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      BAM Artistic Director David Binder to Step Down in July

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      Binder, who was a Broadway producer before joining the nonprofit in 2019, plans to return to theater’s commercial sector.David Binder, the artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will step down in July, as the venerable institution faces ongoing turnover and the challenge of pandemic-era rebuilding after decades of stability in its leadership team.BAM, which began presenting work in 1861 and describes itself as the nation’s oldest performing arts center, long played a key role in New York’s cultural life, presenting adventurous theater, film, music and dance from artists around the world. But the institution was quieter than some at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and Binder’s departure will follow the 2021 exit of the institution’s president, Katy Clark, and the 2020 death of its board chairman, Adam Max.Binder joined BAM as artistic director in 2019, making his tenure significantly shorter than those of his two predecessors, Joseph V. Melillo, who spent 35 years at the institution, and Harvey Lichtenstein, who led BAM’s artistic work for 32 years.Similarly, on the institution’s executive side, Clark left BAM after five years in the post (keeping an apartment the institution helped her purchase); she had succeeded Karen Brooks Hopkins, who had spent 36 years at the institution, including 16 as president. BAM’s current president is Gina Duncan, who started just last year, after a year in which that position was vacant.Binder, who had been producing Broadway shows as well as arts festivals before joining the institution, said he was leaving voluntarily and is planning to return to commercial producing after leading the nonprofit’s artistic programming through the upheaval of the pandemic as well as the change in the organization’s executive staff.BAM said Binder would continue to consult for the organization until next January as it searches for a new artistic leader. Binder began working with Melillo when his appointment was announced in early 2018.“I feel like I’ve accomplished what I set out to do there, and I want to get back to making work and producing work,” Binder said in an interview. “I want to keep growing.”Duncan characterized the transition similarly, saying, “David decided to move on, and I appreciate him letting me know now.” She added, “We have a strong team in place, and I have time to do a search and find someone to be my artistic partner.”Binder’s departure comes as many performing arts institutions around the nation are seeing turnover at the top — New York’s theater leaders have tended to hang on longer than most, which is a source of criticism as well as stability, but there is wholesale change unfolding in San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere.Binder, who is 55, has drawn some buzzy work to BAM, which primarily presents shows developed by other companies.Last year’s pandemic-delayed production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which starred James McAvoy and transferred from London, was both a critical and a popular success, becoming the best-selling show in the history of the BAM Harvey Theater. And this month, BAM was the only institution with two shows on The New York Times’s list of things critics are looking forward to this year: the theater critic Jesse Green wrote about anticipating a production of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan in the starring roles, and the dance critic Gia Kourlas wrote hopefully about BAM’s U.S. premiere of Pina Bausch’s “Água,” a piece created two decades ago in Brazil.Binder arrived at BAM saying he wanted to bring in new artists — his first Next Wave festival there, in 2019, featured only artists who had not previously performed there. Over the course of his tenure, Binder said he will have presented more than 50 debuts of artistic companies as well as solo performers.Ticket sales during his time have generally exceeded projections; BAM says it is attracting new audiences, and there have been multiple programming highlights: Simon Stone’s “Medea” adaptation, produced by BAM, starring Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale; a new spring music series, curated last year by Hanif Abdurraqib and this year by Solange; and an annual artist residency program.“Through the pandemic and through the leadership changes, I feel that the team and I at BAM have stayed focused on putting fantastic work on our stages, and when we couldn’t do it on our stages, we did it outdoors or site-specific or virtually. And the work we’ve done has been really successful,” he said. “We always tried to mix it up: We had the National Theater of Korea’s opera of ‘Trojan Women,’ and ‘Kiki and Herb Sleigh’; we had the Lithuanian opera ‘Sun & Sea,’ which won the Golden Lion at Venice; and we also hosted the world premiere of Madonna’s ‘Madame X’ tour.”In the commercial arena, Binder is best known as the lead producer of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which won the Tony Award for best musical revival in 2014. Binder said that he would soon announce that “Hedwig” was “finally coming to the West End in a big way.”Beyond “Hedwig,” Binder is among a handful of commercial producers who have continued to focus on the production of plays, which tend to be riskier than musicals. He says he plans to resume work on his longtime effort to bring the German director Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “An Enemy of the People” to Broadway. (Last fall, Binder brought Ostermeier’s “Hamlet” to BAM; that production was in German, but “An Enemy of the People” would be presented in English.)Binder said he was also working with the innovative British director Jamie Lloyd, who helmed the “Cyrano” revival at BAM, to develop a new play that he was not yet ready to describe.BAM, like other arts organizations, shrank during the height of the pandemic, but is now nearly back to where it was, according to a spokeswoman: Its current annual budget is $56 million, up from $55 million prepandemic; it has 222 full-time staff positions, down from 256; its most recent Next Wave festival had 13 shows, down from 16 prepandemic; and last spring, BAM presented 17 shows, up from 16 during the final prepandemic spring.“I think we’re doing as well as one can, given the circumstances of the world,” Duncan said. “We’ve had some success in audience growth, and our membership numbers are starting to increase again. Everything is heading in the right direction, and now it’s a matter of time.” More

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      Film Forum Director Karen Cooper to Step Down After 50 Years

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      Karen Cooper, who took over the nonprofit cinema in 1972 and transformed it into a $6 million-a-year operation, will step down in July after five decades.When Karen Cooper took over Film Forum in 1972, the theater was a projector and 50 folding chairs in a loft on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, showing what were then known as underground films. The annual budget was $19,000. Cooper projected the films — sometimes herself — on a single 16-millimeter machine no larger than a microwave.“I’d say to someone, ‘I show independent films,’ and they’d say, ‘You mean pornography?’” Cooper, 74, recalled with a laugh in a recent conversation at the nonprofit art house cinema’s offices, now located across the street from the theater in Greenwich Village.But now, Cooper, who has become synonymous with Film Forum — which has grown into a four-screen space with a $6 million-a-year budget and an influence that reaches far beyond New York City — is stepping down from the director role she’s filled for half a century, the organization announced on Monday.“I’ve thought about this for years,” said Cooper, whose last day will be June 30, though she will remain on staff as an adviser. “I wanted to have a smooth transition.”Succeeding her will be Sonya Chung, 49, the theater’s deputy director, who began working at Film Forum in 2003 as the director of development. Chung, who has a master’s degree in fiction writing from the University of Washington, in Seattle, left in 2007 to write and publish two novels (she also taught literature and writing for three years at Columbia University and for nine years at Skidmore College, both in New York). She returned in 2018 as a programming consultant and a member of the advisory committee, and was hired as deputy director in February 2020.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.Jostling for Best Picture: Weighing voter buzz, box office results and more, here’s an educated guess about the likely nominees for best picture.“Sonya has great taste and a way of articulating it,” Cooper said. “It immediately occurred to me when I met her — unbeknownst to Sonya — that she had the ability to be the director of the theater.”Cooper has been the director of Film Forum since 1972.Emma Howells/The New York TimesCooper was a newly minted 23-year-old Smith College graduate when she took over the theater founded by two film buffs, Peter Feinstein and Sandy Miller, in 1970. Over her 50-year tenure, she built a beloved cultural institution that has introduced the work of now-prominent filmmakers to American audiences, earning the affection of critics and patrons alike.She has led the theater through three relocations — Film Forum moved to its current space on West Houston Street in 1989 — and oversaw a $5 million expansion and renovation in 2018 that upgraded the seating, legroom and sightlines in all screening rooms and added a fourth, which increased the venue’s capacity to nearly 500 seats.Cooper said she was most proud of working to broaden the scope of Film Forum’s programming, introducing audiences to major German filmmakers of the 1970s like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. She was also honored to have programmed the New York premieres of ambitious documentaries such as “Asylum,” Peter Robinson’s 1972 look inside the psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s therapeutic community of people with schizophrenia living together in a group home in London; and Spike Lee’s “Four Little Girls” (1997), about the children killed in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala.It’s the meticulously curated slate of new films — which Cooper, Chung and the artistic director Mike Maggiore map out on a dry erase board in the cinema’s offices as far as six months in advance — that serves as part of the draw for Film Forum’s approximately 200,000 visitors each year, along with a robust lineup of classic films programmed by the repertory artistic director Bruce Goldstein, a concession stand menu of decadent baked goods and a robust lineup of talkbacks with filmmakers.Chung says the biggest challenge facing Film Forum, which is one of the few theaters regularly to feature independent movies in New York, is competition from streaming services. It can be tough, she said, to convince people who’ve become used to watching at home to bundle up, take the subway to the theater and pay $15 for a night out.One solution, she said, is creating a memorable experience that people can’t get anywhere else. They recently hosted Q. and A. events with the filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb, who directed the documentary “Turn Every Page — The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” and the film’s subject, the book editor and her father Robert Gottlieb; as well as with the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose dark tale about the life of a donkey, “EO,” has been shortlisted for an Academy Award. Both events sold out, she said.“Especially post-pandemic, when we have so much streaming overload, younger people are antsy for an IRL experience,” she said, using the acronym for “in real life.”Chung also wants to cultivate a younger and more diverse audience, with a particular focus on people of color from outside the theater’s white, more affluent neighborhood. For the last several years, she has created a young members program and developed partnerships with cultural and community-based organizations like Girls Write Now, a creative writing and mentoring nonprofit for young people from underserved communities in New York City; and ArteEast, a nonprofit that presents work by contemporary artists from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas.And now, starting this month, the theater’s internship program — which places three college students each semester in roles in the theater’s repertory program, outreach and administration departments — will be paid.“We decided we should pay them in order to attract a more diverse group of young people to be able to work here,” Chung said.As for Cooper, a longtime resident of the far West Village who walks to work each day, she will remain an active member of the organization’s programming team. She’ll continue to represent Film Forum at the Berlin and Amsterdam film festivals. She intends to maintain her schedule of watching at least 500 films per year. She’ll continue to focus on fund-raising for the nonprofit, which raises approximately $3 million of its operating budget each year.“I never thought I’d stay here 50 years,” she said. “But where would I go? What do they say — the hedgehog knows one thing, the fox knows many things?“I’m a hedgehog,” she said. “I know one thing — how to run a movie theater.” More

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      Daniel Barenboim, Titan of Conducting, to Step Down in Berlin

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      The 80-year-old conductor, citing poor health, said he would resign as general music director of the Berlin State Opera after three decades.Daniel Barenboim, a towering conductor and pianist who as general music director of the Berlin State Opera over the past three decades built an artistic empire without rival and helped define German culture in the aftermath of reunification, will resign his post this month because of health problems, the opera house announced on Friday.Barenboim, 80, who was diagnosed last year with a serious neurological condition, said in a statement that his illness made it impossible for him to carry out his duties.“Unfortunately, my health has deteriorated significantly over the past year,” he said. “I can no longer provide the level of performance that is rightly demanded of a general music director.” His resignation is effective Jan. 31.Barenboim, one of classical music’s biggest stars, had hoped to return to his famously frenzied schedule this year. But the ongoing uncertainty of his condition placed strains on the State Opera — the company was left scrambling to find substitutes, including for a highly anticipated new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle last fall — and made it difficult to find a path forward.Matthias Schulz, the State Opera’s director, said that the company was grateful to Barenboim, who turned the Staatskapelle Berlin (the pit orchestra of the State Opera) into one of the world’s most revered ensembles.But, Schulz said, it had become increasingly clear that Barenboim could not be the stable figure the musicians needed, noting that he appeared with the company less than 10 times in 2022, compared with more than 50 times in previous years.“He took responsibility for the fact that he just cannot be sure what he really can fulfill,” Schulz said in an interview.Barenboim was unavailable for comment, a spokeswoman for the opera house said.Born to Jewish parents in Argentina, Barenboim has been a fixture in the German artistic and political scene for decades and has helped define the country’s modern culture since the reunification of East and West Germany. In 1989, three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he led the Berlin Philharmonic in a concert dedicated to the citizens of East Germany.He has become an influential public figure in Germany and beyond. In 1999, along with the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. he created the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, providing a forum for young Arab and Israeli musicians to play together.Klaus Lederer, Berlin’s senator for culture, called Barenboim “an artist of the century and one of the most remarkable personalities working in Berlin.” He said in a statement that stepping down was the right choice, even though it was not easy for Barenboim.“His decision was made in a reflective manner; it puts the well-being of the State Opera and the Staatskapelle Berlin in the foreground,” Lederer said. “All of this deserves the greatest respect.”During his tenure in Berlin, Barenboim brought the Staatskapelle to new heights, frequently leading international tours and securing hundreds of millions of euros in government grants to finance his ambitions. He co-founded a music conservatory, the Barenboim-Said Akademie, which opened in 2016. He persuaded officials to build the Pierre Boulez Saal, a Frank Gehry-designed hall housed in the same building as the conservatory, which opened in 2017. And he pushed a costly renovation of the opera house’s main theater, which was finished that same year. The State Opera now has 587 employees and a budget of more than 81.4 million euros ($86.6 million).There have been troubles along the way, but Barenboim maintained his grip on power. In 2019, members of the Staatskapelle accused him of bullying; later that year, though, the opera house, saying that it could not verify the accusations, extended his contract through 2027.He seemed set to reign indefinitely in Berlin, but health woes forced him to cancel performances last spring and summer as he recovered from surgery and grappled with circulatory issues. In October, having disclosed his neurological condition, he said he was taking time off to “focus on my physical well-being as much as possible.” He canceled his participation in the new “Ring,” a herculean undertaking seven years in the making that had been built around him, as well as a planned tour in Asia with the Staatskapelle and a concert in Berlin in November to celebrate his 80th birthday.As he rested at home, he initially resisted resigning his post and told friends and family that he planned to return to the podium. But even as he kept up some appearances, attending rehearsals and teaching classes in Berlin, his ability to lead the opera house full time grew increasingly uncertain.On New Year’s Eve, he appeared to be making steps toward recovery when he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin while sitting down. But critics noted that he at times seemed unsteady and did not deliver remarks to the audience, as he sometimes does on such occasions.His future activity at the podium is uncertain, but this week, he is scheduled to conduct three concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic and the pianist Martha Argerich, a childhood friend, though in an altered, less physically demanding program. It is unclear whether he will reduce his commitments at the Divan Orchestra, the conservatory or the Pierre Boulez Saal.Barenboim’s resignation will mark the end of an era at the State Opera. Schulz said it was too early to know when the company might name a successor.“There’s no need to rush it,” Schulz said. “It’s more important that this institution makes the right decision for the future, and it’s absolutely possible to take time for that.”But it may prove challenging to find a figure of Barenboim’s stature. The Staatskapelle’s musicians have likened their three-decade relationship with him to a marriage.“There are not so many people at the moment who can run an opera house of this size and reputation coming out of the era of Barenboim,” said Manuel Brug, a cultural critic in Germany. “It’s unique that somebody stayed for 30 years and had the possibility to form something like this. It will be hard to follow.”Barenboim said in his statement on Friday that his time at the opera house had inspired him “musically and personally in every respect.” He hoped to continue conducting at the State Opera, he added. He will retain the honorary title of principal conductor for life, conferred on him by the musicians.“Of course, I will remain closely connected to music,” he said, “as long as I live.” More

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      A Music Historian Takes a Top Job at the New York Public Library

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      Brent Reidy, the new director of Research Libraries, said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old library by reaching a younger generation.The New York Public Library on Thursday named Brent Reidy as director of its Research Libraries, putting the 40-year-old music historian at the helm of four vast public research centers whose holdings encompass 17th-century Shakespeare folios and sheet music belonging to Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie and Mozart.Reidy, who has been serving as interim director since William P. Kelly retired in April, will preside over the collection, acquisition and preservation strategies at the Research Libraries, which have a budget of $145 million and welcome four million visitors a year. The position gives him an outsized voice on the direction of national humanities research.An amateur jazz pianist who unwinds by playing John Coltrane, Reidy said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old institution by appealing to a new generation of library goers. Among his priorities, he said, is the continued digitization of the Research Libraries’ holdings, which has become even more imperative during the coronavirus pandemic as users gravitated online. Attendance at the Research Libraries was 30 percent below the average attendance before the pandemic and had not yet returned to prepandemic levels, he added, a challenge facing cultural institutions across the country.“I want people to realize that you don’t need to be a tenured professor with a Ph.D. to have access to our collections — you just need a library card,” he said in an interview.Reidy has been an ardent supporter of federal funding for the arts. During the Trump administration, he criticized its attempt to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, citing former President John F. Kennedy’s assertion that artistic freedom was essential to nourish American culture.Reidy will be responsible for four public research centers — the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Yoseloff Business Center — which collectively have 47 million items in their collections. Among their treasures are Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence; an original Gutenberg Bible from 1455; an unpublished chapter from Malcolm X’s autobiography and an extensive James Baldwin archive.Among the treasures at the library’s research centers is Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence.Robert Kato/New York Public LibraryReidy studied music at Dartmouth College before earning a Ph.D. in Musicology from Indiana University, where he explored national cultural policy under the Kennedy administration, the subject of an upcoming book. Every week, he makes a pilgrimage to the library’s collection of manuscripts and scores belonging to John Cage, the eminent American composer of Minimalist music. “It helps me to de-stress,” he said.A native of Scotia, a village in Schenectady County, N.Y., Reidy said his passion for libraries and books was first ignited as a boy when he would go to the Schenectady County Public Library. With the encouragement of his father, he recalled that he bought about 1,200 LPs from the library, including classical and jazz albums, which he cataloged in the basement of his childhood home. More

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      in Theater

      Anne Bogart Is Not Entirely Retiring

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      The theater director Anne Bogart first made a splash with the radical student productions she put on while teaching at New York University in the early 1980s. Her “South Pacific” (1984), for example, was conceived as the show that veterans in a mental institution performed as part of their therapy. Legend has it that the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate snuffed out the production, but Bogart clarified that it simply denied an extension. “It’s more dramatic to say they shut us down,” she said, chuckling.Under Bogart’s leadership, the New York City-based Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI) Company, formed by a group of artists in 1992, spent three decades exploring experimental outposts in both original creations like “Bob,” “The Medium” and “Hotel Cassiopeia” and re-imaginings of classics, often by ancient Greek playwrights.The group’s emphasis was on rigorous actor training and the performers’ physicality. Bogart’s approach involves “decentering emotion and re-centering the body,” said Jay Wegman, the director of N.Y.U. Skirball, which presented SITI’s “Radio Macbeth” last month. “I love how metaphorical her work is. It becomes an event, and there’s almost a mystical feeling because everything comes together so tightly in her stagings.”Now, SITI is ending its producing activities. “It came down to whether we are an institution — in which case you get a younger, more diverse company and a young artistic director — or a group of people,” Bogart, 71, said. “After a great deal of quite emotional discussion, we decided that we’re a group of people. I think that the legacy is more how we offer a model for future young companies: a collaborative ensemble whose focus is not on real estate but on the plays they do.”Bogart, center, with Kelly Maurer as Andy Warhol in a 1990s production of “Culture of Desire.” Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesBogart is not entirely retiring. She will remain a professor in Columbia University’s directing program, whose alumni include Rachel Chavkin, Jay Scheib, Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page, until 2026. She will also continue to direct on a freelance basis.Although SITI is presenting “A Christmas Carol” at Bard College (spearheaded by the co-director Darron L West) from Dec. 16-18, this felt like a good time to look back, especially since the company’s digital archives are going live on its website on Nov. 15, and a book, “SITI Company: This Is Not a Handbook,” is due soon via Yonkers International Press. Bogart spoke in a video chat from London shortly after the latest (and last) SITI gala. The event prefaced a revival of the company’s production of “War of the Worlds” and turned into a heartfelt tribute to the director. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What were some of the fundamental things that you all agreed on when starting SITI?The actors met at a diner and asked each other: “What does it mean to be a SITI Company member?” Every year they renewed that question, and they always had the same answer: We train together. It’s the cement that’s kept us going over time. Not only do they train together and learn together, but they teach that training, which makes sure they have a paycheck year-round. My own proposal to them was that I had all these theatrical essays I wanted to create. We didn’t expect it to last as long as it did, but I did need a group of people who would work together over time and solve problems together.How did you manage your freelance activities with SITI?I do a lot of opera outside. I always felt that was the least stressful for SITI Company: If I’m going to do opera, nobody can complain, because they can’t sing like opera singers. I still have a big appetite for all those things. That hasn’t changed.Where did you find inspiration when you started out?I came to New York in 1974, at the end of the Judson Church era, and I was very influenced by dance. It was also the explosion of theater companies like the Performance Group, which later became the Wooster Group, André Gregory’s Manhattan Project, Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater, and with the crazy work of Richard Foreman and the big wild things of Bob Wilson. I was also completely in love with German theater — particularly Peter Stein, Klaus Michael Grüber, Luc Bondy — and I stole from them a lot.Bogart with her wife, Rena Chelouche Fogel, in October at the Laurie Beechman Theater.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesIs that why you temporarily moved to Europe in the early 1980s?I decided I hated Americans and I was going to be German. But what I discovered is that I’m actually very American: I have an American sense of humor, an American sense of structure. And I’m really interested in American history — a lot of my work since then has been about Americans like Orson Welles, Bob Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell.What are some of the big theatrical trends you’ve seen coming and going over the past decades?I was part of the generation who just admired directors. I used to follow Bob Wilson and Lee Breuer on the street! Then I noticed that people weren’t naming directors, they were naming companies, like Complicité, for example. That lasted for about a decade. Now the revolution is happening in playwriting, where extraordinary new voices are challenging the old forms. “An Octoroon” — that’s a radical play. So it’s gone from director to company to playwright.How have theater directors themselves changed?I’m surprised by how little they are interested in the regional theater. We have these theater factories around the country that used to be where everybody wanted to go, and it’s not so attractive right now. What is attractive are the art centers, and SITI Company has lived in the realm of the art centers, like the Krannert, the Walker, the Hancher, U.C.L.A. Directors like Rachel Chavkin or Diane Paulus are also looking at commercial models in new ways. When I was younger Broadway was not of interest to me, but the young directors are intrigued.What do you make of theater in the Covid era?We’re in a very interesting moment. The wonderful Scottish philosopher William MacAskill has a theory that every time there’s a cataclysmic event, there’s a period of plasticity in which change happens, and then soon afterwards we clamp down into a new accepted way of being. I think we’re in that moment of plasticity. What comes out on the other side? You or I can’t know.Whose work do you like these days?I got really interested in the work of Stan Lai, a Taiwanese director who’s rethinking the way audiences and plays function. I’m always interested in what Ivo van Hove is thinking about. I have a hate/love relationship with [Romeo] Castellucci: I cannot stand his work most of the time, but I have to deal with it. I guess what I’m looking for is somebody throwing down the gauntlet.“I got really interested in the work of Stan Lai, a Taiwanese director who’s rethinking the way audiences and plays function,” Bogart said.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesDo you think there’s been a renewed interest in the relationship between audiences and theater, especially since Covid?I think that’s what the frontier is right now. My friend [and one of SITI’s artistic directors] Leon Ingulsrud went to the theater the other day. I asked how it was and he said, “Not so good — the actors never said hello to the audience.” I thought that was really interesting. The acknowledgment of that relationship, or how an audience interfaces, is the prize, I think.But how do you do that? Wouldn’t it be distracting?“Bob” [1998] starts with him literally saying hi — there’s a moment of interface, where everybody comes together. In Ivo van Hove’s “More Stately Mansions” [1997] the actors came out onstage, bowed to each other and to the audience, then Joan MacIntosh started speaking at top speed the first monologue of that O’Neill play. I started hearing the thump of people leaving the seats. They just couldn’t stand it. But in a way, that’s also like saying hi. At first I thought, “Damn him, I could never do that — I’m an American, I’m about populist art.”OK, but in all honesty, you’re not really thought of as a populist director.Deep down, yes, it’s in me. It’s how I was brought up. At the beginning of SITI Company we were kind of, “[expletive] the audience.” I don’t feel that at all anymore. I feel that the point of being there is the audience — it’s all about the audience. More

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      Apollo Theater’s Longtime President Will Step Down

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      Jonelle Procope, who transformed the Harlem organization from a struggling nonprofit to an internationally recognized cultural center, will leave in June after two decades in the role.Jonelle Procope, who has served as the president and chief executive of the Apollo Theater in Harlem for nearly 20 years, will step down in June, the theater announced on Tuesday.“The Apollo is in such a strong position now — financially stable, with all the pieces in place for the future,” said Procope, who has led the nonprofit since 2003 after joining as a board member in 1999. “It’s a great time for the next leader to be able to step in and take the Apollo into the future.”Procope has overseen a transformation that has taken the theater from a struggling nonprofit to the largest African American performing arts presenting organization in the country. On Tuesday, the Apollo also announced it had raised $63 million in a capital campaign to fully renovate the 108-year-old building, as well as to support new 99- and 199-seat performance spaces that will be managed by the Apollo at the nearby Victoria Theater and are scheduled to see their first audiences in fall 2023.The renovation of the Apollo Theater is scheduled to begin in spring 2024, with the first cultural programs taking place in spring 2025. Along with a new lobby cafe and bar that will be open to the public, plans include added and upgraded seating, new lighting and audio systems and updates to the building’s exterior.“It was really important for me to complete — or nearly completely reach — that goal before I decided to make the transition,” Procope said of the capital campaign.Over her two decades at the Apollo, Procope, 70, carried out a long-term plan for the restoration and expansion of the theater. She grew the organization’s community and education programs, which served more than 20,000 students, teachers and families each year before the coronavirus pandemic.Procope said she was most proud of the relationships the theater forged with cultural partners such as the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His 2015 book “Between the World and Me,” which explores racial injustice in America, was adapted into a communal performance that had its world premiere at the theater in 2018.Another one of those partnerships was a planned revival of Charles Randolph-Wright’s play “Blue,” which was canceled because of the pandemic; it was set to star Leslie Uggams and Lynn Whitfield with direction by Phylicia Rashad. Procope said that the Apollo was hopeful the production would still happen, but that no plans had yet been made.Charles E. Phillips, the chairman of the Apollo’s board, said a search committee would be formed this fall to begin a national search for Procope’s successor, noting that it would be no easy task.“It’s hard to find leaders like Jonelle who are so consistently good for so long,” Phillips said. “She almost single-handedly turned the Apollo around.” More

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      Two Soho Rep Directors to Leave at End of 2022-23 Season

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      Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who have directed the company with Cynthia Flowers since 2019, will depart to focus more on their own creative output.Soho Rep, the 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan that has long been a home for experimental, formally inventive work, will see a leadership change as Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, two of its three directors, step down at the end of the 2022-23 season.Both Benson and Peponides, who have led the theater alongside Cynthia Flowers since a shared directorship was put into place in 2019, said they were leaving Soho Rep in part to focus more on their own creative work. Benson said she wanted to do more directing, while Peponides said she planned to dedicate more time to Radical Evolution, a producing collective she co-founded in 2011 that focuses on exploring the complexities of the mixed-identity existence.“It came time to make a choice about where to devote my time and energy,” Peponides said. “Doing both was becoming trickier and trickier.”A search committee, led by Soho Rep’s board chair, Victoria Meakin, and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, has been formed to appoint two new directors, Soho Rep said. Peponides and Benson will remain in their roles through the end of the season next summer.Benson, 44, has been with the theater for 15 years, serving as artistic director from 2007 until 2019, when Soho Rep adopted the shared leadership model. During her tenure, she directed the world premieres of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s searing comedy-drama “Fairview,” a co-commission by Soho Rep that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Jacobs-Jenkins’s formally inventive comedy “An Octoroon”; and Lucas Hnath’s black comedy “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.”Peponides, 38, started at the theater as a producer in 2014, producing 18 new plays over her eight years and overseeing Soho Rep’s writer-director lab that is led by the playwrights William Burke and Drury.Under Benson, Peponides and Flowers’s leadership, Soho Rep has worked to improve pay equity through Project Number One, a job creation program developed early in the pandemic that brings artists into the organization each season as salaried staff members with benefits. Two of the three plays in the theater’s 2022-23 season, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury and “The Whitney Album” by Jillian Walker, were written by artists who were in the first class of Project Number One.“We had three world premiere commissions in this year’s season,” Peponides said. “A huge part of the work Sarah and I have been seeding over the past several years is now coming to fruition, so this felt like the moment to step aside and hand it over while it was in great shape.” More

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      Star Maestro With Russian Ties to Depart German Orchestra

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      Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny for his association with a Russian bank, will step down as chief conductor of the SWR Symphony Orchestra in 2025.The conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has been criticized since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia, will step down as chief conductor of a prominent German orchestra in 2025, the ensemble announced on Friday.Currentzis, who has led the ensemble, the SWR Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, since 2018, will leave his post when his contract expires at the end of the 2024-25 season, the orchestra said. He will be replaced by François-Xavier Roth, who leads the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne, Germany.The SWR Symphony Orchestra has faced pressure in recent months to cut ties with Currentzis because of his affiliation with VTB Bank, a Russian state-owned institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries. VTB is the main sponsor of Currentzis’s longtime ensemble, MusicAeterna.In a statement to The New York Times, the SWR said Currentzis’s departure had been decided last year and had nothing to do with concerns about his Russia ties.“The announcement of today is not related to the discussion about the financing of MusicAeterna,” Matthias Claudi, a spokesman for SWR, said. He added that the orchestra hoped to continue to work with Currentzis after he steps down.A representative for Currentzis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Currentzis, 50, is one of classical music’s most prominent conductors. Since the start of the war, his career has been complicated by questions about Russian support, with some presenters canceling or postponing engagements. He has been denounced for his silence on the war and criticized for working with associates of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including some who sit on the board of MusicAeterna’s foundation. Putin awarded Currentzis, who was born in Greece, citizenship by presidential decree in 2014.Working to get beyond questions about his Russian benefactors, Currentzis announced in August that he would form a new international ensemble, called Utopia, with the support of donors outside Russia. The benefactors include a private foundation called Kunst und Kultur DM, which is affiliated with Dietrich Mateschitz, an Austrian businessman who is a founder of Red Bull. Beginning next month, Utopia will tour Europe, continuing through next year.Currentzis has continued to perform with MusicAeterna, which he founded in Siberia in 2004, often before sold-out crowds. More