ArtsJournal Classic (Text)

Ah HAH: “It was to identify song features that could be predictive of mega-hits. Researchers found that top-ranked songs tended to have more difference from past hits than lower-ranked songs, defying the trope that popular songs are just copies of other popular songs.”

Jacques d’Amboise told the story – with mime – at an opening gala for this summer’s Dance on Camera festival at Lincoln Center, and filmmaker Maia Wechsler recorded it for the rest of us. (video)

“The National Choreographers Initiative in Irvine seek[s] to emphasize the creative process and take the pressure off producing a finished, polished product. The three-week summertime workshop — now celebrating its 15th year — will culminate with a public performance July 28 … Unlike formal, completed dance productions, the show will start with four choreographers introducing […]

Here is some real-world data for dancers, choreographers, costumers, stage managers, costumers, etc. It’s not scientific. Dance Magazine asked readers to share what they earned (anonymously, of course) and more than 200 readers responded.

“You’d think the Paris Opéra Ballet would be in damage-control mode after a leaked dancers’ survey, in April, brought up worrying reports of harassment and mismanagement. But instead of addressing these issues internally, the French company is suing one of its own dancers in order to strip him of his union representative status and subsequently […]

“The whole process of constructing life narratives is biased in ways that almost guarantee that people won’t recognize the role of chance events adequately. We remember the moments or months of perseverance that contributed to our triumphs, but forget, or even fail to notice, when Lady Fortune smiles on us: a great teacher, a chance […]

The anonymous activists sent themselves zero Ether on the platform and embedded the text of Yue’s open letter in the transaction’s metadata. Transactions on blockchain are irreversible, so the information cannot be altered. Furthermore, transactions generate distributed copies of themselves within the network, which ensured that Yue’s letter would be permanently documented in the public domain and […]

Jarrod Haar, a human resources professor at Auckland University of Technology, said employees reported a 24 percent improvement in work-life balance, and came back to work energized after their days off. “Supervisors said staff were more creative, their attendance was better, they were on time, and they didn’t leave early or take long breaks,” Mr. […]

Here are three lessons from the rise of Netflix that apply to every company: Big data is powerful, but big data plus big ideas is transformational. Netflix is a technology juggernaut whose analytics, algorithms, and digital-streaming innovations have changed how customers watch movies and TV shows. But this technology has always been in service of a unique point […]

Was the past good or bad? Are we on the right track or the wrong one? Is life getting better or worse? These questions are easy to ask—pollsters and politicians love asking them—but surprisingly hard to answer.

“The poll of 600 drama, music and dance students found that more than half (51%) had experienced inappropriate behaviour, sexual harassment or bullying. Nearly two thirds (73%) of those who experienced some sort of incident identified as female. … When asked if they had reported their concerns, 57% who had experienced inappropriate behaviour did not […]

Using as examples the recent reunion – enthusiastically captured and craftily edited by CNN – of a Salvadoran refugee woman with the six-year-old daughter ICE separated from her as well as the cute-turned-creepy-turned-cruel viral tale known as #PlaneBae, Megan Garber considers “how easily the desire for a happy ending can insinuate itself on the facts […]

The vote on Wednesday was 297-114. It was a boost to arts advocates, who argued that such funding was just a tiny fraction of the federal budget yet offered any array of benefits to local communities. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) proposed the funding cut via an amendment to a larger government funding bill, arguing that the purpose was […]

“Organizations of all sizes have been caught off guard by the #MeToo movement. But small organizations can be at an extra disadvantage because they often lack the resources of larger groups. When a sexual harassment accusation gets made at a smaller company, it can become a community-wide problem. When something happens in your neighborhood, it […]

Many of them, after having been exposed to the high-tech side of what a well-equipped institution has to offer, change direction to embrace a more hands-on, traditional way of making and ultimately learning. These students, after graduating, end up being builders of things — and not very interested in creating objects without having some physical […]

Things have really, deeply changed: “Warming towards Abba reflects a critical embrace of pop culture over the last decade. ‘Poptimism’ has meant that art that was once dismissed for being lightweight, feminine and glittery is now subject to critical close-readings that combine academia with fannish enthusiasm.”

It’s her mother’s maiden name, you guys, it doesn’t mean anything: “Manafort, the movie’s writer and director, used a pseudonym in connection with the project: Jess Bond.”

“King’s enjoyed numerous renaissances since Carrie put him on the map in 1973 — the era following Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation; the early ’90s one-two punch of Misery‘s Oscar win and Tommy Lee Wallace’s It miniseries; the two-year spell at the turn of the millennium when he dropped the final three Dark Tower […]

“Five years after being tapped to lead the newly relaunched Paramount Television banner, Amy Powell is out.” Multiple individuals had complained about things Powell reportedly said about black women on a conference call about the company’s TV adaptation of The First Wives’ Club, which features a largely African-American cast.

“The streaming giant has announced a partnership with SiriusXM that will see it create and launch a comedy-focused satellite radio channel, a move that signals the company’s interest in extending its programming foothold beyond its online video roots.” The channel’s name: Netflix Is a Joke.

Impressive change from 2012: “The contract includes a cost of living increase, Family Medical Leave Act language, processes that address air quality at outdoor concerts and scheduling language that will ‘help our musicians balance their multiple jobs so that it is more possible for them to be able to make a decent, living income.'”

Forty-eighth Street was once famous for stores that sold musical instruments. Those stores catered to musicians of every stripe, but the vibe was very rock and roll. The names that stand out for me are Manny’s and Sam Ash, but there were several others, packed together, one next to the other, each a world unto […]

Lyndon Terracini is staking much of the future and reputation of the national opera company on a digital revolution designed to immerse audiences and create an experience more akin to watching a movie than traditional opera. The glittering reptiles on the Joan Sutherland Theatre stage are part of the wholly digital production design for OA’s […]

Jenny Giering: “In a theological work, Scivias, she described an experience strikingly similar to my own: ‘When I was 42 years and 7 months old, Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast.’ Hildegard is best known, though, […]

The researchers report beetles who were serenaded by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings ate just as many aphids as those who dined in silence. But exposure to the rock music greatly depressed their appetites. Listening to AC/DC reduced by nearly half the number of aphids they consumed over a 16- to 18-hour period.

Jonathan Gold changed the dining scene in Los Angeles, and changed food criticism all over the world. He died soon after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “‘I can’t imagine the city without him. It just feels wrong. I feel like we won’t have our guide, we won’t have the soul,’ said filmmaker Laura Gabbert, who […]

Her own anonymous grant program is called Anonymous Was a Woman, in reference to a line in Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” to pay tribute to female artists in history who signed their paintings “Anonymous” so that their work would be taken seriously. The donor behind the prize wanted to remain unknown. But […]

“In the decades following her death [in 1963], Patsy’s people were ascendant: Winchester’s white laborers and cleaners, people who proudly traced their family land to the [impoverished] hilly folds of the surrounding valley, became homeowners, businesspeople, parents to first-generation college students, even mayor. And through it all, Patsy was their North Star, their proof that […]

“Russian theater and film director Kirill Serebrennikov called the embezzlement allegations against him and his colleagues ‘absurd’ as a Moscow court ordered him to remain under house arrest until August 22.” This is the fourth time his pretrial detention has been extended. “Initially treated as a witness in an investigation targeting Moscow’s Gogol Center theater, […]

How he’s spent the money: “Paying off my student loans—going to grad school in New York City is a doozy! My other big thing was getting my dancers health care. And just making sure my mother had grocery money after my father died.” Biggest mistake: “I had no knowledge of how to invest, or deal with the tax […]

Howard Sherman: “While I don’t look forward to watching plays while holding up my mobile phone (ringer off, of course) for two hours, technology is beginning to offer ways for companies to create more immersive worlds without the construction of physical scenery. As work increasingly bursts out beyond prosceniums, augmented reality may offer possibilities to […]

“Lee’s work is about wrongness: about being the wrong kind of man, woman, Asian; about saying the wrong thing; about getting other people wrong. Her characters are ill at ease in their bodies and in the world and, sometimes, in the very play they’re starring in. … With each production, she begins by asking herself, […]

These shows are important – but we can’t be uncritical of them. When an all-new Broadway version of West Side Story was recently announced that Ivo van Hove will direct with new choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, its lyricist Stephen Sondheim said: “What keeps theatre alive over time is reinterpretation, and when that reinterpretation […]

Producer Richard Jordan, citing Bartlett Sher’s current Lincoln Center Theater production of My Fair Lady: “While critics enthused over Sher’s new ending, referencing it back to the issues of today, watching it play before a regular audience you felt a sense that the musical no longer gave them a pay-off. Instead, it felt as though […]

The genre known as Karagyoz (meaning “black eyes,” after the trickster character at the center of the shadow plays) developed in the 14th century in the Ottoman Empire and became especially popular in Armenia in the 1700s. Now a troupe called Ayrogi is reviving the traditional art, often traveling through Armenia on horseback to perform […]

Whoa: “The podcast includes a raft of interviews, including one with the night watchman who let in the thieves and the first public interview with a second museum guard who was on duty that night.”

“In May the Morgan Art Foundation (MAF), Indiana’s representative since the 1990s and the owner of the artist’s famous Love trademark, filed a lawsuit in New York against the artist’s long-time assistant, Jamie Thomas, and an art publisher, Michael McKenzie. MAF says the pair exploited Indiana towards the end of his life, producing dubious works […]

“The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis … has created an Indigenous Public Art Selection Committee, which will be charged with commissioning a Native artist to do a public artwork for the museum’s sculpture garden. … The museum’s release said the committee was formed in response to the controversy surrounding Sam Durant’s Scaffold (2012),” which was […]

“It’s a well-known fact that Kahlo would revise her year of birth (1907, according to her birth certificate), to align it with the eruption of the Revolution in 1910; what we don’t tend to appreciate is the way in which she consciously drew on Mexico’s religious and cultural traditions to shape her political and self-expression. […]

Noah Charney: “When the collections are dispersed, the art remains extant, but the story told by the collection dissipate. It is rather like an archaeological site — objects found within, undisturbed, tell a story based on their context. The same objects can tell their own, individual stories, but the tale of how they were gathered […]

Writing consists of basically two things: idea and execution. You come up with an idea, and you figure out how to execute it in terms of style, setting, and genre. Writers are understandably protective of our ideas, but for better or worse the law only really protects execution. Unless someone is directly stealing your exact […]

For decades, self-publishing was derided as an embarrassing sign that an author couldn’t cut it in the “real” publishing industry—“the literary world’s version of masturbation,” as Salon once put it. And Amazon, the world’s biggest e-commerce site, with its bookstore-beating prices, was painted as an enemy to authors. But now its self-publishing service, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), has […]

“Prizes, at least the biggest ones, help sell books. Many of them were created for just that purpose and the prize-givers are not shy about saying so, and why should they be? What’s the point of publishing great books if you can’t find an audience for them? Authors and editors all hope that a nomination […]

“The poem ‘If’, which was written around 1895, had been painted on the wall of the university’s newly refurbished students’ union. But students [who argue that Kipling ‘dehumanised people of colour’] painted over the verses, replacing them with the 1978 poem ‘Still I Rise’ by the US poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.”

The academy is paralysed by the scandal, which was followed by a slew of resignations and expulsions. Six of The Eighteen have withdrawn from any part in its deliberations; another two were compelled to do so. The statutes say that 12 members must be present to elect any new ones, so with only 10, no important […]