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Theatre That Smells (And The Designers Who Make It So)
“It always locks in with the design. If you’re doing an ambient scent, really what you’re making is a part of the set that’s invisible. For that, you really want to work with the set and lighting designer to talk about what is the space — what kind of place do we want to evoke? As a scent designer I am supporting them in that — adding an extra dimension to what they’re trying to do.”
How Do You Build A New Professional Theatre In Madison?
“What could set Cap City apart in Madison is something most audiences never consider, but which means a great deal to artists trying to make a living in the business: a Small Professional Theatre Contract through Actors’ Equity, the theater union.”
DC Suburb Works To Be More Urban (Invisibility Is The Key?)
“To the extent that anyone can articulate a sense of aesthetics for this new landscape, it’s all very superficial: It should twinkle at night, bustle by day, have some nice green things here and there, and mainly not impose very much on our eyes or mind. The new Silver Line stations do all of that, and they do it well.”
How Are Europe’s Great Museums Supposed To Handle All Those People?
“Seeing masterpieces may be a soul-nourishing cultural rite of passage, but soaring attendance has turned many museums into crowded, sauna-like spaces, forcing institutions to debate how to balance accessibility with art preservation.”
Is The Bolshoi Ballet A Soviet Throwback?
Alastair Macaulay: “It was hard not to think of politics when watching the Bolshoi’s repertory – which was entirely pre-glasnost. Seeing the tedious mix of Swan Lake (in Yuri Grigorovich’s dismal production), Don Quixote (in Alexei Fadeyechev’s version) and Spartacus (all Grigorovich and all hokum) was to feel the clock turned back 40 years.”
Choreographing A Dance Piece For The Façade Of A Building (And Not A Flat Façade, Either)
For Cincinnati’s Lumenocity celebration, a choreographer and two dancers from Cincinnati Ballet create a work to be digitized and projected onto the (enormous and ornate) face of the city’s Music Hall.
College Radio Fans Fight To Keep Their Stations For Students (And Their Quirky Programs)
“Cash-strapped universities are discovering that their student stations are lucrative assets. They are finding eager partners in public-radio stations and religious broadcasters. The public and religious radio channels are looking to own the equivalent of beach-front property on the FM dial,.”
One Big Problem With Met Opera Contract Talks: All The Different Unions
Management is negotiating with 15 unions, “representing the orchestra, chorus, stage crews, hair and makeup stylists, costumers, scenic artists, cleaners, ticket takers, ushers, security guards and others. Some unions are beginning to eye one another warily, because any agreement made with one of the bigger groups is likely to set a pattern for the others.”
Ira Glass Explains How He Works
Q: “What’s your best time-saving shortcut/life hack?” A: “I’ve got nothing. Reading other people’s answers to this question on your website today made me realize I live my life like an ape.” However, Ira does offer (after the product plugs this site seems to require) an excellent description of how he organizes a bunch of interview material into a structure.
It’s The Year Of The Posthumous Performance – Is That Good For The Artists Or The Art?
Michael Jackson performed at this year’s Billboard Music Awards. Rick James has a new memoir. Tupac Shakur had a Broadway musical. James Gandolfini, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and River Phoenix (!) are in new movies. “It’s not weird that we miss those artists who’ve died. But it is weird that, increasingly, we expect them to keep producing art. The afterlife has become just another career stage – one that’s as lucrative and, in some cases, as productive as the pre-death career ever was.”
Was The Tupac Shakur Musical A Flop? Or Just Ahead Of Its Time?
“Saul Williams, the poet and performer who played the lead role in Holler If Ya Hear Me, tells Kurt Andersen it’s inevitable that hip-hop will carve out a place for itself on Broadway. What killed Holler, Williams says, were people who wrote it off before they saw it.” (audio)
In Defense Of The Remaking Of Mecca
“At night, all lit up and crowded with apartments and hotels, Mecca now looks like a Saudi interpretation of Gotham or even Las Vegas … and shopping malls and high-rise blocks are being built in a circle around the pilgrimage zone.” The Saudis are catching a lot of flak for these changes, but Nesrine Malik argues that they are both necessary and (certain excesses notwithstanding) well-considered.
Making Genuinely Anti-War Art Is Surprisingly Hard
“Art makes its subject interesting and arresting and meaningful. To make art about war, even anti-war art about war, is to risk rendering war interesting and arresting and meaningful.”
Quentin Tarantino Is Filming “The Hateful Eight” After All
The director – who called the project off in a fit of anger after the script was leaked – confirmed the news at, of all places, San Diego Comic-Con.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.28.14
John Luther Adams’s outdoor music needs to come indoors
AJBlog: Condemned to Music | Published 2014-07-29
Parklandia: Stretching, Striving To What End?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-07-29
Performance measures, indices and rankings
AJBlog: For What it’s Worth | Published 2014-07-29
Osipova and Vasiliev Debut World Tour at California’s Segerstrom Center
AJBlog: Fresh Pencil | Published 2014-07-28
The Return of the the Clientele
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-07-28
Monday Recommendation: Ahmed Abdul-Malik
AJBlog: RiffTides | Published 2014-07-28Yet Another Appraisal Of Detroit Institute Of Arts’ Collection (And It’s Big)
“The new appraisal, conducted by Victor Wiener Associates, a New York firm, was commissioned by the Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, a bond insurer that stands to lose hundred of millions of dollars in the bankruptcy. The insurer has called for the masterpieces from the museum to be sold or monetized in some other way, such as being used as collateral for a loan.”
LA MoCA: What’s Next (Who Knows, And That’s A Problem)
“According to a museum spokesman, MOCA hopes to make some relevant announcements by the end of summer. But plainly, there’s a problem. The empty exhibition schedule, which is going to be very difficult to fill, threatens to interrupt the museum’s momentum.”
Enough Is Enough: US Senator Pushes For Law Allowing Musicians To Bring Instruments On Airplanes
“In a letter sent Friday, the Rhode Island Democrat urged U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx to speed implementation of a 2012 law that requires commercial air carriers to allow musical instruments as carry-on items as long as they can be safely stowed in the aircraft cabin. But Reed said the law has not taken effect because the Department of Transportation has yet to adopt the specific rules needed for the provision.”
Time For A New Leader At The Metropolitan Opera?
“What’s clear is that something needs to give and, after nearly thirty-five years of labor-management harmony, it’s apparent that the Met’s problems start at the top. The cleanest solution would be to appoint a new GM, preferably someone, unlike Gelb, with an actual background in opera, who unequivocally believes in the vibrant future of the art form, and who can work creatively within a budget.”
PayPal Forces Buyer To Destroy Violin
“Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violin in order to get his money back. They somehow deemed the violin as “counterfeit” even though there is no such thing in the violin world.”
Margot Adler, One Of NPR’s Signature Voices For Three Decades, Dies At 68
“‘Her reporting was singular and her voice distinct,’ Margaret Low Smith, NPR’s vice president for news, said in an announcement to staff. ‘There was almost no story that Margot couldn’t tell.’”
This Woman Completely Reinvented The Way Broadway Gets Funded
Karen Walter Goodwin’s “idea was essentially to provide an investment bank for nascent stage productions, putting together producers — who were enthralled by the idea of financial backers who did not crave or require creative input — and investors with proven track records who were willing to try their hand in a new arena.”
Why Do We Love Little Free Libraries So Much?
“Though they owe their spread largely to the Internet, Little Free Libraries often serve as an antidote to a world of Kindle downloads and data-driven algorithms. The little wooden boxes are refreshingly physical—and human.”
Forget Supertitles; Just Bring Your iPhone Or iPad To Wolf Trap’s ‘Carmen’ [AUDIO]
“The larger aim is to give texture and context to the things that we do so it feels a little more integrated into 21st century life.”
Is Audience Participation In Theatre A Good Thing?
“All theater is immersive, whether we want it to be or not. You need to design your audience’s experience from the moment they set foot in your theater door, or, preferably, as they approach it from the street.”
The Best Way To Support An Artist
“You may want your supportive activities to make her happy, but for some artists happiness doesn’t lead to creativity; they do their best work in times of turmoil or struggle – and they know it.”
How The First World War Destroyed Everything In Europe Faster Than Anyone Thought Possible
“We think of the First World War as a four-year affair. We forget, though, that Austria-Hungary lost half of its men within the first two weeks of the war — 400,000 men, including 100,000 who were taken prisoner by the Russians.”
Star Wars Wars, Or, The Problem With Film Preservation
“To preserve film as a work of art, one has to preserve ‘not just (but also) the strip, not just (but also) the apparatus, not just (but also) the screening space; what needs to be transmitted into the future is the set of relations between them while they are in performance—the working system.’”
Finally, Starchitect Norman Foster Gets His N.Y. Moment
These four buildings “come after a few notable setbacks for Mr. Foster, including the New York Public Library’s recent decision to rethink its planned conversion of part of its research flagship into a circulating library using a Foster design.”
Look, HarperCollins, No Single Publisher Can Take On Amazon And Win
“Unlike in France, Italy or Germany, where publishers banded together to create options to Amazon, British and American publishers still seem bent on competing with one another, even as Amazon eats into their finances.”
What Happens When You’re A Memoirist With No Parents?
“I don’t know that I would be this free. I don’t know that I would be who I am. I don’t know that I would be writing, and I certainly don’t know that I’d be writing about the stuff that I’m writing about.”
Author Of ‘Up The Down Staircase’ Dies At 103
Bel Kaufman was “a former New York City schoolteacher whose classic first novel, ‘Up the Down Staircase’ — shot through with despair and hopefulness, violence and levity, bureaucratic inanity and a blizzard of official memorandums so mind-bendingly illogical as to seem almost Kafkaesque — was hailed as a stunningly accurate portrait of life in an urban school when it was published in 1965.”
When A Small City Wants Professional Musical Theatre
“What we’re talking about is everybody is paid, from the top down. …And they’re all paid at as close to (Actors’ Equity) scale as possible.”
What’s It Like Working With, And Managing, Robots?
“When the errors crop up–and they always do, in spectacularly catastrophic ways–it sort of feels like a rebellion because I am telling it to do this thing, and it doesn’t follow my instructions. And then it becomes this question of management. Can I convince this entity to do for me what I want it to do and what the entire company is telling it it should be doing?”
Top AJBlogs From 07.27.14
Detroit Creditors Stir Up More Trouble
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-07-28Pay Attention to the Show! (Or What You Will)
AJBlog: We The Audience | Published 2014-07-28What is the Ivy League For?
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-07-26Poetry Is Made For Twitter – Yes, Really
“What’s on Twitter are not diseased firings of glitchy minds. They’re epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, headlines, captions, slogans and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity.”
The Band That Made A Silent ‘Album’ For Spotify Made $20,000 Before The Album Got Pulled
Who says you can’t make money using the music streaming service?
What Will Happen To Los Angeles County After Its Most Fervent Arts Advocate Gets Booted From Political Life?
“Manufacturing in Southern California is history. Big corporate headquarters are history in this town. So what’s the future? The arts are explosive, proliferating like bunny rabbits all over Southern California.”
The British Author Who Has Sold 10 Million Books Under Other People’s Names
“The ghost, who starts out as a hybrid of therapist, muse and friend, enters a psychological minefield. Accordingly, the ghost is advised never to forget that, at the end of the day, he or she ranks somewhere between a valet and a cleaner.”
The Top 10 Artists Lost To The World Because Of World War I
“The first world war occured at one of the most creative moments in the history of art.”
The List To End All Lists Of ‘New Yorker’ Stories We Should Read While The Archives Are Open
Seriously, this is a post compiling all the lists the internet has made about what to read – and it’s complete with links. We’ll see you back here when the archive closes.
Carlo Bergonzi, Masterful Tenor Who Brought Keen Intelligence To Verdi And Beyond, Dies At 90
“A lyric tenor of some vocal heft, Mr. Bergonzi lacked the sonic weight and brilliance of tenors in the Wagnerian mold. But what he did possess was an instrument of velvety beauty and nearly unrivaled subtlety.”
Italy’s Minister For Culture Pledges ‘Revolutionary’ Autonomy For Italian Museums
“If the proposals go ahead – there is a chance that they will be watered down — 20 museums and archaeological sites deemed of ‘major national interest’ will become self-governing institutions, no longer run by civil servants in the culture ministry.”
London Needs More ‘Pop-Up’ Theatre – But It’s Hard To Come By In The West End
“Producers constantly say that West End ticket prices are so high because of the high rents charged by theatre owners, and this would be a way to circumvent those demands – although of course the costs of kitting out a pop-up venue are likely to be very substantial indeed.”
Silent Film Fans Get Noisy To Help Identify Lost Titles
“The audience is encouraged to yell out possible settings, actor names and even car models — anything that might help identify the film.”
So Frank Gehry Is Designing A Campus For Youth Social Services In L.A.
“The idea is that this will be something special. There are so many messages that people, particularly children, get from their environment. There can be a certain bleakness.”
Hey Chicago Art Institute, Time To Consider Going Free?
Around the country, a flurry of high quality art museums have made the switch and reaped financial rewards, but “it is hard to imagine a major museum here going free, especially when the trend in Chicago has been to raise prices and to start charging admission.”
How Did Amy Adams’ First Movie Become A Cult Classic?
A deep (very, very deep) dive into the writing, making, directing, editing and producing of “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” a film that bombed at the box office but (despite its lack of streaming or even a DVD) became a cult classic.
Is Italian Film Back In La Dolce Vita, At Long Last?
“Whereas in Spain, Germany and the UK the proportion of domestically produced movies varies between 10% and 20%, in Italy last year it was 31%.”
Her One (Overwhelmingly Big) Job? Saving Canada’s Public Radio
“Last month, while staff were still trying to digest a cut of 657 jobs announced in April, they responded icily as Conway helped unveil an overhaul of the public broadcaster that will axe about another 20 per cent of their colleagues, or 1,500 positions across English and French services, over the next five years.”