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, the duo behind the DreamWorks family film series Trolls and Kung Fu Panda.

World premiere Shed commission features some awe-inspiring stagecraft (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The story shuttles between modern-day Flushing, Queens, and the near future, although you can’t really tell that from Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s set, which features a very cool ancient boulder on one side, a ladder that leads to a walkway in a silly, glitzy nightclub on the other, and hanging cloths that rise and fall, beautifully illuminated by lighting designer Tobias G. Rylander and Leigh Sachwitz’s colorful, swirling projections. In the mostly senseless fable, aging kung fu master Lone Peak (David Patrick Kelly) is not happy when his daughter, Little Lotus (Jasmine Chiu), is being courted by flashy billionaire Doug Pince (David Torok, a martial artist who needs more acting lessons). Pince is after the Dragon Spring, which is rumored to offer eternal life. When Lone Peak’s protégé, Lee (Dickson Mbi), turns traitor, evil rears its ugly head. Eighteen years later, Little Phoenix (Jasmine Chiu) and Little Dragon (Ji Tuo) meet, leading to a grand finale.

Thrilling final battle elevates Chen Shi-Zheng’s kung-fu musical at the McCourt (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Chen (Orphan of Zhao, Monkey: Journey to the West) was inspired to make Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise by Bruce Lee’s 1964 audition for The Green Hornet, and much of the show has the simplicity of a run-of-the-mill 1960s television series. Plot twists don’t fit, character motivation comes out of nowhere, and set pieces are random and repetitive. But then the last scenes save it from a fate worse than death as the many elements coalesce into a gratifying whole. In a program note, Chen explains, “I wanted to create an allegory for the immigrant experience, transforming iconic Chinese images, movement, and ideas into an American context.” It never reaches that ideal — he dumbed it down too much — and it takes too long to gel, but when it finally does, it’s worth the wait.

BJÖRK’S CORNUCOPIA

Björk’s Cornucopia is a stunning world premiere commission at the Shed (photo by Santiago Felipe)

The McCourt at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
May 22, 25, 28, and June 1
646-455-3494
theshed.org
www.bjork.com

In 2012, Icelandic musician, actress, and international fashion plate Björk presented Biophilia at Roseland, a multimedia performance based on her 2011 app album, an exploration of the relationship between nature, music, and technology. In 2015, her Vulnicura tour opened at Carnegie Hall, an emotional and personal examination of her breakup with longtime partner Matthew Barney. And now the Iceland- and Brooklyn-based artist has inaugurated her latest elaborate production, Björk’s Cornucopia, at the Shed’s McCourt concert venue, where the dazzling show, based primarily on her 2017 concept album about love and nature, Utopia, continues through June 1. Cornucopia begins with several a cappella songs performed by Iceland’s Hamrahlíð Choir in front of the stage, including Björk’s “Sonnets/Unrealities XI” and “Cosmogony,” the boys wearing dark slacks and white shirts buttoned to the top, the girls in traditional folk outfits; at one point the members of the choir — which Björk belonged to when she was a teenager and is still led by the same conductor, founder Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir — darted up and down the aisles of the raised rows of seating.

Björk dazzles in ethereal multimedia production at the McCourt (photo by Santiago Felipe)

It’s then Björk’s turn, and she takes the multilevel stage in a nautilus-like costume designed by Olivier Rousteing of Balmain and Iris Van Herpen, with a headdress by co-creative director and frequent collaborator James Merry that covers much of her eyes. She emerges from behind a curtain of hanging ropes where Tobias Gremmler’s giant color-drenched videos of animated flora and cosmic fireworks (and an avatar of Björk) are projected; the video also appears on a large rear screen. Chiara Stephenson’s set features a pod that looks like an alien-head silo and a platform that extends four rows into the center of the audience. The music is played by Icelandic flute septet Viibra, dressed like fairies, along with harpist Katie Buckley, percussionist Manu Delago, and Bergur Þórisson on electronics; the complex lighting design is by Bruno Poet, with choreography by Margrét Bjarnadóttir. All the elements, under the direction of Argentine film director Lucretia Martel (The Headless Woman, Zama), come together to form a celestial wonderland where Björk’s ethereal music, less dance-oriented than on previous tours, transports the audience on an otherworldly adventure.

Nature comes to the forefront in (photo by Santiago Felipe)

Nature comes to the forefront in Björk’s Cornucopia (photo by Santiago Felipe)

Björk performs twelve of Utopia’s fourteen tracks, including “The Gate,” “Arisen My Senses,” “Claimstaker,” and “Blissing Me” (joined by experimental musician serpentwithfeet), as well as such older songs as “Show Me Forgiveness” and “Mouth’s Cradle” from Medúlla, “Hidden Place” and “Pagan Poetry” from Vespertine, and “Venus as a Boy” from Debut, each with its own unique sonic and visual flourishes. Delago swishes upside-down bamboo-like bowls in a tank of water. A metal ring drops from the ceiling, surrounding Björk as four members of Viibra play flutes embedded in the circle. Björk sings from inside the closed pod. There are different ways to experience the show; if your seats are near the front, it feels more intimate, especially with Björk singing such lyrics as “Just that kiss / Was all there is / Every cell in my body / Lined up for you / Legs a little open / Once again / Awaken my senses / Head topless / Arisen my senses” and “Utopia / It’s not elsewhere / It’s here” in close proximity. But from farther back, the epic scope of the videos and staging combine for a bolder, more immersive effect.

Björk is joined by Icelandic flute septet Viibra for Cornucopia (photo by Santiago Felipe)

Prior to the encores, a recording of sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is projected, the schoolgirl explaining that “we are about to sacrifice our civilization for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. The biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. . . . We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis . . . And if the solutions within this system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself.” It’s a powerful statement that Björk follows with “Future Forever,” in which she opines (in a lush new costume), “Imagine a future and be in it / Feel this incredible nurture, soak it in / Your past is on a loop, turn it off / See this possible future and be in it.” It’s hard not to get on board with that direct yet hopeful sentiment.

REICH RICHTER PÄRT

A flash mob sings Arvo Pärt’s “Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima” in room of Gerhard Richter wallpaper and tapestries (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Shed
Level 2 Gallery in the Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 2, four times daily, $25
646-455-3494
theshed.org

The Shed, the new performance space at Hudson Yards, has made a rather inauspicious debut. The experimental play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, inaugurating the five-hundred-seat black-box Griffin Theater, is a critical and popular flop, with bad reviews, walkouts, and lots of empty seats. The first art installation, an untitled work by Trisha Donnelly, initially cost ten dollars but was made free after a less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the exhibit, which consists of trees on gurneys in a dark room where Leontyne Price’s rendition of “Habanera” from Carmen repeats over and over. But the immersive Reich Richter Pärt is a bit more on track, though it too has its drawbacks. “We’re only getting started,” artistic director Alex Poots told me after a recent performance; Poots previously did wonderful things at the Manchester Festival and Park Ave. Armory.

Curated by senior program advisor Hans Ulrich Obrist and Poots, Reich Richter Pärt is a two-room, fifty-minute multidisciplinary collaboration between eighty-two-year-old American composer Steve Reich, eighty-seven-year-old German visual artist Gerhard Richter, and eighty-three-year-old Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. The audience is first let into an expansive white space with high ceilings; the walls feature vertical wallpaper and jacquard woven tapestries that emulate Rorschach-like strips that are supposed to resemble stained glass, as if the room is a cathedral. Visitors are given too much time to walk around and look at the images; many break off into conversations and take out their cell phones until a group of men and women starts singing, a flash mob performing Pärt’s lovely choral work “Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima,” about three Portuguese shepherd children who claimed to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1917. The choral work, which is dedicated to Richter and was inspired by Psalms 8.2 (“From the mouths of children and infants you create praise for yourself”), is performed by either the Choir of Trinity Wall Street Performing Ensemble or Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

Gerhard Richter and Corinna Belz’s abstract film screens with live score by Steve Reich (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The crowd is then led into a second large room, where people can grab folding chairs and sit wherever they like in the empty space between a wall on one side with a screen and a small orchestra on the other, either the Ensemble Signal or the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), depending on the date. (I saw the former, conducted by Brad Lubman. Poots suggested sitting very close to the musicians for the optimal experience, so I joined such visitors as Marina Abramovic and Francis Ford Coppola.) The orchestra plays Reich’s newly commissioned score, created specifically for an approximately half-hour film by Richter and Corinna Belz, which brings to life Richter’s algorithmic processing of his 2016 abstract painting Abstraktes Bild (946-3), using a computer to fold it in half and half again, dividing it into 1/4096ths and then proceeding in the other direction, creating a hypnotic, kaleidoscopic animation in which the painting morphs from bands of bold color, which also line two walls, into yet more Rorschach-like shapes and figures slowly marching across the screen until it all double back to the color strips. (The original work is on view as well.) The film follows the principles Richter employed in his “Patterns” series, which Reich adapted for his thrilling score. As with the first part of the presentation, the second goes on too long, but it’s still a wonder to behold, an example of the kind of fascinating promise the Shed holds.

NORMA JEANE BAKER OF TROY

Ben Whishaw and Renée Fleming star in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy at the Shed (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The Shed
The Griffin Theater in the Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 14, $49-$172
646-455-3494
theshed.org

An alarming number of walkouts were noted during previews of Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, the inaugural production at the Shed, the sprawling new arts center at Hudson Yards, even though the show runs a mere ninety minutes and boasts the all-star duo of actor Ben Whishaw (His Dark Materials, The Crucible) and opera legend Renée Fleming (Carousel, Living on Love). When I saw it last week, only one couple got up and left, about halfway through; however, there was an embarrassing amount of empty seats in the Griffin Theater, which can hold five hundred. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is an incomprehensible experimental melologue, combining spoken dialogue by Anne Carson with vocal and instrumental music by Paul Clark. It’s an anachronistic mash-up of Euripides’s 412 BCE play Helen with the tabloid-style tale of Marilyn Monroe, equating the two sex symbols as tragic heroines of different kinds of wars initiated by men. (Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926 but often used the last name of her mother’s second husband, John Newton Baker.)

Renée Fleming and Ben Whishaw share an intimate moment in incomprehensible mash-up at the new Griffin Theater (photo by Stephanie Berger)

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1963, and while everyone else in New York City is partying, an unidentified man (Whishaw) and woman (Fleming) are sitting at a small desk in a dark, noirish office with large windows in the back. (The too-long set is by Alex Eales.) While he dictates what appears to be a screenplay, alternating with narrated “History of War” tapes, she dutifully types into her stenography machine, occasionally repeating a phrase out loud in song. (It was sometime difficult to tell if Fleming was singing live or some of her sung dialogue was prerecorded; the sound design is by Donato Wharton.) He is a straightforward, persnickety fellow, declaring every bit of punctuation and line break. His story involves Helen and Marilyn as well as Truman Capote, Homer, Pearl Bailey, Menelaus, Fritz Lang, Hermione, and “Arthur, king of Sparta and New York,” most likely a reference to Arthur Miller, the native Manhattanite who was married to Monroe from 1956 to 1961.

He sometimes adds a newspaper article or other piece of paper to an easel like detectives do when tracking down criminal masterminds. However, very little of it makes any sense. Carson (The Mile-Long Opera, Autobiography of Red) is an award-winning Canadian poet and essayist and teacher of ancient Greek whose translations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have been performed by Classic Stage Company, but Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is impenetrable. (Dare I say it was Greek to me?) It feels as if she and director Katie Mitchell, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre known for her adventurous, controversial productions (The Waves, The Seagull), are trying to confuse and, well, bore the audience. In that regard, they are thoroughly successful.