Dancing

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Robert LuPone, Actor Who Became a Behind-the-Scenes Force, Dies at 76

      by

      After playing a critical Broadway role in “A Chorus Line,” he helped start the vibrant Off Broadway MCC Theater. TV watchers knew him from “The Sopranos” and “Law and Order.”Robert LuPone, an actor and dancer who originated the role of the driven director-choreographer in the musical “A Chorus Line” on Broadway and later helped run a vibrant Off Broadway theater company known for thought-provoking new works, died on Saturday in Albany, N.Y. He was 76.His wife, Virginia (Robinson) LuPone, confirmed the death, at a hospice near his home in Athens, N.Y. She said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. LuPone was familiar to television audiences from his roles on “The Sopranos” and the “Law & Order” franchise. But his first love, like that of his sister, Patti LuPone, was the theater.By 1975, when Mr. LuPone auditioned for “A Chorus Line,” he had been dancing since childhood and had been in a few Broadway shows. Initially cast as Al, one of the dancers vying for a spot in the chorus line of a Broadway musical, Mr. LuPone persuaded Michael Bennett, who conceived and directed the show, that he could play the director, Zach, after Barry Bostwick, who had been cast in the part, left the show during the workshop phase.“Michael has trouble directing actors,” Mr. LuPone said in an interview on the website of the Muny, the musical theater in St. Louis, when it staged “A Chorus Line” in 2017. “No, let me put it this way: Michael has trouble directing egos. He has a tremendous ego. And I have a tremendous ego. Barry Bostwick obviously has a bigger ego than I do.”At the Public Theater, and then on Broadway, “A Chorus Line” was an enormous hit. When it opened at the Shubert Theater — where it would run for 15 years — Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times that as Zach, Mr. LuPone “retires to a godlike perch at the rear of the auditorium and wheedles out of the brassy and the giggly, the pleading and the nonchalant, snippets of their pasts.”The show was nominated for 12 Tony Awards — Mr. LuPone received a nomination for best featured actor in a musical — and won nine, including best musical. That year, his sister was nominated for best featured actress in a musical, for “The Robber Bridegroom.”“A Chorus Line” proved pivotal for Mr. LuPone: His future was no longer in dancing.Ms. LuPone said that her brother had been an “extraordinary dancer,” and that his decision to give up dancing “haunts me.” In an email, she wrote, “I think he couldn’t take the dictatorial environment that choreographers at that time created.”Mr. LuPone said that dancing in musicals had become a “hollow experience.” In an oral history interview in 2018 with Primary Stages, an Off Broadway theater company, he said, “I wasn’t really able to speak, and the ideas were, for me, superficial.”That realization led him to study at the Actors Studio and perform with the Circle Repertory Company. He began teaching acting at New York University in 1981 and showed a very direct demeanor that his students at first found surprising.“Who was this guy from musical theater talking to us actors?” Bernie Telsey, one of those students, said in a phone interview. “He’d never taught before. But it became the best class ever.” Some students continued to study with him after they graduated.In 1986 Mr. LuPone and Mr. Telsey formed the Manhattan Class Company, which later became MCC Theater. Will Cantler soon joined them as associate artistic director and was named an artistic director in 2011.Over nearly 40 years, the company has sought to produce challenging, original plays and musicals, with a view to what Mr. LuPone called a “third act” — affecting audience members enough to keep them talking about the shows after they returned home.Three MCC productions transferred to Broadway and received Tony nominations for best play: “Frozen,” the story of the aftermath of a 10-year-old girl’s murder, which opened in 2004; “Reasons to Be Pretty” (2008), about people’s obsession with beauty; and “Hand to God” (2014), a dark comedy about a teenager and his profane, possibly demonic sock puppet. An Off Broadway MCC production of “Wit,” Margaret Edson’s play about a woman’s reflections on dying after she learns that she has ovarian cancer — which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Drama Desk Award for outstanding play in 1999 — also moved to Broadway.Mr. LuPone in the 1998 Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” He was also a familiar face on “The Sopranos” and “Law and Order.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRobert Francis LuPone was born on July 29, 1946, in Brooklyn and grew up in Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Orlando Joseph LuPone, was an elementary school principal in Northport. His mother, Angela (Patti) LuPone, a homemaker, encouraged Robert and Patti’s show business ambitions, driving them to classes. Robert and Patti danced together as children, winning third prize at a Jones Beach talent contest.“I still have the trophy,” Ms. LuPone said. “It was a tango.”Robert took tap lessons after school before enrolling in the Martha Graham School, where as a teenager he studied modern dance with Graham, José Limón and Antony Tudor. He attended Adelphi University, on Long Island, but, spurred by meeting a dancer better than he was who had gone to the Juilliard School, he transferred there. He majored in ballet and minored in modern dance and graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree.By then he had been in the ensemble of a 1966 production of “The Pajama Game” at the Westbury Music Fair (now the NYCB Theater at Westbury) on Long Island. He made his Broadway debut as a dancer in 1968, in “Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato,” and danced in three more Broadway shows before his agent sent him to audition for “A Chorus Line.”Mr. LuPone worked steadily as an actor in theater, in movies and on television. He played the Apostle Paul in the film version of “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973); was in six daytime soap operas (earning a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for his role on “All My Children”);was seen on series like “Gossip Girl,” “Ally McBeal” and “Billions”; and, between 1997 and 2001, was in Broadway productions of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” Sam Shepard’s “True West” and Herb Gardener’s “A Thousand Clowns.”In six episodes of “The Sopranos,” he played Bruce Cusamano, Tony Soprano’s neighbor and physician, who recommends that Tony see a psychiatrist.In addition to his wife and sister, Mr. LuPone is survived by his son, Orlando, and his twin brother, William.Mr. LuPone’s acting career was secondary to his work at MCC, where he not only developed, oversaw and produced four or five shows a year but also raised money for the theater’s permanent home, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, on West 52nd Street in Manhattan, which opened in 2019.“Bob was fearless,” Mr. Telsey said, adding that playwrights often found it hard to accept the candid notes that Mr. LuPone would write them during previews. “They’d be so stressed, but three days later realized that Bobby was right. He pulled no punches.” More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Baryshnikov Arts Center Chooses Dance Veteran as Leader

      by

      Sonja Kostich, a cultural administrator and dancer, will lead the group as it works to expand its audience amid the pandemic.The pandemic brought a series of changes to the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan, forcing it to cancel two years of live performances and find new ways to connect with the public, including starting a streaming platform.Now, as it looks to its next chapter, the center announced Friday it had chosen a new executive director: Sonja Kostich, a veteran arts administrator and dancer. She succeeds Cora Cahan, a dynamic figure in arts administration who has held the job since in 2019.Kostich, who now serves as chief executive and artistic officer of Kaatsbaan, a cultural park in Tivoli, N.Y., said in an interview that she would focus on expanding audiences and attracting a wider variety of artists to the group’s residencies and other programs. She is expected to start in October.“It should be an art center for everyone,” Kostich, 50, said. “I would love to see it become a place that everybody wants to be a part of, whether or not you’re a die-hard dance fan or someone who works in a completely different field.”The center, with an annual operating budget of $3.5 million and more than a dozen staff members, was founded in 2005 by Mikhail Baryshnikov, the ballet star whose defection from the Soviet Union in 1974 stunned the dance world. He praised the choice of Kostich, saying she had the expertise to lead the center through the pandemic and beyond.“I am honored that she will bring her talents to B.A.C. and am confident that her creative vision, financial savvy and love of the arts is precisely what B.A.C. needs to head into the future,” he said in a statement.The center, which presents dance, music and other programming, resumed live performances only in March, later than many other performing arts groups, as it awaited a long-planned replacement of its heating, ventilation and cooling systems.In 2020, when the coronavirus forced cultural institutions to suspend live performance, the center began a commissioning program focused on digital works as a way of sustaining the organization and encouraging artists to continue creating during the pandemic.The fall season begins in October with a series of salon concerts. Among the performers are Owls, a string quartet, and the Westerlies, a brass quartet. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      This Season at La MaMa: Dance-Theater and a Puppet Rock Opera

      by

      The experimental theater company’s 2022-23 season will showcase a packed lineup under the theme “Remake a World.”For its 61st season, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club will present more than 40 productions from eight countries, including the in-person stage debut of a pandemic-era virtual play, several puppetry productions and a dance-theater-music work.“This artistic community is coming out of a time of huge limitation, of deep questioning,” said Mia Yoo, the artistic director of La MaMa. With “Remake a World” as its theme, she said, the season asks, “What are the paradigm shifts that will help us reimagine?”The 2022-23 offerings include the return of the acclaimed 2021 large-scale puppet production “Lunch With Sonia” (March 16-26), which Laura Collins-Hughes, a New York Times theater critic, called “achingly beautiful”; the U.S. premiere of “Radio 477!” (March 9-19), a Yara Arts Group production inspired by songs by the Ukrainian composer Yuliy Meitus and adapted from the 1979 revue “Hello, This is Radio 477!”; and “Last Gasp: Recalibration” (Oct. 13-30), a version of a piece that the theater duo Split Britches created and recorded on Zoom and premiered digitally in 2020, which will have its live stage debut at the Ellen Stewart Theater.Also on the lineup after pandemic postponements is the world premiere of Elizabeth Swados’s musical “The Beautiful Lady” (dates to be announced). Directed by Anne Bogart, the poetry-heavy piece is set in an artists’ cafe during the Russian Revolution.Come winter, John Kelly will present a new dance-theater work, “Underneath the Skin” (Dec. 1-18), about the fantastical life of Samuel Steward, a gay novelist and tattoo artist, combining movement with Steward’s words, tattoo designs and illustrations.The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater will present “The Conference of the Birds” (Feb. 2-19), a rock opera about humans yearning to fly, as part of La MaMa’s February Puppet Slam.“Broken Theater” (April 20-30), by Bobbi Jene Smith — formerly a member of Batsheva Dance Company — considers a performer’s dissolving boundaries when an audience leaves.And the original home of La MaMa, at 74A East Fourth Street, where a multiyear $24 million renovation is underway, will open temporarily on Nov. 10 for a gala. Until the reopening, all La MaMa performances will be staged at 66 East Fourth Street, in the Ellen Stewart Theater and the Downstairs Theater.Attendees are no longer required to show proof of vaccination; masks, however, are required. For more information, visit lamama.org. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Trisha Brown on the Beach: Catch a Wave of Dancing Bliss

      by

      The dancers were sinking. Even the softest of waves were too much for their feet — strong as they were — to hold their own in the soggy late afternoon sand at Rockaway Beach.“Leaning Duets II,” a work by the choreographer Trisha Brown from 1971, is a classic partnering experiment in balancing while being counterbalanced. In pairs, the dancers faced each other bound by a paddle contraption — a piece of wood on each of their lower backs, looped together with a rope — as they planted their feet and leaned backward.The aim? To create opposing diagonal lines, sort of in the shape of a V. And then to keep moving.A beach, it turns out, poses certain challenges for such a task. There was a steady breeze. The surf was loud. And that sand! Before the dancers could even start to drift and swirl — the sort of delicate micro movements that help make this seemingly simple dance mesmerizing — their torsos began to buckle. Their diagonals curved forward like commas. They dipped to the side precariously.But that was why the members of the Trisha Brown Dance Company were at the beach — to learn, not so much about the dance, which they had performed before, but about the environment. This Saturday starting at 5:30 p.m., as part of the Beach Sessions series, the esteemed company takes over the shoreline from Beach 97th Street to Beach 110th Street with a program highlighting a selection of works chosen for the way they would interact with the beach.From left, Hsiao-Jou Tang, Jennifer Payán and Leah Ives of the Trisha Brown company rehearsing “Group Primary Accumulation.”Because of the start time, high tide is a factor. Carolyn Lucas, the Brown company’s associate artistic director, had placed the dancers on a strip of spongy sand by design. “They need to understand what it feels like to have the earth not necessarily supporting them,” she said, and then noticed a dancer getting the hang of it. “Oh! It’s great the way she’s spinning.”While the company has presented iterations of its “Trisha Brown: In Plain Site” series — versions of early, non-proscenium works — all over the world, it has never staged one on a beach. Beaches have been missing out.The instant the dancers, clad in cyan blue surf tops and shorts, began performing Brown’s choreography, the natural world popped, coming into sharper, more colorful focus. It was like a conversation you might have in a fever dream: The sea gulls twirled around the dancers, and the dancers, perched majestically on a jetty for “Figure 8” (1974), made arcing patterns with their arms as though they were airing out their wings.The program will conclude with a performance on a stage — erected on the sand — of three more dances: “Solo Olos” (1976), “Accumulation” (1971) and “Opal Loop” (1980). But for the first half, audience members will move with the dancers as they progress along the shore. Because of its setting, Beach Sessions is casual by nature. But it’s more than an excuse to sit in the sun. It’s become a poignant end-of-summer tradition in which the wild, enigmatic nature of experimental dance finds, at the beach, its missing twin.Ives and Patrick McGrath, rehearsing for Beach Sessions. Dances were chosen for how they would interact with the beach, and the dancers had to learn to balance on soggy sand. Below left, Payán.Beach Sessions was created in 2015 by the producer and Rockaway resident Sasha Okshteyn, who had a dream: to bring quality dance and performance to Rockaway Beach. But she also had another, more private dream. She wanted to plant a particular company on Rockaway sand — the Trisha Brown Dance Company.“Trisha’s site-specific work in the early ’70s was so revolutionary, and it was made on the streets of Manhattan,” Okshteyn said of Brown, who died in 2017. “I was really excited to think about how her pieces can respond to the natural elements of the beach.”The performances, which will include “Spanish Dance” (1973) and “Group Primary Accumulation” (1973), with the dancers lying on the sand, will be looser than usual, Lucas said. “They’re very playful works,” she said. “That’s something beautiful about the early works and Trisha’s sense of playfulness and sense of humor.”There was a certain wildness in her choreography, too — a slippery chaos bubbling beneath the highly refined surface — that fits with the natural world. It was Okshteyn’s idea to include “Opal Loop,” a luminous work that normally envelopes its four dancers in swirls of fog.“I wanted the program to include works that made sense right along the water’s edge,” Okshteyn said, “and then I also asked for ‘Opal Loop,’ because I was really interested in how Trisha was bringing the natural world onto the proscenium stage. I wanted to reverse that and bring that piece out into the natural world.”“Of course, we can’t have an artificial cloud,” she added, “but to have the natural clouds there — and perhaps it will be a misty day. That’s totally my fantasy, that it’s a foggy day and they’re dancing in the natural cloud.”Trisha Brown dancers in “Spanish Dance.”During a 1987 lecture-demonstration at Jacob’s Pillow, Lucas remembered a moment when Brown suddenly blurted out: “Opal Loop, Opal Loop, Opal Loop, Opal Loop” and spoke about the dance and, in a sense, her philosophy of dancing — her dancing. It’s unpredictability is, she said, “unlikely, ongoing. Phrases are minutes long, yards and yards of never stopping or even slowing down.”Brown referred to this period of her work as the Unstable Molecular Cycle (1980-1983), which is based in memorized improvisation and includes her postmodern masterpiece “Set and Reset.” In “Opal Loop,” Brown said: “There is a total immersion at the bat of an eye, from one physical state to another. It is tumultuous to perform, but if I guide the momentum just right there is an ease.”Lucas, who performed the work, remembers being conscious of how she could feel Brown, “that she would just be guiding something, and all this beauty would just whiz out of her and look so effortless,” she said. “But it was really not effortless”For Beach Sessions — as for all the company’s “In Plain Site” programming — the dances aren’t altered; it becomes an experiment in choreographing choreography. What is the best spot for a particular dance? How might the dancer get from one location to the next? For one transitional moment, Lucas has included “Scallops” (1973), in which the dancers stand side by side and run to a new position in order to keep up with the line.Trisha Brown’s “Figure 8” with Cecily Campbell, foreground, and from left, Patrick McGrath, Amanda Kmett’Pendry, Leah Ives, Jennifer Payán and Hsiao-Jou Tang.“Always, we try to hold the rigor of the idea intact, even though that environment might be challenging it,” Lucas said. “But part of the fun is to learn — you’re like, ‘Oh, look at that beautiful spot.’ And then you start to realize, well, five people can see that. I learned after about my fifth ‘In Plain Site’ to stop looking at beautiful places where nobody can fit. So it really becomes about a bigger picture.”For the dancers, working outside can be challenging. You can get distracted by a tree or a bug; and there’s always the weather to contend with. But, the dancer Patrick McGrath, said: “When you really find that sweet spot and you hear bird calls or frogs and you kind of learn how to use your feet differently in dirt, it informs the work in a way.”“And it’s funny,” he added. “You would think that she would have expected this almost with some of the pieces because they fit so naturally — sometimes a line just works so well outside with a tree.”That kind of serendipitous artistry is a source of surprise and delight at Beach Sessions. This season, with the Rockaway Film Festival, it is also presenting a screening of “Einstein on the Beach,” directed by Robert Wilson and composed by Philip Glass, on Friday at the Arverne Cinema. “It’s interesting to consider the allegorical beach and the real beach,” Okshteyn said. “Also it was made in 1976 and a lot of Trisha’s younger work was made around the same time.”As for bringing a sliver of that world and its art, particularly the Trisha Brown company, to Rockaway? “I’m honestly kind of still in shock that they’re performing,” she said. “Beach Sessions is a homegrown project. I hope it’s inspirational to other young programmers that if you just stick to it, you can do what you want to do. You can grow something on your own.” More

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Solange Enters New Territory: Ballet Composer

      by

      The multihyphenate pop star will compose her first ballet score for the Fall Fashion Gala at New York City Ballet in September.Solange, the pop star whose artistic tendrils have reached into the worlds of music, choreography, fashion, film, visual art and more, will soon add a new genre to her repertoire: ballet composer.New York City Ballet announced on Monday that Solange would write an original score for a work (as yet untitled) by Gianna Reisen that will premiere at the company’s annual Fall Fashion Gala, on Sept. 28. The score is composed for a chamber ensemble that will be made up of some of Solange’s musical collaborators and members of the City Ballet orchestra.This step into ballet is the latest in a series of adventurous turns by Solange, 36, who began her career young as a singer and dancer — including with her sister, Beyoncé, in Destiny’s Child. Solange’s work later blossomed into multihyphenate and more independent territory, with her music — starting with the 2012 album “True” and continuing with “A Seat at the Table” (2016) and “When I Get Home” (2019) — often doubling as a gathering place for genre-crossing, interdisciplinary artists. In her art and in the streets, she has also been an activist for Black Lives Matter and other causes.Solange has long had a theatrical edge that brought her into contact with Lincoln Center regulars and collaborators beyond the musical sphere. She has worked with the designer Carlos Soto, a regular partner of the auteurist director Robert Wilson, and organized programming — as well as brought her own performances — to spaces like the Guggenheim and Getty museums, as well as the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany.Her music for Reisen will be her debut in ballet, which was formative for her as a child in Houston. She saw Lauren Anderson, a pioneering Black principal dancer at Houston Ballet, and once told the writer Ayana Mathis, “My dream was to go to Juilliard.”The new dance is Reisen’s third for City Ballet, and will feature costumes by Alejandro Gómez Palomo of Palomo Spain. The Fall Fashion Gala, which pairs choreographers with designers, will also feature a premiere by Kyle Abraham, with costumes by Giles Deacon; and the first live performance of Justin Peck’s “Solo,” which premiered virtually in 2021 in a film directed by Sofia Coppola, and now features costume design by Raf Simons. Rounding out the gala evening is a George Balanchine masterpiece, “Symphony in C” from 1947. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      In the Theater, Workers Are Demanding Better Conditions

      by

      Getting to play Cinderella in a Broadway revival of “Into the Woods” sounds like a young musical theater performer’s dream, until you break your neck doing the pratfalls built into the role.That’s what Laura Benanti says happened to her in 2002. “I was a 22-year-old girl who didn’t know how to say ‘this doesn’t feel safe to me,’” she wrote on her Instagram page nearly two decades later, after suffering “intense pain every single day for seven years,” two surgeries and much heartbreak.At the time, people bad-mouthed her for missing performances.Disastrous tumbles and physical danger are so much a part of theater history that they’ve become treasured backstage lore instead of causes for concern. I am ashamed to admit to laughing when I read about the dancer who fell into the “Anyone Can Whistle” orchestra pit in 1964, landing on a saxophone player, who promptly died. In 1991 we all gossiped merrily when the tempestuous Nicol Williamson ignored his fight choreography in “I Hate Hamlet” and struck his co-star Evan Handler with a sword. (Handler quit; Williamson got applause.) For much of the early 2010s, the mayhem of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” was an endless source of schadenfreude.Laura Benanti as Cinderella in the 2002 Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut concussions, broken ribs, a fractured skull, a crushed leg and an amputated foot — those are just the “Spider-Man” injuries — aren’t actually funny. And they are only the most visible part of the story of harm endured by theater workers onstage and off. In return for the privilege of scraping by in a field they love, they are commonly expected to endanger themselves physically and emotionally.They dance till they drop. They work punishing hours. They strip themselves, often literally, and enact trauma over and over. If they are parents and nevertheless insist on sleeping more than five hours a night, they may see their children — as Amber Gray, a star in the original cast of “Hadestown,” told me — barely more than 50 minutes a day.The pandemic put a temporary end to all that, reuniting families and helping injuries heal. The pause also gave theater workers, perhaps for the first time ever, plenty of time to consider the lives their profession requires them to lead. It’s no surprise that, as theaters reopened, calls for change therefore emerged with greater urgency. This summer I’ve been grappling with those demands, and in earlier parts of this series I’ve looked at ridding the art form of the “great man” inheritance that built cruelty into its DNA and the movement for fair pay.But getting back to business has also reminded show people of the specific weirdness of their work. In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts — both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them more holistically as humans, even as they continue to gut themselves every night?Some people will not even agree that it should. The idea that theater is a calling, not a job, and that the two categories are mutually exclusive, is so ingrained in the industry’s ethos — not to mention its business model — that demands for shorter working days, more understudies, intimacy coordinators, mental health stipends, child care reimbursements and other accommodations are often met with doubt or derision. Caring for actors, some say, is coddling. Suffering is a badge of honor, and the theater is properly a purple-heart club.Amber Gray received a Tony Award nomination in 2019 for playing Persephone in “Hadestown.” She said her schedule began to make her feel like “a deadbeat mom.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat indoctrination goes deep. Stanislavski saw his students as votaries in an ascetic cult. The men who created the dominant forms of American theater assembled their power by extorting it from others. Musicals have often romanticized the idea that a good artist is a starving one. And Broadway dancers, many trained in a system even more repressive than the theater’s, have traditionally been expected to perform like robots, retire early and shut up in between.Perhaps the most pervasive and pernicious maxim is the one that says the show must go on — no matter what. Work rules that would seem ludicrous in any other business are, in the theater, built into the contracts. Performers represented by Actors’ Equity Association, the national labor union for actors and stage managers, are typically engaged for eight-show weeks, but productions can increase that number under certain circumstances. During holiday seasons, many offer 10-show schedules, and nonunion gigs can exceed even that.Another rule, governing the number of hours a company can work during technical rehearsals, is so reviled it has been the subject of a 2015 backstage comedy. In Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” — named for the clause in Equity contracts that permits 12-hour days if there are two hours off — the under-slept and daylight-deprived company of an absurd plantation melodrama undergoes a kind of mass psychosis while the tech teams adjust lights and scenery.The ReformationThe world is changing, and so is the theater. Our chief critic looks at how.Sacred Monsters: Is it time to cut loose the “great men” who helped America create its classics and its institutions?Paying Dues: Poverty is part of the identity, even the glamour, of the theater. It’s not sustainable.The Hard-Knock Life: The physical risks of the theater have many demanding their basic needs as humans.It’s not fiction. Kate Shindle, the president of Equity, has lived it herself. As a working actor she spent part of 2018 at a regional theater having “an awesome creative experience,” she told me in an email. (She declined to name the theater.) “But the schedule was no joke. On the longest days, I left my apartment at 9 a.m. and didn’t return home until after 1 a.m. And to be clear, the employer wasn’t bending or breaking work rules. This is the intensity that the American theater has been relying on for generations. The workers have helped sustain a model that simply needs to be rewritten.”At its annual convention last year, Equity delegates endorsed the elimination of 10 out of 12s — along with five-show weekend-performance schedules and six-day workweeks. But while these were just recommendations for future contract negotiations, some theaters have already begun to experiment with the ideas.For Donya K. Washington, the festival producer at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the experiment has its roots in 2016. It was then, while working at a different theater, that a production department head told her how the 12-hour tech calls for actors were nothing compared to what he experienced. To manage his crew, implement changes and debrief later, he arrived at the theater well before the cast and stayed well after. As a result, he was working 16-hour days for days at a time.“That’s not sustainable,” Washington said in a recent Zoom conversation. “I didn’t know what to do about it, but it stuck in my head.”After arriving in Oregon in 2019, where she was drafted onto the team creating the intensely complicated schedule that allows a repertory company to function, she started looking for ways to eliminate the 10 out of 12s. It was then that a worker “began proselytizing” for another quality-of-life improvement: the five-day workweek. “We had just finished building the calendar for the 2021 season, and my brain broke,” Washington said.But the pandemic — which closed the festival’s theaters for 14 months — gave her time to think. Over the course of 50 calendar drafts, she played with the parameters. What if the company produced five shows instead of the usual 11? What if they mounted one show at a time instead of several in rep? In one of those passes, since the exercise “wasn’t real anyway,” she decided to see if “you could do a five-day, 40-hour week and still get a production up. And lo and behold you could.”On a spreadsheet, anyway. In reality, when the festival fully reopened this April, the five-day week was not quite attainable. (They got as low as five-and-a-half.) But Washington feels it will be possible in the future, by adding about two additional weeks of rehearsals per show to make up for the lost time. The cost, she said, “would not be ginormous.” Already 10 out of 12s have been eliminated without trouble, reduced to 8 out of 10s — a step in the right direction. “And even if just from a business perspective it makes sense,” Washington added, because happier, healthier, better-rested companies produce a better product.“Sometimes we have a mind-set of doing something for the sake of doing it, because that’s how it’s always been done,” she said. “But step by step we have to retrain ourselves. And not just actors. Even I have to remind myself I’m not supposed to work seven days a week!”When I pointed out that we were having this conversation on a Sunday afternoon, Washington smiled and shrugged.The theater is unlikely to become a model workplace anytime soon. It’s always going to be a very tough life choice for most people. But who gets to make that choice is one of the things at stake in the calls for bettering a work-life balance that more often presents itself as a work-nonwork nightmare. Those who can’t afford to be penniless must generally opt out of theatrical careers, and if they do get a job they can’t afford to complain.Among that group, traditionally, have been parents of young children. Even if you have a stay-at-home partner or the means to hire full-time care, the mismatched hours of a baby’s schedule and an actor’s can be unbearable. Gray, the “Hadestown” star, was horrified to find that her older son, now 6, at some point started to cry whenever she sang, having learned to associate the sound with her going away. “It’s brutal,” she said, “when your child hates what you do. I felt like a deadbeat mom.”From left, Satomi Blair, Tina Chilip and Maechi Aharanwa in Playwrights Realm’s 2019 production of “Mothers.” The company created a pilot program during the 2019-20 season to accommodate parents.Richard Termine for The New York TimesNot that working while pregnant was less worrisome. “We sign contracts that say we must always be able to fit the costume,” she told me, adding that she hid her second pregnancy “because there are so many stigmas.”But general acclaim for her performance in “Hadestown” — and a 2019 Tony Award nomination to cap it — emboldened her when her contract was up for renewal. “I asked for an alternate for the Sunday matinee and Tuesday night, so that I could be home at least one day when my kids are too.” Previously, like most actors, her only day off was a Monday.When the producers, to her surprise, said yes, Gray found that the block of three days off, Sunday through Tuesday, made a huge difference. Finally getting enough sleep, she could “bang out” her two-show Wednesday “like nothing.” Her partner felt supported, she could play with her children, she could see other people’s work and attend the galas where connections are made. And even though the pandemic soon shut down that arrangement, it remains a model. Elizabeth Stanley, the star of “Jagged Little Pill,” made a similar deal when she returned to that show from maternity leave, splitting the role of Mary Jane with her friend Heidi Blickenstaff.These are, so far, one-off solutions, available to women considered important to the commercial success of a show. To test whether the idea of supporting parents could work in the nonprofit sector, the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway company devoted to early-career playwrights, created a pilot program called the Radical Parent-Inclusion Project. Roberta Pereira, the Realm’s executive director, explained that during the 2019-20 season, which included a production of Anna Moench’s “Mothers,” the company basically tried every possible accommodation to make parents welcome not only onstage and backstage but also in the audience.Among those accommodations was a caretaker reimbursement of up to $750, available to anyone working on the theater’s programming that season. (The credit was good for any kind of caretaking, including eldercare.) Rehearsals were cut back to 30 hours over the course of five days from 36 hours in six, necessitating an extra week to make up the difference. Broadway Babysitters, an arts-focused child care company, was hired to mind children during open auditions and callbacks, and a 4 p.m. matinee was added to the schedule. “For children who are younger and take naps,” Pereira said, “that was a much better time than 2 p.m.”The free child care was not just for performers, by the way; audience members brought a total of 22 children, half of them less than a year old, to the matinee — which perhaps as a result sold out.“Not that every theater should try this at the level we did,” Pereira said, “but you could see which things work for you. Some cost nothing, some cost a lot.” In all, the season’s caretaking enhancements added about $38,000 to the company’s $1.3 million budget, most of it covered by increased grants from its usual funders. That’s in line with what PAAL, the Parent Artist Advocacy League for Performing Arts and Media, has found at other theaters experimenting with child care programs. For Elevator Repair Service, a New York-based company, the cost of those programs amounted to less than 2 percent of the budget, PAAL reported.As a result, Pereira said, actors who effectively used to pay to be in a show — or just to audition for it — may no longer have to make the choice between plays and parenting.For the 2019 Broadway production of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon worked with an intimacy director, who helped stage the nude scenes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAchieving a better work-life balance is something you might expect to read about in emails from the human relations departments of companies promoting Yoga Thursdays. And though by no means common in American business, child care stipends are at least a familiar concept. But some of the other changes happening in the theater are intensely specific to the needs of the stage.One is the growing presence of intimacy directors, who help shape moments of physical contact in ways that feel safe to the people performing them. Intimacy Directors & Coordinators, one of several organizations created to further the field, defines its aim as the creation of “a culture of consent” in storytelling. Though that culture was traditionally the responsibility of a show’s director, the history of abuse in rehearsal and production has led many actors to advocate for the hiring of dedicated professionals on every show where the subject may come up — which is to say, virtually all of them.“To not have someone in that position is asking for trouble,” Audra McDonald told me in a recent phone interview. She first worked with an intimacy director in 2019, when Claire Warden helped stage the nude scenes and other physical interactions between her and her co-star, Michael Shannon, in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” Having been in previous situations where she felt she “didn’t have the right to speak up about what was happening,” McDonald found Warden’s presence “revelatory.”“Knowing what the boundaries and parameters were for what Michael and I had to go through on that stage, we could push up against them as hard as we possibly could while knowing what lines not to cross,” she said. “It’s about knowing where the bottom of the pool is, so you feel safer about diving all the way down and then swimming as fearlessly and fiercely as you want.”“Pass Over,” Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s harrowing play about the precarious lives of two young Black men, also had an intimacy coordinator, Ann James. But its producers offered the cast another protection against the potential trauma of the story: a mental health allowance.From left, Jon Michael Hill, Gabriel Ebert and Namir Smallwood in “Pass Over.” They had access to a “health and wellness” allowance during the play’s Broadway run last year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe allowance permitted actors to seek reimbursements of up to $250 a week for expenses deemed beneficial to their “health and wellness as it relates to performing this show eight times a week,” the policy stated. Matt Ross, the lead producer, added that the definition of “health and wellness” was deliberately broad; it could mean, for instance, a therapist or a voice lesson or a massage.Cody Renard Richard, the production stage manager, said it was only fitting to offer that support. “From their first class, actors have been asked to bring their traumas into a certain space, been nagged to call up personal stuff so they can cry in a scene. To ask them to open their wounds like that and not give them the help to deal with the result is incredibly unfair.”The additional cost of the mental health stipend, along with the production’s intimacy coordinator and the equity, diversity and inclusion consultant, Nicole Johnson, was “minuscule,” Ross said. “Probably less than 1 percent of the overall weekly costs.”But low cost is not the main selling point for advocates of such changes; undoing the harm built into the system is. And one of the reasons there is so much resistance to what seem like obviously worthy goals is that the harm has never been evenly distributed. When I spoke to Wayne Cilento, who originated the song “I Can Do That” in the 1975 musical “A Chorus Line,” he seemed proud of his ability to work on that show despite what he described as constant back and knee injuries. Later, in Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’,” which earned Cilento a Tony Award nomination in 1978, he missed only two performances in one-and-a-half years “while other people who didn’t have my urgency were dropping all around,” he said. “Stepping out was not my way.”From left, Jovan Dansberrry, Khori Michelle Petinaud, Manuel Herrera, Dylis Croman, Ron Todorowski and Jacob Guzman in a revival of “Dancin’” at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesStill, in preparing to direct and choreograph a revival of “Dancin’” for Broadway, he said he was more conscious of looking out for his dancers than Fosse was. (Fosse “never had a conversation about how’s your back or how’s your hamstring.”) For the tryout at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring, he cut the material from three acts to two and divvied up “his” track — the sequence of dances he’d done in the original production — among several men because it now seemed too much to ask of just one. For the planned 2023 Broadway production, he is rethinking the number of swings and covers to step into any role at any time so that injured dancers will feel less pressure to perform. And he is much more collaborative with the ensemble than Fosse was with him.“But it’s a fine line,” he said. “Incorporating the ensemble in the conversation makes them feel trusted and cared for, and it’s good for the show. But — this sounds awful — even though I want to hear your problems, at some point I don’t want to. The bottom line is: What you have to do for the show is what you have to do for the show. And the director, the choreographer, is the one who decides what that is.”Cilento is touching on a problem that underlies the uneasiness some people feel about the changes advocates are seeking. So much of what we are used to in the theater, so much of it thrilling, is ultimately the result of individual virtuosity being inspired by individual vision, even if the individual with the vision is a tyrant. When everyone is equally empowered what happens to it? If the theater ever does become a worker’s paradise, will it still produce heavenly art?Another source of unease is that those of us — I include myself — who grew up in the harsh, sometimes inhumane ways of thinking about the theater may have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome. About the harshness we are blasé or even sentimental. When, in “A Chorus Line,” Cilento sang, with the rest of the ensemble, “What I Did for Love,” we understood the response to be: Everything. Anything. The gift was ours to borrow.Now I’m pretty sure that’s not the right answer. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Angel Olsen, Yaya Bey and Others On Their Favorite Songs of Summer

      by

      These tracks will make for a lovely dinner playlist and all but guarantee some after-hours dancing.A lot of us still remember the labor of love that was the mixtape, those countless hours spent pressing record, stop, rewind and play. But, while less time-consuming, curating a digital playlist, rather than relying on an algorithm-fueled compilation, can still be a thoughtful gesture, one that might make all the difference at a dinner party. Song choices can be a way to share (or forget) what’s going on in the world, act as a conversation starter and, above all, set the mood. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Ukrainian D.J. Spins Rare Music in N.Y.C.

      by

      Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“Support Ukraine means listen to some Ukrainian songs, buy some Ukrainian brands, talk about Ukraine one minute a day, just in conversation.” Recently, Daria played her music at Le Bain, a club in The Standard, High Line hotel. More