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      in Movies

      ‘In Our Mothers’ Gardens’ Review: Creating Space for Black Women

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      The Netflix documentary sets out to show how maternal lineages have shaped generations of Black women.In the meditative documentary “In Our Mothers’ Gardens” (streaming on Netflix), the stories could warm a room in any season. Opening with a quote from Alice Walker, whose book “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” inspired the film’s title, the documentary sets out to show how Black maternal lineages have shaped the idea of Black womanhood.The director Shantrelle P. Lewis, who also appears in the film as a subject, weaves together interviews with Black women from a variety of backgrounds, including the activist Tarana Burke, the entrepreneur Latham Thomas and Professor Brittney Cooper, the author of “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.” The interviewees offer anecdotes about their mothers and grandmothers, and reflect on how the relationships nourished them. In one scene, Burke recalls a childhood experience of being slapped by a stranger for playing in the supermarket. When Burke’s grandmother heard what happened, she smashed the store’s window with a pipe.Lewis pairs the stories with a lovely collage aesthetic, layering the interviews with home videos, photographs and music. Sometimes, she even frames her subjects within collages of flowers, antique curios and archival images.As a director, Lewis is admirably present. She seems to have gained the trust of her interview subjects, and has taken care to create a space for openness. But as the women explore spirituality, trauma and resilience, an echo effect emerges. Sometimes that echo can sound like repetition. The film’s division into rough thematic chapters reinforces redundancies; some ideas within the “healing” segment could have fit within “radical self-care,” and vice versa. Yet such hiccups ultimately do not detract from the movie’s grace — nor from its showcase of Lewis’s natural gifts as a communicator and as an artist.In Our Mothers’ GardensNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Theater

      With Her Final Album, Rebecca Luker Bids a Fond Farewell

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      The much-loved Broadway soprano, who died in December, had one more miracle up her sleeve.The last solo number on “All the Girls,” the new duo album from the sopranos Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert, is a piece of specialty material for Luker called “Not Funny.”It’s funny.In the song, by Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid, Luker twits her image as a “spoonful of saccharine” but also punctures it. The gist is that lower-voiced belters get all the laugh lines, possibly because it’s so “hard to land a joke up here” — in the soprano stratosphere. Playing Laurey in “Oklahoma!,” Luker complains, “I’ll sing my ass off, but Ado Annie steals the show.” Then she disproves it by ripping a thrilling high C.Luker was 58 when she last performed the number live, during a concert with Wilfert at Merkin Hall in Manhattan. That was in September 2019, 15 months before she died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease.As yet undiagnosed that night, she had some trouble climbing onto the de rigueur stool, but she sounded as beautiful as ever, clearly enjoying the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with someone who was in fact as close as a sister. They met, Wilfert recalls, at a reading in 2005; when Wilfert said “I’m going to the bathroom,” Luker said, “I’m going too” and they sat “in adjacent johns,” yakking.Luker enjoyed the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with Sally Wilfert, who was as close as a sister. David AndrakoDespite Luker’s unshakable ingénue rep — built on Broadway roles including Lily in “The Secret Garden” (1991), Magnolia in “Show Boat” (1994), Maria in “The Sound of Music” (1998) and Marian in “The Music Man” (2000) — she was by the time of the Merkin Hall concert a sophisticated Broadway veteran and a complex actor, even taking over the crushing role of Helen in “Fun Home” in 2016. Though her voice remained infallibly lustrous, with classical size and control yet zero operatic fussiness, it was her intelligence in deploying it that kept her in demand well past the industry sell-by date for most stars of that repertoire.Nor did her intelligence let up as “All the Girls” was put together. Her husband, the Broadway performer Danny Burstein, says her notes for the producers were “meticulous” despite her suffering. Tommy Krasker, the head of PS Classics, her longtime label, says she listened to mixes with the “clarity of mind and healthy self-criticism” she’d always displayed in their 20 years of working together. When she thought a joke in “Not Funny” wasn’t landing as well as it might, she asked that the piano part, performed by her music director, Joseph Thalken, be rerecorded. The joke now lands like a gymnast after a handspring.What’s remarkable about this is not only that Luker’s health was quickly deteriorating, but that such a fond, full-smile, no-dud album got produced at all, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. How it happened is the kind of story that Luker, whose death came just two days before the digital release of “All the Girls” on Christmas — and in whose honor an A.L.S. fund-raising concert entitled “Becca” will be streamed on Tuesday — would have loved for its unlikeliness and bittersweet ending.Recording dates had been set for March 2020. The lockdown delayed that plan, but by the time PS Classics could safely book a studio again, in August, Luker could no longer sing. Her final performances, in “An Evening With Sheldon Harnick … and Friends” at the York Theater in March and in a three-song concert streamed from home in June, had been achieved with mounting difficulty as she gripped the arms on her wheelchair to make the notes emerge. By autumn she could not make them at all.Though it might have been sensible to abandon the album at that point, Krasker and the producer Bart Migal decided to try an experiment, attempting what Krasker calls “the first studio album made without ever stepping in the studio.” Thalken, the music director, was able to weave new orchestrations around surprisingly good recordings of the Merkin Hall rehearsal and concert; musicians recorded the new parts in their homes; the producers mixed the result; and by some miracle what emerged sounded pristine.Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. Genevieve Rafter KeddyBut not just pristine: rich and compelling. Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices when singing separately, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. (They have the same voice teacher.) Listening to playbacks, even they could not always figure out who was who. In duets like “You Are My Best Friend” (the charming opener) and “Isn’t It Better?” (a Kander and Ebb torch song here turned into an anthem of sisterly support) something sublime happens as the two voices, blending so closely, seem to multiply even as they merge.That effect is at its height in the album’s finale, an unexpected pairing of the Patty Griffin song “Be Careful” with “Dear Theodosia,” a number sung by Aaron Burr to his infant daughter in “Hamilton.” As performed by Luker and Wilfert, “Theodosia” feels like a promise from today’s women to their spiritual daughters to leave them a safer world. “Be Careful,” whose lyric provides “All the Girls” with its title, is wrenchingly ambivalent, celebrating women’s strength but also their fragility — and ending, in this arrangement, on a daringly unresolved harmony.Which feels only right. Strong as the album is — five poetry settings by Thalken are especially lovely — it inevitably comes wrapped in a shroud of loss. I don’t mean just the loss of Luker herself. Her kind of voice (and Wilfert’s) is gradually being squeezed out of musical theater, as classically trained sopranos give way to the kind described so saucily in “Not Funny,” which Kelli O’Hara will sing at Tuesday’s concert. Most new works are written for belters.The greater loss is of course personal. Many of us, mourning a loved one, are grateful for any scrap of their voice that might be preserved in a phone message or video. That’s not Burstein’s situation. He has lots of Luker’s albums to listen to. The problem is that though they are comforting they are also devastating — especially, on “All the Girls,” that final medley, with its aching Griffin lyric: “Be careful how you bend me/Be careful how you send me/Be careful how you end me.”In any case, the albums are what Luker gave us, not him. More than her public voice, what Burstein misses most after 20 years of marriage is her private voice: the one he heard in car rides spent harmonizing together to ’70s hits on the radio.“Now it’s just me and the radio,” he says.By comparison, the rest of us are lucky. Listening to “All the Girls,” in some ways Luker’s funniest and wisest album, we get to keep her singing next to us forever.Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert“All the Girls”(PS Classics)Becca: A Night of Stories and Song in Memory of Rebecca LukerMay 4 at 7:30 p.m.momenthouse.com/targetals More

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      in Music

      The Face of Solo Guitar Is Changing. It’s About Time.

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      Since the heyday of John Fahey, the genre has been seen as the province of white men. A new generation of diverse players is rapidly changing that.Before Yasmin Williams became a teenager, she found her perfect sport: “Guitar Hero,” the dizzying video game where aging rock staples enjoyed an unlikely second life through players wielding plastic controllers fashioned after vintage Gibsons.Williams’s parents purchased the game for her two older brothers, but the suburban D.C. family soon realized she was the household champion. “They would try to beat me,” Williams said on a recent afternoon in the sunroom of her grandmother Marsha’s home, near where she grew up. “But they couldn’t.”More than competition, “Guitar Hero” represented a revelation for Williams. Though she was often the only Black student in her public-school classes, she didn’t know the Beatles, let alone heavy metal, existed before the game. She cut her teeth on her father’s vintage go-go tapes and her brothers’ hip-hop CDs. Williams loved the clarinet, but she wondered if she could make more exciting music if she had an ax like her onscreen idols.“That guitar was the first thing I ever really begged for,” Williams said, and she received a red electric Epiphone SG. “Once I got it, I never played the game that much. The guitar took up all my time.”More than a decade later, Williams, 25, is one of the country’s most imaginative young solo guitarists. Released in January, her second album, “Urban Driftwood,” represents a clear break with the form’s stoic, folk-rooted mores. On her grandmother’s porch, she laid a gleaming acoustic guitar across her jean shorts and hammered out rhythms with her wrist while picking iridescent melodies with her fingers. Wearing a collared cotton shirt and matching bow tie so bright they conjured an exploded dashiki, she reached for a West African kora and beamed. The notes from its 21 strings floated like bird song.“Music should be enjoyable — at the end of the day, that’s what I really care about,” she said. “I want it to be something you can listen to, remember, hum.”Williams’s radiant sound and adventitious origins have made her a key figure in a diverse dawn for the solo guitar. Long dominated by much-mythologized white men like John Fahey, the form’s demographic is slowly broadening to include those who have often been omitted, including women, nonbinary instrumentalists and people of color. These musicians are paying little mind to the traditional godheads. They are, instead, expanding the fundamental influences within solo guitar, incorporating idioms sometimes deemed verboten in what was once a homogenized scene.These players are empowered by online access to fresh inspirations, compelled by current debates about equity and inclusivity and enabled by digital avenues of distribution that circumvent longtime gatekeepers. As this music moves beyond the realm of obscure collectors, its audience and attention have grown, prompted by the possibilities of players who sound as different as they look.“I always saw music as this democratic, horizontal realm, but 99.9 percent of the guitarists I saw were white dudes,” said Tashi Dorji.Clark Hodgin for The New York Times“It’s mostly young men who have been the market and the marketplace,” the Portland guitarist Marisa Anderson said recently. “But I am not going to spend my days focusing on masculinity and patriarchy. I am going to carry on, doing what I know how to do.”This enclave is teeming with new faces and novel ideas. In the Southern Appalachians, Sarah Louise uses her 12-string to shape mystical paeans to salamanders, floods and frogs. In Brooklyn, Kaki King — for two decades, one of the few popular solo guitarists who wasn’t a man — taps and slaps strings to make music as ornate as a healing crystal. In Madrid, Conrado Isasa embeds his acoustic hymns within romantic electronic hazes.Even avowed Fahey acolyte Gwenifer Raymond is compelled by the change. “My entire bloody career has been founded by dudes,” she said, guffawing in her apartment in England. “Representation matters — that’s just true. The music can only get more interesting.”SINCE THE START of Fahey’s record label, Takoma, in 1959, the history of solo guitar has been astonishingly pale.Fahey was the patriarch for a cadre of stylists — Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, Sandy Bull — who assimilated the exotic-to-them styles of the Deep South, India and Africa into discursive instrumentals. Takoma released some albums by Black artists, and Fahey helped revive the careers of forgotten blues artists like Bukka White.But his career often mirrored that of Elvis in its unabashed exploitation of music that Black and rural people made as a way of life. A child of the suburbs, Fahey attributed portions of his first album to Blind Joe Death, as though from the Delta himself. He spun tall tales about learning the blues from a Black man he christened with a racial slur. And he brandished the marketing tag American Primitive, suggesting the folk styles he lifted were compelling if not sophisticated. It is the “noble savage” of acoustic guitar.Decades later, modern solo guitar labels often linger in such shadows. Since 2005, the label Tompkins Square has surveyed the landscape with an ongoing series of compilations titled “Imaginational Anthem”; released between 2005 and 2012, the first five volumes spotlighted less than 10 women or people of color despite featuring 60 players. (Recent editions have been decidedly more inclusive.) After almost three dozen titles, VDSQ has released just four titles not made by white men; the label’s owner Steve Lowenthal said that, after not receiving demos from women or people of color for half a decade, he’s finally getting them.“I’m so used to white men, it’s like wallpaper,” Raymond said. “When you do encounter another woman playing guitar like this, you want to hang out.”Before the modern music market existed, however, the guitar was far more inclusive. In 18th-century Europe, it was one of the few instruments deemed acceptable for women. In the United States near the end of the 19th century, the diminutive parlor guitar became a necessity for women entertaining guests. Born around then in North Carolina, Elizabeth Cotten — a Black woman who literally turned the guitar upside down — helped pioneer the slowly loping style that became Fahey’s calling card. A recent compendium in the globe-trotting series “The Secret Museum of Mankind” even juxtaposes century-old recordings from India, Italy, Greece and Ghana, reiterating how many traditions have shaped the guitar’s development.Tashi Dorji, however, knew nothing about this pan-cultural pedigree. Raised in Bhutan, the small Himalayan nation landlocked by China and India, he understood the instrument as the domain of “endless English and American men,” like Eric Clapton and Eddie Van Halen. Those were the licks he started to learn on the nylon-string guitar his mother purchased from a Swiss expatriate.After Dorji moved to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains in 2000 to attend college, he immersed himself in radical politics and bellicose metal. When he learned about free improvisation, he felt like he’d found an outlet for expressing these nascent ideals. He was stunned to discover, though, that an idiom rooted in rejecting conventions was dominated by people who resembled elected officials.“I always saw music as this democratic, horizontal realm, but 99.9 percent of the guitarists I saw were white dudes,” Dorji said from his home outside of Asheville, where he lives in a mountainside cluster of artists and activists.In his music, Dorji has found his rebellion; it grabs at melodic or rhythmic fragments only to grind them into dust. His 2020 debut for Drag City Records, “Stateless,” is a series of suites for improvised acoustic guitar that culminates with “Now,” a pair of frantic improvisations that steadily stabilize, as though Dorji has found his utopia. Released in September, it struck a clear chord during a season of upheaval, selling out of its first edition in less than a month.“I wanted to use the guitar to interrogate structures of oppression,” Dorji said. “I forced myself to think of it as an act of radical, anarchic expression.”“I don’t want my music to be limited by being the ‘Black guitarist,’ but somebody had to start doing something,” Williams said. “With all the horrible stuff in 2020, it seemed like it was time.”Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesRachika Nayar also found herself clutching a guitar while surrounded by a sea of whiteness. Raised by two Penn State professors who moved to the United States from India, Nayar was “pretty isolated, the only brown kid in a small town.” When she was 11, she picked up the guitar and spent hours in her bedroom every day, practice taking the place of solitary hobbies like whittling and rock collecting.She loved emo’s empathy and punk’s power, plus the “School of Rock” soundtrack. The imagination of jazz, though, spoke to her as a manifestation of oppressed individuality. She marveled at the way the self-taught guitarist Wes Montgomery used his thumb instead of a pick to create a distinct tone. “I realized how generative it is to lean into your idiosyncrasies,” Nayar said.Nayar released her first album, “Our Hands Against the Dusk,” in March. She wrote many of its eight instrumentals by finding a guitar phrase she liked, electronically mutating it and pitting the warped sound against the original. It feels as though the instrument is searching for its essence.When Nayar was a kid, the gadgetry to make such music might have been prohibitively expensive. Now, as a trans Indian American person, Nayar equates the ability to shape her music however she sees fit to her own self-discovery.“It’s a feeling of something rising up inside of me,” she said. “That’s a moment queer people can relate to, when you realize you don’t have to live a certain way.”For Anderson, the Portland musician, exploring the guitar mines a related sensation. She started learning classical guitar when she was 10, eventually gaining what she called an “athletic fluidity.” At 50, Anderson still loves practicing. But she didn’t release her solo debut until she was in her late 30s, so she’d abandoned any impulse to impress.“There is a flash of recognition, and then it is gone,” Anderson said, explaining how an emotionally resonant moment of music might spawn a piece. “It feels like something locking into place, like a cog in a wheel. I’ll obsessively try to get back to that place, where that sound made almost religious sense.”First reluctant to make records, Anderson realized that any label interested in her music would be small, with modest profits and demands. That would allow for “a healthy separation between my music and the marketplace,” she said, noting that her elliptical songs begin as private reflections.“I am not hiding from myself when I am playing alone at home,” Anderson said. “What comes, comes.”IN ENGLAND, RAYMOND does not shy from the impact Fahey had on her life.As a kid in Wales, she started writing blues instrumentals after Nirvana led her to Lead Belly. When her guitar teacher handed her a Fahey LP, she felt validated. Released on Tompkins Square, her 2020 album, “Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain,” is one of the most bracing recent bits of Fahey reappraisal, his grace supercharged by her punk-rock past. “He is almost, by definition, my mean uncle figure,” Raymond said.Raymond is also a video game programmer with a doctorate in astrophysics, so she is accustomed to fields dominated by men. But their historic grip on power is glacially loosening in all these realms, guitar included.“The fear of traditional roles is disappearing,” she said. “This is one effect.”Williams is beginning to accept her role in that deliberate revolution. At the start of her career, she ignored how different she looked from fellow artists and her audience. But she wrote and recorded much of “Urban Driftwood” amid Covid-19 lockdowns, while protests against racial violence roiled. After Williams marched in Washington last summer, she wrote the album’s finale, “After the Storm.” Darkness lingers at its edges, but the sun slinks through the center in the form of Williams’ chiming strings. The moment of respite recognizes how much work remains.“I don’t want my music to be limited by being the ‘Black guitarist,’ but somebody had to start doing something,” she said. “With all the horrible stuff in 2020, it seemed like it was time.”Since Williams released “Urban Driftwood,” nearly every interviewer has asked about Fahey’s formative influence. She proudly tells them she learned about him only recently and she has no guitar heroes. The guitarists she watched most as a kid played in the band of D.C. go-go god Chuck Brown, or maybe Jimi Hendrix.Williams picked up one of her 11 guitars — a harp guitar, where bass strings poke diagonally from the guitar’s small body. She put it on her lap and flew through a flurry of heavenly notes, each low throb lingering as her fingers licked the high strings. It wasn’t the proper technique, she explained, but it worked.“This is why I love the guitar,” she said, looking up to smile. “You can just do whatever you want.” More

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      in Theater

      Rediscovering France’s Early Female Playwrights

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      A growing movement within French theater is reclaiming the work of forgotten female artists, and reviving a lost concept: le matrimoine.PARIS — How many women had professional careers as playwrights in prerevolutionary France, between the 16th and 18th centuries? Go on, hazard a guess.The answer, according to recent scholarship, is around 150. Yet if you guessed the number was close to zero, you’re not alone. For decades, the default assumption has been that deep-seated inequality prevented women from writing professionally until the 20th century.Now a growing movement within French theater is reclaiming the work of forgotten female artists, and reviving a lost concept along the way: le matrimoine. Matrimoine is the feminine equivalent of patrimoine — translated as patrimony, or what is inherited from male ancestors. In French, however, patrimoine is also the catchall term to describe cultural heritage. By way of matrimoine, artists and academics are pushing for the belated recognition of women’s contribution to art history, and the return of their plays to the stage.Matrimoine is no neologism. “The word was used in the Middle Ages but has been erased,” said the scholar and stage director Aurore Evain. “Patrimoine and matrimoine once coexisted, yet at the end of the day all we were left with was matrimonial agencies.”When Dr. Evain started researching prerevolutionary female authors, around 2000, she quickly realized that French academics were behind their American peers. In the early 1990s, Perry Gethner, a professor of French at Oklahoma State University, had already translated plays by Françoise Pascal, Catherine Bernard and other 17th- and 18th-century women into English, and published them.At home, on the other hand, the idea that female colleagues of Molière had been overlooked collided with entrenched narratives. The classical French repertoire revolves around a trinity of male playwrights — Molière, Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille — whose works are taught in schools and widely seen as models of national literary genius.Yet all three men crossed paths with acclaimed female peers. “Le Favori” (“The Male Favorite”), a verse tragicomedy written in 1665 by Madame de Villedieu, was performed by Molière’s own company before the king at Versailles. When Dr. Evain staged it again in 2015, over three centuries after it was last performed, the French playwright and director Carole Thibaut was struck by the similarities between “Le Favori,” which revolves around a courtier who challenges the hypocrisy of royal favor, and Molière’s “Misanthrope,” written the next year.A portrait of Madame de Villedieu (1640-1683).The British Museum“I love Molière, but there are two scenes that are basically plagiarism,” Thibaut said in a phone interview. “He borrowed heavily from ‘Le Favori.’”Before the French Revolution, most female playwrights were upper-class single women who needed to earn a living. In the 19th century, their numbers kept growing: Scholars have found at least 350 women who were paid for their writing, from the revolutionary activist Olympe de Gouges to Delphine de Girardin, both of whom had plays in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française. Many of them hosted literary salons, starting with Germaine de Staël; some, like George Sand, also wrote under a pseudonym to get around gender-based prejudice.Yet not a single one of these women has a meaningful presence on the French stage today. Until the late 2000s, even feminist writers knew nothing of their work. The first volume of a French anthology of prerevolutionary female playwrights (edited by Dr. Evain, Gethner and the New York University professor Henriette Goldwyn) wasn’t released until 2007.When Thibaut, who is now at the helm of a National Dramatic Center in the city of Montluçon, first heard Dr. Evain speak at a conference two years later, the notion of matrimoine came as a revelation. “I fell apart. I started crying,” she said. “She taught me that instead of being at the dawn of a feminist awakening, we were part of a cycle, which sees women emerge and then be erased.”That historical insight coincided with a renewed focus on gender inequality in French theater, in the wake of two government audits. Until 2006, none of the five national French theaters had ever had a female director. There has been some progress since: While only 7 percent of national and regional dramatic centers, the next tier of public institutions, were led by women in 2006, the proportion was 27 percent in 2019. Still, in March, an open letter published in the French newspaper Libération complained about the lack of women being appointed to top theater jobs since the start of the pandemic.From 2009 onward, Thibaut, Dr. Evain and other activists joined forces through an association, known as HF, to push for change, and matrimoine became one of their rallying calls. In 2013, Dr. Evain launched the annual “Days of the Matrimoine,” a festival that runs alongside the “Days of the Patrimoine,” a national celebration of France’s cultural heritage.That visibility is now affecting younger generations of scholars and artists, like Julie Rossello Rochet, a playwright who completed a doctoral dissertation last year on her 19th-century predecessors. In a phone interview, she said that studying their work had helped her process the unease she felt as a young writer: “I kept hearing, ‘Oh, it’s so rare, a woman who writes for the stage.’ Actually, it isn’t.”A performance of  Madame Ulrich’s “La Folle Enchère” (“The Mad Bid”) directed by Aurore Evain. The play had its premiere in 1690 at the Comédie-Française.Carmen MariscalThe scholars interviewed agreed that women’s plays offer a different perspective from that of male playwrights — a female gaze, so to speak, shaped by the authors’ life experiences. “They promoted women’s intelligence,” Dr. Rossello Rochet said.“They created strong female characters, who choose politics over love, as well as male characters who choose love,” said Dr. Evain, who also pointed to the attention they paid to the role of fathers.The two prerevolutionary plays Dr. Evain has directed since 2015 speak to that originality. In addition to “Le Favori,” she brought back Madame Ulrich’s “La Folle Enchère” (“The Mad Bid”), a comedy that had its premiere in 1690 at the Comédie-Française. The plot cleverly toys with gendered expectations: In it, an older woman endeavors to marry a younger man, who is himself a woman in disguise. “It’s an early queer play, in which everything is upside down,” Dr. Evain said. “Order is never restored: The leading lady is in drag until the end.”While a handful of smaller theaters, like the Ferme de Bel Ebat in Guyancourt, have welcomed productions like “La Folle Enchère,” persuading programmers to invest in the matrimoine remains a challenge. The Comédie-Française, where multiple women have presented their work over the centuries, has yet to revive a single one of these plays.In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde in 2017, the troupe’s director, Eric Ruf, said he was “working on it,” but added that it would be hard to sell main-stage tickets for a “little-known” playwright. (A spokeswoman for the Comédie-Française declined to say whether there were plans to bring back plays by women in future seasons.)Yet feminists believe that unless these early women’s plays are performed and taught, history may yet repeat itself. “If we ignore our matrimoine, if we don’t change the way we think about our culture, the women who came after us may not leave a legacy, either,” Thibaut said.In the eyes of Dr. Rossello Rochet, the benefits are obvious for young playwrights. “Having a history has given me deeper roots,” she said. “It has made me feel stronger.” More

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      in Movies

      Chloé Zhao Wins Oscar for Best Direct of 'Nomadland'

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      Chloé Zhao on Sunday became the first woman of color, first Chinese woman and second woman ever to win the Oscar for directing, capping off a historically impressive run of honors she has amassed this awards season for her work on the drama “Nomadland.”In accepting the award, Zhao recalled a phrase she had learned as a child that she said translated from Mandarin to “people at birth are inherently good.” “I have always found goodness in the people I met everywhere I went in the world,” she said. “So this is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves. And to hold on to the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that. And this is for you, you inspire me to keep going.”This year’s Oscars marked the first time in its history that more than one female filmmaker was nominated for the best director in a single year. In addition to Zhao, Emerald Fennell scored a nomination for “Promising Young Woman.”Before this year, only five female filmmakers had been recognized in the director category. In 2010, Kathryn Bigelow became the first and only woman to be named best director until Zhao won the category on Sunday.Earlier in the awards season, Zhao took home the top directing prize at the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards and the Directors Guild Awards and she has won similar accolades from several other groups.“Nomadland” has also garnered wide praise and several honors. The movie tells the story of a widow who travels the country in a van and joins the itinerant work force while connecting with other Americans she meets along the way. Zhao adapted the movie from Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book of the same name and used several nonprofessionals in the cast, including people featured in Bruder’s book.Zhao, who adapted and helped produce “Nomadland,” was nominated for four Oscars in all: directing, adapted screenplay (which she lost to Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller of “The Father”), editing and best picture. More

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      in Music

      Past Students Say Professor of Rock ’n’ Roll Sexually Harassed Them

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      Six former University of Michigan students have filed legal papers accusing a former lecturer of sexually harassing them and the school of not doing enough to protect them.During 16 years teaching at the University of Michigan, Bruce Conforth stocked his lectures with tales from a life filled with boldfaced names: He had rubbed elbows with Bob Dylan, played music alongside B.B. King, apprenticed for the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning and befriended the poet Allen Ginsberg.Students clamored to enroll in his courses on blues music and the American counterculture, later raving about how he had changed their lives.A musician, scholar and founding curator of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Mr. Conforth was a riveting lecturer who, in his trademark black vest and jeans, could discuss everything from Buddhism to psychedelics, and who, in 2012, was chosen teacher of the year by students.“There was almost a celebrity-like aura around him,” said Amelia Brown, who took a Conforth class called “Beatniks, Hippies and Punks” in 2016. “It wasn’t a normal class. He would go on these long tangents about life and spirituality.”But there was a dark side to Mr. Conforth, according to Ms. Brown and other women who said the teacher used his charisma and, sometimes, Svengali-like manipulation to sexually harass his students.Six of the former Michigan students have filed court papers saying they plan to sue the school, asserting it failed to protect them from sexual harassment.  Erin Kirkland for The New York TimesIn 2008, one recent graduate complained to the university that Mr. Conforth, a lecturer in the American Culture Department, had propositioned her when she was a student. The university put him on formal notice but quietly resolved the complaint. Two more women came forward, though, in 2016, to report that Mr. Conforth had worked to engage them in sexual relationships when they were his students, and, in the midst of the university’s investigation, he agreed to quietly leave his faculty position.Now six former Michigan undergraduates — the three women who previously complained and three others — have filed court papers announcing their intention to sue him and the university, asserting he engaged in a litany of sexual misconduct and the school failed to protect them.“He should have been fired,” said Isabelle Brourman, one of the women. “But they allowed him to thrive. They allowed him to win awards.”Ms. Brourman says, according to the court papers, that Mr. Conforth pressured her into a series of sexual encounters, some of them in his campus office, and later, after she had graduated, raped her in his Ann Arbor apartment.A second former student, Ms. Brown, said she was pressured into a sexual encounter with Mr. Conforth after he told her he had feelings for her and pursued her for several weeks. A third woman said he aggressively kissed her. The other plaintiffs say Mr. Conforth propositioned them to have sexual relationships, at times sending them sexually-charged messages or emails and persisting even after they said no. One woman said he gave her a raccoon penis, suggesting it was a talisman.Mr. Conforth declined to discuss the accusations. “I’ve tried to move on with my life,” he said in a brief phone conversation. “This is a past issue.”The university said it handled the 2008 complaint against Mr. Conforth appropriately and set firm restrictions on his behavior. When the subsequent complaints came in, it said it took swift action to investigate and that Mr. Conforth would have faced dismissal proceedings if he hadn’t agreed to retire in early 2017.“You will note in the separation agreement that the university took immediate and lasting action to assure that Mr. Conforth would not be in any further contact with U-M students, even after his employment ended,” a university spokesman said.Sexual misconduct allegations at universities across the country have sparked calls for policies that hold faculty and student offenders accountable. Last year, Michigan fired David Daniels, an opera star and voice professor, after he and his husband were charged with sexually assaulting a singer.Also last year, the university reached a $9.25 million settlement with women who accused Martin Philbert, then the school’s provost, of sexual harassment.The university said it is constantly working to improve its sexual misconduct policies in a statement that cited a number of changes it has made in recent years.Mr. Conforth arrived at Michigan in 2001 with a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Indiana University and a résumé that included his work as the founding curator with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which he left in 1993.Since leaving Michigan, Mr. Conforth, 70, has co-written an award-winning biography of the blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson and helped narrate a Netflix documentary about the musician.While at Michigan, Mr. Conforth was so popular that students chose him as the winner of the “Golden Apple” teaching award in 2012.But four years earlier, Katherine McMahan, a recent university graduate, had told the school about a disturbing incident the previous fall. Ms. McMahan, then 22, said she had attended a blues concert connected to Mr. Conforth’s course and, at a bar after the concert, she said he cornered her outside the bathroom, put his hand around her waist, pulled her closer to him and asked her to come home with him to sleep over. She said she declined but that he persisted until she pushed him away. (Ms. McMahan is a New York Times employee who works outside the newsroom.)Katherine McMahan, left, and Isabelle Brourman, both accuse their former teacher, Bruce Conforth, of sexual misconduct.Kholood Eid for The New York TimesMs. McMahan later received an email from a Michigan official that said the university was taking steps that “it feels are likely to deter future behavior of this nature towards students.” University records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that after McMahan’s complaint, the school had Mr. Conforth sign a “Last Chance” agreement, which stipulated requirements he would need to fulfill to avoid termination.Other former students recount similar experiences, though they did not report them to the university. Cassie McQuater said that in 2007, when she was 20, Mr. Conforth, who was not her teacher and whom she had met only briefly, began sending her emails, declaring his love. In one, she said, he included an erotic drawing of a man and a woman with her name at the bottom. When she eventually agreed to get dinner with him, he asked her to return home with him; she declined.Lauren Lambert, who said she plans to join the intended lawsuit, said that starting in 2011, while she was his student and afterward, Mr. Conforth sent her sexually charged messages, saying he had fantasies about her.Two women said that as part of the effort to engage with them sexually, Mr. Conforth had employed the ruse of suggesting he was a member of the so-called “Order of the Illuminati,” a secret society whose mysteries were popularized in Dan Brown’s novel “Angels & Demons.” The women, Ms. Brourman and her friend, Maya Crosman, said they believed he was responsible for emails they received, purportedly from Illuminati leadership, that recommended they engage in relationships with Mr. Conforth, whom the emails called the “Chosen One.”Ms. Crosman kept a copy of one of the emails — sent from an email address designed to be anonymous — in which a person who identified themselves as Grandmaster Setis recommends she return the “intensely profound love” that Mr. Conforth had for her.The women said they thought Mr. Conforth had the potential to be a kind of spiritual and artistic mentor, but then things grew strange. In legal papers filed in a Michigan court, Ms. Brourman said Mr. Conforth invited them to an arboretum on campus where he engaged in a mysterious ritual that involved cutting off pieces of their hair and giving Ms. Brourman a series of objects, including the raccoon penis, seeds and some kind of medallion. She was warned to keep them with her, or there would be “repercussions,” the court papers said.Both women said they received what appeared to be homemade horoscopes in which it was predicted they were romantically compatible with Mr. Conforth.Ms. Crosman said Mr. Conforth inundated her with messages online, declaring his love. One included a Pablo Neruda poem that said, “I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.” At the end of the semester, she said he forcibly kissed her and stuck his tongue in her mouth during a visit to his office.The two women said they feared reporting their encounters to the university at the time.“We were trying to protect ourselves in ways where we didn’t have to insult him, we didn’t have to fight him,” Ms. Crosman said.Maya Crosman, left, and Cassie McQuater, said that Mr. Conforth inundated them with messages, declaring his love. Ms. Crosman said he aggressively kissed her.Joyce Kim for The New York TimesThe court papers say Brourman felt intimidated by the strange emails she received, including ones that directed her to “service” Mr. Conforth. In 2014, she said they had a sexual encounter in his office on campus. After that encounter, Ms. Brourman and Mr. Conforth met regularly for “spiritual lessons” that required sex beforehand, the papers said. Ms. Brourman said in an interview that at the time, she was confused and thought she might have feelings for Mr. Conforth, but in retrospect, she said she recognizes that she was being manipulated.In fall 2017, after she had graduated, Ms. Brourman said in court papers that Mr. Conforth raped her at his apartment in Ann Arbor. She did not report it, she said, because she feared retaliation, but in February filed a complaint with the police.The two women whose complaints played a role in Mr. Conforth’s departure from Michigan approached the university after learning about each other’s accounts. Shaina Mahler had been 22 in 2014 when she said Mr. Conforth, her favorite teacher, began sending her messages on Facebook. She was flattered at first, but then the messages escalated into expressions of how attracted he was to her.When Ms. Mahler told him that she was starting to feel “confused and anxious” about his messages, Mr. Conforth apologized and said they could be friends, writing, “Please please don’t ruin my life here.” But a few days later, Mr. Conforth sent her more sexually charged messages, saying he wanted to “kiss” and “touch” her, according to court papers.Ms. Mahler let it slide until two years later, when she spoke with Ms. Brown, who recounted a nearly identical experience of being pursued by Mr. Conforth. Ms. Brown, then 21, told him several times his advances were “inappropriate,” according to notes taken by a Title IX coordinator who interviewed her. But one day in his office, when he insisted they hug, they ended up kissing too, she said.That semester, their interactions escalated into a sexual encounter in his office, and Ms. Brown told the coordinator that, at first, she believed it was consensual. She acknowledged having feelings for Mr. Conforth but told the coordinator that she quickly became anxious and conflicted after their sexual encounter. She soon recognized, she said, that she had been manipulated, especially after learning from a friend — another student in his class at the time — that Mr. Conforth had left a note for her saying that he found her attractive.Ms. Brown and Ms. Mahler reported their interactions with Mr. Conforth to the university at the end of 2016 and he retired shortly thereafter.The university said its policy is to share the school’s investigative findings with complainants and that it could not comment on individual cases. But both of the women said that the university did not alert them to the outcome of its review until last year, when Ms. Mahler said she checked in after hearing complaints from other women.“I let it go for a while,” she said, “but I always wondered.”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

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      How ‘Rocks’ Made Stars of Its Schoolgirl Cast

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      By casting first-time actors, the film tells a story rarely seen onscreen: what growing up is like for British women of color.LONDON — Bukky Bakray never thought acting was a real possibility for her. So she’s struggling to get her head around winning a BAFTA — the British equivalent of an Oscar — for her first role.“It’s kind of unbelievable,” Bakray, 19, said in a video interview recently, searching for the words to describe her win for playing the titular character in the coming-of-age movie “Rocks.” “I just didn’t expect it at all.”“It still doesn’t really feel real to me,” said Bukky Bakray of winning the Rising Star Award at this year’s BAFTAs.BAFTA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt the BAFTA ceremony on April 10, Bakray took home the Rising Star Award and was also nominated in the leading actress category alongside the likes of Frances McDormand for “Nomadland” and Wunmi Mosaku for “His House.”Bakray said, “Sometimes when I look back at the pictures I’m like, ‘Did this actually happen?’”“I just feel really blessed,” she added.“Rocks” — which was the most-nominated film at this year’s BAFTAs — was released in Britain last fall to critical acclaim, and is now streaming on Netflix in the United States. The movie was shot in the summer of 2018, when Bakray was 15 and a student at a school in East London. Like most of the cast, she was discovered through open auditions and workshops at schools and youth clubs in the city.In the film, Bakray plays Olushola Joy Omotoso, known as Rocks, a 15-year-old British-Nigerian girl whose life is upended when her mother, who struggles with her mental health, disappears, leaving only an apology note and some cash. Rocks is left to care for her 7-year-old brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu), doing whatever she can to evade an intervention by the social services.“Rocks” is equal parts joyful and heart-rending: an ode to friendship and the beauty of girlhood, but also a deeply affecting exploration of how external forces can threaten the blossoming of those things.For many women who have been educated in London’s public school system, the scenes in Rocks’ East London school will feel deeply familiar and authentic. The girls dance and make up raps, and treat each other with a mix of impertinence and genuine love and care. In the school’s bathroom, we see Rocks’ best friend Sumaya, played by the British-Somali actress Kosar Ali, talk her through using a tampon for the first time.The director, Sarah Gavron, said in an interview that the idea for the film had started to emerge when she was traveling for her 2015 historical drama “Suffragette.” At screenings, she said, she heard young women connecting women’s suffrage to their own lives and concerns, piquing her interest in what contemporary girlhood was like. So she approached the producer Faye Ward with an idea: What if they made a film about girlhood and built it with the girls themselves?Having such an open-ended idea bred collaboration at all levels, Gavron said. “Everybody sort of fed into it because it was a bit like, ‘We don’t have a road map, how are we going to do this?’”The director Sarah Gavron, center, on the set of “Rocks” with, from left, Tawheda Begum, Afi Okaidja, Kosar Ali and Bukky Bakray.Charlotte Croft/AltitudeThe research process was kicked off by Lucy Pardee, the film’s casting director, who has built a reputation for discovering talent and who also won a BAFTA for her work on “Rocks.” She spent time sitting at the back of classrooms trying to glean the rhythms of teenagers’ lives, she said in an interview. It was during this phase that Gavron and Pardee first met Bakray.“We didn’t want to do that thing that lots of adults do, which is project our own memories and sense of what being a teenager was onto modern teenagers,” Pardee said in a video interview. “We wanted to get a sense of what their dramas were, what their lives were.”Open auditions were held to find the cast (Pardee and her associate Jessica Straker saw about 1,300 girls), while workshops were run with teenagers to help build the world and characters around the story that Theresa Ikoko, a British-Nigerian playwright, and Claire Wilson, a television writer, had in mind. Out of those processes, the main cast emerged.While the young actors don’t play themselves in “Rocks,” they were able to feed into the development of the characters. Ikoko brought the scene breakdowns to the actors and asked them to complete exercises, such as writing a diary for their character and deciding what their character’s favorite songs were. That information then informed the script.The actors’ essence was also a big part of the writing process, Ikoko said in an interview. She recalled speaking to Anastasia Dymitrow, who plays a character called Sabina, about her pride in identifying as Polish Gypsy. The comment was ultimately included in the film, when Dymitrow’s character talks about her grandparents and their imprisonment in Auschwitz.Referring to the process, Bakray said, “I’d never felt listened to like that before in my life,” recalling that a stray comment she had made about how she used to ritually buy a cake after school with a friend had ended up in a draft of the script. “It made you feel like you had something of substance to say,” she added.During the script’s development process, the actors’ own lives and backgrounds became part of their characters’ stories.Altitude“Rocks” is unusual even among Black British films, which are more likely to follow the narratives of young Black men.For many British women of color, the opportunity to see their lives and experiences reflected so accurately in film is extremely rare. Tobi Oredein, the founder of Black Ballad, an online platform for Black British women, wrote last year, “For the first time in my life, I saw a girl who looked similar to me and my friends as we ran around secondary school trying to figure friendships, education and life at large.”Ikoko — who hadn’t co-written a film before “Rocks” — credited Gavron and Ward for getting the movie made.“I wouldn’t have been able to make this film if I said ‘I want to make a film about being a young girl from Hackney,’” Ikoko said.“There needed to be a first, and the way the industry is set up, firsts have to happen when people like Sarah and Faye use their power and their privilege and share that and open those doors,” she added.When it came to shooting, the filmmakers were aware of practices or “invisible” training that could make it easier for the first-time actors. During preparation workshops, the girls were filmed so that they would become accustomed to being on camera, and the movie was shot in chronological order to help them to get into the story.There were a lot of scenes that required vulnerability, and the production gave the cast space to try and display those emotions.Bakray said that putting such feelings out in the open was tough. “Pre-shooting, we had a lot of conversations, because they were getting young women that were from backgrounds where we weren’t necessarily emotionally available, that’s not how we grew up,” she said.“We grew up to be strong,” she addedBakray likened her time on the film to an education. “‘Rocks’ was a university,” she said. “They weren’t just preparing us to act for ‘Rocks,’ but they were preparing us to act for the foreseeable.”For many British women of color, “Rocks” offered an extremely rare opportunity to see their lives and experiences reflected accurately in film.AltitudeThree years after “Rocks” was filmed, members of the production team are still taking an active interest in the careers of the young actors they helped put onscreen.Bakray, who spoke from Birmingham, where she is currently filming her next project, said she had work through the end of the year. She said she planned to go to drama school and has auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.“I feel like kids are sponges,” she said. “And these guys caught me at my prime sponge phase.” More

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      Amplifying the Women Who Pushed Synthesizers Into the Future

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      Lisa Rovner’s “Sisters With Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines” spotlights the pioneers who harnessed technology to do more than “push around dead white men’s notes.”When you hear the phrase “electronic musician,” what sort of person do you picture? A pallid, wildly coifed young man hunched over an imposing smorgasbord of gear?I’m guessing the person you are imagining doesn’t look like Daphne Oram, with her cat-eye glasses, demure dresses and respectable 1950s librarian haircut. And yet Oram is a crucial figure of electronic music history — the co-founder of the BBC’s incalculably influential Radiophonic Workshop, the first woman to set up her own independent electronic music studio and now one of the worthy focal points of Lisa Rovner’s bewitching new documentary “Sisters With Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines.” (The movie is streaming through Metrograph’s virtual cinema from April 23 to May 6.)Born in 1925, Oram was an accomplished pianist who had been offered admission to the Royal Academy of Music. But she turned it down, having recently read a book that predicted, as she puts it in the film with a palpable sense of wonder, that “composers of the future would compose directly into sound rather than using orchestral instruments.”Oram wanted to be a composer of the future. She found fulfilling work at the BBC, which in the late 1940s had become a clearinghouse for tape machines and other electronic equipment left over from World War II. Gender norms liquefied during wartime, when factories and cutting-edge companies were forced to hire women in jobs that had previously been reserved only for men. Suddenly, for a fleeting and freeing moment, the rules did not apply.“Women were naturally drawn to electronic music,” Laurie Spiegel says in the film. “You didn’t have to be accepted by any of the male-dominated resources.”Carlo Carnevali/ via, Laurie Spiegel and Metrograph“Technology is a tremendous liberator,” the composer Laurie Spiegel says in Rovner’s film. “It blows up power structures. Women were naturally drawn to electronic music. You didn’t have to be accepted by any of the male-dominated resources: the radio stations, the record companies, the concert-hall venues, the funding organizations.”But in the years since, pioneering women like Oram and Spiegel have largely been written out of the genre’s popular history, leading people to assume, erroneously, that electronic music in its many iterations is and has always been a boys’ club. In a time when significant gender imbalances persist behind studio consoles and in D.J. booths, Rovner’s film prompts a still-worthwhile question: What happened?The primary aim of “Sisters With Transistors,” though, is to enliven these women’s fascinating life stories and showcase their music in all its dazzling glory. The film — narrated personably by Laurie Anderson — is a treasure trove of mesmerizing archival footage, spanning decades. The early Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore gives a private concert on that ethereal instrument that one writer said sounds like the “singing of a soul.” The synthesizer whiz Suzanne Ciani demonstrates, to a very baffled David Letterman on a 1980 episode of his late-night talk show, just what the Prophet 5 synth can do. Maryanne Amacher rattles her younger acolyte Thurston Moore’s eardrums with the sheer house-shaking volume of her compositions.The doc’s archival footage includes Clara Rockmore giving a private Theremin concert.via The Clara Rockmore Foundation and MetrographMost hypnotic is a 1965 clip of Delia Derbyshire — Oram’s colleague at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who is perhaps best-known for composing the eerie original “Doctor Who” theme song — visibly enamored of her work as she gives a tutorial on creating music from tape loops, tapping her patent-leather sling-back flat to the beat she has just pulled out of thin air.Like Oram, Derbyshire’s fascination with technology and emergent forms of music came out of the war, when she was a child living in Coventry during the 1940 blitz experiencing air-raid sirens. “It’s an abstract sound, and it’s meaningful — and then the all-clear,” she says in the film. “Well, that’s electronic music!”These 20th-century girls were enchanted by the strange new sounds of modern life. In France, a young Éliane Radigue paid rapt attention to the overhead whooshes airplanes made as they approached and receded. Across continents, both Derbyshire and the American composer Pauline Oliveros were drawn to the crackling hiss of the radio, and even those ghostly sounds between stations. All of these frequencies beckoned them toward new kinds of music, liberated from the weight of history, tradition and the impulse to, as the composer Nadia Botello puts it, “push around dead white men’s notes.”The film includes footage of Maryanne Amacher cranking up her compositions.Peggy Weil/ via, Metrograph PictureFrom Ciani’s crystalline reveries to Amacher’s quaking drones, the sounds they made from these influences and technological advancements turned out to be as varied as the women themselves. Oliveros, who wrote a 1970 New York Times Op-Ed titled “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady Composers,’” would likely deny that there was anything essential linking their music at all. But the common thread that Rovner finds is a tangible sense of awe — a certain engrossed exuberance on each woman’s face as she explains her way of working to curious camera crews and bemused interviewers. Every woman in this documentary looks like she was in on a prized secret that society had not yet decoded.Situating electronic music’s origins in awe and affect may be a political act in and of itself. In her 2010 book “Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound,” the writer and musician Tara Rodgers called for a history of electronic music “that motivates wonder and a sense of possibility instead of rhetoric of combat and domination.” Other scholars have suggested that electronic sound’s early, formative connection to military technology — the vocoder, for example, was first developed as an espionage device — contributed to its steady and limiting masculinized stereotyping over time.The pioneer Pauline Oliveros wrote a 1970 New York Times Op-Ed titled “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady Composers.’” via Mills College and Metrograph PicturesAnd then there’s the commodifying force of capitalism. For a time in the 1970s — when much of the equipment used to make electronic music was prohibitively expensive — Spiegel worked on her compositions at Bell Labs, then a hotbed of scientific and creative experimentation. But as she recalls, the 1982 divestiture of AT&T had an unfortunate aftereffect: “Bell Labs became product-oriented instead of pure research. After I left there, I was absolutely desolate. I had lost my main creative medium.”Eventually, Spiegel took matters into her own hands, creating the early algorithmic music computing software Music Mouse in 1986. “What relates all of these women is this D.I.Y. thing,” Ramona Gonzalez, who records as Nite Jewel, says in the film. “And D.I.Y. is interesting because it doesn’t mean that you’ve explicitly, voluntarily chosen to do it yourself. It’s that there are certain barriers in place that don’t allow you to do anything.”Watching Rovner’s documentary, I could see unfortunate parallels with the film industry. Women were employed more steadily and often in more powerful positions during the early silent era than they would be for many years afterward, as Margaret Talbot noted several years ago in a piece for The New Yorker: The early industry hadn’t “yet locked in a strict division of labor by gender,” but in time, Hollywood “became an increasingly modern, capitalist enterprise,” and opportunities thinned for women.Suzanne Ciani, a synthesizer whiz who began working with the technology in the late 1960s.via Suzanne Ciani and Metrograph PicturesThe masculinization of electronic music likely resulted from a similar kind of streamlined codification in the profit-driven 1980s and beyond, though Rovner’s film does not linger very long on the question of what went wrong. It would take perhaps a more ambitious and less inspiring documentary to chart the forces that contributed to the cultural erasure of these women’s achievements.But “Sisters With Transistors” is a worthy corrective to a persistently myopic view of musical history, and a call to kindle something new from whatever it sparks in Daphne Oram’s revered “composers of the future.”“This is a time in which people feel that there are a lot of dead ends in music, that there isn’t a lot more to do,” Spiegel reflected a few decades ago, in a clip used in the film. “Actually, through the technology I experience this as quite the opposite. This is a period in which we realize we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible musically.” More