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      Jaimie Branch, Trumpeter Who Crossed Genre Lines, Dies at 39

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      One of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, she forged a direct emotional, and even spiritual, connection with her listeners.Jaimie Branch, an innovative avant-garde trumpet player and composer whose punk-rock intensity and commitment to experimentation and to dissolving the distinctions between genres invigorated the music scenes of New York and Chicago, died on Aug. 22 at her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She was 39.Her death was announced by International Anthem, the Chicago-based label that released albums by her groups Fly or Die and Anteloper. No cause was given.Over the last decade, Ms. Branch emerged as one of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, coaxing a remarkable range of sounds from her horn. She used electronic effects and toy noisemakers (including a Fisher Price Happy Apple from the 1970s) to further extend her sonic spectrum. She would often play a complicated passage, step back and scream, and then plunge back into playing without missing a beat.“I mean every note that I play,” she told the online music journal Aquarium Drunkard in 2019. “When I’m up there, I’m putting it all out on the table. It’s like high risk, high reward.”Ms. Branch forged an emotional, even spiritual, connection with listeners. Her energy could barely be constrained by the stage, filling a room not just with the sound of her trumpet but also with the force of her presence.Offstage, she was just as magnetic. Known to friends as Breezy, she was a gregarious figure, as averse to formality and affectation as she was to capital letters (she preferred her name and song titles lowercase).Ms. Branch was conservatory-trained, but her stage attire was unconventional for jazz circles: an Adidas track suit, a kimono draped over a “Young Latin & Proud” T-shirt, a baggy Outkast “ATLiens” baseball jersey. Her head was always covered, whether by a hoodie, a jauntily askew baseball cap or a knit toque, and her forearms were festooned with colorful tattoos.“She was the quintessential example of ‘honest music,’” Scott McNiece, International Anthem’s co-founder and director of artists and repertoire, said in an interview. “Music that has the capacity to change people’s lives and change the world, which everyone needs now more than ever.”Ms. Branch composed most of the music with Fly or Die, a quartet whose other members were Chad Taylor on drums, Jason Ajemian on bass and Lester St. Louis on cello (who replaced Tomeka Reid after the group’s first album, called simply “Fly or Die”). She favored improvisation for Anteloper, a dub-influenced duo with the drummer Jason Nazary, both of whom also doubled on synthesizers and other electronic gear.While she regularly performed concerts for cultural programmers like Roulette (where she was a 2020 resident artist) and Arts for Art, Ms. Branch was equally at home creating dissonant synthesizer squiggles on a noise-rock bill at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, or playing an impromptu jam session at the San Pedro Inn in Red Hook with her most recent trio, c’est trois, with the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Tcheser Holmes.In a 2017 article on women in jazz, the New York Times critic Giovanni Russonello described “Fly or Die” as one of “the most startling debut albums in jazz this year,” adding that “Ms. Branch uses extended technique and blustery abstraction to a dizzying effect.” In DownBeat magazine’s 2020 critics poll, Ms. Branch was voted “rising star” on trumpet.Ms. Branch in action with her group Fly or Die at the Winter Jazzfest in New York in 2018.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesOn the 2019 album “Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise,” she revealed her impressive singing voice on two songs, one of which, “prayer for amerikkka pt. 1 & 2,” recounts the story of a young Central American woman detained after crossing the Southern border. (The song was based on the actual case of an El Salvadoran teenager whom Ms. Branch’s mother had assisted.)Despite the power of her trumpet playing, Jaimie felt very vulnerable, her sister, Kate Branch said in an interview, and she felt even more so when singing, adding, “She really cared about the message.”Jaimie Rebecca Branch was born on June 17, 1983, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. Her father, Kenneth, was a mechanical engineer; her mother, Soledad (Barbour) Branch, known as Sally, is a psychotherapist and social worker. “Jaimie” is spelled the way it is, her sister said, because the girls’ Colombian maternal grandmother couldn’t understand why their mother would call her daughter Jaime, a boy’s name, “so my mom added another ‘i’ so my grandmother could properly pronounce it.”Jaimie started playing piano at age 3 and wrote her first song, “My Dreams End in the Sky,” at 6. A small orchestra at the family’s church in Long Island performed it, and Jaimie sang it and dedicated it to a retiring minister.When she was 9, the family moved to Kenilworth, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, where she began playing trumpet in the school band. After playing extensively at New Trier High School in Winnetka (including a stint in a ska-punk group, the Indecisives), she moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied jazz performance.After graduation Ms. Branch moved to Chicago, where she became a fixture of the jazz scene. “You could hear her all-encompassing sound just by looking her straight in the eyes,” the trumpeter Rob Mazurek, a frequent Chicago collaborator, said in an email.She left Chicago in 2012 to attend graduate school at Towson University in Baltimore, but departed a few credits short of a master’s degree in jazz performance. She told The Chicago Reader in 2017 that she had begun using heroin in 2008, and she struggled with opioids for years, enrolling in multiple inpatient treatment programs, most recently on Long Island in 2015.Following her time in that program, Ms. Branch moved to Red Hook. She gigged constantly, whether as the leader of her own groups or as a guest in the ensembles of the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and the vocalist Fay Victor.“She was a true collaborator, and that’s why she was so damn good at playing this music,” said the Brooklyn composer and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who began improvising with Ms. Branch soon after she arrived in Brooklyn. “She could listen, give and receive in equal measure with an unparalleled generosity. She had so many extremely close friends who also were collaborators, and because of that she wanted each individual to be really strong and strengthen the community as a whole.”In addition to her sister, Ms. Branch is survived by her mother and two half brothers, Clark and Russell. Her father died in 2017; the first Fly or Die album was dedicated to him.Ms. Branch had recently finished mixing Fly or Die’s third studio album. Ever seeking new sounds, she was also discussing potential projects like dub remixes of Anteloper and exploring her interest in the Chicago electronic dance music genre known as footwork.“A lot of her collaborators were jazz musicians,” said Piotr Orlov, a friend and supporter who wrote the liner notes for the 2021 album “Fly or Die Live,” “but ‘the music’ for her was much broader, always filled with rhythm for moving, improvisation for keeping it interesting or unexpected, and camaraderie. Which is why the connections she made between so-called jazz and contemporary classical, beats and electronic music, rappers and dancers, standards and the hard-core songbook, were completely organic, and always fascinating.”On Wednesday night, as news of Ms. Branch’s death spread, about 75 of her friends and fellow musicians gathered on Valentino Pier in Red Hook, a few blocks from her apartment. As “Fly or Die Live” played through a phone propped up against a small, tinny-sounding megaphone, some in the crowd tapped out beats on drums or on the concrete, others banged tambourines and sleigh bells, and the young saxophonist Zoh Amba played melancholic funereal blasts.From across the Red Hook Channel the distant sound of another trumpet could be heard, most likely from a mariachi band in a waterfront bar, joining the music in a phantom collaboration. More

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      in Television

      Michael K. Williams’s Unfinished Business in Brooklyn

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      Three months before he died, the actor Michael K. Williams spent all day at a block party in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. In some ways it had the vibe of any block party — a D.J. making people move, kids riding bikes in the street, smoke billowing out of an oil-drum grill. But this wasn’t just another summer day in Brownsville. Mr. Williams and a group of community activists had persuaded seven of the politicians hoping to be New York’s next mayor to show up, granting them a forum to explain why they deserved the support of a Black community that was used to being ignored.One by one, the candidates took turns sitting at a folding table in the middle of the block and fielded tough questions from a panel of young people who lived there. Some of those young people belonged to a gang. Many had lost friends and family members to gun violence, and few had faith in the government’s ability to protect them. Mr. Williams sat at the table, too, listening intently.When Eric Adams arrived, wearing a tight orange T-shirt with the slogan “We Can End Gun Violence,” Mr. Williams expressed concern over his use of the term “law and order” at a recent debate. He chose his words with care, the thumb and forefinger of his right hand pressed together in concentration.“Do you think putting more police on the streets is the way to deal with the violence in our community right now?” Mr. Williams asked.Mr. Adams assured him that he didn’t. “We don’t need an overproliferation of cops,” Mr. Adams said. “People commit crimes,” he added, because “a lack of resources came from the city.”Mr. Williams had an intimate understanding of the kind of violence that results from a lack of resources. Before the world knew him as Omar, the gay stickup artist with a strict moral code from the TV series “The Wire,” he was just a kid from the Vanderveer Estates, a complex of 59 buildings spanning 30 acres of East Flatbush, a largely Caribbean neighborhood deep in Brooklyn. In his memoir, “Scenes From My Life,” which will be published this month, he recalls “The Veer” as a vibrant place where block parties had “the air of family cookouts,” but also as a setting of deprivation and pain. During the so-called crack epidemic, police officers called a local intersection “the front page” because of all the murders that drew reporters to those corners. When Mr. Williams was a teenager, he watched a friend die of a bullet wound right in front of him.Mr. Williams at an event at the Howard Houses in Brownsville in October 2020. Toward the end of his life, he devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer.Sue KwonToward the end of his life, Mr. Williams devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer. He pursued this mission, in part, by helping build a model for organizing that he hoped would eventually inspire a national movement. Through this initiative, called We Build the Block, he and the other organizers held “block activations” throughout Brooklyn, culminating in the mayoral summit in Brownsville. Teenage activists would engage their neighbors in conversations about the political process and register them to vote. The group deliberately chose blocks that the police regarded as gang strongholds, while persuading the police, remarkably, to stay out of the way. “It was a way to say we can take care of our own,” Mr. Williams wrote in his memoir. None of these events, as he noted, were ever disrupted by violence.Last summer, We Build the Block took on an ambitious new challenge. With the help of a Black police captain who was interested in unconventional approaches to crime reduction, they began planning to pay a group of young people touched by gang violence to take part in “healing circles” — weekly conversations led by a therapist. In August, one of Mr. Williams’s collaborators, Dana Rachlin, a white woman in her 30s from Staten Island, texted Mr. Williams that one of their requests for funding was out “in the universe.” Mr. Williams replied, “Damn right it is!”That was the last time she ever heard from him. One week later, on Sept. 6, Mr. Williams was found dead of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in his apartment in Williamsburg. He was 54.Dana Rachlin, who helped found We Build the Block with Mr. Williams.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesThe healing circles began the next month. At the first session, a facilitator used singing bowls in an attempt to get the kids to meditate. It didn’t go well. As the kids horsed around and mocked the activity, Ms. Rachlin thought about Mr. Williams. If he’d been there, she thought, the kids would have followed his lead. Lying on a yoga mat, she began to cry. And then she thought about ‌one of the reasons Mr. Williams had been so good at connecting with people: his sensitivity to the pain of others. These boys, she knew, had lost friends too.Mr. Williams’s interest in community organizing can be traced to his mother. He describes her in the memoir as an energetic, caring woman who taught Sunday school, opened a day-care center in their building, and cultivated a network of relationships with community leaders. He loved and admired her. He also feared her. After his father left, when he was 11, his mother tried to protect him from the violence that surrounded them by forbidding him from fighting, a rule that she enforced, as he pointed out, by inflicting violence on him herself. Frustrated by his defiance, she would sometimes tell him that he was unworthy of God’s love.Remembering Michael K. WilliamsThe actor, who starred in the pioneering HBO series “The Wire,” was found dead on Sept. 6, 2021, in his home in Brooklyn. He was 54. Obituary: Williams brought a hard-edge charisma to his portrayal of Omar Little in David Simon’s five-season epic. Tributes: Following news of his death, co-stars, musicians and authors shared their thoughts on the beloved actor. Best TV Performances: Throughout his career, Williams explored provocative intersections of race, crime, sexuality and masculinity. A Legacy Interrupted: To complete the new season of Williams’s series “Black Market,” the producers enlisted the help of some famous friends.He grew to be sensitive and insecure — “the softest kid,” he writes, “in the projects.” After two older men molested him, he “fell into a dark, empty state.” His willingness to venture back into that state, to conjure up his most painful memories for the sake of an acting role, was the quality that would most clearly define him as an artist. The scar across his face, sustained in a razor attack outside a bar on his 25th birthday, seemed to tell of deeper wounds. “We are all broken,” he notes in the book. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the community-organizing campaign, in Brownsville at a We Build the Block event in June 2021.Sue KwonMr. Williams at a graduation ceremony at L&B Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn.Sue KwonHe was 35 when he landed his most iconic role. A fan of “The Wire” might have assumed that the guy playing Omar shared the show’s political outlook, its outrage at the drug war, but he still knew “close to zero” about politics when the fifth and final season aired. That began to change when an African-American senator from Chicago, running for president that year, declared Omar Little to be his favorite character on his favorite show.Around the same time, Mr. Williams was arrested on drunken-driving charges twice in six months. He had struggled with an addiction to alcohol and cocaine, crack and powder, since he was a teenager. Ordered to do community service, he offered to talk about addiction to high-school kids. What began as an obligation became a passion. While Barack Obama’s praise sparked an interest in the political forces affecting his community, the school visits awakened him to the possibility that he could “redeem” himself by working with young people. But it would still be years before this would become the guiding insight of his life.In 2016, he appeared in “The Night Of,” an HBO drama about the moral rot of New York’s criminal-justice system. Playing a charismatic former boxer confined on Rikers Island, he often thought about his nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. Serving 25 years to life in prison, Mr. Dupont started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Mr. Williams’s nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. He started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York Times“The Night Of” told a less redeeming tale, and the performance took Mr. Williams to a dark place. “He was willing to sacrifice himself for some roles,” Mr. Dupont told me. “And those happened to be the characters that people loved the most.” After years of sobriety, Mr. Williams began using drugs on the set, which was an actual prison in upstate New York. It got so bad, his memoir revealed, that the shoot had to be shut down for a day.While promoting the series, Mr. Williams realized he wanted to learn more about the mass incarceration of young people from neighborhoods like his. This led him to make “Raised in the System,” a documentarythat captures the vulnerability and neglect of incarcerated children. Ms. Rachlin, who met him as he was finishing the film, helped him organize a series of screenings for police officers, correction officers, prosecutors and judges. “We wanted the power holders to bring compassion and empathy to the youth before them, their families and communities,” she said.Ms. Rachlin was in some ways an unlikely ally. She had grown up in a conservative Staten Island household. As a teenager, she made campaign calls for George W. Bush. She recalls assuming that people who committed crimes were “bad.” But after college, while working as an advocate for crime victims in the Staten Island courthouse, she found herself, for the first time, spending time around young people who had been arrested and jailed. It was eye-opening. She soon began working with adolescents who had been getting into trouble, eventually starting a nonprofit.As Mr. Williams became an increasingly prominent advocate for criminal-justice reform, Ms. Rachlin continued working closely with him, connecting him with nonprofit groups in the field, teaching him about the inner-workings of government, prepping him for meetings with elected officials. Mr. Williams, for his part, used his fame to attract attention to her work, and served as a personal mentor — “Uncle Mike” — to kids in her organization.Capt. Derby St. Fort with Mr. Williams at a We Build the Block event in Crown Heights in 2020. Captain St. Fort would collaborate with the organization on healing circles.Sue KwonThen, in the summer of 2020, as protests over police violence surged through New York and the rest of the country, Mr. Williams began talking to Ms. Rachlin about how to bolster the role that Black New Yorkers played in shaping the city’s public-safety policies. With the radio host Shani Kulture and five high school students from Brooklyn, they started We Build the Block, the community-organizing campaign.Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the initiative, recalled how down-to-earth Mr. Williams always seemed at their block activations. “He was outside at every event,” he said, “no security, no nothing, talking with the old people and the people rolling dice and smoking weed, getting to know where their head’s at, spreading the word about how to make the community safer.”“He was unique,” Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s reform-minded district attorney, said. “A lot of people with his celebrity, they do social media or they donate money to causes, but he kept it on the ground.”Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.”Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesIn 2019, Ms. Rachlin introduced Mr. Williams to Derby St. Fort, the police captain who would collaborate with them on the healing circles. Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.” When he told Mr. Williams about a group of young men who were causing harm in his precinct, Mr. Williams said he could imagine how they felt — unworthy of love, incapable of change. “He looked at the pain of those who caused pain,” Captain St. Fort said. Arresting them wouldn’t change their perspectives. So the three of them developed a strategy that they hoped would.This was how the healing circles came about. Despite skepticism inside the police department, Captain St. Fort fully embraced the idea and even participated in the circles himself. He found it hard to imagine that the kids would ever trust him, but he was open with them, acknowledging that he had made mistakes in his life. Slowly, he said, the teenagers began to open up too. “A lot of times they felt they had done so much harm in their lives that they weren’t deserving of support,” Captain St. Fort said. “We had to challenge that. I told them, ‘You deserve it.’”Two of the participants, Dorian Garrett, 18, and Kareem Holder, 20, now volunteer as community organizers. One recent afternoon, they met with Captain St. Fort and Ms. Rachlin, along with representatives of the Public Advocate’s Office, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other groups in the basement of a public library, where they were leading an effort to plan a back-to-school event for younger kids in their neighborhood. They’d both gotten steady jobs through the program, and neither had been arrested since the sessions began.They’d never met Mr. Williams, but Ms. Rachlin and Captain St. Fort had told them all about the guy with the scar they’d seen on TV — how he made people feel like they mattered, like somebody cared. “That’s something that I definitely want to do,” Mr. Garrett said, “because the stuff that I experienced, I don’t want that for the younger generation.” He wanted those kids to know something. “I’m here, and they are loved.”Mr. Williams at a voter registration in Brooklyn in 2020. “We are all broken,” he wrote in his memoir. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Sue Kwon More

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      in Movies

      Michael K. Williams’s Unfinished Business

      by

      Three months before he died, the actor Michael K. Williams spent all day at a block party in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. In some ways it had the vibe of any block party — a D.J. making people move, kids riding bikes in the street, smoke billowing out of an oil-drum grill. But this wasn’t just another summer day in Brownsville. Mr. Williams and a group of community activists had persuaded seven of the politicians hoping to be New York’s next mayor to show up, granting them a forum to explain why they deserved the support of a Black community that was used to being ignored.One by one, the candidates took turns sitting at a folding table in the middle of the block and fielded tough questions from a panel of young people who lived there. Some of those young people belonged to a gang. Many had lost friends and family members to gun violence, and few had faith in the government’s ability to protect them. Mr. Williams sat at the table, too, listening intently.When Eric Adams arrived, wearing a tight orange T-shirt with the slogan “We Can End Gun Violence,” Mr. Williams expressed concern over his use of the term “law and order” at a recent debate. He chose his words with care, the thumb and forefinger of his right hand pressed together in concentration.“Do you think putting more police on the streets is the way to deal with the violence in our community right now?” Mr. Williams asked.Mr. Adams assured him that he didn’t. “We don’t need an overproliferation of cops,” Mr. Adams said. “People commit crimes,” he added, because “a lack of resources came from the city.”Mr. Williams had an intimate understanding of the kind of violence that results from a lack of resources. Before the world knew him as Omar, the gay stickup artist with a strict moral code from the TV series “The Wire,” he was just a kid from the Vanderveer Estates, a complex of 59 buildings spanning 30 acres of East Flatbush, a largely Caribbean neighborhood deep in Brooklyn. In his memoir, “Scenes From My Life,” which will be published this month, he recalls “The Veer” as a vibrant place where block parties had “the air of family cookouts,” but also as a setting of deprivation and pain. During the so-called crack epidemic, police officers called a local intersection “the front page” because of all the murders that drew reporters to those corners. When Mr. Williams was a teenager, he watched a friend die of a bullet wound right in front of him.Mr. Williams at an event at the Howard Houses in Brownsville in October 2020. Toward the end of his life, he devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer.Sue KwonToward the end of his life, Mr. Williams devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer. He pursued this mission, in part, by helping build a model for organizing that he hoped would eventually inspire a national movement. Through this initiative, called We Build the Block, he and the other organizers held “block activations” throughout Brooklyn, culminating in the mayoral summit in Brownsville. Teenage activists would engage their neighbors in conversations about the political process and register them to vote. The group deliberately chose blocks that the police regarded as gang strongholds, while persuading the police, remarkably, to stay out of the way. “It was a way to say we can take care of our own,” Mr. Williams wrote in his memoir. None of these events, as he noted, were ever disrupted by violence.Last summer, We Build the Block took on an ambitious new challenge. With the help of a Black police captain who was interested in unconventional approaches to crime reduction, they began planning to pay a group of young people touched by gang violence to take part in “healing circles” — weekly conversations led by a therapist. In August, one of Mr. Williams’s collaborators, Dana Rachlin, a white woman in her 30s from Staten Island, texted Mr. Williams that one of their requests for funding was out “in the universe.” Mr. Williams replied, “Damn right it is!”That was the last time she ever heard from him. One week later, on Sept. 6, Mr. Williams was found dead of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in his apartment in Williamsburg. He was 54.Dana Rachlin, who helped found We Build the Block with Mr. Williams.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesThe healing circles began the next month. At the first session, a facilitator used singing bowls in an attempt to get the kids to meditate. It didn’t go well. As the kids horsed around and mocked the activity, Ms. Rachlin thought about Mr. Williams. If he’d been there, she thought, the kids would have followed his lead. Lying on a yoga mat, she began to cry. And then she thought about ‌one of the reasons Mr. Williams had been so good at connecting with people: his sensitivity to the pain of others. These boys, she knew, had lost friends too.Mr. Williams’s interest in community organizing can be traced to his mother. He describes her in the memoir as an energetic, caring woman who taught Sunday school, opened a day-care center in their building, and cultivated a network of relationships with community leaders. He loved and admired her. He also feared her. After his father left, when he was 11, his mother tried to protect him from the violence that surrounded them by forbidding him from fighting, a rule that she enforced, as he pointed out, by inflicting violence on him herself. Frustrated by his defiance, she would sometimes tell him that he was unworthy of God’s love.Remembering Michael K. WilliamsThe actor, who starred in the pioneering HBO series “The Wire,” was found dead on Sept. 6, 2021, in his home in Brooklyn. He was 54. Obituary: Williams brought a hard-edge charisma to his portrayal of Omar Little in David Simon’s five-season epic. Tributes: Following news of his death, co-stars, musicians and authors shared their thoughts on the beloved actor. Best TV Performances: Throughout his career, Williams explored provocative intersections of race, crime, sexuality and masculinity. A Legacy Interrupted: To complete the new season of Williams’s series “Black Market,” the producers enlisted the help of some famous friends.He grew to be sensitive and insecure — “the softest kid,” he writes, “in the projects.” After two older men molested him, he “fell into a dark, empty state.” His willingness to venture back into that state, to conjure up his most painful memories for the sake of an acting role, was the quality that would most clearly define him as an artist. The scar across his face, sustained in a razor attack outside a bar on his 25th birthday, seemed to tell of deeper wounds. “We are all broken,” he notes in the book. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the community-organizing campaign, in Brownsville at a We Build the Block event in June 2021.Sue KwonMr. Williams at a graduation ceremony at L&B Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn.Sue KwonHe was 35 when he landed his most iconic role. A fan of “The Wire” might have assumed that the guy playing Omar shared the show’s political outlook, its outrage at the drug war, but he still knew “close to zero” about politics when the fifth and final season aired. That began to change when an African-American senator from Chicago, running for president that year, declared Omar Little to be his favorite character on his favorite show.Around the same time, Mr. Williams was arrested on drunken-driving charges twice in six months. He had struggled with an addiction to alcohol and cocaine, crack and powder, since he was a teenager. Ordered to do community service, he offered to talk about addiction to high-school kids. What began as an obligation became a passion. While Barack Obama’s praise sparked an interest in the political forces affecting his community, the school visits awakened him to the possibility that he could “redeem” himself by working with young people. But it would still be years before this would become the guiding insight of his life.In 2016, he appeared in “The Night Of,” an HBO drama about the moral rot of New York’s criminal-justice system. Playing a charismatic former boxer confined on Rikers Island, he often thought about his nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. Serving 25 years to life in prison, Mr. Dupont started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Mr. Williams’s nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. He started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York Times“The Night Of” told a less redeeming tale, and the performance took Mr. Williams to a dark place. “He was willing to sacrifice himself for some roles,” Mr. Dupont told me. “And those happened to be the characters that people loved the most.” After years of sobriety, Mr. Williams began using drugs on the set, which was an actual prison in upstate New York. It got so bad, his memoir revealed, that the shoot had to be shut down for a day.While promoting the series, Mr. Williams realized he wanted to learn more about the mass incarceration of young people from neighborhoods like his. This led him to make “Raised in the System,” a documentarythat captures the vulnerability and neglect of incarcerated children. Ms. Rachlin, who met him as he was finishing the film, helped him organize a series of screenings for police officers, correction officers, prosecutors and judges. “We wanted the power holders to bring compassion and empathy to the youth before them, their families and communities,” she said.Ms. Rachlin was in some ways an unlikely ally. She had grown up in a conservative Staten Island household. As a teenager, she made campaign calls for George W. Bush. She recalls assuming that people who committed crimes were “bad.” But after college, while working as an advocate for crime victims in the Staten Island courthouse, she found herself, for the first time, spending time around young people who had been arrested and jailed. It was eye-opening. She soon began working with adolescents who had been getting into trouble, eventually starting a nonprofit.As Mr. Williams became an increasingly prominent advocate for criminal-justice reform, Ms. Rachlin continued working closely with him, connecting him with nonprofit groups in the field, teaching him about the inner-workings of government, prepping him for meetings with elected officials. Mr. Williams, for his part, used his fame to attract attention to her work, and served as a personal mentor — “Uncle Mike” — to kids in her organization.Capt. Derby St. Fort with Mr. Williams at a We Build the Block event in Crown Heights in 2020. Captain St. Fort would collaborate with the organization on healing circles.Sue KwonThen, in the summer of 2020, as protests over police violence surged through New York and the rest of the country, Mr. Williams began talking to Ms. Rachlin about how to bolster the role that Black New Yorkers played in shaping the city’s public-safety policies. With the radio host Shani Kulture and five high school students from Brooklyn, they started We Build the Block, the community-organizing campaign.Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the initiative, recalled how down-to-earth Mr. Williams always seemed at their block activations. “He was outside at every event,” he said, “no security, no nothing, talking with the old people and the people rolling dice and smoking weed, getting to know where their head’s at, spreading the word about how to make the community safer.”“He was unique,” Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s reform-minded district attorney, said. “A lot of people with his celebrity, they do social media or they donate money to causes, but he kept it on the ground.”Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.”Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesIn 2019, Ms. Rachlin introduced Mr. Williams to Derby St. Fort, the police captain who would collaborate with them on the healing circles. Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.” When he told Mr. Williams about a group of young men who were causing harm in his precinct, Mr. Williams said he could imagine how they felt — unworthy of love, incapable of change. “He looked at the pain of those who caused pain,” Captain St. Fort said. Arresting them wouldn’t change their perspectives. So the three of them developed a strategy that they hoped would.This was how the healing circles came about. Despite skepticism inside the police department, Captain St. Fort fully embraced the idea and even participated in the circles himself. He found it hard to imagine that the kids would ever trust him, but he was open with them, acknowledging that he had made mistakes in his life. Slowly, he said, the teenagers began to open up too. “A lot of times they felt they had done so much harm in their lives that they weren’t deserving of support,” Captain St. Fort said. “We had to challenge that. I told them, ‘You deserve it.’”Two of the participants, Dorian Garrett, 18, and Kareem Holder, 20, now volunteer as community organizers. One recent afternoon, they met with Captain St. Fort and Ms. Rachlin, along with representatives of the Public Advocate’s Office, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other groups in the basement of a public library, where they were leading an effort to plan a back-to-school event for younger kids in their neighborhood. They’d both gotten steady jobs through the program, and neither had been arrested since the sessions began.They’d never met Mr. Williams, but Ms. Rachlin and Captain St. Fort had told them all about the guy with the scar they’d seen on TV — how he made people feel like they mattered, like somebody cared. “That’s something that I definitely want to do,” Mr. Garrett said, “because the stuff that I experienced, I don’t want that for the younger generation.” He wanted those kids to know something. “I’m here, and they are loved.”Mr. Williams at a voter registration in Brooklyn in 2020. “We are all broken,” he wrote in his memoir. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Sue Kwon More

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      Ukrainian Children Bring a Play From a Bomb Shelter to Brooklyn

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      The group recently arrived in New York to perform “Mom on Skype,” first staged in April in Lviv, at the Irondale Center this weekend.In a converted Sunday school space in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn on Monday, eight children, who recently arrived from Ukraine, gathered on a pair of risers and broke into song.Hanna Oneshchak, 12, on the accordion, accompanied the other seven as they sang a Ukrainian folk song, “Ta nema toho Mykyty,” about a man who decides to leave the country to seek better work, but then looks to the mountains and, struck by their beauty, changes his mind.“Whatever the grief we have,” they sang in Ukrainian, “I won’t go to the American land.”The children, students at the School of Open-Minded Kids Studio Theater in Lviv, were rehearsing the song ahead of two weekend performances of the play “Mama Po Skaipu” (“Mom on Skype”) at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn. This will be the American premiere of the 80-minute show, being presented on Saturday and Sunday night.“We share our emotions with Americans,” Anastasiia Mysiuha, 14, said of the group’s play.Calla Kessler for The New York Times“We share our emotions with Americans,” Anastasiia Mysiuha, 14, said in English. And, she said, she hopes that audience members will “better understand what’s happening in Ukraine.”The show, which will be performed in Ukrainian with English subtitles, is a series of seven monologues about family separation told from the perspective of children. Written by contemporary writers from Lviv, the true stories were inspired by the mass exodus from Ukraine in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, many men and women went to other countries to work so they could provide for their families back home.“Mom on Skype” was first staged in a warehouse-turned-bomb shelter in Lviv, in western Ukraine, in April, just two months after the Russian invasion began. There it was directed by an arts teacher turned active-duty Ukrainian soldier, Oleg Oneshchak, who is the father of two of the children in the play: Hanna and Oleksii, 7. It was one of the few cultural events to take place in Ukraine at that time.“Lots of people were crying when we did it in Ukraine,” said Khrystyna Hniedko, 14, one of the performers.Now, the children, ages 7 to 14, are performing for audiences in Brooklyn this weekend.The idea for the visit came about when Jim Niesen, artistic director of the Irondale Center, the home of the nonprofit Irondale Ensemble Project theater company, saw a photo essay in The New York Times in late April about the performance in Ukraine.“I was so inspired by them,” Niesen said in an interview at the theater this week. “There was this horrific war going on, and here they were, doing a play.”He and the theater’s executive director, Terry Greiss, tracked down Oneshchak on Facebook Messenger and proposed an idea: Would he and the children consider bringing the show to Brooklyn?The students, from left: Sofiia Goy, Marharyta Kuzma, Khrystyna Hniedko, Anastasiia Mysiuha (foreground center), Nikol Bodiuk, Valeriia Khozhempa, and the siblings Hanna Oneshchak and Oleksii Oneshchak (seated).Calla Kessler for The New York TimesOneshchak, the children and their families were all enthusiastic about the idea, and Greiss and the team at Irondale began raising money to pay for travel and accommodation costs — the total bill for the monthlong stay for the eight children and their three chaperones, which will also take them to Connecticut and Massachusetts, is around $40,000, he said. (Oleg Oneshchak wasn’t able to make the trip, but his wife, Mariia Oneshchak, who is also an actor and educator at the theater program, was.)A majority of the group’s meals have been donated, and many of them are staying in the homes of Irondale board members and others. The offices of Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries also helped the group book visa appointments, which are difficult to secure because so many people are trying to leave Ukraine, ahead of their arrival on July 22.The generosity of other donors meant that the itinerary for the trip quickly ballooned to include a weeklong performing arts summer camp in Connecticut, where the children taught American campers three Ukrainian folk songs; an outing to see “The Lion King” on Broadway; visits to the Guggenheim Museum and Coney Island; a Russ & Daughters bagel factory tour; and a private tour of the Statue of Liberty.When we spoke at Monday’s rehearsal, Valeriia Khozhempa, 12, said she had been immediately struck by one thing: the absence of air-raid sirens.“It’s a really beautiful life,” she said. “In Ukraine, there are so many air alarms.”There was also a humorous attribute, Khrystyna said: American politeness. “People always say ‘Sorry’ and ‘Excuse me,’” she said. “It’s surprising because everyone is really polite.”Hanna Oneshchak, left, and Nikol Bodiuk in Brooklyn.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThe children began working on the show in January before being forced to halt rehearsals when Russia invaded Ukraine. Even though the play was originally about stories from the 1990s, families are being separated again because men are fighting in the war. (Most Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 — of conscription age — are not allowed to leave the country.)The theme of each of the show’s monologues is that parents do not realize how detrimental their decisions, even if financially prudent, can be to their children’s happiness. “Money can never compensate you for losing your connection to the people you love,” a character says in one of the stories, titled “Through the Eyes of Children.”All of the children are anxious about whether American audience members will understand their message, because of the language barrier and having to read subtitles.“I know it will be hard,” Anastasiia said. “But if they will come, I hope they will try to understand.”All of the proceeds from this weekend’s shows — as well as performances in Hartford, Conn., and Boston next week — will go toward a fighter jet that the group hopes to help purchase for the Ukrainian military. (A used jet costs approximately $1 million, Oleg Oneshchak said.)Hanna Oneshchak, who sings a patriotic Ukrainian song she wrote, said she hoped the audience would see not just the play, but the underlying message about the war that the performers embody.“The world sees this like a film,” she said. “I want them to remember us.” More

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      Review: In ‘Bottom of the Ocean,’ a Deep Dive Into the Soul

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      Themes of change, death and rebirth abound in this peculiar production, a triumph of style and low-budget ingenuity.A spa day, a sound bath, a moving meditation and an initiation into strange and tentacled rites, “Bottom of the Ocean,” an immersive experience staged in a semifinished Brooklyn basement, ranks as the weirdest show in town right now, in a town that doesn’t lack for weird. How odd is it? Show me another work that hides baby octopuses (yes, OK, fake baby octopuses) in its communal bathroom.“Bottom of the Ocean” is the third production, following “Houseworld” and “Whisperlodge,” from Andrew Hoepfner, who runs a newish company, called Houseworld Immersive, dedicated to participatory theater. I had missed the two earlier shows, but over the last month or so, a couple of friends had recommended “Bottom of the Ocean” and I had heard it mentioned in conversation. Booking a ticket began to feel a little like destiny. And there are worse Tuesday-night fates than being delivered to the basement door of a 19th-century church across the street from a smoke and vape shop. Knock at the appointed time and a small window will open. Speak the password and a man in elaborate robes will play a xylophone, welcoming you into new worlds.Undersea motif: An installation of baby octopuses in a bathroom at “Bottom of the Ocean.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesI can’t really tell you what “Bottom of the Ocean” — which you can experience singly, doubly or in a group of five — is about. Probably I shouldn’t. Immersion depends on surprise, on not knowing what you will encounter around the next corner. More abstract than immersive hits like “Sleep No More” or “Then She Fell,” “Bottom of the Ocean” dilates, broadly, on themes of change, death and rebirth. There is often an undersea motif, though that evaporates in certain rooms.The show borrows, ecumenically, from ancient rites (the Eleusinian Mysteries seem to be a particular point of inspiration) and New Age practices. It invents some rituals outright. At one point I may have worshiped a jellyfish.Throughout, the performance insists on radical intimacy. During the preshow, you will be given a safe word that you can utter if touch is not your thing, though the touch provided is gentle and respectful and never delivered without consent. But not all intimacy is physical. The three actors (Hoepfner, Chia Kwa and Naja Newell on the night I attended) play characters, but you play only yourself. And in the course of the performance you will be asked to offer up your own regrets, desires and prayers.I am unaccustomed to making disclosures like these to strangers. I barely make them to my therapist. So if you pride yourself on privacy and personal boundaries, the show may induce some very squirmy feelings. (Maybe that squirminess is appropriate for a show with so many cephalopods.) Those, like me, with lousy night vision, should proceed with caution. The stairs are steep. And those, again like me, who don’t love to sing in public — well, do your warm-ups.Chia Kwa appears in a show that “privileges interiority and reflection over action, sending each participant on a private journey toward something like peace,” our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesI have sometimes thought about the politics of immersive theater, what it means to prefer individual experience over communal joining. And I thought of it again a few times during “Bottom of the Ocean,” at least when I wasn’t thinking of the jellyfish or whether the fire burning on the salver was maybe a little high or how to locate the emergency exit in the dark. But the aims of “Bottom of the Ocean” are strictly apolitical. The show instead privileges interiority and reflection over action, sending each participant on a private journey toward something like peace.Personally, the depths of my soul aren’t my favorite destination, but there is so much to enjoy along the way. Only two designers are credited — Laura Borys, who created the hallucinatory costumes, and the technical designer Howard Rigberg — but “Bottom of the Ocean” is a triumph of style and low-budget ingenuity, achieved through the simplest means: balloons, beans, wax, water. In the fewest square feet, it provides a sensory deluge. Each new room reveals a strange and distinctive environment.If I sometimes found the closeness uncomfortable (the closeness and the singing), discomfort is the trade-off for two hours spent in what can feel like a lucid dream. At the end I emerged, from one sort of warm, wet dark into another. My aura, if I had one, was definitively cleansed.Bottom of the OceanAt Gymnopedie, Brooklyn; boto.nyc. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Wes Jackson to Be the Next President of the Brooklyn Nonprofit BRIC

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      Wes Jackson, a music business entrepreneur, will lead the Brooklyn nonprofit arts organization beginning in July.Wes Jackson, a music business entrepreneur, will be the next president of BRIC, the nonprofit arts organization announced Tuesday. He will begin his new role July 18.He succeeds Kristina Newman-Scott, who led BRIC for three years, and guided it through the first year of the coronavirus pandemic before stepping down last August.BRIC presents cultural programming in Brooklyn. It is perhaps best known for its annual summer concert series, the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, at Prospect Park. This year, it includes free concerts by the reggae band Third World, the rapper Vic Mensa and the Nigerian Afropop artist Yemi Alade, as well as performances by the actor John Cameron Mitchell (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) and the comedian Bridget Everett (of HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere”).Jackson, 48, who serves as the director of a business program designed for professionals in the creative arts at Emerson College in Boston, began his career producing concerts for groups like the Dave Matthews Band and the Roots before starting his promotions company, Seven Heads Entertainment, which he later expanded into an independent record label and management company.In 2005, he founded the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival, which has hosted performances by Jay-Z, Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, and he has served as the event’s executive director for 15 years. “When you’re running a small shop, you’ve got your hands in everything,” Jackson said of leading the hip-hop festival. “Now I have people who can help, and I can dedicate my energy to thinking 10 to 20 years down the line, to turning Celebrate Brooklyn into something that rivals South by Southwest, Coachella.”BRIC, which has a 2022 budget of $16 million to $20 million, will present a bigger stage. Jackson’s predecessor, Newman-Scott, led the reimagining of the organization’s annual music festival as a virtual event in 2020, as well as the start of One Brooklyn TV, which broadcasts educational programming on weekdays during the school year in partnership with New York City’s Department of Education.Jackson said he wanted to continue to find ways to serve people in Brooklyn who may not be able to or want to gather in person, as well as those outside New York.“What we’ve learned through Covid is that now we’re national and international,” Jackson said. “There’s a tremendous upside to raising that level of educational play for an online audience.”Jackson, who grew up in the Bronx, earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Virginia and a master’s in Media Studies from the New School. He moved to Brooklyn about 25 years ago, where he has continued to live with his family while commuting to Boston. More

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      Paul Vance, Lyricist Behind an ‘Itsy Bitsy’ Bikini, Dies at 92

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      His daughter’s experience wearing a bikini on a beach in 1960 inspired him to write a novelty song that became a No. 1 hit.Paul Vance, who described the uncertain path of a girl in a risqué two-piece bathing suit as she advanced from a locker to the shore in the novelty hit song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” died on May 30 in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 92.His daughter Paula Vance confirmed the death, at a nursing facility.It was Paula, who at 2 years old, inspired the song. On a family trip to the beach in 1960, she wore one of the itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikinis that her Aunt Lena had made for her and two of her cousins. But her shyness made her retreat, at first, because of the reaction of two boys who exclaimed that she was wearing no clothes.When she re-emerged, she wrapped herself in a blanket before venturing into the water. While in the water, the bottom of her bikini fell off. Heading home, the lyrics to “Itsy Bitsy” started coming to Mr. Vance. He called Lee Pockriss, his songwriting partner on a number of hits.“I sang the lyric on the phone and by the time he got to my office a couple of hours later, he had 90 percent of the tune written,” Mr. Vance was quoted as saying in the obituary for Mr. Pockriss in The Los Angeles Times in 2011.The song was soon recorded by Brian Hyland, a 16-year-old heartthrob from Queens, and it spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including one week at No. 1. Before Mr. Hyland was introduced on “American Bandstand” — where a little girl would re-enact Paula Vance’s experience on a set with a bath house and mock waves — the host Dick Clark called “Itsy Bitsy” the “hottest or coolest record in the country, the biggest thing around.”“Itsy Bitsy” endured longer than its time on the charts, though. It has been covered dozens of times by artists as diverse as Connie Francis, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and Devo and used in commercials for products like Yoplait Light and Special K cereal.Joseph Philip Florio was born on Nov. 4, 1929, in Brooklyn to Philip and Concetta Florio. His father delivered ice in a horse-drawn wagon. His mother was a homemaker.He began writing lyrics when he was 13 but had no clear path to being a composer. He described himself to The Palm Beach Post in 2015 as a “dese, dose and dem” guy who avoided falling in with the Mafia. Instead, he served in the Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., then opened a junkyard and auto salvage business. He was already in his mid-20s when he met Mr. Pockriss, a composer who had done graduate work with Aaron Copland.“It’s an ideal professional combination,” Mr. Pockriss told The Associated Press in 1960, adding: “He understands the public. I understand the profession.”Their 1957 song “Catch a Falling Star” was a hit for Perry Como in 1957 and the first record certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America.Paul Vance in an undated photo with one of his gold record awards. He had a long career collaborating on songs recorded by Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka, Patti Page and others.via Vance familyThe success of “Catch a Falling Star” let Mr. Vance focus on songwriting, and he changed his name to sound less ethnic. With various collaborators, including Mr. Pockriss, he wrote songs originally recorded by Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Patti Page.Mr. Vance cajoled Clint Holmes into recording his and Mr. Pockriss’s song “Playground in My Mind” by following him into a men’s room to make his pitch, at a venue in the Bahamas, where Mr. Holmes was performing. Speaking to The Palm Beach Post, Mr. Holmes said of Mr. Vance, “His enthusiasm struck me more than the song.” The song, though, became Mr. Holmes’s only top 10 hit.While still writing songs, Mr. Vance owned and bred horses for harness racing.In addition to his daughter Paula, he is survived by another daughter, Connie Vance Cohen; a son, Joseph; a sister, Joanne Florio, a singer; nine grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. His wife, Margaret (Curte) Vance, died in 2012. His son Philip died in 2009.Mr. Vance was erroneously reported to have died in 2006 when the wife of a man named Paul Van Valkenburgh, who had indeed died, asserted that her husband had written “Itsy Bitsy” under the name Paul Vance. The obituary, by The Associated Press, was picked up by many news outlets, including The New York Times. (Corrections ensued, and The Times published a corrective article.)But the false report shook up Mr. Vance’s family and friends. His music publisher confirmed that Mr. Vance, not the deceased man, was the songwriter and that he was still collecting royalties.But as Mr. Vance told The Orlando Sentinel in 2006, some people still called thinking he was dead, and he would inform them: “This is Heaven. Who do you wish to speak to? Paul Vance? Oh, yeah, he just got up here.” More

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      BAM’s Next Wave Festival Returns With an Ivo Van Hove Production

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      The American premiere of the brutal play “A Little Life,” a drag-infused Hamlet and an immersive celestial installation highlight the festival’s latest iteration.The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s artistic director, David Binder, who is programming the 13 shows for the Next Wave Festival, is mixing “incredible light” and darkness, he said.It is the first in-person edition of the festival since 2019 and it will run from Sept. 28 to Dec. 22. The highlight will be the U.S. premiere of the stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “A Little Life” (Oct. 20-29) — a coming-of-age tale about four young men that includes depictions of self-harm, domestic violence, child abuse and suicide.“There’s optimism and there’s things that speak to the challenging world we all live in,” Binder said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “So I think it relates to one piece of all of that mosaic.”Ivo van Hove’s production of Yanagihara’s Kirkus Prize-winning novel, which is set to be presented in Dutch with English supertitles at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, runs just over four hours and features a live video screen to show close-ups of agonizing moments, like a character burning his own arm — and pouring salt in the wound. (Yanagihara is the editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)“It’s an extraordinary production that challenges the audience,” said Binder, who saw the world premiere production in Amsterdam in 2018. “Much like the whole season.”Even though it’s long, he said, “I guarantee you it holds you every moment.”This is just the second Next Wave Festival that Binder, who started as BAM’s artistic director in 2018, has programmed, after the 2020 and 2021 events were canceled because of the pandemic. He told The New York Times in 2019 that his focus for the first event would “move it forward by adding in a whole new slew of artists,” and that emphasis continues this year, with 13 programs created in eight countries featuring dance, music and theater. Nine of the 13 artists and companies are performing at BAM for the first time.“That was our guiding principle,” he said this week, “to cover a lot of ground with lots of international new artists.”One of the returning artists is the German director Thomas Ostermeier, whose riotous production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” will come to BAM’s Harvey Theater stage this fall (Oct. 27-Nov. 5). In Ostermeier’s staging, Ophelia and Gertrude are played by the same actor — as are many of the other characters; the play features just six performers. (The Guardian called the production of it in Berlin, which mixed pop music and drag shows with duels, “kookily funny and coolly self-aware.”)Next up at the Harvey will be the U.S. premiere of the Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues’s carnivalesque dance piece “Encantado,” whose title refers to spirits of healing — the encantados — and which features 100 colored blankets that transform the stage (Nov. 8-9). Meanwhile, at the Howard Gilman Opera House, another dance piece, the Greek director-choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou’s dreamlike concoction “Transverse Orientation,” pairing experimental, painterly choreography with music by Vivaldi, will have its New York premiere, Nov. 7-11.Then the main stage shifts to opera with the U.S. premiere of Ong Keng Sen’s “Trojan Woman,” a queer Korean operatic take on the Greek tragedy (Nov. 18-19). The production, performed in Korean with English subtitles, fuses the traditional Korean musical storytelling form of pansori with K-pop music. (The “Parasite” composer Jung Jae-il composed the music in collaboration with the renowned Korean pansori master Ahn Sook-sun.)Binder also programmed work from within the United States, including an orchestral hip-hop performance by the Los Angeles producer and rapper Flying Lotus, the composer and D.J. Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Wordless Music Orchestra that is being billed as a rendition of their Hollywood Bowl performance in Los Angeles this summer (Oct. 6-7).The festival is set to wrap up with an immersive installation by the Brooklyn-based interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider, whose world premiere of “N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars)” at BAM Fisher may be the closest a New Yorker will come to clear-sky stargazing (Nov. 29- Dec. 22). Visitors will enter a completely dark space and be guided by an unseen voice as 5,000 programmed points of light, which the artist has said are inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s “infinity” mirror room, respond to everyone individually.The season also features the American premiere of the Belgian theater collective FC Bergman’s wordless production of “300 el x 50 el x 30 el” (Sept. 28-Oct. 1), which follows the inhabitants of a small village fearful of an impending disaster. (The title refers to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark.) The Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras will showcase “Open for Everything,” which sheds light on contemporary Romany people, at the Harvey (Oct. 5-8). The Grammy-winning violinist Jennifer Koh and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s staged musical work “Everything Rises,” which seeks to “replace abstract slogans and inert diversity statements with lived experience and direct engagement,” will be at BAM Fisher (Oct. 12-15). More