Boston Calendar of Cultural Events 10/24 - 10/30
Dance, Film, Theatre
By: Nelida Nassar - Oct 24, 2011
Monday, October 24, 2011 7.00 PM
Harvard Film Archives: Lonesome Cowboys
Directed by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. With Joe Dallesandro, Viva, Taylor Mead. US 1968, 16mm, color, 109 min
By the late 1960s, Warhol was using not just sync sound but also color and an increasing emphasis on narrative in an attempt to expand the audience for his movies. One of the more successful of these ventures, Lonesome Cowboys re-imagines Romeo and Juliet as a Western, shot at an Arizona dude ranch often used as a Hollywood location. As the Nurse to Viva’s Juliet, Mead spends much of the film in idle gossip with his charge, as they wonder whether the film's reluctant Romeo might prefer the other cowboys. Not content to be a bystander, Mead undertakes a flirtation with Joe Dallesandro that culminates in a spectacularly salacious dance scene.
Monday October 24, 2011 to January 15, 2012
Thursdays: 6.00, 7.00 & 8.00 PM; Saturdays and Sundays: 1.00, 3.00 & 4.00 PM
Institute of Contemporary Art Performance: Trisha Brown Company Floor
of the Forest
Presented as part of Dance/Draw, Trisha Brown’s Floor of the Forest – part sculpture, part dance prop, part performance – features a 12 x 14-foot steel pipe frame across which ropes are tied and densely threaded with used clothing. Within the structure two dancers wend and weave, literally dressing and undressing their way through the sculpture. Each performance is subject to chance, allowing the individuality of each dancer who performs it to determine their movements, meaning no two performances are ever the same.
Tuesday October 25 to Sunday October 30, 2011 7.30 PM
Emerson Arts, Paramount Main Stage: You Better Sit Down: Tales from my Parents Divorce
is a hysterical account of marriage and divorce, based on The Civilians artists’ interviews with their sardonic, candid, and lovable parents. Four actors – each playing his or her own parents – are conduits of their parents’ stories and, sometimes inadvertently, of their own experiences of family division.
Tuesday, October 25 to November 13, 2011
Huntington Theatre Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA: Before I leave You
by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, directed by Jonathan Silverstein
In a blink, Emily’s Harvard Square world falls apart. Her husband Koji suddenly embraces his Asian roots. Her friend Jeremy's work on his novel gets interrupted by a health scare and his sister Trish moving in. Four longtime friends face too much past and too little future in this moving new comedy.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 7.30 PM
Thursday, October 27, 2011 7.30 PM
Friday, October 28, 2011 7.30 PM
Saturday, October, 29 2011 7.30 PM
Boston Symphony Orchestra: Schumann and Strauss
Rafael Frûhbeck de Burgos conductor Gidon Kremer, violin
Schumann: Violin Concerto
Strauss: Ein Heldenleben
The internationally admired Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer joins Spanish conductor and frequent BSO guest Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos in the first of the conductor’s two BSO programs this season. Kremer plays the relatively rarely heard Violin Concerto of Robert Schumann, a melodically driven, quintessentially Romantic piece written in Schumann’s last productive year of 1853 for Joseph Joachim, the outstanding violinist of the age, who unfortunately never performed it. Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben (“A Heroic Life”) is a romp through the composer’s own personal musical landscape – a multi-faceted tour-de-force culmination of his phenomenal tone poems of the 1890s.
Wednesday October 26, 2011 6.15 PM – 7.15 PM
Museum of Fine Arts: Paradise Lost preceded by A Sister and a Brother
Ibtisam Mara’ana (Israel, 2003, 56 min.). Paradise (Fureidis in Arabic), a small fishing village next door to Tantura, near Haifa, is one of the few Arab villages in Israel that has escaped destruction. Paradise Lost chronicles Mara’ana’s semi-autobiographical quest to reconstruct, with stiff social opposition from family and elders, the lost history of the village where she grew up. Her quest for understanding her own identity – as a Palestinian, as a woman, and as a resident of the Arab village of Paradise (lost) within the Jewish state –t akes the filmmaker much farther afield than she plans. Discussion with director follows screening.
A Sister and Her Brother by Omaima Hamouri and Michael Krotkiewski (2010, 8 min.). Omaima, 22, discusses with her family the standards for an intimate relationship.
Wednesday October 26, 2011 8.15 PM – 9.25 PM
Museum of Fine Arts: 77 Steps preceded by Audition
Ibtisam Mara’ana (Israel, 2010, 56 min.). Filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, leaves her childhood village of Fureidis (Paradise) for an urban existence in Tel Aviv. Filming her own daily life as she goes, the filmmaker breaks taboos and strikes up a relationship with a fellow newcomer, her neighbor Jonathan, a Jewish man from Canada. She also joins the Israeli Meretz party, dreaming of a future in politics. Life becomes increasingly untenable as Israel invades Gaza in 2008, and Jonathan’s Zionist grandfather arrives from Canada for a trip down memory lane to the kibbutz (communal settlement) he helped to establish. As this intimate, raw, nuanced, and thought-provoking cinéma vérité film reminds us, love can’t always conquer all.
Audition by Eti Tsicko (Israel, 2010, 14 min.). A female director auditions a Palestinian actor for a film describing an encounter between an Israeli Jewish woman and a Palestinian Arab man. The line between the film and reality is a fine one.
Thursday, October 27, 2011 5.30 PM – 6.30 PM
Museum of Fine Arts: Diaries preceded by Pastports
by May Odeh (Palestine, 2010, 53 min.).
Diaries profiles the daily lives of three young women living in Gaza who face a double siege: One is the Israeli occupation; the other, the quasi-religious authority that controls the torn city.
Pastports by Rajie Cook (2010, 45 min.). In Pastports, graphic artist Rajie Cook narrates the tale of the poignant hardships of immigration and estrangement in a documentary about his grandfather’s first journey from Ramallah to America in 1906.
Thursday, October 27, 2011 8.00 PM – 9.30 PM
Museum of Fine Arts: Gaza Hospital – Stories preceded by From the Memory of the Sand and Warda
from a Tower Camp by Marco Pasquini (Italy, 2009, 84 min.). If every building has a story to tell, then Beirut’s Gaza Hospital, a former world-class medical center now turned refugee shelter, can recount a saga. Director Marco Pasquini captures this story using archival footage and testimonies from former voluntary medical staff and refugees currently living in the building. Until its fall, the hospital served as a haven for injured and fleeing Palestinians and Lebanese civilians looking for a safe dwelling in the 1980s. From the Memory of the Sand by Ahmad Habash (Palestine, 2007, 3 min.). Produced by the Yasser Arafat Foundation, this tour de force sand animation commemorates the third anniversary of the late President of Palestine, Yasser Arafat.
Warda by Louise-Marie Colon and Delphine Hermans (Belgium/Palestine, 2008, 6 min.). What if Little Red Riding Hood (“Warda,” or “flower” in Arabic) was born in Palestine?
Thursday, October 27, 2011 3.30 P.M. – 4.55 PM
Museum of Fine Arts: Hoda’s Story preceeded by The Gaza Mono-Logues
Johan Eriksson (Palestine/Finland, 2011, 60 min.). This inspirational, touching film chronicles the coming-to-age of Hoda Darwish, a 12-year-old from Gaza who was hit in the head by a sniper’s bullet while sitting in her classroom in Khan Younis in 2003. She defied her doctors’ predictions and came out of her coma, then underwent years of mental and physical rehabilitation in Gaza, driven by her determination to recover.
The Gaza Mono-Logues by Khalil Muzaien (Gaza/Palestine, 2011, 25 min.) is a global project that aims at raising the voice of 31 young people in Gaza by presenting their dreams, fears, frustrations, and aspirations, before, during, and after the 2008 – 09 war. The film follows the group in their training, which follows the tradition of Augusto Boal’s theater of the oppressed methods, and shows how they were affected by the experience.
Friday, October 28, 2011 5.30 PM – 6.45 PM
Museum of Fine Arts: Kingdom of Women preceded by Girls and the Sea and
The Decision Dahna Abourahme (Lebanon, 2010, 54 min.). After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Ein al-Hilweh (the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon) was destroyed, and its men imprisoned. The Kingdom of Women documents the resilience, community spirit, and valor of the women from the camp during this period – how they rebuilt the camp, and protected and provided for their families while their men were held captive. Weaving between past and present, animation and daily life, Abourahme honors women’s contribution to the survival of the Palestinian community in exile.
Girls and the Sea by Taghreed El-Azza (Palestine, 2010, 7 min.). Three young Palestinian girls want to go to the beach after one of them wins a prize to stay at a seaside hotel. But first, they have to overcome several obstacles.
The Decision by Dara Khader, Inna Holmqvist, Anna Person, Laialy Kilani (Palestine, 2010, 13 min.). A young woman struggles with an opportunity.
Friday, October 28, 2011 7.00 PM
Harvard Film Archives: Selections from Helen Hill’s Home Movies
Helen Hill (1971-2007) was a luminary artist dedicated to a mode of handcrafted and lushly imaginative cinema whose all-too-fleeting life marked a high point in the history of independent American animation. Hill began making films at a remarkably early age, directing her first short when she was only ten, and steadily honing her craft at high school in her native South Carolina and then at Harvard where she majored in Visual and Environmental Studies. Deeply influenced by the fairy tale visions of German animator Lotte Reisinger, Hill's first mature films make inventive use of stop-motion and silhouette figures to evoke magical, dreamy and music-filled worlds where the Darwinian order is suspended and the smallest creatures and moments command the greatest presence. Mouseholes US 1999, 16mm, color, 8 min
Vessel US 1992, 16mm, color, 6 min
Upperground Show US 1990-91, digital video, color, 7 min
Scratch and Crow US 1995, 16mm, color, 5 min
Film for Rosie US 2000, 16mm, color, 3 min
Rain Dance US 1990, 16mm, color, 4 min
Your New Pig is Down the Road US 1999, b/w & color, 5 min
Film for Rosie US 2000, 16mm, color, 3 min The Florestine Collection US 2011, 16mm, color, 31 min
Saturday, October 29, 2011 7.00 PM.
Harvard Film Archives: Public Housing
Directed by Frederick Wiseman, US 1997, 16mm, color, 195 min
Dense social histories, desperate entanglements and thwarted dreams course through every interaction – from a drug counseling session to an exterminator visit – at the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago. From police confrontation to sewing circle, it is the unending compassion and grace that astonishes perhaps more than the chronic frustration and hopelessness.
Saturday, October 29, 2011, 8:00 PM
Green Street Studios: An attempt to fail at groundbreaking theater with Pina Arcade Smith
A work by dancer/choreographer Tony Rizzi
Tony Rizzi, dancer and choreographer, takes the audience on a roller coaster ride of wisdom through dance, photographs, videos and text. Rizzi is one of Europe's leading contemporary visual performing dance artists and is internationally presented with his company Moving Productions.
Sunday, October 30, 2011 3.00 PM
Boston Symphony Orchestra: Lang Lang/Celebrity Series
This young pianist has zoomed to international celebrity in a uniquely contemporary way. There has been a whirlwind of talk about Lang Lang in his relatively short career. But the truth of Lang Lang, as with most rapidly maturing artists, is in the hearing. Lang Lang’s emerging triumph may be the way he has withstood the demands of stardom to become a deep and sophisticated musician.
J.S. Bach: Partita No.1 in B-flat Major BWV 825
Schubert: Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960
Chopin:12 Etudes Op. 25