“Ossadnik was a principal dancer with the German National Theater from 1987 to 1991, after which he danced in France with the Ballet Theatre de Bordeaux from 1991 to 1995. Since moving to the United States in 1995, he has worked with various companies across the country and maintains a relationship with the Balanchine Trust.” For the last decade, he was ballet master at Ballet Idaho.
Archives for July 2018
Educator Warns: Big Orchestral Instruments Are In Danger Of Extinction
“Oboes and bassoons are generally not known at all in schools. They might have picture on the wall but they haven’t seen them in the flesh. This has been reflected in the massive falling off of the number of children learning them. The sheer physical size of the instruments, the complications of the reeds, and the expense of lessons has led to these instruments being sidelined.”
Dance Craze: People Are Dancing Alongside Moving Cars. Surprise! They’re Getting Hurt
A recent internet trend is inspiring drivers all over the world to jump out of moving vehicles and dance in the street while a friend in the passenger seat films, and now transpiration officials and law enforcement are starting to speak out against the dangerous fad.
Kennedy Center Takes A Risk With Honoring “Hamilton”
Is the wildly popular “Hamilton,” unveiled to the world in 2015, a classic? Do we know yet if it is a transcendent touchstone of American culture, in the manner of a Sinatra, a Sondheim, or even a Dolly Parton? Does it merit this recognition before, say, Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” or Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” or Duke Ellington’s jazz compositions? Surely not. In this sense, the Kennedy Center is taking a risk with its long game, and messing with the mission of the Honors. Which is to say that the Honors have long sought to set in stone artistic achievement — not be part of the original, taste-making plaster.
Good Art, Bad Person – The Moral/Aesthetic Judgments Are Complicated
When we turn on a movie or when we pick up a book, are we hoping that the movie or the book is good or are we hoping that the artist who made it is good? Run through your list of favorite movies or novels or paintings, then ask yourself what initially drew you to them. Was it the quality of the art or the quality of the artist’s character? Most people, if they are honest with themselves, will probably acknowledge that it’s the former, but that doesn’t mean that an artist’s character has no effect on how we see their art.
Here’s The Latest Art Being Created By Artificial Intelligence
Professor Ahmed Elgammal, of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., has spent five years teaching his artificial intelligence program to create original artwork. Elgammal fed the software 80,000 pieces of art from the last 500 years. After pressing the Enter key, the software creates new, original works.
Twitter Is Making Us All Comedians
As a child, when I heard jokes and watched sitcoms, I considered comedy to be a wonderful, ineffable mystery — like sex, or the Trinity. But the joke formats and memes of social media are training wheels, template-izing comedy for beginners. It’s impossible to look through the microscope at the comedy petri dish all day and not start to pick up on its rhythms and mechanics. For better or for worse, we’re all becoming comedy writers now, in a writer’s room the size of a planet.
Two stories particularly worth your time.
Good morning! The first is a piece from Harper’s July edition. The premise is that as our cities have strived to become better, they’ve actually become much much worse; gated enclaves of communities that live in contrived sanitized landscapes disconnected from their neighbors. The city has become a commodity, a market divorced from its practical purposes: “New York today is not at home. Instead, it has joined London and Hong Kong as one of the most desirable cities in the world for ‘land banking,’ where wealthy individuals from all over the planet scoop up prime real estate to hold as an investment, a pied-à-terre, a bolt-hole, a strongbox.” The second piece is something you might easily skip over. There have been far too many pieces attempting to reconcile bad behavior and good art. But Graham Daseler has a thoughtful piece struggling with the question. “If art can do harm, it stands to reason that it can do good, as well. It’s comforting to think that a work of art, if it’s beautiful enough or moving enough or original enough, may atone for the sins of the artist.” Have a great day.
A Graphic Novel In The Man Booker Competition? It’s About Time
At the end of the day, the inclusion of “Sabrina” on the Man Booker long list is far from an insult to novel-writing or the written word. Rather, it’s a forward-looking acknowledgment that the literary world is changing, and that art can take unexpected forms.
YBAs of the 19th Century
Remember the Young British Artists of the ’80s and ’90s – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and so on? Their 19th-century counterparts were the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. For the first time, a major museum show has matched the Pre-Raphaelites’ work with that of the Old Masters who inspired them.
Publishing Sales Up 5.5 Percent In 2018
The strongest performing trade format was downloadable audio, where sales jumped 36.1%. Sales of physical audio, however, continued to struggle; they were down 11.4% in the four month period. Hardcover sales rose 11.8% in the period, and trade paperback and mass market paperback sales inched ahead 1.4%. In a bit of a surprise, sales of board books, which had been growing quickly, fell 5.5%.
Survey: Most Americans Think Higher Education Is Headed In The Wrong Direction
A solid majority of all adults (61 percent) believe that higher education is headed in the wrong direction, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. But that view is much more likely to be held by Republicans or those who lean Republican than by Democrats or those who lean Democrat. While both Republicans and Democrats express skepticism about higher education, they do so for different reasons — Democrats are more concerned about tuition rates, and Republicans are more concerned about their perceptions of campus politics.
How Affluence Is Killing Our Greatest Cities
By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.
Most Academic Texts Aren’t Written To Be Read. Why?
“After I earned my doctorate in 2015, I was left with a persistent disquiet about how people read and write in higher education. Because gutting or breaking a book easily is only possible if books are written in a way that allows them to be gutted easily.”
There Are Three Movies About The Demise Of Gawker In The Works – What Do Ex-Gawker Staffers Think Of Them?
“It’s unclear how many of the projects, if any, will end up panning out, but drafts of the first two have been going around the film and media worlds for a few months now. … But what do the people who lived through the whole ordeal think? We decided to ask the Gawker diaspora, a cadre of writers who were never shy about sharing their opinions, what they thought about the idea of a movie about the demise of their beloved site.”
What ‘M*A*S*H’ – The Book, The Film, The TV Series – Taught Us Then And Teaches Us Now
“Rationality has lost its currency. The people in charge are dolts — masters of manipulation making testosterone-fueled, incendiary moves on the world stage. Patriotism has soured into ugly, gun-loving nationalism, with brown people and foreigners the targets of a nonsensical, hateful rage. … Each morning seems to bring some fresh hell, a reminder that the nightmare is real, and that there is no end in sight. Salvation is found in small, personal connections, in wry humor, and in the forlorn hope that intelligence and decency will ultimately prevail. That’s one way to describe the basic plot of MAS*H.”
UK Theatres To Get Protection From Noise Complaints By Neighbors
Until now, theatres near new developments have faced the threat of restrictions to their licences or – in the worst-case scenarios – complete closure, because of potential noise complaints from people moving into properties nearby that were granted planning permission after the live venues were established.
An Actress Accuses French Director Luc Besson Of Rape, But France Hasn’t Quite Joined The Me Too Movement
France, you have a problem. “Eeveral forces have kept #MeToo and its French counterpart, #BalanceTonPorc, or ‘Expose Your Pig,’ from having the same impact in France that it has had in the United States. In France, if an accused man is not convicted of a crime, it is relatively easy for him to sue his accuser for defamation. … Other reasons are cultural.”
Bayreuth’s First American Director Gives A Wagner Opera A Feminist – And Maybe Sort Of Happy – Ending
Or was it more ambiguous? Director and MacArthur genius grant recipient Yuval Sharon: “All of these various ideas resonate with each other, or clash with each other, or sometimes don’t get told all the way to the end. … I love things that aren’t closed, because then the audience has such power and freedom to discover things for themselves.”
Oh, So This Is How Netflix Makes Its Decisions (Or Some Of Them, Or So We Think)
The streaming platform uses “taste communities” – “broadly defined groups of subscribers who gravitate toward the same shows … Viewers in the same taste community may live on different continents, but they enjoy the same kinds of TV shows and movies” – to figure out how to drive new programming.
Watching Musical Theatre From The Orchestra Pit Can Be Illuminating
Take the touring company of An American in Paris: “In between big song-and-dance numbers like ‘Fidgety Feet,’ ‘But Not for Me’ and ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,’ the musicians checked their phones, perused a paperback or prepped their instruments until their next cue to play. As the show moved toward its finale, I appreciated that if I was going to spend the evening perched in proximity to a piano, I couldn’t ask for anything more than for the pianist to be playing Gershwin.”
As Netflix’s ‘Orange Is The New Black’ Hits Season Six, Its Double Emmy Winner Explains How She Found Her Voice
Uzo Aduba, who plays the character “Crazy Eyes,” explains how she created the character. “I found her voice Season 1 in one of the stage directions. They had described her as being innocent like a child, except children aren’t scary. And I had a flash in my mind of a woman holding a sledgehammer in one hand and sucking on a pacifier. “
Why Are Series Based On Books Lasting Far Beyond The End Of The Book?
And how did HBO’s Sharper Objects not fall under the sway of the sequel season? Amy Adams wasn’t interested, basically – but the actors on The Handmaid’s Tale, Big Little Lies, and of course Game of Thrones certainly have been, and so have their networks.
Sleeping Like A Sloth Is 100 Percent Good For Your Brain, So Get Some Damn Sleep
It’s one of those seven deadly sins, “but is slothfulness actually wrong? If slothfulness means avoiding responsibility and failing to accomplish important, meaningful goals, then most likely yes. However, if slothfulness means getting more than seven hours’ sleep a night to improve health and increase productivity, then surely there’s nothing wrong with that.”
A Literary Agent Wants You To Know That You Really Do Not ‘Have A Book In You’
Ouch, but also, too real: “Every story is not a book. A story may be things that happened, embellished for interest, but that’s not a book. Many stories don’t get good until the end. Some stories — true ones even — are hard to believe. Other stories are just too short, don’t have enough tension, or frankly aren’t that interesting. The stories we tell that enrapture our friends and families may be extraordinarily boring to those who don’t know us. Those stories are not a book.”