More stories

  • in

    At Frieze New York, Performance Art Takes Center Stage

    This year, Frieze New York will offer three pieces by artists who approach performance “in radically different ways.”Listen to the birds sing, strike up a conversation with a stranger or walk along the High Line, a potted seedling in hand. Those are the ideas behind the performance pieces that will unfold at Frieze New York.Performance art has been a feature of the fair since its debut in 2012, but this year will see the most expansive lineup to date.“Frieze’s investment in performance art began with the recognition that much of today’s exciting, relevant work happens live in ways that are process-driven, participatory and time-based,” Christine Messineo, the director of Frieze New York and Los Angeles, said.This year’s edition of the fair — which runs from Thursday through Sunday at the Shed at Hudson Yards — will offer three performance pieces: “Immortal Coil” by the Berlin-based Asad Raza; “Freestyle Hard,” from Carlos Reyes, who divides his time between Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Caguas, P.R.; and “The Pin” created by the Berlin-based Pilvi Takala. All three have previously participated in Frieze London but are newcomers to the New York edition.The focus on performance works is specific to New York, Messineo said, because the city has a “rich history of dance, theater and avant-garde performance.”In 2022, Frieze New York began a partnership with the nonprofit arts gallery Artists Space in TriBeCa that debuted with a performance, “Grandmother Cindy,” by the dancer and choreographer Devynn Emory.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

  • in

    ‘King Lear’ Review: Kenneth Branagh’s Latest Finds the Wrong Tone

    Kenneth Branagh’s production of the Shakespeare classic speeds through the material and can’t quite figure out its tone.Kenneth Branagh’s “King Lear,” which opened Thursday night at the Shed, is a tragedy that doesn’t seem to know why it’s so tragic. The production’s fleet and feathery interpretation of how one man’s decline rains down misfortune on everyone around him undercuts the gravity of the classic, demoting it into a mere trifle.The play, as many may recall from high school English classes, opens with Lear (Branagh) offering to split his kingdom among his three daughters according to who will flatter him the most. While his two older daughters, Goneril (Deborah Alli) and Regan (Saffron Coomber), comply, his favorite, Cordelia (Jessica Revell), refuses. Lear casts her off with nothing to her name. But the king, accompanied by his jester (also Revell) and a loyal disciple in disguise (Eleanor de Rohan), is eventually driven to madness as he receives what he sees as disloyal treatment at the hands of his sycophantic daughters. Meanwhile, Goneril and Regan scheme against each other for power and for the hand of Edmund (Dylan Corbett-Bader), a wily creep willing to betray his own family for his advancement. Perhaps needless to say, most of these characters are dead by the final scene.Each new production of “Lear” offers its own take on whether the play’s tragedy branches from the titular royal’s psychosis, dementia or a broken ego. In Branagh’s production — he is a co-director with Rob Ashford and Lucy Skillbeck — the king doesn’t come across as feeble in any way. In fact, he’s fit as a fiddle. This Lear hops, crawls and gambols across the stage, even running off into the audience stands at the Griffin theater, meant to stand in for England in the New Stone Age. And despite Branagh’s cartoonish wails and babbles, this production never seems to believe Lear is ever truly ensnared by madness; there’s still a mild sense of cogency to Branagh’s performance throughout that colors him more as a wacky dad with hurt feelings than as a weakened ruler.The show’s breakneck pacing, too, makes it sometimes read more like a light comedy. All considerable five acts are indelicately stuffed into a speedy two hours, without intermission. Though I don’t begrudge a shorter “Lear” — the lengthy play does often meander its way to its protagonist’s demise — this production bolts mercilessly through the dialogue with a cadence that doesn’t allow much space for nuanced emoting, silences or scene transitions to let the story’s depths sink in.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

  • in

    ‘The Effect’ Review: Dissecting the Science of Desire

    In Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Lucy Prebble’s play, Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell are a couple who fall in love during a pharmaceutical trial.A white plastic bucket sits on a spare stage at the Shed, where the director Jamie Lloyd’s stark, riveting production of “The Effect” opened on Wednesday night. By the time its content — a human brain — is revealed, Lucy Prebble’s heady and scintillating drama is already interrogating the biology of desire.What begins as the drug trial of an antidepressant shifts into more slippery territory when a flirtation develops between two of the participants. As they circle each other, neurons blazing, questions swirl about whether their attraction has been chemically engineered — and if love controls the mind or the other way around.The simplicity of a brain plopped in a pail for scientific research becomes something of a mordant sight gag.Previously staged Off Broadway in 2016, “The Effect” digs into what one of the study’s architects calls “nothing short of a revolution in medicine”: drug intervention that considers the psyche a plastic aspect of the self. Lloyd’s production, which premiered in August at the National Theater in London, poses the play’s philosophical inquiries on a stark and minimal plane that feels both cosmic and atomically intimate.During the experiment’s intake, we learn that Connie (Taylor Russell) gets sad but isn’t depressed (“when I’m sad, I’m sad,” she says) and that Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) has a playful swagger, half-flirting with the study’s administrator, Dr. Lorna James (a game and frank Michele Austin), while she asks about his medical history.Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, left, and Austin (with Essiedu and Russell seated onstage), portray the two psychiatrists running the pharmaceutical trial. Sara Krulwich/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