Author Archives: Christina

Valerie Ghent
New Single
La Table Qui Etait Seule

“Born in the atmosphere of the first confinement, in 2020, La Table Qui Était Seule is addressed to a distant friend, in New York City, who perhaps dreams of Paris. In fact the lyrics were written by my dear friend and acclaimed author Christophe Fourvel who wrote to me during lockdown. I put his words to music and we went on to record while the pandemic was keeping us all isolated. The song kept me connected to France and the French language during lockdown in NYC.” – Valerie Ghent

Review by Randy Radic
Sept 24, 2021
“Suffused by surfaces of classical music and jazz, “La Table Qui Était Seule” blends retro aromas with contemporary jazz hues, forming a luscious song highlighted by the bravura voice of Valerie Ghent.”
Read the full review HERE

Spotify Link
Valerie Ghent

More information on Valerie’s Website:
Valerie Ghent La Table Qui Etait Seul

NYC NEXT

Valerie Ghent’s song “New York City Streets” is featured in NYC Next, as an example of Inspiration from inspired New Yorkers.

Watch Here

Beverly Brodsky
Water-Ether
Group Show

A Light in the Water oil on canvas 52 x 56 inches

Water-Ether Art Exhibition
Etra Fine Art
6942 NE 4th Avenue
Miami, FLA

December 28, 2021 – February 19, 2022

I see a light in the water
And sprays of color all around.
Creatures swim by swiftly
Who can tell where they might go
In the blue and the purple.
-Beverly Brodsky

WATER-ETHER, in Miami is an exhibition of works by diverse artists, curated by Alicia Restrepo. Paintings and sculptures are represented within the context of Thales of Miletus and Aristotle’s definition of Earth, air, water, and fire, in addition to ether.
These Greek Philosophers believed that these elements strive toward their natural placement in the universe( which has a soul) and can change from one form into another. “Water, especially, “ is the nature, the Arche, the originating principal of everything.” Therefore, “the earth floats on Water.”

Toby’s Holiday Show
Live puppet show for the very young


TOBY’S HOLIDAY SHOW

December 26, 2021
2PM

Limited Capacity. Buy tickets online. Masks must be worn by all. Adults must show proof of vaccination.

Buy TICKETS Now at EVENTBRITE.COM

PENNY JONES & Co. PUPPETS
Early Childhood Puppet Theatre www.pennypuppets.org

A VILLAGE GEM FOR 45 YEARS

“Very simple, and perfect as an introduction to theatre.” -New York Magazine
“Charming.” -The New York Times

Where:

WESTBETH Home to the Arts
Community Room
155 BANK STREET
between West and Washington Street in the West Village
Tickets on sale at pennypuppets.org and Eventbrite.com
Tickets are $10 for all ages
All Ages – Great for 2 to 8
Stroller Parking
Shows Run about 45 Minutes

Puppet making-workshop follows

Information: (212) 924-0525

http://www.pennypuppets.org

Directions

BUS AND SUBWAY: M14A, M11, M20, (2 blocks)
A, C, E, L, 1, 2, 3 (5 or 6 blocks)

“A Child’s first experience with theater is important and forming. Quality counts.” – Penny Jones

PENNY JONES & CO. PUPPETS has been a mainstay of children’s theater in New York since the 1970’s. The company specializes in informal puppet shows for children aged three to eight, and puppet ballets with live music for audiences of adults, children or both. The company performs in collaboration with chamber ensembles and orchestras. The repertory includes adaptations of classical works as well as original stories and scores. In schools, the company has performed hundreds of times, and Penny has a wide variety of programs from puppet pageants with a cast and crew of 30 to 90 school children, to workshops for small classes, and Penny’s “One on One” – interweaving puppetry, storytelling, movement and arts.

The company has appeared on television, in the Henson International Puppet Festival at the Public Theatre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, at BAM with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, at City Center, Avery Fisher Hall, and in museums including The Museum of the City of New York, The Children’s Museum of New York, the American Museum of Natural History, at Emelin, Wave Hill, the Washington Square Music Festival, at venues from Macy’s to Barnes & Noble, and with orchestras at Bargemusic, Casa de España, Greenwich House Music School, with the New Jersey Symphony, and many, many, more…

Barbara Hammer
Lorraine O’Grady
Best 2021 Solo Shows

Barbara Hammer “Double Strength” video still

Most Memorable Art and Image-Makers of 2021

Holland Cotter
NYT Dec 8, 2021

“The year 2021 was about recovery — slow, partial, tentative, ongoing — from lockdown. Over the summer, museums and galleries rebooted, but with masking and distancing in place. After a year of social isolation, a market trend in easy-to-like figure painting had natural appeal, with portrait shows everywhere. (New York had Medicis and Alice Neel; Hans Holbein and the Obamas currently hold court in Los Angeles) But for me, many of the most memorable events were either outside bicoastal centers or in unusual locations and forms within them.

On the contemporary front, “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And” brought a long overdue career survey of a supersmart American conceptual artist and writer to the Brooklyn Museum. (A book of her essays, “Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space 1973-2019,” was a vital supplement to the show.) Company, a gallery on the Lower East Side, inaugurated a new space with “Barbara Hammer: Tell me there is a lesbian forever …” a museum-ready selection of the late, great filmmaker’s early work on paper, organized by the artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden.

Read entire article New York Times Best Shows

WESTFEST 2022 Call for Submissions

WestFest 2022 Dance Festival

Calling for submissions to participate in WestFest 2022!
This coming year’s festival will incorporate theater setting and the site-specific location treasures of Westbeth Artists’ Facility, iconic in its history and traditions.

​The panel of judges will be looking for a diverse group of emerging & mid-career dance artists with a strong vision and high-performance quality. This year’s curation panel will include guest judges Deborah Lohse and Jamal Jackson.

Apply now at www.westfestdance.com

SELECTED ARTISTS WILL RECEIVE:
The opportunity to show new or previous work in an outdoor theater or site-specific setting.
Free production costs
20 min tech rehearsal slot
Publicity and digital marketing materials for the event
Professional captured and edited photos
Video of performance at a discounted rate

SUBMISSION SCHEDULE:
Early Bird Special Application fee: $30
Submit by December 31st at 11:59PM
Regular Application Fee: $40
Submit by January 10th at 11:59PM.
Finalists Announced Wednesday, January 20th

FREE ON-SITE REHEARSAL SPACE:
Sat Feb 22nd, 1-4PM
Sat Mar 14th, 1-4PM
Sat April 4th, 1-4PM​

TECH REHEARSAL DATES:
April 23rd – 24th: 20 minutes assigned from 1-4PM

PERFORMANCE DATES:
April 30th – May 1st: Live performances scheduled from 1-4PM

PLEASE NOTE:
If selected, the festival will be allowed to use the info and materials submitted in the artist’s application for promotional purposes.
Selected pieces will be between 4-6 minutes.
All artists participating in the festival must be fully vaccinated by tech week.

QUESTIONS
Email us at info@westfestdance.com

PRESS INQUIRIES
www.westfestdance.com
Contact: Lauren Hafner Addison

LINKS:
At Westbeth: https://westbeth.org/westfest-dance-festival/
WestFest website: westfestdance.com

Esther Robinson
Westbeth Board member co-produces Velvet Underground
NYT Recommendation for 2022 Oscar for Best Picture and Best screenplay

New York Times film reviewer Manhole Dargis recommends Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay to Velvet Underground
New York Times January 19, 2022

The Reviews

New York Times Best Films of 2021
Like “Summer of Soul,” this documentary revisits the music of the 1960s in a spirit that is more historical than nostalgic. Rather than assemble present-day musicians to pay tribute to their forebears, Haynes concentrates on the Velvets in their moment and on the artistic scene that spawned them. NYT 2021 Best Films

Rolling Stone
“Velvet Underground feels peculiarly attuned to its moment, to even the question of how to properly depict the moment. It knowingly yet searchingly feels its way through the question of how artists become themselves. Which is sort of a dead question — what inspired this? what kind of a mind came up with this? — because we ask it of artists often and are rarely given answers that sound true. Velvet Underground is clearly willing to do the diligence of providing the moods and contexts and backstories at one needs to give that question a bit of factual heft, however much it streamlines much of this in favor of being as capacious as possible. But what I get from, say, peeking behind the curtain of Reed’s upbringing and depressions as I watch this movie isn’t a clear and simple pathway to the man’s art (or heart, for that matter). It is instead the far more intriguing and murky problem of a private life, a creative life that will never fully be known to me.”

-K. Austin Collins Oct 15, 2021
Read the entire review at Rolling Stone

New York Times
“Haynes doesn’t just want you to listen to the reminiscences of band members and their friends, lovers and collaborators, or to groove on vintage video of the band in action. He wants you to hear just how strange and new the Velvets sounded, to grasp, intuitively as well as analytically, where that sound came from. And also to see — to feel, to experience — the aesthetic ferment and sensory overload of mid-60s Manhattan”

A.O. Scott Oct 22, 2021
Read the entire review in New York Times

Roger Ebert.com
Be aware, though, that viewers who come into Haynes’ two-hour movie “The Velvet Underground” looking for a primer on the band, Lou Reed, John Cale, Maureen “Mo” Tucker, Nico, Andy Warhol, Mary Woronov, The Factory, and other famous names and locations may find the experience disorienting. Despite the presence of traditional documentary elements, and a mostly linear story that pulls you through about 20 years’ of cultural history, Haynes and his collaborators make the experience feel new and surprising, assembling the component parts with an eye towards making not just a movie, but an experience—something that you feel, as you might feel the drums during a live music performances: in your gut.

-Matt Zoller Seitz Oct 13, 2021
Read entire review on Roger Ebert.com

Esther Robinson

Westbeth Board member Esther Robinson is an award-winning filmmaker/producer. Her critically acclaimed directorial debut A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and The Warhol Factory took top prizes at the Berlin, Tribeca and Chicago film festivals. It was re-released theatrically in 2019. As a producer and executive producer her recent titles include (among others): the Academy Award Nominated film Strong Island by Yance Ford, and Memories of a Penitent Heart by Cecilia Aldarondo which premiered in the 2017 season of the PBS series. Additionally, She is an active board member of Women Make Movies, a recipient of Fractured Atlas’ 2014 Arts Entrepreneurship Award and a mom to Otis age 5.

Read more about Esther Robinson

Apple Original Films and Polygram Entertainment present
in association with Federal Films a Motto Pictures and Killer Films production
“THE VELVET UNDERGROUND” a documentary film by Todd Haynes
Associate Producer J. Daniel Torres Line Producer Marissa Torres Ericson Co-Producers Josh Braun Dan Braun Esther Robinson Music Supervision by Randall Poster Archival Producers Wyatt Stone Bryan O’keefe Cinematography by Edward Lachman, asc Edited by Affonso Gonçalves, ace Adam Kurnitz Executive Producers Danny Bennett Pamela Koffler John Sloss Produced by David Blackman Produced by Julie Goldman Christopher Clements Carolyn Hepburn
Produced by Christine Vachon
Directed and Produced by Todd Haynes

Westbeth Flea Market
Surprising Finds

Westbeth Flea Market-to-me market;
Surprising ‘finds’ while hunting for bargains
November 30, 2021
By Jaimee Kosanke

“….I moved the hangers left to right, left to right. Left to…oh! A short-sleeved, pink satin, jeweled button-down, with palm trees on the pocket, reared its perfectly ugly self. She was $3 and the right blend of my past and present. She looked comfortable, slightly never-in-style, half ready-to-wear, half ready-for-bed. This Daytona-retirement-party-piece was the art I had been looking for. I internalized my “so cute” and “I love it.” Sold.

On my way out, I spotted something else.

A painting on white canvas. There were two suspicious men in suits, holding ropes and dancing on a tree branch like a highwire. Two happy squirrels lived beneath. It felt undone. As if the artist was still working something out. There were two worlds meshing and a facade of normalcy. It felt current to me.

The man working the booth told me the artist, Edith Isaac-Rose, had titled it “Springtime” and had previously lived in Westbeth. Isaac-Rose was known for expressing her politics through her art, most popular for her “Daily Rage” series, which drew “inspiration from the daily newspaper…that depicted our nation’s corrupt upper class and its victims.”

Read what happens next in the The Village Sun

Westbeth Movie Night
Crip Camp

Friday December 17, 2021 at 7PM
Westbeth Community Room
FREE Screening

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution is a 2020 American documentary film directed, written and co-produced by Nicole Newnham and James LeBrecht. Barack and Michelle Obama serve as executive producers.

Crip Camp starts in 1971 at Camp Jened, a summer camp in New York described as a “loose, free-spirited camp designed for teens with disabilities”. With disability activists, Larry Allison, Judith Heumann, James LeBrecht, Denise Sherer Jacobson, and Stephen Hofmann, the film focuses on those campers who turned themselves into activists for the disability rights movement and follows their fight for accessibility legislation.

Crip Camp had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2020, where it won the Audience Award. It has received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 100% based on 99 reviews.