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      Peter Zinovieff, Composer and Synthesizer Innovator, Dies at 88

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      His powerful, affordable instruments made memorable sounds for Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, King Crimson and many others.Peter Zinovieff, a composer and inventor whose pioneering synthesizers shaped albums by Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Kraftwerk, died on June 23 in Cambridge, England. He was 88.His death was announced on Twitter by his daughter Sofka Zinovieff, who said he had been hospitalized after a fall.Mr. Zinovieff oversaw the design of the first commercially produced British synthesizers. In 1969, his company, EMS (Electronic Music Studios), introduced the VCS3 (for “voltage controlled studio”), one of the earliest and most affordable portable synthesizers. Instruments from EMS soon became a staple of 1970s progressive-rock, particularly from Britain and Germany. The company’s slogan was “Think of a sound — now make it.”Peter Zinovieff was born on Jan. 26, 1933, in London, the son of émigré Russian aristocrats: a princess, Sofka Dolgorouky, and Leo Zinovieff. His parents divorced in 1937.Peter’s grandmother started teaching him piano when he was in primary school. He attended Oxford University, where he played in experimental music groups while earning a Ph.D. in geology. He also dabbled in electronics.“I had this facility of putting pieces of wire together to make something that either received or made sounds,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in 2015.He married Victoria Heber-Percy, then 17, who came from a wealthy family. She and her parents were unhappy with the extensive travel that a geologist’s career required. After Mr. Zinovieff worked briefly for the Air Ministry in London as a mathematician, he turned to making electronic music full time, supported by his wife.He bought tape recorders and microphones and found high-quality oscillators, filters and signal analyzers at military-surplus stores. Daphne Oram, the electronic-music composer who was a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, taught him techniques of making music by splicing together bits of sound recorded on magnetic tape in the era of musique concrète.But Mr. Zinovieff decided that cutting tape was tedious. He built a primitive sequencer — a device to trigger a set of notes repeatedly — from telephone-switching hardware, and he began working on electronic sequencers with the electrical engineers Mark Dowson and Dave Cockerell. They realized that early digital computers, which were already used to control factory processes, might also control sound processing.Mr. Zinovieff’s wife sold her pearl and turquoise wedding tiara for 4,000 British pounds — now about $96,000 — to finance Mr. Zinovieff’s purchase of a PDP-8 computer designed by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Living in Putney, a district of London, Mr. Zinovieff installed it in his garden shed, and he often cited it as the world’s first home computer. He added a second PDP-8; the two units, which he named Sofka and Leo, could control hundreds of oscillators and other sound modules.The shed was now an electronic-music studio. Mr. Cockerell was an essential partner; he was able to build the devices that Mr. Zinovieff envisioned. Mr. Cockerell “would be able to interpret it into a concrete electronic idea and make the bloody thing — and it worked,” Mr. Zinovieff said in the 2006 documentary “What the Future Sounded Like.”In 1966, Mr. Zinovieff formed the short-lived Unit Delta Plus with Delia Derbyshire (who created the electronic arrangement of Ron Grainer’s theme for the BBC science fiction institution “Doctor Who”) and Brian Hodgson to make electronic ad jingles and other projects.The programmer Peter Grogono, working with Mr. Cockerell and Mr. Zinovieff, devised software to perform digital audio analysis and manipulation, presaging modern sampling. It used numbers to control sounds in ways that anticipated the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard that was introduced in 1983.On Jan. 15, 1968, Mr. Zinovieff brought his computer to Queen Elizabeth Hall in London for Britain’s first public concert of all-electronic music. His “Partita for Unattended Computer” received some skeptical reviews: The Financial Times recognized a technical achievement but called it “the dreariest kind of neo-Webern, drawn out to inordinate length.”Mr. Zinovieff at the Electronic Music Studios in London in 1968. The following year, the company introduced one of the earliest and most affordable portable synthesizers.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMr. Zinovieff lent a computer to the 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Visitors could whistle a tune and the computer would analyze and repeat it, then improvise variations.Continually upgrading the Putney studio was expensive. Mr. Zinovieff offered to donate the studio’s advanced technology to the British government, but he was ignored. To sustain the project, he and Mr. Cockerell decided to spin off a business.So in 1969, Mr. Zinovieff, Mr. Cockerell and Tristram Cary, an electronic composer with his own studio, formed EMS. They built a rudimentary synthesizer the size of a shoe box for the Australian composer Don Banks that they later referred to as the VCS1.In November, they unveiled the more elaborate VCS3, also known as the Putney. It used specifications from Mr. Zinovieff, a case and controls designed by Mr. Cary and circuitry designed by Mr. Cockerell (who drew on Robert Moog’s filter design research). It was priced at 330 pounds, about $7,700 now.Yet the VCS3 was smaller and cheaper than other early synthesizers; the Minimoog didn’t arrive until 1970 and was more expensive. The original VCS3 had no keyboard and was best suited to generating abstract sounds, but EMS soon made a touch-sensitive keyboard module available. The VCS3 also had an input so it could process external sounds.Musicians embraced the VCS3 along with other EMS instruments.EMS synthesizers are prominent in songs like Pink Floyd’s “On the Run,” Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” and the Who used a VCS3 to process the sound of an electric organ on “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” King Crimson, Todd Rundgren, Led Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, Aphex Twin and others also used EMS synthesizers.“I hated anything to do with the commercial side,” Mr. Zinovieff told Sound on Sound magazine in 2016. He was more interested in contemporary classical uses of electronic sound. In the 1970s, he composed extensively, but much of his own music vanished because he would tape over ideas that he expected to improve.He also collaborated with contemporary composers, including Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze. “I didn’t want to have a commercial studio,” he said in 2010. “I wanted an experimental studio, where good composers could work and not pay.” Mr. Zinovieff and Mr. Birtwistle climbed to the top of Big Ben to record the clock mechanisms and gong sounds they incorporated in a quadraphonic 1971 piece, “Chronometer.”Like other groundbreaking synthesizer companies, EMS had financial troubles. It filed for bankruptcy in 1979 after branching into additional products, including a video synthesizer, a guitar synthesizer and a vocoder.Mr. Zinovieff handed over his full studio — including advanced prototypes of an interactive video terminal and a 10-octave pressure-sensitive keyboard — to the National Theater, in London, which belatedly found that it couldn’t raise funds to maintain it. The equipment was dismantled and stored for years in a basement, and it was eventually ruined in a flood.Mr. Zinovieff largely stopped composing for decades. During that time he taught acoustics at the University of Cambridge.But he wasn’t entirely forgotten. He worked for years on the intricate libretto for Mr. Birtwistle’s 1986 opera “The Mask of Orpheus,” which included a language Mr. Zinovieff constructed using the syllables in “Orpheus” and “Eurydice.”In 2010, Mr. Zinovieff was commissioned to write music for a sculpture in Istanbul with 40 channels of sound. “Electronic Calendar: The EMS Tapes,” a collection of Mr. Zinovieff’s work and collaborations from 1965 to 1979 at Electronic Music Studios, was released in 2015.Mr. Zinovieff in 2015, the year “Electronic Calendar: The EMS Tapes,” a collection of his work and collaborations from 1965 to 1979, was released.Graeme Robertson/eyevine, via ReduxMr. Zinovieff learned new software, on computers that were exponentially more powerful than his 1970s equipment, and returned to composing throughout the 2010s, including pieces for cello and computer, for violin and computer and for computer and the spoken word. In 2020, during the pandemic, he collaborated with a granddaughter, Anna Papadimitriou, the singer in the band Hawxx, on a death-haunted piece called “Red Painted Ambulance.”Mr. Zinovieff’s first three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jenny Jardine, and by six children — Sofka, Leo, Kolinka, Freya, Kitty and Eliena — and nine grandchildren.A former employee, Robin Wood, revived EMS in 1997, reproducing the vintage equipment designs. An iPad app emulating the VCS3 was released in 2014.Even in the 21st century, Mr. Zinovieff sought better music technology. In 2016, he told Sound on Sound that he felt limited by unresponsive interfaces — keyboards, touchpads, linear computer displays — and by playback through stationary, directional loudspeakers. He longed, he said, for “three-dimensional sound in the air around us.” More

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      Mimi Stern-Wolfe, Presenter of Socially Conscious Concerts, Dies at 84

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      The range of programs she staged on the Lower East Side and in nearby neighborhoods included an annual concert devoted to composers lost to AIDS.Mimi Stern-Wolfe, a pianist and conductor who specialized in music programs with a social-justice or political theme, most notably an annual concert that featured music of composers lost to AIDS, died on June 21 at a care center in Manhattan. She was 84.Her daughter, Laura Wolfe, said the cause was complications of a series of strokes.In the late 1970s Ms. Stern-Wolfe, a fixture on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for most of her adult life, founded Downtown Music Productions, which in the years since has presented a wide range of programs, including performances by and for children, eclectic shows by the Downtown Chamber and Opera Players, and concerts featuring works by women, music of the Holocaust and more. Ms. Stern-Wolfe played and conducted at many of the performances, often leading from the piano bench.In 1990, moved by the death of her friend Eric Benson, a tenor claimed by AIDS in 1988, Ms. Stern-Wolfe started the Benson AIDS Series, concerts held almost every year since then to, in the words of her organization’s website, “promote the work of gifted composers and musicians who are fighting H.I.V./AIDS and to preserve the creative legacy of those who have already died.”In the early years, with the disease still defying treatment, the concerts were charged with emotion; the audience included people who were visibly sick, emaciated and weeping as the music was played. In later years, she viewed the concerts more as a way to keep the music alive and to convey to a younger generation the trauma of those early years of the epidemic.Rohan Spong, a documentary filmmaker, captured the preparation for the 2010 concert in “All the Way Through Evening,” a film released in 2012.“Mimi felt passionately that the wider community remember the talented music composers affected by H.I.V./AIDS in the early years of the pandemic,” Mr. Spong said by email, “many of whom were felled at young ages, and whom she had known personally.”“As she did with so many other issues,” he added, “she was able to synthesize her humanist values with her love of music and her dedication to her community.” The music she presented, he said, “seemed to cross space and time, communicating the beauty of these men’s lives and the tragedy of their deaths with an immediacy that was felt by audiences over two decades later.”Miriam Stern was born on May 27, 1937, in Brooklyn. Her father, Bernard, was a pharmacist, and her mother, Emma, was a homemaker. She grew up in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens and in the Rockaways. Her parents were both immigrants — her mother, she said, had come from Chernobyl, in Soviet Ukraine — and they kept a lively household, which had an effect on young Mimi.“They were not activists; they were sympathizers,” she said in a 2015 interview with the nonprofit group Labor Arts, which named her a recipient of the Clara Lemlich Award for social activism that year. “They were Jewish immigrant sympathizers and had friends who were both Zionists and Communists, and they all used to come to birthday parties and stuff, and argue. A lot. And I remember being kind of fascinated by that when I was a child.”By age 6 she was taking piano lessons. She graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in 1954, earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Queens College in 1958 and received a master’s degree in music and piano performance at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1961. She lived and studied in Paris for a time before settling on the Lower East Side.She had two passions, as she put it: classical music and “my political proclivities.” But she found that they rarely overlapped; people who were passionate about the causes she cared about didn’t generally have much use for classical music.“What I wanted to do with my music was to find a way to synthesize my political ideas and my music,” she said.Ms. Stern-Wolfe in her apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2013. Most of the concerts she presented took place in that neighborhood or nearby. Michael Nagle for The New York TimesAnd so she organized concerts like “War and Pieces,” featuring music highlighting the consequences of war. She presented concerts devoted to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes and Harriet Tubman. After the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011, she organized a concert of protest songs.Other programs were more whimsical, like a 1987 concert titled “Notes From the Underground: Music as Satire.” And then there was “A Toast to the Steins,” with music by Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein and a poem by Gertrude Stein set to music.Ms. Stern-Wolfe’s marriage to Robert Wolfe in 1961 ended in divorce. In addition to her daughter, a singer-songwriter and child of that marriage, she is survived by her partner of 30 years, the poet Ilsa Gilbert, and a grandson.Although Ms. Stern-Wolfe performed in many places, most of her productions were staged on the Lower East Side or in surrounding neighborhoods, by choice. She wanted to make classical music and other forms accessible to the people who were her neighbors.“I didn’t want to go to the Upper West Side every time I went to a concert,” she said in a 2006 interview, “so I made a vow to bring the music down here. If I’d lived uptown, life would’ve been very different. Perhaps I’d have a job with City Opera.” More

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      Louis Andriessen, Lionized Composer With Radical Roots, Dies at 82

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      After challenging the Dutch musical establishment as a young man, he went on to write a series of large and loud symphonic works that grappled with big ideas.Louis Andriessen, who as a young iconoclast disrupted the Dutch classical music scene before becoming one of Europe’s most important postwar composers with a series of large-scale, often brash works, died on Thursday in Weesp, the Netherlands. He was 82. His death, at his home near Amsterdam in a specialized village for people with dementia, was announced by his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Mr. Andriessen’s musical influences included Stravinsky, bebop and American minimalism, different styles that he often presented in gleeful confrontation. His music was a unique blend of American sounds and European forms, the composer Michael Gordon said in a phone interview.“These pieces are really constructed like big symphonic works, but using the materials of the vernacular,” he said. “The music was the bridge between European formalism and an almost hipster riffing on American jazz and minimalism.”In the latter part of his career Mr. Andriessen created monumental pieces that probed big ideas. “De Tijd,” meaning time in Dutch, took on that subject. “De Staat,” set to the text of Plato’s “Republic,” was about political organization. “De Materie” (“On Matter”) began with a 17th-century treatise on shipbuilding and ended with excerpts from Marie Curie’s diaries.He collaborated with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway on a movie, “M is for Man, Music, Mozart” (1991), and two operas, “ROSA The Death of a Composer” (1994) and “Writing to Vermeer” (1999). In his book “The Art of Stealing Time,” Mr. Andriessen wrote that in Mr. Greenaway’s films, “I recognize something of my own work, namely the combination of intellectual material and vulgar directness.”The opera director Pierre Audi said that each of Mr. Andriessen’s works for the stage “could fly away into fantasy and extreme freedom of structure, with collages of different musical idioms.”“But what characterized them all,” he added, “was an inner architecture. He managed to build operas like cathedrals.”Mr. Andriessen’s early career was fueled by Marxist ideals and the desire to upend traditional practices in classical music. He founded two ensembles in the 1970s. De Volharding (Perseverance) consisted of players who were equally versed in improvised and experimental music, with the idea of giving them greater influence over the musical material they performed. Hoketus, which disbanded in 1987, was named after a medieval technique that splits a single musical line among multiple players.Mr. Andriessen used that technique in “Symphony for Open Strings” (1978), in which musical phrases are painstakingly pieced together from single notes. The players use only open strings, meaning that their left hands, which change the notes on the fingerboard, are rendered useless. It is a way to handicap the very instruments that in traditional symphonic writing receive almost all the expressive material.Mr. Andriessen in 2018 after a performance of his “Symphony for Open Strings” by the New York Philharmonic at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room. The orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, is at left.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn later decades he accepted commissions from major orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, which gave the premiere of his tone poem “Agamemnon” in 2018 during its two-week festival devoted to Mr. Andriessen.In large-scale works his sound was typically strident and bold. His signature orchestration combined beefed-up woodwind and brass along with keyboards, electric guitars and clanging percussion.Most of all, he liked it loud.Mr. Gordon recalled a rehearsal of one of Mr. Andriessen’s orchestral works at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony in Lenox, Mass., in 1994. Mr. Andriessen felt that the piece had come out sounding too polite. The musicians said they had trouble finding the notes.“I would rather you play the wrong note very loud then the right note very soft,” Mr. Andriessen responded.Louis Andriessen was born on June 6, 1939, into a Roman Catholic family in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His father, Hendrik Franciscus Andriessen, was a composer and organist who became the director of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. His mother, Johanna Justina Anschütz, was a pianist. Louis was the youngest of six children, all of whom were musical. (Two brothers also became composers.)From 1956-1962 he studied composition, music theory and piano at the conservatory, then traveled to both Milan and Berlin for advanced studies with Luciano Berio. While studying in The Hague he met the guitarist Jeanette Yanikian who became his partner. They married in 1996, and she died in 2008. Mr. Andriessen is survived by his second wife, the violinist Monica Germino, whom he married in 2012 and for whom he wrote several works. Beginning in 1966, Mr. Andriessen and a group of fellow Dutch musicians pushed for Amsterdam’s storied Concertgebouw Orchestra to engage more vigorously with contemporary music. In 1969, they led what became known as the Nutcracker Action, when activists sabotaged a Concertgebouw performance with frog-shaped metal clickers. That year he collaborated on an opera, “Reconstructie” (“Reconstruction”), which decries American imperialism as it pulls together various styles, including pop, jazz, Mozart pastiche and a speaking chorus. A weeklong run of sold-out performances of the work forced the Dutch culture minister to defend the spending of taxpayer money to finance what was called anti-American agitprop.From 1972 to 1976 Mr. Andriessen composed “De Staat,” a work that would come to define his combination of intellectual rigor and brash sonic exuberance. In “De Tijd,” he played with the listener’s perception of time by manipulating repetition and silence. The frantic, clanging “De Snelheid” (“Velocity”), composed in the early 1980s, investigated the perception of speed and its relationship to harmony.In 1985 he completed “De Stijl,” a Mondrian-inspired piece that would become part of the massive stage work “De Materie,” which sets scientific, historical and mystical texts to a powerful score teeming with sonic hues. Reviewing a 2016 production at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan directed by Heiner Goebbels, which featured a flock of live sheep, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times described it as “colorful, exciting and, during reflective episodes, raptly beautiful.”Mr. Andriessen with the Philharmonic in 2018 after a performance of his “Agamamnon.” His signature orchestration combined beefed-up woodwind and brass along with keyboards, electric guitars and clanging percussion.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAs Mr. Andriessen’s fame grew, the classical establishment he had once heckled embraced him. Beginning in 1978 he taught composition at the Royal Conservatory. Yale University invited him in 1987 to lecture on theory and composition. The arts faculty of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands appointed him professor in 2004. He held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall during the 2009-10 season.Among other honors, he won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Composition in 2011, for “La Commedia,” a polyglot romp through hell anchored in Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” and the 2016 Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music.One of his last major works, “Theater of the World,” centering on the Jesuit philosopher Athanasius Kircher, received its premiere in Los Angeles in 2016. The music blends children’s songs, Serialism and baroque influences into what The Guardian called a “superb, surreal journey.”Having developed dementia, Mr. Andriessen moved to the village in Weesp for people with memory loss last year. The village, called Hogeweyk, has multiple pianos, and Mr. Andriessen would improvise on them for hours. More

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      China’s Communist Party Turns 100. Cue the (State-Approved) Music.

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      A wave of nationalistic music, theater and dance is sweeping China, part of Beijing’s efforts to improve the party’s image and strengthen political loyalty.Yan Shengmin, a Chinese tenor, is known for bouncy renditions of Broadway tunes and soulful performances in operas like “Carmen.”But lately, Mr. Yan has been focusing on a different genre. He is a star of “Red Boat,” a patriotic opera written to celebrate the 100th anniversary this week of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Yan has embraced the role, immersing himself in party history and binge-watching television shows about revolutionary heroes to prepare.“I feel a lot of pressure,” Mr. Yan said in an interview between rehearsals. “The 100th anniversary is a big occasion.”A wave of nationalistic music, theater and dance is sweeping China as the Communist Party works to ensure its centennial is met with pomp and fanfare.Prominent choreographers are staging ballets about revolutionary martyrs. Theaters are reviving nationalistic plays about class struggle. Hip-hop artists are writing songs about the party’s achievements. Orchestras are performing works honoring communist milestones like the Long March, with chorus members dressed in light-blue military uniforms.The celebrations are part of efforts by Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader, to make the party omnipresent in people’s lives and to strengthen political loyalty among artists.Mr. Xi, who has presided over a broad crackdown on free expression in China since rising to power nearly a decade ago, has said artists should serve the cause of socialism rather than become “slaves” of the market.In honor of the party’s centennial, Mr. Xi’s government has announced plans for performances of 300 operas, ballets, plays, musical compositions and other works. The list includes classics like “The White-Haired Girl,” a Mao-era opera about a young peasant woman whose family is persecuted by a cruel landlord. There are also new productions like “Red Boat,” which chronicles the party’s first congress in 1921 on a boat outside Shanghai.Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has said that artists should serve the cause of socialism.Xinhua, via Associated PressThe outpouring of artistic expression comes amid rising nationalism in China. Many artists have little choice but to comply with the government’s demands for more patriotic art, with officials in China’s top-down system wielding considerable influence over decisions about financing and programming.“It has become very important for artists to follow the political line,” said Jindong Cai, director of the U.S.-China Music Institute at Bard College. “The government wants artists to focus on Chinese works that relate to people’s lives and positively reflect China’s image.”Critics have denounced the so-called “red” works as propaganda. But Chinese artists say that is partly the point.“China is very strong now and people should respect that,” said Warren Mok, a Chinese tenor who is embarking on a national tour to celebrate the centennial.Mr. Mok said he hoped to use music to remind people about the party’s success in improving living standards in China. Still, he said it was important that patriotic works are balanced with Western music and other art forms.“Anything you do should not be too extreme,” he said. “If you’re so insecure about your own culture, your own nationalism, you close your door. Isolation is not good for any country.”Hundreds of performances related to the party’s centennial have already taken place, and scores more are expected by year’s end.In Suzhou, a city west of Shanghai, the choreographer Wang Yabin recently staged “My Name is Ding Xiang,” a new ballet about a 22-year-old martyr who died during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In Nanjing, an eastern city, an orchestra recently performed “Liberation: 1949,” a symphony about the Communist revolution by the composer Zhao Jiping.Some works deal with contemporary themes, including the party’s efforts to eliminate extreme poverty and its success in fighting the coronavirus, which Mr. Xi has held up as evidence of the superiority of China’s authoritarian model. A play called “People First” depicts the heroism of medical workers in Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged in late 2019.By reviving older works, Mr. Xi appears eager to remind the public of the party’s glory days.Kevin Frayer/Getty ImagesPropaganda art has a long history in China, and some of the country’s most celebrated works emerged during periods of intense political control, including the decade of bloody upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s known as the Cultural Revolution. During that time, classical music was attacked as decadent and bourgeois, and many Western composers and instruments were banned.In modern China, music and dance from the Cultural Revolution still resonates with the public, including works such as the “Yellow River Piano Concerto” and “The Red Detachment of Women,” a revolutionary ballet.“These cultural products have their own artistic value,” said Denise Ho, assistant professor of history at Yale University who studies 20th century history in China. “For many Chinese, there is a nostalgia for certain aspects of the Mao era.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}By reviving older works, Mr. Xi appears eager to remind the public of the party’s glory days. His government has redoubled efforts to fortify ideological loyalty among artists. This year, a government-backed industry association released a moral code for performing artists — dancers, musicians and acrobats included — calling on them to be faithful to the party and help advance the socialist cause.Mr. Xi, in a ceremony this week at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, handed out centennial medals to 29 party cadres, including Lan Tianye, an actor often described as a “red artist,” and Lu Qiming, a patriotic composer known for the piece “Ode to the Red Flag.”“For Xi, as for Mao, art is first and foremost a political instrument,” Professor Ho said.The Chinese government has tried to use music, dance, television and movies in recent years to improve its image, especially among young people, many of whom have no direct connection to the Communist revolution of 1949.A rap song celebrating the centennial, titled “100 Percent,” has been widely shared on the Chinese internet in recent days. But the 15-minute track, featuring 100 artists, has been mocked for its wooden propaganda slogans.“Our spaceships are flying in the sky,” says one lyric. “The new China must get lit.”Performers say they hope the high caliber of the centennial productions, including elaborate costumes, sets and visual effects, will appeal to younger audiences.A gala performance about the Long March. Some of the country’s most celebrated works emerged during periods of intense political control.Ng Han Guan/Associated PressWang Jiajun, 36, a principal dancer at Shanghai Dance Theater who plays a martyr in a revival of the dance production “The Eternal Wave,” said young people could identify with the work.“These heroes were only in their teens, 20s or 30s when they lost their lives,” Mr. Wang said. “The stories of young people will attract young people.”For artists taking part in the centenary, the effort has at times been laborious.Xie Menghao, a Chinese-born graduate student in music composition in Germany, spent six months repurposing a suite of Red Army songs into a piano concerto about the Long March, a 6,000-mile retreat of Communist forces that began in 1934 and established Mao’s pre-eminence. He said he was proud of the piece, which the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra premiered last month, but added that the experience was “more like a job.”“I just did what they said,” he said in an interview. “Every composer just thinks about the music.”Mr. Yan the tenor starring in “Red Boat,” said he has found it easy to connect with his character, Chen Duxiu, a founder of the party. But he said rehearsals have not always been easy. Younger performers, for instance, have needed help better understanding the emotional experience of being part of the early communist struggle, he said.“They don’t have the ideas to fight or sacrifice for the nation’s destiny,” Mr. Yan, 56, said. “I can do it in one take.”Mr. Yan said he was confident that the show would have success in China and perhaps beyond.“We’re depicting history, not just lecturing how great the Communist Party is,” he said. “This isn’t a communist slogan-type performance. It’s plain storytelling.”Javier C. Hernández reported from Taipei, Taiwan, and Joy Dong from Hong Kong. More

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      Stand-Ups Get Experimental in Five Adventurous New Specials

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      For these sets, Chris Gethard, Rory Scovel, Carmen Christopher, Josh Johnson and Jessica Watkins borrow from improv, documentary and more.“You gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get applause.”When Stephen Sondheim placed this timeless showbiz advice in the classic musical “Gypsy,” he was referring to stripping. If dancing seductively while taking your clothes off is not enough to win over an audience, imagine the challenge of telling jokes in a crowded stand-up scene. In her debut, “Specialish,” Jessica Watkins puts it this way: “You need more than comedy. You need a shtick.”For Watkins, this meant pushing a cart across America on highways and through woods, sleeping in a tent and filming this lonely trek while doing sets in small spaces from New York to California. An odd mix of stand-up special and “Nomadland,” her effort is both exceptional and characteristic of the try-anything moment in comedy, one in which many performers are fusing forms, mixing onstage with off, merry with melancholy, written jokes with music, improv or other elements.Bo Burnham’s buzzy “Inside” (Netflix) packaged a solo show inside a musical. Next month, Tig Notaro releases a fully animated stand-up special. But the fastest growing comedy hybrid is the stand-up documentary. Shots of the comic backstage once bookended the jokes, but now scenes of the life of the comic regularly introduce, respond to and buttress the performance. It’s no surprise that the winners of the 2020 Oscar for best documentary feature made Dave Chappelle’s next movie, “This Time This Place,” a chronicle of, among other things, performing in his hometown Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the pandemic.“Specialish” (available on major digital platforms) is an example of the strengths and pitfalls of this high-concept approach: While it added scenic drama and beauty to her strenuous journey, it eventually overwhelmed the comedy. In explaining why she’s pushing a cart on her trip, she quips, “I wanted to look more homeless.” Such punch lines hit less hard than interludes in her life. The stand-up often seems incidental if not out of place, even a distraction from the main event.Carmen Christopher, left, and Chris Gethard in “Half My Life.”Comedy DynamicsIn recent months, Rory Scovel, Chris Gethard and Carmen Christopher put out more modestly focused specials that mix stand-up with behind-the-scenes footage. Each is experimental in different ways. In “Live Without Fear” (available on YouTube), Scovel, a dynamic and inventive performer who has delivered some of the funniest sets I have ever seen, set himself the task of making up six shows completely on the spot: stand-up merged with improv. His goal was to capture the spontaneity of creation while weaving in post-show commentary on what went wrong.Shot by Scott Moran with sensitivity to the rhythm of jokes, Scovel’s performances are riveting high-wire acts, not as refined as a normal set but displaying the drunken thrill of a party conversation starting to take off. Scovel brings titanic aggression leavened by patience, toying with words, searching for the funny parts, filibustering a premise and biding his time, waiting for inspiration to strike. Many of his best improvisations begin with simple observational premises — the weirdness of the phrase “getting on your high horse” — then move into puns (“pot-smoking horses”) followed by absurdity (“That’s where the show ‘Mr. Ed’ comes from”) and a coda with bizarre rage (“Tell me I’m wrong!”).If Scovel courts failure, Christopher hugs it tightly in “Street Special,” a deadpan, self-consciously awkward special, one of the first produced on Peacock. Carrying his own microphone, Christopher set up shop on New York street corners during the pandemic, surprising nervous pedestrians with jokes. At the start, he interrupts outdoor diners at the East Village spot Veselka by announcing that he just got engaged. After some lonely applause, annoyed glances and some quintessential New York indifference, he said he was kidding, that he has been single for seven years and that he just wanted to see what it felt like to have people excited for him.This cringe comedy will divide viewers. He satirizes certain kinds of hack comedy but finds an oddball spirit all its own. Christopher doesn’t just capture the anxious atmosphere of pandemic-era city life. He exploits it to jack up the tension in a joke.He also shows up as the opening act in Chris Gethard’s special “Half My Life” (on major digital platforms), a chronicle of a road trip alongside a portrait of a comic in a midlife crisis. Gethard is a New York comedy institution whose many projects include the popular podcast “Beautiful/Anonymous,” which features conversations with a stranger. But now, with a newborn at home, he sounds surprisingly ambivalent about his two-decade career, calling himself the king of the “near sellout” and wondering aloud about his passion for performing. “I think I still love comedy, but my back hurts and I’m tired,” he says.In his work, Gethard is known for wandering down dark avenues, but “Half My Life” actually evolves into a lightly fun special. He’s smart enough to drill down on his best bit — a series of jokes about Gatorland, an amusement park in Orlando that competes with Disney World — and concludes by becoming what is surely the first stand-up to perform for an audience exclusively of alligators.Josh Johnson follows jokes with R&B songs on his new album.Mindy TuckerIf there’s a fusion of forms that approaches the popularity of the documentary-stand-up mix, it’s that of the marriage between comedy and music. While many comics use music in their jokes, the new album by Josh Johnson (on Apple Music) is the first I have heard that puts stand-up bits side by side with earnestly produced songs. Johnson is a rising star, a “Daily Show” writer who emerged from the pandemic with this album, as well as a sharply observed special on Comedy Central that is a better showcase for his joke writing. The album, billed as “part millennial escapism, part Negro spiritual,” is a mixed bag that follows a joke about how love should be regulated (“There’s nothing someone hasn’t done for crack that they haven’t done for love”) with an R&B song.Sometimes, the connections between the comedy and the music are hard to detect. It’s right there in its title — “Elusive.”The great thing about standup is that it’s a bare-bones art. Anyone with a voice can do it. And traditionalists have a point when they roll their eyes, insisting that comics should just get to the jokes. These specials have more unnecessary or unfinished elements than the best comedy. (Scovel’s “Live Without Fear” includes a side plot about the history of the theater he performs in that doesn’t quite come together.)But it’s a mistake to be too cynical about efforts to push the form or to borrow from new sources, because that’s what will keep comedy growing. Even if the new adventurousness in specials is rooted in gimmickry, I still welcome it. The stand-up special is too young an art to become set in its ways. More

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      Whistling as an Art Almost Died Off. Can Molly Lewis Keep It Alive?

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      The 31-year-old has whistled at tournaments, in the studio for Dr. Dre and at her Los Angeles lounge show, Café Molly. Now she’s releasing her debut EP.Molly Lewis lives at the top of a steep hill in East Los Angeles, where a group of feral peafowl roam idly around, as if they own the place. Peacocks and peahens don’t have much of a bird song — they emit a sharp “caw” that is “not cute,” Lewis said — but other birds have found themselves in conversation with the 31-year-old whistler.“If I’m out walking in the woods and I hear a birdcall, I try to mimic it,” she said, lamenting that the chats are a little one-sided: “I’ve probably got a terrible accent in ‘bird.’”Humans tend to be more impressed. By her early 20s, Lewis was a veteran of the niche world of competitive whistling; in 2015, she took first prize in the women’s live-band division at the Masters of Musical Whistling tournament. These days, she’s more focused on Café Molly, her lounge show that’s become a trendy affair in Los Angeles nightlife.Led by Lewis and her band, the act usually features special guests: John C. Reilly has stopped by to perform Slim Whitman, and the indie rocker Mac DeMarco to do some Frank Sinatra. All the while, Lewis will stand at the mic, pursing her lips when it’s time to play her parts.The show also helped her get a record contract. Scouts for the label Jagjaguwar reached out after attending a Café Molly event, and in lockdown, Lewis learned guitar, which helped her write formal songs. On Friday, she’ll release her first EP, “The Forgotten Edge,” made with the help of the producer Thomas Brenneck, best known for his work with Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley. The set is part tiki-bar exotica and part spaghetti-western dreamscape, each track anchored by Lewis’s theremin-like whistle. (Pre-orders come with a mint lip balm.)“I always felt like we were making soundtracks for lost films,” Lewis said.The EP was named after the colloquial term for Lewis’s micro-neighborhood at the top of the peafowl-ridden hill by Dodger Stadium. “It’s officially called Victor Heights,” she said on a recent warm afternoon, walking up a particularly steep street to a scenic overlook. For a time, she explained while gasping for air, these few blocks weren’t clearly assigned to any police precinct, leading it to have a lawless reputation. “That’s why it became known as” — here, she adopted a dramatic tone, as if introducing a radio mystery — “‘the Forgotten Edge.’ I just loved that name. It sounded so noir.”Video by Brian Overend for The New York TimesLewis was born in Sydney, but raised in Los Angeles, eventually returning to Australia for high school and college. (Her family lives in Mullumbimby, known as “the Biggest Little Town in Australia.”) She comes from an artistically inclined household: Her mother, Rhyl, is a music supervisor, and her father, Mark, is a documentary filmmaker, specializing in animals and subcultures. His influential 1988 film, “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History,” is viewed in schools around the world.When Lewis took an interest in whistling as a teenager, her parents showed her the 2005 documentary “Pucker Up,” which goes behind the scenes at the now-defunct International Whistlers Convention, in Louisburg, N.C., and has a Christopher Guest-like quality to it. Not long after, she was competing in Louisburg herself, winning the “Whistler Who Traveled the Greatest Distance” award in 2012. Lewis moved to Los Angeles a year later, where whistling gigs of all types, from touring to session work, eventually took over. (She was recently in the studio to play a whistle part for Dr. Dre.)The city “just kind of had a spell on me,” Lewis said. “But I also think L.A. is the only place in the world where I can do what I’m doing. I really don’t think this would have happened anywhere else.”Lewis gravitates toward the older establishments in the city — places where the food may not be great, but the ambience is. “Go to Hollywood, any restaurant, and Molly’s going to know the 80-year-old bartender,” said DeMarco, whose partner, Kiera McNally, is close with Lewis and appears in the video for the track “Oceanic Feeling,” alongside Reilly and a well-behaved hawk. “That’s Molly’s vibe.”“I want to play beautiful music that makes people feel something,” Lewis said. “And it just so happens that whistling is the only thing I can do that allows me entry into the world of musicians.”Brian Overend for The New York TimesIn true form, when asked where she might like to grab a bite to eat, Lewis suggested the Tam O’Shanter, a storybook-style roadhouse in Atwater Village that dates back to 1922. She trusted the waiter’s suggestion for a cocktail (the “Table 31,” named for the corner spot where Walt Disney used to regularly sit), and studied the menu with amusement. “What is a ‘toad in the hole’?” she asked, laughing.Within the Tam O’Shanter’s lifetime, whistling was a relatively common act in the music world. Artists like Elmo Tanner and Muzzy Marcellino made careers for themselves with their lips, and in 1967, the whistling song “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman” became an international hit.Is the ever-increasing speed of society replacing life’s simple pleasures with more complex ones? “I do think, in some sense, it is a lost art in that way,” Lewis said of her vocation. But revivalism isn’t really her goal. And if she remains the only indie-rock whistler for her entire life, that’s fine, too.“I want to play beautiful music that makes people feel something,” she said. “And it just so happens that whistling is the only thing I can do that allows me entry into the world of musicians.”Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs was one of the first major musicians to see the possibilities with Lewis. In 2016, the two performed a duet, you could say, of the gospel song “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” at a Harry Dean Stanton tribute concert. “I’ve always thought of the voice as a sort of instrument,” Karen O said. “Whistling is this other instrument — it’s human breath. I was never witness to someone who can whistle like Molly can. It’s really extraordinary.”No one around Lewis seems surprised at her ability to make whistling a career, but sometimes even she can’t quite believe it. “It’s been working for some crazy reason,” she said, still taking it all in. “I’m going to try to ride it. See how it goes.” More

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      ‘It Taunts the Eye’: Footwork’s Fast Moves Loom Over Chicago

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      Projected onto the Merchandise Mart, “Footnotes” honors a style that’s become popular around the world but isn’t always given recognition in its hometown.Footwork, the Chicago-born music-and-dance form, is famous for its speed. D.J.s deliver a tense, polyrhythmic mix of stuttering samples at the jacked-up rate of 160 beats per minute, and dancers meet the challenge with an onslaught of swivels, kicks and scissoring steps even more bewilderingly quick and intricate than the music.This summer, that speed is finding a match in size. From Tuesday through Sept. 16, “Footnotes,” a short footwork film, is being projected across the 2.5-acre facade of the Merchandise Mart, a behemoth of a building covering two blocks of downtown Chicago. That’s a screen the size of about two football fields. Each night, the incredibly fast dance grows incredibly large.It’s a boost in visibility for a style, developed by Black youth, that hasn’t always been welcome in the city’s center — a style that has become popular around the world but isn’t always given recognition and respect in its hometown.“It’s about damn time,” said the footwork dancer Jamal Oliver, better known as Litebulb. “Footwork has been part of Chicago for 30 years.”Litebulb, in “In the Wurkz,” a touring show by the Era Footwork Crew.Wills GlasspiegelLitebulb, 31, who dances in the film and helped produce it, said that while appearing on the side of a building is exciting, “what’s more fulfilling is giving that opportunity to kids who would never get that chance.” Paying it forward is part of the mission of the Era Footwork Crew, a collective Litebulb helped found in 2014, and of its offshoot nonprofit organization, Open the Circle.In footwork parlance, “opening the circle” means making a space for dancing when the floor is too packed. Open the Circle seeks to do something similar in the field of social justice, not just making spaces for dancing and dancers but also spreading knowledge through education and funneling resources like grant money into the communities that created footwork.“When most people create these kinds of organizations, they’ve already made a fortune and now they want to give back,” Litebulb said. “But we’re doing it from the grass roots.”By design, the work of the Era and Open the Circle blurs in footwork projects, including public “dance downs,” a summer camp (Circle Up), videos, rap singles, a touring show (“In the Wurkz”) and a feature-length documentary on the way (“Body of the City”). The collectives extend footwork into the world of art galleries, universities and music festivals without losing touch with where it came from.Wills Glasspiegel, working on “Footnotes.”Jason PinkneyBrandon Calhoun, adjusting the camera, with DJ Spinn on the MPC drum machine.Jason Pinkney“Footnotes” is an extension of these efforts, both an advertisement and an upshot. “We’ve been doing a lot of work with the City of Chicago,” said Wills Glasspiegel, the documentary filmmaker and scholar who made the film with the Era dancer and animator Brandon Calhoun. “The city has recognized us as a good partner.” (Glasspiegel and Litebulb are both founders of the Era and executive directors of Open the Circle.)In this case, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events reached out about its “Year of Chicago Music” project and a partnership with Art on theMart, which has been projecting public art on the building since 2018.Glasspiegel jumped at the chance. “Footwork is emblematic of our city,” he said, “so we tried to make the film as Chicago as possible, expressing the city as we Chicagoans experience it.” The filmmakers brought in musicians with deep local roots: Angel Bat Dawid; Amal Hubert of Hypnotic Brass Ensemble; and the Chicago Bucket Boys, who, Glasspiegel said, “are the sound of Chicago’s streets.” Elisha Chandler, a dancer with “In the Wurkz,” sings.But if the film’s musicians connect footwork to the city, its method of composition connects the musicians to footwork. To create the soundtrack, the Bucket Boys improvised at 160 beats per minute, then the others laid down improvisations in response, riffing on the blues song “Sweet Home, Chicago.” DJ Spinn, a seminal figure in the genre, took all those pieces and treated them as samples, turning them into footwork.Using the music as a map, Glasspiegel edited together footage of the musicians with footage of dancers. The contribution of Calhoun, also known as Chief Manny, was crucial, too: transforming some of that footage into animation. It makes the dancing more legible.Angel Bat Dawid in a scene from “Footnotes.”Wills Glasspiegel and Brandon K. CalhounThat’s particularly important for “Footnotes,” since the Merchandise Mart presents a challenging surface for projection — the facade is perforated with hundreds of windows that may or may not be lighted. But the animation is useful in conveying footwork more generally. “Footwork moves so fast, it taunts the eye,” Glasspiegel said. Calhoun — with his dancer’s inside knowledge — clarifies its phrasing and shape.At one point in the film, an animated DJ Spinn taps an MPC, the sampling device that is the main instrument of footwork music, and an animated dancer bounces on the keys. This image is important, Glasspiegel said, because it’s a metaphor. “That’s a driving theme for us — that footwork is both music and dance — which people might not know if they don’t know the history.”Footwork developed in the late 1980s and early ’90s in dance clubs, community centers and roller-rink discos that played house music. Another important site was the Bud Billiken parade, one of the largest African American parades in the country and one of the oldest, happening every summer since 1929. In these places, foundational footwork moves, like the Holy Ghost (a slack-limbed shaking) and the Erk n Jerk (a sequence of seesawing, sideways kicks), emerged before footwork got its name.Some of the top dance crews of those days — Main Attraction, House-O-Matics, U-Phi-U — included dancers who became D.J.s, most importantly RP Boo and DJ Rashad. And it was these dancers-turned-D.J.s who created the footwork sound, increasing the tempo and stripping things down to ratchet up the tension (or throw off rival dancers) in dance battles — intense, improvisational face-offs that became the core of footwork culture in the early 2000s. Overlapping rhythms gave dancers more options, and competition pushed innovation.As had happened before with hip-hop — when M.C.s, who made money for the music industry, eclipsed b-boys, who didn’t — the music spread without the dance, especially abroad. “People didn’t really see the dance until DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn brought dancers on tour with them in 2010,” Litebulb said.Elisha Chandler, center, a dancer with “In the Wurkz,” who sings in the “Footnotes” film.Wills GlasspiegelLitebulb was one of those dancers, discovering rapturous fans in Europe but finding less recognition back home. “Too often dancers are viewed as background or bodies, not artists,” he said. “It’s important to have the balance, celebrating what the DJs are doing and what the dancers are doing.”“Footnotes” does that, but it also shows other ways that the Era and Open the Circle have been influencing the footwork scene. When footwork moved from clubs, parades and dance groups into more insular battles, women got pushed out. The Era and Open the Circle have been inviting them back in.“In battling culture, women were expected to stand on the side and look cute,” said Diamond Hardiman, a 27-year-old dancer who appears in the film. “You couldn’t get in the circle.”Women of her generation began battling one another. “It was empowering, seeing what we could do with each other to make ourselves better and letting the guys know that us women can do the same thing that y’all doing.”Diamond Hardiman: “In battling culture, women were expected to stand on the side and look cute. You couldn’t get in the circle.”Jason PinkneyWomen like Hardiman made space for themselves, but Open the Circle has also helped by reconnecting footwork with the youth dance groups in which it began. These groups are filled with girls and often run by women. (Women in the family of Shkunna Stewart, who directs the group Bringing Out Talent, have been running groups for four generations.)Members of such groups are the core population of Open the Circle’s summer camps on the South and East Sides of Chicago, camps where women like Hardiman teach. Some of these children appear in “Footnotes.” A girl called Ladybug leaps like a grasshopper, a dozen stories tall.The goal of the camps is broader than correcting the gender imbalance, though. “In our community, footwork is kind of viewed as nostalgia, but if we can get the kids, then footwork can live on,” Litebulb said. “It will be a whole new evolution than what we thought it was.”And it’s about more than perpetuating a style. As some of the camp T-shirts attest, “Footwork saves lives.”“It really did save my life,” Hardiman said, echoing the sentiment of other Era members. “I grew up seeing the stuff I wasn’t supposed to see at a young age, but footwork showed me I didn’t have to do those things.”“I don’t want my child to go through what I had to go through,” she added.That aspiration can be felt in the film as well. “The big kicker for me is showing the kids anything’s possible,” Litebulb said. “Look at yourself on the side of a building now. Who would have thought?” More

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      ‘Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over’ Review: A Punk Provocateur Endures

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      Beth B’s documentary tells the story of an iconic underground New York City misfit and her durable career.The musician, writer and spoken-word artist Lydia Lunch is an immediately provocative figure. The name alone, right? Escaping a horrifically abusive home in Rochester, N.Y., at 16, she took one look at the burgeoning 1970s punk rock scene on Manhattan’s Bowery and was determined to both join and upend it.“I had a suitcase and $200,” she recalls in “Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over,” a vigorous documentary directed by Beth B, whose own work as an underground filmmaker began in the same milieu as Lunch’s early efforts. Lunch’s first band was called Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and one of their songs began with Lunch caterwauling, “The leaves are always dead.”Lunch, now 62 — who, when reflecting on her generation, says, “The ’60s failed us” — had other interests, musical and extra-musical. The abundance of her ideas, and her resourcefulness in executing them, enabled a career that’s been a lot more durable than those of many other iconoclasts of her time. Her musings on the condition of womanhood and the failings of conventional feminism are emphatic, to be sure. She asks how women “devolved from Medusa to Madonna” and offers an unusual perspective on the #MeToo movement that finds its rationale in an examination of cycles of abuse.Lunch’s entire aesthetic is centered around trauma: how abusers dispense it, how it is — and how she thinks it ought to be — received, and turned back on the world. This yields any number of anecdotes, including a tale from the musician Jim Sclavunos about how Lunch took his virginity before admitting him into one of her bands.The footage of her on the road with her current band, Retrovirus, shows her mastery of live performance and also highlights her very urban sense of sarcasm; sometimes she suggests no-wave’s answer to Fran Lebowitz.Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never OverNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More