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      The Creators of ‘On Sugarland’ Build a Site of Mourning and Repair

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      Ritual and healing are at the center of Whitney White and Aleshea Harris’s new play about a Black community that loses its members to a perpetual war.In the mobile home-lined cul-de-sac at the center of the new play “On Sugarland,” grief is pervasive. A memorial of dog tags, boots and other personal items of fallen soldiers sits center stage, a reminder of a community’s losses. Daily rituals, from services with singing, dancing and shouting to a boy shaving his father’s chin, move mourning from expressions of sorrow to utterances and activities that keep the dead in communion with the residents.“We got a frequency other folk can’t pick up on,” one character says.“On Sugarland,” about a community that is constantly losing its members to a perpetual war, gives new meaning to what Ralph Ellison called the lower frequencies. A register, in this case, that situates life and death on a continuum. The play itself is the latest collaboration between the playwright Aleshea Harris and the playwright and director Whitney White, who previously worked together on the acclaimed “What to Send Up When It Goes Down.” That work, combining an interactive ritual performance with an absurdist parody, bore witness to the many deaths of Black people to police and vigilante violence. Bearing witness is a responsibility that expands justice, James Baldwin wrote.“On Sugarland,” in previews at New York Theater Workshop, follows a preadolescent Sadie as she comes to terms with her mother’s death in combat. The weight of the loss, however, does not prevent her from tapping into her superpower — invisibility. Sadie uses it to her advantage. She can make the dead walk. She can also make the dead talk. And she can act as a conduit to help ease the sting of death. The naming of gods, references to super powers and the repetition of language heighten the play’s sense of reality.Kiki Layne, left, as Sadie and Adeola Role as Odella in “On Sugarland” at the New York Theater Workshop. The play draws elements from Greek tragedy, Southern gothic, Afro-surrealism and hip-hop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHarris, 40, who is also a spoken word poet, uses her text to reshape words. Her characters whisper, shout, elongate a vowel or express rhythmic cadence, allowing language to escape the familiar. “I’m not really a singer, but I can hold a tune,” Harris said. “I think a lot about the sonic experience of the things that I’m writing. I feel like they need to hit the right note in order to resonate the way that I want them to.”She showcased her ability to mix genres — spaghetti western, tragedy and hip-hop — in “Is God Is,” a tale of twins enacting a revenge fantasy. Just as multifaceted, “On Sugarland” features a Greek chorus called the Rowdy and draws elements from Southern gothic, Afro-surrealism and hip-hop, producing sounds that prepare the audience for the otherworldly occurrences that eventually unfold.White, 36, also an actor and musician who grew up in Chicago, often incorporates aural traditions into her work as well. Music was always there. Reflecting on her time at Catholic school, she said: “We had liturgical music, which is where you sit and learn the songs, old school, and you look at the hymnals, and you learn to read music and sing. Religious music was how I started loving the arts and loving music. Then I got involved with theater.”Of Harris’s work, White said: “It has a rhythm and a feeling. It feels like you’re hearing notes, and tones and movements.”Echoing Ntozake Shange’s choreopoetic drama “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf,” which is set to return to Broadway in April, and the works of other Black arts movement playwrights, including Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins and Sonia Sanchez, “On Sugarland” mines the wealth of characteristic Black expression without reproducing stereotypes. It presents a vengeful young girl, her aunt who is suffering from addiction and a sensuous elderly neighbor who finds frumpiness offensive.In a recent interview, Harris and White talked about their new work and how their collaborations have helped them evolve as artists. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Black work can be as experimental and aesthetically excellent as anything else, and we shouldn’t settle,” said White, right, about the lessons she’s learned from working with Harris. Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesHow does the play create new ways to see Black women?WHITNEY WHITE None of them are stereotypes. None of them are tropes I’ve seen before. While they do dip into things that are familiar to me, they’re not flat, they’re quite complex, they’re just delicious. If you look at all of the roles [in Harris’s work], from “Is God Is” to “What to Send Up” to “On Sugarland,” these three plays create work that people can sink their teeth into for their whole lifetime and what a gift is that.ALESHEA HARRIS It was with great delight that I presented the elder women. I was very excited to create a role for two elder Black women who had a lot of meat inside of their stories and got to be very engaged and activated inside of the tale. I hope it feels like a boon to other Black women who are bearing witness to the work.What types of cultural and theatrical rituals does your work draw from?HARRIS I remember when I started writing “What to Send Up When It Goes Down” that my grad school mentor, Douglas Kearney, reminded me that a ritual is meant to bring something into being, and that just felt like a provocation. For the residents of the cul-de-sac in “On Sugarland,” I was really interested in exploring what their ritual of grieving could be. That wasn’t quite a funeral; that was another spiritual expression of care.WHITE There’s a great range of emotion, and ritual is complex. You’ll go to a family service, one person’s laughing, one person’s crying, one person’s being inappropriate. It is like this multifaceted emotive color wheel of Black life that I feel like it is my job to make sure it’s onstage. Because so often the way Black ritual is depicted onstage and onscreen is this very grim, one-noted thing. Actually, like the life cycle, communities and individuals within those communities possess so much. I want to make sure that my people are as alive, and specific, and colorful, and human as possible.What inspired the chorus, or as they are named, the Rowdy?HARRIS The chorus is embodying the innocence of the community and the Black community at large, an innocence that’s criminalized. There’s this language from Evelyn [a character in the play] about the chicks being snatched up from beneath their mothers, and they’re conscripted, they’re being sent off to fight in the war, so their numbers are dwindling.My psychic proposition is to remind us that we are complex, that there’s nothing inherently bad. That there’s great joy in what we do. Just in Black expression, Black mundane expression around the block is gorgeous. It isn’t always held up as such. The proposition is to see ourselves with great complexity and love.WHITE Aleshea sent me a video early on in the process, and she said, “This is the video that inspired the Rowdy.” It’s this beautiful group of young Black people with this speaker, just radically taking up space in a celebratory way that moves through their bodies.When I watch that video, it reminds me of being young in Chicago, growing up, spending time on the South Side with all these other young Black people my age. We would just take over the community, and that wasn’t a negative thing — it was a beautiful thing. It’s so sad that our communities so often are criminalized and viewed in these negative ways. What does it mean to see a group of young people in the prime of their lives die off one by one? What does that say about what these characters are experiencing in the world?How have you, as artists, changed through your collaboration?WHITE Aleshea is making work that is giving voice to the deepest parts of the Black experience. I feel that the way she has changed my work is that I realize I don’t have to settle on stereotypes. I don’t have to settle with naturalism. I don’t have to do things the safe way.The work can be as aesthetically challenging as it is culturally significant. I don’t have to settle until I have work that is as strong and rigorous as possible. Working with her has changed my understandings of what I know to be possible and what I’ve always believed was possible. Black work can be as experimental and aesthetically excellent as anything else, and we shouldn’t settle for anything less.HARRIS Working with Whitney has emboldened me and reminded me that what I want to do is possible. The weird things that I’m doing with language on the page can ring, can scream in a body. Let’s be disruptive of respectability politics. Whitney also understands my desire to present Black women with great muscularity onstage. We understand the rules. We understand how we should conduct ourselves. We were taught how to present ourselves in the world so that we could stay safe. I think she agrees with me that those things aren’t keeping us safe. So, we might as well be fearless. More

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      How Hip-Hop Inched Its Way to the Super Bowl Halftime Stage

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      At Sunday’s game, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar will lead the first-ever halftime performance with rap at its center. The genre has taken a roundabout path to get there.On Sunday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., the Super Bowl halftime show will feature the local rap heroes Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar, placing hip-hop firmly at the center of the annual spectacle, which is routinely watched by more than 100 million people, for the first time.The show, which is being produced in part by Jay-Z’s entertainment and sports company, Roc Nation, will also star Eminem and Mary J. Blige, but it will not be the first to include rap music. The genre has taken a rocky, roundabout path to headliner status at the Super Bowl, with this year’s event coming at an increasingly fraught moment for the N.F.L. regarding race.That baggage is nothing new: At least since 2016, when the quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police killings of Black people, the league has faced questions about its commitment to diversity and social justice, on the field and off. More than 70 percent of the league’s players are Black, but the N.F.L. has no Black owners and, until recently, only one Black head coach. This month, Brian Flores, the Miami Dolphins head coach who was fired last month, sued the league, claiming he and others had been discriminated against in the hiring process.Those debates have trickled into its entertainment business. In 2017, well before his company partnered with the N.F.L., Jay-Z turned down an offer to perform at the Super Bowl, and reportedly urged others to do the same. In subsequent years, with Jay-Z declaring “we’ve moved past kneeling” to some backlash among players and fans, Roc Nation has booked pop extravaganzas featuring the Weeknd, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.But Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg — while among the most recognizable hip-hop veterans with decades of hits and pop culture cachet between them — represent something different, and that may be the idea. “At one point, Dre was in a group that was banned by popular culture,” said Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, which headlined the show in 2011, referencing the widespread controversies of Dr. Dre’s early gangster rap act N.W.A.That the N.F.L. has now turned to these once-controversial figures with their own checkered pasts may seem far removed from the days of pearl-clutching regarding Janet Jackson’s 2004 wardrobe malfunction, M.I.A.’s middle finger in 2012 and Beyoncé’s nods to the Black Panthers in 2016. But some say it’s also indicative of the league’s long, jagged journey to embrace Black music and culture — especially rap — as well as its need to shore up its community bona fides now.“The N.F.L. is positioning the halftime show as a meaningful occurrence,” Dr. Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sport management at the University Michigan and the director of the Center for Race & Ethnicity in Sport, said in an interview. “But to some, it seems performative for the N.F.L. to feature these artists. It feels like window dressing. You’re using Black talent to entertain the masses, but what are you doing that would honor the essence of hip-hop, like addressing racial injustices in the communities that have bred this labor force of Black talent?”Dive Deeper Into the Super Bowl Optimism and Anxiety: This year, SoFi Stadium in Inglewood will host the Super Bowl. What does the event mean for the city? Home Advantage: The Rams will use their usual facilities and home stadium in the game against the Bengals. Here is how they are getting ready.Cooper Kupp: The Rams receiver managed an All-Pro season, becoming a sure-handed catcher and the driving force behind the team’s success.Joe Burrow: He has led the Bengals to their first Super Bowl appearance in 1989. But he still thinks about that playoff loss in high school.The Super Bowl halftime stage was not always a place for hitmakers. In 1967, with popular music venturing into daring directions, a television audience of about 51 million watched the University of Arizona Symphonic Marching Band perform a selection of tunes including the Dixie anthem “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”Other marching bands had the spotlight for years, as did avatars of safe, family-oriented entertainment, like Andy Williams and Carol Channing. No rock performer played the halftime show until 1988, almost seven years into the MTV era, when the oldies act Chubby Checker twisted at Super Bowl XXII. Three year later, New Kids on the Block would become the first contemporary pop group to perform at the event, and the show remained blandly middle-of-the-road until Michael Jackson’s powerhouse performance in 1993.In the years that followed, established greats like Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder dominated, sometimes with more modern acts like Gloria Estefan and Boyz II Men as guests, though the burgeoning hip-hop of the 1990s remained absent. When Queen Latifah joined the Motown tribute in 1998, she performed “Paper,” one of her first songs to not feature any rapping.The next modern M.C. to take the Super Bowl stage was Nelly in 2001, as part of a larger ensemble of pop figures. He returned in 2004 and was joined by P. Diddy, bringing more contemporary rap to the performance than ever before. But that was also the year that changed everything: After a medley of appearances by Diddy, Nelly and Kid Rock, Janet Jackson sang, among other songs, “Rhythm Nation” — an idealistic ode to unity and Black power (“Join voices in protest/To social injustice”) — before finishing the show by duetting with Justin Timberlake on his hit “Rock Your Body.” Just before the commercial break, Timberlake put his hand on Jackson’s costume, pulled at it and exposed her right breast, triggering a national uproar.Missy Elliott, left, joined Katy Perry at halftime in 2015. Will.i.am performed with the Black Eyed Peas in 2011, ushering in a new era of pop on the halftime stage after a period of classic rock acts.From left: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images; Adam Bettcher/Getty ImagesFor years after, the Super Bowl halftime producers retreated to the safety of classic rock: Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and the Who all performed. It was during that period of careful conservatism that Will.i.am saw an opening.“I flew out to New Jersey, went to the N.F.L. headquarters, and I pitched the Black Eyed Peas,” he said in an interview. “We weren’t, like, ‘Yo, we’re family friendly!’ Or ‘We rated PG, bro.’ My pitch was, ‘You know you need to have pop on the halftime show again.’” It wouldn’t be long, he warned the N.F.L., before they ran out of classic rock bands.In 2011, the Black Eyed Peas got the gig, inching the N.F.L. back toward the modern mainstream. But concerns about putting on a show palatable to all audiences lingered. “There’s a girl in our group,” Will.i.am said, referring to the singer Fergie. “They were nervous about that,” he said, and “checked our wardrobe like we were going through freakin’ security at the airport.”“You’ve got to understand the circumstances, and the walls that were up,” Will.i.am added. “We cracked open the door to get the N.F.L. out of that fear of pop and urban music after a seven-year break of only going legacy. To now have everybody from Bruno to Beyoncé to Dre and Snoop — talk about a total perspective change on the importance of diversity and inclusion,” he said, referring to Bruno Mars, who headlined in 2014 and returned as a guest two years later.Yet even as rap slowly regained its place on the Super Bowl stage — with Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliott, Travis Scott and Big Boi all making cameos in the last decade — questions linger about whether the music and its messages can transcend the 12-minute show now that the genre is taking prominence.“The N.F.L. is trying to look better by celebrating hip-hop, but they need to do better,” said Dr. Armstrong, the professor. “I’m hoping the artists are going to use their own power and influence to get them to do so.”A Brief History of Hip-Hop at HalftimeSuper Bowl XXXII (1998)When in doubt, it’s always safe to program something nostalgic, like a salute to Motown’s 40th anniversary (the label was founded in 1959). The featured acts were the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, and Martha and the Vandellas. To balance the generational appeal, they were joined by the label’s then top current act — the throwback harmony group Boyz II Men — as well as the Motown rapper Queen Latifah, who sang a new-jack-swing-inspired version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”Super Bowl XXXV (2001)The St. Louis rapper Nelly, who’d released the breakout Top 20 pop hit “E.I.” in 2000, was an afterthought on this bill, which featured the rock band Aerosmith, then in its fourth decade, and the peppy pop phenoms ’N Sync. The two groups alternated songs, then united for the big finale, “Walk This Way,” joined by Britney Spears, Mary J. Blige and Nelly, whose “E.I.”/”Walk This Way” mash-up included only half of his first verse. Total camera time for rap: 18 seconds.Super Bowl XXXVIII (2004)Three years later, Nelly returned and performed his No. 1 hit “Hot in Herre,” which urged listeners to “take off all your clothes.” Combined with Kid Rock and P. Diddy, there was far more rap included than in any previous Super Bowl show. But this infamous halftime show is mostly remembered for the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake incident, in which her breast was mostly exposed. Not long after, Jawed Karim, a computer science and engineering student, grew frustrated at how difficult it was to find a clip of that moment online, and sensing a market niche for a video-sharing site, soon helped found YouTube.Super Bowl XLV (2011)The N.F.L. disappeared pop music from the halftime show for several years, eager to avoid bad publicity or Congressional criticism. But the supply of widely beloved rock stars was limited, and Ricky Kirshner, in his debut as the show’s producer, brought in the pop-rap group Black Eyed Peas. The group dashed through their many hits while leaping around a set that looked like a “Tron” reboot. And in the Super Bowl’s attempt at broader appeal, Slash of the rock band Guns N’ Roses played guitar while Fergie, of the Black Eyed Peas, sang the band’s ferocious “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”Super Bowl XLVI (2012)Madonna headlined the show in a gladiator’s cingulum — with ample help from the briefly massive party-rap duo LMFAO; the rapper and singer Cee Lo Green; and Nicki Minaj and M.I.A., two inventive rap talents who’d recently recorded “Give Me All Your Luvin’” with Madonna. M.I.A.’s verse had a few expletives, which were bleeped out, and in their stead, she raised her left middle finger to the camera. The F.C.C. reportedly received more than 200 complaints, about one for every 450,000 viewers. The N.F.L. apologized to its audience and filed arbitration claims seeking $16.6 million from M.I.A., whom they said violated a contract requiring her to comply with anti-profanity standards. This prompted M.I.A. to tweet at Madonna, “Can I borrow 16 million?” The conflict was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.Super Bowl XLIX (2015)In the most-watched halftime show ever, with nearly 115 million viewers, the headliner Katy Perry was joined by Lenny Kravitz for a rocking rendition of her hit “I Kissed a Girl,” but the true second banana was Missy Elliott, who performed parts of three of her tracks: “Get Ur Freak On,” “Work It” and “Lose Control.” The pairing of Perry and Elliott seemed more natural than other shotgun marriages, because both are pop surrealists. More than two years later, Elliott tweeted that she’d been in the hospital the night before the Super Bowl, and when her first song started, “I was SO SHOOK. I said Lord I can’t turn back now.”Super Bowl LIII (2019)In solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, a number of Black artists were rumored to have turned down offers to perform in 2019. Instead, Maroon 5 headlined with guest spots from Travis Scott and Big Boi of Outkast. “It’s what it is,” the Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine said after people criticized the band and accused it of violating a boycott. “We’d like to move on from it.”Super Bowl LIV (2020)The N.F.L. knew it had to fix its relationship with hip-hop, and partnered with Jay-Z and Roc Nation to produce the Super Bowl halftime show. Kaepernick “was done wrong,” Jay-Z told The New York Times. “But it was three years ago, and someone needs to say, ‘What do we do now — because people are still dying?’” The headliners were Shakira, a Roc Nation management client, and Jennifer Lopez: two Latina women who have released albums in Spanish as well as English. They were joined by Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper and singer; and J Balvin, a Colombian who brought reggaeton, rap’s younger Spanish-speaking cousin from the Caribbean, to the Super Bowl stage. More

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      BAM Taps Former Leader of Its Film Program as Its Next President

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      Gina Duncan, who had been working at the Sundance Institute since 2020, will return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to lead it out of the pandemic.After a turbulent two years that has forced the Brooklyn Academy of Music to navigate the coronavirus pandemic, budget woes and leadership upheaval, the organization said Tuesday that it was turning to a veteran of its film wing to become its next president, filling a position that was left vacant more than 12 months ago.Gina Duncan, who previously served as BAM’s first vice president of film and strategic programming, has been selected as the organization’s new president, the institution announced. She will take over a multifaceted performing arts behemoth with a $50 million operating budget.Ms. Duncan, 41, who has never held the top job at an arts institution, will be tasked with stabilizing and reinvigorating BAM, an important cultural anchor and incubator known for presenting an eclectic array of cutting-edge artists and performers. Her first day as president will be April 11. She returns after a stint at the Sundance Institute, where she worked as its producing director.“Coming back to BAM feels like returning home,” Ms. Duncan said in a telephone interview. “The other day I went down to see Annie-B’s ‘The Mood Room.’ And it was the first time I had been back in BAM since we all fled our offices in March 2020. And I just was overwhelmed.”“I came back for BAM — the artists, the staff, the audience,” she added. “They’re my people.”The selection makes Ms. Duncan the first person of color to lead the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In choosing her, the academy’s board selected a candidate with whom they were familiar, after previously tapping an outsider in Katy Clark — a violinist-turned-arts-executive — who left BAM after less than six years in January 2021. Ms. Clark’s predecessor, Karen Brooks Hopkins, spent 16 years as BAM’s president, and a total of 36 years at the organization.Ms. Duncan joined BAM’s executive team in January 2017 as an associate vice president for film — a newly created role in which she oversaw the organization’s Rose Cinemas and its repertory film program. Under her leadership, BAM’s repertory programming began to focus more on underrepresented voices in cinema.She was promoted in 2019, with her role expanding beyond film to include responsibility for the organization’s archives and its lectures, classes and discussions; she helped integrate programming across the institution. She also helped move programs online during the early months of the pandemic, officials said.She left BAM in September of 2020 for the Sundance Institute, and now will return after roughly 18 months away.The chairwoman of BAM’s board, Nora Ann Wallace, said in an email that Ms. Duncan’s “leadership skills are immediately evident to anyone who works with her.”“Her ability to inspire a group of people — be it staff, audiences, donors, or our board — is vital to this moment in BAM’s history,” Ms. Wallace said. “The board saw those skills when she was at BAM in her previous leadership role.”Ms. Wallace noted that in addition to her background in film, Ms. Duncan has produced theater and arts-centered community programming for many years. “Gina is a gifted strategist who excels at assessing the bigger picture,” Ms. Wallace said.Ms. Duncan said that her vision for BAM involved ensuring it is “vital and visible across Brooklyn and beyond.” During her initial tenure with the institution, she said, she had worked to ensure that its film program both served local audiences and became part of a “larger national conversation.”“I see an opportunity to do that with BAM across all the different art and rich cultural programming that we present,” she said.When Ms. Duncan’s predecessor, Ms. Clark, left BAM, questions were raised about the housing bonus she had received to purchase an apartment in Brooklyn, which she was allowed to keep when she left the position.Ms. Wallace did not disclose Ms. Duncan’s salary, saying only that her pay is “in line with other performing arts organizations of similar size.” Ms. Duncan’s compensation does not include an apartment or housing allowance, Ms. Wallace said.Ms. Clark’s departure created something of a leadership vacuum at BAM; the board’s previous chairman, Adam Max, died in 2020 and an internal team was appointed to lead the institution temporarily as the pandemic created a crisis for the performing arts. With live performances impossible, BAM was forced to slash its operating budget, lay off some employees and furlough dozens more, cut the pay of top executives and dip into its $100 million endowment for special distributions.Ms. Duncan will have the advantage of taking over at a time when cultural institutions, including BAM, are starting to find their footing again. The academy’s first full season since the start of the pandemic focuses on the artists of New York City.“The industry remains really tenuous,” Ms. Duncan said. But at BAM, she said, she has a “strong foundation to start from.”“An institution is its people,” she said. More

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      in Television

      David Olusoga Wants Britain to Face Its Past. All of It.

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      For more than a decade, the historian and broadcaster’s work has focused on bringing his country’s uglier histories to light. Recently, more people are paying attention.LONDON — In December, when a British court cleared four Black Lives Matter protesters of criminal damages for toppling the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, in June 2020, it was thanks in part to David Olusoga’s expert testimony.Olusoga, a historian whose work focuses on race, slavery and empire, felt a duty to agree to address the court on behalf of the defense, he said in a recent interview, since “I’ve been vocal about this history.”At the trial in Bristol, the city in southwest England where the Colston statue was toppled, Olusoga, 52, told the jury about Colston’s prominent role in the slave trade and the brutalities suffered by the African people Colston sold into slavery.The closely watched court decision was greeted with concern by some in Britain and relief by others, and Olusoga’s role in the defense offers just one recent example of his work’s impact on British society.Olusoga’s comments in court are consistent with a frequent focus of his wider work as one of the country’s most prominent public historians: that long-forgotten or buried past injustices can be addressed in the present day in public-facing, accessible media.Olusoga in a scene from the docu-series “One Thousand Years of Slavery” on the Smithsonian Channel, for which he served as an executive producer.Smithsonian ChannelOlusoga’s latest TV work is “One Thousand Years of Slavery,” which premieres on the Smithsonian Channel on Monday. The show, which he executive produced alongside Bassett Vance Productions, a production company helmed by Courtney B. Vance and Angela Bassett, takes a wide-ranging, global look at slavery through the familial stories of public figures like Senator Cory Booker and the actor David Harewood.One of Olusoga’s best-known projects is “Black and British: A Forgotten History,” which explored — through a BBC television series accompanied by a best-selling book — the long and fraught relationship between Black people and Britain, introducing many people to Black communities here that date back to the Roman times.“I’m interested in the histories we don’t tell. I’m not interested in retelling stories that we’ve told a thousand times,” Olusoga said. “I’m interested in telling stories that are unfamiliar.”Olusoga, who is half-Nigerian, traces this focus to his mother telling him when he was a child that Nigerian soldiers served in World War II. In that moment, his interest in history overlapped with his attempts to understand his Black and British identity, he said. “It made me realize not just that there was more to this for me, but also that I wasn’t being told the whole truth,” he said. “And a lot of what I do is from that moment of realization.”The historian was born in Lagos to a Nigerian father and a white British mother. He moved to Britain as a child and grew up in northeast England with his mother and siblings. In the book “Black and British,” he spoke of the racial tensions of the 1970s and 1980s and a campaign of racist abuse his family experienced, which forced them to leave their home.Olugosa’s “Black and British: A Forgotten History” explores the long and fraught relationship between Black people and Britain.Despite having a difficult time in school — Olusoga was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 14 — there he developed a love of history from a favorite teacher and the television he watched. He studied history at university but opted for a career in TV over academia. For Olusoga, “history was naturally public,” he said. “I chose very deliberately to leave universities and go into television in order to make history.”After 15 years in TV production, he started appearing in front of the camera. He’s now a fixture on British screens presenting shows like “A House Through Time,” which each season tells the story of a British house and its inhabitants over the centuries. In 2019, Olusoga was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to history and community integration (which he struggled to accept because of its association with the violent acts of the empire).In an email, Mary Beard, the author of “Women and Power” and a professor of classics at Cambridge University, praised Olusoga’s skills of persuasion. She remembered that, when filming “Black and British” with Olusoga in a rural English village, an older white woman said she was “proud” to know that one of the earliest inhabitants of her village had been Black after being presented with a reconstruction of that ancient woman’s face.“That is the Olusoga effect,” said Beard, who is another one of Britain’s best-known historians. “He has a real gift for telling stories straight and winning people to seeing things in a different way. It is a very rare gift.”This is also evident in the impact of “Unremembered,” a 2019 documentary that was made by his production company, Uplands Television. The show, presented by David Lammy, a Black Member of Parliament, brought to public consciousness that African and Asian soldiers who died in World War I were not commemorated in the same way as their white comrades, and many lie in unmarked graves. The program ultimately led to a public apology from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.In recent years, Olivette Otele, Britain’s first Black female history professor and the author of “African Europeans: An Untold History,” has seen a shift in how the Black experience is included in British and European history, which she credits in part to Olusoga.“In academia, we do all we can, but to be able to democratize, to reach wider audiences has made such a huge difference, so much so that it’s becoming normal to engage with these topics,” Otele said in a recent interview.Olusoga studied history but opted for a career in television over academia, as he believes history is “naturally public.”Alexander Turner for The New York TimesFor Olusoga, this shift was surprising. “I’ve been telling these stories on radio and television, and fighting for them to be told, for my entire career, and I’ve done nothing different,” he said. “I think what’s happened is the world has changed around me and I think people are more interested in listening.”At the same time, since the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, there have been contentious debates about what gets included in Britain’s public history. In late 2020, following the toppling of the Colston statue, the British conservation charity the National Trust released a report exploring links between some of its sites and colonialism and slavery. The report was dismissed as “woke” by some conservative politicians and many in Britain’s right-wing press.Yet Olusoga said debates like this show that certain segments of the population reject the uglier elements of British history. The past is sometimes used to make British people feel “that we were magical people from a magical island that’s always been on the right side of history,” he said.But, “if you only want to tell yourself the positive stories from your past,” he said, “then that necessarily means you cannot have an honest reckoning with your past.”He added: “And that’s Britain’s issue.” More

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      in Theater

      Review: ‘The Tap Dance Kid,’ Still Out of Step With the Times

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      The Encores! series returns with a 1983 musical that, despite its pleasures, wasn’t quite right then and isn’t quite right now.When 8:30 p.m. was a typical curtain time for Broadway musicals, the main character’s biggest number, crystallizing the crisis and ensuring an ovation — think “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy” — often came at 11.The curtain for Wednesday night’s opening of the Encores! revival of “The Tap Dance Kid” went up at 7:30, so the so-called 11 o’clock number came closer to 10, but it was still recognizably the main event. That’s when Joshua Henry, playing William Sheridan, the conservative father of a Black family thrown into chaos by a son who wants to be a dancer, let loose with a tirade that ripped the fabric of the rest of the show to pieces, expressing with fury and unbridled terror the character’s disdain for what he sees as the performative Blackness of tap.“I keep on smilin’ through the worst of times,” he snarls while shucking and jiving monstrously. “Lettin’ the white man toss me his nickels and dimes.”It’s an astonishing performance, in the best way hard to watch. If only William were the main character it might even make sense at the end of a mostly lighter-hearted story. But he’s not, and it doesn’t, and the biggest number, whenever it comes, should not be his.That “The Tap Dance Kid” is never sure which of the members of the Sheridan family it’s about — the focus seems to change every 10 minutes — is just one of the oddities afflicting this tonally bewildering but intermittently appealing 1983 musical, which Encores!, in its return to live production after a two-year pandemic hiatus, is offering through Sunday at New York City Center.Is the main character, as the title leads you to expect, William’s 10-year-old son, Willie (Alexander Bello), the one who wants to dance despite his father’s prohibitions? Or is it Emma (Shahadi Wright Joseph), William’s 14-year-old daughter, who wants to be a lawyer like him but can barely get his attention because she’s a girl?Bello, left, with Adrienne Walker, who plays his mother, Ginnie.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat about William’s wife, Ginnie (Adrienne Walker), who must “tap dance” around her husband’s temper while trying to make things right for her children? Or Ginnie’s brother, Uncle Dipsey (Trevor Jackson), a dancer and choreographer? Dipsey, depending on your point of view, is either leading Willie astray by teaching him the “shim-sham-shimmy” or upholding the joyful traditions of an art form mastered by men like his late father, Daddy Bates (DeWitt Fleming Jr.).Yes, even a ghost gets two big numbers.The musical was always something of a hodgepodge. The original book, by Charles Blackwell, based on the bracingly dour young adult novel “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change” by Louise Fitzhugh of “Harriet the Spy” fame, never resolved the problem of making peppy entertainment out of such downbeat material.The score — by Henry Krieger and Robert Lorick — fully absorbed that confusion of tone, offering songs that are either purely high-spirited (“Fabulous Feet”) or baldly prosaic (“Four Strikes Against Me”) with little in between. There are times when you don’t know why someone is singing or dancing and other times when you do but wish you didn’t.The Encores! production, directed by Kenny Leon, does not solve those problems. Lydia Diamond’s “concert adaptation” (though the production is amply staged) does make some improvements, moving the story, which in the 1983 production was said to take place in “the present,” to 1956, where it in some ways makes more sense. The family’s interpersonal and often gender-based conflicts — Emma wants to wear pants, Ginnie chafes under her husband’s authority — feel more apt in the earlier period, as does Krieger’s swingy music, which is oddly retro for the composer of “Dreamgirls.” Still, it’s beautifully performed by the 24-piece Encores! orchestra under the direction of Joseph Joubert.But in further revising the jumbled tunestack used for the original production’s national tour, Diamond’s adaptation exacerbates the show’s scattershot approach. (At the start, we get three establishing numbers in a row, for Willie, Dipsey and Emma, thus establishing little.) And the heavy cutting of spoken scenes that is part of the Encores! brief is especially detrimental to such a busy yet unfocused story. In one scene, I realized that Willie was on a bus only after checking the program to find that the number was called “Crosstown.” I’d thought he was in a dream sequence.Foreground from left: Kurt Csolak, Jodeci Milhouse and Justin Prescott. The show’s ensemble numbers, choreographed by Jared Grimes, are suitably spectacular, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreography by Jared Grimes is suitably spectacular in the ensemble numbers, and the demonstration of the changing styles of tap as they pass from Daddy Bates to his children and then, via Dipsey, to more familiar Broadway versions, is fascinating to watch. Jackson (along with Tracee Beazer as his girlfriend, Carole) is an especially exciting dancer, and an appealing crooner as well. And Bello, in a tradition of Willies that includes Alfonso Ribeiro, Dulé Hill and Savion Glover, makes a charming show of learning and then quickly personalizing the steps that are part of his heritage.I wish that were the focus of the story — or that there were a focus at all. If the musical numbers are sometimes hard to grasp visually, the staging of the book scenes is too often undifferentiated. And at least on opening night, after just 11 days of rehearsal, the technical elements were not yet cohering. For a show about the excitement of dance, the pace is strangely languid.That’s partly built into the haziness of the original material. And though one of the things Encores! is designed to show us is what musicals, for better or worse, felt like when they first opened, I’m not sure this production, the first under Lear deBessonet, the new artistic director, succeeds.Perhaps it shouldn’t. That “The Tap Dance Kid” tells the story of an upper-middle-class Black family (“Don’t you buy all of your clothes on the Upper East Side?” William asks his wife rhetorically) made it somewhat ahead of its time in 1983. That it was mostly the work of a white creative team makes it somewhat behind the time now. Letting Black artists take a new look is the only sensible thing to do — except for leaving it be. Not every historical relic needs to be on display.The Tap Dance KidThrough Feb. 6 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      Artistically in Sync, and Reunited for ‘The Merchant of Venice’

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      Arin Arbus and John Douglas Thompson are collaborating on their fifth play, a Theater for a New Audience production that begins previews Saturday.More than 25 years later, John Douglas Thompson still remembers the summer heat that made him sweat beneath his costume. He remembers lines, too, that have been stored in his brain ever since — like the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech, in which his character, the moneylender Shylock, asserts his own humanity.And then there was the spit. Each performance of “The Merchant of Venice,” on an outdoor stage at Shakespeare & Company, in western Massachusetts, started with Thompson walking past his fellow cast members while they spat at him, in character: Christians displaying their contempt for a Jew. It felt horrible — he remembers that as well — but it did lock him into the experience of the man he was playing.“I’d, you know, wipe it off,” Thompson said. “And I just had to keep going. I had to suffer that.”He was still training as an actor then, in 1994; his Shylock was part of a student production by the company. But he has long since established himself as “one of the most commanding classical actors around,” as the critic Ben Brantley once called him. And Shylock, it turns out, is a role that Thompson wanted to revisit.His performance — in a Theater for a New Audience production, starting previews on Saturday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn — appears to be, according to the theater’s research, the first time a Black actor has played the role on a professional stage in New York City. It is also Thompson’s fifth play with the director Arin Arbus, a collaboration that started with her acclaimed “Othello” in 2009.Thompson with Nate Miller, center left, and Maurice Jones (center with hat) during a rehearsal of “The Merchant of Venice.”Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThat show was her professional debut, and she’d had to persuade him to play the title role. He risked it partly because, in his experience, white men directing that tragedy “tend to zero in on Iago and really leave the Black actor playing Othello to fend for themselves,” he said, whereas “the female director being a minority, as the Black actor playing Othello is also a minority, there’s just a connection there.”By now — after also starring in Arbus’s productions of “Macbeth,” Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and Strindberg’s “The Father,” all for Theater for a New Audience — he says that hers are precisely the “careful hands” he needs to help him shape a role as complex as Shylock in a play as controversial as “The Merchant of Venice.”In a joint interview on a January afternoon at a rehearsal space in downtown Manhattan, Thompson, 58, and Arbus, 43, were easy together behind their face masks. Filling in the blanks in each other’s sentences, they seemed artistically in sync in a way that felt organic, not rehearsed. Arbus observed that they argue well — an underrated skill.“I hope to one day be her muse,” Thompson said, and she laughed delightedly.“The Merchant of Venice” is one of those Shakespeare plays that defy easy classification. Technically it’s a comedy, ending sans blood bath and with couples reunited. Yet there is heartbreak in it, not least because Shylock’s beloved daughter, Jessica, betrays and deserts him. And Shylock, like Othello, is an outsider in his own society.Enduringly divisive, the play bristles with bigotry: the antisemitism that is aimed at Shylock, who over the centuries has often been portrayed in ugly caricature; and the anti-Blackness that Portia, the principal character and Shylock’s courtroom nemesis, spouts repeatedly.Arbus working with Alfredo Narciso, seated, and Sanjit De Silva, right. (In the background are Varín Ayala, left, and  Nate Miller.)Amir Hamja for The New York Times“People have issues with this play just on the page,” said Arbus, who, like Thompson, views Shakespeare as depicting bigotry, not endorsing it. She was on staff at Theater for a New Audience when it staged its last production of the play, starring F. Murray Abraham and directed by Darko Tresnjak. It was the only time Arbus has known the theater to get hate mail.The idea for a new production of “Merchant” came from Thompson, whom she described as an actor with “an enormous intellectual appetite and an enormous emotional appetite.”He also has some shiny recent credits in high-profile prestige TV series. Last year, he played Chief Carter, the boss of Kate Winslet’s title character, in the HBO hit “Mare of Easttown”; currently, he can be seen as Arthur Scott, the father of Denée Benton’s character and the husband of Audra McDonald’s, in Julian Fellowes’s HBO glam-o-drama, “The Gilded Age.”Plans for this “Merchant” were already afoot when the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 sparked a racial reckoning. Ask Thompson whether his exploration of the character has changed since then, and he mentions the wider lens on hatred that his depiction — of a Jewish Shylock who is also a Black Shylock — will open up at a time of ever more belligerent public expression of antisemitism and anti-Blackness.He speaks, too, about the buildup of daily indignities and humiliations that Shylock endures before he gets a chance to exact revenge — when Antonio, the contemptuous merchant of the title, fails to repay a loan on time, and Shylock demands as penalty the pound of flesh that their contract stipulates.“What is it that drives someone to say, ‘No more’?” Thompson asked. “How does one who has been discriminated against horribly and treated horribly, how does that person get agency for themselves in a world that refuses, wants to keep them as a second-class or no-class citizen?”Thompson wants to examine why Shylock abandons rationality, insists on a moral wrong and then — this is the sticking point — refuses to relent.What’s fascinating about Shakespeare’s poetry, Douglas said, “is when you let it go with someone of a different culture, of a different race, of a different gender and allow them to be themselves in that language, it’s beautiful.”Amir Hamja for The New York Times“What Shylock is up against is so much bigger than him,” he said. “And I think that’s where the irrationality comes in: ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”Thompson is, of course, not the first Black American to play Shylock in a professional production. That distinction probably goes to the 19th-century Shakespearean Ira Aldridge, though he had to leave New York for Europe to do it.In contemporary times, Paul Butler played the role for the director Peter Sellars in Chicago in 1994, and Johnny Lee Davenport at Milwaukee Shakespeare in 2005.Arbus’s staging — a coproduction with Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C., where it will run in the spring — surrounds Thompson with a racially diverse cast. In consultation with the scholar Ayanna Thompson, a specialist in issues of race in Shakespeare, Arbus said she asked the actors “to bring their backgrounds into the characters that they’re playing.”And in contrast with much American theater in recent decades, which in using colorblind casting has sought to teach playgoers to look past race, Arbus says she intends her audiences to see it, and to think about it.To John Douglas Thompson, their “full-bodied, color-conscious, diverse production is a clarion call,” a way of debunking even unconscious biases on the part of audience members and asserting that Shakespeare’s words belong to more than just a narrow slice of the populace.“The most fascinating thing about this poetry,” he said, meaning all of Shakespeare, “is when you let it go with someone of a different culture, of a different race, of a different gender and allow them to be themselves in that language, it’s beautiful. And I think it’s educational. Then you can learn about people, you know, you really can.”A Shakespeare evangelist through and through, Thompson considers the plays “a birthright,” and likens them to “mother’s milk.”At home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, he has five to 10 copies of each of Shakespeare’s plays, he said — and 15 separate editions of “The Merchant of Venice,” lately placed strategically around his prewar apartment, so that one is never more than an arm’s length away.Arbus says that part of what makes Thompson so compelling onstage is that “he’s very sensitive to the language, very sensitive to other actors.”Amir Hamja for The New York Times“It’s a one-bedroom kind of loft,” he said, “but everywhere there’s a chair or a table, I just want to have it, because I don’t want to go searching for the script, you know what I mean?”It helps to immerse himself that way, and he likes that each version has different scholars’ notes, with possibly slightly varied text. He has even more copies of “Othello” — 16 or 17, he thinks.Arbus, applauding the wisdom of keeping multiple editions, cited a version of “Othello” whose editor had reassigned one of Desdemona’s lines to Emilia, and in the process done away with a key to Desdemona’s character.“You see?” Thompson marveled. “That is fascinating. From a line.”Later, by phone, Arbus would say that part of what makes Thompson so compelling onstage is that “his nerves are closer to his skin than many people’s are, in that he’s very sensitive to the language, very sensitive to other actors.”“It’s these big stories that I feel satisfy his soul in a way that maybe nothing else does,” she said.But that afternoon in the rehearsal space, Thompson was talking about trust — about how he would probably say yes to doing another Shakespeare play with Arbus even before she told him which one she had in mind.“I mean, she may say, ‘OK, it’s going to be a comedy,’” he said. “And I hate comedies. I would still do it.”Rising ever so slightly to his bait, Arbus didn’t mention a title, just a potential role, as distant from Shylock and “The Merchant of Venice” as Shakespeare could be — the weaver-turned-ass in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”“Bottom, Bottom, Bottom,” she said.“I’d say OK,” Thompson said. “I’ll do it with Arin.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’ Review: An Overdue Close-up

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      In this new documentary, Poly Styrene’s daughter grapples tenderly with the legacy of her punk rock mother.Marianne Joan Elliott-Said found her stage name, Poly Styrene, running her finger through the yellow pages, she says in an on-camera interview circa 1976. The lead singer-songwriter of the British punk band X-Ray Spex and the first woman of color in Britain to front a successful rock band, she looks and sounds impossibly, wonderfully young. She has a mouth full of braces, soft eyes and an open smile. The name appealed because it suggested a kind of plastic, she said. Yet there was little synthetic about the rebellious performer with the startling voice. Nor are there any false notes in “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché,” a documentary directed by her daughter, Celeste Bell, and Paul Sng.Five years after her mother’s death in 2011, Bell, though emotional, was able to face a cache of photos, flyers, diaries, poems and lyrics. More than a journeyman rockumentary, “Poly Styrene” is a thoughtfully finessed filial reckoning: a daughter’s journey toward understanding her mother as a young artist and as a young woman of color. Styrene’s mother, a legal secretary who was white, met Styrene’s father, a dapper Somali dock worker, at a club. She and her sister grew up in a Brixton estate.Bell provides the film’s contemplative narration. The actress Ruth Negga (“Passing”) reads Styrene’s diaries and poems, as well as interview transcripts. Recollections from her X-Ray Spex bandmate Paul Dean and other musicians, including Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, give a sense of time, place and, occasionally, bad-lad culture. But it’s the female rockers who pay resonant tribute: the X-Ray Spex saxophonist Lora Logic; Kathleen Hanna; and Neneh Cherry, who credits Styrene for her sense that a woman of color has a place in rock and punk.Poly Styrene: I Am a ClichéNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      in Music

      How Poly Styrene Broke the Mold

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      A biracial woman in a predominantly white, male scene, the X-Ray Spex frontwoman brought fresh perspectives and sounds to punk. A new documentary explores her impact.Poly Styrene beams out from the screen, smile wide, braces cemented across her teeth. In most images of first-wave punk musicians, their eyes are filled with negativity and contempt. In footage from a new film, Styrene’s are bright with possibility.The singer and creative force behind X-Ray Spex died from cancer in 2011, 34 years after her London band released its seismic first single, “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” The world is still catching up. A new documentary due Feb. 2 titled “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché” — taken from one of her song titles that mixed self-aware humor and cultural critique — is the latest ambitious project to chronicle her story, following an oral history book and a roving exhibition of her visual art, both from 2019.“My mum believed she was psychic,” Styrene’s daughter, Celeste Bell, who co-directed the film with Paul Sng, said in a video interview. “You can see that in her lyrics. She had this uncanny ability to predict what was going to happen.”Perhaps Styrene saw the future by paying attention. She set dynamite to the patriarchy on “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,” and “Germfree Adolescents,” the band’s sole album released just months before its 1979 split, is filled with blazing anthems that address identity, consumer culture, environmental ruin, information overload and punk itself. (Its title track, a dubby postmodern love song, was her most successful single.) She wore Day-Glo colors and brought in saxophones and science fiction. She could sing cool hooks or turn her voice into a rocket. Over bionic riffs, her lyrics told rich stories, forming a folk music of her own creation. The effect was sonic Pop Art.A biracial woman in a predominantly white scene, Styrene was not a typical punk. And “I Am a Cliché” is by no means a typical punk film. Bell, who was finishing a master’s degree in political philosophy in 2015 when she began to face her role as caretaker of Poly Styrene’s legacy, appears onscreen and narrates her mother’s complicated life — from teenage runaway to punk sensation to Hare Krishna, all while struggling with bipolar disorder, all before her mid-20s — through her perspective as the (frequently neglected) child of a totemic, explosive figure in punk history.Was she a good mother? Not exactly. But while Bell poses the question and answers it early, she spends the duration of the film bearing out what her mother was always searching for in her lyrics — a complexity scaled large enough to show the truth.Styrene and her daughter, Celeste Bell, who co-directed the film.Tony BarrattThe film’s timing is apt: Styrene’s influence on and relevance within culture keeps growing. Where her brash vision once seemed futuristic, it now feels shockingly attuned to reality. Artists from the vanguard of pop, like FKA twigs, and the heart of punk, like the New Orleans group Special Interest and the London trio Big Joanie, cite her as a formative inspiration. Her influence can also be traced through the still-emerging impact of the riot grrrl movement. It spans decades and generations.The singer, songwriter and rapper Neneh Cherry, who appears in “I Am a Cliché,” said in an interview that she found her own voice by singing along to X-Ray Spex, and recalled listening to the band with her parents, the jazz musician Don and the textile artist Moki Cherry, who “absolutely got” Styrene’s fearlessness and honesty.“When we used to listen to her, they would be like: That’s what we’re talking about,” Cherry said. She noted that it was singing along to her father’s piano playing and entering “a Poly place, tonally,” that her voice first emerged. “Inside of hers is how I found my own voice,” she explained. “I also started listening to her when I was at a space in my life where — I knew who I was, but I didn’t always know how to be who I was, or how to feel that great about it. Poly was and still is like medicine for me.”The feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna first heard X-Ray Spex in 1989 — the year before her band Bikini Kill formed in Olympia, Wash. — and was awed by the breadth of ideas in her writing.“I was really blown away by the lyrics and how much there was a critique of capitalism,” she said in an interview, and how that extended, sometimes subtlety, to critiques of sexism and racism within punk. “Poly obviously is a poet. It was such a perfect marriage of emotion and technique. I was like, How have I never heard of this band before? It seemed better than the Sex Pistols.”Lora Logic and Styrene onstage with X-Ray Spex. The band released one album in 1979 and promptly split.Erica Echenberg/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSTYRENE WAS BORN Marianne Joan Elliott-Said in 1957 to a Somali father and an English mother, who raised Styrene and her siblings alone in a Brixton council estate. In her teenage years, struck with art and rebellion, Styrene fled home to hitchhike to hippie music festivals, stoking an ecological consciousness she would bring to punk. She immersed herself in theater, fashion, poetry and music. A bookish autodidact who left school at 15, she gravitated toward philosophy, the occult, Freud and Jung. As a cinephile she favored the retrofuturism of “Barbarella.” Her rock idols were David Bowie and Marc Bolan. She loved soul and reggae, and Bell said she cited singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Joan Armatrading as huge inspirations.Styrene’s first pre-punk single was a pop-reggae song called “Silly Billy” about teenage pregnancy. It was produced by a man 16 years her senior named Falcon Stuart who would become her boyfriend and the manager of X-Ray Spex. (Bell said she received conflicting stories about Stuart, who died in 2002, over the years, noting in the film: “Sometimes she’d say he was the love of her life; other times, that he’d ruined it.”)When punk hit, Styrene, at 19, was galvanized. Enamored of the Sex Pistols — a previously unseen clip of Styrene dancing in the crowd at one of their gigs recurs in the film — she placed an ad in Melody Maker searching for “yung punx” to “stick it together,” and assembled a crew that included the bassist Paul Dean and, briefly, the saxophonist Lora Logic (until Styrene kicked her out).The band signed with Virgin for the classic “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — its opening declaration, “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard/But I think, oh bondage, up yours!” became feminist punk scripture — before moving to EMI for “Germfree Adolescents.” (Styrene was an uncredited producer on the album, Bell said.) The LP took them to “Top of the Pops” and the BBC, which broadcast a television documentary called “Who Is Poly Styrene?” where the singer famously described that she picked her stage name because it is plastic and disposable: “That’s what pop stars are meant to mean, therefore I thought I might as well send it up.”The early BBC film and “I Am a Cliché” both depict Styrene’s mental health struggles, which the pressures of fame exacerbated. In 1978, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia; she was in a psychiatric hospital the first time she saw herself singing on television. Bell believes her mother’s condition was worsened by the media’s sexist scrutiny of her body as well as the destabilizing nihilism in punk.“A lot of people think X-Ray Spex were a lot more underground than they were. But my mum did have that brush with celebrity,” Bell said. “There is a kind of fame where you can never escape from it, and that was the kind of attention that my mum had, even though it didn’t last very long. It didn’t last very long because she got out.”Bell and Styrene. “She could have made a lot more money,” Bell said, “but she prioritized her health and her spiritual longings over fame and success.”Fabrizio RainoneStyrene went on to release the gentle, tabla-flecked solo album “Translucence” in 1981, and, around then, met the musician Adrian Bell. They married three months later and she gave birth to Bell. Not long after, Styrene eschewed the material world she had observed in her songs by joining the Hare Krishna movement and moving with her daughter to Bhaktivedanta Manor, a country house George Harrison had donated to the group in 1973. But her mental health struggles persisted. She left the temple, and Bell, then 8, went to live with her grandmother.Bell said her mother never had a steady job after X-Ray Spex. She lived off meager royalties, continuing to write and release music. Heartbreakingly, in the film, Bell recalls her mother saying “being broke and famous is the worst of both worlds.”By the early 2000s, Bell and her mother had reconciled. Styrene moved to seaside Hastings, which energized her, and she began to write a retrospective diary of her punk past. (Excerpts are threaded throughout the film.) Styrene had recently recorded a new solo album, “Generation Indigo,” when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Bell said her mother believed in reincarnation, viewing death as “the next great adventure.”“My mum didn’t have an easy life,” she said. “She had a lot of barriers to break through as a mixed race woman, but she did, and she did it on her own terms. She took the DIY ethic and really lived it.”In her diary, Styrene called herself “an ordinary tough kid from an ordinary tough street.” Her daughter said that she fought back when other children mocked her appearance: “She was always getting beat up. She’d been chased down the street by skinheads.”Styrene explored her heritage directly in early poems, which led to intersectional statements on tracks like “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — an indictment of the bondage aesthetic in punk fashion, which she loathed, as much as a liberationist rallying cry. She asked, presciently, in the X-Ray Spex song “Identity”:When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?Do you see yourself on the TV screen?Do you see yourself in the magazine?When you see yourself, does it make you scream?WHEN HANNA FOUND Styrene, her forebear’s influence was musical as well as philosophical. “She could do a vulnerable high-pitched voice and also a loud bellow,” she said. “She used the roundness in her voice, the piercing in her voice. There’s not a fear of pop music with Poly.”For Alli Logout, the vocalist for Special Interest, Styrene was thrilling proof that a person of color had helped invent punk while critiquing it; that vulnerability can exist in chaos; and that punk can be incisive but fun.“My original exploration with music in general was a sadness that I didn’t see any Black bodies occupying that space,” Logout, who uses they/them pronouns, said of their earliest experiences headbanging at metal shows in their small Texas town. But leafing through a stolen book on punk history, “I remember very clearly seeing a picture of Poly Styrene and her braces and being like, what?” Watching a live “Bondage” video, “I felt the otherness that she encapsulated by just being fully herself. Whenever I heard that song, I knew that it was the attitude that I have to present myself in every single day.”Styrene’s fashion sense has also proven to be influential.BBC ArenaBeginning in middle school, the singer-songwriter Shamir felt such a connection to X-Ray Spex that by the fall of 2016, he decided to get Styrene’s face tattooed on his thigh. “Poly was one of the main influences on me to keep the spirit of punk alive as a Black person,” he said in an interview. “She’s constantly staring at me when I wake up in the morning.”“So much of the time, what’s considered punk to everyone else is rage, but I don’t think anyone would categorize her as rageful,” he noted, saying Styrene communicated via different emotions. “I learned from that in a lot of ways.” He added, “You’re always going to be in the margins, but that doesn’t mean you have to be quiet. A lot of times we have to be the loudest in order to be heard slightly.”As Bell organized her mother’s archive, she was struck by the intensity of her process, uncovering many drafts of a single set of lyrics, or a mixed-media collage, like a piece that layered various forms of contraception packaging atop feminist comic strips to explore the nature of modern relationships. (Styrene created all of the band’s art herself.) “She walked away at the height of their popularity,” she said. It’s a decision Bell finds gives the film a hopeful message: “She could have made a lot more money, but she prioritized her health and her spiritual longings over fame and success.”Ultimately, Bell said with conviction, “All my mum wanted, musically and artistically, was to be taken seriously.” More