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      For This Opera Director, a Lot Is Riding on a ‘Handmaid’s Tale’

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      For her English National Opera debut, the company’s new artistic leader, Annilese Miskimmon, has chosen a work she hopes can bring in a new audience.LONDON — Annilese Miskimmon, the British opera director, looked tired and frazzled when she appeared on a recent video call. She was taking a short break from rehearsing “The Handmaid’s Tale” — the first production at English National Opera she is directing since taking over its artistic leadership in the middle of the pandemic. Those rehearsals had not been running smoothly, Miskimmon said, and had been hit by a recent surge in coronavirus cases in England. For a few weeks, the production had been rehearsing partly online.“This is Zoom stress more than opera stress,” she added, with an awkward laugh. She had already canceled two nights of the run, which now consists of just four performances, from April 8 through Apr. 14.Miskimmon said she chose “The Handmaid’s Tale” for her English National Opera debut because the company was founded on the idea of “opera for everyone.” The novel it is based on, by Margaret Atwood, is well known here, and its popularity has only grown thanks to the recent TV adaptation. Both of these, and the opera, by the Danish composer Poul Ruders, imagine a near future in which women are seen as little more than birthing machines. The story felt politically urgent, Miskimmon added. “Every day it’s getting more and more dangerous in some parts of the world to be a woman,” she said.A rehearsal for English National Opera’s produciton of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The production’s run, which begins April 8, has been cut to just four performances.English National OperaFor opera watchers, Miskimmon’s decision to start with a dystopia may seem appropriate. In recent years, English National Opera has been hit by crises both real and imagined. Those have included funding cuts and resignations, as well as complaints about a dwindling number of performances each season. To raise revenue, the company — which only performs in English — now rents out its West End home, the Coliseum, to musical productions each summer.Miskimmon’s 2019 appointment was a surprise. The announcement came shortly after the American director Daniel Kramer resigned as the opera’s artistic director, two weeks after announcing his second season. Kramer had a never held a senior position at an opera house before joining the company, and many critics felt he wasn’t up to the job.Hugh Canning, an opera critic for several British newspapers, said he was “puzzled” that Miskimmon had left a job running the well-funded Norwegian Opera and Ballet in Oslo to take up the reins at English National Opera, also known as ENO. “Maybe she enjoys controversy,” he said.Others in Britain’s opera world agreed that Miskimmon had taken on a tough job. “Running any opera house is hard, but ENO is even harder,” said Gus Christie, the executive chairman of the Glyndebourne opera festival. As London’s “second” opera house, ENO was always competing for audiences with the much-better funded Royal Opera House, just a few blocks away, he added. (The British government gives the Royal Opera House about $32 million a year; ENO gets around half as much.)“If she can turn things around there, hats off to her,” Christie said.John Allison, the editor of Opera magazine, said that Miskimmon had gotten off to “a very good” start. During the coronavirus pandemic, she kept things at ENO moving when most British opera houses were shut, with a series of original ideas that raised the company’s profile. Those included a drive-in staging of Puccini’s “La Bohème” (featuring breakdancers and ice cream trucks), a made-for-TV performance of Mozart’s “Requiem” and a community outreach program in which ENO singers offered vocal lessons to people whose breathing had been affected by Covid.But most of the productions in Miskimmon’s first season had been planned before her arrival, including a staging of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” that will play at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2025. “A lot is riding on this ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’” Allison said. “It’s her first big calling card.”The opera opens in the year 2195, with a lecturer describing the horrors of the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy in which women have no rights and where “handmaids” are forced to bear children for the ruling class.Annemarie Woods, the production’s designer, said that the creative team had researched totalitarian systems and thought about how artifacts of those regimes and their atrocities were preserved. The Coliseum’s stage will look like an exhibition space, Woods said, with items of clothing — including around 50 of the handmaids’ famous red hooded cloaks — suspended and lit like items in a Holocaust museum. Other “exhibits” will include a chunk of a wall where handmaids are executed, displayed like segments of the Berlin Wall.Kate Lindsey, an American mezzo-soprano who plays Offred, the opera’s main character, said she was enjoying rehearsing with Miskimmon, who “made every effort for people to have a voice in the room artistically.”“That’s a real sign of a confident director, and a really, really confident leader,” Lindsey said.Miskimmon said she wanted to turn ENO into a “truly national company” that collaborates with regional opera companies to stage major productions. Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesMiskimmon’s route to the heights of British opera is far from typical. Born in 1974, she grew up in Bangor, a small town outside Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the sectarian conflict that is known as “the Troubles.”She saw her first opera at 10 years old, when her father performed in an amateur production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in a church hall. It was a distinctly lo-fi production: Her father’s costume for the role of Papageno was “a flat cap and some pan pipes on a string around his neck,” Miskimmon said.Yet Miskimmon soon fell hard for the art form. As much as opera was an escape from the violence of the Troubles, part of its appeal was that it also somehow reflected them, she said: At the time, Northern Ireland was a place where people didn’t feel they had much control over their destiny, since they could “go out for an ordinary day’s work, and be blown up.” In opera, Miskimmon said, “the characters are relentlessly driven toward heaven and hell,” without much agency, either. It felt “a much more honest, artistic representation of life.”At Cambridge University, where she studied English literature, Miskimmon directed some student productions. But she never thought she would become a professional director, she said, until she was invited to assist the British director Graham Vick at Glyndebourne. After working on seven productions there, she landed a job as the artistic director of the Opera Theater Company, Ireland’s national touring opera, before eventually moving to the Danish National Opera in Aarhus, and, later, the Norwegian Opera and Ballet in Oslo.Andrew Mellor, an opera journalist who specializes in the Nordic countries, said that Miskimmon was successful in Denmark, with several innovative productions that became talking points. Her take on Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in Aarhus offered audiences two productions — one traditional, one contemporary — and began each night with a vote to decide which would be staged. Equally attention-grabbing was an opera Miskimmon commissioned there called “Brothers,” about Danish soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress after fighting in Afghanistan.Her time at Oslo was more “turbulent,” Mellor said. The Norwegian company’s music director, Karl-Heinz Steffens, left before Miskimmon even started, and she “had a fight with its ensemble system” when she wanted to use more guest singers, Mellor said. Amid the conflict, Miskimmon staged several acclaimed productions, including one of Britten’s “Billy Budd” that featured a huge submarine onstage.“She’s no shrinking violet, and when she has an idea she pursues it,” Mellor said.Miskimmon said her “memories of working in Oslo are not ones of turbulence,” and added that, in her opinion, it had been “a very positive working experience.”Whatever happened in Norway, Miskimmon’s experiences of dealing with tough situations will hold her in good stead for her role at ENO, especially given the challenges the company has ahead.At the end of March, the company canceled a production of Michael Tippet’s “King Priam” that had been set to run in the 2022-23 season. Ella Baker, an ENO spokeswoman, said in an email that this was “with financial prudence in mind,” given the ongoing impact of the pandemic.The company also faces perhaps more significant financial challenges. Over the past year, Britain’s government has focused on a program called “leveling up,” designed to boost the fortunes of areas outside London. Although “leveling up” includes all sectors of Britain’s economy, arts funding has been a particular focus. Government subsidies for London-based arts organizations like ENO are set to be cut by a total of 15 percent later this year, so more money can be spent elsewhere. The government has said that some organizations may lose their funding entirely.Allison, the Opera magazine editor, said some British lawmakers have “always had ENO in their sights,” because funding opera is thought to be bad at the ballot box. With the Royal Opera House more prominent, ENO had “always looked vulnerable,” he said.During the hourlong interview, Miskimmon did not seem concerned by that threat, insisting that ENO already had plans to present more work outside London. Since starting at the company, she said she had been discussing how to turn ENO into a “truly national company” that collaborates with regional opera companies to stage major productions.Miskimmon added that she had a favorite saying: “A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” She had repeated the adage so many times at ENO, including in rehearsals for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” that people must be getting sick of it, she said. But it suited her vision for the company, she added.“It’s about art, and it’s about life,” Miskimmon said. “We’re prepared to take big steps forward, because that’s what opera needs.” More

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      Mira Calix, Iconoclastic Composer and Artist, Is Dead at 52

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      Her work spanned albums, public art installations, music for Shakespeare plays and touring with Radiohead.Mira Calix, a composer, producer and visual artist whose work encompassed electronic music, orchestral commissions, public art installations, theater scores, music videos and DJ sets, died on March 25 at her home and music and art studio in Bedford, England. She was 52.The death was confirmed by her partner, Andy Holden, who declined to specify the cause.“She pushed the boundaries between electronic music, classical music and art in a truly unique way,” her label, Warp Records, said in a statement.Ms. Calix’s projects included solo albums, collaborations and numerous singles, EPs, productions and remixes; music for the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s 2017 stagings of “Julius Caesar” and “Coriolanus,” and a 2003 piece, “Nunu,” that brought together the London Sinfonietta, Calix’s electronics and a cage of live cicadas and crickets, amplified and shown on video screens.She welcomed commissions to make public art.“I like trying to change somebody’s day,” she told the music and cultural website The Quietus in 2012. “I like people coming across something with no expectations. They don’t care who made it. They haven’t gone and bought a ticket, so it’s not about being reverential. People can just wander by.”Among her free installations were “Nothing Is Set in Stone,” an egg-shaped stone monolith in London that used sensors to respond to visitors’ motion with music. Another was “Passage,” a permanent installation in a train tunnel in Bath that was converted into a bicycle and pedestrian path with interactive lights and sounds. “Inside There Falls” was a hangar-size paper sculptural environment in Sydney, Australia, accompanied by music and dancers. And “Moving Museum 35” was a traveling sound installation on a city bus in Nanjing, China.Ms. Calix was the sound artist and composer of a 2018 team installation in the dry moat around the Tower of London to commemorate the centenary of Armistice Day.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Calix told students from Nanjing University of the Arts, who were working with her: “We are not trying to make things easy for our audience. We are trying to make things true.”Although her pieces often employed classical musicians and singers, Ms. Calix was not a traditionally schooled musician. She became a composer by working with computers and samplers. Her music often drew on the repetitions of Minimalism and dance music, on field recordings of rural and urban sounds, on trained and untrained voices, and on layered snippets and fragments.“I wanted to put air in electronic music,” she told Interview magazine in 2015. “I record the sounds of twigs, barks, and stones. I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of combining the natural and the man-made. That juxtaposition is truly beautiful. The question of what is natural and unnatural is very open.”Although her music has often been described as experimental and avant-garde, she insisted that it spoke to ordinary listeners. In a 2012 video interview, she said: “People like the weird stuff. People like abstraction. People like magic, and those are the things that motivate me to make work.”Ms. Calix performing at the music venue Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 2002. “I wanted to put air in electronic music,” she said. Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesMira Calix (pronounced Mee-ra KAY-lix) was born Chantal Francesca Passamonte in Durban, South Africa, on Oct. 28, 1969, to Gabriele and Riccarda Passamonte. She studied photography but was an avid music fan, and with South Africa isolated by anti-apartheid sanctions, she moved to London in 1991 to have direct contact with its music scene. She got a job in a record shop, Ambient Soho; she booked clubs and parties, including events with a collective called Telepathic Fish; and she began working as a disc jockey.In 1993, after a job with the indie-rock label 4AD, Ms. Calix became the publicist at the also independent Warp Records, which specializes in electronic music. Meanwhile, she began constructing her own electronic music with an early Mac computer and a sampler.“The only thing that has really influenced what I do is lack of money,” she told Computer Music magazine in 2012. “I could never afford sample packs and expensive synths, so I looked for organic found sound instead. It’s funny, isn’t it? Being short of money limited the music I could make, but it also meant that I discovered my own sound.”Ms. Calix married Sean Booth, a fellow musician, in the late 1990s, and they separated in the mid-2000s. In addition to Mr. Holden, she is survived by her mother and her sister, Genevieve Passamonte.Executives at Warp Records heard her music and signed her to the label in 1996. She chose to record under the name Mira Calix after it “kind of appeared,” she told Red Bull Music Academy in 2003.“I wrote it down, and it looked good,” she added, “and I really like phonetics. It sounded really nice, and it sounded like a nice person.”The A-side of her first release, the 10-inch vinyl single “Ilanga,” was “Humba”; it ended with a looped vocal repeating, “Do the things that people say you cannot.”Ms. Calix in an undated photo. “I like to create the space in which the music exists and then you step into it,” she said.Warp RecordsHer recordings for Warp were adventurous and unpredictable. They could be noisily propulsive or meditative and ambient, sparse or densely packed, raucous or elegiac. She also toured as a disc jockey alongside groups including Radiohead, Autechre and Godspeed You Black Emperor!But her interests largely turned to multimedia works and site-specific installations, often in collaboration with scientists and visual artists. “I like to create the space in which the music exists, and then you step into it,” she told the website Spitfire Audio.“Chorus,” installed in Durham Cathedral in northern England in 2009, had speakers swinging on pendulums overhead, using customized software to control more than 2000 sound samples interacting with lights and movement. Her 2013 work “The Sun Is the Queen of Torches” grew out of a collaboration with a lab that created organic photovoltaic — light-sensitive, electricity-generating — materials. “Ode to the Future,” in 2018, was based on ultrasound images from pregnant volunteers.Her final album, “absent origin,” was released in 2021. It was a complex collage of her past and her ambitions. She drew from years of material she had saved on her hard drive: beats (including using her body for percussion), nature recordings, previous sessions with classical musicians, favorite songs and poetry, and preserved news footage, including CNN’s coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection.They all became material for song-length, sometimes danceable tracks holding messages of feminism and resistance: exploratory, playful and unpredictable.“The challenge in my work is to engage my audience emotionally, and music is an abstract art form,” Ms. Calix said in a 2013 TED Talk. “I can’t tell my audience how to feel. I need to coax them and guide them and hopefully draw them in.”Alex Traub More

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      Joseph Kalichstein, Pianist of Subtlety and Refinement, Dies at 76

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      An acclaimed exponent of Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, he was best known for his work as a member of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio.Joseph Kalichstein, an Israeli American pianist whose subtle, refined approach made him an exemplary chamber musician, especially as a member of the esteemed Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, died on March 31 in Manhattan. He was 76.His son Avi said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Across his career of more than 50 years, critics agreed that Mr. Kalichstein had an uncommon naturalness, whether in his earliest solo recitals or his later appearances on the chamber music circuit with his piano trio, in which he was joined by the violinist Jaime Laredo and the cellist Sharon Robinson.Mr. Kalichstein had a sense of line and timing that set him apart even as a young virtuoso. His Carnegie Hall debut “carried enough impact to remind one of Horowitz, and that is not a small thing to say,” Donal Henahan wrote in The New York Times in 1967, adding that although there was still some brash impetuosity to Mr. Kalichstein’s playing, he could already sustain “a long, poetic arc as only a born musician can.”That innate musicality made Mr. Kalichstein a stylish exponent of Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, whose solo, chamber and concertante works he recorded with an apt balance of delicacy and drive.Mr. Kalichstein’s credentials as a soloist were never in question after his 1969 victory in the prestigious Leventritt Competition, which led, among other appearances, to dates with the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra under the conductor (and Leventritt juror) George Szell. But he found particular admiration as a chamber musician.The venerable Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio came together by accident, after Mr. Kalichstein appeared as a late substitute for another elegant pianist, Rudolf Firkusny, in a program of Dvorak with his future partners — who were already husband and wife — and other musicians at the 92nd Street Y in 1976.Mr. Kalichstein in an undated photo. His credentials as a soloist were never in question after his 1969 victory in the prestigious Leventritt Competition, but he found particular admiration as a chamber musician.“In the end,” Mr. Kalichstein later recalled of that concert, “we all remarked how easy the performance was. We seemed to phrase together, breathe together, sing together. Sharon and Jaime came to me and said, ‘Maybe we should play together.’”Their official debut as a trio came in 1977, in unusually auspicious surroundings: the East Room of the White House, during the inauguration festivities for President Jimmy Carter, who hired them on the advice of the conductor Robert Shaw.From the start, the trio drew strong reviews for its poise and blend. Mr. Henahan suggested in 1978 that “while predictions as to its longevity and success would be pointless just yet,” the trio’s balance and evident good sense still brought to mind artists of the stature of the Guarneri String Quartet or, more to the point, the then-dominant Beaux Arts Trio.The Beaux Arts lasted 53 years in name, but its initial membership endured for little more than a decade. The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, arguably its successor in stature in concert halls if not on record, still had its original personnel at its last concert, in Phoenix on March 17 — 45 years after its debut.Joseph Chaim Kalichstein, later known as Yossi to his friends, was born on Jan. 15, 1946, in Tel Aviv, the third child of Yitzhak and Mali (Bendit) Kalichstein. Fervent Zionists, they had tried to settle in Palestine in the 1920s, returning to Poland only to flee the fate that befell much of the rest of their family in the Holocaust.Mr. Kalichstein played the piano from a young age and took lessons from Joshua Shor in Israel. He enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York in 1962, studying with Eduard Steuermann and Ilona Kabos. For his Carnegie Hall debut, he paid tribute with two works by Mr. Steuermann, a rarely heard Schoenberg acolyte who died in 1964.After graduating in 1967, Mr. Kalichstein received a master’s degree from Juilliard in 1969 and considered doctoral work before his solo career took off. Sponsored by the Young Concert Artists after 1967, he played Beethoven in one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, in 1968, broadcast on CBS.European as well as American performances followed. The Musical Times noted after Mr. Kalichstein’s European debut in 1970 that the impression he made in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto — with the London Symphony and André Previn — “was not of the extreme brilliance and confidence expected from a young virtuoso so much as thoughtful, sensitive musicianship.”Allan Kozinn of The New York Times in 1999 bracketed Mr. Kalichstein with pianists like Alfred Brendel and Richard Goode, as “a musician who searches beyond the dots on the page, recognizes the breadth of possibilities within a work and has the technique to give those possibilities life.”Mr. Kalichstein was by then primarily known as a chamber musician, above all for his work with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, with which he cultivated a style of polished ease.The trio recorded much of the core repertoire, including the complete Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms trios, as well as an exquisite set devoted to Ravel, for which Mr. Kalichstein contributed a moving account of the solo “Pavane Pour une Infante Défunte.” The trio commissioned works from such living composers as Arvo Pärt, André Previn and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, whose piano concerto Mr. Kalichstein recorded.Mr. Kalichstein consulted for the Kennedy Center after 1997 and was artistic director of its chamber music series until his death. He became a member of the piano faculty at Juilliard in 1983 and added a chair in chamber music studies in 2003.The pianist Emanuel Ax, a colleague at Juilliard, said in an interview that Mr. Kalichstein was “a remarkably direct and openhearted musician, in the best sense uncomplicated and natural.” He added that Mr. Kalichstein was a warm, witty teacher who did not impose his own views on his students, but “would think about the way someone was looking at a piece of music and try to help him or her attain the best possible of version of that.”In addition to his son Avi, Mr. Kalichstein is survived by his wife, Rowain (Schultz) Kalichstein; another son, Rafi; and three grandchildren.His wife had resolved to marry him before she had even met him, after being captivated by a recital he gave at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan in 1971. They were married later that year and were longtime residents of Maplewood, N.J., until moving to Rhode Island last year.In 1994, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times asked Mr. Kalichstein whether he and the other members of the trio enjoyed greater fame as individual soloists or as a collective.“It could very well be the trio,” he responded. “I certainly cannot complain if it’s one or the other. I hope people know me as someone with two different hats.”“I want to have that balance,” he added. “In fact, that is my ideal.” More

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      ‘The Wanderer’ Review: A Dion Musical Hits All the Familiar Notes

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      A new production about the 1960s doo-wop idol follows the usual rise-and-fall formula. Still, the songs are wonderful, as is the angel-voiced ensemble.Sometimes, all a show needs is a harmonizing ensemble perched out of windows and fire escapes in a well-appointed street scene to win you over. That’s mostly what gets “The Wanderer,” a new jukebox bio-musical about the rise of the singer-songwriter Dion DiMucci, across the finish line. Despite its falling into the genre’s tiresome tropes, this long-gestating production, which opened at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey on Sunday night, succeeds on sheer sonic strength.Another story of a singin’ Italian American who could, “The Wanderer” features a divinely voiced Mike Wartella as Dion, best known by his first name. Bio-musicals have a formula that’s certainly “tried” but less convincingly “true.” There are Dion’s humble beginnings, with his initial backing trio, the Belmonts, named after the Bronx neighborhood where they grew up. There are flashes of glory — winning over, and eventually marrying, the new girl on the block (a sweet Christy Altomare). There are setbacks, of course, like Dion’s plunge into a heroin habit, maintained by a shady friend (Joey McIntyre of, yes, New Kids on the Block). And there are moments of writerly ridiculousness, like when a thunderous downbeat follows his tour-mate Buddy Holly’s suggestion that they charter a plane.Aside from the typically inoffensive rise-and-fall-and-rise narrative, Charles Messina’s book hands Dion a lot of vaguely righteous tantrums about being sick of the doo-wop that made him without ever exploring why it is he’d rather be performing acoustic, singer-songwriter sounds. The song selection, while appropriate enough for the show’s nostalgia, is composed almost exclusively of the same rock ’n’ roll classics Dion claims no longer represent him artistically.But, wow, do they sound good thanks to Wartella’s crooning vocals. The Belmonts, played by Stephen Cerf, Billy Finn and Jess LeProtto, work up an impressive amount of charm. But their a cappella charisma is virtually discarded after the first requisite recording booth scene, when the orchestrations go into full swing. John Shivers’s crisp sound design and Sonny Paladino’s terrific music direction present a paradox: the more complex the arrangements, the further they get from the story’s shaky insistence that all Dion wants is a guitar to crank out a simple tune. Even when his neighbor, amiably played by Kingsley Leggs, sets up a soulful number as an antidote to the ’60s hit parade, Paladino doesn’t allow one note to go unscored.At least two scenes try to lend the book’s forced arguments weight by having the music stop, onlookers staring in awe. For a tight-knit Bronx community, these neighbors sure get startled by every little development. Credit must be given to Jasmine Rogers as a neighbor’s daughter, whose appealing stage presence surpasses what little her character gets to do, and Joli Tribuzio, for imbuing Dion’s mother with an interiority the book does not.Beowulf Boritt’s scenic design, consisting mainly of Bronx streets, transcends its straightforwardness through old-fashioned craft. Revolving set pieces reveal jungle gym-like fire escapes and terraces, and an eye-popping scene set during the Feast of Saint Anthony gives Boritt and the lighting designer Jake DeGroot a chance to flex their candy-colored vision. Along with Sarah Laux’s costumes, the sets outshine Sarah O’Gleby’s busy choreography and Kenneth Ferrone’s unoriginal direction.“The Wanderer” doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor does it present a back story that was begging to be told; Dion’s highs and lows weren’t unique. Had it come out during the wave of Boomer traps like “Jersey Boys” and “Million Dollar Quartet,” it might have been buried under sickly nostalgia, its weaknesses amplified through market oversaturation. But, call me a sucker for some good doo-wop, I was continuously charmed by this throwback-y musical and its angel-voiced ensemble.The WandererThrough April 24 at the Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.; papermill.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      Can a Brazilian Pop Star Crack the U.S. Market? Anitta Says Yes.

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      In the past decade, the singer has earned fame and the respect of some of Brazil’s most lauded musical elders. Now she’s taking aim at new audiences but hoping to hold on to her roots.“Meiga e Abusada,” the 2013 song that first catapulted the Brazilian singer Anitta to fame, begins with a Lady Gaga sample and a cool assertion. “I get everything I want,” she sings in Portuguese. “But it was so easy to control you.”In the song’s music video, partly filmed in Las Vegas, Anitta frolics around the desert in a cropped plaid shirt, drinks champagne and hits casinos in a limo. It’s a declaration of her prowess made all the more brazen by its timing: Only a couple of months before its release, it had felt like nothing would ever happen for her.“I’m a pessimistic person,” Anitta said in a recent interview, speaking in Portuguese. That’s partly because the odds were never strictly in her favor. “Growing up, my father would say, ‘We’re poor, you can’t study the arts,’” she said. “He thought I’d need a plan B.”She didn’t. Since putting out her first album at age 20, Anitta has gone on to become one of Brazil’s biggest pop stars. In the past decade, she has released four studio albums, performed at the 2016 Olympic opening ceremony and racked up numerous Latin Grammy nominations. Anitta got her start singing in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, and success eventually followed her to the rest of South America, where a string of Spanish-language hits featuring stars like J Balvin and Maluma cemented her status as one of the region’s top performers.The United States market feels like the final frontier. This month, Anitta will perform at both weekends of the Coachella festival. On April 12, her new trilingual album “Versions of Me” — her first since signing with Warner Records in 2021, and her first international LP — arrives. A solo female pop artist from Brazil has never become a star in North America, but Anitta’s team and label are intent on making it happen — and it shows. Featuring tracks produced by established hitmakers including Ryan Tedder, Stargate, and Andrés Torres and Mauricio Rengifo (who produced “Despacito”), the album’s sleek hooks, taut melodies and glossy production signal a clear attempt at breaking her in America.Speaking via video chat from her house in Miami in late February, Anitta was barefaced on the couch, dressed in an orange Versace T-shirt. She looked tired, but her posture was flawless. “I got back yesterday from Rio and I was exhausted. I’d been working Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday without a break,” she said, petting her sleepy Italian greyhound, Plínio. (He had great posture, too.)Born Larissa Machado in Rio de Janeiro’s working-class Honório Gurgel neighborhood, Anitta, 29, first rose to fame after she posted a video of herself singing into a can of deodorant. Her stage name, a homage to a character she’d long admired from an old Brazilian TV show, “Presença de Anita,” came later. In the series, she explained, Anita would say that she wanted to wake up a different person every day: “She could be romantic, sensual, intelligent and crazy all at once.” Anitta likes playing with that idea too.“People have always wanted to define women: Is she the marrying type? Is she the type that likes to go out?” she added. “But I can be both things, right?”Anitta made a name for herself performing at parties around Rio’s favelas. Funk carioca, or baile funk, a vibrant rhythm that emerged in Rio de Janeiro’s predominantly Black working-class neighborhoods in the 1980s, is the soundtrack of choice at these gatherings, where sound systems often blast the genre’s signature tamborzão beat. “I started bothering everyone and asking if I could sing at their events, the proibidas,” Anitta said.Proibida is Portuguese for prohibited. In the early 2000s, the police — who deemed these bailes (dance parties) breeding grounds for gang violence — began violently sweeping events in Rio’s favelas under the guise of public safety. While the genre now plays in some of the country’s wealthiest neighborhoods and in clubs popular with arty crowds in London and Berlin, its creators, especially those who haven’t yet risen to fame, are still marginalized.Anitta onstage in Miami earlier this year. Since putting out her first album at age 20, Anitta has gone on to become one of Brazil’s biggest pop stars.John Parra/Getty ImageAt the height of the moral panic around baile funk, even stars like Anitta didn’t walk away unscathed. When she performed at the Olympic opening ceremony in 2016 alongside the national icons Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, critics lashed out against her inclusion in the event, dismissing her as a “favelada.”“Prejudice hurts,” Anitta said. “But what artists like Caetano, Marisa Monte, Djavan and Bethânia have always told me is that they were the Anitta of their time,” she said, referring to Maria Bethânia and other Brazilian stars who are mostly over 70 (Monte, the youngest of the group, is in her 50s). “Everyone told them they were bums and now they’re icons.”Veloso, one of the country’s most revered singer-songwriters who has collaborated with the singer in the past, praised her in an email. “Anitta is so competent, sincere, direct and likable,” he wrote. “She has captured the zeitgeist in such an impressive way.”In the mid-2000s, M.I.A. and Diplo began to export funk carioca out of Brazil through songs like “Baile Funk One” and a documentary, “Favela on Blast,” but the genre never made it to the pop charts. Anitta still believes it has the potential to go global, though. And while her new album experiments with a range of styles — the Gaga-inspired electro-pop of “Boys Don’t Cry,” the rollicking reggaeton of “Gata” — “Versions of Me” never completely severs ties with her roots.Still, she knows success often takes time. “The main things are patience and persistence,” she said. “We have to do it step by step.”Ryan Tedder, the frontman for the band One Republic who has written hits for Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, agreed to executive produce Anitta’s project halfway through their first studio session. “She’s easily the hardest working person I’ve ever worked with,” he said by phone. “She does not have an off switch.”Tom Corson, co-chairman and chief operating officer at Warner Records, agreed: “Anitta has what it takes to be a global superstar.” The plan? “Obviously we want hit records,” Corson said. “And we’d like to see her as a unique force within the U.S. and global market, toggling back and forth between languages.” The obvious comparison is Shakira.While “Versions of Me” is above all, an international project, Tedder and Anitta were both adamant that Brazilian rhythms had to be a part of it. “I didn’t want to disenfranchise her Brazilian fan base from what she’s already built,” he said.For “Faking Love” — a baile funk-inspired track featuring the American rapper Saweetie — Anitta and Tedder flew the Brazilian producers Tropkillaz to Los Angeles for a session. “The rhythmic movement of an actual funk beat doesn’t use what’s called quantization,” Tedder said, referring to software that makes beats line up perfectly. “You have to program it in with natural human swing.” It took him several tries before he could get it right; Anitta sat and listened until she knew they’d found the one.Anitta is aware that when it comes to her work, she is a perfectionist first. For years, she has worked with a speech therapist to minimize her accent, and even as she was putting the finishing touches on her album, she was rerecording parts of tracks. Would it matter if she sang in English with a strong accent? It shouldn’t, but it does, she said. “I realized that if I spoke slower in meetings or with an accent, people would respect me less,” she said, recalling how she felt when she started doing business in America.Things are different in her personal life, but it’s hard to completely relinquish control when she has lived the bulk of it under a microscope. Anitta, who is bisexual, kept key aspects of her identity — including her sexuality — hidden from the Brazilian press for years. “It was complicated because it was all very taboo at the time,” she said. “Lots of singers weren’t out, and I don’t judge them because I know people really came after me.”It was only after a bodyguard had to chase down someone who took a picture of her kissing a woman at a party that she realized she wanted to stop hiding. “My mom has known that I kiss girls since I was 13, why should I care what other people think?” she said in a second interview, throwing both of her hands up in exasperation as she slouched down on a hotel room couch in Los Angeles.Politically, aspects of Anitta’s life have long been scrutinized too. The singer was criticized in 2018 when she didn’t outright condemn Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro during the early stages of his campaign. But she maintains there’s a reason for that. “I was having my religious initiation,” she said. In Candomblé, which mixes Yoruba, Fon and Bantu beliefs, initiations typically require people to remain secluded for around 21 days: “I had no way of contacting the outside world.”When it became clear Anitta would have to say something, she called a friend, the lawyer, journalist and political commentator Gabriela Prioli, and asked for help. “I didn’t understand anything. I didn’t know what a congressman does or what a councilman does,” she said. “I’m not ashamed to say it because most Brazilians don’t.”In the end, Anitta found the conversation so helpful she decided to start broadcasting political education classes with Prioli on her Instagram, which she hopes to resume ahead of this year’s elections. While she won’t endorse a candidate, Anitta now firmly opposes Bolsonaro. In late March, when lawyers representing the president’s party petitioned Brazil’s supreme electoral court to stop artists from making “political demonstrations” in their sets, Anitta encouraged other performers to defy them. “To my friends who want to speak out: I’ll pay your fine,” she said in an Instagram story.Bolsonaro and Anitta occasionally even butt heads on social media, where the singer boasts 61 million followers on Instagram alone. “He knows his conservative supporters don’t like me, so he uses my name to draw attention to himself,” she said.Her follower count will likely only grow in the coming months. Popularized by the “paso de Anitta” — Spanish for Anitta’s dance move — her TikTok hit “Envolver” is the first song by a Brazilian artist to enter the Top 10 on Spotify’s global chart. In late March, it hit No. 1 there.Anitta’s upcoming Coachella performance on the festival’s main stage marks another first for a Brazilian artist.“I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “It makes me anxious.” But she is thinking about it.Anitta said rehearsals for the show are happening in Rio, where she’s training with one Brazilian and one American choreographer. (“I wanted to combine both cultures.”) And after that? “I’ve only planned my life until Coachella,” she said half-jokingly.“I’m not going to overthink things,” she said. That’s how music becomes formulaic. “I know what I want to do: if things work out, great,” she added. “If they don’t, that’s also great.” She wasn’t always this way. “But I’ve accomplished so much more than I ever thought I would. If I fell asleep now and woke up at 40, I’d still feel like I’d done what I set out to do.” More

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      The Politics of Rihanna’s Pregnancy Style

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      When the right to control your own body and the right to dress how you like intersect.Ever since she announced her pregnancy in late January via Instagram and an artfully staged paparazzi shot of her and her partner ASAP Rocky strolling beneath the Riverside Drive viaduct, Rihanna’s maternity style has been marked more by what she has not worn than what she has.She has not worn tent dresses. She has not worn maternity jeans. In fact, she has barely worn much clothing at all.Instead she has bared her naked belly at seemingly every turn: in green draped fringe and ombré pants at a Fenty beauty event; in a bra, sheer blue top unbuttoned over her bump and low-slung gray jeans at the Super Bowl; in dragon-bedecked black pants, a vinyl bandeau and a crystal headdress at a Gucci show; in a sheer baby-doll dress over a lacy bra and panties at Dior; and, most recently, in a sheer organza Valentino turtleneck over a sequin skirt and bandeau at Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party.In the annals of public pregnancy, there has never been a display quite like it.Not surprisingly, the general reaction among celebrity watch sites has been a breathless swoon. “Rihanna Keeps Wearing the Hottest Maternity Looks Ever,” HighSnobiety crowed. “Rihanna Is Single-handedly Giving ‘Maternity Style’ a Rebrand,” Glamour U.K. sang.Rihanna at a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in February.Mike Coppola/Getty ImagesAt a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in March.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Fenty Beauty by RihannaThey’re right, of course. But, really, the style choices are just the beginning. In dressing to confront the world with the physical reality of her pregnancy so consistently, Rihanna has gone way past just making a fashion statement. She’s making a “totally transgressive and highly political statement,” said Liza Tsaliki, a professor of media studies and popular culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece.It’s just all couched in the familiar trope of the “the celebrity bump watch.” Sneaky, right?The result is a dizzying swirl of contemporary phenomena, including: (1) celebrity culture, in which we increasingly take our consumer and behavioral cues from boldface names; (2) what Ms. Tsaliki calls “the aestheticization of the body and the monitoring of women’s waistlines”; and (3) modern politics.All of which take this particular pregnancy dress story far beyond mere “get the look” role modeling. (They also explain why this particular “get-the-look” role modeling has been so disproportionately exciting for so many.)After all, said Renée Ann Cramer, the deputy provost of Drake University and author of “Pregnant With the Stars: Watching and Wanting the Celebrity Baby Bump,” this is a time when “many people on the far right and even the mainstream right are promoting policies that challenge the continuing autonomy of women-identifying people over their bodies, lives and decision-making capacity.”At the Dior show at Paris Fashion Week in March.Jeremy Moeller/Getty ImagesBy dressing to showcase her pregnant belly, and in a way that has nothing to do with traditional maternity wear, Rihanna is modeling an entirely opposite reality. “She’s saying, ‘I’m a person still, and I’m my person.’” Ms. Cramer said. That she can be “autonomous, powerful and herself, even while carrying a life.” She’s connecting the right to dress how you like with all sorts of other, more constitutional rights.It’s a pretty radical move.The pregnant body, after all, has been celebrated, policed, hidden away and considered problematic for centuries.In ancient times, pregnancy was venerated and exhibited, seen as a physical embodiment of women’s connection to mother earth, but by the Middle Ages and medieval Christendom, Ms. Tsaliki said, it had been transformed into a shameful state, one connected not so much to the sacred as the profane.It had become a symbol of our base desires and a sign of female instability and lack of control and thus something best kept behind closed doors and (literally) under wraps. At least until the child emerged and the woman was transformed into a paragon of pure maternal selflessness.It was an evolution revealed in “Portraying Pregnancy,” a 2020 exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London that demonstrated how, since the 16th century, “the response to the unsettling physical reminder of mortality and sexuality engendered by pregnant bodies changed.” Or so wrote Helen Charman in a review of the show in the international art magazine Apollo.ASAP Rocky and Rihanna at the Gucci show during Milan Fashion Week in February.Victor Boyko/Getty Images For GucciAfter the Rams Super Bowl victory in February.Ab/BackgridIt revealed, she said, how paintings and other art forms moved from showing pregnant bodies “as affirmations of paternalistic structures of inheritance and power” to trying to pretend they didn’t actually exist (or the condition of being pregnant didn’t) to putting pregnancy front and center as an increasingly idealized state.That began in 1952, when Lucille Ball became pregnant during the filming of “I Love Lucy” and famously forced her producers to write her impossible-to-ignore condition into the script, and onto everyone’s screens (though they still couldn’t use the actual word “pregnant”), as dramatized in the recent film “Being the Ricardos.”That in turn gave way to the tent dress compromise. (Remember Princess Diana’s ruffled smocks and sailor dresses during her pregnancies in the early and mid-1980s?) At least until Demi Moore shocked the world by posing naked and heavily pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, inaugurating the age of the pregnancy art portrait.And that period extended through such belly-baring covers as Cindy Crawford, naked and pregnant on W; Britney Spears, naked and pregnant for Harper’s Bazaar in 2006; and Serena Williams, naked and pregnant on Vanity Fair in 2017. That phase reached its apogee with Beyoncé’s 2017 photo shoot/announcement that she was pregnant with twins, a heavily art-directed series of pictures that seemed to encompass such references as Botticelli’s Venus and a renaissance Madonna.As the pregnant body became valorized for its life-giving potential, it increasingly became “a place of safe transgression,” Ms. Cramer said. And that meant that “it’s one of the few times women-identifying people can safely disrupt some norms.”At Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party in Hollywood.Ngre/BackgridProgressive though they may seem, however, as Ms. Charman wrote in Apollo of such images, they nevertheless “conform to the glossy conventions.”Not so Rihanna. She has made confronting her pregnancy part of her every day. Or maybe more pertinently, our every day. “I was expecting the announcement,” Ms. Cramer said — perhaps even a few other, carefully calculated appearances. “But there has been no return to covering up.”Though it’s possible that this is a totally unconscious choice — maybe her skin is so sensitive that it’s uncomfortable to have anything on her belly — Rihanna herself has a history of consciously using her own physicality and profile to force reconsideration of old prejudices and social conventions about female agency and beauty. Most obviously in her Savage X Fenty lingerie brand, currently valued at around $3 billion.Indeed, her current approach may have been foreshadowed by her choice to have Slick Woods, at nine months pregnant, model in her first Savage X Fenty show in 2018 wearing only pasties and lacy lingerie. Famously, Ms. Woods went into labor on the runway, later posting “I’m here to say I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT WHENEVER I WANT AND SO CAN YOU.” (There were some additional words in there to emphasize her point, but they cannot be printed in this newspaper.)Change the date and those lines could easily be the motto of Rihanna’s maternity wear. She did characterize her own pregnancy style as “rebellious.”Now the question, said Ms. Cramer, is whether “an overt celebration of embodied power through pregnancy can make a difference.” Can the “performance of a powerful pregnancy by a wealthy woman at the top of her game filter down” to change how all pregnancies are perceived?If so, Rihanna will have done a lot more than influence how pregnant women dress. She’ll have influenced how we think about the rights of women. Pregnant or not. More

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      ‘Suffs’ Review: Young, Scrappy and Hungry for the Right to Vote

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      Shaina Taub’s new musical at the Public Theater tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.I don’t remember my grade school history books dedicating more than a few sentences to the women’s suffrage movement. The nearly 100-year history of women fighting for the right to vote is often trimmed down to two main talking points — Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment — and some dismissed the suffragists as self-serious rabble-rousers.In an effort to counter those notions of these revolutionary women and their fight, the new musical “Suffs” begins with the satirical vaudeville-inspired “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” sung by the ensemble, made up of female and nonbinary actors. (The show was scheduled to open Wednesday at the Public Theater, but canceled because of positive coronavirus tests.) They’re dressed in drag — even mustaches — caricaturing their male detractors. We’re in for a tedious history lesson, these hypothetical skeptics predict in song; a dreaded feminist is “planning to scold you for three hours straight.”My first thought: Dear God, I hope not.“Suffs” has a hefty two-hour-and-45-minute running time, after all, and though the musical isn’t guilty of scolding, it is guilty of stifling an impressive — though exhausting — breadth of U.S. history through its contemporary lens.Shaina Taub, the Public Theater’s playwright in residence and creator of the musical, stars as Alice Paul, the headstrong young suffragist who assembles a group of women who lead protests, suffer abuse and incarceration, and march on Washington for their right to access the ballot box.Taub gives a steely performance as Paul, though her standby (Holly Gould) has stepped into the role, as Taub tested positive for the coronavirus just before the production’s scheduled opening.Hannah Cruz, center, in the satirical vaudeville-inspired number “Watch Out for the Suffragette!” in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPaul is joined in the metaphorical barracks by Lucy Burns (played by an understated Ally Bonino), her friend and fellow suffragist who helped Paul form the National Woman’s Party. There’s also Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi, teeming with earnestness), an eager young student and writer from Ohio, and Ruza Wenclawska (a droll Hannah Cruz), the tough-as-nails Polish American factory worker and union organizer. Inez Milholland (Phillipa Soo), a labor lawyer and chic socialite, is their public face; as Inez, Soo, the beloved “Hamilton” alum, brings sugar, sass and style to the group, marching with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.In the seven years that are covered in the musical — 1913 to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified — Paul butts heads with her sisters in the fight. She has a yearslong dispute with Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), who, as the head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, thinks Paul’s moves are too radical. And there’s the journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James), who unsuccessfully tries to bring race into the movement, challenging Paul’s myopic vision for change.But her actual opponent is the president, Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean), who noodles around the stage, step-kicking down stairs with a top hat and a cane while gaily singing misogynistic lyrics like “Men make the money/Ladies make the bread/Men make the rules/Ladies make the bed.” McLean’s jaunty performance introduces some of the few moments of levity in the musical; otherwise a general stiffness pervades the production.Nikki M. James, center, as Ida B. Wells and Cassondra James, right, as Mary Church Terrell in a subplot highlighting the tensions between two suffragists with differing ideas about how to elevate race in the movement.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMaybe that’s because the whole production feels so attuned to the gender politics and protests of today, so aware of possible critiques that it takes on its subject with an overabundance of caution. So a mere 20 minutes into the show, “Suffs” makes it clear it’s not framing Paul as the perfect warrior-saint of the movement. When Paul is dismissive of Wells she responds with the song “Wait My Turn” (“Do you not realize you’re not free until I’m free./Or do you refuse to see?”), establishing her role as the racial conscience of the musical, popping up every once in a while as a reminder of the pitfalls of white feminism. And all these women and stories of their activism are uncomfortably stuffed into a show too scared to miss anything that it becomes bloated with information.In many ways “Suffs” lands like a clunky heir of the Public’s other big historical musical, “Hamilton,” borrowing some of its approaches to structure while trying to avoid the criticisms about its politics around women and slavery. But that’s the risk that comes with recasting history with today’s sensibilities in mind. Even this feminist tale occasionally serves retorts to those funky founding fathers who met in “the room where it happens”; our suffragists sing about how no women got to witness the signing of the 19th Amendment themselves because “a man signed the paper behind a closed door in a room somewhere.”But the musical doesn’t need to try so hard to defend itself or prove its relevance, say, by showing the threats and taunts of men interjected into songs like “The March.” Neither does it need to fall back on preciousness, like when a Tennessee state senator’s mother, an “old farmer’s widow,” sings a banjo-heavy song pleading with her son to vote for suffrage with a promise of his favorite meatloaf in return. Or the pat pairing of some couples in the end, and the heavy-handed finale, “Never Over,” about the continuous march toward progress.The direction, by Leigh Silverman, feels as methodical as the text; the pacing is speedy, and the songs are dense with exposition like those of “Hamilton.” But “Suffs” turns out to be all work and mostly no play, and when it comes to the music itself nothing really pops. There are a few dry touches of vaudeville, and pop and some sugary songs like “If We Were Married,” a number that feels like a contemporary stab at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s 1937 rendition of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” It’s a parody of such cutesy courtship numbers yet it delivers just that.Taub, left, as Alice Paul and Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, who thinks Paul’s moves are too radical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe music is most interesting when it sheds the exposition and allows the characters space to express their hopes, frustrations and desires. Colella slays her performance in one such song, the prickly “This Girl.” Colella clips her words and sharpens her gestures, hitting her notes with the punch of a boxer in the ring. The harmonies, too, like those in the ensemble number “How Long,” which shifts from a tone of despair to one of resilience, also provide the music with much-needed dimension.The choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s typically transgressive style (exhibited in shows like “A Strange Loop” and “Fairview”) feels defanged, ball-and-chained to its very literal interpretation of the material; there’s much marching and posing, syncopated stepping. Mimi Lien brings a similar austerity to her set design — the stately steps and columns of Congress, perhaps, or some institutional building — but the simplicity here works, allowing “Suffs” to focus on its diverse cast of history-makers. In the costume design, Toni-Leslie James strikes a satisfying balance between formal high-waisted skirts and black lace-up boots, and the splashy wide-brimmed hats have enough ribbons and feathers to make a Southern churchgoer swoon.“Suffs” ends with a passing of the torch from one generation of change-makers to the next, revisiting the latest clash of new politics versus old politics: What was once revolutionary becomes out of date. For all the work this show does to illuminate the successes — and failures — of the women’s rights movement, and the constantly evolving nature of our politics, it focuses so much energy on seeming as timely as possible. But, as the suffs learn, movements transform; our government leaders change, as do the demands of the people on the picket line. It’s a lesson the musical should take to heart: You can’t live in the past, present and future of our nation’s politics all at once — at least not without losing your way.SuffsThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      An Afrofuturism Festival Brings an Energy Shift to Carnegie Hall

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      The inaugural event explored a movement about denial and transcendence in the most institutional music hall in New York City.The first time Sun Ra and his Arkestra played Carnegie Hall, in April 1968, they were shrouded in darkness for most of the show. The critic John S. Wilson, reviewing for The New York Times, was flummoxed. Wilson considered himself a Sun Ra fan, but he couldn’t fathom why, on the country’s most prestigious stage, the cosmic keyboardist, bandleader and philosopher was keeping his ensemble’s wondrous “array of odd instruments” and “colorful costumes” out of view.The messages in Ra’s music, and his riddle-like public statements, could’ve helped Wilson understand. “​​On this planet, it seems, it has been very difficult for me to do and be of the possible things,” Ra said in an interview for DownBeat magazine in 1970. “As I look at the world today and its events and the harvest of possible things, I like the idea of the impossible more and more.” Perhaps the most appealing impossibility, for Ra, was to escape — to disappear.The Arkestra returned to Carnegie Hall in February, almost three decades after Ra’s death, to help kick-start the hall’s first-ever Afrofuturism festival, a series of concerts on its major stages, with satellite events held in smaller venues across New York, around the country and online. Those programs included screenings of sci-fi films made by Black directors, comics lectures and panels on social theory.All tied back to Afrofuturism, an artistic movement that mixes realistic racial pessimism with audacious fantasy, and that holds an increasingly prominent place in culture today. Afrofuturism picks up on a more than century-old mode in Black American art: fusing the tools of sci-fi and surrealism with the histories and belief systems of African societies, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria, in search of new models.The trumpeter Theo Croker made his debut performance at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in March alongside the keyboardist Mike King, the bassist Eric Wheeler and the drummer Shekwoaga Ode.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“You can call Afrofuturism the high culture of the African diaspora right now,” Reynaldo Anderson, a Temple University scholar and a co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, said in an interview. He was on the five-person committee of scholars and artists that curated the festival, and he sounded well aware of the inherent contradictions of trying to bring a movement about denial and transcendence into the most institutional music hall in New York City.“The Carnegie function is going to be remembered as bringing all those threads together at a mainstream institution,” he said. “I think we made the argument successfully.”That’s partly because the artists they chose knew how to treat reclamation as a viable alternative to escape. Camae Ayewa, a speculative poet and electronic musician who performs as Moor Mother, sat in with the Arkestra toward the end of its set. “I was never here,” she recited, invoking Ra, over the large ensemble’s turbid, thumping swing. “From 1619 to Wakanda, I don’t exist/Whose map is this? Whose timeline?”Then she issued a warning, seemingly to herself: “Don’t be truth in front of the vultures/Don’t be truth in Carnegie Hall.”The festival’s performances were stacked with moments like this: disruptions of the space, caught between gratitude and suspicion. All the performers seemed sincerely thrilled to be there, and nearly all of them went out of their way to say how welcomed they’d been by the staff and the curators. Most also expressed a kind of surprise.Fatoumata Diawara, the incendiary Malian vocalist, guitarist and songwriter, headlined a bill in Zankel Hall that also featured Chimurenga Renaissance, a transnational band mixing hip-hop, lounge music, Zimbabwean protest songs and Afrobeats. Diawara and her five-piece band administered energy to the room as an undiluted concentrate, playing distorted, tension-ratcheting desert blues and dance music from the West African coast.Her songs are mostly in Bambara, which she sings over tightly riveted rhythms drawn from the Wassoulou region of Mali or the highlife tradition of Ghana. She, too, insisted on the right to remain partly unknown. “Many people told me, ‘Why don’t you sing in English?’” she mused between songs. “I don’t need to sing in English to connect with you guys!” A roar rose up to agree, but the point was already proved.Fatoumata Diawara performed with a band featuring Sam Dickey on bass and Victor Campbell on drums.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesDiawara did one song in English: “Sinnerman,” the old spiritual and Nina Simone staple. By the time the quintet reached a canter, many in the crowd had stood up to dance, and those still in their seats seemed to have loosened up completely. It rearranged the energy in the room, made it unrulier. Not long after, in an encore, she pulled up about 10 audience members to dance with her, and the disarray spread to the stage.There was nothing blatantly futuristic about Diawara’s performance, and she was one of a few artists on the bill who have not made a point of nominally affiliating themselves with Afrofuturism. But it felt unbounded, in a way that made you think about how tightly energy like this is often asked to be kept in when it’s not onstage.By contrast, the flutist Nicole Mitchell often does compose for her Black Earth Ensemble with the science-fiction writings of Octavia Butler in mind. Mitchell and her band gave one of the most consistently breathtaking performances of the festival. Mixing Mitchell’s streaked, blustery flute and echoing effects with the inchoate, chewed-up speech sounds of Mankwe Ndosi; the earthy, shifting beats of the drummer Avreeayl Ra; and the contributions of a small crowd of acoustic instrumentalists, this was music with drive and narrative of its own, but it seemed to make every move in anticipation of something far grander to come. That grand thing never quite arrived, which also felt right.The Detroit techno luminary Carl Craig led a group that included four fellow synthesizer artists and a concert pianist, all playing together, and just about everything they did was grandiose. He leaned into fan favorites from the 1990s, and delivered a key insight during his stage banter: Most of the beats he made as a young person, he said, were crafted with the idea that they might one day become the soundtrack to a “Blade Runner” movie.The Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble performed grandiose versions of fan favorites from his early days.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOpening the festival on Feb. 12, Flying Lotus, who may be Craig’s best-known heir, played a sold-out show at the nearly 3,000-seat Stern Auditorium, flanked by the harpist Brandee Younger and the violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Draped in a white robe, and huddled over what looked like an ice sculpture crowned with a laptop, he ran through new and old material, heaving from agitated beats to wide-open airscapes that the three musicians gradually curved and bent. Abstract projections crawled across the ceiling; the elegant molding overhead became electric goo.The term “Afrofuturism” was coined by the (white) cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, the year Ra died, in a series of interviews he’d conducted with Black writers: Samuel R. Delany, a novelist; Tricia Rose, a hip-hop scholar; and Greg Tate, a music and cultural critic. Those interviews, for a special edition of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, are revealing in a number of ways. In them, Dery framed the proposition of Afrofuturism as a conundrum. “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” he wondered.But Tate — an expert across the fields of jazz, film, comics, Black history and cultural studies — countered, pointing out: “You can be backward-looking and forward-thinking at the same time.” In fact, that very action sits at the center of Black cultural practice, especially in music. “I see science fiction as continuing a vein of philosophical inquiry and technological speculation that begins with the Egyptians and their incredibly detailed meditations on life after death,” Tate said.Shelley Nicole of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber steps to center stage.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesTate’s sudden death in December at 64 sent a chill through the world of arts and letters. Writing since the early 1980s for The Village Voice and other publications, he had been the rare figure who could comfortably present the patois and perspective of everyday Black life to a mainstream (read: white) audience, without any act of translation or dilution. His presence at the festival would have been meaningful.His shadow loomed generously instead. And for the festival’s closing night on Sunday, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, the genre-stirring big band that Tate co-founded in the late 1990s, played two sets of thrashing, syncopated music: five vocalists, seven horn players, two drummers and two bassists, all in the flow. Bringing the show to a close, the guitarist Vernon Reid delivered a last homage to Tate. Reid and the band chanted Tate’s phone number back and forth, and he asked over and over: “Whose band is this?”“Tate’s!”Reid continued: “He wanted you to make a sound. If you made a sound from your heart, you were in the Burnt Sugar Band.”Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber’s set was in many ways a homage to Tate, its co-founder.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times More