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      Benedict Lombe Wins the Blackburn Prize for ‘Lava’

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      The British Congolese playwright earned the $25,000 prize for her memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.For the first time in the 44-year history of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to a female, transgender or nonbinary playwright who writes for the English-language theater, the honor has gone to the writer of a debut play.Benedict Lombe, 30, a British Congolese playwright based in London, received the award on Monday for “Lava,” a one-woman memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.“It feels incredible,” Lombe said in a phone conversation on Monday evening en route to the award ceremony at the Globe theater in London. “It’s a huge play that allows me to create a space where Black people can leave taller than when they walked in.”The Blackburn Prize comes with $25,000, as well as a signed print by the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. Many of its recipients have gone on to great acclaim (among them, the Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Baker, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Paula Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein).Lombe’s “Lava” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, and debuted there in July 2021. Ronke Adékoluejo starred in the one-woman show, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike. In reviewing the work for The Guardian, Kate Wyver praised Adékoluejo’s indefatigable charisma, writing that she “controls the stage with such ease, oozing charm and confidence.”But under the bright joy of Adékoluejo’s performance, Wyver wrote, “fury rumbles in Lombe’s text.”“With hindsight, she takes us through incidents and aggressions from her life, each one being pushed into the pit of her stomach, gnawing at her, getting heavier as she carries the cumulative weight,” Wyver wrote.“Lava,” which Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out London characterized as a “freeform poetic eruption,” tells the story of a British Congolese woman who discovers a tale of quiet rebellion when she has to renew her British passport and wonders why her South African passport — a country she is also a citizen of — does not carry her first name. It takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the time of Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship; post-apartheid South Africa; Ireland; and London.“It was gratifying to be able to celebrate Black people in fullness,” said Lombe, who wrote the play in the summer of 2020, “and to uplift us when so many people were feeling the opposite when they walked in.”Along with Lombe, the nine other finalists for the Blackburn Prize were honored. They received $5,000 each, and included Zora Howard, who was honored for her play “Bust.” One of Howard’s previous works, “Stew,” was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.Last year, Erika Dickerson-Despenza won the Blackburn Prize for her play “cullud wattah,” a look at the water crisis in Flint, Mich., through the lens of one family. It went on to be produced at the Public Theater last fall.Is a New York run also in the cards for “Lava”?“I mean, fingers crossed,” said Lombe, who is in residence with the National Theater Studio in London and working on new commissions. “I hope so. We’ll see what happens.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘La Mami’ Review: Tough Love

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      This documentary about the den mother of dancers at a Mexico City cabaret is vérité at its best.At the Cabaret Barba Azul, women get paid to dance and drink with the male patrons, a custom that dates back to the 1930s. In the beautifully-rendered documentary “La Mami,” the director and cinematographer Laura Herrero Garvín (“The Swirl”) immerses us in the behind-the-scenes world of these dancers through the lens of their den mother: Doña Olga. Like them, Doña Olga also used to spend her nights dancing for pesos, but after 45 years working various jobs at the cabaret to support her five children, she has settled into her post in the club’s dressing room-bathroom combo. There she regulates the distribution of toilet paper with an iron fist, and doles out a charming mix of motherly nurturing and fierce rebukes. Like this bit of poetry: “Men are only good for two things: for nothing, and for money.”Garvín’s adept camerawork allows the story to unfold so seamlessly in its vérité style, that the film emanates the magic of a scripted drama without revealing any noticeable interference. And it creates a palpable depth of intimacy too: from Doña Olga waving incense and whispering prayers throughout the club before the doors open, to the nervous new girl Priscilla putting on makeup in the mirror.The triumph of “La Mami” is that in depicting how Doña Olga and the Barba Azul dancers navigate a job where male pleasure dominates, the film does not look down on them, but instead revels in their humanity. And in so doing, this remarkable portrayal of female friendship offers a poignant, elemental take on the lives of working-class women in urban Mexico today.La MamiNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      The Politics of Rihanna’s Pregnancy Style

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      When the right to control your own body and the right to dress how you like intersect.Ever since she announced her pregnancy in late January via Instagram and an artfully staged paparazzi shot of her and her partner ASAP Rocky strolling beneath the Riverside Drive viaduct, Rihanna’s maternity style has been marked more by what she has not worn than what she has.She has not worn tent dresses. She has not worn maternity jeans. In fact, she has barely worn much clothing at all.Instead she has bared her naked belly at seemingly every turn: in green draped fringe and ombré pants at a Fenty beauty event; in a bra, sheer blue top unbuttoned over her bump and low-slung gray jeans at the Super Bowl; in dragon-bedecked black pants, a vinyl bandeau and a crystal headdress at a Gucci show; in a sheer baby-doll dress over a lacy bra and panties at Dior; and, most recently, in a sheer organza Valentino turtleneck over a sequin skirt and bandeau at Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party.In the annals of public pregnancy, there has never been a display quite like it.Not surprisingly, the general reaction among celebrity watch sites has been a breathless swoon. “Rihanna Keeps Wearing the Hottest Maternity Looks Ever,” HighSnobiety crowed. “Rihanna Is Single-handedly Giving ‘Maternity Style’ a Rebrand,” Glamour U.K. sang.Rihanna at a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in February.Mike Coppola/Getty ImagesAt a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in March.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Fenty Beauty by RihannaThey’re right, of course. But, really, the style choices are just the beginning. In dressing to confront the world with the physical reality of her pregnancy so consistently, Rihanna has gone way past just making a fashion statement. She’s making a “totally transgressive and highly political statement,” said Liza Tsaliki, a professor of media studies and popular culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece.It’s just all couched in the familiar trope of the “the celebrity bump watch.” Sneaky, right?The result is a dizzying swirl of contemporary phenomena, including: (1) celebrity culture, in which we increasingly take our consumer and behavioral cues from boldface names; (2) what Ms. Tsaliki calls “the aestheticization of the body and the monitoring of women’s waistlines”; and (3) modern politics.All of which take this particular pregnancy dress story far beyond mere “get the look” role modeling. (They also explain why this particular “get-the-look” role modeling has been so disproportionately exciting for so many.)After all, said Renée Ann Cramer, the deputy provost of Drake University and author of “Pregnant With the Stars: Watching and Wanting the Celebrity Baby Bump,” this is a time when “many people on the far right and even the mainstream right are promoting policies that challenge the continuing autonomy of women-identifying people over their bodies, lives and decision-making capacity.”At the Dior show at Paris Fashion Week in March.Jeremy Moeller/Getty ImagesBy dressing to showcase her pregnant belly, and in a way that has nothing to do with traditional maternity wear, Rihanna is modeling an entirely opposite reality. “She’s saying, ‘I’m a person still, and I’m my person.’” Ms. Cramer said. That she can be “autonomous, powerful and herself, even while carrying a life.” She’s connecting the right to dress how you like with all sorts of other, more constitutional rights.It’s a pretty radical move.The pregnant body, after all, has been celebrated, policed, hidden away and considered problematic for centuries.In ancient times, pregnancy was venerated and exhibited, seen as a physical embodiment of women’s connection to mother earth, but by the Middle Ages and medieval Christendom, Ms. Tsaliki said, it had been transformed into a shameful state, one connected not so much to the sacred as the profane.It had become a symbol of our base desires and a sign of female instability and lack of control and thus something best kept behind closed doors and (literally) under wraps. At least until the child emerged and the woman was transformed into a paragon of pure maternal selflessness.It was an evolution revealed in “Portraying Pregnancy,” a 2020 exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London that demonstrated how, since the 16th century, “the response to the unsettling physical reminder of mortality and sexuality engendered by pregnant bodies changed.” Or so wrote Helen Charman in a review of the show in the international art magazine Apollo.ASAP Rocky and Rihanna at the Gucci show during Milan Fashion Week in February.Victor Boyko/Getty Images For GucciAfter the Rams Super Bowl victory in February.Ab/BackgridIt revealed, she said, how paintings and other art forms moved from showing pregnant bodies “as affirmations of paternalistic structures of inheritance and power” to trying to pretend they didn’t actually exist (or the condition of being pregnant didn’t) to putting pregnancy front and center as an increasingly idealized state.That began in 1952, when Lucille Ball became pregnant during the filming of “I Love Lucy” and famously forced her producers to write her impossible-to-ignore condition into the script, and onto everyone’s screens (though they still couldn’t use the actual word “pregnant”), as dramatized in the recent film “Being the Ricardos.”That in turn gave way to the tent dress compromise. (Remember Princess Diana’s ruffled smocks and sailor dresses during her pregnancies in the early and mid-1980s?) At least until Demi Moore shocked the world by posing naked and heavily pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, inaugurating the age of the pregnancy art portrait.And that period extended through such belly-baring covers as Cindy Crawford, naked and pregnant on W; Britney Spears, naked and pregnant for Harper’s Bazaar in 2006; and Serena Williams, naked and pregnant on Vanity Fair in 2017. That phase reached its apogee with Beyoncé’s 2017 photo shoot/announcement that she was pregnant with twins, a heavily art-directed series of pictures that seemed to encompass such references as Botticelli’s Venus and a renaissance Madonna.As the pregnant body became valorized for its life-giving potential, it increasingly became “a place of safe transgression,” Ms. Cramer said. And that meant that “it’s one of the few times women-identifying people can safely disrupt some norms.”At Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party in Hollywood.Ngre/BackgridProgressive though they may seem, however, as Ms. Charman wrote in Apollo of such images, they nevertheless “conform to the glossy conventions.”Not so Rihanna. She has made confronting her pregnancy part of her every day. Or maybe more pertinently, our every day. “I was expecting the announcement,” Ms. Cramer said — perhaps even a few other, carefully calculated appearances. “But there has been no return to covering up.”Though it’s possible that this is a totally unconscious choice — maybe her skin is so sensitive that it’s uncomfortable to have anything on her belly — Rihanna herself has a history of consciously using her own physicality and profile to force reconsideration of old prejudices and social conventions about female agency and beauty. Most obviously in her Savage X Fenty lingerie brand, currently valued at around $3 billion.Indeed, her current approach may have been foreshadowed by her choice to have Slick Woods, at nine months pregnant, model in her first Savage X Fenty show in 2018 wearing only pasties and lacy lingerie. Famously, Ms. Woods went into labor on the runway, later posting “I’m here to say I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT WHENEVER I WANT AND SO CAN YOU.” (There were some additional words in there to emphasize her point, but they cannot be printed in this newspaper.)Change the date and those lines could easily be the motto of Rihanna’s maternity wear. She did characterize her own pregnancy style as “rebellious.”Now the question, said Ms. Cramer, is whether “an overt celebration of embodied power through pregnancy can make a difference.” Can the “performance of a powerful pregnancy by a wealthy woman at the top of her game filter down” to change how all pregnancies are perceived?If so, Rihanna will have done a lot more than influence how pregnant women dress. She’ll have influenced how we think about the rights of women. Pregnant or not. More

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      in Movies

      One Last Takeaway From ‘The Slap’: Leave Black Women’s Hair Alone

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      Lost in the Oscars fray is the hurt inflicted when a group is denigrated for a laugh. Chris Rock, who has examined this issue in a documentary, should have known better.While the Slap Heard Round the World has been vigorously debated and dissected since Will Smith confronted Chris Rock at the Oscars, there was more to the incident than its abrupt physicality.Rock’s joke, and Jada Pinkett Smith’s resulting eyeroll, echoed even more thunderously for Black women. Her glare encapsulated the fatigue and frustration that so many of us deal with in the complex daily feat of simply wearing our hair as we like. That Chris Rock would point to a Black woman’s hair for a joke left me breathless, and I wasn’t alone.“When Black women’s hair is mocked by comedians like Rock, he ushers in the everyday forms of microaggressive hatred against Black women that normalized blatant discrimination,” Ralina Joseph, a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the director of the Center for Communication, Difference and Equity, said in an email interview.Black women’s hair has been the object of scrutiny, derision and ridicule in American society since it’s been growing out of our heads. Thanks to standards of beauty that for too long excluded us, we are arguably the largest demographic in the country whose hair is continually policed. Court cases document fights against school districts and corporations trying to govern how we can wear our hair. A segment of people who don’t live with it, in all its iterations of textures and lengths, somehow wants to dictate how and when it’s pretty, professional or unkempt.Distaste for Black hair seeps into our everyday lives: Just last month, the House of Representatives passed the CROWN Act, banning discrimination against natural hair in hiring, public housing placement and public access accommodations. Let that sink in: Exclusionary actions stemming from disdain toward our hairstyles are so pervasive, they require legislation.Nowadays, visibility and a touch of glamorization in mainstream media (I’m lookin’ at you, Beyoncé), have fostered a growing fascination with our manes — a double-edged sword. Bosses scrutinize or give it a shout-out, strangers try to paw or photograph it, friends and frenemies praise or judge it — even Tinder prospects weigh in on it.Academic studies have outlined how strongly the identity of many Black women is tied to their hair. Not having the type of hair that’s affirmed and considered “womanly” in the culture at large can dent one’s sense of self. And feeling that what’s considered a key part of womanhood needs altering to be accepted, especially from childhood, makes it hard to see one’s image as positive.The Altercation Between Will Smith and Chris RockThe Incident: The Oscars were derailed when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, who made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.His Speech: Moments after the onstage altercation, Mr. Smith won the Oscar for best actor. Here’s what he said in his acceptance speech.The Aftermath: Mr. Smith, who the academy said refused to leave following the incident, apologized to Mr. Rock the next day after the academy denounced his actions.A Triumph Tempered: Mr. Smith owned Serena and Venus Williams’s story in “King Richard.” Then he stole their moment at the Oscars.What Is Alopecia?: Ms. Smith’s hair loss condition played a major role in the incident.Since it’s hard to separate our image from our hair, poking fun at a Black hair style is an easy way to get a laugh while devaluing Black women. Witness Jamie Foxx lampooning us as Wanda on “In Living Color” and Martin Lawrence as Sheneneh. It’s incomprehensible that a Black comic would reach for it in such a high-profile setting as the Oscars — especially a man so closely associated with a film about Black women’s hair struggles.Not only did Rock produce and narrate the 2009 documentary “Good Hair,” which brought Black hair culture to the big screen, but he created it with his own daughters in mind. In the opening, he recounts how one of his girls asked him, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” Onscreen, he speaks to a range of women, including celebrities like Raven-Symoné, who explain that when they relaxed their hair, the goal was also about making society comfortable with them.Chris Rock in “Good Hair,” a documentary he narrated and produced.Roadside AttractionsWhile the film could have delved further into how Black women have thrived in a beauty culture (including a hair-care industry) that has rarely included them, it illuminated our struggle to audiences that may not have known one existed. It’s hard to understand how he could help bring that gem of a film to life and yet take a swipe at a Black woman’s hair. Did he so quickly forget the lessons of that film, which seemed to recognize how American society “otherizes” us and our tresses?Or, worse still, did the lessons never matter? Rock has a history of dogging not just Black women, but the entire Black community, or as Joseph calls it, “in-group punching down.”“Despite a brief ‘Good Hair’ moment. where he celebrated (and mocked) Black women, his punching down has also been broadly anti-Black woman,” she noted.Through his career, Rock has demonstrated a penchant for belittling and mischaracterizing Black women, from his ex-wife to female romantic partners in general. In a 1997 episode of “The Chris Rock Show,” he skewered Black women’s need to join the Million Woman March to his guest — Jada Pinkett Smith, a march participant.There’s another sensitive aspect to Rock’s dig at Pinkett Smith. In interviews and on her Facebook series “Red Table Talk,” she has chronicled her painful ordeal with alopecia, a condition that disproportionately affects Black women. She initially concealed her hair loss under wigs. That she decided to shave her head and reveal the reason was to be commended, not jabbed at. To be clear: Whether Rock knew of her condition or not, the joke wasn’t hurtful only because Pinkett Smith deals with alopecia (an affliction to which “Good Hair” even devotes special attention). The insult added an extra layer of hurt, especially because Black women can be harsh on ourselves about hair, amid social pressures and Eurocentric beauty standards that we’ve internalized, often to an extreme degree.Generations of Black American women recall weekend afternoons spent watching an iron comb glow like molten lava on the stove burner. We waited for our mothers to wield the hot comb like a weapon, ready to press our thicket of coils into submission to make us more culturally palatable. Even at a young age, I wondered who I was supposed to be impressing.When I was deemed old enough, I “leveled up” to chemical straighteners that would frequently blister my scalp — all for a flouncy bob I detested. “Beauty is pain,” my hairdresser would chirp as she kneaded the chemical cream into my roots and I winced. In my mid-20s, I decided beauty wasn’t worth that pain, so I chopped off most of my hair and have since maintained a very short, natural style.“When Black women’s hair features as the butt of jokes, the very real and myriad forms of multiple marginalization against Black women is erased and even justified,” Joseph noted. “It hurts.”Even though the jokes at the expense of us and our hair predate Rock, we don’t need him to lead the way in turning up the savagery of the practice, let alone on Hollywood’s biggest evening.Like the director Jane Campion’s misstep a couple weeks ago at another awards show (which, sadly, also involved the Williams sisters, one of the focuses of the Will Smith film “King Richard”), this takedown of a Black woman stings even more for having been unleashed by someone who should know better — in Rock’s case, as a Black father of daughters; in Campion’s, as a woman who’s also probably dealt with sexist professional slights. But the result each time was the same: Black women were expected to smile and take the stab.In one sense, the entire Oscars to-do, and its flurry of embarrassment and apologies, could have been avoided by choosing not to drag a Black woman down by her hair. Yet for too many and for too long, it has felt irresistible not to mess with it, mess with us.So to anyone who ever feels the urge to mock, I’ll reframe Will Smith’s warning at the show: Keep the mention of Black women’s hair out of your mouth. More

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      in Music

      Louis C.K.’s Grammy Victory Leads to Backlash

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      Some comedians are questioning how the Recording Academy saw fit to bestow an award to someone who had admitted to sexual misconduct.“How was your last couple years?” the comedian Louis C.K. says to the audience on the first track to his album “Sincerely Louis CK.” “How was 2018 and 2019 for you guys? Anybody else get in global amounts of trouble?”Louis C.K. did, after he admitted, in 2017, to masturbating in front of women. Several said in interviews that he had done so without their consent; in a statement acknowledging the incidents, he claimed he had always asked first, but later realized that was insufficient since there were power differentials at play. For a short time he disappeared from public view, as a movie he directed and starred in was shelved and other deals dissolved in the early days of the #MeToo movement.But Louis C.K. returned to stand-up, first at comedy clubs and then at bigger venues, which often sold out. And on Sunday night he received a sign of support from the entertainment industry: “Sincerely Louis CK” — his first album since the scandal — won the Grammy for best comedy album.The album opens with the chants and wild applause of an audience.The response to his Grammy was less joyous. As his name trended on Twitter, many comedians, comedy fans and others wondered how the Recording Academy saw fit to bestow an award to someone with an admitted history of sexual misconduct.“Every woman who has been harassed and abused in the comedy business, I hear you and see you and I am so, so angry,” the podcast host Jesse Thorn, who interviews comedians, wrote, followed by several expletives.Female comics shared their own responses. Jen Kirkman posted a segment from her latest album, “OK, Gen-X,” in which she recounts her own encounter with Louis C.K. She had avoided talking about in detail previously, she explained in the bit, because of negative and threatening blowback. “I’ll forward you the rape threats I get after this,” she said.On Sunday, Kirkman reposted some messages from supporters of Louis C.K. who responded to her, often hatefully and in terms that diminished the experiences of assault survivors.The Australian performer Felicity Ward offered a lengthy list of mostly female comics “who’ve never sexually assaulted anyone. Follow, see, buy their stuff.”And the comedian Mona Shaikh wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that the award sent a troubling message. “The comedy establishment sends a dog whistle to sexual predators, forgiving their abusive actions as long as they offer a superficial apology (often drafted by their publicists) and go underground for a year or so,” she wrote. “After that, they can emerge and revive their careers.”Last fall, after the nomination of Louis C.K. and others like Marilyn Manson — who is facing an investigation over multiple sexual assault allegations — drew public ire, Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy, defended the right to nominate anybody as long as they met the organization’s eligibility rules.“We won’t look back at people’s history, we won’t look at their criminal record, we won’t look at anything other than the legality within our rules of, is this recording for this work eligible based on date and other criteria,” he told the trade publication The Wrap. (Marilyn Manson was later removed from the nominations list as a songwriter on Kanye West’s track “Jail,” but remained eligible as one of West’s collaborators on “Donda,” which was up for album of the year.)Rather than weighing in on who could be nominated, Mason said the Grammys would instead draw a line around who was invited to the ceremony, held this year in Las Vegas. The comedy award was one of dozens presented in a ceremony that was held before the prime-time broadcast and was shown online only. Louis C.K. did not attend. Representatives for the Recording Academy did not return requests for comment.On the album, amid bits about religion, aging and sex, Louis C.K. addresses his misconduct a few times, mostly jokingly. “Man, I was in a lot of trouble,” he says in the opening. “Wait till they see those pictures of me in blackface. That’s going to make it a lot worse. Because there’s a lot of those, there’s thousands of pictures of me in blackface. I can’t stop doing it. I just — I like it. I like how it feels.”This trophy is the third Grammy for Louis C.K. in the comedy album category.The Recording Academy does not release details of how its more than 11,000 eligible members vote. Members are limited in the number of categories they may cast a vote in, as the academy tries to encourage them to vote in their various areas of expertise. The nominations process was tweaked for this year’s awards after complaints of secret agendas and uneven playing fields, and boycotts by major artists like the Weeknd.In recent years, the Recording Academy has also been roiled by accusations that it did not include or acknowledge enough women or people of color, and the organization has pledged to do better. But a report last month from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California found that the number of women credited on pop songs has remained largely unchanged for a decade, and that a Grammy-led effort to hire more female producers and engineers did almost nothing.The comedy category has changed names and focus somewhat over the years as recorded comedy shifted from musical numbers to spoken word. Bill Cosby won the prize a record seven times; in 2012, one of his albums was also named to a Grammys Hall of Fame. In the 64-year history of the Grammys, women have been nominated more than 40 times for comedy but only five have won awards outright: Elaine May (as part of a duo with Mike Nichols); Lily Tomlin; Whoopi Goldberg; Kathy Griffin; and, in 2021, Tiffany Haddish. More

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      in Movies

      Michelle Materre, Champion of Black Independent Film, Dies at 67

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      Through her distribution company and an educational series, Ms. Materre was for decades a tireless advocate for underrepresented filmmakers.Michelle Materre, a distributor and educator who promoted Black women’s voices in film and released influential independent movies by Black creators, died on March 11 in White Plains, N.Y. She was 67.A friend, Kathryn Bowser, said the cause was oral cancer.Ms. Materre was an early proponent of independently released works by Black female directors, beginning at a time when diversity in independent film was far from the forefront of the cultural conversation.Her company, KJM3 Entertainment Group, worked on distribution for major films; one of its first projects was the marketing of Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.” Widely viewed as a masterpiece of Black independent cinema and said to have been the first feature film by a Black woman to have a wide release, “Daughters of the Dust” was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2004.The New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in 2020 that “Daughters of the Dust,” which tells the story of Gullah women off the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia in the early 20th century, “has sent ripples of influence through the culture,” inspiring the imagery in Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade” and the director Sofia Coppola’s aesthetic. Ava DuVernay, the director of “Selma,” also regularly cites the film as an influence.Ms. Dash, in a remembrance for the International Documentary Association, wrote, “We remain forever grateful for Michelle and team KJM3 for the initial run of ‘Daughters of the Dust’ in 1992; it would not have been a success without them.”From left, Barbara-O Jones, Trula Hoosier and Alva Rogers in Julie Dash’s ‘“Daughters of the Dust,” one of the first films handled by Ms. Materre’s distribution company, KJM3 Entertainment Group.Cohen Media Group/Everett CollectionKJM3 Entertainment was formed in 1992 and released 23 films before it ceased operation in 2001. Another of the company’s most influential distribution efforts was “L’Homme Sur Les Quais” (“The Man by the Shore”) (1993), a drama by Raoul Peck, the Haitian auteur who went on to direct “I Am Not Your Negro,” the 2016 documentary about race in America based on the writings of James Baldwin.Ms. Materre’s passion for bringing unsung masterworks to wider audiences animated her career. In 1999, she started Creatively Speaking, an effort to package short films from underrepresented filmmakers into full-length programs organized thematically. It has grown into a major cultural player, holding regular screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and educational panels about diversity in filmmaking at the New School and elsewhere.“One Way or Another: Black Women’s Cinema, 1970-1991,” which compiled short films into a longer project, was one acclaimed Creatively Speaking project. In 2017, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called it the most important repertory series of the year.In a 2019 interview for the New School, Ms. Materre said she started Creatively Speaking because she saw a lack of opportunity — a theme throughout her career.“I found that there weren’t very many outlets for filmmakers of color and women filmmakers who hadn’t reached the possibility of making feature films yet,” she said. “They were making short films — all these amazing short films, but nobody was ever seeing them.”Once she began producing these films, she added, “people gravitated towards them like crazy.”In the International Documentary Association tribute, Leslie Fields-Cruz, the executive director of Black Public Media, wrote that Ms. Materre “understood why Black films need special attention when it comes to distribution and engagement.”“There are multiple generations of filmmakers, curators, distributors and media arts administrators,” she wrote, “whose lives and careers have been impacted simply because Michelle took the time to listen and to care.”Ms. Materre, right, with Kathryn Bowser of KJM3 Entertainment, left, and Kay Shaw of the National Black Programming Consortium at the premiere of the film “Follow Me Home” in New York in 1997. Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesMichelle Angelina Materre was born on May 12, 1954, in Chicago. Her father, Oscar Materre, was a Chicago firefighter and owned a paint business. Her mother, Eloise (Michael) Materre, was a real estate agent.She grew up in Chicago and attended the Chicago Latin School. She then earned a B.S. in education from Boston State College and a master’s in educational media from Boston College.In 1975, she married Jose Masso, a Boston public-school teacher. They divorced in 1977. She married Dennis Burroughs, a production technician, in 1990; that marriage, too, ended in divorce. She is survived by her sisters, Paula and Judi Materre. Ms. Materre’s work at Creatively Speaking was centered in New York City; in addition to distributing films, she often organized panels and screenings of little-seen works like “Charcoal” (2017), the Haitian director Francesca Andre’s short film on colorism and skin lightening practices in the Black community.Ms. Materre consulted on the production and distribution of numerous films and served on the boards of the Black Documentary Collective, New York Women in Film and Television, and other groups promoting underrepresented filmmakers.In 2000 she began teaching at the New School in New York City, where her courses focused on diversity and inclusion in media.In a remembrance for The New School Free Press, Ms. Materre’s colleague Terri Bowles, with whom she taught a course at the New School, wrote, “She radiated a love of media and cinema, immersing her students, colleagues and friends in the vernaculars of the image, its myriad presentations and its critical importance.” More

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      in Music

      Molly Tuttle Is a Top Bluegrass Guitarist. She’s Also a Lot More.

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      After two albums of roots pop, the musician returns to her own roots for “Crooked Tree,” an album that takes inspiration from her lifelong journey living with alopecia areata.The singer, songwriter and guitarist Molly Tuttle’s fingers move so quickly, she could pick your pocket without breaking stride. Though she’s only been releasing albums for three years, the sharpest ears in Americana music have taken notice.“I’ve never heard Molly Tuttle strike a single note that wasn’t completely self-assured,” said the roots music guitar master David Rawlings, half of Gillian Welch’s duo. “Molly plays with a confidence and command that only the very best guitarists ever achieve. If that could be bottled, I’d take two.”Best known as a top bluegrass guitarist, Tuttle, 29, is emerging as strikingly label-resistant. The first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s guitar player of the year award (two years in a row, 2017 and 2018), she considers herself as much a singer as a player, whose light soprano packs a surprising wallop. Nor is she, strictly speaking, a bluegrass musician.“I think of bluegrass as part of what I do,” Tuttle said, settling into a chair in her publicist’s office in Manhattan. “I can switch on my bluegrass self, but it doesn’t feel like my core identity, it feels more like an outlet for something I do and that I’ve done since I was a kid.”Tuttle set about defining her own brand of roots pop in two critically acclaimed albums, “When You’re Ready” from 2019 and its 2020 follow-up, “… But I’d Rather Be With You.” While the second LP consists entirely of covers, Tuttle co-wrote every song on “Crooked Tree,” an album out Friday that is very much bluegrass. Several of its songs are written from not merely a woman’s perspective, but a feminist’s, making Tuttle an outlier in what remains a male-dominated genre.“I’d always felt a block writing bluegrass songs,” she said. “I just don’t relate to a lot of the old themes. But something clicked where I was able to write songs that felt true to who I am but still fit into bluegrass.”Tuttle grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., in a musical family. Her father taught guitar for a living, and counted his daughter and her two younger brothers as prized students. Gravitating to the guitar at 8, Tuttle soon had herself on a strict regimen (for a 10-year-old): an hour of practice after school, an hour before bedtime.A musical omnivore, Tuttle helped herself to rock, punk and rap, including the National, Neko Case and the Bay Area punk bands Operation Ivy and Rancid. (Don’t miss her irresistibly propulsive punkgrass cover of Rancid’s “Olympia WA,” her solo a machine-gun spray of 16th notes.) Tuttle played acoustic guitar and banjo in the family’s bluegrass band, but she plugged in with pickup rock groups. Her middle-school music teacher had a big CD collection, much of which found its way onto Tuttle’s iPod.“I remember taking a Rage Against the Machine album home,” she said, “and going, ‘Whoa! This is amazing!’”By her midteens, Tuttle was driving with her father to California bluegrass festivals, reveling in the camaraderie. “It was so cool,” she said, “because nobody at my school knew what bluegrass was.” “People who don’t have alopecia think, ‘Well, it’s just hair,’ or ‘You can wear a wig,’” Tuttle said. “It is a traumatic thing. It’s like losing a part of your body.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe fellowship extended only so far. At one festival, Tuttle joined an impromptu jam in which the only musician she didn’t know was the fellow calling the tunes. When it came her turn to solo, she recalled, “He leaned right in front of me and pointed to the guy next to me, like, ‘You solo.’ He just completely skipped over me.’”Sexism’s sting empowered her: “Today I have my own band, so there’s no one who’s going to make me feel like that guy did, except me,” she said. “But there’s always times,” she added, “when you’re the only woman, so they do the song in a guy key and you can’t sing on it. Stuff like that happens a lot.”Tuttle has spent her life overcoming another hurdle: alopecia areata, an incurable autoimmune disease she contracted when she was 3 years old that results in partial, or, as in Tuttle’s case, total body hair loss.“People thought I had cancer, which made me really self-conscious,” Tuttle recalled. “First my parents got me hats” — you can see her on a YouTube video, peering out from under a sort of oversized cloche. She switched to wigs at 15, and “it was finally, like, ‘I can relax.’”Tuttle said those unaffected by alopecia rarely grasp its gravity. “People who don’t have alopecia think, ‘Well, it’s just hair,’ or ‘You can wear a wig,’” she said. “It is a traumatic thing. It’s like losing a part of your body.” While today Tuttle said she’s comfortable going without a wig, she prefers to wear one onstage. “What feels truest to myself is embracing the fluidity of ‘I can wear a wig one day and not wear a wig the next,’” she said.Learning to live with the disease remains a challenge that inspired the new album’s title song, where Tuttle tells the world, “I’d rather be a crooked tree!” Writing and performing “Crooked Tree” — giving it pride of place as the album’s title — is, for Tuttle, an act of self-acceptance and affirmation.“Growing up with it, and getting comfortable talking about it, has helped me overcome a lot of social anxiety — I’m naturally shy; everyone in my family is,” she said and laughed. “It’s helped me realize that it doesn’t matter what other people think, you can be yourself.”After majoring in guitar performance at Berklee College of Music in Boston — although she said her real tutelage was years of close listening to the singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens (“She stood up for marginalized people”), the guitarists Clarence White and David Grier, and Joni Mitchell — Tuttle arrived in Nashville.She worked with the mainstream pop producers Ryan Hewitt on her first album and Tony Berg on her second. Both surrounded Tuttle’s voice and guitar with multitextured, sometimes overly lush, soundscapes.In February, 2021, Tuttle was writing songs for what was to be a third pop album when bluegrass songs began pouring out of her, a return to her comfort zone in anxious times. Shelving the pop project for the time being, she invited some of Nashville’s top bluegrass players into the studio and asked the dobro master Jerry Douglas, a major force in contemporary bluegrass, to co-produce with her what became “Crooked Tree.”“It’s become such a loose term, anyway,” Tuttle said of bluegrass. “Today, everyone’s listening to everything and blurring things together.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe album’s first single, “She’ll Change,” co-written with Tuttle’s frequent collaborator, Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, is a paean to strong women (“Just snaps her little fingers/And they all stand in line”) sprinkled with Tuttle’s jaw-dropping bluegrass runs.On other tracks, Tuttle doesn’t hesitate to subvert old themes. “I’ve always loved murder ballads,” she said, “I have a natural love of horror movies, and gore, and creepy stories. But some of the old ballads are really misogynist. There’s a lot of violence towards women. So I flipped the perspective to a woman’s.” In “The River Knows,” co-written with Melody Walker, it’s the guy who gets hacked to death, for a change (“Washed the proof out of my hair/Crimson streaming down my skin so fair”).“I’ll always want to come back to bluegrass,” Tuttle said, though she does play with musical convention on the new album. “It’s become such a loose term, anyway. Today, everyone’s listening to everything and blurring things together.”The genre today is indeed quite different from that of its founder, Bill Monroe. “If Bill came to a bluegrass festival today,” said the fiddler-turned-violinist and composer Mark O’Connor, another lifelong border crosser, “he would hardly recognize the genre he helped create.“Having said that,” O’Connor added, “if Bill Monroe were here today, he would hire Molly Tuttle for his Blue Grass Boys. Because she can sing the high lonesome and drive that rhythm on the flattop guitar. But then, Bill would have to consider a name change for the band.”Sitting in Manhattan, Tuttle considered the options: “The Blue Grass Persons?” she suggested. More

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      in Theater

      For Female Directors, a Generational Shift

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      In Germany, a country with few theater leaders who aren’t men, professional success has often meant becoming one of the guys. Now, a new group of women are developing their own way. dFRANKFURT — Of the 24 new productions expected on Schauspiel Frankfurt’s three stages this season, two-thirds will be directed by women. This is an astonishing statistic in Germany, where gender inequality is still pronounced across the vast theater landscape. Despite advances in recent decades, women run only a small fraction of the 142 publicly owned playhouses, and, according to the latest available statistics, in 2016 only 20 percent of theater directors were female.Two current productions at Schauspiel Frankfurt, the municipal theater company, show how the theatrical ground here has shifted over a generation to allow more confident explorations of female self-expression. Both plays lie far outside the standard repertoire, which is consistent with a general trend in German theater to break out of the narrow canon of acknowledged masterpieces. But only one seems to provide a uniquely female perspective on the work in question.Claudia Bauer, born in 1966, is one of German theater’s most acclaimed and prolific directors. A fixture on stages throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland for the past quarter-century, she enjoys a certain seniority among Germany’s female theatermakers. But both formally and thematically, her productions often feel very similar to those of her male colleagues. Like them, she has spent much of her career sifting through the (mostly male) theatrical canon: Some of her most acclaimed recent productions have been based on plays by Brecht, Molière and Tennessee Williams.At Schauspiel Frankfurt, Bauer has turned her attention to Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise,” adapted for the stage in a surprisingly faithful version by the writing team PeterLicht and SE Struck.In a memorable sequence from Buñuel’s surreal Oscar-winning movie, a band of affluent Parisians, trying in vain to eat a meal together, inexplicably find themselves dining onstage at a theater. That scene takes on a heightened degree of absurdity when it is recreated in Bauer’s antic production. The audience, of course, has been there all along. Getting the actors onstage to acknowledge the spectators’ presence could come off as an all too obvious gag, but here it’s a subversive joke that suggests a sort of mutual recognition between the out-of-touch elites portrayed onstage and the affluent theatergoers of Frankfurt, Germany’s financial center.It is one of the inspired moments when Bauer finds clever ways to translate Buñuel’s mischievous provocations to the stage. Her production eschews the film’s ironic detachment and pretense of normalcy in favor of something far more energetic and flamboyant. With a gypsy swing soundtrack and live video projections by Jan Isaak Voges that roam Andreas Auerbach’s set — an upscale residence inside a giant white container — the production feels halfway between a sitcom and a revue.Aided by a nimble eight-person cast that forms a tight unit, Bauer turns the digressive and episodic film into a gleefully absurd carnival where farce coexists with horror.Like Buñuel’s actors, Bauer’s maintain their composure in the face of increasingly perplexing circumstances. But they also preen and pose with evident relish, performing as much for one another as for the audience. “Discreet Charm” was a hit here when it opened this month, and some local critics wondered whether it might be a contender for next year’s edition of Theatertreffen, an annual celebration of the best German-language theater, to which Bauer has been invited four times. The festival recently instituted a quota to help promote the work of female directors: At least half of the 10 shows chosen must be female-led. However, the past few years have seen the dawning of a new generation of bold and self-confident female theatermakers, and I doubt that Theatertreffen’s quota, intended as a corrective, will be necessary much longer.“I and I,” written by Else Lasker-Schüler some 80 years ago and directed by Christina Tscharyiski, also at the Schauspiel Frankfurt.Robert SchittkoMany of the emerging female directors in Germany seem more committed to work that explicitly engages with feminist and post-feminist topics than directors of Bauer’s generation, who were pioneers in a male-dominated landscape where professional success often meant becoming one of the guys. Along with addressing issues of women’s representation, history and psychology, some of these younger directors — including artists from all over Europe, as well as the United States and Israel — are creating exciting stage aesthetics to address those themes.On Schauspiel Frankfurt’s smaller stage, the Kammerspiele, the Austrian-Bulgarian director Christina Tscharyiski, 33, has bravely taken a stab at one of the strangest, most obscure and most difficult-to-perform German plays of the 20th century: “I and I” (“Ichundich”) by Else Lasker-Schüler.That German-Jewish Expressionist poet and artist, who fled the Nazis in 1933, called her sprawling work, in six acts and an epilogue, a “hell play.” Composed in 1940 and 1941, “I and I” is an infernal romp that features characters from Goethe’s “Faust” and real-life personalities, including Lasker-Schüler herself and much of the Nazi high command. The unlikely group meets up in a version of hell somewhere in Jerusalem, which is where the author lived in unhappy exile until her death in 1945.The play was long ignored as an unperformable oddity: It made it to the stage for the first time only in 1979. In the barely four decades since, productions have been exceedingly rare. Tscharyiski’s take on “I and I,” stylishly designed by Verena Dengler and Dominique Wiesbauer, resembles a kind of Dadaesque haunted house where characters in Hasidic robes, medieval garb and Nazi uniforms wander a stage strewn with ash.Unfortunately, the production’s charms are largely visual, and the shortened performing version of the text fails to cohere in a compelling thematic, narrative or poetic way. Despite inspired performances by Friederike Ott as the poet, Lasker-Schüler’s alter ego, and Florian Mania and Tanja Merlin Graf as a pair of rival Mephistos, the demon who bargains for Faust’s soul, the production seems both overstuffed and underdeveloped, and much longer than its 75 minutes. Yet despite the production’s limitations, it feels momentous that this complex work is being reconsidered 80 years after it was written. And it’s heartening to know that a director as prodigiously talented as Tscharyiski can be enlisted to aid in our rediscovery of a key 20th-century artist whose theater works are too little known.Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie. Directed by Claudia Bauer. Schauspiel Frankfurt, through May 1.Ichundich. Directed by Christina Tscharyiski. Schauspiel Frankfurt, through April 17. More