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Dance
Could A Drive-In ‘Nutcracker’ Work This Christmas? This Company’s Trying It
“For five nights [Atlanta Ballet] will construct a pop-up drive-in movie theater on its surface parking lot, and will welcome patrons at $100 a carload ($150 for the front-row parking spaces). … The film will feature the new staging of The Nutcracker, with its outsize sets and startling video projections, introduced to Atlanta audiences in 2018 by artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin.” – Atlanta Journal Constitution
100 Dancers To Perform In Royal Ballet’s Post-Lockdown Comeback
“The company has revealed ambitious details of its ‘comeback’ after a seven-month break from full performances on the Covent Garden stage. The plan is for a celebration performance with 100 dancers and a full orchestra on 9 October, livestreamed around the world. … And while it will be socially distanced, there will be dance duets thanks to couples in bubbles.” – The Guardian
Why Do Mixed-Genre Dance Companies Always Do Their Daily Classes In Ballet?
“That disconnect grows wider every year as contemporary choreographers look beyond ballet — if not beyond white Western forms entirely — in search of new inspiration and foundational techniques. Yet dancers at almost all of the world’s leading mixed-rep ensembles take ballet classes before rehearsals and shows. Most companies rarely depart from ballet more than twice a week and some never offer alternative classes.” This has, in fact, been a subject of debate since Diaghilev’s day. – Dance Magazine
Yvonne Rainer And Radical Dance
Rainer, avant-garde choreographer and filmmaker, has a new book out. “A book about dance is a book, but it is also a mirror. And when a choreographer puts a mirror up to her work, angling to see it with new clarity, she often encounters her own reflection: her image and the mythologies of that image, her layered and conflicting legacies, the ways in which she has moved through the world — or appeared to.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
Company Gives Ballet Dancers Whose Studios Are Closed A Place To Keep Their Technique Up
Says Festival Ballet Providence director Kathleen Breen Combes, “I kept getting these emails of dancers saying they just need a place to train this year. I thought, What if we could provide a space for dancers to get stronger, experiment and try new things in a nonjudgmental and no-pressure environment?” And so the company’s Leap Year program was born. – Pointe Magazine
Ideas
Uncertainty Can Be A Good Thing
The examined human life reflects, we suggest, a new kind of relationship with our own expectations and uncertainty. Yet it is one that we have somehow constructed within the inviolable bounds of a biologically bedrock drive to minimise long-term prediction error. How is this neat trick possible? – Aeon
The Pervasive Toxicity Of Online Misinformation
Today, those wishing to sow discord don’t need bots to post and spread their falsehoods and distortions. They have plenty of unwitting people to do that, their beliefs and actions warped by a “behavioral modification system. That mistrust has destabilized democracy around the world. – Wired
Behind Americans’ Addiction To Crap
It’s not just that these goods are shoddily constructed and add to the world’s clutter. Often, they’re actively harmful. The labor exploitation crap relies on dates back as far as crap itself. Many of the “decorative knickknacks” we consumed in the nineteenth century, for example, were produced in British factories where thousands of people, including young boys, worked with materials that contained lead and arsenic for a couple of shillings a week. – The Baffler
We Thought Phone Calls Were Over. Then The Pandemic Came And People Rediscovered Talking
“Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year,” reported The New York Times back in April. “Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.” – Nautilus
How A Viral Video About Math Ignited A Philosophical Debate
Cunningham had unwittingly re-ignited a very ancient and unresolved debate in the philosophy of science. What, exactly, is math? Is it invented, or discovered? And are the things that mathematicians work with—numbers, algebraic equations, geometry, theorems and so on—real? – Smithsonian
Issues
Is Restoration Versus Opportunity A False Choice For The Arts?
“One of the things we’re learning in the Covid-19 era is that is that community is not defined only by proximity, or space. It’s defined by interest, and I think a lot about the music that we have in our repertoire and the music that should be more a part of the traditional canon of our repertoire.” – Medium
Even Rio’s Carnival Has Been Ruined By The Pandemic
“Rio’s League of Samba Schools, LIESA, announced Thursday night that the spread of the coronavirus has made it impossible to safely hold the traditional parades that are a cultural mainstay and, for many, a source of livelihood. … And while the decision is being characterized as a postponement of the event, no new date has been set.” – AP
Not Some Vow Of Poverty – Getting Paid In The Arts
The money being made in the cultural sector isn’t being made by artists. It is being made by digital platforms and corporate conglomerates. These are deliberate transfers of wealth, not unintended consequences. – ArtsFuse
Ford Foundation: Record $160 Million Lifeline For The Arts
The Ford Foundation this week is announcing an unprecedented $160 million-and-growing initiative called America’s Cultural Treasures, with substantial grants going to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) organizations across the country. The grants are, in most cases, the largest ever for the 20 recipients in the first round. – Washington Post
This Fall’s University Enrollments Are Down
Although the enrollment declines were steepest at community colleges (-7.5 percent), undergraduate enrollment fell at all types of colleges, including private nonprofit four-year colleges (-3.8 percent) and private for-profit four-year colleges (-1.9 percent). The decline was more modest at public four-year colleges (-0.4 percent), although there were differences across public four-year institutions according to location, with rural institutions seeing the biggest decline (-4 percent) and urban institutions seeing slight gains (+0.5 percent). – Inside Higher Ed
Media
A Kinder Gentler Social Medium?
In a landscape of social networks, Telepath stands out because it’s more about your interests than who you know, and it requires real names for the conversations. It’s also positioning itself as a kinder, more inclusive network by making a point to establish ground rules and moderation up front. – Protocol
Fifty Years Too Early: This 1970 Flop Is Just The Satire For 2020
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, a British film that featured Peter Cook, Graham Chapman and John Cleese of Monty Python, and Harold Pinter (as a vicious talk-show host), ended up coming out about six months too late for the British election it was meant to skewer. “[But] for today, the film’s observations on the intersection of media and politics seem uncannily prescient, anticipating the triumph of two populists on opposite sides of the pond: Donald J. Trump and Boris Johnson.” – The New York Times
BAFTA Overhauls Its Awards System To Make It More Diverse
“[The package of changes] includes adding 1,000 new members to its committee and limiting the amount that studios can spend campaigning for nominations, in a bid to recognise more diverse talent. The wide-ranging changes … are the result of a seven-month review process, which was triggered by heavy criticism over the lack of diversity in its major awards earlier this year.” – The Guardian
TikTok Asks Judge To Nullify Trump’s Threat Of A Ban
TikTok contends that Trump has exceeded his presidential power in ordering the ban, which it says amounts to impermissible regulation of users’ “personal communications” and was not “motivated by a genuine national security concern, but rather by political considerations relating to the upcoming general election.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Using Video Games To Explore India’s Politics And History
“Through fantastical environments where buildings and oversized monuments are made of rubber sandals and toothpaste tubes, Studio Oleomingus … crafts interactive stories that cast a playful light on India’s complicated past and present.” – The Guardian
Music
Our Consumption Of Music Is Largely Virtual Right Now. Is This A Threat?
“Are these experiences an authentic way of experiencing live music? Or do they indicate a transition towards a dystopian cultural milieu? In this scenario, we might end up losing sight of the multi-sensory and collective aspects of live music and experience it instead alone at home through a VR headset or a similar technological device.” – The Conversation
Reconceiving Classical Music For The (COVID-Safe) Great Outdoors
Playing chamber music in a midtown Manhattan park? Sure, you can (especially if you’re playing Florence Price), but folks are getting way more creative these days. David Patrick Stearns reports on the Ellen Reid/New York Philharmonic app configured for Central Park, The Crossing dispersing its singers and a specially designed speaker system across a wildflower preserve, and a multi-composer “immersion” in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. – WQXR (New York City)
Choir Practice In Spain Infects 30 Of 41 Members
After one member of the chorus tested positive following the Sept. 13 performance, more than 40 other members and their close contacts went into isolation, the chorus said. Since then, at least 30 singers have tested positive, the Sallent municipal government said. – Seattle Times (AP)
Fire Destroys Moldova’s National Philharmonic Hall
“Firefighters worked for seven hours to put out the fire on Thursday afternoon and were still there on Friday morning. According to the Emergency Situations Inspectorate, the flames burned an area of about 3,500 square metres, reducing much of the interior to ashes.” – Balkan Insight
Things Seem Genuinely Hopeful At Baltimore Symphony For First Time In Years
Only a year ago, musicians and management were just ending a very bitter lockdown-turned-strike, and unflattering details of the orchestra’s severe money troubles had been splashed across the media. Now, despite the pandemic, there’s a new five-year contract in place and a spirit of cooperation. “It’s an astonishing reversal of fortune,” says the co-chairman of the players’ committee; “We’re working together in ways we haven’t in many, many years,” says the CEO. – Baltimore Magazine
People
At 86, Sophia Loren Is Returning To The Screen
“[She] stars in upcoming Netflix drama The Life Ahead, which is directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti. In the film, Loren plays Madame Rosa, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who helps raise the children of deceased sex workers with whom she once walked the streets. She then strikes up an enduring friendship with Momo, a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan who tries to steal her candlesticks.” – The Guardian
Christgau: Remembering The Volatile Stanley Crouch
“Crouch was a fervent American who was an even more fervent African American. He loved to perturb all comers by arguing that in the end the Middle Passage was good for Africans, but nowhere near as much as he loved to praise the richness and diversity of the Black cultures that the horrors of slavery made possible. For him, the peak of these cultures was jazz — from Armstrong to bebop, please, post-’60s not so much.” – Los Angeles Times
Harold Evans, 92, Investigative Journalist, Magazine Founder, Author, Publisher
Over a seven-decade career, Evans exposed major political and business scandals (above all, Kim Philby’s hidden career as a Soviet spy and the abandonment of children deformed by thalidomide by the drug’s manufacturers), edited The Sunday Times and The Times of London (which he left after a battle with Rupert Murdoch), wrote several books, founded Condé Nast Traveler magazine, and served as president of Random House; he became a Reuters editor-at-large at age 83. In a 2002 British Journalism Review poll, he was voted “the greatest newspaper editor of all time.” – Reuters
Juliette Gréco, Legend Of Chanson Française, Dead At 93
“An acclaimed French chanteuse whose sensual stage mystique and doleful voice bewitched audiences for more than six decades and made her an international recording and concert star, … [Gréco] was one of the last links to Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist intellectuals who made her their raven-haired, black-clad muse in the post-World War II bohemia of Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood.” – The Washington Post
Marie Hale, Founder Of Ballet Florida, Dead At 87
A Mississippi native who began studying dance at age 2, she settled in West Palm Beach in her late 20s and began teaching. In 1973, she founded Ballet Arts Theater of Palm Beach, which grew to a four-productions-per-season schedule and a school with 300 students and a record of placing graduates in some of the world’s top troupes. In 1986, Hale reconstituted BAT as Ballet Florida, one of the few fully professional dance companies in the state. – Dance Magazine
Theatre
Hybrid Theatre – Virtual And In Person
“The Institute for Counterfeit Memory” cannily employs the devices it provides to bring you back to the feeling of being in a room with other spectators, even as it reminds you that you are alone. Its ministrations so impressed me that when I turned over the final cue card instructing me to applaud, I actually did. – Washington Post
It’s A Horrible Time For British Theatre, But It Could Be Great For Circuses
“With many circuses sustained by performers and backstage crew from outside the UK, Brexit is a cause for concern. But as the UK’s leading circus directors tell Douglas McPherson, it is also a chance for them to make their mark.” Why? “Circuses thrive in a recession.” – The Stage
‘Enormous Upsurge’ In Complaints Of Racist Behavior To UK Equity
“‘In a period of time [during the lockdown] when nothing was happening, we were receiving dozens of complaints from groups and artists, and we’re still receiving them now,’ said [union general secretary Paul] Fleming. ‘There has been a huge amount of dignity issues around hair and makeup through to reports of casual racism in dressing rooms and racist language in casting processes when people are at their most vulnerable.'” – The Guardian
What Virtual Theatre Is Lacking
“When I tune into a play or a devised theater piece, I’m not looking to be dazzled by computer graphics. Clever Zoom backdrops don’t seize my imagination. I want what I always want from the stage: a confrontation with what it means to be human.” – Los Angeles Times
Musical Theatre Competition Criticized For All-White Semifinals; Organizers Cancel It, Candidates Allege Gaslighting
The Rob Guest Endowment is Australia’s most prestigious musical theatre prize, offering $50,000 (Aus) offers in scholarship money for professional development. In August, a field of 30 semifinalists was announced, and an outcry arose — supported by the candidates themselves — because none of the 30 were BIPOC. Now the Endowment, claiming concern for the semifinalists’ mental health because some have been “targeted and intimidated,” has suspended the award until 2022; the competitors themselves say that they had been about to withdraw en masse. – Limelight (Australia)
Visual
Decision To Delay Guston Show Divides The Art World
“What those who criticize this decision do not understand is that in the past few months the context in the U.S. has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racist imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it.” – The New York Times
Blockbuster Philip Guston Show Postponed Over Concerns About KKK Imagery
On Monday, the National Gallery quietly posted a joint statement signed by directors of all four museums set to host the show: Kaywin Feldman (National Gallery), Frances Morris (Tate Modern), Matthew Teitelbaum (MFA Boston), and Gary Tinterow (MFA Houston). The statement said the exhibition was being pushed “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.” – ARTnews
How Zoning Laws Change The Course Of Cities
How? Michael Kimmelman takes a tour of 42nd Street in New York City to understand how the street became what it is. – The New York Times
A Sculpture Park For Art From Burning Man
No, not all the art on the Playa goes up in flames. In fact, Burners face a real problem: how do they get these enormous sculptures out of the Black Rock Desert and what do they do with them afterward? Now one longtime Burner has provided an option in the desert just outside Las Vegas: Area15, where artworks from the festival are put on display and offered for sale. – Artnet
Uffizi Gallery Says TikTok Has Doubled The Number Of Its Young Visitors
“Since moving onto multiple social media channels, including TikTok, during the lockdown, the Uffizi’s online presence has exploded. In an apparently related trend, young visitors (as a proportion of the total) have nearly doubled since the museum [in Florence] reopened over the summer.” – The Art Newspaper
Words
F. Scott Fitzgerald In 1920 Was The Prophet Of 2020
“We should look anew at 1920 not because centenaries have magical properties but because Fitzgerald’s remarkably sensitive inner ear helped him register, before almost anyone else, when America started losing its balance.” – The New York Review of Books
An AI Scientist Explains Why The GPT-3 Bot Is So Good At ‘Writing’ Original Text
“It’s far and away the most ‘knowledgeable’ natural language generation program to date, and it has a range of potential uses in professions ranging from teaching to journalism to customer service. GPT-3 confirms what computer scientists have known for decades: Size matters.” – The Conversation
JK Rowling’s Controversial New Book Tops Sales List
Sales figures from Nielsen BookScan reveal that Troubled Blood has hit the No 1 spot in the UK’s book charts, selling 64,633 copies in the five days to 19 September. According to the Bookseller, this is “by far” the biggest single-week sale for any Galbraith title, almost double the first-week sales of the novel’s predecessor, Lethal White. – The Guardian
‘The Translator Is A Writer, The Writer Is A Translator.’ Oh, Really?
“How many times have I run up against these assertions? — in a chat between translators protesting because they are not listed in a publisher’s index of authors; or in the work of literary theorists, even poets. … In recent months, I have been dividing my working day between writing in the morning and translating in the afternoon. Maybe comparing the two activities would be a good way to test this writer–translator equation.” For Tim Parks, at least, they’re not at all the same. – The New York Review of Books
With Major Award, Milan Kundera And Czech Republic Kiss And Make Up
The great author and his home country, about which he wrote his most widely-known books, have not always gotten along since he fled the Communist regime in 1975 and didn’t return after it fell. (The latest flare-up happened earlier this year.) But now the 91-year-old Kundera has been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, one of the Republic’s highest honors for writers, and he has “joyfully” accepted. – The Guardian