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Dance
Dear Good Morning America: Ballet Is For Boys
When host Lara Spencer of Good Morning America decided to go after six-year-old Prince George for his studies, she made especial fun of his ballet classes. Her apology Instagram post (after the predictable outcry) didn’t go well either. “The dancer Barton Cowperthwaite said in a comment: ‘No one wants to see a hiking picture from deep in your photo library. We want to see you make an apology, on air, for publicly dragging a child and an entire art form through the mud.'” (This rather ugly episode has spawned a hashtag: #ballet4boys) – The New York Times
Are We Reaching The Point Where Dancers Need Big Social Media Followings Just To Get Hired?
“New York City-based choreographer and director Jennifer Weber once worked on a project with a strict social media policy: ”Hire no one with less than 10K, period’ — and that was a few years ago,’ she says. ‘Ten thousand is a very small number now, especially on Instagram.’ … It’s unsurprising that profit-driven dance enterprises lead the pack when it comes to leveraging artists’ exposure; policies at nonprofit dance organizations are generally less defined or even in place. (Multiple major ballet companies declined to speak with us on the record for this story.)” – Dance Magazine
Don’t Call It Contemporary Dance On Ice
The Montreal-based touring company Le Patin Libre is “not interested in putting contemporary dance on ice, but in doing with skating what 20th-century modern art movements have done with other mediums, from dance to painting to sculpture. They are stripping away story and representation to leave the medium itself on full display.” Jenn Edwards, a former competitive figure skater and contemporary dancer who’s been a member of Le Patin Libre since April 2018, offers an inside view of the company’s work. – Dance International
Can Dance Be Meaningful For People Without Sight?
“The intangible exchange of energy between moving and witnessing bodies in real time is what makes the art form so impactful. It’s a beautiful and grandiose idea that I imagine resonates with many dance artists, but, in creating Translations, that belief was truly put to the test. If you take the visual away from dance, what is left? What are we performing when we aren’t being watched? What do we miss and what is revealed?” – Dance International
Going Through The Archives With Bill T. Jones
Reporter Michael Cooper joins the choreographer as he examines photos from the history of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and tells stories of the time Robert Mapplethorpe photographed the diminutive Zane carrying the very large Jones on his shoulder, why he had to change the title of one of his most famous works from the original Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin Featuring 52 Handsome Nudes, and the evening he told an Italian audience, “Tonight, I am the Pope” and got denounced by the Vatican the next day. – The New York Times
Ideas
We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves – And That’s Determined By Our Age
There’s a lot of research now that shows that in the teenage years we develop skills from what’s called autobiographical reasoning—which is the ability to derive personal meaning from your past—and that’s really the key to narrative identity. When you start doing that in your teenage years, then that kind of opens up a Pandora’s box that says “okay now you can actually create a story for your life that makes meaning about who you were and where you’re going. – Nautilus
We’re Learning How Emotional Intelligence Drives The Brain
“With the help of neuroscientific and behavioural research, we are beginning to appreciate how the ancestral mammal brain is alive and well inside our higher neocortical systems. Unlike the computational approach to mind, the affective turn is deeply rooted in what we know about the brain as a biological reality. In the first decade of the new millennium, affective (or emotional) studies began to trickle into disciplines such as ethology (the study of animal behaviour).” – Aeon
Technology’s Impact On Friendships
The very language of friendship, for instance, is changing right before our eyes. Facebook has convinced us that “friend” can be a verb, often deployed in the imperative mood (“Friend me on…”). Apps have elevated the number of friends above the quality of friendship, displaying the tallies for onlookers to admire, one’s (envious) friends especially. As more than one observer has noted, “Friends used to be counted on; now they are counted up.” – Hedgehog Review
The Anthropologists Who Thought They Could End Racism, Sexism
Franz Boas concluded that “there is not one human culture but many, and he started referring to ‘cultures,’ in the plural. He was engaged in ethnography, and he believed that the job of the ethnographer was to disappear, in effect, into the culture of the people being studied, to understand from the inside what it means to be male or female, to give or receive a gift, to bury one’s dead.” – The New Yorker
Meritocracy Is Making Us All — Even The Rich — Miserable
“Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win. But what, exactly, have the rich won? Even meritocracy’s beneficiaries now suffer on account of its demands. It ensnares the rich just as surely as it excludes the rest, as those who manage to claw their way to the top must work with crushing intensity, ruthlessly exploiting their expensive education in order to extract a return.” – The Atlantic
Issues
The British Library’s Team Of Educators Are Told To Reapply For Fewer – But More Full-Time – New Jobs
What’s going on in Britain? The claim: This is to provide more full-time jobs! But, like National Gallery educators who just experienced something similar and won their court case, the freelancers are fighting back. One Member of Parliament about the NG case, which cost the institution at least £64,000: “This is money … which could have been used to provide full rights and a decent wage for the gallery’s workers which has instead been wasted defending illegal and indefensible employment practices.” – The Observer (UK)
David Koch Stamped His Name On Arts Organizations To ‘Send A Message’ To Liberals
New York’s major arts organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lincoln Center, are now intertwined with the Koch name for decades. Not that there wasn’t dissent – from the outside. On the inside: “He also sat on several cultural boards, hobnobbing there and at galas, with people of varying political persuasions. The longstanding decorum of such gatherings suggested that, like sedate family Thanksgiving dinners, politics was not generally a polite topic for conversation.” – The New York Times
Apple Hired Hundreds Of Contractors To Listen To Siri Recordings – And Has Now Laid Them Off
This is how the recently revealed program worked in Ireland: “Fixed-term workers in Cork were hired to listen to and ‘grade’ Siri recordings. …Staff then transcribed and ‘graded’ these recordings based on a number of different factors.” Now those contractors – around 300 people – have been laid off by Apple. – The Irish Examiner
CEO Exit Interview: A Model That No Longer Works
Arti Prashar: “We operate in a climate where we have been asked to grow and grow, following a business model that just doesn’t work for the arts – of seeking bigger turnover and bigger and wider audiences. We need a mixed economy – always have, always will. I hear of many venues and organisations running huge deficits – how are they going to plug those holes?” – Arts Professional
UK Study: Businesses Are Not Investing In The Arts
Fewer than one-third of businesses do. “Most individuals surveyed by the funder wanted more cultural opportunities where they live (55%), but businesses were less enthusiastic: they prioritised other spending, felt local arts groups were “not business minded enough”, and didn’t see how investing in arts and culture would benefit them.” – Arts Professional
Media
Being An Instagram Influencer Isn’t As Easy As It Used To Be
There’s a brand of young straight men who are “relying on the gifts of biology to flesh out a personality. It works for a while, because viewers like to be complimented and to watch an attractive, familiar talking head give them a pixelated smile on a lonely day.” But to be truly successful – i.e. to make money as an influencer – the young dudes need a lot more. That’s where agents come in. – Hyperallergic
Werner Herzog Is Now A Disney Character
Yes. It’s weird, and it’s true: He’s a “mentor” of some sort in a new Star Wars TV show. Luckily, the show looks super-grim. Still: What? – Vulture
Guess Who Just Got Into Podcasting?
The company that’s into just about everything else (well, not that company, the one that just announced a huge slate of movies and TV show for its new streaming service, but a different big company): Netflix. The company’s line about podcasts: “We are always looking for different ways to engage with people. … We’re talking a lot with our documentary team about what opportunities are out there.” (Shocker: True crime is doing well for Netflix.) – Variety
A Class War In Cornwall Gives Rise To A Dark Movie
Like a lot of coastal areas in a whole lot of countries, Cornwall isn’t all sweetness and ocean and light. There’s a “tension between tradition and progress,” and 20 years ago, a filmmaker wanted to write about a civil war – but now, it’s less civil war than “a question of who gets to belong in a county defined as much by its poverty as by tourists and second-home owners.” – The Guardian (UK)
Getting The Cultural Details Right
When it came to making the new Dora the Explorer movie, the production company worked hard to get things right for indigenous representation. Did it pay off? “Live-action still-pan-Latina Dora, who also speaks Quechua, was created with the help of a consultant to help ensure that the indigenous language and elements were accurate.” (And the lead actor recorded and re-recorded her lines in Quechua to make sure they were correct.) – The New York Times
Music
How The Rossini Renaissance Sparked From A Beachfront Festival To The World
The Rossini Festival in Pesaro, Italy, may never be a Salzburg, but it sure changed Rossini’s reputation. Most of the composer’s “operas were long dormant. For much of the 20th century, Rossini had become a one-opera composer, known solely for his comedy The Barber of Seville.” Then the Pesaro festival ramped up, pursuing “the scholarly rediscovery of even Rossini’s most obscure compositions, together with a dedication to teaching the magnificent fireworks of Rossinian style.” – The New York Times
Spotify Sued For Doing Things Like Putting Eminem Under An ‘Unknown Author’ Level
Yes, that little-known songwriter Eminem … er. But it’s actually far bigger than the potential millions or billions Eight Mile Style claims Spotify owes. “Eminem’s publisher is doing more than merely questioning Spotify’s compliance with copyright law. The lawsuit also makes a pretty bold argument regarding a new law’s constitutionality.” – The Hollywood Reporter
How “Sesame Street” Revolutionized Teaching Using Music
Since its inception in 1969, the public television show has redefined what it means to teach children through TV, with music as its resounding voice. Before “Sesame Street,” it wasn’t even clear that you could do that; once the series began, as a radical experiment that joined educational research and social idealism with the lunacy of puppets and the buoyancy of advertising jingles, it proved that kids are very receptive to a grammar lesson wrapped in a song. – The New York Times
Fascinating Rights Issue: After Dispute, Taylor Swift Says She’ll Re-Record Her Early Albums
The singer reached an impass with her recording label, which owns masters of the original songs. So Swift says she’ll simply re-record them all so she has control. Travis Andrews untangles the copyright implications. – Washington Post
The Access Conundrum At The Heart Of Popular Music Journalism
There are more and more outlets, but they pay writers less and less; there are huge quantities of new music pouring out, but large bodies of readers are going to click on pieces about artists they’ve already heard of; those famous artists have less and less time to make themselves available to journalists, whom they no longer need to reach their fans. Jeremy Gordon looks at this conundrum and seeks a way beyond it. – Columbia Journalism Review
People
What It’s Like For An Actress To Play A Character Who Shows Little Emotion
Anna Torv, who plays a serial-hunting psychologist on Mindhunter, explains: “When you’re an actress, you don’t even realize that the majority of the time you end up carrying the emotional weight of whatever scene you happen to be in. If someone’s going to cry, it’s going to be the girl. If someone is emotional and having a meltdown, it’s going to be the girl. … It’s just the expectation, so that’s what your instincts end up honing. All of a sudden to be in the skin of this woman who is just so dry … Anytime I showed a flicker of something, especially in the beginning, David would be like, ‘Please, pull it back.'” – The New York Times
Conductor Leo Driehuys, 87 – He Built The Modern Charlotte Symphony
“He was a very strong face for the Charlotte Symphony, but he worked his butt off behind the scenes with the power players in Charlotte. He got people to realize that this was something important to put money into because it was good for the city.” – Charlotte Observer
Saying He No Longer Feels Welcome As A Refugee, Ai Weiwei Is Leaving Germany For Britain
“[The dissident artist] said he initially chose Germany after leaving China as it had worked so hard for his freedom, but now felt that Germany had changed and he was once again an exile. ‘Today, due to the political conditions in China, I have again been forced out,’ he said, accusing Europe of pandering to Beijing on human rights so as to win more business.” – Thomson Reuters
Composer Killed By a Bear While Collecting Sounds In The Far North
“Julien really wanted to connect with something else. He really wanted to connect with nature, but not only with nature, but with the scientists and the people that actually are studying the world today.” – CBC
Battle Over Aretha Franklin’s Estate Is About To Get Even Messier (And She Is Probably To Blame For That)
“When Franklin died, at age 76, her family believed she had no will. Under Michigan law, that meant her estate would be divided equally among her sons. … But Franklin’s case is especially complex because determining how she wanted her assets distributed involves deciphering whether any of the three hand-scrawled documents found in her home three months ago — one of them under the couch cushions — should be embraced as her will.” – The New York Times
Theatre
Women At Edinburgh Fringe This Year Report That Sexual Harassment Was Common
The reports are to the BBC and other media, and to an actors’ union as well, but not to police. A lot of the harassment takes place on the Royal Mile as women flyer for their or their companies’ shows. And this is just disgusting on the reviewers’ part: “Another woman said many like her felt pressured into putting up with the unacceptable behaviour of show reviewers – who can make a great difference in getting more people to watch their performances.” – BBC
The Joys Of Traveling From Small Town To Small Town Performing Shakespeare For High Schoolers For $225 A Week (A Reminiscence)
“As a recent graduate with a BFA in acting, I could have been stuck lip-synching to Buddy Holly at an amusement park or being cast as a Native American in a problematic outdoor drama in Chillicothe, Ohio. But here I was doing something respectable; noble, even.” Jeremy D. Larson recalls the three-hour load-ins for 8 a.m. shows. The flu passed from cast member to cast member when no one could sit out a show. The drink and drugs. The streaking. And the time they made the mistake of uttering the title of The Scottish Play out loud – The Outline
Female Comics Are Taking On A Previously Off-Limits Topic: Abortion
“Given the trend over the last few years to use comedy as therapy, to use laughter to counterpoint pain, a complicated subject like abortion is no less likely to be a topic for comedy than mental health, toxic masculinity or sexual abuse. … [And] in the face of [a wave of restrictionist] legislation, comedy is being used as a weapon.” – BBC
Drag In Paris, Nouvelle Vs. Old-School
There are still transformiste cabarets, with what might be called female impersonators (talk about old-school) lip-synching impressions of famous chanteuses for an audience little different from the one at the Moulin Rouge. There’s also a booming new RuPaul’s Drag Race-influenced scene of drag queens (and kings) who invent their own characters — and, writes Laura Cappelle, “the joie de vivre at most events I attended was practically un-Parisian, with no neutral colors or existential gloom in sight.” – The New York Times
In A Parallel Universe, The Onion Imagines Football Programs Jealous Of Funding For Theatre
“I understand that this is a live-theater town. Parents move to this school district just to get their kids in front of a director to potentially get cast as Meg. The JV boys haven’t had new uniforms in 10 years and yet the school spends $250,000 on dance training for Newsies. Football has value—it’s an outlet for so many misunderstood kids, and to see it constantly pushed to the side like this is disheartening.” – The Onion
Visual
It’s Hard To Be On Your Phone Checking Your News Alerts When You’re At The Potter’s Wheel
Ceramics clubs with annual membership programs are popping up all over. Why? Aside from literally not being able to touch a phone while you’re working with clay, “pottery … challenges our post-industrial ideas about art, where we outsource all creativity and handiwork to a few specialists.” – The Guardian (UK)
Cruising For Art – The Bizarro World Of Cruise Ship Art Auctions
One gimmick in particular stood out: A pair of works presented turned away from the audience, and sold as one lot, without any idea of what they looked like. “They are going to be two of the most gorgeous works of art that anyone has ever seen,” Borotescu promised the audience. “Once you turn it around, if it’s something you don’t like, you don’t have to keep it.” – artnet
Anish Kapoor’s ‘Orbit’ — AKA Boris Johnson’s Giant Erector-Set/Sliding Board — Is Millions In Debt
The 376-foot sculpture was commissioned by Johnson, then London’s Mayor, for the 2012 Olympics, and he had hoped that it would become London’s answer to the Eiffel Tower (7 million annual visitors) or the Statue of Liberty (over 4 million). But Orbit never even cracked the 200,000-visitor mark — not even after it was bailed out by tycoon Lakshmi Mittal (which is why it’s now named ArcelorMittal Orbit) and Johnson had Carsten Höller add a sliding tube for which admission is now £17.50 ($21). (Maybe that’s why visitorship is down more than 20% from its peak.) Total debt on the contraption is now £13 million ($15.7 million). – Artnet
Inside India’s First-Ever Contemporary Sculpture Park
At the Madhavendra Palace, just outside Jaipur, “floral murals, elaborate arches, patterned columns, dark paneled doors, and stone-lined courtyards serve as maximal backdrops for sculptures — many of them site-specific — that simultaneously respond to the environment and introduce challenging new ideas into the space. Beauty and contemporary politics collide in room after room; visits to the palace become opulent treasure hunts.” – Artsy
Artists Take Over Power Station And Make Art That Generates Power
The contemporary arts centre E-Werk Luckenwalde will not only open exhibition galleries and studio spaces in a former brown coal power station 65km south of Berlin, it will also begin generating carbon-neutral electricity. Led by the artist Pablo Wendel and the curator Helen Turner, E-Werk Luckenwalde will power its own building with locally sourced biomass and sell the excess energy back to the grid to fund the whole enterprise. – The Art Newspaper
Words
Kicking The Sophomore Curse To The Curb, By Taking Eight Years To Publish A Second Novel
Téa Obreht took her time after The Tiger’s Wife struck the bestseller list and stayed for many, many months. She says, “It was appropriate to let the wrong books go and wait for the right one to come along.” – The New York Times
What Is The Legal Difference Between An ‘Audiobook Caption’ And, Well, A Book?
Audible – the Amazon-owned audiobook giant – is being sued by the big 5 publishers. Why? A new feature that automatically generates “captions” for its audiobooks. Captions that … well, one might be forgiven for thinking we already have “captions” for books, which are books. The argument: “Audible didn’t seek a license, doesn’t plan to compensate publishers and won’t allow them to decide which titles are made available as so-called distributed text. [The lawyer] also says Audible’s Immersion Reading feature, which requires a user to purchase both the audiobook and eBook, meets the goal of Captions without infringing publishers’ rights.” – Wired
Russian Literature And The Meaning Of Truth
“We usually assume that literature exists to depict life, but Russians often speak as if life exists to provide material for literature. Russians, of course, excel in ballet, chess, theater, and mathematics. They invented the periodic table and non-Euclidian geometry. Nevertheless, for Russians literature is in a class by itself. The very phrase “Russian literature” carries a sacramental aura.” – New Criterion
Comfort Reading: In Defense Of Returning To The Same Book Over And Over
Rebecca Jennings — who confesses to having read each of the Harry Potter books at least ten times and insists she’s “not advocating for laziness” — points to research on “repeated hedonic experiences” that explains why those repeated experiences are hedonic (that means pleasurable) and, in fact, good for you. – Vox
Fascinating To Contemplate What We Define As “World Literature” (We Read So Little Of It)
“World literature happens when Russian novels remake English literature; when a Turkish writer takes inspiration from a Colombian writer; when Japanese critics review translations of Lebanese poetry. It almost always involves re-interpretation and misunderstanding: a Spanish monk sent to suppress Aztec literature ended up disseminating it instead; subsequently, Aztec hymns envision a Christian God urging revolt against the Spaniards. World literature is also nothing new under the sun.” – Harvard Magazine