Arts & Lifestyle

“I grew up with boys,” Chloe Misseldine said.

What has being the middle child with two brothers given this striking American Ballet Theater soloist? Not glamour; she was born with that. But a crucial quality for any young ballerina: thick skin.

“Nothing really bothers me,” Misseldine said. “I’m not offended easily. If somebody says something to me, I’ll brush it off.”

Yet over the past week or so, since she made her debut as Tatiana in the ballet “Onegin,” Misseldine has noticed some unusual internal shifts. Tears have flowed. She brought up the word “sensitive” to describe how she’s been feeling, but it’s not quite right. Maybe vulnerable? “I don’t know how to explain it,” she said, “but I just have more emotions.”

Tatiana was big — Misseldine’s first dramatic lead in a full-length ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, where the company presents its summer season. On Wednesday afternoon, she takes on Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake” after a triumphant debut in the dual role at the Kennedy Center in Washington in January.

Word got out. After that performance, the former Ballet Theater star Nina Ananiashvili asked Misseldine to perform as a guest artist with her company, the State Ballet of Georgia, at the London Coliseum later this summer. “She is a rising star,” Susan Jaffe, Ballet Theater’s artistic director, said. “Not just in A.B.T., but in the dance world.”

A lissome 5 feet 9 inches — and over 6 feet on pointe — Misseldine, at just 22, has a distinctive otherworldly magnetism. It was apparent the moment she joined A.B.T. Studio Company in 2018. A year later she became an apprentice at Ballet Theater and a member of its corps de ballet in 2021. She was promoted to soloist in 2022.

Her ascent, by Ballet Theater standards, has felt meteoric, but Jaffe — who’s been in the job 18 months — seems to be more proactive when it comes to new talent. She was only 19 when she first danced “Swan Lake.”

“I come from that era that started them young,” she said. “Start them young because then they have all this time to grow.”

Of course, they need to be ready emotionally, too. “Chloe is totally grounded,” Jaffe said. “Everything that comes to her, she just takes it with absolute solidity and grace, and works hard and isn’t freaked out.”

Odette-Odile, for all of its dramatic and technical requirements, could easily lead to freak-out moments, but it lands in a zone where Misseldine is comfortable: classical ballet. She looks like a swan, too. Her flexible back gives her a gorgeous arabesque; it also accentuates the wingspan of her port de bras. To prepare, Jaffe coached her for several months.

“I was definitely nervous,” Misseldine said of her “Swan Lake” experience in Washington, but less than she had expected to be. “All the building up — I was ready.”

The actual performance felt like a dream. “It went by so fast,” Misseldine said. “All of a sudden, the second act was done. All of a sudden, I was quick-changing into Act IV. And then, all of a sudden, people were taking photos of me backstage.”

In “Onegin,” Tatiana, who transforms from an unsophisticated country girl into an elegant woman, poses a different set of challenges: “I’m growing up a little bit through roles like this,” she said. “I’m only 22. I haven’t lived much of my life. I’ve just really been focused on A.B.T. and my work and ballet. So doing this really has opened me up.”

The ballet by John Cranko, based on Pushkin’s verse novel, is a plunge into full-scale drama especially for Tatiana who at the start is rejected by Onegin. When she refuses to take back a love letter she has written to him, he rips it up. But by the end, it is Tatiana — now married to another — who does the rejecting and the ripping of a letter, Onegin’s proclamation of love and regret.

“This was just completely different — this related to life,” Misseldine said. “Her being a young girl and just fawning over this older guy. I mean, that’s so natural for a young girl to do and to write a love letter. I wouldn’t say him ripping it up in front of her is normal. I feel like people don’t do that. Hopefully not?”

In her debut, after Misseldine tore the letter with an urgent mix of exasperation and sadness, the audience applauded. This doesn’t usually happen. Still, she said later, she wasn’t satisfied. There were props that distracted her; it was a matinee, and she felt rushed. There were partnering mishaps.

Yet Misseldine was riveting. While the role is usually reserved for more mature dancers, Misseldine’s age mattered less than her instinct. She has imagination, depth of feeling. If “Onegin” left her a little raw, she knows that’s not a bad thing. “I’m still figuring out my ways,” she said. “I’m still learning as I’m going.”

When it comes to her acting, she wants to avoid appearing over the top: “Nothing too dramatic, but I still want to have the drama of the ballet,” she said. “Nothing fake.”

As a dancer, Misseldine knows who she is now, but she wasn’t a natural from the start. Born in Orlando, Fla., she is the daughter of Yan Chen, a former Ballet Theater soloist, who was born in China and trained at the Shanghai Dance School, and a businessman father. Misseldine began taking dance classes around the age of 3 or 4 at Orlando Ballet School, where Chen taught. (She is now is a principal teacher for the A.B.T. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School preprofessional division and the rehearsal director of A.B.T. Studio Company.)

Her earliest training was more of an after-school program than anything else. Did Chen see signs of what Misseldine would become? “No!” Chen said in an interview, laughing.

She recognized that her daughter had good proportions, but she lacked strength. “She was a little bit more,” Chen said, “how would I say? Very soggy. She was just hanging.”

But when Misseldine was around 13 or 14, she decided she wanted to participate in ballet competitions. Musicality and coordination aside, Chen felt her daughter needed to work harder. She told her, “There’s no way I’m going to let you onstage,” Chen said. “I’m the professional! When you go onstage you have to have a certain level of the technique. So I started helping her.”

She still does when Misseldine needs it. But Chen is neither a stage mother nor a ballet teacher who sugarcoats. “Of course, encouragement is very important,” Chen said, “but there’s a certain point you need to hear what you need to work on and sometimes give a little push.”

They had their conflicts, but it was more bickering, Misseldine said, than anything else. Out of irritation, she would pretend, for instance, not to perform steps correctly. “But then, as I got older, I started realizing, Oh, what she’s doing is really trying to help me,” Misseldine said. “I started trusting her.”

And Misseldine grew up with another secret weapon: the water. “Actually, when I was young, before I did ballet — this is probably very vital — I grew up on a lake,” she said. “I grew up doing water sports: skiing, wakeboarding, tubing. I feel that’s where my balance comes from.”

Her father, driving the boat, would pull her so that the tube was, “like 10 feet in the air!,” she said.

Her sunny mix of authenticity and fearlessness had to come from somewhere. “My younger brother and I never used to wear life jackets. We had a high dock and we’d jump off it into the water. We were 5, 6, 7 years old. That’s where I get my personality from — living with my brothers, growing up with boys — but then also doing ballet.”

More than two decades after the Strokes led an indie rock renaissance in New York City, a Strokes cover band called the Brokes played a sold-out show at Arlene’s Grocery, a small venue on the Lower East Side.

Hailing from Toronto, the Brokes were on their first American tour, and this gig held special meaning: The Strokes used to play Arlene’s back when they were the garage rock princes of downtown Manhattan honing their act at clubs like this one.

During a 45-minute set, the Brokes blazed through early Strokes hits like “The Modern Age” and “Last Nite” as fans chanted lyrics and pumped their fists into the air. The frontman, Marlon Chaplin, wore sunglasses and fingerless gloves while singing through a distortion effect to match Julian Casablancas’ vocal style.

The Brokes guitarist Adrian Traub-Rees, wearing a white suit and Converse sneakers, looked and sounded like Albert Hammond Jr. as he played a white Fender Stratocaster. The crowd roared when he traded licks with Brandon Wall, who plays Nick Valensi’s guitar parts, during another Strokes fan favorite, “Reptilia.”

Mr. Chaplin addressed the crowd in his Casablancas-esque tone: “We’re taking you back to ‘Room on Fire’ with this next tune.”

After a few more Strokes hits, Mr. Chaplin alluded to the past: “I don’t need to tell you all about the history of the Strokes here at Arlene’s.”

The grainy footage posted to YouTube of the Strokes at Arlene’s in 2000 is now an artifact of a bygone scene. Scruffy and unsigned, the band throws itself into “New York City Cops” and “Soma” from the tiny stage. Three years later, the group would appear on the cover of Rolling Stone. Along with Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Strokes became part of the sleazy indie rock epoch chronicled in Lizzy Goodman’s book “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” and the documentary based on it.

It is the romance of the early aughts that the Brokes recreate for their fans, who are not, as you might expect, aging millennials who grew up listening to “Is This It” on iPods during the George W. Bush administration. Instead, the crowd at Arlene’s was made up predominantly of Gen-Zers who had discovered the Strokes through later albums like “Comedown Machine” (2013) and “The New Abnormal” (2020) and now find themselves yearning for the band’s gritty genesis.

“They sound just like them,” said Bonnie Astrid, 23, who came to the show from New Haven, Conn. “Seeing them feels like I’m seeing the Strokes if they were young again. If Julian was young again.”

Caroline Anchor, 26, concurred. “Being here feels like being at a Strokes nerd fest,” she said. “The Brokes play deep cuts, songs the Strokes would never play live at some big stadium today.”

Sammy Moran, 25, said he felt a fan’s excitement when he bumped into a member of the Brokes on his way to the bathroom. “My parents didn’t create me early enough to see that time when the Strokes were the ultimate New York band,” he said. “I feel robbed because of that.”

He added, “I’d rather see the Brokes a million times over than the Strokes.”

Hours before the show, the Brokes pulled into the Lower East Side in a silver Dodge Caravan and hauled their gear into the venue. Before sound check, they took a walking tour of sorts to visit sites of Strokes history.

Their first stop was 171 Ludlow Street, the former address of Luna Lounge, an early venue for the Strokes that closed in 2005. Now it’s a boutique hotel — Hotel Indigo — but that didn’t stop the Brokes from nerding out as guests with shopping bags stood outside waiting for Ubers.

“We’re on sacred territory,” Mr. Chaplin, the frontman, said. “This is where it started.”

Mr. Traub-Rees, the guitarist, noted the line of tourists outside Katz’s Deli.

“We know a lot has changed here, but to me there’s still an energy on the Lower East Side,” he said. “Maybe it’s the tourist in me, but even despite the Luna Lounge now being a hotel, I am still seeing ghosts and resident spirits. I’m not ashamed to get a pretzel and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Dan Bedard, the group’s bassist, dropped the G word. “We know what New Yorkers think of the Lower East Side’s gentrification,” he said. “But we’re not too cool to be in a tribute band, and we’re not too cool to say we love New York.”

The Brokes continued their ruminations as they marched to the Mercury Lounge on Houston Street. “This was their Cavern Club,” Mr. Traub-Rees said, referring to the Liverpool, England, venue that served as a testing ground for the Beatles. “Standing here, I can visualize the long lines that formed for people to see the Strokes as they started to take off.”

The Brokes ambled into the East Village to seek out the graffiti-marked doorway that once led to Transporterraum, the basement studio where the Strokes recorded their debut album, released in 2001. It’s still a recording studio, known now as Flux Studios. When an engineer stepped out for a smoke, he said a hip-hop session was underway. The Brokes craned their necks to peer inside before the door slammed shut.

Finally, they stepped into 2A, a bar that was once a hangout for the Strokes. Over Brooklyn Lagers, the Brokes reflected on their journey.

It all started, Mr. Chaplin said, on a night out with some friends in Toronto in 2017. They ended up at a karaoke event, and Mr. Chaplin took the stage on a whim to sing the Strokes song “Someday.”

“When I got offstage, everyone said I sounded just like Julian,” he recalled. “A guy at the bar told me he was convinced it was a Strokes recording playing on the speakers.”

It wasn’t until 2022 that Mr. Chaplin assembled some friends to perform as the Brokes, pretty much as a gag, for a Halloween party. Three months later, when they played a Toronto club, The Baby G, they had to turn people away at the door.

“That’s when we realized we had something,” he said.

The Brokes still have day jobs. Mr. Traub-Rees (Albert) is a carpenter. Mr. Bedard (Nikolai Fraiture) works at a nursing home. Mr. Wall (Nick) is a guitar teacher. Mr. Chaplin (Julian) is a video director and editor. And the drummer, Connor MacArthur (Fabrizio Moretti), recently graduated from Toronto Metropolitan University.

Have they heard from the Strokes?

Not yet. But they claim that Mr. Hammond had watched one of their Instagram stories. And Mr. Traub-Rees hugged Mr. Casablancas onstage when he was performing with the Voidz at a Toronto club. “I’m still trying to find someone who has footage,” he sighed.

Mr. Traub-Rees said they occasionally hear from trolls.

“On the internet and in social media comments, people say, ‘Hey, don’t you think it’s a little early for a Strokes cover band?’” he said. “Well, I’m sorry to tell those people that 20 years have gone by, but they have.”

Later that night, after the Brokes finished performing at Arlene’s, some fans made the band members feel like the real thing as they mobbed them for autographs and selfies. Others bought Brokes stickers and T-shirts from a merch table. By the bar, a woman tried to get Mr. Chaplin’s number.

But with a long road ahead of them the next day — a six-hour drive to Buffalo to play their last tour date — the Brokes were eager to catch a few hours’ sleep at their Airbnb in Elizabeth, N.J. And their day jobs awaited them on Monday.

While his bandmates lugged gear back into the Dodge Caravan, Mr. Bedard, now wearing reading glasses, had a smoke outside the venue.

“Playing here tonight, that felt like the New York I’d always romanticized,” he said. “That was a joy playing to those people, seeing them get teleported.”

“Some musicians turn their nose up at playing in a tribute band, but I think we’re an anti-cynical act,” he added. “The irony is that the Strokes always had the ultimate frosty ‘too cool’ attitude. They never wanted to become icons. But we’re happy to play for their fans on stages 365 days a year if they don’t want to.”

The Australian drama “Prosper,” on the Roku channel, follows the Quinn family and their megachurch franchise. Dad Cal (Richard Roxburgh) is the slick, energetic leader, the kind of pastor who does not turn the other cheek but instead punches the guy right back, harder. Mom Abi (Rebecca Gibney) is the tough power player, willing though not always happy to cover up her family’s transgressions — a task that takes up nearly all of her time.

The eldest son, Dion (Ewen Leslie), might be too milquetoast to take over. “If you want to inherit the earth, Dion, you’re going to have to be a little less meek,” says one attaché. Dion’s wife, Taz (Ming-Zhu Hii), is more than happy to push him, though. God helps those who help their spouses, right? Issy (Hayley McCarthy) is the pop singer with a showbiz-Jesus husband (Jordi Webber) who would love his own chance to preach, while Jed (Jacob Collins-Levy) is the prodigal son who ditched the megachurch in favor of a soup kitchen but now finds himself sucked back into the fold. And the baby of the family, the adopted, teenage Moses (Alexander D’Souza), is trying to contact his birth parents amid a self-destructive spiral.

“Nobody does church like us,” Cal brags. One hopes! His plan to plant a church in Los Angeles sends his children scrambling for top position, trying to prove both their spiritual and commercial mettle. They compete to baptize a famous young D.J. the way the “Succession” kids tried to close deals. Jesus is lord, but cash is king, and those sprawling buildings, rock-concert stages, private helicopters and image consultants don’t pay for themselves.

“Prosper” has enough tawdry scandals to qualify as a soap and enough Shakespearean power lust to qualify as a fancy drama. Unlike some of its more prestige-chasing brethren, “Prosper” moves; it almost feels distilled. Episodes zip along, and characters tend to announce their schemes and allegiances, and what the show lacks in nuance it makes up for in momentum. Many of its juiciest arcs are ripped from tabloid headlines, but the series avoids tinny caricature and instead finds the real light and longing in its characters, the sincerity of the search within the hypocrisy of the outcomes.

One night inside their home in Japan, Professor Sato (voiced by Gedde Watanabe) tells his young, baseball-loving son Kenji (Hiro Nakamura) that “Ultraman’s most important task is finding balance.” Moments later, Sato receives a message that the kaiju monster Gigantron is coming. Sato heads outside and transforms into Ultraman, a giant superhero who fights such monsters. Cut to 20 years later, and Kenji is now a professional baseball player who goes by Ken (Christopher Sean). When he moves from the Los Angeles Dodgers to Japan’s Yomiuri Giants, he takes on his father’s role as the monster-fighter Ultraman.

Since 1966, this superhero creation from Eiji Tsuburaya has garnered its fair share of spinoffs, and this Netflix version focuses on themes of family, parenthood and finding balance in life. That might sound a little lofty for young viewers, and the life-lesson sequences did bore my 6-year-old a bit, but there were enough action scenes to ultimately hold his attention.

Ken is up against his own ego, rampaging monsters and Dr. Onda (Keone Young), the head of the Kaiju Defense Force. The parenthood theme kicks into high gear when Ken adopts a cutesy kaiju baby named Ami (Julia Harriman). Shannon Tindle directs this film, which he co-wrote with Marc Haimes.

Lincoln Loud (Bentley Griffin), a spy-loving kid, is beyond excited to have a spy for a new grandmother when his grandfather Pop Pop (Piotr Michael) becomes engaged to Myrtle (Alex Cazares), a former professional sleuth. As Lincoln and his 10 sisters prepare to head to their tropical wedding, he assures his Gran Gran-to-be that if any enemies from her past show up, he’ll help her save the day. Of course, an old nemesis does crash the wedding.

This movie, an extension of the long-running, Emmy-winning Nickelodeon series “The Loud House,” has some clever touches that riff on blockbuster spy films like, of course, the James Bond movie “No Time to Die.” And it’s sweet to watch Pop Pop worry that he’s too boring for Myrtle, only to become a hero and develop a newfound sense of confidence. Kyle Marshall, who helped create over 60 episodes of the series, directed. Whitney Wetta and Jeff Sayers, also veterans of the series, co-wrote the script.

With plenty of car chases, booby traps and silly family-friendly humor, the movie should entertain older preschoolers and younger elementary-aged children.

‘Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation’

Stream it on Disney+.

Children don’t need to be die-hard fans of the Disney Channel series “Big City Greens,” created by the brothers Shane and Chris Houghton, to love this movie version, which sends the countrified Green family to space. Wild child Cricket Green (Chris Houghton) is in constant pursuit of adventure, but his farming family can’t afford the SpaceX price tags to actually travel into the cosmos. When they are offered a free trip if they can save a failing asteroid farm, Cricket convinces the group — his predictability-loving father, Bill (Bob Joles), his sister Tilly (Marieve Herington) and his Gramma Alice (Artemis Pebdani) — to take the ultimate vacation. Bill’s motorcycle riding ex-wife, Nancy (Wendi McLendon-Covey), and Cricket’s wealthy B.F.F., Remy (Zeno Robinson), are also part of the cast.

The characters’ charm and humor, which make the show so watchable, are on full display, and the musical numbers should capture littler ones’ attention. Anna O’Brian, who has led several episodes of the series, directed.

‘Blue’s Big City Adventure’

Stream it on Prime Video.

Most parents who’ve watched television with a preschooler have probably heard the words “My handy, dandy notebook!” at least 100 times. It’s a catchphrase in the hit educational show “Blue’s Clues & You!,” which follows a predictable formula: The host, Josh (Joshua Dela Cruz), records clues in his notebook, that he and his animated canine companion, Blue (voiced by Traci Paige Johnson), follow to solve mysteries.

In the film, Josh and Blue leave the animated, colorful Storybook World, where the show is set, for real-world Manhattan. Josh has an audition for a Broadway show, but when he realizes he’s lost his precious notebook, which has the address for the audition, the duo dance and sing their way around New York searching for clues to find it. The original “Blue’s Clues” host, Steve Burns, returns to the story, and there are animated, talking salt shakers, alarm clocks and bars of soap to charm younger children. Preschoolers should love the movie’s ultra-peppy vibe, and the casting’s inclusivity is a big plus.

The music video director Matt Stawski directed here, and Angela C. Santomero, who cocreated the show and created “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” wrote the script.

‘Kleks Academy’

Stream it on Netflix.

Based on a novel by the Polish author Jan Brzechwa, this dark fantasy opens in the cavernous, creepy Realm of the Wolfurs, where werewolf-type villains declare that “there won’t be a single creature that will ever stand in our way again.” Cut to a Polish neighborhood in New York, where Ada (Antonina Litwiniak), a scooter-riding preteen, zips through the streets and calls a rude cabdriver a “fatso” (not the greatest way to introduce a character to children, but she redeems herself later). She’s quickly recruited to join Kleks Academy, a Hogwarts-esque wizardry school. Ada is skeptical, but her kind (and mysterious) neighbor urges her to go, telling her to follow her destiny and solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance. “What will you choose: the world that you know, or the greatest adventure of your life?” the neighbor asks.

Adults might be annoyed by the dubbed English dialogue, but children who love (and aren’t too scared by) darker themes should be entranced by the magical realism of the world Ada enters. There are lessons about empathy and believing in yourself that help Ada go from a tough, cynical city kid to a courageous leader. Maciej Kawulski directed, and Krzysztof Gureczny and Agnieszka Kruk wrote the script.

Nancy Azara, a sculptor who evoked ancient feminine imagery in her carved and painted wood pieces, and who in 1979 was a founder of the New York Feminist Art Institute, a school run by and for women artists, died on June 27 in Manhattan. She was 84.

Her wife, Darla Bjork, a psychiatrist and artist, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure and complications of scleroderma, a rare autoimmune disease.

In the heyday of the women’s movement — and of feminist consciousness-raising — in the early 1970s, Ms. Azara and other feminist artists began meeting in their downtown Manhattan lofts, to explore their approach to art making and to sketch out projects that would support women artists like themselves, who were largely shut out of the contemporary (and very male) art world.

On the West Coast, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro had created a women’s art program at the California Institute of the Arts, out of which they formed a collective called Womanhouse and presented a groundbreaking exhibition in an abandoned Hollywood mansion. Inspired by its success, Ms. Azara and Ms. Schapiro, who had returned to the East Coast, began to conceive of an independent school at which art would be taught to women, by women.

The institute began with great fanfare. Ronnie Eldridge, the feminist activist and politician who had worked for Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York, helped them to secure a space in the Port Authority building on Spring Street. The advisory board included, among others, the artists Louise Nevelson and Faith Ringgold; the feminist author Kate Millett; the art historian Linda Nochlin; and the activist Gloria Steinem. At a fund-raising gala in the spring of 1979 at the World Trade Center, Ms. Nevelson was the guest of honor, introduced by Carol Bellamy, who was then the City Council president.

Ms. Schapiro dropped out of the institute early on; she and Ms. Azara had competing visions for it. But the other founders — the painters Carol Stronghilos and Irene Peslikis; Selena Whitefeather, a video artist; and Lucille Lessane, an administrator who had worked for community organizations — stayed on.

By 1981, the institute had its own space on Franklin Street, in a building bought by Dr. Bjork. She was the only one of the group with a regular salary and a car, she said, which was helpful because she could ferry artists like Ms. Nevelson and, later, the sculptor Louise Bourgeois to events and help Ms. Azara distribute brochures and posters throughout the city.

In the early days, there were workshops led by Ms. Chicago, the painter Elaine de Kooning and Ntozake Shange, author of the landmark theatrical work “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” who taught poetry. Ms. Azara led workshops in making what she called visual diaries, a technique she had begun in her consciousness-raising groups. At the time, she was trying to quit smoking and needed to do something with her hands, so she began to draw images illustrating the topics that the women around her were discussing. Realizing that it was a way to unlock the creative process, she worked to refine and teach the technique to others.

The school was promoted in Ms. magazine and The Village Voice, and women flocked to it. But with arts funding drying up, its finances were always precarious. Still, the women kept at it. The operating costs were defrayed somewhat by renting the first floor to the Ceres Gallery, which was also devoted to feminist artwork.

Nonetheless, the New York Feminist Art Institute closed in 1990.

“It changed my life completely,” said the sculptor Phyllis Rosser, who had been working as a contributing writer for Ms. when she began attending Ms. Azara’s workshops and sculpture classes. “We all thought this would become a big movement in art and feminism, to have women taught by women artists who were feminists. But it got harder and harder to raise money as feminism was attacked politically.

“It didn’t become the great movement we thought it would be,” she added, “but it did help a lot of women.”

Annunciata Jean Azara was born on Oct. 13, 1939, in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn, and named after her mother, Annunciata (Como) Azara. Her father, Joseph Azara, owned an air-conditioning company.

She studied fashion design at Finch College, a two-year women’s liberal arts college in Manhattan. That was a hard sell for her conservative Roman Catholic parents, because they did not believe in educating women. (She convinced them that Finch was socially appropriate.)

They were even more disapproving when Ms. Azara left home and moved, alone, to Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side. She worked as a costume designer in the theater and on the side made hats that were sold at Bonwit Teller, the Fifth Avenue department store. But she knew she wanted to be an artist, and she went on to study painting at the Art Students League of New York. She remained determined to earn a bachelor’s degree, however, and did so, in 1974, from Empire State University.

She married Maximilian Olivas, a trumpet player, in 1966, and they moved to a loft on Mercer Street. They separated in the late 1970s and divorced in 1992. Ms. Azara met her future wife in 1979, when Dr. Bjork took a sculpture class that Ms. Azara was teaching at the Brooklyn Museum.

“It took me two years to convince Nancy to have a fling,” Dr. Bjork said. “She said she didn’t want to ruin a friendship.” Together since 1981, they married in 2011, when same-sex marriage became legal in New York.

In addition to Dr. Bjork, Ms. Azara is survived by her siblings, Victoria and Joseph Azara; her daughter, Nana Olivas, an artist; her stepson, Maximilian Mark Olivas; and a granddaughter.

Though she trained as a painter, Ms. Azara began working in wood because, she said “it has a history; it’s more alive than canvas.”

Ms. Azara was interested in primitive archetypes and ancient spiritual traditions, and she at first made rough-hewn pieces of plump, bulbous shapes meant to evoke early goddess imagery; other works resembled totems and religious relics. Her pieces were massive, using found lumber — planks harvested from her Manhattan neighborhood, fallen trees from her house in Woodstock, N.Y. Later, she began to work with gold and aluminum leaf and egg tempera in rich reds and blues, often charring the wood, too.

Ms. Azara’s “deep magentas,” the feminist psychologist and author Phyllis Chesler said, “are the color of blood, of sacrifice, of death and of rebirth.” Ms. Azara, she said, “resurrected a more pagan archetype of the Great Mother for the mother-starved daughters of patriarchy.”

The critic Holland Cotter, reviewing Ms. Azara’s 2000 show at the Donahue/Sosinski Gallery in SoHo for The New York Times, wrote that her gilded pieces had a “Byzantine or South Asian splendor.”

In an interview for the International Foundation for Women Artists in 2015, Ms. Azara said: “I used to find the most brutal battered piece of wood, and then once you carve into that piece of wood it just opens up. I just love that part of it.”

She added: “I use wood that speaks to me; in other words, there’s something about it I feel an affinity for. One could explain it’s similar to meeting a person for the first time that you feel like you might have known before or you feel definitely you want to be this person’s friend. So the wood and I decide we could kind of be friends.”

There are two sides to Tiago Rodrigues, the Portuguese director who has led the Avignon Festival since last year. One — gentle, introspective, given to dissecting intimate human conflicts — has long been evident in his stage productions. That includes “Hecuba, Not Hecuba,” his latest premiere in Avignon, in which a mother fights for justice after her son is mistreated by a state institution.

On the other side, Rodrigues has also turned out to be a combative, politically outspoken leader for the French festival, a marquee event on the international theater calendar. Tension is running high in France since the far-right National Rally party came out ahead in the first round of snap parliamentary elections last weekend, and Rodrigues’s response was forceful: Avignon, he told the broadcaster France Info, would become a “festival of resistance.”

On Thursday, Rodrigues pulled together a last-minute night of programming aimed at “mobilizing against the far right” ahead of the second round of voting this Sunday. After a performance of Angélica Liddell’s “Dämon: El Funeral de Bergman,” the Cour d’Honneur, Avignon’s biggest stage, was given over to willing artists, politicians and union leaders from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m.

The choreographer Boris Charmatz opened the evening with 100 or so dancers who performed a group reinterpretation of “Revolutionary,” a defiant 1922 dance by Isadora Duncan. JoeyStarr, a French rapper, recited a poem by Léon-Gontran Damas.

Despite the late hour, the nearly 2,000 seats were packed, and a roar filled the air when Rodrigues, whose father was an antifascist activist in Portugal, finally appeared onstage. “My name is Tiago Rodrigues, and I work for the Avignon Festival,” he said, modestly. “This is a night of democratic union, of strength and hope.”

Not long before, around midnight, a performance of his “Hecuba, Not Hecuba” had wrapped at the Boulbon quarry, an outdoor venue 10 miles from the city. The mood there was calmer: Before the show, as festivalgoers debated the merits of various artists over drinks, it felt like a regular night out in Avignon.

And the intricate structure of “Hecuba, Not Hecuba” invites a different kind of audience attention. Written by Rodrigues himself for the Paris-based Comédie-Française troupe, it weaves together two stories. The first is Euripides’ “Hecuba,” a rarely seen ancient Greek tragedy, whose central character seeks revenge after the death of her son. The second centers on a fictional actress, Nadia Roger, whose autistic son has been mistreated at a state-funded home for disabled minors (a story inspired by real events that took place in Switzerland, according to Rodrigues).

Nadia turns to the legal system for justice as she prepares to play Hecuba onstage — and slowly but surely, Rodrigues blurs the lines between the two characters. In the role, Elsa Lepoivre, a Comédie-Française stalwart, is phenomenal as she shifts between the two women’s subtly different ways of grieving, her facial expressions flickering back and forth.

Rodrigues is skilled at setting up multifaceted characters in a few quick strokes, and the rest of the Comédie-Française cast is playfully introduced in the opening scene, a table read of “Hecuba.” Loïc Corbery pokes fun at the process as the intense actor who immediately goes all out; Denis Podalydès, one of the troupe’s best-known members, leans effectively into his increasingly cantankerous onstage persona, complaining that “Euripides deserved better.”

The rest of the seven-strong cast often act as a Greek chorus, moving from their role in “Hecuba” to commenting on Nadia’s increasingly precarious mental state. Podalydès doubles as an initially taciturn state prosecutor who takes up Nadia’s case against the institution where her son, Otis, was kicked and threatened by staff members, along with other disabled children.

Like Hecuba, who ultimately takes matters into her own hands by attacking her son’s murderer, Nadia grapples throughout with what justice means. If the institution was chronically underfunded and understaffed, does responsibility lie with the employees who mistreated children, or with the state?

Some parts of “Hecuba, Not Hecuba” are convoluted by Rodrigues’s standards. He spins a story out of Otis’s favorite animated series, starring a dog, to set up Nadia’s “barking” — as she puts it — against the system. In some mythological tales, Hecuba is also turned into a dog, and a large canine statue is the only real element of décor in the Boulbon quarry, which felt too vast for the production. (In one funny aside, Corbéry, as one of the “Hecuba” actors, rightly quips about the set: “We don’t know what it’s for, but it’s impressive.”)

Yet as often in his theater work, Rodrigues expertly steers the audience toward empathy: for Nadia and Otis, but also for more complicated characters. At one point, underpaid, marginalized caregivers plead with the prosecutor to understand the working conditions that led to abuse.

The tone may be very different from Rodrigues’s impromptu night of performances against the far right, but his core beliefs are evident either way. What will “resistance” mean if the far-right party wins big in France on Sunday? Time will tell, but both Rodrigues the leader and Rodrigues the storyteller clearly have plenty of fight left in them.

There are two sides to Tiago Rodrigues, the Portuguese director who has led the Avignon Festival since last year. One — gentle, introspective, given to dissecting intimate human conflicts — has long been evident in his stage productions. That includes “Hecuba, Not Hecuba,” his latest premiere in Avignon, in which a mother fights for justice after her son is mistreated by a state institution.

On the other side, Rodrigues has also turned out to be a combative, politically outspoken leader for the French festival, a marquee event on the international theater calendar. Tension is running high in France since the far-right National Rally party came out ahead in the first round of snap parliamentary elections last weekend, and Rodrigues’s response was forceful: Avignon, he told the broadcaster France Info, would become a “festival of resistance.”

On Thursday, Rodrigues pulled together a last-minute night of programming aimed at “mobilizing against the far right” ahead of the second round of voting this Sunday. After a performance of Angélica Liddell’s “Dämon: El Funeral de Bergman,” the Cour d’Honneur, Avignon’s biggest stage, was given over to willing artists, politicians and union leaders from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m.

The choreographer Boris Charmatz opened the evening with 100 or so dancers who performed a group reinterpretation of “Revolutionary,” a defiant 1922 dance by Isadora Duncan. JoeyStarr, a French rapper, recited a poem by Léon-Gontran Damas.

Despite the late hour, the nearly 2,000 seats were packed, and a roar filled the air when Rodrigues, whose father was an antifascist activist in Portugal, finally appeared onstage. “My name is Tiago Rodrigues, and I work for the Avignon Festival,” he said, modestly. “This is a night of democratic union, of strength and hope.”

Not long before, around midnight, a performance of his “Hecuba, Not Hecuba” had wrapped at the Boulbon quarry, an outdoor venue 10 miles from the city. The mood there was calmer: Before the show, as festivalgoers debated the merits of various artists over drinks, it felt like a regular night out in Avignon.

And the intricate structure of “Hecuba, Not Hecuba” invites a different kind of audience attention. Written by Rodrigues himself for the Paris-based Comédie-Française troupe, it weaves together two stories. The first is Euripides’ “Hecuba,” a rarely seen ancient Greek tragedy, whose central character seeks revenge after the death of her son. The second centers on a fictional actress, Nadia Roger, whose autistic son has been mistreated at a state-funded home for disabled minors (a story inspired by real events that took place in Switzerland, according to Rodrigues).

Nadia turns to the legal system for justice as she prepares to play Hecuba onstage — and slowly but surely, Rodrigues blurs the lines between the two characters. In the role, Elsa Lepoivre, a Comédie-Française stalwart, is phenomenal as she shifts between the two women’s subtly different ways of grieving, her facial expressions flickering back and forth.

Rodrigues is skilled at setting up multifaceted characters in a few quick strokes, and the rest of the Comédie-Française cast is playfully introduced in the opening scene, a table read of “Hecuba.” Loïc Corbery pokes fun at the process as the intense actor who immediately goes all out; Denis Podalydès, one of the troupe’s best-known members, leans effectively into his increasingly cantankerous onstage persona, complaining that “Euripides deserved better.”

The rest of the seven-strong cast often act as a Greek chorus, moving from their role in “Hecuba” to commenting on Nadia’s increasingly precarious mental state. Podalydès doubles as an initially taciturn state prosecutor who takes up Nadia’s case against the institution where her son, Otis, was kicked and threatened by staff members, along with other disabled children.

Like Hecuba, who ultimately takes matters into her own hands by attacking her son’s murderer, Nadia grapples throughout with what justice means. If the institution was chronically underfunded and understaffed, does responsibility lie with the employees who mistreated children, or with the state?

Some parts of “Hecuba, Not Hecuba” are convoluted by Rodrigues’s standards. He spins a story out of Otis’s favorite animated series, starring a dog, to set up Nadia’s “barking” — as she puts it — against the system. In some mythological tales, Hecuba is also turned into a dog, and a large canine statue is the only real element of décor in the Boulbon quarry, which felt too vast for the production. (In one funny aside, Corbéry, as one of the “Hecuba” actors, rightly quips about the set: “We don’t know what it’s for, but it’s impressive.”)

Yet as often in his theater work, Rodrigues expertly steers the audience toward empathy: for Nadia and Otis, but also for more complicated characters. At one point, underpaid, marginalized caregivers plead with the prosecutor to understand the working conditions that led to abuse.

The tone may be very different from Rodrigues’s impromptu night of performances against the far right, but his core beliefs are evident either way. What will “resistance” mean if the far-right party wins big in France on Sunday? Time will tell, but both Rodrigues the leader and Rodrigues the storyteller clearly have plenty of fight left in them.