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New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Free Concerts, Festivals and Events in New York This Summer
Brooklyn Bridge Park Summer Programming For 15 years, this park has put together a lineup of activities to rival its breathtaking views. Saturdays in May will feature dance classes on Liberty Lawn with instruction by companies such as American Ballet Theater. The Photoville Festival will set up its annual outdoor exhibition, June 7-22. In August, a Hindu lamp ceremony will take place at Pebble Beach; the Walt Whitman Initiative will lead a marathon reading of his poem 'Song of Myself' in September; and the Harvest Festival will wrap up the season. Intrepid Summer Movie Series On the fourth Friday of each summer month beginning at sunset, the museum will offer free screenings of films with a nautical theme, like 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest' on June 27, in keeping with the exhibition 'Mysteries From the Deep: Underwater Archaeology.' Better yet, the movies will be shown on the flight deck. Doors open at 6 p.m. Admission is first come first served. Summer on the Hudson Need something to do on a random summer day? With more than 300 events to choose from through the fall, this Riverside Conservancy and NYC Parks series gives plenty of options, ranging from forest bathing sessions, evening yoga and a fishing clinic to sunset concerts, movie nights and children's entertainment. Standouts include the Fly NYC kite festival in August, the West Side County Fair in September and the Little Red Lighthouse Festival in October. SummerStage Since the Central Park Conservancy founded SummerStage in 1986, the annual series has expanded to include parks throughout the boroughs. The concert series offers something for everyone, including the Metropolitan Opera Summer Recitals in June, a Bastille Day celebration in July and the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in August. Rhiannon Giddens, Big Freedia, the Roots and Soccer Mommy are also on this year's lineup. Many performances are free and first come first served, but some charge admission. Shakespeare for the City A renovated Delacorte Theater will open its doors on Aug. 7 with the comedy 'Twelfth Night,' directed by the Tony-nominated Saheem Ali and featuring Peter Dinklage, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Lupita Nyong'o and Sandra Oh. Before then, the Public Theater's Mobile Unit will bring another comedy, 'Much Ado About Nothing,' to parks around the city. And throughout Labor Day weekend, Public Works will stage 'Pericles' at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Bryant Park Picnic Performances Every Friday evening this summer, as well as some Thursdays and Saturdays, there will be entertainment on the lawn of this Midtown oasis. The season kicks off with Electric Root's take on 'The Sound of Music.' Contemporary dance dominates in the first weeks of June, giving way to the Emerging Music Festival and then to the New York City Opera, which also performs in September. In July and August, Carnegie Hall Citywide presents musicians such as Cécile McLorin Salvant. August also brings events such as the New York City Circus Festival and Accordions Around the World. Films on the Green Back for its 17th edition, this outdoor festival advocates the best of French cinema. This year, the theme is fashion and there will be just one screening, starting at 8:30 p.m.: 'Coco Before Chanel' on Central Park's Cedar Hill. River to River Festival Established in the aftermath of Sept. 11, this festival from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has taken a few weeks every summer to honor the city's resilience and creativity. This year the calendar extends into the fall and includes a Fish Migration Celebration from the Riverkeepers on June 14, a concert from Taylor Mac on July 29 and an outdoor installation by Maison Millefleurs in August and September in Battery Park. Concerts in the Park Since 1965, the New York Philharmonic has provided free summer serenades. This year, Gustavo Dudamel will lead the orchestra on the Great Lawn in Central Park on June 4; at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx on June 5; at Prospect Park in Brooklyn on June 6; and at Cunningham Park in Queens on June 7. Those performances begin at 8 p.m. and conclude with fireworks. On June 8, an indoor concert that will include Britten's String Quartet No. 1 will be at St. George Theater on Staten Island starting at 2 p.m. BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Under the theme 'Where Brooklyn Meets … the World,' BRIC Arts Media's summer lineup will offer free concerts and screenings as well as benefit shows that explore the global roots of Brooklyn's culture. Performers include Grace Jones and Janelle Monáe, the Klezmatics, Buscabulla, Dinosaur Jr. and Gogol Bordello. Quincy Jones will be honored with screenings of 'The Greatest Night in Pop' and 'The Wiz.' And on July 19 the BRIC will take the celebration to Brower Park in Crown Heights for a showing of a documentary about the dance hall D.J. Sister Nancy. Free events are first come first served; tickets to the benefit concerts are available through BRIC's website. Paramount+ Movie Nights at Bryant Park For more than 30 years, this Midtown tradition has given us at least one reason to like Mondays. This summer kicks off with the teen classic 'Pretty in Pink' and ends with the mafia epic 'The Godfather.' Other titles include 'Good Will Hunting,' 'Interstellar' and 'Pulp Fiction.' Arrive at 5 p.m. to grab a spot, sample the food selection curated by Hester Street Fair, and enjoy some beer, wine or cocktails from Stout NYC; screenings start at 8 p.m. The Museum Mile Festival It's among the best block parties of the summer: From 6 to 9 p.m. on the second Tuesday of June, the stretch of Fifth Avenue that contains some of the city's most notable museums is the place to be. Not only will institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum forgo admission, they will also entertain visitors with free performances and activities indoors and out. (A word to the wise: The lines can get long, particularly at the more popular museums, so arrive early and go to your top pick first.) Summer for the City Since 2022, Lincoln Center has provided hundreds of free and pay-what-you-wish cultural events for two months every summer. Its biggest draw is the mega mirror ball above the dance floor on Lincoln Center's plaza, where multiple times each week bands playing genres such as swing, salsa and disco give visitors a reason to groove. It also includes concerts from the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, celebrations for Brazil Week and the BAAND Together Dance Festival, and this year features a production of the 4,000-year-old Sanskrit epic 'Mahabharata,' the Run AMOC Festival and an American Sign Language version of 'Waitress: The Musical.' Movies With a View Every Thursday, this Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy series, which is celebrating 25 years, offers one of the best ways to enjoy a movie in summer — outdoors with the skyline of Lower Manhattan in view. This year's theme is 'Women and Hollywood' and kicks off with Emma Seligman's 2023 teen comedy 'Bottoms.' Screenings start at sundown. Arrive early for the concession stands and preshow entertainment. Battery Dance Festival For five nights in August, starting at 7, New York's longest-running free dance festival will gather local troupes and global ones to perform on a stage at the edge of Manhattan, with the setting sun as a backdrop. This year's lineup includes companies such as Buglisi Dance Theater, Fairul Zahid and Platforma 13. On Aug. 9 at 7 p.m., the festival will also mark the reopening of Wagner Park with performances from Marie Ponce, the Limón Dance Company and others.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Disruptor Asks, Is New York Finally Ready for ‘DOOM'?
Barking Doberman pinchers behind chain link fencing and performers who looked like they came straight from the Berlin club scene made the ultracool German performance artist Anne Imhof infamous. But last week, at her first rehearsal for 'DOOM: House of Hope' at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, there were no dogs in sight. There were still those impossibly beautiful performers, though, many very young. They were sprawled on the floor of one of the Armory's rehearsal spaces, sitting at the piano, testing out bits of movement, or rehearsing lines from marked up copies of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' — the new project's starting point. Belying her works' fierce, sometimes aggro aesthetics, Imhof was a gentle, observing presence, not so much directing the performers but asking them how they wanted to proceed — utterly unlike the strict rigor of, say, a ballet rehearsal. 'I count on chance and accidents and things that are not planned,' the 46-year-old Berlin-based artist told me. 'There has to be enough openness to it that the performers have agency.' Imhof burst onto the scene at the 2017 Venice Biennale, when her unsettling installation in the German Pavilion won the coveted Golden Lion award. 'For those of us not living in Germany, or Europe, she came out pretty fully formed with that piece,' said RoseLee Goldberg, the founder and director of Performa, the New York biennial that has been evangelizing performance art for more than 20 years. 'It was a powerful takeover — she grabbed the reins of what's possible in performance in a large setting with a big audience.' Starting March 3 through March 12, New York audiences will have a rare opportunity to see Imhof's work when she stages her biggest performance to date in the Armory's 55,000-square-foot drill hall. Despite the amorphous vibe of the rehearsals, there was a subterranean feeling that something big was emerging. Around 50 performers will reimagine Shakespeare's romantic tragedy over the course of three hours. It will feature 26 Cadillac Escalades parked on a floor designed to resemble a school gym, a Jumbotron with a countdown clock and a pirate radio station playing on the vehicles' radios. The performers include skateboarders, dancers from the American Ballet Theater and 'flexers' — practitioners of a form, part dance hall, part hip-hop, that emerged in Brooklyn in the late '90s. Imhof, known for her deep commitment to collaboration, sees her role as providing a scaffold for creative types, many of whom she's worked with for years, to make their own decisions. Instructions for performers might be: 'Hold a pose until you are bored with it,' or 'move until the gesture is pathetic or ridiculous and then push on further past that point.' For all the uncertainty built into Imhof's method, it is remarkably intricate, even more so in this cavernous space. 'This time we have a script, we have a show book, we have a dancing score, we have a ballet score, we have a score that looks insane because it's just my drawings of where everyone is supposed to be,' Imhof said. 'It's very much a score, like it's a SUPER score, like it makes me crazy how much score there is,' she added, laughing. Multiple performers will take on the roles of Romeo and Juliet simultaneously, and the casting is pointedly gender bending. 'I'm making images that I actually want to see,' she said. 'I want to see two women dancing the parts of Romeo and Juliet. I want to see a gender fluid ballet.' In another twist, the piece will start with the main characters' deaths and move toward the beginning of the story — 'I like that we are turning the whole thing around and making the dynamic something more hopeful,' she said. That hopefulness is certainly a departure from the mood of 'Faust,' her Venice Biennale piece. Viewers entered the 1938 Fascist-coded German Pavilion through the back door, flanked by those infamous dogs. Once inside they encountered performers enacting strange, ritualistic activities, setting fires, masturbating, singing or engrossed in their cellphones beneath the glass and steel floor. At points during the five-hour event, they emerged from the claustrophobic space to walk, sing, and scream among the crowd, with industrial music pounding in the background — what one critic described as a 'catwalk show from hell.' The aesthetic drew from corporate architecture, Balenciaga and the Berlin nightclub scene; it was filled with a distinctly 21st-century youthful malaise. The pavilion was packed during its run; lines were up to two hours long. Critical reaction was wildly enthusiastic, though some were put off by the photogenic quality of the work — was it too Instagrammable to be serious art? — while others were skeptical of its refusal to make a clear political statement. As Judith F. Rodenbeck, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, recalled in a conversation, 'It was hard to tell if the alienation and aggression was supposed to comment on fascism or what have you, or if it was just borrowing its aesthetic.' In 2021, Imhof's 'Natures Mortes, Tableaux Vivants' turned the massive Palais de Tokyo in Paris into a multilevel concert stage. She filled it with her own paintings — her devotion to the medium continues to drive her work — as well as work by other artists, from Théodore Géricault to Rosemarie Trockel. 'DOOM' is not Imhof's first foray in New York — she presented 'Deal' at MoMA PS1 in 2015, in which figures performed abstracted, physical 'transactions' involving a vat of buttermilk and 10 rabbits, surrounded by Imhof's etchings and a video piece. (Klaus Biesenbach, who was the director of MoMA PS1 at the time, is the curator of the Armory show.) 'It was somehow too early for me to face the U.S.,' Imhof said. 'If I had known America better, I would never, ever have done a piece like that. It flew in Europe and in France — they were like, oh, rabbits — but here animal rights activists were putting my name all over the internet.' This time she hopes will be different, not least because she has lived in New York and Los Angeles during the past several years. She has also done research at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Getty Research Institute, where she dug into American ballet, the city's dance scene, performing arts history, and dance criticism, all of which has shaped 'DOOM.' The 'Americana' factor is turned up to eleven. Posters promoting the project around town represent the star-crossed lovers' families as high school mascots — a tiger and a wolf in team hats. The set design evokes a prom that has been crashed by a phalanx of tanklike SUVs, a vehicle that Imhof associates with presidential motorcades and U.S. car culture. At one point, the corps de ballet will be line dancing. The music will echo and quote from Bach and Mahler but also rap, Jim Morrison and Frank Sinatra, in a score composed by Imhof and her collaborators. Despite the title, which seems to point to the anxiety many Americans feel now — Imhof insists that it's not a direct response to President Trump, not least because she began working on the piece more than three years ago. 'The wolves and the lions were originally going to be dressed in red and blue, and I realized, no, that's not going to work, it's too strong of a statement. I don't want to come to America and be loud about American politics.' That said, she added, 'I'm pretty aware that I'm a woman in a privileged position in terms of my career and the opportunities that are open to me, but American politics still affects me in very specific ways,' especially in the administration's repressive actions toward the trans and queer communities, to which she and many of her collaborators belong. Imhof has developed deep relationships with those collaborators scattered across Europe and the U.S., including Ville Haimala, a veteran of the electronic music duo Amnesia Scanner; the multidisciplinary artist and choreographer Jerome AB; the actor Levi Strasser (from 'The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes'); Sihana Shalaj, a model based in Stockholm and Paris; and Josh Johnson, a William Forsyth dancer and choreographer. New faces include Talia Ryder, who starred in 'Matilda' on Broadway; Jacob Madden, a classically trained pianist; and Devon Teuscher, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater. And then there is Eliza Douglas, the American painter, Balenciaga model and former romantic partner of Imhof, who has been integral to her work for the past nine years — as performer, musician, singer and composer, costume designer and casting director. Her own paintings have been prominently displayed within Imhof's installations. (Not in 'DOOM,' though, which doesn't include any art or sculpture — 'I didn't want objects,' Imhof said.) Douglas and Imhof met in Frankfurt in 2015, when Douglas was a student at the Stäedelschule, the art academy from which Imhof had graduated. She invited Douglas to her show 'Angst' at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. 'I had this funny feeling that I was auditioning,' Douglas told me. The two started dating, and the collaboration developed organically. 'It was so woven into our life. We would be sitting around in our living room, and I would do something strange, and she would like it, and it would become part of the work,' Douglas said. 'I was always kind of performing for her.' The intimacy of their connection even when their romance ended allowed Imhof to remove her own body from the stage, she said. 'Eliza basically took my part, and she was so good,' Imhof explained, 'it shifted for me — I could give away the idea of being this figure inside of the performance.' She is happy to hand over the reins when making her work, a quality that results in a remarkably non-hierarchical environment where performers decide their own path forward. 'Why should I insist on being some singular artistic genius?' David Velasco, a writer and the former editor of Artforum, says a strength of the work is how the performers seem to relate to one another. 'I can always tell in Imhof's work that they are in actual communion,' he said. 'What's revealed is cool to watch unfold.' Perhaps that notion of collectivity is the political thrust of Imhof's art: 'I'm working with people as I dream the world would work,' she said. 'I don't think a performance can effect a total paradigm shift, but I think it can open up the possibility for people of seeing themselves as part of something.'
New York Times
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Night at the Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts
It was the night after President Trump had officially taken over the Kennedy Center and made himself its chairman, and two well-dressed Washington women were wandering along the plush red carpet inside its Grand Foyer, so grand it could fit the Washington Monument laid on its side. They reached the eight-foot-tall bronze head of John F. Kennedy that lords over the hall and looked forlornly into his eyes. How much longer, one woman joked to the other, until the statue of the 35th president gets torn down and replaced with one of the 47th? They laughed bitterly. It was just last week that Mr. Trump announced his plan to purge the Kennedy Center's board of its Biden appointees and to install 'an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!' He named one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks, Richard Grenell, interim president and proclaimed that there would be no more 'ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA' shown. He complained about drag queens performing there and said it had all become too 'wokey.' Some artists canceled shows. 'Welcome to the New Kennedy Center!' Mr. Trump said on social media, posting an A.I.-generated image of himself waving his arms like a conductor in a concert hall. Most of the people who turned up at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night to see performances in its various theaters had purchased their tickets long before any of that was set in motion. Now they found themselves at an arts center on the cusp of becoming something different — something Trumpian. Some speculated what that might look like. 'I feel like we might just have 'Cats' on rotation moving forward,' said Pamela Deutsch, a documentary film producer who once worked as an usher at the Kennedy Center. (Mr. Trump, who once had dreams of becoming a Broadway producer, is a longtime fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber.) She was there to catch a set by the comic W. Kamau Bell. So was Louis Woolard, a 73-year-old psychotherapist from Maryland. What sort of cultural programming did he envision under the artistic stewardship of the 47th president? 'I don't know,' said Mr. Woolard. 'I guess country music.' At the other end of the Grand Foyer, American Ballet Theater was putting on a production of 'Crime and Punishment,' an effort to make dance out of Dostoyevsky. A 75-year-old real estate investment banker named Wayne Koonce waited in line to have his ticket scanned. 'Maybe the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi will be invited back now that he's cozying up to Putin,' he said. For the many people in liberal Washington scandalized by Mr. Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center, Thursday night was like a cross between a wake and last call. Drag performers protested outside in the cold, as students from George Washington University marched around shouting about Mr. Trump. Inside, some well-heeled patrons of the ballet were literally clutching their pearls as they contemplated the future of the institution. At the other end of the foyer, copies of a children's book called 'Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book' were being sold ahead of Mr. Bell's stand-up routine. (He co-wrote the book.) 'You know, Trump took over, he's the new chairman of the Kennedy Center,' he said at the top of his set. The audience let out a low boo. 'You shouldn't call it the Kennedy Center anymore,' he said. 'Let's call it the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center.' More booing. 'If you're going to have people running it with no expertise at all,' he continued, 'you might as well have it named after the guy with no expertise at all.' (Earlier that day, Mr. Kennedy had been confirmed as health secretary.) Mr. Bell tore into the president and talked about white supremacy, nationalized health care, oligarchy, fascism, socialism, transgender rights, slavery, kale chips, Nazidom and other such topics that would presumably qualify as 'wokey' under new management. The comic also guessed at what sort of changes were in store. 'How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?' he wondered as the audience groaned. On a settee outside the ballet, a husband and wife — both teachers from Arlington, Va. — tried to figure out what the president meant by 'anti-American propaganda.' 'I can't figure it out,' said the wife. 'Immigrants,' suggested the husband. 'But what does that actually mean?' asked the wife. Some fretted as to whether they ought to boycott the place going forward. 'Like a lot of people in Washington,' said Mr. Koonce, 'we're trying to figure out: Will we continue to come? You want to support the artists, but you don't want to support anything connected with this philistine, backward movement of the arts, which is exactly what it's going to be.' So much of what President Trump is up to in Washington is about payback. He is taking his revenge on a town that snubbed him. Last time he was president, some artists accepting the Kennedy Center honors refused to go to the White House, and in response he and Melania Trump never went to the Kennedy Center. Vice President JD Vance, and his wife, Usha, though, seem to genuinely enjoy the Kennedy Center's programming. She has been a member of the opera's board for more than a year, and the couple took their young children there in December for a production of the 'Jungle Book' that the Kennedy Center described as being told 'through a contemporary lens by framing Mowgli as a refugee trying to find safety in a new environment.' (In other words, possibly wokey.) They enjoyed it so much they went backstage after it was over. In Mr. Trump's war against the town's institutions, the battle over this one can seem low-stakes by comparison. What is a performing arts center compared to the Justice Department, trans-Atlantic alliances, foreign aid and all the rest? Still, it has struck a chord. People perambulating up the Grand Foyer on Thursday — many of whom were federal workers now fearing for their jobs — seemed especially agitated by what was happening there. Michael Gray, a 63-year-old retired refugee officer who worked for the State Department beginning under George H.W. Bush, was there to see the ballet. Asked what he thought about the president's proclamation about anti-American propaganda, Mr. Gray said, 'I think it's nonsense.' But he was able to take the long view. 'Things come and they go,' he said, 'but the arts don't, and the love of the arts does not.'
