MoMA’s new exhibition, Home Delivery, is satisfying but kind of perverse for New Yorkers. They’ve installed five pre-fab, temporary homes in the parking lot adjacent to the main museum, between 53rd and 54th Streets. The lot has been used to accommodate queues of people waiting to enter, though that was primarily when the renovated museum opened a few years ago. But the irony for Gothamites is that open lots like this are largely distant fantasies, putting any realistic local application firmly out of reach.
But it’s fun to dream. The houses range in size from tiny to multi-story. One of the most successful designs is the “micro compact home,” not much bigger and just as functional as a railway sleeper car (from what I’ve seen in the movies!) or small trailer home. It’s well detailed, sleek, and looks completely ready to move into. And amazingly, it took just two hours to install, according to the exhibition’s blog. The architects are Richard Horden, Lydia Haack, and John Höpfner. read more
Recently, the Theater Development Fund (TDF) opened a third TKTS discount booth, its first in Brooklyn. The booths are beloved of New Yorkers and tourists for offering tickets to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows at deep discounts. (The Brooklyn outpost will also offer tickets to Brooklyn events. Hmmmm, wonder if BAM and St. Ann’s Warehouse will pop up there…)
Anyway, the thing with the booths is that you’re never entirely sure as to what will be on offer, and you have to see the performance that very evening—though you can buy matinee tickets the previous day. In other words, the booths encourage spontaneity. And spontaneity is seriously endangered these days. read more
Since 2005, Australian native Kathryn Bennetts has been artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders, which makes its full-company Manhattan debut with William Forsythe’s Impressing the Czar at the Lincoln Center Festival in the Rose Theater. Impressing the Czar, described simply as a history of western civilization conveyed with humor, was choreographed in 1988, and has not been performed in the US since 1989. Bennetts spoke from Antwerp by phone on July 12, prior to coming to New York.
Impressing the Czar seems like an ambitious work with which to acquaint New York with the company.
It’s a great way to acquaint New York with the company, because it shows the many talents they have. It’s a piece on a very large scale, and it shows off the company very well. read more
I’ve touched on the importance of public art in a previous post, and the summer onslaught continues with the New York City Parks’ Dance Out! initiative, a series of site specific dance performances around the city (site specific dance around America will soon be finding it’s way to SundayArts in Great Performance’s Dance in America: Wolf Trap). This one combines two cool things: Free art that reaches people in their (common) backyard and site-specific performance. The parks’ series, copresented with the Joyce Theater, focuses on three dances, which will travel to the boroughs—and not just to flagships like Central Park or Prospect Park, but to less obvious spaces like St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx or Staten Island’s South Beach boardwalk. Of the three, Michael Schumacher’s Dans le jardin (in the garden) seems to make the most use of its environment, so the work should change slightly depending on where it’s performed.
And like every summer, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Sitelines series offers free site-specific dance and dance-theater in the financial district. I’m particularly looking forward to Hostile Takeover by Richard Move’s MoveOpolis in August (Move made his name with someone else’s when he recreated Martha Graham dances in full Martha drag realness). The program is described thus: “Feminine beauty is placed upon a pedestal (literally) in the midst of the male-dominated world of high finance, with stunningly costumed, Butoh-inspired female dancers occupying six different locations.” Yowsa! I’m sure I’ll get back to it next month. read more
The best moment of Darkness and Light, Basil Twist’s new collaboration with Robby Barnett and Jonathan Wolken for Pilobolus, comes right at the start. A number of people stand or crouch amid scattered machinery, pointedly staring at the audience. It’s long enough for a mental snapshot, but after a scrim lowers, concealing the scene, I rue my lack of photographic memory. Were they wearing caps and goggles, like long distance swimmers? Tights? They were bare-chested, right? And those were projectors, yes?
The piece unfortunately doesn’t go very far after that sly reveal, settling into mostly basic exercises in silhouette puppetry. A shadowy wedge grows into a figure’s waist. Creatures that appear like frothy doodles inhabit a sea blue scrim. A face morphs into a scary biting and licking machine. Nebula-like wisps dance across a starry field. Blobs consume other blobs and grow. The usual. In fact, the piece would be right at home in the repertory of Momix, founded by one of Pilobolus’ founders, Moses Pendleton. (Coincidentally, earlier this year Pendleton created a work for Diana Vishneva’s Beauty in Motion production that employed similar trompe l’oeuil exercises.) read more
Last night, my 11-year-old son and I went to opening night of Damn Yankees at City Center.
We went on a whim, opting to save money by grabbing a pair of $25 seats way up in the balcony. This is not a show that gets performed often nowadays—it’s not considered a brilliant work of music theater—but the Encores series, of which this show was a part, has a good track record, especially after last summer’s breakout success with Gypsy. Plus, there were some star names worth checking out: Sean Hayes (star of Will & Grace), Jane Krakowski (who plays Jenna Maroney on 30 Rock), and Cheyenne Jackson (currently starring in Xanadu).
This morning, I read a couple of reviews, including Charles Isherwood’s in the New York Times, which called it “a little pizzazz deficient.” The bulk of the critics seem to have concluded that Damn Yankees isn’t in the same league as Gypsy—no home run. And it’s probably not; it’s entertainment on the light side, though to my ears the score holds up remarkably well after more than 50 years.
I am often struck by the disconnect between audience response and critical response. read more
Summer has a kind of Jekyll/Hyde duality. As appealing as outdoor events might sound – concerts and plays in the park, hot dog eating contests on the boardwalk – I find myself seeking cool indoor places more often than not. Two major art shows currently on view – Henry Moore outside at the New York Botanical Garden , and Louise Bourgeois inside at the Guggenheim – reflect this kind of external/internal tension, and not simply because of the obvious settings.
Moore (1898 – 1986) is one of England’s most respected and widely seen modern artists. In “Moore in America,” the show at the New York Botanical Garden his large sculptures of bronze and fiberglass span a familiar array of reclining figures, mother and child, echoes of hillsides. There is no artist whose work looks more comfortable and – in a way that demonstrates his ubiquity and legacy to public art – predictable in a verdant setting. For a viewer, the work offers numerous pleasures, and many of them stem from these qualities. Yet Moore was also a master of mass, negative space, and form.
Bourgeois (born 1911) has produced a body of work, on the other hand, that’s anything but predictable. A stroll up the ramp at the (did I say cool?) Guggenheim, unspools the artist’s progression through forms and media. It also shows her voracious and fearless – even compulsive – exploration of the psyche, and it’s this total package that makes the air conditioned environment even more rewarding. read more
In April, Esquire magazine did a photo spread called “Symphony in Black,” profiling some on-the-rise musicians on today’s classical scene. All were young, talented, hip. One musician I was surprised to see didn’t make it into that piece is José Franch-Ballester, a 27-year-old clarinet whiz who is a native of Moncofa, Spain. New Yorkers take note: Franch-Ballester is giving a recital (free!) on July 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. The concert is part of the summer-long series of free events in lower Manhattan called the River to River Festival.
There’s absolutely nothing bad-boy about Franch-Ballester (pronounced FrAHnk Bai-yess-TAIR), who judging from my recent conversation with him is completely down to earth and rather endearingly modest, considering his accomplishments and talent. He only mentions in passing that at age 27 he is simultaneously on the roster of three of the most prestigious … read more
The talk in art circles may be about China these days, but the northern European scene isn’t doing too bad for itself either. Just this summer in New York, there’s “From Another Shore: Recent Icelandic Art” at Scandinavia House, “Arctic Hysteria: New Art from Finland” at P.S.1, and of course Denmark’s Olafur Eliasson is staging the huge New York City Waterfalls. Sweden and Norway don’t seem to be as strongly represented in visual arts, at least here, at least right this minute, but of course they boast remarkably inventive avant, jazz and pop music scenes that constantly send up a stream of high-quality sounds our way. If you bring up the relatively low population of Scandinavian countries (including, for the purpose of this discussion, Finland and Iceland), you realize that they wield a completely disproportionate influence in artistic matters. read more
In music performance today, one of the hottest presenters around is Wordless Music . If you’re a New Yorker, they seem to be suddenly everywhere, and their concerts have been getting raves from critics from The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, and Gramophone magazine, as well as attracting audiences that represent the demographic holy grail: twenty-something hipsters. Wordless Music’s self-professed goal is “to demonstrate that the various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today—popular and classical; uptown and downtown; high art and low—are an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”
At the moment, they’re doing some of their dismantling at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where at 7 pm. on four Fridays in June, you can hang out with the other cool kids from the class at concerts that are free with pay-as-you-please museum admission. read more
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