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    Climate Activists Interrupt New York City Ballet Performance

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    Protesters interrupted an all-Balanchine program on the company’s spring season opening night, which coincided this year with Earth Day.A small group of climate change activists interrupted a New York City Ballet performance at the David H. Koch Theater in Lincoln Center on Tuesday, the opening night of the company’s spring season.The protest occurred shortly before 9 p.m., as dancers and orchestra musicians performed Balanchine’s “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” the third ballet on an all-Balanchine program for the opening night, which coincided this year with Earth Day.A woman began yelling from the balcony. Then, she shouted, “We’re in a climate emergency,” and unfurled a banner from a balcony.“Our country has become a fascist regime, and we are enjoying this beauty,” said the protester, according to videos of the incident.The dancers and musicians continued to perform through the demonstration for about five minutes. Some members of the audience booed the protesters and demanded their removal.The curtain came down, an announcer said the show would be paused because of the disruption and security officers removed several protesters from the auditorium. About five minutes later, “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” restarted from the beginning and the performance did not face further interruptions, City Ballet said in a statement.Activists had also gathered outside the theater before the performance, holding signs reading “Koch killing the planet” and “No billionaire ballet on Earth Day,” according to photos posted online.The theater is named after David H. Koch, a billionaire who donated vast sums to support the arts but was for some a polarizing figure because of his campaign to counter the science of climate change.The climate advocacy group Extinction Rebellion, which has organized similar protests, said in a social media post Tuesday night that the demonstration was meant to highlight the Koch family’s support for conservative causes and efforts to block policies to fight climate change.The protest follows similar episodes at other high-profile performances. Last year, three climate change protesters disrupted a Broadway performance of “An Enemy of the People,” starring Jeremy Strong. And in 2023, climate activists interrupted a performance of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the Metropolitan Opera. A protester shouted “The spring is tainted,” and dropped a banner that read “No Opera on a Dead Planet.” More

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      Celia Rowlson-Hall’s Sisyphean Beach Balls

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      “I hate large beach balls,” Celia Rowlson-Hall said at the Baryshnikov Arts Center last week.A director, choreographer and performer best known for her quirky and surreal work in film, Rowlson-Hall was rehearsing “Sissy,” an idiosyncratic hybrid of dance and theater. It draws on the Greek myth of Sisyphus, eternally condemned to push a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down. The boulder is represented by a giant beach ball, and in rehearsal the performers were having trouble lofting it into a net suspended above the stage. After failing a few times, they succeeded, only to have the ball bounce back out again.This Sisyphean moment was not planned, but it might easily have been part of the choreography. “Sissy,” which runs at the Baryshnikov Center Thursday through Saturday, is the kind of production that playfully blurs the line between real life and make believe. It’s about a director-choreographer (Zoë Winters), a new mother who is making a dance piece that uses the metaphor of Sisyphus to symbolize the difficulties of balancing motherhood with her artistic life. Rowlson-Hall came up with the idea while she was pregnant and working on a feature film.From left, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Ida Saki and Marisa Tomei at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “Being with the dancers, I’m in heaven,” Tomei said, adding she has relished the opportunity to be physically expressive, “thinking in shapes and body sculpture.”Thea Traff for The New York Times“It was a camera movement in my head,” she said during a rehearsal break. “I saw the camera coming around and revealing this woman who had been hiding behind the rock the whole time. And I was like, ‘Oh, what’s her story?’”Much of the story that Rowlson-Hall wrote is drawn from her life, but it’s nested in layers of fiction and art making. In “Sissy,” which alternates between scenes of dialogue and dance, Winters’s character presents a work-in-progress set in a rock quarry. (Lucas Hegseth plays a quarry worker.) A dancer (Ida Saki) pushes the beach ball around, dances out childbirth, then pushes a slightly smaller beach ball (representing the moon) while holding her child — a child played by Saki’s own 1-year-old son.The showing seems to be going fine when it’s interrupted by a paleobotanist, who announces that she has made a “once in a millennium” discovery in the parking lot: the fossilized root system of the world’s oldest forest. It seems the boulder that is the director’s show is rolling down the mountain again, and she will have to adjust to the new circumstances — a process made more farcical because the paleobotanist is played by the gifted physical comedian and actress Marisa Tomei.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Transformer: Twyla Tharp Dives Into the Future

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      Tharp celebrates her 60th anniversary as a dance maker with a program pairing the monumental “Diabelli” (1998) and the new “Slacktide.”It could be the middle of the ocean on a starless night, but it’s a stage. An arm reaches up, glowing like a beacon of light. It lowers — slowly, deliberately — sliding into the darkness.A piece of movement is nothing without context. Twyla Tharp created that arm gesture nearly 40 years ago as the emphatic closing image of her celebrated “In the Upper Room” (1986), in which two women — the “stompers” — yank down a fist in victory. It’s as much a physical movement as a celebration of making it to the top of a choreographic Mount Everest.During a recent interview, Tharp, 83, hopped from a chair to her feet to illustrate its emphatic power. “Where that came from is the notion of pulling down a shade,” she said. “Blackout!”That dance unspools to a propulsive mix of ballet, modern dance and even calisthenics to music by Philip Glass. It ends with the sense of an exhalation, a release.But what if that final exhalation from “In the Upper Room” turned into an inhalation? What if an ending became a beginning? “Slacktide,” Tharp’s newest dance, is also set to Glass, his “Aguas da Amazonia,” in a new arrangement created and performed by Third Coast Percussion. It starts where “In the Upper Room” left off.“I take that last move and make it go incredibly slow into the future,” Tharp said. “Into another place, and that other place is a transformation.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Getting to the Essence of Camille A. Brown’s Artistry

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      With the high-energy “I AM,” Brown takes her signature interweaving of African diasporic dance forms to new heights.These days, many people know Camille A. Brown from the worlds of theater and opera, where she has become a frequent collaborator on high-profile projects. (She choreographed two hit shows now on Broadway, “Gypsy” and “Hell’s Kitchen.”) But it’s her work with her company, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, that brings us closest to her essence as an artist, showing us who she is, what moves her.That has never been more clearly or piercingly expressed than in her latest dance, “I AM,” which had its New York City premiere at the Joyce Theater on Wednesday. Sweeping the audience into its flow for a joyous 65 minutes, “I AM” is like the exclamation point on the trilogy Brown created from 2012 to 2017 (“Mr. TOL E. RAncE,” “BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play” and “ink”).A program note describes “I AM” as imagining “a creative space for cultural liberation — conjuring new ways of being in this world.” And liberated it is, pulsing with a sense of freedom and possibility that emanates from its outstanding team of 12 dancers and three musicians (Deah Love Harriott on piano, Juliette Jones on violin and Jaylen Petinaud on drums).Brown went to great lengths to contextualize the works in the trilogy, which delved into different facets of African-American identity, like the painful legacies of minstrelsy and the playful rituals of Black girlhood. The first two chapters came with educational resource guides, and Brown regularly led post-show dialogues as extensions of the work.In “I AM,” she continues her signature interweaving of African diasporic dance forms, but with what seems like a greater, bolder openness to letting dance — in deep conversation with music — speak for itself. After Wednesday’s performance, she shared just a brief word of explanation: “I wanted to do something centered around joy.”From left, Brianna Dawkins, Travon Williams and Courtney Ross in “I AM.”Rachel Papo for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Alvin Ailey Productions Head for the Light

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      Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels” aspire to find higher ground at New York City Center.Dancers moving from being scorned to rocking their souls in the bosom of Abraham — this is the narrative arc of Alvin Ailey’s masterpiece, “Revelations.” And that redemptive passage into the light is the template that many choreographers for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater try to replicate.Very rarely does such a work escape the shadow of “Revelations” and the gravity of cliché. Ronald K. Brown did it in 1999 with “Grace,” and during the Ailey company’s current season at New York City Center, a 25th anniversary revival of that unfailingly spirit-lifting dance is successfully replacing “Revelations” in the closing spot of several programs. But “Grace” is an exception, whereas Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels,” the two works that debuted last week, are not.With “Finding Free,” Boykin, a beloved former member of the company, is at least attempting a slightly different approach with an Afrofuturist take. She and Jon Taylor have costumed the cast in long, sleeveless coats with giant lapels and upturned collars that frame their faces and make them look like something between sci-fi courtiers and private eyes. By the end, they have swapped the coats for diaphanous shifts that, like Al Crawford’s cathedral lighting, signify spiritual transformation.That transformation is aided by an original score, courtesy of the jazz pianist Matthew Whitaker, who plays it live in a quintet behind a scrim at the rear of the stage. (Boykin’s last work for the Ailey troupe, her “re-Evolution, Dream” also commendably used a commissioned score by a living jazz musician, Ali Jackson.) In the final section, Whitaker’s organ brings us to church with some funky gospel and “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” has the dancers in diaphanous shifts that signal spiritual transformation. Paul KolnikBut the path to get there is awfully murky. The dancers mainly travel in a pack — shuffling, skittering, pivoting, jogging, lining up. One member after another leaves the flock, only to return. When they spin, the tails of their coats fly up, and they spin a lot. They walk portentously into the light. They also collapse, open their mouths in silent screams, crawl as if crossing a desert and writhe in anguish.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ex-Dancer Accuses Shen Yun of Forced Labor and Trafficking in Lawsuit

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      The former performer, who was recruited to join Shen Yun at age 13, said the prominent dance group coerced children into making money for it.A former dancer for Shen Yun Performing Arts, the prominent music and dance group operated by the Falun Gong religious movement, filed a lawsuit on Monday, accusing its leaders of trafficking vulnerable children to work for little to no pay.The lawsuit, brought in Federal District Court in Manhattan, describes Shen Yun as a “forced labor enterprise” that has exploited underage dancers through threats and public shaming to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.Shen Yun instills obedience in its dancers through a wide range of tactics, the lawsuit alleges, including by confiscating their passports, cutting them off from outside media, denouncing them as Chinese government spies if they questioned the group’s practices and subjecting rule-breakers to public critique sessions.The former dancer who filed the lawsuit, Chang Chun-Ko, said she was recruited from Taiwan to join Shen Yun as a dancer at age 13, in 2009. She performed with the group until she left in 2020, when she was 24.Ms. Chang sued under a federal law that allows victims of forced labor to bring lawsuits against their traffickers.The lawsuit comes three months after The New York Times revealed that Shen Yun’s performers had been working in abusive conditions for years. Ms. Chang, now 28, was among the former performers and instructors quoted in the article.The New York State Department of Labor has opened an inquiry into the company’s labor practices, including its use of child performers, The Times reported last week.The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount in damages. Ms. Chang is the only named plaintiff, but she is seeking to certify the lawsuit as a class action.Shen Yun, which performed more than 800 times on five continents in its most recent tour, puts on a two-hour dance and music show that spreads the message of Falun Gong, a religious movement that is banned in China and has been persecuted by the Chinese government.Representatives of Shen Yun and Falun Gong did not immediately provide a comment on Monday. They have previously denied violating any laws and said labor laws did not apply to their underage performers because they are students who tour with Shen Yun as a learning opportunity, not employees. Every student participates in Shen Yun voluntarily, they have said.“Sure, some people leave because it’s not for them, and that’s perfectly fine,” Shen Yun’s representatives said in a recent statement. “But the vast majority of students will tell you this is their dream come true, and the parents rave about the positive changes in their children.”This is a developing story and will be updated. More

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      ‘The Interview’: K-Pop Trained Rosé to Be ‘a Perfect Girl.’ Now She’s Trying to Be Herself.

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      South Korean pop, known as K-pop, is not just a type of music — it’s a culture, where bold style, perfectly choreographed dance moves and ebullient earworms that draw from pop, hip-hop and traditional Korean music attract a huge and particularly devoted global fan base. The genre’s stars, known as idols, are trained, often for years, by entertainment companies that then place the most promising trainees in groups, write and produce their music and obsessively manage their public images. It’s a system that works for the idols who make it big, but it has also drawn criticism for its grueling methods, which some call exploitative.One of the biggest stars to come out of that system is Rosé. Born Roseanne Park, she trained for four years with one of K-pop’s largest agencies, YG Entertainment, eventually breaking through as part of the girl group Blackpink. Now at age 27, she is striking out on her own with her first full-length solo album, “Rosie,” which comes out on Dec. 6 from Atlantic Records. (The album’s first single, “APT.” a collaboration with Bruno Mars, is a true bop and has made history as the first track by a female K-pop artist to break into the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.) She is still a member of Blackpink, and the group re-signed with YG in 2023. But after years of singing other people’s songs and performing as Rosé, which she described to me as “a character that I really worked hard on as a trainee,” writing her own songs for this solo album has made her think about where she came from and who she is, separate from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Listen to the Conversation With RoséThe Blackpink star talks about striking out on her own, away from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppYou’re about to release your first full-length solo album. Can you tell me what you’re feeling? Like I’ve been waiting to release this album for my whole life. I grew up listening to a lot of female artists. I used to relate to them, and they used to really get me through a lot of tough times. And so I would always dream of one day having an album myself. But I never really thought it would be realistic. I remember last year when I first began the whole process of it, I doubted myself a lot.It probably would be surprising to anyone who would look at Rosé, with all your success, with the enormous fan base that you have, to know that you doubted yourself so much. I don’t think I ever learned or trained myself to be vulnerable and open and honest. So that was the part I feared, because it was the opposite of what I was trained to do.You were born in New Zealand to South Korean immigrant parents and then you moved to Australia when you were 8. In 2012, when you were 15, you auditioned for a slot in YG Entertainment’s trainee program, which is basically a boarding school for becoming a K-pop star. It was your dad’s idea, right? Yes. More

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      Rebuilding After Fire, Jacob’s Pillow Will Open a New Theater

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      The Doris Duke Theater, more than twice as large as the original and designed for modern technology, will open in July.When the Doris Duke Theater at Jacob’s Pillow, the bucolic dance festival in Becket, Mass., was destroyed by a fire four years ago, the festival’s director, Pamela Tatge, promised that it would be rebuilt.“The theater,” she said at the time, “is an essential component of the ecology of Jacob’s Pillow.”On Wednesday, Jacob’s Pillow announced that its new Doris Duke Theater would reopen on July 9, as part of its coming season. And the initial wave of programming there has been conceived specifically with the space in mind.“We all struggled when we lost the Doris Duke,” Tatge said in an interview. “But we had this moment to think of what we will build and why, and what sort of building we need in the future.”The campus of Jacob’s Pillow has other performances spaces: the large Ted Shawn Theater, and the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage. The old Doris Duke opened in 1990, with 230 seats and the look of a sleek barn.A $10 million gift from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, insurance claims and other gifts paid for the costs of the new theater. Jacob’s Pillow, Tatge said, wanted its new building to be a flexible space with “the ability to support the future of where this field is going.” The organization hired the Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo, and brought on the Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson as a consultant, to design a theater, Tatge added, “that was in dialogue with nature.”The result is a building nearly twice the size of the original theater, with a range of 220-400 seats and the ability to also house residencies and other events, perhaps at the same time. It will be equipped with a spatial audio system and specialized cameras for livestreaming and interactive video performances.Tatge said that next summer’s lineup of artists at the Doris Duke Theater was based on “works that could magnify and amplify the flexibility of the space, as well as works that demonstrate the intersection of dance and technology.”The programming includes the world premiere of Andrew Schneider’s “Here,” Shamel Pitts’s “Touch of Red” and Eun-Me Ahn’s “Dragons.” The Taiwanese choreographer and roboticist Huang Yi will make her Pillow debut, as will the Indigenous Sámi choreographer Elle Sofe. Faye Driscoll will return to the festival with her work “Weathering,” from last year, and Schneider and Pitts will create digital-first pieces.In the future, Tatge said, Jacob’s Pillow hopes to commission works that incorporate augmented reality, technology similar to video conferencing and other forms of mixed reality. And they can be developed year-round in the new building.“It will be a maker space,” Tatge said of the Doris Duke Theater. “At a time where there is a crisis of ambition in our country because a lack of resources, the fact that we’re going to be able to support artists — that is something.” More

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      Vladimir Shklyarov, Star Russian Ballet Dancer, Dies at 39

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      The Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, which announced the death, did not say how or where he died.Vladimir Shklyarov, one of the world’s premier male ballet dancers, died on Saturday night, according to the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he was a principal dancer.The theater did not say in its announcement how or where Mr. Shklyarov, 39, died.Russia’s Investigative Committee, a federal law enforcement agency, began an investigation into Mr. Shklyarov’s death, according to RIA Novosti, a state-run news agency. “A preliminary cause of death was an accident,” RIA Novosti quoted the Investigative Committee’s office in St. Petersburg as saying.Over a two-decade career, Mr. Shklyarov gained international acclaim, performing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in London and other prestigious theaters around the world.Born in Leningrad, Mr. Shkylarov graduated in 2003 from the Vaganova Ballet Academy, a famed institution with nearly 300 years of history. Its graduates include Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov.Mr. Shklyarov joined the Mariinsky directly out of school, and went on to perform in both contemporary and classical productions, including “Swan Lake,” “Don Quixote” and “Giselle.” He received multiple awards for his work, including the prestigious Léonide Massine International Prize in 2008. But the Mariinsky said that “the most precious for Vladimir” was receiving the title of an honored artist of Russia in 2020.Information about survivors was not immediately available. In 2012, Mr. Shklyarov married another dancer, Maria Shirinkina, who also performed with the Mariinsky, according to Russian news media.In a review of a performance during the company’s 2016 tour of the United States, a New York Times critic said, “The best moment came from Maria Shirinkina, supernaturally airborne, and Mr. Shklyarov, elegant and mournful, in a cobbled together extract from ‘Giselle.’ For a little while, they suggested another world.”A former ballerina, Irina Bartnovskaya, wrote on Telegram that Mr. Shklyarov had been at home, on painkillers and preparing for foot surgery before his death. She said that he went out to smoke onto “a very narrow balcony” and fell five stories in “a stupid, unbearable accident.”Her account could not be verified, but it echoed similar reports in Russian news outlets, including Fontanka, which quoted a Mariinsky Theater spokeswoman, Anna Kasatkina, as saying that he was on painkillers and expected to have surgery. More