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      ‘The Collaboration,’ About Warhol and Basquiat, Plans Broadway Bow

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      The play, by Anthony McCarten, will be presented this fall by the Manhattan Theater Club, following a run earlier this year at the Young Vic in London.“The Collaboration,” a new play exploring the relationship between the painters Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, will transfer to Broadway this fall.Manhattan Theater Club, a nonprofit that operates the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway, said it would partner with the Young Vic Theater in London to present the play at the Friedman, with previews beginning Nov. 29 and an opening night scheduled for Dec. 20.The play was written by Anthony McCarten, from New Zealand, who is best known for his biographical screenplays, including the Oscar-nominated “The Theory of Everything” and “The Two Popes,” as well as “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Darkest Hour.” If all goes according to plan, “The Collaboration” will be the second work by McCarten to make it to Broadway, but just barely; he has also written the book for “A Beautiful Noise,” a biographical musical about Neil Diamond that is running in Boston and is scheduled to start previews on Broadway on Nov. 2.“The Collaboration” is to star Paul Bettany (best known for playing Vision in several Marvel projects) as Warhol and Jeremy Pope (who scored two Tony nominations in a single season, for “Ain’t Too Proud” and “Choir Boy”) as Basquiat. The two are expected to reprise their roles in a film adaptation.The play (as well as the forthcoming movie) is directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, the artistic director of the Young Vic, where it had its premiere production this year. It opened to mixed reviews, but both actors won praise for their performances, which Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, deemed “bravura.”The play is set in 1984, when Warhol and Basquiat were working together. They both died later that decade.“The Collaboration” is the second play slated to be presented on Broadway by Manhattan Theater Club this season; it is scheduled to follow closely after “Cost of Living,” by Martyna Majok, which is expected to open at the Friedman in early October. More

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      ‘The Art of Making It’ Review: Seeking a Bigger Canvas

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      Despite its haphazard approach, this documentary about the contemporary art world serves as a decent explainer for the industry’s fraught dynamics.It’s no wonder that the art world, especially in recent years, has inspired a number of scathing dark comedies — think “Velvet Buzzsaw” or the Palme d’Or winner “The Square,” films that mock the industry’s elitism and its entanglement with capitalism.“The Art of Making It,” a documentary by Kelcey Edwards, doesn’t entirely depart from those pessimistic fictional portraits. It does, however, offer a more pragmatic, occasionally hopeful, perspective on the visual arts ecosystem and the collectors, gallery owners, curators, critics and artists that play by its rules — or, for better or worse, try to make their own.“Making It” boasts a number of first-rate talking heads — there’s the famed New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz; the notorious art dealer Stefan Simchowitz; the critic and media influencer known for her art-world memes, Hilde Lynn Helphenstein (a.k.a. Jerry Gogosian). As Edwards jumps to and from these insiders, she traces the careers of several artists, like Jenna Gribbon, a figurative painter whose social media savvy helped launch her career; and Chris Watts, a multimedia artist who was kicked out his M.F.A. program at Yale for not conforming to that institution’s standards of marketability. (Annoyingly, only Gribbon’s work is explored in detail.)
      For those unfamiliar with the industry, “Making It” is a decent explainer of its fraught dynamics: the M.F.A.-to-gallery representation pipeline; the desire for more commercial artwork; the mercenary practices of certain buyers and collectors.But Edwards’s generic approach — heavy on talking heads and explanatory title cards — often yields fuzzy results, with a haphazard rush of information overwhelming the rare moments the documentary settles into a more defined and compelling point of view. And as much as Edwards attempts to cover multiple bases, she’s also looking at the art world through the narrowest peephole — more like the art world establishment, featuring a handful of black sheep.The Art of Making ItNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Ken Knowlton, a Father of Computer Art and Animation, Dies at 91

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      His work at Bell Labs in the 1960s laid the groundwork for today’s computer-generated imagery in film and on TV.Ken Knowlton, an engineer, computer scientist and artist who helped pioneer the science and art of computer graphics and made many of the first computer-generated pictures, portraits and movies, died on June 16 in Sarasota, Florida. He was 91.His son, Rick Knowlton, said the cause of death, at a hospice facility, was unclear.In 1962, after finishing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Dr. Knowlton joined Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., a future-focused division of the Bell telephone conglomerate that was among the world’s leading research labs. After learning that the lab had installed a new machine that could print images onto film, he resolved to make movies using computer-generated graphics.“You could make pictures with letters on the screen or spots on the screen or lines on the screen,” he said in a 2016 interview, recalling his arrival at Bell Labs. “How about a movie?”Over the next several months, he developed what he believed to be the first computer programming language for computer animation, called BEFLIX (short for “Bell Labs Flicks”). The following year, he used this language to make an animated movie. Called “A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies,” this 10-minute film described the technology used to make it.Though Dr. Knowlton was the only person to ever use the BEFLIX language —he and his colleagues quickly replaced it with other tools and techniques — the ideas behind this technology would eventually overhaul the movie business.By the mid-1980s, computer graphics were an integral part of feature films like “Tron” and “The Last Starfighter.” In 1995, a studio in Northern California, Pixar, released “Toy Story,” a feature film whose images were generated entirely by computer. Today, computer-generated imagery, or CGI, plays a role in practically every movie and television show.“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels,” said Ted Nelson, a computer science pioneer and philosopher who wrote about Dr. Knowlton’s early work. “Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”Kenneth Charles Knowlton was born on June 6, 1931, in Springville, N.Y. His parents, Frank and Eva (Reith) Knowlton, owned a farm in that small community, about 30 miles south of Buffalo, where they grew corn and raised chickens.After graduating a year early from high school as class valedictorian, Dr. Knowlton enrolled in a five-year engineering and physics program at Cornell University, where his parents had first met while studying agriculture before deciding to buy a farm. He stayed at Cornell for a master’s degree, which involved building an X-ray camera using parts from an electron microscope.At Cornell, he met his future wife, Roberta Behrens, and together they joined the Quakers. After he finished his master’s degree, they traveled to Quaker work camps that helped build housing infrastructure for the poor in El Salvador and Mexico, where he contracted polio. He walked with a leg brace or a cane for the rest of his life.It was at Cornell in the mid-1950s that Dr. Knowlton developed his interest in computers — room-size machines operated via punched cards and magnetic tape reels that were just beginning to arrive in government labs, academia and industry. After reading about a group at the Massachusetts Institute Technology that aimed to build computer technology that could translate between languages, like English and French, he joined the project as a Ph.D. student. His thesis advisers included the linguist Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky, a founding father of artificial intelligence.At Bell Labs, Dr. Knowlton realized that he could create detailed images by stringing together dots, letters, numbers and other symbols generated by a computer. Each symbol was chosen solely for its brightness — how bright or how dark it appeared at a distance. His computer programs, by carefully changing brightness as they placed each symbol, could then build familiar images, like flowers or faces.Dr. Knowlton and Dr. Harmon’s 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman was hung on the wall of their boss’s office as a joke. This remastered version was recreated under Dr. Knowlton’s supervision in 2016. Jim Boulton, Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton; remastered from Jim Boulton’s backward-analyzed digital files of Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton’s “Studies in Perception I, 1966.”After experimenting with movies, he applied similar techniques to portraits and other still images. In the mid-1960s, he and a collaborator named Leon Harmon created a 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman and, as a joke, hung it on the wall of their boss’s office.Their boss, Edward E. David, Jr., the Bell Labs executive director of communications research, who would later serve as science adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, was not amused. But the portrait later caught the attention of the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, who put it on display in his New York City loft when he launched a project called Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., in the fall of 1967, aiming to develop new collaborations between artists and engineers.The New York Times published an article about the event the next day, including a picture of Dr. Knowlton’s image of the nude woman, titled “Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I).” It was believed to be the first full-frontal nude printed in the pages of The New York Times. A year later, the picture was part of a landmark exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.”Dr. Knowlton remained at Bell Labs until 1982, experimenting with everything from computer-generated music to technologies that allowed deaf people to read sign language over the telephone. He later joined Wang Laboratories, where, in the late-1980s, he helped develop a personal computer that let users annotate documents with synchronized voice messages and digital pen strokes.In 2008, after retiring from tech research, he joined a magician and inventor named Mark Setteducati in creating a jigsaw puzzle called Ji Ga Zo, which could be arranged to resemble anyone’s face. “He had a mathematical mind combined with a great sense of aesthetics,” Mr. Setteducati said in a phone interview.In addition to his son Rick, Dr. Knowlton is survived by two other sons, Kenneth and David, all from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; a brother, Fredrick Knowlton; and a sister, Marie Knowlton. Two daughters, Melinda and Suzanne Knowlton, also from his first marriage, and his second wife, Barbara Bean-Knowlton, have died.While at Bell Labs, Mr. Knowlton collaborated with several well-known artists, including the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, the computer artist Lillian Schwartz and the electronic-music composer Laurie Spiegel. He saw himself as an engineer who helped others create art, as prescribed by Mr. Rauschenberg’s E.A.T. project.But later in life he began creating, showing and selling art of his own, building traditional analog images with dominoes, dice, seashells and other materials. He belatedly realized that when engineers collaborate with artists, they become more than engineers.“In the best cases, they become more complete humans, in part from understanding that all behavior comes not from logic but, at the bottommost level, from intrinsically indefensible emotions, values and drives,” he wrote in 2001. “Some ultimately become artists.” More

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      At 52, Mabou Mines Is Still Testing Boundaries

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      A three-day retrospective will shine a spotlight on the group’s most daring projects.The word “crazy” comes up fairly regularly when talking to people about the Mabou Mines theater company.Take one of Sharon Ann Fogarty’s early experiences with that fabled group — nine years before she became one of its co-artistic directors. It was on “Mabou Mines Lear,” a gender-reversed production of “King Lear” — not obvious back in 1990 — that was directed by Lee Breuer and starred Ruth Maleczech as the monarch.“The opening scene had dogs and all these kiddos so my job was to pick the kids up around five o’clock, drive them over, do the scene and drive them back,” Fogarty, now 65, said. “Then I would come back, and I was doing various other parts. One of them was holding down Isabell Monk while Honora Fergusson gouged her eyes out. It was kind of a crazy, crazy time,” she continued, “but it was really fun.”Starting Thursday, Mabou Mines is celebrating 50 years of theatrical experimentation with a three-day megamix, a retrospective of some of its most notorious, daring, beloved, memorable or, yes, craziest projects. (The company is actually 52 years old but the celebration was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.) The works will include live readings, concerts and films, in conjunction with a companion exhibition of archival material, at the Mabou Mines home in the 122 Community Center, in the East Village, where the group settled in 2017 after decades of a peripatetic existence.The 1990 staging of “Mabou Mines Lear,” a gender-reversed production of “King Lear,” featured, from left: Kandel, Ruth Maleczech and Greg Mehrten.Michael CooperThe performing arts, by definition, exist in the moment, so mounting a greatest-hits package — especially of an Off Off Broadway company — is a daunting task. Mabou Mines got the idea for its extended birthday party after a founding member, JoAnne Akalaitis, spearheaded a 12-hour tribute to the playwright María Irene Fornés at the Public Theater in 2018. “So when we came to talk about Mabou Mines’s 50th, JoAnne said, ‘Why don’t we just do a marathon of all the pieces?’” Fogarty recalled.This would have been more than 60 works, so they settled on 31. “Some are going to be excerpts, some are going to be full, some are just going to be the music,” Fogarty said. “Some of them are an hour, or you get 15 minutes, like a juicy scene or something.”The programs will bring former company members back to the fold, along with simpatico guests such as Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel, who will perform Franz Xaver Kroetz’s “Through the Leaves,” produced by Mabou Mines in 1984, on Thursday. The following day Akalaitis will direct David Greenspan, Ellen McLaughlin and Ellen McElduff, a former company member, in Samuel Beckett’s “Play,” which Mabou Mines staged in 1971.The time machine will travel all the way back to Mabou Mines’s first project, “The Red Horse Animation” (1970), which was conceived during a retreat in the isolated Nova Scotia town that gave the company its name. On Saturday, Akalaitis — who was in the original production — will reprise it alongside a pair of first-generation Mabou heirs: the writer, director and actress Clove Galilee, who is Breuer and Maleczech’s daughter, and the choreographer David Neumann, the son of the Mabou members Fergusson and Frederick Neumann, who died in 2012. (Akalaitis’s then-husband, Philip Glass, another founding member, wrote the music.)Tight family bonds have always been part of the Mabou Mines matrix — the group, born out of the experimentations of the 1960s, blurred the personal, the artistic and the political. Akalaitis, 84, recalls that the children of company members tagged along on tour in the 1970s and babysitters were in the line budgets for rehearsals — an afterthought for many current theaters.A still from “Moi-Même,” a movie that some of the Mabou Mines artists shot in Paris in 1968 and 1969 but never finished. It will be shown this weekend as a work-in-progress backed by a live band.John Rounds“Looking back, it was based on a very sound socialist principle that we are all equal and we all get paid the same amount of money, whether we’re working or not,” she said of the company’s precepts. “And when there was no money, there was no money — there wasn’t money for some.”Breuer, who died last year, had quickly emerged as a dominant personality, and he directed some of the troupe’s most famous shows, such as “Peter and Wendy” (the story of Peter Pan told by a solo actress and puppets, in 1997) and “Mabou Mines Dollhouse” (Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” with the men played by actors under 5 feet tall and the women by actresses who were nearly 6 feet, in 2003).At the same time the company embraced decision-making by consensus, which did not necessarily help speed things along. “Consensus building is very, very hard but I also think it’s the only way to do it,” Akalaitis said. “If you have a group of people who basically have big egos and don’t want someone else to be the boss, the only way to do it is that everyone’s the boss.”Even now, the company split leadership responsibilities among four co-artistic directors: Fogarty, Karen Kandel, Mallory Catlett and Carl Hancock Rux.The major reason Mabou Mines has endured for a half-century is that it has always drawn like-minded people who thrived on experimentation. Kandel remembered her first experience with the company, working on “Mabou Mines Lear” with Breuer and Maleczech. “There was a kind of trust that whoever was doing whatever role, you would find your way there,” Kandel, 69, said in a video conversation.Clockwise from top left, Fogarty, Rux, Kandel and Catlett. The shared leadership model, the co-founding member JoAnne Akalaitis, said, “was based on a very sound socialist principle that we are all equal.” Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“There was the shy me and then there was the thing inside of me, and that’s what Lee wanted to see come out,” she continued. “One time I said, ‘Why am I going to climb up this telephone pole?’ Lee’s response was something like, ‘Don’t ask me those questions, that Stanislavski [expletive]. Just climb up the pole!’” (Kandel would go on to star in the Mabou hit “Peter and Wendy.”)Past and present are inextricably entwined in “Moi-Même,” a movie directed by Breuer that the artists who would go on to form Mabou Mines (except for Akalaitis and Glass) shot in Paris in 1968 and 1969 but never finished.Breuer’s son Mojo Lorwin retrieved the footage and during the pandemic went over all 16 hours of it with his father on Zoom — there was no script and the dialogue was never dubbed in, so Lorwin, 38, was trying to figure out some sort of through line. “I did the vast majority of the work on it after he died but it really feels like a collaboration because he gave me this stuff to work with, but he left me all this space, too,” he said. “So I’ve written a script, I decided what these things mean.”On Saturday, “Moi-Même” will be presented as a work-in-progress backed by a live band and the Foley artist Jay Peck, with Kandel voicing all the adults and Declan Kenneally all the kids.In a way, it will be a bridge between Mabou Mines’s prehistory and what may lie ahead. “The future will be, hopefully, something that still feels like us,” Kandel said, “but won’t look like us.” More

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      ‘The Story Won’t Die’ Review: Art in a Time of Crisis

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      This documentary about Syrian refugee artists explores the role of art in the face of war and displacement.In 1949, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared that to write poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric.” The question underpinning his statement remains ever relevant: In the face of wars, genocides and other atrocities, does art-making serve any purpose? David Henry Gerson’s documentary, “The Story Won’t Die,” answers with a resounding yes. The Syrian refugee artists profiled in the film — men and women who’ve suffered one of the most brutal displacements of our time — make a case not just for art’s survival but for art as a means of survival.Weaving together interviews with a number of Syrian singers, rappers, dancers and visual artists now based in Europe, Gerson probes the ways in which artistic expression emerges both because and in spite of repression. For some, like the post-rock musician Anas Maghrebi, who brought his three drum kits on the boat across the Atlantic, their vocation is a spiritual life jacket of sorts. For others, like the photographer Omar Imam, the experience of migration has provided a furious impetus: His “Syrialism” series attempts to redefine stereotypical depictions of refugees.Threading the needle between individual tales and a broader historical portrait is as much a challenge for Gerson as it is for his subjects. While the artists are eager to represent their experiences in their work, they want to be seen as more than “a laboratory rat for people to show documentaries about,” says Bahila Hijazi, a member of an all-female Syrian rock band. If Gerson’s brisk supercut style can feel frustratingly cursory at times, he chooses wisely to concede the stage to the artists — rousing scenes from concerts and recitals are the film’s highlights — rather than turn them into data points for an exhaustive account of the refugee crisis.The Story Won’t DieNot rated. In Arabic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Brontez Purnell Brings His Disparate Parts Back to the Dance Stage

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      “Dance is basically language, like another form of writing,” said Purnell, the author of “100 Boyfriends.” He is bringing a new solo piece to Performance Space New York.“I’m such a Cancer,” Brontez Purnell said. “Double Sagittarius too. Just so pointlessly optimistic.”With so many projects happening at once, Purnell, 40, has no reason not to be. Though he has been creating music, films, dance pieces and written works for years, it was his 2021 book, “100 Boyfriends,” that gave him a heightened cultural visibility. Part memoir, part novel, part ethnographic study, the book creates an impressive, no-holds-barred map of his sexual adventures and misadventures in Northern California and earned him a Lambda Literary Award for gay fiction, awarded this week. He maps those experiences back onto his body, a site of his art, as evidenced by his stunning array of tattoos.With Purnell, who was born in Alabama and now lives in the Bay Area, there is practically no distinction between body, mind and spirit, a unity that informs his dancing. Much like his writing, his onstage presence is so liberated it’s almost confrontational. And while he can be unrestrained, it’s always informed by rigor. He worked as a go-go dancer while studying contemporary dance with the modern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, and other Bay Area choreographers; in 2010, he established the Brontez Purnell Dance Company.During the pandemic, his dance practice took a back seat to writing projects. But now he’s back, with his first evening-length solo dance piece, “Invisible Trial,” which premieres this week at Performance Space New York in Manhattan. Based on a paranoid short story by Sylvia Plath, the 40-minute dance loosely follows the nervy receptionist of a mental health clinic, who works under the watchful eye of the God of Anxiety.The work, which Purnell describes as “an intense condensing of structure, sculpture and text,” features a soundscape of original music and spoken passages from Plath’s story. On a minimalist set — with rope, bedding, a reception’s desk — the performance sees him cycle from tinsel-covered headpieces to office wear to full nudity.Purnell rehearsing at Performance Space New York. He describes “Invisble Trial” as “an intense condensing of structure, sculpture and text.”Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesPurnell has enlisted dramaturgical help from the playwright Jeremy O. Harris. Purnell’s longtime collaborator, Larry Arrington, a dancer and astrologer, did the choreography.“My role was more about supporting Brontez as he fleshed his ideas out, and constantly shower him with as much love and care as possible,” Arrington said in a Zoom interview, a framed photo of Purnell in blurry motion behind her. “You look at what he puts out and wonder how he takes all these disparate parts to make something beautiful and epic. How does one person contain this much kinetic spark?”In a quiet room at Performance Space New York, Purnell talked about his relationship to Plath, dance and the eternal martyrdom of the artist. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What has it been like returning to dance?I spent quarantine finishing my new sci-fi novel, and my new poetry collection, and had forgotten that dance is basically language, like another form of writing. It was time for me to put my body onstage again, to remind myself that I live in a body. The whole point of performance is to reignite the body. It’s a very important spiritual practice.Tell me about you and Sylvia Plath.I started reading her in, like, sixth grade. I had this teacher who gave me books, and they didn’t know what to give this little gay boy, you know, so they just gave me Sylvia Plath. She has this poem called “Mushrooms.” I don’t know, I had a rough childhood, and I just remember the last line stuck with me: “We shall by morning/Inherit the earth/Our foot’s in the door.”What about the Plath story, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” draws your attention?It’s whip-smart, and beatnik-y, and I think really cemented Plath’s voice. It seems very autobiographical because she got electroshock therapy, and the story ends with the narrator getting it after her boss finds her snooping through the clinic’s files. It’s very tense, and she kind of sets herself up as a Christ figure, with the crown of thorns being the electroshock thing.Are you a martyr?Yes, but a really lazy one.You have all of this amazing body art, and so much of your writing is about using your body as memory. I feel like that’s martyr adjacent?I’m doing it so no one else has to. I’ll go do the dirty work and report back, you don’t have to worry about all this. Somebody said that about me in a review once, and I thought that was really funny. It was like, “Brontez is doing all your drugs; smoking crack; [expletive] your boyfriend, and your boyfriend’s boyfriend; drinking your vodka — all so that you don’t have to.”In “Invisible Trial,” Purnell goes from tinsel-covered headpieces to office wear to full nudity.Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesYou’ve been trying to do this piece for 10 years. What held it up?I’ve never had time or given myself permission to do a solo, and this was something that I always wanted to do right, and with support. The San Francisco dance scene is OK, but I have never gotten a whole lot of monetary support from that scene.What do you feel gave you that permission? Performance Space? The success of “100 Boyfriends”?It had been so long since I had actually danced, because of quarantine. Most of my performance art stuff became me doing this humanitarian thing where I was giving free sex shows online to men in closeted countries.How did that go?It was awesome because, you know, men in homophobic countries are so much more appreciative of you and your body. It gave me a new eye on performance, on how much of your soul you’re sharing.What about “Johnny” made you want to turn it into a dance?I’ve always liked Plath’s nervous tension; she’s essentially always writing about anxiety. Here, she’s writing about the futility of being an office worker with other dreams. A lot of the books I’ve written were done in tandem with some terrible job I had. I think the piece is this weird allegory for someone who has other, bigger dreams in life, but are kind of earthbound by their 9-to-5.Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesWhat did the collaborations for this look like?The dramaturgy, with Jeremy, was just a series of late night phone calls about the structure I wanted to do, and how I want to execute it. With Larry, I just gave her certain parameters.But I don’t like to stress out my collaborators too much. I prefer just setting coordinates and then going in there and dealing with it, with their voices in the back of my head. I’m a bit anti-authoritarian, so you can tell me what to do, but not too much. Once you ask someone to choreograph and you ask someone to be a dramaturge, you’re basically asking someone to change your diaper and spank you.Why the new title, “Invisible Trial”?It’s about the idea that there are unforeseen actions happening all around you, dictating your behavior. For instance, if there’s a shadow campaign against you, do you actively confront that? Or do you keep just living your regular life and let the universe sort it out? Every time you bring it up, are you bringing something to the attention of people who had no clue? Now you’ve really put yourself in the spotlight. More

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      A Rapper’s Delight: Hip-Hop Memorabilia Goes Up for Auction

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      Original vinyl records, turntables and other ephemera belonging to the hip-hop pioneer D.J. Kool Herc will be included in a sale at Christie’s.In the 1970s, D.J. Kool Herc and his sister Cindy Campbell were famous for throwing parties in the rec room of their Bronx high-rise at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, which became known as the “birthplace of hip-hop.”Now some of the original vinyl records and turntables from those neighborhood jams, and other memorabilia, will be auctioned online in a sale organized by Christie’s with Payal Arts International, a consultancy practice.The sale, from Aug. 4 through Aug. 18, represents a larger effort by Christie’s to reach out to a broader population of clients and collectors. An exhibition of the more than 200 items included in the sale will be open to the public at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries from Aug. 5 to Aug. 12, as part of Hip-Hop Recognition Month in New York City.Up for auction are some of the turntables and original vinyl records from the parties Herc and his sister Cindy threw at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Christie’s Images Ltd. 2022.“For far too long, our country has neglected to celebrate the contributions of Black Americans to the extent that is deserved,” Darius Himes, Christie’s international head of photographs, said in a statement. “The spirit of the parties that Herc and Cindy would throw were always about inclusion — people from all races and cultures across New York’s many neighborhoods would come to hear the best new music played loudly on Herc’s famous sound system.“From the depths of Planet Rock, a.k.a. the Bronx — came a fire and energy that first captivated the 5 boroughs, and then permeated every facet of the globe,” Himes added. “There isn’t a country today whose youth haven’t been influenced by this movement. And it all started here, in New York City, by a talented Black American with very few resources.”The sale will include disco balls, shoes, hats, belt buckles and jewelry of that pioneering period, as well as Polaroids of Herc and friends, and numerous awards.“At our parties in 1970s New York, it was about something that was bigger than ourselves,” Herc, whose real name is Clive Campbell, said in a statement. “Hip-hop is both an American immigrant story and a global story — it belongs to everybody. And we can still see and feel it today.” More

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      La Scala Woos a Younger Audience

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      Like so many cultural institutions, opera houses need to instill passion in the ticket holders of the future.Even an iconic opera house like La Scala must create programming to build the audience of tomorrow. One-third of today’s audience is under 55 years old. But Dominique Meyer, the artistic director and chief executive, is determined to make the house even younger.Since 2009, the theater has offered operagoers under 30 the possibility of attending previews of performances, which are usually reserved for private audiences, and a pass, which gives access to backstage tours, workshops and more. The subscription package, Under30, grants four performances for the price of one and the opportunity to meet artists at a happy hour.Mr. Meyer credited the efforts of his predecessors Stéphane Lissner and Alexander Pereira for their efforts, noting that the subscribers are “very faithful.” He wants to make sure, however, that they remain so: The house’s internal surveys have revealed that audience members between 30 and 40 are the hardest to retain.“It is not as if one’s salary suddenly becomes three times as big when you turn 30,” he explained. “All of a sudden, they have to pay full price, and the tickets are not as good as before.”As such, starting next season, the house will offer loges to those 35 and under at 50 percent of the normal price (370 euros to 920 euros, or $396 to $986, for a four-person loge). There will also be weekly performances offering half-priced tickets — including the opportunity to enjoy free drinks and socialize in specially reserved areas. (Tickets at normal price run up to €150 euros for ballet and €250 for opera.)“Every opera lover has made friends during a performance,” said Mr. Meyer. “We want to support this kind of communal environment.”He also hopes to “open the theater’s doors” to new potential audience members. Last July, the house orchestra, chorus and ballet toured different parts of the city as part of the initiative La Scala in Città (La Scala in the City), offering free tickets. On one occasion, in the Porta Romana District, dancers performed at Mysterious Baths, the swimming pool and cultural event center, in a program of excerpts from works by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Léo Delibes, Ólafur Arnalds and more.Dominique Meyer, La Scala’s artistic director and chief executive, in the theater next to a statue dedicated to the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMr. Meyer recalled that the only problem were the mosquitoes, which pestered the dancers, especially when they had to hold still. La Scala in Città will be repeated this September on a larger scale, including the young singers of the opera house’s academy, ballet school and children’s choir.This season also saw the launch of the subscription package Un palco in famiglia (A loge for the family), for which adults pay full price and can bring their children for €10 to €15 a head. Materials designed especially for minors are distributed at performances.Meanwhile, since 2014, the theater has mounted productions made for children, welcoming more than 200,000 visitors. This season featured a children’s version of Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (“Cinderella”), which was also streamed on La Scala’s website.Next season will, for the first time, feature a newly commissioned work, “Il Piccolo Principe” (“The Little Prince”), based on the classic French children’s novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. All productions are under one hour so that young visitors don’t grow bored, and they include child performers to further stimulate interest in the art form.The house has welcomed back most of another audience sector: tourists. They now make up 22 percent of total listeners, down from 30 percent before the pandemic.Mr. Meyer says that while visitors from Asia and Russia have not returned, the Europeans — and the Americans — are back. Of this group, the largest fraction (18 percent) is from Switzerland, followed by France (14 percent) and the United States (13 percent). The cities best represented are Vienna, Paris, London and New York.“If we are diligent and continue,” said Mr. Meyer, “we are certain to win a new audience.” More