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      With ‘Waiting for the Sibyl,’ Kentridge Looks Into the Future

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      The South African artist developed a piece about how difficult it is to see around the next corner. Ironically, the work anticipated the uncertainties of pandemic life.LONDON — Billions of us have spent the past two or so years trying to divine the future. Will I get Covid-19? How bad will it be? When will the coronavirus pandemic end? Will it ever end? Reliable answers have been scant; even if we’ve been cushioned from the worst effects, many people have been camping in a sort of existential waiting room, living in near-permanent uncertainty.Appropriate timing, then, that the Barbican arts center in London is about to stage a chamber opera, by the South African artist William Kentridge, about how difficult it is to see around the next corner. Titled “Waiting for the Sibyl,” it retells the myth of a Greek prophetess whom mortals once pestered with exactly these sort of exasperating questions.A scene from “Waiting for the Sibyl,” which premiered at the Teatro Dell’Opera di Roma, in Italy, in 2019.Stella OlivierThat prophetess, the Cumaean Sibyl, was said to have spit out her written answers on oak leaves, but there was a catch: If the wind scattered the leaves, she would not help put them in the correct order, leaving her clients none the wiser. The opera is a reminder that humans have been trying to get a jump on what’s coming next for perhaps as long as we’ve existed — and that maybe we’d be better served by living in the present instead.In a recent interview in London, Kentridge said that, ironically, he hadn’t seen the piece’s relevance coming: He had begun work on “Waiting for the Sibyl” more than two years before the pandemic.“Those questions of mortality, fate, who are we in this world, have been the bread and butter of artists for millennia,” he said. “But that’s been brought right to the forefront now.”Commissioned by the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in Italy and debuted there in September 2019, the roughly 40-minute piece consists of short, fragmentary scenes without dialogue. At first, it seems as cryptic as anything produced by a Greek oracle. A cast of nine singers and dancers enact moments from the legend. In one, a performer writhes in stuttering flashes of light in front of a screen displaying messages like, “I have brought NEWS” and “THE MOMENT HAS GONE.” Later, the cast dances while surrounded by scraps of prophecies on leaves of paper.The prophecies themselves are wry: “Resist the THIRD MARTINI,” “DISCARD LAST YEAR’S SOCKS.” But the parallels with our pandemic experience are often eerie. “FRESH GRAVES are everywhere,” reads one. Another is even more plangent: “My turn is when?”Making the opera had been an intricate process, Kentridge explained. The work was compiled from odd phrases he’d seen in books of English, Russian and Hebrew poetry and from a 1916 book of proverbs compiled by the South African writer Solomon Plaatje, which he made into a libretto of sorts.“A libretto is a straitjacket: You put it on willingly, but nonetheless it is a restriction,” Kentridge said. This opera “is a totally different experience.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThese scraps of text were then workshopped with the singers alongside the composers Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd. Together, they translated the phrases into African languages including Zulu, Setswana and Sesotho and Xhosa, and developed an improvised musical score.Sometimes, the music refers to traditions such as call-and-response isicathamiya choral singing; elsewhere it is deliberately jumbled. To draw all of this together, Kentridge created art work — drawings, ink washes, sculptures, palimpsests of old letters and reference books — which he turned into animated projections and stage designs.Like so many of his works, the result is a “collage,” Kentridge said. While he has designed and directed operas before — notably a madcap spin on Shostakovich’s “The Nose” (2010) and a brutally monochrome version of Berg’s “Wozzeck” (2017) — being able to create his own universe was liberating, he added.“A libretto is a straitjacket: You put it on willingly, but nonetheless it is a restriction,” he said. “This is a totally different experience.”Mahlangu said that, for himself and the singers, the Greek source material seemed remote at first. Yet as they developed the piece, it began to resonate with African mythologies and storytelling traditions. “Many people in South Africa believe that when people die, they don’t actually die,” he said. “They continue to look after the living. There is a sibyl in each and every one.”He added that this story of prediction and counter-prediction also resonated with the volatile politics of contemporary South Africa, which became even more turbulent amid the pandemic, as the country’s unemployment rate climbed to a dizzying 35 percent. “Here we are constantly in the state of wonder and worry,” Mahlangu said: “‘What is the next step? Where will we be?’”Now 66, Kentridge is unusual — almost unique — among contemporary artists in having achieved as much acceptance in theaters and opera houses as in museums and contemporary art spaces. He began his career in the mid-1970s as a Johannesburg-based illustrator and printmaker, but his practice has expanded to include whimsical short films, elaborate installations and majestic pieces of public art.A still from “City Deep,” an animated film by Kentridge about South Africa.William KentridgeOften his subjects reference classical literature or art history; almost always they reflect on South Africa’s bitter legacy, as in his new animated film “City Deep” (2020), a response to Johannesburg’s contentious history. A documentary on the making of the movie will be screened at the Barbican alongside “Waiting for the Sibyl.”In an era of conceptual and digital art, Kentridge has remained defiantly figurative and analog: His hulking charcoal drawings, loose sketches in Indian ink and flickering projections are immediately recognizable. Even when working on collaborative projects, the bulk of his time is spent laboring alone with ink, or charcoal, and paper, the artist said. “The physicality is essential. It’s the medium through which the thinking happens.”Much as he enjoys making gallery-based shows, he loves the challenge of theatrical commissions, he added. “The opera house says, ‘We’ll give you a canvas, 17 meters wide, 11 meters high. And we’ll give you another 18 meters of depth,’” he said. “And I get to make an hour-and-a-half drawing in the space.”With opera houses and concert halls closed, he hunkered down in Johannesburg and made a series of nine films about his studio practice, which are now being edited. He has also been preparing a career retrospective at the Royal Academy in London (set to open in September after pandemic-related delays), and making an animated film response to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, which will be performed live at the Lucerne festival, in Switzerland, in June.“There are always a few too many projects,” he said with a laugh. “But I can’t blame anyone but myself.”In an era of conceptual and digital art, Kentridge has remained defiantly figurative and analog: His hulking charcoal drawings, loose sketches in Indian ink and flickering projections are immediately recognizable.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesRe-encountering “Waiting for the Sibyl” in light of the coronavirus had been salutary, he added: Though the opera was partly about the limits of human knowledge, partly about mortality itself, it also contained seeds of hope.“In the long run, none of us are going to get out of this alive, but while we are here, we can acknowledge that,” he said. “We can still work wisely and optimistically. Comfort must be taken where it can be found.” More

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      ‘Charlotte’ Review: An Artist’s Brief Life

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      This animated biopic about the German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon takes faithful inspiration from her life. What if it had taken more energy from her art?In the animated biopic “Charlotte,” about the German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, the film’s most eloquent moment may be its last. Concluding on an image of the French Riviera as the sounds of a Nazi roundup can be heard, the directors Éric Warin and Tahir Rana come closest to capturing Salomon’s brief life with its tensions between the creative and the nihilistic.The actress Keira Knightley voices Salomon, who became known posthumously for “Life? or Theatre?,” the vast series of autobiographical gouaches she painted while living in the South of France. In 1938, her parents sent her from Berlin to the American philanthropist Ottilie Moore’s estate in Villefranche-sur-Mer, where her maternal grandparents had relocated.“Life? or Theatre?” — now considered an early graphic novel — is made up of 769 paintings, which are thick, unsettling and expressionistic.Like her opus, the film covers Salomon’s youth in Berlin with her father, a physician, and stepmother, an opera singer; her romance with her stepmother’s voice coach, Alfred Wolfsohn (a very fine Mark Strong); her time at Berlin’s Academy of Arts; her relationship with her grandparents; and, yes, the rise of the Third Reich.But the demons closing in on her in France don’t only wear brown shirts. Jim Broadbent gives voice to her grandfather with a sternness that hints as his tyranny. It is her grandfather’s vindictive revelation of the family’s history of mental illness and suicides that spurs Salomon to create her masterwork.“Charlotte” takes faithful inspiration from the artist’s life, and understatedly renders the facts of her tragic death before the credits. On the day Salomon arrived at Auschwitz, she was killed. She was 26 years old, and pregnant.In the end, “Charlotte” is bereft of the spirit of the artist who made the uncanny “Life? or Theatre?” What an even better tribute the movie would have been had it also taken heated energy from Salomon’s art.CharlotteNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      How Manuel Solano Found Joy by Playing Music

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      5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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      in Theater

      Warhol-mania: Why the Famed Pop Artist Is Everywhere Again

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      Andy Warhol is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works.Andy Warhol left behind a lot of self portraits.There was the black-and-white shot from a photo booth strip, from 1963, in which he wore dark black shades and a cool expression. In 1981, he took a Polaroid of himself in drag, with a platinum blond bob and bold red lips. Five years later, he screen-printed his face, with bright red acrylic paint, onto a black background. These and other images of the Pop Art master rank among his best-known works.But one of his most telling self portraits wasn’t a portrait at all, in a conventional sense. Between 1976 and 1987, the artist regularly dictated his thoughts, fears, feelings and opinions — about art, himself and his world — over the phone to his friend and collaborator Pat Hackett. In 1989, two years after his death, Hackett published “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a transcribed, edited and condensed version of their phone calls.And now, more than three decades later, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” has come to Netflix as a bittersweet documentary series directed by Andrew Rossi. In a video interview, the director pointed out that Warhol had intended for the book to be published after he died.“It does seem like there’s some message which maybe he himself didn’t even understand,” Rossi said. “There’s an open invitation to interpret it as there is with any of his artwork — because I do view the diaries as another self portrait in his oeuvre.”Warhol’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death, in 1987. His fascination with branding and celebrity, as well as the famous dictum often attributed to him — “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — are if anything even more relevant in the age of social media and reality TV.“There’s a reason why ‘Warholian’ remains a description,” Rossi said. “He’s one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric.”But if Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is — onscreen, onstage, in museums and in the streets. Earlier this month, Ryan Raftery returned to Joe’s Pub with the biting celebrity bio-musical “The Trial of Andy Warhol.” Anthony McCarten’s new play in London, “The Collaboration” — which centers on the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat — is already being adapted for the big screen. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol: Revelation” investigates his Catholic upbringing. And starting Friday, Bated Breath Theater Company will bring the theatrical walking tour production “Chasing Andy Warhol” to the streets of the East Village.“The Andy Warhol Diaries” delves into Warhol’s relationship with Jon Gould, a Paramount executive.Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixTogether, the works create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human beneath the white wig. Even as he created an indelible, internationally famous identity, this child of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, grappled with his faith (Byzantine Catholic) and his sexual orientation (gay, but never quite as out as many of his contemporaries) — areas that both “The Andy Warhol Diaries” and “Andy Warhol: Revelation” explore in particular.A significant portion of the Netflix series examines Warhol’s romantic relationships. It delves into Warhol’s struggles to show his love for his first long-term partner, an interior designer named Jed Johnson. Later comes the preppy Paramount executive Jon Gould, whom Warhol showered with affection but who eventually died of AIDS.The Enduring Legacy of Andy WarholThe artist’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death in 1987.Warhol-mania: If Andy Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is: onscreen, in museums and in the streets.A Play: In “The Collaboration,” Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.A Book: “Warhol” by Blake Gopnik, the first true biography of the artist, reveals a narrative that gets more complex the more closely you look.A Musical: “Andy,” Gus Van Sant’s Warhol-inspired stage debut, may be the movie director’s oddest tribute to date.An Exhibition: “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum shows how Catholicism seeped into the Pop master’s work.Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was interviewed in the documentary series. Rossi found her through her work on the 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again,” for which she wrote an essay titled “Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS.”“There are these moments when he’s doubting himself, when he is questioning what it is to be successful, what it is to be getting older, what it is to be in love,” she said. “That’s one of the strengths of what the series reveals, is that there’s a human that’s behind this mythical story.”Beck pointed to pieces of Warhol’s “Last Supper” series, some of which are currently on view in “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” She referenced one painting in particular, “The Last Supper (Be a Somebody With a Body),” which fuses an image of Jesus Christ with that of a bodybuilder, a symbol of health and masculinity. Beck said the work reflects Warhol’s reactions to the AIDS epidemic.“When you have these two things juxtaposed, you have this real expression of ideas around mourning and suffering, but also forgiveness,” she said.“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” at the Brooklyn Museum, pays special attention to the artist’s faith.Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /
      Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” which opened in November and runs until June 19, is broken into seven sections that move visitors from the artist’s immigrant upbringing and the roots of his religion through the different phases of his life and career, with a particular focus on the tension between his faith and his queer identity.“This is beyond soup cans and Marilyn,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, referring to a few of Warhol’s Pop Art hits. Diaz first put on “Revelation” at the Warhol museum before bringing it to Brooklyn.Carmen Hermo, an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, organized the New York presentation of “Revelation.” Both she and Diaz are the children of immigrants, like Warhol, and she speculated that this part of the artist’s background helped to account for his famed work ethic and his fierce drive to create the best version of himself.Diaz said, “For me, he lives the American dream,” adding that more nuanced, relatable perspectives on the artist were finally “surpassing this mythological Warhol with the big glasses, big wig.”Warhol is “one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric,” said Andrew Rossi, the director of “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixAcross the East River, Mara Lieberman, the executive artistic director of Bated Breath Theater Company, is using her fair share of glasses and wigs. Beginning Friday, Lieberman will direct “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a theatrical tour through the East Village in which multiple actors play the artist simultaneously, alluding to his love for repeated images and various personas.One scene depicts something that happened on a trip Warhol took to Hawaii with the production designer Charles Lisanby, with whom he was in love at the time. A couple of days after arriving at the hotel, Lisanby brought another man back to the room, and Warhol exploded, hurt — an event that has been described in biographies of the artist.Warhol has said that he later realized the power of saying “so what” in response to painful life events, an insight he detailed in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” It is, Lieberman said, “his greatest coping strategy.”This attitude was a key ingredient — along with his ideas about identity, technology, celebrity and more — in Warhol’s “highly stylized, constructed, brilliantly strategized brand,” Lieberman said.“Andy liked to take life and put a frame around it and say, ‘Look, that’s art,’” she said. “We go out in the streets of New York, and we put a frame around things and say, ‘Look, that’s art.’” More

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      in Music

      Camille Norment Explores New Sonic Terrains at Dia Chelsea

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      The composer and sculptor, born in America and based in Norway, presents two installations on the border of art and music.In the late 1960s and 1970s, the best place to hear new music was often not a concert hall, but an art gallery. Back then, while Carnegie Hall and the still-new Lincoln Center played it safe uptown, the minimalist composer Steve Reich was presenting his rhythmic, exacting compositions down at the Park Place Gallery, led by Paula Cooper. You could hear Philip Glass’s “Music in 12 Parts” at Leo Castelli Gallery, or Meredith Monk’s a cappella ululations at the Walker Art Center. Composers and artists collaborated with ease — La Monte Young wrote compositions for the sculptor Robert Morris; Glass assisted Richard Serra in the creation of his early splashes of lead — and the very distinction between new art and new music could be hazy: the Fluxus artists Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Allan Kaprow and Yoko Ono were all trained in music composition.New York still has some independent institutions where music and art commingle, like the ambitious Brooklyn nonprofit Blank Forms. But on the whole, contemporary art seems a little afraid of ambitious new music; the performer who makes it into the museum these days is more likely to be a DJ or a pop star like Solange, who uses the prestige of the white cube as essentially an Instagram-optimized backdrop. (As to the epochal catastrophe of “Björk,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015, we are going to pass without comment.) A few institutions with roots in that 1970s moment have maintained the interdisciplinary flame. Last month, the Rothko Chapel in Houston (born 1971) invited the composer Tyshawn Sorey to present a major new work in its crepuscular galleries, as Morton Feldman had done 50 years before.And here in New York the Dia Art Foundation, which has regularly made space for composers like Young and Max Neuhaus in its minimal and conceptual canon, has turned its Manhattan galleries over to Camille Norment, the Oslo-based American composer, musician and artist. This is the second exhibition at Dia’s reopened Chelsea galleries since the long-delayed reopening, and fills two adjacent galleries with sonic installations, one austere and one intricate, one high-pitched and one low-toned. Both make use of feedback and resonance effects, and treat music as both sonic and physical phenomena. Both are rigorous yet accessible, and both may leave you hungry to see the artist in concert.The better of Norment’s two new works — both are untitled; the show is called “Plexus” — is in the first gallery, which contains a monumental brass structure in two parts, standing alone in the empty space. The lower part is an inverted bell, a little below human adult height, with a gently flared lip like a calla lily’s. Suspended just above the bell aperture is a second, elongated brass form that looks like a liquid frozen in mid-drip. The only other objects in the room are four long microphones pointed at the sculpture, which produce sonic feedback from the brass instrument, soft, sustained and sublime. The instrument is therefore less a bell than a singing bowl, its tones gently, continuously distorted by spectators’ (or listeners’) motions.A view of the second gallery in “Plexus” (2022), which is filled with dozens of planks of wood. Embedded in them are speakers that play looped recordings of a droning choir.Camille Norment and Dia Art Foundation; Bill Jacobson Studio, New YorkThe ringing produced by this hieratic brass sculpture has both a plastic and a sonic component — a point Norment underscores by listing the media used in this installation as “brass, sine waves, autonomous feedback system, and archival radio static.” In other words, she’s using periodic sound (that is, sine waves) as both a sculptural material that she can mold, like a sculptor shapes metal or stone, and also a spontaneously produced phenomenon of the brass and the microphones, similar to the tones of a trumpet or saxophone.The room is a sculptural installation as well as an active musical instrument, and after a few minutes its resonant keening takes on an Apollonian dignity. As for the last element, the recorded radio static, I could only hear it faintly when I got close to the brass bell. It provides a bit of a beat but it seems an extraneous addition, especially after reading an explanatory text on Dia’s website that reveals the source of the static to be from ’60s and ’70s “community reporting and documentation of social and environmental struggles.” I’m not sure that explicit political source material was needed. Because all on its own, Norment’s ringing and vibrating sound system lets us experience a fragile interdependence of bodies and environments. In here, we are at once creators, listeners and corrupters of an ecology of sound.The second gallery is much busier. Norment has filled it with dozens of planks of wood — of “responsibly sourced wood,” Dia informs us, with a whiff of Whole Foods solicitude. They reach from the floor to the ceiling, and their chocolate brown tones come close to matching the gallery’s rib-vaulted roof. Embedded in the planks are speakers, which play looped recordings of a droning choir, whose low bass notes contrast with the higher-frequency sound of the bell room. You can sit or lie down on the planks, and feel the singing travel through your thighs and buttocks when the chorus crescendos. But the use of recordings, the somewhat milky ah-ah-ah-ahs of the singers, and the maritime overtones of the planks make this installation more like an illustration of a musical ecology. What makes the brass work more exciting is that it constitutes one, out of sound and space.Norment was born in 1970 near Washington, D.C., but since 2005 she has lived in Oslo — the Norwegian capital that last decade emerged as one of Europe’s most fecund art centers. (A lot of the new ferment comes from its excellent art school, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where Norment is a senior faculty member.) Her sonic installations often make use of the natural frequencies of materials, objects and even whole buildings, including at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where she used microphones and other transducers to turn the Nordic pavilion into a constant broadcaster of tones.She also leads an ensemble, the Camille Norment Trio, featuring the electric guitar, the Norwegian fiddle and her own instrument: the glass armonica, invented by Benjamin Franklin in the 1760s, which consists of blown glass discs arrayed on a spindle that produce ethereal tones when rubbed. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the glass armonica was an instrument associated with divinity and also horror: Donizetti used it for the original orchestrations of the mad scene in “Lucia di Lammermoor.”Her engagement with feedback and resonant frequencies continues an exploration that Reich undertook by swinging microphones in front of speakers for his “Pendulum Music,” or that Jimi Hendrix produced in the space between guitar and amp. And it’s an engagement that dovetails quite naturally with the minimalist, process-oriented and environmental artists that Dia exalts up in Beacon. One of the values of this show may be to get artists and art audiences to think a little harder about what’s in our headphones as we strut through Chelsea or sulk on the train. Spend some time listening to the frequencies of her brass bell, and a clean distinction between the sonic and the sculptural — between music and art — starts to dissipate into air.Camille Norment: PlexusThrough January 2023. Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 845-231-0811; diaart.org. More

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      in Movies

      Cities and States Are Easing Covid Restrictions. Are Theaters and the Arts Next?

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      Cultural institutions face tough decisions: Is it safe to drop mask and vaccine requirements, and would doing so be more likely to lure audiences back or keep them away?When music fans walked beneath the familiar piano-shaped awning and into the dark embrace of the Blue Note Jazz Club in Greenwich Village this week, a late-pandemic fixture was missing: No one was checking proof of vaccination and photo IDs.A special guest visited to herald the change. “Good to be back out,” Mayor Eric Adams of New York told the overwhelmingly maskless audience Monday, the day the city stopped requiring proof of vaccination at restaurants and entertainment venues. “I consider myself the nightlife mayor, so I’m going to assess the product every night.”It is a different story uptown, where Carnegie Hall continues to require masks and vaccines and the Metropolitan Opera goes even further, requiring that all eligible people show proof that they have received their booster shots — safety measures that always went beyond what the city required but which reassured many music lovers. “We want the audience to feel comfortable and safe,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.With cities and states across the country moving to scale back mask and vaccine requirements as coronavirus cases fall, leaders of cultural institutions find themselves confronted once again with difficult decisions: Is it safe to ease virus safety measures, and would doing so be more likely to lure audiences back or keep them away?Their responses have varied widely. Broadway will continue to require masks and proof of vaccination through at least the end of April. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington announced that it would drop its mask requirement for visitors to its museums and the National Zoo on Friday, following moves by major art museums in places like Chicago and Houston. Some comedy clubs in New York that ditched masking mandates months ago are weighing whether to continue to require proof of vaccination.“At the beginning of this, many arts organizations were having to develop their own policies before there were clear government guidelines,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “As we come out of this, again, you’re finding arts companies having to find their own way.”The Metropolitan Opera continues to require masks and proof of vaccination and booster shots, and to limit food and drink consumption to one part of the opera house.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesIn interviews, leaders of almost a dozen cultural groups across the country emphasized the need for caution and carefulness. But they noted that each of their situations are distinct. In museums, patrons can roam large galleries and opt for social distance as they please. In theaters and concert halls, audience members are seated close together, immobile for the duration of a performance. Opera houses and symphony orchestras tend to draw an older and more vulnerable audience than night clubs and comedy clubs.The feedback arts leaders say they are getting from visitors has differed: Some said that they had felt increasing pressure to ease their rules in recent weeks, while others said the vast majority of their audience members have told them that they were more likely to visit venues that continue to maintain strict health and safety requirements.“For every one person who complains about the mask requirement, we have probably about 10 people who express unsolicited gratitude for the fact we are choosing to still have masks in place,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director and chief executive of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles. She said she would be “surprised” if her organization changed its masking rules before Broadway does.On Broadway, which was shut down by the pandemic for more than a year, officials have said that theater operators would continue to require masks and proof of vaccination through at least April. “We do look forward to welcoming our theatergoers without masks one day soon, and in the meantime, want to ensure that we keep our cast, crew and theatergoers safe so that we can continue to bring the magic of Broadway to our audiences without interruption,” Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said in a statement.The Metropolitan Opera, which was the first major arts institution to require people entering their opera house to be both vaccinated and boosted, never missed a performance during the height of the recent Omicron surge, and is in no rush to ease its safety measures. “For us, safety comes before Covid fatigue,” said Gelb, the general manager. “So we’re going to err on the side of caution.”But the company has eased some of its backstage protocols: Soloists were not required to wear masks during recent stage rehearsals of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which helped some work on their diction as the company sang it in the original French for the first time.Like the Met, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center are also maintaining their mask and vaccine mandates for the moment. Carnegie Hall continues to require masks and proof of vaccination, but recently dropped its policy of briefly requiring booster shots. Masking and vaccine rules also remain in place at the San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Opera and Center Theater Group.Two of New York’s premier art-house cinemas are taking different approaches — at least for now. Film Forum’s website says that proof of vaccination is no longer required and that masks are encouraged but not required. Film at Lincoln Center will continue to require proof of vaccination and masks through Sunday, but plans to relax its policy next week.The Metropolitan Museum of Art has stopped checking vaccine cards but is still requiring masks indoors.Seth Wenig/Associated PressA recent poll conducted by The Associated Press found that half of Americans approve of mask mandates, down from 55 percent who supported the mandates six months ago and 75 percent who supported them in December 2020.Choosing what to do is not easy.Christopher Koelsch, the president of the Los Angeles Opera, said that the surveys he has reviewed suggest that roughly a third of audience members would only come to performances if a mask mandate was in place — but that roughly a third would refuse to come if masks are required.“No matter what decision you make,” he said, “there are people who are going to be upset with you and believe that you are making the wrong decision.”Some museums are in an in-between moment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art stopped checking vaccine cards as of Monday but still requires masks. And the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City is likely to lift its mask mandate this month, said Julián Zugazagoitia, the museum’s director.As mask mandates fall in schools, restaurants and other settings, he said, he felt “almost forced” to follow suit. “What I’d like to see us do is keep this as a suggestion,” he said of wearing masks indoors.Other art venues have already changed their rules. Officials at the Art Institute of Chicago said the museum eliminated its requirements for masks and vaccines on Feb. 28 in line with new governmental policies. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — one of the first major American museums to reopen after the country went into lockdown in March 2020 — also relaxed its most recent mask mandate last week. As it did previously in the fall, the museum is now recommending — but not requiring — masks for visitors and staff.“We’ve had an increasing number of visitors and staff inquire about why we haven’t — or when are we going to — relax the mandatory mask requirement,” said Gary Tinterow, the museum’s director.At the Broadway Comedy Club in New York, patrons have been allowed inside maskless for some time. But Al Martin, the club’s president, said he has been debating whether to stop requiring that his guests be vaccinated.On one hand, he said, checking people at the door required him to add staff members, which costs money. And he estimated that he has lost roughly 30 percent of his audience because of the mandate. On the other, he said, he liked having a city vaccine mandate to fall back on. “It gave a degree of safety and assurance to people,” he said.He ultimately decided to do away with the vaccine mandate at his club as of Monday despite his personal concern that the city “might have been slightly premature” in rolling back the rules.He reserves the right to change his mind about his club’s policy, he said.“If I see my business drop 40 percent because people are not feeling safe in my venue,” he said, “we’re going back to the vaccine passport.” More

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      in Television

      Conrad Janis, Father on ‘Mork & Mindy’ and Much More, Dies at 94

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      His role on the hit sitcom was just one of more than 100 film and television credits; he was also a fine jazz trombonist and co-owner of an art gallery.Conrad Janis, an actor familiar to television viewers as Mindy’s father on the hit sitcom “Mork & Mindy” who was also a skilled jazz musician and a gallerist well known in the New York art world, died on March 1 in Los Angeles. He was 94.Dean A. Avedon, his business manager, confirmed the death.Mr. Janis, a child of the noted art collectors and gallerists Sidney and Harriet (Grossman) Janis, moved easily between the worlds of high art, jazz and acting, sometimes switching one hat for another in the same evening.“Conrad Janis Is Glad to Live Three Lives,” the headline on a 1962 Newsday article read. At the time he was starring in the romantic comedy “Sunday in New York” on Broadway and, after the Friday and Saturday night performances, playing trombone with his group, the Tailgate 5, at Central Plaza in Manhattan. (On Sundays he’d trek to Brooklyn to play at the club Caton Corner.) When not onstage or on the bandstand, he could often be found at his father’s art gallery.Sixteen years later he found himself on one of the most popular shows on television when he was cast on “Mork & Mindy,” which premiered in September 1978, as the father of Mindy (Pam Dawber), a Colorado woman who befriends an eccentric alien (Robin Williams). On Sundays during this period, he played in the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band at the Ginger Man, a club in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose owners included Carroll O’Connor of “All in the Family.”The key to juggling three areas of expertise, Mr. Janis told Newsday, was keeping his personas separate.“It just wouldn’t do to tell a knowledgeable art patron that ‘man, I dig Picasso the wildest,’” he said.Mr. Janis, an accomplished trombonist as well as a busy actor, peformed regularly with the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band. Among the other members of the band, seen in performance in 1980, was his fellow actor George Segal, who played banjo and sang.Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, via AlamyConrad Janis was born on Feb. 11, 1928, in Manhattan. His parents had a successful shirt-making business early in their married life, which gave them the wherewithal to begin collecting art and, in 1948, open the Sidney Janis Gallery, which became, as The New York Times put it in Sidney Janis’s obituary in 1989, “a major pacesetter for the art world in the 1950s and ’60s.”Harriet Janis also wrote books with the jazz historian Rudi Blesh, including “They All Played Ragtime” (1950). That connection led to Conrad’s musical expertise. Mr. Blesh’s daughter played trombone in her school’s marching band but lost interest; the spare trombone ended up in Conrad’s hands. He particularly studied the music of the influential New Orleans trombonist and bandleader Kid Ory.“I memorized a lot of what he did,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.His acting developed alongside his musicianship. When he was 13, a classmate at the Little Red School House in Manhattan told him that “Junior Miss,” a popular Broadway comedy about a teenage girl, was holding auditions for a road company. He auditioned, got in, and spent two years with the tour, advancing to a leading juvenile role. He started doing radio voice work at the same time.“I played kids of 14 and old men of 40” on the radio, he told The New York Times in a 1945 interview.He landed a role in the pre-Broadway run of “The Dark of the Moon,” which got him noticed by a Hollywood talent scout. He remained with the play when it went to New York, making his Broadway debut in March 1945, but within a few months he was on the West Coast to make his first film, the comedy “Snafu,” in which he played a teenager who lies about his age to enlist.It was the first of more than 100 film and television credits. In the movies, he played alongside some famous names: Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in the notoriously bad “That Hagan Girl” (1947), Charlton Heston and other prominent stars in “Airport 1975” (1974), Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker” (1975), George Burns in “Oh God! Book II” (1980).He was on television from the medium’s earliest days, playing numerous roles in the late 1940s and ’50s, many of them on shows like “Suspense,” “Actor’s Studio” and “The Philco Television Playhouse” that were broadcast live. Some of those roles took advantage of his familiarity with musical instruments.“All through the ’50s,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1981, “I was in so many TV shows as a young musician on drugs, desperately trying to kick the habit, that I’m sure I helped cement in the public’s mind a relationship between musicians and dope. All they cast me in were shows in which I did or didn’t kick the habit. I was always saying, ‘Hey, man, I just got to have a fix.’”He continued to play small parts on TV in the 1960s and ’70s before landing his best-known role, Mindy’s father. His character operated a music store, but although “Mork & Mindy” ran for four seasons, he never got a chance to play his trombone on the show, something he regretted.“The producers wouldn’t go for it,” he told The Albany Democrat-Herald of Oregon in 1990. “We had a really cute script where I got together with my old Dixieland jazz band, but they didn’t think it was funny enough.”Mr. Janis with Thomas Scott, left, and Steven Scott in the 1996 movie “The Cable Guy.”He continued to work in television after “Mork,” with appearances on “St. Elsewhere,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Frasier” and other shows. His later movie appearances included small roles in “Mr. Saturday Night” (1992) and “The Cable Guy” (1996). He sometimes collaborated with his wife, Maria Grimm, including directing two movies she wrote, “The Feminine Touch” (1995) and “Bad Blood” (2012).Mr. Janis’s acting career also included a dozen Broadway credits, among them the Gore Vidal play “A Visit to a Small Planet” in 1957 and a revival of “The Front Page” in 1969.Throughout his musical and acting adventures, Mr. Janis also kept a hand in the art world.Arne Glimcher, the founder and chairman of Pace Gallery and a friend of Mr. Janis’s for almost 60 years, said Mr. Janis worked for his father at the Sidney Janis Gallery and was responsible for certain artists there, including Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann.“His knowledge of 20th-century art and Modernism was really encyclopedic,” Mr. Glimcher said in a phone interview.When Sidney Janis reached 90, he turned the Janis Gallery over to Conrad and his brother, Carroll, who kept it going until 1999.Mr. Janis’s first marriage, to Vicki Quarles, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Ronda Copland. Ms. Grimm, whom he married in 1987, died in September. He is survived by his brother; two children from his first marriage, Christopher and Carin Janis; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Glimcher said that in recent years some of Mr. Janis’s old jazz pals would come to his home in Beverly Hills on Thursdays and play. When his wife died, Mr. Glimcher said, Mr. Janis gave her a jazz funeral, then changed the location of those jam sessions.“Every Thursday,” Mr. Glimcher said, “he took the jazz band to her mausoleum and played there.” More

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      50 Years Later, the Rothko Chapel Meets a New Musical Match

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the chapel’s anniversary, is a tribute to the first music performed in the space.Before Tyshawn Sorey composed a note of his latest work, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, he spent hours inside its octagonal temple containing more than a dozen dark canvases.Immersing himself in Mark Rothko’s fields of seeming black, Sorey noticed that the paintings shifted subtly over time — and that time itself appeared to dissolve. The colors changed to match the sun coming through the chapel’s skylight. When he would go outside and return, his adjusting eyes made it feel as though the works were coming to life.Few people can give Rothko the time or space to perceive what Sorey saw. But “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” something of a sonic distillation of what he experienced, might give them an idea. Written for the chapel’s 50th anniversary — and delayed a year because of the pandemic — his new work will premiere there on Saturday, ahead of a staged presentation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York this fall.The piece is in part a tribute to one of Sorey’s heroes, the composer Morton Feldman, whose “Rothko Chapel” was written in 1971 for the building, a project by the arts philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil. Feldman’s piece — scored for percussion, celesta, viola, choir and soprano — was an abstract analogue to Rothko’s canvases. Deceptively formless, it is music to be inhabited. But near the end, the viola plays what Feldman called a “quasi-Hebraic melody” that he composed as a teenager, an invocation of and memorial to his (and Rothko’s) heritage.The Feldman is “a special piece,” said Sarah Rothenberg, the artistic director of the presenting organization DaCamera, which, with the chapel, commissioned Sorey’s premiere. “It’s a remarkable synergy between space and music that has become a kind of ambassador.”In conceiving a 50th-anniversary commission, a new ambassador was desired. Sorey came to mind, Rothenberg said, because of how he engages with the history of Black Americans — a parallel to the chapel’s civil rights-minded mission. And his style, she knew, had been shaped by Feldman.Sorey, 41, was first exposed to Feldman’s music in college, when he heard his teacher Anton Vishio practicing “Piano.” “It was just beautiful,” Sorey said, adding that the music, its sonorities and its patience “really spoke to me more than anything else I was listening to at the time. Pretty much any composition I’ve written is in some ways inspired by Morton Feldman. It’s hard to shake off such an influence.”Maurice Peress conducting the premiere of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” in 1972.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Hickey-Roberston, via Rothko Chapel ArchivesAlong with other influences, including Roscoe Mitchell, Feldman taught Sorey the goal of reaching a place in music where time no longer seems to exist and a listener can become truly present in the moment. “Every sound has its own world at that point,” Sorey said. “You could talk about the technical parts, but the quality that I want to get out of it is presentness.”For “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” he chose virtually the same instrumentation as “Rothko Chapel” — in a way that the director Peter Sellars, who will stage the piece at the Armory, said reflects lineage in music, “how your granddaughter has your grandmother’s eyes.” But in lieu of the quasi-Hebraic melody, Sorey quotes, in his refracted style, the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” He added a piano (played by Rothenberg, doubling on celesta) and changed the soprano soloist to a bass, which he felt better matched the tone of the paintings.Sellars recalled that when he went over the score with Sorey for the first time, they looked at the part and, more or less at the same time, said who they wanted to sing it: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Sorey has contributed treatments of spirituals to Tines’s “Mass” recital program, a collaboration that began after Tines first heard what would become “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” Sorey’s evening-length work inspired by the life of Josephine Baker, written for the soprano Julia Bullock.“I realized he was able to open meaning in text by recreating it in his voice,” Tines said. Together he and Sorey have revisited the catalog of spirituals, because, Tines said, “Tyshawn is able to reveal the truer psychology of what those songs mean.”The Rothko canvases, Sorey said, change color with the sun coming through the skylight.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFeldman referred to “Rothko Chapel” as a “secular service.” While Sorey emphasized that Feldman is just one of the influences on “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” the idea of a secular service is what he aims for; it’s why he prefers to call his performances rituals. And it permeates this work, beginning with the first measure: Lasting indefinitely, it is a dissolution of time in which tubular bells resonate at near silence, with pitches of two chords struck at random as the other performers enter the space.“It’s kind of a similar feeling to when I first walked into the chapel,” Sorey said. “It’s almost this cathartic sort of emotion, the moment you get when you walk in there; it’s like a religious experience. So by having the resonant sound happening, and you’re not sure what to make of it — it’s almost a ceremonial, spiritual thing going on. You’re eliminating any sort of external obstacles, for that type of clarity that I think Rothko was always going for in his art.”Once the choir joins later, its members sing without vibrato, staggering their breaths to create seamlessly suspended streams of sound that, Sorey said, are not unlike the paintings surrounding them.“To me, the voices are like these panels,” he added. “The sonorities are expressive, expressing a certain type of emotion, like tragedy or grief. So like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience. And I’m seeing the listener being surrounded by these ever-changing emotions.”“Like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience.”Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFew people — about 300 people over two performances — will get to experience the premiere this weekend. But there are plans to release an album of the work on the ECM label, as a follow-up to its 2015 release of “Rothko Chapel,” which featured artists, including Rothenberg, who return for “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Then, in late September, the piece will travel to the Armory, where the audience will be immersed in panels by Julie Mehretu, an artist whose abstractions share preoccupations with Sorey and Rothko. On the surface, this cavernous space could not be more different from the intimate chapel. But, Sellars said, “what’s beautiful about the Armory is, it can create the occasion for something.”He continued: “What Tyshawn is creating is memorial space. Rothko and Feldman created memorial space from silence, from grief, from darkness, where you could feel the presence of erased histories and erased lives that are nonetheless present and moving and speaking within these fields of darkness. ­Feldman and Rothko brought their histories to that space. And I think this group of artists will, too.”Details are still being worked out — such as whether to hide the choir — but at the very least, Sorey said, it will “become more intensified” than the presentation in Houston.“How can we make it more of a ritualistic or ceremonial event?” he added. “How can we intensify the spiritual, metaphysical matter in which the piece is received? That’s what I want: to really magnify that experience.” More