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      How ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ Brought Step to the Met

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      The opera’s choreographer and co-director, Camille A. Brown, talks about the legacy of the African diaspora and influence of “School Daze” in her dances.Camille A. Brown had a lot of catching up to do. She wasn’t part of the original creative team behind Terence Blanchard’s opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” when it was presented in 2019 in St. Louis. But at the Metropolitan Opera, where the production runs through Saturday — the first time a work by a Black composer has been presented there in its 138-year history — her touch is palpable.Clearly, she caught up. And she’s making history, too: Brown, who shares directorial duties with James Robinson, is the first Black artist to direct a Met production. She is also the opera’s choreographer, and as such has brought social dance — step, the percussive form popular at historically Black colleges and universities (H.B.C.U.) — to the Met stage.Opening Act III is a step number that stops the show in its tracks. On opening night, the dancers held their final pose, one foot crossed over the other as sweat poured down their faces. Frozen in a line facing the audience, they tried to control their breathing as the audience clapped and roared. And clapped and roared some more. It lasted for more than a minute, and it was spectacular.When was the last time a dance stopped an opera in its tracks? Brown, a Tony-nominated dance-maker who choreographed “Porgy and Bess” under Robinson’s direction at the Met, has never experienced anything like it.Brown at opening night last month.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“I was just thrilled,” she said. “I was thrilled for the moment. I was thrilled for social dance. I was thrilled for the dancers onstage that had been working for six weeks to put this show together.”She added: “I feel like the audience — to me — was clapping for several reasons. It was about the dance, but it was about what it meant to see that on the stage. And legacy.”Step and its use of the body as a percussive instrument speaks to the Black experience: When their drums were taken away, enslaved people created rhythm with their bodies. In the opera, step enters the picture when the protagonist, Charles (Will Liverman), is a college student and pledges at the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. He also continues to grapple with the experience of having been molested by his older cousin when he was a young boy, seen in flashbacks. (The opera is based on the 2014 memoir by The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow.)While Act I contains no actual dance, the characters roam the stage with vibrant texture — their everyday, pedestrian movement, both rich and real, is recognizably Brown. Along with the step number, Brown choreographed another major dance, which opens Act II and shows Charles surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Full of tension and longing, it reveals the character’s state of mind: confused and anguished, yet also intrigued.The baritone Will Liverman surrounded opens surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBrown is adept at baring emotion through the body. The dancers, their arms reaching imploringly, move vividly and broadly as if washing the stage with brushstrokes. Later, they transform into trees as Charles sings: “We draw our strength from underneath. We bend, we don’t break. We sway!”As he sings, Charles rounds his body forward in a powerful contraction and opens his arms as he stands straight and ultimately rises above his suffering.In “Fire,” which will be broadcast theatrically on Oct. 23 as part of the Met Live in HD series, Brown displays her choreographic range. “There was the more contemporary dance side, and then there’s the more rhythmical side,” she said. “You don’t get to feel those extremes in one place very often.”And her directorial prowess is only growing. Up next? She directs the Broadway revivalof Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Recently Brown spoke about her work on “Fire” and honoring her ancestors. What follows are edited excerpts from that conversation.Brown with her co-director, James Robinson, during a rehearsal in August.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesHow did you, as a choreographer and director, envision the opera?When I’m working on a show, and as a director of my company, I always try to find, what is my entry point to the story? I thought about some of my dear friends that had very similar stories, so I entered it in that way.When I first heard about the opera and I found out that there was a fraternity section, I was so excited. There’s an opportunity to do a step dance inside of an opera?Why is it so important to put social dance on the Met stage?We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens and along with that comes Black culture spoken through or danced through the Black lens. And knowing that, at one point in the Met’s history, Black people weren’t allowed to perform on that stage.So you go from that to now: We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage. That is so powerful. You see the fraternity-sorority, you see the H.B.C.U., but you also see the Juba dance [the African-American percussive form that uses the feet and the hands]. And you see the African diaspora onstage.“We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage,” Brown said of the fraternity scenes.Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesHow did you put the number together?I was inspired by two movies: “Drumline” and “School Daze.” I’ve always loved “School Daze,” and when this opportunity came about to create the fraternity scene, I thought this needs to be a moment. Yes, Charles is pledging, and he’s going through that experience, but it’s also important, especially being on the Met stage, to show as much as we can of what that whole entire experience is. I want to talk about the dream ballet. Is it OK if I call it that?[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, that’s totally fine.What were you thinking?In any show that I’ve done, there’s always one piece that is really, really hard for me. And that was what you call the dream ballet. The first two weeks of working on it, I was freaking out a little bit because I wasn’t liking what I was doing.What happened?I was talking to my co-director, James Robinson, about the movie “Moonlight” and about how Charles was wrestling with what we are calling phantoms in his dreams — and how they haunted him, but they also enticed him. And so I gave myself a break and eased back on criticizing myself and said, You know what? Just play. Give yourself the space to figure it out.How did “Moonlight” influence you?Just by the beautiful imagery. Just wanting to talk about relationships and the sensitivity, and how does it feel to touch someone for the first time? Feeling like it’s wrong, but wanting to trust that it’s OK.“We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow involved were you in the first act?It may be easy for someone to come in and go, Oh, well, she just did the choreography. But that really wasn’t the case. James and I were both thinking about the molestation scene and how the chorus interacts.Most of the chorus members were also in “Porgy,” so I’d already worked with them. We were talking about how they move because even though they’re technically not dancing, they still are moving. And it’s the 1970s. We looked at some videos and talked: What were the small ways that people walked to indicate the time period?Was Katherine Dunham in your mind throughout this experience?Oh! Why do you ask?Because of your use of social dance and the fact that she choreographed at the Met. And because so much of this opera, at its root, is about the body as a force. It’s urgent. It made me think of your lineage.I always carry her and Pearl Primus and Dianne McIntyre and Marlies Yearby in the space with me. This is a historical moment, but this is also about people who have paved the way for you. It is coming from a deep place — it is coming from the social dance. How can I contribute to that legacy of Black choreographers delving into the African diasporic space? It’s about contributing to the space. When we do what we know, and we show how honest we are with our decisions, that is honoring our ancestors. More

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      Brooklyn Academy of Music Plans a New York-Focused Season

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      In its first full season since the start of the pandemic, the organization will feature a mix of new and familiar works in dance and theater.There will be dances exploring Black love and relationships, theater works highlighting the impact of technology on daily life and an appearance by the filmmaker Spike Lee.The Brooklyn Academy of Music will focus its coming season on the artists of New York City, the organization announced on Friday, as it seeks to bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic.“This is a season to celebrate artists who give New York City a sense of possibility, a sense of wonder, a sense of effervescence, a glow, a bit of magic,” the academy’s artistic director, David Binder, said in an interview. He said the academy wanted to create a season to mark New York’s recovery from the pandemic, which brought many of the city’s cultural institutions to a standstill for more than 18 months.The season, which runs November to March, is the academy’s first since the start of the pandemic. As the organization tries to lure audiences back to its stages and recover millions in ticket revenue lost during the pandemic, it will feature a mix of familiar hits and new works.Dance will be front and center, starting in November with the world premiere of “The Mood Room,” a Big Dance Theater production, conceived, directed and choreographed by Annie-B Parson. The show, which takes place in Los Angeles in 1980, mixes dance, theater and spoken opera to explore the effects of Reaganism.The dance lineup also includes Reggie Wilson’s “Power” in January, and the New York premiere of Kyle Abraham’s “An Untitled Love,” in February. The work, set to neo-soul music, is described as an “exaltation of Black love and unity.”Also in February comes Pam Tanowitz’s acclaimed “Four Quartets,” a staging of T.S. Eliot’s poems. When it had its premiere at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, in 2018, Alastair Macaulay, writing in The New York Times, called it “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”In March, the Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Morris’s classic “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” (1988), set to Handel’s oratorio.There will be theater and cabaret offerings as well. In March, SITI Company, the noted experimental New York theater company, will stage “The Medium,” a minimalist meditation on the role of technology in society.The cabaret performers Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman will star as their alter egos Kiki and Herb in a new holiday special, titled “SLEIGH,” which will premiere after Thanksgiving.In December, Lee will appear alongside his brother for a conversation about the filmmaker’s new book, “SPIKE,” a visual look at his career.With coronavirus cases still high, it remains to be seen whether audiences will turn out at prepandemic levels, but Binder said he believed many people were clamoring for live performances. The academy’s brief fall season, which opened in September, has attracted several sold-out crowds, he said.“It seems New Yorkers are really hungry to get back into the theater,” Binder said. “I feel very optimistic and excited.” More

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      The Flea Announces New Resident Company and a Focus on Black and Queer Artists

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      The Off Off Broadway theater, which ended programs for emerging artists in December, will return next year with a model that centers the work of underrepresented artists.The Flea, a notable Off Off Broadway company that discontinued its most prominent programs for emerging artists in December, effectively eliminating dozens of positions and provoking the ire of resident artists, announced a new model for its future and a new show. That model, unveiled on Thursday, focuses on supporting the work of underrepresented artists via self-contained, self-programming resident companies.“I’m really excited about it,” said Niegel Smith, the Flea’s artistic director since 2015 and one of the few Black artistic directors at a prominent New York theater. “The artists have total autonomy in making their work, and we’re making a long-term investment in a group of artists we care deeply about.”The first resident company will be the newly formed Fled Collective, composed of many of the members of the Flea’s former nonunion acting company, the Bats. It will have a three-year residency that comes with an unrestricted $10,000 cash grant and $50,000 in space rental credits each year, as well as production and marketing support and resources to develop new work. The company will have complete control over its artistic output and will focus on the work of artists of color and queer people.“Almost all the things we asked for, the Flea added into this partnership,” Dolores Pereira, a leader of the Fled Collective and a former member of the Bats, said in an interview. “It’s been a very collaborative process.”The theater will also begin a multiyear residency program for itinerant artistic companies. The first participant will be Emerge 125, a Black woman-led modern dance troupe that will receive creative, technical and producing support, discounted rental space, and access to office space for at least three years. The theater hopes to eventually support multiple companies in the program each year, Smith said.Pereira said the Fled Collective aims to be able to pay all its artists and plans to rely on the annual $10,000 cash grant and additional fund-raising to do so. The company has no cap on members and currently has at least 50, she said.The theater also restructured its board, with at least one seat now allotted to an artist from a resident company (board members remain volunteers, Smith said). He said the Flea, which has three paid staff members, aims to raise at least $850,000 to support programming and operations in the coming year.Since 2017, the Flea has operated out of a new, three-theater building in TriBeCa whose largest performing space holds about 100 seats. In the last few years, it has staged plays focusing on police brutality, gun violence and other timely issues: “The Fre,” a play by Taylor Mac that is partly a queer love story, was in previews when the pandemic forced it to close.The Flea also faced pushback for its reliance on unpaid artists, which boiled over in June 2020 when a number of the unpaid workers wrote a letter accusing the theater of “racism, sexism, gaslighting, disrespect and abuse.” The Flea then committed to begin paying all of its artists. But in December, it dissolved its programs for emerging artists, citing the financial effects of the pandemic.Through months of having meetings almost weekly, then holding a healing circle, and with the help of a Black woman-led consulting group, CJAM Consulting, the Flea and its artists set out repairing their relationships, Smith said. The theater’s staff also completed anti-oppression and antiracism training.“There definitely was a lot of hurt,” Pereira said. “But now it feels like a new relationship.”The first show of the new season (which is being produced by the Flea, not a resident company) will be “Arden: A Ritual for Love and Liberation,” slated for early 2022. That work was conceived by five artists including Carrie Mae Weems and Diana Oh and draws inspiration from the Forest of Arden from “As You Like It” — reimagined as a place where “queers, feminists and intellectuals dare to create the world that centers their desires.” It will be followed in June by four Juneteenth public art commissions that meld artists’ reflections on the holiday with work that honors Black culture. Additional productions will be announced at a later date, the theater said.Pereira hopes that organizations like the Fled Collective — which focus on empowering underrepresented artists — can serve as a blueprint for other companies, and help artists “reclaim their power.”“The harm done at the Flea is not unique to the Flea, but showcased throughout the theater community,” she said. More

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      ‘Black No More’ to Land Off Broadway This Winter

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      The musical will feature the theatrical debut of the Roots’ Black Thought, who will be writing the music and lyrics and be in a lead role.“Black No More,” a musical with a book by the “12 Years a Slave” screenwriter John Ridley and music and lyrics by the Roots’ Tariq Trotter, a.k.a. Black Thought, will finally get its turn in the spotlight.The musical, originally scheduled to premiere in October 2020, was delayed by the pandemic. The production, from the New Group, will now begin this winter.“Black No More,” based on George S. Schuyler’s 1931 novel of the same name, will play a limited engagement, Jan. 11 through Feb. 27, 2022, at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Opening night is scheduled for Feb. 8.“The music transcends genre,” Trotter said in a phone interview. “But most of it feels like Black music. I feel like this play, we might be able to break it down and use it as an education in the origins and history of Black music.”“I didn’t feel like I was confined; I didn’t feel like I had to stick to music of the day,” he continued. “I felt like we were able to tell the story, and make it in very many ways a period piece — without only writing jazz music.”Schuyler’s satirical story, a piece of the Harlem Renaissance canon, follows the development of Black-No-More, a scientific procedure for turning Black skin white, created by one Dr. Junius Crookman. (Trotter, in a theatrical debut, will also play Crookman in the show.)The protagonist, Max Disher (Brandon Victor Dixon), decides to undergo the procedure after being spurned by a white woman for being Black. In the meantime, Black-No-More gains popularity nationwide. The more Black people make the transition, the more obvious the economic importance of racial segregation becomes.“I thought it was mind blowing,” Trotter said of Schuyler’s book. “I couldn’t believe that something of this caliber of science fiction and wit and just dark humor and something with so many layers was written at the time that it was.”Apart from Trotter and Dixon (“Hamilton”), the cast also includes Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal”), Tamika Lawrence (“Rent”), Theo Stockman (“American Psycho”), Tracy Shayne (“Chicago”) and Walter Bobbie (“Chicago”). Rehearsals begin in November. Additional casting will be announced at a later date.The show will be coming from a Tony-winning team: It will be directed by the New Group’s founding artistic director, Scott Elliott; choreographed by Bill T. Jones; and have music supervision, orchestrations and vocal arrangements by Daryl Waters.“There’s a very serious look that we need to take at history and at the story of this nation and the ways in which it has been told and will be told, moving forward,” Trotter said. “It’s my hope that this work and work like this are going to compel people to continue that examination.” More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Awards Covid Relief Grants

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      The American Rescue Plan Act, with its $87.8 million in funding, will support projects at nearly 300 cultural and educational institutions in the country.The New York Public Library, the USS Constitution Museum in Boston and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Charlottesville, Va., are among more than 300 beneficiaries of new Covid relief grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that are being announced on Monday.The grants, which total $87.8 million and are supported by $135 million in funding allocated to the endowment under the American Rescue Plan Act that was signed into law in March, will provide emergency relief to help offset pandemic-related financial losses at museums, libraries, universities and historical sites in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and Northern Marianas. The endowment distributed the first $52.6 million in June.Adam Wolfson, the endowment’s acting chairman, said in a statement that the grants, which can be as much as $500,000 for organizations and $5 million for grant-making programs that distribute funds to organizations, “will save thousands of jobs in the humanities placed at risk by the pandemic and help bring economic recovery to cultural and educational institutions and those they serve.”The cultural and educational institutions will receive a total of $59 million from the endowment, and 13 grant-making organizations will receive $28.8 million to distribute to humanities projects undertaken by organizations or individuals.The funding, designed to allow organizations to retain and rehire staff, as well as rebuild programs and projects disrupted by the pandemic, will enable the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to develop an African-American oral history project at Monticello, the plantation where the former president lived until his death in 1826; allow the New York Public Library to expand its digitized collection of African American, African and African diasporic materials; and support the creation of hands-on experiences and virtual programming about the Navy ship anchored in Boston at the USS Constitution Museum.In New York, 33 of the state’s cultural organizations and three grant-making programs will receive a total of $16.2 million. Funding will support expanded access to materials by historically underrepresented artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s library collections; the hiring of a videographer at the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation to document the theater’s legacy, with a focus on African and African American culture; and planning for the Museum of the City of New York’s centennial year in 2023. Firelight Media, a nonprofit that supports filmmakers of color, will also receive $2 million for a grant program for 36 Black, Indigenous and people of color filmmakers whose work on documentary projects was disrupted by the pandemic.Elsewhere, the grants will allow both Old North Church in Boston and Christ Church in Philadelphia to investigate their ties to the colonial slave trade, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to design an immersive living history experience to introduce visitors to their history and culture, and the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Neb., to develop tours about the writer whose novels explore the lives of early pioneers there.Around 90 colleges and universities received funding to support their humanities programs and departments: Adjunct faculty at Seattle Central College will work with local tribal representatives to revise history and literature courses to incorporate Indigenous perspectives, the University of Oklahoma Press will develop a new Native American imprint in collaboration with the university’s Native Nations Center and East Tennessee State University will retain and rehire staff to support free online access to materials documenting the history of Southern Appalachia. More

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      ‘I Feel an Abundance’: A Composer Dips Into the Dance World

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      The choreographer Andrea Miller chose Lido Pimienta — “she’s a superstar” — to score her new piece for New York City Ballet. They talk about breaking new ground.“Arrghh, the pressure!” exclaimed the composer Lido Pimienta, after being told that she and the choreographer Andrea Miller were the first all-female team to be commissioned to create a piece for New York City Ballet.When that dance, “sky to hold,” with costumes by Esteban Cortázar, debuts at the company’s fall fashion gala on Thursday night, both women will be breaking new ground. For Miller, a contemporary choreographer who danced with the Batsheva Ensemble in Israel before founding her New York company, Gallim Dance, it will be the first time she has created a piece on pointe. And for Pimienta, a Canadian-Columbian singer-songwriter whose music incorporates Indigenous, Afro-Columbian and electronic elements, “sky to hold” is her first theatrical score.And more ground broken: Pimienta, who has incorporated her voice and songs, which she will perform live, into the score, is also the first female composer of color to create a piece at City Ballet. The score isn’t the company’s usual fare: it includes vallenato, a popular folk music genre from Colombia, and dembow (“heavy rhythm, very groovy,” Pimienta said) from the Dominican Republic, sometimes making unconventional use of classical instruments like the harp.Most of the collaboration between Miller, who lives in New Haven, and Pimienta, who lives in Toronto and London, Ontario, has been done remotely. But last week, Pimienta arrived in New York and at rehearsals.Pimienta (in back) rehearsing “sky to hold” with City Ballet dancers Sara Mearns and Taylor Stanley.Erin Baiano“It’s pretty cool to have her with us, watching and reacting to us as artists,” said the principal dancer Sara Mearns in a phone interview. “Andrea warned us, know the music, don’t rely solely on her voice because she might not do the same thing every show. I love that; you have to be out there, in the moment.”In a video interview, with Miller on a train and Pimienta in a temporary apartment, they discussed the evolution of the score and the choreography, and how Pimienta came to be performing in the work. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did this collaboration come about? Did you know each other?ANDREA MILLER I told a friend, who was working with Lido at the time, that I had a commission from City Ballet and really wanted to take the music seriously. She said, “Stop right there: It’s Lido Pimienta.” I knew Lido’s music, she is a superstar, so my jaw just dropped. My husband and I, and our kids, listen to her music all the time, and it’s so exciting, so inspiring, you want to dance to it with your headphones on.LIDO PIMIENTA It’s funny, when Andrea contacted me, I was working on music for my next album and really thinking about orchestration.It’s my first time doing something this big, and I am always fighting the feeling of impostor syndrome. But I told myself: Even if I have never composed for 66 musicians before, there are 66 channels in the music I produce. If Andrea thinks I’m worthy, it’s fine!Pimienta says, “I told myself: Even if I have never composed for 66 musicians before, there are 66 channels in the music I produce.”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesHow did you begin? Did you discuss specific ideas, images or musical styles?PIMIENTA We were communicating constantly and dreaming together. I kept watching Andrea’s work, which was very inspiring for me. My songs are about me and my lived experience, but for this it also had to be about Andrea and the dancers, so I wanted to create a story with the music that we could all tap into.MILLER It was a specially dark time during the pandemic, and I was thinking of heat, the sun on my face, going dancing with strangers! I was craving the heat of intimacy, of summer, of warmth. I gave Lido a sense of that, and I also let her know which pieces of her music were very inspiring to me.PIMIENTA My job was to translate those ideas and feelings into music. As someone from Colombia, I know that feeling of the sun hitting your face as you lie in a hammock. That gave me an intro; a feeling of heat, but also of tension.I am a singer and I would say my work is about storytelling, so once I had that idea, in my head there was this whole movie happening. I thought, I should tell Andrea, so I sat down and wrote and illustrated the story I saw.It’s about a seed, who falls in love with a storm. To get to light and heat, you go through the storm, and that became the musical thread.Andrea, how did the evolution of the score affect the development of the choreography?MILLER Lido is so generous, and had let me listen without telling me how anything should be. But after receiving the story, I had so much more to say and discover. There was something in her story and drawings that reminded me of both the magical realism of Colombia and the symbolism and mysticism of Chagall, whose work I love.In the ballet, I do have a seed character, Taylor Stanley, and a storm, Sara Mearns, but I’m not worried about it making sense. The shape and feel of it are just there to absorb and take away, like looking at a painting.Pimienta: “I am a singer and I would say my work is about storytelling,”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesLido, how does it feel to see your work given a visual counterpart?PIMIENTA It feels potent, it feels extreme — I feel an abundance. When I see the dance responding to the rhythm, the sound, the melody, it’s very emotional for me. I told Andrea, you might have to get another singer, because I might cry throughout the ballet!Was it always part of the plan that you would sing onstage?PIMIENTA Never in a million years did I think I would be performing. But after Andrea got the first draft of the score, she said, where is your voice? I thought, OK, I’ll be in the pit, and she said, “We’ll put you onstage and give you some steps.” I said NOOOOO, so the compromise is that I’ll be on the side of the stage.Now, of course, I’m totally into the fantasy. I had my fitting yesterday, and I thought, how fabulous am I going to be? Maybe I will walk around the stage!Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThere’s pressure in being the first female composer-choreographer team to create an entirely new work for the company. (Violette Verdy created a dance to an existing score by Mary Jeanne van Appledorn, in 1988.) That’s still noteworthy; are things changing?MILLER There has been important progress, but I also feel sadness for all the talented women who didn’t get to choreograph or compose or get recognition in their time. And I’m always conscious that when we talk about things turning around, we’re not thinking globally.PIMIENTA I am South American, Indigenous, Black, brown, an immigrant — sometimes I feel like I am just those boxes being checked off. So to have this support and confidence is just incredible.It makes me feel sad for this world of classical music and ballet that it’s so remarkable that we are women because in my musical world I mostly work with women. But it’s not just that. Having more people like me is important because there is a class divide, too; people don’t necessarily feel at ease going to a symphony concert or a ballet. It’s a pity. For me, the classical world actually feels very contemporary, very much what is happening now. I want more people to understand how strong and inspiring it can be. More

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      María Mendiola, Half of a Chart-Topping Disco Duo, Dies at 69

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      “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” which she and a fellow ballet dancer recorded under the name Baccara, became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s.MADRID — María Mendiola, a member of the Spanish duo Baccara, whose “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s, died here on Sept. 11. She was 69.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her family. They did not give the exact cause, but said that she had been dealing with a blood deficiency for two decades.Baccara, the duo of Ms. Mendiola and Mayte Mateos, achieved instant fame with “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” the first song they ever recorded, which was released in 1977 and went on to become the most successful disco song by a female duo. It sold about 18 million copies worldwide and topped the charts in Britain, Japan and several other countries.Ms. Mendiola and Ms. Mateos were dancers with the company of Spain’s national television broadcaster when they met. At the suggestion of Ms. Mendiola, who thought that their careers would last longer if they switched to singing, they left to form their own act, originally called Venus, which began performing in 1976. Their debut, at a club in Zaragoza, was short-lived: The management fired them for being “too elegant” — another way of saying that they refused to do lap dances for the club’s patrons.The duo appeared for the first time on television in 1977. Their breakthrough came that same year following a chance encounter with Leon Deane of RCA Records, who saw them perform in a hotel while he was on vacation in the Canary Islands and suggested that they visit RCA’s recording studios in Hamburg.RCA agreed to produce Baccara’s first album and included “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” an English-language song whose rights the label already owned, although it had not yet assigned it to any of its artists.Baccara spent four years with RCA and released four albums, including several other songs that ranked high on the international charts, although none matched the success of their first hit. The duo also toured worldwide, including in the Soviet Union. In performance, Ms. Mendiola always dressed in white and Ms. Mateos in black.But the two singers had a major fallout in 1980 over who should be the lead voice on their song “Sleepy Time Toy.” Ms. Mendiola filed a lawsuit to block the song, which had just been released and had to be withdrawn from the market.The singers continued their feud and stopped talking to each other, and the composer of most of their songs, Rolf Soja, decided to quit working with them. In 1981, Baccara released their final album with RCA, “Bad Boys”; coming at a time when the popularity of disco music was starting to wane, it was not a big success. RCA did not renew Baccara’s recording contract, and the two singers formalized their split.María Eugenia Martínez Mendiola was born on April 4, 1952, in Madrid. Her mother, Lola Mendiola, was a homemaker; her father, Emilio Martínez, was a police official at the Madrid airport.Ms. Mendiola studied at an Italian school in Madrid and trained to be a ballet dancer at the national school there before joining the Spanish state broadcaster’s dance troupe.Even though both singers were Spanish, Baccara represented Luxembourg in the 1978 Eurovision song contest, with a song about a holiday romance called “Parlez-Vous Français?” (Ms. Mendiola spoke five languages, including French.) Luxembourg’s entry finished seventh in the competition.After Baccara broke up, the two singers pursued separate careers. In 1981, Ms. Mendiola formed another duo, New Baccara, with another former ballet dancer, Marisa Pérez. While they never came close to matching the fame of the original Baccara, one of their songs, “Call Me Up,” was a hit in Spain in 1987 and also did well in Germany.Ms. Pérez ended her career in 2008 because of an illness, and a niece, Laura Mendiola, replaced her as Ms. Mendiola’s partner. In 2010, Ms. Mendiola formed a final partnership — Baccara Featuring María Mendiola — with another singer, Cristina Sevilla, who had previously collaborated for six years with Ms. Mateos. Their most recent single, “Gimme Your Love,” was released in 2018.Ms. Sevilla said that she had planned to continue with Ms. Mendiola, but that the pandemic had put their most recent concert projects on hold.“María was a powerful woman, who was always laughing even in the difficult moments,” Ms. Sevilla said. “Apart from being my partner, she was my real friend.”Ms. Mendiola is survived by a son, Jimmy Lim, and three grandchildren.“Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” had an unexpected revival, thanks to a Scottish soccer player, Andrew Considine, who had danced to the song at his bachelor party. Last year, a video of him and other players dancing to the song went viral, which inspired a cover version of the song by a Glasgow rock band, the Fratellis. The song also became an unofficial soccer anthem in Scotland, belted out by fans in the stadium during the recent European championships.While Scotland and soccer put Baccara back in the spotlight, Ms. Mendiola told the British news media that she wasn’t impressed by the Scottish version of the chart-topping song. It was, she said, “not my cup of tea.” More

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      Balanchine, the Teacher: ‘I Pushed Everybody’

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      He used to say he would be remembered more for his teaching than his ballets. The film “In Balanchine’s Classroom” provides a glimpse of that.The setting is a ballet class, and the year is 1974. George Balanchine throws up his arms in exasperation at the sight of a dancer executing a step incorrectly at the barre. We may not be able to see her, and what she’s doing wrong, but we feel how hard Balanchine is taking it. It’s not just his words — “that’s bad” — but the punctuation of his body, emphatic, agile, alive.His hands slap his thighs. He raises an arm like a stiff branch to show how far a leg should be raised. It’s not high; it’s parallel to the floor.“Go enough,” he says, before lifting it a couple of inches. “To go up later. See? ’Cause if you go high, you fall down.”His arm crashes down, hitting his leg. Then his zinger: “Newton’s Law.”The new film “In Balanchine’s Classroom,” directed by Connie Hochman, focuses on the teaching of the groundbreaking choreographer — and how it instilled his dances at New York City Ballet with articulate, musical brilliance. It’s both enthralling and heartbreaking. To love Balanchine is to love this film; to love this film is to love ballet, specifically Balanchine’s kind and his kind of dancer: daring, fast, strong, free, at one with the music. Each is different from the next. That mattered to him.“What do you see?” he says in a voice-over. “You see a person doing it. This person, not the other one. This particular person. This particular leg is lifted or neck is bent. I care about these people, you see.”Balanchine, right, working on “Bayou” in 1952.Sam Falk/The New York TimesBalanchine is irreplaceable. His ballets are still performed, most regularly by City Ballet, the company he formed with Lincoln Kirstein, but are they performed in the same way? It’s that question that makes the film heartbreaking. Each year since Balanchine’s death in 1983, his legacy has become more vulnerable. The pandemic sped that up.In many ways, “In Balanchine’s Classroom” is a call to action, an opportunity to study what he left behind: his teaching, which was the basis for all that followed. He not only revolutionized ballet, but he also made it reflect the feeling of the time while giving it a sense of timelessness.“I feel the sadness too,” said Hochman, a dancer who studied at the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet as a child in the 1960s. “But I like to always remember that Balanchine was such an optimist.”“He sometimes was pulling his hair out trying to get his point across,” she added, “but he just stuck with it because he really believed in his dancers and he loved them so much.”Since Hochman began work on the documentary more than 10 years ago, several of the dancers she interviewed, including Jacques d’Amboise, have died. Esteemed teachers like Suki Schorer, a former principal who started teaching at Balanchine’s request in the early 1960s and continues to do so at the School of American Ballet, are getting older. That the film preserves their voices, and many more, is invaluable. (Hochman is also building an archive of the dozens of dancers that she interviewed for the film. A selection of snippets is available online.)Merrill Ashley, a former principal who appears in the film, said that Balanchine used to say that he would be more remembered for his teaching than for his ballets. “I don’t think that’s happened, but I think it should happen,” she said in an interview. “And I think this will be an important tool to show the world how he taught, and that it was important to him. He was a teacher.”“I like to always remember that Balanchine was such an optimist,” Hochman said.Ernst Hass, via Zeitgeist FilmsAnd he didn’t teach through counts and imagery alone. What this film shows so lucidly is how his philosophy of movement lived inside of his body. Rare archival footage of him teaching and rehearsing show not only his speed and accuracy but the generosity of his own dancing body as he demonstrates what he wants. Balanchine is clear, but he’s not polite. He devours space.One of Hochman’s greatest challenges was to unearth film of Balanchine. The classroom material comes from Jerome Robbins and Christine Redpath, then a dancer in the company and now a repertory director. In diving into the digital collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Hochman combed metadata. If she found something with words like “‘rehearsal’” and “‘Balanchine works with dancer,’” she made a note of it.One chunk of material she found is exceptional: footage from a shoot for a 1981 TV production of “The Spellbound Child,” or “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,” set to Ravel. The rehearsal was filmed, which meant “hours and hours of Balanchine working on that ballet,” Hochman said. “They were making a blueprint of the path of the dancers and the camera angles. It was wonderful.”It’s a fantasy ballet, full of creatures and objects that come to life; Balanchine, who created the first version of it for the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in 1925, revived it in 1975 for City Ballet’s Ravel Festival. In one rehearsal, he asks a dancer if she “could run starting forever.” She isn’t sure what he means — who would be? — so he shows her, lunging on the floor and moving forward and back slightly as if he is about to take off but some invisible force keeps him from doing so.“Something like that,” he says.“What do you see?” Balanchine says in Hochman’s film. “You see a person doing it. This person, not the other one.”Zeitgeist FilmsBalanchine, here and in footage of class, is an energetic force: The film may be blurry or grainy, but his intention is not. “Did you see moths in your life?” he asks a group before taking off in a serpentine swoop as if it were suddenly a moonlit night. Whoosh! He is so fast, so urgent. It’s all the more mesmerizing in the digitized films of him teaching class, as flickering lights render him ghostly, otherworldly.“It’s so magical,” Hochman said. “But when you watch it, I think on a subliminal level, you feel that this just barely captured what happened, because dance evaporates — everything goes, but we just have this little hint. The deterioration actually adds to the meaning of it.”Why would a dancer who never took a class from Balanchine want to make a film about his teaching? Hochman, who went on to become a member of the Pennsylvania Ballet, loved class. And when Pennsylvania Ballet would perform in New York, Schorer, her former teacher, would come to see her dance.“I did a solo in ‘Raymonda Variations’ and Suki came backstage,” Hochman said. “She’s very spirited and very blunt, and she said: ‘It was lovely, Connie, but you don’t get it. It’s about opposition.’ And she started right there in the dressing room trying to get across to me what the variation was about. The Balanchine dancers knew something that I didn’t know. It was like a fog.”Balanchine was a surprise guest at a 1972 School of American Ballet rehearsal, with Hochman and Fernando Bujones.Virginia BrooksShe wanted to get to the bottom of it for herself. And even more important, she wanted to preserve the dancers’ perspectives on Balanchine and his training, and to show how Balanchine cherished his dancers’ individuality.Even if you never had the luxury of seeing the company when he was in charge (I depressingly did not), “In Balanchine’s Classroom” shows that he would stop at nothing to make dancers more precise, stronger, more musical and also more themselves. “I wanted to have a certain way of dancing,” he says in another voice-over. “I want to have clean dancers. So I pushed everybody.”Balanchine studied at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, Russia, starting at age 9. (He left the Soviet Union in 1924.) That classical training, Ashley said, is what he passed onto them. “When people say he’s not teaching classical ballet, that is just ludicrous,” she said. “He is going back to the very essence of what ballet was.”What happens when there is no one left to correct the myths? Ashley is not alone in worrying about his legacy as a teacher and about misconceptions surrounding some of his ideas: He wanted the hand to be rounded with the fingers separated like petals, but sometimes it ends up looking like a claw. And there’s a the notion that he didn’t want his dancers to put down any weight in their heels when they danced. What Balanchine actually wanted was for dancers to feel as though there was nothing more than a piece of onion skin between the heel and the floor. “A piece of paper, that’s it,” Ashley said. “Your heel can touch the floor, but your weight can’t be in the heel.”While City Ballet can still feel like a glorious bouquet — Balanchine used to say his dancers were like flowers that bloomed at different times to create a garden — it’s not hard to imagine that he could transform today’s dancers into something transcendent. “This is how I see it: He chose people with strong personalities that he enjoyed,” Hochman said. “The rigors of ballet technique could not squelch them.”A moment from Balanchine’s “Serenade,” as seen in “In Balanchine’s Classroom.”Zeitgeist FilmsHochman draws out some of those personalities: How did they become so devoted? What was the spark? There’s something particularly affecting in Heather Watts’s story. A free spirit from California, Watts, in an interview, said he used to call her his little flower child. She was something of a problem — “discipline was not my middle name,” she admits in the film — but he wouldn’t give up on her.One day, when she was late for a costume fitting, Balanchine told her it was her last chance. Around that time, she got to perform a lead role in “Serenade,” and after the performance, Balanchine delivered the words that shifted her focus: “You were good.”“In that moment,” Watts says in the film, “he becomes the only voice in my head that can guide me to what I most want.”Hochman shows Watts (and others, too) coaching younger dancers: passing on her knowledge that in a Balanchine ballet there is no such thing as safe. Sometimes Watts finds that the dancers she works with improve but then settle into a place of safety. “You have to keep going,” she said. “And that’s what he did with us.”Dancers today like to use the expression that choreography is in their bodies. To Watts, that means trouble. “You’re not dancing on the edge of a volcano,” she said. “And you’re not hanging on that note like your life depended on it.”She thinks about the role of Dewdrop in “The Nutcracker.” In it, Balanchine challenged her to run as fast as she could, to bend as much as possible and to fly — to not touch the ground.“He dared me not to touch the ground,” Watts said. “That’s exhilarating. That’s an exhilarating dare.” More