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

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