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DANCE
Bolshoi’s Controversial ‘Nureyev’ Leads Nominations For Russia’s Top Dance Awards
"Both the creators of the ballet and its performers have been nominated for the Benois de la Danse, nicknamed the ballet's Oscars, in four professional categories: Ilya Demutskiy for Best Composer, Yuri Possokhov for Best Choreographer, Kirill Serebrennikov for Best Stage Design, and dancer Vladislav Lantratov for Best Performance in the title role of the ballet Nureyev." Serebrennikov, whose recent film Summer will be in competition at Cannes next month under house arrest in a case many observers consider trumped-up, just had his detention extended into July. … [Read More...]
At New York City’s Public School For Dance
"'Justin,' yelled the ballet master Patrice Hemsworth. 'Move your arms. Good, good, good. Boys, you look beautiful. Go girls. Use your shoulders.' She watched silently for another few beats and then, as the recorded music stopped, yelled out: 'The feet were good but, the arms have to work with it. And you’re rushing like crazy.'" A reporter visits Ballet Tech, a city academy for middle- and high-schoolers founded by choreographer Eliot Feld. … [Read More...]
Two Bolshoi Ballet Stars Denied Visas To Dance In US
Olga Smirnova, one of the Bolshoi's biggest stars, and Jacopo Tissi, a La Scala Ballet alumnus who joined the Moscow company in 2016, were refused nonimmigrant worker visas to dance at a Youth America Grand Prix gala at Lincoln Center this week. … [Read More...]
These Monks Meditate By Dancing
"In the West, our idea of monastic ritual involves prayer and quiet reflection. But there are monasteries in Assam, in the far reaches of northeastern India, where prayer has always been, and continues to be, expressed through dance. The monks in these communities, or sattras, perform with and for each other, and for the deity. Sattriya, as this dance form is known, became one of the eight official classical dance forms of India only in 2000 - since then, its visibility has grown beyond the monastery walls." … [Read More...]
Robert Fairchild’s Blooming Post-New York City Ballet Career
"'I would rather try and fail than not try,' he says. He's applied that same philosophy to his career: Last fall, he decided to leave life as a ballet star behind to find out what possibilities might lie in musical theater, TV and film. In the course of our conversation, he repeats the same sentence over and over, like a mantra: 'You never know how far you're gonna go if you don't jump.' This is his jump." … [Read More...]
IDEAS
The Technological Take On Expressing Ourselves
"More and more of us now express our emotions through the devices and software we rely on in our everyday lives. E-mail, text messages, social media, video chat—each platform demands of us different expressions of ourselves. And in the near future, we will have a new range of technologies at our disposal—sensors, monitors, and software with the power to track, nudge, persuade, and coerce. What the clock did to time, technologists hope to do to emotion—regulate and regiment it, measure and monitor it. But taming the temperamental beast that is human emotion might prove a challenge that contemporary technology is unfit to take on." … [Read More...]
Why We Need A New Age Of Romanticism
In our new era of Enlightenment, we need Romanticism again. In his speech ‘Politics and Conscience’ (1984), the Czech dissident Václav Havel, discussing factories and smokestacks on the horizon, explained just why: ‘People thought they could explain and conquer nature – yet … they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.’ Havel was not against industry, he was just for labour relations and protection of the environment. The issues persist. … [Read More...]
Are These The Most Influential Philosophers In The Second Half Of The 20th Century?
One philosophy professor, Chen Bo of Peking University, conducted a survey along with Susan Haack of the University of Miami, at the behest of a Chinese publisher seeking important philosophical works for translation. … [Read More...]
The Next Arms Race: Artificial Intelligence (And It’s Already Started)
Artificial intelligence is a very powerful technology, and there is an arms race going on. Fast forward 20 years into the future and one of the players could have won the race. China is more likely to win than Russia is, although Russia has a lot going on. So, we could end up in a world that China may not formally control, but they effectively do because they rule the cyberworld. … [Read More...]
So… Blame Humanities For Today’s Bad Politics?
"The midcentury ideal — of literature as an aesthetically and philosophically complex activity, and of criticism as its engaged and admiring decoding — is gone. In its place stands the idea that our capacity to shape our protean selves is the capacity most worth exercising, the thing to be defended at all costs, and the good that a literary inclination best serves. Democratizing the canon did not have to mean abdicating authority over it, but this was how it played out." … [Read More...]
ISSUES
Ohio Arts Funding ED Steps Down In “Challenging” Climate
Cuyahoga Arts and Culture CEO and executive director Karen Gahl-Mills has resigned, effective June 7, according to a press release sent this morning, April 18. In a challenging atmosphere of funding cuts, the leader of one of the nation’s largest public funders of the arts became embattled on several fronts: first in an attempt to address racial inequity in grantmaking to individual artists, and subsequently by choosing to significantly reduce operating support to nonprofit organizations all at once, rather than gradually, in the hope of keeping grant amounts stable for a period of years despite a projected continual decline in cigarette tax revenue. … [Read More...]
‘Disney For A Despot’: How Saddam Hussein Turned The Ruins Of Babylon Into A Propaganda Vehicle
"For Saddam, the ruined city of Babylon had always held a special fascination. He ordered an ambitious reconstruction of the city's walls, costing millions of dollars at the height of the Iran-Iraq War. ... When archaeologists told him that ancient kings like Nebuchadnezzar had stamped their names on Babylon’s bricks, Saddam insisted that his own name be stamped on the modern bricks used in the reconstruction. ... In 1981, Babylon was where celebrations took place to commemorate the first anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Iran, with officials using the slogan, Nebuchadnasar al-ams Saddam Hussein al-yawm (yesterday Nebuchadnezzar, today Saddam Hussein)." … [Read More...]
How Can Arts Orgs’ Boards Help Combat Harassment? Talk To The Artists
Pia Catton: "For non-profits, misconduct can pose a real threat to funding. Foundations don't want molesters and predators operating with those they fund. Why should individual donors give to theatres turning a blind eye? If people act that way, a new level of board involvement in hiring and oversight is needed. One path to that is more direct input from artists about what's happening in the company and during the hiring process. ... There is no shortage of knowledge among artists and their peers about who's handsy, manipulative or abusive." … [Read More...]
How Airline Ticket Pricing Could Be Applied To The Arts
The secret of an effective pricing strategy is differentiation and airlines do this on a number of levels, harnessing as many of the factors that affect demand for flights as they can. … [Read More...]
The Legend Of Tulipmania In 17th-Century Holland Is Way Overblown
"Stories have been circulating for nearly 400 years about the apparently strange compulsion that led otherwise sensible merchants, nobles and artisan weavers to spend all they had and more on tulips, only to land in bankruptcy and ruin" - and pulling the entire country's economy down with them - "when the bottom fell out of the market in February 1637." Historian Anne Goldgar argues that this narrative is a moralistic Victorian invention and that primary documents from the late 1630s tell a somewhat different story. … [Read More...]
MEDIA
CBC Is Digitizing, Then Destroying Eight Decades Of Audio/Video Archives…
The Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation says the public broadcaster’s English service earlier this month began destroying acetate transcriptions, as well as audio and video recordings that span eight decades, after converting the master copies into a digital format. The foundation asked the CBC earlier this year for time to find a suitable space to archive and preserve the material, but says it was turned down. … [Read More...]
Facebook Wants To Make Its User Data Available To Social Scientists. Should It?…
In partnership with the non-profit Social Science Research Council, Facebook's social-science program will put out a call for university scientists to apply for grants to study the effects of social media on democracies and elections, potentially using proprietary Facebook data. The money will come from various foundations known to give to Democrats, Republicans, and journalists. … [Read More...]
Netflix Considers Buying A Movie Theatre Chain…
Although no cinema deal has materialized, the idea of Netflix buying a theater chain would mark a new phase in the company's rapid ascent to become one of the most powerful players in the entertainment industry. … [Read More...]
Russia Can’t Let Go Of Fight Over Movie About Tsar Nicholas II And The Ballerina He Loved…
"The reaction to Matilda represents, in microcosm, many of the contradictions of contemporary Russian culture. It should have been a flagship Russian movie, ... [and] originally had Oscar ambitions. Instead, the film's reception was derailed by religious purists. Part of Vladimir Putin's narrative is that he, too, is part of Russia's imperial legacy. Some think that he believes he has been divinely ordained to play his role. In some ways, this has been an embarrassment for the government: they part-funded the film. But they couldn't defend it, as the protesters were articulating one of the key tenets of Putin's presidency: Russia needs to return to the greatness of the tsars and to its Orthodox church roots." … [Read More...]
‘There Is No Going Back From Here’: Saudi Arabia’s First Female Filmmaker On The Kingdom’s Lifting Of The Ban On Cinemas…
"Five years ago, Haifaa al-Mansour made history with her moving and critically-acclaimed drama Wadjda, making her not just the first female Saudi filmmaker, but the first director to have shot a feature film in the kingdom. At the time, the idea of Wadjda being released on home soil was ludicrous: its cinema and theaters had long since been closed following the country's adoption of strict ultra-conservative Islam in the early '80s. On April 18, 2018, however, a new cinematic dawn broke over the kingdom with the opening of Saudi Arabia's first cinema since the movie theater ban was lifted in December ... [Al-Mansour] wrote to The Hollywood Reporter with her thoughts on the cinema opening, the "seismic shift" now sweeping over her home nation and why nothing will be the same again. … [Read More...]
MUSIC
Was The Orpheus Model Of Flattened Orchestra Hierarchy A Success?
Asked whether the principles of the Orpheus Process had any resonance these days, Stanford business professor Jeffrey Feffer replied in an email, “There are various movements that have tried to ‘democratize’ organizations. They mostly don’t work or don’t last. I am a huge believer in the advantages of the Orpheus approach, but it flies in the face of fundamental human psychology. So, no, although the Orpheus experience at one point got some press and attention, I would not say there is much diffusion, even in the music world where the MTT/SF Symphony model is much more prominent.” … [Read More...]
Collecting All The Music Written In Nazi Concentration Camps
"Jewish Italian musicologist and pianist Francesco Lotoro has devoted his life to unearthing thousands of songs and scores written during the Holocaust. ... Lotoro has catalogued symphonies, operas, scores and songs written on everything from coal sacks to toilet paper and by anyone who composed it in the captivity of a concentration camp: Jews, gypsies, prisoners-of-war. He has collected more than 8,000 pieces of music, with the goal of both preserving them for posterity and repairing a 'gap' in music history, a time when innumerable composers were murdered in the Holocaust." … [Read More...]
Solresol, The 19th-Century Invented Language Based On Music
"Jean-François Sudre, a music teacher in 19th-century France, ... [had a] vision of a universal language [that] transcended linguistic boundaries. From written and spoken word to melody, gesture, number, and even color, there are few ways that one can't express Solresol, the language that Sudre spent more than three decades developing. But after his death in 1862, it was largely forgotten. Fittingly, the global connections made possible by the digital age have forged a 21st-century life for Solresol." … [Read More...]
Classical Music’s Insecurity Problem
It’s sad but true that many people denigrate and distrust their own reactions to classical music out of fear that they don’t “know enough,” and that other, more sophisticated folks know more. When people leave the movie theater they rarely hesitate to give their opinion of the movie, and it never occurs to them that they don’t have a right to that opinion. And yet after most classical music concerts you can swing your program around from any spot in the lobby and hit a dozen perfectly capable and intelligent people issuing apologetic disclaimers: “Boy, I really loved that — but I’m no expert” or “It sounded pretty awful to me, but I don’t really know anything, so I guess I just didn’t get it.” … [Read More...]
Philosophically, Music Of Our Time Has Lost Its Way
"Few people play instruments, and music at home emerges from digital machines, controlled by buttons that require no musical culture to be pressed. For many people, the young especially, music is a form of solitary enjoyment, to be absorbed without judgment and stored without effort in the brain. The circumstances of music-making have therefore changed radically, and this is reflected not only in the banal melodic and harmonic content of popular music, but also in the radical avoidance of melody and harmony in the ‘modern classical’ repertoire. Released from its old institutional and social foundations our music has either floated into the modernist stratosphere, where only ideas can breathe, or remained attached to the earth by the repetitious mechanisms of pop." … [Read More...]
