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      How Did Melanie’s ’Brand New Key” Hit No. 1?

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      Melanie’s “Brand New Key” is just one of many weird songs that somehow topped the Billboard charts.When Melanie’s “Brand New Key” debuted in 1971, some people were confused. What did the singer, who died on Tuesday at 76, mean when she sang about having a brand-new pair of roller skates and someone else having a brand-new key?Melanie told interviewers that she wrote the song in 15 minutes, after ending a 27-day fast, and that it was intended to be cute. The folk singer said that it did not have a deeper meaning, though many thought its playful lyrics about biking and roller skating were really about sex (“Don’t go too fast but I go pretty far”). It sounded strange, like a song out of time — Melanie said she intended it to hearken to the 1930s — sung with what could now be called a warbling “indie girl voice.” And it somehow hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.The song has lingered in pop culture, from a lip sync battle between Jimmy Fallon and Melissa McCarthy to a post-apocalyptic DJ playing it endlessly on “Kids in the Hall.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Movies

      New (and Old) Moves for a Choreographer to Hip Hop’s Stars

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      For Fatima Robinson, choreographing “The Color Purple” was far more than a job. It was a callback to her youth, before becoming known for her pop work.The choreographer Fatima Robinson made her name, at 21, with an epic Michael Jackson video. Two decades later, she orchestrated the moves for 1,000 performers at a Super Bowl halftime show. Then she rose to become Beyoncé’s director of choreography.But among the most meaningful work of her career has boiled down to a series of handclaps.When Robinson was growing up in Los Angeles, her mother took her and her two younger sisters to see “The Color Purple” — a family milestone. After that, “I saw the movie probably every year of my life,” she said. The girls were inspired by the onscreen sisters’ patty-cake-style routine; they made the claps their own and share it to this day, often in emoji form. If “we’re getting on each other’s nerves,” Robinson said, it’s a symbol of peace. “We know that’s, like, that special love that we have for each other.”Now, as the choreographer for the latest version of “The Color Purple,” a movie musical directed by Blitz Bazawule, she helped devise the onscreen clapping pattern for the young siblings Celie and Nettie. “It was sooo special,” Robinson said. “That sister love in this movie is so what I have with my sisters.”“The Color Purple,” based on the Broadway musical of Alice Walker’s seminal Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, arrives with a mantle of heavyweight backers and performers, including the producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg and the stars Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, Taraji P. Henson and Colman Domingo. In Robinson, 52, they added perhaps the most elevated hip-hop and R&B choreographer working today, who has worked in music, TV, film and live events, including Super Bowl halftime shows in 2022 and 2011. (She was also recently named a creative director for the Knicks City Dancers.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      An Opera Superfan’s Surprise Gift: $1.7 Million for the Arts

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      Lois Kirschenbaum, who died in 2021, made the donations to cultural groups from unexpectedly large life savings.When Lois Kirschenbaum, a cultural aficionado who was a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera for more than half a century, died in 2021 at 88, star singers gave tributes and fellow fans offered remembrances.But that was not the end of Kirschenbaum’s relationship with the arts.Though even her closest friends didn’t know, Kirschenbaum, a former switchboard operator who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, had made plans to give away a large share of her life savings — some $1.7 million — to cultural groups upon her death. After years of legal proceedings, donations of $215,000 apiece have started to arrive, surprising groups like New York City Opera, American Ballet Theater, Carnegie Hall and the Public Theater.“I was just astonished,” said John Hauser, the president of the George and Nora London Foundation for Singers, one of the recipients. “I had no idea that she had that kind of money.”Kirschenbaum had no spouse, siblings or children, and lived a no-frills lifestyle, working as a switchboard operator for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organization, until her retirement in 2004. On most nights, she traveled by bus and subway to Lincoln Center, where she secured free or cheap tickets just before performances began.Kirschenbaum was known to rush to collect autographs after performances at the Metropolitan Opera.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesElena Villafane, a lawyer for the executor of the estate, said that Kirschenbaum had “an incredibly frugal, Depression-era lifestyle.” Her father was an optometrist who died in 1990, Villafane said; his first and second wives died before him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      In a Land of Primary Colors, Home Is Where the Bounce House Is

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      As part of Under the Radar, Nile Harris resurrects his play that weaves together text, sound, minstrelsy and dance to explore the American experience.What makes a house a home? And what constitutes an American home? Planted dead center on the stage in “This House Is Not a Home,” a slippery, ever-shifting work by Nile Harris, is a house — a bounce house. But it’s more than an inflatable plaything.It is at the heart of a web of ideas that touch on national politics, arts funding and a local New York scene — the tiny slice of Lower Manhattan known as Dimes Square. You get a sense of where Harris stands on that bit of geography: In “This House,” there is a fight. Over a vape.Beginning Saturday as part of the Under the Radar festival, “This House” — sad and boisterous, dark yet at times blisteringly funny — will be reprised at Abrons Arts Center, where it was first presented with Ping Chong and Company last summer. (Harris is a member of Ping Chong’s artistic leadership team.)A provocative look at politics and race, “This House” is a critique of the American experience that explores the intersections of modern-day liberalism, the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and well-meaning nonprofit arts institutions. It gets raucous. Will the bounce house survive this insurrection? The idea for what became the work began in the summer of 2020 when Harris, 28, and his friend, the interdisciplinary artist Trevor Bazile, started to fantasize about a bounce house. It reminded them of the Capitol Building, Harris said, but it could also represent any institution — and then morph back into “a preadolescent meme.”Harris started to envision a series of happenings that might incorporate a bounce house: “Should we pull up to a George Floyd protest with a bounce castle,” he said of one idea, “and have people jump for Black lives?”The bounce house idea was placed on the back burner until 2021, when Bazile became the director of New People’s Cinema Club, a New York film festival funded in part by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a financial supporter of Trump-aligned candidates. “Trevor had a very clear point of view around, like, it doesn’t matter the hand that feeds you — it’s all bad,” Harris recalled. “There’s no clean money.”“With this Peter Thiel money,” he added, “we bought a bounce castle because that was on our forever list to do.”Throughout “This House,” Harris appears in disguises, including Woody from “Toy Story” and a gingerbread minstrel character he calls Timmy.Elias Williams for The New York TimesAs part of the film festival that year, Harris and Bazile hosted a party featuring a bounce house in a Dimes Square loft. But just two days after the festival closed, Bazile, who was 25, died suddenly. (Harris declined to specify a cause.) While “This House” is a running commentary — sonic, spoken, choreographic — on many subjects, it is, at its core, a meditation on grief.It’s also an extension of a manifesto, released by Harris and Bazile as a Google document, about a fictional board meeting. The manifesto, a labyrinth of hyperlinks, poses questions like: “Do you like Black voices or just the voices that say what you want to hear?” “Will you wear your Telfar bag to the race war?”Throughout “This House,” Harris appears in disguises, including Woody from “Toy Story” and a gingerbread minstrel character he calls Timmy, whose face is fixed in a smile. “Maybe there’s some comment there about Blackness and Black life, but it’s a smiling face,” he said. “It’s approachable.”Dyer Rhoads, the production’s dramaturg and set designer, has created a vibrant set that brings to life a universe of primary colors, where paintings, plastic and, of course, the bounce house, function as a larger-than-life diorama. But because “This House” reacts to the events of the moment, it will not be the same show it was last summer.“I always say it’s 60 percent set and 40 percent improvised,” Harris said of the show, which is informed by world events and uses improvisation, including audience interactions. “It responds to current affairs, it responds to the conditions that it’s put in. And we are in a very different state in the world than we were six months ago.”Improvisation means everything to Harris, who added, “How I understand being a moving and performing body is responding to what is presently happening in the room.”“This House” features the performance artist Crackhead Barney employing her daring crowd work; and the dancer Malcolm-x Betts, whose unfurling, out-of-body improvisations lend a vivid vulnerability to an increasingly fractious stage world. To Harris, the work is a play. But the “the play,” he said, “is the people. The play is about me, Malcolm and Barney and our thoughts on the world.”Harris, born and raised in Miami, was a serious theater student growing up. He attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, along with Rhoads, and graduated with a B.F.A. in acting. “I’m an actor for better or worse,” he said. “I don’t know what I am.”Actually, you get the feeling that he does know — or at least that through making art, he’s figuring it out. Harris has created shows since his teenage years; after moving to New York in 2017, he discovered the experimental downtown dance world and took a formative workshop with the choreographer Sidra Bell. “It really cracked open my brain,” he said of her improvisatory approach. “If I have any dance education, that is a point of reference.”“A lot of how I understand my relationship to audience is through the notion of clowning,” Harris said. “There may be laughter, there may be costuming, there’s physicality.”Elias Williams for The New York TimesHe studied clowning, too: “A lot of how I understand my relationship to audience is through the notion of clowning,” he said. “There may be laughter, there may be costuming, there’s physicality.”Creating the physical approach for Betts’s movement in “This House” began when the pair spoke about childhood memories; Betts said that it was as if the bounce house represented the ghosts of children.Betts’s improvisations are rooted in his movement background — Black club house dancing, vogueing, West African dance. “The dancing is very physical,” he said. “The memories are moving through me, and memory can also trigger you to go into a space that you don’t expect to go. It’s triggering in a way that enables something new to unlock.”Even as Harris calls “This House” a play or even an opera — the sound design is an important component, especially the way that vocal amplification is incorporated — he thinks a lot about language in the body. He doesn’t consider himself a dancer, though he has performed as one, and dance is a continuing practice for him, he said, “inside of my greater theatrical concerns and convictions.”“I love dancers,” he said. “I hang out with dancers, I’m in that community of people. There’s just something about that community of artists that is really just moving. If you can commit to valuing impermeable things that barely exist and dedicating your whole heart to it? It’s so not shiny, it’s so not sexy. It’s just, like, that commitment is work. And that feels really important.”That also relates to something Rhoads, the dramaturg, said about “This House”: “In a lot of ways, it’s ended up being about the risks we take for art.”And Harris is open to risks. Big ones. “Do you want to know my dream?” he said. “I really want to create and direct a pop star concert. It’s not narrative — it’s associative, it’s sound based, it’s image based and it’s dancing.”He said he was thinking of a Doja Cat — someone who would get him, someone who would appreciate his affinity for creating interludes with weird little meme jokes. “I want to work with scale,” Harris said. “There’s no opportunities for emerging artists or an artist in New York to work with scale. By hell or high water, I will.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Priscilla,’ Olivia Rodrigo and the Year of Girlhood and Longing

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      When she was just 14, Priscilla Beaulieu, an Air Force brat stationed with her family in Germany, met one of the planet’s biggest pop stars. The pair formed a connection, and when it was time to temporarily part ways, he left her with a keepsake.That gift, an Army issue jacket from Elvis Presley, is an important symbol in the movie “Priscilla,” hanging from her bedroom wall like a poster ripped from a magazine. The film’s director, Sofia Coppola, seems to be making a point about the gaping age gap between teenager and heartthrob (24 and a year-plus into military service), but also about the universality of a girl’s crush — relatable, all-consuming.In class soon after, in a scene that reminded me of Britney Spears anxiously counting down the seconds until the bell in the “ … Baby One More Time” video, a daydreaming Priscilla fidgets at her desk. You can almost see the cartoon hearts floating above her head as Coppola offers this unsettling portrait of an adolescent drawn into an age-inappropriate relationship. But her knowing depiction of girlhood longing stayed with me, too. Because whether you were a teenage girl in 1959 or in 2023, that specific ache — in love, or what you think is love — will probably feel familiar.I noticed that pang — the kind that comes from badly wanting something seemingly just out of reach — surfacing in our entertainments this year: full-throated and kicking down doors on “Guts,” Olivia Rodrigo’s hilarious, if wrenching, relationship album; simmering to a boil in “Swarm,” the series about an obsessed fan with a gnawing hunger; and yearning for validation in “Don’t Think, Dear,” a dancer’s devastating memoir of a ballet career that stalled at the barre. Girls giving voice to their pain even when they couldn’t fully make sense of it. Girls spilling their guts.The Cruel Tutelage of Alice Robb“Ballet had given me a way to be girl,” a “specific template,” Alice Robb writes in “Don’t Think, Dear.”To middle school, she wears her hair scraped into a bun, a leotard instead of a bra. She trains at the New York City Ballet’s prestigious school. At 12, though, struggling to keep up, she’s expelled after three years of study. The rejection is unshakable, and the sting goes on for decades. Desperate for a do-over that never comes, she enrolls in less prominent dance academies, where she’s heartbroken to encounter girls with flat feet and messy buns. She stalks old classmates on social media, and for 15 years, keeps up a dutiful stretching routine that she hopes will maintain the outlines of a ballet body, one that telegraphs her as “special.”“The dream of being a ballerina begins with the dream of being beautiful,” Robb writes. Anyone who has ever pulled on a tutu, this pink puff of fabric imbued with something indescribably feminine, is probably nodding at this assessment of ballet’s initial pull. American girlhood is practically wrapped in blush tones, with ballet as a kind of shared rite. It’s there at every stage: in the aspirant of the popular “Angelina Ballerina” children’s books and in the nostalgic young enthusiasts who’ve recently given the art form’s aesthetics a name, balletcore, playing dress-up with the uniform. But for those like Robb who see ballet not as a phase, but a pursuit, letting go is hard. To fail at ballet is to fail at being a girl.That’s not true, of course. But wounds sustained in girlhood, when you’re not yet emotionally equipped to mend them, tend to linger. With each page, I rooted for Robb, now a journalist in her 30s, to find the position that would let her plant her feet back on the ground.Alice Robb at Steps in Manhattan.Laurel Golio for The New York TimesAnd I thought of an Olivia Rodrigo lyric: “I bought all the clothes that they told me to buy/I chased some dumb ideal my whole [expletive] life.” That’s how Rodrigo, the 20-year-old pop supernova, deals with the anguish of rejection on her sophomore album, “Guts”: She thrashes.Rodrigo realizes that, in its first throes, “Love Is Embarrassing.” (It is.) On that throbbing track, she admits the hold “some weird second-string loser” has on her. On another, “Get Him Back,” she jokingly lays out a conflicted revenge plot as the bridge drops to a whisper: “I wanna kiss his face, with an uppercut,” she confesses. “I wanna meet his mom — just to tell her her son sucks.” She’s cataloging her humiliations, but she’s laughing at them, too.She refuses to wallow for long, and I’m convinced this is partly what gives the album its buoyancy. (It’s an approach that, in hindsight, would have given me more relief than the semester I spent writing love-stricken poetry on tiny notecards at my university’s performing arts library after a brutal breakup.)Headfirst Into HeartbreakGirlhood, strictly marked in years, comes to a close in the waning years of adolescence. But for some, I think this period calls for a less tidy metric, one that makes room for a soft transition into late girlhood, or adolescence — with all of its intensifying feeling — and then post-girlhood, with its own round of heartbreaks. Lauryn Hill was 23 in 1998 when she released a relationship album for the ages. “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” multiplatinum and Grammy-winning, tracked her recovery from a series of rumored breaks: with her hip-hop trio, the Fugees, and one of her bandmates, Wyclef Jean, with whom she was said to have shared a stormy romance. For a generation of us, it was as if she’d found our own love letters and read each one out loud.This fall, reunited with her bandmates, the girl from South Orange, N.J., returned to the stage to breathe new life into that indelible collection. On opening night of a short-lived tour, I watched from the Prudential Center in nearby Newark as Hill wailed the exasperated plea from “Ex-Factor”: “No matter how I think we grow, you always seem to let me know it ain’t working.” It had been 25 years since Hill’s “Miseducation”; a quarter-century for perspective, love and motherhood to right-size once outsize feelings. She sang the words she’d written all those years ago, but this time her voice was tinged with unmistakable joy.Lauryn Hill on the 25th anniversary of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” tour.Mathew Tsang/Getty ImagesThere is longing in the fictional world of “Swarm,” but little joy. Dre (Dominique Fishback), a socially awkward 20-something, spends her days posting online tributes dedicated to her favorite artist, a Beyoncé stand-in named Ni’Jah.“I think the second she sees me, she’d know how we’re connected,” Dre tells her roommate.Dre is a “Killer Bee,” one of a hive of obsessive fans, and she will live up to the name: She soon sets off on a violent cross-country spree, picking off Ni’Jah’s unsuspecting online critics. After each kill, famished, Dre devours anything she can get her hands on — a leftover apple pie, a sandwich. It becomes clear that she’s not hungry at all; what she’s starved for — longing for — is connection. In that sense, she’s not so different from the scores of women and girls who packed concert stadiums this past summer, adorned in sparkling silver or baring arms stacked with friendship bracelets.A Girl Walks Into Her KitchenWhile I contemplated girlhood and longing this year, I was also cheered by how girls have prioritized their own delight. My favorite entry in that category was Girl Dinner, a TikTok trend that transformed a simple meal, meant to be enjoyed solo, into a satisfying feast — “a bag of popcorn, a glass of wine, some bread, some cheese and a hunk of chocolate,” as Jessica Roy put it in The New York Times this summer.The idea was to put convenience first, ostensibly leaving more time and space for the pleasures that elaborate meal prep and cleanup might not. The concept of Girl Dinner, which also embraces the internet appetite for giving ordinary things a fresh polish by renaming them, felt like an antidote to longing. A reminder that sometimes being full, all on your own, can be just as fulfilling. More

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      in Theater

      Best Arts Photos of 2023

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      Peter Fisher for The New York Times2023 in Retrospect: 59 Photographs That Defined the Year in ArtsDeadheads, ballerinas and Mick Jagger: As 2023 winds down, revisit a memorable handful of the thousands of images commissioned by our photo editors that capture the year in culture.Marysa Greenawalt More

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      in Movies

      Sofia Boutella Talks ‘Rebel Moon’ and Madonna

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      Sofia Boutella knows what it’s like to lose a home.Born and raised in Algeria, Boutella was 10 when she and her family fled to Paris after Algeria descended into civil war.Now 41, she drew on that formative experience for Zack Snyder’s sci-fi epic “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire” as Kora, a mysterious woman who has been uprooted from her former life and must create a new one in a village on a distant moon. Like Kora, Boutella understands what such a journey takes from you and what it gives in return.“There is something that happens when you remove yourself from your country of origin that is very powerful,” Boutella said. “I don’t feel a sense of belonging to a territory. But at the same time, I feel such a strong sense of being part of this earth and a connection to it as a whole.”Before turning to acting, Boutella danced — attending ballet class in Algiers when she was a girl and, finding a semblance of stability when she continued with ballet as well as jazz, contemporary and hip-hop in France. She also tried rhythmic gymnastics and spent a year on her new country’s national team.When she was 19, she became a dancer for a Nike Women’s campaign, crisscrossing the globe, and soon landed a gig as a stage dancer for Madonna, a life-changing experience that opened the door for work with Rihanna and Usher.“I was a tomboy when she met me,” Boutella said of Madonna. “She gave me my first pair of heels.”Boutella as Kora, the mysterious woman at the heart of “Rebel Moon.”Clay Enos/NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      The Artists We Lost in 2023, in Their Words

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      The many creative people who died this year built their wisdom over lives generously long or much too short, through times of peace and periods of conflict. Their ideas, perspectives and humanity helped shape our own: in language spoken, written or left unsaid; in notes hit, lines delivered, boundaries pushed. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their voices.“I never considered giving up on my dreams. You could say I had an invincible optimism.”— Tina Turner, musician, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)“Hang on to your fantasies, whatever they are and however dimly you may hear them, because that’s what you’re worth.”— David Del Tredici, composer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Ever since I can remember, I have danced for the sheer joy of moving.”— Rena Gluck, dancer and choreographer, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“The stage is not magic for me. It never was. I always felt the audience was waiting to see that first drop of blood.”— Lynn Seymour, dancer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Paul Reubens.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Most questions that are asked of me about Pee-wee Herman I don’t have a clue on. I’ve always been very careful not to dissect it too much for myself.”— Paul Reubens, actor, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“If you know your voice really well, if you’ve become friends with your vocal apparatus, you know which roles you can sing and which you shouldn’t even touch.”— Grace Bumbry, opera singer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Actors should approach an audition (and indeed, their careers) with the firm belief that they have something to offer that is unique. Treasure who you are and what you bring to the audition.”— Joanna Merlin, actress, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Glenda Jackson.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“If I have my health and strength, I’m going to be the most appalling old lady. I’m going to boss everyone about, make people stand up for me when I come into a room, and generally capitalize on all the hypocrisy that society shows towards the old.”— Glenda Jackson, actress and politician, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t see myself as a pioneer. I see myself as a working guy and that’s all, and that is enough.”— William Friedkin, filmmaker, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“Some people, every day you get up and chop wood, and some people write songs.”— Robbie Robertson, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I wasn’t brought up in Hollywood. I was brought up in a kibbutz.”— Topol, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Jimmy Buffett.Michael Putland/Getty Images“I don’t play at my audience. I play for my audience.”— Jimmy Buffett, musician, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)“I’m still not a natural in front of people. I’m shy. I’m a hermit. But I’m learning a little more.”— Andre Braugher, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)“Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”— Louise Glück, poet, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I paint because I believe it’s the best way that I can pass my time as a human being. I paint for myself. I paint for my wife. And I paint for anybody that’s willing to look at it.”— Brice Marden, artist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“Writing is about generosity, passing on to other people what you’ve had the misfortune of having to find out for yourself.”— Fay Weldon, author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Ryuichi Sakamoto.Ian Dickson/Redferns, via Getty Images“I went to see one of those pianos drowned in tsunami water near Fukushima, and recorded it. Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought, ‘Nature tuned it.’”— Ryuichi Sakamoto, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“I hate everything that is natural, and I love the artificial.”— Vera Molnar, artist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“A roof could be a roof, but it also could be a little garden.”— Rafael Viñoly, architect, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“True architecture is life.”— Balkrishna Doshi, architect, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)Sinead O’Connor.Duane Braley/Star Tribune, via Getty Images“Words are dreadfully powerful, and words uttered are 10 times more powerful. The spoken word is the science on which the entire universe is built.”— Sinead O’Connor, musician, born 1966 (Read the obituary.)“Before I can put anything in the world, I have to wait at least a couple of years and edit them. Nothing is going out that hasn’t been edited a dozen times.”— Robert Irwin, artist, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“An editor is a reader who edits.”— Robert Gottlieb, editor and author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Matthew Perry.Reisig & Taylor/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“Sometimes I think I went through the addiction, alcoholism and fame all to be doing what I’m doing right now, which is helping people.”— Matthew Perry, actor, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)“It was the period of apartheid. You know, it was very hard, very difficult and very painful — and many a time I felt, ‘Shall I continue with this life or shall I go on?’ But I continued. I wanted to dance.”— Johaar Mosaval, dancer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“God would like us to be joyful / Even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.” (“Fiddler on the Roof”)— Sheldon Harnick, lyricist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“I remember back in the day, saying it’s so cool that the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie are still played. That’s what we wanted hip-hop to be.”— David Jolicoeur, musician, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)“Civilization cannot last or advance without culture.”— Ahmad Jamal, musician, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Harry Belafonte. Phil Burchman/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die.”— Harry Belafonte, singer and actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“Some people say to artists that they should change. Change what? It’s like saying, ‘Why don’t you walk differently or talk differently?’ I can’t change my voice. That’s the way I am.”— Fernando Botero, artist, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”— André Watts, pianist, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)Renata Scotto.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Singing isn’t my whole life.”— Renata Scotto, opera singer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate.”— Frances Sternhagen, actress, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)David Crosby.Mick Gold/Redferns, via Getty Images“I don’t know if I’ve found my way, but I do know I feel happy.”— David Crosby, musician, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)“I’m very abstract. Once it becomes narrative, it’s all over. Let the audience decide what it’s about.”— Rudy Perez, choreographer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t have a driven desire actually to be in the act of writing. But my response to any form of excitement about reading is to want to write.”— A.S. Byatt, author, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t think I ever wrote music to react to other music — I really had a very strong need to express myself.”— Kaija Saariaho, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)Richard Roundtree.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“Narrow-mindedness is alien to me.”— Richard Roundtree, actor, born 1942, though some sources say 1937 (Read the obituary.)“The reason I’ve been able to dance for so long is absolute willpower.”— Gus Solomons Jr., dancer and choreographer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“My practice is a resistance to the glamorous art object.”— Phyllida Barlow, artist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.”— Milan Kundera, author, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Mary Quant.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“The most extreme fashion should be very, very cheap. First, because only the young are daring enough to wear it; second, because the young look better in it; and third, because if it’s extreme enough, it shouldn’t last.”— Mary Quant, fashion designer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)“I spontaneously enter the unknown.”— Vivan Sundaram, artist, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“The goal is to wander, wander through the unknown in search of the unknown, all the while leaving your mark.”— Richard Hunt, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Angus Cloud.Pat Martin for The New York Times“Style is how you hold yourself.”— Angus Cloud, actor, born 1998 (Read the obituary.)“I have an aura.”— Barry Humphries, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“Intensity is not something I try to do. It’s just kind of the way that I am.”— Lance Reddick, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)Alan Arkin.Jerry Mosey/Associated Press“There was a time when I had so little sense of myself that getting out of my skin and being anybody else was a sigh of relief. But I kind of like myself now, a lot of the times.”— Alan Arkin, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“I have always thought of myself as a kind of vessel through which the work might flow.”— Valda Setterfield, dancer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”— Cormac McCarthy, author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Elliott Erwitt.Steven Siewert/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“In general, I don’t think too much. I certainly don’t use those funny words museum people and art critics like.”— Elliott Erwitt, photographer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its humorless own arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.” (“The Information”)— Martin Amis, author, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)Magda Saleh.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“I did not do it on my own.”— Magda Saleh, ballerina, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“The word ‘jazz,’ to me, only means, ‘I dare you.’”— Wayne Shorter, musician, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“What is a jazz singer? Somebody who improvises? But I don’t: I prefer simplicity.”— Astrud Gilberto, singer, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)“It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”— Anne Perry, author, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“When I think about my daughter and the day that I move on — there is a piece of me that will remain with her.”— Ron Cephas Jones, actor, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)“Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future.”— Norman Lear, television writer and producer, born 1922 (Read the obituary.)Tony Bennett.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Life teaches you how to live it if you live long enough.”— Tony Bennett, musician, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via Getty Images. More