Film: Margaret Mead Film Festival 2016 at AMNH

A Revolution in Four Seasons
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/opening-night-a-revolution-in-four-seasons

Under the Clouds (Das Nuvens Pra Baixo)
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/under-the-clouds-das-nuvens-pra-baixo

Kolwezi on Air
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/kolwezi-on-air

Drokpa
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/drokpa

Nagarjuna Art School
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/nagarjuna-art-school

Train to Adulthood
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/train-to-adulthood

Walls
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/walls

Salero
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/salero

Sonia's Dream
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/sonia-s-dream-el-sueno-de-sonia

Reindeer in My Saami Heart
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/reindeer-in-my-saami-heart

Seven Songs for a Long Life
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/seven-songs-for-a-long-life

J.C. Abbey, Ghana’s Puppeteer
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/j.c.-abbey-ghana-s-puppeteer

Theater: Public Enemy

From the web site: http://www.pearltheatre.org/production/public-enemy/

Henrik Ibsen’s PUBLIC ENEMY
in a version by DAVID HARROWER
directed by Artistic Director HAL BROOKS

“When a local doctor discovers that the water in his small town’s mineral baths is contaminated, it sets off a cataclysmic showdown between  a corrupt government that doesn’t want to be blamed, an angry community that doesn’t want their economy ruined, and a single man’s determination to tell the truth—no matter the cost to family, town, or self.

The play offers a story of political corruption (a poisoned water supply and the conspiracy to cover it up) and one man’s almost self-destructive need to reveal the truth. This adaptation offers a 90 minute compression of the Ibsen original that streamlines the action of the story, but sticks closely to his style. The setting and costumes have been updated to reflect 2016, and, although it doesn’t draw a one-to-one comparison with Flint, MI (the play doesn’t entirely allow it), that narrative is very much in our minds.  It’s an incredibly timely piece, with a great cast.”

From Kate Farrington , Director of Education and Dramatury

Theater: "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"

From the web site: http://www.twentythousandleaguesunderthesea.ca/about

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea is an immersive theatrical production that connects the wonders of the Victorian era with today’s scientific and water environmental issues. Four talented actors and an award-winning design team from Canada and the U.S. retell Jules Verne’s classic undersea adventure, with the help of original multimedia, action figures, puppets and video content.

Richard Clarkin as Captain Nemo
Suzy Jane Hunt as Claire Wells/Claire Aronnax
Marcel Jeannin as Ned Land
Rick Miller (director) as Jules

Written by Craig Francis and Rick Miller

Theater: A Taste of Honey

From the web site: http://www.pearltheatre.org/production/a-taste-of-honey/

In 1959 at age 18, playwright Shelagh Delaney rocked the theatre world with a play that both defined and defied her generation.  A Taste of Honey is the clever, passionate, and poignant story of a young woman facing an uncertain future in a hostile world—and learning to trust that love, in its every heartbreaking and messy form, will see her through.

“Delaney was only 18 when she wrote this story of a complex mother-daughter relationship challenged and defined by a world of poverty, gender inequality, racism, and sexual identity. The play asks deep questions, but does so  with humor and optimism. Delaney mixes hyper-realistic details of life in England’s poorest industrial towns in the late 1950s with a dose of meta-theatrical emotional exploration through music—the play incorporates a live jazz band that the actors are (sort of) aware of.

It’s a tender story of a young woman trying to engage with a much larger and more complex world than the one she’s grown up in—in many ways, far more than Osborne’s Look Back in Anger of the same time period, Delaney anticipates the social questions of the 1960s and sets her heroine on the path to answer them”

– From Kate Farrington, Director of Education and Dramaturgy

by SHELAGH DELANEY
directed by AUSTIN PENDLETON

Rebekah Brockman
John Evans Reese
Rachel Botchan
Bradford Cover
Ade Otukoya

Review: http://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/theater-reviews/2016/09/30/theater-review---a-taste-of-honey-.html

Dance: Figure a Sea by Deborah Hay

The review: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/arts/dance/review-deborah-hay-peak-performances-montclair-state.html?_r=0&referer=https://www.google.com/

Dance: Maria Hassabi: Staged at The Kitchen, NYC

http://thekitchen.org/event/maria-hassabi-staged

My impressions: 

Slow

Tense

Deeply sad

Beautiful

Music: Momenta Festival II at TENRI

Thursday, September 29, 2016

An Interval of Infinity
Curator: Alex Shiozaki, violin // Guest Artist: Nana Shi, piano

Joji Yuasa: Solitude — in Memoriam T.T. (1997)
Somei Satoh: Birds in warped time II (1980)
Toru Takemitsu: A Way a Lone (1980)
Akira Nishimura: Sonata II, “Trance Medium” (2005)
Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet No. 15 in F Major, op. 135 (1826)

Tenri Cultural Institute
43A West 13th St.
New York, NY

http://www.momentaquartet.com/

Theater: What Did You Expect?

From the Public Theater web site: http://www.publictheater.org/en/Public-Theater-Season/Gabriels-What-Did-You-Expect/

Tony winning writer and director Richard Nelson (The Apple Family Plays, James Joyce’s The Dead) returns to The Public this fall with the second play in his new three-play cycle, The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family.

WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? brings us back to the kitchen of the Gabriel family, with the country now in the midst of the general election for President. In the course of one evening in the house they grew up in, history (both theirs and our country's), money, politics, family, art and culture are chopped up and mixed together, while a meal is made around the kitchen table.

From left: Meg Gibson, Lynn Hawley, Roberta Maxwell, Maryann Plunkett, Jay O. Sanders, Amy Warren

World Premiere Three-Play Cycle
THE GABRIELS: Election Year in the Life of One Family
Play Two: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?
Written and Directed by Richard Nelson
Featuring Meg Gibson, Lynn Hawley, Roberta Maxwell, Maryann Plunkett, Jay O. Sanders, Amy Warren

Scenic Designers Susan Hilferty and Jason Ardizzone-West
Costume Designer Susan Hilferty
Lighting Designer Jennifer Tipton
Sound Designers Scott Lehrer and Will Pickens
Production Stage Manager Theresa Flanagan

.....
My notes on the play:

To know that the tragedy is in your hands to be delivered, but to soften the blow by adding the details.
Something is being revealed while something else is intentionally hidden.
The man had a sexy voice and a trusting face.
The eternal optimist says: Things get better.
The famous psychiatrist says: The people who are ill are brave, they should be regarded as heroes.
Some will always seek to know who they are, where they belong, why they are different.
The parents sat on a bench and wept after dropping their child off at college.
In mourning for the deceased, the worst moment is the one when your senses fool you to believe that the deceased is alive and near you again - and this trick of your senses is swiftly crushed by reality.
The quiet grief is unspoken: the notes of the song which the siblings all learned to play on the family piano; Richard's piano students and the dire necessity to sell the piano.  - dp

Theater: The Hunger

From the web site: http://www.bam.org/opera/2016/the-hunger

OPERA
By Donnacha Dennehy
Alarm Will Sound
Conducted by Alan Pierson
Directed by Tom Creed

Presented in association with Irish Arts Center

Part of 2016 Next Wave Festival
Underdog history comes to life through new music and old Irish songs in composer Donnacha Dennehy’s opera about the Great Famine of 1845-52, rooted in Asenath Nicholson’s harrowing first-person account in Annals of the Famine in Ireland. Featuring acclaimed ensemble Alarm Will Sound (Nonesuch Records at BAM, 2014 Next Wave) and celebrated Irish folk singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, The Hunger imagines soprano Katherine Manley as Nicholson and Ó Lionáird as the voice of the voiceless, with instrumentalists integrated into the staging. Old recordings of traditional sean-nós songs dovetail seamlessly with Dennehy’s score, while video clips of interviews with Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, and others underscore the political roots of this tragedy that brought a nation to its knees.

PROGRAM NOTES
Set and video design by Jim Findlay

Co-produced by Alarm Will Sound and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Commissioned by Alarm Will Sound with additional funding from Arts Council of Ireland, MAP Fund, The Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, and New Music USA

Theater: Songs of Lear

From the BAM web site: http://www.bam.org/theater/2016/songs-of-lear

THEATER
Song of the Goat Theatre (Teatr Piesn Kozla)
Directed by Grzegorz Bral


Part of 2016 Next Wave Festival
Gathered in a semicircle on a bare stage, 10 women and men weave a frenzied tapestry of raw physicality and emotion: a Corsican chant wailed to the ocean, the visceral howl of funereal grief. Distilling Shakespeare’s great tragedy to its essence, Polish troupe Song of the Goat Theatre and director Grzegorz Bral make their BAM debut with the breathtaking song cycle Songs of Lear, a favorite among critics and audiences alike at the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. King Lear’s storm of the soul—madness, despair, disappointment, love—becomes a feverish deluge of polyphonic sound, as these formidable vocalists harness the sheer power of the human body, voice, and spirit.

LANGUAGE
In Polish, English, and Latin

The review in the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/theater/review-songs-of-lear-we-hear-cordelia-singing.html