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      Klee Benally, Navajo Activist and Artist, Dies at 48

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      He helped found a punk-rock band when he was 14. That led to a long career as an advocate for Native American and environmental causes.Klee Benally, a dynamic Navajo activist, artist and punk-rock musician who championed Native American and environmental causes, died on Dec. 30 in Phoenix. He was 48.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his sister, Jeneda Benally. She did not specify the cause.For decades, Mr. Benally, who lived in Flagstaff, Ariz., fought the expansion of the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort on one of the San Francisco Peaks, a mountain range just north of Flagstaff that 13 tribes consider sacred. He also fought the resort’s use of treated wastewater to make snow, a practice that Native Americans and environmental groups said was poisoning the ecosystem. He protested against a pumice mine on those same peaks, and against uranium mining and transport in the area.He campaigned for the rights and care of Indigenous homeless people and against racial profiling. He made films and art about his activism.He was a community organizer and a youth counselor; he taught media literacy and film to Indigenous teenagers; and he marched against the celebration of Thanksgiving. Late last year he published a book, “No Spiritual Surrender,” about his efforts practicing what he called Indigenous anarchy, and he created a board game, “Burn the Fort,” in which Native American warriors fight off colonizers (and learn some history while doing so).He chained himself to an excavator, was charged with trespassing and joined numerous legal complaints.But his first foray into activism was through music, in 1989. He was 14 when he and his siblings, Jeneda and Clayson, formed Blackfire, a high-velocity punk band that mixed traditional Navajo chants and music with protest songs about the oppression of Indigenous people.Mr. Benally embraced the middle-finger-to-the-world punk ethos — he loved the Ramones, whose music he introduced to his mother, a folk singer — and he could really shred a guitar. The Ramones loved Blackfire back: C.J. Ramone produced the band’s first EP, “Spirit in Action” (1994), and Joey Ramone sang on two of the songs on “One Nation Under” (2002), its first full-length album.Critics were admiring, too. In 2007, David Fricke of Rolling Stone touted Blackfire’s fourth album, “[Silence] Is a Weapon,” as “pure ire, CBGB-hardcore-matinee protest with jolts of ancient chorale.”The band played at South by Southwest and other music festivals but declined to play in bars, at least at first. Mr. Benally thought it would be hypocritical, given that alcohol abuse was an issue on reservations. In addition, at the time the Benally siblings were all under 21.“Some people watch too many movies and think John Wayne killed all the Indians or they’re out dancing with wolves,” he told The Albuquerque Journal in 2003, explaining Blackfire’s mission to educate audiences. “But in reality there are over 500 nations throughout the U.S. carrying on their cultures, their own individual ways of life, their own languages and their own ceremonies.”Mr. Benally in 2005. He spent decades protesting the expansion of a ski resort on a mountain range that 13 tribes consider sacred.Jill Torrance/Arizona Daily Sun, via Associated PressKlee Jones Benally was born on Oct. 6, 1975, in Black Mesa, Ariz., on the Navajo reservation near Flagstaff. Music and activism ran in the family. Klee’s father, Jones Benally, is a traditional Diné (as the Navajo call themselves) medicine man; his mother, Berta Benally, is an activist and folk musician of Russian-Polish Jewish heritage who grew up in the folk scene of Greenwich Village. The couple met in Los Angeles, where she was working with Hopi elders.Klee and his siblings were brought up with their father’s Diné traditions, and they grew up performing traditional dances. Their mother introduced them to the folk canon; Blackfire would later set some of Woody Guthrie’s poems to music. The area where they lived was part of a land dispute that forced the relocation of thousands of Navajo people, and attending protests became a family affair.In addition to his sister and his parents, Mr. Benally is survived by his wife, Princess Benally, and his brother.Blackfire went on hiatus after two decades, mostly so the Benally siblings could concentrate more directly on advocacy and activism.Mr. Benally often framed his environmental work in terms of religious freedom. “As Indigenous people in the so-called United States, we don’t have guarantees for our religious freedoms like the rest of you,” he told The Arizona Republic in 2013. “This is a struggle for cultural survival — the struggle to protect sacred spaces.”Mr. Benally was a local hero in Flagstaff, where he founded a number of community organizations and aid groups. He was both angry and pragmatic; he liked to say that everyone was indigenous to somewhere.“He was a powerhouse of anticolonial thought and action — ever ready to protect the land,” Dallas Goldtooth, a Native American activist and actor, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Benally explained his worldview in a 2020 interview with Spirituality Health magazine: “As an artist, there’s no dichotomy between art and life with our traditional teachings as Diné people. There’s no separation; our life is creation. So our creative expression comes in many different ways. What I look at is: What are the issues facing our communities, and what strategies can be most effective? Is it going to be through song? Is it going to be through prayer or action? Or can it be all of them?” More

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      In Steve McQueen’s ‘Occupied City,’ a Marriage of Art and History

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      Steve McQueen collaborated with his wife Bianca Stigter to make “Occupied City,” a four-hour documentary that brings Amsterdam’s World War II history into the present day.When the British filmmaker Steve McQueen was considering making a feature film about a free man who was captured and sold into slavery, his wife, the Dutch journalist and historian Bianca Stigter, suggested he start with a true story.She found a 1853 memoir by a New York man who was kidnapped, sold and enslaved for 12 years in Louisiana, named Solomon Northup. McQueen was immediately intrigued. “What was so interesting about it was that the script was there,” he said last week, over lunch with Stigter in Amsterdam. “I didn’t have to invent a story.”His resulting 2013 feature film, “12 Years a Slave,” adapted from Northup’s memoir by John Ridley, won three Academy Awards, including best picture.For the couple, it was just one example of a kind of creative symbiosis that has defined their 28-year relationship. In 2022, when Stigter made her first film, “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a documentary based on rare footage of a Polish village before the Holocaust, McQueen was a co-producer and “a sounding board,” she said.Over 187 days, McQueen and his team shot 960,000 feet of film showing daily life in Amsterdam.Lennert Hillege/A24McQueen’s latest film, the four-hour documentary “Occupied City,” which opens in theaters in the United States on Dec. 25, is the couple’s most extensive collaboration to date. He adapted the movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, from Stigter’s book, “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” a 560-page historical encyclopedia that was published in Dutch in 2019, and she is one of the movie’s producers.Stigter’s reference book records the geographical dimensions of that period of Nazi rule in Amsterdam — where the bombs dropped, where rallies were held — but it also memorializes places where Dutch people suffered and died: soup kitchens during the 1944 to 1945 famine known as the Hunger Winter; apartments where Jewish families committed suicide; and public squares, train stations, a theater and a day care center where Jews were held before their deportation to concentration camps.In “Occupied City,” Stigter’s text is read out in unemotional voice-over by the British actor Melanie Hyams, while the camera shows scenes from contemporary Amsterdam. But because it was mostly shot from 2020 to 2022, much of the footage captures the city during Covid-19 lockdowns.McQueen, who was born and raised in London, is both a filmmaker and a Turner Prize-winning visual artist, recognized by Queen Elizabeth with a knighthood in 2022. But he has lived a more under-the-radar life in Amsterdam, Stigter’s hometown, since the late 1990s. The couple raised their two children in the city, though they declined to discuss how they met or when, precisely, they got married.He said that he has always felt Amsterdam’s cityscape represented layers of history that must be excavated, from the 17th century, when it was the hub of Golden Age Holland, up through the horrors of World War II. “There are always archaeological digs going on in your brain as you walk the streets,” he said. He’d long wanted to make a film that simultaneously engaged the present and the past.The footage was then overlaid with a voice-over drawn from Stigter’s book “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.”Lennert Hillege/A24Around 2004, McQueen said, he was conceptualizing a film that might somehow draw the city’s World War II past into the contemporary moment.“I had this idea to physically map one image over the other,” McQueen said, “to illuminate the ghosts from the past.” He heard the tapping of keys from the next room, he recalled, where Stigter was writing the first version of her “Atlas,” and thought: “What if the past is text and the images of now are now?”McQueen set out to shoot every address in Stigter’s book — more than 2,000 locations — and the filming was planned long before any signs of the pandemic. But when lockdowns in the Netherlands began in March 2020, McQueen decided to go on undeterred.“It was like the way Dutch people still just go out into the streets and cycle when it’s raining — the weather doesn’t change the plan,” he said. “We just had to embrace it.”For two and a half years, McQueen and his crew shot on location, producing 960,000 feet of film, he said, far more than he would need, even for a long documentary. Stigter sometimes attended the filming, but not always. “It felt a little like I was in the way,” she said.Shooting was planned before the coronavirus pandemic, and carried on throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. “We just had to embrace it,” McQueen said.Lennert Hillege/A24Some of the shots show quotidian activities, suggesting that life goes on, oblivious to the past. We see a shuttered H&M store, where we learn that young Dutch volunteers once stood in line to register for the Waffen S.S. People joyfully play in the snow and walk their dogs in the Sarphatipark, where one of the final roundups of Jews took place in 1943.But filming during the pandemic meant that the life captured by the cameras wasn’t ever entirely ordinary. Sometimes, the drama unfolding in the present moment reminds us that we remain as vulnerable to catastrophe as ever, as in a scene where elderly Dutch citizens line up for Covid vaccinations.At other times, wartime themes and contemporary visuals converge in unusual and unsettling ways, like when hundreds of unmasked protesters gather on Museumplein, a central square in the museum district, in early 2021, to decry the new masking regulations. The protesters are forced out of the square by police on horseback, and using water cannons and dogs.It is ambiguous whether the footage is suggesting a link between the World War II era and Covid times. This is a touchy moral question, because protesters and far-right Dutch politicians have, in recent years, made false equivalencies between the Holocaust and the government’s Covid-19 regulations.Yet McQueen said that such onscreen convergences were merely an attempt by the viewer to “make sense out of nonsense.”“I wanted the screen to be a mirror where people saw themselves reflected back on them, so you ask: Who am I in this?” he said. “It’s more of a meditation than a history lesson.”“Occupied City,” which includes 130 of Stigter’s addresses, clocks in at 247 minutes, plus a 15-minute intermission. But this is not the end of the project for McQueen and Stigter. He was in the process of planning a future artwork, which he said would attempt to include every address in the book. For Stigter and McQueen, the process of bringing the “Occupied City” to the public — as a book and a film, and soon an artwork, as well — has been a shared labor of love, which, like their relationship, is an ongoing conversation.“I’ve been with this woman for 28 years and without those 28 years, this artwork would never have been made,” McQueen said. “It was just the case that we live together, we share our lives together, and this is one of the things that has come out of it, along with two children. It’s never been an effort. It’s only been a mutual appreciation.” More

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      Susan Sarandon Apologizes for Comment About Jews at Rally

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      The Oscar-winning actress said she now regrets “diminishing” the long history of antisemitism in remarks at the rally, which led her agents to part ways with her.The Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon apologized Friday for saying at a pro-Palestinian rally last month that people feeling afraid of being Jewish right now were “getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.”The remarks drew widespread criticism and soon afterward her agency, United Talent Agency, let it be known that it had dropped her as a client.In a statement posted to Instagram Friday night, Sarandon said that she had been trying to communicate her concern for rising hate crimes. “This phrasing was a terrible mistake,” she said, “as it implies that until recently Jews have been strangers to persecution, when the opposite is true.”“As we all know, from centuries of oppression and genocide in Europe, to the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, PA,” she said, referring to the synagogue shooting that killed 11 and wounding six others in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history, “Jews have long been familiar with discrimination and religious violence which continues to this day.”“I deeply regret diminishing this reality and hurting people with this comment,” she said of her remarks at the Nov. 17 rally. “It was my intent to show solidarity in the struggle against bigotry of all kinds, and I am sorry I failed to do so.”Antisemitic incidents and Islamophobic attacks have soared in New York City, on campuses and online since the Israel-Hamas war began.Sarandon, 77, has long been an outspoken activist for progressive and left-wing causes, sometimes clashing with more moderate liberals in Hollywood, while nurturing a prolific career featuring iconic roles in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Bull Durham” and “Thelma & Louise.” More recently she appeared in the Showtime series “Ray Donovan” and the DC Comics movie “Blue Beetle,” which came out in August. More

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      in Music

      Extinction Rebellion Climate Protesters Interrupt Met Performance

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      Met officials were forced to bring down the curtain halfway through the opera as protesters unfurled banners that read “No Opera On A Dead Planet.” The performance later resumed.The opening night of a revival of Richard Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York was interrupted Thursday night by climate protesters shouting “No Opera” from the balconies on both sides of the opera house.Protesters with the group Extinction Rebellion NYC unfurled banners that read “No Opera On A Dead Planet,” according to Peter Gelb, the general manager at the Met. Met officials were then forced to bring down the curtain at around 9:30 p.m., halfway through the second act.About eight minutes passed before security officials ushered out the protesters perched on the balconies, Mr. Gelb said.The crowd jeered the demonstrators and burst into applause when the curtains again opened, but the elation was short-lived.A woman sitting in the orchestra section of the audience then stood up and began to shout.The curtains closed again. While security removed the woman, Mr. Gelb consulted with other officials on how to proceed.Many audience members shouted back at the protesters, with people screaming “Go away!” “Go home!” and “Shut up!” Some attendees walked out, with one person questioning “is there no security here?”The show was delayed for 22 minutes, Mr. Gelb said.Mr. Gelb appeared onstage to inform the audience that the house lights would remain on so security could quickly identify and remove any additional protesters who might pop up during the rest of the four-and-half-hour performance.The production was scheduled to end shortly after 11 p.m. but will instead end closer to midnight because of the interruptions.Mr. Gelb said the protesters were removed from the premises and referred to the police.A New York Police Department spokesman said no arrests were reported.The return of Otto Schenk’s classic production was eagerly anticipated among opera goers because it marked the Met debut of the highly-sought-after baritone Christian Gerhaher, who sang the role of Wolfram. The Austrian tenor Andreas Schager sang the title role, Elza van den Heever was Elisabeth and the opera was conducted by Donald Runnicles.In a statement, Extinction Rebellion said the demonstration was timed to “coincide with the main character’s declaration that ‘love is a spring to be drunk from.’”It added: “contrary to those words spoken on stage, springs are not pure now, because we are in a climate crisis, and our water is contaminated.”“Everyone was just so startled,” said George Chauncey, a history professor at Columbia University, who was seated in the orchestra section. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”Mr. Chauncey said some audience members were concerned about their safety, while others were annoyed that opening night was interrupted.“I agree there’s a climate emergency and I understand the frustration that leads people to do something like this,” he said. “But I’m not sure it’s very effective.”Before the show, several demonstrators were at the house protesting the Israel-Hamas war, including Nan Goldin, the photographer and activist.Thursday’s interruption was just the latest example of climate activists disrupting a classical music concert.In September, climate activists interrupted a performance in Switzerland. And last year during a performance of Verdi’s Requiem in Amsterdam, according to Opera Wire, climate activists shouted: “We are in the middle of a climate crisis and we are like the orchestra on the Titanic that keeps playing quietly while the ship is already sinking.” They were escorted out minutes later.Climate activists have also targeted museums, sometimes harming paintings, and interrupted sporting events. In September, Extinction Rebellion NYC also interrupted the U.S. Open semifinal match between Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova. Four protesters in the upper levels of Arthur Ashe Stadium called for an end to fossil fuels, and one activist glued his feet to the ground. Their protests delayed the match for 49 minutes.Javier C. Hernández More

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      A Landmark of Black Cinema, Restored for a New Age

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      The British director Horace Ové struggled to get his 1975 film, “Pressure,” made and released. Now, weeks after his death, a new restoration is celebrated in New York and London.On a recent, rainy evening in London, movie fans gathered at the British Film Institute theater for a much-anticipated premiere, though the film was made nearly 50 years ago: Horace Ové’s newly restored “Pressure,” considered the first feature by a Black British director.Ové died last month, just weeks before his film was set to be celebrated internationally with screenings at both the London and New York Film Festivals. Herbert Norville, who starred in “Pressure” when he was 15, said in a speech at the London screening that he hoped the audience saw “what it was like being Black, being British and growing up in an era where racism was rife.”A roiling social-realist drama shot in 1974, “Pressure” follows Tony, a young Black Londoner looking for a job and a sense of belonging. He is pulled in several directions: by his activist older brother, by his pious West Indian mother and by white British society, which refuses to embrace him.Gradually radicalized by encounters with potential employers, a friend’s landlord and the police, Tony reaches a boiling point. In an interview after the screening, Norville, who played Tony, described the film as “pulling no punches” in its depiction of the reality of Black life in London in the ’70s. In an earlier Q. and A. with the audience, he had noted that the film’s themes of “institutional racism and police brutality” were still relevant in Britain today.In recent years, mainstream cultural institutions including the Tate museums and the BBC have been giving work made about Black British, and specifically Caribbean, lives more attention. The restoration of “Pressure” is accompanied by a major British Film Institute retrospective, “Power to the People: Horace Ove’s Radical Vision,” though in prior decades, the director struggled for recognition from the establishment.Oscar James and Sheila Scott Wilkinson in scene from “Pressure.” The film features professional and nonprofessional actors. BFI National Archive/The Film FoundationThe journey to get “Pressure” made was fraught. In 1972, Robert Buckler, who produced the film, was working as a script editor for the BBC, looking for stories about “the struggle for ordinary people,” he said in a recent interview. Buckler, who is white, spent part of his youth in the racially mixed London neighborhood of Peckham, and felt that the BBC’s programming wasn’t “reflecting fully the way our society was changing around us,” he said.In Britain in the 1970s, the Caribbean Artists Movement was thriving and Black British artists, poets, playwrights and theater directors were making work — just not for mainstream film or TV. Buckler said he approached Ové, a documentarian and photojournalist from Trinidad, to develop a script, but was unable to convince the BBC to fund a film “about a Black Englishman.” He recalled executives asking, “‘Well, who on earth would be in it?’”Instead, the British film Institute, or B.F.I., eventually financed “Pressure,” in 1974. Ové cast a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, and the movie debuted at the London Film Festival the following year. But “Pressure” did not receive a theatrical release until 1978. “Banned is technically the wrong word,” said Arike Oke, a B.F.I. executive responsible for the organization’s archive; the delay in reaching movie theaters was more to do with “bureaucratic cul-de-sacs.” But the B.F.I. didn’t “proactively champion the film” at the time, Oke conceded.Its themes, however, were prescient. In “Pressure,” Tony is beaten by the police and arrested after attending Black Power meetings and marches; in 1976, a riot erupted following Notting Hill Carnival in west London, and as Buckler put it, “a sort of warfare between the youth and the police” broke out.Horace Ové in 1987. After making “Pressure,” he worked prolifically in TV.John Nobley/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesIn the same way that New York Magazine would later argue there could be “violent reactions” to Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” from Black audiences, Buckler said he wondered if the theatrical release of “Pressure” was delayed because of concerns it would heighten racial tensions.The British movie industry remained tentative about investing in Black talent for decades after the “Pressure” release, and filmmakers that followed Ové, like John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, worked mostly in gallery spaces, while Ové worked prolifically in TV. He made only one other theatrically released movie, the 1986 comedy “Playing Away.”Zak Ové, the filmmaker’s son, said “Pressure” showed “exactly where we’ve come from and the kind of determination that was necessary.” He added that his father’s “honest depiction of a gritty reality” was a part of history at risk of disappearing if it was not honored.If it wasn’t for Ové, said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection, that history “may not have been captured” at all. The director carved out a space “for Black people to speak for ourselves, in a landscape where a lot of those conversations were being had for us,” he said.Clark, who is British, but lives in the United States, has championed “Pressure” for several years. He said that Criterion plans to release a Blu-ray edition of the movie in 2024, and recalled programming screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the film played from “a rickety 16-millimeter print.” With the movie’s cerebral Black Power advocates campaigning for Black rights, Caribbean immigrants striving for middle-class security and disenfranchised Black British youths driven to crime by a lack of opportunity, “Pressure” offers “a meeting of different ideas and forms and embodiments of Blackness,” Clark said.At the New York screenings of the film, he said, there were “young, trendy Brooklyn people from across the diaspora” asking: Where has this been all my life? More

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      in Theater

      A Tiananmen Square Musical Worries About China’s Glare

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      The original lead actor and director withdrew from the Phoenix production of a show about the 1989 pro-democracy protests, a topic that China aggressively censors.When it was announced that Zachary Noah Piser would be playing the lead role in “Tiananmen: A New Musical,” he happened to be on a concert tour of five Chinese cities with a group of Broadway actors.One day later, Piser, who played the title role in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway last year, posted a short statement on Instagram, where most of his posts are bright and colorful.This one featured just seven words set against a blank white backdrop: “I have withdrawn from the musical Tiananmen.”“It was very odd to me because it was one statement, and it’s not usually how things like this happen in our business,” said Marc Oka, a cast member who found out about Piser’s departure through the Aug. 25 post, which had comments disabled.Those involved with the “Tiananmen” musical, which premieres at the Phoenix Theater Company next month, are well aware that China aggressively censors discussions of the Tiananmen protests, in which Chinese troops killed hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy student activists.Jason Rose, the musical’s lead producer, said Piser’s manager told him — without providing details — that the actor felt pressure to leave the show and to post on Instagram. The manager, Dave Brenner, denied saying that.“It was a decision he had to make and it was not an easy one,” Brenner said of Piser, declining to comment on why the actor quit a day after the public casting announcement. Piser also declined to comment.Since the show, which follows the account of two Chinese students during the 50 days of protests at Tiananmen Square, was optioned by Rose’s Quixote Productions two years ago, some members of its cast have been worried about how the Chinese authorities might respond.It is unclear exactly why Piser, who is Chinese American, decided to leave the show he was set to star in. But the show’s original director and at least one other cast member dropped out, Rose said, because of fears about the safety of family members in China. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.Darren Lee became the musical’s director after the first one dropped out because of concerns about his family’s safety.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe departures illustrate how frightening it can be for people with connections to China to bring attention to the 1989 protests in Beijing. The Chinese government continues to evade responsibility for the massacre and tries to eradicate any remembrance of the event — the brutal conclusion to weeks of demonstrations that had pierced the Communist Party’s facade of invincibility.“Even doing a regional production in Phoenix, Ariz., there is so much concern over the control and reach of the Chinese government that American actors are afraid to be involved in the show,” said Kennedy Kanagawa, who replaced Piser in “Tiananmen.”The show’s new director and choreographer, Darren Lee, who is Chinese American, said he accepted the job only after determining that he did not have direct relatives who might face retaliation from the Chinese government.“It was the first time where I’ve ever been in the position where I asked my parents whether or not they thought it was OK to take the show,” he said.“Tiananmen: A New Musical,” with a book by Scott Elmegreen and music and lyrics by Drew Fornarola, follows two fictional students at Beijing Normal University who are named after real students killed by the military. Initially, the students, Peiwen and XiaoLi, have contrasting perspectives on the protests, but they fall in love and witness history as tanks roll into the square and soldiers draw their guns.Chinese troops killed hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy student activists during protests in 1989.Jeff Widener/Associated PressThe musical wrestles with the tension between the revolutionary act of remembering and the authoritarian attempts to erase history. In one of the closing scenes, set in the present day, XiaoXia, the sister of XiaoLi, lights a candle as part of a vigil remembering the protests. A soldier arrests her and snuffs out the flame.Earlier in the show, in a fictional monologue as his soldiers gun down protesters, Deng Xiaoping, China’s top leader at the time, says, “People will forget what we did here.”He adds: “At the edge of memory, who defines the truth? Me.”To this day, the Chinese government is vigilant about eliminating discussion of Tiananmen. The word remains one of the most censored topics in the country, second only to President Xi Jinping, said Xiao Qiang, an expert on censorship and China at the University of California, Berkeley.It does not matter, Xiao said, that this show is being staged at a regional theater.“Even the word ‘Tiananmen’ would generate fear in the Chinese government and that fear would generate a very repressive action,” he said.Within China, people who publicly discuss what happened at Tiananmen can face jail time or see their children prohibited from attending universities. In May, the activist Chen Siming was arrested by the Chinese authorities over a social media post paying tribute to Tiananmen, according to Human Rights Watch.Often the mere specter of danger is enough to muzzle any dissent, Xiao said.The cast of “Tiananmen” is entirely Asian American and Pacific Islander, but those who are not ethnically Chinese have less concern about their involvement. Kanagawa and Oka, who are both Japanese American, said they felt comfortable speaking about the show because neither has family ties to China.Potential consequences have been front of mind for other contributors. After Piser dropped out of the show, Rose said, some cast members grew more fearful and asked not to be featured in news releases or photographed.The cast has had daily conversations, Kanagawa said, about repercussions for participating in the show. Some fret about being banned from visiting China or having business contracts canceled. Others fear for the safety of their relatives.“People in China disappear still, and the idea of that being a family member is legitimately terrifying,” Kanagawa said.“Every person in the room has decided, for whatever reason — could be artistic, could be political, could be whatever — to be there,” Lee said.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe Phoenix Theater Company and Quixote Productions have a history of staging politically relevant productions, presenting a musical in 2020 called “¡Americano!,” about a young man who discovers he is an undocumented immigrant. But “Tiananmen,” which was shaped by Wu’er Kaixi, one of the real student protesters in Beijing, has produced a special set of challenges.“Every person in the room has decided, for whatever reason — could be artistic, could be political, could be whatever — to be there,” said Lee, the musical’s new director. “Everyone also understands that their comfort and their safety is paramount.”Rose said Piser and the theater company had worked cooperatively until the actor arrived in China on his concert tour. At that point, “everything changed,” Rose said.“I was always aware of the sensitivities, but frankly that’s what drew me to the show,” Rose said. “If this were 1954 or 1951, would Russia be dictating our arts scene?”“This is a show that needs to be told,” he added, “particularly because of the efforts to erase the bravery and courage from history.” More

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      ‘The Five Demands’ Review: Occupying a College for Racial Justice

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      In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, a documentary recalls the occupation of City College 50 years ago.Among the wave of student protests that occurred across American university campuses in the late 1960s, the student occupation of The City College of New York in April 1969 was a highly local yet pivotal act of civil disobedience. The more than 200 Black and Puerto Rican students who occupied the buildings on South Campus for two weeks did so in protest of the school’s admissions policy and the lack of diversity in its student body. At a time when 40 percent of New York City’s high school graduates were Black or Latino, the film reports, only 9 percent of City College attendees were part of those communities. “The Five Demands,” a new documentary from Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, returns to the campus 50 years later alongside former students, now in their late 60s and 70s, who participated in the protests.In interviews, City College alumni who were recruited through the college’s SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) recall being underprepared in their education and made to feel like tokens who didn’t belong there by their white peers. And indeed, the “five demands” central to the occupation largely revolved not only around making efforts to admit more students of color, but also to provide them with adequate support once they were enrolled — a commitment that many elite colleges and universities still struggle with to this day.In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision that rejected affirmative action, the film feels eerily timely. Schiller and Weiss’s direction is utilitarian, cutting together talking-head interviews with montages of the occupation set to era-appropriate protest songs. But to its credit, the lack of flashiness puts the students’ struggles for racial justice front and center, and ultimately serves to highlight a less-remembered aspect of the countercultural student movement.The Five DemandsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      For France’s Protesters, the Streets Are the Ultimate Stage

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      The country has a long history of demonstrations, which often feature overtly theatrical elements. Our Paris theater critic marched along on Tuesday to soak up the spectacle.In large-scale theater and dance works, bodies moving in space have a momentum of their own; their collective power often feels like it could move mountains. Yet no number of monumental performances can compare to the enveloping force of tens of thousands of people, announcing as they did in Paris this week: “We are the show.”Street protests — a time-honored French tradition — are generally not for the agoraphobic, but on Tuesday, the crowds were the biggest on record this century. France’s Interior Ministry estimated there were 1.28 million marchers, while trade unions said there were 3.5 million. In Paris, the crowds were so large that some protesters branched off on a different course, along the Left Bank.The mountain the protesters were trying to move, for the sixth time in two months, was President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise the legal age of retirement by two years, to 64. Yet beyond that particular policy, demonstrations are frequent enough in the country that they have taken on a ritualistic dimension, and often feature overtly theatrical elements designed to grab the attention.In late 2019, the Paris Opera Ballet made international headlines by performing an excerpt from “Swan Lake” in the cold outside the Palais Garnier, to protest a previous attempt at a pension overhaul. The Comédie-Française, France’s most prestigious theater company, joined in with a Molière performance from the theater’s windows and balcony. (Perhaps to avoid a repeat, both institutions’ bespoke pension arrangements are excluded from this year’s proposed changes.)Artists taking an active role in protests is nothing new in France. During the revolutionary events of May 1968, a number of theater venues were occupied, and performances were staged outdoors and at factories. One company from 1968 hasn’t stopped since: the Théâtre du Soleil. That egalitarian troupe, led by Ariane Mnouchkine, is such a stalwart of demonstrations that even protesters who rarely go to the theater look out for their creative street performances.At regular intervals during the protest on Tuesday, Mnouchkine gave the signal for a spectacle she called “the attack of the crows.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesOn Tuesday, its performers were easy to spot from afar, with a giant white puppet, known as Justice, that towered above the surrounding protesters. The slim figure was carried by four bearers on a palanquin, while the company’s actors animated its arms and billowing skirts from the sides. Blood was smeared on Justice’s solemn-looking face, which, like the rest of the puppet, was created by the Théâtre du Soleil’s own technical team.More on FranceRestoring Notre Dame: Experts are trying to revive the centuries-old acoustics of the cathedral, which caught fire in 2019. Here is how the building’s architecture plays a role in the endeavor.Trials by Fire: During her first year as France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra faced chaos and scandals in soccer and rugby. With the Paris Olympics looming, her toughest days may be ahead.Art Invasion: Mosaics by a street artist who calls himself “Invader” have become part of the fabric of Paris. They are everywhere — if you look for them.A Staunch Protester: Jean-Baptiste Reddé has hoisted his colorful signs in nearly every street protest for over a decade, embodying France’s enduring passion for demonstrations.Mnouchkine herself, 84, kept a watchful eye on the proceedings. Justice was created in 2010, she said in an interview, for another strike against pension changes. The puppet has never appeared in a stage production, but she has seen her fair share of demonstrations, including in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015. “We immediately felt that people were happy to have a symbol to rally around that wasn’t just a giant sound system,” she said. “They also want something beautiful, something that carries emotion.”At regular intervals, as the march plodded forward, Mnouchkine gave the signal for what she called “the attack of the crows.” Ten or so members of her company ran forward with black birds on sticks, ambushing Justice. To classical music and thunderous drum beats, Justice leaned forward, then back, fighting the crows off with a small sword; two assistant directors oversaw the struggle, directing the actors in real time. To the delight of protesters, Justice won every time, then took a celebratory spin and gave a bow.Marching not far from the Théâtre du Soleil, a street theater company called Les Grandes Personnes had also brought two oversize puppets, both regulars appearances in their shows: Céline, an older white woman, and K.S., a young Black man. Brought to life by one person each, they bounced along to the sound of horns and cheering marchers, while a nearby performer held a sign that said: “I don’t want to die onstage.”Yet artistic contributions to the march were fewer and farther between than I expected, an impression Mnouchkine confirmed. Two years of pandemic-related closures and cancellations have also left their mark, with fewer theaters willing to go on strike this week.A crow puppet carried by members of the feminist group Rosies.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesPolice on the Place d’Italie, where the demonstration ended.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesPerformers from the street theater company Les Grandes Personnes at the demonstration on Tuesday.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesBringing theatrical craftsmanship to strikes is “a tradition that is getting lost,” she said. While one of the performing arts’ main unions, C.G.T. Spectacle, brought a truck equipped with musical instruments and a sound system, the performances seemed a little subdued.There was more attention to spectacle in the protest style of feminist groups like the Rosies, who draw their name from Norman Rockwell’s feminist icon Rosie the Riveter. Dressed in blue overalls, with makeup that made them look like overworked zombies, the women’s collective has developed a small repertoire of choreographed protest songs, which anyone can learn through videos or workshops.When I spotted them, dozens of Rosies were dancing to Gala’s 1990s hit “Freed From Desire,” which had become “Women On Fire,” with French lyrics about pension reform. From the back of a truck, two women led the motley group, which punched the air to the beat.It was a joyful flash mob, but the strike’s greatest piece of theater remained the spectacle of so many bodies in the streets of Paris — wave after wave, subsuming any individuals, claiming the city as their stage for the day. Many chanted and held signs, but the vast majority simply moved as a collective.Demonstrators on Tuesday protested, for the sixth time in two months, President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise France’s legal retirement age.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesMost of the time, there was a warm, carnivalesque atmosphere, but a crowd’s mood can also change at the speed of light. Nearly four hours into the march, some people around me suddenly stood still, then started walking backward. Something in the air had shifted, as if a coup de théâtre were about to change the narrative; press photographers near me took out their safety helmets.Minutes later, when the sea of people parted, it became clear a group of black-clad protesters, their faces hidden, were ready to face off violently with the rows of police officers on the other side of the boulevard. I hurried back to a less volatile area. Later, when I reached the end point of the march, the Place d’Italie plaza was hazy with tear gas and surrounded by police officers, with people streaming confusedly into the few streets that weren’t blocked.It was a staggering sight, like an immersive show gone out of control. Yet the march also brought out communal emotions, together with a sense of freedom and open self-expression, that even the best theater can struggle to replicate. As collective experiences go, I won’t forget this one any time soon. More