(718) 260–2500 Brooklyn Paper’s essential guide to the Borough of Kings August 16–22, 2019
MUSIC
Hot Sauce
It’s a National treasure!
A Williamsburg concert hall is welcoming
people to its new lounge with a month-long free
music series. Producers at National Sawdust, a
North Sixth Street music venue, have launched
“Sauce,” a series of happy hour music sessions,
every Thursday and Saturday inside a re-purposed
restaurant, providing a casual and intimate
setting for Brooklynites to soak in the sounds,
according one of the organizers.
“You come in and you almost feel like you’re
inside someone’s living room,” said Martin
Movagh. “You have the curation of a concert
but with the vibe of an open mic.”
The space used to be the restaurant Rider, which
shut its doors during the spring. It is in the same
building as National Sawdust, which is currently
closed while it installs a new 700-speaker sound
system. One of Movagh’s colleagues decided to
open up the former eatery so that locals could enjoy
some music while the main space is on hiatus.
“Sauce was born of me and my colleagues
wanting to have fun,” said Ras Dia. “It’s very
different from what we do during the year with a
sit-down concert. We want people to flow through
the space.”
At each show, an eclectic lineup of artists perform
in the space that used to be Rider’s bar,
while drinks and grub are available in the restaurant’s
former lobby and entrance area.
The remaining roster includes a wide variety
acts, including improvisational sitar player
Nish Chari; the Video Game Music Collective,
a band that reinterprets classic video game
soundtracks; Rose Generous, a Filipinx-American
singer, weaver, and cyborg; and the spoken
word group Word of Mouth.
The organizers will bring some of the Manhattan
jazz scene across the East River, with
two concerts from Robbie Lee, host of jazz sessions
at Cleopatra’s Needle in the distant isle’s
Central Park.
Whether the new lounge will continue to host
free concerts once the venue’s larger hall reopens
at the end of the month remains to be seen, according
to Dia.
“My hope is that it does continue and that it
continues to grow,” he said.
Movagh hopes that the space will become a
part of shows at the larger venue.
“It might be a fun thing to do in conjunction
with our program,” he said.
“Sauce” at the National Sawdust Lounge 80
N. Sixth St. at Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg,
(646) 779–8455, www.nationalsawdust.org,.
Thursdays and Saturdays, 5–9 p.m., through
Aug. 31. Free. — Kevin Duggan
Home stretch New take on Chekhov uses fi lm and video to explore the housing crisis
By Aidan Graham
Brooklyn Paper
Talk about a full house!
A bizarre new play in Gowanus will
explore what makes a house a home.
“House, or How to Lose an Orchard in 90
Minutes or Less” combines intimate firstperson
interviews with Anton Chekhov’s
1903 play “The Cherry Orchard” and the
1977 cult-classic horror film “House,” to
tell a provocative story about the meaning
of shelter, said the show’s director.
“It’s really a meditation on these questions
of housing, and what does a house
mean?” said Rubén Polendo. “And to really
zero in, not necessarily on the statistics
THEATER
of it, but more on the emotional aspects.”
The play — put on by the experimental,
technology-heavy production company
Theater Mitu — wants to engage the audience
in a larger conversation about housing,
using first-person interviews with homeless
people, the tale of a family forced to
sell their home, and eerie elements from a
haunted house story, said Polendo.
“We ran a whole host of interviews with
people who have lost their homes, or have
transitioned their homes,” he said. “We
wanted to also source a piece of literature
to look at a meditation on that subject —
that’s how we landed on ‘The Cherry Orchard.’
And, the third piece of the puzzle
is a 1970s Japanese horror film called
‘House,’ which adds a sense of tension about
what’s left behind.”
The show will features seven actors performing
live on stage, as well as various
television screens displaying pre-recorded
video throughout the performance. Audience
members will wear headphones, and
all the sound from the videos and miked
actors will be channeled directly to them,
said Polendo.
“It has more in common with seeing a
series of visual art installations,” he said.
“It does really feel like an intimate conversation
that’s very personal and very emotional.
The headphones really allow for
that experience.”
Polendo hopes the audience will gain
a new emotional understanding of homelessness
and the plight of those who lack
proper shelter.
“When you walk away, you walk away
affected,” he said. “That can mean a lot of
things. It can mean that you’ve heard or felt
things about the subject that you hadn’t before,
or it triggered your imagination.”
CLASSES
Back to collage
It’s back-to-school season — for adults!
A Bushwick community space will launch a
new semester of art and writing workshops for
adults and teens this month. Classeteria, which
offers classes for homeschooled children during
the week, also features
workshops for grown-ups
on evenings and weekends,
which it will showcase
at an Open House
event on Aug. 18.
The school’s founder
said that she was inspired
by the community education
space Brooklyn
Brainery, in Prospect
Heights and Park Slope, and opened the venue
last year to create a learning space for her homeschooled
children.
“I was inspired by the thought of building an
urban folk school,” said Selena Beal, who lives
in Williamsburg with her family. She came up
with the cafeteria theme to emphasize its wide
variety of “a la carte” classes.
“I used the theme of the cafeteria to illustrate
the idea of people selecting from a wide variety
of content based on interest; of each of us having
a different ‘meal’ when it comes to education,”
she said.
Upcoming classes for adults include a history
of Japanese art, several drawing classes,
and a memoir-writing workshop. One unique
upcoming session focuses on Zen and the art of
collage creation.
For the one-night workshop “Meditation Installation”
on Sept. 19, an expert print maker and
yogi will combine her meditative practice with
collage-making. The class will begin with a period
of quiet reflection before attendees create
collages of text, fabric, and natural objects. According
to instructor Jessica Baker, meditation
can help people enter an artistic “zone.”
“Anytime you make art you’re entering into
another state,” said Baker. “There’s a certain clarity
and focus that takes you into the very present
moment of what you’re doing.”
Baker has offered variations on “Meditation
Installation” before, but hopes to make the upcoming
workshop even more interactive, since
collaborative workshops yield the richest art.
“I’m much more interested in doing that now
than anything else — I really want to engage with
people and the community,” she said.
Each semester of Classeteria offers both students
and teachers a chance to try something
new, said Beal.
“My favorite part of running the adult programming
at Classeteria is how excited both
the facilitators and the students are about each
class,” she said.
Classeteria Open House 284 Suydam St.
between Knickerbocker and Irving avenues in
Bushwick, www.classeteria.nyc. Aug. 18; 4–7
p.m. Free. “Meditation Installation” at Classeteria.
Sept. 19 at 6 p.m. $25. — Rose Adams
By Bill Roundy
Brooklyn Paper
All in all, it’s just another bike on
the wall!
A Brazilian artist has painted
a pair of murals at the entryway to
Dumbo, one showing the gears of a
gigantic bicycle, and the other depicting
a man playing the trumpet. The
images show two things that United
States and Brazil have in common,
said the artist behind the images.
“I wanted to express things we have
in common in both cultures, and to
celebrate them,” said Apolo Torres,
who created the murals last week with
backing from the city’s Department of
Transportation, the Dumbo Improvement
District, Brasil Summerfest, and
Urban Walls Brazil.
The images decorate each side of the
Pearl Street tunnel beneath the Brooklyn
Queens Expressway, between Prospect
and York streets.
Torres’s hometown of Sao Paolo is
filled with chaotic traffic, said the artist,
but using a bicycle to get around
can make it bearable. The giant image
of a bike — and the biking child
in the background — represent his
hope that more people will embrace
two-wheeled transportation.
“It’s really liberating to move
around using a bicycle. It’s my way
of representing a look into the future
... and my hope that we will be able
to have more friendly cities, both to
the environment and to our people,”
he said in a statement.
On the opposite wall, the image “Heritage
I (Music)” represents the shared
European and African lineage behind
music in each country, he said.
Photos by Apolo Torres
“By mixing African rhythms with
European instruments and harmonies,
Americans created jazz and Brazilians
created samba,” said Torres. “My
intention with the musical mural is
to celebrate the strength of our musical
heritage.”
“Heritage I (Cycling)” and “Heritage
II (Music)” on Pearl Street between
Prospect and York streets in
Dumbo.
Circle of life: Isabella Uzcátegui stars in “House, or How to Lose an Orchard in 90 Minutes or Less,” debuting at Theater Mitu on Aug. 23.
Theater Mitu
“House, or How to Lose an Orchard in
90 Minutes or Less” at MITU580 (580
Sackett St. between Nevins Street and
Third Avenue in Gowanus, www.theatermitu.
org) Aug. 23 at 7:30 p.m., Aug.
24–25 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. $25.
Wall of sound
Pair of new murals in Dumbo
celebrate music and bicycling
Blown away: The giant trumpet player and drumming kids in Apolo Torres’s mural “Heritage I (Music)”
represent the shared heritage that led to samba in Brazil, and jazz in the United States. Apolo Torres
recently completed this giant image of a bicycle in the Pearl Street tunnel in Dumbo.
Jessica Baker Jill Steinberg
/www.thea-termitu.org
/www.classeteria.nyc
/www.thea-termitu.org
/www.nationalsawdust.org,
/www.thea-termitu.org
/www.nationalsawdust.org
/www.classeteria.nyc