At a time of high anxiety around technology’s impact on arts and culture, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Collider Fellowship is focused on new opportunities, welcoming multi-disciplinary artists to explore how emerging tech can transform live performance and the performing arts.
Today, the famed New York performing arts center is announcing its second class of Collider Fellows — a group of six artists working in areas from virtual reality to artificial intelligence to the immersive 4DSound System.
“I love that they’re all really thoughtful people who are not just thinking about [the work] itself, but how it fits into a larger conversation in arts and technology,” said Lincoln Center’s vice president of programming Jordana Leigh.
Leigh added that she’s an “eternal optimist” about how tech can benefit the arts. When asked about broader worries around AI, she countered that she’s excited about artists who can use AI as “another tool in their toolkit, like a mixer for sound or a paintbrush for paint.” She also suggested that for some artists, “technology is catching up to their vision, versus their vision catching up to this technology.”
To illustrate some of this potential, Leigh pointed to a recent Lincoln Center arts and tech commission, Dream Machine by Nona Hendryx. By using a combination of AI, VR, and augmented reality to immerse visitors, especially BIPOC visitors, in Afrofuturist environments, Leigh said Dream Machine shows how art can help “people who do not see themselves in technology to start seeing themselves in it — particularly Black and Brown people, especially Black and Brown women.”
“I think the more people who are part of the conversation, the more chance we have for it to be a good conversation,” she added.
Image Credits:Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
The new Collider Fellows, selected through a nomination-based process, will continue exploring that potential. For the next nine months, they’ll be provided with studio space at Lincoln Center and Onassis ONX, along with a financial stipend and support from Lincoln Center staff.
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The Collider Fellowship, Leigh added, is part of a broader umbrella of programs through which the performing arts center seeks to support artists in “non-transactional” ways.
Notably, the fellowship does not require participating artists to complete a final project or commission. Leigh said that the first class of Collider Fellows included one artist who completed “five or six prototypes” during the program, while another wanted to “take this time to rejuvenate, read tons of books, do tons of research, slow down” — she said both approaches are “completely acceptable ways to use this fellowship.”
According to Leigh, many of the projects that emerged from that first class are “still germinating,” and some could potentially be shown at Lincoln Center itself. And while Leigh described herself as “doubling down on location-based experiences,” particularly those that involve VR, AR, and extended reality, she also suggested that the Collider Fellows could help Lincoln Center rethink the ways it can reach audiences globally.
“I don’t think we’re closing the door to anything right now,” she said.
Here are the six new Collider Fellows, with brief descriptions of their work:
Cinthia Chen, a multidisciplinary artist and technologist whose work (pictured above) combines performance, installation, and projection design to explore memory, hybrid identities, and spiritual futurism
Sam Rolfes, a virtual performer, artist, and co-director of virtual performance studio Team Rolfes, whose work includes motion-capture performances, fashion and print design, and music visuals for Lady Gaga, Arca, Metallica, and Netflix
James Allister Sprang, the first U.S.-based artist to work with 4D Sound System, creating immersive, sensory-based experiences that explore diasporic timelines and the Black interior
Stephanie Dinkins, a transdisciplinary artist and educator focused on emerging technologies, race, and future histories, who was recently named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential people in AI
Kevin Peter He, who draws on his background in cinema, dance, and urban transformation to work across film, performance, and game engines, exploring how structures and technologies shape narrative and embodiment
Dr. Rashaad Newsome, a Whitney Biennial alum whose work combines collage, performance, AI, and robotics to explore Black and Queer cultural expression
Chelsea Lehnea and Ricardo José Rivera in Anna di Resburgo. Steven Pisano
After the Metropolitan Opera’s season ends in early June, local opera lovers patiently bide their time until late July when Teatro Nuovo again offers a pair of Italian bel canto operas at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. Following last year’s semi-staged productions of Donizetti’s Poliuto and Ricci’s Crispino e la Comare, Teatro Nuovo this summer offered New Yorkers the modern premiere of Anna di Resburgo by Carolina Uccelli and the first local outing in several decades of I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Vincenzo Bellini’s take on Romeo and Juliet.
If the revival of a rare full-length opera from the mid-19th Century by a woman composer didn’t reveal a hidden masterpiece, Anna did provide a fascinating glimpse into what might have been had Uccelli continued her opera career. And Capuleti provided clues as to why this work by one of Italy’s greatest composers has never been taken up by the Met.
Several days before its Rose Theater date, Anna received its first performance since 1835 at Teatro Nuovo’s other home, New Jersey’s Montclair State University. Will Crutchfield, the group’s founder who for two decades led Opera at Caramoor where he began his exploration of neglected works of the first half of the nineteenth century, had carefully prepared a new performing edition of the second opera composed by the prodigious Uccelli. Following the publication of a group of songs when she was still a teenager, Saul, Uccelli’s first opera, premiered in Florence when she was just twenty years old. It attracted the notice of Gioachino Rossini whose support helped smooth the way for Anna’s only production in Naples five years later.
Uccelli, then a widow with a young daughter, had the bad luck to produce her opera just a month after the hugely successful first performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor which, like Anna, takes place amid warring clans in Scotland and ends with a tomb scene. After its second show, Anna, like similarly named Donizetti operas like Emilia di Liverpool, Maria di Rohan, Gianni di Parigi and Gemma di Vergy, disappeared until Crutchfield unearthed it. Uccelli wrote no more operas but enjoyed a modest career giving concerts throughout Europe with her accomplished pianist-daughter until her death in 1858 at age 48.
Gaetano Rossi’s tangled Anna libretto revolves around sons in conflict over the sins of their fathers. Anna’s husband Edemondo has been in hiding accused of the murder of his father Roggero by the late Duncalmo. Meanwhile, Duncalmo’s son Norcesto remains consumed with bringing Edemondo to justice. Anna and her son have been disguised as peasants at Olfredo’s farm until Norcesto notices Anna’s son’s resemblance to his father and reveals the pair’s true identities.
Their exposure draws Edemondo out of hiding, and he is swiftly condemned to be executed for patricide until a conscience-stricken Norcesto reveals that it was actually his own father who murdered Roggero. Thus, Anna, which appeared headed for disaster, gets an unexpected happy ending.
The opera’s first act demonstrated that Uccelli was a competent composer of no great individuality. But its second and final act reveals a much more compelling creator who seized on the story’s impending disaster and provided music of startling immediacy. After an arresting opening chorus, Uccellini gives Anna a striking, soaring solo describing her grief as she contemplates her son’s perilous future. After a vivid double-aria for Edemondo, Anna and Norcesto confront one another in a magnificent, lengthy duet of accusation and recrimination that is the score’s remarkable high point. If the opera ends with a predictably bland chorus of rejoicing, Uccelli has indelibly shown us the great potential she had.
Teatro Nuovo brought back for Anna the three singers who had formed the central triangle of last summer’s Poliuto. Once again, striking soprano Chelsea Lehnea embraced her character’s crises with a forceful flamboyance. She boldly added many searing high notes that communicated Anna’s increasing desperation. While her big top register easily filled the theater, the middle of her cool voice wasn’t forceful enough, and she was very reluctant to dig into her chest voice until that riveting duet with Ricardo José Rivera’s Norcesto.
The Puerto Rican baritone who had stood out as Severo in Poliuto once again brought a richly stirring voice and commanding presence to the brutal, then remorseful Norcesto. He chose, though too often, to sing above forte, but he enlivened the performance whenever he was present. As Edemondo, tenor Santiago Ballerini also loved to aim his resonant high notes to the back balcony, but he showed more care than Rivera for softer dynamics in Uccelini’s grateful music.
Another tenor, Lucas Levy excelled as the benevolent Olfredo and got the work’s most unique number: his aria describing Edemondo’s trial for murder is written in a fast-moving patter style usually reserved for comic moments. Elisse Albian’s glittering soprano briefly pleased as his daughter Etelia, who joined her father in relating much of the opera’s complicated exposition.
Teatro Nuovo eschews having a conventional conductor, so its splendid period-instrument orchestra is led by a pair of performing musicians. In Anna’s case, Lucy Tucker Yates played the fortepiano as Maestro al Cembalo while primo violino Elisa Citterio led the band as Capo d’Orchestra. They paced the music with crispness and verve making a strong case for Uccellini’s often richly imagined orchestral writing.
For Capuleti, Crutchfield took over at the cembalo, while Jacob Lehmann, who last year had skillfully guided Poliuto, returned to his violin as Bellini’s Capo.Many in the audience have missed Capuleti: though Crutchfield conducted it at Caramoor in 2012, its most recent local outing was in 2001 when the much-missed New York City Opera staged it with Mary Dunleavy and Sarah Connolly as the star-crossed lovers.
Bellini’s 1830 opera had to wait until the postwar bel canto revival was in full swing before it had its 20th-century revival. In 1957, Italian Radio presented it with Fiorenza Cossotto as Romeo, and the next year, the American Opera Society brought it to New York for the first time in more than a century with Giulietta Simionato, who would perform it again with AOS six years later opposite Mary Costa as Giulietta. AOS’s successor in presenting rare bel canto works, Eve Queler’s Opera Orchestra of New York, brought together three starry diva-pairings: Ashley Putnam and Tatiana Troyanos; Mariella Devia and Jennifer Larmore; then finally, Annick Massis and Vesselina Kasarova.
Alina Tamborini and Stephanie Doche in I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Steven Pisano
In the past several decades Elina Garanca and Joyce Didonato have donned Romeo’s tights around the world, and the former recorded the opera with Anna Netrebko. But the Met has resisted mounting the opera though the company has recently embraced bel canto operas with more urgency than it had while James Levine (who reportedly had little patience for that repertoire) held sway.
Though Capuleti premiered just a year before Bellini’s masterpiece Norma, it feels like an early work, less complex and less potent. While the music for Romeo and Giulietta shows the composer at his most inspired, the remainder of the work comes across as perfunctory. The libretto by Felice Romani draws not from Romeo and Juliet but from Shakespeare’s source, so Bellini’s opera lacks expected, iconic moments such as the lovers’s first meeting, their balcony encounter and secret marriage, all of which Charles Gounod in his Roméo et Juliette, for example, captured so beautifully.
Even the opera’s title seems miscalculated as the contentious Capulets and Montagues are scarcely featured. Paris has already been killed before the action begins, and Capulet and Friar Laurence are cardboard characters, while no Montagues beyond Romeo appear at all. Tebaldo, the tenor role, gets an ordinary cavatina-cabaletta that fails to make much of an impression. Despite Robert Kleinertz’s earnest, sometimes strenuous efforts for Teatro Nuovo, his Tebaldo remained a cipher.
Bellini’s Romeo is written for a mezzo-soprano, a trouser role that permitted the composer to conjure elaborate female duets that rival those prominently featured in Norma. The challenging roles of the lovers demand a charismatic pair at the top of their game. The opera has most often been revived as a vehicle for superstar soprano-mezzo pairings. Lacking singers of that caliber Teatro Nuovo offered instead promising young artists who tackled Bellini’s writing with care and devotion but lacked the outsized panache that can really bring Capuleti to life.
Alina Tamborini as Giulietta brought a large penetrating soprano with a quick vibrato that, like Lehnea’s, opened up brilliantly on top. However, she lacked warmth in the middle which made her haunting “Oh! quante volte,” the opera’s most famous aria, less moving. Her daring ornaments sometimes went overboard but still brought excitement to an occasionally bland evening. She did partner beautifully with her ardent Romeo, Stephanie Doche, in their all-important duets.
A restrained Doche began uneasily but gained confidence in her interactions with Tamborini. In the second act, she firmly negotiated Romeo’s wide-ranging music from arresting chest tones to brightly ringing high notes. Her quietly devastating rendition of Romeo’s grief-stricken aria over the “dead” Giulietta demonstrated the rightness of Bellini’s music which in the past was often omitted by star mezzos who preferred an older variant from an opera by Nicola Vaccai.
Both operas this summer were directed with apt economy by Marco Nisticò in front of effective projections by Adam Thompson that evoked productions of the time of the work’s composition. Nisticò, who as a bass-baritone frequently performed with Crutchfield at Caramoor, might have done more with his eager chorus, but his solo singers performed with intensity and focus.
The novelty of Uccelli’s Anna attracted a bigger, more enthusiastic audience than the better-known Bellini work, but both were greeted gratefully by an audience lately starved for bel canto by the Met, a company now more dedicated to presenting contemporary works—a repertoire shift that’s proven only partially successful.
Steve Carell and Alison Pill in Uncle Vanya.Marc J. Franklin
It’s Chekhov 101 to say his characters inhabit separate worlds that rarely converge. All those rueful doctors, vain landowners, stoic laborers, and pretentious artists jabber across the samovar without really connecting or changing. Sure, they level pistols at each other (and themselves) or profess undying love, but such flashes of passion smack of solipsistic play-acting. Therein lies the comedy dusted with melancholy. Still, if Chekhov’s people are not in the same play, you hope the actors inhabiting them will be. Such is not really the case in Lincoln Center Theater’s starry but arid Uncle Vanya, staged with noncommittal chill by Lila Neugebauer.
Mimi Lien’s scenic design bluntly underscores the sense that these “Russians” (scare quotes because they’re vaguely Americanized) are planets whose orbital paths do not intersect. Her set pieces crouch at the edges of the Vivian Beaumont’s broad stage, emphasizing psychic distance by maximizing negative space. The first two acts have a backyard, cottagecore vibe—picnic table, folding chairs, bench, and a huge black-and-white photograph of birch trees covering the back wall. (All very wood-ish.) The second act brings us inside the home of agricultural manager Vanya (Steve Carell) and his niece Sonya (Alison Pill), but the tasteful, midcentury decor seems equally repelled to the periphery.
The cast of Lincoln Center Theater’s Uncle Vanya. Marc J. Franklin
If the furniture is having an existential crisis, so are the depressed folks perched on it. Vanya is a middle-aged crank who sacrificed love and happiness for duty, drudging for decades on a farm and funneling money to Alexander (Alfred Molina), a pompous fraud of an art professor. Alexander was married to Vanya’s deceased sister, and the homely, naïve Sonya is the product of that union. Elena (Anika Noni Rose), Alexander’s much younger second wife, is an exquisitely bored nymph after whom Vanya lusts—as does family friend Astrov (William Jackson Harper), a local doctor who moonlights in environmentalism and binge drinking. Oh, almost forgot: Sonya loves Astrov, Vanya hates Alexander, and there’s a non-speaking local youth (Spencer Donovan Jones) who casts sad, smoldering looks at Sonya. The last element is an invention by Neugebauer, yet another iteration of unrequited love in this matryoshka of misery.
Uncle Vanya (a new take comes along every few years) is not exactly breakfast—as in, you have to work hard to screw it up—but its performers usually have solid support. Once they’ve polished their patronymics, they can settle into pathos-rich comedy tinged with Chekhov’s prophetic sense that pre-revolutionary Russia was about to crater under the idle protagonists’ feet. One of his signature tricks is musing about the generations to come. “People who are alive a hundred—two hundred years from now,” cynic-idealist Astrov wonders, “what will they think of us? Will they remember us with kindness?” Similar to the way that Shakespeare articulated unseen and unseeable inner life (Hamlet’s inky cloak), Chekhov cultivated anxious futurity in his restless people. Perhaps he was asking himself: Will my extremely specific Slavic material be relevant a century down the road?
William Jackson Harper in Uncle Vanya. Marc J. Franklin
The answer is yes, of course. Unless you’re allergic to Dr. Anton’s blend of bleakness and whimsy, the physician-playwright still grabs us with his clinical yet sympathetic dissection of human frailty. So, what are Neugebauer, her design team (including Kaye Voyce on costumes and Lap Chi Chu and Elizabeth Harper on lights), and an A-list ensemble doing to keep us focused on Vanya’s angsty journey from surly bitterness to…well, catatonic despair? The current version by the formidable Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me) doesn’t attempt anything too radical. The language is more or less vernacular American with a light dusting of profanity (three shits, a fuck, a few hells and craps). Despite the modern clothing and furnishings, there are no smartphones or laptops in sight. When I first heard that Schreck was translating, I had this nutty hope she might flip the gender of the title figure. Gimmicky? Yep. But it would be something.
That is, something more than an efficient but lukewarm modern-dress Vanya with fine actors who never quite gel. I’d see Harper (Primary Trust) in anything; he’s a sui generis compound of tetchiness, insecurity and warmth, but I didn’t particularly buy his friendship with Vanya or even his status as doctor. By the third act he has traded hospital scrubs for paint-spattered leisurewear, and you wonder if Astrov’s gone on sabbatical to improve his stippling and brushwork. Carell is the celebrity draw, of course, and it’s neat to see him modulate his movie-star shtick—bashful-teen-trapped-in-middle-aged-dude’s-body—to something rawer and more anguished. For Vanya’s hysterical third-act meltdown, bewailing years of waste, Carell leaps on the kitchen table and crawls across it, screaming at Molina like a plump tabby cat having its midlife crisis.
Others onstage seem either miscast (Rose) or under-directed (Molina), but Pill proves to be the evening’s MVP with a painfully yearning Sonya. The gawky spinster-in-training is red meat for young actors, and Pill radiates nervy panic from every pore. Pale and reedy, she scrunches her face into a rictus of pain, yet never tips into overacting. Rendered in English, some of Chekhov’s pet descriptors (not just in Vanya) are “weird,” “strange,” “stupid” and their variants. To be human is to be a freak, and Pill embodies that brokenness with a palpable heat I wish could have ignited everything around her.
Uncle Vanya | 2hrs 30mins. One intermission. | Vivian Beaumont Theater | 150 W. 65th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here
