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      in Music

      In New York, Masks Will Not Be Required at the Opera or Ballet

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      Many arts groups, worried about alienating older patrons, have maintained strict rules. Now “the time has come to move on,” one leader said.Masks are no longer required in New York City schools, gyms, taxis and most theaters. But a night at the opera or the ballet still involves putting on a proper face covering.That will soon change. Several of the city’s leading performing arts organizations — including the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and New York City Ballet — announced on Monday that masks would now be optional, citing demands from audience members and a recent decline in coronavirus cases.“The time has come to move on,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview.The Met, Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic will end mask requirements on Oct. 24, along with Film at Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. The David H. Koch Theater, home to City Ballet, will follow on Nov. 1. Two venues on the Lincoln Center campus, the Mitzi E. Newhouse and Claire Tow theaters, will maintain their mandates.The decision is a milestone for classical, dance and opera institutions, which had been among the most resistant to relaxing mask rules — wary of alienating older patrons, who represent a large share of ticket buyers. As coronavirus infections have declined and masks have vanished from many other settings, arts groups are feeling pressure from audiences to make a change.At the Met, for example, only about a quarter of ticket buyers said in a survey last month that they would feel uncomfortable attending a performance if masks were optional. Over the summer, that number had been close to 70 percent.“People’s attitudes are changing,” Gelb said. He hoped that relaxing the rules would help make the Met more accessible to “younger audiences who really don’t want to wear a mask.” With the elimination of the mandate, the company will also reopen its bars, many of which have remained closed during the pandemic.Proof of vaccination, as well as masks, were required to gain entry to many venues starting last year, when arts organizations returned to the stage after a long shutdown. Over the summer, however, as hospitalizations and deaths declined, many groups began to ease their rules. Broadway theaters (with a few exceptions) dropped the vaccine requirement on May 1, and the mask mandate on July 1.While most classical, opera and dance groups eliminated the vaccine requirement this fall, many kept in place strict mask mandates on the advice of medical advisers. The question of masks posed a challenge for many groups; they risked alienating some ticket buyers, no matter how they proceeded.At the Met, stage managers have delivered announcements from the stage before each performance reminding audiences to keep masks on for the duration of opera. At Carnegie Hall, ushers have checked each row and called out people who were not wearing masks.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said that the hall kept mask rules in place this fall because of lingering concerns about the virus among some medical advisers and audience members. But it decided to make a change after medical advisers said it could operate safely without masks, and after complaints from the audience were growing.“Ushers were finding it actually quite difficult because a lot of people were very annoyed having to still wear masks when in most of their lives they’re no longer doing so,” Gillinson said in an interview.By eliminating the mask rules, arts leaders hope they can help restore a sense of normalcy at a time when many groups are struggling to recover from the turmoil of the pandemic. While live performance is flourishing once again in New York and across the United States, audiences have been slow to return.Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in an interview that the mask rules could change if the virus emerged as a deadly threat once again.“This is an ever-evolving situation,” she said. “We will stay on top of whatever the current medical protocol dictates.”But for now, she said, it is time to change focus.“We feel it’s important that we do our part to help the city return to a much more normal state of affairs,” she said, “and to encourage people to come back into the city and to reinvigorate the economy.” More

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      in Television

      Britain Wonders, Is It Too Soon to Dramatize the Pandemic?

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      A new Sky Atlantic mini-series, “This England,” depicts the early days of Covid-19 in the country, with Kenneth Branagh playing Boris Johnson.LONDON — In the final moments of the new mini-series “This England,” Boris Johnson, the exhausted and embattled British prime minister, stares bleakly out of a window at 10 Downing Street and falls back, as he often does, on Shakespeare.“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,” says Johnson, who is played by Kenneth Branagh in the series, a six-part drama about Britain’s ordeal with the coronavirus pandemic.“We usually leave it there, you know,” he says, turning to his anxious wife, Carrie (Ophelia Lovibond), who is cradling their newborn child. “Forget the rest.”But Johnson goes on to recite the end of John of Gaunt’s deathbed soliloquy from “Richard II,” with its damning reproach of the king. “That England, that was wont to conquer others,” he says, “hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”It is a fitting coda to a much-talked-about show in Britain, a series that captures the everyday heroism of Britons during the pandemic, but also the failings of their leaders and how those failings contributed to a dilatory response that arguably deepened the nation’s suffering and led to needless additional deaths.“This England,” which debuted with solid ratings on Wednesday on Sky Atlantic in Britain, chronicles, almost day-by-day, how the first wave of the pandemic swept across the country. To many, the timing is curious, given that the latest wave of the virus hasn’t even ebbed yet.Work on “This England” began in June 2020, not long after the first Covid-19 wave had rampaged across the country.Phil Fisk/Sky AtlanticMichael Winterbottom, the British documentary filmmaker who wrote the script with Kieron Quirke, said that he viewed the show as a “mosaic of many people’s experiences,” from those of Johnson and his advisers to those of doctors and nurses — and, above all, of the dying — in the overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes.“The goal was to be human and, I think, humane,” Winterbottom said in a joint interview with Branagh. “To honor and acknowledge this incredible, painful loss.” For all the government’s confusion and missteps, he added, “There was a sense that everybody was doing their best.”Yet inevitably, “This England” shows people falling short. Caught in the fog of a mysterious illness, some in government, like Johnson, initially underestimated the risk. Others were compelled to make bad personal choices, like the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who drove 260 miles, in breach of lockdown, to visit his family as the virus struck.Work on “This England” began in June 2020, not long after the first wave had rampaged across the country, and the desperate scenes in ambulances and hospital intensive care units have an anguished immediacy. Much of the commentary about the show in Britain has focused on whether it’s too soon to dramatize all of this.Nearly 300 people died of Covid-19 in England in the seven days ending on Sept. 17; more than 4,000 were admitted to hospitals. The government is still pleading with people to get their booster shots. Johnson was drummed out of office only two months ago after a scandal over parties at Downing Street that violated lockdown rules.The outcry over the parties does not figure in the film, which ends instead with the misbegotten road trip Cummings made to his parents’ house in the north of England after his wife contracted Covid. This abridged timeline led The Financial Times to declare that the show “pulls off the unusual feat of feeling simultaneously premature and dated.”When the series opens, Johnson’s girlfriend, Carrie Symonds (Ophelia Lovibond), is pregnant.Phil Fisk/Sky Atlantic“This England” has also had to contend with a torrent of other news. Sky pushed back the series by a week after the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Sept. 8, which plunged the country into 10 days of mourning. It premiered at a time when the government of Johnson’s replacement, Liz Truss, caused a run on the pound by announcing a plan to cut taxes despite double-digit inflation.Winterbottom acknowledged that the show was a first cut and that some might prefer the cooler perspective that comes with distance, which might be found in future books or films about the pandemic. But his goal was to make a kind of diary of a national trauma, he said. “By being close,” he noted, “you’re able to get a fresher view.”The other big debate is over Branagh’s performance as Johnson. The actor, a 61-year-old Oscar-winner, wore a blonde wig, prosthetics and padding to assume the 58-year-old politician’s shambling appearance.Some critics praised Branagh for nailing Johnson’s propulsive gait and peculiar diction. Another dismissed it as an impersonation that recalled the puppets on “Spitting Image,” a British TV show that satirized public figures of the 1980s and ’90s.Branagh, who has played real-life figures including Franklin D. Roosevelt and the German SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, said that he and the writers had debated how closely he should try to mimic Johnson. They concluded that the former prime minister was too vivid in people’s minds to stray far from the O.G.“With somebody so prominently in the public eye,” Branagh said, “I think it’s harder to serve to an audience something that is very, very different — that is stylized and abstract.”The series shows Johnson initially underestimating the risk posed by the coronavirus.Phil Fisk/Sky AtlanticTo plumb Johnson’s interior life, Branagh said that he had read all the former prime minister’s books, including his biography of Winston Churchill, as well as his newspaper columns for The Daily Telegraph. He came to see Johnson as a kind of “poet-politician,” ambitious and combative, but also emotionally separated from those around him by the crushing weight of his job.That translated to the production. “I didn’t really have small talk with other actors,” Branagh recalled. “It was as if there was already a sense that you must be burdened, and if you are burdened, you must be left alone.”Branagh watched footage of Johnson hustling through the House of Commons to capture his distinctive forward-leaning posture. He said that he had been especially struck by a video in which Johnson, then the mayor of London, runs down a 10-year-old boy while playing rugby during a visit to Japan. “This barreling-forward intensity, almost unstoppable, is just part of the propulsion,” Branagh said.But “This England” also offers a sympathetic portrayal of a harried man with a tangled personal life. Between crisis meetings and late-night awakenings to soothe his crying baby, Johnson is depicted as plaintively leaving voice mail messages for his adult children. It suggests a painful rift after Johnson divorced his second wife, Marina, and moved in with Carrie, who worked as a Tory Party communications aide.“This England” also captures the cramped, claustrophobic work environment in Downing Street, which doubles as the prime minister’s home and the headquarters of the British government. There are tracking shots of aides walking and talking about urgent matters of state, which recall the Aaron Sorkin series “West Wing.” The close quarters nearly became deadly after Johnson himself contracted Covid and wound up in an intensive care unit for three days.Dominic Cummings (Simon Paisley Day) is depicted as arrogant, entitled and contemptuous of his colleagues. Phil Fisk/Sky AtlanticTo the extent that there are heroes and villains, the show clearly puts Cummings in the black hat category. Played by Simon Paisley Day, he is depicted as arrogant, entitled and contemptuous of his colleagues. Winterbottom said that the producers had reached out to all the principals to gather their accounts.When the show takes the camera out of Downing Street, “This England” abruptly shifts from a political procedural to a tragedy. There are many scenes in hospitals and nursing homes, some of which were filmed in a real nursing home with actual residents and nursing staff, who were essentially re-enacting their experiences.“Our starting point was to make everything as accurate as possible, as authentic as possible,” Winterbottom said.It adds up to a heartbreaking depiction of the pressure on health workers, and the fear, pain and often lonely deaths of those hooked up to ventilators. By the final episode, it is easy to understand why a tormented Johnson would stand at a window, peer into a cold dawn and mourn how a disease had conquered his “sceptered isle.” More

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      in Theater

      Lynn Nottage’s ‘Clyde’s’ Is the Most-Staged Play in America

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      An annual survey, suspended during the pandemic, resumes and finds theaters nationally doing fewer shows and torn between escapism and ambition.Theaters around America appear to be staging fewer shows than they were before the pandemic, but a lot of the work they are doing is by Lynn Nottage.An annual survey by American Theater magazine, conducted this year for the first time since the start of the pandemic, found that Nottage’s sandwich shop comedy, “Clyde’s,” will be the most-produced play in the country this season, with at least 11 productions. The survey also found that there were 24 productions of Nottage plays planned this season, which ties her with the perennial regional theater favorite Lauren Gunderson for the title of most-produced playwright in America.“Clyde’s,” which had a well-reviewed Broadway production starring Uzo Aduba that opened late last year, is peopled by characters who previously served time in prison, and its mix of laughter and social commentary, plus Nottage’s stature as a two-time Pulitzer winner, apparently appealed to those who program theater seasons. Among those staging the play are the Arden Theater Company in Philadelphia, the Arkansas Repertory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Center Theater Group in Los Angeles and TheaterWorks Hartford.“‘Clyde’s’ just hit the sweet spot — it has a multiracial cast, it addresses issues of incarceration and racial tension, it’s a comedy, and it’s really smart, and it’s by a Pulitzer winner,” said Rob Weinert-Kendt, the editor in chief of American Theater and an occasional contributor to The New York Times. “It’s a comedy, but it’s not turning away from the world.”Nottage, in an email, said she was pleased the play was finding an audience.“‘Clyde’s’ is a play about people trapped in a liminal space. It is also about community, healing, creativity, mindfulness and forgiveness,” she said. “I’m really quite humbled to be back on the most-produced list with this particular play, which speaks to the moment, as it is about the process of resurrecting one’s spirit and finding grace in the simple business of living.”Lynn NottageJingyu Lin for The New York TimesThe finding that fewer productions are being mounted is troubling, though not surprising — artistic directors around the country have been saying that they were ramping back up slowly after the pandemic shutdown because audiences have not come back in prepandemic numbers. The American Theater lists are based on a survey of theaters that are members of Theater Communications Group; in the 2019-20 season, respondents reported planning to stage 2,229 full-run shows; this season, even with the first-time addition of audio and streaming shows, as well as productions on Broadway, the count is only 1,298.The survey, which counts both plays and musicals but excludes work by Shakespeare and variations on “A Christmas Carol” (because there are so many productions they would swamp everything else), finds more diversity than in the past: Seven of the 14 most-produced plays are by writers of color, and 10 of the 24 most-produced playwrights are writers of color.Notably, though composers are not tracked by the survey, work with songs by Stephen Sondheim is experiencing a spike in popularity since his death last year, with at least 19 productions planned around the country. (In New York, there are three: “Into the Woods,” which opened on Broadway this summer; “Merrily We Roll Along,” running at New York Theater Workshop this winter; and “Sweeney Todd,” coming to Broadway next spring.)After “Clyde’s,” the other most popular shows include some crowd-pleasing entertainments — the comedy “Chicken & Biscuits,” a stage adaptation of “Clue,” the musical “Once” — alongside more challenging fare, like Nottage’s play “Sweat.” After Nottage and Gunderson, the most-produced playwrights are Matthew López, August Wilson and Dominique Morisseau. The complete lists are at americantheatre.org.Update: After publishing its survey results on Friday, American Theater magazine amended its lists to reflect new information. As a result, the statistics about the season’s diversity have been updated in this story. More

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      in Music

      Robert Fripp Lightens Up

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      No one expected to see the leader of King Crimson dancing in a tutu on YouTube. In a rare interview, the guitarist explains “an entirely different trajectory.”Robert Fripp became a rock star without acting like a showman. As the guitarist and leader of King Crimson — the band he founded in 1969 — Fripp, 76, has written music that’s barbed, visceral, complex and ambitious, seizing the vanguard of progressive rock yet reaching a broad audience.King Crimson’s catalog has found multiple generations of admirers among musicians, including the Rolling Stones, the Clash, the Mars Volta, Black Midi and even Kanye West, who sampled “21st Century Schizoid Man” in the song “Power,” which has been streamed more than 135 million times. (The deal involved is still under litigation.)Fripp’s guitar riffs are saw-toothed and dissonant; his solos lines slice and sear. But onstage, he has always been the picture of an introvert: seated, taciturn, entirely concentrating on his guitar.“Some players can put on a really great show playing guitar. I can’t,” Fripp said in a rare video interview from Long Island, where he was preparing to teach one of his Guitar Craft seminars. His white shirt, vest and tightly knotted tie were a sartorial contrast with his hair: a gray, upright Mohawk. “I have to focus and pay attention very closely. I have no room for jumping around or symbolic gestures. So the excitement isn’t in what the player is doing in terms of his gestures. It’s in terms of the music which is appearing.”But during the pandemic, Fripp has showed a new public face: droll, chatty and unpretentious. He and his manager, David Singleton, are on a speaking tour called “That Awful Man and His Manager,” promising to discuss music and business and to answer fan questions; it comes to City Winery in Manhattan on Friday. (The “awful man” designation teases at Fripp’s many disgruntled former bandmates and business associates.)Spurred by his wife, the pop-rock singer Toyah Willcox, in 2020 Fripp started co-starring in a charmingly homemade weekly series of YouTube videos, “Toyah and Robert’s Sunday Lunch,” that has them attacking pop and rock hits from Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” often in costumes and makeup. The couple has also danced — both in tutus — to “Swan Lake.”Outside of King Crimson, Fripp has made ambient music using Brian Eno’s “Frippertronics” looping setup; added indelible solos to songs like David Bowie’s “Heroes”; produced albums for Peter Gabriel, the Roches and Daryl Hall; written voluminously in an ongoing online diary; and taught Guitar Craft seminars, where he seeks to instill the same technical and philosophical discipline — an important word for Fripp — that he brings to his own playing.He has repeatedly dissolved and reconfigured King Crimson to his shifting but exacting specifications. “When there is nothing to be done, nothing is done: Crimson disappears,” Fripp has said. “When there is music to be played, Crimson reappears. If all of life were this simple.”A documentary, “In the Court of the Crimson King,” appeared at festivals earlier this year, and Fripp completed a book, “The Guitar Circle,” with the lessons of his Guitar Craft seminars. He is about to release a collection of his long-accruing aphorisms about music, ethics and creativity in three sets of 78 cards each, the same number as a Tarot deck. Leaving no merchandising opportunity unturned, he also offers personalized, handwritten, metal-leafed versions of his aphorisms.A chat with Fripp invariably spirals outward, from the particulars of guitar tunings to what he jovially calls, with an expletive, “cosmic” horse manure. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What makes a man go on tour with his manager?Probably to present our work to the world in a way that doesn’t quite get across in social media, in the same way that performance, for me, is really the only place where you connect with music. When you meet someone face to face, you can engage. And a key part of the so-called speaking tour is likely to be the Q&A.During the pandemic you became very active on social media. Did YouTube change your life?Yes, very much indeed. The main change in my life, following lockdown, is I got to spend time with my wife for the first time in 34 years of marriage up to that point. And I loved it. I have a wonderful, dear wife, but I kept leaving her. For me, lockdown was an opportunity to address some subjects of interest to me, including catching up on my academic reading in music. But there is my dear wife thinking, “This old character is losing it — I’ve got to get him going.” So then out came the tutu and “Swan Lake,” which was something of a turning point in my life.You’ve been more performative on YouTube than you have been for 40 years in King Crimson.I think that’s probably true.“Some times have been better than the others,” Fripp said, “but riches and popularity have never been on the top of my to-do list.”Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesIs that going to change you when you go back to performing concerts?I don’t think I can look back. I think the future has now shot off on an entirely different trajectory. A personal interest for me is kicking received opinion. Because if you were only seen in a certain way, there is a richness in life which is somehow closed to you. A question: Have you seen Toyah and Robert live sitting in with the Trevor Horn band at the Cropready festival?Yes, you played Lenny Kravitz and tuned your guitar in the standard tuning, E-A-D-G-B-E, for the first time since 1984. You broke your streak. But most of your lockdown songs were probably written in standard tuning.That’s right. I’m learning to play in E again. And after spending nearly two years working very hard, translating classic rock riffs into a C pentatonic tuning — that’s C-G-D-A-E-G — to actually tune to E is a lot easier, but it’s also a challenge.How did the C tuning start?I was in the Apple Health Spa on Bleecker and Thompson back in September 1983, in the sauna at half past 10 in the morning, almost asleep, and the tuning flew over my head. At the time I couldn’t understand what it was for. I was asked to give a guitar seminar at Claymont Court in December 1994, to raise funds for the running of the estate and the children’s school. There was a click and I realized the tuning was for the guitar class. So at that point, anyone who came into a Guitar Craft seminar was pretty much on the same page. Whether you had experience or not, you have a new tuning. Including me.Which has now led to the book, “The Guitar Circle.”It’s pretty much what, as a young guitarist, I would have liked to have known. The aphorisms are probably the most useful part of the book.What unanswered questions do you still have?I know pretty much all I need to know at this point in my life. But it’s a question of engaging with it. And I hesitate because it’s so easy to get involved in cosmic horse [expletive]. An understanding is what you can take onstage that’s entirely practical.Speaking of the stage, the most recent version of King Crimson turned the typical setup inside out, putting the drums up front and the other musicians in the back. Why did you do that?It’s a very simple story. I think maybe it was July 2013 — Toyah and I were visiting chums in Vauxhall. I was sipping gently on prosecco, and for some reason I asked the question, “If King Crimson were to perform tomorrow night, what would it be?” And then it appeared: three drummers at the front, the conventional front line at the back. It was what we call the point of seeing, and I trust points of seeing in that way. And then I knew what King Crimson would be if it formed.But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to take that up because King Crimson for me is grief. Nothing else in my life can happen when King Crimson is in go mode. It is such a responsibility. The background to King Crimson is in the counterculture. And we probably wouldn’t use the term today, but the aim was to change the world. Can music change the world? Well, back then, all the young players and probably most in the audience would say, “Of course it can.” But moving 53 years later, we’d say, Well, that’s horse [expletive]. But for me it’s not. It’s still an ongoing concern and a responsibility to the originating intention within King Crimson, which is something that is always possible when music is available. That is a continuing theme and a continuing imperative.Isn’t there some pleasure in performing?During the rehearsals, as we were playing the notes, I felt the music move into the notes. There is a quite distinct experience of King Crimson as an individuality in this thing, entirely apart from whoever is playing it, moving into this certain place onstage. And for me, that is validation. But if, for whatever reason, a performance doesn’t meet what is possible, it is an acute suffering for me.People can recognize your guitar tone from a single note. What do you want that tone to be?True. That’s all.The actual sound of the note may change, like if you’re sustaining or whatever. But that’s the criterion. Is this note true? And I remember with King Crimson, I think it was in Preston — it might have been Darby — in the autumn of 1972. And I threw off a lick. And it was awful. It felt like I was lying to my mother. It violated conscience for that one lick. I was lying to music and that was appalling. And it still irks me to this day.What have you learned from all the pop songs you’ve been playing on YouTube? When I heard “Toxic,” that sounded like a Crimson riff.Some of the riffs, I think, “Hmm, maybe we supped at the same table.” I love playing classic rock riffs. They are relatively easy, providing you’re alert when you’re playing them. It was a privilege playing in Crimson, but it was a very specific repertoire. As a guitar player, it’s like the Olympics of guitar, phenomenally difficult lines, and it required two to four hours of practicing a day. Now, King Crimson is not in go mode. I can step back from it to a certain extent and move my attention into learning E tuning.You’re touring with your manager, and you have an aphorisms deck called Finance. How does having to earn a living affect your music?I have no problem singing for my supper. My sense has always been: Present your work to the public. Some people change their work to meet what they believe their public is. Well, that might work for a while, but I have no idea what my public will want, so if I hear something, I follow it. If I see something, I follow it and present it to the public, trusting that there will be a sufficiency in order for a supper to arrive. And historically that’s worked. Some times have been better than the others, but riches and popularity have never been on the top of my to-do list.I’ve learned to trust the music, trust the process. And it’s important that the audience should know they are as important as the musician. If the audience is present and engaged and listening, the relationship is qualitatively different. When that happens, the moment becomes actually real. And there is a profound satisfaction in there. And then you go back, you get on the bus and you drive overnight to the next venue and it all begins again. More

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      in Music

      Raises and Safety Protections in City Ballet Dancers’ New Contract

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      The dancers will receive a wage increase of 6.7 percent this season. The company also agreed to hire an intimacy director and to work to eliminate stereotypes in ballet.When the pandemic hit in 2020, battering cultural institutions and forcing New York City Ballet to cancel performances for 18 months, the company reduced the salaries of dancers and other artists by 4 percent as it worked to weather the crisis.The dancers have in recent months sought to offset those losses, pushing for raises as they negotiated a new labor contract. This week, they won a victory: City Ballet said that as a part of a three-year labor agreement, it would raise salaries for dancers and restore some benefits that were halted during the pandemic, including vacation pay and contributions to retirement accounts.Sam Wheeler, the national executive director of American Guild of Musical Artists, the union representing dancers, stage managers and other workers at City Ballet, said in a statement that the contract was “a great example of what can be achieved when management and unions work together.”Like many cultural groups, City Ballet is working to restore cuts made during the pandemic with the hope that the worst of the crisis is over. In recent months, as the financial outlook for arts institutions has grown somewhat brighter, some groups, including the New York Philharmonic, have reversed pandemic-era pay cuts. But arts leaders acknowledge that many uncertainties remain, including whether audiences will return to concert halls as frequently as they did before the pandemic.Under the agreement, which was ratified by the union on Tuesday, the dancers will receive a wage increase of 6.7 percent this season, tied to the rate of inflation in New York City. In 2023 and 2024, they will receive additional increases.City Ballet, in a statement, said the contract “both provides economic benefits, and continues our important work on creating a respectful and safe workplace for all employees.”The contract includes several measures aimed at building a safer and more inclusive culture at City Ballet, especially for women and dancers of color.The company will hire an intimacy director on a pilot basis to care for the physical and emotional well-being of performers, and to help ensure that consent is given when dancers are called upon to touch each other in intimate ways.Under the agreement, City Ballet will formally adopt a policy allowing dancers to use tights and shoes that better match each dancer’s skin tone, rather than standard pink attire, a practice that the company has been experimenting with since last year. The company also pledged to work to eliminate racial and ethnic stereotypes in ballet.The pandemic shutdown disrupted the careers of many of City Ballet’s rising stars and resulted in the loss of $55 million in anticipated ticket sales. Just as live performance was getting off the ground last year, the Omicron variant emerged, forcing the company to cancel 26 shows in December and January, including performances of “The Nutcracker,” typically its most lucrative show of the year.Attendance last season was still below prepandemic levels, hovering around 80 percent. But the company hopes that its new season will bring audiences back in force. The company’s first performance will take place on Sept. 20 with a program of dances by George Balanchine. More