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They saw Dallas as a literary hub, then got to work making it one
DALLAS, TX.- When Will Evans arrived in Dallas just more than a decade ago, he had a degree in Russian literature, a passion for “reading the world,” and a bold vision: to create a publishing house dedicated to translating the best books in any language into English and bringing their authors into conversation with American — and especially Texan — writers and readers. He started going to the readings and other literary events around town and posted about them under the hashtag #literarydallas. “I was made fun of relentlessly,” he said. But in 2013, around the same time he started his publishing house, Deep Vellum, two other people — Javier García del Moral and Paco Vique, civil engineers from Spain — were hatching their own literary plans. They wanted to start a bookstore that would be something more: a community hangout ... More

Homelessness is especially hard on children. Making music helps.
NEW YORK, NY.- “We’re going to be making a beat,” Dannyele Crawford said as the kids settled noisily into their seats at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. “I want you to imagine that you live on another planet. The beat is going to be based off that.” Six-year-old Bella Diaz and the other five children in a room lined with computers donned headphones and began choosing from hundreds of audio loops in the music software program GarageBand. The room filled with clashing, tinny riffs leaking from headsets as the pint-size producers danced and bobbed in their seats. What the children did not know this recent Monday afternoon was that Crawford, 27, is not just a teacher. She is a music therapist, there to help children deal with the stress of not having a permanent place to call home. Since 2015, therapists who work for the Brooklyn ... More

The Tony nominations are tomorrow. Here's what to expect.
NEW YORK, NY.- At a time when Broadway is overflowing with plays and musicals but could use more ticket buyers, this season’s Tony Award nominations will be announced Tuesday, offering a boost to some shows and dashing the hopes of others. Here’s what you might want to know about the Tony nominations, which this year will recognize plays and musicals that opened on Broadway between April 28, 2023, and April 25, 2024: A few categories are to be made public shortly after 8:30 a.m. Eastern on the Tuesday broadcast of “CBS Mornings.” (CBS airs the Tonys, so it has first dibs on the news.) The full list of nominees will be announced on the Tony Awards YouTube channel starting at 9 a.m. Two previous Tony winners, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Renée Elise Goldsberry, will read the list of nominees. The New York ... More

Love, war and the refugee crisis, set to the music of Sting
NEW YORK, NY.- When choreographer Kate Prince set out several years ago to create a dance show based on the music of Sting, she was unsure what story she might be able to tell using his varied songbook. Then she saw photos of young Syrian refugees taking desperate risks to reach safety in Europe, and she had an idea. She would use some of Sting’s and the Police’s most affecting music, songs such as “Desert Rose” and “Every Breath You Take,” to tell the story of a family displaced by war. The result is “Message in a Bottle,” which premiered in London in 2020 and comes to New York City Center, in Manhattan, for a two-week run beginning Tuesday. In the nearly two-hour show, featuring Prince’s dance company, ZooNation, she draws on freestyle dance, salsa, Lindy Hop, street dance and other styles to bring ... More

Jazz saved the bassist Luke Stewart. Now he's working to rescue others.
NEW YORK, NY.- On a Sunday afternoon in March, Luke Stewart — a bassist and composer who has gradually emerged as a galvanic force in the contemporary jazz vanguard — stood at the corner of Pine and Broadway, in Manhattan’s Financial District, running down some local history. He pointed across the street, where the American Stock Exchange sat next to Trinity Church, and noted our proximity to the former site of New York’s municipal slave market. “You see this pattern really all over the world,” Stewart said, “where literally people are taken from the auction block, where we started, right down here to be saved in the church and sold, and then sent off to wherever they’re going.” Stewart is wont to drop deep knowledge, whether he’s pointing out the sites of bygone jazz lofts in NoHo or spontaneously unpacking a Ravel score at ... More

A student orchestra shouts 'Mambo!' and meets its idol
NEW YORK, NY.- The student musicians, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, were rehearsing an excerpt from “West Side Story” in a high school auditorium one recent afternoon. Then, as the trumpets blared and the timpani went wild, a voice broke out from the conductor’s podium. “Oy yo yo yo yo yo yo,” said superstar maestro Gustavo Dudamel, who was leading the rehearsal. “You are not dancing together.” Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, paused for a moment, telling the students they needed a more precise rhythm and sound. Then he put his hands in his pockets and swaggered around the stage. “This is cool, really cool music,” he said, eliciting laughter from the students. “We need something that goes with the nature of the body.” The students, part of a 95-member youth ensemble ... More

Open now: 'Margaret Lee: Life Lines' at Jack Hanley Gallery
NEW YORK, NY.- Sometimes lines are drawn that mark us off distinctly from everything else. This delimitation is deceptive. What once appeared solid and impenetrable reveals a shakiness, bringing to light that which was once believed to be forgotten. Impressions emerge and point to the indissoluble bonds that keep us from falling out of the world, away from untenable illusions and closer toward that which can be grasped. - M.L., NYC 2024. Paintings have held prominent positions within Margaret Lee’s artistic practice, often incorporated within larger sculptural installations, playfully manipulating the object and image relationship. For her 5th solo exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery, the paintings on view need no sculptural substantiation. A persistent yellow radiates across the canvases, marking a distinct palette shift away from ... More

How trumpeter Jeremy Pelt became a chronicler of Black jazz history
NEW YORK, NY.- Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt was sitting on his couch, browsing YouTube, when he decided to become an author. It was 2018, and Pelt, by then a fixture on the New York jazz scene for two decades, came across a 1994 interview with jazz drumming great Arthur Taylor, conducted by a fellow percussionist, Warren Smith. “It could have been ‘Batman,’ or something,” Pelt recalled during a recent conversation in his Harlem apartment. “It was like an hour and 45 minutes, I remember, and I just was transfixed the whole time.” Pelt was especially taken with a section where Taylor discussed “Notes and Tones,” his landmark book of musician-to-musician interviews, first self-published in 1977 and later reissued more widely. In it, giants such as Miles Davis, Nina Simone and Max Roach spoke with often bracing candor about race, the music ... More

Turning a dance spotlight on painter Juan de Pareja
NEW YORK, NY.- Eduardo Vilaro’s latest dance for Ballet Hispánico is about a 17th-century artist who, in recent years, has come into his own. Juan de Pareja was enslaved by Spanish painter Diego Velázquez for more than two decades. During a trip to Italy, Velázquez painted a portrait of Pareja, who was also his studio assistant, showing an Afro-Hispanic man shrouded by darkness, but with an open, unwavering gaze. Those eyes, looking out to an unjust world, are sharp and alive. The portrait was a sensation; it now hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Months after it was completed, Velázquez signed a document granting Pareja his freedom.) Last year, Pareja was the subject of an exhibition at the Met; this year, Vilaro, the artistic director of Ballet Hispánico, honors him with a somber work of dance theater, “Buscando a Juan ... More

Office politics gone awry in 'Jordans'
NEW YORK, NY.- The workplace in “Jordans,” an ambitious but unwieldy new play at the Public Theater, is so white that it’s a bit alarming. I don’t mean to say it’s full of white people (though it certainly is that, too), but rather that the aesthetic of the space itself catches your attention: minimalist, modern, white screens and walls. By the end of the play, however, those bright white spaces will be covered with blood. Jordan (Naomi Lorrain) is the only Black employee at Atlas Studios, a “full-service rental studio and production facility,” as she says to a potential client. She’s the one who answers the phones; she also gets the lunches, collects receipts and calls maintenance. When her boss, Hailey (Kate Walsh), decides the company’s new path to revenue involves appealing to a more “diverse” demographic, she hires a director ... More

Pope's visit to art exhibition in prison is a first for Venice Biennale
NEW YORK, NY.- Landing by helicopter at a women’s prison where the Vatican has mounted its pavilion for the Venice Biennale international art exhibition, Pope Francis on Sunday told the women incarcerated there that they had a “special place in my heart.” “Grazie,” one woman called out. Others applauded. Many of the women had participated with artists in creating works that hang throughout the prison for the exhibition, titled “With My Eyes.” Francis, the first pope ever to visit — if briefly — a Venice Biennale, said that it was “fundamental” for the prison system “to offer detainees the tools and room for human, spiritual, cultural and professional growth, creating the conditions for their healthy reintegration.” “Not to isolate dignity, but to give new possibilities,” Francis said to applause. Over the decades, countries ... More