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DANCE
How Science Is Building Better Dancers
The Royal Ballet is rich in tradition, but the company’s 97 dancers are now supported by a 17-strong team of sports science and healthcare experts. “Our facilities are now similar to those of a Premier League football club,” explains Gregory Retter, clinical director of ballet healthcare. “Strength, jumping, force attenuation, cardiovascular fitness, psychological wellbeing and nutrition; all support the dancer to be free to create artistic excellence. This is a completely new concept in dance.” … [Read More...]
History’s Most Dangerous Dances
The notion that dancing is dangerous and subversive is actually deep-rooted and wide-ranging. Throughout history, international dances have inflamed passions and come under Puritanical fire. … [Read More...]
Pina Bausch Company Fired Its Director After Only A Year
Adolphe Binder, previously the director of the GöteborgsOperan Danskompani, was the fourth director to run the Tanztheater Wuppertal since Bausch’s death, and the first to have had no direct relationship with the choreographer or her works. (The longtime Wuppertal member Dominique Mercy ran the company with Bausch’s assistant and rehearsal director Robert Sturm until 2013, when they were succeeded by Lutz Förster, another veteran company member.) … [Read More...]
Using Dance As A Tool In Mental Health
Mental health is an issue that can be difficult to approach and discuss. Dance can break down this barrier as it allows us to express ourselves without using words: how we move our bodies can say so much. Dance allows us to explore complex ideas, feelings and emotions, and find creative ways to express that in movement. … [Read More...]
The Journalist Who Signed Up For Every Kind Of Dance And What He Learned
For five years, Henry Alford signed up for everything from pas de deux classes and a swing dance conference to tap lessons with Alvin Ailey and a “contact improv jam.” He researched the lives of the greats — Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, Arthur Murray, Mikhail Baryshnikov — and includes anecdotes about each. For example, in the early 1960s, Martha Graham told a roomful of Texas college students that “all great dancing stems from the lonely place.” “Where is the lonely place?” asked a girl in the audience. “Between your thighs,” Martha told her. “Next question?” … [Read More...]
IDEAS
Is Economics Incompatible With Humanities?
Economics, Morson and Schapiro say, has three systematic biases: it ignores the role of culture, it ignores the fact that “to understand people one must tell stories about them,” and it constantly touches on ethical questions beyond its ken. Culture, stories, and ethics are things that can’t be reduced to equations, and economics accordingly has difficulty with them. Morson and Schapiro’s solution is to use the study of the humanities, and particularly of realist fiction, to broaden perspectives and to reintroduce to economics those three missing factors. … [Read More...]
Will Robot Labor Free Us To Pursue Our Passions?
“Just as the division of labor among humans leads to much better work outcomes, so will the rise of automation benefit the worker. Only the outcome will be many multiples greater than that which springs from human divisions of labor. Imagine the future if robots achieve their potential to erase all manner of work forms,” he writes. “How very exciting.” … [Read More...]
Scientists Turn To AI To Design Bike To Break Speed Record
Currently the record is held by Sebastiaan Bowier, who in 2012 set a record of 133.78 km/h, or just over 83 mph. It’s hard to imagine how his bike, which looked more like a tiny landbound rocket than any kind of bicycle, could be significantly improved on. But every little bit counts when records are measured down a hundredth of a unit, and anyway, who knows but that some strange new shape might totally change the game? … [Read More...]
Will Artificial Intelligence Be Our New Therapists?
Some people might be more comfortable disclosing their innermost feelings to an AI. A study conducted by the Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles in 2014 suggests that people display their sadness more intensely, and are less scared about self-disclosure, when they believe they’re interacting with a virtual person, instead of a real one. As when we write a diary, screens can serve as a kind of shield from outside judgment. … [Read More...]
Are The Best Ideas Beautiful? How Science Has Tried To Make The Case
I think it’s time we take a lesson from the history of science. Beauty does not have a good track record as a guide for theory-development. Many beautiful hypotheses were just wrong, like Johannes Kepler’s idea that planetary orbits are stacked in regular polyhedrons known as ‘Platonic solids’, or that atoms are knots in an invisible aether, or that the Universe is in a ‘steady state’ rather than undergoing expansion. And other theories that were once considered ugly have stood the test of time. … [Read More...]
ISSUES
Survey Suggests Pro-Brexit Voters Do Not Engage With Arts
"It's not just that there's a relationship between engagement in the arts and voting Remain at the area level: it looks like it's particularly about attending cultural institutions, which must come as a challenge to the institutions themselves.” … [Read More...]
How Is It We Acquire A Taste For Something?
Whatever the answer to this question, the phenomenon is rife. Children are unlikely to appreciate a sip of beer. Yet a decade later they may relish the evening’s first pint. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, they have acquired the beer-taste. Taste acquisition does not stop at beer and blizzards: consider coffee and classical music, olives and oysters. … [Read More...]
Sports And Pop Music Make Fortunes From Merchandise Sales. Why Not The Arts?
Merchandising? Virtually non existent but for a few big museum gift shops that contribute something to the bottom line. Many organizations make a half hearted attempt to sell shirts or calendars with the organization or artist logo at live performances, but it is an anemic exercise at best. … [Read More...]
How The UK Government Proposes To Treat Culture Post-Brexit
The UK, it states, will always be a country that “advocates cultural diversity as part of its global identity and is committed to ensuring its support of European culture”. It proposes a “culture and education accord” that provides for UK participation in EU programmes and “allows UK institutions to be partners, associates or advisers” to EU projects and vice versa. … [Read More...]
A Screed Against Diversity Efforts In The Sciences (Because You Should Know…)
"The science diversity charade wastes extraordinary amounts of time and money that could be going into basic research and its real-world application. If that were its only consequence, the cost would be high enough. But identity politics is now altering the standards for scientific competence and the way future scientists are trained." … [Read More...]
MEDIA
MoviePass Stock Dives, Losing 26% Of Its Value…
The issue has lost more than 98% of its value this year and has continued to decline in recent weeks in the wake of AMC’s launch on June 20 of a discount pricing program, allowing customers to see three movies a week for a $19.95 monthly fee. MoviePass has more than 3 million subscribers and allows customers the chance to see a movie a day for a monthly fee of $9.99. But Wall Street has been losing faith in whether MoviePass can survive by selling data about its customers and striking marketing partnerships. … [Read More...]
Netflix Adds Only 600K Subscribers In Q2 And Its Stock Price Plunges…
The company reported 670,000 streaming net adds domestically and 4.47 million internationally. Wall Street analysts expected 1.23 million net adds in the U.S. and 5.11 million overseas for the period (slightly higher that Netflix’s prior guidance). … [Read More...]
More Than Half Of UK Parents Allow Their Kids To Play 18+ Video Games…
The survey noted that parents allow their children to play these PEGI 18 titles “without supervision or knowledge of the game beforehand.” The survey, found by GamaSutra, also revealed that 86% of respondents don’t pay attention to the ratings assigned to games. Many parents surveyed feel differently about film ratings, as only 23% responded that they don’t concern themselves over film age restrictions. … [Read More...]
How Netflix Figured Out How To Dominate The Emmys…
Yeah, it spent billions. But "Netflix racked up its dominant tally by having lots of Emmy-approved shows in many categories, rather than one or two overperforming titles — perhaps the best possible outcome for an outlet whose business model is geared toward appealing to as wide an audience as possible. While HBO, NBC, and Hulu all had shows with more than 20 nominations, Netflix’s biggest performer — The Crown — earned a comparatively modest 13 noms." … [Read More...]
Two Of America’s Last Three Blockbuster Video Stores Are Closing…
According to the Blockbuster Alaska Facebook page, the franchise’s last two locations in the state will shut their College and Debarr locations, located in Fairbanks and Anchorage respectively, on July 16, and will reopen the next day to sell off their inventory through August. … [Read More...]
MUSIC
How A Vancouver Family Turned Out A Generation Of Star Pianists
Jon Kimura Parker, Jamie Parker, Ian Parker, and Liz Parker are siblings and cousins. All three Parker pianists have garnered praise for their recordings as well as their performances across North America and beyond. How did the Parkers of Vancouver manage to produce a generation of musicians that has left such a discernible mark on the world of classical piano? On a practical level, it boiled down to a family discipline. … [Read More...]
Apple Music Overtakes Spotify as Biggest Music Subscription Service
Apple Music’s growth accelerated past Spotify’s, and now, for the first time, Apple has pulled ahead. According to a report from Digital Music News last week, Apple Music has become the top on-demand streaming music service in the U.S. in terms of users. (The exact user numbers weren’t released.) Both apps have roughly 20 million U.S.-based subscribers, but Apple Music now has the upper hand. … [Read More...]
Fyre Festival Redux: Another Extravagantly Fraudulent Festival Implodes
XO Music Festival was slated to take place this weekend, July 12th to 15th, in Antioch, California. It promised seven stages, performances by 100 artists including Ludacris, Vanilla Ice and T.I., and a litany of Instagram-minded perks such as a foam pit, a color arena, an indoor skating rink and something billed only as an “interactive bounce arena.” Days before the start of the show, however, several artists dropped out of the lineup citing incomplete or missing payment, and Bay Area news outlets reported that other musicians were increasingly worried about whether the show was still taking place. On Wednesday, Contra Costa Event Park, the festival’s venue, suddenly released a statement canceling the festival entirely, “due to the promoters’ lack of fulfilling contractual obligations.” … [Read More...]
Despite Efforts, Lack Of Diversity Is Still A Big Problem In America’s Orchestras
African-Americans make up 1.8 percent of orchestras nationwide while Hispanics make up 2.5 percent, according to an industry-wide study. Those statistics inspired several performing arts organizations to form the National Alliance for Audition Support, which prepares talented musicians of color for auditions. Making it past that first hurdle is crucial as one opening in a top-tier orchestra can easily attract as much as a thousand candidates. … [Read More...]
Enormous Casino Going Up In The Shadow Of Santa Fe Opera Has Fans Worried
The casino, a multimillion-dollar project by Tesuque Pueblo, is being built on land that housed a flea market for many years. Construction has been moving rapidly since it started in earnest earlier this year, and the casino is expected to open this fall. Exactly what the finished product will look like — or how it will affect people’s experience at the opera — is a big unknown because the project is still in the works. … [Read More...]
