Alan to the Max at The Met Museum

Alan Cumming in Max and Alan
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

A tycoon, a trapeze artist, a nightclub owner, a sailor. German Expressionist Max Beckmann saw himself as an actor on the stage of life and often painted himself in disguise. Tony Award-winning Alan Cumming has created this personal musical work drawing on his own experience as an émigré to New York, channeling an artist who fled his native land after he was famously denounced as a "degenerate" by the Nazis. Beckmann died just sixteen months after arriving in New York, suffering a fatal heart attack while on his way to The Met. This MetLiveArts commission is inspired by the artist's all-too-brief time in New York. -- from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Cumming with Beckmann's Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket (1950)
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

I have never had the good fortune to see actor Alan Cumming perform in a cabaret--or in Cabaret, sadly. So, I can't say for sure, but if he lets loose in more intimate spaces the way he let loose in Max and Alan, his one-night-only performance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, he should be declared a vital national energy resource. We need him now--and not only because, politically-speaking, Cumming always fights the good fight.

Responding to the Met's wonderful Max Beckmann in New York show (on view through February 20), Cumming brought a startling portfolio of songs performed with the vibrant, versatile trio of Lance Horne (piano), Eleanor Norton (cello) and Alon Ilsar (percussion). His selections evoked a life lived head-on despite risk, conflict or doubt. The Scottish émigré clearly, often amusingly, identifies with Beckmann: "We quite like degenerate things in Scotland," he quipped.

In his statement for the show, Cumming wrote:

And of course we are bound by our connection and connected by our bond, to the era of the Weimar Republic, that supernova moment when art and sex and satire and politics all sidled up alongside each other and sparked so impossibly brightly for a few electric years. He was there. He was in it. I am merely a disciple, a conduit by proxy.

Kurt Weill, expected guest at Cumming's party, kept company with Miley Cyrus ("Wrecking Ball") and Kate Bush ("This Woman's Work"). Friedrich Hollaender's wistful "Falling in Love Again," approached with a rare delicate touch, was there along with Jerry Herman's button-bursting gay anthem, "I Am What I Am," from La Cage aux Folles. Between songs, Cumming offered insights into Beckmann's paintings, his loves, his world.

A song of love is a sad song, hi-lili, hi-lili, hi-lo. A song of love is a song of woe, don't ask me how I know.

It all culminated in an encore, the ominous "Mad World" (Tears for Fears), with the singer taking Horne's place at the piano. That was to be expected. In early November, Cumming had written a brooding piece in his blog on the prospect of our election ending disastrously.  Now, like all of us, he had much on his mind.

As a singer, Cumming is ever the masterful actor, using face and body as channels for a prodigious force called from I know not where, simultaneously blazing bright and blazing dark. Even the suddenly flashed, dimpled grins possess the gathered tension you see in his arms and hands as he plunges his whole being into lyrics and, for godsake, delivers them. The voice just whips out and lashes. You reel back, expecting to go away exhausted by his entire effort. Instead, you end up curiously exhilarated.

Or, at least I did. After the show, I subway-ed downtown to my Santacon-invaded East Village, feeling mentally sharp and strengthened for battle.

Thank you, Alan, so very much.

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Speak out! Call to action from The Bessies' Lucy Sexton

Lucy Sexton, Executive Director
New York Dance and Performance Awards, The Bessies
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Dear colleagues,

Lucy Sexton here, Executive Director of the NY Dance and Performance Awards, The Bessies. I am writing with the urgent plea that we join together as cultural leaders at this time and collaborate in making statements about our core beliefs, in light of the threat posed to those beliefs and practices by the incoming government administration.

I was moved by this article by the journalist Sarah Kendzior who has studied authoritarian governments and asks her readers to “Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others.  Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.” https://thecorrespondent.com/5696/were-heading-into-dark-times-this-is-how-to-be-your-own-light-in-the-age-of-trump/1611114266432-e23ea1a6

I think it is time for all major cultural organizations in our city to make a public statement stating their values. This can be lifted directly from your mission statement and the verbiage you use when submitting grants. Something clearly stating your organization’s commitment to diversity, to freedom of expression and freedom of religion, to LGBT and women’s rights, more as you see fit. In this way we can say to the world that we will continue to stand for these truly American ideals; and we can remember to hold ourselves to these standards when the going gets tough.

I refer you to these articles on self censorship of a Trump-criticizing art exhibit* and on the withdrawal of foundation grants to a university after an anti-Trump rally.** We all know that difficult decisions about what to present and how to maintain funding will loom in the years ahead. Let us commit ourselves now to doing all in our power to resist the pressure to censor Muslim voices, immigrant stories, radical feminist work, openly pro-LGBT narratives, and so much more. It will be tough. The great work begins.

My goal is simply to do a press release drawing attention to the statements once a critical number of organizations have either submitted a statement or posted one on their own sites. The words are yours. Please let me know if you would like to participate in any way. Perhaps you have already released such a statement to your community. Just let me know where to find it.

I will also need help in reaching out to smaller and larger cultural organizations that I am not in touch with. Please feel free to recommend other institutions or groups you think should be included. If there is someone else at your organization that I should be in touch with, let me know. Please call or email with thoughts and questions and suggestions.

Thank you for your participation and support,

Lucy Sexton

lucy@bessies.org

Open this letter

on the NYDPA/Bessies' website.

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Mika Kurosawa, 59

Mika Kurosawa, Leading Figure in Contemporary Dance in Japan, Dies at 59
by Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, December 9, 2016

With Baldwin our witness at Harlem Stage

Meshell Ndegeocello (above)
Justin Hicks (below)
in Can I Get A Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin
(photos: Marc Millman)

There's church.

And then, there's church.

When a Black person says it, it's usually the latter and comes with a world of cultural meaning.

And that's where Meshell Ndegeocello is taking you this week--that is, if you paid the price of the ticket. And, if you did, good on you, because you can tell your grandkids you were there when Ndegeocello and her collaborators, inspired by James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), both tapped and radically remade the ritual of church to address this godawful, pivotal time in our American history.

A Harlem Stage Water Works commission, Can I Get A Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin encircles vocalist/bassist Ndegeocello and her musicians--Jake Sherman on organ, Jebin Bruni on keyboards and Abraham Rounds on drums--with rings of church pews and chairs for us "congregants." The intimate theater space is further ringed and centered by Abigail DeVille's installations. Before the show starts, the audience can walk around and check them out. I had time to look closely at only two of these assemblages which, despite a few recessed, come-and-go lights, remained cloaked in dark, forbidding mystery. Their mirror shards, especially those covering mannequins' faces, seem designed, like nail-studded n'kisi power figures, to neutralize and deflect evil.

As audience members found seats, Sherman worked the organ slow and mellow in the manner of church. The celebrants/performers began milling around, each cheerfully stopping, here and there, to greet a congregant. Their ritual garments featured reflective glitter, adornments of fake jewels, rich alignments of strips that mimicked fur and feathers. Church began to feel indigenous and Afro-Atlantic and festive and anything but colonized into blandness.

Directed by Charlotte Brathwaite, this warm, inviting, hot and inciting service featured not only funk and jazz and call-and-response and impromptu dance and a charming communion but also several "sermons."  Yes, several. I'd imagine no church Ndegeocello could ever dream up--or could stand--would have only a single mouthpiece for the divine.

Vocalist Justin Hicks, with a voice as sweet as it was passionate, held forth, and so did Staceyann Chin, incendiary spoken-word poet and lesbian activist. And so did Paul J. Thompson, musician turned high school principal who told us how his own difficulties with the America's school system led him to teach in a more nourishing way, armed with Baldwin's essays. And so did vocalist Toshi Reagon, who invoke the righteous power of the Civil Rights movement, exhorting her listeners to raise their voices for justice.

Above and below: Staceyann Chin
(photos: Marc Millman)

It was, as Chin told us, "a call to order--or a call to disorder, whatever you deem necessary."

We needed several sermons, yes, because there remains so much to grapple with--from the threat to healthy water sources to the accelerated rise of white nationalism to the dulling despair that can make good people pull away from one another and the useful work they could do.

Baldwin's uncompromising voice and his visage--in still portrait and in ghostly, out-of-sync film imagery--presides over the setting. The back page of the program features a photo of him sitting on a chair and gazing down at something in his hands. I cannot make out what it is, but I'm imagining it might be a pocket watch. It's that kind of gaze and that kind of holding. His slender body is folded in upon itself, the bent head half in shadow, the legs and feet close together, the arms foreshortened and locking a protected--and, to our prying eyes, unseeable--space in front of his solar plexus.

Silent, this man who had so much to say with his writing and speaking voice. The face might be interpreted as sad, but I see thoughtfulness. Full of thought. Taking time for it.

He sits alone in the photograph. Writers do their work alone, even if the necessity for their work springs from engagement with a troubled society and with the world beyond it, as did Baldwin's work. Like other writers, he needed his time for quiet, for thought, for processing, for conjuring. Without any of that, we would not have the writing we turn to now and again for clarity, for reminder, for courage, for direction. The writing we need always and now as never before.

He was also a man who used the technology of his day to do a good deal of his critically important work in the world. We know the man not only from his writing but from his numerous appearances on television. Yes. Moving out from quiet, moving into public space, he took every opportunity to go in front of as many people as possible and speak good sense to a country refusing to grow up and look at itself.

I have no doubt that Baldwin, in a similar way, would work the hell out of the new technology of our day. He'd make it work for him, and we'd be better off for it.

That's right. Baldwin would figure out how to turn all this mess into church.

Can I Get A Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin--running through Sunday with performances at 7:30pm and, on Saturday and Sunday, matinees at 2pm.

Sold out, but there is a waiting list. Go, go, go!

For more information, click here.

Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Greg Lake, 69

Greg Lake, Emerson, Lake & Palmer Co-Founder, Dead at 69
by Kory Grow, Rolling Stone, December 8, 2016

"What Will Be Different?": Who do I stand with?

It has been a month since the US presidential election and--as we watch the president-elect steadily arm himself for assault on every aspect of our society's progress, any hope that our democracy might be a true guiding light in the world--many of us continue to struggle to process, on mental, emotional, even visceral levels, just what has happened.

Last Monday, New York Live Arts opened its doors for a gathering, Open Spectrum: What Will Be Different?, conceived by marketing consultant Brian Tate and curated by Tate and NYLA's Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong in alliance with MAPP International.

The forum examined issues of concern to women, a demographic with complex effects upon the course of this election. Program notes set forth the following questions:

The election is over. Now the future awaits, and the lives of women--of us all--will be transformed. What shifts of policy and culture can we expect for women under President Donald J. Trump? How should we respond as citizens to advance the cause of justice and equal opportunity for women from today forward? To meet that challenge, how will we ourselves change?

[I take full responsibility for that strikeout, by the way.]

Tate noted three other questions to guide each of as we each find our best response to the challenge of this time:

What do I stand for?
Who do I stand with?
What am I ready to do?

It was the second question that interested me most as I looked around the studio and noted the striking predominance of white women of professional/upscale appearance. And although there were some dance artists in attendance, this apparently was not an event with much draw for the dance community. Although the excellent panel featured notable performing artists (Adrienne Truscott, Susana Cook), cultural scholars and critics (Catharine R. Stimpson, Margo Jefferson) and Brooklyn Museum chair and arts activist Elizabeth A. Sackler along with human rights activist Rana Abdelhamid in a venue historically grounded in the art of dance, it was fascinating that the crucial role of the arts and of artists scarcely came up for consideration.

Cook's experience of growing up under military dictatorship in Argentina offered insight into how the unacceptable gradually transforms itself into the norm. It would have been good to hear more about how Argentinian artists, forced to work under the radar, managed to carry on their struggle. Jefferson--one of the panel's most searching speakers--cited King Lear:

The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

And yet what hung over the room was a sense of shock, grief and apprehension still so raw that perhaps everyone, artists included, are still figuring out how to balance that weight and how to shape feelings into effective action.

The question was raised: Who are our models for responsible civic engagement? From the perspective of the arts and artists, the answers called out were revealing: Cecile Richards, president, Planned Parenthood Federation of America; activist and scholar Angela Davis; German Chancellor Angela Merkel; filmmaker Ava DuVernay, my first choice; and Sylvia Rivera, the late trans-activist veteran of Stonewall, whose name was not familiar to most of the audience. I kept thinking, a downtown arts audience would know Rivera's name right away.

Who do we stand with?

Future Open Spectrum gatherings will address the post-election concerns of other demographic groups, including people with disabilities, Black youth and immigrants. For information, contact New York Live Arts here.

See the video of Open Spectrum: What Will Be Different? here.

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A nearly-winter Wonderland of art at Invisible Dog

You're in Wonderland
in Boerum Hill's The Invisible Dog Art Center.
(photos: Maria Baranova)

Dance artist Yanira Castro of a canary torsi has made her first venture into video installation with PERFORMANCE | PORTRAIT, part of Wonderland, a new exhibition at The Invisible Dog, the Boerum Hill art center directed by Lucien Zayan. I found Castro's work here--which I won't spoil for you--to be an experience to be seduced by, to breathe with. I don't know if this video actually recalibrates one's seeing, but if you then look around the rest of Wonderland, you might notice similar invitations to take your time, lean in close and savor what's tiny and intricate and often interestingly elusive.

Lead Collaborators
Yanira Castro (Concept/Choreographer)
Kathy Couch (Installation Artist)
Stephan Moore (Interaction Designer)
Julie Wyman (Filmmaker)

Performer Collaborators
Anna Azrieli
Leslie Cuyjet
Peter Schmitz
David Thomson

Viewing schedule for PERFORMANCE | PORTRAIT:
In main space: December 3-30
In the glass house: January 5-15

WONDERLAND 

features over twenty artists:

Douglas Adesko, Matilde Alessandra, Vanessa Belli, Connie Bree, Guillaume Bresson, Tegan Brozyna, Jon Burgerman, Halsey Chait, Timothy Corbett, Andrea DeFelice, Digby and Iona, Lars van Dooren, Shannon Finnegan, Ryan Frank, Camille de Galbert, Crystal Gregory, Michael Hili, Oliver Jeffers, Caitlin Masley, Spencer Merolla, Anne Mourier, Dara Oshin, Mac Premo, Patrick Reynolds, Rachel Selekman, William Suran, Ian Trask, Peter Treiber, Nikita Vishnevskiy, Kevin Waldron and Alexa Williams

Viewing schedule for WONDERLAND:
Saturday, December 3 to Friday, December 30

Special Gallery Hours:
Monday to Saturday from 12pm to 7pm
Sunday from 12pm to 5pm

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn
(directions/map)

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