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Dance
World’s Tallest Ballet Dancer, Fabrice Calmels, Is Leaving Joffrey After 19 Years
“I think I’m at the top of my game. I’m not retiring, I’m not doing this because of health. And I love teaching and coaching.” And, while he loves Chicago, he’s moving to L.A. “First of all, California is warmer, and I need that for a little while. Also California makes sense because a lot of things that I want to do could be movie-related. I also feel like it’s far away from ballet … and I like that challenge.” – Pointe Magazine
Artistic Director Of Houston’s Shuttered METdance Launches New Company
METdance, the city’s largest company after Houston Ballet, was disbanded this past summer, having never recovered financially from 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. Before the summer was over, Marlana Doyle had started both a school, the Institute of Contemporary Dance Houston, and the Houston Contemporary Dance Company, which gives its first performances this weekend. – Houston Chronicle
Strikes Over Pension Reform Have Cost Paris Opera And Ballet €2.5 Million A Week
“The Opéra de Paris’s pension regime is one of the oldest in France, dating back to Louis XIV. It is costly as ballet dancers are allowed to retire at 42 and technical staff can leave with a full pension in the their 50s. However, their generous regime is one of 42 that are for the chop after President Emmanuel Macron’s controversial shakeup of the French pension system.” – The Telegraph (UK)
At The Jacob’s Pillow Gala This Summer, One Patron Was Subjected To Humiliating Racist Treatment By Some Other Patrons. Here’s How The Director Handled It.
“After hearing about this, I couldn’t stay silent. I wrote an op-ed for our regional paper, The Berkshire Eagle, describing how Jacob’s Pillow, like many cultural institutions, is working to create a climate of inclusiveness. ‘We can diversify the artists … we celebrate onstage, the dancers we teach in our school, and the representation of people of color on our board and staff,’ I wrote. ‘What can we do to evolve our audiences so that our institution is truly inclusive?” I invited readers to share their thoughts.” Pamela Tatge writes about what has happened as a result. – Dance Magazine
The Wonder Of Merce Cunningham In 3D
We watch the dancers from close up and on all sides, our proximity enhanced by the magic of 3-D. The elegance of the cinematography (by Mko Malkhasyan) turns these passages into the stanzas of a visual poem. – The New Yorker
Ideas
Fiction Versus Fake News
“Fake news stories have proved irresistible for readers. Studies have shown that people spread false news on Twitter six times faster than news that is true. Unlike novels, which create complex narratives that take time to consume and understand, fake news delivers ready-made conclusions to consumers with little or no context. These are sensational bits of information that do not provide nuance and do not invite interrogation.” – Columbia Journalism Review
The Truth About Facts (And Checking Them)
The great truth of fact-checking: while facts are sacred to writers, readers, and, above all, editors, they are sometimes more work than they’re worth. The importance of fact-checking—particularly when it comes to inconsequential detail—is based on the long-held theory that if you’re fastidious about the little things, the reader will trust you with the big things. But the history of fact-checking suggests that too often, the accumulation of verifiable minutiae can become an end unto itself. – Columbia Journalism Review
The Limits Of Truth
There is a real risk that scientific fact will eventually be reduced to just another opinion, even when those facts describe natural phenomena—the very purpose for which science was developed. – The Scientist
A Crisis Of Truth?
It seems irresponsible or perverse to reject the idea that there is a Crisis of Truth. No time now for judicious reflection; what’s needed is a full-frontal attack on the Truth Deniers. But it’s good to be sure about the identity of the problem before setting out to solve it. Conceiving the problem as a Crisis of Truth, or even as a Crisis of Scientific Authority, is not, I think, the best starting point. There’s no reason for complacency, but there is reason to reassess which bits of our culture are in a critical state and, once they are securely identified, what therapies are in order. – Los Angeles Review of Books
The Responsibility Of Intellectuals
Intellectuals, in order to be able “to speak the truth and expose lies” must understand how ideology works in the form of official institutions and everyday life. Ideological analysis is not simple and requires specific knowledge and skills. – 3 Quarks Daily
Issues
Thousands March Against Hungarian Regime’s Plans To Tighten Control Of Performing Arts
“Actors and directors led Monday evening’s rally in Budapest against a bill that they say threatens artistic freedom and extends the nationalist government’s reach into areas that should be politically independent. The city’s liberal opposition mayor Gergely Karácsony also addressed the crowd. … [The legislation will] establish a national cultural council to determine ‘the unified strategic direction of various segments of culture’.” – The Irish Times
The Importance Of Stalin Jokes
“By the 1980s, Soviet political jokes had become so widely enjoyed that even the US president Ronald Reagan loved to collect and retell them. But, 50 years earlier, under Stalin’s paranoid and brutal reign, why would ordinary Soviet people share jokes ridiculing their leaders and the Soviet system if they ran the risk of the NKVD (state security) breaking down the door to their apartment and tearing them away from their families, perhaps never to return? … And yet, countless diaries, memoirs and even the state’s own archives reveal that people [did].” – Aeon
Should Arts Organizations Program For The Election?
Many think there’s a separation of politics and art. But simply ignoring elections seems an abdication of responsibility. There are ways to think about how to address elections if you’re an artist. – Clyde Fitch Report
Theme Park Workers File Suit Against Disney Over Low Wages: “We’re Living In Cars!”
A new class action lawsuit, filed Friday in California Superior Court and announced in a press advisory Monday, argues that the Walt Disney Company, worth approximately $130 billion as of this year, failed to pay hundreds of those workers a living wage. The complaint was filed by five Disney employees on behalf of more than 400 hospitality workers. – The Daily Beast
Staged Trial Of Asylum Seeker Shines Light On EU’s Growing Refugee Problem
“Dutch asylum court is not exactly a well-trodden topic within performance art, but last week in Amsterdam, a one-off staging of a refugee trial asked the public to determine the fate of an actual case. The piece” — Ehsan Fardjadniya’s Refugee on Trial: Afghan Journalist Ali J vs. Netherlands — “asked questions about the role of performance in analysing complex social and legal issues, and with it how visual artists are using performance to platform issues often left hidden.” – The Art Newspaper
Media
How Awards Distort Our Movie And Music Culture
Awards are, it must be said, an absurdity. It is not only possible but crucial to insist on the importance or value of art without giving it a trophy. For the many who are interested in the arts, both mass-marketability and the potential for conferred prestige (i.e. awards) should be irrelevant. If those markers are your interest above the work itself, you can turn to metrics, algorithms, and trending topics, which have robust and widely-available platforms for consumption and analysis. Instead, in discussing and deciding what’s available to watch, what’s worth or not worth watching, and how movies are shaping our society, we must try to de-emphasize the validating mechanisms the industry itself provides. – The Daily Beast
NPR Changes The Formula For What It Charges Local Stations
Among stations with annual membership income above $4 million, the median change in fees is a 9% increase, according to NPR; among stations with income below $250,000, an 8% decline. – Current
Brazilian Film Industry Suffering Under Bolsonaro Government
Brazilian cinema – put on the map by global hits such as City of God and Aquarius – has suffered a succession of blows since Bolsonaro took office in January, from a general lack of interest in the arts to more pointed attacks on films dealing with themes such as sexual diversity and race. – The Guardian
So Many Good, And Successful, Movies By And About Women This Year — Why Are They Getting So Few Award Nominations?
Films such as Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, Melina Matsoukas’s Queen & Slim, Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, and Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers have been nearly shut out of the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations. Reporters Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes look into the reasons. – The New York Times
What’s Behind #PayUpHollywood?
“In recent weeks, hundreds of TV and film assistants … have begun to speak out about their experiences on the bottom rung of the industry, mounting a fight for better pay and fair treatment.” Many of those assistants are paid only $12 and hour, California’s minimum wage, and the stories of bizarre demands and mistreatment by bosses are legion. – The Guardian
Music
A New Opera Company For Orange County? Not Likely
LA Opera continues to stage traditional and spectacular productions, Long Beach Opera forges ahead in its scrappy and innovative way, San Diego Opera provides yet another outlet for listeners. The market for opera in Southern California may already be saturated, and it may be a settled question: asking for a fully-staffed, active and sustaining professional company in Orange County that consistently delivers top-quality, fully-staged productions before packed and enthusiastic houses? It may be too much. – Voice of Orange County
Study: Surgeons Perform Better With Music Playing In The Operating Room
As the study noted, music is already played in operating theatres as a matter of course by most doctors and nurses — about two-thirds, as it turns out. Participants said that listening to music reduced stress and made them feel more relaxed. Patients also reported that music played before their surgeries reduced stress levels. Almost all the respondents preferred classical music of some kind, with a slight preference for Mozart piano sonatas. Classical music was used in six of the studies, and music of choice in the others. – Ludwig Van
A Full-Time Classical Singing Career, Over 16 Years, Will Cost You A Million Dollars
Tenor Zach Finkelstein: “Below I’ll show you four case studies demonstrating that the inability to continue in a performing career and support yourself financially has very little to do with the expenses of running an opera business, although they are onerous. Or your abilities as a performer, although it is a necessary condition to be best-in-class. Success has to do with two major decisions you make when you are most vulnerable and know the least about the business: the amount you pay for your undergraduate and graduate school education, and the cost of living in the city where you build your career.” – The Middle-Class Artist
Strikes Over Pension Reform Have Cost Paris Opera And Ballet €2.5 Million A Week
“The Opéra de Paris’s pension regime is one of the oldest in France, dating back to Louis XIV. It is costly as ballet dancers are allowed to retire at 42 and technical staff can leave with a full pension in the their 50s. However, their generous regime is one of 42 that are for the chop after President Emmanuel Macron’s controversial shakeup of the French pension system.” – The Telegraph (UK)
English Music? Why Do We Think Of It As Nostalgic?
Since the 2016 Brexit referendum, the UK has suffered a collective breakdown over national identity and our relationship to Europe, and it should perhaps be no surprise to see the 48/52 divide reflected in our musical tastes. – The Guardian
People
Actor Danny Aiello, 86
He memorably portrayed blue-collar heavies and hotheads in films such as “The Godfather: Part II,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and “Do the Right Thing,” and played against type as a middle-aged mama’s boy in “Moonstruck.” – Washington Post
How Reese Witherspoon Remade Herself Into A Genuine Multimedia Mogul
“Tired of dreadful scripts and degrading magazine spreads, the Oscar-winning actress, producer, entrepreneur and activist built an empire on her own taste and work ethic. Now she plots projects all over Hollywood and responds to critics of her paychecks: ‘Does it bother people when Kobe Bryant or LeBron James make their contract?'” – The Hollywood Reporter
David Bellamy, Naturalist, Television Host, And Environmentalist, Dead At 86
“Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the BBC’s ‘Bouncing Botanist’ was a television regular, leaping over ‘wocky pwotuberwances’, enthusing over ‘twee pherns’ or plunging his hands lovingly into evil-looking sludge to declare it a ‘bweeding gwound for amazing organisms’. … [He] did for botany and ecology what David Attenborough did for biology.” In later life, though, a series of very controversial statements brought him into serious conflict with mainstream environmentalists. – The Telegraph (UK)
May Stevens, Protest Artist Known For ‘Big Daddy Series, Dead At 95
“Stevens was known for her monumental paintings that dealt with social and political issues, as well as her activism, teaching, and writing. The artist used personal experiences and her responses to racism and oppression to inform her works, which span painting, collage, drawing, and prints.” – ARTnews
William Luce, Playwright Of ‘Belle Of Amherst’ And ‘Barrymore’, Dead At 88
“Over a 40-year career, Luce … worked with the likes of Zoe Caldwell, George C. Scott and Claire Bloom as he wrote about the private lives of Charlotte Brontë, Lillian Hellman, Isak Dinesen, Zelda Fitzgerald and others. The Belle of Amherst, his portrait of the reclusive Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson, won [Julie] Harris the fifth of her six Tony Awards … Barrymore, about the gifted and self-destructive actor John Barrymore, earned [Christopher] Plummer his second Tony and was filmed for television.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Theatre
Cost Of The Edinburgh Fringe Is Shutting Out Working Class Artists
“So, who can afford to perform at the Fringe regularly? Who can absorb a grand loss every year? Who can work unpaid for 17 weeks at a time? The answer is people who already have money. People who have the financial resources to take that hit year-in and year-out while they build a profile, while they experiment, while they get better at their job. Not me, and not any of my fellow working class artists – that’s for sure.” – The Stage
‘The Inheritance’ Was A Huge Success In London, So Why Isn’t It Catching On In New York?
Isaac Butler: “Usually when a piece from the U.K. fails to resonate in the U.S. (or vice versa), we can chalk it up to intangible cultural differences between our two countries and their famous separation by a common language. But this was an American play, with a mostly American cast, about New York City, the AIDS crisis, gay history, and what members of a community owe to each other. Why has it ended up struggling so much over here? The answer is partly political, … [but] more deadly, I think, are basic problems of playwriting craft: If The Inheritance is failing to connect, it is because its structure as a work of drama is unsound.” – Slate
Founders Of Chicago Theatre Leave. Theatre Erases History Of Their Involvement
“They indicated that they didn’t want to be associated with the theater any longer after they had departed, so we did that.” When I asked if they said they wanted to be excised from its history, he said, “We interpreted it in that fashion.” – Chicago Reader
Arkansas Repertory Theatre Went Dark Last Year. Now It’s Come Back From The Dead.
“The theatre, which has a current operating budget of $4.5 million, stopped producing last year to focus on tackling its [$2.6 million in] debts … As they planned to reopen, … the board focused on three elements that make the Rep ‘sacred,’ and that were a must for future sustainability: being affordable to attract audiences, producing relevant shows, and maintaining professional status [as an Equity house].” – American Theatre
Hungarian Government Plans More Control Over Theatres
“This proposal would eliminate cultural diversity, which stems from freedom — which means artists are not kept on a political leash,” Budapest mayor Gergely Karacsony said. The Hungarian Theatre Society also issued a statement saying the plan would curtail artistic freedoms in an unacceptable way. – Reuters
Visual
ARTnews’ Top 200 Collectors List For 2019
“There is this great shift in what’s going on in collecting,” said Sara Friedlander, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art. “Collectors across the board are looking for something new that is also of great quality—in concert with what’s happening curatorially in museums and in scholarly gallery shows.” The result, she said, is “shifting the conversation away from simply dead white men to artists of color and women.” – ARTnews
Ten Top New Museums Of 2019
These ten museums opened in 2019. We’re not saying they’re the best, but they sure are fun buildings to look at. – Dezeen
At Putin’s Request, Russia’s Major Museums Are Opening Regional Satellites
The Hermitage in St. Petersburg has just opened a branch in Omsk, the Pushkin in Moscow is setting up in Samara and Nizhny Novgorod, and both museums are making plans to open outposts in Yekaterinburg. Similar plans are in the works from Kaliningrad (wedged between Poland and Lithuania) to Tomsk in Siberia to Khabarovsk in the Far East and (especially) Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. – The Art Newspaper
Rebuilding The Shattered Great Mosque Of Aleppo
“A civil engineer named Tamim Kasmo, 73, has joined a team of architects and engineers, stonemasons and woodworkers who have taken on the task of rebuilding the [12th-century] mosque. … Kasmo’s team must put the minaret back up and repair the broken columns, scorched ceilings, and bullet-scarred walls of the prayer hall and arcades that surround the courtyard.” – Atlas Obscura
Berlin’s Biggest Art Fair Is Canceled
Berlin’s most prominent art fair evolved out of its previous iteration, Art Berlin Contemporary, and was held for the past three years in the historic Tempelhof airport each September, showing mostly contemporary art. But the fair’s owner which also runs Art Cologne, has decided after months of discussions that the conditions in Berlin are too unpredictable for its liking. – Artnet
Words
Native American Languages Are Disappearing. There’s A Bill In Congress That Can Help Preserve Them.
“On Monday, in a small step to preserve this tradition, the House passed the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Programs Reauthorization Act, named after the legendary Tewa linguist. With the Senate vote already in the bank, the measure is headed to President Trump’s desk. Like a variety of other set-term appropriation bills, the legislation, which was first passed under George W. Bush in 2006, has to be renewed by Congress every five years to maintain the funding. And like so many other necessary pieces of legislation, it is still deficient.” – The New Republic
At What Point Does Memoir Become Biography And Biography Become History?
“[Biography] was once thought, as Michael Holroyd called it, ‘the shallow end of history’, unable to provide sufficient context and with a tendency to exaggerate the role of individuals in the passage of time. … Many a biographer still falls in love with his or her subject, making the hope of objectivity even dimmer than for conventional history. And arguably the whole conceit is flawed.” – History Today
How Reading Has Changed In The 2010s
“For a while we were told that books were going to be a thing of the past. A new century had dawned, our lives were being digitised and surely there was no longer any reason to lug the pressed pulp of dead trees around. And yet, over the past decade, it seems clear that the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated.” – BBC
Canadian Literary Juries Struggle With Balance Between Politics And Art
“(Literature) should not be reduced to politics, obviously, because human experience is more than politics. But also, human experience is never without politics.” – Toronto Star
How The Hawaiian Language Was Rescued From Near-Oblivion
“In the ’60s, estimates suggest that fewer than 2,000 people could speak Hawaiian fluently, and just a few dozen of them were children. But then something remarkable happened. An unlikely Hawaiian renaissance blossomed in the ’60s and into the ’70s, initially driven by artists who sought to reclaim traditional music and dance. … Today, roughly two dozen of Hawaii’s public schools teach exclusively in Hawaiian, about a third of them charters. The number of Hawaiian speakers in the state is now 18,000, roughly half of them fluent.” – The Atlantic