“My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful,” wrote the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky in his Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, “the more narrowly I limit my field of action.” This is also a poetics of theater as practiced by the American playwright Richard Nelson in his acclaimed Rhinebeck Panorama. The 12 plays that make up the Panorama—seven on the Apple family, three on the Gabriels, and two on the Michaels—have engaged Nelson since 2010, when the first Apple play appeared. And to what does Nelson limit his field of action? The kitchen tables in three homes in upstate New York, where the Apples or Gabriels or Michaels are preparing a meal and talking. READ ON

Though focused on contemporary dance, Akram Khan can’t keep away from the classics. The British-Bangladeshi choreographer first broke into the world of ballet in 2016, when he reimagined Giselle for the English National Ballet. Khan pulled the gauzy Romantic ballet out of its feudal-folk setting and placed it in a sweatshop in the industrial hinterlands. More powerfully still, he held audiences captive with his utterly singular vocabulary. Ballet and kathak (a form of classical Indian dance) are joined in nothing short of alchemy. “It is the world I live in,” Khan says. “I can’t differentiate the two.” Which brings us to Khan’s much awaited Creature, premiering next week at Sadler’s Wells, in London. READ ON

Imagine you’re a beachcomber browsing for colorful shells or sweeping the sands with a metal detector in search of lost treasure when, suddenly, looming before you is the giant half-submerged, bulbous head of Damien Hirst—in snorkeling goggles, no less. Freaky! READ ON