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    Hundreds of Artists Call on N.E.A. to Roll Back Trump’s Restrictions

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    In one of the first signs of collective pushback to the Trump administration’s arts initiatives, several hundred American artists are calling on the National Endowment for the Arts to roll back restrictions on grants to institutions with programming that promotes diversity or “gender ideology.”Among the 463 writers, poets, dancers, visual artists and others who signed the letter are the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights Jackie Sibblies Drury, Lynn Nottage and Paula Vogel. There is also one name with striking historical resonance: Holly Hughes, a performance artist who in 1990 was one of the so-called N.E.A. Four, denied funding by the agency because of concern from conservative critics at the height of that era’s culture wars.“In some ways this just feels like déjà vu all over again,” Ms. Hughes, now a professor of art and design at the University of Michigan, said in a telephone interview. “These funding restrictions are a good barometer for who is the easy punching bag in American culture at the moment.”The artists on Tuesday sent a letter to the N.E.A. objecting to new requirements for grant applicants that the organization put in place this month to comply with executive orders signed by President Trump. One of the requirements is that applicants “not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws”; the other is that federal funds not be used “to promote gender ideology,” referring to an executive order, prompted by Mr. Trump’s concern about public policy toward transgender people, that declares that American policy is “to recognize two sexes, male and female.”The artists’ letter asks the N.E.A. to “reverse” the changes, saying “abandoning our values is wrong, and it won’t protect us. Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism.”“Trump and his enablers may use doublespeak to claim that support for artists of color amounts to ‘discrimination’ and that funding the work of trans and women artists promotes ‘gender ideology’ (whatever that is),” the letter adds. “But we know better: the arts are for and represent everybody.”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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      The N.E.A.’s New Gender and Diversity Edicts Worry Arts Groups

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      As the National Endowment for the Arts adjusts to comply with President Trump’s executive orders, “gender ideology” is out and works that “honor the nation’s rich artistic heritage” are in.The National Endowment for the Arts is telling arts groups not to use federal funds to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “gender ideology” in ways that run afoul of President Trump’s executive orders — causing confusion and concern.Black Girls Dance, a Chicago-based nonprofit that trains and mentors young dancers, was recently approved for a $10,000 grant to help finance an annual holiday show called “Mary.” Now the small company is wondering if it still qualifies for the money.It was the company’s first grant from the N.E.A., and Erin Barnett, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, said that receiving it had been “a step of validation — like ‘We see you and we support the work that you’re doing.’” But she said that if the grant were canceled for running afoul of the new requirements, she would persist. “I serve a God that sits on the highest throne of all, and he’s not going to stop this show,” she said.It is unclear what the new rules will mean for groups seeking grants, or for those that already have them in the pipeline. Many arts organizations have pledged to support diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and several groups that have received funding in the past have presented works about transgender and nonbinary people.The new N.E.A. rules require applicants to agree not to operate diversity programs “that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws” and call on grant applicants to pledge not to use federal funds to “promote gender ideology.” They refer to an executive order Mr. Trump signed that declares that the United States recognizes only “two sexes, male and female.”The N.E.A. did not answer questions about whether organizations that have already been told they would receive grant money would be affected.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

      How ‘Her Story,’ a Feminist Comedy, Came to Rule China’s Box Office

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      “Her Story” touches on sensitive topics in China, like censorship and gender inequality. But its humorous, nonconfrontational approach may have helped it pass censors.The movie calls out stigmas against female sexuality and stereotypes about single mothers. It name-drops feminist scholars, features a woman recalling domestic violence and laments Chinese censorship.This is not some indie film, streamed secretly by viewers circumventing China’s internet firewall. It is China’s biggest movie right now — and has even garnered praise from the ruling Communist Party’s mouthpiece.The success of “Her Story,” a comedy that topped China’s box office for the last three weeks, is in some ways unexpected, at a time when the government has cracked down on feminist activism, encouraged women to embrace marriage and childbearing and severely limited independent speech. The film’s reception reflects the unpredictable nature of censorship in the country, as well as the growing appetite for female-centered stories. Discussion of women’s issues is generally allowed so long as it does not morph into calls for rights. “Her Story,” which some have called China’s answer to “Barbie,” cushions many of its social critiques with jokes.The director of “Her Story,” Shao Yihui, has emphasized at public appearances that she is not interested in provoking “gender antagonism,” an accusation that official media has sometimes lobbed against feminists.At a time of sluggish growth and anemic ticket sales, movie producers — and perhaps government regulators — have been eager to attract female audience members, an increasingly important consumer base. Other recent hit movies have also been directed by and starred women, including the year’s top box office performer, “YOLO.”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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      Chris Brown’s Concerts Draw Protest in South Africa

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      Women’s rights activists have petitioned for the singer to be denied a visa for two shows in South Africa, where gender-based violence is high.After Chris Brown announced that he would be performing in Johannesburg, tickets for the city’s 94,000-capacity FNB Stadium sold out in under two hours. A second show was swiftly added.Nearly as quickly came a protest against Brown, who has faced allegations of violence and harassment of women including his guilty plea on charges that he assaulted Rihanna, his then-girlfriend, in 2009. Women for Change, a South African nonprofit, started a petition to block Brown’s performances on Dec. 14 and 15. The organization presented the petition, which received over 50,000 signatures, to the country’s Departments of Home Affairs and of Sports, Arts and Culture, asking that Brown be denied a visa.The singer’s planned return has particular resonance in South Africa, where women are killed at a rate five times higher than the global average, with 60.1 percent of those murders committed by an intimate partner, according to a study by the South African Medical Research Council. “We aim to send a clear message that South Africa will not celebrate individuals with a history of violence against women,” Sabrina Walter, the founder of Women for Change, said in an interview.Brown and his representatives have not addressed the protest, but in October, as the group spread the #MuteChrisBrown hashtag on social media, the singer seemed to troll the organization by writing, “Can’t wait to come,” under one of its Instagram posts. Walter said the reply triggered a wave of online harassment from Brown’s followers, including death threats against her and her team. It was not the first time Brown used his fame to rally against detractors. He has challenged other celebrities who refer to allegations made against him, and in February used Instagram to accuse the NBA of bowing to sponsor pressure to disinvite him from participating in an event related to its All-Star game. In 2019, Brown was released without charges after being accused of aggravated rape in France. He then sold T-shirts that read “This Bitch Lyin’” online.In the years since his 2009 arrest, Brown has been accused a number of times of violence against women, including throwing a rock through his mother’s car window in 2013 and punching a woman at a Las Vegas nightclub in 2016. In 2017, his ex-girlfriend Karrueche Tran obtained a temporary restraining order, citing harassment, physical violence, intimidation and death threats during and after their on-again-off-again relationship, which lasted from 2011 to 2015. In 2022, a judge dismissed a lawsuit that accused Brown of drugging and raping a woman on a yacht owned by Sean Combs.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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      Claire Daly, Master of the Baritone Saxophone, Dies at 66

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      She was celebrated for both her playing and her love of the jazz community. “My life in music,” she said recently, “is the smartest thing I’ve done.”Claire Daly, who was regarded by both her fellow musicians and critics as a standard-bearer on the baritone saxophone, died on Tuesday on a friend’s farm in Longmont, Colo. She was 66.The cause was squamous cell cancer of the neck and head, said the saxophonist Dave Sewelson, a longtime friend.Thanks to her flexibility on an ungainly instrument and her expressive precision as a soloist, Ms. Daly was a frequent winner of critics’ polls from the Jazz Journalists Association and DownBeat magazine.Thanking the journalists’ group when she received its 2024 award for best baritone saxophonist, she wrote in May on Facebook: “Kudos to all the baritone players — we get to play bari! We are the lucky ones. My life in music is the smartest thing I’ve done.”She spent many of the early years of her career playing both jazz and rock in all-female ensembles. Her sturdy playing formed the foundation of the original Diva Jazz Orchestra, which from its founding in 1992 established itself as one of the most potent big bands in jazz, gender notwithstanding.She left Diva after seven years, tending thereafter toward small ensembles. She collaborated frequently with the pianist Joel Forrester in the quartet People Like Us, with the experimental pop vocalist Nora York, and with Mr. Sewelson in the bottom-heavy trio Two Sisters Inc. (its other member was the bassist Dave Hofstra).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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      A Play About J.K. Rowling Stirred Outrage. Until It Opened.

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      The muted reaction to the Edinburgh Fringe show “TERF” suggests that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, offense can quickly vanish.There are more than 3,600 shows in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most will struggle to get even a single newspaper review. Yet for months before the festival opened on Friday, one play was the subject of intense global media attention: “TERF,” an 80-minute drama about J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, and her views on transgender women.Before anybody had even read the script, a Scottish newspaper called the play, which imagines Rowling debating her views with the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies, a “foul-mouthed” attack on the author. An article in The Daily Telegraph said that “scores of actresses” had turned down the opportunity to play Rowling. And The Daily Mail, a tabloid, reported that the production had encountered trouble securing a venue.On social media and women’s web forums, too, “TERF” stirred outraged discussion.The uproar raised the specter of pro-Rowling protesters outside the show and prompted debate in Edinburgh, the city that Rowling has called home for more than 30 years. But when “TERF” opened last week, it barely provoked a whimper. The only disturbance to a performance on Monday in the ballroom of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms came from a group of latecomers using a cellphone flashlight to find their seats. About 55 theatergoers watched the play in silence from the front few rows of the 350-seat capacity venue.The play imagines a showdown in a restaurant between Rowling and the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGiven the regular disagreements between some feminists and transgender rights supporters, the uproar around “TERF” was not unexpected.But the muted response to the show itself suggests that fewer British people are riled by the debate than the media coverage implies — or at least that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, outrage can quickly vanish.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

      A Queer Mountain Lion Leaps From the Page to the Little Island Stage

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      Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” narrated by an animal in peril in the Hollywood Hills, is adapted for a staged reading.The concept behind Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” is an eyebrow-raising one: It’s a story about overdevelopment and climate change narrated by a mountain lion who muses on the lives of hikers and loved ones.Hoke was loosely inspired by the mountain lion known as P-22 whose regular sightings in the hills surrounding Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, successful crossing of two freeways and eventual death captured the public’s attention in 2022. In “Open Throat,” according to the book’s publisher, the animal identifies as queer, and uses they and them pronouns.The book is “what fiction should be,” the novelist Marie-Helene Bertino wrote in her review for The New York Times, and it made several end-of-year best-of lists and awards shortlists.With an internal monologue that has poetically broken stanzas and a fluid sense of time and reality, “Open Throat” does not immediately call for theatrical adaptation. Yet a staged version of the work is premiering Wednesday as part of Little Island’s ambitious summer series of live performances at its outdoor amphitheater.The narration is divided among three performers, including Chris Perfetti, who is holding the book, and Calvin Leon Smith. “I think the beauty of it, and the reason we’re intentionally having three different voices, is making it universal,” Perfetti said.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“It reads beautifully,” Zack Winokur, Little Island’s producing artistic director, said of the book. “The way it’s placed on the page is visually interesting. The way the voice exists is not like anything else. I kept thinking that it being so voice-driven would make an amazing show, and I didn’t know how to do it, which is the greatest thing in the world.”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

      The Broad Appeal of the Elsa Dress from “Frozen”

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      Wearing a costume from “Frozen” in daily life has become a pastime for many children who identify with the character, regardless of gender.Dressing up as Elsa, the blond queen with magical powers from Disney’s animated film “Frozen,” wasn’t necessarily Jeff Hemmig’s idea of a good time.​​“It was well outside of my comfort zone,” Mr. Hemmig, 43, said.But he knew it would make his son, Jace, happy. So Mr. Hemmig, who lives in Killingly, Conn., squeezed his shoulders into a dress his mom made for him, which matched an Elsa costume she had made for her grandson. Mr. Hemmig then performed a rendition of “Let It Go,” choreography and all, as Jace watched.“He loved it,” Mr. Hemmig said. “He was filled with joy.”Mr. Hemmig wasn’t thrilled about wearing the dress: He said it was tight in the armpits and it made him feel vulnerable. But he loved how it delighted his son, then 3. “Seeing Dad do it, too, felt like a big moment,” Mr. Hemmig said.Like the Hemmigs, countless parents have gone to great lengths to satisfy their Elsa-obsessed children since “Frozen” was released in 2013 and became the cornerstone for one of Disney’s most successful franchises. And Mr. Hemmig is far from the only father to dress as Elsa with his son.Such instances have happened enough that the actor Jonathan Groff, the voice of the character Kristoff in “Frozen” and “Frozen 2,” thanked the films’ directors at a 2022 event for “creating space for young boys to dress up as Anna and Elsa,” the franchise’s sister protagonists.Jacqueline Ayala had been a preschool teacher for five years when “Frozen” came out, and it quickly infiltrated her classroom. For a time, Ms. Ayala recalled, there was only one Elsa dress in its dress-up chest. “That’s why the kids started wearing their own costumes to school,” she said. “So they wouldn’t have to share it.”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

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Wiener Festwochen Says ‘No Excuses Anymore’ for Inequality

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      In Vienna, a series of concerts and summits will highlight women and nonbinary composers, as well as the dominance of the dead, white, male canon.In the world of classical music, progress toward gender parity can seem incredibly slow.Recent big wins have included women of the New York Philharmonic being allowed to perform in pants, and the appointment of the second woman — ever — to a music director role at one of the 25 largest orchestras in the United States. The Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world’s great ensembles, hired its first female concertmaster last year.Frustrated by the stubborn gender imbalances in classical music, the directors of the Wiener Festwochen, a prestigious arts festival in Vienna, have this year formed the “Academy Second Modernism,” an initiative that will showcase works by 50 female and nonbinary composers over five years.This season, less than 8 percent of approximately 16,000 works staged by 111 orchestras worldwide were composed by women, according to a report from Donne, Women in Music, an organization working for equity in the classical music industry. Of those works, the vast majority were composed by white women.According to the report, three of the 10 orchestras that performed the highest proportion of works composed by women were in the United States: the American Composers Orchestra in New York, the Chicago Sinfonietta and National Philharmonic in North Bethesda, Md. But at the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, two of America’s top orchestras, only about 10 percent of the music programmed was composed by women.“There are so many of us,” said Bushra El-Turk, a British-Lebanese composer who often merges Western and Eastern musical traditions in her work. “Whether we’re given opportunities is the problem.”Rehearsing El-Turk’s opera “Woman at Point Zero,” in Vienna last month.David Payr 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