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    Kim Hill Is Building Her Seat at the Table

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    After walking away from the Black Eyed Peas, the artist and designer has been making work on her own terms.Before the Black Eyed Peas were a stadium act fronted by Will.i.am and Fergie, they were a trio of quirky Los Angeles-based rappers who often collaborated with Black female singers. Macy Gray, best known for her 1999 hit “I Try,” sang on their first two albums, released in 1998 and 2000. But their closest female collaborator in those days was Kim Hill.Hill, now 54, never formally joined the group (she got her own solo deal with the band’s label, Interscope Records), but she toured with them for five years and contributed vocal hooks to tracks like “The Way U Make Me Feel” (which she co-wrote) and “What It Is,” both released in 1998. The video for the latter shows her mugging for the camera alongside Will, Taboo and Apl.de.ap and, while her sultry vocals temper their young-man energy, she’s too goofy and fully clothed (in a fuzzy tangerine bucket hat, jeans and a trench coat) to present as what she calls a “come hither” chanteuse.That kind of typecasting never appealed to Hill. Growing up in a suburb of Syracuse, N.Y. — where she sang gospel at church but also performed with the city’s predominantly white children’s choir — she learned to use her wit to put people at ease and honed her sense of when it was time to make an exit. “I never feel like I have to be stuck somewhere that doesn’t feel good energetically or spiritually,” she says. “When it’s time to dip, it’s time to dip.”After majoring in dance at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue music. Label representatives looking for the new Mariah or Whitney were befuddled by this Black girl performing folksy songs with R&B vocals over hip-hop beats. But she connected with the Peas’ misfit energy when she met them at an artist showcase in 1995. She remembers thinking, “These are my people.”For the next five years, Hill traveled the world with the group, but eventually, she believes, her bandmates seemed to resent the attention she was getting from fans and the press. At the label, she perceived an ambient though unspoken discontent about her refusal to sexualize her image. In 2000, she says, she got word that the band was getting a raise from which she’d been excluded and felt sure it was time to part ways. When the Peas’ third album, “Elephunk” (2003), introduced Fergie — who proved central to their crossover success — Hill watched the group’s ascent with the pain of one left behind, as well as some big-sisterly pride.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Emma Corrin and Maggie Nelson on the Strength in Vulnerability

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      Admiration Society brings together two creative people from two different fields for one wide-ranging conversation.Emma Corrin first encountered Maggie Nelson’s work three summers ago, when the actor was in Brighton, England, filming 2022’s “My Policeman,” a British drama about postwar sexual repression. At the time, Corrin, now 28, was grappling with their gender identity, and a friend recommended “The Argonauts” (2015), Nelson’s memoir about queer desire and making a family with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge. The book appealed so deeply to Corrin that, when that production ended, they decided to remain at the flat they’d rented during filming to finish reading it.Nelson, 51, was born in Northern California and moved in the 1990s to New York, where she worked as a waitress, trained as a dancer and took workshops with the poet Eileen Myles before getting her Ph.D. in English at the City University of New York. In addition to “The Argonauts,” Nelson, who’s now based in Los Angeles, is the author of “Bluets” (2009), a meditation on love and loss in the form of a treatise on the color blue; “Like Love” (2024), her latest collection of essays and conversations; and eight other books that include scholarly criticism, autobiography, true crime and poetry.Corrin’s career has also spanned genres. After earning a degree in education, English and drama at the University of Cambridge, the London-based actor gained sudden acclaim as Princess Diana on “The Crown” in 2020, and then went on to star in the historical romance “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (2022), the psychological thriller “A Murder at the End of the World” (2023) and in the 2022 stage adaptation of “Orlando: A Biography,” Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel. Once billed as an ingénue, Corrin brings a fierce physicality to their roles, the next of which will be in Robert Eggers’s gothic horror film “Nosferatu,” an update of the vampire classic that will be released next month.For Corrin, who recently wrote a screenplay with a friend, Nelson’s work remains a touchstone. After wrapping “A Murder at the End of the World,” the co-creator Zal Batmanglij presented the actor with a copy of “The Red Parts,” Nelson’s 2007 memoir of following a murder trial. Earlier this year, Corrin saw the playwright Margaret Perry’s adaptation of “Bluets,” starring Emma D’Arcy, Kayla Meikle and Ben Whishaw, in London. It was the first time that Nelson’s work had been performed onstage.This past summer, Corrin, who was in Los Angeles to promote their turn in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” met Nelson for the first time in a Hollywood photography studio, where the actor and the writer discussed vulnerability, the dangers of self-editing for social media and the pleasure of bringing a sense of play to their work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Why the Year’s Best Performances Are From Actresses Who Say Very Little

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      Films like “Conclave” and “Bird” provide a stark contrast to the recent succession of films about women finding their voices.IN A TENSE moment midway through Edward Berger’s recent movie “Conclave,” a pulpy thriller about the process of selecting a new pope, Isabella Rossellini, playing a nun named Sister Agnes, enters a room full of cardinals from around the world. A series of uncovered secrets and shifting alliances have turned this initially serene council into a rat’s nest of backstabbing, grandstanding, explaining, interrupting men. After asking permission to speak, Sister Agnes discreetly delivers a piece of information that will upend the papal election and expose some of the most powerful figures in the Roman Catholic Church to public, career-ending humiliation. Her short speech concluded, she bobs at the waist ever so slightly, giving a tiny curtsy whose performance of feminine deference is a put-down in itself. For the rest of the film, Sister Agnes never says another word.Her sly protest recalls another time when a quietly rebellious woman confounded a council of would-be holy men: Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 classic “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” long considered one of the towering performances of cinema history. Shot almost entirely in tight close-up, Falconetti’s Joan is doubly mute: first, of course, because the film itself is silent but, more pointedly, because the sparse script, based on records of Joan’s 1431 trial, puts nearly all the words in the mouths of her captors. As her male inquisitors grill her about the angelic visions that she claims have told her to dress in men’s clothing and lead the French army into battle, it’s Joan’s refusal to answer or even acknowledge their questions that most enrages them. When one questioner quizzes her about the length of the Archangel Michael’s hair, Joan’s wry response — “Why would he have cut it?” — is a forerunner of Sister Agnes’s ironic bob: a gesture of malicious compliance that serves to expose the hypocrisy of her inquisitors.For much of film history, women spoke less than men simply because their characters were seldom the story’s focus. The “strong, silent type” of westerns and detective stories was made strong by his silence, while female characters were typically weakened by theirs. When women in classic Hollywood films stepped outside the role of helpmeet, it was to personify the so-called mouthy dame (a type that, at its best, includes Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea in 1941’s “Ball of Fire” and Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in 1950’s “All About Eve”). But however sparkling, brash or bitchy their banter, for decades dialogue written for female characters — often by male screenwriters — existed mainly to establish the fact that a woman was, for some reason, talking.“Women Talking,” the 2022 film by the writer-director Sarah Polley, won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, a category befitting both its title and its subject: A movie about a Mennonite community of horrifically abused women claiming the right to speak, whose every frame overflows with expressive, persuasive, angry and anguished language, was recognized specifically for its words. That acknowledgment provided some catharsis in the wake of countless #MeToo scandals. But in the years since, along with a spate of acclaimed movies about women finding their voices (2022’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; last year’s “Poor Things” and “Barbie”), a new space has opened up onscreen for women pointedly not talking. Several films released this year — including Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” and Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” — have featured performances by female protagonists whose silence is neither a mark of trauma nor a state of oppression to be overcome but a deliberate strategy, whether for the purposes of introspection, self-preservation or self-discovery.Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Erotos” (1993).© Nobuyoshi Araki, courtesy of Taka Ishii GalleryWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More