New TV shows, museum openings, film releases and concerts — it’s a lot to keep track of. Let us help you. For the week of Jan. 7, seven events in New York and elsewhere not to be missed:
Dance: Kosoko’s ‘Séancers’; Moriah Evans’s ‘Figuring’
Jan. 9-16; americanrealness.com.
American Realness, a forward-thinking festival of dance and genre-bending performance, returns to New York for a ninth year. What began as a scrappy response to the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters has grown into a January tradition, considerable in scope, influence and ambition.
This year’s edition includes 17 works at locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, including the festival’s Lower East Side headquarters and original home, Abrons Arts Center. Highlights include three world premieres — Moriah Evans’s “Figuring”; Marissa Perel’s “(Do Not) Despair Solo”; and Keyon Gaskin’s “[A Swatch of Lavender]: a Self Portrait.”
And if you missed them the first time, catch Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s stirring “Séancers”; Mariana Valencia’s wittily introspective “Album”; and Nora Chipaumire’s Patti Smith-inspired “#Punk.” SIOBHAN BURKE
Pop: The Killers on Tour
Jan. 7; tdgarden.com. Jan. 9; barclayscenter.com. Jan. 10; theanthemdc.com. Jan. 12; thegarden.com.
“Who’s the man? I’m the man,” The Killers’ Brandon Flowers sings on “The Man,” one of last year’s finest pop tautologies. (“I got news for you, baby: You’re looking at the man,” he adds for maximum clarity.) The sparkle of self-parody only makes it more fun to sing along with — as is true for all great Killers songs, including the 2004 single “Mr. Brightside,” which has enjoyed a long afterlife as a meme.
Continue reading the main storyThe Killers catalog makes for endlessly enjoyable karaoke material, and it’s also pretty great in concert. The group’s latest arena tour hits the U.S. this Sunday, with a headlining show at Boston’s TD Garden, followed by two performances in New York — Tuesday, Jan. 9, at Barclays Center and Friday, Jan. 12, at Madison Square Garden — with a Washington, D.C., show in between on Wednesday, Jan. 10. Those last three dates are sold out, but the resale market is plentiful. SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON
Classical: A McCarthy-Era Opera and Other New Works
Jan. 12-14; prototypefestival.org.
This week marks the launch of a recent but essential addition to January’s classical calendar: the upstart Prototype Festival, a celebration of contemporary opera and music theater in all its forms. This year’s lineup includes audacious new works by a wide variety of composers, including Michael Gordon‘s deconstruction of 1940s horror movies and Alicia Hall Moran’s vocal work featuring ice skaters, at several New York venues.
One highlight is “Fellow Travelers” by Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce. Based on the eponymous novel by Thomas Mallon, the opera tells the story of an affair between two men during the McCarthy-era “lavender scare,” when the federal government purged gay employees from its ranks. Spears’s intimately lyrical score serves as the persuasive foundation for a wrenching, interiorized drama. WILLIAM ROBIN
Film: Andrey Zvyagintsev, Midcareer
Jan. 12-24; moma.org.
Vanished fathers. Mothers with secrets. And the children trapped in the barren gulf between. “Loveless: The World of Andrey Zvyagintsev,” a retrospective opening on Friday, Jan. 12, at the Museum of Modern Art, explores the 53-year-old director’s fascination with the bleak despair of the Russian everyman and woman.
The survey of five features opens with “Loveless,” Mr. Zvyagintsev’s devastating 2017 drama about a divorcing couple eager to move on without their 12-year-old son — who then goes missing. The film is Russia’s entry for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards in March. The lineup continues with Mr. Zvyagintsev’s “The Return” (2003), in which a father suddenly reappears after a 12-year absence; “Elena” (2011), which plumbs the divide between a nurse and the wealthy patient she marries; and “Leviathan” (2014), in which an auto mechanic wages war against post-Soviet bureaucracy. It also includes the United States theatrical premiere of “The Banishment” (2007), in which a father hastily moves his family to the countryside, where the mother makes an unexpected announcement.
Mr. Zvyagintsev will discuss his work following screenings of “Loveless” on Jan. 12 and “Leviathan” on Jan. 14. KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Theater: Women’s Voices Theater Festival in D.C.
Jan. 15 to Feb. 15; womensvoicestheaterfestival.org.
Of the many cities where women marched in protests last January, Washington, D.C., had the biggest crowd, with hundreds of thousands flooding the streets. The capital’s Women’s Voices Theater Festival won’t make that kind of noise, but it, too, is a collective display of female force, aimed at righting inequity. As 25 plays by women take over local theaters, they will upend (if only temporarily) a stubborn status quo that favors male playwrights.
Refocused since the first festival, in 2015, this second edition is smaller in size but broader in scope, embracing not only world-premiere productions (like Mary Kathryn Nagle’s “Sovereignty” at Arena Stage) but also American premieres (including Timberlake Wertenbaker’s “Jefferson’s Garden” at Ford’s Theater) and plays that have already been tested Off Broadway (such as Danai Gurira’s “Familiar” at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company).
Officially, the festival runs from Jan. 15 to Feb. 15, but some shows begin sooner (like Theresa Rebeck’s “The Way of the World,” starting Jan. 9 at the Folger Theater), and more than a handful (such as Heather Raffo’s “Noura” at Shakespeare Theater Company) won’t close until March. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
TV: A Gallic Procedural
Jan. 11; walterpresents.com.
The Frenchman Thomas Adam (Thomas Jouannet) has what in TV land is called a gift. Whenever he touches an object, the memories of those who used it flood his brain, along with their secrets. He also has a past. Fifteen years ago, he committed a crime in New York for which he was sentenced to life. Then the F.B.I. cut him a deal: Help them find the people with the most to hide in exchange for a pardon.
The catch? He can’t leave the United States. But then Thomas receives a small statue from which he intuits that his brother (Alexis Loret), a cop, is about to be murdered, prompting him to make a run for his hometown, Aix-en-Provence, and confront a long-buried family tragedy.
“Contact,” a 2015 series debuting Thursday, Jan. 11, on the streaming site Walter Presents, is the Gallic answer to the big American network procedural — if its protagonist were, say, vacationing in the South of France. KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Art: Arthur Mitchell, Looking Back
Through March 11; wallach.columbia.edu.
A 1962 promotional photograph of Arthur Mitchell as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows him crouched in dense foliage with a crown of leaves in his hair, a choker around his throat and his taut naked arms extended to touch a nearby tree trunk. His expression as precise as it is charming — he knew exactly what he was doing.
Mr. Mitchell was the first African-American principal dancer for the New York City Ballet. But in 1969, he left to found the Dance Theatre of Harlem, where he leapt, almost instantly, from teaching local children in a 152nd Street garage to international acclaim. This show, drawn from the archive he donated to Columbia in 2014, will feature costumes and memorabilia as well as photography. WILL HEINRICH
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