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      Zazie Beetz and Regina King on Their Big Battle in ‘The Harder They Fall’

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      In the Netflix western, the two actresses, playing members of rival cowboy gangs, engage in an epic fight. Here, they break down the scene.“Trudy’s mine,” hisses Stagecoach Mary Fields (played by Zazie Beetz), her eyes blazing.Trudy Smith (Regina King) ducks into a dye barn, its rafters hung with swatches of color.Their eyes lock, Mary empties her shotgun onto the floor. Trudy tosses her pistol to the side.“Let’s go,” Mary spits out. A wild fight scene ensues between the two members of rival cowboy gangs: bodies hit windows, teeth crunch into hands and horseshoes hurl toward heads.Toward the end of the new Netflix western “The Harder They Fall” — a reminder that Black cowboys should be as much a part of the genre as anyone else — Mary and Trudy duke it out in an epic fight that nearly ends in death.Although the director, Jeymes Samuel, is a singer-songwriter known as the Bullitts, he has dabbled in filmmaking, and “The Harder They Fall” is his first feature. In a video interview, he clarified that he wasn’t reimagining the western — he was “replacing” it.“What I was doing with that fight, I’ve done it the whole film,” he said. “The whole film is reverse psychology on what we know as the western and puts up a mirror.”Historians estimate that one in four cowboys were Black, a fact that was hardly reflected in the conventional westerns popular in the 20th century, which were largely devoid of people of color.In creating the film, his aim was to counter two tropes of traditional westerns: people of color shown as less than human; and women appearing subservient and less than men. “Westerns have never given light to women and their power in that period,” he said. That’s why Samuel, who wrote the screenplay with Boaz Yakin, inverted gender roles in the Mary-Trudy battle.“All the men in the film, when they have conflict, they pick up guns,” Samuel said, adding, “It takes the two women to literally throw away their guns and duke it out.”Regina King as Trudy Smith. She, Beetz and their stunt doubles practiced the fight in their off hours.David Lee/NetflixAlthough the actresses, part of a star-studded cast, worked closely with their stunt doubles, Nikkilette Wright and Sadiqua Bynum, most of the final cut features the actresses themselves — because the stunt doubles were simply too good at their jobs. The stand-ins’ work “was too clean,” Samuel said. “In that particular scene, it was perfect and neat, whereas I needed the urgency. When you put Zazie and Regina together, neat went out the window.”Beetz, King, Wright and Bynum practiced the fight on their own time in a hotel conference room in Santa Fe, N.M., where much of the movie was shot. As rough and tumble as the scene may look onscreen, Beetz said in a phone interview that it was all very carefully choreographed.“We also wanted the fight to look scrappy, because we wanted it to look real and intense and how people really would potentially fight,” she said. “I think it’s just a testament in general to the shift in film and the shift in how we see women and their physical abilities.”As part of her preparation, the actress read about Stagecoach Mary Fields, the first African American woman in the United States to be a mail carrier on star routes — routes handled by contractors who were not employed by the Postal Service. (Many of the main characters are based on real historical figures, but Samuel fictionalized the vast majority of the plot.) Fields was enslaved until she was around 30 years old, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Then she went on to live a whole new life.“There was a lot of formerly enslaved people who moved to the West, and the culture of the United States wasn’t as established in the West,” Beetz said. “So there was more mobility for Black people. And there really were towns that were all Black, and they were self-sustaining, and it was an interesting place where Black people could thrive.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Kristen Stewart’s Princess Diaries

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      Kristen Stewart has sometimes been accused of just playing variations on herself, as if that isn’t half the reason we’re drawn to movie stars. In “Twilight” (2008), she brought a specific and sullen appeal to a heroine conceived as a blank slate for female readers; later, in “Personal Shopper” (2017), when Stewart traded her polo shirts for a rich client’s shimmering dress, you could see both the star and the character regarding her new look in the mirror: Is this me? Could I make it me?At first, her new drama “Spencer” would appear to be a sop for the sort of moviegoer who’d demand a more rigorous transformation from the “Twilight” actress: Directed by Pablo Larraín (“Jackie”), the movie is a psychological portrait of Princess Diana as she unravels, then rallies, over a three-day Christmas holiday. Instead of hiring a British actress, Larraín chose Stewart, a contemporary figure of California cool who met me on the day of our interview wearing a brick-red pinstripe suit, her jacket sleeves rolled up to reveal a small constellation of tattoos.The 31-year-old actress who sat opposite me on a balcony at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood may not have looked like the obvious pick to play the people’s princess, but a funny thing happens as you watch “Spencer”: The distance that initially seemed so vast between the two women will close to the point where it seems like the canniest casting ever. Stewart, after all, knows a thing or two about a life lived in the public eye, the scrutiny leveled at a high-profile romance, and the private moments snatched away by paparazzi.Stewart gave her all to the movie, studying Diana’s posture, mannerisms and accent; the resulting performance, potent and provocative, has thrust her to the front of this year’s crop of best-actress Oscar contenders. “I used to think that I needed spontaneity and anxiety to propel me into something truthful and that if I had too much control over it, it was immediately going to become fabricated,” Stewart said. “I just didn’t have the confidence to hold that and be like, ‘No, you can design something.’”But Larraín had that confidence in her.“She’s like an actress from the ’50s or ’60s,” the director said. “What she’s doing for the story can be at a very grounded character level, but it’s elevated to a poetic level that creates an enormous amount of mystery and intrigue. And that’s probably the best cocktail you could ever find for a performance on camera.”Stewart as Princess Diana (opposite Laura Benson) in a scene from “Spencer.”NeonStewart knew that taking on “Spencer” would be a challenge, and in the days leading up to the shoot, she even developed lockjaw as she ceaselessly practiced her British accent. But once she was on set, finally channeling Diana, her fears melted away: “At the end of week one, I was like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done. This is the most alive I’ve ever felt.’”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.What was your first impression when Pablo pitched “Spencer” to you?He was so sure that I should do this, and I thought that was audacious and crazy because it just doesn’t seem like the most instinctive, immediate choice.Did he tell you why it had to be you?He was like, “There’s something about Diana that we’ll never know. You make me feel like that. I’ve seen your work, and I never really know what you’re thinking.” And I feel that way about Diana as well. Even though I feel this overwhelming attraction to her spirit and her energy, there’s something that’s disarming about her. I want to hang out with her. I want to race her down a long hallway. I want to, like, meet her kid.Still, was it a natural step to say yes to this movie?The only reason that you work as an actor for this long is to try and outdo yourself every time. This one was just the proper step up that I couldn’t really say no to. It was ambitious and attractive, and I was like, “If I can’t do that, then I’ll just stop and direct movies instead.” And it’s fun to imagine a larger conversation. It’s fun to imagine if you’re capable of holding that.What emerged of Diana as you researched her?There were so many layers to read. There were so many ways in which she tried to reveal herself, that weren’t necessarily in the form of a direct sentence. She wasn’t allowed to be like, “I’m dying, and he doesn’t love me.” I think the way she expressed herself is so interesting because there are so many lenses between you and that communication.It’s like, to not acknowledge that every single person in the world is sitting here on this balcony with us is wild. We have to pretend they’re not because we’re being nice to each other. Which is nice! But also, we’re talking to everyone in the whole world right now.And I’m asking you to be vulnerable with me, as though what you say won’t be chopped up, reblogged and retweeted by people who aren’t here.You roll the dice, definitely. One could write a very long paper on the exchange between a journalist and an actor. That’s obviously not why we’re here, but yeah.Though Stewart knows something of what Diana experienced with paparazzi, the actress said she was never told “to sit and stay in the way that was so damaging and dishonest.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesBut it kind of is. Diana had to be incredibly savvy about her image and the way it was used, while still radiating utter authenticity. Actors are required to do the same.Every way that we reach out toward each other has to be designed from an interior place. Therefore, it’s a form of manipulation. You want someone to understand you; you want to make someone feel the way that you feel. It’s sad to think about her in general because she’s just the most coveted, loved and also rejected, self-hating person. Those things shouldn’t go together.Unless some of it is cause and some of it is effect. Do we respond to her in a way that causes a little bit of that? When she’s called the people’s princess, does that imply a form of ownership?Of course, which I think she probably tried to cultivate. I think she had to reach out to get any sort of warm acceptance, when obviously at home she felt invisible and unheard and stifled and cold. She was looking sort of everywhere she could for that kind of love. She was the first royal in the entire history of them to reach out and touch people physically, in their face, without gloves on. That rocked people to their core.How did you square some of her contradictions?There were people that were like, “She would never use profanity.” And then other memories would be like, “Oh, gosh, she just came in swearing.” So you can’t know her. With famous people, you hear someone go, “I met them once and they’re not very nice,” but it’s like, “Were you asking them how their day went when they were coming out of the pisser? Maybe they weren’t nice to you in that moment.” People love to have one experience sort of sum up an entire human’s personality. You just have to take everyone’s perspective and shove them together and kind of figure out your own.You’re clearly speaking from personal experience. But in other interviews I’ve read, you demur when asked to draw a direct line between your time in the public eye and Diana’s.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      When Women Filmmakers Get to Tell Their Origin Stories

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      Movies about men who make movies are common, but female auteurs don’t often get such chances. That’s just one reason two new releases are so surprising.The newly released “The Souvenir Part II” and “Bergman Island” are both films by modern masters that not only delve into the filmmaking process but also draw from the personal lives of the filmmakers themselves.Sound familiar? Self-reflexive movies like these practically double as auteurist rites of passage — think “8 ½,” Federico Fellini’s beguiling ode to creative block with Marcello Mastroianni playing a version of the filmmaker; “Day for Night,” François Truffaut’s chaotic comedy about artistic collaboration starring Truffaut himself in the on-camera director’s chair; and, more recently, “Pain and Glory,” Pedro Almodóvar’s melodrama about an aging filmmaker (Antonio Banderas) in crisis. The list goes on, but with the newest films, there’s a crucial distinction: the masters in question are women.Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II” and Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island” revolve around two women filmmakers, avatars for the directors, navigating their desires, relationships and creative pursuits in ways that fully reinvigorate the self-referential genre. Spotlighting the intellectual doubts and processes of two very different types of women, these films also raise subtle questions about gender disparity in the movie business and the unique ways in which women artists come into their own. And refreshingly, these films never dabble in obvious, self-congratulatory screeds about sexism — theirs is a magic much more potent and revelatory.“The Souvenir Part II” is the follow-up to Hogg’s 2019 drama about a soft-spoken student filmmaker who falls into a fraught and ultimately tragic romance with an alluring heroin addict. The new movie again draws generously from Hogg’s early years attending the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England. Still reeling from her lover’s death, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) must build herself back up. The demands of completing her thesis film — a relationship drama based on her memories, that is, the events of the first film — propel her to become a more self-assured individual, transformed by the cathartic powers of creative work. In the end, the presentation of Julie’s finished film doubles as a plunge into her subconscious, a Technicolor fantasia akin to the deliriously joyous endings of golden age movie musicals and a brilliant shorthand for the marriage of art and life.In the press notes, Hogg said that despite being “terribly introverted” in film school, she had “a very clear idea of where I wanted to go, so I was able to blank out the voices, usually of men, that said ‘you can’t do a film like that.’”Indeed, we see Julie contend with skepticism from her own cast and crew, sharing their doubts about her directorial style behind her back or directly to her face in one particularly blustery spat initiated by a boorish male colleague. In conversation with an academic advising committee, Julie must stand her ground in the face of dubious filmmaking veterans accustomed to certain rigid practices.Hogg’s methods are highly improvisatory — her scripts contain little dialogue and are instead filled with descriptions, references to particular memories and images that might encourage ad-libbing and a more organic kind of creation.Now 61, and decades into her career, Hogg has room to experiment. Though she’s not exactly working on expensive and elaborate studio films, she enjoys privileges and leeway not typically afforded to female directors.Vicky Krieps, left, and Tim Roth are a filmmaking couple in Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island.”IFC Films, via Associated PressTo this day the word “auteur” brings to mind a boy’s club. Consider how new films by male directors labeled visionaries like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, or Wes Anderson are treated as events. The cult of male genius more pertinently extends to the kinds of money, time and space given for such so-called genius to flourish. Correcting the gender imbalance in the film industry isn’t just a matter of creating more opportunities for women — in effect meeting quotas — but believing in the unique visions of women artists and robustly investing in the cultivation of those visions.Hogg and Hansen-Love are hardly the only women filmmakers to get personal and explore the emotional twists and turns in getting a new movie off the ground. The work of the provocateur Catherine Breillat often has an autobiographical bent. Her “Abuse of Weakness” (2014) starred Isabelle Huppert as a filmmaker who experiences a stroke, as Breillat did, and in “Sex Is Comedy” (2004), the director restaged the behind-the-scenes drama leading up to the filming of one of her most infamous sex scenes. Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” (1997) starred the director as a video store worker struggling to make a documentary about a forgotten actress from the 1930s. The recent restoration and release of “The Watermelon Woman” certainly helped pull Dunye’s ingenious autofiction out of obscurity. Nevertheless portraits of female filmmakers aren’t exactly well known or particularly numerous.The discrepancies between the way male and female filmmakers are treated are put under a magnifying glass in “Bergman Island.” Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), directors both, retreat to the island where Ingmar Bergman shot several of his films in order to focus independently on their new scripts. Mia Hansen-Love, who was in a 15-year relationship with the filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Irma Vep,” “Personal Shopper”), shows Chris procrastinating and suffering from extreme writer’s block, while Tony diligently fills page after page of his notebook with sexually questionable material. Ah, to be an auteur! As Chris, riddled with self-doubt, wastes time exploring the island on her own terms, the more well-known Tony hosts public Q. and A.’s and fields compliments from devoted fans. And when Chris finally shares the details of her latest idea for a movie, Tony seems distracted.No matter, Hansen-Love seems to say. If not Tony, the audience will be fully captivated by Chris’s dream world. A film-within-a-film unfolds, a sweltering romance between a younger couple (Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie) that also takes place on Faro Island and seems to reconfigure Chris’s frustrations and anxieties into new and visceral form.Both “Bergman Island” and “The Souvenir Part II” show an intimate understanding of art’s liberating potential, the power that fiction and fantasy afford individuals still in search of themselves. These aren’t exclusively female ventures — anyone who understands what it means to be diminished and looked down upon will find solace in the possibility of an alternative, an outlet for self-expression that transforms trauma and fear and insecurity into a source of fulfillment and strength.Crucially, Julie and Chris aren’t shown reveling in the success of their films, getting revenge on their male skeptics, or landing multimillion-dollar deals. Their triumphs are private, premised as they are on the satisfaction of creating something true and beautiful in spite of their vulnerable creators — Chris falls asleep in Bergman’s study and awakens in the future as her own film shoot comes to a close, her husband’s approval and the towering cinematic figure so central to her artistic development a twinkle in the past. We’re in her territory now. More

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      She Was an Organist for the Ages

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      Jeanne Demessieux, born 100 years ago, was an astonishing player and a virtuosic composer.Few musicians have faced a debut more intense than did the organist Jeanne Demessieux. For years before her first concert — one of six she gave at the Salle Pleyel in Paris early in 1946 — her teacher Marcel Dupré had stoked rumors of her outlandish talent.“Jeanne Demessieux is the greatest organist of all generations,” Dupré, then practically the god of the French organ world, had declared in 1944. She would be, he predicted, “one of the greatest glories of France.”There was tremendous pressure, then, on this shy, workaholic, perfectionist prodigy, who had lived under what Dupré said was his “artistic protection” since 1936 — winning first prize in his class at the Paris Conservatory in 1941 and remaining his student and assistant after that.Pressure, too, from the imposing program of the first of her “six historic recitals,” as the publicity announced them: the Bach C Minor Passacaglia; a Franck chorale; a Dupré prelude and fugue; the premiere of her own, impossibly challenging Six Études; and a symphony in four movements — one she improvised.Yet Demessieux, who was born in Montpellier, France, in 1921 and whose centenary is being celebrated with performances of her complete organ works at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan Nov. 6, 13 and 20, exceeded expectations. Dupré waxed “of a phenomenon equal to the youth of Bach or Mozart.” Maurice Duruflé, then finishing his Requiem, declared that “next to Jeanne Demessieux, the rest of us play the pedals like elephants.” Le Figaro wrote that she was a fairy tale that could be believed in, for she had been “irresistible absolute perfection.”“She certainly earned her place,” Stephen Tharp, the organist for the St. Thomas concerts, who released a recording of Demessieux’s complete organ compositions in 2008, said in an interview. “You like her interpretations, you don’t like her interpretations — but the amount of skill, focus, intelligence it took to play programs of that stature at the Salle Pleyel, in her 20s, and to compose, to improvise, in the way and at the level that she could, was really without equal.”Demessieux became the first female organist to sign a record deal, setting down a fleet run through Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor for Decca in 1947, and paving the way for women such as Marie-Claire Alain and Gillian Weir. Tours began, taking her around Europe and on to the United States, where the critic Virgil Thomson, praising her “taste, intelligence and technical skill of the highest order” in 1953, would think of “masters” like Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne and Olivier Messiaen as the only possible equals of this “extraordinary musician and virtuoso.”Demessieux seemed destined to take a top liturgical position, at Dupré’s St.-Sulpice or even at Notre-Dame. But shortly after her debut, Dupré, who appears to have been fed unfounded rumors that Demessieux had been disloyal, cut off contact with his pupil and resolved to sabotage her career.Instead, Demessieux stayed with her family’s parish church, where she had been organist since she was 12, until she succeeded Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré as titulaire, or chief organist, at the church of the Madeleine in 1962. She prospered at a Cavaillé-Coll instrument with which she had a rare bond, having recorded a transcendent Franck cycle on it in 1959, the high point of an invaluable eight-disc set from Eloquence that came out earlier this year, amply documented with notes by the organist D’Arcy Trinkwon.Although Demessieux was a star in the 1940s and ’50s, when she kept up a punishing concert schedule alongside her liturgical work and her teaching in Liège, Belgium, her status faltered after her death from cancer in 1968, at just 47. The Eloquence set gives her Decca tapes their first release on a major label in the CD era.Part of the reason for Demessieux’s ebbing fortunes can be traced to the rise of neoclassical and period performance practices, which made her impulsive, lyrical, heartfelt style — one that brought a singular lightness of touch to a grand symphonic tradition — seem outdated, especially in the Bach and Handel with which she often opened her concerts.Part of the reason, too, was the difficulty of her compositions, some of which were unpublished until recently and were promoted mostly by students like Pierre Labric. Although her whirling “Te Deum” from 1958, inspired by the Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, has had sustained success, works like her études, her “Triptyque” and her late Prelude and Fugue pushed the frontiers of the possible, and they remain “ferociously hard” even now, Tharp said — “things she really wrote for herself.”While Demessieux sometimes wrote with moving simplicity, as in chorale preludes like “Rorate coeli” and “Hosanna filio David” that speak to the devotional quality of her Catholic faith, many of her pieces have an angst to them, a gnarled bleakness, though they stop far short of atonality.“She uses a voice that I don’t think women were often allowed to use in other ways, and she puts it all into her music,” the organist Joy-Leilani Garbutt said in an interview.Predictably, Demessieux faced sexist stereotypes throughout her career. There were critics who wrote ill of the high heels that were an intrinsic part of her pedal technique, or that she was “too young and attractive to be an organist of the first rank,” as The Boston Globe put it in 1953. Some churches still barred women from their organ lofts, not least Westminster Abbey, which had to give her special dispensation to perform in 1947. Perhaps most scurrilous was the slur that she was merely the creation of Dupré, not an artist in her own right.But Garbutt, a scholar and a founder of the Boulanger Initiative, which advocates women composers, has found in her research that prejudices came with a twist in this case. Demessieux emerged from a tradition in which women organists could and did shine, though she might well have dazzled brightest of all.“She wasn’t the only woman international virtuoso, she wasn’t the only woman composer for the organ, and she wasn’t the only woman professor of organ, or the only woman to hold a major church position,” Garbutt said, mentioning Joséphine Boulay, the earliest woman to win first prize in organ at the Paris Conservatory, in 1888; Renée Nazin, a student of Vierne’s who did three world tours in the 1930s; and Rolande Falcinelli, who succeeded Dupré as professor at the Conservatory in 1955.“But I think Demessieux may have been the only woman to do all of those things in her lifetime,” Garbutt said.This was an era when women had greater opportunities to succeed, Garbutt argues, suggesting that they found grudging acceptance when jobs needed filling after so many men had died in the world wars. The spatial configurations of French churches played a role, too, with organists seated high in the gallery, unseen during Mass. While there were Parisian priests who tolerated or even supported women, others banned them, a rule that some artists used their invisibility while performing to flout. Henriette Puig-Roget, for instance, simply submitted her name as Monsieur Roget, cross-dressed, and substituted for Charles Tournemire at Ste.-Clotilde.Even so, the opportunities were fleeting. “The invisibility was a privilege or a tool that could be used to create their music,” Garbutt said, “but on the flip side it made their work disappear almost as soon as it had been created.” Women have since occupied major organ posts — Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin, for instance, has shared Dupré’s old position at St.-Sulpice with Daniel Roth since 1985 — but equal representation remains a distant ideal.In achieving that ideal, though, it may well be helpful to have historical material like the new Demessieux set. It is a revelation, from the incandescence of her Toccata from Widor’s Fifth Symphony to the jazzy angularity of Jean Berveiller’s “Mouvement”; the reverence of her Bach chorale preludes to the fury of her Liszt. The playing invites superlatives, even as it defies the complexity and artificiality of the organ to such an extent that it allows a rare focus on the music itself.“Who is the greatest organist of the 20th century?” Tharp said. “I really think it’s fair to say she’s a contender.” More

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      ‘Different Way of Fighting’: Lyrics Are the Weapons of All-Women Roma Band

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      Many Roma women face pressures to marry young and take on traditional gender roles. Pretty Loud, a hip-hop group from Serbia, wants girls to decide for themselves.Laetitia Vancon and BELGRADE, Serbia — The members of Pretty Loud, possibly the world’s first all-Roma female hip-hop group, don’t write saccharine love songs.Their lyrics focus instead on the pains Roma women experience: marrying and having children too young, feeling like second-class citizens and not finishing high school.“Don’t force me, Dad, I’m too young for marriage,” the six members, who hail from Serbia and are in their midteens to late 20s, sing in one song. “Please understand me, or should I be quiet?” they rap in another. “No one hears when I use my Roma girl’s voice.”Persecuted for centuries, many Roma people in Europe — the continent’s largest ethnic minority — live in segregated communities with limited access to amenities and health care. Women and girls also face gender expectations like being wives and mothers at a young age, which some say cause stress and isolation.The six members of Pretty Loud are in their midteens to late-20s.The group’s youngest members, Elma Dalipi and Selma Dalipi, 15, who are twins, are still finishing high school.“They are taught when they grow up that they will get married, cook and raise kids, but we want to change this,” Silvia Sinani, 24, said of Roma girls, adding that such expectations made it hard for women and girls to finish their educations.One of the band’s goals is to show there is another way. “We want every girl to decide for herself,” Ms. Sinani said.The women of Pretty Loud are hoping their music, authenticity and visibility as performers — already rewriting social conventions in their community in Belgrade, the Serbian capital — can help women and girls elsewhere find their own voices. Formed in 2014, Pretty Loud has danced, sung and rapped on stages across Europe.“It is a different way of fighting,” said Zivka Ferhatovic, 20. “We fight through the music and songs.” Zivka Ferhatovic, left, and Dijana Ferhatovic, members of Pretty Loud, in their house in the Belgrade neighborhood of Zemun.“It is a different way of fighting,” Zivka Ferhatovic, 20, a band member, said of her activism. “We fight through the music and songs.”She added that the group wanted its fusion of traditional Roma music and Balkan hip-hop to confront the everyday realities of many Roma women — be it domestic abuse, sexism or racial discrimination. In one song, they warned that marrying someone abusive would not bring happiness. In another, they addressed their experiences of discrimination. Music was an obvious medium for the band’s members to express themselves and to continue celebrating the signature sound of Roma music.“We grow up with music for when we feel bad and when we feel happy,” said Zlata Ristic, 28. “I sleep with music. I can’t live my life without music.”When she’s performing, Ms. Ristic, said, “I feel like the strongest woman in the world.”Pretty Loud began as a project of GRUBB, an organization running educational and artistic programs for Roma youth in Serbia. On a summer afternoon, they rehearsed for a performance in front of the distorted mirrors at GRUBB’s center in Zemun, a neighborhood in Belgrade where many of the city’s Roma people reside.Pretty Loud began as a project of GRUBB, a center in Zemun, a neighborhood in Belgrade where many of the city’s Roma people live.“We grow up with music for when we feel bad and when we feel happy,” said Zlata Ristic, 28, “I sleep with music. I can’t live my life without music.”Fearing social stigma, the band’s members were initially reluctant to write songs and perform. But others involved with GRUBB helped them to focus their writing and performance on personal experiences.Over time, they grew more comfortable with the idea of melding the personal with the artistic. One performance used a silk sheet with a red spot to theatrically recreate the ritual of inspecting sheets after a wedding as a way of “proving” the bride’s virginity.“It became very poetic,” said Serge Denoncourt, a professional artistic director and longtime volunteer who said he encouraged them to explore the power of art. “They understand there you can talk about anything if you have a way to talk about it.”Now, Pretty Loud’s songs signal a unified hope: to represent Roma women in a modern world free of racism and sexism.A tourist in the Zemun area of Belgrade asking a group of Roma musicians to play for him. Raising her son was like having a “baby doll,” Ms. Ristic said. “We grew up together.” “The whole point of the music is to help them use their voice, not to speak for them,” said Caroline Roboh, a founder of GRUBB. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Pretty Loud’s own community, where members have become role models, a point of pride for them.“Little girls, they come to me and say: ‘Bravo, I want to be like you one day,’” Ms. Sinani said.Even outside their circles, they are amassing supporters who say the group is sending a modern message that Serbia needs to get behind.“Their energy breaks through the walls and spreads love,” said Joana Knezevic, a Serbian actress who watched a recent Pretty Loud performance. “They are women who have something to say.”It is a message that Ms. Ristic, who brings a cheerful energy to the group’s dynamic, learned early on. At 16, she got married and, soon after, pregnant. When the union broke down and she confronted being a single mother, Ms. Ristic became depressed. Raising her son, who is now 11, was like having a “baby doll,” she said. “We grew up together.”Zivka Fahratovic on a youth program on TV Pink in Belgrade. Outside their circles, members of Pretty Loud are amassing supporters who say the group is sending a modern message that Serbia needs to get behind.When Zivka is not studying or helping her grandmother at home, she is a teacher at GRUBB. The organization runs education and artistic programs, working predominantly in Serbia with Roma children and young people.Now, she wants to set an example for women who are unhappy in their marriages, even if they fear raising children alone.“I know when they are divorced, they think their lives stop,” Ms. Ristic said of women. “But I want to show they can continue with their dreams.”It is sometimes a difficult balancing act for members of Pretty Loud, who are trying to live the messages they preach. Some work at Grubb while holding other jobs; others, like the group’s youngest members, Elma Dalipi and Selma Dalipi, 15, are still finishing high school.“We’ve had numerous offers for marriage, but we never accepted any,” said Zivka Ferhatovic of her and her sister, Dijana Ferhatovic, 19. Their determination to finish school is supported by their grandparents and has a personal motivation — they believe their mother, who had her children young, ultimately left the family, in part, because she married too early.“We know the pain,” Zivka Ferhatovic said.After one of Pretty Loud’s most recent performance, the cheers made Dijana Ferhatovic’s chest tighten, she said. “We’re really doing something,” she added, though she called it a small step.Her sister disagreed. “How can you say it’s small?” Zivka Ferhatovic said.The coronavirus pandemic has slowed the band’s activity, and existing inequalities left Roma people in Europe particularly vulnerable to it. (Many of Pretty Loud’s members contracted Covid-19.)Over the summer, as borders reopened in Europe, Pretty Loud again took to stages: to cheers at a United Nations event celebrating refugees, under blue lights in Slovenia, at an audition for a Croatian talent show. And the bandmates have more dreams: of making a real demo for an album, performing in Times Square, writing a book about their lives — perhaps even entering politics.Though not yet household names or able to make a living solely from their music, the band is beginning to attract wider European attention. Earlier this month, a video of their successful audition for that Croatian talent show drew 120,000 views.Ms. Ristic, now a dance teacher at GRUBB, wants to grow her followings on TikTok and Instagram, where she posts Pretty Loud performances. Though it has exposed her to racist and sexist comments, she won’t stop posting, she said.“I don’t delete them because it’s not my shame,” she said, adding: “This is how people treat us. I want to show why we fight.”Pretty Loud members watching a recording of their performance after a show in June in Belgrade. Their songs signal a unified hope: to represent Roma women in a modern world free of racism and sexism.Most of the members of Pretty Loud said there was still room for romantic love, children and marriage in the future — so long as they get to choose when.In the future, Ms. Ristic wants to try just about everything: getting her license and then driving a truck while smoking a cigarette, making music with Serbian artists and raising her son, she said, with strong Roma role models so he grows up respecting women.Most of the members of Pretty Loud say there is still room for romantic love, children and marriage in the future — so long as they get to choose when. But after one marriage, Ms. Ristic has seen enough.“I make my own way forward for me, alone. It’s very hard, but I will try,” she said. “I don’t need husband. I want only fun.”Formed in 2014, the group has danced, sung and rapped its way from rookie status to being featured at events across Europe.Laetitia Vancon More

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      in Television

      Netflix Series Stirs Debate About the Lives of Ultra-Orthodox Women

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      The show, “My Unorthodox Life,” tracks the world of Julia Haart, who fled a religious community she found repressive. But some in the community she left say they feel misrepresented.MONSEY, N.Y. — Even at the most liberal flanks of the ultra-Orthodox community here there are daily moments where women live quite differently from men.At synagogue, they must pray in segregated balconies or curtained-off sections. They are prohibited from becoming rabbis and are cautioned against wearing pants, or singing solo or dancing in front of men, lest they distract the men from Torah values.But do they go to college, have careers, watch television, enjoy their lives?Yes, say women of the Yeshivish community in this suburban hamlet 30 miles north of Manhattan, some of whom are upset by how they are portrayed on Netflix’s popular reality series “My Unorthodox Life.”The nine-episode show tracks the world of Julia Haart, 50, who fled Monsey in 2012 and became a successful fashion and modeling executive. Haart paints a dismal picture of her old ultra-Orthodox life, portraying it as oppressive, suggesting women are deprived of decent educations and are basically allowed just one purpose — to be a “babymaking machine.”In the show, Julia Haart describes her former life in an ultra-Orthodox community as repressive, and rejoices in the freedom she feels now that she has left it behind.   Olivia Galli for The New York Times“The women in my community are second-class citizens,” she says in one episode. “We only exist in relation to a man.”It is an image that is rejected by women like Vivian Schneck-Last, a technology consultant who has an M.B.A. from Columbia University and worked as a managing director at Goldman Sachs. She feels Haart diminishes the intellectual and professional strides that women in the community have made.“People in Monsey are upset because she has misrepresented what Orthodox people and particularly Orthodox women are all about,” Schneck-Last said.Roselyn Feinsod, an actuary and partner in the giant accounting firm of Ernst & Young who was once friendly with Haart, said she and her daughter graduated from the same girls high school as Haart, Bais Yaakov of Spring Valley, and that most of its graduates now go on to college. Defying stereotypes of ultra-Orthodox women as unworldly, Feinsod said she has run seven marathons and biked 100 miles around Lake Tahoe.“Monsey is a beautiful community with educated people respectful of each other,” she said.Reactions to the show, both positive and negative, have spread beyond Monsey. The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel and lohud.com, which covers an area that includes Monsey, all featured articles about the debate. Critics and supporters of the show have posted videos on YouTube.Under the hashtag #myorthodoxlife, women have described their own successful careers and general satisfaction with the religious life.Roselyn Feinsod, who was once a friend of Julia Haart, said the show misrepresents the career opportunities available to ultra-Orthodox women like herself, a partner at a major accounting firm.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York Times“People were beyond upset, people were personally insulted,” said Allison Josephs, the founder of the Jew in the City website, who said people posted complaints on the site, which she created to change negative perceptions of religious Jews. “Pretty much every Jew I encountered was feeling, ‘Can you believe what they did to us again?’”Haart defends her depiction as accurate and says she has heard from many ultra-Orthodox and formerly ultra-Orthodox women who agree with her that the community represses women.“Everything about your story resonated so deeply with me,” one woman wrote in a message on Haart’s Instagram page. “I too left the Orthodox community and had to start over after struggling for so long with being unhappy.”Several people familiar with the ultra-Orthodox community wrote directly to The Times to express their support for Haart’s perspective, including Tzivya Green, a former member of the same Yeshivish community in Monsey.“Women are still told to keep quiet and, taught from a young age, that men hold all the power,” Green wrote. “We are taught to never go against a man’s word. Men are everything and women are nothing.”Haart describes the criticism as a personal attack that distracts from the sense of female empowerment she hopes to promote. Since leaving Monsey she has created her own shoe business and is now chief executive of the Elite World Group, among the world’s largest modeling agencies. Her show was just picked up for a second season.Haart agreed to address the debate over her show in an in-person interview if it could be filmed as part of her show. After The Times declined that arrangement, she and The Times were unable to agree on an alternative.Monsey is home to a variety of Orthodox Jews — some modern, some Hasidic and some of the ultra-Orthodox variation that Haart was part of, known as Yeshivish. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThough she did not respond to written questions from The Times, saying she had addressed them in prior interviews, she did provide her perspective by pointing out remarks she has made on social media and also by releasing a statement. It said in part: “My sole purpose in sharing my personal story is to raise awareness about an unquestionably repressive society where women are denied the same opportunities as men, which is why my upcoming book and season 2 of my show will continue to document my personal experience that I hope will allow other women to insist on the precious right to freedom.”There are communal pressures in Monsey against television-watching as a waste of time, as the show depicts. The role of women as mothers and homemakers is prized. Though some scholars argue it should not be interpreted as a slight, a prayer in which men thank God for not making them a woman is recited each morning.Still, several women interviewed in Monsey said the show’s perspective is often dated, sometimes exaggerated and conflates the multiple strains of Orthodox Judaism practiced in Monsey.The hamlet of Monsey derived its name from the Munsee branch of the Lenape Native Americans who populated the area before the arrival of Dutch and British colonists. Monsey has become a metonym for the Orthodox Jews of Rockland County, who represent more than a quarter of its population and gather at more than 200 synagogues and roughly half that many yeshivas. Their arrival converted Monsey, a one-stoplight town with a single yeshiva in 1950, into a place populated by a variety of Orthodox Jews — some modern, some Hasidic and some of the ultra-Orthodox variation that Haart was part of, known as Yeshivish or Litvish (Lithuanian), and within those groupings, several gradations or sects of each.That diversity, perhaps not as multicolored as Joseph’s coat, is nonetheless visible on the streets where thick-bearded men in black silk robes and cylindrical fur hats known as shtreimels mix with clean-shaven men in Polo shirts and chinos, recognizable as observant only by their skullcaps.Haart has spoken in interviews about the gradations of Judaism, but some critics of her show say it does not do enough to depict the variations of Orthodox Judaism.  Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesHaart has acknowledged in media appearances and other settings that there are “gradations of Judaism,” and that others from her community may not share her perspective. At its best, she acknowledged in a TV interview with Tamron Hall, her religion fosters an appreciation of charity, of kindness.But critics say those nuances are not captured on the show, where she uses terms like “brainwashed” and “deprogram” to describe ultra-Orthodox life in Monsey in ways that suggest it is more a cult than a personal choice. They say they worry the show describes strictures more typical of, say, the Brooklyn-based Satmar Hasidim, not the less stringent community of which she was part.For example, while the show accurately presents television as frowned upon in Yeshivish circles, they say it doesn’t make clear that many people, including Haart, owned one. (Haart acknowledged on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” that she had a television in her later years in Monsey and said she lied about it to school officials who otherwise would not have admitted her children.)And yes, as Haart explains on the show, some in the community are not crazy about women riding bikes because the pedaling might expose their knees. But the critics said the show does not make clear that women, including Haart, still rode bikes, in modest attire. (Haart posted about her family bike rides on her Instagram account earlier this month.)Though Haart has said she feels she was deprived of an education by a subpar school system, several women said she was a brilliant, top-notch student who could have attended college without any problem, or stigma, had she decided to.“She was very popular, had every opportunity, a leader in the class, and now she’s turned it into some persecution situation,” said Andrea Jaffe, a certified public accountant and former American Express executive who said that for many years she lived across the street from Haart.Haart, left, reaching out to her daughter Batsheva. Haart has said providing her children with a less restricted way of life was one motivation for her decision to leave Monsey.  NetflixMuch of the Netflix show concerns Haart’s relationship with her four children, three of whom retain various ties to Orthodoxy. (Haart is divorced from their father, but has since remarried. Both men appear on the show.) In Monsey, where religious traditions prescribe the patterns of daily life, her candid discussions with the children about her own sexuality, and theirs, run counter to the norm.Feinsod, a mother of four, said she was offended by what she characterized as Haart’s effort in front of a national audience to draw her children away from an observant life.“It’s fine for her to make choices, but for her to try and force the children’s hand in front of an audience of millions of people is disappointing,” she said.Of course, freeing her children from what she describes as the stifling imprint of ultra-Orthodoxy is exactly what Haart embraces as her mission.“I lived in that world and it’s a very small and sad world, a place where women have one purpose in life and that is to have babies and get married,” she tells her 14-year-old son, Aron, in the second episode.She says that, for her, the low-cut tops she favors are not just gestures of style, but emblems of freedom, of a woman controlling her own body and how it is presented.Netflix declined to comment on reactions to its show, which is at least the third it has presented in recent years about Orthodox life. “Unorthodox,” a mini-series, focused on another woman’s flight from her Brooklyn Hasidic community.The Israeli family drama “Shtisel” has been applauded by many in the Orthodox world for its subtlety, rounded characters and humor.Several women who have lived in Monsey or spent considerable time there said that kind of nuance is missing from Haart’s show, which they said gives no sense that some women cannot only avoid misery, but thrive, while maintaining ultra-Orthodox values.“There’s no monolithic Monsey,” Josephs said.Additional reporting by Colin Moynihan. More

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      in Theater

      Neil LaBute Seeks ‘The Answer to Everything’ in Germany

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      The American playwright’s first new play since he parted ways with his theater in 2018 during the #MeToo movement finds a stage far from New York.AUGSBURG, Germany — If all you know about Neil LaBute’s new play “The Answer to Everything” is that it’s an artistic response to #MeToo and “cancel culture,” you might brace yourself for an upsetting evening at the theater.A tightly coiled chamber piece about three women who plot vengeance on the men who’ve wronged them, “The Answer to Everything” is the prolific and polarizing playwright’s first full-length stage work since “How to Fight Loneliness” in 2017. Since then, he’s fallen from grace in the rarefied world of New York theater.LaBute has long been a diagnostician of dark, uncomfortable aspects of human relationships. A number of his best-known plays (several of which he’s adapted and directed for the screen, including “In the Company of Men,”) are unsettling examinations of cruelty that can leave viewers wondering whether LaBute supports or condemns his unsavory characters. Cynicism, viciousness and mercilessness — especially toward his female characters — have been some of the tools of his trade.In recent years, these signature themes and attitudes have come under scrutiny. In 2018, one of New York leading nonprofit theaters, MCC Theater, abruptly ended its 15-year relationship with LaBute. No specific reason was given for the break, but the theater’s executive director told The New York Times, “We’re committed to creating and maintaining a respectful and professional work environment for everyone we work with.” The internet was abuzz with speculation that LaBute’s obsessive depictions of toxic gender dynamics had put him out of step with the contemporary cultural climate.This background helps explain why “The Answer to Everything,” in which female retribution looms large, isn’t premiering at any of the New York theaters where LaBute has worked over the past three decades, but instead in Augsburg, a southern German city that is famous for being the birthplace of Bertolt Brecht.It is unusual, to say the least, for a new play by a leading American playwright to debut abroad and in translation. In an email, LaBute explained why he chose a German theater to premiere his latest work.“There are so many brave artists outside the United States who are willing to table material that might be less politically correct or audience-friendly,” he wrote, “and those are the places that I want to be.”Any fears that LaBute’s new work would be a pity party after his exile from MCC, an evening validating misogyny or an anti-#MeToo manifesto evaporated once the curtain went up on Susanne Maier-Staufen’s sleek hotel set. Not only does the play take its female protagonists seriously, it also offers zero apology for entitled (and crude) male behavior.In the play, the nervous and often chatty banter between the three heroines circles a vengeful pact that binds them to one another.Jan-Pieter FuhrIt’s difficult to talk about “The Answer to Everything” without giving spoilers, but I’ll do my best. LaBute does a deft job of keeping us in the dark for the first half of the evening, as the nervous and often chatty banter between the three heroines circles a central issue — a vengeful pact that binds them to one another — without naming it. Maik Priebe, the director, knows how to sustain the suspense and tension, which are carefully rendered in Frank Heibert’s German version of the script, although the odd moments of comic relief are mostly lost in translation.LaBute has funneled a wealth of influences and rendered them in his own signature style, with rapid-fire and naturalistic overlapping dialogue. The plot’s themes are redolent of Patricia Highsmith and Hitchcock, two masters of suspense not exactly known for their positive portrayals of women. Look more closely, though, and you find traces of other works about implacable women that have rubbed off on LaBute, from ancient Greek tragedy to films like “Diabolique” and “Drowning by Numbers.”LaBute loves corkscrew-like plots and although “The Answer to Everything” can feel like a 100-minute ticking time bomb, it doesn’t detonate as one might expect. In lieu of wild twists, we get a gradual series of painful revelations. (LaBute is going for something entirely different from the explosive force of Emerald Fennell’s film “Promising Young Woman,” another recent drama of female retribution.)One of the most refreshing things about “The Answer to Everything” is how it avoids moralizing. LaBute does not manipulate his characters or audience, and the tone is far from judgmental. We are not explicitly invited to either applaud or condemn the “answer” that this group has settled on in order to remove predatory men from their lives. Instead, we’re asked to examine the spectrum of gray between justice and revenge.There is one critical plot twist that flies in the face of the call to “believe all women,” which I could see making American audiences squirm if the play makes it stateside (there are no concrete plans yet for a U.S. premiere).An unflinching approach to examining bad behavior is nothing new for LaBute, but here he goes to uncommon lengths to make us understand his protagonists’ motivations and weaknesses. The group portrait is sobering and also less dreadful than you might expect.Sieder plays Carmen, the gang’s no-nonsense ringleader. Jan-Pieter FuhrThe actresses play off one another skillfully, though not always with the nuance the script seems to require. With her mix of sang-froid and simmering rage, Katja Sieder is the most impressive of the bunch as Carmen, who is the gang’s no-nonsense ringleader. Ute Fiedler’s conscience-stricken Cindy equivocates and pleads with pathos-laden urgency. Paige, who is often stuck in the middle of the battle, feels the least fleshed out, both as a character and in Elif Esmen’s interpretation.There were moments when this production felt like something of an out-of-town tryout. Judging by the enthusiastic response from an audience full of teenagers and older adults at the weeknight performance I attended, local theatergoers in Augsburg were eager to embrace the play’s conundrums and ambivalences, even if it meant going home with more questions than answers.The Answer to Everything. Directed by Maik Priebe. Staatstheater Augsburg, through March 12, 2022 More

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      in Music

      Dottie Dodgion, a Standout Drummer in More Ways Than One, Dies at 91

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      At a time when a female jazz percussionist was a rarity, she played with Benny Goodman and went on to work with Marian McPartland and other big names.Dottie Dodgion, one of the very few high-profile female drummers in the male-dominated jazz world of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Sept. 17 in a hospice center in Pacific Grove, Calif. She was 91.The cause was a stroke, said her daughter and only immediate survivor, Deborah Dodgion.Ms. Dodgion, who was known for her steady and swinging but unobtrusive approach to the drums, worked for more than 60 years with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Benny Goodman, Marian McPartland and Ruby Braff. She also led her own combos. But she rarely recorded.“She didn’t get the exposure that she might have gotten through recording because of her gender,” said Wayne Enstice, who collaborated with her on her autobiography, “The Lady Swings: Memoirs of a Jazz Drummer” (2021). “She wasn’t taken as seriously as she should have been — not by other musicians, but by people on the business side.”Unlike some drummers, Ms. Dodgion was more concerned with keeping the beat than with calling attention to herself.“There’s no denying that many drummers love the spotlight,” she wrote in her autobiography. “That’s why I sometimes say I’m not a ‘real drummer.’”She rarely took solos, she wrote, and when she did solo her approach “came from being a singer.”“I’d hear the melody inside my head,” she added, “so the rhythms I laid down always followed the song form of whatever tune I played.”She continued to play until she was 90, with her own trio, on Thursday nights at the Inn at Spanish Bay in Pebble Beach, near her home in Pacific Grove — a gig that lasted 14 years. After breaking a shoulder in 2019, she sang while another drummer, Andy Weis, filled in for her, until the coronavirus forced the hotel to shut down temporarily.Ms. Dodgion performing in Delaware Water Gap, Pa., in the 1980s with the pianist John Coates Jr. and the bassist DeWitt Kay. via Dottie Dodgion/University of Illinois Press“She swung hard — and that meant there was a lesson to be heard in watching her play,” Mr. Weis said by phone. “She knew exactly what tempo would swing the hardest.”The celebrated jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington recalled that she had begun playing drums at 7 and first saw Ms. Dodgion about two years later at a women’s jazz festival. As far as Ms. Carrington knew at the time, Ms. Dodgion was the only female drummer around.“She always had a beautiful time feel, which is the most important part of being a drummer,” Ms. Carrington said in a phone interview. “She was never the fanciest, trickiest drummer in the world who dazzled with solos, but she really captured the essence of being a drummer.”Dorothy Rosalie Giaimo was born on Sept. 23, 1929, in Brea, Calif. Her father, Charles, was a drummer. Her mother, Ada (Tipton) Giaimo, aspired to be a dancer but became a waitress after her husband left the family when Dottie was 2.One day, when she was 5, her father stopped by her grandparents’ house in Los Angeles, where she was living, and, as she said, “kidnapped” her, taking her on the road for two years to the hotels, road houses and strip joints where he led a band. Absorbing the sounds and rhythms of her father’s drumming was her introduction to show business, albeit against her will. She was 7 when she returned to her mother, who had remarried.Her stepfather, a chicken farmer, raped Dottie when she was 10; he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After she and her mother moved to Berkeley, Calif., Dottie found peace in her weekend bus trips to San Francisco to see her father’s band at a strip club, Streets of Paris.“His excellent time attracted all the best strippers,” she wrote.As a teenager, she sang at private parties and weddings, which led to work in the mid-1940s with bands led by the jazz guitarist Nick Esposito and the renowned bassist Charles Mingus. Singing eventually gave way to drumming, which she picked up by listening to her father, and through the 1950s she played in clubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nevada. For a time, she was the house drummer at Jimbo’s Bop City in San Francisco.When the pianist Marian McPartland formed an all-female band in 1977, Ms. Dodgion was her drummer. From left, Mary Osborne, Vi Redd, Ms. Dodgion, Ms. McPartland and Lynn Milano.Marian McPartlandMeeting the bassist Eugene Wright, who would become an integral part of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, had a transformative effect on how she viewed her role in a band.“Eugene coached me on the nuances of playing in a rhythm section,” she wrote, “including the intangible insides on how to fit with the piano and the bass.”Ms. Dodgion’s first marriage, to Robert Bennett, was annulled; her marriages to Monty Budwig, a bassist, and Jerry Dodgion, a saxophonist, ended in divorce.With Mr. Dodgion, who was in Benny Goodman’s band, Ms. Dodgion moved to Manhattan in 1961. On their first day there, the band rehearsed for an engagement at Basin Street East. Ms. Dodgion dropped her husband off; when she returned at the end of the rehearsal, she was surprised when Goodman, who was looking for a new drummer, asked her to sit in with the band.“I thought it was just a jam session,” she told The New York Times in 1972. “Benny’d call out a number — ‘Gotta Be This or That’ — and I’d start looking for the music. But he’d say, ‘Don’t open the book.’ Every tune, it was the same — ‘Don’t open the book.’ At the end of the rehearsal, Benny said: ‘See you tonight, Jerry. You, too, Dottie.’ That was how I found out I was going to play with the band.”Ten days into the engagement at the club, Goodman forgot to introduce her when he name-checked some members of his 10-piece band. When the crowd demanded that he announce her name, he relented, and she received a standing ovation. But as she left the bandstand, she later recalled, Goodman’s manager whispered “’Bye” in her ear, indicating that she was being fired for getting more applause than her boss.Ms. Dodgion was not out of work for long. She quickly got a job with Tony Bennett at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Over the next 40 years, she played with Marian McPartland, Ruby Braff, Zoot Sims, Wild Bill Davison, Joe Venuti and others.“She could adapt from swing to bop, to Latin rhythms, all without calling attention to herself,” Mr. Enstice said. “She could fit in with anyone.”Ms. Dodgion worked with Ms. McPartland in 1964 and again 13 years later, when Ms. McPartland led an all-female band.“Dorothy had a natural sense of swing,” Ms. McPartland told The Sacramento Bee in 1989. “She keeps steady time and she swings — those are the most important things for a good drummer.” More