Hello. Since the last time we spoke, I:
Finished Italo Calvino’s excellent If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
Attended four world premieres of new dance works…
First, the Martha Graham Dance Company at the Joyce Theater. I saw Program A, which you can see this Friday and Saturday. Cortege, a new piece by choreographic duo by Baye & Asa, debuted last Wednesday. It is one of the best things I have seen in a while—a real feat of both athleticism and emotion. Martha Graham’s dancers are almost shockingly good; I say this as someone who sees a lot of professional dance in New York so you know I really mean it!! Another standout—more for its emotional artistry and expressive impact—was Xin Ying’s world premiere of Letter to Nobody, a solo in which she dances with Martha Graham herself (a piece which absolutely sits at the intersection of art and technology). There is a really lovely moment at the end of the piece that is one of the few artistically resonant uses of AI I’ve ever beheld. When the lights when down, the audience emitted a collective “ah,” the audible expression of being moved. It helps that Xin Ying is undoubtedly one of the best dancers in the world performing right now.
I also saw Sara Mearn’s artist residency performance at New York City Center. Mearns, if you’re unfamiliar, is a New York City Ballet principal known for her expressive movement and expansive port de bras. The first piece Don’t Go Home is more of a play with dance embedded within it than a complete work of dance. The script—which is about a dancer (Mearns, playing “Sara”) auditioning for a film role of a dancer named Claire. Claire/Sara seem to share a lot in common—they’ve had struggles (Mearns has experienced depression, injuries, and hearing loss—the latter of which has been happily resolved with her recent decision to get hearing aid implants) and they must now make their big comeback. The performance is purposefully meta one; I’m not sure it would work starring any other dancer but Mearns because of how clearly it deals in autofiction. The dancing is lovely, as it always is—especially with some partner work with newly anointed NYCB principal Gilbert Bolden III—but the script itself deals heavily in sentimentality. There are many delightful bursts of humor that leaven the piece. The second piece, Dance Is A Mother by former Alvin Ailey principal Jamar Roberts (who, luckily for us, also dances in it) is a contemporary work marked with fluidity and selective and strategic moments of unison. Music by Caroline Shaw—performed live on stage with a string quartet and solo singer—gives the work a mellifluous but not overly ornamental quality.
Now, the news.
You absolutely need to read this New York Times story about how a blogger has embroiled an arts-focused nonprofit and summer resort in heaps of controversy, culminating in the ousting of its president (who contends he stepped down by choice). I can’t believe I was unfamiliar with the Chautauqua Institution, which was founded as 1874, first as a religious organization that later evolved into a 750-acre educational center that hosts performances and lectures in the arts and humanities mostly over a nine-week summer session. Based in Chautauqua, New York (400-or-so miles away from Manhattan, on the far west stretch of the state), the organization sells day passes as well as tickets for individual events, but you can also pay a little more than $3,000 for a season pass (lodging and food not included). About 100,000 people are expected to attend this year. It is where Salman Rushdie, in 2022, was attacked and nearly died.
The reason I suppose I was not aware of Chautauqua is that I do not have generational wealth. In fact, from the Times’s reporting, it seems that most Chautauqua regulars have attended its summer sessions for generations. There are a lot of accusations that such regulars have thrown at the Institute, and especially at president Michael Hill, who took the office at 2017. Some say that the administration has become more cloistered (after the attack on Rushdie, an administrative building that previously had an open-door policy is now locked, but can be entered by first ringing a doorbell). Others suggest that the campus is physically deteriorating (the cinema was temporarily closed for renovations). And an attempt at interfaith discourse led to the Institute’s first Muslim staff member, director of religious programs Rafia Khader, to step down after a now-deleted essay on the war on Gaza drew criticism from Jewish leaders at the organization.
As the country itself grows more divisive, so too does political debate seem to increase at this storied enclave. Conservative regulars have accused programmers of being too liberal, while they have often advocated for more far right-leaning speakers to get slotted in to the calendar, in spite of the Institute always having had a bipartisan approach to its programming; one lecture series by the Ford Foundation which largely focused on white privilege appears to have taking the matter a touch too far left for some. All of this has been fueled by the author of, and commenters on, a small blog called The Gadfly. In May, Hill will leave his post as president, and he appears largely unbothered by the online chaos that had been spurred in the effort to make him do so. “Get a life, man,” he says in response.
What was the most-visited museum in 2024? According to The Art Newspaper’s annual survey, the Louvre expectedly tops out the list. It’s followed by the Vatican Museums, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern. Overall, London’s museums continue to see a downturn; in New York, MoMA and the Guggenheim also saw decreased numbers compared to 2023. The museums that had the biggest boosts in numbers followed similar strategies: they put on show-stopping exhibits of buzzy art works…or they tapped into pop cultural appeal with more modern takes (see: the V&A’s exhibit of Taylor Swift’s costumes).
If you are in London you should absolutely see the Royal Ballet perform Justin Peck’s Everywhere We Go in November/early December. As I have mentioned before, it is my favorite piece of his—and it will be the first Peck piece that Royal Ballet ever performs. That program also includes Balanchine’s Serenade and a debut by Cathy Marston, which makes it especially hard to beat. Royal Ballet’s just-announced 2025/2026 season also includes a new full-length ballet by Akram Khan, whose version of Giselle I’ve brought up multiple times. Carnage and the Divine is inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Actually, I think Eugene Onegin is trending. Ralph Fiennes will make his opera directing debut next year at the Opéra National de Paris with Pyotr Illych Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, which the actor summarizes: “Eugene Onegin tells a love story that doesn’t work.”
American Ballet Theatre brought Onegin, choreographed by John Cranko for Stuttgart Ballet in 1965, back into its repertoire last summer, and Royal Ballet is performing the work in its current season through June 12. In February, the San Francisco Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet announced a joint commission of Ukrainian choreographer Yuri Possokhov’s Eugene Onegin. The ballet, which will have an original score by Ilya Demutsky, will debut in San Francisco in January before Joffrey takes it to Chicago next June. In the fall, London’s Royal Opera debuted a stripped-back production of Eugene Onegin, the opera, with staging by Ted Huffman; in February, La Scala debuted its own new production of the same opera by director Mario Martone.
Why does this appear to be the novel-in-verse of the moment? Pushkin began publishing Eugene Onegin in serial form, precisely 200 years ago in 1825. The first completed version was published in 1833. The plot is basically about a man (Eugene Onegin) ghosting a woman (Tatyana) and then, years later, wishing he hadn’t because now he sees she is exceedingly beautiful and the object of many people’s attention. She rejects him though she does still love him—and she’s already married someone else. In the middle of it, there is a duel that leaves one man dead. It is hard to say why this story has captivated so many artists today. It is, at its core, a tragedy, one that I know many women in Brooklyn have personally experienced, except, perhaps without the duel.
The Royal Opera also has a new associate artistic director, Netia Jones, who lovessssss to be at the intersection of art and technology! Next year, she will curate a four-day festival, RBO/Shift, exploring how opera and technology, namely, AI can work together. She’s previously put on a VR opera and seems to have a pretty healthy perspective on it all. “We can’t be blind to the dangers and risks, but the whole AI story isn’t just about worrying if machines are going to create operas or make everybody unemployed. It’s about how we, the humans in the loop, can be enabled to imagine new futures when we’re using it,” she told The Guardian.
Meanwhile, the Welsh Opera is experimenting with a one-year pilot program which gives people with chronic pain access to an online course that teaches them operatic vocal and breathing techniques. So far research shows about two-thirds of participants experienced reduced pain, the BBC reported.
Are AI models advanced enough to translate literature? asks The Markup. I am here to simply answer, no. The story focuses on a Swedish startup Nuanxed, which has so far translated 900 books with AI. Here’s something that won’t surprise you: it has so far focused on commercial fiction (which is, of course, more plot- than prose-driven) and nonfiction rather than literary fiction. Please continue to stay in your lane Nuanxed! (It pains me to type this company’s name.)
This might just be IRL Lydia Tár. Except conductor Joana Mallwitz, who just made her Met Opera debut, actually seems quite enthusiastic and lovely. Her New York Times profile also details how, in addition to juggling her role as music director of the Konzerthaus Berlin, she’s also had to lobby for arts funding as Germany cuts back cultural budgets. “We are not some mismanaged corporation in crisis,” she said. “If Germany is going to take pride in its culture, keeping concerts affordable should be a basic civic right.” She’s right!
While the Getty Museum remained safe from the fires that ravaged Los Angeles earlier this year, ArtNews reports that the museum is selling $500 million in bonds to further fortify it against future climate disasters.
The Bolshoi Ballet—which many consider to be the greatest ballet company in the world, technically speaking—is not doing so great as Russia continues its war in Ukraine. The company is being accused of nepotism as Maria Shuvalova, the daughter of a top Kremlin official, made her debut in a lead role…and got pretty bad reviews calling her “clumsy and vulgar” with “no technique,” the The Times reported.
Luckily, you can see an actually good former-Bolshoi dancer, as Olga Smirnova—who left Russia in 2022 in protest of the war—will dance with American Ballet Theatre this summer as a guest artist in Giselle. Currently, she dances with Dutch National Ballet, and stars in a new production by Helen Pickett, Lady Macbeth. I hope it is better than Crime and Punishment!
I guess we should check in with What’s Going On with the United States, aside from economic collapse:
Kevin Young, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, stepped down on Friday, with a statement saying that he wanted to focus on his writing (he is also the poetry editor of the New Yorker), the NYT reported.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will not award any grants in 2025, and it has canceled a reported but unconfirmed $175 million in already-awarded grants, NPR reported. This impacts thousands of arts organizations, museums, libraries, archives, and more, in all 50 states.
Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III vowed that the museum would remain free of partisanship. He said in a memo to staff, “We remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research and the arts to all Americans...We will continue to showcase world-class exhibits, collections and objects, rooted in expertise and accuracy,” Courthouse News reported. The NYT asked the White House where it stood on Bunch’s role at the Smithsonian, to which it responded in a statement: “President Trump is ensuring that we are celebrating true American history and ingenuity instead of corrupting it in the name of left-wing ideology.” When asked about Bunch’s depiction of Trump in his 2019 book A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump, White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote, “Lonnie Bunch is a Democrat donor and rabid partisan who manufactured lies out of thin air in order to boost sales of his miserable book. Fortunately, he, along with his garbage book, are complete failures.” In addition to the fascism, the syntax of these people’s sentences is really something to contemplate.
The Kennedy Center sent me a mailer asking me to become a member, which at least gave me a laugh.
I am very interested in Katie Kitamura’s forthcoming book, Audition, but I also liked what she said in this New Yorker interview: “Novels and writing in general feel incredibly important, because it is already clear, in the new Administration, that language is going to be a terrain where a substantial part of this battle is going to be fought: what language people are allowed to use, how language is manipulated or denuded of meaning. I think what writers do or can try to do is to use language with precision and care. When words stop meaning what they’re meant to mean, then we’re in trouble.” ▲
Excellent image choice