A Dance Performance Brings 1990s New York to Provincetown
New York City nightlife in the 1990s (at least before then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s eventual crackdown) was a decadent world of avant-garde artistry, opulent parties, and unabashed indulgence. “Club kids” like Richie Rich and Amanda Lepore embodied an experimental counterculture that embraced acceptance, gender fluidity, and sexual exploration.
In Factory|Refactory, New York-based Eryc Taylor Dance Company pays tribute to the 1990s club scene. Inspired by Taylor’s own observations of the era and choreographed in collaboration with company dancers, the production encompasses an odyssey of art, addiction, recovery, and destiny as it narrates the tale of a young, impressionable artist newly immersed New York’s intoxicating vivacity and perilous vices.
Outer Cape audiences will have a chance to experience excerpts from Factory|Refactory at an “informal outdoor sneak peek” in the courtyard of the Mary Heaton Vorse house (466 Commercial St., Provincetown) on Sunday, June 18th at 5 p.m. Presented by the Provincetown Arts Society and featuring both company and local dancers, the performance is a fundraiser for a dance festival — culminating in a full production of Factory|Refactory — that will take place in Provincetown in summer 2024. Sunday’s event will include hors d’oeuvres, cocktails, and a silent auction.
Reserved seating tickets are $25. See provincetownartssociety.com and etd.nyc for information. —Georgia Hall
The Coarse Refinements of Henry Rothman
Coarse Refinement, the title of a new exhibition of work by Henry Rothman (1910-1990) at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, describes one pair of the opposing qualities of his art. Rothman’s mixed-media collages — which incorporate everything from ticket stubs and faded advertisements to cigarette wrappers and bank receipts, along with newsprint and colored paper — embody other sets of contradictions and tensions as well: hard and soft, nature and culture, form and expression.
Although Rothman spent nearly 40 years moving between New York City and Provincetown’s East End, where he was at the center of its artistic community, the intimately scaled and meticulously assembled collages he began making in the late 1950s are a world away from the plein air landscapes and heroic abstract expressionist paintings of his contemporaries. Deliberately made with found materials, they convey a similar sense of layered memory and physical decay as the abandoned buildings and peeling walls Rothman photographed earlier in his artistic career. While he often incorporated printed material and text into his compositions, they serve more as a vehicle for texture, shape, and pattern than they do to convey meaning.
“The first time I actually remember seeing one of Rothman’s collages, it was precisely what I had expected: refined, even if conjured of coarse elements, purely abstract, and assembled in a manner that reflected a series of choices that made it impossible to imagine having been composed in any other way,” says Samuel Tager, who co-curated the exhibition with Paul Resika, in a statement accompanying the show. For his own part, Resika calls Rothman simply “the best collage artist I ever knew.”
The exhibition is on view until July 23. See paam.org for information. —John D’Addario
Celebrating Juneteenth in Provincetown
Although President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, promising freedom to the enslaved African-American population of the South, it took nearly three years until slavery was officially abolished in the U.S. with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. On June 19 of that year, Union General Gordon Granger and his troops entered Galveston and proclaimed freedom for approximately a quarter million slaves in the state of Texas. The date has been commemorated and celebrated as Juneteenth ever since.
Juneteenth was proclaimed a federal holiday in 2021, becoming the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Day in 1986. This year, it will also be commemorated in a two-day celebration in Provincetown.
Juneteenth Provincetown 2023 begins on Sunday, June 18 with BLACK-CELLENCE, “a celebration of Black talent,” at the Governor Bradford (312 Commercial St.). Hosted by Mahoganny, the evening includes a cocktail hour at 6 p.m. followed by performances by Qya Cristal, Latez, Jay White, Lily Rose Valore, Devy, Drigo, Zon Legacy, Dangelo, and DJ Arrow. The celebration continues on Monday, June 19 with a community ceremony and cookout on the lawn of the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House starting at 2 p.m.
Guests are invited to wear red, black, and green to the events to honor the colors of the Pan-African flag. There is a suggested donation of $25 for the Sunday evening program; guests are invited to pay what they’re able to at the cookout on Monday. Additional donations may be made through Venmo (@JuneteenthPtown), and more information is available on Instagram (@JuneteenthPtown). —John D’Addario
A New Season of Chamber Music
When Felix Mendelssohn published his Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor in 1840, no less an authority than Robert Schumann — himself one of the greatest Romantic composers and one of the most important music critics of the era — called Mendelssohn “the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the brightest musician, who most clearly understands the contradictions of the age and is the first to reconcile them.” It has remained a staple of the chamber music repertoire ever since.
Mendelssohn’s trio is the highlight of the opening concert of the Meeting House Chamber Music Festival’s 49th season on Sunday, June 18 at the Church of the Holy Spirit (204 Monument Road, Orleans). The rest of the program was still to be announced at press time.
Two guest musicians — internationally renowned violinist Irina Muresanu and Grammy-nominated cellist Sergey Antonov — will accompany pianist and festival founder and director Donald Enos on June 18. Later concerts in the season will include other guest musicians and pieces by a wide variety of classical, Romantic, and 20th-century composers, including Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro for Horn and Piano on Monday, June 26.
All concerts begin at 7:30 p.m. Single concert tickets are $25 at the door, with free admission for those under 18. A six-concert season ticket is available for $90. See meetinghousemusic.org for information. —John D’Addario
Musicians as Muses at Wellfleet Preservation Hall
A current exhibition at Wellfleet Preservation Hall (335 Main St.) explores an ongoing collaboration between visual artists and musicians on the Outer Cape.
“Musicians as Muses” includes work by 14 artists who attend live model sessions at the Eastham studio of Paul Schulenberg, who often has local musicians accompany the artists as they work. For the current show, several local musicians became the models themselves.
Curated by painter Catherine Hess, the exhibition shows a wide range of approaches to portraiture, a quality most apparent when two or more artists depict the same musician. Two portraits of singer-songwriter Gabriella Simpkins are a good example: Hess’s loose, impressionistic treatment of her model contrasts with Robin Wessman’s precision of line and color. Each painting expresses a different facet of their shared subject.
Several other musicians make multiple appearances in the show, including Tianna Esperanza (currently the Hall’s resident artist), Mozelle Andrulot, Tim Dickey, BT Hayes, Bruce Maclean, Emerald Rae, David Roth, and Mark Small. “We also wanted to be sure to include a number of portraits of Steve Morgan, who we lost at the end of last year,” says Hess. Other musicians whose portraits are on view include Natalia Bonfini, Sarah Swain, Naomi Steckman, and Teresa Bloemer.
There will be a public reception for the show on Friday, June 23 at 2 p.m., during which several artists will assemble to paint a new model: jazz guitarist and composer Dario Acosta Teich. The exhibition is on view until June 27. See wellfleetpreservationhall.org for information. —John D’Addario
A New Poetry Book Honors the Natural World
Provincetown-based poet Sandy Longley has always been a protector of nature. One of her earliest memories as a child was tending to injured birds who’d fallen from their nests. “I admire their resilience,” she says, “their little basic lives of trying to survive. That’s very moving to me.”
This care for the environment is evident in her new poetry book, Mothernest. There will be a book launch on Friday, June 16 from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the Nor’East Beer Garden (206 Commercial St., Provincetown).
In 2012, Longley spent two weeks in a dune shack in the Cape Cod National Seashore, an experience she describes as “life-altering for me as a writer.” It was there that many of the book’s poems, which intimately capture the world of animals, began to form. “Solitude and nature, that’s what nourishes me,” she says. “I could live out there.”
Mothernest was a runner-up for the Morgenthau Prize, awarded for a first book by a poet age 70 or older. David Keplinger, the judge for the prize, had high praise for Longley’s work: “This is a poet in the tradition of Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, and Seamus Heaney, whose poems are at home with borders and frontiers between danger and softness, life and death,” he said in a statement accompanying the award.
Longley says her age gives her the necessary time to focus on her work. “I’ve passed through a lot of milestones happily, and it’s kind of my time,” she says. For Longley, aging has come with a deep gratitude for her life and the acute awareness of the natural world that is evident throughout the collection.
The book launch is free and open to the public. There will be refreshments, a cash bar, and signed copies of Mothernest for purchase. —Oliver Egger
