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Raimund Hoghe, Choreographer of Power and Frailty, Dies at 72

Raimund Hoghe, Choreographer of Strength and Frailty, Dies at 72

In it he offered meditative, meticulous deconstructions of well-known images, with the slow, sometimes enigmatic gestures of the performers referring to the original works, as if the movement had been broken by a prism. Mr. Hoghe, indifferent and a physical contrast to his dancers, was a constant but deliberately unemotional presence. This kind of juxtaposition was a common theme in his work.

“You could say that not much happens with“ Boléro Variations ”,” wrote Claudia La Rocco in a 2009 review in the New York Times. “The performers lead beautifully crafted, often simple, phrases into a series of powerful recordings.” But in the end, she noted, “rich worlds of intention and regret blossom in every act.”

In another work, “Pas de Deux”, created in 2011 for Takashi Ueno, Mr. Hoghe offered the slow ceremonial donning of kimono sashes and a vision of the young dancer’s physical control and strength that was neutral to his own weak body.

“I brought this vulnerability to the stage that we should always be aware of,” and not just in times of crisis, he said last year when asked about working during the pandemic.

Raimund Hoghe was born on May 12, 1949 in Wuppertal. His mother Irmhild Hoghe, a seamstress, was a widow and had a 10-year-old daughter when she met Mr. Hoghe’s 15-year-old father. Mr. Hoghe never knew his father, who married another woman, although his parents continued to write to each other – letters he published in a book, “The Price of Love” (1984).

His mother, he said in interviews, always accepted his appearance and believed that she could go her own way. “She often said there were worse things than a back like mine,” he said in a 2004 interview in Le Monde.

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Candy Tooth: Will There Be a Season 2 on Netflix?

SWEET TOOTH (L to R) CHRISTIAN CONVERY as GUS and NONSO ANOZIE as TOMMY JEPPERD in episode 102 of SWEET TOOTH Cr. KIRSTY GRIFFIN/NETFLIX 2021

I went into Netflix’s Sweet Tooth not knowing what to expect, and what I got was an adventurous, mysterious, and wild journey. The series based on the comic book of the same name by Jeff Lemire takes place in a post-apocalyptic world as a young boy named Gus, who is half-human and half deer, sets out on a quest to find his mother, and ends up finding out way more than he bargained for. Each of the eight episodes is packed with so many twists and turns that by the time the final episode rolls around, you’re left begging for more.

So, will there be a second season? Though Netflix hasn’t officially renewed the series, there’s a good chance it will have more episodes. Not only is it based on a comic book, meaning there are plenty of storylines left to explore, but within one day of its release, the show has already found its way into the Top 5 on Netflix. Plus, the fact that it’s executive produced by Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey probably doesn’t hurt!

In the season one finale, so many storylines come together, but there are still so many loose ends left to tie up. After Gus learns his true origins, he tries to seek refuge at The Preserve not knowing that it has actually been taken over by General Abbot and his Last Men. They eventually show up, shoot Jepperd, and capture Gus. While Gus narrowly escapes being experimented on at The Preserve, there are still so many dark uncertainties looming. Here are just a handful of questions I need answered in a second season:

  • How will Jepperd recover from being shot? Honestly, this was the biggest question on my mind after seeing Jepperd unconscious in the field. Though he is eventually rescued by Aimee, knowing what happens to his character in the comics, I can’t help but worry about his fate on the show.
  • What does Aimee have planned for The Preserve? Speaking of Aimee, what exactly does she have planned for The Preserve? She’s adamant on working with Jepperd to get her daughter back, but what kind of tricks does she have up her sleeve?
  • Will Bear be reunited with her sister? One of the biggest twists in the final episode is that Bear’s real name is Becky and her sister is actually Wendy, aka Aimee’s adopted daughter who has been captured by The Preserve. Something tells me we’re in for a big family reunion in season two.
  • What’s General Abbot’s deal anyways? The first season barely scratches the surface of General Abbot’s backstory. It appears that he wants the vaccine so that he can use it however he sees fit, but what are his greater plans?
  • Will Jepperd be reunited with his son? In one of the final episodes, we learn that Jepperd’s wife gave birth to a son, but they were taken away shortly afterwards. We can’t help but wonder if his son is actually one of the hybrids at The Preserve with Gus.
  • Which side is Birdie on? In the final scene of season one, we learn that Birdie is still alive and appears to be working in Alaska to find a cure. But whose side is she on? In episode seven, we learn that Birdie stays back at Fort Smith when the military takes over the lab so that Richard can take off and save Gus. Perhaps she agrees to help them so that she can work undercover to find a cure and eventually reunite with Gus.
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Need Extra Numerous Conductors? Orchestras Ought to Look to Assistants.

Want More Diverse Conductors? Orchestras Should Look to Assistants.

It is one of the indelible star-is-born moments in music history: Leonard Bernstein, the 25-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, steps in for an ailing maestro and leads the orchestra in a concert broadcast live on the radio, which causes a sensation .

“It’s a good American success story,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial following a front-page review of the 1943 coup. “The warm, friendly triumph filled Carnegie Hall and spread over the airwaves.”

Fifteen years later, Bernstein was music director of the Philharmonic. And the dream of moving from assistant to a large American orchestra to its leadership – like climbing a career ladder – was cemented in the popular imagination.

There are still assistant conductors, bright, talented 20- and 30-year-olds who are hired by orchestras for a few years. In fact, there are more of them than ever, and they carry a variety of titles: Assistant, Associate, Fellow, Resident. Almost every large orchestra has at least one, and they still perform the traditional tasks of Bernstein’s day: sitting in the concert hall at rehearsals, checking balance sheets and writing down scores; Conducting groups of musicians off-stage for certain pieces; and of course to be ready to take the podium in an emergency. But it’s rare for them to move up to the top jobs.

And that can be a missed opportunity. When Marin Alsop leaves the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this summer, it will leave the top flight of American ensembles as they were before they took office in 2007: without a single female music director. This group had only one black music director and only a handful of the leaders were Latino or Asian.

“It has long been a paternalistic industry to some extent,” said Kim Noltemy, executive director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, in an interview. “A lot has changed in the last 20 years, but there are delays for the top management level, be it management or conductors.”

It looks different, however, if you look at the country’s assistants, a far more diverse group in which colored women and musicians have been successful in recent years.

Now is the chance that these assistant conductors will become more than just another ear in a darkened auditorium. They offer the opportunity to accelerate greater diversity in institutions that have developed slowly over time. The question now is how quickly they will rise to the top ranks – and whether, when the big orchestras are looking for music directors in the coming years, they will be looking at the audience right under their noses.

“It’s great to have a BIPOC assistant conductor,” said Jonathan Rush, the Baltimore assistant conductor who is Black, referring to the acronym for Black, Indigenous and People of Color. “To have that is great. But there still aren’t many opportunities for you to be the person a younger musician can look up to. Yes, I get educational concerts, they’re great, but we would have a bigger impact if we were music directors. “

As community engagement and public relations have expanded nationwide and become increasingly important to leading orchestras, many assistants have added these activities to their portfolios as well. And during the coronavirus pandemic, when many artists were grounded abroad, some assistants took on new meanings. Vinay Parameswaran, the Cleveland Orchestra’s assistant conductor who had spent a few years mostly doing family concerts and leading the ensemble’s youth orchestra, unexpectedly ran several large programs on the Cleveland subscription streaming platform.

The differences between the assistant ranks of the 25 best American orchestras and the music directors of these orchestras can hardly be overestimated. The Dallas Symphony, for example, has had three assistants as of 2013, all women; one of them, Karina Canellakis, is now chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic. The two conducting apprentices of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have been women since 2015. The Minnesota Orchestra’s assistants during this period were Roderick Cox, one of the few black conductors to perform with leading orchestras and major opera houses, and Akiko Fujimoto, who became music director of the small Mid-Texas Symphony in 2019.

Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who was a conducting fellow and then assistant conductor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has become a star, directed the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England and made recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. Gemma New, resident conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra until last year, is now Principal Guest Conductor in Dallas and conducted the New York Philharmonic’s Memorial Day concert at St. John the Divine Cathedral.

But there are still ubiquitous, sometimes damaging assumptions about how a music director should look and act – who can be with donors, who can help sell tickets. And apart from Bernstein’s model, there is no clear pipeline from assistant to director positions with top American orchestras, as is the case with many corporations.

Of the current top level music directors, only a handful started out as assistants to the type of orchestra they lead today. (And as a sign of how isolated this world is, two of these handfuls, Michael Stern, now in Kansas City, and Ken-David Masur, in Milwaukee, are the sons of musical royalty, the violinist Isaac Stern and the conductor Kurt Masuren. )

Andrés Orozco-Estrada, now music director of the Houston Symphony, is the rare conductor who lives the Bernstein dream, but he didn’t do it in the USA: he was an assistant at the Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna in the early 2000s, a few years later to the chief conductor. (European orchestras have followed the American ones in the codification of assistance programs; the traditional conducting career in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries, leads through opera houses, not symphonies.)

The experiential paradox is part of the problem. Top orchestras require their conductors to be mature, especially when performing on prestigious subscription series. But if you haven’t already had this experience, it’s hard to get.

“There are some people who are basically professional assistants or just move from assistant to assistant,” said Stephanie Childress, the current assistant to the St. Louis Symphony, suggesting the feeling that some talented artists are just in those ranks cycle without climbing further.

Orchestra officials, however, insist that things change, accelerated by the shock of the pandemic and calls for more racial and ethnic diversity over the past year.

“As it always has been, everything is being rethought,” said Noltemy, adding that resistance from players and listeners has subsided. “’The orchestra won’t accept it; the audience won’t accept it ‘- that has been completely deconstructed. “

There are ways to increase the chances that today’s assistants will become tomorrow’s music directors. Orchestras could deepen their investment in their assistant programs and add positions to expand the pool of talent who gain experience and become known. There should be a stronger obligation to provide slots for subscription programs to assistants under their contracts; This is a Covid imperative that could outlast the pandemic fruitfully.

Ensembles should look to assistants from other organizations when hiring concerts. It happens sometimes: Yue Bao, currently conductor of the Houston Symphony and a major streaming role for that orchestra last year, will debut with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival this summer.

Matías Tarnopolsky, executive director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, said he wanted some sort of consortium program that could rotate assistants between multiple top institutions to give them a broader experience. “Could a conducting scholarship be a multi-ensemble,” said Tarnopolsky, “either within the USA or around the world, combining symphony and ensemble for new music? Then you really expand your learning. “

And when a young conductor is successful, let it snow. In Baltimore, just before the pandemic, Rush performed as part of the orchestra’s Symphony in the City series and was then asked to attend his next assistant conductor audition, slated for June 2020.

That audition was canceled as the virus spread, but Rush received another call in July. “Hey, listen,” he recalled the orchestra, “the musicians rave about your work again and again in February, and we would like to invite you to become assistant conductor for the 2020/21 season.”

“It was definitely different,” Rush added as he assisted during the pandemic, which included working with the orchestra’s streaming programs on a regular basis. “But I wouldn’t have got that much podium time. I was allowed to conduct the orchestra every week. ”

Ensembles should have a plan for continuing relationships with their assistants as these young conductors move on. Marie-Hélène Bernard, the executive director of the St. Louis Symphony, said the organization has committed to inviting Gemma New as a guest conductor each season after her residency contract expires.

“For them we have a trusting relationship,” said Bernard. “She can leave her level of comfort and take musical risks that she might not take with other orchestras that she has not yet attended. Maintaining is not just for the time that she is here with us. “

This is the work that can help transform the encouragingly diverse landscape of assistant conductors into the future of the best music directors in the country. “Getting a replacement for Marin isn’t even a turning point,” said Noltemy, referring to Alsop’s departure from Baltimore. “The turning point would be a significant number of women in positions in the top orchestras in the United States”

But the field won’t get there without taking risks. Ruth Reinhardt had just started as an assistant in Dallas in 2016 when she was recruited into a subscription program to replace a seasoned conductor who had suffered a stroke. Dallas Morning News reviewer Scott Cantrell raved, “Few artistic experiences are as exciting as a brilliant debut by a young musician.”

It worked for amber; We’ll see if it works for this new generation. “When I started conducting about 15 years ago,” said Reinhardt, “people frankly said that you couldn’t do that as a woman. And things are changing. The jobs are more available. Hopefully we will move up as we age. “

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Watch These 15 Titles Earlier than They Depart Netflix in June

Watch These 15 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in June

Writer and director Mike Mills (“Beginners”) based this coming-of-age story in 2016 on his own teenage years and the single mother who raised him. In his film, it’s Dorothea (a great Annette Bening), who rents the guest rooms in her big, chaotic house to William, a handsome carpenter (Billy Crudup), and Abbie, a hip young photographer (Greta Gerwig). Hoping to raise her teenage son to be a sensitive young man, she turns to Abbie and her son’s best friend, Julie (Elle Fanning), for help. The late 1970s backdrop sets the stage for nostalgia, and the sunny Southern California setting promises plenty of good vibes. But Mills isn’t interested in sticking to what was before; this is a confused, complicated accounting.

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The television adaptations of Armistead Maupin’s richly textured series of San Francisco novels have appeared on a variety of networks for more than two decades, most recently with Netflix’s own revival in 2019. But it all started with that 1993 miniseries in the Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney) moves to San Francisco in the summer of 1976. However, she is just one of many fascinating characters in Maupin’s tapestry of Life in a Vibrant Time. Olympia Dukakis, Barbara Garrick, Mary Kay Place, Ian McKellen, Janeane Garofalo and Chloe Webb belong to the bulging ensemble.

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This 1977 World War II epic poem by Richard Attenborough is like the who’s who of the ’70s stars: Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford Red, and Liv Ullmann all show up, and even if few of them share scenes, indulging in the movie star’s sheer performance is still fun. Connery makes the most of his time as a major in the British Airborne Division realizing the seemingly tough mission may not be successful. But Hopkins quietly steals several scenes as a gentleman commanding officer, whose manners occasionally disrupt his mission.

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“This is Miss Bonnie Parker and I’m Clyde Barrow,” says Warren Beatty. “We’re robbing banks.” And they did so across the United States during the Great Depression, when the desperation of the time turned them from common criminals to folk heroes. This 1967 crime drama by Arthur Penn took that mythologization even further, filling the title roles with glamorous movie stars (Faye Dunaway plays Bonnie) and telling her story with a style and moral malleability borrowed from European art cinema. The results changed American filmmaking and spawned a new movement of intricate antihero and cinematic experimentation.

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A Choreographer Finds His Approach, Getting Misplaced within the Stars

A Choreographer Finds His Way, Getting Lost in the Stars

Kyle Marshall’s pandemic year was all about change. He turned 30. He moved into his own apartment. He now depends on his dance company, which he formed in 2014, for his livelihood. And he’s working with new dancers, a major shift for a choreographer whose works were populated by close friends and roommates — fellow graduates from Rutgers University.

“That transition felt like a lot, but it also felt absolutely necessary because it brings new ideas forward,” he said in an interview. “It keeps me accountable to how I want my ideas to come across. I have to communicate in a different way. I have to work with less expectation, and I think that’s really healthy.”

In this next step of his career, he said, he’s more focused and more comfortable making decisions. But the pandemic made also him realize something else: Just how exhausted he was. Before the shutdown, in December 2019, his company performed two works exploring Blackness at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “It took a toll on me,” Marshall said. “One thing that came out of Covid that I was grateful for was just the time to rest.”

“I wish I was better prepared,” he said of dealing with the stress of his dancing life, which also includes teaching and being a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. He added, “I wish I was in therapy sooner.”

The experiences of the past year have shifted both his work and the way he works. During the pandemic, Marshall started to embrace improvisation; he also found himself drawn to jazz, which led him to think about the role improvisation plays in Black art.

“I also thought improvisation would be a helpful way for performers to get back into material after not being onstage for so long,” he said. “I was in such a place of improvisation that it didn’t feel quite right for me to start dictating to people what to do with their bodies.”

This month, two new dances — one a film, the other live — will have their premieres. “Stellar,” a trippy piece inspired by Afrofuturism, jazz and science fiction, is a digital work for the Baryshnikov Arts Center, available for two weeks starting June 7. The other dance, “Rise,” is a celebration of club music that will be performed live at the Shed on June 25 and 26.

In each, there is a sense of elation, of wonder. “‘Stellar’ was thinking about something that was sci-fi and still rooted in Black culture and Black art-making, but stemming from other things besides just pain,” he said. “There’s more that I want to explore and more that I want to sit in to make work.”

For “Stellar” Marshall conjures a universe, meditative and otherworldly, in which three dancers, Bree Breeden, Ariana Speight and Marshall himself, move to a dreamy score by Kwami Winfield, featuring the cornet, bits of metal, a hand drum and a tambourine. The dancers, in painted and dyed sweatsuits designed by Malcolm-x Betts, practically glow, lending a sense of mysticism to the darkened stage where Marshall’s circular patterns and revolving bodies, seem to regenerate the space over time. There’s a weightlessness to them; at times, they seem like particles.

“Stellar” unfolds in five sections, each a different grouping or exploration. “The first opening, as we call it, is ‘expansion,’” Marshall said. “I was trying to create a body that was floating.”

The work has a ritualistic quality, which owes much to the music. Before he started working with the dancers, Marshall spent time figuring out the structure and the concept with Winfield. Sun Ra, the avant-garde musician with a passion for outer space, was a big influence.

“Sun Ra represents an alternate vision of the future — the potential to be more than what we’re born into as humans and specifically Black people in America,” Winfield said. “Sun Ra is sort of in between traditionalism in jazz and expanding it outward into noise. And something that Kyle and I talked about specifically was the way Sun Ra treats his keyboard like the controls of a spaceship.”

Marshall was also inspired by other jazz artists, including John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane and Albert Ayler. The sound that they produced felt out there to him — in a good way. And it also came as a surprise: His knowledge of experimental music was linked to the composer John Cage. But “these people were also working on breaking down boundaries of sound, creating distortion, creating noise, working in dissonance,” Marshall said. “That was not a part of my education, and I found it very empowering: Here are Black artists working in a very radical way.”

It led to him to consider his own improvisational practice as he tried to explore new ways of moving. The transcendence of Alice Coltrane’s music was particularly meaningful. “It’s just not playing to perform,” Marshall said. “It feels like she’s pulling something out of her. It felt like it held me and kept me feeling that I can access that for myself.”

And as Winfield — a former roommate of Marshall’s — worked on the piece, he also participated in the dancers’ warm-up. That gave him, he said, “a holistic understanding of my role in reference to everyone else — just knowing the energy and focus required to maintain connections to the material, time and each other in space.”

“Stellar,” which the dancers hope to perform live in the future, creates a world where even the makeup (by Edo Tastic) is a space for Marshall to explore Afrofuturism: “I thought it added a little royalty to it,” he said.

But nailing the right makeup — or anything related to the look of a dance — doesn’t come naturally to him. “I’m a very, like, structural, embodied person,” he said. “Everyone asks me: ‘What about hair? What am I doing with my hair?’ And I’m like: ‘Don’t. I don’t know.’ Hair and makeup and costumes don’t come last, but they’re not my strengths. I’m trying to embrace that a little bit more and to get more people involved and see how it can inform the work.”

The music for “Rise,” his first live group piece since the pandemic, is composed and performed by Cal Fish, and inspired by house music. The feeling Marshall is going for? “It’s what you get both in the church and the club — that kind of opening and uplift,” he said. “I’m thinking about uplift as both an energetic feeling, but also a choreographic idea that the work ascends: It goes from a low place to a high place. Leaning into that expectation is something I’ve never indulged in choreographically.”

Again, it’s all about change. “Creating something that actually feels joyful,” he said with a smile.

It might seem odd, but Marshall’s embrace of joy is in response to the death of George Floyd and his aversion, he said, to displaying more pain. “A lot of my work was thinking about trauma and either displaying it or showing it,” he said. “I just think that cycle is toxic. I think about displaying Black violence: What does that do for the viewer?”

And what, he wonders, do we need coming out of this time? “I need a bit more space in my life, a bit more dreaming,” he said. “More affirmation and positivity. I just don’t think that right now for me is the time to sit in my trauma. I need more joy in my life.”

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’90s BFFs Talk about Celeb Crushes, TV, and Friendship

'90s BFFs Discuss Celebrity Crushes, TV, and Friendship

Image source: Haley Davis

Since the 1990s we’ve swapped hamburger cell phones for smartphones and posters by Leo DiCaprio for properly curated Harry Styles fan accounts, and our BFFs were with us to experience every minute of it. We met two best friends who had been there for each other over the decades – Sabrina the teenage witch Co-stars Melissa Joan Hart, aka Sabrina Spellman, and Soleil Moon Frye, aka Roxie King – to look back on their IRL friendship over the years and share some of their favorite moments both on and off screen.

When they were about 6 years old, Frye and Hart attended an audition for Ron Howard’s 1983 film Small shots and eventually became close friends in their teens when they started working together on the later seasons of Sabrina the teenage witch. “We’re both very talkative, very adventurous people, and we just became quick friends,” Hart told POPSUGAR before Frye added, “When we were in our late teens we were inseparable. We both love to talk. We both love to listen and we both love to be really honest with each other. “

“She had a baby so I had to have a baby and then she had another baby so I had to have another baby. So Soleil’s life determines my life. ”

In addition to being college BFFs on screen, the two were there for each other through thick and thin in real life, chatting about celebrity crushes and their favorite outfits Sabrina over half a liter of ice and the occasional spoonful of caviar. “I remember crying on her shoulder in my early 20s with numerous boyfriend problems,” Hart said, adding that she and Frye used to share an apartment in New York. “When I met my husband and we got married, she suggested this house we should buy and it became our first home together. And then she suggested where we get married. She had a baby, so I had to have a baby … and then she had another baby, so I had to have another baby. So Soleil’s life dictates my life. “

Image source: Haley Davis

Today, Hart has three kids and Frye has four kids, so their ’90s-style slumber parties usually include family time, but that hasn’t stopped them from squeezing a bit of childhood nostalgia here and there. “I am looking Punky [Brewster] with the kids, “said Frye, mentioning that she hopes to guest star in the Hart Punky Brewster Restart. “While we were making the sequel it was so cute because my 7 year old and all the kids and my 5 year old we all got together and saw it Punky Pilot. . . It really is a dream come true. And it’s so much fun working with incredible, great and inspiring people every day. “

“I love this amazing creature so much and she was just such an amazing friend to me and just a special part of my life.”

The couple don’t usually talk about work or on the set these days, but Hart added that some of their favorite guest stars during their Sabrina Spellman days were Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, * NSYNC, Blondie and Dick Van Dyke, with whom she was on season four “Welcome Back, Duke” danced. “It was amazing that everyone loved the show so much that they want us to be there or their kids loved the show and they wanted to be there for their kids,” she said.

To celebrate National Best Friends Day on June 8th, Frye and Hart teamed up with Heluva Good! Dips merch competition in the style of the 90s. And while life has been a whirlwind of change since the 90s, it’s nice to know that some of our favorite screen friendships are still holding IRL. “I love this amazing creature so much and she was just such an amazing friend to me and just a special part of my life,” Frye said before turning to Hart. “I have so many deep memories of you and the fact that you were just always there to support me [means so much]. “It seems as if the ex-Sabrina the teenage witch Costars really have a magical bond that cannot be broken. Feeling nostalgic? Check out our compilation of over 100 gifts to give to your best friend ahead of National BFF Day.

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5 Issues to Do This Weekend

5 Things to Do This Weekend

Beauty pageants like you’ve never seen them before. Supernatural creatures from folklore. A disposable coffee cup in love.

These are just some of the themes of the KidsFilmFest, an international slate with short film adventures, which this year like last year will be shown completely online. For $ 10, families can watch the two programs presented by the Brooklyn Film Festival anytime from Friday noon until 10:00 p.m. Eastern Time on June 13th. Streaming on CineSend, each series – eight titles for children ages 3 to 7 and nine for ages 8 to 15 – followed by a recorded discussion with filmmakers.

The animated selection includes Xi Chengzhuo’s beautiful, wordless “Ballad of Musical Notes”; Catherine Chen’s “Yuan Yuan and the Hollow Monster,” in which a girl defeats a hurricane; and Susan Lim and Samudra Kajal Saikia’s “Boy Scientist” on geek romance. But the strongest love story is live action: “Finally,” Lorena Gordon’s portrayal of a gay teenager growing up – and a warm coming out.
LAUREL GRAVE

“Vienna Waltzes” is the last great spectacle that George Balanchine created for the New York City Ballet. It’s 45 minutes of waltzes that move from the forest to a rough beer hall to elegant ballrooms, erotically charged and spooky. In the end, the stage is flooded by a whirlpool of pairs of waltzes, dozens of them multiplied by mirrors.

A free performance of the 2013 work will be available on the company’s website and YouTube channel from Thursday, 8 p.m. Eastern Time through June 17. It’s a fitting finale to a strong digital season that featured a beautiful Sofia Coppola film about the company’s return to its home theater. In September the dancers will again fill the stage in front of a live audience. For the time being, “Viennese Waltz” fills the screen.
BRIAN SEIBERT

Pop rock

While the live music slump in town begins to thaw and the virtual programming is still going strong, New Yorkers can look forward to a summer of music both outdoors and online. This weekend, the Brooklyn Museum’s flagship First Saturday program – which is still alive despite its necessarily smaller scale and new outdoor environment – provides a re-entry point for the concert disadvantaged. The free Pride-themed program from 2 p.m. offers a drag show, a set by the Peru-born DJ Undocubougie and a performance by Kalbells, the psychedelic synth-pop group around Kalmia Traver, who also participate for their spirited singing. well known is the band Rubblebucket.

Another musical offering this weekend comes from Lake Street Dive, a group of New England Conservatory graduates who have refined a retro soul sound with contemporary luster on seven studio albums. They draw on their latest “Obvious” for livestreams on Saturday and Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time; Tickets start at $ 20 and are available at boxoffice.mandolin.com.
OLIVIA HORN

The composer and improviser Anthony Braxton will be 76 years old on Friday. But he will not celebrate the occasion with nostalgia.

His “12 Comp (ZIM) 2017”, which is to be released on Blu-ray audio and as a digital download, brings together a dozen set-length performances, all of which are dedicated to one of his latest concepts (“ZIM” refers to a style of composition.) based on intensity gradations). The ensembles vary from six to nine players, each with several brass specialists (from trumpet to tuba), two harpists (including Jacqueline Kerrod and Brandee Younger), and Braxton himself (on a variety of reeds).

Listening to the album every 10 hours may forbid, so start with a track; playing with density and thrift reveals an accessible form of experimental drama. “Composition No. 409 “, which is available as a preview on the Bandcamp page of the album, is majestic: It develops from a sensitive state of mysticism, in which harps glisten over accordion drones, to conflagrations that are fueled by the hot phrasing of this saxophonist still untroubled by age.
SETH COLTER WALLS

theatre

Paul Rudnick has worked on Broadway lately than almost anyone. When Nathan Lane gave a pop-up performance at the St. James Theater in April to signal the industry resurgence, he gave a Rudnick monologue and played a hardcore theater fanatic.

Carter Ogden, the less than self-confident hero of Rudnick’s lively new novel “Playing the Palace” (Bekley), is equally enthusiastic about the stage. On Valentine’s Day as a single and heartbroken, he cycles across Manhattan and imagines a musical number in which everyone else is paired. Little does he know that he is on his way to his own meeting – with Edgar, the ridiculously handsome, cute and emotionally damaged Crown Prince of England.

Comparisons with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are inevitable as Carter and Edgar see one obstacle after another. But this is a romantic comedy; The question is not whether love triumphs, but how. The answer can make you cheer.
LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

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Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

Many critics found the film off-putting, and it did not do well at the box office. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it had “no emotional center.” Although Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times loved Mr. Sutherland’s performance, he found most of the characters too clearly doomed to care about.

But Mr. Canby wrote in The Times that the film was “in many ways remarkable,” declaring its subject a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization and “second-rateness as a way of life.”

Judith Crist, then the acclaimed founding movie critic for New York magazine, praised “The Day of the Locust” in a full-page review. “So brilliant is” this film, she began, “so dazzling and harrowing its impact, so impotent are the superlatives it evokes” that you almost want to avoid looking at it directly, like a solar eclipse. She concluded, “To call it the finest film of the past several years is to belittle it.”

The National Board of Review named it one of the year’s 10 best films.

Jerome Hellman was born on Sept. 4, 1928, in Manhattan, the second child of Abraham J. Hellman, a Romanian-born insurance broker, and Ethel (Greenstein) Hellman. After high school, he served two years in the Marine Corps, then began his working life as a messenger in the New York office of Ashley-Steiner, a talent agency.

He rose through the ranks and founded his own agency in 1957, before he was 30. But he sold that business in 1963 and became a full-time movie producer, beginning with George Roy Hill’s comedy “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). Peter Sellers played the title role, a New York concert pianist who is trying to initiate an affair with a married woman but is being stalked by two adoring adolescent girls. The film was both well reviewed and a hit.

His other films as producer were Irvin Kershner’s “A Fine Madness” (1966), starring Sean Connery as a poet with writer’s block, and “Promises in the Dark” (1979), starring Marsha Mason as a doctor treating a teenage cancer patient. It was the only film that Mr. Hellman ever directed, and only because Mr. Schlesinger, who was scheduled to do so, had dropped out.

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Lesbians in Ballet: ‘Has Anybody Like Me Ever Walked These Halls?’

Lesbians in Ballet: ‘Has Anyone Like Me Ever Walked These Halls?’

Two new ballet projects, both released online this month by the Joyce Theater, allow dancers to be their authentic selves in very different ways. In a live stream on June 10th, Ballez, who turns 10 this year, will unveil “Giselle of Loneliness”, a radical reinterpretation of the classic romantic ballet “Giselle”. And Pierce’s “Animals and Angels”, a short film with the dancers Cortney Taylor Key and Audrey Malek in a duo on top, celebrates its premiere on June 21st.

In a project that is still developing, the dance artist and scholar Alyah Baker, 39, is researching her artistic background as a queer black woman in ballet. For her final master’s thesis at Duke University, “Quare Dance,” she brought together three dancers (on Zoom) who share their identities: Malek, a member of the Washington Ballet Studio Company; Key, a freelance artist based in New York; and Kiara Felder, dancer with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal.

“Always being the only one is one thing I’ve seen a lot,” Baker said, “either the only black woman or the only black dancer or the only queer dancer or woman in certain circles.” Her research, she added added, “was really motivated by: I know that I am not the only one.”

Dance historian Clare Croft, editor of Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, notes that ballet education for women begins so early that it is imperative for women to have different role models. “Looking up to the older girls is so ingrained in what it means to grow up a woman in ballet,” said Croft. “That’s why it’s exponentially more important to have people who come out as lesbians or queer women.”

Throughout her career, Pierce, 32, who danced for the New York City Ballet and Miami City Ballet, rarely met other lesbian ballet dancers. When she saw an article in Pointe magazine about queer women in ballet last fall, she immediately contacted one of the featured dancers, Lauren Flower, a former member of the Boston Ballet and founder of the Queer Women Dancers blog. Together they reached out to others with similar experiences and organized a “big queer zoom call,” as Flower calls it.

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Meet Ray Nicholson, Jack Nicholson’s Son

Meet Ray Nicholson, Jack Nicholson's Son

If you found yourself wondering why Panic‘s Ray Hall looked so familiar, you’re not alone. That might be because Ray Nicholson, the actor behind the bad boy of Carp, TX, is the spitting image of his father, Jack Nicholson. That’s right, Jack has a hot 29-year-old son. It didn’t take long for us to be charmed by his character, and the more we’ve learned about real-life Ray, the more we’ve fallen for him. Despite having a famous father and mother — actress Rebecca Broussard — there’s still an air of mystery to the actor; Amazon Prime Video’s Panic is essentially his breakout role. If, like us, you have already binged the show and just want to know more about Ray, ahead are five facts to tide you over until he can grace our screens once more.