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    Meg Stalter Rejoices With Dolly Parton and a Loyal Chihuahua

    The comedian talks about banishing the worst of 2021 in Amazon’s “Yearly Departed,” while celebrating the best in real life.Meg Stalter is famously her own biggest fan — if not you, then who? — but even she has been a little awed by her recent success.Her live comedy shows sell out in minutes. She stole scenes in her first acting gig as an ebulliently inept assistant to a talent agent on HBO Max’s “Hacks.”Now she is laying the worst of 2021 to rest. On Dec. 23 she’ll bid farewell to “hot vaxx summer” in a flirty-girl get-up, in the second edition of the Amazon annual special “Yearly Departed.”The hyperchatty Stalter was star-struck by a lineup of fellow comics that included Yvonne Orji, Chelsea Peretti and Dulcé Sloan. Then Jane Fonda walked onto the set to shoot her segment.“No one could talk,” she said. “We were all drooling and I think she thought we were weird because at first we couldn’t speak. And she was like, ‘Is everything OK?’”In a word, very.But after paying her dues in comedy for eight years, Stalter sees her ascent during the pandemic as bittersweet.“Everything is starting to happen now and it’s really strange to be so worried about other people — we’ve experienced so much devastation — and also to stop and be like, ‘How lucky am I to be living my dream right now?’” she said. “I guess that’s what life is. You have to just embrace the good parts, even when it’s scary and hard.”Calling from London, where she was making her British stand-up debut at the Soho Theater, Stalter did an impromptu riff on her own Top 10 of 2021, from Dolly Parton’s inclusiveness to the joy of private karaoke rooms. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Dolly PartonI’ve listened to her every year, but especially this last year. She is the best celebrity because she feels, to me at least, that she just supports everyone. She’s the true meaning of a Christian because she loves God, and then she loves people, and she accepts everyone for who they are — which is what we should have all learned this year, just to love each other and take care of each other.I’m somebody who grew up in church and doesn’t go now. I’m this bisexual person who still believes in God. Dolly doesn’t have any judgment on anyone else’s life, but still keeps some of the beliefs that she grew up with.2. The “Free Britney” MovementMy friends and I are so happy for her. Everyone always knew that she didn’t have control over her life, so it was really powerful and exciting to see her now get control. We’re celebrating — and it’s her birthday today! I bet she’s somewhere strange with her boyfriend, like dancing on a boat.3. TakeoutI’d love to cook more, but I am addicted to ordering takeout or Grubhub or Postmates. In London, I haven’t been able to figure out their ordering food apps. It’s like moving to a different planet.4. Instagram LiveWhen the pandemic started, I did a bunch. Every night I would do a different crazy-themed one. I’d be like, “OK, we’re going to Paris tonight.” And then I’d decorate my apartment with stuff that I could find that made it look like Paris. It was a way for me to connect to other people. I was in New York alone, really scared, and I felt like the only thing keeping me sane was doing that at night.5. High-Waisted JeansThere’s something really classic about wearing a good pair of high-waisted jeans. I like a plain shirt and jeans during the day, and then wearing this beautiful gown at night for a show. That’s really appealing to me. I think both are a little bit of structure that we didn’t have during quarantine, because we were wearing sweatpants.6. Time With FamilyMy family is truly everything to me. When would we ever have spent this much time in the same house as when we quarantined together? It was really lifesaving to be laughing in the same house again.7. “The Office”It’s one of my comfort shows. I watched it a lot this year. It still holds up. The dinner party episode is my favorite. The boss invites people to come to dinner at his house and he’s being very passive-aggressive with his girlfriend. Either people think it’s the funniest episode of TV or they’re like, “I can’t even watch it.” It’s kind of my sense of humor.8. Dining in Restaurants AgainSomething I really was missing in quarantine was the feeling of being at a table with all of your friends and everyone’s laughing and you don’t even remember why and everyone’s talking over each other. It’s exciting that we are experiencing that again slowly. Every hangout feels precious and thrilling.9. Private Karaoke RoomsLast night I did a private karaoke room with a couple of friends, and we had the best time. It felt safe. We just sang for hours. It makes sense for it to be more popular now than it was. My friend was on a trip and he did a solo karaoke room. I don’t know if I would like that or not. I like to be in front of an audience, even if it’s three friends.10. Quarantine AnimalsI feel like everyone should have a pet now. I think it’s lifesaving. I have a Chihuahua who’s 15 years old. She was a family dog, but she came to live with me during quarantine and I am attached to her. Animals are so empathetic and they can tell when you’re sad and they just really calm you down. I’m afraid of when she passes because she’s so old. My sister is begging me to get another animal, but I feel like my dog doesn’t want me to get another dog. She likes to be alone with me. More

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    10 Works of Art That Evaded the Algorithm This Year

    Contemplation, not clicks: Our critic looks back on marble sculptures in Rome, songs of “atmospheric anxiety” and the Frick Collection in a new light.From left: A performer in “Catasterism in Three Movements”; one of the Torlonia Marbles; a detail from the refurbished Hôtel de la Marine in Paris. Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Tom Bisig, Basel; Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times; James Hill for The New York TimesThe coronavirus pandemic is a health crisis with so many cultural sequelae: above all, the absorption of all facets of our lives deeper into networks and phone screens. Even more than last year, I’ve been drawn to art, music and movies that, in one way or another, evade the workings of likes and shares — and carve out a place for human creativity in a world too governed by algorithmic logic.‘Cézanne Drawing’The apple of my eye. The Museum of Modern Art’s meticulous, almost overwhelming summer exhibition distilled modernism’s father figure to his essence, revealing the day-by-day, stroke-by-stroke scrutiny needed to make a piece of fruit as weighty as the Holy Family. Those bottom-heavy pears, those clumpy bathers. Those short daubs of green and blue in his views of Mont-Sainte-Victoire. Those Provençal rock formations — rocks of air and watercolor, Cézanne as geologist! What these hundreds of sheets reconfirmed, right on time, was that your art will never change another person’s life if it merely shows what you think. You need the distinction, the seriousness, that can only come from form. (Read our review of “Cézanne Drawing.”)“Bathers,” an 1890 pencil and watercolor work by Paul Cézanne, was featured in a Museum of Modern Art show.Metropolitan Museum of ArtRyusuke HamaguchiI’d call the 42-year-old Japanese film director the most exciting in years if he weren’t so … calm. “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi’s unfailingly precise tale of a widowed actor sublimating his grief through his chauffeur and Chekhov, has virtues one fears have gone missing from cinema: long takes, guillotine-crisp editing, an unhurried faith in the importance of images. Like Jacques Rivette and Mike Leigh before him, Hamaguchi contrasts his unobtrusive camerawork with the conventions of theater — in this case, a multilingual “Uncle Vanya” production that builds to a silent, heart-stopping finale, when the troupe’s Sonya sighs “We shall rest!” in Korean sign language. Add to that “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” Hamaguchi’s three-part fugue of love and intuition also released this year, and you have the emergence of a stunning talent who finds the romance in rigor. (Read our review of “Drive My Car.”)Barney & FriendsTwo decades ago his world-making was mistaken for American Wagnerism; but Matthew Barney is more collaborative and more relaxed than you’d think, and he’s doing the best work of his career in the lighter register first seen in his 2019 film “Redoubt.”For the performance “Catasterism in Three Movements,” this September at the Schaulager in Switzerland, he ceded more than half the evening to the Basel Sinfonietta, who performed Jonathan Bepler’s churning music alongside a Berniniesque sculpture of copper, brass and scorched pine. Three women brought the remainder of “Catasterism” to life: the contact improvisation pioneer K.J. Holmes, the Cree hoop dancer Sandra Lamouche, and the athlete Jill Bettonvil as a sharpshooting Diana who pumped a dense-as-flesh Barney sculpture full of lead. (Read our review of Matthew Barney’s “Redoubt.”)K.J. Holmes, a Cree hoop dancer, was featured in “Catasterism in Three Movements,” a collaboration between the artist Matthew Barney and the composer Jonathan Bepler.Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation; Tom Bisig, Basel‘The Torlonia Marbles’Alone in Rome this spring, at the nearly empty Capitoline Museums, I saw the first public display in half a century of the greatest collection of ancient art in private hands. Travel restrictions made an accidental sleeper of the Torlonia family’s Greek and Roman sculptures: dozens of portrait busts, a hirsute billy goat reclining like a love god, a shattered Hercules recomposed from a hundred shards. Rome was my first trip abroad since the pandemic, and I’d submit to a dozen P.C.R. tests to see this actually legendary collection before it disappears again on Jan. 9. (Read our report on the Torlonia Marbles.)More than 90 rarely exhibited sculptures were on display in the “Torlonia Marbles” exhibition at Rome’s Capitoline Museum.Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times‘Promises’Astral but never spacey, architectural yet also boundless, this nine-movement, album-length composition deserved every one of the rave reviews that rained down upon its release in March. As Pharoah Sanders’s subdued tenor sax (and occasional vocalizations) weave around the London Symphony Orchestra’s strings and the synths and celesta of Sam Shepherd — a.k.a. Floating Points, a British electronic musician nearly five decades Sanders’s junior — “Promises” comes to feel like a self-regulating ecosystem, an ever denser net of music and motion. These guys knew what they were doing when they chose, for the album’s cover, a painting by Julie Mehretu, whose retrospective this year at the Whitney Museum of American Art had the same accumulating grandeur. (Read our review of “Promises.”)Frick MadisonThe secret to good decorating: just buy the best stuff and do nothing! The Frick’s down-to-the-pith reinstallation in the Whitney’s vacated building refiltered the Vermeers and Velázquezes we thought we knew, and isolated Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” in a sublime Brutalist cell illuminated by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows. What Frick Madison has proved, more subtly, is that we can give art context in a hundred digital formats; museums’ bigger challenge is carving time and space to really look. (Read our story on the making of Frick Madison.)Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” is illuminated by one of the architect Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows while on display at the Frick Madison.Gus Powell for The New York TimesThe Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’I feel as useless / As a tree in a city park / Standing as a symbol of what / We have blown apart …. As forests burned in B.C. and diplomats dithered in Glasgow, the Toronto singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman, who performs as the Weather Station, turned in an unreserved, openhearted album of atmospheric anxiety, in which guitars mingle with greenhouse gases and loss is measured in metric tons. She knows we don’t need artists to tell us the climate has changed; we need them to tell us how we have. (Read our interview with the singer.)Parisian RenovationsParis had a quartet of major cultural openings this year. The Bourse de Commerce, renovated by Tadao Ando for the contemporary art collection of François Pinault, drew the most Instagram shares, but it was two renovated historical sites — the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of Parisian history, and the Hôtel de la Marine, the stupefyingly grand naval headquarters — that best married old and new. The city’s sweetest surprise is the old Samaritaine department store, reopened after 16 years, its Art Nouveau expanses renewed with the undulating glass of the Japanese firm Sanaa. (Read our story on the restoration of the Hôtel de la Marine.)The Hôtel de la Marine, the former headquarters of France’s Ministry of the Navy, has reopened as a museum.James Hill for The New York TimesBooks Are Back!Closer to home, the New York Public Library re-emerged from a far too long pandemic closure with a sweet new home: the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, formerly the decrepit Mid-Manhattan Library, rethought and revived by the Dutch firm Mecanoo with Beyer Blinder Belle. Its clean white expanses have computers galore (there’s even a Bloomberg terminal for budding teen traders), but the core remains its 400,000-strong circulating book collection, open for free browsing. A few years ago, the N.Y.P.L. was planning to sell this place, and to exile the books in its main research branch to New Jersey. The Niarchos — as well as Toshiko Mori’s renovation of the Brooklyn Public Library — is an affirmation that cities need readers, and readers need print. (Read our review of the new library.)Daniil Medvedev’s MockeryThe year’s finest and funniest performance art took place at Arthur Ashe Stadium, when the lanky young Russian smacked his last serve, won the U.S. Open title — and dumped his whole body onto to the court, miming a PlayStation move as he lolled like a dead fish. As arrogant as it was ridiculous, Medvedev’s side flop has stuck with me all this fall as a Gen-Z master class in how to stay human in a world of memes. If you must dive into the algorithm, then do it with total contempt. (Read our profile of the “octopus” Daniil Medvedev.) More

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    A Kennedy Center Honors With the Presidential Box Used as Intended

    Former President Donald J. Trump did not attend the tribute, but President Biden was on hand as Bette Midler, Joni Mitchell, Berry Gordy, Justino Díaz and Lorne Michaels were honored.WASHINGTON — The orchestra cycled through an early homage to the latest class of honorees: an excerpt from the opera “Carmen,” a tribute to the sounds of Motown, the chorus of “Wind Beneath My Wings.”But the 44th Kennedy Center Honors did not begin in earnest on Sunday night until President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden, the first lady, arrived to their seats in the presidential box in the opera house, and were introduced to a standing ovation from a crowd of thousands wearing masks and black tie.Mr. Biden’s presence — the first time a president has attended the event since 2016 — heralded the restoration of tradition for the Honors, a star-studded event that recognizes lifetime achievements in the arts, including music, dance, theater, film and comedy, and helps raise money for the arts complex. The event had been rattled in recent years by former President Donald Trump’s decision to skip the festivities altogether after some recipients had announced in 2017 that they would not attend a gala event at the White House. Then in 2020 it was derailed, or at least delayed, by the coronavirus pandemic.“It is quite nice — very nice — to see the presidential box once again being occupied,” David Letterman, the comedian, declared in opening remarks, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd as Mr. Biden and Dr. Jill Biden waved. They were joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and Douglas Emhoff, the Second Gentleman.Just six months after an abbreviated celebration of the 2020 nominees, there were glimmers of both political and artistic normalcy. The show returned to its annual December slot, providing nearly four hours of tribute performances and speeches to more than 2,000 guests, who packed the opera house in shimmering gowns and tuxedos.President Biden spoke at a reception for the honorees at the White House. This year’s honorees were Justino Díaz, Lorne Michaels, Bette Midler, Berry Gordy and Joni Mitchell.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAnd in addition to attending the event, Mr. Biden revived the practice of hosting a White House reception for the five honorees: Bette Midler, the screen and stage actress; Joni Mitchell, the singer-songwriter; Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown; the opera singer Justino Díaz; and Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live.”“For this pandemic of profound loss and pain, as we move forward toward repair and renewal, the artist vision is important as it ever has been — I would argue more important,” Mr. Biden told the honorees in the East Room. “We’ve seen the power of art in every form to heal, to comfort, and recover.”He lavished praise on the honorees, calling Ms. Midler “a performer without peer,” and praising Mr. Díaz for bestowing “the sound of soul” on audiences. He thanked Mr. Gordy for helping to create “music that lifted us higher” and told Ms. Mitchell, “You sing poetry, it seems to me.”And he called Mr. Michaels “Mr. Wise Guy,” joking about the number of actors tapped to play the president on “S.N.L.” over the years, and noting, “If you can’t laugh at yourself, we’re in real trouble —- and you make me laugh at myself a lot.”Echoes of the pandemic still reverberated. Attendees had to repeatedly show proof of vaccination, an existing policy for all performances at the Kennedy Center. Masks — an array of medical, satin and sequined — were required, but removed for photos, performances and food.The medallion ceremony on Saturday evening, a traditionally more intimate dinner where the honorees receive the rainbow-ribboned awards, was held at the Library of Congress in order to host just over 200 people and accommodate coronavirus protocols.Seated at library desks with the lamps on, the honorees were feted under the gaze of statues of Shakespeare and Plato, after guests perused exhibits dedicated to their work. As he received his medallion, Mr. Díaz, allured by the acoustics, burst into an excerpt from “Otello,” his deep voice reverberating throughout the room.Ms. Mitchell, who spoke briefly with reporters after receiving her medallion, said that “there was a lot of heart to the whole thing.”The Honors event is a key fund-raiser for the Kennedy Center, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its opening in 1971. The event raised nearly $6.5 million, a spokeswoman said, with the cost of tickets to the Sunday gala ranging between $600 and $10,000.But for the honorees and the menagerie of lawmakers, donors, artists, colleagues and family members arriving to pay tribute, it was a celebration of not just their legacy, but of the return of their communities and live performances after the pandemic devastated arts industries around the world.“It’s very special and it’s a different perspective — I get to enjoy, not suffer with nerves,” said Mr. Díaz, who performed during the Kennedy Center’s inaugural year in Ginastera’s “Beatrix Cenci” (and who sang in the first performance at the new Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center in 1966).“It’s like coming home again, except a different part of the house.”Members of the cast of “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations,” the Broadway musical, sang a cappella on the red carpet in between interviews, before performing in character onstage as part of a tribute to Mr. Gordy. For Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation secretary, and his husband, Chasten, the evening was their first date night since their twins were born. And Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and a host of bipartisan lawmakers could be seen applauding and dancing in their seats before the end of the night.“I think I’m in a dream,” Mr. Gordy proclaimed. “And it’s a wonderful dream.”To honor Ms. Mitchell, the ceremony included Brandi Carlile, a friend and collaborator, performing “River,” Ellie Goulding singing “Big Yellow Taxi,” and Norah Jones performing both “The Circle Game” and “A Case of You.”Mr. Díaz grew emotional as his daughters, Natascia Díaz and Katya Díaz, sang “En Mi Viejo San Juan,” before excerpts from “Carmen” and “Faust” were performed. Ms. Midler cheered as a trio of her “Hello, Dolly!” castmates performed “Friends,” before Billy Porter, the actor and singer, emerged from a clam shell to lead a medley of her songs.A parade of comedic veterans from S.N.L. alternated between gently ribbing Mr. Michaels, their former — or current —  boss, and thanking him for his influence on their careers. It was punctuated by a trio of mock “Weekend Update” segments hosted by Kevin Nealon, Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler, and Colin Jost and Michael Che. Paul Simon concluded the tribute to Mr. Michaels with a performance of “America.”During the tribute to Mr. Gordy, the show paused to restart after an apparent technical mishap. But when the set parted to reveal Stevie Wonder at the piano, breaking into a medley that included “My Cherie Amour,” “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” and “Superstition,” the crowd erupted into raucous applause.By the finale, “Higher Ground,” the audience was on its feet.“To be part of this sort of lineage and this long line of people who have contributed so much to the culture, it’s just staggering to me,” Ms. Midler said. “I am so thrilled.”The Kennedy Center Honors will be broadcast on CBS on Dec. 22. More

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    Cultural Center Opens in Chelsea, Aiming to Help Artists in Pandemic

    Chelsea Factory will offer residencies in music, dance, theater and film at its 14,000-square-foot space in Manhattan.The pandemic has disrupted the lives of scores of artists across New York City, leaving many struggling to find steady work.Now a performing arts space in Manhattan is hoping to help.Chelsea Factory, a 14,000-square-foot cultural center on the West Side of Manhattan, announced on Tuesday it would offer performance and rehearsal space to artists trying to pursue ambitious projects in the changed coronavirus landscape. The center, backed by philanthropists and real estate executives, will operate as a “pop-up initiative” for five years and offer residencies to artists in music, dance, theater and film.James H. Herbert II, a banking executive who is behind the project, said the aim of the center was “to accelerate post-pandemic recovery” for artists.“Artists and partners can pursue ambitious ideas with financial and creative freedom,” Herbert, who is the founder, chairman and co-chief executive of First Republic Bank, said in a statement.Chelsea Factory’s first cohort of resident artists was chosen by the center’s staff with input from artistic communities. It includes, among others, the choreographers Hope Boykin and Andrea Miller; the composer Troy Anthony; and the filmmaker Luis G. Santos. They will each receive stipends of $10,000 and be given studio space as well as production support for projects.The center also plans collaborations with local organizations such as the dance-dedicated Joyce Theater and National Black Theater.Donald Borror, managing director of the center, said the center hoped to help artists “finish that piece that was never finished” because of the pandemic.“We just see the ability to really move people forward in their careers,” he said in an interview.Lauren Kiel, the center’s executive director, said its five-year timeline would allow it to be flexible.“Bringing these resources on the scene right now in such a nimble way is a unique offering that can quickly respond to whatever is going to happen as the art sector moves through these next quite uneven, unpredictable and unprecedented few years,” she said.Chelsea Factory occupies the space formerly held by Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, which closed in 2015. It will offer heavily subsidized rentals to independent artists and community groups.Public performances are set to begin in January. More

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    N.Y.U. Skirball Season Reinvigorates the Classics

    Elevator Repair Service will premiere a show inspired by Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” and the Classical Theater of Harlem’s hip-hop-infused “Seize the King” gets an encore.Numerous high-profile Shakespeare productions will fill New York stages next year.Among them will be “Seize the King,” Will Power’s contemporary spin on “Richard III” that was staged by the Classical Theater of Harlem in Marcus Garvey Park last summer, which is likely the only production that has a courting scene in a bathtub and that sprinkles in references to birth control and eating sushi with a fork.The 95-minute, hip-hop-infused reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s classic will return from March 3 to March 13, as part of New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts’s new season, which was announced on Tuesday. Carl Cofield, who directed the summer production, will return as director.In her review of last summer’s outdoor staging, the New York Times critic Laura Collins-Hughes deemed the show a Critic’s Pick, praising its humorous reimagining of the classic characters. The production “contained multitudes of beauty,” she wrote.Before “Seize the King,” the Skirball will kick off its season with the world premiere of Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull,” inspired by Anton Chekhov’s classic drama “The Seagull” and directed by John Collins (Feb. 2-20). Elevator Repair Service, a veteran theater company known for its unconventional takes on classic literary texts, staged “Gatz,” an eight-hour reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” at the Skirball in 2019.“‘Seagull’ isn’t a marathon” like “Gatz,” Jay Wegman, Skirball’s director, said of the new production, which runs about two and a half hours. “But it’s going to be whacked out in a wonderful way.”The Skirball has also lined up the world premiere of an interactive online experience called “I Agree to the Terms” (March 25-April 3), created by the theater company Builders Association with input from “microworkers” who develop Amazon’s algorithms. Audiences will complete virtual training sessions with these workers — taking them inside a sprawling and largely unregulated industry of people who earn pennies per click while completing assignments that are repetitive, boring, maddening and sometimes disturbing.“They’ve done a few workshops, and it’s anxiety-provoking in these sessions,” said Wegman, who added that the show becomes a competition among audience members. “You’re constantly being watched and counted and manipulated by the algorithm, so it’s very timely.”Rounding out the Skirball’s season are a concert by the Spanish flamenco singer Miguel Poveda, who will make his New York City solo debut (April 7-8); the world premiere of David Dorfman Dance’s “(A)Way Out Of My Body” (April 22-23); the New York premiere of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun’s “Zolle” and “A Cockroach’s Tarantella,” presented with International Contemporary Ensemble (April 29-30); and another New York premiere, the choreographer and MacArthur fellow Eiko Otake’s “The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable” (April 14-17).A full season lineup is available at nyuskirball.org. More

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    Hayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last Spell

    Hayao Miyazaki photographed outside his atelier near Studio Ghibli in Tokyo on Oct. 4, 2021.Takahiro KaneyamaHayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last SpellNo artist has explored the contradictions of humanity as sympathetically and critically as the Japanese animation legend. Now, at 80, he’s coming out of retirement with another movie.Nov. 23, 2021THE SCREEN IS black, and then comes the first frame: Hayao Miyazaki, the greatest animated filmmaker since the advent of the form in the early 20th century and one of the greatest filmmakers of any genre, is seated in front of a cast-iron stove with a pipe running up toward the ceiling, flanked by windows propped half open. Sun burns through the branches of the trees outside. Three little apples perch on a red brick ledge behind the stove. He wears an off-white apron whose narrow strap hooks around the neck and attaches with a single button on the left side — the same style of apron he has worn for years as a work and public uniform, a reminder that he is at once artist and artisan, ever on guard against daubs of paint — over a crisp white collared shirt, his white mustache and beard neat and trim, and his white hair blurring into a near halo as he gazes calmly at me through owlish black glasses, across the 6,700 miles from Tokyo to New York.I have one hour to ask questions. It is a rare gift, as Miyazaki has long preferred not to speak to the press except when absolutely necessary (which is to say, when he’s prodded into promoting a film), and has not granted an interview to an English-language outlet since 2014. Our conversation has been brokered by the newly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which mounted the first North American retrospective of his work in September, with Studio Ghibli’s cautious assent; Jessica Niebel, an exhibitions curator, cites him as an exemplar of an auteur who “has managed to stay true to himself” while making movies that are “approachable to people everywhere.” I know I am lucky to have this time, and yet it feels wrong to meet Miyazaki this way, at a distance (due to Covid-19 travel restrictions) and through a computer, a machine he has so famously shunned.To accompany T’s story on Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli provided rarely seen watercolor imageboards drawn by the animator himself during the development of his films. Here, a sketch of the warrior Ashitaka from “Princess Mononoke” (1997).Hayao Miyazaki © 1997 Studio Ghibli – NDFor, in an age of ever-advancing technology, his animated films are radical in their repudiation of it. From “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), with its vision of gentle friendship between two children and an enormous growling forest creature whom only they can see, to the ecological epic “Princess Mononoke” (1997), whose title character, a human raised by wolves, first appears sucking blood out of a wound in her wolf mother’s side (the hero, an exiled prince, takes one look at her blood-smeared face and falls in love), to the phantasmagorical fable “Spirited Away” (2001), in which a timid girl must learn pluck and save her foolish parents (who’ve been transformed into pigs) by working at a bathhouse that caters to a raucous array of gods, Miyazaki renders the wildest reaches of imagination and the maddest swirls of motion — the stormy waves that turn into eel-like pursuers in “Ponyo” (2008), the houses rippling and bucking with the force of an earthquake in “The Wind Rises” (2013) — almost entirely by hand. And unlike Walt Disney, the only figure of comparable stature in animation, Miyazaki, who is now 80, has never retreated to the role of a corporate impresario, dictating from on high: At Studio Ghibli, the animation company he founded with the filmmaker Isao Takahata and the producer Toshio Suzuki in 1985, he’s always worked in the trenches, as part of a team of around a hundred employees devoted just to production, including key animators and background, cleanup and in-between artists, whose desks he used to make the rounds of daily for decades. (His own desk is hardly bigger than theirs.) He still draws the majority of the frames in each film, numbering in the tens of thousands, himself. Only occasionally has he resorted to computer-generated imagery, and in some films not at all.“I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil,” he tells me. (We speak through an interpreter, Yuriko Banno.) Japanese pencils are particularly good, he notes: The graphite is delicate and responsive — in the 2013 documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness,” directed by Mami Sunada, he mocks himself for having to rely on a soft 5B or even softer 6B as he gets older — and encased in sugi (Japanese cedar), although, he muses, “I don’t see that many quality wood trees left in Japan anymore.” He adds, “That’s a true story,” then laughs, leaning in to the screen, and I think of the ancient, moss-cloaked trees in “Princess Mononoke,” cut down to fuel Lady Eboshi’s ironworks, and of their counterparts in the Shiratani Unsuikyo Ravine on the island of Yakushima in the south, which Miyazaki visited while location scouting for the film. The oldest cedar there, 83 feet tall and nearly 54 feet in circumference, is believed to be more than 2,600 years old, making it one of the oldest trees on earth. (The forest of the film does not exactly correspond to the ravine, Miyazaki has said: “Rather, it is a depiction of the forest that has existed within the hearts of Japanese from ancient times.”)A watercolor imageboard from Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” (1997).Hayao Miyazaki © 1997 Studio Ghibli – NDMiyazaki lives with his wife, Akemi, a former fellow animator — they met as colleagues at Toei Animation nearly 60 years ago on the movie “Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon,” and married in 1965; she stopped working to raise their two sons, at his request, and, he has said in the past, “hasn’t forgiven” him — in Tokorozawa, northwest of Tokyo, where the Totoro Fund (supported in part by donations from the Miyazakis) has purchased more than 10 wooded hectares, dense with oak and camphor trees, for conservation. But today he is speaking to me from the Tokyo suburb of Koganei, from a small building a short walk away from the headquarters of Studio Ghibli that he uses as a private atelier. He sometimes affectionately calls it Buta-ya, Japanese for “pig house.” (He is fond of pigs, and often sketches himself as one.) Out front he parks his cloud-gray Citroën 2CV, with a tiny two-horsepower engine and a rollback roof that leaks when it rains (the model was discontinued in 1990); a wine-colored version of it appears in the careening cliffside chase scene in his directorial debut, “Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro” (1979). Every December, he puts cuddly stuffed goats, mementos of his work on the “Heidi: A Girl of the Alps” TV series in the ’70s, in the kitchen window to greet passing children. When the Academy Museum requested a goat to display in its exhibition, he demurred: The children would miss them.Buta-ya was meant to be a retirement office, where Miyazaki could pursue personal projects. He built it in 1998, after announcing that he would make no more feature films, then returned to Studio Ghibli the next year with the story idea that would become “Spirited Away,” the highest-grossing movie in Japanese history until last fall’s “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train” (an extension of a popular manga franchise and part of a different strain of Japanese anime, focused on action and vengeance, with a video-game-like feel). “Spirited Away” won the 2002 Academy Award for best animated feature, the only film from outside the West to ever do so. In 2013, he said again that he was done with film, and that time, having directed 11 features in 34 years, he was taken seriously: Studio Ghibli shut down its production department.Yet here he is now, making a new film. “Because I wanted to,” he says, and grins, like a grizzled thief come back for one last heist.GORGEOUS, PROFOUND, BORDERLESS in possibility — yes, yes, but above all, Miyazaki’s films are thrilling. He is a master of suspense, whether sending a fugitive girl skittering down a rickety pipe that pops off the wall as she runs (“Spirited Away”), or swooping after a novice witch reeling on a broomstick because she’s forgotten how to fly and must quickly relearn so she can rescue her friend, a boy who’s dangling from a dirigible and about to crash into a clock tower (the 1989 “Kiki’s Delivery Service”). His visual style is at once commanding and intimate, a mix of fluid, loose lines and an accumulation of detail — in contrast to more mainstream anime’s labor-saving preference for caricature and clipped movement — that enables him to invoke the immediacy of life without being beholden to its precise contours. He deploys a palette of saturated colors, bright but never gaudy, standing out against cool grays and dun tones, and pays attention to quicksilver adjustments of light and shade, especially the shadows within shadows that give featheriness and depth to the night. He is equally expressive in close-up and panorama, and virtuosic in his open skies, creating clouds that are almost characters unto themselves, whether high-heaped loomers, broad swaths of rubble or voluptuous whorls like the heavy heads of flowers, stained by sunset or the deepening blues of day. (The Academy Museum’s retrospective includes a green-carpeted knoll where visitors may rest and gaze up at a video of passing clouds.)A self-portrait in marker made exclusively for T by Miyazaki on shikishi board, upon which it’s customary in Japan to draw or write a message in order to express gratitude (the characters below the drawing are his signature).Hayao MiyazakiAnd how easily Miyazaki slips from one register to the next, from hushed to clamorous, often in the same scene, as in the exquisitely timed comedy of towering Totoro, with his giant claws, standing beside two little girls at a bus stop in the dark. It’s raining; one girl offers him an umbrella, an instrument he has never encountered before. A toad stares at him from across the road, as if equally perplexed. We squint up at the trees to see a few particularly fat raindrops falling from a branch. They plonk down on the umbrella, loud, and Totoro startles. More drops come, a scattering of drumbeats, and his eyes widen. He heaves his body up in the air and lands with a boom, and all the drops caught in the trees come crashing down, his own personal storm. And then — because of course there’s more — the bus arrives, only it’s a scampering cat with headlight eyes and a door that opens in its side to whisk Totoro away.But Miyazaki is a realist, too. Toward the end of his 2004 film, “Howl’s Moving Castle,” which is mostly devoted to magic — a girl is transformed by a witch into an elderly woman, a wizard shape-shifts into a dark man-bird, a castle uproots itself and clanks around on clawed feet — a great-bellied airship looms into view and starts dropping bombs on a cobblestone town. Black clouds and flames surge over houses; the sky hangs red. No war takes place in the source material, a 1986 novel by the British writer Diana Wynne Jones. This is Miyazaki’s memory.He was born in 1941, the same year that Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, and he was 4 years old when American planes attacked the city of Utsunomiya, where his family had been evacuated from Tokyo. He recounts in “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” how he saw a glow at the window and hid under a bridge, his legs in a ditch. With the incendiaries still falling, his father carried him up the riverbank and to a small truck so they could escape. As Miyazaki and his father settled into the vehicle’s bed, a woman with a child asked if they could come, too, but they were left behind. “We left them behind,” Miyazaki says. A month later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. More humiliations followed: the emperor’s renunciation of divinity, the dismantlement of the country’s armed forces and a formal abjuring of war, enshrined in the Constitution.A still from “Castle in the Sky” (1986).Hayao Miyazaki © 1986 Studio GhibliA still from “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988).Hayao Miyazaki © 1988 Studio GhibliAlthough Miyazaki was too young to comprehend the magnitude of what was taking place, that time remains a cornerstone of his work, as it was and has been for many Japanese artists who came of age during the war or in its aftermath. The late antiwar painter Tatsuo Ikeda, who was born in 1928 and conscripted as a teenager to become a kamikaze pilot — the country’s defeat saved him — started out making portraits for American soldiers from snapshots of their girlfriends or wives, and went on to create eerie black-and-white tableaus that bristle with malformed animals and punishing machines. Haruki Murakami, born in 1949 in Kyoto, the former seat of the imperial court, writes novels of deadpan humor that surreally interrogate the legacy and persistence of Japanese nationalism.And perhaps the most harrowing Japanese war film ever made is Studio Ghibli’s 1988 “Grave of the Fireflies,” adapted by Takahata from a 1967 short story by Akiyuki Nosaka about two children left homeless in the wake of an air raid. It bears the freight of Takahata’s own memories of fleeing a firebombing as a 9-year-old — he was born in 1935 — as his feet were burned by melting asphalt, and wandering without food for two days. “No one gave him anything, not even potato vines,” Miyazaki recalls in “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.” (Astonishingly, in its first release, “Grave of the Fireflies” was paired with “My Neighbor Totoro” as a double bill: anguish and solace.)Arguably, the rise of Japanese animation itself, in both its monster/superhero and more lyrical veins, was a direct response to the shock of defeat and anxiety over atomic fallout and the threat of genetic mutations. The monster Godzilla first appeared in a live-action 1954 film as a dinosaur, roused from the bottom of the ocean by an American hydrogen bomb test, who spews radiation over Tokyo in a visceral re-enactment of an air raid. (Miyazaki tells me that he remembers watching the movie and being reminded of American warplanes “dropping bombs from high above, out of reach.”) If Godzilla was fear and rage incarnate, Astro Boy — known in Japanese as the Mighty Atom, and introduced by the animation pioneer Osamu Tezuka in a 1951 manga, followed by an animated TV series starting in 1963 — sublimated anxiety into heroism: A boy robot whose body is powered by nuclear energy gets abandoned by his maker (giving him kinship with the war’s many orphans), but learns to use his abilities to fight for peace.Miyazaki’s movies, with their warplanes and intrusions of Western décor and dress, keep circling back to the traumatic moment when Japan, which until the mid-19th century had kept itself closed off to the outside world, was forced to embrace the West and Western values. The devastated population complied in confused haste, as if to erase the shame of recent history and their own complicity in a war waged by a nationalist government out of a belief in Japan’s cultural superiority. (Some saw this as a capitulation to the West and a fatal loss of dignity; in 1970, the writer Yukio Mishima died by ritual suicide in protest, after shouting, “Long live the emperor!”) Niebel, of the Academy Museum, suggests that Japanese audiences are drawn to Miyazaki’s work because it’s essentially nostalgic. There’s a yearning, faintly mournful, for an older Japan, one free of both imperialistic hubris and Western materialism.A woven wool blanket — featuring Chihiro, the heroine of “Spirited Away” (2001) — designed by Loewe’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson, as part of a series in which T commissioned four artists deeply influenced by Studio Ghibli to create original works that accompany this story. “Their poetic films have the ability to connect with adults just as powerfully as with children, creating a sense of nostalgia,” Anderson says. “Loewe’s connection to the studio is in our mutual love of crafts and artisanal techniques, expressed in our respective languages.”Photo by Florent TanetBut part of his films’ greatness is that they can also be loved by viewers who never sense the dark current below. In “Porco Rosso” (1992), the hero may be an embittered war veteran, but he’s also, literally and delightfully, a pig flying a plane, and is spectacularly good at it.MIYAZAKI’S FATHER WAS not a bystander in the war. He ran a munitions factory that produced wings for the military’s fearsomely acrobatic Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter planes, which in the last months of the war were converted for kamikaze missions. In a 1995 newspaper essay in The Asahi Shimbun, Miyazaki describes his father as something of a grifter, bribing officials to accept defective parts. After Japan’s surrender, when there were no more planes to furnish, his father used leftover duralumin, an aluminum alloy that had helped keep the Zero lightweight and dangerous, to make flimsy spoons, which he pawned off on impoverished customers desperate for household goods. Later, he briefly turned the factory into a dance hall, before bringing the family — Miyazaki is the second of four sons — back to Tokyo.Although Miyazaki never set foot in his father’s factory, which was off limits as a military site, he was entranced by airplanes and the liberation of flight from an early age. (Ghibli is both the hot, dusty wind that sweeps through the Libyan Desert and the name of an airplane, the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli, a World War II Italian reconnaissance bomber.) This obsession has manifested in almost every film, in humans who turn into flying creatures or simply walk on air; in fanciful machines like the flaptors in “Castle in the Sky” (1986), propelled by four translucent wings; and in reproductions of real-world aircraft, as in “Porco Rosso,” in which the hero’s wrecked seaplane, inspired by the 1920s-era Italian racer Macchi M.33, is rebuilt by an all-female crew to ready it for a climactic dogfight, and in “The Wind Rises,” which tells the (not entirely) true story of the designer of the Zero, Jiro Horikoshi, who in the film as in life opposed the war and whom Miyazaki portrays as reluctant to see the beautiful machines he’s created deployed as emissaries of death — a stand-in for Miyazaki’s father, or the man he might have been.As Miyazaki grew older, he found fault with his father both for profiting off the war and for never expressing any shame or guilt. (He shares this troubled inheritance with the writers W.G. Sebald, born in 1944 in the Bavarian Alps, who had to grapple with his father’s past as a soldier in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and the Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, born in the suburbs of Paris in 1945 not long after V-E Day, whose own father kept company with collaborators and profiteers.) And yet, Miyazaki wrote in 1995, “I am like him” — a man of contradictions: a filmmaker who condemns the proliferation of images even as he contributes to it; an artist who has devoted his career to children but was rarely home to take care of his own; an environmentalist who can’t bear to give up his cigarettes or wheezing car; a professed Luddite who revels in the mechanics of modern vehicles but tries “not to draw them in a fashion that further feeds an infatuation with power,” as he has written; a pacifist who loves warplanes; a brooder with a dark view of how civilization has squandered the gifts of the planet, who nevertheless makes films that affirm the urgency of human life.“Untitled” (2021), by Elliott Robbins. “Miyazaki’s films were some of my earliest exposure to foreign cinema,” the artist says. “Because so much of his interest is to look to his own culture for inspiration, as an outsider, I feel that Miyazaki’s films create space for a viewer to compare the differences in the nuances of their own lived experience, as well as to connect to what is universal in his stories.”Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Joshua ScottThis embrace of contradictions may be why Miyazaki’s movies, although beloved in the West (if not as wildly successful as in Japan, where his last five films combined took in close to 100 billion yen in their first release, or around $873 million), in some ways thwart the Western mind. Absent are the dominating themes of monotheism — a fall from an original state of grace, followed by redemption — and a clear dichotomy of good and evil. “I’m not a god who decides on what is good and bad,” Miyazaki tells me. “We as humans make mistakes.” In his world, there are few outright villains or even truly bad characters, only characters who do bad things. Lady Eboshi wreaks havoc on the forest in “Princess Mononoke” but also gives sanctuary to brothel workers and those afflicted with leprosy. No-Face, the gliding black shroud who eats people in “Spirited Away,” turns out to be simply lonely and, when soothed, spits out his victims. Even the mutant stampeding army of trilobite-like behemoths from the toxic jungle in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” (1984), who kill the heroine by flinging her into the air and trampling her underfoot, end up restoring her to life with the touch of their golden antennae.So Disney was never an influence. (Miyazaki has gone so far as to say, in a 1988 lecture, that he hated Disney’s movies and their easy sentimentality: “To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience.”) Instead, Miyazaki looked to works like the French animator Paul Grimault’s “The King and the Mockingbird” (released in different forms in 1952 and 1980), in which a chimney sweep and a shepherdess flee from a vain and despised tyrant king through a cavernous 296-story castle while a coterie of animals mounts a revolution, and the Armenian animator Lev Atamanov’s “The Snow Queen” (1957), whose heroine self-effacingly sacrifices her shoes to a river to beg for help in finding her lost friend, and whose gleefully amoral, knife-wielding Robber Girl — who captures the heroine and steals her bonnet and muff, then is horrified and furious to find herself moved to tears by her victim’s tale of woe — is a forerunner to the wolf girl of “Princess Mononoke.”Curiously, considering the limitations on women’s professional progress in Japan (which makes the country an outlier among developed nations), Miyazaki’s heroines outnumber his heroes. Within the world of anime, these characters are called shojo, girls of an in-between age, no longer quite children and not yet women; but where shojo were typically passive figures subject to romance narratives, Miyazaki’s girls display formidable know-how and independence. They take on jobs, organize households, fight battles and rescue boys from near death — all matter-of-factly, without ever trumpeting notions of girl power. Although some are princesses, they resist the trappings of fairy tales: Princess Mononoke doesn’t live in a palace. Chihiro, in “Spirited Away,” is awkward and lacks the big eyes that traditionally signify beauty and vulnerability in anime, while Sophie, the mousy milliner in “Howl’s Moving Castle,” spends most of the movie in the guise of a stooped old woman. Even when the spell is broken and her youth returns, her hair remains gray. It’s a reminder that something has been forever lost; that, even with the most powerful magic, there can be no reset, no starting over.Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli’s producer, photographed at the company’s Tokyo offices on Oct. 4, 2021, alongside plush versions of, from left, the characters Totoro and Catbus from “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988).Takahiro KaneyamaAmerican animated films of today, by contrast, still tend to culminate in a happily ever after, or at least a vanquishing of foes. (“We have a desire for closure,” Niebel says.) Miyazaki offers something more nebulous and even unsettling. The resurrection in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” is a stark exception, for elsewhere in his oeuvre, death is not defeated, only at best delayed. Prince Ashitaka in “Princess Mononoke,” whose body has been progressively consumed by the dark stain of a curse, is never completely cured; a shadow remains on his arm, and he is separated from the girl he loves by a sense of duty — he to the humans of Iron Town, she to the wolves of the forest — although they promise to visit each other. Cruelty, too, is not so much punished as neutralized, as when the youthful-appearing Witch of the Waste in “Howl’s Moving Castle” is reinstated to her true age and revealed to be a doddering old lady, whom Sophie spoon-feeds without complaint, despite still suffering from the witch’s curse. Recovery may be possible, but not full restitution.In a 1991 directorial memo for “Porco Rosso,” a farce that includes a preening American pilot eyeing a career as a Hollywood star and a snarling gang of sky pirates who prove helpless when confronted with a gaggle of schoolgirls, Miyazaki cautions, “We must treat every character respectfully. We must love their foolishness. … One common mistake — the belief that to draw a cartoon is to draw someone sillier than oneself — must be avoided at all costs.” At the heart of the film is a hard-bitten bounty hunter who takes on the guise of a pig out of a sense of guilt at having survived World War I while his fellow pilots died. (Miyazaki describes the film to me as “a boy’s dream.”) The woman he loves but doesn’t believe he deserves laments this “curse,” but only he can free himself from it, by no longer condemning that part of himself.“In the town that I live in, I have precious friends, but I also have people I detest,” Miyazaki tells me. “That is what human society is all about.” Even his friends are flawed, and not just them. He says, “It’s a mirror of who I am.”IT IS TEMPTING to read Miyazaki’s protestations as simple humility, and to cast him, against his will, as a sort of secular saint. In many ways he fits the part: the benevolent neighborhood uncle who brings joy to children through his work, picks up trash from the river on his days off and, over the past two and a half decades, has made quiet pilgrimages to a sanitarium near his home for patients with leprosy who, for much of the 20th century, faced segregation by law in such facilities. One patient became a friend, and Miyazaki held his hand when he was dying.“(New) Spirits Away” (2021) by James Yaya Hough, who says, “As an African American artist, I have been influenced by decades of great anime from Japan but deeply impacted by my own social and cultural experiences of race, mass incarceration and American history/culture. It’s through this lens that I connect with some of the strongest themes in Miyazaki’s body of animation: the struggle of the human spirit, self-discovery and love.”Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Joshua ScottBut Takahata, Miyazaki’s mentor at Toei Animation in the ’60s and ’70s and, eventually, his greatest rival, dismisses this hagiography in the afterword to “Starting Point” (1996), a collection of Miyazaki’s early interviews, lectures and essays, writing, “Hayao Miyazaki is a man who struggles. … He weeps, is playful, loves people, expects too much of their talents, howls at his broken dreams, becomes enraged.” The brilliant and notoriously perfectionist Takahata, who once took eight years to finish a film, died in 2018, but he still casts a shadow; Miyazaki spent 15 years working with Takahata before becoming a director himself, and even though his movies at Studio Ghibli consistently outperformed Takahata’s at the box office, he still craved his mentor’s approval. (Suzuki, in a 2014 memoir, insists that Takahata is the only viewer whom Miyazaki has ever wanted to please.)Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    If Remote Work Empties Downtowns, Can Theaters Fill Their Seats?

    Since the pandemic, San Francisco has embraced work-from-home policies. Now venues and concert halls are wondering if weeknight audiences are a thing of the past.SAN FRANCISCO — As live performance finally returns after the pandemic shutdown, cultural institutions are confronting a long list of unknowns.Will audiences feel safe returning to crowded theaters? Have people grown so accustomed to watching screens in their living rooms that they will not get back into the habit of attending live events? And how will the advent of work-from-home policies, which have emptied blocks of downtowns and business districts, affect weekday attendance at theaters and concert halls?Nowhere is that last question more urgent than here in San Francisco, where tech companies have led the way in embracing work-from-home policies and flexible schedules more than in almost any other city in the nation. Going to a weeknight show is no longer a matter of leaving the office and swinging by the War Memorial Opera House or the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “It’s something that could be a threat. We’re all trying to wait and see whether there’s a surge of interest in live activity again or is there a continuation of just being at home, not coming into the city from the suburbs.”Arts groups are trying to gauge what the embrace of more flexible work-from-home policies will mean for their ability to draw audiences in a city whose housing crunch has already driven many people to settle far from downtown. Close to 70 percent of the audiences at the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony — two nationally recognized symbols of this city’s vibrant network of performing arts institutions — live outside the city, according to data collected by the two organizations.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, which presented a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaSome economists see the trend of remote work persisting. “It’s likely we are going to have more people working from home than other places,” said Ted Egan, the chief economist for the city and county of San Francisco. “The tech industry seems to be the most generous for work-from-home policy, and employees are expecting that.”Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently. At Salesforce, which has 9,000 employees, employees will only have to come to work one to three days a week; many will be allowed to work at home full time. Dropbox, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, also has adopted a permanent work-from-home policy. Facebook and Google, both of which have a significant presence in San Francisco, have implemented work-from-home policies.Egan said that the trend might pose more of a problem for the city’s bars and restaurants than for its performing arts institutions. “My suspicion is that performing arts are going to be less sensitive to working from home than other sectors,” he said. “It’s not the kind of purchase you do after work on a whim, like going for happy hour.”Attendance has been spotty as this city’s art scene climbs back. Just 50 percent of the seats were filled the other night for a performance of “The Displaced,” a “gentrification horror play” by Isaac Gómez, at the Crowded Fire Theater. “We had sold-out houses on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and much lower participation on Wednesday and Thursday night,” said Mina Morita, the artistic director. “It’s hard to tell if this is the new normal.”There were some patches of empty seats across the Davies Symphony Hall the other night, as the San Francisco Symphony presented the United States premiere of a violin concerto by Bryce Dessner, even though it was the third week of the long-delayed (and long-anticipated) first season for Esa-Pekka Salonen, its new music director. The concerto, with an energetic performance by Pekka Kuusisto, the Finnish violinist, was greeted by repeated standing ovations and glowing reviews.Attendance in October was down 11 percent compared to before the pandemic, but the symphony said advance sales were strong, suggesting normal audiences might return in spring.Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images“The audience is back,” Salonen said in an interview before he took the stage. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large, the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”The San Francisco Opera also began its new season with a splashy new hire: a new music director, Eun Sun Kim, who in August became the first woman to hold the position at one of the nation’s largest opera companies. She conducted a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall that incorporated chain-link fences and flickering video screens to update the story of the liberation of a political prisoner.Even so, the opera, which can seat 2,928 with Covid restrictions, sold an average of 1,912 tickets per show for “Fidelio,” its second production of this new season. That’s better than its second production in 2019, Britten’s “Billy Budd,” a searing work that does not always attract big crowds. But it drew fewer people than the opera’s second production in 2018, “Roberto Devereux,” which sold an average of 2,116 tickets a performance.“The urgency to be bold, to be innovative, to be compelling to get audiences to come back or give us a try for the first time has never been stronger,” Shilvock said. “There will be a hunger for things that have an energy, that have a vitality, that give a reason to come into the city.”Even before the pandemic, cultural organizations were dealing with challenges that threatened to discourage patrons, including a stressed public transportation system, traffic, parking constraints and the highly visible epidemic of homelessness. And many institutions were struggling to make inroads in attracting audiences and patrons from the tech industry, which now accounts for 19 percent of the private work force.Now, facing an uncertain future as they try to emerge from the pandemic shutdown, arts organizations are embracing a variety of tactics to fill seats..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Hope Mohr, the co-director of Hope Mohr Dance, said that her organization was spending $1,400 per night to livestream performances, so audiences could choose between coming into San Francisco or watching from their living rooms.“A hybrid experience — I have to do that from now on,” she said. “My company usually performs in San Francisco, and I have audience coming from all over the bay.”These calculations are taking place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety. It is not clear how much these early attendance figures represent a realignment, or are evidence of audiences temporarily trying to balance their hunger for live performances against concerns about the spread of the Delta variant — even in a city where 75 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated. Lower attendance figures have been reported by performing halls across the country.“The audience is back,” Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, said. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”Christopher M. Howard Opening nights have found performers relieved to be playing to real crowds again and audiences delighted to be back. “The convenience of at-home entertainment has made it not as desirable for some folks, ” said Ralph Remington, the director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission. “But that being said, even though the density of the numbers isn’t as great as it was prepandemic, the audiences that are coming are really enthusiastic.”Advance sales for “The Nutcracker” at the San Francisco Ballet, with one-third of the tickets going for just $19 a seat to help bring in new patrons (the average ticket price is $136), have been moving briskly.Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the ballet’s interim executive director, said she hoped that working from home had made people eager to break out of their increasing isolation. “I would do anything to get out,” she said. “I hope that’s a good sign for our season.”At the height of the pandemic, about 85 percent of San Francisco-based employees worked from home; that number is about 50 percent now, said Enrico Moretti, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.“I think it’s possible that people are not going to commute from Walnut Creek at night to go to downtown San Francisco for the opera to the same extent,” he said. “But I don’t expect those office buildings will sit empty. There will be other people moving into them.”The Magic Theater, a 145-seat-theater in Fort Mason, just beyond Fisherman’s Wharf, has been experimenting with different kinds of programming, such as a poetry reading, and pay-what-you-can seats to lure patrons who live — and now work — far from the theater.“This is going to be an interesting year for everyone,” said Sean San José, its artistic director. “Are people going to come back? The zeitgeist is telling us something. Maybe we should listen. This ain’t a pause. We have got to rethink it.” More

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    At the Radio City Christmas Show, Some Workers Worry About Covid Rules

    Employees must all be vaccinated, but some are upset that the upcoming show is not also testing them for the virus, as is done on Broadway and at other major performing venues.Some of the people who put on the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show are expressing concerns about the Covid-19 protocols in place for workers as the show prepares to open on Friday night.All the employees for the “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes” must be vaccinated. But other aspects of the annual Christmas pageant’s policy are not in line with those put in place by Broadway theaters, the Metropolitan Opera and some other live performance spaces across the city, according to email correspondence and a policy document reviewed by The New York Times.Unlike on Broadway, at the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet, for example, the Madison Square Garden Entertainment company that produces the show and owns the theater is not requiring employees to be tested for the virus. Unions representing some of the employees of the show have raised the matter of testing to the show’s management, according to an email reviewed by The Times.Management at the Music Hall says the protocols it has in place are completely safe, were developed in conjunction with health and safety experts and have been used successfully at a roster of shows in the venue since late summer.“We believe our protocols are more than adequate to protect people in our building,” a spokeswoman for Madison Square Garden Entertainment, Kimberly Kerns, said. “The show has more than 1,000 employees. While there are a vocal few that don’t agree, the vast majority are excited about coming to work.”Under the Music Hall’s policy, masks are recommended but not required for artists, cast and crew members, which differs from the protocol at many performing arts institutions like Carnegie Hall. In addition, at Radio City, not all audience members must wear masks as is the case with all Broadway shows. (The “Christmas Spectacular” is admitting audience members with one dose of a two-dose vaccine, and they will have to wear masks. But fully vaccinated audience members who are 12 or older will not be required to wear a face covering.)Kerns emphasized that Radio City Music Hall is a vastly different kind of venue than a Broadway theater. It is far bigger, with 6,000 seats and more space between the stage and the audience, she said. And, importantly, she said, company officials believe the venue’s air filtration system is “just as good — and most likely better” than any system at any performance venue in the city.The spokeswoman also noted that management does recommend wearing a mask. She said the show has provided information on where and how to get a test off site. And she reiterated that the company is using the same protocols for the “Christmas Spectacular” that it has used effectively for other events at Radio City and other properties the company owns. (Madison Square Garden, another of its venues, has been home to Knicks games and concerts at which vaccinated audience members did not have to wear a mask.)Four unions representing the show’s musicians, stagehands, dressers and its dancers, the Rockettes, did not respond to requests for comment.The “Christmas Spectacular” runs for roughly eight weeks, employs more than 1,000 people, and delights several thousand audience members at each show. On some days during the run, the “Christmas Spectacular” is performed four times in a single day..css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}.css-1in8jot{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1in8jot{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1in8jot:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1in8jot{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}What to Know About Covid-19 Booster ShotsThe F.D.A. has authorized booster shots for millions of recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. Pfizer and Moderna recipients who are eligible for a booster include people 65 and older, and younger adults at high risk of severe Covid-19 because of medical conditions or where they work. Eligible Pfizer and Moderna recipients can get a booster at least six months after their second dose. All Johnson & Johnson recipients will be eligible for a second shot at least two months after the first.Yes. The F.D.A. has updated its authorizations to allow medical providers to boost people with a different vaccine than the one they initially received, a strategy known as “mix and match.” Whether you received Moderna, Johnson & Johnson or Pfizer-BioNTech, you may receive a booster of any other vaccine. Regulators have not recommended any one vaccine over another as a booster. They have also remained silent on whether it is preferable to stick with the same vaccine when possible.The C.D.C. has said the conditions that qualify a person for a booster shot include: hypertension and heart disease; diabetes or obesity; cancer or blood disorders; weakened immune system; chronic lung, kidney or liver disease; dementia and certain disabilities. Pregnant women and current and former smokers are also eligible.The F.D.A. authorized boosters for workers whose jobs put them at high risk of exposure to potentially infectious people. The C.D.C. says that group includes: emergency medical workers; education workers; food and agriculture workers; manufacturing workers; corrections workers; U.S. Postal Service workers; public transit workers; grocery store workers.Yes. The C.D.C. says the Covid vaccine may be administered without regard to the timing of other vaccines, and many pharmacy sites are allowing people to schedule a flu shot at the same time as a booster dose.Several company members, who asked not to be named because they said they were concerned about possible retaliation, said they worried about working in cramped spaces backstage; they also noted that they have family members at home who are at risk.Infectious-disease experts say the best way to protect the health and wellness of theater cast and crew members involves a combination of vaccination, air filtration, frequent testing and mandatory masking backstage.At some other venues, employers are requiring, providing and paying for Covid tests for their vaccinated arts workers. Broadway employees are currently being tested at least twice a week. People who work regularly at the Met Opera are expected to take one weekly test between Saturday and Tuesday and another between Wednesday and Friday. The New York Philharmonic tests members of its orchestra as well as crew and staff members who interact with the orchestra once per week.“Not having people mask in a full theater — I’m not ready for that yet,” said Dr. Danielle Ompad, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at New York University. “For a group of employees who are walking around without masks because that’s part of the performance — I would still want to be able to get tested.”Though transmission has been rare at live performance venues so far this fall season, Broadway productions like “Aladdin” caught positive cases within its company through testing and were able to resume performances in relatively short order. More