Events

Composer and National Sawdust co-founder, Paola Prestini returns to MASS MoCA with a work-in-progress preview of her new opera Old Man and the Sea, created with Royce Vavrek and Karmina Šilec, that interweaves Hemingway’s classic fable with original portraits of quotidian life to create a look at aging, legacy, and our relationship to oceans. The evening will include an excerpt of the new work, followed by a conversation on stage with the principal creative team.

The cornerstone of National Sawdust's mentorship program, the Hildegard Commission is its program for emerging composers who are women or of other traditionally marginalized genders. This year's cohort of composers -- Andrea Guterres, Hannah Ishizaki, Yaz Lancaster, DM R, Kelley Sheehan and Foteini Tryferopoulou -- were given the works of the poet C.P. Cavafy to use as a source of inspiration for their commissions, and the resulting works will be available as a sonic installation for the month of April in a rink-level public space of Rockefeller Center. The soundscape features recordings of the new works by the National Sawdust Ensemble.

This conversation, curated in partnership with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, a historically queer space, welcomes poet Richie Hofmann and the museum’s Director of Curatorial Programs Stamatina Gregory to explore Cavafy’s identity as a gay writer, and his influence on generations of LGTBQIA+ writers, artists and thinkers. This event is presented by McNally Jackson Bookstores.

Celebrated Cavafy scholar and a noted translator of his work Daniel Mendelsohn will engage in conversation with acclaimed poet Jana Prikryl on Cavafy’s stature as a “poet of the world,” which will consider the poet’s biography, the global influences on his work, as well as the art of translation, and the process of bringing his work into another place and time. This event is presented by McNally Jackson Bookstores.

“Archive of Desire": A Festival Inspired by the Poet C.P. Cavafy will officially open at National Sawdust with the premiere of a performance by artist Sister Sylvester and musical artist Nadah El Shazly. Sister Sylvester will create handmade art-books to be read communally by the audience, inside of a live-score by El Shazly. The work is inspired by the blank and torn out pages in “Constantinopoliad, an Epic”, the journal Cavafy began when he and his family fled Alexandria to sail to Constantinople when the poet was just 18 years old, and by the poet’s erotic poems, where he meets with ghosts across time.

Walls is an interactive, audiovisual installation by artist Ali Santana that reimagines C. P. Cavafy's poem of the same title as an immersive, experimental Hip Hop experience. In this installation, participants must work together to solve an interactive rhythm poem. By activating a sequence of beats, rhythms and stanzas that combine key elements of Cavafy’s original poem, the installation is transformed into a wholly unique and expansive fractal world.

Ekphrasis is a video work and artistic research project devised by Matthew Niederhauser and Marc Da Costa that explores how poetry can illuminate the algorithmic systems that form the backdrop of our lives and, increasingly, shape what we feel and imagine. In the work, C. P. Cavafy's poetry becomes a filter and prompt to interrogate the visuality of today’s machine learning tools. These technologies are the magic sorcerers of the moment, spooking and exciting us, yet drawing their material not from a supernatural world beyond, but instead from the zeitgeist of images and text that live online.

Lit, 2023 is a newly commissioned mural co-created by Nick Cave & Bob Faust for an exterior wall of Brooklyn’s National Sawdust. A billboard-scale expression of radical joy intended to refuel us on our way toward that more perfect society, the mural will make use of the cumulative powers of its visual components: Cavafy’s prescient words, an image of a Nick Cave soundsuit, and the facade of National Sawdust itself.

The Poetry Project will present of the neighborhood that I behold: a Cavafy Marathon. A five-hour event, titled by a line of text in the poem “In The Same Space,” will include readings by notable poets, writers, actors, activists, civic and community leaders and performances featuring music, dance and other interpretations. Celebrating the breadth of Cavafy’s work – his complex questions and reflections on diaspora, queerness, time, history, and memory through his exploration of the City in contrast to the State, this marathon format will serve as a many-voiced tapestry, weaving together narrative and civic identity; considering what we do within evolving communities through our inherited and shifting mythologies; and questioning what modes and methods of authorship shape our sense of place, origin, and future.

A symposium for poets from New York, Egypt and Greece will be held at Columbia University and led by professors Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia) and Karen Emmerich (Princeton), both members of the Cavafy Academic Committee that advised on the digitization of Cavafy’s archive. The title, Days of 2023, references Cavafy’s many works named “Days of,” with the year of their writing, or a date of reflection. Featured poets include Orfeas Apergis, Yiannis Doukas, Phoebe Giannisi, Katerina Iliopoulou (Greece); Haytham al-Wardani, Iman Mersal (Egypt); Janlori Goldman, Robin Coste Lewis, Brenda Shaughnessy (US). That evening, in the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, a free event will feature the poets performing either Cavafy poems in Greek and/or Arabic or new writing prepared for the occasion, paired with music by Sofía Avramidou, Marcos Balter, Zosha di Castri, Stylianos Dimou, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Lena Platonos, and Georgios Poniridis.

Death of Classical and The Alexander S. Onassis Benefit Foundation present Waiting for the Barbarians, a sprawling, one-night-only exploration of love, loss, lust, and longing centered around the timeless poetry of C.P. Cavafy, set to brand-new music by luminaries like Rufus Wainwright & Missy Mazzoli, Laurie Anderson, Helga Davis & Petros Klampanis, Nico Muhly, Paola Prestini, and more, accompanied by The Knights and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

In Archive of Desire, Robin Coste Lewis, Julie Mehretu, Vijay Iyer, Jeffrey Zeigler, and Charlotte Brathwaite meditate collaboratively on the sensuality of C. P. Cavafy, diaspora, and the liminal spaces present everywhere in his work. The evening draws inspiration from Cavafy’s archive, processing the sonic, visual, and cultural tones found in his poetry through recitation, live music, electronics, and new visual work.

The Onassis Foundation has commissioned a series of visual poems entitled Visual Cavafy, exploring the cinematic power of Cavafy’s language. Featured artists will include Taylor Mac; Julianne Moore; Carl Hancock Rux with Daniel Bernard Roumain, Bora Yoon, and Jeffrey Ziegler. Visual Cavafy showcases the work of directors Evi Kalogeropoulou, Elena Park, and Christos Sarris in collaboration with incarcerated individuals in Greece; creators Jad Abumrad and Mac Premo; and filmmakers/editors such as Justin Ervin, Steven E. Mallorca, and Pete Scalzitti. These films, which include works created both in New York, conceived and produced by Elena Park/Lumahai Productions, and in Greece by Onassis Stegi, will be shown in a public screening at the New Museum.

In Archive of Desire, Robin Coste Lewis, Julie Mehretu, Vijay Iyer, Jeffrey Zeigler, and Charlotte Brathwaite meditate collaboratively on the sensuality of C. P. Cavafy, diaspora, and the liminal spaces present everywhere in his work. The evening draws inspiration from Cavafy’s archive, processing the sonic, visual, and cultural tones found in his poetry through recitation, live music, electronics, and new visual work.

A spirited conversation between raconteur Paul Holdengräber and André Aciman– another Alexandria-born writer— will give insight into their years-long fascination with Cavafy, and why so many artists share this passionate interest in his work. This event is presented by McNally Jackson Bookstores.

Inspired by C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Ionic,” multidisciplinary genius Juliana Huxtable concludes the festival at National Sawdust with a “visual rave” in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Joe Heffernan and her band Tongue in the Mind. Music, spoken-word, visuals, and a nod to Greek legendary composer Lena Platonos will create a perfect paean to the performative nature of Cavafy’s work, and what is known as his “in-between” quality and essence. The evening will crescendo into a dance-party led by the Jamaican sonic disruptor DJ SHYBOI who recently sold out shows at MoMA PS1 and the Guggenheim.

Curated by Paola, the festival assembles multi-genre events that engage with Cavafy’s poetry.