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    Girls to the Front: Punk Pioneers Are Coming to Lincoln Center

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    The institution’s annual American Songbook series honors “singer outsiders” including Fanny and Poly Styrene in events curated by Kathleen Hanna and Tamar-kali.For more than 65 years, Lincoln Center has hosted virtuoso concert musicians, opera singers and ballet stars.But a noise queen with ripped tights and a screeching guitar?Enter Kathleen Hanna and Tamar-kali, musicians with big bootprints in the punk scene, and curators of the latest iteration of Lincoln Center’s venerable American Songbook series. Their version honors “singer outsiders,” which includes a series of concerts and tributes to acts like the Slits, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex and more, this month and next. It’s the first time Lincoln Center has celebrated the raw, propulsive D.I.Y. genre of punk, let alone the women who kicked their way through.The idea was to introduce an uptown audience to “our canon,” as Hanna, the Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman, and riot grrrl originator, put it. They booked contemporary artists to showcase punk’s elasticity, and to highlight styles that have historically been overlooked.“As a songwriter, there’s a lot of delegitimizing of aggressive music,” Tamar-kali said. But curating for Lincoln Center offered validation: “It just feels like I’m real musician now,” Hanna said, and they both laughed.Tamar-kali, a Brooklyn singer and composer (born Tamar-kali Brown), helped found the New York collective Sista Grrrl Riot, an outlet for feminist Afropunk, in the late ’90s; she and Hanna met in the early aughts and have been seeking ways to work together since.“As a songwriter, there’s a lot of delegitimizing of aggressive music,” said Tamar-kali, one of the series’ curators.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesWe 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

      There’s Always Room in the Clown Car

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      For centuries, clowns have mostly been men. A new group of talent is changing that.AS A YOUNG woman in Mexico City, Gaby Muñoz, a 43-year-old performer known onstage as Chula the Clown, recalls, putting on makeup with her friends was always a fraught experience. “There was this whole idea of how to be a woman. They had this beautiful hair and these divine bodies, and I would look in the mirror and think, ‘Well, I guess not in this life.’ That made me laugh,” she says. As Chula — her round face washed white, her lips a tiny red heart, her eyebrows painted into inquisitive asymmetry — Muñoz, who this spring will begin touring through Europe and Central and South America, has played a jilted bride and a doddering old lady. She’s used her open, expressive face and antic physicality to joke wordlessly about loss, aging in a woman’s body and other concepts that have long been overlooked in the male-dominated world of clowns. For Muñoz, laughter isn’t an end in itself but rather, she says, “a way to connect.”Clowns, jesters, harlequins and fools have, of course, played a similar role throughout history. In ancient Greece, they served as ribald choristers in epic dramas, while emperors in Han dynasty China delighted in the buffoonish exertions of the court paiyou. Shakespeare’s world-weary wags spoke truth to King Lear and other royals, while the heyoka, the holy fool of many Sioux tribes, inverted day-to-day logic to provoke healing laughter. The emblematic sad clown that we know today evolved from the melancholic, talc-dusted Pedrolino of 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, while the contemporary circus clown, with his exaggerated face paint and physical wit, debuted on a London stage around 1800. (The one dressed in an ill-fitting suit and oversize shoes emerged as his clumsy foil seven decades later.) Though ritually and physically distinct, clowns have always been, as the heyoka John Fire Lame Deer writes with Richard Erdoes in their 1972 book, “Lame Deer Seeker of Visions,” “sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary.” They were also almost always men.During her childhood in Estonia, the 29-year-old London-based clown Julia Masli dreamed of acting in tragedies for exactly that reason: comedy, she assumed, was a man’s game. When, in 2017, she watched the legendary English clown Lucy Hopkins perform in Brighton for the first time, “seeing a woman do something so absurd and free felt like a revolution,” she says. In Masli’s show “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha,” which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023 and has since toured internationally, she appears onstage as a doe-eyed Victorian vagabond who asks audience members to share their problems. As she offers solutions both genuine and absurd — enlisting a bored office worker to record the show’s minutes; duct-taping a lonely young woman to a group of strangers onstage — she transforms the emotional labor so often foisted on women into a source of laughter and catharsis.OTHER RISING FEMALE clowns, like the 26-year-old English actress Frankie Thompson and the 32-year-old Swiss Mexican theater artist Paulina Lenoir, use womanhood itself as a source of humor. In the former’s “Body Show,” performed with her collaborator the 29-year-old trans masculine anarchist clown Liv Ello, Thompson forgoes exaggerated makeup and costume, combining lip-syncing and confrontational bouffon (an approach to clowning that emphasizes absurdity and shock) to discuss her history with anorexia. Small and blond — “people treat me like this tiny-angel special little bird to be protected,” she says — Thompson makes herself grotesque by, say, licking the stage or choking down Marmite, eliciting laughter that implicates the audience in the humiliations of body dysmorphia. Meanwhile, Lenoir’s persona Puella Eterna feminizes the physical exaggeration of the classic male clown by wearing a corset, a flamenco skirt and a giant Minnie Mouse bow in lieu of a bulging nose. As master of ceremonies at her Fool’s Moon cabaret, Puella displays the kind of unearned self-assurance that usually wins praise for men and scorn for women.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 Television

      Helly vs. Helena the Most Brutal Battle on ‘Severance’

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      Contains spoilers about past episodes.About halfway through Season 2 of “Severance,” Helly R. is rocked by a stunning betrayal: Helena Eagan, masquerading as Helly, has deceived Mark S. into having sex with her, believing he was sleeping with Helly.The grift was not terribly difficult to pull off. Helly and Helena are the same person after all, albeit with a consciousness split in two by the “severance” procedure. That technology, meant to compartmentalize memories and — in theory — alleviate the painful or boring parts of life, is the foundation on which the hit show’s universe is built. The many ethical, moral and physical consequences that accompany it have helped make “Severance” one of the most dissected TV shows in years.Helena is the “outie,” a fully realized human above ground; Helly is the “innie,” a “severed” employee essentially being held prisoner below ground in an office run by the mysterious Lumon Industries.Helena’s sexual betrayal was just one in a series of tit-for-tat expressions of disgust, disrespect and resentment between the two women who are one woman (played by Britt Lower, who walks the fraught line between the characters with tremendous nuance).In Season 1, Helly attempted to kill Helena in what would have amounted to a murder-suicide by hanging herself in an elevator that serves as a psychic breaker switch between the consciousness of innies and outies.Before that, Helly tried to appeal to Helena, asking to resign from her post at Lumon. When management told her that Helena had declined, Helly didn’t believe her outie would allow her to suffer against her will. So as a warning to Lumon leaders — whom Helly believed must be responsible for holding her captive — she threatened to guillotine her own (and therefore Helena’s) fingers with a paper cutter.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 Music

      ‘The Interview’: Lady Gaga’s Latest Experiment? Happiness.

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      Over the course of her long career, Lady Gaga has proved herself to be one of music’s great shape-shifters. She has gone from the dance pop of her earliest albums, like “The Fame” (2008), to the rockier “Born This Way” (2011), to country-inflected sounds on “Joanne” (2016), to singing American Songbook standards alongside her friend Tony Bennett. Despite surely making her record label nervous a few times, the mercurial nature of Lady Gaga’s gift has come at no discernible cost to her career. She is one of only three solo artists — Michael and Janet Jackson being the others — to have hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart multiple times across three different decades. She has also earned 14 Grammy Awards, including one earlier this year for her duet with Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile.”All that success made it especially intriguing to learn that her new album, “Mayhem,” which arrived this week, would be a return to the pop sounds of her early work. A step into familiar territory is a curious one for someone so steadfastly set on surprise. Was she hoping to capture some nostalgia? Looking for back-to-basics rejuvenation? Or could it be that making a “classic-sounding” Lady Gaga album was going to be some sort of meta examination of her own music and image?As she explained it when we spoke in February, the answer is, in a way, all of the above. At 38 years old, and after some time lost to fibromyalgia and personal trauma, Gaga finally felt ready to reclaim a sound that belonged to her. She also, thanks in no small part to her fiancé, the entrepreneur Michael Polansky, felt supported enough to do it. Which is proof that, for a world-famous pop star anyway, a little normalcy can be the most productive change of all.Listen to the Conversation With Lady GagaThe pop superstar reflects on her struggles with mental health, the pressures of the music industry and why she’s returned to the sound that made her famous.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppIn an announcement for “Mayhem,” you referred to your “fear” of going back to the pop music that your earliest fans loved. Why were you scared of that? You know, I made my artistic way living on the Lower East Side starting around 17 years old, and worked the New York music scene as much as I could. Ultimately that landed me into making “The Fame,” my first studio album. That music came out of the culture of people that I was living with at the time. I was surrounded by musicians, photographers, club promoters, people that lived and breathed art. It was a community of support, and one of the reasons I was afraid was I was so far away now from that community. It also felt like maybe I would just be recycling something that I had done before. But ultimately I decided that I really wanted to do it and that this sonic style and aesthetic really did belong to me.How do you characterize that sound? My sound is an amalgamation of the music that helped me fall in love with music. So it’s got classic rock in it, disco, electronic music, ’80s synth. It’s sort of like picking and choosing my favorite fragments of songs that I loved throughout my childhood. It is everything I love about music but all in one place. I didn’t always do that. Sometimes, in my records, I decided, OK, I’m going to make my version of a country record. More

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      in Music

      A Jazz Quintet Bubbling With Good Vibes? Meet the Women of Artemis.

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      The pianist Renee Rosnes formed the group in 2016, and it has evolved into a five-piece drawn from different nations and generations with a common goal.The multinational, intergenerational jazz quintet Artemis is, as they might say, bubbling. Last fall, it topped Downbeat magazine’s reader’s poll as jazz group of the year for the second time running. On Friday, the band released its third album, “Arboresque,” which captures both the hard-bop strut of the most beloved 1960s recordings by its storied label, Blue Note Records, as well as Artemis’s own fresh take on jazz tradition.“We’re not here to prove anything,” said the pianist Renee Rosnes, 62, the group’s musical director and, in her words, “organizational force.” “We’re just playing music together, in conversation, with reverence for each other.”At the suggestion of a French promoter, Rosnes formed Artemis in 2016 to perform concerts in Paris and Luxembourg for International Women’s Day. “I never had such a proclivity to put together a band of all female musicians before,” she said. “But here’s a lot of players that I love.”She assembled an all-star septet, featuring the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen — who named the group for the Greek goddess of the hunt and wilderness — the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, the bassist Linda May Han Oh, the clarinetist Anat Cohen, the saxophonist Melissa Aldana and the singer Cécile McLorin Salvant. “I love their playing, and who they are,” Rosnes said, “and I thought it could be fun.”“We’re not here to prove anything,” Rosnes said. “We’re just playing music together, in conversation, with reverence for each other.”Scott Rossi for The New York TimesIt was fun, of course — and a commercial draw. A European tour in 2017 introduced the group’s permanent rhythm section (Allison Miller on drums and Noriko Ueda on bass), and Don Was, the president of Blue Note, signed Artemis on the spot after its set at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2018, a performance preserved on NPR’s “Jazz Night in America” program.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

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      9 Songs That Define R&B’s New Era

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      In my article on the renaissance of women in R&B, I write about a new generation of artists who are reshaping the genre, with some returning to the music’s gospel-based roots and others annexing fresh sonic territory — hybridizing with the latest hip-hop, grafting in global sounds and claiming R&B’s rightful stake in pop music today. That tells only part of the story, though, as many R&B artists resist the industry’s categorizations: While accepting the award for best country album at this year’s Grammys, Beyoncé, a 16-time winner as a solo artist in R&B categories, voiced an opinion shared by many Black artists: “I think sometimes ‘genre’ is a code word to keep us in our place.”What unites today’s R&B with music of the past is its celebration of voice. Fans don’t talk only about who can sing but about who can sang — enlisting their physical gifts and knowledge of tradition in performances that reach past exhaustion. Below is a playlist of nine songs, all released since 2020, by women artists who are extending and redefining R&B’s rich tradition.1. Muni Long’s “Make Me Forget” (2024)“Sometimes people just need to leave stuff alone when it comes to classics,” Long told me in an interview, recalling her hesitancy when the producer Tricky Stewart presented her with the instrumental for “Make Me Forget,” a spare interpolation of D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” (2000). But writing her own song on top of one of the most seductive songs (and music videos) in R&B history presented a welcome challenge. The verses tease out the terms of a fledgling relationship, working with and against old-school gender roles (“Know when to walk away / When I’d rather that you stay / Gently put me in my place / Leave when I need some space”). In the chorus, Long pleads three straight times for her new love to make her forget — the pain of her past relationship? The man before him? — only for the final line to reveal that she’s asking for him to make her forget “anything before you that didn’t feel like this.”2. Summer Walker’s “Session 33” (2021)On 2018’s “Session 32,” Walker sings about the messy process of moving on from a failed relationship (“Threw away your love letters / I thought it’d make me feel better”). The recording has all the qualities of a home demo, down to the sequenced title and the absence of the mixing and mastering of the modern studio — a conscious choice to underscore the song’s raw emotions. “Session 33” is its natural extension, but with a difference. Still an acoustic affair, featuring Walker’s voice and guitar, the recording now offers some studio sweeteners that “Session 32” lacked: echoed vocal effects, harmonic overdubs and Walker’s cleanly miked voice. “Session 33” shares with its predecessor the sense that the artist is letting us in on her creative process — as well as on her romantic life. “Should I move on since no one’s here?” she asks herself. The song never answers.3. Jazmine Sullivan’s “Pick Up Your Feelings” (2021)With her 2021 concept album, “Heaux Tales,” Sullivan gave voice to herself and many other women working against the sexist conceit, sometimes perpetuated in R&B, that women are conquests and men are conquerors. On songs like “Put It Down,” “Lost One” and, most powerfully, “Pick Up Your Feelings,” she renovates the tired theme of the no-good man by centering her own — and other women’s — empowerment. The whole album is an exercise in validating female sexual desire while also acknowledging women’s equal capacity to do dirt, all while condemning the societal double standard that lets men do the same without tarnishing their reputations. But Sullivan’s not writing an essay; she’s engaged in a vocal workout session. And her peers have taken notice: “I’ve literally watched Jazmine Sullivan videos hundreds of times, slowed them down to 0.25 speed and mapped out the note transitions on sheets of paper that end up looking like infinite stairs,” says the artist Jessie Reyez. “Hearing her sing is like watching someone make a joke out of gravity.”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

      ‘Paint Me a Road Out of Here’: Faith Ringgold’s Gift to Prisoners

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      In this documentary, the artist depicts what a more just and beautiful world might look like.In 1971, the artist Faith Ringgold received a grant to make a painting for a public institution in New York City. She decided to ask the prisoners in the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island what they wanted to see in a painting. “I want to see a road leading out of here,” one incarcerated woman told her.Ringgold took that idea and ran with it. She didn’t paint a literal road. Instead, her canvas — entitled “For the Women’s House” and installed at the prison in January 1972 — is divided into eight sections. In each, women are depicted performing jobs traditionally held by men at the time: bus driver, construction worker, basketball player, president. The road is implied: Seeing women in positions and roles they don’t always occupy can open up the viewer’s world. She might be in a prison for now, but there’s a place for her worth aspiring to beyond these walls.This was Ringgold’s imagination at work, always depicting what a more just and beautiful world might look like, particularly for the people whom the powerful prefer to ignore. Ringgold and “For the Women’s House” both appear in the documentary “Paint Me a Road Out of Here” (in theaters), directed by Catherine Gund, and hearing and seeing her talk is reason enough to see the film. Ringgold died in 2024 at 93, and is widely considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, a native New Yorker who was unflagging in her activism and commitments to dismantle racism wherever it surfaced. As a Black woman and an artist, she insisted on coupling political meaning with her work, which is suffused with curiosity and joy.“Paint Me a Road Out Of Here” is not a biographical film about Ringgold, even though you’ll learn a lot about her biography from it. The film has bigger aspirations, connecting art, prisons, activism and an expansive life. One major subject in the film is the artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, an executive producer of the film whose prison reform work often draws on her own experiences while incarcerated. Shortly after her own arrest, for example, Baxter went into labor — 43 hours while shackled to a bed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

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

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

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      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