This weekend at The Church in Sag Harbor reflects the broad range of its programming, starting tomorrow at 6 p.m. when Ryunosuke (Jesse) Matsuoka will be on hand for Knowledge Friday.
Mr. Matsuoka is a restaurateur, sake sommelier, and principal of Tip Top Hospitality, whose restaurants include Sen and K Pasa in Sag Harbor, and Kumiso and Smokey Buns in East Hampton.
Born in New York City, he was raised and educated in Tokyo and Honolulu before settling on the South Fork permanently in 2003. His father, Kazutomo Matsuoka, a retired top-division sumo wrestler turned chef, opened Sen in the mid-1990s, and Jesse began working there 20 years ago, rising from dishwasher to general manager by 2009. He founded the American Sake Association in 2018.
His talk will explore “the brotherhood of the traveling palate,” according to The Church, including how sitting down at a table with a family for true local culture and cuisine, and immersion beyond the standard tourist favorites, shaped his understanding and appreciation of culinary art and etiquette. He will even touch on what the diet of a sumo wrestler looks like and what it takes to prepare. A question-and-answer session will follow his talk.
Tickets are $10, free for members who R.S.V.P. in advance.
Eric Fischl, a co-founder of The Church, will be there on Saturday afternoon at 4 to reflect on “Heaven, Hell, and the Garden: Archetypes of the Creative Mind.” While those three archetypes find expression in all cultures, Mr. Fischl will focus on the visual arts of Western art history, specifically how shape, color, line, gesture, pattern, and scale — the language an artist chooses to express feelings and thoughts — can be further explored within the dimension of those three classic motifs.
“The archetypes of heaven, hell, and the garden are handy generalizations for the exploration of ways to look at individual works of art though, albeit a little silly,” he has said. The talk will feature his musings and interpretations of an array of paintings and drawings from the past 700 years, among them, perhaps most well known, Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”
As an artist, Mr. Fischl is noted for his large-scale, naturalistic images of middle-class American life. His suburban upbringing provided him with a backdrop of alcoholism and a country club culture obsessed with image over content. His early work thus became focused on the rift between what was experienced and what could not be said.
He is also the author of a memoir, “Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas,” published by Crown in 2013.
Tickets are $10, $5 for members.
A workshop devoted to Afro-Caribbean spiritual movement and dance will take place on Sunday afternoon at 3. “One of the best ways to understand a people is to observe their dance,” says Johnnoy Johnson, a dancer and choreographer who will lead the workshop.
Dance plays a vital role in Afro-Caribbean religious tradition and is one of the outlets used to connect and aid those of African descent in identifying where their ancestors lived in Africa.
Participants will learn about different deities and their associated gestures; explore movement vocabularies from Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Haiti, and learn about ritualistic dance and how it has become part of the contemporary dance and choreography tradition. While the workshop is movement-based, no prior experience is required; the dancing will be adaptable for all ages and fitness levels.
Mr. Johnson has an associate’s degree in dance, performance, and choreography and a postgraduate diploma in arts education from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica. He is currently producing his first documentary, a look at Ivy Baxter, the Jamaican matriarch of concert dance.
Tickets cost $25, $15 for members. Because space is limited, advance registration has been suggested.
