Hilton Als on Understanding Difference in “Alok”
Hilton Als
Staff writer
There are a lot of ghosts in the exhibition “Dueñas de la Noche: Trans Lives and Dreams in 1980s Caracas” (through Jan. 25), at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, in Tribeca: trans people who you know couldn’t make it because of AIDS, and because of the cruelty that is visited upon trans people in what remains a Catholic city. But the integrity you see in “Trans,” a 1982 documentary by the filmmakers Manuel Herreros de Lemos and Mateo Manaure Arilla, which is the centerpiece of this important show, is bittersweet—the women it follows have made their own community out of an emotional need, for sure, but also out of necessity: in their world, health care, if it existed at all, was dicey, and violence was no stranger. The black-and-white production photographs that document the women at work—primarily as sex workers—and after, are poignant, and add a lot to a view into a shadowy world where the fierce determination to be oneself was often met with resistance. But this did nothing to diminish these women and their hope and their beautiful internalized glamour.
More than forty years separates “Trans” and “ALOK,” the director Alex Hedison’s sensitive and heartfelt portrait of Alok Vaid-Menon, a nonbinary author, poet, and comedian, which is currently streaming as part of NewFest36’s virtual encore series (through Dec. 25). Sitting under a cloud of brightly colored hair, Alok speaks not only from the experience of being caught in a world not of their making but about how to make one’s own world. And to see Alok’s friends and fans join them in the grand experience of freedom is liberating. To listen to Alok and see them alternate good cheer, seriousness, and welcoming spirit is to remember what the trans community lost during the early years of their marginalization, and what we can gain by getting to know folks like Alok—an understanding of how difference is different only if you think it is.
This understanding comes in the form of music on “Transa: Selects,” a fabulous new album that features queer artists reinterpreting Prince, a long piece by André 3000, and songs by Sam Smith and other luminaries. The vocalist Sade breaks your heart wide open with her song “Young Lion,” about her son, Izaak. In it, Sade apologizes for not knowing what Izaak went through in order to be himself. But then the regret turns to the joy of acceptance, and its light: “So close your eyes,” Izaak’s mother sings slowly, deliberately. “Arms open wide / And feel the light / Arms open wide.”
About Town
Off Broadway
The hepcat stylings of Ethan Lipton and his jazz combo give Lipton’s meticulously funny, often wise “We Are Your Robots” (a co-production of Theatre for a New Audience and Rattlestick Theatre, directed by Leigh Silverman) a delightful throwback air. Lipton exactly titrates condescension and concern as the front man for a robot quartet performing to a humanity that mistrusts its own machines. He floats between patter about complex ideas (panpsychism, the structures of experience) and surprisingly tender lyrics. “What do you want, my human friends?” he sings, and the show thinks about it for eighty minutes. The singer’s grandfather, a Roomba, crashes the gig, but Lipton, patient as ever, boosts the old guy offstage, lifting him, gingerly, like a man moving a turtle out of traffic.—Helen Shaw (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; through Dec. 8.)
Goth Rock
The music that the singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe makes sounds more than a little haunted, though not always in the same ways. Her 2010 album, “The Grime and the Glow,” began an ongoing exploration of the uncanny, in an interplay between noise and harmony that has carried her from the sludge of doom metal to the melancholy of acoustic folk. Even at their heaviest, her songs are possessed by a weightlessness, elevated by an elegant, ethereal voice that echoes out like a clarion call. Written through a journey to sobriety, Wolfe’s newest album, “She Reaches Out . . .,” once again finds the gothic artist where she is most captivating: a dark, liminal space in search of light.—Sheldon Pearce (First Unitarian Congregational Society; Dec. 6.)
Dance
Five years ago, Bintou Dembélé became the first Black woman to choreograph for the Paris Opera. The achievement brought her a new level of recognition, but she has been a leading figure in French hip-hop dance for decades. For her New York début, Dembélé brings a project in two parts to close out L’Alliance’s Crossing the Line festival. “Palabre/s en mode marron” is an afternoon symposium gathering Francophone thinkers and artists to discuss what Dembélé calls “maroon thinking,” a notion derived from enslaved people who escaped to form their own maroon communities. “Rite de passage // solo II” is a fifty-minute embodiment of some of those ideas by the virtuosic dancer Michel Onomo.—Brian Seibert (Performance Space New York; Dec. 6-7.)
Classical
