While some of these 10 warriors have been exhibited elsewhere, the institute is enhancing the experience with augmented reality technology to digitally recreate weapons and other objects that were originally held by the statues. The original artifacts crumbled and vanished as earthen walls and roof timbers collapsed during the warriors’ long occupancy of three underground pits.
Archives for September 2017
The Making Of Ta-Nehisi Coates
At the age of 41 (he turns 42 on Saturday), Mr. Coates has become one of the most influential black intellectuals of his generation, joining predecessors including Ms. Morrison, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Dr. Cornel West. “He’s a rock star,” said Dr. Nell Irvin Painter, professor emeritus of American history at Princeton University, adding that Mr. Coates is asking questions that even “other historians have not been asking.”
Film Incentives Gone Wild: Canary Islands Have Become Most Lucrative Place To Shoot Movies
The territory now ranks among the most financially attractive locations for shooting movies. The benefits extend to feature films, documentaries, animation projects and TV series. To qualify, a film’s minimum spend should be 1 million euros, or about $1.2 million, and the minimum budget must be 2 million euros, or approximately $2.3 million.
A Local Theatre That Acts Globally
Identifying La MaMa as a New York theatre is accurate in the geographical sense only. It might be more apt to think of it as the international theatre of the East Village, in accordance with Ellen Stewart’s belief that the local is global and the global local.
The Museum Made For The Age Of Instagram: Ice Cream!
“More than 241,000 people follow its page, and countless more have posted their own photos from within the space. (Instagram doesn’t show how many photos have been posted at a particular geotag, but there are over 66,000 images with the #museumoficecream hashtag.) All those grams have made the Museum of Ice Cream a coveted place to be: In New York, the $18 tickets to visit—300,000 in total—sold within five days of opening. At its San Francisco location, which opened this month, single tickets went up to $38. The entire six-month run sold out in less than 90 minutes.”
What, Exactly Is Temperature? (Maybe Not What You Think)
“Since temperature is really a statistical quantity, you can’t have a temperature of a single particle. So, the next time someone talks about the temperature of a single electron—or worse, the temperature of a photon—maybe you should just walk away.”
With The Trump Presidency, Images Have Taken Public Art To New Levels
“The images spread as they do because, taken together, they can seem to reveal hidden truths about a president who remains, for all his spotlighting and swaggering, a cipher. This is an era, after all, in which the American public, primed with Making a Murderer and American Crime Story and NCIS, embraces forensic analysis as a form of entertainment. In that context, each new image of the president, and each image of the people and things surrounding him, takes on not only the quality of art—provocative, illustrative, asking to be analyzed—but also the quality of a mystery.”
Experts: Leonardo Might Have Drawn Nude Mona Lisa
Scientists in Paris have been looking into a charcoal drawing of a woman, which was until now believed to have been drawn by Leonardo’s students. The drawing, titled Joconde Nue, shows a topless woman who bears a striking resemblance to the Mona Lisa that hangs at the Louvre museum in central Paris. Experts at the same museum have concluded, after weeks of tests, that the charcoal drawing was “at least in part” actually done by Leonardo himself.
A New E-Book Format Designed To Be Read In Web Browser
The platform, designed by the New York studio HAWRAF, “lets users play around with font, text size, line spacing, and background color.” (There’s also a text-to-speech function and a mode with a typeface specially for people with dyslexia.) “When you click on the footnotes, located in tiny typography to the right of the main text, they overtake the main text so you can get a closer look. … A ‘focus mode’ blacks out most of the browser, keeping your wandering eyes from getting distracted.”
This Is What Theatre That Has Become Gentrified Looks Like
“The London-based company has become synonymous with a particular form of immersive theatre, where you are less of an audience member and more of a participant. Punchdrunk takes over a large building, such as an old office block, turns it into a meticulously decorated, multiroom stage set and sends theatregoers wandering through.”
Pompeii To Build Contemporary Art Collection
“Pompeii is inviting artists to create sculptural works incorporating archaeological fragments from the ancient Roman site near Naples, which its director-general Massimo Osanna says will show that it is still ‘a place of the contemporary’. Osanna hopes to build a permanent collection of new works and open a space to display them.”
Our Music Is Incredibly Diverse. But With Globalization How To Keep It From Becoming Generic?
“The engagement with music is one of the most universal activities of humans that does not have a direct link to our survival as a species. Nobody ever died from music depravation, yet we work and worship to music, dance and court to music, make love and relax to music, rejoice and grieve with music. With the developments in migration, travel and technology over the past 70 years (which in retrospect we will probably regard as the most significant period of musical change of the past two millennia), two important things have happened.”
The Guy Who Auditions Dancers For Cirque Du Soleil Explains What He Looks For
Rick Tjia: “Little do the dancers know how many tens of thousands of dancers I have seen and auditioned to get to this moment in time, little do they know the complexities and the enormous number of hours needed to cast one show, much less 22 at the same time – all the time – and counting. Little do they know how much audition ‘success’ is out of their control and how much of it actually is. But they wouldn’t know, and I guess I wouldn’t expect them to. During this wait time the question going through the dancers’ minds is, what is the secret? … There is no mystery, there is no secret.”
How A Playwright Sparked A Critic’s Memories Of Her Own Late Father
“Theater is where I go to confront the hard stuff; to have my heart shredded there is O.K.” Laura Collins-Hughes writes of her recent encounters with Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday and Eurydice and how they helped her with her father’s decline and death from Parkinson’s disease.
What Carey Perloff Achieved In Her 25 Years Leading American Conservatory Theater (A Miracle, Basically)
“Her ability to make a go of ACT in the wake of dual disasters – the artistically uncompromising [founder Bill] Ball’s financial mismanagement and 1989’s Loma Prieta earthquake, which partially collapsed and temporarily shuttered the palatial Geary Theater – looks downright miraculous even to her. … The story of those early years, particularly a riotous first season that included a picket by the Catholic Church and exercised critics and season subscribers alike, is now theatre lore.” Perloff talks to Richard Avila about how she did it and what she learned over the years, especially about being a woman running a major institution.
Is ‘Mother!’ Insane Enough To Be An Opera? Its Director Is Considering It
“In a new Reddit AMA with Darren Aronofsky, the director was asked by a commenter named chickenmagic (of course) if he considered staging his new movie as a play, to which he responded, ‘johan johansson and i are thinking about turning it into an opera.'” (Jóhannsson composed the score for the film.) This could make sense – indeed (as some have observed), it could make more sense than the movie does.
Marcel Proust Had Sock-Puppets Plant Good Reviews Of His Work
“The French writer Marcel Proust paid for glowing reviews of the first volume of his Remembrance of Things Past to be put into newspapers, letters by the great author reveal. The novelist wrote the notices himself and sent them to be typed up by his publisher ‘so there is no trace of my handwriting’ to distance himself ‘absolutely from the money that will change hands’.”
California School Board Resists Pressure, Declines To Ban Transgender Book From Kindergarten
“A Rocklin school board voted unanimously late Monday night to retain the policies that allowed a book about a transgender child to be read in kindergarten, but adopted a provision to forewarn parents of potentially controversial subject matter. The vote followed months of controversy that erupted over the book” – which was brought in by a transgender child – “being read at a Rocklin charter school’s story time.”
To Close Deficits, Met Opera Resorts To Staff Buyouts
“The Metropolitan Opera, which has continued to struggle at the box office and face what it calls ‘economic challenges,’ has offered voluntary buyouts to 21 of its 243 administrative employees.”
What Lyric Opera Of Chicago And The Joffrey Ballet Are Getting Out Of Their New Partnership
Chris Jones writes that the deal “is, at its core, an acknowledgment that it is no longer viable for even a world-class institution like the Lyric to sustain, maintain, operate and program a huge opera house entirely with productions of the repertory for which it was built.” But there’s more to it than that, Jones finds, and the benefits aren’t only about saving money.
When A Starchitect Designs A Major Project He Doesn’t Want You To Notice
David Chipperfield is doing a gut renovation of Berlin’s New National Gallery – designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – to, as a reporter puts it, “fix problems caused by age, as well as some that have plagued it since birth. … [He wants it] to perform as well as the most modern, assiduously climate-controlled and carefully lit museum – without any visitor noticing that he was ever there.”
The Hidden Museum: Tate St. Ives Doubles Its Space, But Where The Neighbors Can’t See
“In a deft feat of engineering, an almost 600-sq-metre space has been excavated into the hillside, chiselled 15 metres down into the granite bedrock, providing a vast light-flooded chamber for temporary exhibitions that the gallery has sorely needed for years.” Why take all that trouble? Because the residents of the tiny Cornwall town where the gallery is located absolutely hated the original expansion plan.
The Most Popular Theatre In Glasgow Serves Meat Pies And Beer (And No, It’s Not Playing ‘Sweeney Todd’)
“Scarcely past midday on a Monday lunchtime, a full 45 minutes before curtain up, the queue for the box office is already snaking on to the road. Inside Òran Mór, a spacious pub-cum-performance venue in Glasgow’s West End, the line of ticket holders is even longer. They are here for A Play, a Pie and a Pint, a lunchtime series launched by David MacLennan in 2004 and not so much a success as a phenomenon.”
Vermont Gets A New Professional Ballet Company
Ballet Vermont grew out of the Farm to Ballet project (agriculture-themed dance on local farms) that got some media attention two summers ago; artistic director Chatch Pregger now plans to make the endeavor more firmly established and permanent. Yet there are no plans for a home base: Ballet Vermont will continue to perform around the state, often outdoors.
Even Though He’s Stepping Down As Its Boss, Julio Bocca Wants Uruguay’s National Ballet To Be A World-Beater
The Ballet Nacional Sodre in Montevideo has been making strides and leaps (ahem) since the former international star, a native of neighboring Argentina, became director of the company in 2010. The announcement that he’s resigning as director made news in South America last month, but he’s not actually leaving the company: he’ll focus solely on training its dancers.