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      New York Public Library Acquires George C. Wolfe’s Archives

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      More than 50 boxes of ephemera from the playwright and director’s career include notes on “Angels in America” and research for “Jelly’s Last Jam.”When the playwright and director George C. Wolfe moved to New York City in his 20s, he got a job at an archive for Black cultural history, where his work saving newspaper articles and maintaining records fueled a habit of preserving his own ephemera.“It activated this sort of curiosity-slash-obsession about who gets remembered, what gets saved, what gets valued and what doesn’t,” Wolfe said recently.On Thursday, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired more than 50 boxes of material from throughout Wolfe’s career, during which he became one of the most sought-after theater directors in the country. His productions, including “Angels in America” and “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” garnered multiple Tony Awards, and he’s credited with revolutionizing the Public Theater over a decade as its producer.Working scripts, correspondence with theatrical figures such as Tony Kushner (with whom Wolfe worked closely on “Angels in America”) and photographs from throughout his career were purchased for an undisclosed amount. The archive also includes his research for historically driven productions, including for “Shuffle Along,” which Wolfe wrote based on the events surrounding the 1921 musical — a rare all-Black production at the time — and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, which is being revived next year as part of the Encores! series at New York City Center.Wolfe, 68, who directed “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for film, cautions that the act of establishing the archive should not communicate that his career is waning. Rather, he views the process as making room for new stories, and — more practically speaking — making space in his home.“They were taking over,” he said of the boxes, “so I let them win.”Wolfe recalled that some of his saved materials included audition forms with his assessments of actors, notes from Kushner on Part 1 of “Angels,” and a scrapbook from his 1986 Off Broadway play “The Colored Museum,” which helped him gain national recognition as a playwright. Some items he said he decided not to part with just yet, including a note from Joseph Papp, the founder and longtime leader of the Public Theater, which Wolfe took over a couple years after Papp’s death, producing Broadway-bound shows such as “Caroline, or Change,” “Take Me Out” and “Topdog/Underdog.” (All three have had recent Broadway revivals.)Doug Reside, the theater curator for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has sought to persuade artists like Wolfe to begin transferring their collections earlier than they might have expected because of complexities around saving digital material that may be stored on machines that are quickly becoming obsolete. This became a priority for Reside when he was a researcher at the Library of Congress working on the archives of Jonathan Larson, the “Rent” playwright and lyricist, whose three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks were a challenge to salvage.“It has become really important to start preserving this history as close to the moment of creation as possible,” Reside said.Wolfe’s own career spans a period of rapid technological development: He wrote and directed his first play, “Up for Grabs,” in 1975, and directed his most recent Broadway production in 2019. The archives include handwritten letters and telegrams Wolfe received with feedback about shows. Further down the technological timeline, there’s a DVD with a preview of Act 2 of “Shuffle Along,” as well as email printouts related to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”“It’s telling the stories of the shows that I worked on,” Wolfe said of the collection, “but embedded in that, it’s telling the story of those times.”Wolfe has not yet agreed to transfer his digital archives to the library, but he said that he would consider doing so in the future. The collection will be accessible in about a year in the special collections reading room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. More

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      Lincoln Center Names Conductor for Reimagined Mostly Mozart

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      Jonathon Heyward will succeed Louis Langrée as music director of the center’s revered summer ensemble.Jonathon Heyward, the rising young conductor who this fall will become the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has been tapped to lead Lincoln Center’s summer ensemble, a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the center announced on Wednesday.Heyward, 30, will start a three-year contract with Lincoln Center next year. His appointment is part of the center’s changes to the revered Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, by giving it a new name, embracing a wider variety of genres and bringing more racial, ethnic and gender diversity to the stage.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston can fall in love with this music, then anyone can,” Heyward said in an interview. “It has everything to do with accessibility and presentation.”Heyward succeeds the orchestra’s longtime music director, Louis Langrée, whose contract expires this year. During Langrée’s 21-year tenure, he has helped rejuvenate the ensemble and cement its reputation as an acclaimed interpreter of the music of Mozart and the Classical repertoire.“The orchestra musicians and I have developed a unique bond that I will treasure forever,” Langrée said in a statement. “I wish Jonathon as many joys as those I experienced during this extraordinary journey.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some complaints from audience members, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music — which was once a fixture of the season and festivals there, but has been reduced significantly.Since the pandemic, the future of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, established in 1973, has been uncertain. The festival whose name it bears — once one of Lincoln Center’s premier summertime events — no longer exists. In its place is “Summer for the City,” featuring a wider variety of genres, including pop music, social dance and comedy.Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said that the rethinking of Mostly Mozart was aimed at “opening this up and really saying that this is music that belongs to everyone.”“It’s a necessary evolution,” she said. “This is an orchestra that I think has a big place in the hearts and minds of New York City, and we want to keep it that way.”The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will get a new name when Heyward takes the podium next year. Thake said that its longtime moniker felt “a little myopic right now.”“We’d love to just open up that conversation and have this orchestra be something more than just one composer, or mostly anything,” she said.The center and the orchestra are negotiating a new contract — the previous agreement expired in February — and discussing issues including auditions, the process for hiring substitutes, diversifying the ranks of the ensemble and promoting community engagement.Heyward, who made his Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra debut last year and will return this summer, said that he would work to broaden the ensemble’s repertoire, including by programming more works by contemporary composers. He mentioned Hannah Kendall, a friend, as an example of an artist he was eager to explore.“We have to continue the lineage and the storytelling of today in order to really grow the art form,” he said.Heyward said he would also seek to preserve the ensemble’s heritage. “I just don’t see that just completely disappearing overnight,” he said. “It won’t, simply.”“I don’t plan on just throwing out the Beethoven symphonies, the Schumann symphonies or Mozart,” he added. “That’s not the approach to take, and that’s not what I believe in.” More

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      A 19-Year-Old Pianist Electrifies Audiences. But He’s Unimpressed.

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      Yunchan Lim’s victory at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year made him a sensation. He says the attention makes him uneasy.After six hours of sleep and a breakfast of milk and curry rice, Yunchan Lim, the South Korean pianist, was in a rehearsal studio at Lincoln Center on Tuesday morning working through a treacherous passage of Rachmaninoff.“A little bit faster,” Lim, in a black sweatshirt and sneakers, said casually to the conductor, James Gaffigan, as they prepared for Lim’s New York Philharmonic debut this week. Gaffigan laughed.“Usually pianists want the opposite!” the conductor said.Lim — shy, soft-spoken and bookish — stunned the music world last year when, at 18, he became the youngest winner in the history of the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas. His victory made him an immediate sensation; a video of his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in the finals has been viewed more than 11 million times on YouTube. (He will play that piece with the Philharmonic this week, under Gaffigan’s baton.)Still a college sophomore, Lim has inspired a devout following in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has become a symbol of pride in South Korea, where he has been described as classical music’s answer to K-pop. Like a pop star, his face has been printed on T-shirts.Lim at the Van Cliburn competition, playing with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.Richard Rodriguez/The Cliburn, via Associated Press“He’s a musician way beyond his years,” said the conductor Marin Alsop, who headed the Cliburn jury and led the Rachmaninoff performance. “Technically, he’s phenomenal, and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal. He’s incredibly musical and seems like a very old soul. It’s really quite something.”But Lim is uneasy with the attention. He does not believe he has any musical talent, he says, and would be content to spend his life alone in the mountains playing piano all day. (He limits his use of social media, he says, because he believes it is corrosive to creativity and because he wants to live as much as possible as his favorite composers did.)“A famous performer and an earnest performer — a true artist — are two different things,” he said in an interview this week at the Steinway factory in Queens, where he was shopping for a piano.Born in Siheung, a suburb of Seoul, Lim had a childhood filled with soccer, baseball and music. He began studying the piano at 7, when his parents enrolled him in a neighborhood music academy. He was drawn to the piano, he said, because he had grown up hearing Chopin and Liszt on recordings that his mother had purchased when she was pregnant. He was also taken by the majesty of the instrument.Lim was taken by the majesty of the instrument when he was young. “The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“Technically, he’s phenomenal,” Alsop said of Lim, “and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal.”Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.At 13, he enrolled in a prep school at Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. His teacher, the pianist Minsoo Sohn, was impressed by the sensitivity of his interpretations.“At first he was a little bit cautious, but I immediately noticed that he was a huge talent,” he said. “He’s very humble, a student of the score and he isn’t over expressive.”Sohn initially steered his student away from competitions, worried about the pressure. But when the pandemic delayed the Cliburn competition, which is held every four years, making it possible for Lim to qualify, Sohn suggested he give it a try, telling him to treat it as a performance, not a competition.“I thought the world needed to listen to what Yunchan could play in his teenage years,” Sohn said.When Lim arrived in Fort Worth for the competition, which took place over 17 days, he said he felt the spirit of Van Cliburn, the eminent pianist for whom the contest is named.Lim sometimes practiced as much as 20 hours a day, he said, sending recordings to Sohn, who was in South Korea, for guidance. He existed on a diet of Korean noodles and stews prepared by his mother, who had accompanied him, as well as midnight snacks of toasted English muffins with butter and strawberry jam made by his host family.“I knew it was like Russian roulette,” he said of the competition. “It could turn out well, or you could end up shooting yourself in the head. It was a lot of stress.”As he prepared to walk onstage to play the Rachmaninoff concerto, he said he thought of Carl Sagan’s idea of Earth as just a “pale blue dot” in the universe.“When the stage doors open and the audience applauds, when I nervously sit down at the piano and press the first key, that moment is like the Big Bang for me,” he said. “I’m nervous, but the image of the pale blue dot gives me courage. I just think of the moment as something occurring in that small little speck.”His Rachmaninoff won ovations, but he was dissatisfied with the performance, believing that he achieved only about 30 percent of what he had hoped to accomplish. Since the competition, he said he had been able to watch just the first three minutes of the YouTube video before growing dispirited.When he returned to South Korea after the Cliburn, he said he was unchanged. “I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” he said at a news conference with his teacher.“I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” Lim said at a news conference with his teacher.Ayesha Malik for The New York TimesLim, who is still enrolled at Korean National University of Arts, plans to transfer this fall to the New England Conservatory, in Boston, where Sohn now teaches.As a student, his international career has taken off, with a recital at Wigmore Hall in London in January and an appearance with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in February. This summer, he will reunite with Alsop to perform the Rachmaninoff concerto at the Bravo! Vail festival in Colorado and the Ravinia Festival in Illinois. Next year, he will make his Carnegie Hall debut with an all-Chopin program.The New York Philharmonic booked him soon after Deborah Borda, its president and chief executive, saw YouTube videos of his performances at the Cliburn — a Beethoven concerto as well as the Rachmaninoff.“I was blown away by how fluent he was in both styles,” Borda said. “He was just brilliant.”Ahead of his debut in New York, Lim has been fine-tuning his interpretation of the Rachmaninoff. In preparing the concerto’s somber opening notes, he said, he imagines the “angel of death” or cloaked figures singing a Gregorian chant, following his teacher’s advice.This performance is especially meaningful, he said. On his commute to and from middle school, he often played a 1978 recording of the Rachmaninoff concerto by Vladimir Horowitz and the Philharmonic. He said he had listened to the recording at least 1,000 times.Lim said he felt nervous to follow in the footsteps of Horowitz, one of his idols, and that he would always consider himself a student, no matter how successful his career might be. He said artists should not be judged by the number of YouTube views they received, but by the authenticity of their work.“It’s a bit hard to define myself as an artist,” he said. “I’m like the universe before the Big Bang. I’m still in the learning phase.”“I’d like to be a musician with infinite possibilities,” he added, “just like the universe.”Jin Yu Young contributed research from Seoul. More

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      Les Arts Florissants Returns to New York, Endangered

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      William Christie’s early-music ensemble, once a staple at Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, finds a new home in Carnegie Hall.The pair of concerts that William Christie and his ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, offered at Carnegie Hall this week made me a little sad.Not the concerts themselves: They were excellent, occasionally exquisite. What depressed me was the question of whether there’s a future in New York for this pathbreaking early-music group, founded in France four decades ago by Christie, an American.Its longtime bases when on tour in the city, Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, have jolted away from the kind of music programming that was until recently a core part of their identities — and the kind that Les Arts Florissants embodies. But this ensemble gives the lie to the suggestion, made by certain administrators, that presenting music of the past necessarily means sleepy renditions of the standards.Sure, Christie and Les Arts Florissants don’t do contemporary pieces. Their repertoire, with its founding specialty in the French Baroque of Lully, Rameau and Charpentier, doesn’t check fashionable boxes of diversity, equity and inclusion.But that doesn’t mean they are reactionary, dull, irrelevant or unworthy of being presented alongside the best of the present day. For decades, they have been fulfilling the task of any truly important cultural institution: opening up new worlds of beauty and excitement, both emotional and intellectual. Not merely rehashing what’s known, but introducing modern audiences to works and composers overlooked for centuries.Les Arts Florissants opera productions, in particular, have been deep and poignant — and very vibrant — excavations. But the organizations with the spaces and resources to put them on in America’s cultural capital no longer seem to think that’s a meaningful endeavor. That’s a loss for New York.So gratitude is due to Carnegie, one of the city’s few remaining major presenters of early music, for offering the ensemble a place to land — at least for the moment and in spare numbers. On Tuesday, Christie and the young violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte appeared upstairs, at Weill Recital Hall. And on Wednesday, Christie led slightly (but not much) beefier forces downstairs, at Zankel Hall.Christie and Langlois de Swarte gave a version of the violin-harpsichord program they recorded a few years ago, featuring sonatas from the early 18th century that demonstrate the influence that passionate, tumblingly virtuosic Italian music had on the austere, even severe dances of 17th-century France.The revelation of that album — and the best part of Tuesday’s recital — was the work of Jean Baptiste Senaillé, a favorite of the aristocracy in his day but now an obscurity. He was particularly adept at inflaming restrained French elegance with Italian intensity, as in the inexorably winding violin line of a G minor sonata’s prelude, exploding in arpeggios that lead to a fiery yet stylish gavotte.Langlois de Swarte, his tone clear but with an appealing hint of wiry bite, played with vivacity and wit. And the Adagio harpsichord introduction to a sonata in C minor showed off Christie’s magic touch, his phrasing noble yet gentle.Both this and Wednesday’s program were canny: short enough to do without an intermission, yet focused enough to feel immersive. So many programs these days valorize variety, but to spend a bit over an hour in a single sound world can be a profound experience.Better to be left wanting more. But I ever so slighted rued that, since it consisted mostly of selections of movements, Tuesday’s recital included only one full Senaillé sonata. (The recording boasted four, alongside two by his slightly younger contemporary, Jean-Marie Leclair.)On Wednesday, Christie led from the organ an ensemble of, at its most robust, nine male singers and seven players in a set of sacred works by Charpentier, whose opera “Les Arts Florissants” gave the group its name.This was, a little belatedly, music for the Lenten period, beginning with Charpentier’s beautiful, sober yet luscious set of 10 “Meditations for Lent” — a kind of proto-Passion that charts the story of the Stations of the Cross. Soloists sing some of the lines of biblical dialogue, with the narration given a hypnotic setting for groups of voices.In these meditations and three “lessons,” traditionally sung as part of evening services during Holy Week, the instrumentalists were superbly restrained. And, if none of the individual voices were particularly impressive, the choir achieved remarkable, moving effects of hovering gauziness and almost whispered sweetness; the sound was sometimes mellow, sometimes thrillingly emphatic. Precision of attack let even this modest-size group take on fearsome grandeur when singing of the ripping of the temple’s curtain as Jesus was crucified.The almost excruciating impact of tightly shifting harmonies matched the accounts of pain and torture in the texts. The hall lights were dimmed almost to darkness; the mood, unbroken by applause until the end, was rapt.It, like Tuesday’s recital, was a performance to be celebrated. But it was hard not to feel like these bite-size concerts were whetting the appetite for a full meal that may never come this way again. More

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      Lincoln Center Revives Summer for the City, Hoping to Draw New Fans

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      The festival will include hip-hop, Korean arts, Mostly Mozart and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.Lincoln Center will bring back its Summer for the City festival this year, the organization announced on Monday, continuing its efforts to attract new audiences by embracing a wide variety of genres, including pop and classical music, social dance and comedy.There will be a weeklong celebration of hip-hop, performances by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and a Korean cultural festival. A flock of 200 neon-pink flamingo lawn ornaments will adorn a pool near David Geffen Hall, part of a reimagining of the center’s outdoor spaces by the Broadway costume and set designer Clint Ramos.“The hope is to transform the campus — to upend people’s expectations of what Lincoln Center is,” Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “To allow people to just come and play and understand that this isn’t a precious palace on a hill, but a place to inspire joy.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked in recent years to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some grumbling among fans of more traditional genres, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music. Some elements of the Mostly Mozart rubric have been reduced in recent years, including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and performances of new music that flows out of the classical tradition.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will perform 13 concerts over three weeks, beginning with a program on July 22 that features Mozart’s Concerto No. 2 for Flute, with the soloist Jasmine Choi, as well as the Korean folk song “Arirang” and Soo Yeon Lyuh’s “Dudurim.” The performance is also part of Korean Arts Week, which includes K-pop bands, DJs and a film festival.It will be Mostly Mozart’s last season with Louis Langrée, who has been the ensemble’s music director since 2002. His contract expires this year.Thake said that Mostly Mozart would maintain a presence after Langrée’s exit. She said that the center was in talks with the orchestra about future seasons, and that they were discussing how Mostly Mozart “fits within the values of Lincoln Center,” including efforts to reach new audiences and promote inclusivity.“There’s no doubt that the orchestra will maintain a central place in our programming going forward,” she said.Hip-hop will be front and center as part of a celebration of its 50th anniversary, with performances by J.Period, Rakim and Big Daddy Kane.An opera based on Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower,” by the folk and blues musician Toshi Reagon and the composer Bernice Johnson Reagon, will get its New York City premiere at Geffen Hall on July 14.Social dance returns on June 14 with a performance of Cuban music by the singer Lucrecia and the salsa band 8 Y Más. The giant disco ball that hung over the main plaza last year, also designed by Ramos, will be back too.More than 300,000 people attended last year’s festival, which aimed at helping New York City heal after the upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. More than three-quarters of them had never before bought a ticket to a Lincoln Center offering, according to the center.Thake said she was not overly concerned about skeptics who worry that the center’s identity has changed too much.“To those people I say, It’s wonderful that you have found a home at Lincoln Center and what a gift it has been that Lincoln Center has been a home for so many for so long,” she said. “All that we are doing right now is opening up that invitation. And really having many, many more New Yorkers be able to say the exact same thing. That’s a real gift, and something that not only we can do, but something that we really have to do.” More

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      Lincoln Center Chooses Hearst Chief as Next Board Chair

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      Steven R. Swartz, president and chief executive of Hearst, will replace Katherine G. Farley, the longtime chair, in June.Lincoln Center faces a series of challenges in the coming years: recovering from the pandemic, reaching new audiences and making its campus more welcoming to the public.Now it will have a new board chair to help tackle those priorities: Steven R. Swartz, president and chief executive of Hearst, whom the center announced on Thursday would replace Katherine G. Farley, the longtime chair, in June.Swartz, who has been a Lincoln Center board member since 2012, said in an interview that he would continue the vision of Farley and Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, who have worked to broaden its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres like hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.“We’ve really done an amazing job of making our campus and our programming open and accessible and inclusive,” he said. “We just want to keep it going.”Farley, who took over as board chair in 2010, said in an interview that she thought it was time for a change after the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, which reopened last fall, a year and a half ahead of schedule.Farley was a major force behind the renovation, a project that had languished for years, working with the leadership of the New York Philharmonic, including its president and chief executive, Deborah Borda, and the chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang. She secured a gift of $100 million from Geffen, the entertainment mogul, in 2015 to help kick-start the renovation. (Lincoln Center, the nation’s largest performing arts complex, owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord.)“The hall is finished, all the money’s been raised, our budget is balanced,” Farley said. “It just seemed like this was the right time to pass the baton.”During her tenure, she worked to bring more racial and gender diversity to Lincoln Center’s executive ranks, helping create a fellowship to build a pipeline of board members for the entire campus.She also faced criticism during her tenure, including during a turbulent time in the mid-2010s when the center endured leadership churn and financial woes.Swartz praised Farley, describing her tenure as an “extraordinary chairmanship.” She will remain on the board’s executive committee.He said that under his leadership the center would try to reach the broadest possible audience.“Now as the city looks to recover from the pandemic,” he said, “I think the arts give us hope and give us inspiration, and they give people across the city, from all walks of life, just much-needed entertainment.” More

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      What an ’80s Feeling: ‘Flashdance' Turns 40

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      The film helped bring breaking into the mainstream. Over the years, it also became famous for the subs and doubles of its star, Jennifer Beals.At the climax of a strip routine, a young woman in silhouette arches back across a chair and pulls a cord. A cascade of water drenches her flexed body.In a leotard and leg warmers, the same woman stretches and runs in place, her wet hair flinging moisture as she shakes and rolls her head.Still in the leotard and leg warmers, she faces a panel of judges at an audition— jog-skipping while pumping her arms high, turning and turning, diving into a somersault, spinning her on back.These and other moments from the 1983 movie “Flashdance” still circulate in cultural memory, loved and mocked and recognized, even by people who never saw the film. On Monday, in honor of its 40th anniversary, New Yorkers get a rare chance to watch it on a big screen, as the closing selection of this year’s Dance on Camera Festival at Film at Lincoln Center. Get ready to cheer or jeer.Jennifer Beals, the star of “Flashdance,” in the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt she made famous.Everett Collection“So many people hold it in a special place,” Michael Trusnovec, a curator of the festival, said, noting how the movie’s style permeated the Long Island dance studios that he grew up in. He also pointed to how “Flashdance” had affected fashion: the sweatshirts with the neck hole cut to fall off one shoulder. And he stressed how dancers, including those inspired by the brief appearance of B-boys, had gravitated to the movie, thinking: “That’s what I want to do. I want to be that.”Beyond dance, much of the movie’s staying power comes from the soundtrack, especially Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” and Giorgio Moroder’s “What a Feeling,” sung by Irene Cara. The songs support sequences that are essentially music videos, which is how those scenes (the jogging workout, the audition) became ubiquitous on MTV — and why they still circulate online. Cara’s voice connects “Flashdance” to “Fame,” the 1980 movie with her hit title song, just as the supporting actress Cynthia Rhodes connects it to “Dirty Dancing,” from 1987. It’s an ’80s dance-film node.Beals in the movie’s freak-out scene.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesThere’s some fondness for the plot, too. Set in Pittsburgh, it’s a follow-your-dreams story and a Cinderella tale. Alex — Jennifer Beals in the role that made her a star — is a welder by day and dances in a burlesque club at night (occasioning not just the famous water-drenched number but also a freak-out in white Kabuki makeup amid strobe lights). Her dream is to be accepted into a prestigious dance conservatory. By the end, she gets in, and she gets the guy, her older boss at the steel mill.Over the years, the film has acquired a kind of notoriety, too, because Beals did so little of Alex’s dancing. Most was performed by a French dancer, Marine Jahan. And in the climactic audition scene, there were more doubles: the gymnast Sharon Shapiro for the dive into the roll; and for the backspin, the 16-year-old B-boy Richard Colon, better known as Crazy Legs.Richard Colon, better known as Crazy Legs, doubling for Beals.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesInitially, Colon said in an interview, he was brought in to teach the other doubles — on the day before shooting. That wasn’t enough time, so the director, Adrian Lyne, asked him to perform the backspin himself, in a leotard and wig, after shaving his legs and his newly grown mustache.“I was this little arrogant Puerto Rican from the Bronx with all this machismo,” Colon said. “I put my hands up to Lyne’s face and rubbed my fingers together, like, ‘You gotta pay me.’”They paid enough, Colon said. And in the next decades, the residual checks “definitely came in handy,” he added, as did his joke about being the first in hip-hop to dress in drag.Colon was known to the filmmakers because he was already in the movie. He and a few other members of the pioneering B-boy group Rock Steady Crew appear in another scene, when Alex discovers them dancing with a boombox on the sidewalk.To the B-boy anthem “It’s Just Begun” by the Jimmy Castor Bunch, Normski pops and locks like a windup robot, Ken Swift and Crazy Legs spin on their backs and Mr. Freeze holds an umbrella while doing the backslide, just before Michael Jackson made that decades-old move famous as the Moonwalk. This one-minute sequence had an outsized impact.“It’s impossible to overestimate the significance of ‘Flashdance’ in the history of breaking,” said Joseph Schloss, the author of “Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York.” “That one scene pretty much single-handedly brought breaking into the mainstream.”Some members of Rock Steady were at first hesitant to be in the movie. “We didn’t practice with other groups,” Colon said, “because it was all about the element of surprise.” Marc Lemberger, better known as Mr. Freeze, said he was afraid that other dancers would “bite our moves”— steal them.A scene from “Flashdance.”Parmount PicturesAfter the movie’s release, the crew “became instant ghetto celebrities,” Colon said. “There was lots of love and lots of jealousy.” They got on the David Letterman show and into “Beat Street,” one of a few breaking-themed movies that came out the next year. “Flashdance” is connected to that part of the ’80s, too.The Hollywood interest was a quick fad, but breaking lived on. For decades, Colon said, he would meet people who sneaked into “Flashdance” just to see that one scene, people who saw themselves in the dance, many of them far from the Bronx.“When you talk to people in different hip-hop dance scenes around the world,” Schloss said, “almost inevitably they will say, ‘Well, the first time we saw it was in ‘Flashdance.’”In “Planet B-boy,” a 2008 documentary focused on the international B-boy competition Battle of the Year, dancers from Japan, Germany and France all testify to that effect. (And where did the director of the film, Benson Lee, get idea for the documentary? From rewatching “Flashdance” and wondering what had happened to the form.)The ripples from the scene can also be felt in “Top Nine,” a new documentary getting its world premiere at Dance on Camera just before “Flashdance.” It’s about the Russian B-boy crew Top 9, formed around 20 years ago.Its members tell their story of banding together, improving their skills and gaining global respect for Russian B-boys. They win Battle of Year in 2008, beating a dominant Korean crew. That glory doesn’t solve their money problems — this isn’t a “Flashdance” fairy tale — but they keep dancing.Through it all, they don’t mention “Flashdance,” but listen to the song they use to win in 2008: “It’s Just Begun.” And when some of them start a festival in St. Petersburg, which masters do they import? Ken Swift and Crazy Legs. More

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      Review: From Lil Buck, History and a Chance to Flash Some Brilliance

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      “Memphis Jookin’: The Show,” which presents jookin “in the world it comes from,” is sincere entertainment, packed with talent and heart.“This is going to be very educational for a lot of y’all,” Lil Buck said at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater on Thursday.He was speaking before the New York premiere of “Memphis Jookin’: The Show,” which he conceived, produced, helped choreograph and stars in.Buck, also known as Charles Riley, is the biggest star of jookin, the Memphis-born street dance. He’s probably the only jookin specialist that most people have heard of. And because of how Buck became famous — dancing to classical music, collaborating with Yo-Yo Ma and ballet companies — many of those people might have misconceptions about the dance.Hence this show, which seeks, in Buck’s words, to present jookin “in the world it comes from.” And to do so in the form of a 90-minute, touring theatrical production, with a plot and dialogue. Such street-to-stage transpositions can, and usually do, go wrong in a hundred ways. With more skill and care than originality, “Memphis Jookin’” mainly avoids the pitfalls. It’s sincere entertainment, packed with talent and heart. And, yes, it’s educational, too.The story, serviceably if sometimes clunkily written by Ameenah Kaplan and Malcolm Barrett, follows JJ (the manic Dai’Vian Washington), a Memphis kid who decides to document the jookin scene with his dad’s camcorder. He goes to the Crystal Palace roller rink — an important location in jookin history and Buck’s biography — where his friend DJ Fly (Bradley Davis) is on the turntables. There we see a loosely staged scene of jookin in situ: little bursts of dancing that sometimes flare up into fights.This narrative setup also allows DJ Fly to give JJ (and us) a history lesson about the development of the underground hip-hop music that goes with jookin (ably supplied by Marshall and Parker Mulherin and Young Jai). As he explains how changing technology allowed DJs to play with speed and rhythm, the lessons are illustrated with dancing that enjoyably demonstrates parallel development.Throughout the show, the choreography (by Buck, Terran Noir Gary and Marico Flake) and the direction (by Amy Campion) work together to make points, flash some brilliance and keep things moving. A dance battle escalates into a generational confrontation when Buck arrives like a new-kid-in-town gunslinger to challenge the old-school champ Double OG (Flake, well known in urban dance circles as Dr. Rico).It’s a smart use of the always affable Buck, acknowledging that his dancing is on another level. The otherworldly gliding in sneakers, the toe-tip balances that splay riskily and recover: He effortlessly pushes everything a little further. Double OG (a gruffly witty dancer who seems to be gracefully scraping schmutz from his shoes) admits defeat by resorting to violence. JJ and DJ Fly have to restore the peace.Lil Buck in “Memphis Jookin,’” which he conceived, produced, helped choreograph and stars in.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesThis narrative turn is typical of the show’s dramaturgy, obvious but effective. JJ brings everyone together by showing them what he has recorded on his camera, scenes now danced by cast members as others pretend to watch the camcorder playback. What might have seemed like nothing much when we saw JJ filming the first Crystal Palace scene is now revealed, with some fast forwarding, to be quite wonderful: a trio of whiz kids, a boy-girl romance. We see Double OG teaching another cast member, Cameron Sykes, the basics of jookin, starting with the foundational gangsta walk, and Sykes manages the trick of pretending to be clumsy so he can transform into a marvel.Then JJ’s camera and the documentary premise pay off again, this time with interviews. On the rear wall, we see video of one of the dancers (well edited by Joe Mulherin), telling his or her story, while onstage that dancer expresses the story through jookin. Elise Landrum sweetly explains how dance is therapy, how it’s kept her sane. Dra’em Hines talks about learning to dance from his father and how the other cast members supported him when his father died.Buck tells some of his story, too, acting out his inspirations, including Crystal Palace dancers and Michael Jackson. The crux of his tale is a crisis, when a mentor told him that his dancing was “cool but not gangsta enough.” What he learned, he says, is that jookin wasn’t about skills and tricks; it was about expressing pain, love, joy, who you are.His aspiration, he adds, is for people to recognize jookin as a “fine art.” The dancing — not just his, but everyone’s — makes its own case: inventive, expressive, impressive, hard-won. But the narrative points to goals other than respect or prestige. At the end, JJ uploads his footage to YouTube and watches in astonished triumph as his views and subscribers rocket into the millions.During the post-show discussion, Flake was more frank about the show’s purpose — saying, in effect, that yes, jookin is art but artists need money. Landrum, in her interview segment, expressed delight in “getting paid to do what I like.” What these dancers need is a way to be professional without being Lil Buck. And this show that Lil Buck has made for and with them and taken on tour could be the answer.Memphis Jookin’: The ShowThrough Friday at the Rose Theater, Lincoln Center; lincolncenter.org. More