The WG News

archive

Search Results for: Allen Yi

Jill Satterfield—Spiritual Radical, School for Compassionate Action

By Leave a Comment

Jill Satterfield in her Williamsburg loft.

Jill Satterfield in her Williamsburg loft. Photo by William Hereford

Teaching What “Is”— Interview with Jill Satterfield

Hanging from silks, or sweating in heated rooms, and taking poses to extremes are just a few of the dozens of ways that yoga is being taught today. In North Brooklyn recently, WG ran a story about no less than 17 unique yoga studios that have opened in the last few years, in a two-part series [January and March ’11] called “OMMMM My God, So Many Yoga Studios.” This month, we had the opportunity to interview Vajra Yoga and Buddhist meditation teacher Jill Satterfield, who moved to Williamsburg in March. We spoke about the yoga scene and her thoughts on yoga’s continuing and growing popularity.

READ MORE

Urban Rooftop Farms, Hens & Bees

By Leave a Comment

a very beautiful chicken

By Kimberly Sevilla
Owner of Rose Red & Lavender, and life-long gardener

I remember my first “rooftop garden,” in a walk-up on Avenue D in Manhattan. I attempted to grow some tomatoes in five gallon buckets, nothing fancy, and certainly not pretty. I quickly discovered that on hot summer days tomatoes drink a lot of water, and over a long weekend vacation, get destroyed. Hauling water up three flights of stairs and hanging out on a hot rooftop was no fun. My first year as a rooftop gardener was a big disaster, and I learned that no amount of love can revive a crispy tomato plant. I retreated, to my terrestrial garden, where the elements were a little more forgiving, and put my rooftop endeavor on hold for a few years.

READ MORE

Ai Weiwei Recognized by an American Scholar 25 Years Ago

By Leave a Comment

American scholar Philip Gould. Photograph by Fred Yu

American scholar Philip Gould. Photograph by Fred Yu

I didn’t realize Professor Philip Gould was a few days away from turning 90 years old when I requested he meet me outside the Plaza Hotel. Were it me, I probably would have responded with something like “that’s quite a shlep for me, young lady.” But not Gould. He was cordial, vibrant, and more than happy to meet me on my own terms. After all, it was Gould who’d given the now infamously incarcerated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei his first-ever U.S. group show. To my reporter’s mind, interviewing him while sitting somewhere between the bronze rooster and bronze dog’s head of Ai Weiwei’s newest public sculpture seemed just the ticket.

Gould’s dossier is an impressive one: 33 years as a professor at Sarah Lawrence, along with teaching tenures at Columbia, Pratt, and Teachers College in Beijing; and a personal collection of some 6,000 objects from Africa and the East. I’d prepared some pretty generic and academic questions for him, but Gould wanted to stay on point. He was passionate about politics: the East and its love of ancestors and the West’s compulsion to topple cultural heroes as fast as we mint them. And he had more insights into Dada-ism’s reach than I’d previously imagined possible.

READ MORE

Building an Innovative Williamsburg Theater at The Brick

By Leave a Comment

From a recent production at The Brick, “The Tremendous Tremendous” written and performed by The Mad Ones. Performers are portraying The Tremendous Travelling Abbotts (a fictional troupe of actors from 1939). (Clockwise from the top) actors Michael Dalto, Marc Bovino, Stepvnie Wright Thompson and Joe Curnutte. Photo by William Hereford

From a recent production at The Brick, “The Tremendous Tremendous” written and performed by The Mad Ones. Performers are portraying The Tremendous Travelling Abbotts (a fictional troupe of actors from 1939). (Clockwise from the top) actors Michael Dalto, Marc Bovino, Stepvnie Wright Thompson and Joe Curnutte. Photo by William Hereford

When writers/directors Michael Gardner and Robert Honeywell leased space at 575 Metropolitan Ave in Williamsburg in 2002, they just wanted a place where they could stage their own works and maybe invite a few a friends to do the same; never did they imagine that just a few short years later, the Brick would play host to a multitude of festivals, award-winning plays, improv theater, and even late night burlesque shows. “People have really latched on to this space and they’re taking us to all kinds of places,” says Gardner. From a young age, theater was in Gardner’s blood. “I grew up watching Woody Allen movies. I remember thinking I wanted to go to New York and be one of those crazy, neurotic people,” he laughs.

When he came of age, he followed his dream and enrolled in NYU to study theater, writing and music theory. “Robert and I cut our teeth in the Lower East Side experimental theater circuit. I worked with the Lower East Side Y and we staged plays in a storm cellar run by the theater group The Emerging Collector. At some point in the late 90’s, we were thinking about renting a garage in Manhattan and turning it into a small theater, but we found out people wanted a lot of money for their garages. That’s when we decided to look for a permanent performance space.” Their search lead them to Williamsburg, to a sizable garage inside a century-old building that has a previous life as an auto-body shop, and later a yoga studio. “It was a raw space when we first moved in, but we transformed it into a theater.” The theater’s name was inspired by the dramatic old brick walls that give the space its indelible character.

READ MORE

OMMMMG: So Many Yoga Studios in the Neighborhood – Part 2

By Leave a Comment

It’s a boom time for yoga studios in Williamsburg/Greenpoint. When I first began researching for Part I of this story, I was aware there was a surge of new places to practice yoga in the neighborhood, but I didn’t realize we were in a veritable cornfield of them. Turns out that behind those barricades we all thought contained high-rise apartment buildings—just yoga studios! Miles and miles of yoga studios. If you haven’t yet sought out a neighborhood practice space for your plow pose, it’s a wonder you haven’t tripped into one, given their prevalence. It’s even possible you are living in a yoga studio and haven’t realized it yet. Take a whiff of the air—is it incense-scented? Is your pup, Sparky, all of a sudden stretching with his back knees bent, and his pelvis tipped in the air? Are people touchy about you wearing shoes inside your own home?

But in all seriousness, what is wonderful is that each location offers a different flavor of practice; a unique pathway to enlightenment and philosophy of mind/body healing. There are studios for those who like chanting, and studios for those who want to skip the “OM” business and dive straight into a workout. There are studios in the east, in the west, and Southside and Northside. And while there are ever more variations of the eastern discipline dotting our enlightened streets, what remains a common theme, is that when we come together to heal ourselves, good feeling and goodwill prevail throughout our community.

Yoga to the People (Affordable Yoga)
211 N. 11th St. 2nd Floor
b/w Driggs Ave. and Roebling St.

Yoga To The People’s name is instantly recognizable. The first YTTP studio cropped up on St. Mark’s place four-and-a-half years ago, and is now one of the premiere spots for donation-based Power Vinyasa in Manhattan, holding heralded classes crammed with post-workday yogis, some-times as many as 60 at a time. The brand new Williamsburg outpost hasn’t garnered quite that much traffic yet, but I would be surprised if the studio’s contingency didn’t grow rapidly in the coming weeks. When I attended class at 4:30pm on a Tuesday, the just-opened traditional hot yoga studio held a class of about sixteen, one of the largest classes I attended in my ongoing yoga marathon. YTTP also had the most equal male to female ratio of any class I attended, and I don’t know about the other ladies in the neighborhood, but I am always motivated to work a little harder when there’s some strapping muscle around.

READ MORE