This Week @ Le Petit Versailles

This week @ Le Petit Versailles
346 East Houston Street < Avenues B & C > Rain or Shine. FREE / voluntary donation
F / V trains to Second Ave. Walk east on Houston St. or J / M trains to Delancey. Walk northeast to Houston St.
Press contact: Peter Cramer 212-529-8815

August 10 Thursday 8:30 pm
“ This Delicate Monster”
created by Michelle Handelman

“This Delicate Monster” is a multi-media pop fable inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, a book of poems succulent and darkly suave as 19th-century Paris and Baudelaire himself. Michelle Handelman transposes the Flowers of Evil into a garden feast of excess and desire with multiple projections, live performances, organic foods and cocktails, creating a haunting and hallucinatory fragmented narrative best described as a cross between a music video, a pagan ritual and a Vogue fashion shoot gone terribly wrong. Collaborating with couture costume designer Garo Sparo and a cast of performers, Handelman visits the abyss of fear and the sublime - implicating the viewer every step of the way. A visceral experience not to be missed.

Michelle Handelman, video artist, performer and director of the critically acclaimed feature documentary BloodSisters (1999 Bravo Award) invites the viewer into her invented world of This Delicate Monster – a benevolent nightmare creating a new spin on the human condition - an abject space where meaning falls apart in a persistent and macabre performance of endurance.


August 12 Saturday 8pm.
“OUT” - FreeFormFilmFestival
A collection of outsider and incorrect film/video clips that we have been calling, "OUT” , includes excerpts from training videos, performances, advertisements, and television programs from the past 50 years.
At Free Form we present new experimental works, but are also preservationists of forgotten and discarded media. Video archeology can be a humorous way to show our culture its history. Comparatively, old programs lack production tricks and gloss, which makes their formerly encoded messages stand out plainly. We like to study these messages and the arc of values the media has pushed to gage our cultures changing and unchanging values.

LPV News
http://www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/0631,musto,74049,15.html
MIXED SALAD WITH CAESAR'S UNDRESSING
" There was a literary orgy at the neighborhood garden Le Petit Versailles' "Arouse Is Arouse Is Arouse"—a Gertrude Stein tribute where Gertie's books were laid across the impromptu stage and everyone was invited to grab one and read a passage aloud. No one did. Then the organizers put some "Alice B. Toklas brownies" on the snack table. Everyone did. "
Contrary to this report, enthusiasts did get reading! They just need a bit of incentive!


Events are made possible by Allied Productions,Inc.,
Gardeners & Friends of LPV,Citizens for NYC, GreenThumb/ NYC Dept. of Parks,
Materials for the Arts; NYC ,Dept. of Cultural Affairs,NYC Dept. of Sanitation
& NYC Board of Education. and Manhattan Neighborhood Network.
LPV Programs are made possible with public funds the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency