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Festitango 2017
June 20-25 was my third time at the Festival International de Tango Medellín, a festival I like for its musical programming, its focus (in the city of Gardel’s death) on singers, and the window it opens on the city’s tango culture, which values professional distinction and amateur achievement in equal measure. There are competitions for…
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Hermia & Helena
HERMIA & HELENA opens in a New York that might, until the clues cohere, be Buenos Aires. Flowers that could be in any garden, fulgent with color. The echo of drumming on the avenues. A city park – where? The impression depends, to be sure, on a sense of both cities. The Argentine director Matías…
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Tania Stavreva
My first sight and sound of Tania Stavreva was at a tribute to the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera in his centennial year. The Bulgarian-born pianist opened the concert, to great effect, with two Ginastera pieces and one, “Bulgarian Prelude” (2016), that she had written in his honor. I noticed afterward, following her career, that she…
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Pablo Estigarribia
The Argentine pianist Pablo Estigarribia balanced his concert last week, at Mezzrow in New York, on a tripod of genres. Trained, at first, in classical, he came, at age twenty or so, to tango, a course that he has followed for the past decade. He has studied and played with top tango figures and found…
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Personal Shopper
PERSONAL SHOPPER is a great film by Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart is great in it. It follows upon Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, also with Stewart, a great film too and parallel in structure. PERSONAL SHOPPER swaps out the fictional for the supernatural or implies, perhaps, that the two are one and the same.…
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Ensen
The Tunisian artist Emel Mathlouthi released her new album at Joe’s Pub in February and sings again in New York at (le) poisson rouge on May 6. The collection is called ENSEN, which means “human” in Arabic, and it paints a sonic picture of how it feels to be so in the world. To read…
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The Hairy Ape
The first image you see at Eugene O’Neill’s THE HAIRY APE at the Park Avenue Armory are rows and rows of seats, ready to absorb the arriving audience into a yellow, Borg-like mass. The implication is that, once we are seated, the play will redound on us with its expressionistic theme: society as a machine…
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Kedi
A Turkish friend has told me that her greatest culture shock upon coming to New York from Istanbul was the absence of street cats as a part of daily life – cats, she said, that people take it on themselves to care for, but who come and go independently, with no real sense of “masters”…
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Julieta
At the start of JULIETA, the folds of a red cloth expose a recognizable lushness. This is “Un film de Almodóvar.” The cloth belongs, when the shot pulls back, to a dressing gown worn by Julieta, played by Emma Suárez, no less luminous now than she was in the Julio Medem films in which I…
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Manifesto
MANIFESTO is an installation by Julian Rosefeldt of 13 short films in simultaneous play in the darkened space of the Park Avenue Armory. More than one, but never all, of the screens are visible from a given point. Cate Blanchett, playing different roles in each film, delivers lines taken from some 55 manifestos (most artistic,…