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Vogue
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Patsy Ferran Is Riding High
She's also been the Blanche DuBois to Paul Mescal's Stanley Kowalski in Rebecca Frecknall's revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, and turned up in the latest installment of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, playing an AI assistant in one of the anthology series' more emotional, meditative episodes. The Spanish-British actor says she felt apprehensive going into Streetcar's recent stint at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (before that, it had been a hit in the West End). 'We were taking one of the most-loved American plays of all time to New York as a bunch of Brits with quite an unconventional take on it,' she recalls. 'I was truly anticipating potential rejection from an American audience. I knew about going to New York for a year and a half, so I had a year and a half to mentally prepare for a panning.' Eventually, however, Ferran let herself see the experience 'as an experiment.' She explains: 'I thought, Let's just offer something with an open mind and an open heart and see what happens—and if they don't like it, that's totally okay! Cut to preview one, and the New York audience was so vocally generous.' The six-week run quickly sold out as reviewers raved about Ferran's revelatory take on the Southern belle. 'I remember after that first show, we were all staring at each other, wide-eyed on stage, thinking, Oh my God, I think they're loving this!' Ferran goes on. 'Being an actor is a strange thing, because you are presenting yourself as part of the art—you're collectively telling a story, but you're so personally involved. When something doesn't work, I can't help but take it a little personally. It's your face, your body, brain, and soul that's part of the story.' Streetcar is an intense play on its own, but to exit the stage door every night and be confronted with high-octane New York City, too, made the period perhaps the most feverish six weeks of her life. 'Thankfully, my body is very obedient when I have a job to do—and when the writing is so good, and your company of actors are so talented and generous, the job is easier... and dare I say it, fun,' Ferran says. 'But I couldn't have done another show [afterward]! I needed to lie down and not move.'
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
BAM Announces a Female-Led Next Wave and Fall Season
The Brooklyn Academy of Music will welcome its 42nd Next Wave festival this fall, with most works created by female artists, the performing arts center announced on Thursday. 'We led with women,' said Amy Cassello, who became BAM's artistic director last year after serving in the role as interim. 'It just felt like a good time to center women creatives.' The announcement comes at a time of financial fragility and leadership flux for the academy. BAM's staff has declined by more than a third in recent years, and its nearly $52 million operating budget is smaller than it was 10 years ago. But there is momentum, and audiences are growing. Next Wave will have 11 events, as it did last year, up from eight in 2023. That year, the festival scaled back to nearly half of the 2022 offerings amid staff layoffs. 'I feel confident that we have the number of shows that make a coherent statement,' Cassello said, adding, 'I wish there were more money to subsidize and support and invest in artistic work.' The festival opens with the choreographer Nora Chipaumire's 'Dambudzo' (Oct. 8-9), a blend of painting, sculpture, sound and performance, transforming the nearby performing arts space Roulette into a Zimbabwean house bar. The lineup also includes the French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen's 'LACRIMA' (Oct. 22, 24-26), a choral theater performance that, in a dark look at the fashion industry, traces the many hands across the world it takes to create a wedding dress for a British princess; Eiko Otake and Wen Hui's 'What Is War' (Oct. 21-25), a fusion of movement and video testimony about war and its aftermath on collective memory and the body; and the choreographer Leslie Cuyjet's 'For All Your Life' (Dec. 3-7), a solo performance interrogating the life insurance industry's ties to slavery. Next season will also feature a revival of Richard Move's dance-theater work 'Martha@BAM — The 1963 Interview' (Oct. 28 -Nov. 1), in which Move recreates a 1963 interview between Martha Graham (Move) and the critic Walter Terry (the playwright Lisa Kron) at the 92nd Street Y. BAM will also present a screening of 'The Mahabharata' (Sept. 18), a film adaptation of Peter Brook's nine-hour theatrical presentation of the Sanskrit epic that BAM staged in 1987 atthe theater now known as the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong. The Harvey will be the site of the screening of Brook's (much shorter) 1989 film, newly restored by his son, Simon Brook. The season concludes with a revival of the raucous post-rock opera 'What to Wear' (Jan. 15-17) by the avant-garde theater maker Richard Foreman, who died in January at 87. The hallucinatory work, with a score by Michael Gordon, will be conducted by Alan Pierson and directed by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, and run as part of Prototype, the experimental New York opera festival. 'BAM has always been artist-centered and adventurous and risk-taking,' Cassello said, 'and I think that's absolutely necessary. Always has been.'
New York Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘My Heart Was in My Throat, and the Tears Were Flowing'
Very Kind Dear Diary: I was in the audience for a performance of Rebecca Frecknall's production of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the play's final minutes, my heart was in my throat, and tears were flowing. In my clouded peripheral vision, I noticed a young woman next to me. Her shoulders were shaking softly as she wept. After the house lights came up and the ovation died down, I turn to her. 'Could I give you a tissue?' I asked. 'Yes, actually,' she said. 'That's very kind.' I handed her a tissue. 'The kindness of strangers?' I said sheepishly, unable to help myself. She took the tissue and blew her nose. 'Too soon,' she said. — Deborah M. Brissman Like Diamonds Dear Diary: In 1954, when I was 11, I traveled from Washington, D.C., to New York City to visit my camp friend, Judy, for a week. Thrillingly, my parents let me travel alone on the train. It was part of a planned 'historical adventure.' Another part involved returning alone by airplane. Judy's widowed father met me at Grand Central. I waited for him near the lost-and-found window. I remember looking up at the sky mural on the ceiling and feeling at home in the universe. Judy lived in a huge, old-fashioned apartment across from Central Park, with maybe 12-foot ceilings and tall windows hung with dark red velvet curtains. She had cats and an older brother who played the violin. Her father seemed old to me. He also seemed confident, which is probably why my parents trusted him to host me. He took us to museums and the public library and let us explore on our own via the subway. The family had gotten tickets to 'Peter Pan' on Broadway, with Mary Martin as Peter. On the day of the show, a big storm with high winds materialized. I was afraid we would miss the show, but Judy's father was undeterred. We walked and then ran together to the theater in the rain, without umbrellas. As we did, gusting winds shattered a window above us, and glass showered down onto our heads like diamonds. The play was magical, and the characters flew on wires. The next day I flew home on American Airlines. It was a very bumpy ride. — Ruth Henderson The Guggenheim Dear Diary: My first day as an intern at the Guggenheim Museum was my third day in New York City. Fresh off a plane from Scotland, I had rented a room at the 92nd Street Y because I didn't know a soul in town. My internship supervisor took me to lunch to celebrate my first day, and while we were in line getting our food we met a tall, shy man, a former intern. When I sat down at a table, the former intern did too. My supervisor got up and went to another table to talk to some colleagues. The former intern, Austin, and I struck up a conversation. Eventually, we became part of a gang of friends that summer. After the internship ended, I was hired full time, and a year later Austin became my roommate. Two years after that, he asked me out on a date, and three years later, we were married. The group of friends I met that first summer came to our wedding and have remained our New York family ever since. These friendships are now two decades strong. I think of them every time I am in the Guggenheim's rotunda. — Michelle Millar Fisher The Band Shell Dear Diary: Earphones in and sunglasses on, I was power-walking home through Central Park. Suddenly, I noticed an older couple waving at me. It turned out that they were lost. They unfolded a paper map and asked for help finding Naumburg Bandshell. I squinted at the map, nodded as if I understood it, then pulled out my phone to check Google Maps. As luck would have it, we were heading the same way, so we decided to walk together. They were off to hear an orchestral ensemble, and their faces lit up when I mentioned that I played the viola in a graduate medical student orchestra. When we got to the band shell, they surprised me with an extra ticket and insisted I join them. At intermission, we discovered that we lived just a few blocks apart on the Upper West Side. We shared a taxi home, and over an impromptu dinner, a friendship took shape. A year and a half later, we still gather for dinner, a reminder that some of the sweetest connections are the ones that come unexpectedly. — Mollie Hobensack Unacceptable Dear Diary: I went to a new bagel store in Brooklyn Heights with my son. When it was my turn to order, I asked for a cinnamon raisin bagel with whitefish salad and a slice of red onion. The man behind the counter looked up at me. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I can't do that.' — Richie Powers Read all recent entries and our submissions guidelines. Reach us via email diary@ or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter. Do you have a tale of a memorable experience that occurred during a childhood trip to New York City? Please submit it below or share it in the comments. While you're there, join the conversation.
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
John Jasperse Starts La MaMa Moves! Honoring a Female Lineage
It begins with a line of women in black dresses, advancing toward us. As the tide of their bodies turns back, one more woman emerges through them. She holds our attention with both otherworldly fluidity and a flashing of claws. She points at us with casual command, then shimmies. As she walks away, she looks over her shoulder with the tiniest of smirks. Something witchy is happening in John Jasperse's 'Tides,' which had its premiere at the start of the 20th anniversary of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Much of the magic derives from the casting. The pointing woman is Jodi Melnick, who has been bewitching audiences for decades. Later Vicky Shick, another veteran spell caster, wags a finger. But the hidden force is Jasperse, a choreographer whose compositional skill and artistry channel the talents of these exceptional performers into the special sorcery of contemporary dance. 'Tides' honors a particular lineage. Melnick, Shick and Cynthia Koppe have ties to the postmodern luminary Trisha Brown, an early Jasperse inspiration. Younger dancers in 'Tides,' Maria Fleischman and Jace Weyant, have been students of Jasperse and Melnick. As the dancers combine and recombine or line up together and shield their eyes from the moon, there are suggestions of the older dancers taking the younger ones under their wings. Some drama comes from Hahn Rowe's oddly aerating score, which ranges from poltergeist noises to techno beats. Ben Demarest's lighting lines the sides of the stage for sections that resemble catwalk modeling, illuminates the back wall to highlight dancers curiously conjoining body parts and partially blinds us with oncoming headlights. But the main charge of 'Tides,' one of the most engrossing dance works I've seen this year, comes from the choreography: a strong structure kept supple and alive with little slippages and surprises. 'Tides' made for a thrilling but incongruous start to La MaMa Moves, which continues though Sunday. The festival is customarily a home to the fledgling and never-quite-arrived ends of experimental dance. A premiere by Jasperse, a major choreographer whose work has appeared at major theaters like Brooklyn Academy of Music, could be read as an anniversary treat and an act of generosity — or as a troubling symptom of a dance ecosystem in crisis. Two shared programs this past weekend were back to festival business as usual: a lot of first-draft ideas and one undersung delight. In 'dance for no ending,' Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro tried all kinds of things — entering along the walls as if playing a vertical game of Twister, hurling props onto the stage, wrestling, drawing, making ironic announcements through a bullhorn. None of the zaniness, though, was actually fun or funny. Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a thoughtful, talented choreographer when he has multiple bodies at his disposal. But his solo 'Mooncry' was vanishingly thin. After some throat-clearing business of entering and exiting the stage, he read names of audience members and threw mints at them. The work, he said while standing on a pile of books, was research into crying. But the research seemed to be in early stages, hitting on a strong idea only occasionally, as when he wittily hung a wig on a microphone stand next to a fan. In the other shared program, Megumi Eda addressed intergenerational trauma in her solo 'Please Cry.' Her grandmother was a nurse in the Japanese military during World War II but never discussed the experience. She taught Eda not to cry. We learned some of this as Eda livestreamed herself and talked to her dead grandmother on her cellphone, shared home movies, wore a nurse's coat and thrashed against a wall. A standout dancer decades ago in the company of Karole Armitage, Eda remains striking, but the work was inchoate. That kind of deficiency is to be expected from this festival, but so are discoveries like Nic Gareiss. A virtuoso step dancer in Irish and Appalachian traditions, Gareiss isn't unknown in New York: He's been presented at the Irish Arts Center and last week at the Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival. Nevertheless, he's an underexposed treasure. At La MaMa, Gareiss was joined by Alexis Chartrand, who plays French Canadian fiddle tunes on a Baroque violin. Gareiss scuffed and scraped the sanded floor, easing into fancy flatfooting and tucking in surprises like knocking heels and clicking toes. Much of the time, he stayed in place with his feet directly underneath him and danced, as it were, under his breath — murmuring, whispering. He spoke of his collaboration with Chartrand as a 'meshing of sonic intimacies,' and so it mainly was, starting quiet and getting quieter. At one point, Gareiss, an unassuming charmer, made a comment about being in an experimental theater and gave audience members permission to express themselves in 'noises of pleasure.' He also mentioned being 'a petulant queer child' who rebelled against his Irish dance teacher's prohibition against scraping feet. In those two comments, perhaps, was an answer to how a traditional dancer like Gareiss (out and proud in a traditional field) fits into the frequently undercooked avant-gardism of La MaMa Moves and how he quietly invigorated it.
New York Times
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Onstage and Off, Whitney White Is Everywhere This Spring
This spring, Whitney White directed the ensemble drama 'Liberation' Off Broadway, then the two-hander 'The Last Five Years' on Broadway. Just days after that musical opened, she stood in an upstairs room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, rehearsing 'Macbeth in Stride,' her adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, which begins performances on Tuesday. During the song 'Reach for It,' White, who plays a version of Lady Macbeth, took the lead. 'Power's not supposed to look like me,' she sang into a microphone. Maybe it should. A multidisciplinary artist with an unusual number of hyphens, White, 39, is an actor, a musician, a writer for theater and television (the Amazon series 'I'm a Virgo') and an increasingly in-demand, Tony-nominated stage director. Her current projects, White observed during a rehearsal break, are all about ambitious women. 'I'm weirdly one of them,' she said. White grew up in Chicago, in a one-bedroom apartment with her working single mother. Her first exposure to theater was at her grandfather's church, the Apostolic Church of God, which boasted a 50-person choir. A visit to Cirque du Soleil was another formative experience. At Northwestern, White took theater classes, but she found the scene there cliquey, exclusionary, so she majored in political science instead. While interning for Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008, she realized that she had to be an artist after all. 'There's nothing else that I can really wholeheartedly do with myself,' she said. With Nygel D. Robinson at the piano, the cast of 'Macbeth in Stride' in rehearsal, from left: Charlie Thurston, White, Holli' Conway, Phoenix Best and Ciara Alyse Harris. Credit... Elias Williams for The New York Times Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
