Roslyn Sulcas

That is probably all about to change. On Sunday, Menzies, 45, will be front and center of Netflix’s much-anticipated third season of “The Crown,” in which he takes over the role of Prince Philip from Matt Smith, who played the part for the show’s first two seasons. It isn’t Menzies’ first leading role in a popular series; he played the 20th-century academic Frank and Frank’s 17th-century alter ego, Black Jack Randall on “Outlander.” But the high-profile and worldwide distribution of “The Crown” is bound to be a game changer for Menzies, who has been lauded for his portrayal of Philip in early reviews.

“The big surprise of the new series of ‘The Crown’ is that Olivia Colman isn’t the best performer in it,” Carol Midgley wrote in The Times of London, going on to praise Menzies as superb — “in voice, mannerisms and plausibility, chuntering about being served venison twice in a week and rolling his eyes at the melodramas of Princess Margaret.”

The role had been linked to both Paul Bettany and Hugh Laurie when Menzies was cast, and he might have been seen as relatively low-profile in comparison to his co-star Colman (who won an Oscar last year for her portrayal of Queen Anne in “The Favourite”) and Matt Smith, the former “Doctor Who” star.

But Peter Morgan, the creator of “The Crown,” said in an interview that Menzies had “a real stillness, maturity and dignity” that everyone had felt was perfect for the role of Philip.

“The Tobias surprise!” Morgan said. “Personally, I don’t know how he isn’t a household figure already. He is utterly persuasive and serious in a role that is often a cartoon figure.”

Menzies, who will also play Philip in Season 4, currently in production, isn’t at all sure that he likes the idea of being properly famous. “It does feel different, and I am trying not to think about it,” he said in an interview last month at a central London hotel. “I like being invisible in my life around London.”

In person, he is friendly, reserved and circumspect, giving the impression of someone who lives intensely in the mind. “One of the things I most treasure about Tobias is that you can sit in silence with him very calmly, or have a three-hour conversation with him very calmly,” said Robert Icke, who first directed Menzies in 2015 in the Wallace Shawn one-man play, “The Fever,” which was shown in a bedroom at the Mayfair Hotel. “Sometimes he used to come over and read, and we wouldn’t speak at all.”

The director Rupert Goold, a close friend, said that Menzies had always been hardworking (“lots of actors think they are, but he actually is”) and thoughtful, drawn to the process of acting rather than to celebrity or status.

“He has always been a kind of secret weapon,” Goold said in a phone interview. “There are a lot of great male actors of his generation here in the U.K., but I would put Tobias right up there in the top group.”

For Menzies, “The Crown” comes near the end of a year full of delightfully deadpan spots in some of the buzziest shows on television. He reprised his doctor role for the final season of Amazon’s “Catastrophe,” was an awkward maybe-love interest for Aisling Bea in Hulu’s “This Way Up” and made a surprise appearance in the “Game of Thrones” finale that resulted in one of the most meme-able moments of the season. (“Uncle, please sit.”)

“The Crown” finds him offering a portrait of the prince as a middle-aged man. Season 3 runs from 1964 to 1977, when Philip was in his 40s and early 50s, and Menzies’ portrayal is built around the idea of Philip questioning his identity and sense of self.

“In some ways, it’s a continuation of themes in the first seasons: being second to his wife, sacrificing his own life and career to some extent,” he said. “But there is a further digging in to that, a sense of the road not traveled. I think we all have those thoughts.”

Menzies watched and enjoyed the first two seasons of “The Crown,” and was immediately keen when approached about the part. “Philip had struck me as an interesting and complicated person,” he said. “It seemed like an exciting, challenging role to take on.” As is usual for him, he did his homework.

“There is a lot written, a lot of footage, and it’s both intimidating and an amazing resource,” he said. “There is the technical aspect of working on the voice and physicality, which I enjoyed; those parameters can paradoxically be very creative. But it can be its own crazy rabbit hole.”

The act of living in the imagination — having “the privilege to spend time bringing other psyches to life” — is what he loves about the work, Menzies said. But he didn’t have any acting ambitions as a child or teenager.

“My big passion was tennis,” he said. “I was quite good for a bit, around 10 to 13.”

He grew up in Canterbury, where he moved with his mother and brother after his parents separated, and went to a rural Waldorf school. His mother took him to a lot of theater, he said, enumerating some shows he remembered: “Street of Crocodiles, Cheek by Jowl’s all-male ‘As You Like It,’ Rambert, a lot of contemporary dance.”

After high school, he started a performing arts course at Stratford-upon-Avon college. “It was intuitive,” he said. “I don’t really know why I went.” Initially he gravitated toward the more physical side of performance, getting accepted (“weirdly, since I had virtually no training”) into both the Laban Center for Movement and Dance (now called Trinity Laban) and the Jacques Lecoq school of mime in Paris.

Laban ultimately felt like too much of a stretch, but he wanted to go to Lecoq. “I couldn’t get the money to go,” he said, “but what I could get was a grant for drama school.” He ended up at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

“I suppose that’s when I got the acting bug,” he said. “It took me a while to work it out, and that I was any good at it.”

He planned to be a stage actor specializing in experimental theater. But before he had even finished drama school, he got on job on the long-running television drama “Casualty,” which gave him a crash course in working on camera. Unlike most fledgling actors, he stayed busy from then on, appearing in dozens of British shows (“MI5,” “Black Mirror,” “The Honorable Woman,” “The Night Manager”) and starring in others, like the HBO series “Rome” and Starz’s “Outlander.”

“The questions he would ask, how much he would push about working the text, that was invaluable for me to see,” said his “Outlander” co-star Caitriona Balfe in a telephone interview. “It taught me, this is what you can ask when you are an actor who really thinks about where the meat of the scene is, what is superfluous and what isn’t.”

Menzies also has worked steadily in the theater. Goold, who has collaborated with Menzies on numerous productions, most recently “The Hunt,” said he had probably worked with him more than any other actor.

“He projects a quality that has both masculinity and sensitivity,” Goold said. “And he combines incredible relaxation with an ability to probe and uncover, never leave any stone unturned; at that level he is unparalleled.”

Icke described Menzies as “really unusual, in that he is not a super-emotional actor, won’t burst into tears and scream and shout, but is very complicated and deep.” Icke added that he “has an unusual superpower: He is better than almost any actor I have worked with in animating difficult chunks of text, lifting an idea and making it profound.”

In its most basic terms, Menzies said, acting is “often just a question of meditating on who the person is, why they are saying what they are saying, why they are behaving as they are behaving.” In “Outlander,” he added, one of his characters was a sexually, physically violent sadist. “He does things I’ve never done in my life, but you imagine yourself into why he might do this, and then find the bits in you where you’ve had feelings of aggression, murderousness, darker impulses. We all have those feelings; we just don’t act upon them.”

So, comedy next? Menzies laughed. “No, I’m more maudlin in my tastes,” he said, adding that he would love to work with the film director Joanna Hogg (“here’s my pitch Joanna!”) and with European theater directors like Thomas Ostermeier or Ivo van Hove.

“I think my tastes are getting more and more esoteric,” he said. “I recently went to a library of performance art and saw the wildest stuff, somewhere between a religious event, a performance and a happening. I thought, now this is what I want to do.”

This article originally appeared in

With 'The Crown,' a 'Secret Weapon' Could Become Not So Secret

LONDON — You have probably seen Tobias Menzies in a host of television shows (“Outlander,” “Rome,” “Catastrophe,” “Game of Thrones”). You may have seen him in a movie (“Casino Royale,” “Atonement”). And if you’re a theater buff who visits England, you might have caught him in a number of leading roles (“The History Boys,” “Hamlet,” “Uncle Vanya”). He is that ascetically-but-unobtrusively-handsome actor, with those deep grooves running down each side of his face; the one who disappears so thor...

LOS ANGELES — Bella Lewitzky was a fervently Californian choreographer, a force-of-nature creator who had no particular desire to make it in New York.

Instead, she believed in her own center of choreographic gravity, in Los Angeles. So it seems fitting that “Kinaesonata,” not seen for more than 20 years, has been revived for L.A. Dances, a festival at L.A. Dance Project.

For those not familiar with Lewitzky’s work, which was rarely presented after her company disbanded in 1997, “Kinaesonata,” staged by Walter Kennedy, a former Lewitzky dancer, is a revelation. In this 1970 piece, set to the insistent rhythms and atonal lyricism of Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1, the dancers move with a deeply rooted, grounded quality that feels very much of its time. But the movement, with its balletic purity of line, its off-center angles and its rapid, joyous flights through space, also feels startlingly vivid and fresh.

The festival, running through Nov. 24, also features eight commissioned pieces, most from Los Angeles choreographers, as well as two works by Benjamin Millepied, the founder and director of the company. It’s a forward-looking enterprise; since starting L.A. Dance Project in 2012, Millepied has maintained that the city is a fertile ground for dance.

But to look forward, you also have to look back, Millepied said after a performance in late October at the company’s studios in downtown Los Angeles. “You can give opportunities and try to nurture a generation of choreographers,” he said, “but it’s important that the audience, dancers and choreographers also get some context, that they see this work and understand there is a history here too.”

Lewitzky, who grew up in San Bernardino, California, trained with, and later danced for, prominent choreographer Lester Horton, who would become a profound influence on the young Alvin Ailey. She ran a company in Los Angeles for three decades and founded dance departments at CalArts and the Idyllwild Arts Academy.

Her company performed on the East Coast for the first time in 1971, and despite an enthusiastic critical response, only a handful of times after that. “Bella wasn’t that interested in performing in New York” or in critical success there, Kennedy said, adding that her attitude was partly a reaction to Horton’s desire to “make it” in New York.

Although known in the dance world, she never achieved the brand-name recognition of her friend and contemporary Merce Cunningham or of other West Coast dance-makers like Simone Forti or Anna Halprin. But judging by “Kinaesonata,” she was a choreographer with a style and technique as decisive and crafted as any of her more celebrated peers.

That style and aesthetic comes from modernism, Millepied said. “It has these formal shapes and geometries that make you think of architects of that time,” he said. “Dancers today want to move like hip-hop dancers; the rigor of this kind of work — the way you move in and out of positions and create shapes — isn’t what might be most exciting to them. But it’s a real education.”

Millepied said he hoped to revive other works by Lewitzky and by other significant California choreographers, like Forti and Halprin. “There has been an important, distinctive modern dance tradition here,” he said. “It’s vital for the young LA choreographers that I want to commission from to see the discipline, the focus, how much craft there is in this work.”

Millepied had been trying to find out more about Lewitzky’s choreography when he discovered the Twitter account of filmmaker Bridget Murnane, who is working on a documentary about her. Murnane sent him several videos, and he immediately picked out “Kinaesonata.” While some Lewitzky works “need a little context,” Millepied said, “this clearly shows the level of her craft and imagination.”

He was less happy with the unitards and black backdrop of the original — “I wanted people to look at the dance without costumes that scream 1970s” — and commissioned artist Charles Gaines to create new scenery and costumes. (This was apparently a bone of contention among Lewitzky loyalists, but the bright color-block shorts and tops, overlaid with transparent mesh, gave the piece a vibrant, crisp feel.)

“Kinaesonata” dwarfed most of the other works that I saw on programs A and B of the L.A. Dances festival. (Program C, which includes “Kinaesonata” and pieces by Tino Sehgal, Madeline Hollander and Millepied, opened in Paris last week and continues in Los Angeles this month.) There were patchily intriguing moments in Shannon Gillen’s “Run From Me,” in Charm La Donna’s “Kora” (which benefited from its wistfully elegant music by Toumani Diabeté), and in the opaquely dystopian “Split Step,” by visual artist Emily Mast and choreographer and director Zack Winokur.

More successful was Kyle Abraham’s “Chapter Song,” a skillful series of vignettes set to Philip Glass (“Einstein on the Beach”), Kendrick Lamar, Barbra Streisand and others. Abraham tucks ballet, hip-hop and a little humor into his piece, which has athletic floor work, slow, precise balances and enigmatic gestures. It doesn’t quite add up, but it’s never dull.

Two L.A. Dance Project company members, Gianna Reisen and Janie Taylor, also created chamber works for the festival. (Five of the festival’s eight commissions are by women.) Reisen, who has choreographed for New York City Ballet, didn’t help herself with a rather undifferentiated violin score by Andrew Bird, but the dynamics and timings of her trio suggested her talent for shape and composition.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of the festival was Taylor’s “Adagio in B Minor,” a duet set to Mozart’s piece for solo piano. Taylor, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, has never choreographed before; in a conversation from Paris, she said Millepied “drew it out of me” after she had created a duet during an improvisation session.

But her “Adagio,” which she performed with the marvelous David Adrian Freeland, is a small gem, full of charm and surprise. Taylor suggests the courtesy of ballroom dancing, the awkwardness of first encounters, and the way that ballet’s formality can both channel and mask emotion. And it has a beguiling, unexpected ending that feels musically perfect. Like “Kinaesonata,” it conveys the joy of dancing and the artistry of dance-making.

L.A. Dances Festival: Through Nov. 24 at L.A. Dance Project, Los Angeles; ladanceproject.org

(Critic’s Notebook)

Reviving a Homegrown Modernist Out West

It was 6 p.m. in Paris and midday in New York, and Jérôme Bel was peering intently at the computer screen on his kitchen table.

Dancer Catherine Gallant suddenly appeared in the Skype window. “We’re on Governors Island. Shall I show you the view?” she said. Bel, who is often described as an experimental choreographer, groaned theatrically and said, “I wish I could be there.”

But it was Bel’s decision not to be in the rehearsal room in New York, where Gallant was about to run through “Isadora,” his new solo about the modern-dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. He will not be at Gallant’s performance Wednesday at the Crossing the Line festival, nor at any other performance of the work in North America. That’s because Bel decided this year, for ecological reasons, that he would not work in any way that involves flying.

It was a tough decision. Like most successful performing artists, Bel depends on an international touring circuit. But at a moment of growing youth protests about climate change and increasing consciousness about greenhouse gas emissions from air travel, he feels no other choice is possible, he said.

“My career is really international, not national,” Bel said after the rehearsal, speaking in rapid French that was punctuated by eyebrow-lifting and gesticulations: “I don’t know whether I’ll be able to hang in there.” (Expressive shrug.) “If not, too bad.” (Flourish of hands.) “I’ll go and live in the country and teach dance to children.”

Meanwhile, he is reinventing his professional life, one project at a time. The decision to quit flying came in February, he said, after it dawned on him that, while he was in Paris, assistants had flown to both Hong Kong and Peru to stage his works. “I realized that I was lying to myself, trying not to use too much heating, eating organic food, but being a hypocrite, because my work contributes to the ecological crisis,” he said. “I made the decision that I would no longer be part of this artistic jet set.”

Initially, Bel thought this would mean the end of his career. His two full-time assistants, whose job is to coordinate and plan his tours, were horrified. But several projects were already in the works, including the Duncan solo, which Bel had begun creating with French dancer Elizabeth Schwartz, with the intention of touring the United States.

So she could avoid flying there, Schwartz suggested he contact Gallant, a fellow Duncan specialist based in New York. Bel and Gallant decided to try working via Skype. Over several sessions, they worked on changing and adapting the existing text that frames and contextualizes the Duncan dances Gallant performs in the show.

Before the run-through of the solo in the Governors Island studio, Gallant tested how far left and right she could move before being cut out of Bel’s view. As she danced, the screen froze several times, and Amelia Dawe Sanders, Gallant’s assistant, had to repeatedly log onto the Wi-Fi, which kept disconnecting, and adjust the microphone.

Bel remained calm throughout, making notes while waiting for the Skype session to reconnect. “Of course it is difficult and unsatisfactory,” he said later. “It’s like being visually impaired and hard of hearing. But this is a price I am willing to pay.”

On the other end, Gallant was more anxious. The interruptions were disappointing, she said, because it was important for her to be able to perform the solo right through. “You’re really just crossing your fingers,” she added.

“It’s not the same as being in a room together, especially generationally, for someone like me,” said Gallant, 63. “But I realize that this opportunity exists for me because of what Jérôme decided.”

Bel is not the only internationally successful artist with an anti-flying stance. Berlin-based performance artist Tino Sehgal refuses to travel by plane, as does British theater director Katie Mitchell. (There are even fewer cultural institutions with this policy; the Helsingborg Concert Hall in Sweden is a rare example.)

“It reduces the scope of where I can work,” Mitchell said in a telephone interview.

“I have been reflecting on, and wondering, whether Skype will evolve, whether our understanding of how we make things will evolve,” she said. If more artists used the video platform this way, she added, “it would open up a whole range of possibilities about how we make work and can use technology.”

For some, however, the difficulties are greater. In a telephone interview, Belgian choreographer Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker, who leads the dance company Rosas, called Bel’s decision “very courageous.” But, she added, “his practice is very different to what we do; when you work with highly skilled dancers performing the specific writing of a choreographer, you can’t transmit that by Skype.”

And, transmission isn’t the only issue. “Let’s not be naïve: Our performance practice is part of the mechanics of a capitalist market,” de Keersmaeker said. Even her recent decision to have Rosas travel only by train in Europe, increases travel costs and takes more time, she said. “We will ask the people who invite us to share the expense,” she said. “Will they be willing?”

Bel said he had persuaded theaters for upcoming tours to allow train trips; in the fall of 2020, he is to go by train to Moscow and his assistants to four cities in China. He said these questions had forced him to interact with theater directors and presenters in a new way. “You have to explain that for 40 hours of train, you need to tour the country, go to more than one city.”

It’s not just his own travel, but the carbon footprint of the arts internationally, which preoccupies Bel. “If you won’t buy tomatoes that don’t come from France, or wherever you live, why do we watch culture that is flown in from other countries?” he said.

Courtney Geraghty, the artistic director of the Crossing the Line festival, said that it was important to awaken peoples’s consciences about environmental issues, but also important to show work from abroad. “In countries where there is nationalism and protectionism,” she said, audiences need “cross-cultural dialogue and international voices.”

Bel acknowledged that his decision was radical, and that his choice was not available to all. “Everyone intelligent and sensitive to this cause must invent their own solutions,” he said. “But our work in contemporary art is to change things.” (Huge swirl of arms.) “We must change this.”

When the Choreographer Won't Fly, the Dancers Rehearse by Skype

PARIS — “Can you see me? Can you hear me?”

In the auditorium, a team checked the red velvet seats, making sure that each was in the correct position. On the stage, performers rehearsed, apparently oblivious to the controlled chaos all around.

It was a week before the scheduled opening, on Friday, of the Théâtre du Châtelet, one of Paris’ most famous stages, which has been closed for a 2 1/2-year, $34.7 million renovation. In one of the lobbies, a large table had been set up for a group of inspectors who had spent the morning examining every aspect of the renovation. They were deciding whether to give formal permission for the theater to open.

“It’s all going to be fine,” said Ruth Mackenzie, the Châtelet’s artistic director. “That’s what I keep telling everyone.” (She was proved right; the commission pronounced a “favorable verdict” at the end of the day.)

Mackenzie, 62, is small, forthright and cheerful. When asked about her, everyone said the same thing: She is a powerhouse who doesn’t take no for an answer.

“She is artistically fearless, and an experienced and strategic political thinker,” said Alex Poots, the British director of The Shed in New York, in a telephone interview. In fact, Mackenzie worked as an adviser on culture and media to two British governments, as well as running the Nottingham Playhouse and the Chichester Festival Theater, both in England, and Scottish Opera.

After directing the London Cultural Olympiad, a program of arts events that accompanied the 2012 Olympics, she moved to the Holland Festival, which she ran from 2015 to 2018. “I hoped that would be a job forever,” Mackenzie said. “But Jean-Luc Choplin, who was running Châtelet, suggested I pitch for the job, and it was irresistible.”

Choplin, who had announced that he would leave when the theater closed for renovation, also suggested Mackenzie team up with Thomas Lauriot dit Prévost, his No. 2 at the Châtelet from 2006 to 2013. Although Lauriot dit Prévost’s title is general director, he and Mackenzie said they shared all aspects of the theater’s leadership, from budget planning to artistic choices.

“We started by spending a complete day together in Brussels,” Lauriot dit Prévost said in their shared, spacious office overlooking the Seine River. “We talked about our political vision of what a theater should be in society, what our values were, what we would stand for.”

Mackenzie is the first Briton to run a French national institution and the first female director at the Châtelet since it opened in 1862. But Christophe Girard, Paris’ deputy mayor for culture, said that her nationality was never an issue during the hiring process.

“I think the fact that she isn’t French is useful,” he said. France has its own cultural and institutional norms, he added, and Mackenzie “knows when she doesn’t want to understand, and I think she solves a lot of problems that way. Ruth knows how to use what could be a weakness and make it a strength.”

It’s hard to overstate the cultural importance of the Châtelet, designed by Jean-Antoine-Gabriel Davioud in 1862 as one of a pair of theaters facing each other across a square in the city center. (Its twin, the Théâtre de la Ville, is also currently under renovation.)

It was in the Châtelet where the artistic revolutions and innovations of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes were first seen; here where Mahler, Strauss and Tchaikovsky conducted; where Josephine Baker, Cole Porter and Juliette Gréco all sang.

Although the main purpose of the renovation was to get electrical circuits, fire safety and security up to code, the Châtelet has also had a makeover: freshly gilded moldings, restored paintings and ceilings, new wallpaper, restored statues on the facade, crumbling stone cleaned and repaired.

A renovated building isn’t the only change. Choplin transformed the Châtelet’s identity — previously linked to serious classical music and opera productions — with long runs of American musicals like “42nd Street” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” and he brought in pop culture figures like Damon Albarn and David Cronenberg to direct their own work. Despite initial controversy over his choices, they proved extremely popular. Now, Mackenzie and Lauriot dit Prévost must place their own stamp on the theater.

That’s not an easy task, said Ariane Bavelier, the deputy culture editor of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro. “There is always drama around the Châtelet. Scandal and outcry are in its DNA,” she said, citing the premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” in 1911, and the Jean Cocteau-Eric Satie-Pablo Picasso collaboration, “Parade,” in 1917. (She could have added “DAU,” the huge interactive art project by filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, whose chaotic opening in January was poorly received by critics.)

Mackenzie and Lauriot dit Prévost have deliberately alluded to that part of the theater’s history by opening the theater and their season on Friday with a reworked version of “Parade,” directed by Martin Duncan. Beginning with an outdoor procession featuring giant puppets created by Marionetas Gigantes, a company from Mozambique, the show continues with “Satie’s World,” a series of free, small-scale installations throughout the theater that evoke some of the eccentric aspects of the French composer’s life. Then comes the paying-tickets part: high-wire performances (literal and figurative) by Stéphane Ricordel’s Paris-based circus ensemble Boîte Noire and Streb Extreme Action, a daredevil dance troupe from New York.

“I always knew I wanted three continents — Africa, Europe, America — and to open up the theater to as many people as possible,” Mackenzie said. “The citizens of Paris have paid for this theater and will continue to pay, through taxes,” she added. “What are we going to give them for their money?”

What they are getting in the first season includes a musical version of Albert Camus’ “Les Justes” directed by rapper and writer Abd Al Malik; Australian opera director Barry Kosky’s production of Handel’s “Saul”; Pina Bausch’s little-seen “Seven Deadly Sins,” presented by Tanztheater Wuppertal; and an homage to South African singer Miriam Makeba.

Both “Parade” and “Les Justes” were partly created and scripted from yearlong workshops in different Paris suburbs, drawing on communities who might not otherwise be exposed to theater. “We start as we mean to go on,” Mackenzie said.

In France, she added, community engagement is not necessarily seen as a positive. Her observation was echoed by Bavelier of Le Figaro. “My worry is that when you start to mix up cultural education with artistic vision, you weaken the programming,” she said.

Mackenzie defended her position. “Nothing I am saying means we are delegating the choice of artists to the citizens of Paris, any more than we are asking them to focus the lights,” she said. But, she added, the Châtelet was an imposing place, “full of gold leaf, and however much we love it, you have to think about how people can access what we offer, access the magic.”

She drew breath. “What would I like us to be famous for? That we said we were here to serve every citizen of Paris, and we did.”

After a Renovation, a Storied Theater Hopes to Entice Paris

PARIS — The workmen were everywhere. Backstage and onstage, they were hammering, banging, gluing, carrying, laying tarpaulin, shimmying up ladders and shouting, “Attention!”

What were they waiting for? Not a rock concert. Not a soccer match. Remarkably, they were staking out a spot for a contemporary dance performance. That’s because in Taiwan, contemporary dance is virtually synonymous with Cloud Gate Dance Theater, a company that has a special place in the nation’s cultural life. (There is a Cloud Gate Street in Taipei, and Aug. 21 is Cloud Gate Day.)

The open-air show was a final bow for Lin Hwai-min, the company’s founder, who was stepping down as the troupe’s artistic director after 46 years. Like the company, he looms large in his country’s cultural life, as famous in Taiwan as any movie or pop star.

By midafternoon, the skies had cleared and the lines had swelled to thousands. At 7:30 p.m., around 50,000 people were seated decorously on the plaza between the National Theater and the National Concert Hall. Camera operators were stationed nearby, filming the dance for a live broadcast on national television.

When Lin arrived onstage, the audience members applauded, shouted and held up banners proclaiming their love. At the end of the show, they waved their phones, creating a sea of lights.

Cloud Gate, which will now be run by Cheng Tsung-lung, the director of the company’s junior troupe, has long been an established presence on the international dance scene. “Lin Hwai-min is the name card of Taiwan in the performing arts, one of the most important representatives of our culture,” said Chang Hui-chin, the director general of Arts Development at the Ministry of Culture, who was attending the outdoor performance. “He has connected us to the world.”

Lin Yatin (no relation to Lin), an associate professor of dance at the Taipei National University of the Arts, said there was no professional contemporary dance troupe in the Chinese-speaking world when Lin founded Cloud Gate in 1973. That was a moment when Taiwan was seeking its own cultural identity following 50 years of Japanese rule (1895-1945), after which it was ceded back to China. In 1949, China’s nationalist government lost control of mainland China and fled to Taiwan, establishing martial law.

“They made my parents’ generation Japanese, and they tried to make us Chinese,” Lin said before the concert. “I didn’t set out to reflect Taiwanese society, but when I started choreographing, I knew I wanted it to be something of our own.”

What he came up with was a remarkable blend of Western and Eastern dance forms and aesthetics, fusing Martha Graham and other contemporary dance techniques with Chinese classical and folk dance and ballet. In the 1990s, he would add martial arts, meditation, tai chi and the breathing techniques of qigong to his dancers’ regimens.

“When Lin founded Cloud Gate, Taiwan was still under martial law rule, with no recognition, knowledge, appetite and audience for dance of any kind,” said Chien Wen-pin, the executive and artistic director of Taiwan’s new $348 million National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts. “The early success of Cloud Gate was indirectly responsible for the founding of Taiwan’s National Theater and Concert Hall and the National Symphony Orchestra nearly 15 years later. It is not an overstatement to say that Cloud Gate and Lin have created for Taiwan three generations of audiences for culture from square one.”

Lin, 73, a charismatic man who looks preternaturally youthful, said he had wanted to be a dancer ever since seeing Powell and Pressburger’s classic ballet film “The Red Shoes” at age 5.

His upper-middle-class family “never took it seriously,” he said, but when he published a short story at 14, he used the earnings to pay for ballet classes. He studied journalism, published two books of short stories, and won a fellowship for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. There, he began a course in dance, learning Graham and Doris Humphrey techniques, among others. “I spent more time at the barre than writing,” he said.

He started to dabble in choreography soon after, and attended two summer sessions at the Martha Graham School in New York. After finishing his degree in Iowa, he returned to Taiwan, and began teaching in the English department at Chengchi University in Taipei. But a dance department at another university heard about his experiences in the United States and asked him to teach.

“I was reluctant at first, but found I could offer a lot,” he said. “The kids I taught wanted to perform, so we started Cloud Gate.” (The company is named after an ancient Chinese ritual dance.) Their first two performances sold more than 3,000 tickets. “It was a good story,” Lin said. “A famous young writer had turned himself into a choreographer.” A good story, maybe, for everyone else, that is. “I almost had a nervous breakdown,” he said. “I thought, I’d better learn how to choreograph.”

Frustrated by his generation’s ignorance about Taiwanese history and traditions, he also decided to learn about his country. “I didn’t know a thing about my own culture,” he said. “I read our poetry, spent time at museums, went to see traditional opera. I felt the company needed to connect to our own country.”

That connection has probably been the secret of Cloud Gate’s success at home. (When the company’s studios burned down in 2008, Huang Haluko, the company’s manager said, there were so many spontaneous donations that the company was able to build a new $22 million home by 2015 without a fundraising campaign.) But Cloud Gate also quickly received international recognition after it began to tour abroad in the late 1970s, winning acclaim for the elegance of Lin’s fusion of styles and the beauty of his stage settings.

Joseph V. Melillo, the former artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, who first invited the company to perform “Nine Songs” there in 1995, said in an email that no one challenges Lin’s “maturity of choreographic style and composition” in the Asian dance world, adding that Lin was an unparalleled teacher and had produced a new choreographic generation.

Lin is modest in the face of these accolades. “All modern dance companies tend to fall apart when their founder dies,” he said before the show. “I consider myself the caretaker, not the identity. Cheng Tsung-lung is ready for a challenge. It would be terrible to keep a Prince Charles in the house.”

Cheng, 43, is in many ways very unlike Lin. His background is not literary or intellectual; his parents, migrants from the south of the country to Taipei, sold slippers on the street before starting their own small factory. Sent to a school with an extensive dance program, Cheng excelled but became addicted to amphetamines in his early teens, he said. Being arrested by the police for possessing drugs and performing community service was a turning point, he said. After graduating, he worked as a truck driver by day, and studied dance part-time at college at night.

He joined Cloud Gate, but after four years, a spinal injury forced him to stop dancing and led him to focus on choreography. He became the resident choreographer and artistic director of the junior troupe, Cloud Gate 2.

His physical style and inspirations are his personal history, he said, citing “13 Tongues,” a 2016 work based on his memories of the vivid street life of his childhood, and which Cloud Gate 2 performed earlier in the week at the company’s sleek and curvaceous building, in a verdant setting outside the city.

Cheng said that he was shocked when Lin asked him to take over Cloud Gate, but that he tried not to feel intimidated or nervous. He said his central focus was to maintain a connection to society. “Dancing is a way to connect people, and now the baton is with me,” he said. “You don’t have to abandon the past to have new beginnings.”

But on Saturday, the theme was continuity, not change. “My parents brought me, and now I bring my children, and it’s the same for so many,” said a woman near the front of the stage. Lin echoed the sentiment in his speech, alluding quickly to his retirement and that of several dancers, before moving on briskly. “Cloud Gate Theater of Taiwan will keep moving forward,” he said. “See you here next year.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/arts/dance/cloud-gate-dance-taiwan.html" id="f206f17e-bb6c-35d6-a3f5-952e13de0af4">The New York Times</a>.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A lunchtime bout of torrential rain, lightning and thunder couldn’t keep a crowd of intrepid souls from lining up at Liberty Plaza here Saturday. They simply put up their umbrellas.

In Taiwan, a Contemporary Dance Troupe Brings in the Crowds

The camera moved in for a close-up of her pale, anxious face. “Sorry, Lily, just one more time,” said Tom Shankland, the director of the new adaptation of “Les Misérables,” a coproduction with BBC and PBS’s Masterpiece. “Listen, my deathbed scene was on Day 2,” said Collins, who was playing the ill-fated Fantine. “It’s all uphill at this point.”

There is not much that’s looking up for any character in Victor Hugo’s epic 1862 novel “Les Misérables,” which has provided the subject matter for dozens of theater, television and film adaptations, most famously the blockbuster musical that zillions of fans affectionately call “Les Miz.”

But this six-part television adaptation, which first aired in Britain from December to February and arrives on Masterpiece on Sunday, might come as a surprise to those who only know the musical. This version hews much more closely to Hugo’s book, a five-volume, 365-chapter novel that over the course of its complex plot explores history, law, politics, religion and ideas about justice, guilt and redemption. Set in a grimly realist France, its abundant starving poor and oppressed are entirely disconnected from the wealthy classes. (The aptly dreary set here, in a dilapidated, gloomy former prison, might as well have sported a sign saying “Likely to Perish Within.”)

Unsurprisingly, the musical, which got a lavish Hollywood adaptation in 2012, focuses mainly on the central characters and plot lines. “I thought the musical a very feeble representation of the book,” said Andrew Davies (“Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “War and Peace”), who wrote the screenplay for the new series. “It very much reinforced my idea that we needed a proper, old-fashioned long-form television adaptation.”

The story (skip ahead if you are one of the millions who have seen a previous incarnation) begins with Jean Valjean (played here by Dominic West), a peasant who has almost finished his sentence of 19 years hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving relatives. Brutalized by his jail time, he is transformed through an act of kindness and becomes a wealthy and respected citizen, with a new identity. When he discovers that one of his former factory workers, Fantine, has become destitute after being fired, he adopts her daughter, Cosette, who is living with the evil Thenardiers (Olivia Colman and Adeel Akhtar in the series).

Pursued over the years by his former jailer Javert (David Oyelowo), a police officer obsessed with bringing the former criminal to justice, Valjean raises Cosette (Ellie Bamber) who eventually falls in love with Marius (Josh O’Connor), a student taking part in the revolution against the monarchy in the June Rebellion of 1832.

Let’s just say that very few characters get a happy ending.

“I think we managed to include everything that was really important,” Davies said, adding that he had streamlined some of the narrative’s twists and turns, notably Valjean’s repeated returns to and escapes from prison and Javert’s uncanny reappearances wherever Valjean is to be found. “I think this has made it feel less improbable and more believable in modern terms,” he said.

In a series of conversations, Davies, Shankland and a few of the principle actors talked about three important aspects of the miniseries that set it apart from the musical. Here are edited excerpts.

Valjean vs. Javert

Dominic West: The first question is obviously, what is Javert’s problem? Why is he so obsessed with Valjean? You do wonder what’s going on there, and we sort of hinted at it in one glance where I am naked in front of him when (Valjean) is released from the prison hulks. It always helps to bring things down to love and sex, and I think there is a homoerotic thing going on, perhaps the love of the jailer for his prisoner. It’s a modern, reductionist view to bring it down to that, and we didn’t emphasize it. But it’s there.

That they are alter egos, in a way, was the biggest clue to why Valjean felt so guilty, so unworthy. I realized that anyone who is brutalized and treated like an animal eventually becomes that. Valjean’s belief that he doesn’t deserve anyone’s love in the real world is central to his sense of self, and that is an important political point. Javert believes criminals are born that way, and Valjean is evidence that criminals are products of their environments.

David Oyelowo: My first interaction with “Les Mis” was with the musical, and when I read Andrew Davies’ script, it seemed very apparent that I could bring real layering and complexity to this character, who in the musical is a much more one-dimensional villain. I suddenly understood this man, born to criminal parents in a prison and filled with loathing for that world. It became apparent to me that he had transposed a side of himself onto Jean Valjean, and needed to destroy that part of himself he saw there. You need six hours of television to explore that complex idea!

Oppression and Politics

Tom Shankland: I am one of the few people in the universe who wasn’t really aware of the musical and the story, beyond the posters. When I read the script and novel, I really got a sense that this was a story of revolution, of social injustice, about people who felt disenfranchised. I wanted to find a way to interpret the story in a way that felt respectful to Hugo, but also politically relevant. It has wonderfully big moral questions: What does it mean to be good in a cruel world? What is meaningful action?

Drawings from the period — etchings of that revolution and others, images of urban warfare — were important in creating visual imagery, but I also drew from my memory of the 2011 London riots, and from the gilet jaunes in Paris. I didn’t want it to be just big images of the barricades, and I didn’t want it to be stiff and costume drama-y. There is nothing romantic or picturesque about those experiences; they are frightening and chaotic.

Oyelowo: Hugo shows the fragility of the class system so well. Fantine starts off just above the underclass and falls catastrophically. Javert is the reverse, rising to prison officer and policeman, forcing his way up through the social hierarchy, but always feeling precarious. This idea of the fragility of many people’s social and economic positions feels very relevant today. In our society, the gaps between the haves and the have-nots is widening and people’s lives can be stripped away, just as they are in this story.

The Dark Side

Lily Collins: There are parts of each character’s story line in “Les Misérables” that doesn’t get into film versions or the musical, because there just isn’t time. A song lyric can try to tell the story in one line, but here we show Fantine’s early life, how she falls in love, is deceived and has a baby. That makes her fate all the harder because we have discovered that side of her life, her trusting and joyous personality.

We shot my death scene first. I did a lot of research about what France would have been like for women at that time. What were the diseases, the symptoms of the disease she might have died from, what that would look like for filming. It was pretty grim, especially the scene when her teeth are pulled out because she is selling them for money for her child. It really made me push myself and find out what I could withstand physically and emotionally.

West: I hadn’t seen Valjean played as initially completely unredeemable in other versions of the novel. I wanted to really show that brutal, callous side that Hugo depicts, and we wanted to make his leap from that to romantic hero as big as possible. That really gets your pulse going as an actor. In a way, I went back to my childhood. I wasn’t a street urchin, but I was a fairly coarse Yorkshire kid, and I tapped into that. In the same way, the Thenardiers are usually treated in a more comic vein, but they are really evil. It’s interesting and remarkable that the novel hasn’t been treated in this kind of depth for a very long time.

Davies: The series ends with an image of two little boys, who we have seen begging earlier, and who Gavroche, a street urchin, takes under his wing. Gavroche is killed, and the little boys are still begging at the end, as a reminder to the audience that although the story ends happily for some, the suffering and brutality goes on.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/arts/television/les-miserables-collins-oyelowo.html" id="194ac4c5-c9f8-390b-a90b-0358778fc0e3">The New York Times</a>.

VILVOORDE, Belgium — Lily Collins, dressed in a mud-colored linen shift, tried to hide the small piece of jewelry she had crafted, as a hatchet-faced factory supervisor approached.

Less Singing, More Misery

John Kani, one of South Africa’s most celebrated actors, posed the questions rhetorically, with characteristic gravel-voiced resonance, while Antony Sher, another celebrated actor born in South Africa, looked on.

The subject: Kani’s new play, “Kunene and the King,” which opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, on April 3.

In “Kunene,” directed by Janice Honeyman, Kani, 76, and Sher, 69, reincarnate the black/white divide under apartheid that dominated their youth.

Kani, who grew up in a township outside the city of Port Elizabeth, began to act in 1965 with a group that included Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona. The three men began working on material together and wrote “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and “The Island,” a pair of one-act plays that helped bring the realities of apartheid to the world; it won Kani and Ntshona a joint best actor Tony Award in New York in 1975.

When they returned to South Africa, they were arrested and placed in solitary confinement for several weeks. Ten years later, Kani lost an eye (he wears a prosthetic one) after a beating by police. He continued to write, and played South Africa’s first black Othello in a contentious 1987 production.

In post-apartheid years, he became the director of Johannesburg’s Market Theater, and he has recently appeared in “Captain America” and “Black Panther,” among other movies.

Sher grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Cape Town, and left South Africa at 19 to train as an actor in England. By the early 1980s, he was performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company; his breakthrough came in the title role of “Richard III” in 1984. He was awarded a knighthood in 2000.

“Kunene and the King,” produced by the RSC and Fugard Theater in Cape Town, is set in the present, 25 years after the end of apartheid — which did not, Kani suggests, mean the end of racism or injustice.

It tells the story of the relationship between Lunga Kunene, a black nurse taking care of Jack Morris, a famous white actor, who is terminally ill, but nonetheless preparing to play King Lear.

It’s the second time Kani and Sher have performed together; in 2008 and 2009 they played Caliban and Prospero in “The Tempest,” also directed by Honeyman.

Following a preview performance of “Kunene,” Kani and Sher talked about their relationships to South Africa, and Shakespeare as a unifying force. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: How long have you known each other?

Antony Sher: In 1995, I was part of a workshop run by the National Theater studio at the Market Theater in Johannesburg, and I remember many conversations and meals. We had known one another a bit before, but that was the real meeting.

John Kani: Tony was well-known in South Africa because he was this famous English actor. We were proud of him! Then in 2008 and 2009, we had the chance to work on “The Tempest.” During that time, I had an idea about a two-hander for us, and we talked about it. Life went on, I didn’t think about it, and then last year, the idea suddenly came back to me. I felt: We need to look at South Africa’s democracy. We are littered with incidents, issues and geographical segregation that prevent us from becoming a united society. I wanted to write a story about two men who seem to be happy with what’s going on, but when you bring them together, the rifts quickly surface.

Sher: Sorry to embarrass John, but he is one of my heroes, both as an actor and an activist during the bad old days. When he called last year, and said, “We once talked about this, would you read it?,” I was very excited.

Q: Do the different experiences of the black and white characters in the play have parallels with your own lives?

Kani: A good friend of mine, Barney Simon, once said you can’t write a play “about.” You must tell a story from personal experience. When that’s in front of you, all these things come in. How many times do we pretend to one another with a Colgate smile? I decided to put Lunga in Jack’s house, and see what surfaces.

Sher: John and I went in completely different directions. I left South Africa and my South African identity behind. My family was typical of white families at the time, almost ignorant about apartheid, which sounds impossible, but it was true. When I became politicized in England, I couldn’t believe that a Jewish family had made no comparisons between what had happened to them, with pogroms in Eastern Europe, and what was happening to black South Africans.

Life is a dangerous business and if it works out well, you mustn’t regret. But I celebrate the way it has come full circle, that John and I can be in this play together, marking a moment in South African history.

Q: Mr. Kani, what did you want to convey in the play? Is there a specific idea about what is happening as South Africa celebrates 25 years of democracy?

Kani: I was 51 when I voted for the first time in 1994, and I look at South Africa through those spectacles. I see a lot of progress, a lot of good. When I talk to my son, who was born in 1994, he sees so many things that were not fulfilled in the promises that were made. There are still many South Africans who think they had nothing to do with apartheid. But I am trying to talk about collective responsibility here.

Sher: What is clever in John’s writing is that making my character an actor lets you assume he will be a liberal man. But he lets seep through a lot of old apartheid views, and he isn’t overjoyed at sharing his home with a black man. Yet he depends upon and needs him so completely.

Kani: Shakespeare is the link between them, what brings them together, even if South African history and politics divides them. The kingdoms that Shakespeare writes about have their parallels in the kingdoms of Africa.

Q: What role can political theater play in South Africa today?

Kani: I still remember the moment when my teacher, Mr. Budaza, walked into class and said, “Today we are going to study ‘Julius Caesar,’ one of Shakespeare’s most important plays.” That moment, and [hearing] Mark Antony’s speech in Xhosa, are in this play. Shakespeare examines how democracy is built. In South Africa, now is the time for protest theater once more!

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/theater/john-kani-antony-sher-kunene-and-the-king.html" id="168668a9-f03f-30ac-adcc-f1ad60f324b0">The New York Times</a>.

STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England — “What does a black man think has happened since South Africa had democratic elections in 1994? What does a white man think?”

Making Sense of South Africa's Journey

The cause was a heart attack she had while riding her bicycle, her daughter Carla Capalbo said.

Lousada danced under the name Pat McBride with Ballet Society, which was founded in 1946 by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, and with the company after it was renamed New York City Ballet in 1948. She performed in works by Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Merce Cunningham, Lew Christiansen and Jerome Robbins. (She is not to be confused with the principal dancer Patricia McBride, who joined City Ballet in 1959.)

Lousada was a cast member of many central works created by Balanchine, including “The Four Temperaments,” which had its premiere on City Ballet’s opening night, Nov. 20, 1946, at the Central High School of Needle Trades.

Along with dancing in the corps de ballet of Balanchine’s “L’Enfant et les sortilèges” (1946), “Symphony in C” (1947) and “Symphonie Concertante” (1947), she performed the solo role of the Young Girl in “The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne” (1947), to a commissioned score by Vittorio Rieti, and the role of Eurydice in “Orpheus” (1948).

“How lovely she was, such a perfect Balanchine body, and well into a great career,” eminent dance researcher Ann Hutchinson Guest wrote in a letter to Ballet Review in 2016.

Lousada also took part in City Ballet’s first professional production, in 1948, of Balanchine’s “Serenade” (1934), as the Dark Angel, and created the role of the Princess in his “Firebird” (1949).

“Her characterization grew in charm as the season progressed,” Lillian Moore wrote in Dancing Times in February 1950.

Lousada performed in two early Merce Cunningham works: “The Seasons” (1947), Ballet Society’s inaugural commission from an outside choreographer, and “Games” (1950), a trio in which she appeared alongside Tanaquil Le Clercq and Cunningham himself.

She remained friendly with Cunningham and his partner, composer John Cage, who were frequent visitors to her London home in later years.

Lousada was also immortalized in another art form. In 1950, photographer Paul Himmel photographed her emerging from the water on Fire Island; the portrait, called “Botticelli Girl,” was part of the 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Patricia Marie McBride was born April 4, 1929, in Manhattan to Charles McBride, a stockbroker from Ballybofey, Ireland, and Marie Minon Camera, an opera singer from Piedmont, Italy. After her father lost his money in the crash of 1929, the family moved to Bronxville, New York, where her father was a building manager and her mother a seamstress.

Patricia began dance classes at a young age with a local teacher in Bronxville. When she was 10, she began attending classes at the School of American Ballet, founded by Balanchine and Kirstein in 1934. She was given a scholarship when she told the school that her parents could not afford to send her more frequently.

Balanchine, one of her teachers, was “struck by Pat’s special beauty and glow,” said Nancy Lassalle, a director emeritus on City Ballet’s board, who met Lousada when they were both students at the school.

When Ballet Society was formed, Lousada was invited to join, along with several fellow students, including Le Clercq, a close friend who would become a major ballerina and Balanchine’s fourth wife.

In 1951, Lousada left City Ballet and married producer Carmen Capalbo. She expressed regret about her early retirement from ballet all her life, telling an interviewer in 2012 that she didn’t like to think back on the City Ballet years because “I ratted my chances.” Balanchine, she said, had believed in her and had been “totally disappointed” when she left.

Lousada had two children with Capalbo, but the marriage lasted just a few years. After they divorced, she danced in the original Broadway production of “Silk Stockings” and was given a small speaking role in the show because of her ability to imitate a Russian accent.

In 1957, she moved with her children to Paris; it was there that she met photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who became a close friend. After two years, Lousada moved back to New York, where she worked as a representative for photographer Gordon Parks while pursuing her own interest in photography.

During that time she met Anthony Lousada, a British lawyer with many artist clients, including Henry Moore, Ben Nicolson and Barbara Hepworth. Anthony Lousada was chairman of the Tate Gallery from 1967 to 1969 and introduced Patricia Lousada to a wide artistic circle. She moved with her children to London, and they married in 1961.

For a while she ran a small dressmaking business from the basement of their house in the Chiswick neighborhood. She later took cooking courses at the Cordon Bleu Institute and La Varenne. A chance remark to her friends Anya Sainsbury, former Royal Ballet ballerina Anya Linden, and John Sainsbury, head of the British grocery chain Sainsbury’s, led to her first cookbook.

It was about pasta. “I think it’s going to be a big thing,” Lousada told them.

“Pasta Italian Style,” published by Sainsbury’s in 1981, was a success, and Lousada went on to write a dozen more recipe books, introducing British cooks to such exotica as burgers and tapenade.

She served as a board member of the Royal Ballet and maintained a lively social life, meeting and making new friends who were often generations younger.

In addition to her daughter Carla, Lousada is survived by three other children, Marco Capalbo, Sebastian Lousada and Isabella Lousada; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

After Anthony Lousada’s death in 1994, Patricia Lousada reconnected with an old friend, lawyer and law professor John Lowenthal, with whom she lived until his death in 2003. Lowenthal’s passion for music brought her more closely into that world, and at 80 she began to learn the piano, practicing three or four hours a day.

LONDON — Patricia McBride Lousada, who was a founding member of New York City Ballet and interpreter of some of George Balanchine’s seminal early works and who later became a noted cookbook author, died Jan. 8 in London. She was 89.

Roslyn Sulcas

Articles written by the author

With 'The Crown,' a 'Secret Weapon' Could Become Not So Secret

Reviving a Homegrown Modernist Out West

When the Choreographer Won't Fly, the Dancers Rehearse by Skype

After a Renovation, a Storied Theater Hopes to Entice Paris

In Taiwan, a Contemporary Dance Troupe Brings in the Crowds

Less Singing, More Misery

Making Sense of South Africa's Journey

Patricia McBride Lousada, Early Balanchine Muse, Dies at 89

Decoding Robert Rauschenberg

Decoding Robert Rauschenberg

A playful American choreographer tackles Beckett

Joyce Theater Ballet Festival has a starry lineup

Surrender to a boundary-blurring tour of Europe, war and peace

Nothing is random in a meditation on Shakespearean themes

Beyoncé, Ballet and points between: A choreographer calmly covers the waterfront

The moment when Nureyev became Nureyev

Review: Queen Victoria in toe shoes?

Ivo van Hove unlocks a rarely staged 'Diary'

William Forsythe: 'Isn't ballet delightful?'

Two choreographers at work in a Pina Bausch-haunted land