“We cross the ocean, we pass in front of the Statue of Liberty, we go up the Hudson River… On the right bank, New Jersey, on the left bank, Manhattan. No doubt, here we are in New York. New York from the 1950s to the 1970s, with its artistic revolutions and socio-political movements. This Saturday, August 6, at the stroke of 11:30 a.m., storyteller Catherine Peth immersed some twenty visitors in a journey through space-time, around the “New York” exhibition by Evelyn Hofer.
The streets of New York: an incessant movement
But how do you enter the New York of the 1950s? By its streets, first of all. The red storefront of a restaurant, the details of billboards, “the street becomes a spectacle”, launches Catherine Peth. Broadway by light, New York is transfigured by lights. But also by the incessant reconstructions of the city: in the foreground of a color shot, the ruins of a destroyed building. The storyteller quotes an excerpt from the logbook of French journalist Michel Polac, visiting the city in 1958: “The Americans do not let New York live, it must die and be reborn. »
From the Beat Generation to New York New Wave
Throughout the visit, the storyteller crosses the space, from one photograph to another, from one year to another, juggling between the architectural, artistic and political history of a city in turmoil. “Now we’re going up to 42nd Street,” she says. In black and white photos, young people from the “Beat Generation”. That of another America, the rebellious America, which likes to hitchhike and rejects established norms. Just opposite, only a few meters further, here we are in Times Square. The group stops in front of a photo of the set of the film Shadows (1959), by John Cassavetes: a docu-fiction, where young Americans are confronted with racial segregation. Contrary to the big Hollywood industry, the director engages in independent cinema, “we are talking about the New York New Wave”, comments the storyteller.
From the fight against racial segregation to feminism
But the 1960s were also about struggles. The storyteller returns to the speeches of Martin Luther King then to the figures of American feminism: Betty Friedan (president of the national organization for women) and Gloria Steinem (author of an article published in the New York magazine “after the black power, women’s liberation”).
Like the happenings, these performances of the 1960s, the storyteller mixes modes of expression, between image, voice and music. From Charlie Parker’s saxophone to the rhythmic sound of hip-hop, via John Cage’s concert of silence (4?33?), the journey brings together different worlds that are so close at the same time, in a New York that won’t stop surprising us.
Practice
The next and last storytelling visit will take place on Saturday, August 13, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., at the GwinZegal art center. Free, on reservation at tel. 02 96 44 27 78.
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