Director Jessica Grindstaff Talks Us Through Port(al), Her Innovative, Multimedia Collaboration With the Brooklyn Youth Chorus
When they first put their minds together a couple of years ago, Jessica Grindstaff and her creative partners on Port(al)—a sprawling, ambitious, innovative new collaborative production with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus that premiered this week at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—faced the kind of problem that certain artists always seem to relish. How could they do the impossible, and do it within some fairly precise constraints?
The task at hand: to inhabit, animate, investigate, and otherwise bring back to life the 35,000-square-foot Agger Fish Building, the only still-unrenovated structure in the Brooklyn Navy Yard ('There are holes in the walls that birds are flying in and out of,' Grindstaff says before a full-dress run-through earlier this week), and to tell a new story about not just a building, but also a port, a city, a country at war, a way of life.
While the kaleidoscopic team working alongside Grindstaff includes co-composer Paola Prestini (co-founder and artistic director of National Sawdust), co-composer and co-librettist Jad Abumrad (creator of the podcasts Radiolab and Dolly Parton's America), and co-choreographer Ogemdi Ude, the beating heart of Port(al) is the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, whose 44 members range in age from 12 to 18, led by founder and artistic director Dianne Berkun Menaker.
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One of Them Days In this lively, raunchy, broke-girls-about-town comedy, Keke Palmer and SZA play Dreux and Alyssa, best friends and roommates who risk being evicted from their crummy Los Angeles apartment unless they can rustle up $1500 in rent money in one day. The film opened in January and, defying all odds at a time when Hollywood bean-counters have largely given up on theatrical releases, stuck around in cinemas for more than three months. A movie that draws that kind of audience must be doing something right, even if that 'something' is simply reaching people where they live right now, in an America where paychecks are withering and necessities are more costly each day. Palmer and SZA make a dazzling team: their timing crackles, and even when Alyssa and Dreux fight, you can still feel the fizzy, blood-is-thicker-than-water affection between them. 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