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    Misery Loves Company? Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair Hits a Nerve.

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    Movies that are major downers, it turns out, are a big film festival draw. “Sometimes the world is such that you just need to wallow a little bit.”The festival Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair started three years ago as a primal scream from a little Los Angeles nonprofit organization.What has happened since says a lot about the mood in at least one corner of American culture.The American Cinematheque, a nonprofit that brings classic art films to Los Angeles theaters, was struggling to sell tickets in 2022. Older cinephiles were still spooked by the Covid pandemic; younger ones were glued to Netflix.At the same time, some Cinematheque staff members were depressed about the direction the world seemed to be heading. It was the year Russia invaded Ukraine, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a gunman killed 19 children at a Texas elementary school and Big Tech rolled out artificial intelligence bots.Out of that somber stew came a programming idea called Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair. Over seven days, the Cinematheque screened 30 feel-bad movies. It called the selections “the greatest films from around the world that explore the darkest sides of humanity.” For the inaugural festival, one centerpiece film was Béla Tarr’s “Satantango” (1994), a seven-hour-and-19-minute contemplation of decay and misery.Gabriel Byrne in Joel Coen’s 1990 film “Miller’s Crossing.”20th Century Fox, via The American Cinematheque“‘Everyone was saying, ‘You should do comedies,’” Grant Moninger, the Cinematheque’s artistic director, said. “But we thought, ‘What if you did the exact opposite?’ We’re not in this to dangle keys at a baby.” (Now might be a good moment to mention that Moninger grew up with a mother, he said, who “only rented movies on VHS in two genres: the Holocaust and slavery.”)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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      Tribeca Festival: Music and Movies Make for a Successful Mix

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      The festival has more than 20 music events this year — its highest number yet — including documentaries, music videos and podcasts.Metallica, Billy Idol, Miley Cyrus and Depeche Mode — they are just a few of the music acts participating in the Tribeca Festival this month. The Korean rock band the Rose, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Wizkid and Anderson .Paak are also part of the mix.These artists are either the subject of documentaries or have a hand in creating films premiering at the event, which starts Wednesday and runs through June 15. Following their screenings, some musicians, like Billy Idol and Eddie Vedder, are taking the stage to perform in intimate settings compared with their usual mass crowds. Others, including Depeche Mode and Metallica, are sitting for conversations with audiences.Music has been a part of the event since its inception, according to the festival’s director and senior vice president of programming, Cara Cusumano. In its first edition in 2002, the festival partnered with MTV for a free community concert in Battery Park City with Sheryl Crow, Counting Crows, Wyclef Jean and David Bowie. “We have always considered Tribeca a storytelling festival, so music fits in alongside the other forms of storytelling we celebrate like games, immersive, TV, podcasts and, of course, film at the center,” Cusumano said in an email interview.Much like the festival itself, the amount of music at Tribeca has only grown over the years, she said. The increased presence of musical programming is driven by its popularity with audiences. Cusumano said that the music events saw the highest number of attendees compared with the number of attendees at any other part of the festival. Tribeca is hosting more than 20 music events this year — the highest number yet — including documentaries, music videos and podcasts.“Anecdotally, we often hear audiences speak about how special the experience was since they have usually just seen a doc about the artist, which puts the show and the artist themselves in a unique context,” Cusumano saidIn 2011, Tribeca opened with “The Union,” a documentary about making the eponymous album from Leon Russell and Elton John. In his performance for audiences after the premiere, John dedicated his love ballad “Your Song” to New York. The film and John’s concert set the precedent for Tribeca opening with a music documentary whenever possible, Cusumano 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

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      At Tribeca Festival, ‘The Scout’ Spotlights a Low-Profile Role

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      Written and directed by Paula González-Nasser, who worked as a location scout for about six years, the film explores the existential quandary at the heart of this seeming dream job.It’s often said that the city a movie is set in is like a character in the story — think New York in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” or Hong Kong in Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love.” But it takes a location scout to find the ordinary streets and houses that create a complete, lived-in picture of that place. This largely invisible but important role in moviemaking provides the lead character of “The Scout,” which premieres Thursday at the Tribeca Festival.Paula González-Nasser wrote and directed “The Scout” after toiling as a location scout for around six years. The filmmaker, who grew up in Colombia and Miami, got into the business after moving to New York in 2016, when a scout left the show where she was a locations production assistant. What followed were busy stints on the shows “High Maintenance,” “Search Party,” “Broad City,” and films like “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” — driving around, knocking on doors, and leaving fliers in neighborhoods in search of the perfect locations for scenes.She started keeping a diary of her appointments, if only to preserve more of the memories of all that she saw. When the idea struck her to tell a story about her job through a movie, she knew she didn’t want to show the hustle-and-bustle on set that meta movies about filmmaking often focus their energies on.“You never see the boring, drab, behind-the-scenes part of making a movie,” González-Nasser said during an interview in a cafe in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood where she had scouted locations for the HBO series “High Maintenance.”When scouting locations, González-Nasser would enter homes and take photographs to present to the filmmaking team.Paula González-Nasser“But,” she continued, “I also wanted to show a character in a job that was blending the personal and professional and pulling her in many different directions.”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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      South by Southwest London Has Its Own Musical Touch

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      The festival, which has a long association with music, presents an opportunity for London acts to perform on a bigger stage.When South by Southwest first began in Austin, Texas, in 1987, the Shoreditch neighborhood in East London was still filled with empty warehouses. But it was beginning to attract a wave of artists who would help it eventually become synonymous with music and culture.Almost 40 years later, this area will be the site of South by Southwest London, the organization’s first foray into Europe. And for some of the London-born musicians who are performing, it’s a huge opportunity that also reflects the area’s reputation and artistic cachet.“It’s super exciting that it’s now finally arriving on home soil,” said Joel Bailey, an R&B and soul artist from Southwest London whose stage name is BAELY. He continued: “London’s got so many different hubs of, kind of like pockets of creative spaces and Shoreditch is definitely one of them. It’s thriving.”Jojo Orme, who performs as Heartworms, was born in London and said she briefly lived in Shoreditch. “They just have the fingers on the pulse there. It’s always beating,” she said, adding that “so many people love to travel to Shoreditch for a show because it’s always a good time.”Jojo Orme, who performs as Heartworms, said people flock to shows in vibrant Shoreditch, the festival’s home base. “They just have the fingers on the pulse there.”@kate.samsara.photographySouth by Southwest London, which begins on Monday and runs through June 7, will feature performances by more than 500 artists across about 30 venues as part of its music festival. It will also include a film and conference series, just like the flagship festival in Austin. An Asia-Pacific branch of the event started in Sydney in 2023.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 Theater

      Dozens of Festival Plays Worth Traveling to This Summer

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      Across the country, you’ll find Shakespeare in amphitheaters, exciting new works on intimate stages and many regional repertories in bucolic settings.In and Around New YorkJust off Manhattan, a full-to-bursting open-air season is already underway at Little Island (through Sept. 28), a park in the Hudson River that looks from afar as if it was built atop a giant’s stash of stiletto heels. Highlights include Kate Tarker and Dan Schlosberg’s “The Counterfeit Opera: A Beggar’s Opera for a Grifter’s City” (through June 15); Sarah Gancher’s bluegrass re-envisioning of “Eugene Onegin,” directed by Rachel Chavkin (July 30-31); and “The Tune Up,” a music-filled evening of new work by Suzan-Lori Parks (July 30-Aug. 3).And at the newly renovated Delacorte Theater in Central Park, Shakespeare in the Park makes a glittery return with Saheem Ali’s production of “Twelfth Night” (Aug. 7-Sept. 14), starring Lupita Nyong’o as Viola, Sandra Oh as Olivia, Peter Dinklage as Malvolio, Daphne Rubin-Vega as Maria and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Andrew Aguecheek.Amid the hive of theater development that is Poughkeepsie in summertime, New York Stage and Film’s dozen public performances at Marist College (July 11-Aug. 3) include new works by Donja R. Love, Carly Mensch, Hansol Jung, Kirsten Greenidge and John Patrick Shanley, while a reading of Drew Gasparini and Alex Brightman’s musical “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” is part of the Powerhouse Theater season (June 20-July 27) at nearby Vassar College. In Garrison, under the tent at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, “The Comedy of Errors” (June 6-Aug. 2) plays in rep with Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker” (June 8-Aug. 3), followed by Dave Malloy’s chamber musical “Octet” (Aug. 11-Sept. 7).The Pennsylvania ShakespeareFestival, about an hour north of Philadelphia, takes an expansive approach to the Bard. You can see “Hamlet” (July 9-Aug. 3) and its Tom Stoppard spinoff, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (July 17-Aug. 2). Iambic pentameter not your jam? You can also catch the musical “The Producers” (June 11-29) or the Lorraine Hansberry play “A Raisin in the Sun” (June 25-July 13). Now that’s range.Shakespeare & Company’s outdoor stage is in bucolic Lenox, Mass.Nile Scott StudiosNortheastWestern Massachusetts is a travel destination for the Berkshires’ hilly beauty and for the summer seasons of its established theaters, including Barrington Stage Company (June 3-Oct. 12), in downtown Pittsfield; Shakespeare & Company (June 19-Oct. 12), in bucolic Lenox; and Berkshire Theater Group (through Oct. 26), in both Pittsfield and Stockbridge.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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      Willem Dafoe Returns to His Stage Roots at the Venice Theater Biennale

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      Willem Dafoe is returning to his roots. While his distinctive, chiseled features are instantly recognizable from over 150 movie roles, Dafoe, 69, actually got his start in experimental theater. In 1980, he co-founded the New York City-based company the Wooster Group, and performed with it for more than 20 years.Now, he is taking on the role of a curator. Last year, Dafoe was announced as the artistic director of the 2025 and 2026 editions of the Venice Theater Biennale, one of several festivals that began life as offshoots of the Art Biennale. (The theater event is actually an annual fixture.)And there will be familiar faces around Dafoe at this year’s edition, which opens Saturday and runs through June 16. Dafoe is paying tribute to some avant-garde theater companies that shaped him and were prominent 50 years ago at the 1975 edition of the festival, with productions from Denmark’s Odin Teatret and Thomas Richards, formerly of Workcenter Grotowski. The Wooster Group’s longtime director (and Dafoe’s ex-life partner), Elizabeth LeCompte, will receive the event’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.Under the tagline “Theater Is Body. Body Is Poetry,” the Theater Biennale will also welcome a mix of European directors whom Dafoe described in a recent video interview as “modern maestros” — including Romeo Castellucci, and Milo Rau — as well as emerging artists. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did this appointment come about? Did Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the president of the Venice Biennales, reach out personally?Yes. I knew him a little bit: He was a very good friend of a dear friend of mine. I knew he wanted to talk to me, and it was the simplest of phone calls. I was very happy to accept.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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      Opera Companies Find Savings and Gains Through Collaborations

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      Co-productions can help companies across the globe save money, collaborate artistically and ensure that lesser-known works are seen by more audiences.Simon McBurney’s acclaimed production of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which debuted last month at the Salzburg Easter Festival ahead of its Metropolitan Opera premiere, almost didn’t happen.McBurney’s staging, once envisioned as a co-production between the Met and the Bolshoi in Moscow, was in limbo after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to the war, the New York company severed ties with all Russian state-run institutions.At that time, Nikolaus Bachler had recently taken over as artistic director of the Easter Festival and was looking for other companies to share productions with. One of his ambitions was to present McBurney’s “Khovanshchina” in Salzburg. The Met signed on as co-producer. “For me, it was crucial to find partners from the very beginning,” he said in an interview last month at his office in Salzburg’s picturesque Altstadt, or Old City, shortly before the second and final performance of “Khovanshchina” at the festival, on April 21.“Especially for a festival like ours, it is such a pity — they did this in the past — that you do a production for two times and then it’s over,” he said. “This is an artistic waste and economic waste.”A scene from John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Met, a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.Karen Almond/Met OperaIn recent years, the Met has increasingly turned to co-producing not only to share costs, but also as a way to collaborate artistically with other companies. The final premiere of the current season, John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” a Met commission composed by Mason Bates that adapts Michael Chabon’s novel, will open the 2025-26 season and is a collaboration with the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where it premiered in November. Two further premieres in the new season, “La Sonnambula” and Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” are shared among various opera companies in Europe and the United States.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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      At Theatertreffen Festival, Bodies Do the Talking

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      Choreographer-led works at the annual German theater event range from the transgressive to the melancholic.In this year’s Theatertreffen, the annual Berlin festival showcasing the best theater from the German-speaking world, two of the 10 selected works — narrowed down from 600 by a jury — are choreography-led productions where bodies, rather than mouths, do most of the talking.The first of these, “Sancta,” is the brainchild of the Austrian choreographer, director and performance artist Florentina Holzinger. Like all her shows — including “Tanz,” which played earlier this year at NYU Skirball in New York — it comes with trigger warnings, this time for blood, needles, “self-injurious acts” and sexual violence.Holzinger, who will represent Austria at next year’s Venice Biennale, is known for traversing dance, theater and visual art, and “Sancta” is her first foray into classical music. She has reworked Paul Hindemith’s scandalous 1922 one-act opera “Sancta Susanna,” about a nun tormented by forbidden desire, to critique the patriarchal structures of the Roman Catholic church. When “Sancta” played in Stuttgart, Germany, last year, the opera house there said some nauseated audience members needed medical attention, and in Vienna, Austrian bishops denounced the show as a “disrespectful caricature.”At the Volksbühne in Berlin, “Sancta” opens with a rendition of Hindemith’s score by three wild-eyed singers in habits before morphing into a provocative variety show. Naked performers kiss, grope, and grind against a towering metal crucifix. Roller-skating nuns glide along a halfpipe and karate kick suspended metal sheets. In one stomach-churning scene, a strip of skin is sliced from a performer’s chest, fried and fed to another cast member in a techno-scored tableau evoking the Last Supper.Florentina Holzinger’s “Sancta” starts by reworking a 1922 opera about a nun tormented by forbidden desire and morphs into a provocative variety show.Nicole Marianna WytyczakIf Holzinger’s intent is to shock, she succeeds — but her efforts also backfire. The relentless barrage of subversive scenes means that, over the show’s nearly three-hour run time, it’s easy to become desensitized. Its most powerful moments lean into topical humor, rather than excess: When a performer with dwarfism walks onstage dressed in papal robes and dryly declares, “It’s official,” she elicits big laughs from the audience. (It was the day of Pope Leo XIV’s election.) Later, the performer proclaims herself the first lesbian pope, to more enthusiastic laughter.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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      BAM Announces a Women-Led Next Wave and Fall Season

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      The arts institution, which has shrunk its programming in recent years, unveiled its fall lineup.The Brooklyn Academy of Music will welcome its 42nd Next Wave festival this fall, with most works created by female artists, the performing arts center announced on Thursday.“We led with women,” said Amy Cassello, who became BAM’s artistic director last year after serving in the role as interim. “It just felt like a good time to center women creatives.”The announcement comes at a time of leadership flux for the academy and financial fragility that was intensified by the pandemic. BAM’s staff has declined by more than a third in recent years, and its nearly $52 million operating budget is smaller than it was 10 years ago.But there is momentum, and audiences are growing.Next Wave will have 11 events, as it did last year, up from eight in 2023. That year, the festival scaled back to nearly half of the 2022 offerings amid staff layoffs.“I feel confident that we have the number of shows that make a coherent statement,” Cassello said, adding, “I wish there were more money to subsidize and support and invest in artistic work.”The festival opens with the choreographer Nora Chipaumire’s “Dambudzo” (Oct. 8-9), a blend of painting, sculpture, sound and performance, transforming the nearby performing arts space Roulette into a Zimbabwean house bar.The lineup also includes the French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s “LACRIMA” (Oct. 22, 24-26), a choral theater performance that, in a dark look at the fashion industry, traces the many hands across the world it takes to create a wedding dress for a British princess; Eiko Otake and Wen Hui’s “What Is War” (Oct. 21-25), a fusion of movement and video testimony about war and its aftermath on collective memory and the body; and the choreographer Leslie Cuyjet’s “For All Your Life” (Dec. 3-7), a solo performance interrogating the life insurance industry’s ties to slavery.Next season will also feature a revival of Richard Move’s dance-theater work “Martha@BAM — The 1963 Interview” (Oct. 28 -Nov. 1), in which Move recreates a 1963 interview between Martha Graham (Move) and the critic Walter Terry (the playwright Lisa Kron) at the 92nd Street Y.BAM will also present a screening of “The Mahabharata” (Sept. 18), a film adaptation of Peter Brook’s nine-hour theatrical presentation of the Sanskrit epic that BAM staged in 1987 atthe theater now known as the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong. The Harvey will be the site of the screening of Brook’s (much shorter) 1989 film, newly restored by his son, Simon Brook.The season concludes with a revival of the raucous post-rock opera “What to Wear” (Jan. 15-17) by the avant-garde theater maker Richard Foreman, who died in January at 87. The hallucinatory work, with a score by Michael Gordon, will be conducted by Alan Pierson and directed by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, and run as part of Prototype, the experimental New York opera festival.“BAM has always been artist-centered and adventurous and risk-taking,” Cassello said, “and I think that’s absolutely necessary. Always has been.” More