Tag: Weekend

You’re never too young for Carnegie Hall. This venerable institution keeps even the youngest children entertained with free online projects, all accessible through their website, ranging from writing lullabies to discovering the orchestra.

Do you have an energetic preschooler? Discover Sing With Carnegie Hall, a series of six interactive videos on topics such as rhythm, imagination and play. Each short session is moderated by singer-songwriter Emily Eagen and includes a guest artist offering both movement and music. Little ones can count in Spanish with Sonia De Los Santos, pretend tossing smelly socks with Onome and imitating the expressive antics of Nick Demeris, aka Human Instruments.

Demeris is also a voice in “Camille’s Rainbow”, described as “an opera for babies”. (You read that right.) Composed by Thomas Cabaniss and Saskia Lane, with a libretto by Zoë Palmer, this work celebrates color with soaring vocals and Riza Printup’s harp. Dan Scully created animations for the six online segments that are as dreamy and lyrical as the score.
LAUREL GRAEBER

A post-Covid future is finally around the corner for music festival organizers who have started to announce line-ups for summer and fall. But the fields of Worthy Farm in Somerset, England will be largely dormant for the second year in a row: Glastonbury, the flagship festival that normally takes place there, won’t welcome the music-loving crowds again until 2022.

Instead, a virtual program this weekend offers participants a mud-free alternative. The rock-oriented bill shows strong British representation, with Coldplay, Damon Albarn, Idles and Wolf Alice playing sets from the festival grounds. They are joined by Haim, who offers a west coast perspective with his summer pop-rock, and Jorja Smith, who plays silky R&B. Contributions from PJ Harvey and Jarvis Cocker are also planned.

The festival offers a number of time zone-specific streams to choose from, including one at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on Saturday with encore broadcasts at 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets for each stream start at $ 27.50 and are available at worthfarm.live.
Olivia Horn

To dance

Remake a problematic “tea”

A few years ago, New York ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin and art administrator Phil Chan founded Final Bow for Yellowface, an initiative that calls for an end to outdated, offensive depictions of Asian people in ballet. What began with the mission to update the classical canon – specifically the “The Nutcracker” section known as “Tea” – has since grown into a larger platform for celebrating Asian dancers and choreographers.

In May, Yellowface.org is hosting 10,000 Dreams: Virtual Choreography Festival for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Each day the series features a short digital work by a choreographer of Asian origin. This weekend features contributions from Jessica Chen (Friday), Keerati Jinakunwipat (Saturday) and Pallabi Chakravorty (Sunday). Final Bow also partnered with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago to present “Unboxed,” for which three choreographers came up with their own versions of “Tea”. The first two by Yin Yue and Edwaard Liang were published; Peter Chu’s third arrives on Monday at hubbardstreetdance.com/unboxed.
SIOBHAN BURKE

Classical music

A ‘lady’ with a little restraint

At first glance, Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” seems easy to sell. It offers glaring murders, explicit sensuality and a broad satire – as well as a seditious orchestration.

But it’s more than pulp fiction. The main character (real name: Katerina) has to do more than endure claustral domesticity and physical assault before engaging in violence again. Opera works best when hints of defiant idealism are allowed to creep in. Therefore, it is mainly thanks to the approach of the mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams that a performance from 2019, which is streamed on the operavision.eu website and its YouTube channel, works so well.

Williams is staged by director Graham Vick in an English translation and performed by the Birmingham Opera Company in a “disused, legendary nightclub”. He has plenty of room to convey the physicality inherent in the role, although she and Vick are about to grind house ambiance was wooed in director Martin Kusej’s famous approach. With the relief of the Grand Guignol, the devastating final scenes can be hit even harder.
SETH COLTER WALLS

theatre

Stories of the Asian Diaspora

Celebrate the last full week of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with two digital offers from Ma-Yi Theater Company in their broadcast studio and streaming platform at ma-yistudios.com.

A reading by Daniel K. Isaacs “ONCE UPON A (Korean) TIME” will be broadcast from Thursday to Sunday. Isaac, an actor known for his sensitive stage and film performances, shows a skillful, delicate touch as a playwright and gives his characters a love of history and tradition in a story about a Korean girl trying to clear the mess around her to understand. Tickets cost between $ 5 and $ 50, and the proceeds will fund future production of the piece.

Until May 31, the platform will also be offering “Vancouver”, an endlessly moving puppet show written and staged by Ma-Yi’s artistic director Ralph B. Peña. The intimate story shares the plight of a Japanese family who moves to the Pacific Northwest in search of a place to call home. You can watch the play for free, but donations are welcome.
JOSE SOLÍS

The spring jazz program is back in full swing – most of it is still virtual, but some of it is personal. The big event on Friday is International Jazz Day, an annual UNESCO-sponsored celebration that is now taking place for the tenth time and culminating in an All-Star Global Concert that takes place at 5 p.m. Eastern Time on jazzday.com with artists like Herbie Hancock and Melissa are streamed. Aldana and Angélique Kidjo are streaming in from all over the world. (PBS stations broadcast a special documentary at 8 p.m. on International Jazz Day.)

Separately at 7 p.m., pianist Anthony Wonsey will be performing a live-streamed trio performance from the WEB Du Bois Institute of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as part of an ongoing weekly YouTube series “Fire Fridays: The Cats Talk Back” from a talk by musicologist Maya Cunningham on gender roles in African American music.

Two festivals will take place in other cities on Friday and Saturday evenings: the Chicago Jazz String Summit, organized by cellist Tomeka Reid, is streamed on his website; and the first Bayfront Jazz Festival will take place in person in Miami, but will also be broadcast on live.eluv.io/bayfront-jazz-festival.
GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

The closure of the pandemic forced the Museum of the Moving Image to stop the exhibition Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey about the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it will return when the museum reopens to members and certain other ticket holders on Friday and to the general public on Saturday, as well as regular film screenings open to everyone starting Friday. Starting this weekend, “2001” will be shown alternately on Friday evening on 70 millimeter film and every Sunday afternoon on digital projection.

The museum will also play Kubrick’s other features, starting with “Dr. Strangelove ”(on Sunday and May 7th) and bring you his longtime See It Big! Series that this month includes Steven Spielberg’s Kubrick project “AI Artificial Intelligence” (May 9th and 15th) from 2001.

The museum asks visitors to check its safety guidelines in advance. Information on opening times and tickets can be found at moveimage.us.
BEN KENIGSBERG

comedy

Getting salty with cystic fibrosis

For the past four years, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation has hosted the Get Salty stand-up event at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood, California, which attracts fun famous people like Sarah Silverman to raise funds to help fight the disease. Since the store has not yet fully reopened this year, the foundation has concentrated on an area that extends across the real and virtual world: the InCrowd Interactive Stage. Then the performers are surrounded by a semicircle of screens populated by viewers who are present via zoom.

Muhammad Ali was such a larger than life figure that it can be hard to imagine him as anything other than a world champion. But that’s exactly what Idris Goodwin did in And In This Corner: Cassius Clay of the Atlantic for Kids division of the Atlantic Theater Company.

Directed by Reggie D. White, this episodic audio adaptation of Goodwin’s play follows the Boxer, who was born Cassius Clay Jr., aged 12-22. It shows that Cassius (Franck Juste) was sensitive to injustice – he defeats the bully from the neighborhood – The script also tells about his internal conflict over participation in a wider struggle: the fight for civil rights.

This nuanced work, which requires reservations, can be streamed free of charge as four segments or as a 55-minute performance on the Atlantic website until May 24th. YouTube listening parties for the entire production are also held every Saturday at 10:30 am Eastern time. This is followed by a discussion with the director and the cast on Saturday and a workshop on making radio plays on May 15th.
LAUREL GRAEBER

Art museums

A blocked path to progress

After Derek Chauvin’s conviction, it is difficult to find out where we are in what President Biden called our “March for Justice in America.” To provide perspective, the New York Historical Society is offering “Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow” for free on its website. The exhibition, which appeared in Society in 2018 and 19 and has toured the country since then, explores how deeply ingrained the circumstances of the murder of George Floyd – and many other violent acts like this – really are.

This online version was compiled from photos taken while Black Citizenship was at the Atlanta History Center earlier this year. With this online version, visitors can enlarge images of objects and click on panoramas for a 360-degree view. Starting with Dred Scott’s struggle for citizenship, the exhibit looks at the events that led to the creation of freedoms for black Americans, and then shows how they persevered when Jim Crow’s laws took away many of those freedoms and lifts them off the advancement and advancement of progress has long shaped the life of blacks in this nation.
MELISSA SMITH

With the change of seasons, the increasing availability of vaccines, and the cautious return of live performances, New Yorkers may feel more hopeful than they have been in a while. But whatever stage of the pandemic we are at, it can still be exhausting when the effects of a draining year hit.

A new digital production by tap dancer and choreographer Ayodele Casel promises a surge of joy that will lead us through this second spring of the pandemic. The evening “Chasing Magic”, presented by the Joyce Theater, unites Casel with the jazz composer and musician Arturo O’Farrill, a continuation of their celebrated Joyce engagement in 2019. In addition to a collaboration with the choreographer Ronald K. Brown, the show includes other contributions by the tap artists Anthony Morigerato, Naomi Funaki, Amanda Castro and John Manzari, in which creative chemistry is emphasized as an antidote to isolation. The presentation begins Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time and runs through April 21. Tickets are $ 25 and are available from joyce.org.
SIOBHAN BURKE

Film series

The views from Hitchcock’s ‘Window’

After a year in prison, New Yorkers may be the last thing they want to stare out of an apartment. But “Rear Window”, Hitchcock’s 1954 masterpiece, never gets old and its story sums up what cinema is.

As an intrepid photographer with a broken leg, James Stewart becomes a captive viewer who is tied up by a frame – not a movie screen, but his window, from which he experiences the love life and loneliness of his neighbors as a proxy until he sees evidence of it possible murder. Repeated reflections don’t tarnish the tension and only inspire awe at how Hitchcock deals with the individual set and the perspective of Stewart’s character. In a dark theater, the finale – in which the protagonist uses a flashlight to defend himself – will have its real dazzling effect.

“Rear Window” will be shown in the Film Forum from Friday to April 15th. Please read the Policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching films in theaters.
BEN KENIGSBERG

CHILDREN

Focused on feelings

Puberty is often difficult, and asking for help can be even more difficult for those who experience it. On Friday, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. East Coast Time, the 2021 Changing Minds Young Filmmaker Festival will address these challenges with short essays focused on mental health.

Presented by Community Access, a Manhattan nonprofit, this free virtual program includes the festival’s winning film – Kat Dolan’s “Nobody but Myself” – and seven finalists. The films, selected from more than 700 submissions by directors ages 15-25, address topics such as anxiety, body image, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Dolan’s project portrays depression as an intimate companion, while Naeela Djemil’s “Petrichor” shows how it affects a young Muslim woman.

Shadille Estepan, the communications and outreach manager of the Born This Way Foundation, a youth initiative co-founded by Lady Gaga, will moderate a final Q and A with the filmmakers. The entire program will be streamed on event.gives and on Facebook and will then also be available on the Instagram page and the Community Access YouTube channel.
LAUREL GRAEBER

Classical music

Put on the mix

When the Komische Oper Berlin is planning a season of musical dramas, it is often a pleasure to see that repertoire warhorses alternate with modernist works and joking rarities. The upcoming free concert by his orchestra on Friday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time will have a similar form (streaming on komische-oper-berlin.de, where the concert will last for a week after the live presentation).

The classic on offer is Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony. The modernist work is Webern’s Variations for Orchestra. The joking rarity? That would be Friedrich Gulda’s Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra – a piece full of transitions between jazz and rock influences as well as Austrian vintage dances (among other things, points of reference).

As a pianist, Gulda worked with Chick Corea and was a well-known interpreter for Mozart. But since the concert can also be registered as pastiche, it will be interesting to hear whether the conductor James Gaffigan – a New York favorite who will debut with this orchestra on Friday – can bring a sense of unity to the overall program.
SETH COLTER WALLS

Though her early career was rooted in the Washington, DC go-go scene, singer and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello has long since transcended regional and genre affiliations. For three decades, her records have moved freely between R&B, hip-hop, rock and jazz, provoking and challenging listeners with experimental forms and open politics.

As the curator and headliner of this year’s BRIC JazzFest, which is practically taking place for the sixth time this weekend, Ndegeocello is something of the spiritual leader of the festival. Like them, only a few participants are exclusively jazz musicians. On Thursday night’s program is Phony Ppl, an energetic Brooklyn fiver fed by funk and hip-hop (as heard on her latest single with Megan Thee Stallion). On Friday, Ndegeocello shares the bill with composer, singer and art world darling Justin Hicks. Robert Glasper, an inventive pianist with a Rolodex star staff including Kendrick Lamar and HER, will perform on Saturday.

Tickets for the streams, which begin at 7 p.m. Eastern Time each evening, start at $ 20 and are available at bricartsmedia.org. The prices increase according to the number of viewers per household.
Olivia Horn