Today’s Stories
Time To Make The Theatre Reforms We’ve Needed For A Long Time
Anna Fleischle, an award-winning designer, has defined “a moment of reset in our industry.” Rachel O’Riordan, artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, says she is looking at the public square outside the theatre on King Street. West End producers know that the days of the premium ticket and rip-off booking charges are over. And one can only say to all three parties: what took you so long? – Prospect Magazine
Toronto Symphony Cancels 2020/21 Season
But the orchestra says it will look for ways to perform in smaller ensembles. TSO musicians will also continue to perform virtual concerts. Since the start of the pandemic, musicians and guest artists have appeared in more than 100 virtual concerts and events, which have been viewed more than two million times, according to the TSO statement. – CBC
Canada’s Cineplex Movie Theatre Chain Sues Over Aborted Takeover
On June 12, the U.K.-based cinema giant had called off its planned $2.1 billion takeover of Cineplex, which would have created one of the world’s largest cinema companies with more than 11,200 screens globally. Cineplex, as a once friendly takeover attempt has hit the rocks, claimed that Cineworld “breached its contractual obligations and its duty of good faith and honesty.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Extraordinary Times: A One-Time Wealth Tax Would Help Fix Things
Extraordinary times need astonishing remedies. In this very rich country, private wealth has soared to six times the value of annual GDP. So take a deep breath and jump in. A once-in-a-lifetime windfall tax of 10% on all wealth would yield £1 trillion – enough to pay for all the things we regard as essential for civilisation. – The Guardian
Why Humor Has Eluded Philosophers
Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind. – Aeon
Pompeo Says US Is Considering Ban On TikTok
TikTok — which is owned by Beijing-based startup ByteDance — has been repeatedly criticized by US politicians who accused the short-form video app of being a threat to national security because of its ties to China. They allege that the company could be compelled to “support and cooperate with intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.” – CNN
How Conductor Alan Pierson Brought ‘Ten Thousand Birds’ Indoors
Back in 2014, Alarm Will Sound — the contemporary music ensemble Person founded at Eastman and has been leading ever since — played the world premiere of John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds (which is basically a big catalogue of birdsong transcriptions in no prescribed order) as a sort of outdoor sound installation. This year, as the coronavirus confined Pierson and his colleagues in their homes, he got the idea to reconceive the piece as Ten Thousand Screens, an online video in which the musicians each played from their own homes. Author Garth Greenwell, a friend of Pierson’s going back to college days, talks with him about why and how he did it. – The Paris Review
Quibi Was Going To Reinvent Video. But Is Anyone Watching?
Quibi, the brainchild of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney studio head and DreamWorks co-founder, had promised to reinvent television by streaming high-quality content in ten-minute-or-less chunks to “the TV in your pocket.” – New York Magazine
How A 15-Year-Old Cartoon Series Became One Of The Most-Watched Shows In America
“Avatar: The Last Airbender … first ran from 2005 to 2008 on Nickelodeon, and swiftly made a name for itself as a politically resonant, emotionally sophisticated work — one with a sprawling but meticulously plotted mythos that destined the show for cult-classic status. Last summer, after Game of Thrones flubbed its finale, fans and critics held up Avatar as a counterexample: a fantasy series that knew what it wanted to be from the beginning.” – The New Yorker
The Frustrations Of How To Think About “Hamilton” In 2020
How can one story simultaneously broadcast a contemptible message of myopic reverence for America’s Founding Fathers to some, while others take from it an equally powerful repudiation of everything those founders represent? Unraveling this question requires understanding Hamilton as the messy, mutable product of two masters: its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the constantly roiling cultural context in which it’s been viewed, especially in 2020. – Vox
Silicon Valley Gets A New Professional Dance Company
“San Jose Dance Theatre [has] announced that it [is] launching a professional ballet company, as well as a trainee program and a new pre-professional training division. This is good news for San Jose, which saw Silicon Valley Ballet shut down in 2016.” – Pointe Magazine
So You Want To Direct Our Play (We Have A Few Changes…)
Congratulations! Your MFA in directing is about to be put to good use, effectively proving your father wrong about your job prospects. Your firm grasp of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, not to mention your dissertation on the dramatic relevance of Aristotle’s Poetics, will give you the edge you need to pour into your cast of laypeople like the eager, empty vessels they are. – McSweeney’s
For The Second Time In Two Years, Fire Shatters A Brazilian Museum
“In September 2018, a devastating fire ravaged Brazil’s National Museum [in Rio de Janeiro]. Now, yet another Brazilian cultural institution — the Federal University of Minas Gerais’ Natural History Museum and Botanical Garden (MHNJB) in Belo Horizonte — has fallen victim to an inferno.” This is, in fact, the sixth museum fire in the country in the past decade. – Smithsonian Magazine
Time For A Rethink In How The Arts Are Delivered
Of course, Zoom is not the answer to saving the arts for the digital generation, but it does pose the question: Why don’t we have better alternatives? For many institutions, fear that improving the virtual performance would threaten the health of the physical one has kept them in a state of pseudo-Internet denial. But the international health crisis has forced organizations to confront a generational sea change that has been brewing across the arts since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. – The American Scholar
Two Radical Publishers Celebrate 50 Years
“Our sales go up with political and economic turmoil and down during times of prosperity,” says Jake Stevens of Verso. “It’s really amazing to see all the different types of books that we experimented with as a publishing company, and the varied directions our publishing vision has traveled,” says Jisu Kim of Feminist Press, “but also how much we still stick to our foundational editorial pillars.” – Publishers Weekly
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Sides Line Up After Students Demand Removal Of A WPA Mural
“An alumnus has filed a suit to save a fresco at the University of Kentucky that depicts enslaved people; a Black artist whose work is shown with it also wants the mural to stay.” – The New York Times
America’s Largest Arts Funder Is Pivoting To Social Justice Causes. Its President Explains Why
Elizabeth Alexander of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: “We were going to do it anyway, [but in] this moment … it seems very clear … that we all need to be thinking very sharply about how the work that we do contributes to a more just society.” But that doesn’t mean Mellon will stop funding the arts: “The way that we’re interpreting social justice is very broad. It’s very important to Mellon in all of our grant-making to say, ‘Who haven’t we reached? Who haven’t we supported?” – Artnet
Earl Cameron, Pathbreaking Black Actor In British Cinema, Dead At 102
A native of Bermuda who settled in the UK after World War II, he performed — “against the odds,” he once said — to perform in 40 feature films as well as numerous TV movies and series. “His big screen roles ranged from James Bond’s secret service minder Pinder in Thunderball (1965) to the dictatorial president in Sydney Pollack’s thriller The Interpreter (2005).” – The Guardian
Actors’ Equity Approves First Post-COVID Productions
“The union, which represents 51,000 actors and stage managers around the country, said it had given the green light to two summer shows in the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts: an outdoor production of the musical Godspell, and an indoor production of the solo show Harry Clarke.” – The New York Times
La Scala Reopens For First Time Since COVID Lockdown
For now, it’s a small-scale relaunch: only 600 audience members in a roughly 2,000-seat house (so social distancing can be maintained) and chamber music rather than full-fledged opera. There will be a total of four programs in July before the traditional summer break; in September, the company will perform Verdi’s Requiem in Milan’s Duomo and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in the theater. – France 24
Meet France’s New Culture Minister
“[Roselyne] Bachelot, 73, is returning to politics after eight years working as a commentator in radio and television. Prior to that, she served as the minister of ecology and sustainable development under former President Jacques Chirac, then as health minister and minister of social cohesion under President Nicolas Sarkozy, always in rightwing governments.” – The Art Newspaper
Michelangelo: Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man
When Michelangelo turned seventy, as he does at the beginning of Michelangelo, God’s Architect, he had nineteen more years to live, every one of them spent at work. As dear friends died and his body weakened, he took on a remarkable series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware, as William Wallace emphasizes, that he would never live to see them completed. In his deeply spiritual vision of the world, his own limits hardly mattered; God had called him, and he had answered. – New York Review of Books
A Need To Redefine Black Music
If Black lives matter now more than ever, hearing Black liveness in classical music also matters. The alternative is an addiction to exclusion that ends, as addictions often do, in impoverishment. – The New York Times
School As We Knew It Is Over. Long Live School!
“School” as we knew it is over — but that doesn’t mean learning has to be. Learning is a universal activity across human societies; school as we knew it is a recent, unusual, self-contradictory institution. As educators and as citizens, we need to understand the various purposes school was supposed to serve, and the limitations to its success. Only then can we re-imagine education for, and beyond, this public health emergency. – Medium
Big Problem For The Arts: Insurers Won’t Insure Against Virus Cancellations
“Right now most insurers, if not all, have come out with a virus or communicable disease exclusion that they’re putting on their policies.” – Reuters