Tag Archives: wade thompson drill hall

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Willem Dafoe and Marina Abramovic examine the seminal performance artists life in Robert Wilson spectacle (photo © Lucie Jansch)

Willem Dafoe and Marina Abramović examine the seminal performance artist’s life — and death — in Robert Wilson spectacle (photo © Lucie Jansch)

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through December 21, $135, 7:30
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

As the audience enters the Park Ave. Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall to find their seats in the rising bleachers, three figures are already onstage, a trio of white-faced women representing Marina Abramović lying in coffins, motionless, hands clasped over their chests. On each seat is a copy of the Seventh Regiment Gazette newspaper, which announces, “Artist Marina Abramović Dies at 67.” Soon three dogs are onstage, sniffing at the red bones scattered around the coffins. For the next two and a half hours, episodes from the life of the seminal performance artist are depicted as only director Robert Wilson can do it: visually stunning and psychologically confounding, gorgeous and infuriating, rousing and frustrating, hysterically funny and annoyingly repetitive. Looking like a cross between Joel Grey in Cabaret,, the Joker from Batman, and the Heat Miser from The Year without a Santa Claus, Willem Dafoe narrates the story, primarily from a heavily littered platform in front of the right-hand side of the stage, calling out biographical tidbits from Abramović’s professional and personal life, some of which are then played out with a cast that includes Abramović first as her domineering mother, then as herself. Tales of her family being the first in their neighborhood in the former Yugoslavia to have a washing machine, her mother throwing an ashtray at her head, Marina considering getting a nose job, and her breakup walk with Ulay across the Great Wall of China are accompanied by music by Baby Dee, Scott Joplin, Paul Anka, and others, original compositions by William Basinski, and live performances of haunting songs by musical director, composer, and lyricist Antony, looking robust in a large, dark gown, and the Svetlana Spajić Group. The compelling second act is far more successful than the disappointing first, with a less abstract narrative and greater involvement from Dafoe. It is of course a visual spectacle, with wild costumes by Jacques Reynaud, crazy makeup by Joey Cheng, fab lighting by A. J. Weissbard, and video projections by Tomasz Jeziorski that feature snippets of some of Abramović’s durational performances. Although clear connections can be made between events in Abramović’s childhood and certain works, especially those that involve physical attacks on her body, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović is not meant to be mere biography, autobiography, or obituary; instead, it is another unique and unusual collaborative performance in a provocative career that has been experiencing a quite a resurgence over the last decade, with more to come.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Marina Abramović’s life — and death — takes center stage with the help of Willem Dafoe, Antony, Robert Wilson, and others

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
December 13-21, $135, 7:30
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Performance artist extraordinaire Marina Abramović has been undergoing a career renaissance this century, highlighted by an exciting, vibrant 2010 MoMA retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” and the 2012 documentary about the making of the exhibition. The Serbian-born, New York-based Abramović is a regular at fancy galas, and she even recently performed at Pace Gallery with Jay-Z. So what does the sixty-seven-year-old artist do, just as her life and career have become rejuvenated? Well, she stages her own funeral, of course. Actually, Abramović has decided to hand her biography over to experimental theater maestro Robert Wilson, the man behind such innovative and unique collaborations as The Black Rider with William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits, Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony with Bernice Johnson Reagon and Geoffrey Holder. In The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, the woman behind the “Rhythm” series and so many other cutting-edge works plays herself and her mother, with Willem Dafoe serving as narrator and songs by Antony Hegarty. Conceived and directed by Wilson, it is another audiovisual spectacle that has already had a documentary made about its creation; “Marina is the landscape, Bob the mind, Antony the heart, Willem the body,” director Giada Colagrande explains. The Life and Death of Marina Abramović will fill the Park Ave. Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall December 12-21; on December 15 at 6:15, armory artistic director Alex Poots will moderate an artist talk with Abramović and Dafoe in the Veterans Room as part of the Malkin Lecture Series.

MASSIVE ATTACK V ADAM CURTIS

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through October 4, $60
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

For twenty-five years, Robert “3D” Del Naja has been half of the British trip-hop group Massive Attack, along with Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, releasing such seminal records as Blue Lines, Protection, Mezzanine, and 100th Window. For thirty years, BBC journalist and filmmaker Adam Curtis has been making such award-winning documentaries and nonfiction series as Pandora’s Box, Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh, The Century of the Self, and The Power of Nightmares. Del Naja and Curtis have now teamed up to create the immersive multimedia production Massive Attack v Adam Curtis, co-commissioned by the Manchester International Festival, the Ruhrtriennale International Festival of the Arts, and the Park Avenue Armory. Former graffiti artist Del Naja and Curtis are joined by United Visual Artists, which has been providing LED installations for Massive Attack’s live shows since 2003, set designer Es Devlin (Howie the Rookie, The Master and Margarita), and vocalists Liz Fraser and Horace Andy as they delve into what Del Naja calls “a collective hallucination” and Curtis refers to as “a musical entertainment about the power of illusion and the illusion of power.” In the general admission show, multiple screens project a dizzying array of images examining the global sociopolitical culture of the last fifty years, declaring that “you are the centre of everything” while also including stories of individuals trying to find some hope for a better future. Massive Attack v Adam Curtis runs through October 4 in the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall; the October 3 performance will be preceded by the ticketed panel discussion “Viewing Media Through an Artistic Lens” with Simon Critchley, Joyce Barnathan, and Alexis Goldstein, moderated by Graham Sheffield.

Massive Attack and Adam Curtis fight the power in multimedia show (photo by James Medcraft)

Update: The title Massive Attack v Adam Curtis might suggest that the trip-hop band and the controversial experimental filmmaker are locked in some kind of competition, but instead Robert Del Naja and Curtis come together in exciting ways in their thrilling multimedia show. The ninety-minute production takes place in an elongated rectangular section of the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where fifteen hundred people squeeze in, with four large screens to the right and left and three more in the front, behind which Massive Attack plays a wide variety of cover songs (as well as a few snippets of their own tunes), joined by the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser and Jamaican singer Horace Andy, both of whom have collaborated with the British band before. Curtis’s Everything Is Going According to Plan flashes across the eleven screens, as archival news footage, superimposed text, and narration by David Warner focus in on such figures as Donald Trump, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, economist Fischer Black, Jess “the Automat” Marcum, and others who Curtis believes have contributed to the economic and political downfall of the world. He also tells the powerful, tragic stories of British painter Pauline Boty and Russian postpunk musician Yegor Letov. Meanwhile, Massive Attack performs the Shirelles’ “Baby, It’s You,” the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar,” Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” Dusty Springfield’s “The Look of Love,” This Mortal Coil’s “Dreams Are Like Water,” “Yanka’s Song,” “Safe from Harm,” and other songs, accompanying Curtis’s brutal, funny, cynical, and ironic images that portend the end of the world as we know it. The finale implores people to take action and save the planet from certain destruction, but you might be too dizzy and depressed by that point to care.

THE MACHINE

THE MACHINE depicts the epic battle between grandmaster Garry Kasparov and IBM computer Deep Blue (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through September 18, $45-$90
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
www.donmarwarehouse.com

In The Machine, playwright Matt Charman and director Josie Rourke turn the 1997 chess match between grandmaster Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer into a lively, riveting, edge-of-your-seat multimedia sports event. With the audience sitting on raised bleachers on all four sides of the stage in the Park Avenue Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Kasparov (Hadley Fraser) battles Deep Blue, operated by its cocreator Dr. Feng-Hsiung Hsu (Kenneth Lee). As the hard-fought six-game match continues, flashbacks reveal critical moments in the main competitors’ lives. Kasparov, who lost his father at a young age, is still a child when he takes on grandmaster Anatoly Karpov (Cornelius Booth), his mother (Francesca Annis) determined to have him be accepted to Karpov’s famous school. Hsu, at Carnegie Mellon, teams up with fellow student Murray Campbell (Trevor White) to attempt to improve a chess computer built by their professor, Dr. Hans Berliner (John Ramm), while struggling to commit to his cheerleader girlfriend, Tamsin (Antonia Bernath). During the match itself, cameras move around Lucy Osborne’s inventive set, projecting images onto an overhead Jumbotron while a pair of announcers detail the action. Two of the most thrilling moments occur when at first chessboards, then computers are pushed around the square stage along lighted tracks, beautifully choreographed scenes (by Jonathan Watkins) that continue the theme of man vs. machine, equating the two fields. Fraser plays Kasparov with a nervous energy that highlights his growing fear and worry as the games go on, while Lee’s Hsu is jumpy and awkward as he gives up any chance of a personal life in order to invent the best. During the course of the show, Kasparov is alternately referred to as both “too human” and a “monster,” while he accuses the IBM team of cheating because Deep Blue made what he believes to clearly be human moves in the second game, as this engaging Donmar Warehouse production once again focusing on the similarities between the machine that is man and the machine that is built by man. Be sure to arrive early, as there are many chess sets at the armory where visitors are encouraged to sit down and play.

MATT CHARMAN AND JOSIE ROURKE: THE MACHINE

Garry Kasparov takes on Deep Blue in epic chess battle being re-created at the Park Avenue Armory (photo by Helen Maybanks)

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
September 4-18, $45-$90
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
www.donmarwarehouse.com

A seminal moment in the history of man vs. machine took place in 1996-97, when Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov played the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in a series of highly publicized chess matches that would serve as a critical turning point in the ascendance of artificial intelligence. That epic battle has now been dramatized by England’s Donmar Warehouse, which will be staging the U.S. premiere of The Machine at the Park Avenue Armory September 4-18. Written by Matt Charman (A Night at the Dogs, The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder) and directed by Donmar artistic director Josie Rourke (The Physicists, The Cryptogram), the two-and-a-half-hour multimedia show features Hadley Fraser as Kasparov, Francesca Annis as Clara Gasparyan, Phil Nichol as television commentator Mandy Dinkleman, and Kenneth Lee as Feng-Hsiung Hsu (or Tsu), the computer scientist, known as Crazy Bird, who built Deep Blue. The production, which should look spectacular in the armory’s expansive 55,000-square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, is designed by Lucy Osborne, with lighting by Mark Henderson, sound by Ian Dickinson, choreography by Jonathan Watkins, and video projection by Andrzej Goulding. On September 7 there will be an artist talk with Rourke and Charman in the Veterans Room, moderated by armory artistic director Alex Poots ($15, 5:00).

OKTOPHONIE

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN & RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
March 20-27, $40
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Since opening its doors as an arts venue in September 2007, the Park Avenue Armory has staged some of the city’s best, and most unusual, productions, including memorable performances and installations by Ernesto Neto, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Ann Hamilton, Ryoji Ikeda, Shen Wei Dance Arts, Tom Sachs, STREB, Peter Greenaway, and Christian Boltanski, often involving immersive, interactive environments. Its latest presentation is yet another unique, involving piece, Oktophonie, a reimagined audiovisual version of the eponymous composition by German electronic maestro Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), a sixty-nine-minute layer from Act II of Dienstag aus Licht, the Tuesday portion of Stockhausen’s twenty-nine-hour opera cycle Licht: The Seven Days of the Week. The section follows the conflict between the archangel Michael and Lucifer, with yelling and bravery, tasting and devotion; the central color is red and the planetary object is Mars. The music will be led by Dutch musician Kathinka Pasveer, who contributed voice and flute to a 1992 recording of the work and has collaborated directly with the composer. The outer-space set is designed by internationally renowned artist and Hugo Boss Prize winner Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose work often involves interaction between creator and audience, perhaps most famously with him serving food to visitors. At the armory, ticket holders are encouraged to wear white and will be sitting on cushions against a lunar surface, surrounded by a cube of speakers. “The simultaneous movements — in eight layers — of the electronic music of ‘Invasion — Explosion’ with ‘Farewell’ demonstrate how — through ‘Oktophonie’ — a new dimension of musical space composition has opened,” Stockhausen once explained. Yes, there should be quite an intersection of music and space at the armory, where Oktophonie runs March 20–27, with tickets going fast. There will be an Artist Talk on March 23 at 6:00 in the Veterans Room ($15), with Pasveer and musician Suzanne Stephens, moderated by new armory artistic director Alex Poots.

ANN HAMILTON: THE EVENT OF A THREAD

Ann Hamilton’s interactive “the event of a thread” spreads across the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at Park Avenue Armory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 6, $12
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
the event of a thread slideshow

First and foremost, Ohio-born visual artist Ann Hamilton’s “the event of a thread” at Park Avenue Armory is fun, fun, fun. Visitors get to push each other on wooden swings that hang seventy feet from the ceiling of the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the movements manipulating an enormous white cloth that dances with the manufactured wind, rising and falling like ocean waves and drifting like clouds, especially when viewed from below, lying on the floor underneath it. But there’s much more to this interactive site-specific commission, curator Kristy Edmunds’s final contribution as the institution’s artistic director. (Edmunds has played a major role in transforming the armory into one of the city’s most exciting spaces for experimental public art.) Hamilton’s multisensory shared experience is about warp and weft, speaking and listening, reading and writing, voice and gesture, music and memory; it’s about interdependence and multiple meanings; it’s about community, connection, crossing, concordance, and communication; and it’s about flying home. Hamilton weaves a different kind of social media web with “the event of a thread,” bringing people physically together to work as a unit to effect change. At the entrance to the hall, two members of Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, wearing bulky animal-hair coats, are seated at a table, reading carefully organized texts by Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aristotle, Susan Stewart, Ann Lauterbach, and others; their voices are broadcast via paper-bag radios scattered throughout the room (which visitors are encouraged to pick up and listen to). Also on the table are dozens of pigeons in small cages, waiting to be released at the end of the day so they can fly home to their roost as a performer sings. At the far end of the hall, a lone woman sits at a second table, writing letters with a pencil while watching the activities going on behind her via a mirror.

One of two readers recites from a concordance scroll as part of Ann Hamilton’s multisensory “the event of a thread” at Park Avenue Armory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Taking her title from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica article “Weaving, Hand” written by textile artist Anni Albers (wife of Josef Albers), Hamilton explores the nature of crossings, beginning with cross stitching. In an essay in the must-read newspaper that accompanies the project, Hamilton writes that “‘the event of a thread’ is made of many crossings of the near at hand and the far away: it is a body crossing space, is a writer’s hand crossing a sheet of paper, is a voice crossing a room in a paper bag, is a reader crossing with a page and with another reader, is listening crossing with speaking, is an inscription crossing a transmission, is a stylus crossing a groove, is a song crossing species, is the weightlessness of suspension crossing the calling of bell or bellows, is touch being touched in return. It is a flock of birds and a field of swings in motion. It is a particular point in space at an instant of time.” The work takes on yet another crossing when viewed from above; the armory usually does not allow visitors on the upper balcony level, but for “the event of a thread” people can walk up the stairs and stand parallel to the huge sheet, watching the intense pulley system lift and lower it in a thrilling marionette-like dance, comparing the men, women, and children on the swings, who are actually making the cloth move, to the unseen hand of a supreme being. With “the event of a thread,” Hamilton has created an awesome spectacle, a complex combination of elements that can be enjoyed in multiple ways.