Culture

Elevator Repair Service in “The Sound And The Fury”

James and I have been busy attending music and theater performances. Here are some recommendations:

• The New Georges (see earlier posts) present “Stretch”, described as a fantasia about the final days of Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon’s loyal secretary. You even get a live score for violin, trumpet, bass and IBM Selectric typewriter. Use code BLAST here for $16 tickets through May 14.
• The Elevator Repair Service, one of the greatest theater companies I know, are presenting “The Sound And The Fury” at New York Theater Workshop. Brave the evil Telecharge’s “Broadway Offers” site here to get $20 tickets for Memorial Day Weekend. Anything starring Susie Sokol cannot be missed.
• There are still tickets left for Gotham Chamber Opera‘s “Ariadne Unhinged” this weekend, with music of Monteverdi, Haydn, and Schoenberg, production and choreography by Karole Armitage, and design by the artist Vera Lutter. We’re going tonight.

On the subject of Off and Off-Off Broadway, check out The Playgoer on Christopher Isherwood’s stupid attack on Off-Off, as if it’s some kind of community theater. See, my visual arts readers? It’s not only the visual arts that get this kind of random stupid articles from The New York Times. Do not miss the comments, especially that from sbs about the difficult relationship between Equity creative theater companies doing the best work in NYC including Elevator Repair Service and Target Margin.

[photo from the Elevator Repair Service website]

performance by Flora Wiegman at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, 8/14/2007

James and I already bought our tickets to this. Can’t wait!

Amy Granat, Felicia Ballos, and Flora Wiegmann:
An Evening with Cinema Zero

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues

February 22 and 23 (Friday and Saturday), 8pm
Tickets: $10

Filmmaker Amy Granat teams up with choreographers Felicia Ballos and Flora Wiegmann to present a new collaborative film and dance performance. In addition, Granat has selected a film and video program featuring short works by Hollis Frampton, Joan Jonas, Peter Kubelka, Richard Serra, and Joyce Wieland, among others.

Cinema Zero is an ongoing project that activates connections between artists of different generations and fosters experimentation across disciplines.

James and I just bought tickets to see David Gordon’s “Uncivil Wars: Collaborating with Brecht & Eisler” at The Kitchen. We try to see everything David Gordon does, and when a work includes his wife/partner Valda Setterfield, John Kelly, and Estelle Parsons as performers, how could you miss it? It’s also a great chance to hear some of the music of Hanns Eisler, one of the best and sadly underknown leftist composers of the 20th Century. If you like the Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht collaborations, you’ll like the Eisler even more I suspect.

Speaking of Weill/Brecht, we recently watched the new Criterion DVD of “The Threepenny Opera” (1931). Highly recommended!

Ed Hamilton, of the Hotel Chelsea Blog, will be reading tonight from is new book, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, at 7pm at 192 Books in Chelsea.

192 Books
192 Tenth Avenue at 21st Street

James and I will try to get there, probably a little late, as we’re attending the opening night preview of the new Asian Contemporary Art Fair. ArtCal is a media partner.

This is going on until 6pm today at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, so you have about half an hour to run over there. Sorry for the late notice. Flickr issues delayed me, and the darned slideshow still doesn’t work or I would post that.

Check out the whole set on Flickr. That is gallery director Jennie Moore in the background in the overalls. She’s no Prada-wearing diva gallery director! She gets her hands dirty.

If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.

Joan Didion, Morning After The Sixties, 1970

I just finished reading The White Album by Joan Didion. I have read a couple of other books of her essays, and of course I read everything she writes for the New York Review of Books.

The Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performing “Arab Line.” (Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times)

Cedar Lake Dance, the well-funded dance company on 26th Street in the former Annie Leibovitz studios, hasn’t always received stellar reviews for its choreographic choices. While I hope they find some younger, underknown choreographers to work with, I have to say I am thrilled with what happened when they brought Ohad Naharin in for a residency with the company’s dancers. If you didn’t know it, you would think these dances had been working with him for years. It was one of my favorite evenings of dance in some time, and the music ranging from Arvo Pärt to Vivaldi to John Zorn is great fun too.

It runs through July 1. If you go, do NOT spend intermission away from the stage. The night we attended, Jon Bond performed a sexy and funny solo during that time. Go here to buy tickets.

Related links:

• New York Times review (where I got the photo)
• Brooklyn Rail interview with Ohad Naharin
• A 2005 column from Dance Insider about the morality of a well-funded dance company whose funds come from Wal-Mart
• My blog post from 2002 about Naharin’s Virus at BAM