BAM BAM BAM - Theatre Internationale @ Brooklyn Academy of Music

Before the thoughts leave:
We had a nice slice of international theater this year. There was the Polish company TR Warszawa with their unforgettable production of "Krum". Then from Germany came the Thalia Theater's chilling production of Wedekind's "Lulu". Finally there was James Thiérrée's Nouvelle Cirque "Au Revoir Parapluie".
Well two out of three ain't bad.
I will state simply I have never gone in for the nouvelle cirque esthetic, and Thiérrée's production didn't change my mind. Hats off to the performers, who give their all to this piece of fluff.
Much more intensely enjoyable was TR Warszawa's "Krum". Written by Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin, it tells the story of a man who comes home from travelling bearing nothing, not even for his mother! In Krum's world there is nothing. Sex is a bumpy, lumpy act. So is eating. It's not a pretty story, but this company of actor's are so physically rooted in their characters, we know their pain and sorrow on an empathic level. Despite all the gasps going in (two and three quarter hours and NO intermission?!?), no one left this clever production early.
A similar severity was encountered with the Thalia Theater's "Lulu". Directed by Michael Thalheimer (whose earlier production at BAM Emilia Galante was mesmerizing), this production is stripped of every prop except a gun and a knife. A blank white wall marches incessantly forward, pushing these the sad doomed lives of it characters closer to our face as they come to their retched end. Lulu is not presented as a vixen or seductress, but as a young sexually precocious gamin. In her world, Lulu is everything to everyone, and so, ultimately, worthless.
Again it was the actors great physical presence on the stage that allowed us to understand the rise and fall of this young woman, her dramatic impact on the lives around her, her utter despair and solitude when she turns her final trick with Jack the Ripper. (thank goodness since the supertitles were slow and not well translated)

GEORGE SEURAT & MARTIN PURYEAR @ MoMA

We took in these two big shows at the Art Barn of Modern Art (ABoMA) yesterday with friends. The museum's exhibitions crew have carved out five nice galleries on the sixth floor to exhibit George Seurat: The Drawings. It should be mentioned that SOMEONE felt the need to pepper the show with several small painted canvases, whose soul purpose seems to be to add a bit of color to this very black and white show. But oh what blacks!! The first image to pop out at you as you enter the first gallery, which is dedicated to early works and academic drawings, is a female nude. It is a fine example of this artist's mastery of the conté crayon, and the plump soft curves of the model seem to spring off the paper. And we see lots of women throughout the exhibit: nurses with babies, women from behind, women with parasols, singers, his mother. All are rendered with incredible sensitivity to the medium on the paper. In one drawing, Place de la Concorde, Winter, this touch allows you entrée into a snowy winter in Paris years ago. In others, like The Veil and The Lamp, the unusual chose of subject or angle along with his lightness of his hand almost seem to put Seurat in the Symbolist camp. This show, which is not traveling, is comprised of many works from private collections. It also allows visitors to see seven of nine Café Concert drawings. Done by Seurat late in his life (he died in 1891 at the age of 31), they become both academic and social studies, showing not only the gaslight reflecting off the performer, but a feel of the urban mix of the milieu. The final one of these works, Café Singer, 1887-88, is done on Gillot paper, very likely for gillotage, an early reproduction method, and shows the artist reclaiming many subtle details that he had foregone in pursuit of Pointillism. In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, would the artist have returned to his more academic roots to reach the broader masses that he documented? Discuss amongst yourselves.

I have passed through Martin Puryear exhibits over the years at various galleries, usually wandering in and out without too much to say. But seeing them at the artist's current retrospective at MoMA allowed me to see this artist in a new light. Things that were "well-crafted" and "interesting" in smaller spaces, became much more mesmerizing and fascinating when seen among their brethren in ABoMA's behemoth sixth floor gallery and second floor atrium. Forms and materials are revisited; shapes emerge and grow. Titles can reveal meaning or hide it, but what remains with Puryear is his uncanny ability to reinvent certain simple shapes: wall circles made from tree branches, turn into long weeping ovals of thin veneer, turn into images of tribal Fang masks. We are presented again and again with some unenterable space; are we being kept safe or kept out? Two large sculptures in the atrium, Ladder for Booker T. Washington and Ad Astra, both give us a feeling of monumental striving, but towards what? The tip of the latter work can be seen near the balcony of the sixth floor galleries! Oh, why reach for the moon when we have ABoMA!!

I'M NOT THERE - a JTLR ticket give-away

Yes JTLR readers, it's your opportunity to win two tickets to a screening of Todd Haynes' new film I'm Not There.

Simply write to us at Join the Lean Rat: Art & Culture and tell us what you enjoy the most about our blog. Send your kudos and adulations to jointheleanrat@gmail.com and be sure to put I'm Not There give-away in the subject line. One luck blog reader will win two tickets to the November 29th 7PM screening at Film Forum, 209 W Houston Street, NYC NY.

Don't miss out on one of the must-see events of the year! Then post your thoughts on our review right here on-line!! Help make our blogosphere grow!!!

Enter today!!

NOWHERE MAN - I'm Not There @ Film Forum

Todd Haynes' new feature film, I'm Not There, can add its title to the recent string of cinematic nostalgia for New York City (his grainy vision of Greenwich Village in the early 60's is superb). But add to that a nostalgia for London in the Swinging Sixties and California in the Seventies during the Vietnam War. Haynes showed us in his last film, Far From Heaven, that period work is a snap for him. Haynes' idea here is create as unconventional bio-pic about America's most unconventional of icons, Bob Dylan. What we come out with is The Velvet Goldmine with music rights.

Well, maybe a bit more.

Well, maybe quite a bit more.

I am not now nor ever have been a Bob Dylan fan. His vocal timbre has always caused my molars to clench. But he has written a good hook now and then. And others simply adore him. Often, during the course to this two hour and fifteen minute epic, I found myself tapping along, laughing out loud, and routing for our "hero" in all of his guises.

By this I mean that Haynes has divided up Mr. Dylan's life into six different personae. The film is "narrated" by Arthur (Ben Wishaw), a poet whose responses to a faceless inquisitor comment on the arc and action of the films narrative. We first meet Woody, who represents the pre-New York City fiction that Dylan peddled on the streets there, and is played by the young, black actor Marcus Carl Franklin. This is followed by Jack, the successful protest singer played by Christian Bale. Jack's life is chronicled in lofty documentary style with many talking heads giving their thoughts and feelings on those time. Chief among these is Alice Fabian, a fictionalized Joan Baez, played with nice subtlety by Julianne Moore. The Jack character re-emerges later in the film transformed into Pastor John, representing Dylan's repentant Christian Revival period.

We also have Jude, played winningly by Cate Blanchett, who represents Dylan in his 1960's post-folk, electric, in-your-face period. Shot in gorgeous black and white by cinematographer Edward Lachman, Haynes makes these scenes a loving homage to Fellini's 8 1/2, another film which studies the conflicts of the artist, both internal and external. Blanchett looks gaunt and fragile, chewing her nails and rubbing her eyes, but never too tired to put up a fight. Jude plays his electrified London concert on a stage backed with an enormous American flag. As his fans complain and boo, he shouts out "This is American music"! Which just brought to mind Gertrude Stein's comment on America, "There is no there there".

In Jude we see the first fires of an artist facing failure, both personal and physical. This is further explored in the character of Robbie, a New York actor play by Heath Ledger. Jack's performance in a 1965 film biography of the now vanished Jack has brought him fame but not happiness. Robbie's troubled ten-year relationship with his wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is chronicled from sweet beginning to its bitter end, all against the backdrop of Vietnam War television broadcasts.

Then we have Billy, nee "The Kid", gone into hiding from the world, only to re-emerge to help save the Halloween-loving town of Riddle, MO from the railroad and his supposed slayer Pat Garrett. Garrett is played by a wonderfully by a wizened Bruce Greenwood, who in the black and white scenes also plays Mr. Jones, a tidy, tight BBC culture critic who plagues and berates Jude. Billy is played by Richard Gere with an earnest earthiness, as well as a putty nose which makes him look a lot like Steven Spielberg. Forced to leave town, Billy hitches a ride on a passing locomotive, the same transport we first met Woody on. He even finds Woody's guitar case in his boxcar. And so Haynes has brought us full circle, Dylan rising like a Phoenix from the ashes. A very tidy package. Perhaps too tidy for this notorious shape shifter. So Haynes provides us with afinal image of the subject of his film. The "real" Dylan, close-up and back lit, wailing away on guitar and harmonica. I don't think I'll ever look at that face the same way again.

Just don't ask me to listen to any of his albums, thank you!

I'm Not There, a film by Todd Haynes, will be presented on two screens at Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St, New York, NY for two weeks beginning Wednesday, November 21, 2007. Click on the link above for tickets and screening times.