Aurelia Butler

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    After Her Oscar Win, Will Michelle Yeoh Get to Lead Again?

    The historic victory should mean opportunities to star again, but too often after such milestones, Hollywood doesn’t find central roles for women of color.We’re conditioned to think of an Oscar win as the endpoint to a journey. For some actors, holding that trophy is the realization of a dream held since childhood. For others, it’s the culmination of a well-deserved comeback.But what happens after that win? In our eagerness to treat Oscar victories as career capstones, do we pay too little attention to the opportunities that are supposed to come afterward, yet often don’t?I’ve been mulling that over since Sunday night, when Michelle Yeoh took the best actress Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It happened at the 95th edition of the Academy Awards, the kind of big, tantalizing milestone that prods you to contemplate what has come before, and Yeoh’s win proved especially historic: The first Asian star to win best actress, she was greeted onstage by Halle Berry, the first Black woman to have pulled off that feat.Asking Berry to announce the winner with Jessica Chastain (the previous year’s winner) was a gamble twice over. If Yeoh had lost to one of her four competitors — all of whom were white women — the ensuing photo op would have served as a stark example of a best-actress category that has been hostile to women of color for 95 years. And though Berry has returned to the Oscars several times since her 2002 win for “Monster’s Ball,” it has always been as a presenter and never as a nominee. To see her there is to be reminded that an Oscar win carries no guarantees when an actress is already liable to receive fewer scripts and career opportunities than her white counterparts.So though Yeoh’s triumph was a long time coming, and I teared up as she addressed “all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight,” I also found myself worrying that it won’t be enough. The people in the Dolby Theater looked awfully proud of themselves after Yeoh’s win, but if they really want to do right by her, they have to keep writing lead roles for 60-year-old Asian actresses; otherwise, it’s just empty back-patting.That, after all, was the real breakthrough of “Everything Everywhere,” Yeoh told me in October. We were at an awards event where, flanked by the “Everything Everywhere” directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, she reminisced about a Hollywood career that had mostly been filled with supporting parts.“Look, I’ve been very blessed — I’ve continuously worked, and I’ve worked with great directors,” she said. “But for the first time, I’m No. 1 on the call sheet, thanks to these guys. I do meaningful roles, like in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and ‘Shang-Chi,’ but it was not my movie.”Yeoh said she hoped that “Everything Everywhere” would not be a one-off, but more than a year after the film’s release, it’s unclear when, or if, she will have another lead film role. Coming projects — including the big-screen musical “Wicked,” the third “Avatar” movie, and the ensemble mystery “A Haunting in Venice” — all consign her to supporting parts. Though she is a headline-making superstar who led the hip studio A24 to its biggest ever worldwide hit, Yeoh is still too often treated as additional casting rather than the main event.“Even you, Michelle Yeoh — on the top of the world — has struggled to find the right roles,” Kwan told her when we met in October. “I think that has taken a lot of people by surprise.”Yeoh laughed ruefully. “I read scripts and it’s the guy who goes off on some big adventure — and he’s going off with my daughter!” she said. “I’m like, no, no.”Few Hollywood movies are conceived with a woman over 50 as the central character, and the ones that are greenlit tend to offer those leads to a triumvirate of white women: Meryl if she’s older, Cate if she’s younger and Tilda if she’s weirder. To ensure that Yeoh can be first on the call sheet again, filmmakers must think more creatively, as Kwan and Scheinert did when they revamped “Everything Everywhere” for Yeoh after conceiving the film as a Jackie Chan vehicle. (And while they’re at it, can they find something juicy for last year’s best supporting actor, Troy Kotsur, similarly a boundary breaker — with “CODA,” he became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar — who has been seen in little since?)As momentum in the best-actress race swung from the “Tár” star Cate Blanchett to Yeoh over the last few weeks of awards season, I kept hearing a common refrain from voters: While Blanchett already had two Oscars and would surely be nominated again — she has eight nominations overall — this could be Yeoh’s only chance at gold. Though I understand the practicality of that argument, I hope those voters understand that their job isn’t done simply because of how they marked their ballot. Yeoh’s Sunday-night win is a big one, but the real victory will come when the lead roles that had long eluded her grasp start to become commonplace. If Hollywood can make that so, then instead of an endpoint, Yeoh’s historic Oscar will serve as a long-needed new beginning. More

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    Review: A Pianist’s Inheritance Inspires Little Masterpieces

    Adam Tendler’s program of works that he commissioned from 16 composers after the death of his father is emotionally involving and musically rewarding.When the pianist Adam Tendler received an inheritance — really, a manila envelope stuffed with cash — it did not take him long to think of a smart way to put it to use.Weeks after his father’s death, and being handed that money, Tendler began to commission new piano solos around the theme of inheritance. As he recalled in an essay for The New York Times, he realized that by doing this, he could both process his grief as well as fashion a program that could live on in his creative practice.It’s a touching and sagacious concept — though hardly one guaranteed to be an artistic success. The classical world has seen a number of similar, small-scale commissioning initiatives since the beginning of the pandemic; even when they draw some of the brightest names in the field, as Tendler has done, the result has often seemed frustratingly diffuse.But Tendler’s project, “Inheritances,” registered as emotionally involving — a musically rewarding and tightly plotted 80-minute set when he performed the collection on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York. It was presented in collaboration with Liquid Music, the group that helped the pianist develop the show over multiple years.Nearly every one of the 16 composers on the bill responded to Tendler’s prompt with an A-game effort. Missy Mazzoli’s “Forgiveness Machine” opens with nervy, high-register oscillations that give way to grave bass interjections, before making space for a more relaxed treatment of melody in its middle section. But the score isn’t a simplistic journey toward acceptance: Some of the initial mechanistic churning returns at the close.Other composers reveled in similar ambiguity: music that suggested some arc of understanding, while also observing the persistent notes of friction in a relationship. In its opening bars, Scott Wollschleger’s “Outsider Song” includes sustained-tone airs of mourning, stark prepared-piano pitches and bursts of extended technique. So far, so typical, you might think, at least when it comes to post-John Cage experimentalism.But before long, Wollschleger’s piece works a gorgeous changeup by allowing its more striated tones to flower into full motivic passages, beautiful on their own terms even as the overall harmonic world remains somber. Call it a small masterpiece — a term you might also apply to Timo Andres’s “An Open Book,” which moves between contrapuntal strictures and more free-associative lines with casual discipline.It was a joy to hear so much good music from so many contemporary artists — and in such quick succession; “Inheritances” moves fast, and without an intermission. Just as I was fully appreciating the dancing qualities of Angélica Negrón’s aesthetic in “You Were My Age,” the rug was pulled, giving way to the melodic gifts of John Glover’s “In the City of Shy Hunters.” When Christopher Cerrone’s hypnotic and meditative “Area of Refuge” ended abruptly, without the kind of closing, inventive flourishes I’ve come to treasure in his music, I glanced at the program notes and learned that it was written shortly after his own father’s unexpected death.If any piece appeared less distinct than what had come before, that was largely on account of the strong standard set by this cohort. Throughout, you could hear some artists plying familiar ground with assurance. That was the case with Pamela Z’s “Thank You So Much,” which relied on her practice of looping, editing and phasing samples of someone’s recorded voice — here, Tendler’s — to create motifs.Some composers took risks, as Marcos Balter did when punctuating the more abstruse edges of his piece, “False Memories,” with select, dreamy sequences of jazz-chord harmony. His program note said that this idiom was not usual for him, but that’s no reason for him to stop pursuing the line of thought in future pieces; the result on Saturday was transporting.It would have been enough for Tendler to perform these discrete compositional languages persuasively and call it a night. But there was also a sense of true dramatic stakes. The piece “hushing,” by inti figgis-vizueta, played out over archival video of Tendler as a child; the intense chordal pounding of the piece had the feel of eerie, silent-film piano accompaniment. And I teared up when Tendler spoke directly about his father over Darian Donovan Thomas’s gently reflective work “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers.”Tendler’s concert, by the end, amounted not only to a display of contemporary compositional force, but also a true show. The 92nd Street Y date was a one-night affair, but I hope that additional audiences can experience the live version of “Inheritances” — and that Tendler chooses to close the book on it with a recorded album.Adam TendlerPerformed on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York, Manhattan. More

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    Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu and the Joy of Playing Villainous Goddesses in ‘Shazam’

    The “Shazam!” actresses say they signed on for their first superhero movie because the roles are a leap forward for women.If superheroes have one thing in common, it’s not so much capes or extraordinary abilities but memorable foes. As its spoilery title reveals, the new movie “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” (a sequel to 2019’s “Shazam!”) has supersized its antagonist factor by going for immortal divinities, plural.Which is how Billy Batson (Zachary Levi), whose nom de superhero is Shazam, and his pals find themselves battling the daughters of Atlas as they do the kind of things power-mad mythological beings are wont to do: unleash oversized beasties, flatten entire cities and point menacingly into the distance.“A good thing about being about magic and gods was that they didn’t have to be in a similar age or anything like that,” the director David F. Sandberg said by phone. “We could just cast the best people we could get.” That turned out to be Helen Mirren as the bossy eldest sister, Hespera, and Lucy Liu as the steely Kalypso. (Rachel Zegler, from “West Side Story,” plays younger sibling Anthea, whose relationship to humans is more ambiguous.)Sandberg quickly realized that Mirren, 77, had not come to play — or maybe she had. “We had to talk her out of doing certain stunts that she wanted to do,” he said.In a video interview, Liu, 54, and Mirren displayed an easygoing rapport, along with a few differences in temperament and approach. Calling from Los Angeles, Mirren dispensed lighthearted jokes and pretended to be a quasi-gadfly at this whole acting thing, while Liu, who was in New York, brought up the ins and outs of portraying an antagonist. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Hespera and Kalypso are introduced as gods rather than goddesses. Is it an important distinction?LUCY LIU We’ve been talking about this, trust me. It’s “Fury of the Gods,” and I was like, “Shouldn’t it be goddesses?” We thought, “We’re already in that realm, as long as it’s not human, we’re fine.”HELEN MIRREN See, I love being an actress. It feels very Belle Époque, very sort of 19th century. Certainly if I’m a god, I would think of myself as a goddess, I have to say.LIU During press, we generally say that we are goddesses. [They both laugh.] This will be the only time I could say that.“It’s ‘Fury of the Gods,’ and I was like, ‘Shouldn’t it be goddesses?’ We thought, ‘We’re already in that realm, as long as it’s not human, we’re fine,’” Lucy Liu said.Warner Bros. PicturesWhat drew you to sign on for your first superhero movie?MIRREN We’re above the superheroes. [Laughs] I don’t go see a lot of superhero films, quite honestly, but I had seen the first “Shazam” and been utterly charmed. So when “Shazam 2” came along, I thought, “Well, if I was going to do a superhero-type movie, that is the one I’d like to be involved in,” because of the wit.LIU To have that experience with one another — outside of working on the blue screen and not really knowing exactly what was going on — was really special. I don’t immediately think about the characters as much as the relationship that was built from that time. We were all learning what we were supposed to be doing, and isolated. We were luckily in the same Covid pod with one another.Were you surprised to see that your outfits would be so gladiator-like?MIRREN I now have a lot of sympathy and respect for any man playing a gladiator because they are carrying one hell of a load on their shoulders, as I found out. The costumes are heavier than they look. And we were wobbling around on enormous platform shoes — gladiators never had to contend with huge, great high heels.LIU And the cape! We would ask oftentimes if we could un-cape ourselves because it was so heavy. It would just pull everything down our shoulders and pull the armor back against our necks. I had them cut mine shorter. Helen’s was longer and heavier than mine.MIRREN With me it’s all about the look. If it looks good, I’m going to suffer it. Also it covered up my bum.Is playing a god different from playing a regular antagonist?MIRREN It’s a different psychology because you don’t have to deal with normal human psychology, which is great. We didn’t have to consider “Why is this villain doing this? Was she abandoned by her mother at a young age?” My stand-in did some of a scene when we walk through a marketplace and I was telling her how to do it like a goddess: “You have to walk as if you’re walking through honey or cream or butter or whatever. You have to absolutely own the space.”LIU I do think there is a delight in having a mission, and having that intention helps you have a straight line that you’re following regardless of what’s happening around you. We worked with the sibling rivalry, the level of experience that each of us had. In the beginning I’m guessing that everyone thought, “Kalypso is going to be so strong and powerful,” but then Hespera grabs her head and pulls her back. That’s the dynamic and those are the nuances that we have engaged in because, as Helen said, we own who we are — we’ve been given this, we were born into it, and so the struggle is the disagreements between each other and our opinions, essentially.For a long time female baddies used sexuality as a weapon, which is not the case here. Do you feel this reflects the ways we now conceive of women’s power onscreen?LIU Yes, it’s not a femme fatale. I think back in the day they would not have made “Wakanda Forever” with a female lead — they probably would have replaced Chadwick Boseman or had another male lead take over. I still think there’s a long way to go. And I do think that there’s sometimes a little bit of a stereotype or stigma where if a woman plays what the audience perceives as the antagonist, she automatically falls into a group or some sort of prescription of what was in the past, as opposed to creating something new and dynamic.MIRREN You did “Charlie’s Angels” and for someone of my generation, it was a huge sea change: full force, fearsome women action. But controlled by a man, so even though it was a massive step forward, there was still that anchor holding it back, in a way. Now that anchor has been let go, thank God. We move forward in a different way, hopefully.“The costumes are heavier than they look,” Helen Mirren said. “And we were wobbling around on enormous platform shoes — gladiators never had to contend with huge, great high heels.”Warner Bros. PicturesLIU If you can believe it, that movie was made 23 years ago. When it was first out on television, it was, “Here’s the sexy one and here’s the one that’s smart.” You always had to categorize it in order to make it sellable: Which audience member prefers which kind of girl? Now it’s very different. It’s moving in the right direction.Who are some of your favorite movie villains?LIU One that happens to be in a superhero movie is the Joker, somebody who has mental illness or is different and becomes ostracized, then assumes a position of power. Cinema doesn’t always portray them as people that are just born evil — that’s not as interesting as somebody who has become something to survive. That fight or flight becomes their way to journey through the world. Unfortunately, often it’s just with destruction or pain against others.MIRREN I would say, Ian McKellen playing Richard III is one of the greatest supervillains of all time. “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” He declares his evil intentions in that very first monologue: “I hate you all and I’m going to [expletive] you up. You just watch me.”It feels that doing Shakespeare would be great prep for a supervillain’s grandstanding rhetorics. A lot of that style goes way back.MIRREN I was just thinking the other day that those great ancient verbal poems people learned by heart are superhero stories: They are about guys who have super strength and can go in and kill a whole army. There’s big descriptions of the way their swords cut through everybody. They’re totally superhero stories. I was wondering why superhero movies seem to be eternally successful and I thought, “Well, of course, for thousands of years these are the stories that human beings have been telling to entertain each other and excite each other and frighten each other.”Do Hespera and Kalypso have action figures?LIU We have these Funko Pops with our exact outfits.MIRREN We do? Oh, good, I want one.LIU Rachel sent a picture of the three of us and said, “It’s like we’re hanging out,” and I was like, “Yeah, during Covid because we’re all in boxes.” Somebody brought it up to me to sign, so now I know it’s real, the project has now been franchised.Lucy, has your son seen the film?LIU He’s 7, and I told him, “I think there’s too many scary things in the movie.” He said, “I’ll just wait until I’m 10.” He’s obsessed with Helen, and when he was 5 he said he was going to marry her. She’s magical for all ages. More

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    When Best Picture Winners Overcome a Release Early in the Year

    “Everything Everywhere All at Once” isn’t the first top film to have its debut long before awards season. But it is one of the few to go the distance.When “Everything Everywhere All at Once” made its debut last March at the South by Southwest film festival, followed by a nationwide release the next month, expectations were modest.Maybe the quirky A24 film about a multiverse-jumping mother striving to finally connect with her daughter — and busting some martial arts moves along the way — would make some money. And then “hot dog fingers” mania happened. Seemingly overnight, TikTokers glommed on to the prompt “If the multiverse is real, I hope there’s one where …” and imagined alternate timelines for their lives. Moviegoers across the country flocked to see the film once, twice, nine times. But back in spring 2022, no one could have anticipated the movie’s best picture triumph at the Oscars on Sunday night.Conventional wisdom has it that films released in the fall make stronger contenders. So when “Everything Everywhere” won, it joined a select group of films that were similarly released early — or early-ish — in a previous year, and that went on to capture the most coveted prize in Hollywood.Here are nine times a release in spring or summer — or, once, even in January — has gone on to win big.January 1943‘Casablanca’A release early in the year was not viewed as a competitive disadvantage until the early 1990s, when the former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s guerrilla-style efforts on behalf of smaller indie films like “The Crying Game” (1992) and “Il Postino” (1995) kicked off the modern era of Oscar campaigning. The World War II-set romantic drama “Casablanca” was actually in good company among the 10 best picture contenders: All but three were released between January and August.May 1952‘The Greatest Show on Earth’In the 1950s, it was common for best picture winners to also be box-office behemoths. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Cecil B. DeMille’s 152-minute circus extravaganza, became the highest-grossing film of the year in 1952, thanks to its extended stay in theaters.March 1965‘The Sound of Music’David Lean’s epic romance “Doctor Zhivago,” a December release, was the favorite after he won best director for his previous two movies (“The Bridge on the River Kwai” from 1957 and “Lawrence of Arabia” from 1962). But audiences loved Maria — “The Sound of Music” became the highest-grossing film of 1965 — and the film won five statuettes, including best picture.May 1969‘Midnight Cowboy’The only X-rated film to ever win best picture hit theaters long before the four other best picture contenders. The idea of releasing awards contenders as close as possible to the date of the ceremony — just before the eligibility cutoff at the end of the previous year — so they’d be top of mind for voters was just beginning to take hold and would become common in the 1980s.March 1972‘The Godfather’ Paramount brass locked horns with the director Francis Ford Coppola on every major decision, and the studio chief at the time, Robert Evans, fought to push the film’s original Christmas 1971 release to the spring to force Coppola to do another edit. (That made the film, which runs nearly three hours, even longer!) To be fair, “The Godfather” would have been Oscars catnip no matter when it was released.February 1991‘The Silence of the Lambs’Like “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “The Silence of the Lambs” was bolstered by huge word of mouth and strong reviews. The cannibalistic thriller — still the only horror movie to win best picture — topped the box office for five consecutive weeks after it was released in February 1991. Then it hit VHS just before Halloween, vaulting it back onto voters’ radar.July 1994‘Forrest Gump’This crowd-pleasing baby boomer tale was up against a stacked lineup of best picture nominees that included “Pulp Fiction” and “The Shawshank Redemption.” But moviegoers had embraced the tale of Tom Hanks’s kindhearted Alabamian, and it spent the summer hovering at or near the top of the box office, a run that Oscar voters surely noted.May 2005‘Crash’The divisive, Los Angeles-set race-relations drama pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history. The gay western “Brokeback Mountain” was an early front-runner and theories abound about why voters gave its filmmaker, Ang Lee, the best director Oscar but the top prize to Paul Haggis’s urban drama. In hindsight the win wasn’t exactly definitive. In 2012, Film Comment named “Crash” the worst best-picture winner of all time.June 2009‘The Hurt Locker’“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s low-budget American war thriller, had a slow rollout in theaters, going from four to 535 by the end of July. But it racked up strong performances at precursor award shows leading into the Oscars. More

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    Next Jazz at Lincoln Center Season Will Celebrate Wayne Shorter

    As part of the performing arts center’s 2023-24 concert season, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis will honor Shorter, the innovative saxophonist who died this month.Jazz at Lincoln Center announced a 2023-24 concert season on Tuesday that includes tribute concerts to the influential saxophonist Wayne Shorter and performances from both jazz world fixtures like Bobby Rush and Terence Blanchard and up-and-coming artists like the singer Samara Joy, who won a Grammy for best new artist this year.Wynton Marsalis, the composer and trumpeter who is the organization’s managing and artistic director, will be among the artists celebrating Shorter, who died this month, on March 8 and 9 of next year.Rush, the singer, guitarist and harmonica player who is considered one of the last remaining blues masters of his generation, will play early next year, the center announced. Next March, Blanchard, the film and opera composer best known for scoring Spike Lee films, is scheduled to perform a career retrospective with his band, the E-Collective, and the Turtle Island Quartet.And Joy, who won her first Grammy this year at 23, will headline her first show at the organization’s Rose Theater in October.Marsalis, who is the face of Jazz at Lincoln Center, is slated to play several other concerts this year and next. He and the rest of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will open the season on Sept. 21 with a “reimagining” of his small group compositions as big band orchestrations in a concert called “Beyond Black Codes,” a reference to his 1985 album “Black Codes (From the Underground).” In January, Marsalis will pay tribute to Max Roach, the drummer and a founder of modern jazz, in concerts that mark 100 years from Roach’s birth in 1924.Another pair of concerts in February will celebrate three other jazz architects: Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and Charles Mingus, with music direction by Vincent Gardner, the trombonist and composer. The other part of the concert includes the premiere of a new suite, called “Usonian Structures,” by the composer and saxophonist Andy Farber.Ellington will also be the focus of concerts in the spring, led by Marsalis, to celebrate what would have been his 125th birthday. There will also be performances paying tribute to the civil rights activist and singer Bayard Rustin, which will be presented by the drummer Bryan Carter, as well as concerts celebrating the singers Mahalia Jackson and Sarah Vaughan.Other performances include an annual Valentine’s Day concert from Dianne Reeves; concerts by the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel; a set of shows by Catherine Russell, celebrating the genre of Hot Club jazz that emerged in 1930s Paris; and a two-night event by the ensemble Artemis. The saxophonist Sherman Irby will premiere a new commission, called “Musings of Cosmic Stuff.” More

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    Hilary Hahn Practices in Public, Wherever and However She Is

    BOSTON — Backstage at Symphony Hall here on a recent afternoon, Hilary Hahn opened her violin case and took out her instrument.She flipped it up to her chin, then paced around; she was warming up to play Bach for a group of Boston Symphony Orchestra staffers, as a run-through before she set out on a tour that continues in Los Angeles and Chicago this week. For the moment, she was trying to break in a new set of strings, as any violinist might.She paused. She set her pink-cased iPhone down to face her, having scouted the dressing room for an angle, then turned on its camera and pressed record. She played her Vuillaume violin toward the lens, but not exactly for it. She let it watch while she tuned and tuned again; while she repeated tricky little passages; while she sighed, composing herself. She stopped it when she was done.Hahn edited the video down to a bit more than a minute of unflashy content then posted it, with all the brisk efficiency of a social media intern, to Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. There were no retakes, no notes to her publicist. Season 6, Day 61, of #100daysofpractice was in the can.“I make a point of not picking up the part of the practice that is impressive,” Hahn, 43, said in an interview afterward. “I pick out the part that’s the actual work, where I know I was in the zone, and I wasn’t thinking about anything else.”Hahn, the artist-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony, has long thought about her role in broader terms than many superstar soloists. She has commissioned works including garlanded concertos and brief encores; taped Suzuki exercises for young students to aspire to; and given recitals for babies (all right, their parents). And this prodigy turned pre-eminence is an experienced poster, too: For years, she tweeted in the voice of her violin case.Even so, #100daysofpractice has become an unexpected phenomenon. Social media statistics are notoriously unreliable, but the hashtag counts 800,000 posts on Instagram alone, and has brought amateurs and professionals alike into a community of musicians who, for their own reasons and in their own ways, post part of their daily routine. Drawing back the veil on how musicians work when they are not onstage, Hahn is trying to relieve at least some of the negativity that can surround a crucial — yet traditionally private and largely untaught — element of a musical life.Hahn’s practice videos tend to be recorded where they can be — whether on the road, in a hotel room or at home.Sophie Park for The New York Times“I make a point of not picking up the part of the practice that is impressive,” Hahn said.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHahn came up with the idea in 2017, when she first noticed #The100DayProject, an initiative that asked creative, primarily visual artists to make something, day after day. She chose an activity that she thought she should have been undertaking with a similar commitment to regularity, but was not.“I desperately wanted to get reposted, get attention,” Hahn, laughing, recalled of a time when her social-media presence was not as formidable as it is now. “I didn’t get reposted at all, I was like: ‘I’m here! I’m doing something innovative! I’m boring my fans! Notice me!’”On one level, Hahn’s posts since are a diary of a virtuoso’s life. There’s Hahn at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, at Wigmore Hall in London, at David Geffen Hall in New York, where she recently became the first artist to play a solo recital in the refurbished main theater. There’s Hahn on a private jet, in a hotel, and in another, and another. There’s Hahn in her Cambridge, Mass., home, with her Grammys on a side table or her guinea pigs behind her. There’s Hahn the working mother, playing with one of her two children as her impromptu accompanist, or stealing a quiet moment after midnight, exhausted.Part of Hahn’s message, she said, is that being deliberate about practice, whatever else might be going on in life, allows marginal gains to compound. That opportunity for accountability and self-discipline has attracted other soloists to join in. The pianist Dan Tepfer said that he adopted the hashtag this year to recommit to daily practice, after a grueling, monthslong tour.“I like to say that if your practicing isn’t a practice, you’re not practicing,” Tepfer said. “It truly is a practice, it’s a daily activity, and the power of practicing comes with that kind of continuity.”Hahn practicing on the stage of Symphony Hall in Boston.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHahn initially saw the project along similar lines, and to an extent still does. But as she read the replies to her posts, and spoke with fans after concerts, she saw that the posts were being interpreted as a statement about the need for musicians to accept imperfections and embrace their vulnerabilities — or as a challenge to “the toxic mentality around practice,” as she put it.“We’re just so often in classical music, really trained to beat ourselves up until we get it right, on our own,” Hahn said. “I compare it to walking into a room by yourself, and you’re looking in a mirror, and you’re having to pick out everything that’s wrong with you, and then fix it, with no ability to fix it. You’re supposed to walk out better. And it’s just such an impossible thing. You actually just walk out with all these ideas in your head of what’s wrong with you.”“I realized that we need to have a lot more self-compassion as musicians,” she added. “You can’t become someone you’re not in practice, and you can’t make the music become something that it’s not ready to be. It’s just difficult, though, to reconcile that with expectations, sometimes.”Hahn’s most powerful videos are not those in which she tosses off some Bach with all her familiar assurance, but those in which she does least with her instrument. “Practice” turns out to mean all kinds of things, from listening back to past concerts to doing near-silent left-hand studies while the laundry whirs along. But it can also mean mindfully taking a day off, or acknowledging feeling burned out, and responding appropriately.“I know some people say that’s not practice,” Hahn said on the video for Day 34 of last year’s series. “Can you count that as practice? But it is about the practice of long-term practicing, that mentality that it is — it’s a lifestyle. There’s a consistency to it, and being a consistent practicer doesn’t always mean practicing by data.”Hahn’s videos, she said, challenge “the toxic mentality around practice.”Sophie Park for The New York TimesMany of Hahn’s admirers have taken that lesson about mindfulness to heart. Another violinist, Elena Urioste, tried the project two years ago, and “promptly failed on my third day,” she wrote on Instagram. She responded with her own hashtag, #ErraticDaysofPractice.The rising violinist and hashtag devotee Nancy Zhou said that Hahn “positively reinforces the whole practice culture and what it should be,” and that she was “completely confident” that the star has had an influence.“It makes them start thinking,” Zhou said of colleagues she had talked with, “about, well, how can they more deeply and more forgivingly look at the way they practice?”Hahn said that series has been useful to her own routine, though it took her time “to be at one with the public and the private aspects of it.” And there have been periods when filming — or writing analytically about it — has interfered with practice itself. The series eventually dispelled a “cycle of commentary” that fixated on how she played “perfectly,” she said, denying that that was her intention.But even if Hahn sees her posts as modeling just one possible approach — practice isn’t perfect — and certainly not as lessons in how to practice or play the violin, she has come to accept what she calls their “greater purpose.” She has no plans to stop them just yet.“As a student, I never saw someone practice,” Hahn said. “I would sort of illegally listen to the wall, or even if I would poke my head into the window to see who was there, then you would duck down. You know, you tried to listen a little bit.”“We had no idea how people achieved what they achieved,” she continued, “and the fact that people have embraced the project, started doing it themselves, they’re getting comfortable posting stuff that isn’t polished — it feels like maybe the idea was mine, but the game changer is the pickup of this community.” More

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    ‘Lumière’: An Actress Destined to Be in the Light

    Jeanne Moreau’s first film as a director is showing for a week at Film Forum, newly restored and seven minutes longer than its 1976 U.S. release.Movies directed by their stars are a genre unto themselves, one that includes first-person documentaries, avant-garde “psychodramas,” and self-portraits like Jeanne Moreau’s “Lumière” — a movie about a fictional actress in her prime.“Lumière,” Moreau’s first film as a director, is showing for a week at Film Forum, starting March 17, newly restored and seven minutes longer than the 1976 version released in the United States.Moreau doesn’t assume a role in “Lumière” so much as present herself. Not autobiographical, it is a film about acting, or what Yvonne Rainer called the “lives of performers.” Moreau’s character, Sarah, is a benign star orbited by three disparate colleagues. Laura (Lucia Bosè), an Italian actress about Sarah’s age, is married to a producer and oppressed by her social roles as wife, mother and daughter. Somewhat younger, Julienne (Francine Racette) is a narcissistic (or ambitious) stage actress being stalked by an even more narcissistic American star (Keith Carradine). And Caroline (Caroline Cartier), an insecure neophyte, is struggling with exploitative men and an emotionally abusive partner.“Lumière,” which opened the Second International Festival of Women’s Films in 1976, provocatively scheduled before the New York Film Festival that year, is more matter-of-fact than polemical. Several men revolve around Sarah as well. These include the annoying young director who is also her lover (Francis Huster), a saintly older man (François Simon) who helped her survive a personal tragedy, and a moody novelist (Bruno Ganz) to whom she’s taken a fancy. Sarah’s colleagues seem hemmed in by men who are jealous, predatory and selfish, unable to fathom the female solidarity that the film celebrates. By contrast, she is independent.As Sarah is in control of her life (and wardrobe), so Moreau appears confident in her direction of a large and talented cast. One of the busiest actors of her generation, whose résumé included work with some of the world’s greatest directors — Antonioni, Buñuel and Welles, among them — she doesn’t lack for visual ideas. (Curiously, the one movie Sarah cites is Ingmar Bergman’s “Hour of the Wolf,” a gothic tale of an artist’s descent into darkness that is the near opposite of “Lumière.”)Fluid and assured, the movie unfolds in the days leading up to Sarah being presented with a lifetime achievement award — which, in terms of Moreau’s career, might almost be “Lumière.” Moreau as a filmmaker is less vain than honest in presenting herself as a universally admired professional. When she was interviewed by Richard Eder for The New York Times, she explained that, as a child, she used to sneak off to the theater: “I sat there in the dark and watched all these people in the light on the stage. I got so excited. I thought that I was not destined to be in the dark; my vocation was to be in the light.”Onscreen, Moreau projects self-possession. In its final scene, “Lumière” illustrates another showbiz bromide: The show must go on — and it is Moreau’s show. Her resting-face frown may suggest dour determination, but her moments of levity are surprisingly generous. The “lumière” of the title is also, as the French critic Isabelle Jordan ended her review of the film, that of “the most beautiful smile in French cinema.”LumièreThrough March 23, Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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    Gary Glitter Is Back in Prison After Violating Probation Terms

    The singer was released from prison last month after serving half of a 16-year sentence for sexually abusing three young girls decades ago.LONDON — The former glam rock singer Gary Glitter, who was released from prison last month, was sent back to prison on Monday for breaching the terms of his probation, Britain’s Ministry of Justice said.“Protecting the public is our number one priority,” a Ministry of Justice statement said on Tuesday. “That’s why we set tough license conditions and so when offenders breach them, we don’t hesitate to return them to custody.” The statement did not specify what the singer, whose real name is Paul Gadd, did to violate the terms of his release.Mr. Gadd was released from prison in early February after serving half of a 16-year sentence for sexually abusing three young girls decades ago, and had been set to serve the remainder of his sentence under probation, a common arrangement in Britain.Following his release, Mr. Gadd, 78, had been fitted with a GPS tag and faced other restrictions.In 2012, Mr. Gadd was arrested as part of an inquiry set up to investigate accusations of sexual abuse against Jimmy Savile, a longtime BBC host. That arrest led to Mr. Gadd’s conviction in 2015 on one count of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault and one count of sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of 13.At his trial, prosecutors detailed how he had abused his access to young fans as his fame grew globally in the 1970s, when he had a string of hits, including “Rock and Roll Part 2.” His music has also been featured in films, including “Joker,” one of the top grossing films in 2019. More