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    Singer Sues Met Opera Over Firing for Post-Pregnancy Vocal Problems

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    The mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, who suffered vocal problems during and after pregnancy, is suing the opera company — and the union that represented her — after she lost work.The Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili was once one of opera’s most sought-after stars, renowned for stirring, powerful performances in works like Bizet’s “Carmen” and Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.”But after she began experiencing vocal problems during pregnancy in 2021, her career suffered. When she returned to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, company officials later said, she did not sing up to her standard. The Met canceled her upcoming engagements, and she lost work at other opera companies.Now Rachvelishvili, 40, is suing both the Met and the union representing her, seeking more than $400,000 in compensation for lost work. In a complaint filed in late March, she accused the Met of breaching its contracts with her, and she said that her union, the American Guild of Musical Artists, had failed to properly represent her.Rachvelishvili’s lawsuit claimed that the Met had been aware that she had “suffered complications from her pregnancy and birth affecting her voice and vocal range.” The suit described her as being “disabled due to her pregnancy” and accused the opera company of discriminating against her.“I was shocked that I was not given a chance to recover and all of my contracts for the next two years were immediately canceled without pay,” she said in a statement.The Met said it could not comment on pending litigation.Her complaint argues that the Met should compensate her because of a contractual agreement known as “pay or play,” which requires institutions to pay contracted performers even if they later decide not to engage them.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Amadou Bagayoko, Half of Malian Duo Who Went Global, Dies at 70

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      As Amadou & Mariam, he and his wife were improbable pop stars on two counts. Their style was venturesome and eclectic, and they were blind virtuosos.Amadou Bagayoko, a Malian guitarist and composer who with his wife, the singer Mariam Doumbia, formed Amadou & Mariam, inventing a broadly accessible sound that made fans of people worldwide who otherwise knew little about music from Africa, died on Friday in Bamako, Mali’s capital. He was 70.His death was announced by the Malian government, which did not provide a cause. He and Ms. Doumbia lived in Bamako.In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Amadou & Mariam was regularly described as the new century’s most successful African musical act.Mr. Bagayoko, who grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, called their sound “Afro-rock,” and the group regularly combined his winding guitar solos with, for example, the pounding of a West African djembe drum.Yet the group’s music also consistently evolved. Their breakout hit, the 2005 album “Dimanche à Bamako,” had chatty spoken asides, sirens, the hubbub of crowds — city sounds turned into melodies. Their 2008 album “Welcome to Mali,” conversely, embraced an electronic style of funk, opening with a song, “Sabali,” featuring Damon Albarn of the arty hip-hop group Gorillaz.What was consistent was a sweet, graceful sound that still had the power to build to crescendos, with Ms. Doumbia’s alto achieving clear, pleasant resonance over a rich orchestration.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story’ Review: A Legend and His Kryptonite

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      The original Superman actor gets a comprehensive, if narrow-mindedly celebratory, tribute in this traditional talking-heads-style doc.Biographical documentaries too often turn into hagiographies, so you could imagine how that’s even more easily the case when the subject is as beloved as Christopher Reeve. The actor, who is best known for playing Superman in the original 1978 film (and the three sequels that followed in the 1980s), gets a suitably comprehensive tribute in the HBO doc “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.”Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, this traditional talking-heads-style documentary weaves together deep-cut archival footage from Reeve’s heyday and interviews with his three children, other relatives, and friends in the business (like Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close and Whoopi Goldberg). The filmmakers jump back and forth in time, presenting early on a 1995 accident that would forever change Reeve’s life.Reeve was thrown from a horse, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. But the movie’s shaken-up timeline keeps the documentary from becoming a mere before-and-after story. Instead, it considers the breadth of Reeve’s career and personal life — his beginnings in the theater, his feelings about playing Superman, his efforts to break the mold, and his two most important romantic relationships — with his injury looming over his successes like Kryptonite.Reeve’s bond with his fellow actor Robin Williams also makes up one of the documentary’s meatiest threads, adding depth to the character study. In many ways, Reeve actually was a gentle all-American type, but footage of his friendship with Williams brings out his funny, artistic — and dark — side.The documentary argues that without Williams and Reeve’s wife, Dana (who deserves a film of her own), Reeve wouldn’t have pulled out from his post-accident depression.Their love and optimism were key to his rehabilitation and turn to activism. Too little is said about some disabled people’s criticisms of Reeve’s advocacy (specifically, the belief that it was overly fixated on a cure as opposed to promoting destigmatization), which would have productively complicated the portrait. But that’s no surprise considering the narrow-mindedly celebratory scope of this homage.Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve StoryRated PG-13 for language and themes. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      in Movies

      Christopher Reeve and 6 Takeaways From the Documentary ‘Super/Man’

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      The new film chronicles the life of the paralyzed star, covering his friendship with Robin Williams and gut-wrenching details about his care and family.The documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” traces the life of the Juilliard-trained actor who found megastardom in the 1970s and ’80s playing Superman, and in 1995 as a different kind of hero, after an accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. It features never-before-seen footage of Reeve, who died in 2004 at 52, chronicling his early days; his pivotal friendship with his Juilliard roommate, Robin Williams; and his transformation, in a wheelchair and on a ventilator, into a leading disability and research advocate. Friends like Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg and John Kerry offer their observations; disability rights activists do, too. It’s a thought-provoking tear-jerker.It also doubles as a family movie, showing Reeve in his role as a father to his three children — Matthew Reeve and Alexandra Reeve Givens from an early relationship that he fled at the height of his fame, and Will Reeve, his son with his wife, Dana Reeve. With unwavering support, she largely gave up her career as a singer and actress to care for her husband. She died of cancer in 2006, just 18 months after him, leaving behind their son, then 13.The compounded tragedy is leavened by the hope that Reeve embodied, especially with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which has invested $140 million in the search for a cure for spinal cord paralysis. The film — which arrived in theaters 20 years after Christopher Reeve’s death, almost to the day — chronicles their determination, and doesn’t flinch from the darkest moments, including money worries and the relentlessness of day-to-day caregiving.Reeve, left, and his wife, Dana, with the comedian and actor Robin Williams after Reeve’s appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1996.Vince Bucci/AFP, via Getty ImagesThe unvarnished approach — and the timing, with Reeve’s children having reached solid footing as adults — led the siblings to agree to the project after years of turning down other offers, said Will Reeve, 32, a correspondent for ABC News and a look-alike to his father. They hoped their home movies and archival material “would provide a deeper meaning and greater texture to his story,” he said, “and remind folks of the fullness of life that one can have, despite whatever catastrophic injury they may suffer, whatever disability they may have.”In a video interview from London, where they’re based, the filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui discussed their rationale for not putting Reeve “on a pedestal,” as Ettedgui described it. “It was really important to show how someone who you might think of as being somehow perfect — the ideal hero — how they experience the same insecurities, the same family issues that the rest of us might,” he said.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Should Famous People Be Telling Us This Much About Their Illnesses?

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      For some celebrities, revealing all is part of the product. For others, it looks like a deeply unpleasant chore.This past summer, Celine Dion manufactured a breathtaking cultural moment. It was at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, just after a long, daffy and highly maximalist buildup to the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. Suddenly, there she was, standing on a terrace of the twinkling Eiffel Tower in a scintillant Dior gown. As she sang, a swell of both applause and what sounded like a collective moan of pleasure rose from the audience. Celine Dion was alive and singing. And if you didn’t cry, it could only be because you didn’t know.It was hard not to know. A few weeks before the Olympics came the release of “I Am: Celine Dion,” a well-publicized documentary that took viewers inside what had become of her life since she became largely housebound with stiff-person syndrome — an exceedingly rare disorder that, in Dion’s case, causes terrifying whole-body spasms so severe that they can break bones. Anyone who has watched “I Am” knows what these crises look like, because Dion allowed herself to be filmed during one of them, for 10 minutes, her body frozen in agonizing contortions. By that point, we were already familiar with Dion’s universe of deep illness; we’d seen her holed up in her Las Vegas compound, surrounded by doctors, unable to walk properly, unable to sing properly, often supine, her body distended, her skin raw. In terms of radical transparency, “I Am” is a milestone: a completely new standard for Bravely Baring All.Dion is far from the only celebrity to have invited the public to witness life with a serious illness. Lady Gaga’s 2017 documentary, “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” revealed the star’s daily struggle with fibromyalgia, and in last year’s “Still,” Michael J. Fox — a groundbreaking figure in celebrity-illness transparency — further tugged down the curtain on how severe his Parkinson’s disease has become. Selma Blair, who spent a portion of her career hiding symptoms, eventually revealed a diagnosis of M.S. and then began posting intensely personal bedside updates on social media. Last year an issue of British Vogue had her on the cover, in a skinny beige column of a dress, patent pumps and a cane, with a headline announcing her as “Dynamic, Daring & Disabled.”For fans, these narratives can create a kind of whiplashing feelings roller coaster. You see Lady Gaga diminished and sobbing because of unrelenting full-body pain — and then, soon enough, suspended from the top of a Houston stadium for a Super Bowl halftime performance. You witness Celine Dion in a heartbreaking, horrible fit and then belting out an Edith Piaf song from such great heights. The intention here, surely, is to show that such stars are only human, that their lives and bodies have the same potential for suffering as ours. But the insane highs and pitiable lows these stories offer us feel almost inhumanly extreme. And in watching them, I began wondering if the stars in them didn’t end up feeling caged by the seemingly necessary Hollywood framing in which inspiration and drama need to take precedence over nuance and open-endedness. Dion and Gaga have to adapt to illnesses for which there is no known cure. So what do they do now? The answer is synonymous with their job: perform.Middleton’s video just feels so weird.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Ford and Mellon Foundations Name 2024 Disability Futures Fellows

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      The 20 recipients, including a Broadway composer, a Marvel video game voice actress and a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, are the initiative’s final cohort.The Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations on Wednesday named the 2024 Disability Futures Fellows — the latest class of disabled writers, filmmakers, musicians and other creative artists who will receive unrestricted $50,000 awards.This year’s recipients include Gaelynn Lea, a folk artist and disability rights activist; Natasha Ofili, an actress and writer who in 2020 became one of the first Black deaf actors to portray a video game character — Hailey Cooper — in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales; Warren Snipe, a.k.a. Wawa, a deaf rapper and actor who performed in sign language at the 2022 Super Bowl; and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist whose work focuses on queer, transgender people of color.Lea said she almost missed an email telling her she got the award. “Because the email said, ‘We’re excited to offer you $50,000,’ it went to my spam,” Lea, 40, said in an interview. (She later received a follow-up email.)“It’s very validating that I’m doing this stuff I really care about, and now it’s being recognized,” added Lea, who won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016, and composed and performed original music for a Broadway production of “Macbeth” starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. Lea plans to use the award to fund the writing of a memoir to be published next year.The initiative, which is administered by United States Artists, named its inaugural class of fellows in 2020, with the goal of increasing the visibility of disabled artists and elevating their voices. (About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) The second class was announced in 2022, and this is the last cohort in the program. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers.Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, said in a statement that the program reflected the foundation’s support of the “work, experiences and visions of disabled artists — both in their individual practices and in the collective power they wield in the arts at large.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      What if the Disabled Characters Were Just Going About Their Day?

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      Madison Ferris and Danny J. Gomez star in the meet-cute “All of Me” — proof that depictions of disability onstage don’t have to be “a buzz kill,” as Ferris puts it.A bizarre thing happens when the actors Madison Ferris and Danny J. Gomez are out and about in public together, using mobility aids to get around: she a scooter, he a wheelchair. Inevitably, she said, strangers approach, presuming that the two are somehow in distress.“People will be like, ‘Are you OK? What’s going on?’” Ferris said the other afternoon at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan, where they are starring in the New Group’s Off Broadway production of Laura Winters’s romantic comedy, “All of Me.”And if several wheelchair users should roll down the street together, Gomez said, “then it’s like the circus is in town.” Such as the night a few friends of his from the Los Angeles dance team the Rollettes came to the play, and he and Ferris left with them afterward.“Everywhere we went,” he said, “just stares, left and right.”To Gomez, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a mountain-biking accident in 2016, that kind of othering underscores the need for theater, television and film to depict more disabled people, and do it more matter-of-factly.“Then it wouldn’t be so weird in real life,” he added. “It would just be people going about their day. Like, I don’t stare at you when you’re with your group of friends.”Not that “All of Me” is intended as pedagogical, but he does think it could help.In “All of Me,” Ferris and Gomez play characters who rely on electronic text-to-speech devices to talk. Kyra Sedgwick, left, plays Ferris’s mother.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      New ‘Richard III’ Raises an Old Question: Who Should Wear the Crown?

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      A production at the Shakespeare’s Globe theater faced criticism because a nondisabled actor plays the scheming king. But disputes like these miss the point, our critic writes.When Michelle Terry, the artistic director at Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London, decided to put on a production of “Richard III” with a feminist twist, she probably didn’t expect accusations of discrimination. But that’s what she got. The run-up to the show’s premiere on Tuesday was overshadowed by a controversy over the fact that Terry had cast herself as villainous title character despite not having a physical disability.The play depicts a set of murderous machinations whereby Richard, Duke of Gloucester, achieves his ascent to the English throne in 1483, and the events leading to his demise at the hands of Henry, Earl of Richmond, who would become Henry VII, the first Tudor king. Richard, described as “deformed” in the play’s opening lines, has traditionally been portrayed as a hunchback — almost always by able-bodied actors, with only a few notable exceptions in recent years. (In 2022 Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, became the first disabled actor to play Richard for the Royal Shakespeare Company.)When Shakespeare’s Globe announced its casting earlier this year, the Disabled Artists Alliance, a British organization, published an open letter condemning it as “offensive and distasteful,” since Richard’s “disabled identity is imbued and integral to all corners of the script.”Shakespeare’s play, the statement added, “cannot be successfully performed with a non-physically-disabled actor at the helm.” The Globe issued a robust response pointing out that Richard would not be played as disabled in this production, and adding that, in any case, “the Shakespearean canon is based on a foundation of anti-literalism and therefore all artists should have the right to play all parts.”The Globe pushed back strongly against organizations like the Disabled Artists Alliance, which said Richard should be played by a disabled actor.Marc BrennerUntil relatively recently, it was uncontroversial to have a nondisabled actor play a disabled role. Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of an autistic character in “Rain Man” and Daniel Day-Lewis’s protagonist with cerebral palsy in “My Left Foot” both won best actor prizes at the Academy Awards in the late 1980s. These days, the practice is increasingly contentious: Jake Gyllenhaal received blowback when he played an amputee in “Stronger” (2017), as did Dwayne Johnson in the action movie “Skyscraper” (2018); Bryan Cranston was similarly criticized for playing a quadriplegic in “The Upside” (2019).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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Pedal Steel Noah’s Covers Charm Fans Online. Up Next: His Own Songs.

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      This 16-year-old from Austin, Texas, plays New Wave and post-punk hits with his brother and dog beside him. This week, his first EP, “Texas Madness,” comes out.Like many American teenagers, Noah Faulkner, 16, is obsessed with music. He’ll spend hours going down rabbit holes, listening to every note played by his favorite artists and studying new discoveries. He recently came out of a monthslong deep dive on Clarence Ashley, a banjo player who recorded during the Great Depression and “makes me feel like I’m an old man,” Faulkner said. Ashley’s music “feels very spooky, and I imagine it’s like an abandoned place somewhere.”Unlike most teenagers, Faulkner is translating these influences into a dedicated music career. Using the handle Pedal Steel Noah, he posts daily covers of ’80s New Wave and post-punk hits on Instagram and TikTok, interpreting the work of acts like the Smiths and Tears for Fears on one of the hardest instruments to master. Along the way, he’s made fans of Neko Case, Big Thief, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and scores of others drawn to his emotive playing and charming setup: a big Texas flag in the background, his brother, Nate, 13, on bass and a shaggy Aussiedoodle panting along.Faulkner’s interest in pedal steel stems from an early plunge into country music. “I was listening to George Strait when I wanted to listen to something that’s cheerful and faithful,” he said. Eli Durst for The New York TimesIn March, the brothers and their father, Jay, played several showcases during the South by Southwest festival in their hometown and opened for the Black Keys’ keynote address. Dressed in a Western shirt, black cowboy hat and the colorful Crocs that have become his signature footwear, Pedal Steel Noah put a Texas stamp on songs by Duran Duran and the Cocteau Twins.“It was amazing,” he said via video call from the dinner table, his family gathered around him, “but it was exhausting. Hopefully, I can give myself a reward of a party for my friends.” On Monday, he’s taking the next step in his young career, releasing “Texas Madness,” an EP that includes three covers and two original tracks.

      View this post on Instagram A post shared by Noah Faulkner (@pedalsteelnoah) 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More