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      ‘Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later’ Review: Trailblazers Revisited

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      This documentary from Daniel Peddle offers an update on the transmasculine people of color who participated in ballroom culture in the 1990s.The 2005 documentary “The Aggressives” provided a novel view of ballroom culture, or the underground pageant scene which emerged as a haven for queer Black and Latino youths in the 1980s and ’90s. The subjects of the 2005 film are people who identified themselves as “aggressives” — they were assigned female at birth, but they competed in ballroom categories highlighting their masculinity. They walked the catwalk dressed in construction gear and basketball jerseys. The original film followed its stars for five years, as they carried their gender performance out of the ballroom and into the streets, into their relationships and family lives.Now, decades years later, the director Daniel Peddle follows up with his former subjects, in the documentary “Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later.” Four of the original subjects of “The Aggressives” return to offer updates from their lives, and once again, the filmmaker interviews his subjects across five years.One such subject, Kisha, who was once a model, has grown into an artist, and the film uses Kisha’s photography as a clever way to include commentary on the original film from new transmasculine, nonbinary or lesbian subjects. Trevon now identifies as transmasculine and nonbinary, and is happily partnered and considering how to build a family. Octavio works to reestablish a relationship with his son, and he considers when to pursue gender affirming surgery. Chin seeks support from the Transgender Law Center for assistance in navigating immigration law after he is targeted for deportation by ICE. In each of these updates, Peddle hews close to his original film’s style: he asks his subjects to define themselves and then he keeps watching, letting their actions color in the lines of their self-definition. It’s an approach which grants dignity to his subjects, an effect which is only amplified by the passage of time.Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years LaterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Park Avenue Armory Will Host ‘Illinoise’ and ‘Indra’s Net’ in 2024

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      The Armory’s upcoming season also includes the North American premiere of ‘Inside Light.’The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2024 season on Thursday, including the New York City arrival of “Illinoise,” a dance-theater work based on a Sufjan Stevens album and staged by Justin Peck, and the North American premiere of “Indra’s Net,” an immersive installation performance inspired by a Buddhist story and created by the interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk.Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of Park Avenue Armory, said the season of performances would provide audiences with opportunities to explore themes of interdependence and spirituality.“It’s a special journey about joy, contemplation and spiritual exploration,” Robertson said.“Illinoise,” which will run for several weeks starting March 2, is an adaptation of Stevens’s 2005 concept album “Illinois,” leading the audience through the American heartland from campfire storytelling to the edge of the cosmos. This music-theater production, adapted by Peck and the Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, will feature new arrangements by the composer and pianist Timo Andres.Performances of “Indra’s Net,” featuring Monk’s vocal ensemble, as well as a 16-piece chamber orchestra and an eight-member chorus, will start on Sept. 23. The work draws on music, movement and architecture to tell a tale of interconnectedness and interdependence inspired by an ancient Buddhist and Hindu legend in which an enlightened king stretches a net across the universe, placing a jewel at each intersection.The Armory’s season will also include the North American premiere of “Inside Light,” in which Kathinka Pasveer, director of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, performs five electronic compositions from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 29-hour opera cycle “Licht.” The performance, which opens on June 5, was conceived specifically for the Armory and will include lasers and a high-definition video projection.In addition to those performances, the Armory’s upcoming season includes:The world premiere of “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” from the choreographer Kyle Abraham, with digital design by Cao Yuxi and a score composed and performed live by yMusic.The North American premiere of “R.O.S.E,” a homage to club culture by the choreographer Sharon Eyal that is directed by Gai Behar and Caius Pawson.“Shall We Gather at the River,” a musical call to climate action that weaves together Bach cantatas and Black American spirituals. It will be staged by the director Peter Sellars and performed by the Oxford Bach Soloists and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. More

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      36 Hours in Acadiana, Louisiana: Things to Do and See

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      10:30 a.m.
      Time travel to a historic village
      When the British forcibly removed the Acadians from parts of Canada in the mid-18th century, an event known as Le Grand Dérangement, the French-speaking Acadians started making their way down the Mississippi River, creating settlements in South Louisiana. Vermilionville was the name given to Lafayette when it was established in the 1820s as one of those settlements. Today, Vermilionville, a 23-acre, open-air living history museum along the banks of the Vermilion River, tells the story of that migration and how the Acadians’ mingling with Creole, Spanish and Native American traditions created the unique culture of today’s Acadiana. Visitors can embark on a guided boat tour of the grounds, be entertained by costumed actors and historical reenactments, or join Cajun dance lessons and jams. The on-site restaurant, La Cuisine de Maman, also hosts an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch. Adult admission, $10; handicap-accessible. More

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      Curtains Down, Bottoms Up: When the Show Ends, the Night’s Just Getting Started

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      “Dead Letter No. 9,” “Cocktail Magique” and “Hypnotique” are offering theatergoers a taste of nightlife.A funny thing happened at Dead Letter No. 9, a new performance space in Brooklyn. It was just after 10 p.m. on a Saturday in late October. The evening’s show had finished, but the audience wouldn’t leave — crowding instead into the adjoining bar for cocktails, mocktails and flatbreads.Though New York City has its cabaret spaces and piano bars, theater and nightlife mostly occupy separate addresses. Blame temperament or real estate or the lingering effects of cabaret laws (finally repealed in 2017), which required a license to allow patrons to dance, but in general those who long for a drink and a show at the same time have had to settle for overpriced chardonnay in sippy cups. Ah, the glamour.New shows and new venues are blurring those lines. Though I am a lady with a hilariously low tolerance for alcohol who likes to be in bed just as the cable TV shows are getting good, I attended three of these performances over the last few weeks, trading a good night’s sleep for this superabundant approach (drinks, snacks, dance, card tricks, elaborate lingerie) to evening entertainment.Audience members sit facing the stage at “Cocktail Magique.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesStrong cocktails complement the dance routines at the show.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Joey Evans Is Back. This Time He’s a Struggling Artist.

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      Joey Evans is a charming cad, a heel, an unapologetic womanizer, a gigolo. He’s a second-rate nightclub entertainer who breaks the heart of an ingénue and seduces a rich older woman, trading sex for money.In 1940, some people found Joey, the protagonist of the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical “Pal Joey,” repellent. “Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Brooks Atkinson famously wondered in his review for The New York Times.In the decades since, though, the main charge against the show hasn’t been foulness so much as incoherence. Production after production — the last one on Broadway was in 2008 — has attempted to rescue a handful of great Rodgers and Hart songs from the weak book that John O’Hara cobbled together from some of his demotic short stories published in The New Yorker.Seven years ago, the director Tony Goldwyn — best known as an actor — decided to try his hand at a rescue operation. He brought in the screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, and together they came up with an idea: What if Joey were a gifted, struggling artist? That way, it wouldn’t just be a story of sex and betrayal but also one of art versus ambition. After a few readings, though, that twist didn’t seem reason enough for a revival, so they added another: What if Joey were Black?Ephraim Sykes, who plays Joey Evans, with Marshal Davis, left, and Glover. “Playing this part has been freeing,” Sykes said. “Music is the lifeblood of this man, and it just so happens that one of his instruments is his body.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesTo tell that story, Goldwyn and LaGravenese, who are white, felt they needed Black collaborators, which is why their production of “Pal Joey,” opening at New York City Center on Nov. 1, is co-directed by Goldwyn and the tap dancer Savion Glover, who also did the choreography; and has a new book by LaGravenese and Daniel Beaty.The new story, set in the 1940s, is, as Beaty put it, “about the evolution of a Black artist” — a forward-thinking jazz singer — “in a world where there was no space for him to be his authentic self and what that costs him.” This is a story, he added, with contemporary relevance: “We’re still wrestling with a world where those the system has not been built for are fighting to have a voice.”It was Beaty’s idea to add some characters who would have been very surprising in any previous production of “Pal Joey” — Black ancestral spirits called the Griots. “At the start of the show, we have this character who is brokenhearted because of the absence of space for him,” he said, “but these ancestors appear, like an energy that lives within him, and give him some hope.”In this iteration of the play, Sykes’s Joey has a soul, and ancestors appear in the form of extraordinary tap dancers.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThose ancestors appear in the form of extraordinary tap dancers, including Dormeshia and Glover. And they keep reappearing throughout the show to remind Joey of his authentic self. This Joey, played by Ephraim Sykes, has a soul, and that soul expresses itself in the deeply rooted sound of Savion Glover’s tap dancing.The Griots are “a connection to something very old,” Beaty said. “The artists who have danced, sang and acted this path before. I have sat with many of them: Ossie Davis, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte. Ruby Dee told me, ‘We have always had to dance with a gun at our feet, but still we must dance.’”Glover, too, has always been an artist attuned to his ancestors, especially the veteran tap dancers who mentored him when he was a child. His solo shows can feel like séances, his jazz improvisations quoting those dead teachers and summoning their spirits. “Those Griots could be Jimmy Slyde, Lon Chaney, Chuck Green and Buster Brown,” he said, listing four hoofer-mentors he celebrated in the 1996 Broadway musical “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” for which he won a Tony Award for choreography.“Wherever I am, they will be,” he added. “They walk with me.”And not just in the Griot sections. At a recent rehearsal of one of Joey’s nightclub numbers, Glover stressed that he was stealing a rhythm from Henry LeTang, who choreographed “Black and Blue,” the 1989 Broadway show in which a teenage Glover shared the stage with Slyde, Chaney and other tap masters.“I appreciate the platform for dance to be part of the storytelling,” Glover said. “But if I have a side agenda, it would be to remind people of the contribution of those old cats.”The first Joey, in 1940, was a then-little-known Gene Kelly, who vaulted from the part into Hollywood fame. Frank Sinatra played Joey for the sanitized 1957 film. Revivals at City Center in the 1960s starred Bob Fosse, years before he directed shows like “Chicago” that made Joey’s sleaze into a dominant style.But Beaty and Glover are connecting “Pal Joey” to another history, another well. Like many productions Glover has been involved with — from “Jelly’s Last Jam” in 1991 to the 2016 reimagining of “Shuffle Along” — this “Pal Joey” is concerned with the transformations of jazz.Glover has always been an artist attuned to his dance ancestors. “They walk with me,” he said.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesWorking with Glover “is a master class, to put it lightly,” Sykes said.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesIn the years after the premiere of “Pal Joey,” Rodgers and Hart’s last show together, jazz artists, more than any others, kept the songs of Rodgers and Hart alive, as ground for improvisations. This production’s new story has the benefit of justifying the inclusion of more of those songs. Along with eight from the original, including “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” this “Pal Joey” borrows 15 from other Rodgers and Hart shows, standards like “My Funny Valentine,” “Where or When,” “This Can’t Be Love” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Musically, the show is now a Rodgers and Hart songbook, rearranged by Daryl Waters and Glover.But the production’s jazz approach, evident in each number, is about more than just musical style. “Savion lives in the realm of possibility,” Goldwyn said. “Like: ‘Let’s not nail this down. Let’s see what it might begin to become.’ That creates an environment of constant discovery. It’s very fertile.”“We’re trying to create creation,” Glover said. “We want the audience to feel it is happening, like they’re at the club.”That kind of improvisational freedom requires a particular cast, especially a particular Joey. Sykes, who played David Ruffin in “Ain’t Too Proud,” the 2019 Broadway musical about the Temptations, trained as a dancer at the Alvin Ailey school.“I always spoke first with my body,” he said. “Learning to act standing still is something I’m still learning. Playing this part has been freeing. Music is the lifeblood of this man, and it just so happens that one of his instruments is his body.”“Savion lives in the realm of possibility,” Tony Goldwyn, center behind Glover, said. The pair are co-directors of this reimagined version. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesWorking with Glover, Sykes said, “is a master class, to put it lightly. He operates on such a different plane of thinking. He’s always pushing me past what I thought was my limit, and we’re all being pushed to create jazz, to make a different show every night.”A new character, a club owner named Lucille, is played by Loretta Devine, who was in the original cast of “Dreamgirls” in 1981. “She’s the closest to the language we’re trying to summon,” Glover said. “She’s the living proof.”LaGravenese said that the addition of the Lucille character, “the one closest to the ancestors,” was part of an idea to surround Joey with strong women. Linda, the ingénue, is now a confident equal, played by Aisha Jackson. Joey’s relationship with Vera, the rich older woman, played here by Elizabeth Stanley, is now interracial, which raises the stakes, but Vera’s character is also more complex.“In some earlier workshops, our Vera was the beautiful Marin Mazzie,” LaGravenese said. “And Marin” — who died in 2018 — “said ‘What if Vera really loves Joey?’ And that opened up another door to making her more human.”“Marin is an ancestor now, too,” Beaty said. “I think the energy we’ve been feeling in the rehearsal room is the presence of the ancestors. In the cultures I come from, Ghanaian and Cherokee and Blackfoot, we believe that when you invite in the ancestors, they show up.” More

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      Théâtre de la Ville Reopens After 7 Years of Renovations

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      The Théâtre de la Ville, now named for Sarah Bernhardt, reopened after a seven-year renovation. But its once-radical approach to dance is now less of a calling card.A lot can happen in seven years. When the Théâtre de la Ville — a flagship venue for Paris’s contemporary dance and theater scene — last welcomed audiences, in late 2016, TikTok had just launched. A pandemic seemed like a far-fetched idea. La(Horde), the influential dance collective featured prominently during the theater’s reopening festivities this month, was still wholly unknown.Roughly half of the Théâtre de la Ville’s current employees joined during the closure and didn’t set foot in the building during renovations, its director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota said during a tour of the playhouse last month. (While it was closed, shows continued at a temporary location, the Espace Cardin, at partner venues and on the Théâtre de la Ville’s second stage, Les Abbesses.)Anticipation for the reopening was high, and the Théâtre de la Ville does look — and feel — different. First, it boasts a new, slightly unwieldy name: the Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt, a nod to its most famous owner, the French actress who ran the space between 1899 and 1923. (The venue’s website has yet to reflect the rebrand.)The biggest change, however, hits when you walk through the doors. The heavy-looking concrete staircase that led from the entrance into the auditorium has been eliminated. Discrete stairs are now hidden in the back of the hall, and two curved mezzanines in warm wood tones hug the facade — with panoramic views of the neighborhood, including the Théâtre du Châtelet, the rival playhouse that stands across the street.The old concrete staircase in the thater’s entrance is gone, creating an open atmosphere with panoramic views.Josephine BruederThe closure was never intended to last this long. The initial plan was a partial renovation to bring the Théâtre de la Ville, which hadn’t had a significant upgrade since 1967, up to current security and technical standards. Difficulties quickly piled up, initially because of extensive lead and asbestos, then owing to the Covid pandemic. The total cost, first estimated at 26 million euros, or $27.5 million, ultimately rose to €40 million ($42 million).The result is a distinctly 21st-century update, which adds yet another layer to what was already an architectural mille-feuille. Inaugurated in 1862, the building was destroyed during the Paris Commune of 1871 and rebuilt a few years later. It was then rebranded several times before the city of Paris chose to reimagine it in 1966. While the facade and roof remained, the Italian-style interior was gutted in favor of a more egalitarian, Brutalist-style auditorium, designed by Jean Perrottet and Valentin Fabre.The auditorium still feels familiar. While the seats are now a muted shade of sand instead of gray, its concrete underpinnings — dotted here and there with gold leaf — still hang over visitors in the hall. Behind the scenes, however, the stage machinery has been entirely updated. Even the mezzanines are now equipped with curtains and professional lighting, for smaller in situ performances.And Demarcy-Mota, Théâtre de la Ville’s director since 2008, is attempting to make up for lost time. In early October, the reopening was marked with a free 26-hour performance marathon, “The Great Vigil,” starring around 300 artists from the fields of dance, theater and music.“Marry Me in Bassiani,” a production created by the French dance troupe La(Horde) at Théâtre de la Ville.Aude AragoSome, like the choreographers Angelin Preljocaj and Lucinda Childs, were regulars long before the Théâtre de la Ville closed. Another frequent visitor, the flamenco star Israel Galvan, made a surprise appearance for a brilliant duet with the French harpsichordist Benjamin Alard.Others were making their Théâtre de la Ville debut, like the pianist Yi-Lin Wu, who set a meditative tone around 1 a.m. with a performance of Ravel’s shimmering “Gaspard de la Nuit.” There was something eerie about wandering the halls late into the night, encountering a highly theatrical statue of Bernhardt playing Phaedra, by a staircase, and climbing up to a newly opened studio, La Coupole, to watch “Ionesco Suite,” a five-play mash-up of the French dramatist’s works, directed by Demarcy-Mota — until well past 3 a.m.For many visitors at the opening, it was a joyful reunion with a playhouse that shaped much of the French dance scene in the last decades of the 20th century. At that time, the Théâtre de la Ville fiercely promoted avant-garde contemporary dance, and became known as the Parisian home of the Tanztheater luminary Pina Bausch, who visited each year.In her Théâtre de la Ville debut, the pianist Yi-Lin Wu set a meditative tone with a performance of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit.” Laurent PhilippeThis identity had begun to shift in the years before the Théâtre de la Ville closed, with a greater diversity of choreographic trends represented on its stage. Still, during its seven-year absence, other Parisian venues like the Grande Halle of La Villette have stepped up their dance offerings or reoriented their focus to favor more diverse voices and collectives, many of them steeped in street dance styles.So as the Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt kicked its first season into gear this month, it was sometimes hard to discern what sets it apart from other theaters. High-profile choreographers are no longer identified with individual venues, the way Théâtre de la Ville once was with Bausch: Every programmer in town seems to want the same names.The collective La(Horde), which took over the stage after “The Great Vigil,” is one example. Less than a week before its run of “Marry Me In Bassiani,” a production the group created for a Georgian company, Iveroni Ensemble, La(Horde) was across the street at the Théâtre du Châtelet with its newest creation, “Age of Content.”There will be plenty more opportunities to see what Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt does with its revitalized venue as its season progresses. Demarcy-Mota, a theater director who splits his programming between dance, theater and a smattering of music events, said in his inauguration speech last month that he sees the stage as “a space for contradiction.”And the thrill of discovering new work in a theater known for groundbreaking performances could already be felt last week when La Coupole, the upstairs studio, hosted “En Addicto,” a one-man show inspired by a monthslong residency in a hospital wing devoted to addicts.Its director and performer, Thomas Quillardet, let the voices of staff and patients alike flow through him with just the right mix of empathy and levity. It brought to mind Demarcy-Mota’s commitment to sending Théâtre de la Ville artists to local hospitals during the pandemic, to share poems or mini-performances. It’s been a long wait, but these artists can finally come home. More

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      Movement and Memory: Dance Love and Dance Rejection in Ireland

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      Michael Keegan-Dolan has collaborated with his partner Rachel Poirier on “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” coming to St. Ann’s Warehouse.“For some reason I wanted to be a dancer,” Michael Keegan-Dolan said of his younger self. “And then I realized I was really bad at it.” Keegan-Dolan, a choreographer and director, was talking on a video call from his home in Dingle, a remote spot on the southwest coast of Ireland where he lives with the dancer Rachel Poirier, and where his dance company Teac Damsa is based. “I was this kind of tragic character.”Sitting next to him, Poirier chuckled. “I didn’t see him dance then,” she said, “so thank God I don’t need to comment.”Keegan-Dolan’s dance-theater work “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” which opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Saturday, springs from the tension between this thing he loved beyond all others — dance — and the realities of his body.In a mix of stories and dance, he and Poirier trace the dogged efforts of a young Irishman, based on Keegan-Dolan, now 54, coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, struggling to find his place in the world of dance. It plays out against a backdrop of ingrained ideas about masculinity, I.R.A. violence and his feelings of being an unwelcome outsider in England, where he went to advance his training.“I was a kind of tragic character,” Keegan-Dolan said of wanting to dance but not being much good at it. Poirier didn’t see him perform back then, she said, “so thank God I don’t have to comment.” With the couple is their dog Chamalo.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesIn ballet school Keegan-Dolan was told that his pigeon-toed feet were hopelessly untrainable. In the show he recalls being asked by a teacher, with as much kindness as she can muster, “Is there anything else you might like to do with your life?” He can’t think of anything.His salvation, it turned out, would be choreography, and through it, theater. After his last appearance onstage as a dancer in 1994, he turned to making dances and eventually rose to acclaim as a choreographer, first in opera and later in ensemble works of his own.In 1997 he founded Fabulous Beast Dance Theater in the Irish Midlands, which, after its relocation to Dingle, became Teac Damsa. (The name means “house of dance” in Gaelic.) With those companies Keegan-Dolan has explored themes from Irish history and myth in well-received works that combine live music, theater and dance, like “The Bull,” “Rian,” a reimagined “Swan Lake,” and “Mám,” recently presented at Sadler’s Wells.In “How to Be a Dancer” he turns his lens inward. There are just two characters, the Dance Man and the Dancer, played by Keegan-Dolan and Poirier.The work’s intimate scale is partly a product of circumstance. “How to Be a Dancer” was created during the pandemic and rehearsed at a theater down the road from Keegan-Dolan and Poirier’s house. (It premiered in 2022 at the Gate Theater in Dublin.)For Susan Feldman, the artistic director at St. Ann’s, the small scale offered an opportunity. “I’ve been aware of Michael for many years,” she said in an interview, “and I’ve seen many of his works, but our space isn’t really conducive to presenting large dance pieces.”Feldman was struck by the honesty and humor of the show. “I was really interested that it would be him dancing,” Feldman said of Keegan-Dolan, who hasn’t performed in decades and appears in a series of wigs. “At first I didn’t even realize it was him.”Keegan-Dolan turns his lens inward in “How to Be a Dancer,” which he developed in Dingle during the pandemic.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe material that makes up “How to be a Dancer” began to emerge before the pandemic, Keegan-Dolan said, but the period of forced inactivity gave him time to look back on memories that had dogged him for years. The number in the title comes from yoga practices that hold that 72,000 channels, known as nadis, circulate energy through the body.The stories in the show draw upon the kinds of memories — small revelations, as well as shameful or painful experiences — that help shape our inner lives. Keegan-Dolan describes sitting in his home in Dublin, the youngest in a large family, watching Gene Kelly on television as his mother ironed. And how he felt when he took his first dance class, at 18, towering over the barre in rugby sweats in a room full of “9-year-old girls in pink leotards,” he says. He should feel ridiculous, he adds, “but instead I feel like I am in exactly the right place.”After moving to London in the ’80s, a period of deadly bombings by the Irish Republican Army, he remembers being called a terrorist and worse. Often he reframes such painful experiences as absurdist comedy. But the sting is still there.Onstage, the stories roll out of him like well-worn yarns. And like all such tales, they contain some fabrication. “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story,” Keegan-Dolan said. He is a natural storyteller, lively and funny, “un peu cabot” (a bit of a show-off), as Poirier put it in her native French.The storytelling is layered with snippets of movement and dance, as when Poirier and Keegan-Dolan re-enact a happy-awkward dance at an Irish disco in the ’80s, while bullies hurl insults from the sidelines. “I wait for him to go,” Keegan-Dolan says of one of them, “and when he’s gone I start dancing again.” Nothing can deter his joy in movement — not even the fear of being punched in the face.Keegan-Dolan, a natural storyteller, said, “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story.”Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe more technical dancing in the show is left to Poirier, who has danced with the Rambert dance company and the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group among other troupes. She is the dancer he would have liked to have been, Keegan-Dolan said — along with Rudolf Nureyev, Fred Astaire and Jacques d’Amboise.The climax of the piece is a 15-minute solo performed by Poirier that the pair choreographed together to Ravel’s “Boléro.” Here, the memories that rise to the surface are hers.“There are bits of steps hanging there, dance memories,” Poirier said, “and the feeling of what it’s like to be a dancer, all the struggles and the lack of money, and the greatness and the poetry that comes with doing the job we do.”And even as she pushes through exhaustion, the freedom and force of her movements, sustained by Ravel’s music, suggest something about the power of dance, the thing that has kept Keegan-Dolan in its thrall all these years.“It connects you to a part of yourself that is otherwise totally inaccessible,” he said. “And you don’t even have to be good at it.” More

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      ‘Free Your Mind’ Does Little to Challenge the Brain

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      A huge new performance space in Manchester, England, opened with a show that trumpets the building’s possibilities, but doesn’t push any boundaries.There was a sense of momentous occasion on Wednesday at the opening of the new Aviva Studios performance space in Manchester, England. Political and cultural figures made sweeping declarations: This was Britain’s most significant cultural project since the Tate Modern opened in London over 20 years ago; the largest government investment in the arts since forever; the most important new theater space in Europe; and a generator of work, well-being and regeneration in Britain’s underserved north.“It’s a big day not just for Manchester, but for the U.K.,” said Lucy Frazer, Britain’s culture secretary, at a news conference several hours before the opening performance of “Free Your Mind,” a large-scale spectacle directed by Danny Boyle that inaugurated the building.The 144,000-square-foot Aviva Studios (named for an insurance company that gave around 35 million pounds, or $43 million, to the project) is the new home of Factory International, the organization that produces the Manchester International Festival. The building was designed with multipurpose and multidisciplinary intent by Ellen van Loon from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Dutch firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, costing “around £240 million,” or $290 million, according to a spokesman for the venue.There is a conventional 1,600-seat theater (“the Hall”) and a 700-foot long, 226-foot high performance space (“the Warehouse”) that can accommodate 5,000 people. The spaces can be used individually, combined or divided to create several distinct, acoustically isolated performance areas.The seats in the theater can be taken out for gigs; the floors can flood and drain; you could hang 100 cars from the ceiling of the Warehouse. “We want people to imagine seemingly impossible things,” said John McGrath, Factory International’s artistic director, during a tour of the building.The massive 144,000-square-foot space hopes to revitalize the arts scene in Manchester.Marco Cappelletti, via OMA and Factory InternationalLiving up to these ambitions in an opening show is a tall order, even for Boyle, the Academy Award-winning film director (“Trainspotting,” “Slumdog Millionaire”) who masterminded the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. For “Free Your Mind,” he teamed up with the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, the composer Michael “Mikey J.” Asante, the designer Es Devlin and the writer Sabrina Mahfouz to create a show loosely based on the “Matrix” movies, with their prescient themes of artificial intelligence taking over human life.At the news conference, Boyle talked about using “The Matrix” (directed by the Wachowski siblings) and its sequels as a widely available cultural reference, and “Free Your Mind” is mostly interesting as a statement of intent. It’s accessible, fun, visually spectacular and entirely unchallenging. But on the evidence of opening night, the show draws an impressively young, hip and diverse audience.“Free Your Mind” opens in the Hall, with a lecture delivered via an old-fashioned television screen and new-fashioned technology by the mathematician Alan Turing, who developed an early vision of modern computing. There is a quick history of Manchester as the home of the machine, and a question asked early: “Should we be worried that machines could think?”Dancers in trench coats appear, moving with robotic jerkiness and Neo (Corey Owens), the hero of “The Matrix,” emerges from the front row and is confronted by a dark-glasses-wearing, sinister group, before the scene changes to a cluster of faceless figures encased in stretchy white fabric that is attached to the ceiling. As they move in a circle, the tubes of fabric entwine like a maypole; visually arresting and oddly old-fashioned, reminiscent of the choreographer Alwin Nikolais’s experiments with form and fabric in the 1950s and 1960s.The show begins with a monologue delivered by an avatar of the mathematician Alan Turing, which the visual effects company Union VFX created from a photograph.Tristram KentonThe show’s movements are directed by the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy.Tristram KentonThese figures are presumably the humans whose energy is being harvested by an evil artificial intelligence: the truth revealed by the omniscient Morpheus to Neo in “The Matrix.” A series of episodes move us through a meeting between Neo and the female warrior Trinity (Nicey Belgrave), confrontations with the police and the machine Agents who guard the Matrix, and the trial of the first robot to kill a human.Sandy’s movement language, drawn from hip-hop and street dance vocabularies, is boldly graphic, and he adeptly moves the 50-dancer cast in crisp, cascading formations, but there is little subtlety or variety either here or in Asante’s serviceable atmosphere-creating score. (The sound system, however, is fab, as is Lucy Carter’s lighting.) The only standout dance moment comes in part two, when Sandy himself, as Morpheus, performs a compelling solo of sweeping, martial arts-inflected motion, legs kicking high as his body arches backward.In the intermission, Matrix-agent figures were suspended around the huge lobby and bar space (rather more effectively Matrix-y than anything onstage), and white rabbit-headed figures danced with audience members. (A reference to the message, “Follow the white rabbit,” that appears on Neo’s computer screen in the movie, but surely also to the Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit,” with its lyrics about mind-bending pills.)Part two, in the Warehouse, is more abstract, with Devlin’s spectacular set as the star: a huge cocoon of white Manchester cotton rounding out the angles of the space and enclosing the audience, mostly standing on each side of an enormous catwalk. Long narrow screens above this stage offer a montage of Manchester cultural history — footage of millworkers, British soap operas, references to pop bands like Joy Division — then show an incessant stream of images that blur into a kind of visual wallpaper as one scene after another plays out beneath.The show’s sets are by the designer Es Devlin.Tristram KentonPart two of “Free Your Mind” plays out on an extended catwalk in a part of Aviva Studios called the Warehouse.Tristram KentonThis section is presumably our present in which data, rather than energy, is being harvested from us humans. Amazon packages are delivered, Twitter ticks, the Apple logo and Google are referenced in Gareth Pugh’s costumes; dancers move while unable to take their eyes off their phones. Finally we get the battle between Neo and Smith, with a re-enactment of the famous bullet-stopping sequence in the original film, before a group finale to Asante’s portentous chords. The final image is of the screens, showing human figures effaced by vertical lines of code. (Oh dear.)The audience, which clearly knew and loved “The Matrix,” didn’t seem depressed by that, and gave the show a rousing ovation. “Free Your Mind” is a good night out and a decent demonstration of the new building’s capacities, even if its muddled mix of pure-dance display and clumsy propositions don’t say much about what it means to be human. Something stranger and more genuinely boundary-pushing would have been a welcome opening salvo from the often-visionary minds at Factory International. Perhaps that’s next.Free Your MindThrough Nov. 5 at Aviva Studios, in Manchester, England; factoryinternational.org. More