Arts

Performing Arts

The Passion of Martha Graham

In a new biography, Deborah Jowitt meticulously describes Graham’s pioneering dances, but brushes lightly over Graham’s fervid, turbulent personal relationships, and the importance she ascribed to passion and sexual pleasure.

May 9, 2024 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Furious Stasis

Verdi’s sprawling opera La Forza del Destino draws its power from asymmetry, arbitrary juxtapositions, and extreme situations.

April 18, 2024 issue

Frances Wilson

‘Diabolical Fame’

Composed of rhapsody and opinionation, without shape or chronology, Roger Lewis’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tries to get at the strangeness of stardom.

March 21, 2024 issue

Edward Mendelson

‘She Talk Her Mind’

Zadie Smith’s Wife of Willesden offers an exhilarating counterpoint to the writer’s understanding of character as it emerges in her fiction.

March 7, 2024 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Alone in Paradise

George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s opera Picture a day like this illuminates not just the loss of a child but also music’s power to create imagined spaces so alluring they become an escape from reality.

March 7, 2024 issue

Chantal McStay

Wallow Around and Live!

In her hypermediated performance pieces, the Argentine artist Marta Minujín invited audiences to lose their bearings.

March 21, 2024

Laura Quinton

The Universalist

For three decades, the dancer and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon has aspired to make ballet a popular art.

January 23, 2024

Adam Shatz

Cries and Whispers

Throughout her long career, Meredith Monk has pushed beyond verbal language to explore the full potential of the human voice.

November 22, 2023

Joan Acocella (1945–2024)

Remembering Joan Acocella

Joan Acocella

Dancing for Balanchine

October 11, 1990 issue

Joan Acocella

On Tap

June 6, 1996 issue

Joan Acocella

The Neapolitan Finger

December 21, 2000 issue

Joan Acocella

The Elmore Leonard Story

September 24, 2015 issue

Joan Acocella

Crotch Shots Galore

May 24, 2018 issue

Joan Acocella

From Russia, with Love

May 25, 2023 issue

On Dance

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

A scene in the Kingdom of the Shades from La Bayadère, 1900; from Marius Petipa: La Dansomanie, a two-volume album in three languages published last year by the St. Petersburg Museum of Theater and Music to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Petipa’s birth

Joan Acocella

Souls in Single File

On Marius Petipa, the most productive and influential ballet choreographer of the late nineteenth century.

December 19, 2019 issue

Jennifer Homans

Hail Balanchine

‘Serenade’ has no story or narrative. It is internal—inward, like the music, and more of a prayer or ritual than a theatrical spectacle.

December 21, 2017 issue

Nate Wooley

Eastern Sounds

Ahmed Abdul-Malik recorded six overlooked albums combining jazz and North African folk music. A new European quartet has revived his legacy to create a new music of their own.

October 6, 2024

Simon Callow

Under the Spotlight

Richard Sennett’s new book, The Performer, ranges beyond acting to musical, political, social, and pictorial performance.

October 17, 2024 issue

Brian Seibert

‘Carefully Plotted Chaos’

For decades the choreographer Twyla Tharp has been drawing on her past successes and even returning to earlier failures, looking to get it right this time.

August 21, 2024

Dilara O’Neil

Dancing Laser Beams

George Balanchine’s Rubies represents New York City Ballet’s centrality to American dance, and American dance’s centrality to the art form.

July 17, 2024

Jennifer Krasinski

Taking the Performance Apart

A retrospective of the artist Joan Jonas displays her will of steel, her porosity before the world, and her ways of playing with perception.

June 30, 2024

Brian Seibert

‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, once kings of American culture, invented a new kind of musical theater in shows like Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific. But by the time of their final work together, a critical backlash had begun.

June 20, 2024 issue

Hannah Gold

Second Hand News

In David Adjmi’s new play, a fictional Seventies rock band struggles with life and art.

May 18, 2024

Fintan O’Toole

The Whistleblower We Deserve

The ambiguous hero of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is a man of science who insists on the primacy of truth and evidence. But he’s also, possibly, a bit of a fascist.

May 23, 2024 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Perpetual Expectation

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s operas have a pervasive aura of waiting for something just out of sight, shrouded in veil upon veil.

May 23, 2024 issue

Erica Getto

The Company She Keeps

Molissa Fenley’s kinetic dances emerge from the tension between the lone artist and the collective: her group works resemble kaleidoscopic solos, while her solos feel like duets with a ghost.

April 20, 2024