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Wanda ProductionsIn the mood for something shorter? The New York Shorts International Film Festival has over 300 films, including “Booksmart” (shown here, 3 minutes, France), “Quico” (12 minutes, United States), “Genius Artist” (8 minutes, China) and “Bienvenidos A Los Angeles” (15 minutes, United States). More
The film festival gave Meg Smaker’s “Jihad Rehab” a coveted spot in its 2022 lineup, but apologized after an outcry over her race and her approach.Meg Smaker felt exhilarated last November. After 16 months filming inside a Saudi rehabilitation center for accused terrorists, she learned that her documentary “Jihad Rehab” was invited to the 2022 Sundance Festival, one of the most prestigious showcases in the world.Her documentary centered on four former Guantánamo detainees sent to a rehab center in Saudi Arabia who had opened their lives to her, speaking of youthful attraction to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, of torture endured, and of regrets.Film critics warned that conservatives might bridle at these human portraits, but reviews after the festival’s screening were strong.“The absence of absolutes is what’s most enriching,” The Guardian stated, adding, “This is a movie for intelligent people looking to have their preconceived notions challenged.” Variety wrote: The film “feels like a miracle and an interrogative act of defiance.”But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.Sundance leaders reversed themselves and apologized.Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive director of “Jihad Rehab” and called it “freaking brilliant” in an email to Ms. Smaker. Now she disavowed it.The film “landed like a truckload of hate,” Ms. Disney wrote in an open letter.Ms. Smaker’s film has become near untouchable, unable to reach audiences. Prominent festivals rescinded invitations, and critics in the documentary world took to social media and pressured investors, advisers and even her friends to withdraw names from the credits. She is close to broke.“In my naïveté, I kept thinking people would get the anger out of their system and realize this film was not what they said,” Ms. Smaker said. “I’m trying to tell an authentic story that a lot of Americans might not have heard.”Battles over authorship and identity regularly roil the documentary world, a tightly knit and largely left-wing ecosystem.Ms. Smaker wanted to explore what leads men to embrace terrorism. But Arab American filmmakers say that framing was all too familiar. Meg SmakerMany Arab and Muslim filmmakers — who like others in the industry struggle for money and recognition — denounced “Jihad Rehab” as offering an all too familiar take. They say Ms. Smaker is the latest white documentarian to tell the story of Muslims through a lens of the war on terror. These documentary makers, they say, take their white, Western gaze and claim to film victims with empathy.Assia Boundaoui, a filmmaker, critiqued it for Documentary magazine.“To see my language and the homelands of folks in my community used as backdrops for white savior tendencies is nauseating,” she wrote. “The talk is all empathy, but the energy is Indiana Jones.”She called on festivals to allow Muslims to create “films that concern themselves not with war, but with life.”The argument over whether artists should share racial or ethnic identity and sympathy with their subjects is long running in literature and film — with many artists and writers, like the documentarians Ken Burns and Nanfu Wang, arguing it would be suffocating to tell the story of only their own culture and that the challenge is to inhabit worlds different from their own.In the case of “Jihad Rehab,” the identity critique is married to the view that the film must function as political art and examine the historic and cultural oppressions that led to the imprisonment of these men at Guantánamo.Some critics and documentary filmmakers say that mandate is reductive and numbing.“What I admired about ‘Jihad Rehab’ is that it allowed a viewer to make their own decisions,” said Chris Metzler, who helps select films for San Francisco Documentary Festival. “I was not watching a piece of propaganda.”Ms. Smaker has other defenders. Lorraine Ali, a television critic for The Los Angeles Times who is Muslim, wrote that the film was “a humanizing journey through a complex emotional process of self-reckoning and accountability, and a look at the devastating fallout of flawed U.S. and Saudi policy.”She is dismayed with Sundance.“In the independent film world there is a lot of weaponizing of identity politics,” Ms. Ali said in an interview. “The film took pains to understand the culture these men came from and molded them. It does a disservice to throw away a film that a lot of people should see.”From Firefighter to FilmmakerMs. Smaker was a 21-year-old firefighter in California when airplanes struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. She heard firefighters cry for vengeance and wondered: How did this happen?Looking for answers, she hitchhiked through Afghanistan and settled in the ancient city of Sana, Yemen, for half a decade, where she learned Arabic and taught firefighting. Then she obtained a master’s from Stanford University in filmmaking and turned to a place Yemeni friends had spoken of: the Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center in Riyadh.The Saudi monarchy brooks little dissent. This center tries to rehabilitate accused terrorists and spans an unlikely distance between prison and boutique hotel. It has a gym and pool and teachers who offer art therapy and lectures on Islam, Freud and the true meanings of “jihad,” which include personal struggle.Hence the documentary’s original title, “Jihad Rehab,” which engendered much criticism, even from supporters, who saw it as too facile. “The film is very complex and the title is not,” said Ms. Ali, the Los Angeles Times critic.To address such concerns, the director recently renamed the film “The UnRedacted.”The United States sent 137 detainees from Guantánamo Bay to this center, which human rights groups cannot visit.But reporters with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and others have interviewed prisoners. Most stayed a few days.Ms. Smaker would remain more than a year exploring what leads men to embrace groups such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban.Saudi officials let her speak to 150 detainees, most of whom waved her off. She found four men who would talk.A film still of the guard tower. Ms. Smaker envisioned the documentary as opening with accusations facing the men — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Meg SmackerThese conversations form the core of the movie and cut far deeper than earlier news reports. That did not dissuade critics. Ms. Disney, a titan in the documentary world, picked up on a point raised by the film’s opponents. “A person cannot freely consent to anything in a carceral system, particularly one in a notoriously violent dictatorship,” she wrote.This is a debatable proposition. Journalists often interview prisoners, and documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line” give powerful voice to them, without necessarily clearing this purist hurdle of free consent.Ms. Disney declined an interview request, saying she wished Ms. Smaker well.Lawrence Wright wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” and spent much time in Saudi Arabia. He saw the documentary.“As a reporter, you acknowledge the constraints on prisoners, and Smaker could have acknowledged it with more emphasis,” he said. “But she was exploring a great mystery — understanding those who may have done something appalling — and this does not discredit that effort.”To gain intimate access, he added, was a coup.Ms. Smaker envisioned the film as an unfolding, opening with American accusations — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Distrust yielded to trust. Men described being drawn to Al Qaeda out of boredom, poverty and defense of Islam. What emerged was a portrait of men on the cusp of middle-age reckoning with their past.Ms. Smaker asked one of the men, “Are you a terrorist?”He bridled. “Someone fight me, I fight them. Why do you call me terrorist?”Her critics argue that such questions registered as accusation. “These questions seek to humanize the men, but they still frame them as terrorists,” Pat Mullen, a Toronto film critic, wrote in Point of View magazine.Mr. Metzler of the San Francisco festival said a documentarian must ask questions that are on a viewer’s mind.The film in fact dwells on torture inflicted by Americans at Guantánamo Bay. Ali al-Raimi arrived at age 16. “Every day was worse than the last day,” he said.He tried to hang himself.“Nothing,” he said, “was worse than Guantánamo.”The men longed for the prosaic: marriage, children, a job. Khalid, a voluble man, was trained as a bomb maker; in the film, he said he now crafts remote-control car alarms in Jeddah. Ambiguity lingers.Success, InterruptedSundance announced in December that it had selected “Jihad Rehab” for its 2022 festival, held the following month. Critics erupted.“An entirely white team behind a film about Yemeni and South Arabian men,” the filmmaker Violeta Ayala wrote in a tweet.Ms. Smaker’s film had a Yemeni-American executive producer and a Saudi co-producer.More than 230 filmmakers signed a letter denouncing the documentary. A majority had not seen it. The letter noted that over 20 years, Sundance had programmed 76 films about Muslims and the Middle East, but only 35 percent of them had been directed by Muslim or Arab filmmakers.Sundance noted that in its 2022 festival, of the 152 films in which directors revealed their ethnicity, 7 percent were Middle Eastern. Estimates place Americans of Arab descent at between 1.5 and 3 percent.Sundance officials backtracked. Tabitha Jackson, then the director of the festival, demanded to see consent forms from the detainees and Ms. Smaker’s plan to protect them once the film debuted, according to an email shown to The Times. Ms. Jackson also required an ethics review of the plans and gave Ms. Smaker four days to comply. Efforts to reach Ms. Jackson were unsuccessful.The review concluded Ms. Smaker more than met standards of safety.Ms. Smaker said a public relations firm recommended that she apologize. “What was I apologizing for?” she said. “For trusting my audience to make up their own mind?”Prominent documentary executives said Sundance’s demands were without precedent.An executive who has run a major festival went so far as to write an email to Sundance cautioning that its demands of Ms. Smaker might embolden protesters. Festivals, the executive wrote, will ask “two, three, four times what are the headwinds” before extending an invitation.That executive had earlier invited Ms. Smaker to show “Jihad Rehab,” but she had declined as her film was not yet completed. This executive asked to remain anonymous out of concern of offending Muslim filmmakers.“Jihad Rehab” premiered in January; most major reviews were good. But Ms. Smaker’s critics were not persuaded.“When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic,” wrote Jude Chehab, a Lebanese American documentarian, “my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn’t. Point blank.”Ms. Disney, the former champion, wrote, “I failed, failed and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are.”Her apology and that of Sundance shook the industry. The South by Southwest and San Francisco festivals rescinded invitations.Jihad Turk, former imam of Los Angeles’s largest mosque, was baffled. In December, his friend Tim Disney — brother of Abigail — invited him to a screening.“My first instinct,” he said, “was ‘Oh, not another film on jihad and Islam.’ Then I watched and it was introspective and intelligent. My hope is that there is a courageous outlet that is not intimidated by activists and their too narrow views.”An Elusive Happy EndingIn June, Ms. Smaker received another screening — at the Doc Edge festival in New Zealand.She hopped a flight to Auckland with trepidation. Would this end in cancellation? Word had leaked out, and Mr. Mullen, the Toronto film critic, tweeted a warning.“Oh wild — controversial Sundance doc Jihad Rehab comes out of hiding,” he wrote, adding: “Why would anyone program this film after Sundance? File under ‘we warned you!’”Dan Shanan, who heads the New Zealand festival, shrugged.“What happened at Sundance was not good,” he said. “Film festivals must hold to their belief in their role.”Ms. Smaker has maxed out credit cards and, at age 42, borrowed money from her parents. This is not the Sundance debut of her dreams. “I don’t have the money or influence to fight this out,” she said, running hands back through her hair. “I’m not sure I see a way out.” More
At least three local artists were cut from the traveling rap show, scheduled for this weekend in Queens, at the request of the New York Police Department, their representatives said.At least three rappers with ties to the booming New York drill scene — which has risen in popularity in recent years, even as law enforcement officials and politicians like Mayor Eric Adams have questioned its relationship to local gun violence — have been removed from the lineup of the traveling rap festival Rolling Loud, scheduled for this weekend at Citi Field in Queens, at the request of the New York Police Department, the artists’ representatives said.The rappers included Sha Ek, a 19-year-old from the Bronx; 22Gz, an influential figure in Brooklyn’s drill movement; and Ron Suno, a musician and comedian from the Bronx.Rolling Loud, which is scheduled to run from Friday to Sunday, and the New York Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the rappers’ removal this week. But the last-minute cancellations matched a similar scenario ahead of the festival’s New York stop in 2019, when five artists, including 22Gz and Pop Smoke, had their performances scrapped.The rappers had “been affiliated with recent acts of violence citywide,” according to a letter sent by an assistant chief at the Police Department to the festival organizers at the time. “The New York City Police Department believes if these individuals are allowed to perform, there will be a higher risk of violence.”Tariq Cherif, a founder of Rolling Loud, said then that the festival had no choice but to comply if it wished to return to New York. A representative for Sha Ek and 22Gz said this week that the artists were paid in full for their performances.But on Thursday, Stanley Davis, a manager for Sha Ek who is known as Noodles, said in a statement that his client had not been charged with any crime that could justify his ban. “The police try to associate what he’s doing with violence and negativity,” he wrote. “They don’t respect that he’s an artist and entertainer trying to better himself and feed his family at 19 years old.”Davis added, “Sha Ek has performed all over the Northeast this year. The crowds at his concerts are full of kids dancing and having fun. He’s excited to keep growing his touring business and proving the police wrong.”Diamond Brown, a manager for Ron Suno who goes by Bo, said via text message: “How can a person who has no criminal record and no gang ties — the kid never even made a diss record — be denied to perform in his hometown after all his hard work?”Suno had been involved in a fight at last year’s edition of Rolling Loud in New York, but he downplayed the incident in subsequent interviews and on social media. No charges were filed.A spokeswoman for 22Gz’s record label, Atlantic Records, confirmed his removal but declined to comment further. 22Gz is currently out on bond after being charged in June with attempted murder for his role in a Brooklyn club shooting that injured three people.Drill, which started as a neighborhood hip-hop sound in Chicago about a decade ago, has since traveled to London, New York, Stockholm and beyond, becoming a dominant mode for rap music. But the proudly hyperlocal artists, whose songs are often a reaction to and a documenting of gun violence, gang disputes and extreme poverty in their hometowns, have also faced heavy scrutiny from community leaders and law enforcement officials, who claim that the music incites more violence.In the United Kingdom, drill artists have said their lyrics and their very existence have been criminalized, resulting in constant scrutiny. Chief Keef, one of drill’s pioneers and a breakout star from Chicago, has also been prevented from performing in his native city, or even nearby, with police once shutting down a concert in Indiana in which Keef was appearing only via hologram from California.In New York, Mayor Adams has questioned whether social networks should ban drill music from its platforms. “Violent people who are using drill rapping to post who they killed, and then antagonize the people who they are going to kill is what the problem is,” he told reporters earlier this year.The mayor then met with a coalition of New York rappers to discuss drill and potential ways to reduce gun violence in the city. Two of the drill artists who sat down with Mayor Adams in February — Fivio Foreign and B-Lovee — are still scheduled to perform at Rolling Loud this weekend.Since its 2015 debut in Miami, Rolling Loud has grown into the defining and farthest-reaching music festival for rap, though it has also been connected to spates of arrests and occasional violence. Headliners this weekend in New York include Nicki Minaj, Future, ASAP Rocky and Playboi Carti. More
As offices and schools reopen, ParisOffFestival brings a carnival atmosphere to an area of low-income housing in the city.PARIS — “Dear neighbors!” an affable puppet called out from a third-floor window here last week. In the packed street below, a mix of theatergoers, local families and passers-by looked up. As more puppets appeared in the windows of an apartment building in the city’s south and addressed the crowd about loneliness and the “bitter pills” of daily life, the spectators murmured in approval.The strangely uplifting spectacle was part of ParisOffFestival, an annual event that began two years ago, but which already occupies a special niche in the Paris theater calendar. Run by the Théâtre 14 over three days in early September, it strives to keep the spirit of summer festivals going, even in the midst of “la rentrée,” the reopening of offices and schools that signals the end of the lengthy summer holidays in France.Seven theater productions, as well as readings, were performed during daytime hours in the courtyards of subsidized apartment buildings, in the Théâtre 14’s garden and at a local stadium, all a short walk apart. Also close by, the small pedestrian street where the puppets made their appearance acted as a welcome area for the public to hang out, with beer, cotton candy and loungers at the ready.All of the festival’s performances were free, a big investment from the small Théâtre 14, a city-run playhouse inaugurated in 1982, whose annual budget of around $800,000 is just a fraction of what the biggest stages in Paris receive.The Théâtre 14 used to keep a low profile, but since 2020, a new management team — the actor-director Mathieu Touzé and the arts administrator Édouard Chapot — has found creative ways to insert the institution into the national conversation, from partnerships with high-profile playwrights to yearly events like ParisOffFestival and Re.génération, a spring festival devoted to site-specific work.The first edition of ParisOffFestival, in the summer of 2020, was a quick-thinking response to the coronavirus pandemic. After the cancellation that year of the Avignon Festival, French theater’s biggest event, Touzé and Chapot offered their help to 15 companies that had been due to perform in the Avignon Fringe. The Fringe is known as “le Off” in French, hence the name of the festival, which has stayed, even as Avignon reopened for business.That first edition, Chapot said recently, allowed the new team to meet locals who had never set foot inside the Théâtre 14. While the red brick buildings in the area near the playhouse look, at first glance, like standard bourgeois Paris dwellings, the neighborhood is primarily composed of low-income housing developments. For many there, going to the theater is an unnecessary luxury, even when it’s just a few yards away.Florence Janas and Mathias Bentahar in “Florence & Moustafa.”Théâtre 14So ParisOffFestival takes theater to them instead, with additional funding coming this year from Paris Habitat, the city’s social housing authority. Last Saturday, two of the shows were staged in the courtyards of apartment complexes that Paris Habitat runs. As the mock wedding depicted in Guillaume Vincent’s “Florence & Moustafa” unfolded, a few people stepping out of their homes were stopped in their tracks and watched a scene or two, looking startled. (Others sped past, headphones firmly on.)For those paying attention, the selected shows proved engaging, with “Florence & Moustafa” an especially witty choice. It was designed as an offshoot of a much larger production, Vincent’s sprawling and extravagant “One Thousand and One Nights,” first seen at the Odéon playhouse in 2019. Like that show, “Florence & Moustafa” puts a contemporary spin on Arabic folk takes, but it requires only two actors, a table and a few props.The action started at the housing project’s gate. In full wedding attire, the performers, Florence Janas and Mathias Bentahar, welcomed audience members as the bride and groom might greet guests at a slightly unhinged reception. As they directed people to their seats, they traded thinly veiled barbs between declarations of love — and then asked someone in the first row to help them butter slices of toast.The audience didn’t get to share the food, but the interplay between Janas’s over-the-top unpredictability and Bentahar’s quiet confidence kept the proceedings lively. Like “One Thousand and One Nights,” “Florence & Moustafa” constantly slips between modern references and folk tales, which are interwoven as the characters’ back stories. Florence, we hear, tricked a former husband who had already married and disposed of seven wives; Moustafa found a magic lamp and squandered his three wishes, in a case of penis enlargement gone very wrong.That surreal energy carried over to some of ParisOffFestival’s other offerings. “Crust,” a one-man show starring the juggler Guillaume Martinet, made delightful use of the event’s backdrop. As the audience waited for him near the edge of a street, he peeked at us from behind parked cars, then sheepishly came closer wearing just white underwear and moon boots, like a curious alien, at once eager and scared.His supple juggling came as an extension of his loose-limbed stage character, catching props even as he spun, hung from window rails and crawled on the floor. When a photographer attempted to snap him up close, he played hide and seek, then climbed on top of a construction site container and continued his act there.Other productions felt more haphazard in their attempts to craft an overall narrative, including “The Windows,” the puppet show, which was designed by the company Les Anges au Plafond. Leaning out from the casements of a single building, the various characters — lonely inhabitants, a care services worker for the elderly and, inexplicably, some birds and a goat — never really made sense in relation to one another.“Divine Wind,” a one-man show directed by Cécile Bernot, brought a virtuosic performance from David Jonquières, a gifted mime who can also mimic cartoonish sound effects. While his imitation of a plane going down is uncanny, his attempt to retell a part of World War II history — the events of 1941 in the South Pacific — felt repetitive and came uncomfortably close to offensive caricature in its depiction of Japanese characters.Adrian Saint-Pol and Elsa Guedj in “Infinity Minus One.”Théâtre 14On the other hand, Luna Muratti’s “Infinity Minus One,” also staged in a housing project courtyard, never lost its sense of grace, despite being drowned out at times by gusts of wind and passing cars. The show was inspired by a young French poet, Alicia Gallienne, who died at the age of 20; her work was published posthumously in 2020 by her cousin Guillaume Gallienne, a star actor in France.Gallienne’s poetry is a lovely discovery, full of dreamlike visions and suspended non sequiturs addressed to an elusive other, and here it was ideally delivered by the actress Elsa Guedj, seen recently in the Netflix series “Standing Up,” with help from the flutist Adrian Saint-Pol. Guedj has that rare ability to convey emotions bubbling up without yet being fully formed.“I have eyes in the shape of departure,” she whispered early on, before addressing Saint-Pol, who doubles as the love interest in Gallienne’s poems. By the time she covered his eyes with her hands and closed hers, at the end of “Infinity Minus One,” the surrounding noise was forgotten. The summer festival season may be over, but this was a welcome encore. More
Small independents emphasize their strengths at the film festival.Some of the biggest jewelry houses raise their public profiles as major sponsors of film festivals, like Chopard at Cannes, Cartier in Venice, and Bulgari, which is supporting the Toronto festival for the first time in September. But what are the options for small independent jewelers that can’t afford such expensive affiliations?Several Italian brands, including Nardi and Vhernier, have found opportunities on the red carpet at the Venice International Film Festival. The event, scheduled this year from Aug. 31 to Sept. 10, is also called Venice Mostra (in English, Show) and is part of the Venice Biennale art exhibition.“Big brands have monopolized film festivals,” said Alberto Nardi, a third-generation member of his family’s jewelry business. “We cannot compete, so we have to play with our strengths, which are, firstly, that we are here in Venice and, secondly, that we do something original, different.”Last year, for example, Cécile de France, a Belgian actress in the cast of “Illusions Perdues,” wore Nardi earrings to a festival photo call for the movie. The set was made of yellow gold and enamel, accented with turquoises and pink sapphires, and called Maschera (in English, Mask). Its design was inspired by rings decorated with masked faces in enamel that were popular in the 1700s in Venice.The actor Cécile de France wearing Nardi earrings accented with sapphires and turquoises at a photo call for the film “Illusions Perdues.”Yara Nardi/Reuters“We get close to talents we respect and who appreciate us and genuinely enjoy wearing our jewels,” Mr. Nardi said.The Milan-based brand Vhernier takes a similar approach. “We do not have any contracts, and we do not pay anyone. Celebrities who wear Vhernier do so simply because they like it,” Isabella Traglio, the brand’s deputy general manager, said in a video call.The house’s sculptural pieces — such as the rose-colored Verso ear clips worn by the English-French actress Stacy Martin at the festival in 2018, and the white gold Giunco bracelet worn by the Italian actress Matilde Gioli in 2016 — reflect the orientation of the house, which was founded by a sculptor and a goldsmith in 1984.Vhernier has had some big-screen exposure, too: Jane Fonda wore its styles in the 2018 movie “Book Club.” Usually, film producers ask jewelers to pay for such placement, but Ms. Traglio said the opportunity arose thanks to Ms. Fonda, who has often worn the brand, and there was no monetary transaction.The actress Stacy Martin wears Vhernier’s sculptural ear clips at the 75th Annual Venice Film Festival in 2018.Mondadori Portfolio, via Getty Images“We can’t and don’t play the game of big brands that usually go for big celebrities,” Ms. Traglio said. “We lean to emerging talents.”But sometimes such emerging talents can push a brand into the spotlight.“Brands that throw a piece of jewelry on someone will most likely never recover the investment,” Daniel Langer, chief executive of the brand development and strategy company Équité and a professor of luxury strategy at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., wrote in an email. “However, if it is done smartly — if values align and enough content can be created and used on social media — then a single event is amplified into a bigger communication opportunity.”The Milan-based brand Rubeus said that was what happened last year when the house lent its Hexagon earrings and Cabochon ring set with sapphires, emeralds and diamonds to the Italian actress Benedetta Porcaroli for the Venice festival debut of “The Catholic School.”The buzz surrounding the controversial film, inspired by the 1975 kidnapping and murder of two young girls in Italy, attracted attention to the actress, who played a leading role, and to the jewelry on social media, as well as in Italian versions of Vogue and Elle. “Social media are taking the event closer to everyone and potential clients,” Nataliya Bondarenko, the company’s creative director, wrote in an email.As a result, the brand said, interest was revived in its inaugural high jewelry collection, which was introduced in 2019, but had little opportunity to be highlighted during the early days of the pandemic.Rubeus’s presence in Venice during such a prominent occasion also inspired the brand to create a set of fragrances and to continue a series of capsule collections of accessories and clothing begun in 2017 in collaboration with Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua, a company specializing in fabrics that was founded in the 19th century in Venice.The Italian actress Benedetta Porcaroli at the 2021 Venice festival debut of “The Catholic School.”Claudio Onorati/EPA, via ShutterstockOf course, Venice has been a muse for large luxury houses, too. Last year, for example, Dolce & Gabbana showcased its high jewelry and haute couture collections in the city.And this year, to celebrate a philanthropic donation to restore a pulpit in St. Mark’s Basilica that was damaged by devastating floods in 2019, Pomellato is presenting a collection of rings made in porphyry, which will be available only in its Venice boutique (In 2021, the brand dressed Tiffany Haddish for the film festival’s red carpet.)“Venice is the most magical festival, but it is logistically tough,” the London-based stylist Aimée Croysdill wrote in an email. She has dressed Laura Haddock for Venice, and also has experience with the Oscars, the Cannes Film Festival and the British Academy Film Awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs.“Getting on and off jetties into bobbing boats means you cannot do huge heavy gowns that go on for meters,” she wrote. “That kind of opulence is usually kept for Cannes.”Such logistical difficulties are a boon for some Italian jewelry houses, like Crivelli, that know how to cope with the city’s complexities — and have earned reputations that ensure their creations won’t be replaced at the last minute.“Being close to Venice has allowed us to be present on the red carpet constantly, and this continuous engagement has strengthened our relationships with the talents and their entourage, who know that they can count on us,” Alessia Crivelli, marketing manager of the family business, wrote in an email. The house, known for its gold heart-shaped pendants, was founded by her father in the 1970s in the jewelry-making town of Valenza, between Milan and Turin, and has a flagship store in Milan.For the Venice festival, Crivelli accessorized the Norwegian film director and actress Mona Fastvold in 2020 and 2021, as well as Naomi Watts and Raffey Cassidy in 2018.Crivelli accessorized the Norwegian film director and actress Mona Fastvold for the 78th Venice International Film Festival in 2021.John Phillips/Getty ImagesThe relationship between the festival and small Italian jewelry brands may seem unusual, considering Cartier’s sponsorship role, but the French house appears to be more interested in the festival’s cultural connections than its red carpet opportunities. “Our partnership with La Mostra goes beyond the red carpet,” Arnaud Carrez, Cartier’s chief marketing officer, said in a video interview. He stressed how film is an art form that is close to Cartier, and how the festival provides a culturally rich platform to entertain clients and friends of the jewelry house.Roberto Cicutto, president of the Venice Biennale, echoed the comment in an email: “We are working together not only in terms of communication and hospitality for their guests, but also thinking about content,” referring to the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award, a prize given to someone who is considered to have made a significant contribution to contemporary filmmaking. It was first awarded in 2007, but Cartier began presenting it in 2021.It is not unusual for brands to want to associate themselves with the art of film, Luca Solca, a luxury analyst at the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein, wrote in an email: “Art is seen as a blueprint for personal luxury goods, given its universal language and its disconnect to cost.”But Cartier undoubtedly was pleased last year when Jennifer Lopez appeared at the festival, draped in Cartier diamonds and Ben Affleck. According to an email from Alison Bringé, chief marketing officer of the media analytics company Launchmetrics, Ms. Lopez’s social media post about the visit was worth $2 million in media impact to Cartier.Yet, Mr. Nardi expressed sadness at how marketing machines have overwhelmed the magic of cinema — and of the jewelry world. “I think it debases our products,” he said.“I grew up listening to the stories of Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly coming to Venice and buying jewelry in our store, but that world has now gone.” More
A lifelong film lover, she stood up to protesters, and to federal and church authorities, to bring challenging movies to the masses.Joanne Koch, the longtime head of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who stared down picketers and, at times, government and church authorities to present controversial works by the likes of Godard, Scorsese and Oshima while presiding over the New York Film Festival, and who oversaw the creation of the center’s own temple for cineastes, the Walter Reade Theater, died on Aug. 16 at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 92.Her daughter, Andrea Godbout, said the cause was aortic stenosis.A lifelong defender of artistic freedom, the Brooklyn-born Ms. Koch (pronounced “coke”) served as the Film Society’s executive director over more than a quarter-century of change and growth, starting in 1977. (She was not related to David H. Koch, the oil magnate whose name adorns the ballet theater at Lincoln Center).In 1973, she helped create the film festival’s New Directors/New Films series, which showcases the work of emerging directors and has included the work of Spike Lee, Pedro Almodóvar and Wim Wenders. She also helped produce 19 of the society’s celebrity-studded gala tributes to film luminaries including Fred Astaire, Laurence Olivier and Audrey Hepburn, as well as spearheading the acquisition in 1974 of the influential critical journal Film Comment, where she served as publisher.As the society’s chief financial officer, she helped raise funds and coordinate the design for the Walter Reade Theater, which opened in the center’s Rose Building in 1991 as a sanctuary for independent and foreign films at a time when the VHS revolution was imperiling many repertory film houses.Ms. Koch, center, with Wendy Keys and Richard Peña of the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the Walter Reade Theater. Ms. Koch oversaw the creation of the theater, which opened in 1991.courtesy Film at Lincoln Center“Her passion was always to build new audiences for films and provide them superior venues for moviegoing,” said Wendy Keys, a board member and former executive producer of programming for Film at Lincoln Center, as the society is now known. “She wasn’t just a dollars-and-cents person. She was driven by her great love of film.”Her most visible role, however, was managing the prestigious New York Film Festival. At a time when competing film festivals in North America were exploding, she helped it maintain its international prominence — and its strictly curated format.“We would fight like cats and dogs over every film we showed,” Ms. Keys, a former member of the selection committee, said in a phone interview. “We always considered ourselves to be presenting each of our 25 films on a velvet cushion, as opposed to showing more than 350 films, which is what a lot of other festivals do.”Sometimes those decisions came at considerable risk. For example, Ms. Koch and the rest of the society found themselves in a face-off with federal authorities in 1976 when the festival scheduled the North American premiere of Nagisa Oshima’s “In The Realm of the Senses,” an unflinchingly graphic tale of sexual obsession set in Tokyo in 1936. (“‘Senses’ does not show anything that has not been available in hard-core porn houses around Manhattan,” Richard Eder of The New York Times wrote in 1977.)That notorious film created a buzz in New York cultural circles, Ms. Keys recalled, with notables like John Lennon and Yoko Ono scheduled to attend the premiere at Alice Tully Hall. But then federal customs and Treasury officials, after seeing the film at a press screening, threatened seizure and legal action if the film society showed it.The film was cleared in court, and Ms. Koch invited the original audience, which had been turned away, to a screening at the Museum of Modern Art a few months later. “She thought that nothing should be avoided, whether it was too violent or explicitly sexual or anti-religious,” Ms. Keys said. “That was very deep to her core. She was a provocateur.”The firestorm was far greater in 1985, when the festival scheduled a premiere of “Hail Mary,” a film by Jean-Luc Godard that imagined the Virgin Mary as a modern-day young woman who worked at a gas station. More than 5,000 protesters, some toting candles, turned out at the screening, according to an essay by the philosopher Stanley Cavell in the 1993 anthology “Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in Film.” The rector of a seminary in Connecticut warned, “When the bombs fall on Manhattan, one will especially fall on the cinema where this film is being shown.”Ms. Koch in an undated photo with her husband, Richard A. Koch, and the playwright David Mamet. Among her accomplishments at Lincoln Center was helping to create the New Directors/New Films series. courtesy Film at Lincoln Center“The film is not anti-Catholic,” Mr. Cavell quoted Ms. Koch as saying. “We don’t mean to offend — certainly that was not our intent — but we feel strongly that art has to be respected as art.”Picketers again swarmed Lincoln Center for the festival’s premiere of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film portraying Jesus as a man caught in a struggle between the earthly and the divine.Joanne Rose Obermaier was born on Oct. 7, 1929, in Brooklyn, the only child of John Obermaier, an electrical engineer, and Blanche (Ashman) Obermaier, a professor of elementary education at New York University. As a teenager at Midwood High School, she “used to sneak into the Loew’s Kings movie theater on Flatbush Avenue through a side door for matinees,” Ms. Godbout, her daughter, said.She graduated from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., with a degree in political science, and in 1950 she took a job in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, eventually becoming a technical director working on film preservation.In 1949 she married Oscar A. Godbout, a journalist who covered Hollywood for The New York Times in the 1950s and later wrote about the outdoors as the newspaper’s “Wood, Field, and Stream” columnist. The couple divorced in 1967, and later that year she married Richard A. Koch, the director of administration for MoMA.Mr. Koch died in 2009. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three stepsons, Stephen Jeremy and Chapin Koch, and two grandsons.In 1971, Ms. Koch took a job at the Lincoln Center Film Society, where she ran a program called “Movies in the Parks.” She ascended to the society’s top post six years later.Not all her battles there amounted to artistic crusades. In 1987 she found herself embroiled in a different sort of controversy when she and Alfred Stern, the society’s president, were reported to have led a campaign to oust Richard Roud, a respected cinephile and the longtime director of the festival, in a dispute that erupted after Ms. Koch overruled the festival’s selection committee to include two films by Federico Fellini.“I think Joanne wanted more power,” David Denby, then the film critic for New York magazine and a member of the selection committee, was quoted as saying in The Times. “It became obvious this summer when she started strong-arming the committee on the selections.”Ms. Koch told The Times that the move “had nothing to do with film selection,” but rather involved longstanding administrative differences.Even so, it was a difficult chapter. “It was horrible,” Ms. Koch recalled in a 1992 oral history. “I was put on the cover of The Village Voice as ‘The Terminator.’”But she was unrepentant. “It really did change the way I look at myself professionally,” she said. “Realistically, I’m not such a nice person all the time. You can’t be, in this kind of a job.” More
Four classical music festivals. Three children. Two exhausted parents, with a brave grandfather in tow. One bedraggled minivan.It’ll be fun, my wife promised me. Surprisingly, it was.While some of my colleagues have been taking in the mighty festivals of Europe over the past few weeks — premieres in Aix-en-Provence, France, and the charms of Salzburg, Austria — the revival of programming after the darker days of the pandemic affords the adventurous a fresh chance to get better acquainted with the summer offerings here in the United States.There are plenty of them, after all. Several of our major orchestras benefit from their own vacation homes, whether Tanglewood for the Boston Symphony or Blossom for the Cleveland Orchestra, Ravinia outside Chicago or the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Others, not so fortunate in padding their bottom lines with picnickers, play on in their usual halls, or piece together short residencies in various climes.Then there’s Ojai, and Ravinia, and Spoleto, and Caramoor, and Bard, and Cabrillo and many, many more festivals; if your budget stretches and your stomach is strong, you can even take a jet boat down the Colorado to hear “Quartet for the End of Time” in a riverside grotto outside Moab.Attending a music festival in the Rockies offers the chance to combine listening with visiting national parks and resorts like this one, in Vail. Andrew Miller for The New York TimesThe opportunities are endless, but for anyone interested in combining soundscapes with scenery, as our Junior Rangers demand, one road trip through the mountains begs to be explored.My family and I — including children aged 6, 3 and not quite 1 — started with the up-and-coming Colorado Music Festival in Boulder, which is within easy reach of Rocky Mountain National Park. Then it made sense to a climb up to the ski resorts west of Denver — first to Bravo! Vail, then to the next valley for the Aspen Music Festival and School. Jackson Hole, Wyo., didn’t look all that far away, really. There, the Grand Teton Music Festival plays just outside the park of the same name, with Yellowstone National Park an hour to the north. Why not?Of course, we could have left at that, and that would probably have been wise. Still, there’s also an alluring route back south, down through the Canyonlands of Utah and on toward Santa Fe Opera. Tempting.With the rest of the family flying home, I reported on “Tristan und Isolde” and “M. Butterfly” there recently. But what about the other four festivals, which we visited over 12 days in July?They are all quite different, serving discrete audiences in distinct atmospheres even if spending time at some of them is expensive, whatever the ticket price. Each has its own idea of what — and whom — a summer festival should be for, and each turned out to be valuable in its own way.John Adams leading a performance of his composition “City Noir” at the recent Colorado Music Festival.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesColorado Music FestivalGlance at it from a distance, and you might mistake the auditorium of the Colorado Chautauqua, where this 44 year-old, five-and-a-bit week festival is based, for Wagner’s temple in Bayreuth. Built in 1898, it is perched on Boulder’s southwestern flank, the Flatiron rock formations brooding behind it with hiking trails all around. Get there at the right time, and you can just about hear a rehearsal from the playground down the hill. Our youngest watched deer wandering the grounds from his swing, while I eavesdropped on some John Adams.Fetchingly ramshackle, the wooden hall offers an acoustic that is as comfortable for string quartets as for the festival’s orchestra, and it draws an audience that listens closely. It’s a solid platform, one from which the music director, Peter Oundjian, who has recently taken over the Colorado Symphony in Denver, hopes to turn this festival from a primarily local event to something with broader reach.That’s an easy enough mission to believe in if you have friends like Adams. Contemporary scores are dotted through even the more traditional evenings here, which this season included commissions from Wang Jie and Wynton Marsalis, and there’s a flair to the programming that mixes slightly unusual works with cornerstones of the canon.Peter Oundjian, the festival’s music director, hopes to turn it from a primarily local event to something with broader reach.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesEven so, my visit coincided with the start of a new music week that Adams took part in organizing as composer in residence, albeit without offering any novelties himself. The Attacca Quartet came in for a night to feast on works by Philip Glass and Gabriella Smith, but of the three concerts I heard, the two orchestral programs were most revealing of this festival’s virtues.Take the second: a brief premiere from Timo Andres, “Dark Patterns,” prefaced Samuel Adams’s Chamber Concerto, a violin concerto in disguise that smartly refracts Baroque forms and was played amazingly by the soloist Helen Kim, before Samuel’s father, John, stepped up to conduct his own, pulsating “City Noir.”Adams visibly enjoyed himself on the podium, and with good reason: The festival ensemble is an admirable one. The players mostly hail from regional orchestras — the wind soloists, for instance, include regular-season principals from Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii and Florida — and they come together each summer to play with terrific commitment and no shortage of virtuosity.They can play pretty much anything, too. The first program I heard was one of three that intriguingly paired the piano concertos of Beethoven with works by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oundjian busily drew crisp, energetic support for Jan Lisiecki, who was a rather clangorous soloist in the “Emperor” Concerto, but the real shock was the rarefied eloquence that his orchestra lavished on the Vaughan Williams’s World War II-era Fifth Symphony. I’m still thinking about it, weeks later.Concert-goers listening from the lawn seats at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater during the Bravo! Vail summer music festival.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesBravo! VailCelebrating its 35th season, the delightfully friendly Bravo! Vail is an entirely different kind of affair. Digging deep into its donors’ pockets, it brings three major orchestras, as well as a chamber ensemble, to town for six intense weeks of performances, the most prominent of them in a stunning outdoor amphitheater named for the local vacationer-turned-civic-booster Gerald R. Ford (yes, that one).It’s a jaunt that the ensembles clearly value. The fourth one rotates from year to year; this season, it was the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. But the Dallas Symphony Orchestra just signed up to appear through 2024, while the Philadelphia Orchestra is contracted through 2026 and New York Philharmonic through 2027.The magical setting — cradled in forested mountains, the amphitheater abuts a botanical garden and backs onto a creek — doubtless has a lot to do with that, and the players and their families have time to enjoy the ski resort’s abundant amenities.But Juliette Kang, the first associate concertmaster of the Philadelphians, told me during a break in rehearsals that she and her colleagues also take inspiration from the hardy folk who turn down a seat in the pavilion, where the atmosphere is relaxed enough that nobody minded my six year old drawing the flowers behind the stage during Brahms’s Fourth, for the tiered lawn. Out there, where our baby babbled his way through Bruch to no complaints, lightning warnings are routinely ignored and no amount of rain sends the attentive patrons scuttling for cover; tarpaulins, not just golf umbrellas, are necessary here.Classics and pops are mostly what these audiences brave thunderstorms for — the Texans brought the Beatles as well as Beethoven — even if the artistic director, Anne-Marie McDermott, has valiantly begun a commissioning project that this summer saw three premieres reach the main stage. And the chamber music and free community concert series roam more enthusiastically across the repertoire.Nathalie Stutzmann conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Vail festival last month.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesWhile the Philharmonic often uses its time in Vail to test out programs for the Lincoln Center season to come, the Philadelphians repeated pieces from the season prior, given the single rehearsal on offer for each evening. Nathalie Stutzmann, their principal guest conductor, who was on the podium for the two concerts I heard, said she finds that performances seem to breathe more naturally in the mountain air; there was not even a whiff of complacency in hers.Vail’s amphitheater, with its four-paned roof redolent of ski runs, offers fair sound, and though it is a tad reticent with details, it has enough body that the Philadelphians still sounded like the Philadelphians. Deluge be damned, Stutzmann turned in one of the most honestly moving Tchaikovsky Sixths that I have heard.At the Aspen Music Festival, Gil Shaham, left, shared the spotlight with the young cellist Sterling Elliott, performing the Brahms Double Concerto.Tessa NojaimAspen Music Festival and SchoolFor the musical tourist, the problem with Aspen is that its title is a misnomer.Founded in 1949 as part of Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke’s plan to turn a sleepy Colorado town into a haven for the soul and mind alike, this venerable endeavor is best thought of as a finishing school for budding elite musicians, about half of whom now receive a free ride scholarship for the considerable costs.Although plenty of guest artists pass through for recitals, most of the hundreds of performances in the sprawling, eight-week season here have a primarily pedagogical purpose, as the students put to use what they have learned from the enviable faculty. Renée Fleming, no less, now directs the opera program with the conductor Patrick Summers.The festival serves the students, in other words, and the reverse is less the case.Not that Aspen sprawls quite as much as it once did, despite a gorgeous, $75 million campus renovation that was completed in 2016. Wind the clock back a couple of decades, and you would have found a thousand students here; this year, officials had to cut an entire orchestra from the program because of a housing shortage, leaving the student body at 500 or so. Alan Fletcher, Aspen’s chief executive, said that it’s not yet clear whether that number will become the norm.Patrons picnicking outside the Aspen festival’s Benedict Music Tent.Tessa NojaimThe Benedict Music Tent, which succeeded two previous structures as Aspen’s main venue when it opened in 2000, could do with as much of a refresh as the programming, which is dismayingly staid given the usually eclectic tastes of the music director, Robert Spano; next to the ostentatious glamour of the city, the tent looks unkempt. Tickets also don’t come cheap to sit on the hard blue benches indoors, though anyone — families included — can listen for free on the meadows outside.That would just about have been worth doing for the concert I heard, a Sunday afternoon feature from the school’s leading ensemble, the Aspen Festival Orchestra, that Fletcher said from the stage was “purely emblematic” of what the school aims to achieve.Faculty take the principal seats while their students play alongside them; alumni often return as soloists, in this case the ever-popular violinist Gil Shaham, who shared the spotlight with the excellent young cellist Sterling Elliott in an engaging Brahms Double Concerto. Although the tent’s acoustic is distant, and the conducting of the guest maestro John Storgards in Saariaho’s “Ciel d’Hiver” and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 6 was oddly brusque, the playing standards were high.Grand Teton Music FestivalI’m not sure that the residents of Jackson Hole, whether they are fortunate enough to enjoy their first or their fourth homes in sight of the Grand Tetons, quite understand what they have going for them at Walk Festival Hall, a happily unpretentious, 700-seat indoor theater beside the gondolas in Teton Village.Donald Runnicles, the music director here since 2006, is a no-nonsense man with a no-nonsense festival. Though a piano series started this year and there are weekly chamber music nights to attend — if you, unlike my wife, can tear yourself away from seeing the sun set from the mountaintop — the main attraction is the Festival Orchestra, which operates on a subscription-season schedule, performing programs twice and rehearsing thoroughly.It shows. This is another ensemble made up of players from across the country: some retreat here from orchestras as prestigious as the Boston and Chicago symphonies, while a number usually play in opera pits, including at the Metropolitan Opera, and a few are even conservatory professors who come here to sharpen their performance skills. Some of the musicians stay for the whole season, but most can only manage two or three weeks. If that constantly changing roster might pose problems — five concertmasters are listed in the program book, and 15 horns — it also lends an eagerness to the playing.Donald Runnicles, who has been the Grand Teton music director since 2006, conducting the Festival Orchestra in July.Chris LeeRunnicles, one of the most underrated musicians of his generation, knows how to use it. The all-Russian program I heard was of unerring quality, one in which even a political statement was carefully conceived for its musical value.Before a strong, big-boned account of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, which is often thought of as the composer’s declaration of liberation after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Pittsburgh Symphony violinist Marta Krechkovsky, whose family remains in Ukraine, played the solo line in Myroslav Skoryk’s “Melody,” which has been in wide use as a hymn to freedom since the Russian invasion. Heard in that context, the Shostakovich became all the more immediate.You could have asked for a mite more focus to the orchestral sound in the concert, though you would struggle to hear a more astounding rendition of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2, or anything else to be honest, than the one that soloist Augustin Hadelich contributed.You could ask for a little more variety in Grand Teton’s programming generally, too, although there’s a dexterity to how it incorporates new music — John Adams’s “Absolute Jest” alongside Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” for instance — and it’s no small feat to put on Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony and Puccini’s “La Bohème” in a place where bears roam the night.But to quibble like that would be to miss the point; not every festival needs to be an Ojai. What Grand Teton offers, like Bravo! Vail and the Colorado Music Festival in their own ways, is a simpler kind of joy, of good music in glorious surroundings. I know where I’d while away my summer, if I could. More
The annual Paris l’Été hosts some especially strong multidisciplinary shows this summer, one of which includes a seven-hour hike.PARIS — The birds hovering around the ruins of Port-Royal des Champs, a former abbey southwest of Paris, may have been taken aback by the flock of visitors who arrived on a recent Saturday. Around 11 a.m., bleary-eyed Parisians poured out of buses for a seven-hour hike through the site and woodland that surrounds it — all in the name of theater.And “Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Clara Hédouin’s back-to-nature adaptation of a 1935 Jean Giono novel, took full advantage of its unusual setting. A hunt was staged in the forest. Farming, a central theme, was debated in front of actual barns. Bird names were listed, at length, to the human audience in a meadow, while the local fauna circled above.The trek wasn’t what you’d expect from a city-centric arts festival like Paris l’Été (literally “Paris in the summer”), which played host to “Joy of Man’s Desiring” and organized travel from the capital. Yet this multidisciplinary festival, which started in 1990 as a way to keep the performing arts scene alive in Paris during the quiet summer months, has always had a quirky side.Its first director, Patrice Martinet, delighted in bringing unconventional works to venues ranging from gardens to suburban residential buildings. In 2016, a new team was appointed under Laurence de Magalhaes and Stéphane Ricordel, who were already at the helm of the Monfort playhouse in Paris. They promptly changed the name of the festival, from Paris Quartier d’Été to the more anodyne Paris l’Été.The early years of de Magalhaes and Ricordel’s tenure saw a dip in the quality and originality of the festival’s programming, but the 2022 edition suggests they have now found their footing. While Paris l’Été remains much smaller than the major French summer festivals, like Avignon, this year intriguing productions abounded. The week before “Joy of Man’s Desiring,” locals and tourists could take their pick from a Ukrainian punk concert, an immersive performance starring professional strippers and a bravura theater show built entirely out of cardboard props, among other offerings.Dakh Daughters at the Monfort theater.Maxim DondyukOn July 14, Bastille Day, a packed audience watched as the Ukrainian band Dakh Daughters, which has often performed at the Monfort theater since 2013, returned to that stage under very different political circumstances. This radical feminist group, which bridges the gap between punk and folk influences with stunning ease and a dark theatricality, has long sung about the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine, as well as Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Donbas region. Yet currently, the band’s entire country is under attack.“Close the sky over Ukraine,” the screens behind the group read early in the show, and images of the conflict, Russian nationalist propaganda and protests around the world were subsequently shown. Between songs, the stories of ordinary Ukrainians were read in voice-over. Midway through the concert, the women of Dakh Daughters, who also performed at the Avignon Festival this week, asked the audience to observe a minute of silence.While the band performed a number of songs that were composed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and its members dressed, as usual, in tutus and combat boots, with faces painted white, the band’s typically no-holds-barred performance style was stripped back. An edge of cold despair shaded even the loudest, most percussive moments. “I would like to return to my home,” the band’s drummer said at one point, in softly accented French. “Do you want peace in your home?” she then asked the audience. When the answer was a resounding “yes,” she whispered: “Good idea.”Marion Coutarel and Julie Benegmos in “Strip: At the Risk of Liking It.”Quentin ChevrierDakh Daughters aside, this year Paris l’Été focused primarily on new and recent French productions. “Strip: At the Risk of Liking It,” directed and performed by Julie Benegmos and Marion Coutarel at a high school, gave audiences a window into the world of professional striptease — and kept them on the edge of their seats, too, with the promise of one-on-one time with a stripper in a private booth for a lucky few.The production relied a little too heavily on this literal teasing. Early on, Benegmos and Coutarel explained that, at regular intervals, a flower would be given to an onlooker, who would then be invited to follow them outside the small auditorium. Two men and a woman were selected when I attended, and the audience was left to wonder what happens next. (The answer comes at the very end, and while I won’t give it away, it involves a virtual role reversal.)There is much of interest in the rest of “Strip: At the Risk of Liking It,” including filmed interviews with other professional strippers, a pole dance number and questions about the degree of freedom women are afforded when selling eroticized performances. But the show’s structure never quite flows, with abrupt transitions that fail to dig deeper into this material.“Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret,” on the other hand, takes an impossibly complex idea and makes it work through sheer virtuosity. The show is built around the contrast between Olivier Martin-Salvan, dressed in a dapper suit, who sits throughout the show and mumbles in an expressive yet incomprehensible mix of English and gibberish, and Pierre Guillois, who flits around him in boxer shorts, carrying dozens of cardboard cutouts as a means of telling the story.Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan in “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Caberet.”GestuelleThey come in all shapes and sizes, with words written on them to explain what they represent: “fjord,” “tree,” “hail,” and even “fly swat.” With the help of two assistants on the sides, Guillois, a maverick of a performer, spins lo-fi yet meticulous choreography out of these props. (Despite the title, the closest we get to skating is some shoe boxes on Martin-Salvan’s feet.)“Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret” has won a number of awards this season, including a Molière, and it was obvious why in this outdoor revival at the Centre Culturel Irlandais. Puns and visual jokes are interspersed throughout as Martin-Salvan’s character goes on an absurd quest around European countries to reconnect with a siren he met (in the form of Guillois, wearing a cardboard tail). There is nothing currently like it on the French stage, and the instant standing ovation rewarded the duo’s ingeniousness.The ingeniousness of “Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Hédouin’s open-air saga around Port-Royal-des-Champs, was of a different nature, and it had outstayed its welcome by the seventh hour. Giono, whose novel the show is based on, was an early environmentalist, and his characters, all inhabitants of a small village who set about reclaiming their joy with the help of a mysterious stranger, did fit beautifully into the surroundings. But the cast’s take on Giono’s lyrical style was often plodding, and gave the sense that the production had yet to find its inner rhythm.Still, there was joy to be found in traipsing through forests and the remains of the abbey, armed with the camping stools provided by Paris l’Été. At the end of the day, it was the sign of a festival hitting its stride, and thinking outside the box again.Paris l’Été. Various venues in Paris, through July 31. More
