Today’s Stories
Steven Leigh Morris On What Did In LA Stage Alliance
“When members of the community say about LASA that they didn’t feel included or respected, my heart goes out to them. I ran the organization, and I often felt the same way.” – Stage Raw
What I’ve Learned Watching Dance Online For A Year
Work filmed or streamed that is performed with a live audience present cannot replicate the exchange of energy, delight, sorrow, laughter, and tears of being physically present in the theater – yet it does satisfy somewhat my craving for watching dancing. – Oregon Arts Watch
Hot Off The Press — How The Sacramento History Museum Became A TikTok Star
Museum docent Howard Hatch started making short videos of him working an old printing press. Soon the museum had more than a million followers on TikTok – WESH (Sacramento)
How To Help Students Catch Up After Lockdown? The Arts
Research confirms that arts education contributes significantly to social-emotional well-being as well as college, career and citizenship readiness. – San Diego Union-Tribune
How Gabby Giffords Uses The French Horn To Help Her Recovery
The ex-Arizona representative was shot ten years ago. She’s rebuilt her life with constant therapy, including playing the French Horn, which helps with her ability to speak. – PBS News Hour
Artist Rachel Whiteread Has Changed Her Art, And Her Life
Whiteread won the Turner Prize when she was 30, the first woman, and youngest artist, ever to win – and she id it for casting an entire house in London. She’s been casting objects and the spaces around objects for three decades. But now? Now, she’s building new things. – The Guardian (UK)
After More Than A Year Apart, Singers Miss Collaborating
Afro-Brazilian musician Luedji Luna: “It’s been a sad year for artists and for the three of us: What we love doing most is performing with each other.” But it hasn’t been all terrible. “When the pandemic started, we all reacted differently. Xenia is more of a meditative person, so she wasn’t online much. Larissa started to produce beats. And I became a mom.” – The New York Times
Poets Lost A Lot Of Readings, Series, And Opportunities During The Pandemic, So What Do They Think Is Next?
“For readers still thawing from a year in isolation, two questions in [Sesshu Foster’s untitled] poem are especially prescient: ‘How to start again? How to wake up?'” – Los Angeles Times
The Boston Symphony’s Lucia Lin Says Classical Music Is Not Eurocentric
And she has the duet series to prove it. Lin, who commissioned duets before adding interviews to her presentation of new work: “In the beginning I just wanted to have these duos written. Then I decided, you know, part of the reason people are afraid of new music is they don’t understand it. What happens if people get to know the composers a little bit?” – Boston Globe
The MTV Show ‘The Real World’ Jump-Started Reality TV As We Know It, But At A Huge Cost
In 1992, television wasn’t all about the latest competition or race or humiliation reported to the camera. So when The Real World started, it was a shock. Perhaps not as much of a shock – but a choice that has echoed for nearly three decades – is the way the show framed Black cast members. “The show often sacrificed nuance in favor of drama when framing the Black castmates for the network’s predominantly white audience.” – BuzzFeed
The New Ascendance Of The Nature Memoir
We’re all looking for something – solitude, connection to nature, an escape from our houses and apartments – and so, publishing is providing us with many (many) nature memoirs. But where to start? Check out this heavily annotated list. – LitHub
We Know Theo, But What About Vincent Van Gogh’s Sisters?
He (and Theo) had three. From reading a book that includes some newly translated letters, we can learn that “Lies was frustrated that women didn’t have more professional options that were socially acceptable. We learn about how Wil often copied Vincent’s drawings and was his favorite model, and that the two wrote to each other about art and literature and inquired about one another’s mental health.” – Hyperallergic
Benita Raphan, Maker Of Lyrical Short Films That Hover Between Documentary And Experiment, Has Died At 58
Raphan’s “genius” films – about people with unusual minds and talents – weren’t quite documentary; they were that, but more. “Up From Astonishment (2020), her most recent film, is about Emily Dickinson. In it, ink blooms on a page; butterflies pinwheel; there are empty bird nests, an abacus and various inscrutable shapes. Susan Howe, a poet, and Marta Werner, a Dickinson scholar, are the film’s narrators, but not really. Ms. Raphan had sampled clips from her interviews with them and used their words strategically and evocatively.” – The New York Times
The Great Depression’s Dance Marathons Were An Exploitative Craze
They might sound like yet another fun thing for young people to have done back in the day, but no. They were even deadly, with reports of at least two dancers dying near the dance floor as others simply passed out. “Dance marathons, also called walkathons to avoid legal and moral scrutiny, were essentially the Netflix dating show of that era. As an emcee entertained the audience with dancers’ biographies over live music, the couples danced, stumbled and dragged each other for weeks on almost no sleep in the pursuit of money and glory.” – San Francisco Chronicle
The Hollywood Bowl Is Back, With Celebration And Caution, For The Summer Of 2021
Though the bowl will be limited to 4,000 in a venue that seats 17,500, the excitement is real. “The organization is still ramping up to tackle the complexities of reopening, but Smith said the L.A. Phil is planning 45 to 60 concerts.” – Los Angeles Times
Premium Classifieds
Applications open for the 2021 National Critics Institute
Helmed by the Chicago Tribune's Chris Jones, NCI is a one-week virtual boot camp for early and … [Read More...]
Jacksonville Symphony seeks Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer
The VP & CMO works in close collaboration with the President & CEO, Senior Leadership Team, … [Read More...]
Master of Arts in Arts Administration – Goucher College
Designed for the working professional, the M.A. in Arts Administration from Goucher College allows … [Read More...]
Gianluigi Colalucci, Restorer Of Michelangelo’s Colors, Has Died At 91
In the 1980s, Colalucci led the team that restored the Sistine Chapel. “To paint the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo labored atop a towering scaffolding, his neck craned skyward and paint dripping onto his face. In an enterprise that captivated the international art world, Mr. Colalucci assumed the same position for the delicate task of cleansing the chapel of the layers of filth that had accumulated during the intervening centuries.” – Washington Post
The Messy, Low-Budget, Rediscovered Late Soviet Era Lord Of The Rings
The 1991 project was believed to be lost. “But after Tolkien fan clubs urged the broadcaster [Channel Five] to scour the archives of its Soviet predecessor, Leningrad Television, workers for Channel Five managed to find the footage last year” – and to put it online for all of us to enjoy in late March. – The New York Times
Performers In South Africa Protest For More Government Help During The Pandemic
For the performing arts community, the closure of Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre was something of a last straw. “In just a decade of existence the theatre, named after world-renowned playwright Athol Fugard, had become a much-loved venue that put on work by local writers as well as internationally known plays and musicals.” Artists are asking their government to do much, much more for them – and their strapped venues. – BBC
BAFTA Wins Include A Fair Number Of Surprises
Chloé Zhao won another directing award for Nomadland, which also won best film on the second night of the mostly online awards. Anthony Hopkins was a surprising win for The Father; at 83, he’s the oldest male actor to win a BAFTA. Promising Young Woman and Emerald Fennell also came in for surprising wins, and Youn Yuh-jung’s win for Minari capped a late surge for the actor. – The Guardian (UK)
Stephen Hawking — A Life In Ideas Obscured By Celebrity
Hawking was no Newton. He said so himself. At a White House event in 1998, First Lady Hillary Clinton read a question from the Internet: “How does it feel to be compared to Einstein and Newton?” He replied, “I think to compare me to Newton and Einstein is media hype.” Then again, as Charles Seife demonstrates in Hawking Hawking, he “worked very hard to cultivate” these comparisons. – New York Review of Books
Dancers Are Still Trying Everything To Make It Through The Pandemic
Real talk: “Kathleen Tiernan, a trainee at Ballet Austin, fears that the pandemic will financially stunt the ballet industry for years to come. ‘I don’t know that I would wanna risk going to one of those small companies that could be very close to shutting down,’ said Tiernan, who is still in auditions season. ‘And I don’t know how they’re surviving because those types of companies were already struggling before the pandemic and already paid their dancers unlivable wages.'” – The Dispatch
Scott Rudin’s Abusive Behavior Was An Open Secret
Why did the media not come out and treat it as the truly awful (and unacceptable) fact that it was? “Unlike past stories, The Hollywood Reporter’s offers, for the first time in Rudin’s almost 40 years as a producer, an unromanticized affirmation of the seemingly endless anecdotes about him as a manager. It details his alleged misbehavior as well as his influence, which has arguably made the industry and the journalists who report on it more likely to accept workplace aggression as a condition of great art.” – The Atlantic
Chloe Zhao Wins Director’s Guild Honor, Cementing Her Status As Presumptive Oscar Favorite
Zhao, director of Nomadland, is the first woman of color and only the second woman ever to win the DGA award. Though director David Fincher didn’t win for Mank, he had a great line: “Directing … is a bit like trying to paint a watercolor from four blocks away through a telescope, over a walkie-talkie, and 85 people are holding the brush.” – The New York Times
New Guidelines Suggest Actors Set Nudity Boundaries Before Filming
To keep actors safe – and, of course, to cover their own liability – some productions are now employing intimacy coordinators. But contracts can go farther, and the #TimesUp group has suggested that “a so-called ‘nudity rider’ or ‘simulated sex waiver’ should be in place before filming begins.” – BBC
Statues Are Living The High Life In Boris Johnson’s Britain
Lucky statues! “Without themselves needing to organise, these historically neglected members of the inanimate community have within the last few months secured privileges, protections and high-level advocacy that, in addition to their existing plinth status, falls only narrowly short of full suffrage – and even that cannot confidently be ruled out.” – The Guardian (UK)