Performing Arts

Shape-Shifters

In The Method Isaac Butler traces the evolution of an acting theory that was both ferociously denounced and fanatically embraced.

August 18, 2022 issue

Brian Seibert

Never the Same Step Twice

Where the previous generation of dancers arranged their steps into tidy, regular phrases, John Bubbles enjambed over the bar lines, multiplying, twisting, tilting, turning.

May 12, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Verdi’s Decentered Epic

The six principal characters of Don Carlos grasp at separate ends, but nothing is finally to be attained.

April 21, 2022 issue

Adam Kirsch

Black Voices, German Song

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?

February 10, 2022 issue

Ian Frazier

‘Part of Why We Survived’

A new history of the long tradition of Native comedy, inside and outside mainstream entertainment

January 13, 2022 issue

Rachel Eisendrath

I Killed a Man Back There

If, as Hamlet claims, every play holds a “mirror up to nature,” what kind of mirror is Robert Icke’s production?

August 10, 2022

Erica Getto

Choreographed Uncertainty

Even the most rigorous viewing of a Trisha Brown dance will never quite reveal the springs and levers that hold it together.

June 22, 2022

Sam Huber

The Boundaries of Kinship

In her plays, Alice Childress revealed how vulnerable even the most private, self-enclosed spaces are to history’s incursions.

May 17, 2022

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

Dancers of the New York City Ballet performing George Balanchine’s Serenade at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, Russia, July 2003

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

Larry Wolff

The Struggle Over Verdi

The mood of urgency and unease in La Forza del Destino—the opening performance of this year’s Parma Verdi Festival—also hangs over Italy ahead of Sunday’s national elections.

September 24, 2022

James Shapiro

Shakespeare Noir

There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and Joel Coen feel in perfect alignment.

January 13, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Notes from Underground

Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s new opera recasts the Orphic myth with Eurydice as the central character.

January 13, 2022 issue

Coco Fusco

Whose Art Thrives in Cuba?

Art and dance were battlegrounds for the struggle to define the meaning of the revolution.

December 16, 2021 issue

Tim Page

Playing Together

In the late 1980s, when composers and audiences moved in deeply divided circles, Bang on a Can’s commitment to diverse programming began to break down the divisions within contemporary music.

November 18, 2021 issue

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