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      Theater Breaks Ties With Ivo van Hove After Report on Bullying

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      An investigation found that a “culture of fear” had developed at the International Theater Amsterdam during the years when the star director led the company.The International Theater Amsterdam said on Wednesday that it had cut ties with Ivo van Hove, the Tony-winning director who led the company for more than 20 years. The breakup was announced just weeks after a report said that a “culture of fear” had developed under van Hove’s leadership and that he allowed bullying to go unchecked.Although van Hove stepped down as the theater’s artistic director last year, he stayed on as a salaried artistic adviser and was scheduled to create new work. A news release this week said that those collaborations had been terminated, and that the theater’s entire supervisory board had resigned.“By taking these steps and creating space for restoration and transparency, the interests and feelings of all involved are taken seriously,” Clayde Menso, the International Theater Amsterdam’s managing director, said in a statement.In July, the International Theater Amsterdam published an independent report that included the results of a survey of 285 current and former employees.The report detailed incidents of bullying and intimidation, including an actress shouting at a member of the technical staff after an error, and a guest director acting similarly toward actors. Many of the survey’s respondents said they did not feel safe at the company.Last week, the NRC newspaper published its own investigation into the theater’s backstage culture. In the article, an actress said a colleague had grabbed her by the throat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      7 Days in the Cultural Life of an Artistic Director

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      Violaine Huisman, who leads programming for the Crossing the Line festival, takes in dance on Little Island, a world premiere at Asia Society and “invigorating” translation projects.Bastille Day felt a little bit different this year than others, said Violaine Huisman, the artistic director of New York’s annual Crossing the Line festival. L’Alliance, the French cultural center in Midtown, throws a party every July 14, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. This year, the celebration took place just one week after a surprising snap election left President Emmanuel Macron — and France — in a state of flux.“I overheard onlookers wondering out loud whether it was a French tradition to demonstrate with blank signs on that day,” recalled Huisman, who had just been in the country to witness the upset in the streets. (Many participants in this year’s festival opted to carry blank placards in homage to a demonstration created by the choreographer Anna Halprin during the civil rights and antiwar protests of the 1960s.)During these times of uncertainty, many look to art for clarity and guidance. Huisman, 45, is certainly one of those people, as she has been hard at work curating programming for the next Crossing the Line, which kicks off several weeks of art, dance and theater on Sept. 5.Ahead of the festival, Huisman tracked a few days of her cultural life, noting some of the performances, books and music, mostly from her native France, that inspired her. Here are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.“I overheard onlookers wondering out loud whether it was a French tradition to demonstrate with blank signs on that day,” Huisman said.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesSunday: Placards for PeaceWe celebrated Bastille Day at L’Alliance with a street fair and an amazing piece of performance art, in which two dozen volunteers carrying blank placards engaged in a procession through Midtown, trailed by a marching band. It was a re-enactment by Anne Collod of Anna Halprin’s “Blank Placard Dance.” Volunteers asked audience members what they would march for. “Peace” was the overwhelming response.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      He Wants People Restarting Their Lives to See Themselves Onstage

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      Tarell Alvin McCraney, the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, is focused on bringing marginalized people to the theater.At a time when nonprofit theaters are still recovering from the pandemic shutdown and are looking to connect with their communities, Tarell Alvin McCraney is looking in unorthodox places: prisons, homeless shelters and the foster care system.One year into his tenure as the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, McCraney, 43, doesn’t just want to expand his audience, he wants the theater to be a place where the marginalized and struggling see themselves onstage and feel welcome.“The first thing we do is make sure that they can see plays that reflect their lives,” McCraney said in a recent interview, “plays that deal with folks who are in the system, formerly incarcerated, trying to rebuild their lives.”It is with this priority in mind that McCraney decided to start this season with his own play, “The Brothers Size,” which began previews Aug. 14 and explores the complicated but loving relationship between Oshoosi, just out of prison, and his older brother Ogun. The Geffen has offered free tickets to “populations impacted by incarceration” through its Theater as a Lens for Justice initiative, which McCraney started shortly after his arrival.The Geffen, which has an annual operating budget of about $15 million and a staff of 45 full-time employees, will do the same with its upcoming productions of “Waiting for Godot,” which opens in November, and “Furlough’s Paradise,” which opens next April.These types of outreach efforts might not necessarily translate into ticket sales. But nonprofit theaters all over the country are eager to build their audiences at a time when subscriptions have declined; the Mark Taper theater in Los Angeles suspended productions last year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Edinburgh Fringe, There Are 2 Plays About Gwyneth Paltrow

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      Multiple shows at the Edinburgh Fringe make camp fun out of the 2023 civil action that spurred a thousand memes — and one of them is a triumph.Terry Sanderson, a retired optometrist, was unsuccessful when he sued the actress turned wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow over a collision on a Utah ski slope. Though he claimed that she had crashed into him, a jury determined it was actually his fault. The live-streamed 2023 civil case was an unseemly but strangely fascinating spectacle featuring two equally dislikable archetypes: the vexatious litigant and the preening, out-of-touch celebrity.But in another sense, Sanderson won: His name is now forever etched into pop culture folklore, as not one but two new stage productions about the ski trial at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe attest.In “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” Sanderson’s vibe is that of a spurned lover.Jonny RuffThe more rough and ready of the two, “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” at the Pleasance Courtyard, is a camp burlesque in which both parties are mercilessly skewered. Linus Karp, in drag, plays Paltrow with the drawling malice of a pantomime witch. She’s an entitled girlboss whose altruistic affectations mask a sociopathic character, while Joseph Martin as Sanderson is dull mediocrity personified. The characters’ partners are played by plucky audience volunteers, aided by a teleprompter, and Kristin VanOrman, Sanderson’s lawyer, is represented as star-struck and hopelessly incompetent by a disheveled ventriloquist’s dummy, voiced by Martin.In this telling, both Sanderson and his lawyer are driven not so much by monetary greed as by a pathetic desire to connect with Paltrow. They are moths to the flame of celebrity, and Sanderson’s vibe is that of a spurned lover. There are snowball fights, some jousting with skis and snatches of music. When Paltrow utters the immortal line that spurred a thousand memes, “I lost half a day of skiing,” the stage lighting switches to a deep red to emphasize the severity of her plight. At the end of the show, the audience gets to be the jury, voting via QR code to decide who wins.Linus Karp as Paltrow, with Kristin VanOrman, Sanderson’s lawyer, played by a puppet.Jonny RuffWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Ruhrtriennale, Searching for the Sublime Among the Ruins

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      In the abandoned industrial sites that serve as the festival’s venues, our critic witnessed beauty struggling to be born: fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly.“I Want Absolute Beauty,” the title of the opening production for this year’s Ruhrtriennale, sounds like a mission statement of sorts.The event, one of Germany’s major arts festivals, lights up the former industrial sites that dot the Ruhr region, in the country’s northwest — though hulking power plants and abandoned steelworks aren’t where you necessarily expect to find beauty. Then again, this 22-year-old festival has always been about letting audiences encounter the sublime among the ruins. Everywhere I turned during the Ruhrtriennale’s opening weekend, I witnessed beauty struggling — fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly — to be born.This summer, the Ruhrtriennale welcomes a new artistic leader, the acclaimed Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove. His three-season tenure kicked off on Friday night with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” a staged cycle of songs by the English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey that van Hove has created for the German actress Sandra Hüller, presented at the Jahrhunderthalle, a former power station in the city of Bochum.Hüller, best-known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Anatomy of a Fall,” gives gutsy and full-throated renditions of 26 of Harvey’s songs accompanied by a four-person band. It’s a heroic performance over an intermission-less hour and a half. Van Hove doesn’t impose a narrative, in the style of jukebox musicals, but a journey of sorts can be followed through the titles (“Dorset” — “London” — “New York”) that appear on a screen where both live and prerecorded video is projected throughout the evening.The stage area is covered in dirt, and dancers twirl, writhe and gyrate around Hüller. The choreography, by the collective (La)Horde, is earthy and elemental, sometimes joyous and liberating, but often menacing and with hints of sexual violence. Hüller is always front and center, her voice tough but with an edge of fragility. Sometimes she joins the dancers in their primeval thrashing. The results can be exhilarating but are just as often exasperating. Despite the high caliber of the performances, it’s easy to lose interest. Occasionally there’s an earsplitting crescendo or blinding flood light to jolt us back to attention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s the Next ‘Baby Reindeer’? Maybe Francesca Moody Has the Script.

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      Francesca Moody has put on some of the Edinburgh Fringe’s biggest breakout hits. This year, she has three shows that she’s hoping will go global.One day in fall 2018, the British theater producer Francesca Moody was rummaging around in her bag for something to read during a train ride when she found a script she’d been meaning to look at for weeks.Glancing at its first page, she read a scene in which a man logs onto his voice mail. “You have 50 new messages,” the cellphone’s robotic voice says. The messages are all from a woman named Martha.For the rest of the train journey, Moody couldn’t take her eyes off the script of “Baby Reindeer,” a one-man play about a comedian’s struggles with a female stalker who he occasionally, with self-destructive results, encourages.“It was just a thriller,” Moody recalled in a recent interview. “And what was amazing was it wasn’t a normal victim-perpetrator narrative. It was about all the gray areas in between.”When the train reached its destination about an hour later, Moody didn’t get up. She stayed in the empty carriage to devour the script’s final pages. By then, Moody recalled, she’d already decided two things: That she had to produce this play, and it had to be at Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the best place in Britain to generate buzz for new plays and musicals by lesser-known writers.Success there, she knew, could propel the show to success in London. Maybe in New York, too. Although at that moment, she couldn’t predict that “Baby Reindeer” would also secure a Netflix deal and 11 Emmy nominations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Project That Celebrates Collaboration and Cooperation

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      For T Magazine, Kate Guadagnino set out to identify the many people involved in creating a single object or artistic work, including a luxury handbag, a performance piece, a pizza and more.The price tag on a particular Bottega Veneta leather bag is eye-popping: $15,000.But when you consider the number of people (more than 30), the amount of time (more than a year) and all the fair and exhibition visits (dozens) behind the creation of the bag, “it’s easier to accept it being expensive,” said Kate Guadagnino, a contributing writer for T: The New York Times Style Magazine.Ms. Guadagnino recently spent about two months chronicling the resource- and labor-intensive processes to make five objects or artistic works, including a plant-based chair, a nine-hour stage performance and a potato pizza. The resulting project, which was published online last week, appears in T Magazine this Sunday.Like the items whose production Ms. Guadagnino documented, the series also required a team effort: It took more than 20 editors, researchers, photographers and others over three months to produce. Nick Haramis, an editor at large at T Magazine who spearheaded the project, said that the five items were whittled down from 47 initial ideas.“The ones that were most compelling were either exceptionally intricate — like the ‘Spirited Away’ puppets — or seemingly simple, like Dan Barber’s slice of pizza,” he said. “The goal was that by including those extremes we might land on something unexpected and fun.”In an interview, Ms. Guadagnino reflected on what she learned from her reporting and how it changed the way she thinks about pricing. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You interviewed 18 people for this project. With so many people involved in the production of these items and works, where did you begin?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sydney Lemmon Puts the Twisted Humanity Behind Tech on Broadway

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      After a small part in “Succession,” the actor has a breakout role in “Job,” in which she plays a content moderator having a mental breakdown.Jane is a young professional living in the Bay Area whom you might find at SoulCycle. The actor Sydney Lemmon has taken that description of her character in “Job” with a grain of salt.The young woman she is presenting to Broadway audiences is not a stereotypical millennial. Instead, Lemmon’s Jane is a formidable vessel of reckless passion, someone who has been shaped by the corporate grind of a Silicon Valley job monitoring the heinous acts that people upload onto social media. She is a self-described “Xanax girlie” white knuckling her way through a mandated therapy session meant to determine whether she is ready to return to work after a psychological breakdown that went viral.Oh, and Jane has a gun, too.“She loves her job,” Lemmon said last week during an interview in her dressing room at the Helen Hayes Theater in Midtown Manhattan. “But the thing that most people seem to connect with when I talk to them at the stage door is her feeling of isolation.”Lemmon has played the character for more than a year, charting an unlikely path in a hit commercial production nearly seven years after she first appeared on Broadway, following her graduation from the Yale School of Drama. Smaller roles in film and television — including a short run on the acclaimed HBO series “Succession” — helped raise her profile within the industry; theater, however, is where she has developed a cult following.Lemmon and Peter Friedman in “Job,” which is running through Oct. 27 at the Helen Hayes Theater.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times“All of the show was crafted around Sydney,” said Michael Herwitz, the production’s director.“When we cast her, she was absolutely not what we thought we wanted,” he recalled. “We thought Jane was going to be someone demure, a petite white woman who graduated college two years ago and wouldn’t necessarily pose a physical threat.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More