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Asian Composers Replicate on Careers in Western Classical Music

Asian Composers Reflect on Careers in Western Classical Music

Asian composers who write in Western classical musical forms, like symphonies and operas, tend to have a few things in common. Many learned European styles from an early age, and finished their studies at conservatories there or in the United States. And many later found themselves relegated to programming ghettos like Lunar New Year concerts. (One recent study found that works by Asian composers make up only about 2 percent of American orchestral performances planned for the coming season.)

At times, the music of Asian composers has been misunderstood or exoticized; they have been subjected to simple errors such as, in the case of Huang Ruo, who was born in China, repeated misspellings of his name.

For all their shared experiences, each of these artists has a unique story. Here, five of them provide a small sampling of the lessons, struggles and triumphs of composers who were born in Asia and made a career for themselves in Western classical music. These are edited excerpts from interviews with them.

Music is my language. To me “West” and “East” are just ways of talking — or like ways of cooking. I’m a chef, and sometimes I find my recipe is like my orchestrations. It would be so boring if you asked me to cook in one style. Eastern and Western, then, have for me become a unique recipe in which one plus one equals one.

I am in a very special zone historically. I’m 63, and part of the first generation of Eastern composers after the Cultural Revolution to deal with Western forms. But it’s just like rosemary, butter and vegetables. You can cook this way, that way — and that’s why the same orchestras sound so different, from Debussy to Stravinsky to myself.

I’m lucky. When I came to the United States as a student, my teachers and classmates gave me enormous encouragement to discover myself. And I learned so much from John Cage. After this, it felt so easy to compose. And when people approach me for commissions, I re-approach them about what I’m thinking about. I remember when Kurt Masur asked me to write something for the New York Philharmonic — the Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra — I said, “Can I write something for water?” He said, “As long as you don’t flood our orchestra.”

Yes, we often are misunderstood. It’s like when you cook beautiful black bean with chili sauce and chocolate. They may say, “Hey, this is a little strange.” But you explain why, and that can be very interesting. Thank God I love to talk. And there has been progress for us. I am the first Eastern composer to be the dean of a Western conservatory, at Bard. That’s like a Chinese chef becoming the chef of an Italian restaurant. That’s the future: a different way of approaching color, boundary-less, a unity of the soul.

One thing about composers like Tan Dun: They came out of the Cultural Revolution, after a door had closed for so many years. So there was so much focus on what China was doing, a lot of curiosity — curiosity rather than active racism. Our generation — I’m 44 — is so different.

We learn Western music with such rigorous systems. And we do not close our ears to different traditions or styles; that attitude determines early on that you don’t have that kind of boundary, or ownership. But you still hear those conversation topics about “East meets West.” It’s so tiring. East has been meeting West for thousands of years; if we’re always still just meeting, that’s a problem.

Programming Chinese composers around Lunar New Year is in general very problematic. Do we need to celebrate the culture? Yes. Do we need to celebrate the tradition? Absolutely. But it can be part of the main subscription series, or a yearlong series. Then you can really tell stories, not just group people by a country.

My name does not give me ownership of Chinese culture. There are so many things I don’t know. There are so many burdens and fights — as the woman, the woman of color, the Chinese woman — that I decided to fight nothing and just create my own stuff. I told myself that if I had a great body of work, that would speak to what a Chinese woman can do.

I never wanted to be pigeonholed, to be a reduced representation. I wanted to always open that Pandora’s box of messiness — and I encourage others to celebrate messiness, the unclean narrative of your life. Every immigrant has her own path; your work should absolutely be reflective of that. So if I’m a spokesperson, it’s for my own voice. And through that particular voice, I hope there is something that resonates.

When I left China, it was a time of economic and cultural reform. I’m glad I came to the United States, but I do have a little bit of guilt. I probably could have done more there. At the time, my ambition was to try to learn Western music and become the best composer, pianist and conductor I could be. I was fortunate to work with many fantastic musicians and meet Leonard Bernstein, who took me under his wing for five years. Now, at 65, when someone asks me if I consider myself a Chinese or American composer, I say, in the most humble way, “100 percent both.” I feel well-versed in both cultures.

Occasionally, there has been racism and misunderstanding, but that is inevitable. Would that be different if there were more Asian people running orchestras? Maybe. My response has just been to try to produce the best music I can. I wrote an opera for San Francisco Opera — “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which they’re reviving. It’s based on a very popular Chinese story, and when I worked on it with David Henry Hwang, we asked ourselves: “Is this for a Western audience or Asian audience?” We decided first and foremost it should just be good, and it had to be touching. Good art should transcend.

Years ago, I wrote an orchestral piece, “H’un (Lacerations),” which premiered at the 92nd Street Y in New York. It is about my recollections growing up during the Cultural Revolution, and is thus sonically harsh and dramatic, with no melody. My mother was there, and she said it brought back a lot of painful memories. I was also sitting next to an old Jewish woman, and after I took a bow onstage, she leaned over and said, “If you changed the title to ‘Auschwitz,’ this would be just as appropriate.” That was the highest compliment.

The Korea of my childhood and adolescence was a very different place from what it is today. In the 1960s, it was an impoverished developing country, devastated by colonialism and by the Korean War, and until the late 1980s, there was a military dictatorship in place. In order to develop as a composer, one had to go abroad, as there didn’t exist an infrastructure for new music. Now 60, and having lived for 35 years in Europe, it remains important for me to contribute to the contemporary music scene in Asia.

When I moved to Germany, there was a tendency to put composers in certain boxes, with all the aesthetic turf wars back then. Since I was neither interested in joining any camp or fashionable avant-garde or other trends, fulfilling exotic expectations, or assumptions of how a woman should or should not compose, I had to start a career in other countries while still living in Germany. Prejudices such as viewing an Asian composer or performing musician only through “sociological” lenses are still relatively common in various countries, but times are changing. Of course, there exist prejudices and complacency in the whole world, including in Asia. Perhaps the only remedy to this apparently, and sadly, all-too-human impulse is try to retain a sense of wonder and attempt to find distance to oneself.

I have worked in different countries for decades, and have felt a need to stay curious about different musical cultures, traditions and genres. I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity, any musical style or culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum: Art has always thrived when there has been cross-fertilization.

At the same time, one should be wary of the danger of exoticism and superficial cultural appropriation. I think that a contemporary composer needs to study different cultures, traditions and genres, but make use of those influences in a selective, historically conscious and self-critical manner.

When people heard I came from China, they would often say, “Does your music sound like Tan Dun?” I don’t think they meant any harm, but it shows a certain ignorance. I tried to explain that China is a big country, and we all speak with our own voice.

I started as an instrumental composer, and a lot of those works got programmed at Asian-themed or Lunar New Year concerts. I didn’t notice at first, but you begin to see patterns. I don’t feel my work has any less quality than my other colleagues who are not minority composers, but for conductors, programmers and artistic directors, it doesn’t seem to come to their mind that you can naturally program an Asian composer’s work next to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.

That’s one of the reasons I turned to opera. I thought, there must be no opera company having a themed season devoted to Asian composers. So finally, I got to be programmed next to “Fidelio” and “Madama Butterfly.” That was my revenge. Also, I’ve wanted to write on subjects that reflect Asian or Asian American topics, to really share these stories. In this case it is actually me making the choice.

Someone once told me I speak English with an accent. I said, “Otherwise, how would you know that’s me speaking?” I feel the same way as a composer. I want to have my own originality, to speak with my own accent — with my love of Western musical styles, but also this heritage I carry of Chinese culture.

Without coming to the United States, I would be a different composer. If I went to Europe instead, I would also be very different. But I feel I made the right decision, and at 44 I fully embrace who I am today, and where I am as well.

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I’m Obsessed With ‘Previous.’ The Twist: I Gained’t See It.

I’m Obsessed With ‘Old.’ The Twist: I Won’t See It.

Let me say up front that I do not expect to see M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, “Old,” which arrived in theaters last week, for no other reason than that I am traveling and haven’t set foot in a theater in almost two years. But in the past few weeks, I have watched its trailer over and over, enthralled by its combination of existential horror and unintended humor. The trailer introduces us to some people who become trapped on a remote beach, where they begin to age at an insanely accelerated pace. Naturally, they try to figure out what’s happening, floating theories and freaking out. This being a Shyamalan film, the trailer promises they will spend a lot of time looking confused and concerned — the same facial feat Mark Wahlberg sustained across the running time of “The Happening” — and yelling at one another, demanding explanations.

This is a familiar, Manichaean, Shyamalan-ish universe: A diverse group of bewildered souls, alone in a menacing void, earnestly playing out whatever endgame logic the scenario dictates. (It’s as though the director were compelled to continually make big-budget versions of “Waiting for Godot” — you think he can’t go on, but he’ll go on.) So we see a family on vacation, headed to the beach. The cast is soon filled out by others: a couple, a 6-year-old girl, a woman in a bikini making smoochie faces at her phone, two more men. Soon enough, the kids find things in the sand: rusted items from their hotel, cracked sunglasses, late-model iPhones. A young bleach-blonde corpse bobs toward a boy in the water. (She did not die of old age, but will decompose in hyperlapse.) Then the real aging begins. Parents confront their kids’ sudden adolescence. The 6-year-old girl grows up, becomes pregnant and gives birth on the beach. Some greater force is afoot, be it fate, God, time, Facebook or nature. Whatever it is, it clearly doesn’t care how many travel rewards points or memory-making family vacations you had in real life.

Near the start of the trailer, Vicky Krieps’s character dreamily tells her impatient children: “Let’s all start slowing down.” Then everything starts speeding up. At some point she turns to her husband and exclaims, “You have wrinkles!” (The horror!) But of course “Old” will not be an allegory about the importance of sunscreen. What we’re being shown here looks far more like a meditation on mortality wrapped in a cautionary tale about our accelerated lives — about the scariness of time flying and kids growing up too fast, of bodies going to hell and the inescapability of death, and about the ravages we’ve visited upon the Earth, which will remain blanketed in all our fancy garbage long after it has turned us to dust.

Part of what’s so captivatingly strange about the trailer is the way it takes a movie that compresses life into a couple of hours and then compresses that into a galloping two-and-a-half-minute highlight reel. Its breakneck, parodic pace calls to mind Tom Stoppard’s “15-Minute Hamlet,” in which all the most famous scenes from Shakespeare’s play are crammed (twice!) into a quarter of an hour. (In a film adaptation I once saw, Ophelia drowned herself by plunging her head into a bucket.) The title alone reduces the existential horror of the premise to a midlife freakout.

The graphic novel from which this movie is adapted — “Sandcastle,” written by Pierre Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters — was inspired by Levy’s memories of childhood holidays. “He used to travel a lot to a beach exactly like this one, in the north of Spain,” Peeters told the comics site CBR. “Later, he went back with his own children, and one day he had this idea.” The beach could serve as a microcosm of Western society, “with some of its strong basic figures.” This was not a thriller, Peeters said — “it’s a fable.”

It takes a movie that compresses life into a couple of hours and then compresses that into two and a half minutes.

Shyamalan may be best known for his last-minute twists, but this was an option the “Sandcastle” authors ultimately decided against. According to Peeters, Levy had written a resolution to the story, a final twist — “but we finally decided it was useless, and would have destroyed the frightening dimension of the book.” The frightening dimension, of course, is that there is no escaping time, or death — and neither is there any simple revelatory twist in life that will explain what you’re meant to be doing with your time here.

Anyone converting this source material into a movie has a choice to make: Either you embrace the terrifying meaninglessness of our short lives, or you try to offer consolation with a resolution to the story. The trailer tips its hand that Shyamalan has chosen the latter: The last words we hear are Gabriel Garcia Bernal’s character saying, “We’re here for a reason!” Maybe we are and maybe we are not, but my time on Earth is limited, and any story that attempts to wrap up the problem of life will feel like a waste of it.

As I watched this trailer over and over, I was also, coincidentally, in Spain, where I lived for many years while growing up. I am writing from my brother’s new apartment in Madrid, which happens to be next door to the childhood home of a childhood friend. Walking my dog past her building, then meeting with her later, I find myself dwelling on the trailer, on the nature of time passing, on how compressed and accelerated it can feel. It’s strange to sit across from people you met in elementary school but haven’t seen in years. It makes you feel like the couples in the trailer, watching their spouses transform into their future selves. Time seems to pass at an accelerated rate when you return to a place periodically, over a long period, with large gaps in between.

During the past year and a half of paralysis — this remote, isolated, slowed-down time, during which some of the most privileged among us were able to isolate in safety and comfort — it could seem as if the future were on hold. (It was not.) Time felt endless and slow until, for me, it accelerated significantly. I lost my mother suddenly. After 18 months of not traveling anywhere, I came back to the city where I lost my father, where my nephews were born, where my parents’ still-living friends have become elderly. It is funny to see how much has changed, and which things never change. I met a friend at a gallery opening and mentioned on arrival that I’d forgotten to iron my dress. He seemed happy to hear this: “You’re still you!” he said.

Perhaps, for some of us, last year felt like a pause. But there was no pause. There never is. You look away for a moment, and your kid is tall. Your dog is old. Friends move away. You begin to wonder where this is all going. What’s the twist? When will it arrive? And then maybe you realize where you are, which may be a very old city — old to you and old in history, though not as old as some — and here you are, repeatedly watching a trailer for a movie, feeling a strange feeling.

Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks and Other Mixed Messages” and a contributing writer for the magazine.

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A Vogue Legend, Nonetheless Enlarging Circles of Pleasure

A Vogue Legend, Still Enlarging Circles of Pleasure

When Archie Burnett walks onto a dance floor, he tends to take it over.

That’s partly because he’s a big guy, 6 foot 4 and full of muscle. Especially in the 1980s and ’90s, when he was a mainstay of New York City’s underground clubs, his body was, as he recently put it, “banging.”

A body like that commands attention, but any chance of fading into the background truly disappears when he starts to move. Then he’s a kaleidoscope of long lines and sharp angles. Every moment, he’s ready for a camera to click; every moment, he’s on beat.

His dancing is also knowledge in action. Vogue and waacking, resurgent in popular culture, may be new to some, but not to Burnett. He’s a grandfather of the House of Ninja, a collective of dancers instrumental in the spread of vogueing from ballrooms to videos and fashion shows in the ’80s and ’90s. With Tyrone Proctor, a pioneer of waacking who happened to be Burnett’s brother-in-law, he helped revive that style of flamboyant, air-slicing improvisation, developed in Los Angeles gay clubs in the 1970s. House dance is home territory, too.

A Burnett dance-floor takeover, though, is never hostile. The choreographer David Neumann remembers going to clubs with him in the ’90s. “People would want to battle him,” Neumann said. “But Archie would immediately disarm the person — screaming, slapping the floor, praising them.”

“That’s his attitude,” Neumann continued. “If you are really in the dance, you get props. Now, eventually, he’ll likely beat you, but that’s not his goal. His goal is the joy of dancing.”

Sally Sommer, a critic and historian who followed Burnett to clubs in the ’80s and put him at the center of her ’90s-club-dance documentary, “Check Your Body at the Door,” similarly described Burnett’s attitude in an interview: “It’s about enlarging the circles of pleasure.”

At 62, Burnett is still enlarging those circles — in clubs but also in classrooms. Since the ’90s, as demand for instruction in underground club styles has grown all around the world and especially in Europe, he has become one of the most revered and influential teachers. (“The most significant disseminator,” Sommer said.) Younger dancers lovingly describe him as a fairy godfather, a cool uncle or the best dad ever, as a friend who makes you want to dance even if your feet hurt.

From July 28 to Aug. 1, his teaching takes a new form: “Life Encounters,” a show at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires. In it, Burnett and an intergenerational cast of dancers tell the story of his life in dance. (Video of the production will be available on the Jacob’s Pillow website Aug. 12-26.)

They tell that story through dance, with vignettes of Burnett’s high school days, his initiation into underground clubs and vogueing, his first encounter with Europe and experimental dance. These are all scenes of discovery, in which he typically portrays himself as a novice. There’s a lot of humor.

Burnett is at the center, dancing and narrating. His voice is as big as the rest of him, and he’s accustomed to holding forth. Ask him almost any question these days, and his answer is likely to include the phrase “What I tell the kids is …” or one of what he calls his “sayings,” like “you can’t fake the real” and “the club is the classroom.”

The club was his classroom. He had almost no formal training. At first, he cribbed moves off “Soul Train.” Up until 2014, he had a day job with Metropolitan Transportation Authority. (In “Check Your Body,” you can see him washing out subway cars.) Dancing, for him, has been more passion than profession.

Speaking after a recent rehearsal, Burnett said the most important experience of his life started in 1980, when he began dancing at the Loft, the underground party celebrated for its mixed crowd of dance devotees and its spirit of acceptance. “The Loft was a come-as-you-are party,” he said. “It allowed me a nurturing ground to be who I was, even when I didn’t know who I was.”

When Burnett was growing up in Brooklyn, dancing was something he had to do on the sly. His mother, a Seventh Day Adventist from Dominica, didn’t approve. “I wasn’t doing drugs, I wasn’t killing anybody, but she had an issue because I like to shake my ass to a beat?” Burnett said. “She told me I was going to go to Hell, that I should go to God. But dance is like a religion for me. It’s where I feel closest to my spiritual plane.”

His mother wanted him to be a preacher, and in a sense, she may have gotten her wish. Burnett preaches the gospel of the Loft, which is a gospel of love. The message of “Life Encounters” is the message of all his classes: “Live your truth” and “you are good enough.”

There’s not much sadness in the show, though there has been in Burnett’s life. “When AIDS hit the scene, my friends were dropping like flies,” he said. Willi Ninja, who founded the House of Ninja and became famous after appearing in the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” died of AIDS-related heart failure in 2006. Burnett was his health care proxy. “I had to pull the plug after he went into cardiac arrest,” he said. “Those experiences shaped my idea of friendship and family. I try to spread that love through dance.”

It’s not that Burnett doesn’t teach movement. He tries to teach his students as he learned. “These kids were never raised in club culture,” he said. “They’re seeing it from the outside. But this stuff comes from the inside out. I try to make it as if we’re at a party and I’m inviting them to do what I do” — a mirroring that connects them to the music and to their own responses.

For the cast of “Life Encounters,” rehearsals have been a continuing master class. “Archie is a history bearer and he’s always dropping gems,” said Abdiel Jacobsen, who used to be a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company (and who uses the pronoun “they”). A few years ago, looking for ways to more fully express a gender-fluid identity, Jacobsen discovered encouragement and welcome in Burnett’s vogue and waacking classes. Now a devotee of the Hustle, they do that partner dance with Burnett in the show.

Sinia Alaia (who also goes by Sinia Braxton, Nia Reid and other names) met Burnett about seven years ago, when they were both teaching in Sweden. A recognized diva in the vogue ballroom scene — in “Life Encounters,” she schools the others in sass — she was then in her late 30s and had not been performing and feared doing an instructor demonstration. “But Archie told me, ‘You got this, girl,’ and he breathed that life into me,” Reid said. “It’s when you stop dancing that you feel the aches and pains.”

Getting older hasn’t been easy for Burnett. “I’m my own worst critic,” he said. “If I think of all the abilities I had when I was 20, I’d go insane. But I tried to stop worrying about what I didn’t have and remember what I did.”

What he has are relationships. The cast of “Life Encounters,” he said, is like a “family love affair.” Maya Llanos is the daughter of the D.J. Joey Llanos, a friend of Burnett’s from the Paradise Garage days. Samara Cohen, better known as Princess Lockerooo, is the foremost protégé of Proctor (who died last year). DeAndre Brown (Yummy in the ballroom) was once part of the House of Ninja. Burnett met Ephrat Asherie on the dance floor. “I’ve danced with that girl for 20 years,” he said.

And what he has is knowledge. The playwright Marcella Murray, who serves as dramaturge for “Life Encounters” along with Neumann, said that in doing research for this show, “Archie is the research, this amazing font.”

But it’s not just Burnett’s knowledge about dance that impressed Murray. “We have been having conversations in the arts about how we treat each other,” she said. “It’s been wonderful to see how Archie has moved through the world, and how people want to show up for him.”

“Because we’re all trying to be like that,” she continued, “not just making brilliant art, but being good people who make art. That’s my favorite reason for being glad that people are going to get to see more of Archie.”

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Little Combine’s Horny Music Movies Are All the time Enjoyable

Little Mix's Sexy Music Videos Are Always Fun

Little Mix know how to turn up the heat, but they also know how to have a really good time. Over the years, the British girl group — Jade Thirlwall, Perrie Edwards, and Leigh-Anne Pinnock and former member Jesy Nelson — have gone all out for their visuals. Whether they’re dancing the night away or getting dolled up in fun outfits, they always manage to turn their music videos into a big party. Their latest collaboration with Anne-Marie is no exception to that rule. The music video for “Kiss My (Uh Oh),” which was released on July 23, shows the group going full Bridesmaids as they have a wild bachelorette party with the English singer. After watching their latest collaboration with Anne-Marie, see some of their sexiest videos as a group ahead.

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Songs to Accompany a Dreamy Summer season Dinner Get together

Songs to Accompany a Dreamy Summer Dinner Party

“Kris’s wife, Lisa Meyers, sent this to me several months ago and told me it reminded her of her father. We’re both daddy’s girls so she thought I would enjoy it and think about my dad. And just a few days ago, my boyfriend, Craig, played it for me and I said, ‘oh my gosh, this song is haunting me.’ I would love to record it some day.”

“Cmon Let’s Go” — Girlschool

“A fist-pumping rager that’s fun, fun, fun. Who doesn’t want to listen to something like this while hanging out with pals and eating barely cooked Greenmarket corn straight off the cob in someone’s backyard?”

“Far From Right” — Habibi

Rahill Jamalifard, Habibi’s vocalist, is a Superiority Burger alum from way back when we first opened in 2015. This track is from 2014, and it still hits really hard in 2021. It has a very difficult to achieve kinetic nonchalance with a vocal delivery that asserts the influence of Rahill’s Michigan upbringing.”

“Dressed in Black” — Teengenerate

“Greatest band of all time? Tokyo’s Teengenerate. No question. And Fifi, the former guitarist and vocalist, currently operates the greatest bar on the planet — Poor Cow, also in Tokyo.”

“Wiwasharnine” — Mdou Moctar

“This plays pretty much once every other day on the Superiority Burger iPod. The groove on this track is relentless. They are playing in Brooklyn in mid-September, a not-to-be-missed gig.”

“Clair de Lune” — Claude Debussy

Various — Sly & The Family Stone

“When you’re listening to folks nattering about, talking over one another and getting louder and louder, it’s time for Sly & The Family Stone to take over the room — quick! Take your pick — ‘Family Affair,’ ‘Everyday People,’ ‘If You Want Me to Stay,’ ‘Everybody Is a Star’ — or just put on all of them!”

“HUMBLE.” — Kendrick Lamar

“Reason to Believe (feat. Courtney Barnett)” — Vagabon

“As if the Karen Dalton version weren’t dreamy enough, this one makes me tear up instantly.”

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HBO and HBO Max Subscribers Seen Reaching 73 Million in 2021

HBO and HBO Max Subscribers Seen Reaching 73 Million in 2021

AT&T may not want HBO Max anymore, but the streaming platform is gaining traction with customers.

HBO and HBO Max, home to genre-bending franchises such as “Game of Thrones” and “The Sopranos” and Hollywood blockbusters like “Wonder Woman 1984,” have added 10.7 million customers in a little over a year, with 2.8 million coming in the three months ending in June, AT&T reported on Thursday. Those figures include both HBO Max and the HBO TV channel.

The company has 67.5 million subscribers to HBO and HBO Max, with 47 million in the United States. AT&T, which has struck a deal to sell its media businesses, expects HBO and HBO Max will have between 70 million and 73 million customers by the end of the year, exceeding earlier predictions.

Netflix, the most popular streaming service, has 209 million subscribers, with about 66 million in the United States. It gained customers in the second quarter, but growth has considerably slowed and it lost 430,000 subscribers across the United States and Canada, a sign that cracks are beginning to show in the streamer’s long-held dominance.

Speaking on the broader streaming industry, Jason Kilar, the chief executive of AT&T’s media arm, WarnerMedia, said in an interview: “The only thing I can promise you is change. There is no doubt that change is coming, and that’s appropriate because we live in a dynamic time.”

WarnerMedia, which includes CNN, the Warner Bros. film and television studios and the Turner cable networks, is about to become the property of Discovery Inc., as media companies continue to gobble each other up in an effort to take on Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The deal, which is expected to close around the middle of next year, will create the second-largest media business in the United States, behind the Walt Disney Company and ahead of Netflix and NBCUniversal.

Mr. Kilar, who learned of the acquisition only weeks before it would be announced, could be out of a job after the deal closes.

Both companies are prohibited from working together until the merger is approved by government regulators, including striking any employment agreements. Still, such deals often involve tacit arrangements about leadership. Mr. Kilar said that he had met socially with David Zaslav, the head of Discovery, but that he hadn’t broached the topic of his employment.

“David and I have known each other for a long time,” he said, “and I think it’s fair to say there’s a lot of shared respect between the both of us.”

Mr. Kilar, who took charge of the company only 15 months ago, said he did not have plans to step away.

“There will be a point where I pick my head up next year where I think about this topic,” he continued. “But I certainly don’t intend to do it until 2022.”

Mr. Kilar, who was the founding chief executive of Hulu, is considered within Hollywood to be a bit of an iconoclast. In 2011, he broadsided the industry with a now-famous manifesto on the future of entertainment that, to many, came across as a blistering critique of Hulu’s corporate ownership.

The post panned traditional TV for running far too many commercials. Mr. Kilar also blasted cable, predicting that viewers would eventually drop expensive packages.

After Mr. Kilar joined WarnerMedia, he quickly shuffled the executive ranks and cut costs in an effort to streamline the business.

Then he angered Hollywood (again) by breaking with tradition and releasing the entire 2021 lineup of Warner Bros. films on HBO Max on the same day they were scheduled to appear in theaters. The move would have cost some of Hollywood’s biggest players back-end profits — the commission that top-flight producers and stars earn based on box office receipts — but the company quickly worked out deals to make sure they would be paid.

Unlike Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max and other new entrants into streaming have legacy agreements with cable distributors and Hollywood studios that prevent a more full-throated approach to making films and TV shows immediately available online.

For Mr. Kilar, the move wasn’t about upsetting Hollywood, but rather was part of a larger strategy to goose HBO Max.

It seems to have worked. The release of made-for-the-big-screen spectacles like “Godzilla vs. Kong” on HBO Max helped to increase the service’s customer rolls.

Mr. Kilar intends to keep up that strategy through 2022. Warner Bros. will release 10 films exclusively for the streaming platform. And big-budget films like “The Batman,” a reimagining of the comic book character starring Robert Pattinson, will have relatively short windows in theaters of 45 days before they show up on HBO Max, according to Mr. Kilar.

“That’s very, very different than the way the world operated in 2019,” he said. “Ultimately, I do think that as long as you’re thoughtful about it, change could be very, very good for not only the customers but also the people we get to work with.”

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‘Ailey’ Assessment: A Poetic Have a look at the Man Behind the Dances

‘Ailey’ Review: A Poetic Look at the Man Behind the Dances

Too often, the idea of Alvin Ailey is reduced to a single dance: “Revelations.” His 1960 exploration of the Black experience remains a masterpiece, but it also overshadows the person who made it. How can an artist grow after such early success? Who was Alvin Ailey the man?

In “Ailey,” the director Jamila Wignot layers images, video and — most important — voice-overs from Ailey to create a portrait that feels as poetic and nuanced as choreography itself. Black-and-white footage of crowds filing into church, children playing, dance parties, and the dusty landscape of Texas (his birthplace) builds an atmosphere. Like Ailey’s dances, the documentary leaves you swimming in sensation.

Ailey’s story is told alongside the creation of “Lazarus,” a new dance by the contemporary choreographer Rennie Harris, whose homage to Ailey proposes an intriguing juxtaposition of past and present. In his search to reveal the man behind the legacy, Harris lands on the theme of resurrection. Ailey died in 1989, but his spirit lives on in his dancers.

But his early days weren’t easy. Born in 1931, Ailey never knew his father and recalls “being glued to my mother’s hip. Sloshing through the terrain. Branches slashing against a child’s body. Going from one place to another. Looking for a place to be. My mother off working in the fields. I used to pick cotton.”

He was only 4. Ailey spoke about how his dances were full of “dark deep things, beautiful things inside me that I’d always been trying to get out.”

All the while, Ailey, who was gay, remained intensely private. Here, we grasp his anguish, especially after the sudden death of his friend, the choreographer and dancer Joyce Trisler. In her honor, he choreographed “Memoria” (1979), a dance of loneliness and celebration. “I couldn’t cry until I saw this piece,” he says.

Ailey’s mental health was fragile toward the end of his life; Wignot shows crowds converging on sidewalks, but instead of having them walk normally, she reverses their steps. He was suffering from AIDS. Before his death, he passed on his company to Judith Jamison, who sums up his magnetic, enduring presence: “Alvin breathed in and never breathed out.”

Again, it’s that idea of resurrection. “We are his breath out,” she continues. “So that’s what we’re floating on, that’s what we’re living on.”

Ailey
Rated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour and 22 minutes. In theaters.

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Storm Reid Dances to Normani’s “Wild Aspect” | Video

Storm Reid Dances to Normani's "Wild Side" | Video

We’re going to need a collaboration between Storm Reid and Normani ASAP. On July 21, the Euphoria actress posted an Instagram video of herself dancing to Normani’s new “Wild Side” track. Reid’s energy (and her animal print outfit) was flawless, despite throwing together the at-home video in a matter of minutes before she started work. Clearly, she can keep up with the best of the best, so let’s get her on a stage with Normani right away.

Even Reid’s makeup artist, Joanna Skim, was amazed to see what she pulled off in such a short time. “Ma’am. You stepped away for three minutes and shot a whole music video. How,” Skim commented on Reid’s video. Hey, when inspiration strikes, you have to go for it, especially if you’re “shooting [your] shot” like Reid was. Here’s to hoping this duo connects soon, and we finally get to see them work together as Normani rolls out new music.

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A Rap Tune Lays Naked Israel’s Jewish-Arab Fracture — and Goes Viral

A Rap Song Lays Bare Israel’s Jewish-Arab Fracture — and Goes Viral

BEIT YEHOSHUA, Israel — Uriya Rosenman grew up on Israeli military bases and served as an officer in an elite unit of the army. His father was a combat pilot. His grandfather led the paratroopers who captured the Western Wall from Jordan in 1967.

Sameh Zakout, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, grew up in the mixed Arab-Jewish town of Ramla. His family was driven out of its home in the 1948 war of Israeli independence, known to Palestinians as the “Nakba,” or catastrophe. Many of his relatives fled to Gaza.

Facing each other in a garage over a small plastic table, the two hurl ethnic insults and clichés at each other, tearing away the veneer of civility overlaying the seething resentments between the Jewish state and its Palestinian minority in a rap video that has gone viral in Israel.

The video, “Let’s Talk Straight,” which has garnered more than four million views on social media since May, couldn’t have landed at a more apt time, after the eruption two months ago of Jewish-Arab violence that turned many mixed Israeli cities like Lod and Ramla into Jewish-Arab battlegrounds.

By shouting each side’s prejudices at each other, at times seemingly on the verge of violence, Mr. Rosenman and Mr. Zakout have produced a work that dares listeners to move past stereotypes and discover their shared humanity.

Mr. Rosenman, 31, says he wants to change Israel from within by challenging its most basic reflexes. “I think that we are scared and are controlled by fear,” he says.

Mr. Zakout, 37, wants to change Israel by overcoming their forebears’ traumas. “I am not emphasizing my Palestinian identity,” he says. “I am a human being. Period. We are human beings first.”

At first viewing, the video seems like anything but a humanistic enterprise.

Mr. Rosenman, the first to speak, launches into a relentless three-minute anti-Palestinian tirade.

“Don’t cry racism. Stop the whining. You live in clans, fire rifles at weddings,” he taunts, his body tensed. “Abuse your animals, steal cars, beat your own women. All you care about is Allah and the Nakba and jihad and the honor that controls your urges.”

The camera circles them. A guitar screeches.

Mr. Zakout tugs at his beard, looks away with disdain. He’s heard it all before, including that oft-repeated line: “I am not a racist, my gardener is Arab.”

Then Mr. Zakout, his voice rising, delivers the other side of the most intractable of Middle Eastern stories.

“Enough,” he says. “I am a Palestinian and that’s it, so shut up. I don’t support terror, I’m against violence, but 70 years of occupation — of course there’ll be resistance. When you do a barbecue and celebrate independence, the Nakba is my grandmother’s reality. In 1948 you kicked out my family, the food was still warm on the table when you broke into our homes, occupying and then denying. You can’t speak Arabic, you know nothing of your neighbor, you don’t want us to live next to you, but we build your homes.”

Mr. Rosenman fidgets. His assertive confidence drains away as he’s whisked through the looking-glass of Arab-Jewish incomprehension.

The video pays homage to Joyner Lucas’s “I’m Not Racist,” a similar exploration of the stereotypes and blindness that lock in the Black-white fracture in the United States.

Mr. Rosenman, an educator whose job was to explain the conflict to young Israeli soldiers, had grown increasingly frustrated with “how things, with the justification of past traumas for the Jews, were built on rotten foundations.”

“Some things about my country are amazing and pure,” he said in an interview. “Some are very rotten. They are not discussed. We are motivated by trauma. We are a post-traumatic society. The Holocaust gives us some sort of back-way legitimacy to not plan for the future, not understand the full picture of the situation here, and to justify action we portray as defending ourselves.”

For example, Israel, he believes, should stop building settlements “on what could potentially be a Palestinian state” in the West Bank, because that state is needed for peac

Looking for a way to hold a mirror to society and reveal its hypocrisies, Mr. Rosenman contacted a friend in the music industry, who suggested he meet Mr. Zakout, an actor and rapper.

They started talking in June last year, meeting for hours on a dozen occasions, building trust. They recorded the song in Hebrew and Arabic in March and the video in mid-April.

Their timing was impeccable. A few weeks later, the latest Gaza war broke out. Jews and Arabs clashed across Israel.

Their early conversations were difficult.

They argued over 1948. Mr. Zakout talked about his family in Gaza, how he missed them, how he wanted to get to know his relatives who lost their homes. He talked about the Jewish “arrogance that we feel as Arabs, the bigotry.”

“My Israeli friends told me I put them in front of the mirror,” he said.

Mr. Rosenman said he understood Mr. Zakout’s longing for a united family. That was natural. But why did Arab armies attack the Jews in 1948? “We were happy with what we got,” he said. “You know we had no other option.”

The reaction to the video has been overwhelming, as if it bared something hidden in Israel. Invitations have poured in — to appear at conferences, to participate in documentaries, to host concerts, to record podcasts.

“I’ve been waiting for someone to make this video for a long time,” said one commenter, Arik Carmi. “How can we fight each other when we are more like brothers than we will admit to ourselves? Change won’t come before we let go of the hate.”

The two men, now friends, are at work on a second project, which will examine how self-criticism in a Jewish and Arab society might bring change. It will ask the question: How can you do better, rather than blaming the government?

Mr. Zakout recently met Mr. Rosenman’s grandfather, Yoram Zamosh, who planted the Israeli flag at the Western Wall after Israeli paratroopers stormed into the Old City in Jerusalem during the 1967 war. Most of Mr. Zamosh’s family from Berlin was murdered by the Nazis at the Chelmno extermination camp.

“He is a unique and special guy,” Mr. Zakout said of Mr. Yamosh. “He reminds me a little of my grandfather, Abdallah Zakout, his energy, his vibes. When we spoke about his history and pain, I understood his fear, and at the same time he understood my side.”

The video aims to bring viewers to that same kind of understanding.

“That’s the beginning,” Mr. Zakout said. “We are not going to solve this in a week. But at least it is something, the first step in a long journey.”

Mr. Rosenman added: “What we do is meant to scream out loud that we are not scared anymore. We are letting go of our parents’ traumas and building a better future for everyone together.”

The last words in the video, from Mr. Zakout, are: “We both have no other country, and this is where the change begins.”

They turn to the table in front of them, and silently share a meal of pita and hummus.

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Is ‘Loki’ a True Marvel Variant? Or Only a Enjoyable Experiment?

Is ‘Loki’ a True Marvel Variant? Or Just a Fun Experiment?

One thing Marvel knows how to do is expand a story. Think back to the nascent days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the early ’00s. The so-called Phase 1 was about building out the superhero roster with individual film narratives that would dovetail into a big crossover movie: “The Avengers.” A decade and a half later, the crossovers are old hat, the Easter eggs are expected, and a spate of new movies and TV shows continue to provide an influx of stories and characters that branch off into their own universes.

You could even say the M.C.U. resembles a branching timeline — that’s what a member of the Time Variant Authority, or T.V.A., the bureaucracy at the center of the Disney+ series “Loki,” would say. Because for all the interdimensional fun the series has, “Loki,” which wrapped up last week, is a philosophical dialogue that also functions as a metacommentary on Marvel’s storytelling. The show’s central theme about the value of order versus chaos reflects how the M.C.U., as it expands across Disney+ and beyond, alternatively presents and breaks from contained, linear narratives and rote character types.

Although Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the sometime nemesis and sometime ally of the Avengers, was killed by Thanos in “Avengers: Infinity War,” the Asgardian now appears — resurrected! — in his own series. But it’s only a resurrection in a branding sense: The series centers on an earlier version of Loki, one who escapes the Battle of New York, from the first “Avengers” film, with the all-powerful glow-box (known as the Tesseract). His escape with the Tesseract causes a branch in the timeline, an offense that gets him first arrested by the T.V.A. and then recruited by one of the group’s agents, Mobius (Owen Wilson), to help catch a female “variant” Loki (Sophia Di Martino) who has been disregarding the rules of other timelines. In an inspired, if awkward, Freudian twist, the two Lokis fall for each other and team up to dismantle the T.V.A. before eventually finding themselves at odds.

From the beginning, “Loki” was an odd addition to the M.C.U. because it, like the recent “Black Widow” film, tried retroactively to give a back story and growth to a character who was already dead in the central M.C.U. timeline. More intriguing, it repositioned a character who had been an antagonist and a foil to Avengers like his adopted brother, the Norse golden boy Thor, as the hero of his own story, one that undermined what we had already seen happen in the franchise.

By making another version of Loki a hero, the series itself is acting as a variant. In general, Marvel has been using its latest Disney+ shows to deviate from the often wearying, even oppressive, timeline that the films have established. These side stories open up the world to more subtle, interesting narratives: “WandaVision” and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” allowed their heroes to develop in terms of both superhero abilities and emotional depth.

But whatever their divergences, these stories always end up leashed to the main M.C.U. narrative — Marvel’s own inviolable timeline, which often yields an awkward result. “WandaVision” used its classic TV parodies to cleverly explore the contours of grief and emotional escapism until its “Avengers” adjacency apparently demanded a requisite explosive ending. Sam Wilson (Falcon) and Bucky Barnes (the Winter Soldier) wrestled with trauma and its consequences, but the specter of Captain America, and the question of whether Sam would ultimately take up the shield, took over the story in the end.

In “Loki,” the Asgardian discovers that everything is predestined, even his identity. Loki is supposed to be a villain, and he is supposed to lose. There are no other options. What the series asks is, how does a character whose purpose is simply to accentuate, by way of contrast, the strengths and flaws of others, lead his own story?

The series certainly struggles to answer that question at first; Loki seems out of place in his own show. When the show allows him to be less of a reactionary character — he gets his own foils in the form of his many variants — he finally feels like the focus of the narrative. He evolves, proving that Loki can win and be honest and loving and compassionate. And just as “Loki” challenges how its title character is defined, so does the series break him out of the sole function he has served in the M.C.U. thus far.

As a loyal T.V.A. agent, Mobius, as he tells Loki, believes that his job is to maintain an ultimate sense of order — even if that order appears to rob the universe of free will. What happens when the timeline is all sorted out, without branches? “Just order, and we meet in peace at the end of time,” Mobius says.

“Only order? No chaos?” Loki responds. “That sounds boring.”

Marvel risks undercutting itself with “Loki” and with each bit of narrative chaos introduced by its latest shows. How can anything have emotional stakes when there is always a loophole or deus ex machina around the corner? (Indeed, “Loki” takes place in a closed loop, which by the series’s end has reset.) And at what point does narrative consistency fall apart and give us an indecipherable jumble of contradicting events?

The franchise wants to subscribe to both a traditional mode of storytelling and a bit of narrative chaos in the form of time travel, multiple universes and nonlinear shifts in time and space — all of which allow for deviations from the main story line. But the more variant stories we get, the more unstable and convoluted the whole structure becomes.

“Loki” is a fun touch of chaos for Loki fans, myself included, but it makes me wonder how much longer the relative order of the M.C.U. franchise’s central chronology can sustain the backpedaling and jumps and reversals, even within their own pockets of time. The vast megaverse that is Marvel already hosts countless characters and stories, and yet having one in which Loki is still alive is infinitely more fun.

But as delightful as “Loki” is conceptually, to me it felt like simply a fun, diverting experiment. What Marvel will do with the results of this experiment is another story. This season’s cliffhanger ending means that the full measure of the series’s success and impact is still to come, whether in the second season promised in the finale or in the broader M.C.U.

Is “Loki” truly a variant within the M.C.U.? Will it introduce reverberations throughout the films and TV shows going forward, or will it be essentially isolated in its own playful thought bubble? If the former, I suspect the Marvel won’t be able to sustain the full heft of the master narrative, with all of those branches, forever — that is, unless Marvel fully embraces chaos and lets the M.C.U. fracture into separate multiverses without such a restrictive overarching timeline. After all, if the god of mischief has taught us anything, it’s that a little bit of chaos can go a long way.