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      Review: ‘The Medium’ Is Less a Message and More a Museum Piece

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      This early 1990s play, based on the life of Marshall McLuhan, is being revived by the company that created it.“You can’t go home again.”Variations on that line are uttered eight times in “The Medium,” which the director Anne Bogart is reviving this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. So it’s likely that she and her venerable experimental ensemble, SITI Company, were aware of the hazards of revisiting a play they created together and first performed in 1993.It makes utter sense that SITI would choose “The Medium” for this, its final season, as it prepares to wrap up three decades of theater-making. “Based on the life and predictions of Marshall McLuhan,” as the program puts it, the show is a cracked and heightened remix of that 20th-century communications theorist’s trenchant thoughts on technology — the ways it shapes us, and the world.The company’s first devised work, it is crammed with ear-catching observations far beyond McLuhan’s famous maxim “The medium is the message.” What better time than now — after two years in which so many of us have had to keep a corner of our homes camera-ready for work meetings — to stage a piece that helps us think about our inseparability from our devices and what that does to our interactions with other human beings?So it’s slightly puzzling that this smartly designed production, at BAM Fisher, feels labored. Starring Will Bond as a winningly hokey McLuhan in brown suit and bow tie, it is missing that ineffable ingredient that would grab us by the collar and pull us in. Intelligent though the show is, it isn’t fun, and it wants to be.Its genial McLuhan is in for a frantic evening, clicking through television channels as he has a stroke. Fragments of pop culture jostle with his own ideas in hallucinatory scenes that take the form of small-screen programming. There’s a talk show and a cooking show, a detective drama and a televangelist’s broadcast. In interstitial moments, characters move as if zombified.They are all peopled with a much-doubling, four-actor ensemble: Gian-Murray Gianino, Violeta Picayo, Stephen Duff Webber and Ellen Lauren — who, like Bond, is a founding member of the company and was part of the ensemble in the play’s 1994 production at New York Theater Workshop. (Gabriel Berry, the show’s original designer, has updated her costumes for the revival, but they’re still delightfully midcentury mod.)The McLuhan of this play does not want to be portrayed as an enemy of technology, merely someone aware of its dangers. “I feel a bit like the man who turns on a fire alarm only to be charged with arson,” he says.Yet “The Medium” is more interested in the harms of technology than in its formidable democratic powers, which President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and ordinary people there and in Russia have harnessed recently with such savvy through social media. A month ago, before the war, the play might have landed slightly differently.Still, we are by now so long steeped in technology, and in talk of it, that the play may be most useful for thinking about how we arrived at this point. As McLuhan says here, “Only by understanding change can you ease the burden of experiencing it.”The same may apply to “The Medium” as a means of understanding SITI Company. In 1994, Bogart told The New York Times that plays from the recent past are “memory capsules of who we are.”For Bogart and her ensemble, surely, that is what “The Medium” has become: a reminder of their origins and who they used to be. It’s instructive to see it now in the light of their subsequent influence as collective creators of brainy, physical, contemporary theater. But there is a stubborn sense of watching it from an archival distance, as if it were a live tableau in a museum and we were behind a velvet rope.The MediumThrough March 20 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Brooklyn Academy of Music Plans a Global Season

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      The company’s spring offerings include the British choreographer Akram Khan’s “Giselle” and the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby.After focusing its most recent season on the artists of New York City, the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Monday announced a spring season filled with global offerings, including the New York premiere of the British choreographer Akram Khan’s “Giselle,” a series of shows by the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby and a production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring James McAvoy.The season will also feature a variety of New York artists, like the contemporary ensemble Bang on a Can and the visual artist Saya Woolfalk, who will present a new digital installation.“It’s local and it’s global,” the academy’s artistic director, David Binder, said of the new season. “There’s an optimism running through it, where artists are reimagining what the world can be.”The academy hopes the offerings will continue to drive its recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. The academy saw relatively robust ticket sales in the fall and winter, with several sold-out performances, Binder said, but is still working to recover from the turmoil of the pandemic, which forced it to suspend performances for more than a year.The spring season opens on March 24 with the New York premiere of “32 Sounds,” an immersive documentary by the filmmaker Sam Green. The film, which was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January, is narrated live; audience members wear headphones.Khan’s acclaimed reworking of “Giselle,” which the English National Ballet is bringing to the academy in June, has been widely praised since its premiere in London in 2016. It has since been performed in Auckland, New Zealand, as well as Hong Kong and Dublin.The New York Times called the 2016 production “a beautiful and intelligent remaking of the beloved 1841 classic, and probably — and improbably — the best work Mr. Khan has created.”During four performances at the academy in May, Gadsby, the star of the popular Netflix specials “Douglas” and “Nanette,” will perform “Body of Work,” her latest stand-up show, which explores themes of love and relationships.In April, Jamie Lloyd’s Olivier Award-winning production of “Cyrano de Bergerac” will come to the academy, featuring McAvoy, the “X-Men” star.In addition to “Giselle,” there will be a variety of other dance productions. The 10-member Brazilian dance group Suave will perform “Cria” in March, after its original engagement at the academy last fall was delayed because of visa issues. The German choreographer Sasha Waltz’s “In C” will have its American premiere in April, accompanied by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. The annual DanceAfrica festival returns in May.Binder said even though another surge of the virus was always possible, he was hopeful audiences would turn out for the new season.“I feel very lucky that our audiences are there and up for the adventure, and are ready and are really super engaged,” he said. “People are really ready to come back.” More

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      ‘Top of the Heap’: Is It Blaxploitation? Avant-Garde? Afrofuturism? All Three.

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      Released in 1972 and now rediscovered, the movie is as ambitious as “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and even weirder.The tale of a tightly wound Black police officer whose identity crisis leads to an action-packed nervous breakdown, “Top of the Heap” makes a statement — not least in that its writer-director, Christopher St. John, is also the star.Hardly seen since its initial 1972 release, “Top of the Heap” was rediscovered about a decade ago by the determined programmer of Chicago’s Black Cinema House. Now restored, it’s getting a theatrical run at BAM in Brooklyn.The movie, which appeared a year after Melvin Van Peebles’s one-man show “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” rocked the world, is nearly as confrontational and no less ambitious. Uptight and disagreeable, St. John’s George Lattimer isn’t a conventional hero; nor, as The Amsterdam News dryly noted in a generally favorable review, “the stuff of which positive images are made.”George has every problem a white cop would have and many more. Universally suspicious, he is subject to racial epithets by Black drug dealers and roughed up by a white cop only too eager to mistake him for a criminal. His crisis begins when he learns that, after 12 years on the Washington, D.C., police force, he has been passed over for sergeant and his mother in Alabama has died.“Top of the Heap” devotes considerable time to George’s compensatory fantasies, mainly daydreams of being the first Black astronaut. The New York Times critic Roger Greenspun, who found the movie uneven, wrote that these excesses allowed it to “develop a measure of genuine interest.” If it were an avant-garde film, “Top of the Heap” would be considered a psychodrama, with the artist turning the camera on himself.As replete with zappy flashbacks as an Alain Resnais production, “Top of the Heap” is stabilized by its fiercely alienated central performance. St. John, an Actors Studio member who had recently played a Black militant onscreen (“Shaft”) and onstage (“No Place to Be Somebody”), intentionally makes no effort to woo the spectator. Consequently the film is stolen by the singer-dancer Paula Kelly.Identified in the credits as only the Black Chick, Kelly has a comic scene in which she confounds George by setting his complaints to music, and another in which, sheathed in gold lamé, she parodies Tina Turner with the cyclonic spin she puts on the plodding country-western gospel song “Put Your Hand in the Hand.”Very much of its moment, “Top of the Heap” begins with a hippie-hardhat mud-wrestling riot and ends with a sniper assassination; it was topical enough to snag J.J. Johnson’s first score after “Shaft” and provide a popular Nixon impersonator his movie debut. At one point, George and his nerdy white partner (Leonard Kuras) discuss the possibility of U.F.O.s. George says he would caution the aliens to stay away: “We got Richard Nixon here.”George’s dreams of escaping Earth are almost a metaphor for the movie — the only commercial feature that St. John would ever make. If this intimation of Afrofuturism suggests that the “Top of the Heap” was a bit ahead of its time, so, too, was its critique of blaxploitation, delivered even before the clichés had hardened.Top of the HeapFeb. 18-24 at BAM in Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      ‘It Was a Crusade’: Karen Brooks Hopkins Revisits Her BAM Tenure

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      In a new memoir, the former president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music reflects on some of the organization’s most memorable stagings and artists.“Fund-raising is like a military operation,” Karen Brooks Hopkins writes in her new memoir, “BAM … and Then It Hit Me,” an account of the 36 years she spent at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “The odds are always against you. It’s going to be 90 percent rejection with many ‘casualties’ along the way, and you must constantly shift your strategy to find new ways forward.”Hopkins, 70, who joined the organization as a 29-year-old development officer in 1979, became its president in 1999, and discovered early on she had “the fund-raising gene.” During a long tenure (she retired in 2015), her tenacity and ability to raise money for ambitious experimental projects was a vital element in establishing the academy as a cultural force and a hub for must-see work by artists like Peter Brook, Laurie Anderson, Ivo van Hove and Pina Bausch.Her memoir, which will be published by powerHouse Books on March 1, combines personal history, fund-raising strategies and an informal account of some of the academy’s most memorable stagings and artists. It will have its official book launch on Feb. 17 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Hopkins will discuss her career with Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director.Hopkins, second from right, with, from left, Bruce Ratner, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson around 1984. BAM Hamm ArchivesHopkins recounts her early years spent working with the visionary arts programmer Harvey Lichtenstein and — after he retired — her extensive tenure as president alongside Joseph V. Melillo, the academy’s executive producer.“Karen was the person standing right behind Harvey, who took up a lot of space, quietly doing a lot of very crucial things,” Anderson said in a phone interview. “Not just with presenting work, but in the initiatives with the neighborhood and the audience.”Together, Melillo and Hopkins extended Lichtenstein’s uncompromising legacy.“We had a shared vision for BAM,” Melillo wrote in an email. “I had the confidence as I curated the artists and their works for the three stages that she would identify the financial resources.”During their tenure (Melillo retired from the position in 2018), the academy’s artistic budget grew from $21 million to $52 million; Hopkins established an endowment that now stands at $100 million; and the BAM campus expanded to include a new theater, the Richard B. Fisher Building, and a new building project, BAM Strong, to link three of its spaces.Hopkins, who has an MFA in directing, said her theater background meant that she had always remained profoundly connected to the work onstage and to the priority of an artistic vision.“I have been so lucky to have these great artistic partners, Harvey and Joe,” she said in a recent video interview. “We were all in it together. For us, BAM wasn’t a job, it was a crusade.”Over a two-hour anecdote-filled conversation, Hopkins — now a senior adviser to the Onassis Foundation — picked out some highlights of her time at the academy. “I love talking about BAM,” she said.‘The Mahabharata’Lichtenstein “would do anything,” Hopkins said, for the British born, France-based director Peter Brook. So when Brook, in 1986, suggested a nine-hour adaptation of an ancient Hindu epic, which he had developed with Jean-Claude Carrière, the answer, naturally, was an immediate yes. “The Mahabharata” was produced by the academy the following year.Peter Brook’s nine-hour production of “The Mahabharata” in 1987.Gilles Abegg“We created a new theater just for that show,” she recounted, describing the renovation of the dilapidated Majestic Theater into what is now called the BAM Harvey, a block away from the main theater, which Brook felt was too formal a space for the work.“It was like moving a small country to New York and having them live here for a month,” Hopkins said. “And we had no money to do it.” But after she heard Brook describe the genesis of the work she decided “this was the greatest fund-raising story of all time.” She took the director and a group of donors to see the play in Paris, where it had been staged at Brook’s home theater, the Bouffes du Nord, raising the money in a relatively short time.“In the world of Brook, there is no real separation between spectator and performer, between the past and the present; they exist side by side in the theater and in life,” Hopkins said. “What you saw was the most profound combination of theatricality and the human condition finding an expression that was mind-blowing.”‘United States Parts I-IV’The pioneering, avant-garde work of the composer Laurie Anderson came to the academy soon after Lichtenstein started the Next Wave Series (which became the Next Wave Festival in 1983). “In 1982, we did ‘United States,’ Hopkins recounted. “It was risky to put an artist who wasn’t that well-known in a 2,000-seat opera house, but the work was a masterpiece. She held the stage for hours as a musician, a storyteller and a visual artist, and the entire show, a remarkable comment on America, was her conception. You felt you were watching an artist really come into her own.”A poster advertising what Hopkins called Laurie Anderson’s “masterpiece.”BAM Hamm ArchivesAnderson’s work was everything Lichtenstein wanted: “genre-bending, breaking forms, offering new ways of bringing shows to the stage,” Hopkins said.‘The Island’Many South African plays were presented at the academy over the years, but one that resonated most forcefully for Hopkins was “The Island,” in 2003, starring John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who wrote the play with Athol Fugard.“‘The Island’ was a piece that was like an arrow to your heart,” Hopkins said, “like the most intense short story you ever read.” She added: “It was simple, dark and profound. You were on the island with them, and in an hour you understood what they had been through for so long. Of course, it was really about Mandela, and you understood that when people are confined in an utterly inhospitable place, yet find each other and are committed to the same cause, there is a beauty and purity to the friendship that is a life bond.”Winston Ntshona, left, and John Kani in “The Island” in 2003.Richard TermineKani and Ntshona were “a partnership, a chemistry made in heaven,” she said.Watching a post-apartheid play by Nicholas Wright, “A Human Being Died That Night,” at BAM in 2015, offered “a remarkable historical trajectory told by theater,” she added. “When you stay in a place for 36 years, you realize it’s not about one season, even 10 seasons. It’s about generations of artists, and about history.”The Work of Pina BauschWhen Lichtenstein, who was a dancer before becoming an arts administrator, saw the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, “he absolutely went berserk,” Hopkins said.“Café Müller,” one of the first shows Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble presented at the academy in 1984, was a revelation, Hopkins said. “Each artist had a distinctive personality and role, and you knew them like you knew actors.”The works were often “crazily difficult” to stage, she added. “For ‘Arien,’ we needed tons of water to rain on the stage, and by mistake toxic waste was delivered and had to be removed from our parking lot by guys in hazmat suits.” In “Palermo Palermo,” a wall stretching across the stage had to fall; in “Nelken” thousands of carnations had to be installed over the whole stage.Pina Bausch’s “Palermo Palermo” in 1991.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library“One year we did ‘Bluebeard,’ which had a million dead leaves onstage,” Hopkins added. “It was June, 90 degrees and we had no air conditioning. One critic said it smelled like a compost heap.”The Tanztheater Wuppertal was a huge audience draw for the academy. “Pina was a discovery who became a blockbuster,” Hopkins said.‘Happy Days’ and ‘Endgame’Samuel Beckett’s experimental, difficult and poetic work was a natural fit for the academy, Hopkins said, and Melillo was particularly keen on finding new productions of his work. Two in particular, stand out for her.In “Happy Days,” directed by Deborah Warner, “the great Fiona Shaw found the yin and yang of that role in a way I had never seen,” Hopkins said. “It’s not every actress who can be buried up to her neck, and communicate both the desperation of her circumstances and an optimism despite them. You were laughing and crying at the same time.”Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s 2008 production of Beckett’s “Happy Days.”Brooklyn Academy of Music The other enduring memory, she said, was of John Turturro playing Hamm in a wheelchair, with Max Casella as Clov, in the “unrelenting and unforgiving” play “Endgame.”One night, she recalled, the wheelchair collapsed, sending Turturro flying through the air. “He never broke character, even when the stagehands came on to pick him and the wheelchair off the floor,” Hopkins said. “The audience went nuts that night.”‘Einstein on the Beach’Lichtenstein discovered the work of the American director Robert Wilson, who was making a name for himself in Europe, around the time he took over at the Academy in 1967. “Harvey, in his most avant-garde heart, loved Robert Wilson, and felt he was on a divine mission to make sure that Bob’s large-scale work was seen in the U.S.,” Hopkins said. “There was almost no one in the audience for early pieces like ‘Deafman Glance,’” she said. “Or they would go home, do some laundry, come back; the pieces went on for hours!”In 1984, Lichtenstein told his team that they needed to raise $300,000 to present a Wilson collaboration with the composer Philip Glass, called “Einstein on the Beach.” Hopkins agreed. “I don’t know how, but we’ll do it,” she said.“Einstein” was a success. “After that the legend just grew and grew,” she said; the show returned to the Academy in 1992 and in 2012. “Bob works in a very inside-out way, not traditionally theatrical and very stylized,” Hopkins said. “But it comes from the gut and although the pieces can look cold, they are not. The heat comes from the ice around it; it’s an artistic trip.”She added that she particularly loved his 2014 adaptation of the Soviet writer Daniil Kharms’s “The Old Woman” with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe. “It was devastating, about someone starving to death, and you felt it,” she said. More

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      BAM Taps Former Leader of Its Film Program as Its Next President

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      Gina Duncan, who had been working at the Sundance Institute since 2020, will return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to lead it out of the pandemic.After a turbulent two years that has forced the Brooklyn Academy of Music to navigate the coronavirus pandemic, budget woes and leadership upheaval, the organization said Tuesday that it was turning to a veteran of its film wing to become its next president, filling a position that was left vacant more than 12 months ago.Gina Duncan, who previously served as BAM’s first vice president of film and strategic programming, has been selected as the organization’s new president, the institution announced. She will take over a multifaceted performing arts behemoth with a $50 million operating budget.Ms. Duncan, 41, who has never held the top job at an arts institution, will be tasked with stabilizing and reinvigorating BAM, an important cultural anchor and incubator known for presenting an eclectic array of cutting-edge artists and performers. Her first day as president will be April 11. She returns after a stint at the Sundance Institute, where she worked as its producing director.“Coming back to BAM feels like returning home,” Ms. Duncan said in a telephone interview. “The other day I went down to see Annie-B’s ‘The Mood Room.’ And it was the first time I had been back in BAM since we all fled our offices in March 2020. And I just was overwhelmed.”“I came back for BAM — the artists, the staff, the audience,” she added. “They’re my people.”The selection makes Ms. Duncan the first person of color to lead the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In choosing her, the academy’s board selected a candidate with whom they were familiar, after previously tapping an outsider in Katy Clark — a violinist-turned-arts-executive — who left BAM after less than six years in January 2021. Ms. Clark’s predecessor, Karen Brooks Hopkins, spent 16 years as BAM’s president, and a total of 36 years at the organization.Ms. Duncan joined BAM’s executive team in January 2017 as an associate vice president for film — a newly created role in which she oversaw the organization’s Rose Cinemas and its repertory film program. Under her leadership, BAM’s repertory programming began to focus more on underrepresented voices in cinema.She was promoted in 2019, with her role expanding beyond film to include responsibility for the organization’s archives and its lectures, classes and discussions; she helped integrate programming across the institution. She also helped move programs online during the early months of the pandemic, officials said.She left BAM in September of 2020 for the Sundance Institute, and now will return after roughly 18 months away.The chairwoman of BAM’s board, Nora Ann Wallace, said in an email that Ms. Duncan’s “leadership skills are immediately evident to anyone who works with her.”“Her ability to inspire a group of people — be it staff, audiences, donors, or our board — is vital to this moment in BAM’s history,” Ms. Wallace said. “The board saw those skills when she was at BAM in her previous leadership role.”Ms. Wallace noted that in addition to her background in film, Ms. Duncan has produced theater and arts-centered community programming for many years. “Gina is a gifted strategist who excels at assessing the bigger picture,” Ms. Wallace said.Ms. Duncan said that her vision for BAM involved ensuring it is “vital and visible across Brooklyn and beyond.” During her initial tenure with the institution, she said, she had worked to ensure that its film program both served local audiences and became part of a “larger national conversation.”“I see an opportunity to do that with BAM across all the different art and rich cultural programming that we present,” she said.When Ms. Duncan’s predecessor, Ms. Clark, left BAM, questions were raised about the housing bonus she had received to purchase an apartment in Brooklyn, which she was allowed to keep when she left the position.Ms. Wallace did not disclose Ms. Duncan’s salary, saying only that her pay is “in line with other performing arts organizations of similar size.” Ms. Duncan’s compensation does not include an apartment or housing allowance, Ms. Wallace said.Ms. Clark’s departure created something of a leadership vacuum at BAM; the board’s previous chairman, Adam Max, died in 2020 and an internal team was appointed to lead the institution temporarily as the pandemic created a crisis for the performing arts. With live performances impossible, BAM was forced to slash its operating budget, lay off some employees and furlough dozens more, cut the pay of top executives and dip into its $100 million endowment for special distributions.Ms. Duncan will have the advantage of taking over at a time when cultural institutions, including BAM, are starting to find their footing again. The academy’s first full season since the start of the pandemic focuses on the artists of New York City.“The industry remains really tenuous,” Ms. Duncan said. But at BAM, she said, she has a “strong foundation to start from.”“An institution is its people,” she said. More

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      7 Ways to Remember Martin Luther King in New York

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      From in-person and virtual performances to exhibitions and tours, the city offers plenty of options for honoring the civil rights leader this year.Since 1983, just 15 years after his death, the third Monday in January has been designated as a federal holiday in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. This year, on Jan. 17, cultural institutions all over New York have planned concerts, exhibitions, service opportunities and tours, both in person and online. (Bring your vaccination card, and check mask-wearing and ticketing policies online beforehand.)Here are seven ways to commemorate the legacy of the civil rights leader and learn more about Black history in New York.An Annual Bash in Brooklynbam.org.The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 36th annual tribute to King, held in person and streaming live at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, will feature a dance piece by Kyle Marshall, set to the oratory of King’s final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and performances by the singer Nona Hendryx with Craig Harris & Tailgaters Tales and the Sing Harlem choir. A keynote address will also be delivered by Imani Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University. Following the event, visitors can view a display of digital billboards inspired by the writings of bell hooks or attend a free screening at 1 p.m. of the documentary “Attica,” about the violent 1971 prison uprising.The choreographer Kyle Marshall, who created a dance piece set to the oratory of King’s final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”Steven SpeliotisActivism and the Artsapollotheater.org.The Apollo Theater and WNYC’s 16th annual celebration will hold two virtual broadcasts on Monday, at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., engaging WNYC radio hosts, scholars and community leaders in a discussion about how the struggle for social justice has affected artists like Nina Simone and John Legend. Guests include the Rev. Al Sharpton, the sports journalist William C. Rhoden and Trazana Beverley, who won a Tony Award for her role in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” The free event can be streamed through the Apollo’s Digital Stage.Learn More About the Metropolitan Museum of Art$125 Million Donation: The largest capital gift in the Met’s history will help reinvigorate a long-delayed rebuild of the Modern wing.Recent Exhibits: Our critics review a masterpiece “African Origin” show, an Afrofuturist period room and a round-the-world tour of Surrealism.Behind the Scenes: A documentary goes inside the Met to chronicle one of the most challenging years of its history.A Guide to the Met: From the must-see galleries to the lesser-known treasures, here’s how to make the most of your visit.Discover Seneca Villagecentralparknyc.org; metmuseum.org.Take a tour of Central Park that conjures Seneca Village, the largest community of free African American property owners in early-19th-century New York. Beginning at Mariners’ Gate near the West 85th Street entrance at 2 p.m. on Saturday, your guide will share how the area, once home to around 1,600 residents, provided a respite from the racial discrimination and crowded conditions of downtown Manhattan — until residents were forcibly displaced in 1857 to make way for Central Park. That history is also the subject of a new, vibrant installation across the park, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room” imagines the home of a Village resident as it might still exist if the family had been left to live undisturbed.Make a Craftwavehill.org.Just before leading the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, King passed through the hamlet of Gee’s Bend and encouraged its 900 residents to vote. They would go on to establish the Freedom Quilting Bee, a group that allowed women of the town to earn an income by making quilts that were sold at Saks and Sears; some textiles have entered the permanent collection of the Met. You can put your own sewing skills to the test on Saturday or Sunday at Wave Hill House in the Bronx, where plentiful squares of fabric will be on hand.Quiltmaking at Wave Hill House in the Bronx. Joshua BrightChoose a Causeamericorps.govSince King’s birthday was first observed, it’s been a tradition for volunteers across the country to devote the day to service. Whether you commit to a few hours or a whole month, the website of the federal public-service organization AmeriCorps has a directory where you can search for volunteer opportunities (including ones specific to the holiday). There are virtual options, too, like tutoring or transcription for the Smithsonian Institution and National Archives.A Streaming Sermontheaterofwar.com“The Drum Major Instinct,” a sermon King delivered in 1968 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, will be presented on Zoom on Monday at 7 p.m. by Theater of War Productions and the office of Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate. Along with the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, and the city police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, Williams will take part in a dramatic reading of the text, which challenges people to channel justice, righteousness and peace into acts of service and love. Accompanying them will be performances of music composed in honor of Michael Brown Jr., the 18-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.‘Activist New York’mcny.orgAn ongoing exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York chronicles 350 years of social activism in the city, including civil rights, immigration, transgender activism and women’s rights. It begins with the struggle for religious tolerance during the Dutch colonial period, encompasses debates over nudity, prostitution and contraception in New York, from 1870 to 1930, and ends more recently, with the Movement for Black Lives. New material is added regularly, so it’s one to revisit. More

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      ‘The Mood Room’ Review: 1980s Anomie, California Style

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      In Big Dance Theater’s new work, premiering at BAM Fisher, Annie-B Parson melds her sensibility with that of the Conceptual artist Guy de Cointet.The first thing we learn about the five sisters gathering in their childhood home in Annie-B Parson’s “The Mood Room” is that it’s been a year since their parents died. One of the sisters tells us that. They all talk a lot, though very little about grief.Something is clearly wrong. The sisters are anxious and depressed. They can’t always tell one another apart; their own identities aren’t stable. One sister has become allergic to the sun. The water isn’t clean. They have many ideas about how to fix the problems: doctors and diets, new lighting and other purchases and changes of scene, vacations to exotic locales or just a retreat to the room of the title.Even without a program note, you might guess from the sisters’ speech and from the interior décor that we are in the early 1980s — a 1980s that hasn’t ended. The production, which Big Dance Theater debuted at BAM Fisher on Tuesday, takes its text from “Five Sisters,” a 1982 work by the Conceptual artist Guy de Cointet. Born and raised in France, he lived in Los Angeles and captured the self-absorption of some of the city’s inhabitants with a mixture of amusement and alarm.Michelle Sui and Moran.Julieta CervantesIn a program note, Parson calls de Cointet “an artistic soul mate,” and it is remarkable how much his text seems to call for her customary approach. Roaming an elegantly tacky interior of fringe curtains and beige carpeting (kudos to the designer Lauren Machen), the sisters emphasize the artificiality of their speech, drawn from commercials and soap operas and bits of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” all treated equally. Often before underlining a word, they pause and pose.That pausing and posing is pure Parson. The sisters dance a lot here, sometimes in girl-group formation, step-touching as a disco ball revolves. But every second of the show is tightly choreographed, tightly controlled, down to how they hold their water glasses and dangle their feet. The anxious mood derives from this exertion of control, especially as the sisters react to and remark upon shifts in light and sound.The addition of music by the experimental laptop artist Holly Herndon is an inspired choice. Full of vintage noises, it’s like a spliced memory reel of the era, echoing Laurie Anderson without sampling or recognizable quotation. The sisters keep characterizing it differently (“what odd music,” “what thoughtful music”) and yet accurately.The cast is also expert: Kate Moran as the sister with the sun allergy, Elizabeth DeMent as the sleepy-eyed workaholic, Myssi Robinson as the clean-lined dancer with hearing and hip problems, Michelle Sui as the painter. Theda Hammel, appearing briefly without the other sisters, introduces a welcome, looser humor — at once the most Chekhovian and contemporary, dishing about a guy she’s met, rearranging household objects before saying, “That’s how I remember it.”That earns a laugh, but otherwise, humor is thinly spread. Across an hour, sisters accumulate and one finally leaves, but nobody really changes. Which is the point, a static point perhaps more suited to museums and art galleries than a theater. The program note cites “the enduring damage of the Reagan era” and consumerism consuming civic engagement, but the production doesn’t carry that much political weight. Yes, such people as these sisters exist, in Los Angeles and in all of us. The question is: Are you in the mood to spend time with them?The Mood RoomThrough Sunday at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org More

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      Kiki and Herb Will Be Back Where They Belong for Christmas

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      Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman have resurrected their Christmas act for “a big, old chosen family reunion.”Kiki and Herb, the glamorous and harrowing cabaret duo created by Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman, never performed as reliably as the Radio City Rockettes. But for a while in the early 2000s, no Christmas felt complete without them — especially if you are the kind of person who prefers a belt of Canadian Club to eggnog.In those days, Bond played Kiki as an elderly “boozy chanteusie,” with Mellman as Herb, her childhood friend and put-upon accompanist. In fright drag, with age makeup crisscrossing her face, Bond’s Kiki would stalk through the crowd like a bloodthirsty elf, savaging holiday carols and performing medleys that intermixed “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” with “Suicide Is Painless.”“It seemed like a gift to an audience that wouldn’t necessarily be going home for Christmas, wouldn’t necessarily have the best relationship with their family,” Mellman said recently. Their shows wrapped that present in spilled drinks and smeared mascara.Kiki and Herb played their last holiday show, “Kiki & Herb: The Second Coming,” in 2007. Bond and Mellman dissolved their artistic partnership not long after. Mellman continued in the cabaret scene and performed with the band the Julie Ruin. Bond wrote new music and evolved as a visual artist. They didn’t speak for years. After reuniting at a memorial for their friend José Esteban Muñoz, they performed together again, in a show called “Seeking Asylum!,” at the Public Theater in 2016. And now, they have resurrected their Christmas act for what Bond calls, “a big, old chosen family reunion.”Beginning Tuesday, Mellman and Bond will debut “Kiki & Herb: SLEIGH at BAM,” for five performances. Studded with fan favorites — Tori Amos’s “Crucify,” Belle and Sebastian’s “Fox in the Snow” — the show will include new numbers, like Brandi Carlile’s “The Joke.” (During the duo’s last hiatus, Mellman built a file of 300 potential new songs.)On a recent weekday afternoon, Mellman and Bond met at a coffee shop in Brooklyn to chat about reclaiming Christmas and how their characters might spend the holiday. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.It’s been 14 years since your last holiday show. Why restart the tradition now?JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND Before the pandemic, Kenny found this footage of our 1999 show at Flamingo East. I had a meeting with David Binder [the artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music] to propose recreating it. He goes, “You should do a Kiki and Herb Christmas show.” They never take the good idea, I thought at the time. But then history happened, and I was feeling pretty sad last Christmas. As I started looking at what we could do as things opened up again, David sent me another email. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to get together with everybody for Christmas.This set list is mostly familiar material, right?KENNY MELLMAN It’s a question of when you go to see your favorite band and they play none of the songs you want to hear. We skirted that for years, but I felt it’d be nice to give people a Christmas present this year of being like, here. Have it.BOND We’re unpacking all the broken ornaments.How were Kiki and Herb birthed into the world?BOND I created the character of Kiki during the AIDS crisis. I was a young person in my 20s, a street activist. I felt like saying all the things I wanted to say as myself would sound too strident, too earnest. To have this boozed up old person who had done it all, seen it all, I could say anything as this character.MELLMAN All the glitz and craziness and insanity and surrealism lends it a gravitas that it would not have if you just said it in a very straight way.BOND I brought elements of people I really knew into Kiki — very intimidating, very smart women who had just gotten a [expletive] hand dealt, who somehow became these amazing creatures. So that was always there. Herb was based on this guy who worked in a piano bar that we performed at sometimes, this single guy who would drink tequila and had a picture of his cat on the piano.MELLMAN He would drink tequila and just start crying.How has the act changed over the years?MELLMAN We started this as a kind of street theater inside a bar [in San Francisco]. We were both super young, going to queer clubs, protesting every night. Coming to New York — a different atmosphere, a different queer scene — it became less like, Oh, we have to be screaming at the end of the world.BOND We started performing Kiki and Herb here in January of ’95, and ’95 was the year that the cocktail [the antiretroviral therapy for H.I.V.] came and started making lives last longer. So, it became different.MELLMAN We stopped doing mushrooms. So that changed it.BOND It’s New York, we’d better raise our game, we’d better stop doing mushrooms.What was it like to move through adulthood performing these characters?BOND That’s part of why I had to stop. I just felt like I didn’t know fully who I was. I always feel like I’m a disappointment. Because I know that people love that character so much. And I’m not that character. I remember, I thought, maybe if I just did a reality show, and I just lived as that character, people would like me more and I wouldn’t be so lonely.MELLMAN Back in the day, we were doing late-night shows, and then going out even later because we wanted to hang out with all these amazing people. There was no balance.BOND Last year when I was doing streaming performances from my house, I discovered that after 30 years in the business, that I never did a show where I didn’t go out and greet the public afterward. That’s probably why I don’t have any intimacy in my life.But as wild as the act could be, as grotesque as it could be, it was also about love.MELLMAN Like no matter what Kiki does Herb will be there. I find that really lovely and something to aspire to in a weird way. As much as a real psychological expose of that relationship would probably be horrifying, at the base of it is this incredible love for each other that transcends everything.It’s the idea that what if someone saw you at you’re just absolutely worst —MELLMAN And would still be there.So do the shows reach for a kind of emotional truth?MELLMAN Oh, for sure. There was always an emotional center to the act, because it came from a place of survival. I was recently just picturing what San Francisco was like when we created this. I wrote a poem that had the line, “The freshly dead are walking the streets.” That’s what it felt like.BOND Also it goes back to the people that I based the character on, who I had so much love for and who I felt were judged so harshly. My whole drive was to be this very unlovable character, whom people could not help but just love.How do you think Kiki and Herb would be spending this holiday?BOND Probably like us when we were young — meeting at some dive bar and playing pinball and drinking all day. Which sounds nice to me actually.MELLMAN They’d be like, I heard there’s a free buffet.BOND Right? Bottomless cocktails and free buffet at Christmas.MELLMAN Perfect. More