James Turrell At Mass MoCA

James Turrell’s “Hind Sight” (1984), at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA), North Adams, MA:

“the viewer proceeds through a corridor into a dark chamber devoid of visual or aural stimuli (apart from the exhalations of an air duct). The experience is similar to falling asleep, as physical reality recedes from consciousness and the viewer enters a meditative state. After 10 to 15 minutes, the viewer’s pupils are fully dilated, at which point the viewer is called back to the material world by the presence of a dim light on the opposite side of the chamber, so faint that it can only be perceived in the viewer’s peripheral vision.”

Having previously experienced Turrell’s “Perfectly Clear” at the Museum, which projects a sense that one is floating in a boundless visual void, one recognizes Turrell’s proposal that he does not make art using light but rather by challenging the human eye and perception to recognize not what we see but how we see....
-Anthony Napoli

Romeo & Juliet (adapted in a Jewish-style) at the American Sephardi Federation/Center for Jewish History

Singer, composer, impresario David Serero's latest work, a Jewish adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, is a clever, slightly contemporized performance of the theatrical classic. Seen through a Jewish lens of an  Ashkenazi Juliet and a Sephardi Romeo, the production combines English, Yiddish, Ladino and Russian song, with drama, humor and requisite sword play. Performed by an energetic cast, and highlighted by Serero's operatic performance, the show's all-to-brief run will be at the Center for Jewish History, in New York City, thru June 23.