Andrew Boynton attends Ultima Vez’s “What the Body Does Not Remember”: http://nyr.kr/10nisRB

Photograph by Danny Willems.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Opera at the Met combines musical brilliance, emotional potency, and social pyrotechnics, creating a cultural crescendo that’s hard to match. I was curious to see the opera in High Definition, the Saturday matinee video broadcast beamed live from the Met to small-town theatres across the country. It seemed like a contradiction in terms: isn’t the opera, by nature, an imperial experience? Doesn’t it require a sophisticated metropolitan context? Can it survive translation into the provinces? 

Roxana Robinson watches Opera in HD at the movies: http://nyr.kr/Z6zqTB

Andrew Boynton on “VEAL,” the latest project from multidisciplinary design collective Harrison Atelier, that addresses the ecology of the industrial animal by incorporating “dance in a luminous way that was unexpected in a work of such dark and disturbing content”: http://nyr.kr/XSOmEs

Photograph by Ben Nicholas.

Evan Osnos talks to Li Liao, a young performance artist, who

got an assembly-line job making iPads, and forty-five days later he used his wages to buy one. As an exhibit, he put the iPad on a pedestal, tacked up his uniform and badges, and framed his contract. The effect, on a white gallery wall, is a strangely addictive ready-made tableau about the intersection of money, aspiration, and technology.

Click-through to read the interview: http://nyr.kr/SetOqT 

“Dance comes from the body, but it starts in the brain…”

Andrew Boynton on Jeanine Durning’s solo performance “inging”: http://nyr.kr/W3apJL

Photograph by Ian Douglas

Andrew Boynton on Jodi Melnick’s reworked version of her 2012 piece “Solo, Deluxe Version,” retitled, “Solo, (Re)Deluxe Version”: “Melnick is an intelligent choreographer, with an admirably pared-down aesthetic and a keen sense of how to compose stage pictures.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/RSPZmd

Photograph by Ian Douglas/New York Live Arts.

This year’s Ten Best List might be called “Lahr’s Last Huzzah.” When I began as Senior Critic, in 1992, the second show I reviewed was Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing,” in Chicago. Odets seemed to me a woefully overlooked major writer. Over the decades, I’ve also reviewed Odets’s “Flowering Peach,” “The Country Girl,” and written a Critic at Large about him. The last show of my twenty-year New Yorker joyride was Odets’s “Golden Boy”—Lincoln Center’s masterly production which indisputably puts Odets in the pantheon of great twentieth-century playwrights. In a good theatregoing year, you’re lucky to get one production of such exhilarating high quality; this year, I got two—the second being Mike Nichols’s inspired revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” They share first place…

Click-through for John Lahr on the top 10 plays of 2012: http://nyr.kr/SiLv9F

Marina Harss on the Martha Graham Dance Company, and their loss after Hurricane Sandy: http://nyr.kr/ZKscpA

Most important, puppets hover in a space between realism and abstraction. Because they are not human, they don’t come at us with a lot of confusing detail. What detail they do have is economical, artistic—chosen—and therefore they can represent ideas easily.

Joan Acocella on Chinese puppeteer, Yeung Fai’s show at Lincoln Center, “Hand Stories,” which tells of his family’s history in puppetry: http://nyr.kr/OzMTOG

(Photograph by Stephanie Berger.)