Performing Arts

Phantasms of the Opera

The invention of gas illumination offered operagoers in the mid-nineteenth century “a completely new experience of light” that reshaped operatic composition and performance.

March 11, 2021 issue

Matthew Aucoin

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

May 13, 2021 issue

Sonia Delaunay: Danseuse, deuxieme version, 1916

Clair Wills

Stepping Out

The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said—to interpret signs almost before they have been given, to read messages in the moment they are being sent.

August 20, 2020 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Back on Catfish Row

‘Porgy and Bess’ at the Met

November 21, 2019 issue

Kate Maltby

Tom Stoppard’s Theatre of Memory

For Stoppard, this play is a personal “coming-out.” That may be a difficult concept for some American Jews to understand, but England is not America.

February 14, 2020

Yvonne Rainer (left) performing ‘Corridor Solo’ and ‘Crawling Through’ from Parts of Some Sextets at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1965

Erica Getto and Max Nelson

‘Don’t Write on Here, Bad Girl’

Over sixty years, Yvonne Rainer has made an art of bringing a deadpan comic tone to strenuous scenes of bodily exertion, political struggle, emotional strain, and taxing thought.

April 23, 2020 issue

Mike Nichols on the set of Catch-22, Guaymas, Mexico, 1969

Simon Callow

Charm Defensive

Mike Nichols was charismatic, witty, invariably quotable. But do I feel I knew him? Not at all.

September 24, 2020 issue

John Cage and Merce Cunningham, France, 1970

Christopher Benfey

The Opposite of Ordinary

July 2, 2020 issue

The Latest

Larry Wolff

A Halo of Nostalgia

The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire.

November 4, 2021 issue

Dan Chiasson

Larger Than Life

Nearly sixty years after its founding, Bread and Puppet Theater still has the power to unsettle, despite evoking old battles, old adversaries, and perhaps even lost causes.

September 23, 2021 issue

Imani Perry

In Her Own Voice

To be a Black artist has always required one to fight as well as create.

July 1, 2021 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Theater, Politics, and Critic

“The way the personal and the political overlap in certain public lives can be illuminating for both arenas.”

May 22, 2021

Dan Chiasson

This Ain’t No Disco

Talking Heads were at once a party band and an art project.

March 25, 2021 issue

Coco Fusco

Decolonizing the Museum

“We thought when we began that the performance would be understood as a parody,” says the interdisciplinary artist and writer.

February 6, 2021

Maggie Doherty

Bella Abzug’s Fight for a Broader Feminism

On the feisty congresswoman’s posthumous return to the spotlight.

November 5, 2020 issue

Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik performing John Cage’s 26'1.1499'' for a String Player, 1965; photograph by Peter Moore

Brian Dillon

Chaos and Cathode Rays

October 22, 2020 issue

The choreographers Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Erick Hawkins, Paul Taylor, Martha Graham, Yvonne Rainer, José Limón, and Don Redlich, on the terrace of Graham’s Manhattan home, New York City, 1968

Christopher Benfey

Missed Steps

So many steps! So many turns! A leap. A landing. And done. The other dancers had no trouble remembering the steps. I had trouble.

August 26, 2020

Caryl Phillips

Derek Walcott in New York

Derek Walcott had many New Yorks, and all of them played a part in his life and in his evolution as a writer. But perhaps the most important of all his New York sojourns was the one from the Fifties.

July 29, 2020