Dancing

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Whether Dancing or Still, the Body in ‘Ema’ Tells the Story

      by

      In Pablo Larraín’s unsettling film, Mariana Di Girolamo stars as a dancer who finds freedom through reggaeton dance.Ema is the oddest of things: a dancer with a passion for setting things on fire. In “Ema,” Pablo Larraín’s film, the title character has a particular look, too: bleached hair slicked back so severely that it appears to be shellacked to her head. That hairstyle, hard and impenetrable, is like a coat of armor, which makes sense. Ema is made of ice. Until she dances.Set in the coastal city of Valparaíso in Chile, “Ema,” now in theaters and on Amazon and other digital platforms starting Sept. 14, tells the story of a couple, an older choreographer and a younger dancer — Gastón (Gael García Bernal) and Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo) — who adopted but then abandoned a Colombian boy named Polo. The reason they give up the boy turns out to have something to do with fire; he’s fond of it. It’s not hard to draw conclusions about who might have encouraged him.Ema is a member of her husband’s experimental dance company, and it’s no secret that she has lost interest in it — and in him. Her obsession is reggaeton and its dance, which she relishes for its aggressive sensuality; outside of the dance studio with her friends, her body is electric as she lets her limbs fly and her hips shake. Gastón is not impressed. To him, reggaeton is music to listen to in prison, “to forget about the bars you have in front of you.”Their generation gap is apparent as Gastón continues: “It’s a hypnotic rhythm that turns you into a fool. It’s an illusion of freedom.”Moving like a unit: A scene from “Ema,” with choreography by José Vidal.Music Box FilmsIs it? Who is Ema? She gave up her son, but seems to want him back. She’s a seductress who carries — and uses — her body with steely, precise intention. While her inner world is a mystery, it’s clear what reggaeton allows her to feel: free.Dance is the key. But unlike so many films and television series of late, it isn’t a superficial layer tacked onto the story. In “Ema,” Larraín, the director of “Jackie” and the coming “Spencer,” has given dance, or movement, a leading role. It’s also a means to an end that extends beyond conventional choreography: How can dance bring Ema closer to freedom? Whether she is alone or with her friends — a collective body moving as one — her physicality spreads across every scene. And she doesn’t even have to be moving: Her inner vibrations are just as lucid in stillness.Because of that, the film, with its dreamlike score, is something of a dance, too — floating, gliding and then, all of a sudden, turning on a dime. “Ema” is an action film, but not in the conventional sense: The body is the action. And while there is dialogue, words add up to less than the deliberate pacing of each scene and the poetic power of Di Girolamo’s frame.In a magnetic solo at the port, dusky light envelops Di Girolamo’s silhouette as she stands with her back to us and her legs wide apart. Her right arm, bent at the elbow, is raised, her hand in a fist. Rocking her hips, she swings from side to side as her arms open and close. It is hypnotic, but she’s no fool. She’s strong and tenacious; you sense the tension leaving her body through her dance.Di Girolamo in a dance scene at the port in “Ema.”Music Box FilmsAs she picks up the pace, walking with purpose and changing direction, her back undulates and her angled arms carve through the air to an imaginary beat. Moments later, she’s on a carousel ride, but there are echoes of her dance: As she grips her horse’s pole, she sways, dipping from side to side; she’s almost relaxed.Once she stops moving, her expression changes: Her thick brows frame a stony face. She is catlike with the kind of stare that makes you feel invisible; at the same time, she dances as if you were invisible. She’s beyond needing an audience.Di Girolamo is not a trained dancer, though she studied flamenco for a few months as a teenager. Her mother decided she would be better off doing that than being in therapy. “It was literally a therapy for me,” Di Girolamo said in a recent Zoom interview. “It gave me the necessary tools to be empowered and to continue ahead.”But she does love to dance. (Her husband is a D.J.) In “Ema,” she had tools to help her body acclimate to her character: One was the hair, which helped her to see Ema as an energy — like the sun, like fire. “She’s very hypnotic, and in some ways she’s very dangerous or destructive,” Di Girolamo said, “but you also want to be close to her.”“She’s very hypnotic, and in some ways she’s very dangerous or destructive,” Di Girolamo said of Ema, “but you also want to be close to her.”Music Box FilmsThe other was her training. Di Girolamo worked closely with the Chilean choreographer José Vidal, whose company appears in the film. Mónica Valenzuela was also part of the choreographic team, and her focus had more to do with the reggaeton moments. “I think Pablo wanted more of a nasty movement that I wasn’t apparently quite able to find,” Vidal said with a laugh, in an interview. “So she came to add some spice. It’s not like there is phrase one, phrase two — it is a mix of all of the materials.”Vidal’s choreographic approach involved studying Di Girolamo’s mobility: the flexibility of her spine, the range of her arms. He then turned that into a language. “More of a street dance, reggaeton sort of thing,” he said. “But it never came directly from that. My intention was, OK, we’re going arrive there. But we’re going to arrive there coming from an inside place.”The process began with immersive work that helped Di Girolamo to “connect into herself, into her emotions, into her structure,” Vidal said. “How does it feel to move here” — he patted his chest and swayed his shoulders — “and what connects you with each emotion? It was never about making her imitate or repeat something directly.”Vidal on the set. To choreograph for Di Girolamo, he studied her mobility and turned it into a language.via FabulaDi Girolamo also had to blend in with the professional dancers in Vidal’s company. The opening scene features an excerpt from his “Rito de Primavera,” inspired by “The Rite of Spring.” To dance in it, Di Girolamo studied ballet and Pilates. “I don’t have very good posture, so we worked on it,” she said. “I had to understand the limits and the possibilities of my body.”That led her to find Ema’s physicality — her rhythmic, weighted walk and the way she invades space both to intimidate and to get what she wants. “Dance was very important for me to understand how she seduces the other characters,” Di Girolamo said. “It’s the tool she has, and she’s conscious about that tool.”She spent a lot of time on the floor breathing. Vidal called it an initiation into the body, into the movement. In addressing her posture, Vidal focused on opening her chest, which in turn paved the way to showing her tasting freedom, even being vulnerable. There’s a reason the scene at the port feels so fresh and spontaneous.“I remember it was very cold, and Pablo said, ‘Mariana, now you have to improvise a dance scene,’” Di Girolama said. “I was like, what? But I started dancing. I used the same steps of the choreography, but I deconstructed them. I’m not very good at improvisation, but if I have some tools, some things that I know, I can do something with it. I kind of deconstructed the choreography to make a new one.”It wasn’t easy. “I was very nervous,” she said. “It’s like singing. It’s a very personal thing. It’s like a window of our souls.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Doors Didn’t Open Easily’ on Her Path to ‘Cinderella’

      by

      The choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter has quietly become an important figure in the world of musical theater, especially with her work for Andrew Lloyd Webber.LONDON — Midway through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new “Cinderella,” the male ensemble throws itself into a thrusting, muscle-popping number that perfectly illustrates the musical’s fictional setting of Belleville, a town devoted to beauty in all its superficial forms. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious, a sly take on an objectification more usually embodied by a female chorus, and a witty amplification of the musical’s reimagining of the Cinderella myth.That dance (which incorporates kettle bells), and all the others in this West End production, is the work of JoAnn M. Hunter, a longtime Broadway performer and choreographer who has quietly become an important figure in a field that boasts very few women, and even fewer women of color.“A great number of choreographers go their own way,” Lloyd Webber said in a telephone interview, “but JoAnn is completely different, a wonderful collaborator who you can really talk to about what the show needs. She is hugely important to the look of the show.”“Cinderella,” which finally opened on Aug. 18 at the Gillian Lynne Theater here after multiple pandemic-related delays, has a book by Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”) and lyrics by David Zippel (“City of Angels”). It’s Hunter’s third collaboration with Lloyd Webber and the director Laurence Connor, after the 2015 Broadway production of “School of Rock” and the much-lauded 2019 West End revival of “Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Carrie Hope Fletcher as Cinderella in the new West End production. Tristram Kenton A few critics jibed at Fennell’s rewriting of the Cinderella story: The heroine, played by Carrie Hope Fletcher, is a spirited, grumpy Goth; Prince Charming is M.I.A.; and his younger brother, Prince Sebastian (Ivano Turco), is the shy and awkward hero. But most reviewers concurred that the new musical is a great deal of fun, helped along by the wittily inventive, hugely varied dances that characterize Hunter’s style.“JoAnn M. Hunter’s choreography keeps it all swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes,” Sam Marlowe wrote in The I.Hunter, who is in her 50s, was born just outside of Tokyo, but grew up in Rhode Island with her Japanese mother and American father. She and her older brother were the only mixed-race children in their community. “I got taunted quite a lot, and I didn’t understand what was different about me,” she said.Ballet, which she started studying at 10, proved a savior. “In dance class I didn’t feel different at all,” she said. “I was just a dancer, with dancer friends. I always wonder if that’s why I fell in love with the art form.”At 16, she went to New York City on a summer dance scholarship. One night she bought a standing-room ticket for Bob Fosse’s Broadway musical “Dancin’.” As she watched, she made a silent vow: “I’m not going back home. This is where I belong.” What she saw, she said, was the possibility of “expressing all those things inside you.” Her family, she added, “never hugged, never said ‘I love you.’ But onstage I saw you had permission and freedom to show your feelings.”She went back to Rhode Island just long enough to tell her mother she wasn’t returning to high school, then moved to New York, taking dance classes, working at Barney’s and attending audition after audition, but staying under the radar in spite of her efforts. “I couldn’t get arrested at the time,” she said wryly.After working at the Opryland USA theme park in Nashville in the early 1980s (“we sang, we danced, we did four shows a day; I loved it”), she was hired for tours of “West Side Story” and “Cats.” But she experienced long periods of joblessness and insecurity.There was hardly any diversity on Broadway in the late 1980s, she said, and she felt acutely aware of looking different than the “beautiful tall blond girls” at auditions. “People would look at me, and say, ‘What are you?’” she recounted. “I would answer, ‘whatever you need me to be.’”She played the white cat in “Cats” for 15 months, and began to gain confidence. Then, in 1989, she had an experience that was pivotal for her subsequent choreographic career. She joined the cast of “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway,” an evening-length show of selections from Robbins’s choreography for musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” and “On the Town.”The ball scene in “Cinderella.” A theater critic credited Hunter with choreography that keeps the story “swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes.”Tristram Kenton“Jerry was a tyrant,” she said, “but I adored working with him, and I think I was absorbing so many lessons without thinking about it. He was unsurpassed at telling a story through movement.”Ensemble roles in Broadway shows (“Miss Saigon,” “Guys and Dolls,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) followed, and soon Hunter began to work as a dance captain, the ensemble member who can teach the choreography for every character. While she was performing in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, the director, Rob Ashford, asked her to be his choreographic associate.“JoAnn was always the smartest person in the room as well as the best dancer, and I knew she would be invaluable,” Ashford said in a telephone interview. Hunter, who had just gone through a divorce, wasn’t so sure. (She said her initial response was “aaarghhhh.”) But she had to take the chance.“She is a real problem solver and a great collaborator,” Ashford said. “In a musical, a choreographer has to get inside a director’s head and translate that vision into their own creation. She was always about the goals of the show.”The director Michael Mayer, who hired Hunter to oversee Bill T. Jones’s choreography for “Spring Awakening” in 2006, said in a telephone interview that one of her great gifts is to “understand why the steps are there, what the characters are trying to accomplish through the movement, and how the movement is in conversation with the rest of the elements of the show, even though at that point she hadn’t made up the moves.”Hunter’s first independent choreography for a musical was for a 2008 U.S. touring production of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” “I remember thinking, I’m never going to know unless I try this,” Hunter said. “And if I’m bad, not too many people will have seen it!”Asked whether she thought this kind of insecurity was particularly rife among women, Hunter looked thoughtful. Perhaps, she said. “Men tend to try things without worrying if they have the experience.” She added that the paucity of female choreographers on Broadway didn’t help her confidence.Although there are still relatively few female choreographers working on Broadway, this has begun to change: Camille A. Brown, Michelle Dorrance, Ellenore Scott and Ayodele Casel are all choreographing upcoming Broadway shows. Hunter agreed that women are now somewhat more visible in musical theater. “It’s amazing to think as a dancer I only ever worked with two female directors, Susan Stroman and Tina Landau,” she said. “At the moment these issues are at the front of our brains, as is racial diversity. I hope it’s something enduring, not a fad.”When she choreographed “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” she added, she was still too fearful about a choreographic career to give up the insurance having an Equity card provides. “I am afraid of failure; we all go through life thinking, ‘I’m going to be found out,’” she said. She laughed. “I’m still petrified.”Hunter’s choreography, the director Rob Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from [Jerome] Robbins of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesHer first Broadway commission came from Mayer, with the short-lived revival of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Then came “School of Rock.”Hunter said she had worked closely with Lloyd Webber on “Cinderella,” both on Zoom during lockdown, and in person from August last year. “People don’t really understand that a choreographer on a musical does much more than the dance sequences,” she said. “You move people around, deal with the transitions, where the audience’s focus should go. You have to be totally connected to the vision of the composer, writer and director.”The choreographer also often works with a dance arranger, she added, who adapts the score for dance sections. “A script direction might say, ‘goes into a dance moment,’” she explained. “But I think, ‘What do we want to say here?’ You might want a Latin feel, a tango rhythm, a French chanson, as a way of making mood and story more understandable.”For the “Muscle Man” dance in “Cinderella,” for instance, she thought about what the musical was trying to say and suggested a sound equivalent. “They are such macho, testosterone guys, and I had the idea of using kettle bells, which sounds like something dropping and is funny.”For “Cinderella,” Lloyd Webber did the dance arrangements himself. “I sketched out what I thought the dance music should be,” he said. “Then JoAnn took that, and actually stayed very faithful to it, but we added accents and she would ask for elements that the dance might need. It’s a really important collaboration, because you can’t look at the dance if you can’t listen to the music; it has to be good.”Hunter said that while she doesn’t read music, she has an acute sense of instrumentation and rhythm. “I just say things like ‘I don’t want it so pingy-pingy!’” she said. “That way I can make funny funnier and sexy sexier.” She added, “I always want every movement to tell a story. When Prince Sebastian dances at the end, I told Ivano, it’s not about the dance, it’s about you speaking up for yourself.”Her choreography, Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from Robbins, of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Hunter, who last year directed and choreographed “Unmasked,” a concert retrospective of Lloyd Webber’s career, is working as both director and choreographer on “SuperYou,” a new musical written by Lourds Lane. Hunter described it as “a superhero, self-empowering piece about women finding their own voice” and said she hopes it will go to Broadway.Hunter added that she was still frequently the only woman on a creative team. “I’ve worked with great people, but the doors didn’t open easily,” she said. “I still feel I am constantly proving myself.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      JoJo Siwa to Have First Same-Sex ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Partner

      by

      The “Dance Moms” alum and TikTok personality will join the ABC show as the first contestant to compete in a same-sex pairing.On Thursday, “Dancing With the Stars” history was made with the announcement that the dancer and social media personality JoJo Siwa would be the first contestant on the ABC program to compete with a same-sex partner.The executive producer Andrew Llinares shared the milestone during a “Dancing With the Stars” Television Critics Association panel.IM SO EXCITED https://t.co/EN1ygC5Jj3— JoJo Siwa!🌈❤️🎀 (@itsjojosiwa) August 26, 2021
      (The show also announced that the gymnast and Olympic gold medalist Suni Lee would be featured in its 30th season, and that other celebrity competitors would be revealed on Sept. 8 on “Good Morning America.” The season begins Sept. 20.)“I have a girlfriend who is the love of my life and who is everything to me,” Siwa told USA Today in an article published Thursday. “My journey of coming out and having a girlfriend has inspired so many people around the world.”“I thought that if I chose to dance with a girl on this show, it would break the stereotypical thing,” she said, adding that it would be “new, different” and a “change for the better.”Siwa came out as part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community earlier this year, when she posted a photo of herself wearing a T-shirt that read “Best Gay Cousin Ever” on Instagram. In April, she told People that “technically I would say that I am pansexual.”At the critics’ association panel, the model and TV personality Tyra Banks — who hosts and executive produces “Dancing With the Stars” — said that she supported the move.“You’re making history, JoJo,” she said. “This is life-changing for so many people. Particularly because you are so young doing this. For you to say this is who you are and it’s beautiful, I’m so proud of you.”Siwa, known for her sparkling hair accessories and bubbly personality, met her girlfriend, Kylie Prew, on a cruise. They began dating in January, and in June, the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization Glaad had named her in their 20 Under 20 List.Glaad’s head of talent, Anthony Allen Ramos, lauded the show’s move in a statement on Thursday. “At 18, JoJo Siwa is once again using her platform to inspire and uplift the L.G.B.T.Q. community,” he said. “As one of today’s most watched and celebrated programs on television, ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and Tyra Banks are making the right decision to feature JoJo Siwa competing alongside a female professional dancer.”“The show has such a wide, far-reaching audience,” he said, “and there is a real opportunity here for people to celebrate the same-sex pairing and root for JoJo and all L.G.B.T.Q. young people.” More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      ‘The Opposite of Airlines’: When Larger Audiences Require Fewer Seats

      by

      Yes, the comfy chair. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco put in roomier seats just in time to try to lure audiences back from the couches they got used to during the shutdown.SAN FRANCISCO — Wagner was the worst. Five hours — sometimes more — of squirming in 1932-era seats at the War Memorial Opera House here, sinking into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering the bulge of the springs and the pinch of the wide armrests, craning for a glimpse of the stage around the head of the tall person one row ahead.“Particularly on a long opera — oh my God,” said Tapan Bhat, a tech executive and a season-ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.When the San Francisco Opera opens Saturday, starting its scaled-back 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca” after a shutdown of more than a year, those punishing seats will be gone. The opera has used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, roomier ones. The opera used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace its 3,128 seats. Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesAnd San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and sports arenas around the country have been increasingly investing in comfort in recent years — with wider and plusher seats — to try to accommodate audiences that have grown in breadth, if not in numbers. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult men in the United States was 168 pounds, according to federal data; it is now 199.8 pounds.Since the pandemic struck, the owners of theaters and live venues have come to see such investments as more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are dropped, presenters face the challenge of luring back patrons who, during more than a year without theaters, have grown accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the sprawling comfort of their own couches and recliners.“The entire patron experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, a partner with OTJ Architects, a Washington-based firm. “Venues are working diligently to improve that experience. We’ve never spent so much time on seats.”The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.The old seats were thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, and had wide armrests that made them feel narrower.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesEven before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie — tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat — to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century?“I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.”“The seats have historically been patrons’ No. 1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And with some justification. We had springs coming through some of the seats.”San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial. The new seats have wooden backs, which could improve the acoustics, and cup holders. (No clinky ice cubes will be allowed, though.)Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe new, ergonomically tuned chairs are slightly higher, roomier and firmer than the old ones. There is 2.5 inches more leg room, and the chairs have been staggered to improve sightlines, giving even the shortest operagoers and balletomanes a better shot at seeing what is taking place onstage. The seat widths are about the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making seats feel roomier. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice, though, with all its clinking distractions, is not permitted).Comfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring.The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco — its seats were at least renovated in 1993 — but they were decidedly in need of replacement. The widths of Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the renovation; now they range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats there was reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.“We are doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, the technical director at the Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of cramming more narrow seats onto planes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas want to be long. People expect different things.”“To put it bluntly, it takes a lot more effort to sell a ticket these days,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they’ll be here again.”Many of the seats in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, will be a bit wider as well when its current renovation is complete. While most of the seats in its old hall were 20 inches wide or less, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches wide or wider.The San Francisco Opera will return to the opera house on Saturday with “Tosca.” Alfred Walker, left, and Michael Fabiano sang at a recent rehearsal.Cory WeaverThe seat backs in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; doing away with that cushioning means more leg room for those sitting behind. “I am 6-foot-1 without shoes,” said Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “And I have very long legs. They were the type of seats that when I sat in them, my knees came up to my belly button.”The old seats at the War Memorial had become vintage relics, thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, a particular concern to the opera crowd, which tends to skew older.“Like those seats you saw when you went to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, the assistant managing director of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, who oversaw the project. “You know, when your grandma had her favorite chair and it sits a little too low, and was a little too worn.”With uncushioned seat backs, the sound in the hall should be crisper. “Applause won’t die in the room, so you’ll have a great sense of enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible the lady with the candy wrapper will annoy us more. I am hoping that peer pressure will remind her to unwrap her candy before the performance begins.”The renovation began in 2013 with replacement of seats on the box level, and it includes 12 bariatric seats, designed to hold weights of up to 300 pounds, that will be 28 inches wide, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, an increase of six from before the renovation. The project was funded by a ticket fee ranging from $1 to $3.The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which also installed seats at the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as halls in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Toronto. The historical nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall — it opened in 1932 — and the exacting demands of its high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complicated.“This is the most extensive design we have ever done on a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, the president of Ducharme Seating. “The opera houses are always the most stringent customers.”Germain-Gordon said that theaters probably have little choice but to invest this kind of money as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic. “People can have in their home a beautiful media room,” she said. “Back in the olden days, if you wanted to see something you had to go see it. Nobody had TVs the size of movie screens, or La-Z-Boys. But people are investing in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”Bhat, the tech executive, said anything would be better than the seats he had suffered over 25 years of long nights at the opera.“They were creaky,” he said. “The upholstery would be fraying. So if you’re sitting in an opera in less than comfortable seats, something that’s going on for four and a half hours, or the first act of ‘Götterdämmerung,’ which is like 90 minutes long — it’s torture.” More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      This Summer’s Dance MVP: The Weatherman

      by

      At Jacob’s Pillow, with all shows outdoors, a new uncontrollable element emerged: weather. That’s where Paul Caiano comes in.BECKET, Mass. — A week after the Jacob’s Pillow season opened here, five dancers were rehearsing in the vegetable garden for a site-specific work, “Tillers of the Soil.” They tied up tomato plants, practiced wielding a machete and learned about the Native planting practice known as three sisters — growing corn, beans and squash together. The sky was clear.“Paul said it’s going to rain at 3:30 p.m.,” said the choreographer Adam Weinert — and at almost exactly that moment, a balmy afternoon erupted into showers. The dancers fled the garden, laughing, wheelbarrow in tow.Paul is Paul Caiano, an affable Albany, N.Y., weatherman who this summer took on the role of first-ever resident meteorologist for the Pillow.Ching Ching Wong and Cynthia Koppe in “Tillers of the Soil” at Jacob’s Pillow.Christopher DugganAfter last year’s festival was canceled because of the pandemic, Jacob’s Pillow moved its summer dance festival totally outdoors this year. But that has posed a new set of worries from an uncontrollable factor, namely the weather.Even festivals and theaters that have had outdoor performances for years have found this summer singular thanks to extreme weather paired with Covid-19 precautions. Events outside in the elements have proliferated alongside record-breaking heat waves, sudden storms and flash floods.At Jacob’s Pillow, that’s where Caiano, 50, comes in. He’s been a weatherman for almost three decades, delivering spirited daily reports for NewsChannel 13 and WAMC public radio. “I thrive from trying to give people the information they need to make decisions,” he said, “whether it be just to go golfing, or a bigger thing like having 10,000 people at their performance.”Before this summer at Jacob’s Pillow, Vinny Vigilante, director of technical production, made weather calls on his own. It was lower stakes because there were fewer outdoor productions and less equipment involved. “This year, because we moved outside, I definitely was like, ‘I need help,’” he said. He’d heard that the Tanglewood Music Center nearby worked with a meteorologist. “And that turned out to be Paul,” he said.“I thrive from trying to give people the information they need to make decisions,” Caiano said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesIn 2012, Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, invested in state-of-the-art weather-tracking software. It even installed a Thor Guard device, which the Coast Guard and NASA use to measure electrostatic energy in the atmosphere and to predict when lightning is likely to strike. Still, help was needed to interpret the complicated data, so the facilities manager Bobby Lahart began searching for a meteorologist. When Lahart cold-called WAMC, Caiano picked up. He’s been forecasting severe weather for Tanglewood’s outdoor stages since then.Becket, the Western Massachusetts town that Jacob’s Pillow calls home, is a microclimate that’s difficult to accurately forecast. The grounds are surrounded by mountains, valleys and ocean winds. Caiano says the landscape is like a moisture-trapping bowl that wind blows right over, leaving foggy, wet conditions within. The grounds might be experiencing sudden showers, as on the day Weinert and his dancers had to cut their rehearsal short, while just 20 minutes away, the town of Lee is sunny, dry and clear.That variability is an enjoyable challenge to Caiano, a lifelong weather nerd who idolized the meteorologists on the Weather Channel when young. But it’s been tough for the festival, which has had a 44 percent cancellation rate of performances so far this summer. (The festival continues through Aug. 29.) When there’s a rainout, ticket holders can either receive a full refund, rebook for another show or donate the ticket amount.Every morning, Caiano checks his computer models first thing. He evaluates whether the predictions he made before going to sleep the night before have panned out and makes any necessary adjustments to his forecast. He then writes a detailed synopsis of the day’s weather for both Jacob’s Pillow and Tanglewood, including precise information about jet streams and wind shear. He also boils it down into layman’s terms: “If it comes right down to it, there’s only a 30 percent chance” of rain, reads one. “Let’s do this.”A sunny day at Tanglewood in July for the Boston Symphony’s first in-person concert since March 2020. Caiano gives a detailed description of the weather each day to Jacob’s Pillow and Tanglewood.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesA cancellation is not something Caiano takes lightly. Every show the weather disrupts means lost revenue, disappointed ticket holders and artists who don’t get to perform. It’s a difficult balance to strike. Be overcautious and a perfectly clear day goes to waste; be too bold and put the performers, audience and equipment at risk.The final decision about whether a performance will proceed must be made four hours before showtime, to give ticket holders fair warning if it’s canceled. Once that call is made, Vigilante tells patron services, which emails ticket holders three hours in advance.“They send you a nice email during the day,” said Enid Hoffman, who had tickets to see a performance by the Latin dance group Contra-Tiempo that was canceled because of rain. “They handled it beautifully, but we were looking forward to it. It’s like, you look forward to Christmas and then somebody stole Christmas.”At Shakespeare & Company in neighboring Lenox, where outdoor performances have long been the summer norm, the artistic director Allyn Burrows and his colleagues consult weather apps and pore over the minutiae themselves. They huddle in the box office watching weather patterns on Burrows’s computer, or argue via group text about whether to cancel a show. “We’re as animated about the weather discussions as we are about Shakespeare’s text, so the debates are vociferous,” he said.More than half of Shakespeare & Company’s shows this year have been postponed or moved indoors because of weather, and Burrows said that the concern isn’t just rainstorms, but extreme heat, exacerbated by climate change. Recently, he and his team fashioned a makeshift shade out of black mesh cloth on the fly on a particularly sweltering day.“I’ve been performing outdoors for 30-odd years now and this year feels different than any other year,” he said. “Part of me likes to think of it as an aberration, but my better self is saying, continue to make plans.”Grace McLean in “Row,” at the Clark Art Institute’s reflecting pool, a Williamstown Theater Festival production that lost nearly 60 percent of its rehearsal time because of weather conditions.Joseph OMalley and R. Masseo DavisFurther north, Williamstown Theater Festival in Williamstown, Mass., is also hosting its first fully outdoor season this year, on found stages, including the Clark Art Institute’s reflecting pool, where Grace McLean stars in “Row.” The musical lost nearly 60 percent of outdoor rehearsal time because of the weather, and six of the first seven scheduled performances were canceled. “It’s just been kind of disappointing and frustrating, because we’re not getting to do our job,” she said.The sky was dreary, gray and damp the day before “Tillers of the Soil” — Weinert’s adaptation of a dance originally choreographed by Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis in 1916 — had its premiere at Jacob’s Garden. The dancers spread straw on the soft, wet ground before the performance, but their feet still grew muddy and soaked as they danced. “We were able to still be in the moment with everything that was happening,” Brandon Washington, a dancer, said. “It ended up being super sunny and beautiful.”For dancers, weather, especially rain, has meant being ready to be frustrated — or ready for the show to go on in tough circumstances. On July 3 at Little Island, a new park on the Hudson River in Manhattan, Hee Seo, a principal for American Ballet Theater, did not know until showtime whether her “Dying Swan” solo would happen. Even then, the rehearsal and show were both delayed, and when Seo started dancing, she could feel raindrops. “But we didn’t stop,” she said. “I carried on. I finished my piece.”Artists and audiences have been hungry for performances, even as the cancellations pile up. The Trisha Brown Dance Company canceled performances on June 8 and 9 at Wave Hill in the Bronx because of rain. The company’s director, Carolyn Lucas, said the dancers rehearsed amid the drizzles until they couldn’t. “After this year of Covid, I think everybody is missing dancing and performing so much,” she said. “They were very flexible to sort of do something a bit more extreme just to get the show on the road.”It’s unlikely there will be another summer with quite this particular mix of circumstances. And at Jacob’s Pillow, the hope is that there won’t need to be another outdoor-only season. But ever adaptable, dancers will continue to make the most of what’s thrown at them. As Washington said of his performance in the garden, “With everything that was happening leading up to the performance, the wet ground was kind of the least of our concerns.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Little Island Unveils Free Monthlong Festival With Over 450 Artists

      by

      The festival, which runs from Aug. 11 to Sept. 5, features a flurry of music, dance, and comedy performances from both established and emerging artists.Little Island was dreamed up as a haven for the performing arts on the Hudson River, and in its first months, it is also being put forward as a playground for artists who have been kept from the stage for far too long.The operators of the island announced on Tuesday that it would host a free monthlong arts festival starting in mid-August that would feature more than 450 artists in more than 160 performances.There will be dance, including works curated by Misty Copeland, Robert Garland and Georgina Pazcoguin. There will be music, including the pianists Jenny Lin and Adam Tendler, the composer Tyshawn Sorey and the saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin and her band. And there will be live comedy, with television stars like Ziwe and Bowen Yang in the lineup.The festival — which is being produced by Mikki Shepard, formerly the executive producer of the Apollo Theater — is another major effort by New York’s performing arts community to revive the arts after the pandemic darkened theaters and concert halls for over a year. For the performers, it is an opportunity to get paid to create new work and explore where their art is heading after months of pandemic restrictions, and in the wake of racial justice protests that swept the country.“We wanted artists to have a voice in terms of, where are they now?” Shepard said. “Coming out of this pandemic, where do they want to be?”By offering free performances, the festival’s objective is to host an audience that combines typical arts patrons with people who might not normally buy tickets to see live music or dance. The performances in Little Island’s 687-seat amphitheater will be ticketed, but shows located elsewhere on the island will not be, allowing tourists and other park visitors to stumble upon them as they’re walking around the 2.4-acre space.“Nothing about it is refined,” said George C. Wolfe, a senior adviser working on the festival, which is called NYC Free. “It’s to give people a place to play.”Copeland and Garland are co-curating a performance on Aug. 18 that features eight Black ballet dancers from three major companies: American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet and the Dance Theater of Harlem, where Garland is resident choreographer. During the performance, Copeland will read aloud from American history texts on top of hip-hop, soul and funk music.Other dance performances include Ballet Hispánico performing an evening of new works by Latina choreographers on Aug. 18, an evening of dance curated by the choreographer Ronald K. Brown on Aug. 25 and a performance by the tap dancer Dormeshia on Sept. 1.As for music, the first day of the festival on Aug. 11 will feature John Cage’s work “4’33”” — in which the score instructs that no instruments be played. It will be performed by students of the Third Street Music School Settlement, led by Tendler. Other musicians include the jazz duo Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner; Flor de Toloache, an all-women mariachi band; and Ali Stroker, the Tony-winning “Oklahoma!” performer, who will sing and tell stories onstage. The final night of the festival includes an all-women jazz performance, curated by the drummer and composer Shirazette Tinnin.The comedy lineup features a stand-up show hosted by Michelle Buteau and a live show called “I Don’t Think So, Honey!,” hosted by Yang and Matt Rogers, that grew out of a segment on their podcast.The festival is funded by Barry Diller, the mega-mogul who paid for Little Island and whose family foundation will bankroll the first two decades of the park’s operations. It will run from Aug. 11 to Sept. 5. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Ailey’ Review: A Poetic Look at the Man Behind the Dances

      by

      Jamila Wignot explores the life of Alvin Ailey in a new documentary that brings a choreographer to life through movement and words.Too often, the idea of Alvin Ailey is reduced to a single dance: “Revelations.” His 1960 exploration of the Black experience remains a masterpiece, but it also overshadows the person who made it. How can an artist grow after such early success? Who was Alvin Ailey the man?In “Ailey,” the director Jamila Wignot layers images, video and — most important — voice-overs from Ailey to create a portrait that feels as poetic and nuanced as choreography itself. Black-and-white footage of crowds filing into church, children playing, dance parties, and the dusty landscape of Texas (his birthplace) builds an atmosphere. Like Ailey’s dances, the documentary leaves you swimming in sensation.Ailey’s story is told alongside the creation of “Lazarus,” a new dance by the contemporary choreographer Rennie Harris, whose homage to Ailey proposes an intriguing juxtaposition of past and present. In his search to reveal the man behind the legacy, Harris lands on the theme of resurrection. Ailey died in 1989, but his spirit lives on in his dancers.But his early days weren’t easy. Born in 1931, Ailey never knew his father and recalls “being glued to my mother’s hip. Sloshing through the terrain. Branches slashing against a child’s body. Going from one place to another. Looking for a place to be. My mother off working in the fields. I used to pick cotton.”He was only 4. Ailey spoke about how his dances were full of “dark deep things, beautiful things inside me that I’d always been trying to get out.”All the while, Ailey, who was gay, remained intensely private. Here, we grasp his anguish, especially after the sudden death of his friend, the choreographer and dancer Joyce Trisler. In her honor, he choreographed “Memoria” (1979), a dance of loneliness and celebration. “I couldn’t cry until I saw this piece,” he says.Ailey’s mental health was fragile toward the end of his life; Wignot shows crowds converging on sidewalks, but instead of having them walk normally, she reverses their steps. He was suffering from AIDS. Before his death, he passed on his company to Judith Jamison, who sums up his magnetic, enduring presence: “Alvin breathed in and never breathed out.”Again, it’s that idea of resurrection. “We are his breath out,” she continues. “So that’s what we’re floating on, that’s what we’re living on.”AileyRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour and 22 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters’ Review: Still Making Waves

      by

      A striking new documentary explores the enduring legacy of a dance piece created by Bill T. Jones at the height of the AIDS crisis.What happens to a work of art when time displaces it from its original context, and from the impetus that inspired it? That’s a question that can elicit dry theories. But in “Can You Bring It?: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters,” a new documentary directed by Tom Hurwitz and Rosalynde LeBlanc Loo, the answer is passionate and moving.Jones is the co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, a modern dance troupe. It grew out of the performing duo that Jones formed with his partner Zane, who wasn’t a dancer when they met in the early 1970s.Zane died of AIDS-related lymphoma in 1988. The movie gives a moving précis of their work-life collaboration before addressing the decisions Jones made in the aftermath of Zane’s death. One of those decisions took the form of the piece “D-Man in the Waters.”The dance was inspired by a series of group improvisations. It was a reflection of the troupe’s experiences, its struggles and its losses. As a piece of choreography, it’s since been performed by dozens of collegiate and professional companies. “Can you bring it?” is what Jones asks a group of dancers at Loyola Marymount College in 2016 as they prepare the piece under the direction of Loo, a former Jones/Zane company member.These students have little knowledge of AIDS, so Jones and Loo ask them to find points of struggle in their lives, as part of a student community and otherwise. The intercutting between vintage footage of the Jones/Zane company and the student production, as well as footage from another contemporary production of the piece — shot with an onstage intimacy that recalls the in-the-ring segments of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” — make for an unusually lively documentary experience.Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the WatersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More