For more than a decade, the singer-songwriter Mitski has been a totem for yearners. The artist has described herself as a black hole where people can dump their feelings, but her music moves beyond ugly emotions toward catharsis. “Still, nobody wants me / And I know no one will save me, I’m just asking for a kiss / Give me one good movie kiss and I’ll be all right,” she sings on her 2018 nu-disco single “Nobody,” her voice at once covetous and wistful. There is a heightened intensity to her songs, even at their most muted—a simmering cauldron of woe in near-constant threat of bubbling over.

From her 2016 hit “Puberty 2” to her 2023 album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” Mitski has carved out one of the more spellbinding and successful careers in indie music. Alongside her producer and longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland, she has drifted from dream-pop to folk rock to dance music, webbing genre tatters together into a kind of understated yet snug comforter. Her voice is capable of imbuing any canvas with melancholy, but it would be reductive to label her a mere singer of sad songs. Her lyrics crackle with a desire to be made whole, as evidenced by her most recent single, “I’ll Change for You”: “How do I let our love die / When you’re the only other keeper of my most precious memories?” she appeals. Mitski’s new album, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” is out Feb. 27; on the heels of its release, she will play a six-show residency at the Shed (March 2-4, 6-7, 9), opening the spiritual void once more.—Sheldon Pearce

The New York downtown scene of the sixties and seventies was a place of overlapping friendships and studio space, and the artist Robert Rauschenberg was at the center of it. Rauschenberg’s designs brought a witty, even Surrealist edge to the works of the choreographer Merce Cunningham; later, Rauschenberg worked with the younger Trisha Brown. Almost nine years after her death, Brown’s Trisha Brown Dance Company performs her silvery, fluid “Set and Reset” (1983), to a memorable score by Laurie Anderson, paired with Cunningham’s “Travelogue” (1977), for which Rauschenberg created a performance arena that included bicycle wheels, flags, and tin cans—everything but the kitchen sink.—Marina Harss (BAM; Feb. 26-28.)

In much the same way that youngsters might dig their parents’ Beatles records, the pianist and composer Amy Williams had a formative relationship with the music of the minimalist composer Morton Feldman. Her father, Jan, a percussionist who taught alongside Feldman at the University of Buffalo, also participated in the premières of several of Feldman’s major works, giving Williams a head start in understanding the logic of his elongated tones and weighty silences, which are now the signatures of compositions such as “For Philip Guston” and “Rothko Chapel.” In a nod to Feldman during the year of his centenary, Williams performs his sprawling, evergreen piano piece “Triadic Memories”; its repetitions and ghost harmonics were once described by Feldman as the “biggest butterfly in captivity.”—K. Leander Williams (Miller Theatre; March 3.)

In 1979, the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld affixed strips of white fabric across the dotted traffic lines of a street in Santiago, turning legible marks into symbols with more open-ended meanings—plus signs or perhaps crosses—and reclaiming the landscape from the regime of Augusto Pinochet. It was the first of many actions Rosenfeld would take, and art works she would make, that disturbed the order of public space as a way of protesting Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. Alongside her more public, often collaborative, projects, she also made collage films whose emotional impact is built on unexpected juxtapositions—another kind of disruption. “Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces” gathers an eye-opening range of material for her first retrospective in the U.S.—Jillian Steinhauer (Wallach Art Gallery; through March 15.)

The rapper turned pop star Lizzo felt like a lodestar of the twenty-tens Zeitgeist. She transitioned from new-age sensation to feel-good success story: a lyricist with pipes, a twerking flautist, and a high-energy sex- and body-positive entertainer, whose skills and charisma culminated in the 2017 mega-hit “Truth Hurts.” Her 2019 album, “Cuz I Love You,” remains a time capsule of all that felt distinctive about Lizzo as an artist—the duality of her songcraft, its sonic malleability, and her effervescence as a performer. She has since faced allegations of misconduct from former dancers, but her comeback mixtape, “My Face Hurts from Smiling,” which dropped last June, is a reminder of an enduring dexterity.—Sheldon Pearce (Blue Note; Feb. 27-28, March 1.)

The playwright and director Ngozi Anyanwu’s “The Monsters,” for Manhattan Theatre Club, is a tender two-hander about estranged half siblings. It’s also an unusual athletic performance, which opens with Big (Okieriete Onaodowan), a mixed-martial-arts champion, pummelling an invisible nemesis, like Jacob subduing the Angel. His muscled arms slam the mat, and the audience can smell the sweat. The play isn’t subtle; the final sequence leans hard on truisms about addiction and trauma, which are affecting but overly explicit. But both Onaodowan and the terrific Aigner Mizzelle, as Big’s messy, openhearted younger sister, Lil, are utterly electric and connected. In the most thrilling, soul-filling sequence, Big trains Lil, and then they become their younger selves, play-wrestling with the joy that only children get to feel before the world’s judgments set in.—Emily Nussbaum (City Center Stage II; through March 22.)

Raymond Depardon, who launched his career as a teen-aged photographer in the nineteen-fifties, turned to filmmaking in the seventies and became one of the era’s most artistically distinctive and politically probing documentarians. A retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center (through March 1) includes a remarkable set of films made behind the scenes of the French judicial system. In “Caught in the Acts” (1994), Depardon spotlights a peculiar practice: prosecutors interrogating suspects without a defense lawyer present. Keeping the camera still in a courthouse’s small, windowless chambers, Depardon depicts these face-to-face showdowns as litanies of misery, as the officials make suspects confront the grim circumstances leading to their arrests. With radical austerity, he evokes the burden of hard lives and the crushing force of governmental power.—Richard Brody

Taran Dugal ventures into strange cocktail territory.

Think back, if you can, to your initial foray into cocktails—the revelation in discovering the foaminess of egg whites or, perhaps, the horror of your first dirty Martini. Oddball, a new bar in Alphabet City aimed at “bringing out-there flavors down to earth,” intends to deliver similar thrills to even the most experienced barflies. On a recent icy weekend, two first-timers passed under the scarlet orb affixed above the fogged-up glass entrance, and sat beneath a vintage Japanese jazz poster, as the flickering of their table candle cast shadows on the wall. Soothing R. & B. played as they eyed the menu and its three categories (Easygoing, Energetic, and Explorative). Unwilling to appear faint of heart—“Easygoing is for chumps!”—they opted to start in the middle, with the Lightspeed Drifter, a blueberry-and-whey-based Daiquiri featuring a strong horseradish taste, which took more than a few sips to get accustomed to. Luckily, the Far Side, with its refreshing notes of cilantro, dill, pineapple, and tomatillo, allowed the duo to regroup, taking solace in what tasted like a tropical salsa. There’s no rest for the thirsty, however—the waiter returned, and the guests, after some brief recon, ventured into the Explorative section. The Infinite Loop (“a Vesper Martini goes on vacation,” as the menu put it) was met with grimaces galore, its sharp, dry mix of guava and brandy far too harsh for their taste buds. The explorers, in over their heads, ran for cover to an old reliable, and arrived at the house’s whiskey sour: a sweet, frothy delicacy topped with exquisitely marbled foam. Tongues tested, palates finally pleased, the adventurers decided that this was as good a place to stop as any. When it comes to cocktails, they realized, the well-trodden path trumps the road less travelled.

Our writers on their current obsessions.

This week, I’m still thinking about Braden (Clavicular) Peters and the “looksmaxxers,” a subculture of young men obsessed with extreme physical self-improvement and baroque slang who seem to have achieved a new level of public awareness in recent weeks. The looksmaxxers are surely the subject for which several generations of gender-studies Ph.D.s have been training; I can only hope, given the embattled state of the academic humanities, that the experts are here for us when we need them most.

This week, I loved “Anno’s Counting Book.” My mother-in-law was a longtime preschool teacher, and she gives my almost three-year-old son unexpected and excellent books. Recently, she found a thrift-store copy of this wordless 1977 picture book by the Japanese illustrator Mitsumasa Anno. I am not someone who’s inclined to gas up math, but these drawings make the subject feel somehow . . . intuitive, beautiful, and fun?

This week, I cringed at “The Pitt.” I won’t quit “The Pitt,” no matter how clunkingly didactic or saccharine it gets. I’m just going to sit back and let lines like “Most people who think they have a penicillin allergy actually don’t” wash over me. I do, however, wish that the show would stop insisting there is some kind of interesting chemistry between Noah Wyle and the new attending played by Sepideh Moafi; there is not.

This week, I’m consuming waffles. I am generally skeptical of single-use kitchen gadgets, but I recently made an exception for a waffle-maker and won’t look back. I get neurotic making pancakes but waffles are gratifyingly foolproof. Invite people over, promise them waffles. Who says no to waffles?

Next week, I’m looking forward to Playreaders. A few months back, a friend who lives in my neighborhood and is a genius started a semi-regular gathering called Playreaders. It’s like a book club, but for reading plays. There is no homework (preparation is actively discouraged); we just eat dinner, drink some wine, read the play aloud, then talk about what we’ve read. For the next installment, we’re doing “Dance Nation,” by Clare Barron.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet: