Harper's Bazaar August 2021

I remember coming to New York in the early ’90s to visit my brother and seeing Savion Glover perform with Gregory Hines at the Joyce Theater. I left feeling like I’d been to church and seen God. That performance moved me so profoundly that it has stayed with me to this day. I never fully grasped the magnitude of what the performing arts contribute to our culture until this past year when, due to the pandemic, every theater went dark. Dance, music, drama, comedy, and all of the other wondrously diverse forms of live performance we create and experience are the ultimate expression and reflection of our collective humanity. To herald the return of the stage, we decided to dedicate this issue to performance. We wanted to celebrate performers who,…

FEATURED TRACKS 1. “I STILL LOVE YOU” Bishop Briggs 2. “GOOD NEWS” Mac Miller 3. “MYSTERY OF LOVE” Sufjan Stevens 4. “I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU” Dolly Parton 5. “LOST” Frank Ocean FULL PLAYLIST Briggs wrapped up the tour behind her second studio album, Champion, at the end of 2019, right before the pandemic hit. Ahead of her first show back—she’ll be supporting Dermot Kennedy at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater on August 5—she curated a playlist around this issue’s theme of performance. “There were a few things that came to mind when diving into the concept—the visual aspect, how it makes you feel, vocal performance, and escapism,” Briggs explains. “This playlist is a mix of all of those elements.” Kicking it off is one of Briggs’s own songs, a soulful…

1 HANG OUT WITH THE OBAMAS “The Obama Portraits Tour,” showcasing the paintings of President Barack Obama (by Kehinde Wiley) and First Lady Michelle Obama (by Amy Sherald) commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, opens August 27 at the Brooklyn Museum, with stops in L.A., Atlanta, and Houston to follow. 2 TEST-DRIVE A TATTOO Scared to commit to body art? Ephemeral tattoo studio—located in Brooklyn and, come fall, L.A.—has developed an ink that fades within 15 months so you can try out your dream design without making a forever pledge. 3 DANCE DANCE, DANCE From July 30 to August 9, Colorado’s Vail Dance Festival will feature performances by this year’s artist-in-residence, American Ballet Theatre principal Calvin Royal III, and company-in-residence, the Philadelphia contemporary company BalletX. Other highlights will include an evening…

COLLIER SCHORR PHOTOGRAPHER “The Inner Gigi” Page 64 “Lady Gaga orchestrating her arrival at a party with me on her arm.” DURGA CHEW-BOSE WRITER “The Inner Gigi” Page 64 “Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mike Nichols’s 2012 revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Hoffman’s portrayal of Willy Loman was devastating, impossible to experience without somehow fearing it, loving it, feeling defenseless toward it.” LUDIVINE POIBLANC STYLIST “The Inner Gigi” Page 64 “When I saw Shakespeare’s play The Tempest in Paris, directed by Peter Brook.” SIOBHAN BURKE WRITER “Leaps & Bounds” Page 74 “Riverdance at Radio City Music Hall in 1996. I grew up doing competitive Irish dance, and for my nine-yearold self, that show was everything. I actually saw it again at Radio City on March 11, 2020. That…

THE GOOD BUY: Chanel 11.12 Bag My personal style is influenced by movies. I love Romy Schneider in the Visconti film The Job. Chanel did the clothes. I also love the actresses Anouk Aimée and Capucine because they always look sophisticated. But for the past year I’ve basically been living in sweatshirts and old Levi’s. I’ve been staying in Napa, where I grew up, and I didn’t expect to be in the country for such a long time, so I had only a few things with me. I wasn’t even carrying a bag aside from a canvas tote. In May I had a big birthday and wanted to treat myself, so I decided that this pink-and-navy knit Chanel 11.12 would be something cute and chic to re-emerge into the world…

“I’m definitely a type-A workaholic,” says Morgan Jerkins, who released two books during the pandemic while holding down a full-time job. “I justify going overboard because I love what I do.” In August of last year, Jerkins, currently a senior editor at ESPN’s sports and culture Web site the Undefeated, published her second nonfiction book, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, in which she retraces her ancestors’ journeys across America as she explores her own Black identity. Her debut novel, Caul Baby, which came out in April, “hits on Black motherhood, survival, gentrification, capitalism, and the tension between self-autonomy and familial obligations,” says Jerkins, who has been working on it since she settled in Harlem, where the novel is set, after grad school.…