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      Jim Jarmusch’s Collages Are Ready for Their Close-Up

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      The filmmaker has been quietly making small, eerie collages on newsprint for 20 years, with faces switched onto other bodies. Now they’re finally on view.Jim Jarmusch likes removing the heads. He likes to swap the heads of world leaders with Picassos or Basquiats, or simply excise them entirely, leaving a head-shaped void. A man with a coyote’s head rides in the back of a car, rather dejected. Warhol’s head is a favorite motif: twin Andys in sunglasses standing stoically in a tunnel; Warhol’s head grafted onto a state official striding a tarmac; a man slouched in a chair, one of the artist’s Brillo boxes fixed where his head should be.Jarmusch is best known for writing and directing pleasingly downbeat films like “Night on Earth” and “Down by Law,” in which laconic protagonists meander through the weirder corners of the world, encountering fellow travelers, or simply the uncanny. For the past 20 years he’s also been quietly producing collages like these, notecard-size pieces of delicately layered newsprint on cardstock that echo a similar worldview, scrambling imagery to create alternatingly deadpan and revelatory compositions.“I never intended to do anything with these,” Jarmusch, whose thatch of chalk white hair and blackout shades are still a familiar presence on the downtown scene, said in an interview this summer. “But I thought, well, why not share them? See if they amuse anyone.”“Untitled,” 2017. Is this Josef Albers’s head that’s gone missing from the artist’s body? Jim Jarmusch includes a newsprint clue that suggests so.Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology Editions“Untitled,” 2017.Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology EditionsJarmusch says he was content to keep this practice to himself, creating upward of 500 collages, most of which haven’t been publicly seen. But over the last year, while at the Catskills home he shares with his wife, the filmmaker Sara Driver, he was convinced, with the encouragement of Arielle de Saint Phalle, with whom he has worked for nearly 10 years, to organize and present this strain of his practice. The result is Jarmusch’s first monograph, “Some Collages,” published this month by Anthology Editions, which collects more recent examples made in the last seven years. “Newsprint Collages,” a solo show of the original collages, his formal gallery debut, opens at James Fuentes on Wednesday.And they are in fact highly amusing, in an spookily absurdist manner. They recall “La Boutique Obscure,” the impressionistic dream diary the Oulipo writer Georges Perec kept between 1968 and 1972, hallucinatory, slightly terrifying, but also frequently funny. Jarmusch’s collages are manipulations of something originally presented as fact — a détournement of photojournalism serrated and spliced into surrealist scenes that collapse time (a Victorian-era woman in a modern hospital room), or illustrate some psychic fantasy (releasing a primal scream while an audience applauds).Jarmusch has no qualms vivisecting species like a paper-based Doctor Moreau (a man with the head of a Pomeranian led away in handcuffs). But one thing he doesn’t tamper with is scale. The collages dismantle the newsprint’s visual information but remain faithful to its original size, which means many of them are minuscule, some near-microscopically so. It also means the experience of looking at one is physically intimate. The images force you to crane your neck to decipher them, or bring the page closer to your face, as if receiving a secret. As objects go, “Some Collages” is stout, a macabre photo album. It’s small enough to be considered portable, which gives it a utilitarian cast, ready to be produced to divine something important or true about the day’s news. As Joseph Cornell wrote, “Collage = reality.”“Untitled,” 2017, one of many mashups of historical periods.Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology Editions“Untitled,” 2017. “I love Nico,” the artist said. “I’m saving her head.”Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology Editions“The interesting thing about them is they reveal to me that my process of creating things is very similar, whether I’m writing a script or shooting a film or making a piece of music or writing a poem or making a collage,” Jarmusch said. “I gather the elements from which I will make the thing first. Like, shooting a film is just gathering the material from which you will edit the film, you know? The collages reduce it to the most minimal form of that procedure.”Still, collage presents an attractive convenience. Whereas a film shoot necessitates sophisticated and heavy equipment, not to mention the cooperation of many people, the collages require only solitude and a copy of the paper, a movable feast of broadsheet. “Mostly I do it in between the rigors of making a film, when I need to be left alone, or maybe people around me want me to leave them alone,” Jarmusch said. “I made a lot of these over the last few years before my mother died, in Cleveland. I would stay with her in her house, and go into another room and work on them. It’s stepping aside the real world, so to speak.”Jarmusch keeps an old metal flat file in his garage with drawers dedicated to backgrounds, saved cardboard and “paper I’m attracted to,” newspapers he’s yet to parse. “I have files of heads,” he added. He has a strict set of self-imposed rules: newspapers only (no magazines), no sharp cutting tools (he favors ballpoint pens that have gone dry, which “can cut in a crude way”). The effect is a fiber halo, the tears and separations leaving a roughness that makes the images appear to fuzz, as if in a dream. “I’m not quite sure why I even adhere to these things. It’s like an oblique strategy,” he said, referring to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s card-based method for inspiring creativity.“I can work on them anywhere,” Jarmusch said of his collages. “I make them in hotel rooms. Most of the time I do it between the rigors of making a film.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesJarmusch’s collages fit within a rich art history, which joins with the art world tradition of appropriation, as sacred as it is misunderstood, from Kurt Schwitters, who assembled delirious assemblages from trash, to Hannah Hoch’s and Man Ray’s Dadaist compositions, to Ad Reinhardt’s clattering, modernist “Newsprint Collage.”“Max Ernst, Picasso and Braque, particularly, bringing other textures into their work, which carries through to one of my favorite artists of all time, Jasper Johns,” Jarmusch said. “I like that little kids can make them. You can make them so minimal. In some ways John Baldessari’s are even more minimal than mine because he didn’t even bother to replace faces but just put colored circles over them — some of those I think are very beautiful.”He went on: “In some ways my favorite artists of the 20th century are, on a philosophical level, Duchamp for the first half and Warhol for the second half. I must say I still find it hilarious when people still don’t understand that because Richard Prince reappropriated a photograph, well, why wasn’t that photograph worth hundreds of thousands of dollars before that? How come he gets all that money?.”“Untitled,” 2017Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology Editions“Untitled,” 2016. A man with a coyote’s head rides in the back of a car.Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology EditionsBefore he landed on filmmaking, Jarmusch intended to be a poet, studying under the New York School poet David Shapiro (who also made collages) and Kenneth Koch, and traces his animating principle to their strategies. “Koch once gave me a poem by Rilke, and said, bring me your translation in two days. I said, ‘But Kenneth, I don’t know any German.’ And he just looked at me with a kind of twinkle in his eye and said, ‘Exactly.’ And so the idea is take something, anything, and make a new thing out of it.”Newsprint appeals to Jarmusch for its availability, but also its ephemerality. “I like it being so fragile,” he said. “You know, the old joke of yesterday’s newspaper you wrap the fish in or whatever, it’s something intended to be discarded. It reduces it’s own self-importance somehow.”The thought occurs that this story could end up as part of one of Jarmusch’s collages, a neat closed loop. Does he find it ironic that he’s speaking with The New York Times about art he makes with copies of The New York Times? “It’s a little strange,” he said. “But I think it’s funny too. I love that newspaper thing. I love it in old movies where they roll the presses and all of that.”“Untitled,” 2017. Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology EditionsCould that be Glenn Close’s head, on a body with a tuxedo? Jarmusch won’t say beyond, “I try not to think too much about the kind of juxtapositions I’m creating.” Images are from his monograph “Some Collages,” by Anthology Editions.Anthology EditionsThese qualities also give the project an elegiac air. As local newspapers around the country cease operations or migrate to digital-only formats, Jarmusch’s collages become a document of a rapidly evaporating medium. “I realized only recently that, gee, I’m using materials that are almost obsolete now,” he said. “There’s something soothing for me in handling the paper, I don’t know how to explain it. Digital is too cold for me. I love it for many things, my last films have been shot with digital cameras and I’ve been editing on digital machines since 1996. I’m not a total Luddite.”Jarmusch is interested in the pure visual collision of collage, but his source material inevitably troubles their innocence. Politicians creep in, along with images of global strife, which can be interpreted as commentary. “I try not to think too much about the kind of juxtapositions I’m creating,” Jarmusch said. “If they seem too pointed or too cute or something, I get rid of them. Sometimes someone says, ‘Oh, do you realize that’s the former right-wing prime minister of Australia?’ No, I don’t know who that was. Or other times I’ll just find a nice photo of Nico [the Velvet Underground singer]. I love Nico, I’m saving her head. And then I find something where I think, that would be nice for Nico. They’re kind of childlike, my way of putting them together. They’re playful.”Yet he also admits, “Some of them are a little scary or dark. Some of them, I hope, are funny. The New York School poets taught me if there’s nothing funny in any of your stuff, then wow, how unfortunate for you.”Jim Jarmusch: Newsprint CollagesThrough Oct. 31, James Fuentes, 55 Delancey Street, Lower Manhattan; (212) 577 1201; jamesfuentes.com. More

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      A Climate Opera Arrives in New York, With 21 Tons of Sand

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      “Sun & Sea,” an operatic installation that won the top prize at the Venice Biennale, is being staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.On a rainy morning last week, a beach arrived at the front door of a theater in Brooklyn.Or at least the raw ingredients for one: 21 tons of sand, packaged in 50-pound bags, 840 of them. Wheeled into the BAM Fisher on pushcart dollies, they were unceremoniously dropped onto the theater’s tarp-covered floor with a dull thud.Once opened and spread around, the sand would form the foundation of “Sun & Sea,” an installation-like opera that won the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and has emerged as a masterpiece for the era of climate change. Neither didactic nor abstract, it is an insidiously enjoyable mosaic of consumption, globalization and ecological crisis. And its next stop is the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it opens on Wednesday and runs through Sept. 26.Over 20 tons worth of sand were brought to the BAM Fisher for the production in 50-pound bags.George Etheredge for The New York Times“The way it delivers its ideas, it’s totally surprising,” said David Binder, BAM’s artistic director. “It disarms you and lures you in. That’s not the way we’re used to receiving work about the issues of our day — what we’re all facing in this summer of fires and floods and what we’ve done to the planet.”For the work’s creators — Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte — the reception of “Sun & Sea,” only their second collaboration, has been something of a Cinderella story, as they said in a recent video interview. But as much as it is a fairy tale, the work is the fruit of a friendship that began in the Lithuanian town where they all grew up.Barzdziukaite eventually became a director; Grainyte, a writer; Lapelyte, a musical artist. In working together, they were attracted to opera, they said, because it provided “a meeting place” for their individual practices. As a trio, Grainyte added, “we can listen to each other and dive into this process without fighting or dealing with egos.”The sand was used to create an indoor beach for “Sun & Sea,” which uses the setting for a musical meditation on climate change and globalization.George Etheredge for The New York TimesTheir first project was “Have a Good Day!,” which traveled to New York for the Prototype festival in 2014. Like “Sun & Sea” it approached its subject — the thoughts of supermarket cashiers, and cycles of consumption — with a light touch. The cast of 10 singers, all women to evoke a typical store in Lithuania, shared stories that charmed until, in their accumulation, they took on the nauseating excess of the photographer Andreas Gursky’s similarly themed “99 Cent.”“The idea was to have this zoom-in approach using micro narratives,” Grainyte said, “but also being conscious that we also belong to this part of buying and selling circles.”It was important to the three creators that, while bitterly ironic, “Have a Good Day!” was not polemical. “We tried to really avoid the ‘one truth’ because it’s never black and white,” Lapelyte said. “That goes the same with ‘Sun & Sea.’ When we talk about the climate crisis, it’s never coming with one view.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times“Sun & Sea” is more ambitious: still subtle, intimate and haunting, but sprawling in scale. From a sliver of sand, Barzdziukaite, Grainyte and Lapelyte extract broad implications. The beach, after all, is a battleground of the Anthropocene that both embraces and defies nature. It’s a destination deemed worth flying around the world, expelling tons of carbon, to simply lounge on — though not without a heavy dose of sunscreen to avoid a burn, or worse.The characters in Grainyte’s libretto, which is both plain-spoken and poetic, are overworked and over-traveled, both self-righteously against technology’s intrusion in their lives and welcoming of it. Their stories are told as monologues and vignettes, broken up by choruses of sinister serenity.Often, the characters are oblivious. “What a relief that the Great Barrier Reef has a restaurant and hotel!” one woman sings. “We sat down to sip our piña coladas — included in the price! They taste better under the water, simply a paradise!” Her husband seems unaware that his burnout isn’t so different from that of the earth itself as he sighs melodically, “Suppressed negativity finds a way out unexpectedly, like lava.”“Sun & Sea” in Venice, where it won the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 2019.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesSome characters find beauty in the horrors of modern life. “The banana comes into being, ripens somewhere in South America, and then it ends up on the other side of the planet, so far away from home,” one sings. “It only existed to satisfy our hunger in one bite, to give us a feeling of bliss.”Another, in the most unforgettable image of the opera, observes:Rose-colored dresses flutter:Jellyfish dance along in pairs —With emerald-colored bags,Bottles and red bottle caps.O the sea never had so much color!“We didn’t want to be too declarative,” Barzdziukaite said. “At some point, Vaiva was taking off all the words which were dealing with ecological issues directly.” The final work amounted to about half of what was written.George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York TimesWhat they didn’t want was to give the impression that they were climate activists. “It would be unfair to say that,” Grainyte said. “If we were activists, we wouldn’t create this work that is traveling the world.” (The production, like many in the performing arts, isn’t the most eco-friendly: For the BAM presentation, all that sand was transported by truck from VolleyballUSA in New Jersey to Brooklyn.)But that doesn’t mean “Sun & Sea” avoids responsibility by design. Political art is a spectrum, and its creators are aware that they are wrestling with unwieldy and urgent topics; they just want their opera to “activate,” as Lapelyte put it.Crucial to that effect are, beyond the text, the music and visual presentation. The electronic score — earworm after earworm — provides minimal accompaniment for the singers, and was written to reflect the ease of leisure.After “Sun & Sea” closes, the sand will be vacuumed up, sanitized and repurposed.George Etheredge for The New York Times“We wanted it to be quite poppy, that it would remind you of a song that you know well but you can’t say which,” Lapelyte said. “And at the same time it’s very much reduced to very few notes, and it’s also repetitive like a pop song.”The action, while largely improvised by volunteers who flesh out the cast, is obsessively managed by Barzdziukaite. Participants are asked to arrive wearing specific colors (mostly calming pastels). While the roughly hourlong opera is sung in a loop, they are instructed not to seem to be acting, nor to acknowledge the audience. For the performers, the experience shouldn’t be any different from a trip to the beach.“We are very much using this documentary approach in every aspect,” Barzdziukaite said. Observant audience members might notice how casually plastic fills the space; a pair of partially buried headphones, or some abandoned toys, will be familiar sights.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn Venice, audiences left “Sun & Sea” to be confronted by countless cheap souvenirs and towering cruise ships. When the run ended, the city was flooded. Heavy rain will also have preceded the piece’s arrival in Brooklyn, with the storm carrying the remnants of Hurricane Ida having killed over 40 people in New York and three neighboring states. None of this is lost on the creators, who find themselves wrestling with what it means to make subtle art in a world whose natural disasters increasingly have the heavy-handedness of agitprop.“I feel like I’m living in a dissonance and asking myself what’s next and how I should behave,” Grainyte said.Those who attend the BAM production might find themselves asking similar questions. They won’t see tchotchkes crowding Venetian shops, but perhaps on the way home they will take another look at the garbage on the subway tracks or the shelves of miniature Empire State Buildings in Midtown.If there’s any waste they shouldn’t be worried about, it’s all that sand. After “Sun & Sea” closes, it will be vacuumed up, sanitized and repurposed as a beach volleyball court, maybe, or as a playground. But probably never again as an opera.Sun & SeaWednesday through Sept. 26 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      5 Things to Do on Labor Day Weekend

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      Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City.Art & MuseumsMoMA PS1’s Engaging CourtyardNiki de Saint Phalle’s “La femme et L’oiseau fontaine” (1967) will be on view in MoMA PS1’s courtyard until Monday.Niki Charitable Art Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; MoMA PS1; Marissa AlperIn 1997, the courtyard at MoMA PS1 became the main venue for “Warm Up,” a summer event that mingled art, music and design in order to draw new audiences. But things change. “Warm Up” certainly hasn’t gone away, but last fall, the institution began “PS1 Courtyard: an experiment in creative ecologies,” a program testing out ways to use the outdoor space that encourage community engagement.The initiative’s projects include a fountain from Niki de Saint Phalle, part of a larger exhibition at PS1 that closes on Monday, and Rashid Johnson’s “Stage.” Visitors are welcome to get up on his installation’s large yellow platform and freely use its five live microphones of varying heights. By showing a microphone as a dynamic social tool, Johnson’s piece, which will be on view through the fall, indicates the many things a stage can represent: a site of protest, music making, solidarity and, most important, amplification of your voice.MELISSA SMITHFilm SeriesScenes From Every SeasonA scene from “A Summer’s Tale,” one of four features in Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, all of which Film Forum will screen through Sept. 9.Janus FilmsThe maximalist moviegoing event of Labor Day weekend is “Lawrence of Arabia,” screening on Saturday and Sunday on 70-millimeter film at the Museum of the Moving Image. But for a minimalist alternative, try Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons — four features, each set at a different time of year, that Rohmer, the most conversation-oriented French New Wave director, turned out from the late 1980s through the late 1990s. (Together, the running times total roughly two showings of “Lawrence of Arabia.”) With the changing of the seasons, Film Forum is showing all the titles separately from Friday through Sept. 9.Watching them in tandem illustrates how Rohmer — superficially so consistent and serene — subtly toys with structure and variation, recombining types of characters in friendships and romances that rarely develop as expected. The most summery is, naturally, “A Summer’s Tale.” Melvil Poupaud plays a commitment-phobe vacationing in Brittany who somehow winds up juggling a surfeit of commitments to women.BEN KENIGSBERGJazzCelebrating a Visionary Record LabelCharles Tolliver at the 50th anniversary of Another Earth in 2019. Through Saturday, he will be celebrating another 50th anniversary at Birdland — that of the record label he started with Stanley Cowell, Strata-East.Lev Radin/Pacific Press, via Getty ImagesIn 1971, seeking refuge from an exploitive, increasingly commercialized jazz industry, the trumpeter Charles Tolliver and the pianist Stanley Cowell founded Strata-East, a record label offering artists creative freedom and relative commercial control. Though short-lived, Strata-East inspired Black musicians in other cities to undertake similar efforts. And it captured a moment in time: Nearly every Strata-East album simmers with the heat and tension of the Black Power era, delivering terse, syncopated rhythms and pushing jazz linguistics into a more spare, confrontational zone.Cowell died last year after a prolific career, but Tolliver, 79, continues to perform. At Birdland through Saturday, he is celebrating the label’s 50th anniversary with an ensemble of all-stars, including some who recorded on Strata-East in the 1970s: the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, the pianist George Cables, the bassist Buster Williams and the drummer Lenny White. Sets are at 7 and 9:30 p.m. The late show on Saturday, which will also be livestreamed at dreamstage.live, will feature a guest appearance by the storied bassist Cecil McBee and will be hosted by the actor Danny Glover.GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOComedyNo Labor for These LaughsErik Griffin in his Showtime special “AmeERIKan Warrior.” He is headlining at Carolines on Broadway through Saturday.ShowtimeEven workaholics know they should take it easy this weekend, and fans of “Workaholics” will recognize the headliner at Carolines on Broadway through Saturday: Erik Griffin, who played Montez Walker on that Comedy Central sitcom. Griffin also portrayed a stand-up in “I’m Dying Up Here,” a dramedy about comedy in the 1970s on Showtime, where you can find two of Griffin’s comedy specials. At Carolines, he will perform one set at 7 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, and two sets at 7 and 9:30 on Saturday. Tickets start at $31.25.On Sunday at 7 and 9:30, Carolines will welcome Rosebud Baker, who released her debut special, “Whiskey Fists,” in August on the Comedy Central Stand-Up YouTube channel. Tickets are $27.25 and up.There will be a two-drink minimum at each show.SEAN McCARTHYKIDSThis Is How They RollA child at an NYC Unicycle Festival event in 2019. The 12th edition of the annual celebration takes place throughout the boroughs this weekend.Kenneth SpringleIn New York, casual basketball games are about as common as strutting pigeons. But the contest scheduled on Saturday at 11 a.m. in the Bronx should result in a lot of head-turning, not to mention wheel-turning.That’s when the King Charles Unicycle Troupe will play — while riding its favorite vehicles — at the basketball court in Clinton Playground in Crotona Park. (Enter at Clinton Avenue and Crotona Park South.) A beloved local circus act, these guys can double-Dutch jump rope on one wheel, too.Their show is a highlight of the 12th annual NYC Unicycle Festival, a free outdoor celebration presented by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. The festivities also include long-distance group rides on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, which proficient young unicyclists can join if they’re accompanied by an adult. (Details are on the festival’s website.) Experienced riders can participate in a post-performance pickup game with the King Charles players on Saturday, too, along with a free-throw basketball contest and a unicycle obstacle course.Neophytes, however, can do more than watch. On Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m., at Grant’s tomb in Morningside Heights, the festival’s conclusion will offer instruction and youth-size equipment for children who want to give unicycling a whirl.LAUREL GRAEBER More

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      ‘Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed’ Review: No Gloss

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      This documentary on “The Joy of Painting” star focuses on the controversy over who controls his brand and legacy.Bob Ross’s hair was a thing of beauty. When he appeared on “Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee,” Regis Philbin teased him about his Afro, which Ross sweetly admitted might be more nurtured than nature. And photos of Ross as a teenager and then as a young airman rocking a pompadour make clear he always liked a good ’do. This is among the cheerier scenes in the director Joshua Rofé’s “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed,” a documentary less about Ross’s life than about what happened to his brand in the later years and after his death. Annette and Walt Kowalski, who were Ross’s business partners, are not painted in a flattering light. (The couple declined to participate in the film.)Ross’s television show, “The Joy of Painting,” ran from 1983 to 1994. And the title nods to the way Ross coached students and then an exponentially growing audience to treat a mistake as a “happy accident.” Yet, as much as happy was Ross’s touchstone word, grief permeates the film. Ross died of lymphoma in 1995. He was 52. His only child, Steven, and friends and fellow artists John Thamm and Dana Jester carry the heft of the storytelling here.If we are to trust the film — and this is not an unreasonable concern given that it treads on disputes over the estate — then heartache laid the foundation of Ross’s relationship with the Kowalskis. Annette Kowalski had recently lost her son when she took a course with Ross in 1982. A still deeper sorrow infuses the film. “I’ve wanted to get this story out for all these years,” Steven Ross says early on. Later he states, “What they did was shameful, and people should know that.”From the outset, the documentary nudges us toward the shadows with a twinkling then foreboding score. Illustrations with the texture of a paint-by-numbers kit underline the darker themes of Steven Ross’s recollections. The film’s depiction of what the Kowalskis did to own Ross’s name when he became ill is ugly, yet unsurprising given that the parties were in the midst of a legal dispute after Ross’s death.Toward the end, the director pulls out of the moral tailspin by introducing folks touched by Ross. These testimonials are welcome but they underscore that the other side of this saga is sorely missing. The melancholy result is that the painter with the spectacularly lulling voice, the hallmark ’fro and the liberating kindness remains a mystery; not the brand that’s made millions but the guy who touched millions.Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & GreedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Virus Fears Prompt a Major New York Theater to Postpone Its Return

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      As the Delta variant spreads, Signature Theater delayed its planned October opening of “Infinite Life,” a new play by Annie Baker.Signature Theater, a prominent Off Broadway nonprofit, has postponed its return to the stage over concerns about the persistent coronavirus pandemic, becoming the first major New York theater to take such a step.The theater’s leadership announced the postponement Friday afternoon, just days before rehearsals were to begin for “Infinite Life,” a new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, who was also planning to direct the work. The production was supposed to run from Oct. 5 to Nov. 7.“Due to ongoing health and safety concerns, Signature Theater and Annie Baker have decided to postpone the upcoming production of ‘Infinite Life,’” the theater said in a statement. “Signature will continue, in discussion with artists, to evaluate on a case-by-case basis how to proceed with other programming planned for this season. The company and artist agree that this is the best choice for this show at this time.”Around the country, there have been a number of cancellations and postponements of pop music tour dates and festivals because of the rise in coronavirus cases caused by the spread of the Delta variant. There have been several theater postponements in California, including at Berkeley Repertory Theater, which recently cited the Delta variant in delaying until next year a Christina Anderson play that had been scheduled to begin in October.It is unclear whether the postponement of “Infinite Life” is an outlier or a first indication that the theater industry is getting cold feet about the many reopenings planned in New York this fall, on Broadway and off. Two Broadway shows, “Springsteen on Broadway” and “Pass Over,” are already running, and 15 more plan to start next month; there are also some plays already running in commercial and nonprofit venues around the city, and many of the city’s larger nonprofits plan to resume presenting shows during the fall.Broadway theaters are requiring audience members to show proof of vaccination and wear masks. And Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that all performing arts theaters must require proof of vaccination as part of a mandate that applies to indoor dining, entertainment, and fitness.Signature said it was still hoping to stage a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” in October. Although “Infinite Life” would have been its first stage production since the start of the pandemic, it would not have been the first use of its building: This summer, the nonprofit featured an installation called “The Watering Hole,” conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon, in its Frank Gehry-designed home, the Pershing Square Signature Center, a few blocks west of Times Square.Baker, who won a Pulitzer in 2014 for “The Flick,” writes plays that are sometimes hard to describe, and very little has been released about this one, but a spokesman said there was a six-person cast. In news releases, the theater has described “Infinite Life” as “a play about no end in sight” and “a new play that tackles persistent pain and desire.” More

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      Times Analyzed 3,000 Videos of Capitol Riot for Documentary

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      Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On Jan 6., as rioters were attacking the U.S. Capitol, Times journalists on the Visual Investigations team were downloading as many recordings of the violence as they could find.Over the next six months, the team, which combines traditional reporting techniques with forensic visual analysis, gathered over 3,000 videos, equaling hundreds of hours. The journalists analyzed, verified and pinpointed the location of each one, then distilled the footage into a 40-minute documentary that captured the fury and destruction moment by moment. The video, the longest the team has ever produced, provides a comprehensive picture of “a violent assault encouraged by the president on a seat of democracy that he vowed to protect,” as a reporter says in the piece.The visual investigation, “Day of Rage,” which was published digitally on June 30 and which is part of a print special section in Sunday’s paper, comes as conservative lawmakers continue to minimize or deny the violence, even going as far as recasting the riot as a “normal tourist visit.” The video, in contrast, shows up-close a mob breaking through windows, the gruesome deaths of two women and a police officer crushed between doors.“In providing the definitive account of what happened that day, the piece serves to combat efforts to downplay it or to rewrite that history,” said Malachy Browne, a senior producer on the Visual Investigations team who worked on the documentary.“It serves the core mission of The Times, which is to find the truth and show it.”Haley Willis, a producer on the team who helped gather the footage, said that some of the searches required special techniques but that much of the content was easily accessible. Many of the videos came from social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Parler, a platform that was popular with conservatives and later shut down. The team also collected recordings from journalists on the scene and police radio traffic, and went to court to unseal body camera footage.“Most of where we found this information was on platforms and places that the average person who has grown up on the internet would understand,” Ms. Willis said.In analyzing the videos, the team members verified the images, looked for specific individuals or groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and identified when and where each one was filmed. Then they put the videos on a timeline, which allowed them to reconstruct the scenes by the minute and track the key instigators.David Botti, a senior producer, said the team wanted to use this footage to explain how the riot happened, to underscore just how close the mob came to the lawmakers and to explore how much worse it could have gotten. For example, the investigation tracked the proximity of the rioters to former Vice President Mike Pence and an aide who was carrying the United States nuclear codes.“It’s rare to get an event of this magnitude that’s covered by so many cameras in so many places by so many different types of people filming with different agendas,” Mr. Botti said. “There was just so much video that someone needed to make sense of it.”Dmitriy Khavin, a video editor on the team, said he wanted viewers to feel like they were on the scene. But he also recognized the images were graphic, so he tried to modulate the pace with slower moments and other visual elements like maps and diagrams.“This event was overwhelming,” Mr. Khavin said. “So we worked a lot on trying to make it easier to process, so it’s not like you’re being bombarded and then tuning out.”Carrie Mifsud, an art director who designed the print special section, said her goal was similar, adding that she wanted to stay true to the video’s foundation. “For this project, it was the sequence and the full picture of events,” she said. Working with the graphics editors Bill Marsh and Guilbert Gates, she anchored the design in a timeline and included as many visuals and text from the documentary as possible to offer readers a bird’s-eye view of what happened.“My hope is that the special section can serve as a printed guide to what happened that day, where it started, and the aftermath, Ms. Mifsud said.For the journalists on the Visual Investigations team, it was challenging to shake off the work at the end of the day. Mr. Khavin said images of the riot would often appear in his dreams long after he stepped away from the computer.“You watch it so many times and look at these people and notice every detail and digest the anger,” he said. “It is difficult.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Lost Leonardo’ Review: Art, Money and Oligarchy

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      This documentary about the painting “Salvator Mundi” packs the fascination and wallop of an expertly executed fictional thriller.To paraphrase John Lennon, Leonardo da Vinci is a concept by which world civilization (such as it is) measures artistic mastery.“The Lost Leonardo,” a documentary directed by the Danish filmmaker Andreas Koefoed, is a disquieting confirmation of this idea. It’s the story of how a painting purchased for a little over $1,000 was soon identified — if not wholly authenticated — as a Leonardo, and eventually wound up in the hands of a Saudi oligarch who spent more than $400 million on it. Among other things, this picture freshly demonstrates that a conventionally structured documentary can pack the fascination and wallop of an expertly executed fictional thriller.The globe-trotting narrative begins with Alexander Parish, a self-described “sleeper hunter” — an art buyer who looks for catalog mistakes — purchasing the painting “Salvator Mundi” from a New Orleans dealer. Working with the renowned art historian and restorer Dianne Modestini, Parish and his financial partner Robert Simon determine they have a Leonardo on their hands. And so the movie moves from “The Art Game” to “The Money Game.”Into this narrative, “The Lost Leonardo” weaves coherent mini-treatises on restoration, art dealerships, free ports, the true nature of the auctioneering business and more. The art critic Jerry Saltz blusters that the painting is not just not a Leonardo, but that it’s garbage. The writer Kenny Schachter is more considered and rueful in expressing his doubts. Footage of spectators reacting to the painting suggests that one can produce a Pavlovian response to an artwork merely by labeling it a Leonardo. The movie also features F.B.I. and C.I.A. figures, the New York Times investigative journalist David Kirkpatrick and Leonardo DiCaprio.It’s a dizzying tale. And whether or not you believe “Salvator Mundi” to be a real Leonardo, it’s ultimately a disgusting one.The Lost LeonardoRated PG-13 for language. In English and French with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      A Puppet Festival Returns to New York, All Grown Up

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      After more than a year of pandemic-related crises, Manuel Antonio Morán wanted to give a gift to New York. He envisioned something lighthearted and uplifting, but also thought-provoking and as varied as the city itself. The answer? Puppets.But there’s nothing here to prompt sneers or eye rolling. The International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC, which arrives this week with over 50 shows and events, more than a dozen short films and five accompanying exhibitions, including “Puppets of New York” at the Museum of the City of New York, is far from a kiddie celebration.“The wrong perception in the United States is that puppetry is just for children or to be used for education,” Morán, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, the programming’s Lower East Side hub. “That’s something I’m fighting every single day.”The works on display in the “Puppets of New York” exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York include Bruce Cannon’s marionette Lady Love Power (inspired by Diana Ross).Karsten Moran for The New York TimesRolando, a puppet by Agrippino Manteo whose family immigrated to New York a century ago. They specialized in making complex metal-armored Sicilian marionettes.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesAlan Semok’s Howdy Doody marionette (recostumed by Richard Liljeblad).Karsten Moran for The New York TimesRick Lyon’s hand puppet Trekkie Monster from “Avenue Q” and others in the exhibition, which opens Aug. 13, highlight puppetry traditions.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThis festival, which is offering 60 percent of its performances free (tickets to the rest are $15 each), may help convince the doubters. Although Morán founded Puppet Fringe NYC as a biennial in 2018 — Covid-19 prevented its 2020 edition — this version is almost twice the size of the original and essentially a rebirth. Beginning on Wednesday with the first Puppet Week NYC, which comprises five days of live events, the festival continues through Aug. 31, mostly in virtual form, with shows from countries including India, Israel, Argentina, Spain, South Korea and the Ivory Coast.It “represents the whole immigrant ethos of the Lower East Side, channeled through the lens of these other citizens that are puppets,” said Libertad O. Guerra, the executive director of the Clemente. The center is producing Puppet Fringe NYC with Teatro SEA, the downtown Latino theater Morán started in 1985, and Morán’s own agency, Grupo Morán.This year’s festival will also have workshops in puppet construction, four of them for adults. And for those whose tastes run to the politically barbed or the comically risqué, two grown-ups-only puppet evenings are planned, one of them called the “Bawdy, Naughty Puppet Cabaret/Puppet Slam.”“They’re including elements of burlesque,” Morán said of the slam, to be presented on Saturday by the Puppetry Guild of Greater New York. “There might be a little bit of skin,” he added with a laugh.Herbert and Lulu, the hobo bugs, by Craig Marin and Olga Felgemacher, as they are installed at the Museum of the City of New York.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesInstallation view of Shari Lewis and James Patrick Brymer’s hand puppet Lamb Chop, with costumes by Pat Brymer Creations. On Wednesday, Lewis’s daughter Mallory and Lamb Chop will perform “The Shari Lewis Legacy Show.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut perhaps this festival’s most novel element is its partnership with the Museum of the City of New York, which will open its 2,500-square-foot exhibition with a sold-out celebration on Thursday evening. “Puppets of New York,” which runs until early April at the uptown Manhattan museum, features photographs, videos, films and sets, as well as more than 60 puppets. They range from cardboard finger models designed by Penny Jones to José A. López Alemán’s 12-foot-tall Titanya, the fairy queen from “Sueño,” Teatro SEA’s Afro-Caribbean version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”“The main argument of the show uptown is that the history of puppetry in New York City mirrors the demographics of the city,” said Monxo López, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellow who curated “Puppets of New York.” And, he noted, “many different puppeteers that reflect that diversity have not been as visible as others. It was important to tell that story of diversity, of visibility, of inclusiveness, in a way that also showed joy and possibility.”Derek Fordjour and Nick Lehane’s puppet (called a man whose name is never known) from their 2020 production “Fly Away.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesTo that end, the exhibition includes not only designs by famous masters like Jim Henson and Ralph Lee, but also work by artists like the Manteo family, who brought complex metal-armored Sicilian marionettes when they immigrated to New York a century ago, and Derek Fordjour and Nick Lehane, whose 2020 puppet production, “Fly Away,” featured a nameless young Black man.“My strategy was that each object had to tell as many stories as possible,” said López, who also collaborated with the author and curator Leslee Asch to organize “Puppets of New York: Downtown at the Clemente,” a complementary exhibition on view through Sept. 30. It joins three other art shows that will be there through August: “Teatro SEA’s International Collaborations”; “Murals of Puppetry Around the World,” featuring Alfredo Hernández’s paintings; and “Vince Anthony’s Legacy,” which celebrates the retired founder of the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, to whom the festival is dedicated.The exhibitions reveal a synergy with the festival’s live performances, which will mostly be presented outdoors. (All in-person events require registration and face masks.) Chinese Theater Works, which will deliver puppet dragons and the Chinese judge of the dead to the Clemente’s plaza over four nights in “The Triple Zhongkui Pageant,” will be represented by shadow puppets at the Museum of the City of New York. Also at both those locations will be Lamb Chop, perhaps the most memorable — and feistiest — sock puppet of all time, who appeared on children’s television for 40 years with her ventriloquist co-star, Shari Lewis.“She’s the Velveteen Rabbit of puppets,” said Lewis’s daughter, Mallory Lewis, referring to Margery Williams’s children’s classic about a stuffed animal that becomes real. On Wednesday evening, Mallory Lewis and Lamb Chop will perform “The Shari Lewis Legacy Show,” an interactive production featuring a new, pandemic-related ending. “It’s a tribute to the first responders,” she said in a phone interview.The City Parks Foundation’s production of “Little Red’s Hood” will be performed in both English and Spanish.via Museum of the City of New York Other family-friendly performances will take place all weekend. Bruce Cannon, artistic director of the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater in Central Park, contributes his talents to the City Parks Foundation’s jazzy production of “Little Red’s Hood,” to be performed in both English (Saturday) and Spanish (Sunday).Besides this fairy tale, in which the Wolf stalks Little Red through Manhattan, Cannon will present his own “Harlem River Drive,” a one-man homage, on Sunday.“It explores how Harlem became Harlem,” he said in a phone interview. While touching on serious topics like racism and the Depression, it also offers joyful music and multiple kinds of puppets, all operated by Cannon. They usually include a marionette inspired by Diana Ross — absent from the festival performance because it’s in “Puppets of New York” — and two of Michael Jackson. (When was the last time you saw a moonwalking marionette?)The festival will host three performances of Deborah Hunt’s “La Macanuda.” Here, an image from a 2019 performance at the National Puppetry Festival in Minneapolis.Richard TermineDeborah Hunt, a New Zealander living in Puerto Rico, will also examine a community’s evolution in three performances of “La Macanuda,” whose title, she said in a phone conversation, means “a large, friendly being.” Hunt, whose work appears in the Teatro SEA exhibition, portrays the character in a puppet that encases her entire body. Accompanied by cutouts, scrolls and a smaller puppet, she enacts a wordless tale — essentially a statement supporting immigrants — in which La Macanuda rescues the victims of a city-destroying ogre. “She’s a kindly departure for me,” said Hunt, whose work often tends toward the macabre.The Clemente’s own neighborhood stars in nightly performances of “Los Grises/The Gray Ones,” Morán’s music-filled show about the community’s elders, and Saturday and Sunday in “Once Upon a Time in the Lower East Side,” which the center commissioned from the Junktown Duende collective, a troupe that creates puppets from recycled materials.Its production is “centered around a tenement where waves of immigrants settled,” said Adam Ende, a member of Junktown Duende. And it’s “specifically about the history of immigrant puppetry.”While the show deals with gentrification and police brutality, it also illustrates the transformation of a blighted space into a community garden. And like Puppet Fringe NYC, it’s a testament to strength amid hard times. “The struggle continues,” Ende said. “And we’re celebrating together, endlessly.” More