Fewer and fewer people are left who can give us firsthand accounts of their experiences with the Holocaust. “Never Forget to Lie,” a presentation of PBS’s “Frontline” on May 14 (check local listings), presents some of those voices. One belongs to the filmmaker, Marian Marzynski. Mr. Marzynski, the documentary relates, was 5 when his Jewish parents handed him over to Christians, and he ended up in a Roman Catholic orphanage.
“My childhood still seems to be my psyche’s unfinished business,” he says in the film, one of several he has made about his experiences. “They told me that to stay alive, I must forget who I was.”
He returns to Warsaw and meets up with several other survivors who were saved in similar fashions. They were all children at the time, of course, and their recollections have a fragmentary, scary-fairy-tale quality. One particularly recalls the boots of the German soldiers, shiny but scary. Mr. Marzynski’s mother survived the war, but he never saw his father again.
“I spent two and a half years at the orphanage,” he says. “When we saw the heavy smoke over the Warsaw ghetto, I overheard the words, ‘The Jews are burning.’ Was my father still there?” NEIL GENZLINGER
Dueling Truths In Indian Film
Truth, principle and the secular Indian way come in for a drubbing in Feroz Abbas Khan’s “Dekh Tamasha Dekh,” the opening-night feature of the 13th-annual New York Indian Film Festival. Mr. Khan’s film — like the festival’s centerpiece, “Shahid” (about Shahid Azmi, a human-rights activist and lawyer who was killed in 2010), and its closer, “Filmistaan” — concerns Hindu-Muslim relations, and the news is mostly bad. In “Dekh,” a battle plays out over a poor man’s dead body. Was the man — killed by the falling effigy of a politician, no less — a Muslim or a Hindu? Was he Hamid, as he died, or Kishan, as he was born? Should he be buried or cremated? Based on a true story, Mr. Khan’s kaleidoscopic movie finds that fertile Indian place where farce meets tragedy, with neither quite getting the upper hand.
The festival also features a small sidebar celebrating the 100th anniversary of Indian film, which includes a rare chance to see the sui generis “Kalpana” (1948), a film about classical dance, told through classical dance and directed by Uday Shankar, a classical dancer (and Ravi’s brother). (Tuesday through May 4; schedule and information: iaac.us/nyiff2013.) RACHEL SALTZ
Seeking Life After Life
Since prehistoric times, visionaries have looked beyond the limitations of mortality toward realms of regeneration and new life. The Stephen Petronio Company is doing such searching, choreographically, in Mr. Petronio’s new “Like Lazarus Did (LLD 4.30),” inspired by myths and concepts of resurrection. Mr. Petronio has been appointed the Joyce Theater’s first artist in residence, a post that gives him opportunities to focus entirely upon artistic matters. His collaborators on the evening-long “Lazarus” include Janine Antoni, a visual and performance artist, and Son Lux, whose score draws upon spiritual music and texts, from American slave songs to the meditative drones of Eastern mysticism.
It will be performed live by an ensemble that includes members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City. Mr. Petronio will also do some choreographic resurrections. Although most of his movement material is new, he has incorporated into it fresh treatments of choreography created over his company’s 28-year history. (7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on May 5, Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, 212-242-0800, joyce.org; $10-$59.) JACK ANDERSON
A Reopening, And a Look Back
The Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College has been closed for renovations for the last 10 months. This Sunday it reopens with a free celebration from 1 to 4 p.m. and the exhibition “Pre-Columbian Remix: The Art of Enrique Chagoya, Demián Flores, Rubén Ortiz-Torres and Nadín Ospina,” featuring four contemporary artists from Latin America who were inspired by ancient Aztec, Mayan and Incan cultures.
The overall mood of the show might be summarized by the title of Mr. Ortiz-Torres’s black-and-white photo series, “The Past Is Not What It Used to Be.” The works document imitations of pre-Columbian art and artifacts, some of them installed at nightclubs and amusement parks. Mr. Ospina’s carved-stone caryatids and gold-plated statues also nod to pre-Columbian icons, but closer inspection of their heads reveals features from Goofy, Mickey Mouse and other cartoon characters. And in paintings and works on paper by Mr. Flores and Mr. Chagoya, superhero figures who might be from comic strips or pre-Hispanic codices act out episodes from Mexican history. (Through July 14, 914-251-6100, neuberger.org.) KAREN ROSENBERG
Comes Around, Plays Around
The New York music promoters Search & Restore and Boom Collective have teamed up with the monthlong Red Bull Music Academy series for “A Night of Improvised Round Robin Duets.” The evening has a simple, inherently generative framework, with roots in acting classes as much as experimental music of the ’70s and ’80s: Musician A starts with a five-minute solo improvisation; Musician B joins Musician A for a five-minute duet; A leaves, and C arrives to play with B for five minutes. And so on, through a list of more than 20 players.
The list is broad: Thundercat (a k a Stephen Bruner), the virtuosic future-funk bassist; Glenn Kotche, drummer of Wilco; Andrew W. K., the rock singer with a sideline in improvised music; the cellist and composer Erik Friedlander; the great jazz saxophonist Joe Lovano; the P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell; Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth; the no-wave Roots drummer Questlove; and so on. (8 p.m., Wednesday, Brooklyn Masonic Temple, 317 Clermont Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, redbullmusicacademy.com; tickets $15.) BEN RATLIFF
More Dreaminess From Foreman
In a recent interview, the actor Rocco Sisto was asked what an audience attending “Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance),” could expect. “I am at that point in rehearsal where I don’t even have an idea what the audience will see,” he said. This is probably a common sentiment among actors about to open in a play by Richard Foreman, the downtown auteur whose singular shows are known for being as meticulously designed as they are enigmatic. Like most of his works, this play was written, directed and designed by Mr. Foreman. It opens on Tuesday at the Public Theater, which presented Mr. Foreman’s “Idiot Savant,” with Willem Dafoe, in 2009.
Plot summaries are always simplifications, but they are particularly irrelevant for Mr. Foreman’s works, which can be dreamlike, surreal, indulgent and rigorous at the same time. If that doesn’t clarify things, well, you would not be the first person baffled by a show of his. Even so, he’s a one-of-a-kind artist always worth checking out. (425 Lafayette Street, 212-967-7555, publictheater.org.) JASON ZINOMAN
Welcome, Visitors and Students
The major orchestras, opera companies and halls in a musical capital like New York overshadow a more obscure bounty: its conservatories. They are rich repositories of young talent, and that talent often goes on display in performances that gain less attention than the big boys like the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic. The Juilliard School, especially, presents fine opera productions featuring student musicians, often led by a major conductor.
This week Juilliard presents Janacek’s pungent fable “The Cunning Little Vixen,” conducted by a previous visitor, the highly regarded Anne Manson. Ms. Manson, who made her New York City Opera debut in 2007, is long overdue across Lincoln Center Plaza, at the Met. Emma Griffin directs. (2 p.m. Sunday, 8 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 212-721-6500, lc.lincolncenter.org; $30.) DANIEL J. WAKIN
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 28, 2013
A television entry this weekend in the Week Ahead column on Page 4 misidentifies the date on which PBS plans to broadcast on its “Frontline” program the documentary “Never Forget to Lie,” which features firsthand accounts of the Holocaust. After the section went to press, PBS moved the broadcast date to May 14 from this Tuesday, April 30.
|
