Latest news with #OtherWorlds
Time Out
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
West Side Fest is back this July with a packed weekend of free activities
Head west this summer to experience some of the best cultural activities in the city—for free. West Side Fest is back for its third year with gratis fun for all ages at museums, parks, performing arts centers and cultural institutions across the west side of Manhattan. Programming runs from July 11–13 with a packed weekend of activities, including free admission to The Whitney, tai chi classes on the High Line, tours of Poster House, zine-making at Print Center New York and much more. It's hosted by The West Side Cultural Network, a group of museums, parks, performing arts centers and cultural institutions located within a half-mile portion of the city. The event is meant to highlight the west side as a cultural destination with a mix of history, fresh activities and open gathering spaces. West Side Fest highlights include: A Free Friday Night at The Whitney Museum of American Art with music by Public Records Curator-led tours of Fallout: Atoms for War & Peace and other exhibits at Poster House Art workshops focused on creating pieces inspired by the plants, soil, fungi and insects in the High Line gardens. Tai Chi and Afro-Brazilian Dance workshops on the High Line (Sunday only) A backgammon tournament on artist Sam Moyer's handcrafted boards at Hill Art Foundation Walking tours that engage with the local ecology of the Hudson River hosted by Hudson River Park A painting workshop at Manhattan's only beach, Gansevoort Peninsula A curator-led tour of the Steve McQueen exhibition at Dia Chelsea Collaging and zine-making using the LGBT Center's National History Archive with A mandala-making art experience hosted by the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art Performances of Pilobolus's Other Worlds Collection at The Joyce Theater Zine-making workshop with artist Francisco Donoso hosted by Print Center New York Music, performances and readings at The Shed The Art, Craft & Vintage Market hosted by Westbeth Artists Housing A multi-day reading room at The Kitchen Tours of the exhibition "Stephanie Comilang: An Apparition, A Song," alongside servings of the Filipino dessert halo-halo ("mix-mix") at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances The full schedule is absolutely packed; be sure to check it out here. In a statement, NYC's Cultural Affairs Commissioner Laurie Cumbo said West Side Fest has "fast become a New York City tradition." "Manhattan is the cultural capital of the world, and the West Side is one of its most vibrant stages," Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine added in a press release. "From museums and parks to performance spaces and art installations, West Side Fest brings together the institutions that fuel our economy, strengthen our communities, and tell the story of who we are as New Yorkers."
Winnipeg Free Press
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Alexis's beguiling stories feel like a search for home
André Alexis has never let his novels worry too much about reality — witness, for example, the talking dogs in his 2015 masterpiece Fifteen Dogs. In his most recent novel, 2021's Ring, Aphrodite's ring allows the wearer to wish three changes in her beloved. The foremothers of one of the protagonists, Gwen, used the ring to change their men. Should she? Intriguing love relationships and philosophizing about love follow. His new story collection Other Worlds is more puzzling. That the soul of Tam Modeste, an old Trinidadian buyeis (a Carib shaman), enters a dying 11-year-old boy in Petrolia, Ont., seems like the Toronto-based Alexis's attempt to make a gut-level connection with his lost Trinidadian past — a past that recedes the more he tries to grasp it. Almost a novella within the collection, Contrition: An Isekai is the most captivating story of the nine pieces in the collection. Waking up in Paul Williams, Tam hates the sound of English (except for Ogden Nash). Paul's parents, though celebrating their dead son's revival, are troubled by this new, not-so-huggable version, less so the hugging mother than the father, who finds it harder to hide his promiscuity from a buyeis than from an adolescent. In Alexis's hands, the dual soul becomes a way of expressing an estrangement from Canada, although eventually the boy becomes more Paul than Tam. Jamie Hogge photo André Alexis Even stranger is The Bridle Path, in which the lawyer telling the story wants very badly to fit in with an über-wealthy group around his client Edward Bryson. 'It felt,' the lawyer says, 'as if I'd arrived somewhere I belonged.' Thus, when Bryson's wife Miranda explains that the main meat dish at the party is a boy, the lawyer isn't sure whether to take her literally, metaphorically or ironically. Is cannibalism a shibboleth to keep out the unsophisticated? The lawyer doesn't want to commit a faux pas that might nudge him out of the group. Alexis, however, hints that that he isn't quite as tight with Bryson as he imagines: one of the parties at which he feels honoured to be a guest is 'for tradespeople' who have helped Bryson. Despite the humour — the lawyer, for example, feels 'chastised' when, after he shows dismay at the meat dish, Bryson calls him an 'accountant' — the story is too macabre to enjoy, and Alexis's ending never answers the lawyer's confusion. Without the specific critiques in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (to which Alexis alludes), it's difficult to discern the target of the satire. Is it rich people generally? If so, that seems unfair. Or is Alexis telling a lawyer joke, mocking the narrator for ultimately fitting in so well as a factotum to the wealthy, the equivalent of today's Todd Blanche to Donald Trump? Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. Other stories go in a variety of directions; one concerns another buyeis, and one another son who, much like Paul, speculates about his unfaithful Trinidadian father. In the final piece An Elegy (an essay, not a story), Alexis explicitly states that his writing is a 'search for home' which, he soon adds, is 'Trinidad, circa 1957' — in other words, the country and year in which he was born. He concludes that his father wanted to escape his home territory, Belmont in Port of Spain. Other Worlds Alexis also reveals that for a year in his youth, he traded the name he didn't like — André — for a name he did: Paul. Here and elsewhere, Alexis's work has the air of a puzzle. If you can answer the questions posed in Other Worlds — 'What is a rabbit when tied to a sofa?' or 'When is a lake most likely to yield?' — then you're ready for Alexis. (Spoiler alert: the answers are 'Western' and 'midnight.') Reinhold Kramer is a Brandon University English professor. His most recent book is Are We Postmodern Yet? And Were We Ever?.
