Pop Music: Sleater-Kinney Regroups in New York
Oct. 30-31; ticketmaster.com.
De facto inheritors of the riot grrrl torch, the Olympia, Wash.-born trio Sleater-Kinney began churning out raucous, confrontational rock songs more than two decades ago and have since become latter-day patrons of feminist punk.
In recent years, the group, headed up by Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, has offered up a playbook for female artists who want to achieve longevity in the spotlight — a relatively rare phenomenon in an industry whose misogyny and ageism tends to cut careers short. One of their best tactics is experimentation: A creative partnership with St. Vincent, for instance, gave their latest album, “The Center Won’t Hold,” a touch of art-pop flair.
This week, Sleater-Kinney will perform at Brooklyn’s Kings Theater and Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom as part of their first tour since the departure of their longtime drummer, Janet Weiss. Her sizable shoes will be filled by Angie Boylan, a member of the punk band Aye Nako. OLIVIA HORN
Dance: Paul Taylor’s Past and Future
Oct. 29-Nov. 17; ptamd.org.
For the first time since Paul Taylor’s death in 2018, the company he founded returns to the David H. Koch Theater in Manhattan for its annual Lincoln Center performances. The season will be full of reflection on the past, honoring not only Taylor — with two free memorial performances on Oct. 29 and Nov. 5 — but also Donald McKayle, another modern dance pioneer who died last year.
On Nov. 12, three guest ensembles take the stage in works spanning McKayle’s career as a choreographer: Dayton Contemporary Dance Company in “Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder” (1959); Ronald K. Brown/Evidence in “Songs of the Disinherited” (1972); and Juilliard Dance in “Crossing the Rubicon” (2017).
Further widening the Taylor circle, the season features a premiere by Kyle Abraham and recent works by Margie Gillis and Pam Tanowitz, who expertly mines Taylor’s style to accentuate its idiosyncrasies. Nov. 17 brings the final performances of three longtime company members: Michelle Fleet, Jamie Rae Walker and Parisa Khobdeh. SIOBHAN BURKE
Film: Searching for a New Homeland in ‘Synonyms’
Oct. 25.
When the Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid was around 22, shortly after finishing his military service, he packed up his stuff and fled to Paris, certain that he was at heart European and had been born by mistake in the Middle East. Once in France, he learned the language, he recalled, by obsessively studying a dictionary of synonyms.
That’s the genesis for his loosely autobiographical “Synonyms,” which Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called “a furious, at times splenetically funny squirm-a-thon,” and critics have hailed as unmissable.
Tom Mercier, exhilarating in his feature debut, plays Yoav, who, not long after arriving in Paris, finds his Airbnb ransacked and his belongings stolen, and prepares to freeze to death in a bathtub — only to be rescued by a gorgeous young French couple (Quentin Dolmaire and Louise Chevillotte) living beneath him. But Paris, as Yoav discovers wandering its streets and spewing out words with similar meanings (“nasty, abominable, odious, lamentable”) is no more welcoming than the country he left behind.
“Synonyms,” opening in New York on Oct. 25 before a national rollout, won the Golden Bear for best feature at the Berlin International Film Festival. KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Classical Music: A Marathon of Electric Guitars
Oct. 27; ditherquartet.com.
The new-music marathon has long been a storied format for adventurous composers and ensembles. In recent years, the electric guitar quartet Dither has launched its own long-form musical festivals, the seventh of which arrives at Brooklyn’s Frost Theater of the Arts on Sunday.
Titled “The Dither Extravaganza!” the marathon centers around sets by the quartet, which has a raucously groovy new album out Nov. 1 on New Focus Recordings, featuring sharp-edged works by composers such as Eve Beglarian and Ted Hearne as well as ensemble members themselves.
The extravaganza’s programming broadens: the mezzo Alicia Hall Moran will sing some of her own works; the Mivos Quartet plays music by the experimentalist Linda Catlin Smith; and the composer-performer Shelley Washington will blast on her baritone saxophone. There’s more, too, making for a total of seven hours of mind-bending music. WILLIAM ROBIN
Art: A Sculptor’s Unsettling Insights
Oct. 29-Dec. 21; hauserwirth.com.
I’ve been thinking about Alina Szapocznikow’s dismembered body parts for years. A Polish-born, concentration-camp survivor who found her way to Paris after the war, Szapocznikow died of cancer in 1973, at 46. Before she did, she made goofy desk lamps with bright red lips on them; piles of polyester resin breasts; and a cast of her own jaw with cigarette butts embedded in it.
Comic and disconcerting, these pieces leavened surrealist techniques with a critical woman’s perspective. They also found a way to address both the Nazi Holocaust and the dehumanizing violence of misogyny with the same insouciance. “To Exalt the Ephemeral: Alina Szapocznikow, 1962-1972,” at Hauser & Wirth in Manhattan, will not be a show to miss. WILL HEINRICH
Theater: Shakespeare’s Boy in ‘Hamnet’
Oct. 30-Nov. 3, bam.org.
So many plays about fathers and sons owe a debt to “Hamlet,” Shakespeare’s tragedy about a prince mourning the death of his father, the king. When Shakespeare wrote it, he had reason to feel his own deep and recent grief — not for a parent but for his only son, Hamnet, who died at age 11 in 1596.
“Hamnet,” a play from the Dublin- and London-based theater company Dead Centre, stars 11-year-old Aran Murphy in the title role, onstage alone. Through video, Hamnet meets and converses with Shakespeare, the father who was so absent from his childhood. The Irish Independent newspaper described the show, written and directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, as “an extraordinarily fascinating and moving disposition on the meaning of life and particularly of death.” It comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival for five performances, starting on Wednesday at BAM Fisher. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
TV: Acorn’s Super Sleuth Returns
Oct. 28; acorntv.com.
Praise be to women of a certain age. And while plenty of attention will be heaped this week on Kathryn Hahn’s portrayal of a divorced empty-nester confronting her sexual reawakening in HBO’s “Mrs. Fletcher,” consider stirring Mrs. Raisin into the mix.
“Agatha Raisin & the Haunted House,” debuting Oct. 28 on Acorn TV, finds M.C. Beaton’s London publicist turned Cotswolds sleuth — played by the fizzy, delightfully tart Ashley Jensen — entering her own age of enlightenment: Now reunited with her lost love, James Lacey (Jamie Glover), she has just opened a detective business. To drum up publicity, she investigates an eerie mansion owned by an imperious blue-blood despised by practically everyone. And before her Skittles-colored wardrobe and orange-slice lip gloss has evaporated from the mist, murder has once again stained the cobblestones of Carsely Village.
Jensen will bring her frothy slapstick, like an adult version of Scooby-Doo, to three more mysteries next year to round out Season 3. KATHRYN SHATTUCK
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