• Antigone

    Juliette Binoche stars in Ivo van Hove’s Next Wave Festival production of the Sophocles tragedy, in a new translation by Anne Carson. .

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  • Barbecue

    In a new play by Robert O’Hara (“Bootycandy”), directed by Kent Gash, a group of siblings gather in a park to confront their sister about her drug abuse. In previews.

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  • Clever Little Lies

    Marlo Thomas stars in Joe DiPietro’s comedy, directed by David Saint, as a woman trying to figure out what went wrong during a tennis match between her husband and her son. In previews.

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  • Low

    Since this trio from Duluth, Minnesota, led by the guitarist and songwriter Alan Sparhawk and his wife, Mimi Parker, was formed, in 1993, the group’s music has been marked by slow tempos and the interplay between Sparhawk’s yearning vocals and Parker’s soaring harmonies, which give the songs a vaguely religious quality. (Both Sparhawk and Parker are practicing Mormons.

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  • Godspeed You! Black Emperor

    In March, this nine-member Montreal-based group released “Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress,” an album as epic and passionate as their landmark 1997 début, “F#A# (Infinity).” The record’s four songs, especially the ten-and-a-half-minute opener, “Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!,’ ” and the fourteen-minute closer, “Piss Crowns Are Trebled,” traverse familiar, expansive sonic terrain.

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  • Tears for Fears

    Alternating between New Wave karaoke fodder (“Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “Shout”) and goth-tinged mope-rock (“Mad World”), this British duo has aged better than much of the so-called Second British Invasion of the mid-eighties. The group is led by childhood friends Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, who dug into youthful trauma for inspiration.

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  • The Jesus and Mary Chain

    In the mid-eighties, these Scottish alt-rockers lacquered the tough girl-group sounds pioneered by Phil Spector with the demented feedback of the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop, and the combination proved effective; their 1985 magnum opus, “Psychocandy,” became a singular entry in the history of pop music, catalyzing the U.K.

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  • Picasso Sculpture

    You may come away from this magnificent show of nearly a hundred and fifty objects, which date from 1902 to 1964, convinced that Picasso was more naturally a sculptor than a painter, though all his training and early experience, and by far most of his prodigious energy, went into painting. The definitive artist of the twentieth century was an amateur—nearly a hobbyist—in sculpture, so the medium reveals the core predilections of his genius starkly, without the dizzying subtleties of his painting but true to its essence.

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  • Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980

    This rewardingly difficult exhibition of nearly three hundred works is an important salvo in the museum’s continued effort to internationalize the story of modern art, disrupting North Atlantic dominance from both the east and the south. An overture of geometric abstraction from the nineteen-fifties, in which Ellsworth Kelly is joined by Brazil’s Lygia Clark and Croatia’s Julije Knifer, prepends a great rupture: from Prague to Caracas, artists lost faith in institutions, states, and markets, and turned to nontraditional media, from poetry to mail art.

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  • Gego

    Gertrud Goldschmidt—she later compressed her name into a syncopated pseudonym—fled Germany in 1939 for Venezuela. After a stint as an architect, she began making delicate constructions out of aluminum or iron, works so insubstantial they seem less like sculptures than like drawings in space.

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  • PaJaMa

    In the late nineteen-forties, the American artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French made a portmanteau of their first names and collaborated on a series of photographs that owe much to Jared’s mannered, oneiric realist paintings. The trio and assorted friends (George Platt Lynes, George Tooker, Donald Windham) posed like sirens or sentinels in the landscapes of Nantucket, Provincetown, and Fire Island, and appeared naked in New York interiors.

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  • New York City Ballet

    The company kicks off its fall season with that most quintessential of ballets, “Swan Lake.” With its modernist designs, streamlined structure, and rather stark ending, Peter Martins’s production can feel a tad cold.

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  • Camille A. Brown & Dancers

    Brown’s social-issue pieces can feel too much like the book reports of a diligent student, but “BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play” requires less research. The movement vocabulary, drawing from sidewalk games like double Dutch, engages Brown’s rhythmic gifts and intensity.

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  • K. Kvarnström & Co.

    In “TAPE,” the Finnish-born choreographer Kenneth Kvarnström, now based in Stockholm, plays with ideas of the Baroque. The musician Jonas Nordberg performs Bach, Couperin, and Poulenc on lute, guitar, and theorbo, as dancers entangle with one another, sometimes with duct tape, or seem to disassemble their bodies at the joints.

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  • Yasuko Yokoshi

    Yokoshi, a deeply intelligent choreographer who has spent years skillfully superimposing the techniques of Western post-modernism and traditional Japanese theatre and dance, presents her latest work, “ZERO ONE,” at Danspace Project. The two performers, Manami and Sawami Fukuoka, are identical twins; one has immersed herself in Western contemporary dance, the other in the postwar Japanese dance-theatre movement known as Butoh.

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  • Metropolitan Opera: “Turandot”

    At its best, the vast golden city that Franco Zeffirelli built for Puccini’s Chinese fairy tale “Turandot” provides a gilt frame for the bold lyrical style of the composer’s final and most ambitious opera. This season, a clutch of big-name dramatic sopranos alternates in the punishing title role of the ice princess with a penchant for executing her suitors.

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  • Loft Opera: Verdi

    The resourceful company returns to the site of its most recent, acclaimed production, a circus school in Bushwick, for a selection of scenes from “Aida,” “La Traviata,” and other Verdi operas, featuring a quartet of singers accompanied by piano. The director John de los Santos divides up the playing space into four small stages, surrounded on all sides by the audience, for an immersive opera-going experience.

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  • N.Y. Philharmonic: Opening Gala

    The wave of change that will engulf the Philharmonic in the next several years has already begun: Alan Gilbert has announced that he will be leaving the post of music director in 2017, and the administration of Lincoln Center revealed that Avery Fisher Hall would be renamed David Geffen Hall, in acknowledgement of a hundred-million-dollar gift (earmarked for renovations) from the music-industry mogul. And now the music begins, with two opening-week programs.

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  • Brown and Breen Piano Duo

    The Australian duo comes stateside for the first time, bringing the music of fellow countrymen and women in a program at Symphony Space. It includes works by Percy Grainger (his “Fantasy on Themes from Porgy and Bess”), Elena Kats-Chernin, Nigel Westlake (“Oscillations”), Miriam Hyde, and Ross Edwards, as well as, most tantalizingly, “Island Songs,” the final work of Peter Sculthorpe, scored for the unlikely (but no doubt exciting) combination of piano duo and didgeridoo—for which they will be joined by the Aboriginal performer Russell Smith, playing an instrument he commissioned especially for the piece.

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  • The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

    This documentary, directed by Stanley Nelson, will be a useful primer for anyone unschooled in the story of the Black Panthers, although their look, their impact, and their raison d’être remain lodged with surprising tenacity in the public mind. We hear of the birth of the movement in Oakland, California, and of the speed with which its militant message spread to the North, in contrast with the more equable, church-grounded toil for civil rights in the Southern states.

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  • Coming Home

    The director Zhang Yimou’s calculatedly poignant drama depicts a Chinese family torn apart in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late fifties, driven deeper into despair by the Cultural Revolution, and uneasily reassembled in the late-seventies thaw. Lu (Chen Daoming), a former professor sent to a labor camp for “rightism,” escapes from custody and makes his way back to the family home that he shared with his wife, Feng (Gong Li), a teacher, and their daughter, Dandan (Zhang Huiweng), whom he hasn’t seen since she was three.

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  • Grandma

    Lily Tomlin shines as the cantankerous, combative, brutally frank poet Elle Reid, now fallen into literary silence after the death of her partner of thirty-eight years. Elle breaks up with a new, much younger girlfriend named Olivia (Judy Greer), but her uncreative solitude is disturbed by the arrival of her teen-age granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner), who is pregnant and has an appointment for an abortion that very day, but no money to pay for it.

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  • The Hills on Governors Island

    New plans for the centerpiece of the park on Governors Island feature four man-made hills assembled atop the rubble of buildings left over from the island’s days as a Coast Guard base. Construction won’t be completed until 2017, but the Hills will be open for a preview on Sept.

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  • World Maker Faire

    The maker movement embraces a wide swath of innovators, inventors, and tinkerers who, in the face of modern convenience, have continued the tradition of hands-on crafting while often incorporating new technology. Those creators come out of their basements and garage workshops for this festival, one of the world’s largest celebrations of the D.

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  • Morbid Anatomy Museum

    Julie Tibbott, the author of “Members Only: Secret Societies, Sects, and Cults Exposed,” gives a lecture, accompanied by a slide show, surveying the history of secretive groups with strongholds in New York, from the nineteenth-century Know-Nothing Party to the current cult of La Santa Muerte. (424 Third Ave.

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  • Cooper Union

    A tribute to the former Poet Laureate of the United States Philip Levine, who died in February of this year, will feature readings by poets including Juan Felipe Herrera, Edward Hirsch, Sharon Olds, Yusef Komunyakaa, and David St. John.

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