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      Movement and Memory: Dance Love and Dance Rejection in Ireland

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

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      ‘Free Your Mind’ Does Little to Challenge the Brain

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

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      The Passion of Adèle Haenel, an Artist of Fierce Political Conviction

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      Haenel, working with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne in “L’Étang,” is trying to “pierce through the surface of things.”The actress Adèle Haenel bristled when asked what drew her to radical art and politics. “The term ‘radical’ is used as a way to discredit protest discourse,” said Haenel, who is best known in the United States for the 2019 art-house hit “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” That was also one of the last feature films she worked on. Since then, she has opted to dramatically alter the course of her life and career.Over the past few years, Haenel, 34, has become one of the most visible and committed faces of the #MeToo movement in France. In May, she wrote an open letter published in the influential French culture weekly Télérama to explain her absence from movie screens: “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession toward sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”She has, she told me, “a political understanding of the world, and my actions are consistent with it as much as possible. Calling someone radical is a way to say ‘She’s hysterical, she’s angry.’ I prefer coherent to radical.”I said that I had used the word in a positive way — to suggest bold choices that steered clear of the artistic mainstream. “I’m not annoyed with you,” Haenel said. “I’m reacting strongly, but it’s just to make myself clear.”Making herself clear is important to Haenel, who has an intense focus and frequently looked to the side as we talked, as if to better organize her thoughts away from an interlocutor’s gaze. She sometimes wrote down points she wanted to come back to later — and she did return to them.We were talking in a house on the bucolic campus of PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, N.Y., where Haenel was appearing in the director-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s show “L’Étang.” The show comes next to New York City for performances at New York Live Arts, Saturday through Monday, as part of the Dance Reflections festival.By American theatrical standards, “L’Étang” (“The Pond”) is pretty close to radical, though. Based on a short play by the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, the dance-theater piece locks Haenel and Julie Shanahan, a longtime member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, in a helix of escalating tension performed in often excruciatingly slow motion, a tempo familiar to those who saw Vienne’s hypnotic “Crowd” last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Haenel takes on multiple roles, most notably that of Fritz, an adolescent who fakes suicide to attract his mother’s attention, and his two siblings; Shanahan plays their parents. The atmosphere is somewhat hallucinatory — Vienne has cited David Lynch among her influences — but it requires consummate precision, both physical and emotional.“We worked a lot on trying to pierce through the surface of things, and that’s not something you can do alone,” Haenel said. “Among the people onstage, we tried to better understand what’s implied, to understand a person’s feelings. You start anticipating when a person is going to stop moving. That’s a kind of communication I feel very strongly with Julie. We don’t need to talk about it endlessly; I just feel how long she’s going to take to do something.”For Vienne, effort is an integral part of the process. “What I do is very technical from a choreographic and interpretive standpoint,” she said in Chatham. “This virtuosity is the result of a long physical and theoretical training — sociology, philosophy and politics are important to understanding what we’re in the process of building, and the formal choices we make as we create the piece.”This rigor and commitment suit Haenel, as she passionately pursues a path in which artistic goals are intertwined with politics and life, a dedication that coalesces in her work with Vienne.The two met in 2018, when they were on the admissions committee for the National Theater of Brittany’s acting school. Haenel participated in a workshop with prospective students led by Vienne. “I loved it,” she said. “The improvisation was related to her show ‘Crowd’ and involved developing slow motion as a new sense, like seeing or hearing, that would allow you to live or experience things differently.”Making herself clear: Haenel, who has retired from the movie business, has collaborated with Vienne on a few projects. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang,’” Haenel said, “is the issue of violence.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe pair further explored that theme in “L’Étang,” which became their first official collaboration and, after a Covid 19-imposed delay, premiered in 2021. Over the course of our conversation, Haenel often circled back to what she referred to as de-hierarchization. In the show, for example, words, movement, music, sound and lighting all contribute to communicating information, feelings and emotions. This undermines the traditional place of text at the top of the theatrical pyramid, and makes us reconsider what carries meaning onstage.And “L’Étang” subverts the usual link between the performers’ body language and the way text is delivered — especially since the voices are often electronically distorted. (Adrien Michel did the sophisticated sound design.)“It’s about the friction between text and subtext,” Haenel said. She brought up an especially intense scene in which she and Shanahan are face to face. They barely move, but the effect is one of terrifying brutality. “Julie actually speaks very calmly, but for us it’s a crazy scene of aggression because there is a negation of the body language,” Haenel said, adding that something they explored with Vienne was dissociation. “We’ve achieved a level where we can have a body that looks almost stoned with a speeded-up voice.”The impact is intended to be as much political as it is aesthetic. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang’ is the issue of violence,” Haenel said, “and this violence is not about saying tough things, but about turning someone else’s speech into silence.”Haenel and Vienne’s partnership has bloomed since 2018. In August, they premiered a new show, “Extra Life,” also starring Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick, at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany. They are also involved with public readings of work by Monique Wittig, the lesbian philosopher and activist who died in 2003 and has been enjoying a revival in France over the past few years. While in New York for “L’Étang,” Haenel is participating in a Wittig event on Wednesday at the Albertine bookstore, which its organizers conceived in collaboration with Vienne.“Talking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation,” said Haenel, who is trying to get new English translations of Wittig’s work off the ground. “I’d love to help her be read again in the United States, to be studied more.”Digging deep with Vienne and championing Wittig are of a piece for Haenel. “I’ve always tried to engage in a thinking process,” she said. “The idea is not so much to become better, but not to become calcified in an antiquated relationship to the world. What’s at stake is not whether that relationship is truer or not — I find the idea of a criteria of truth super-problematic — but whether it’s more alive or not. At least for me.” More

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      In an Opera About Civil War Spies, Dancers Help Drive the Drama

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      Houston Grand Opera, known for innovation, unveils Jake Heggie’s “Intelligence,” directed by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and featuring Urban Bush Women.In a theater at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan one recent afternoon, a rehearsal for the coming opera “Intelligence,” about Civil War-era spies, was about to begin.But as the stage lights came on and the music blared, there were no singers in sight. Instead, six dancers from Urban Bush Women, a dance troupe in Brooklyn, were front and center, locking arms, jumping into the air and improvising movements inspired by African traditions.“I want to see if we can find that physical charge,” Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founder of Urban Bush Women, who is directing and choreographing the opera, told the dancers. “Let it breathe. Let it flow.”“Intelligence,” which opens the season at Houston Grand Opera on Friday, tells the story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a member of an elite Confederate family, who operates a pro-Union spy ring with the help of Mary Jane Bowser, an enslaved woman in her household. The opera, with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Gene Scheer, offers a meditation on the legacy of slavery and the overlooked role of women in the war.“Intelligence,” more than eight years in the making, stands out for another reason. While dance is an afterthought or an embellishment in many operas, it drives this drama, with eight performers from Urban Bush Women sharing the stage with seven singers, including the mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton as Van Lew and the soprano Janai Brugger as Bowser. The dancers serve as a Greek chorus, falling like soldiers on a battlefield or passing secrets along a chain.“It’s a big story, and dancers are an integral part of the storytelling force,” Zollar said. “They’re not just coming in for their number or routine.”The dance-centered approach may be unusual, but it is a natural fit at Houston Grand Opera. For decades the company has been known for innovation, helping birth important 20th-century works like Leonard Bernstein’s “A Quiet Place” (1983) and John Adams’s “Nixon in China” (1987).Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is directing and choreographing “Intelligence” for Houston Grand Opera. “It’s a big story, and dancers are an integral part of the storytelling force,” she said.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesUnder David Gockley, Houston Grand Opera’s general director from 1972 to 2005, the company embarked on an ambitious effort to commission dozens of new works and garnered an international reputation for risk-taking. “Intelligence” is the company’s 75th premiere — and the fourth opera by Heggie to debut in Houston.Khori Dastoor, Houston’s general director and chief executive since 2021, said the company aimed to build on its legacy.“We can be an important opera company, but also maintain our nimbleness and spirit of innovation,” she said. “We aren’t having debates about whether change is good. We’re always thinking about what’s next.”Houston Grand Opera’s agility served it well during the pandemic. While many cultural organizations are still struggling to win back audiences, Houston is in a relatively strong position, with a budget this fiscal year of about $33 million, compared with about $24 million before the pandemic. Ticket sales were up about 8 percent last season, compared with the 2018-19 season, even as subscriptions fell. Donations have been robust; earlier this year, the company secured a $22 million gift, the largest in its history.And audiences remain enthusiastic. The company has been working to draw more Black, Latino and Asian residents by venturing outside the opera house more often. Last season, it partnered with 140 community groups and presented operas at 32 locations across Houston. On a night in late October, “Intelligence” will be performed before an audience of nearly 2,000 primarily low-income high school students.“Most of our audience at Houston Grand Opera does not experience us in the opera house; they experience us in their neighborhood or at a school,” said Patrick Summers, the company’s artistic and music director. “We let people in our own community tell us their stories.”The artistic focus is also shifting, even as classics like Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” remain staples of the repertoire.Last season the company premiered “Another City,” a chamber opera about homelessness in Houston that is based on interviews with residents, inside a nondenominational Christian church and service organization. And in 2021, the company staged the premiere of “The Snowy Day,” an opera based on the 1962 children’s book known as one of the first to prominently feature a Black protagonist.“Every opera company is really a reflection and expression of their city,” said Dastoor, the first woman to serve as general director. “I want our operas to look and feel and sound like Houston.”“Intelligence,” which was originally scheduled to premiere in 2021 but was delayed by the pandemic, highlights neglected voices, with themes that connect to modern-day social issues.Zollar rehearsing with Vincent Thomas, left, Johnson and Medina.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesHeggie got the idea from a docent who approached him during an event at the Smithsonian in Washington and suggested that he look into Van Lew and Bowser for his next opera.“I started Googling their names, and my jaw was just on the floor,” he said. “I had been looking for what the next story would be, and I knew it was right because I felt this fire and this shiver.”Heggie turned to Scheer, a frequent collaborator, for the libretto, and he approached Houston Grand Opera about commissioning the work, encouraged by its history of championing new music.“You can’t guarantee success with a new piece,” he said. “But Houston is willing to give it a chance.”Heggie said he was given a choice early on, based on budget considerations, to feature a dance company or a chorus. He had already written operas with prominent choruses and said he thought that the seven singers of “Intelligence” could together sound like a chorus.He thought dance would be a better fit, he said, a way to fill in some of the “question marks in the storytelling” arising from the limited records of Van Lew and Bowser’s intelligence-gathering operation.“Dancers can explore the emotional world of this — really where there aren’t words but there can be movement that might give us clues,” he said. He wrote a percussive score to match.Heggie reached out to Zollar, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021, who founded Urban Bush Women in 1984 as a way to elevate the stories of women in the African diaspora. She was hesitant at first — she had never directed an opera — but started to see connections between opera and dance. It helped that she was a fan of Heggie’s first opera, “Dead Man Walking,” which premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2000 and opened the Metropolitan Opera season this fall.Heggie and Scheer visited Zollar in Tallahassee, Fla., where she teaches at Florida State University.“They were really interested in the points of view that I would bring to the story, not just as a name attached,” she said. “And the dance. They definitely wanted the dance.”The creative team for “Intelligence” includes the conductor Kwamé Ryan, the set designer Mimi Lien and the costume designer Carlos Soto.In preparation for the opera, Zollar and other members of the team visited the South for research. They toured the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., visited the former site of the Van Lew mansion and walked the Richmond Slave Trail.Zollar said those visits offered a “spiritual grounding” for the opera and a reminder that the country was still grappling with the legacy of slavery. “It’s still vibrating,” she said. “It’s still with us in the air.”In choreographing the opera, she drew inspiration from a variety of sources, including the African writing system called Nsibidi, as well as the Kongo cosmogram, a symbol from the BaKongo belief system in West Central Africa.Zollar said she wanted her dancers to be a spiritual force in the opera: “They are what’s whispering in your ear, what’s around us that we cannot see.” From left, Cook, Gaskins, Medina, Johnson, Ware and Earle.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesZollar said she wanted the dancers of Urban Bush Women to be a spiritual force in the opera; she calls them the “is, was and will,” referring to their ability to speak to the present, past and future. They play with notions of entanglement and secrecy, echoing the themes of the opera.“They are what’s whispering in your ear,” she said, “what’s around us that we cannot see.”At the Guggenheim rehearsal, she encouraged the dancers to draw on their own influences — club dancing, jazz, Cuban music. She worked with Mikaila Ware, a member of Urban Bush Women, to refine a sequence of jumps and falls.“It’s so beautiful,” Zollar said. “Can you give me a little bit more suspension? Can you give me a little bit more air?”A central challenge for Zollar was adjusting to the scale of opera. She has been fine-tuning the dancers’ movements so they resonate at the Brown Theater in Houston, which has more than 2,400 seats.Having the backing of a prominent opera company, she said, allowed her to spend the time necessary to immerse herself in the work. She added she was feeling a mix of “sheer terror and excitement” ahead of the premiere.“Usually, I operate on prayers, spit and gaffer’s tape,” she said. “Now we can fully realize our vision. Now we can create something new.” More

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      On Europe’s Dance Floors, Music Too Fast for Feet

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      Since Europe’s clubs reopened after pandemic lockdowns, young partygoers have been drawn to a hard, driving style of techno. It’s changing the way people dance.It was Friday night, and the clubgoers at the Sputnikhalle nightclub in Münster, Germany, were primed to go hard. Decked out in black clothes and sunglasses, despite the dim light, the young crowd chanted the name of Héctor Oaks, a Spanish D.J., as he began playing his signature muscular, fast techno. Standing on top of the club’s risers, the crowd barely tried to keep up with the beat. Instead of moving their legs, many just oscillated their hips.Neele Hoyer, 21, a college student attending the event, explained that most other German techno fans of her age had developed affinity for such breathless music. “It’s gone totally mainstream,” she said. Dancing to such a fast beat could sometimes be strenuous, she added, but “this is what’s normal to us.”In recent years, Oaks, 32, has become a prominent figure in a broader trend in electronic music. While conventional techno is often played at around 120 to 130 beats per minute, Oaks and other D.J.s often play at 145 or above. The resulting hard-charging, breakneck sound has become the defining sound of Europe’s dance floors since the lockdown phase of the pandemic.Dancing to such a fast beat could sometimes be challenging, said Neele Hoyer, a college student. However, she added, “This is what’s normal to us.”Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesAlthough fast electronic music is not new, its broader dominance is. A data analysis by the German public broadcaster RBB this summer found that the top electronic music tracks of 2022 had much faster tempos than similar songs in 2016. Specialist dance music publications like Mixmag and Beatportal have noted the trend, and many of the buzzy D.J.s of the moment, like Ukraine’s Daria Kolosova and the Polish D.J. VTSS, are known for cranking up the speed.“I see it everywhere,” said Casper Tielrooij, the founder of Dekmantel, a label and annual electronic music festival in Amsterdam. “It’s not only techno, but jungle and trance and drum and bass.” He argued that although the zeitgeist had started to change before Covid, the faster, harder genre of techno had “exploded during the pandemic” and tastes were partly being shaped by young people who had spent their late teens or early twenties in lockdown.Luigi Di Venere, a techno and house D.J. who often plays at Berghain, the Berlin techno club, said that “there’s this idea that they need to speed things up to make up for it, and in case it happens again.” He added that the less “organic” and more “robotic” fast music suited a generation of clubgoers more connected to online culture.While conventional techno is often played at around 120 to 130 beats per minute, many D.J.s in Europe are playing at 145 or above.Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesHe argued that the brisk sound is partly sustained by a kind of feedback loop: As some D.J.s play faster, their co-headliners imitate their style to keep up the energy in the club. “You can’t just be a grandma and go, ‘Tra-la-la, 120 B.P.M.,’” he said, adding that he believed the trend still hasn’t reached its peak.In an interview, Oaks said that he began developing his sound in 2013, by melding traditional techno sets with other genres, including trance. Music played at a higher speed, he said, causes dancers’ hips, rather than their feet, to resonate, fostering a movement more akin to hovering than dancing. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” he added.He recalled that the music he played was an outlier on the European club scene a decade ago. But he partly grew a following at Herrensauna, a Berlin-based queer party known for its harder sound. The Herrensauna D.J.s’ 2018 appearance on the influential Boiler Room platform, which hosts livestreamed sets, was a “turning point” for his kind of music, he said. “After that, you could see everything switched.”Héctor Oaks said an appearance on the streaming platform Boiler Room was a “turning point” for his kind of music.Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesThe style’s success was likely fueled by other developments, including the proliferation of online D.J. streams, like Hör, during the pandemic’s lockdowns. According to Di Venere, because these streams were often shorter than normal club sets, D.J.s were pushed to squeeze in as much energy as possible, and the high-octane results became a staple at Europe’s illegal pandemic-era raves.Since coronavirus-prevention measures were relaxed last year, the sound has now transitioned to the continent’s clubs, including in smaller cities like Münster, which has a population of around 300,000. Oaks is now regularly booked at venues in Ibiza, for instance, which were previously known for their softer, warmer sound.Tahliah Simumba, 25, a Scottish musician who D.J.s as TAAHLIAH, grew her following during the pandemic with pop-inflected sets that often culminated at 170 B.P.M. In a recent phone interview, she said that TikTok, the video app, has been crucial in shaping post-pandemic club culture. The app, which focuses on snappy clips, has a large user base of techno fans, and its short videos favor fast-paced music.She added that, as a younger D.J. raised in an online environment, her sound was largely developed in isolation from the dance floor. “I try not to be held back by hierarchical idea of what D.J.ing is,” she said. “I want to be having as much fun as possible, and what is D.J.ing, after all, other than playing music you like?”Instead of moving their legs, many dancers at the Sputnikhalle just oscillated their hips.Valentin Goppel for The New York Times More

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      In ‘Black Sabbath: the Ballet,’ Heavy Metal, on Pointe

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      Carlos Acosta’s first major commission as the leader of Birmingham Royal Ballet celebrates a local band and the hard-rocking genre it invented.On a recent afternoon, 18 members of Birmingham Royal Ballet spun, pirouetted and leaped across a rehearsal room, with all the grace and skill associated with classical dance. Yet the music blaring out of the sound system wasn’t by Tchaikovsky or Ravel. It was by Black Sabbath.When the dancers finished the sequence to the Ozzy Osbourne-fronted band’s pounding track “Iron Man,” Pontus Lidberg, the lead choreographer for the company’s new production, “Black Sabbath: The Ballet,” nodded approvingly. Then he decided he needed movement more suited to the aggressive music.“Shall we try a stage dive?” he said.In 2020, Birmingham Royal Ballet — based in England’s second most populous, but often overlooked, city — grabbed the British dance world’s attention when it appointed the Cuban ballet star Carlos Acosta as its artistic director. Now, Acosta said, he hoped that the Black Sabbath Ballet, which has its premiere Wednesday, would gain the company global attention, too, as well as help the company find a wider audience at home.A mural celebrating Black Sabbath in their hometown of Birmingham.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesA preview performance on Saturday attracted a mix of Black Sabbath and ballet fans.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesThe second part appears to be working. An eight-show run at Birmingham’s vast Hippodrome theater is sold out, as are runs in London and Plymouth, England.Acosta said he had chosen Black Sabbath for his first major commission at the company because the heavy metal band was one of “Birmingham’s jewels.” Before forming, the group’s four members worked in the city’s factories and abattoirs, but soon after they came together in 1968, they began mixing lyrics influenced by horror movies with hard rock, in a style that was eventually christened heavy metal. Over the following decades, most major metal bands, including Iron Maiden and Metallica, cited Black Sabbath as a key influence, and the band sold over 70 million albums.Acosta noted that Birmingham has a canal bridge named for Black Sabbath, but otherwise, he said, the city hadn’t done enough to celebrate the brand or the genre it created.Birmingham Royal Ballet’s artistic director, Carlos Acosta, said he hoped that “Black Sabbath: The Ballet” would gain the company global attention and also help the company find a wider audience at home.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesThe idea of melding heavy metal music and dancing on pointe was initially met with some confusion, Acosta said, including from Black Sabbath’s members. Tony Iommi, 75, the band’s guitarist, said that when he heard about the project, his first thought was: “Dancing to Sabbath! How’s that going to work?”Still, Iommi agreed to meet Acosta and was won over by the dancer’s enthusiasm for the band and a shared background: Acosta came from a poor part of Havana, Iommi said, while Black Sabbath’s members hailed from rough districts of Birmingham, where street brawls were common and ballet lessons nonexistent.“Carlos had such a belief in what he was doing,” Iommi said.It took Acosta several years to work out how to stage a full-scale ballet to the band’s music. Ben Ratcliffe, writing in The New York Times in 1993, described the ideal Black Sabbath song as “slow and low, loud and long.” Lidberg, the ballet’s lead choreographer, said that the repetitive, angry riffs of the group’s most famous songs, like “War Pigs” and “Paranoid,” at first seemed more suited to contemporary dance.Acosta and Black Sabbath’s guitarist Tommy Iommi collaborated on the show. “Carlos had such a belief in what he was doing,” said Iommi. “The whole band signed it off.”Drew TommonsIt was only with a deep dive into the band’s catalog that the creative team realized there were other songs — including the psychedelic “Planet Caravan” — that had gentler moods. The final ballet will contain orchestral versions of eight Black Sabbath tracks, as well original music by a team of composers. A metal guitarist will play onstage, too.Although the piece is no story ballet, it does feature scenes based on real events, including an industrial accident Iommi suffered in 1965 that was key to the development of Black Sabbath’s sound. The guitarist, then aged 17, was working a shift in a Birmingham sheet metal factory when he caught his right hand in a machine. It tore off the tips of two fingers, leaving bloody bones sticking out.To continue playing, Iommi fashioned new finger tips out of dishwashing soap bottle caps, then slackened his guitar strings to ease the pressure as he pressed down on the fretboard. Those changes helped create Black Sabbath’s — and so metal’s — signature booming sound.Five years later, when Black Sabbath released its self-titled debut album, critics hated it, but fans flocked to the band’s concerts. Black Sabbath made headlines throughout the ’70s for its drug-fuelled antics as much as for its music. (The sleeve notes for the band’s fourth album, recorded in Los Angeles in 1972, thanked the city’s drug dealers.) But even for Black Sabbath, Osbourne went too far, and in 1979, the band’s other members fired him. In the solo career that came after, Osbourne once bit the head off a live bat onstage.The ballet features “head banging, air guitars, and moshing,” according to its lead chief choreographer, Pontus Lidberg. Ellie Smith for The New York TimesLidberg said that he had toyed with including many strange, real-life moments in the ballet, including the bat biting, but, ultimately, the show would be thematic, rather than specific. The first act centers on how Birmingham’s clattering factories influenced heavy metal’s sound, he explained, and the third act is about the band’s fans.Lisa Meyer, a Birmingham music promoter, is credited as the ballet’s “metal curator,” tasked with ensuring authenticity — but it remains to be seen what metal fans will make of it.Barney Greenway, the Birmingham-born lead singer of Napalm Death, a band that pioneered the metal subgenre of grindcore, said he hoped the dancers didn’t rely on “metal stereotypes, like throwing the ‘devil horns,’” a hand gesture often seen at rock concerts. Nonetheless, he said, his interest was piqued.Iommi predicted one subset of fans that would likely appreciate the ballet: Black Sabbath’s original followers from the 1970s. “They wouldn’t want to go to a rock concert anymore,” he said. “Some are in their 80s!” This show would be perfect for them, Iommi added: They can watch it sitting down. More

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      36 Hours in Santiago, Chile: Things to Do and See

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      10 a.m.
      Hike a city-center hill
      Clear a sore head with a sharp ascent up Cerro San Cristóbal, a green islet of native trees and plants in the city center. At 10 a.m., the cable car opens, getting you to the top in under 10 minutes (a hop-on, hop-off day ticket costs 7,900 pesos and includes the funicular railway and shuttle buses within the 1,821-acre Parque Metropolitana). If you’d rather do the hour-long hike, start at the Pedro de Valdivia Norte entrance. As you climb, enjoy panoramic views of the city and mountains, incongruously punctured by the 980-foot, needle-like Gran Torre Santiago, South America’s tallest building. Your reward at the summit is a mote con huesillo (around 2,500 pesos), a refreshing, sweet juice containing a rehydrated peach and a handful of corn, available from the many stands at Estación Cumbre. To descend, take the funicular down the far side, leaving you in Bellavista — and just a block from La Chascona, the poet Pablo Neruda’s quirky home. More

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      Something for Everyone, Even Cannibals, at the Philadelphia Fringe

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      The festival presents a violent Shakespearean interaction with fruit, dance for neurodiverse and neurotypical audiences and showers of (play) money.There is a strange kind of hunger that can overtake you at a fringe festival: so much to devour and so little time to devour it. New York has been starved of a fringe since 2019, a loss even though the fringe that we had struggled to define itself. But an hour and a half away, the Philadelphia Fringe has endured. Originally a showier event, with a goal of attracting established, out-of-town stars, it has since refocused on local artists.During a recent weekend at the festival, which runs through Sunday, I swallowed an entirely reasonable number of shows, each of which felt appropriately fringe-y, flowing comfortably beyond the mainstream. Built for small, temporary stages, these shows validate fringe festivals as places of experiment, milieus to test and explore. Of the four that I saw, three were about appetite and the mess that appetite can make. And the last was less about hunger than it was about feeding its spectators, creating a nurturing, restful space for all.“Citrus Andronicus” is classic fringe — a cute idea, overstretched. A collision of toy theater, object theater and Elizabethan drama, it restages “Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare’s bloodiest play (which is saying something), using much of the produce section. In a space bedecked in a worrying amount of plastic sheeting, a college professor (Madeleine Claire Garcia) attempts to give a lecture entitled “Blistering Viscera: Revenge, Violent Tribalism, and the Subjugation of the Feminine in ‘Titus Andronicus’.” But she is repeatedly interrupted by two porters (Eli Lynn and Peter Smith), who are delivering boxes of fruit for the conference’s banquet. The professor can’t shush them, so she recruits them, replacing her lecture with a high-potassium plot summary. Many bananas are sacrificed.I’m enough of a weirdo that I might have preferred the original lecture. While the clowning, under the direction of Charlotte Northeast, is nimble, there are ultimately only so many things a person can legally do with a tangerine. Eventually, the professor also becomes infected by the pulpy, pithy madness, emphasizing how the desire for revenge, for violence, can poison us all. A few further ideas are introduced (the lights blink whenever the name of Aaron, one of Shakespeare’s rare Black characters, is spoken), but ultimately unexplored.Courtney Henry in “Rhythm Bath,” a performance installation designed for both neurotypical and neurodiverse audiences.Wide Eyed Studios“Citrus Andronicus” is presented by the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, which has a mandate to make classical work more accessible. But bold, bloody “Titus” isn’t especially difficult and the goofy idea, however playfully executed, can’t sustain a full-length show. But what riches for the compost bin!Riches also animate “Make Bank,” a site-specific performance at Manufacturers’ National Bank. Audience members use an item plucked from a junk drawer to gain entry to the space, and that item can then be bartered for shells, corn husks, trinkets and yard sale detritus. A Mesopotamian spice bazaar is set up in one corner, a Dutch tulip market in another; a disembodied teller appears in a dark room; and a Meso-American deity resides next to the vault. Divided into groups, attendees assemble the items they have collected — by barter, gift or theft — into totemic sculptures while burlesque performers populate the space. One is (under)dressed as a Dutch maiden with windmill pasties, the other as a cow, presumably a cash cow. There is also a singalong to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”If “Citrus Andronicus” suffers from too few ideas, “Make Bank,” directed by Terry Guerin, produced by Meg Saligman and devised by Dylan Smythe and Lillian Mae Ransijn, has perhaps too many, though these also entail themes of greed and waste. The atmosphere, however unfocused, is one of excess. Expect to be showered in paper money. The money is fake. The sense of abundance is real.So ostensibly are the facts of the effusive, floral “Rose: You Are Who You Eat.” John Jarboe, who uses she/her pronouns, begins this autobiographical solo show by gnawing fried chicken from a bucket. Then she confesses to a murder. Apparently, she absorbed a twin in utero, a phenomenon known as vanishing twin syndrome. But that twin, who would have been named Rose had she lived, didn’t really vanish. This piece, which Jarboe describes as a “support group for gender cannibals,” is a reckoning with identity and queerness.Jarboe has long believed that she ate Rose, but as she sings toward the end of the show, it “Turns out Rose ate me.”Produced by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, with Emily Schreiner, as part of a rolling world premiere, and directed by MK Tuomanen, “Rose” is still in bud. A show about gender cannibals, adorned by tender, frisky music composed and performed by Emily Bate, Daniel de Jesús, Pax Ressler, Be Steadwell and Jarboe seems original enough. And Jarboe is an appealing performer. But as she acknowledges, the coming-out story is already a cliché. While certain moments are wholly unique, like Jarboe’s repurposing of a hockey jersey as a ball gown, others borrow overtly from artists like John Cameron Mitchell and Taylor Mac. The show seems to end twice before it actually concludes with a call-and-response section, which is then followed by a medley of covers: “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and “Kiss From a Rose.” Some love, some pruning, and “Rose” should bloom.After so much fruit, money and flowers, so much wanting, so much appetite, it was restful to retreat into “Rhythm Bath.” A performance installation created by the choreographer Susan Marshall and the set designer Mimi Lien in conjunction with Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities, the dance piece is staged on an upper floor of Christ Church Neighborhood House. The ceiling is covered in white parachute fabric, which breathes in and out. Through holes in the fabric, glimpses of feathery, cobweb-like material can be seen, some of it lit with fiber optic filaments.The afternoon show I attended was a relaxed performance, as are all of their performances, designed for both neurotypical and neurodiverse audiences. The seating was flexible, the lighting (Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) subdued and the sound (Dan Trueman and Jason Treuting, who also composed the music) kept to a reasonable volume. Spectators who found it too much could retreat to a darker room with a giant bean bag. That afternoon, as 10 dancers performed elegant versions of pedestrian movement — walking, standing, leaning — I saw two young women in the audience stand up and join in. Another spectator faced the wall. A fourth watched while wearing headphones and dark glasses. All seemed to be enjoying themselves.In contrast with the excesses of the other shows, this performance was simple, even restrained. The mood was meditative. It was, in its quiet way, the most nourishing thing I saw.Philadelphia FringeThrough Sept. 24 at sites around the city; phillyfringe.org. More