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Dance
What’s The Most Physically Demanding Job In America? According To Insurers, It’s Dancer
“Researchers at InsuranceProviders.com analyzed data from the Occupational Information Network, a national organization developed through support from the U.S. Department of Labor …, to determine the 20 most physically demanding jobs in the country. They analyzed the level of strength, stamina, flexibility and coordination required for a host of jobs, and each category was assigned.” Dancer tops the list with 97 points out of 100. (Athlete came in third.) – Dance Magazine
I Began Studying Ballet At Age 62
Michelle Herman: “In that very first class, long before I had any idea what I was doing, … I had a moment of what seemed like perfect clarity: My body and my mind were working as one. And this was something I had no experience of. During the brief periods of my life when I’ve exercised — when I’ve taken up swimming or aerobics or yoga — I had always turned off my mind in order to attend to my body. That was why it was fun (when it was fun), and I wanted it to be fun — how else could I get through it? But I saw, that first day in the dance studio, that it was the work of ballet that appealed to me — the mental work, I mean.” – Slate
Sasha Waltz And Johannes Öhman To Leave Staatsballett Berlin
“According to a company press release [about the two artistic directors], Öhman is leaving to accept a directorship at Swedish contemporary dance presenter Dansens Hus. Waltz” — whose appointment was greeted with fury by the company’s dancers (though they later patched things up) — “has chosen to depart at the same time rather than become sole artistic director, though she will continue to be artistically involved with the company through 2021 as a choreographer.” – Dance Magazine
Social Media Influencers Are Changing The Face Of Dance
Commercial dancers — the performers who animate music videos, films and TV shows — have long needed the right look, the right connections, expertise in the most popular styles and an agency to access coveted jobs. Now, however, video and social media have democratized who can succeed in the industry. – Los Angeles Times
Why, Exactly, Is The Paris Opera Ballet On Strike? Here’s An Explainer
The company’s labor action is yet another part of the series of national protests against President Macron’s planned pension reforms. The twist is that, as we know, ballet is not like other professions (dancers’ bodies won’t hold out until age 65), and the Paris Opera Ballet’s pension system dates back to the 17th century. – Dance Magazine
Ideas
As Robots Take Over There’s An Opening For People
“The 20th century economy rewarded being the same, suppressing whatever made you weird and interesting. But this economy doesn’t reward that. This economy has shifted far more in the direction of rewarding uniqueness. So broadly speaking, more passion is more possible.” – Chicago Reader
The Virtue Of Being Able To Say Hard Things In Print… Have We Lost It?
Writers are individuals whose job is to find language that can cross the unfathomable gap separating us from one another. They don’t write as anyone beyond themselves. But today, writers have every incentive to do their work as easily identifiable, fully paid-up members of a community. Belonging is numerically codified by social media, with its likes, retweets, friends, and followers. Writers learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers. In the most successful cases, the cultivation of followers becomes an end in itself and takes the place of actual writing. – The Atlantic
Our Conception Of Time As A Process Has Evolved
Over the past few centuries, philosophers of time have worried about divine eternity, absolutism and Kantian idealism. Our current fixation on presentness, and whether it is a real feature of the world, is a 20th-century fad. Ironically, it’s rooted in a Dormouse who rejected the reality of time altogether. – Aeon
Survival Of The Fittest? Turns Out Collaboration Might Be More Important
Put simply, life is beginning to look ever more complex and ever more collaborative. All this has fractured Western biology’s consensus on Darwin. – Slate
How Self-Help Books Have Influenced Literature
Serious authors create; self-help writers multiply. But the influence of self-help on prestigious literature is much deeper and more sustained than figures such as Macdonald would have us believe. – Aeon
Issues
Research: How New York City’s Arts Work Force Diversity Compares To The Rest Of The City
“Based on responses from our survey, a high share (66%) of cultural workers identify as White (non-Hispanic), compared to just 32% of New York City’s population. In contrast, Hispanics, Blacks/African Americans, and Asians are underrepresented – 10% of cultural workers identify as Black/African American, compared to 22% of the city’s population; 11% identify as Hispanic, compared to 29% of city residents; and 6% identify as Asian, compared to 14% of city residents.” SMU Data Arts
The Difficulty Of Being A Cultural Ambassador For The US In The Time Of Trump
Under the Trump Administration, the challenge for cultural workers who agree to participate in official events is akin to swimming upstream in boiling waters. Civil servants, thinking of the long game—the point in the future when Trump will be gone and our democracy will be restored—task cultural workers with creating a counter-narrative of America while their employer puts forth a pernicious, deleterious version of the country. But how will this anticipated moment of restored democracy arrive if we behave as if events unfolding in this country were normal, as if our collective house were not on fire? – The New Yorker
NEA Releases Results Of Latest Survey Of Public Participation In The Arts
Among the key findings: 74% of American adults engage with the arts via electronic media, 54.3% attend arts events, and 53.7% create or perform art themselves. Three states, D.C. and metro Cleveland have particularly high rates of attendance at performances, while Vermont, Montana, and metro Dallas lead in art show attendance, and nearly 90% of adults in greater Philadelphia and Baltimore engage with the arts via electronic media. – National Endowment for the Arts
Does Russia’s New Minister Of Culture Hate Culture?
Her blunt views on culture were summed up in a 2008 blog which complains “I simply can’t stand going to exhibitions, museums, opera”. – BBC
One Of New York’s Most Storied Experimental Venues Is Letting Artists Run It For A Year
“Performance Space New York [formerly P.S. 122], the historic performance arts nonprofit in Manhattan’s East Village, will shift to a new, artist-run model for 2020. A cohort of NYC-based artists and collectives will direct the organization’s programming, working in collaboration with its staff, board, and leadership. The artists will have ‘full transparency into the organization’s inner workings’ and control of its annual production budget to pay their own wages and develop programs … The only requirements of their tenure is that the spaces must be utilized.” – Hyperallergic
Media
Saying That Conditions Had Become ‘Impossible’, China’s Last Independent Film Festival Shuts Down
“The China Independent Film Festival has held 14 editions and shown some 1,000 films since it was established in 2003 in Nanjing, the capital of coastal Jiangsu province. Many of the titles it highlighted touched on topics like homosexuality or political history deemed sensitive or inappropriate by the ruling Communist Party. Other films were effectively underground titles as they lacked the government ‘dragon seal’ of censorship approval required for public screening.” A statement by festival organizers said that “it has already become impossible to organize a film festival that truly has a purely independent spirit and is also effective.” – Variety
How Rotten Tomatoes Actually Works
A key point that many people don’t realize is that the site does not use any algorithms: each review that goes into a movie’s or TV show’s Tomatometer score is read and evaluated by a human curator. “In a world of endless choice, on an internet increasingly dictated by predictive algorithms that recommend ‘for you,’ Rotten Tomatoes represents something more analog. And it raises the question: What’s the best way to choose? Or, more to the point, who do you trust?” Reporter Simon van Zuylen-Wood spent a couple of days at the Rotten Tomatoes to learn just how the site operates. – Wired
For The First Time Netflix Reveals How Many Watched “The Queen”
The third season, which stars Olivia Colman as the Queen, was watched in 21 million homes in its first four weeks. That was 40% more than saw the second season over the same time period, Netflix said. – BBC
Netflix Greenlights Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein Movie With All-Star Producers
Netflix has acquired all rights to the untitled Leonard Bernstein film that Bradley Cooper will direct, star in and produce from the script he co-wrote with Oscar-winning Spotlight scribe Josh Singer. The project exits Paramount, which set the film as a priority project in May 2018. – Deadline
What Is Going On In Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix Show?
Just capitalism and sheer wackiness, or what? (Paltrow’s “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle costs $75 and sold out almost immediately, for one thing.) But there’s more. “The Goop Lab is streaming into a moment in America that finds Medicare for All under discussion and the Affordable Care Act under attack. It presents itself as airy infotainment even as many Americans are unable to access even the most basic forms of medical care. That makes the show deeply uncomfortable to watch.” – The Atlantic
Music
So Much For The Grammys’ New Era
Ousted chief Deborah Dugan’s explosive claims threatened to overshadow the star-studded show itself, which is scheduled to air on CBS. Her brutal portrait of the Recording Academy as a chummy cabal of men with expense accounts, conspiring to line their pockets on the backs of musicians, harass women at will and cover it all up, seemed to confirm people’s most cynical fears about the music industry and the Grammys in particular, which have long been criticized as out of touch and lacking transparency. – The New York Times
Oregon Bach Festival Announces Three Finalists To Lead It
The festival has been in turmoil for the past few years after letting its artistic and executive directors. Finalists are conductors Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Craig Hella Johnson and Julian Wachner. – Eugene Register-Guard
Opera And Classical Young Artist Programs Are Big Business — For Everyone But The Young Artists
Zach Finkelstein: “Company X is a prestigious music apprenticeship festival for instrumentalists and singers. They take in about $15 million a year in revenue, own over $80 million dollars in assets, including real estate, investments, and cash on hand, and pay their CEO almost half a million dollars a year. Nearly two thousand young musicians paid $60 each last year to apply for a handful of spots, with no guarantee of being heard in person. netting the company an estimated $118,000 in application fees. And they pay their newly-hired apprentice performers absolutely nothing.” – The Middle-Class Artist
Detroit Symphony Chooses Its Next Music Director (It Was Love At First Sight)
Jader Bignamini’s first performances with the DSO were unexpected: in 2018, due to cardiac surgery, outgoing music director Leonard Slatkin had to cancel the final concerts of his tenure with the orchestra, and Bignamini stepped in. It was, says the DSO’s board chairman, “the right time, right place, right chemistry.” The new maestro begins his initial six-year term this fall. – Detroit Free Press
Longtime Boston Symphony CEO Mark Volpe Announces Retirement
“In an era when many of his peers have been buffeted by economic challenges, Mr. Volpe, 62, has kept the orchestra on firm footing by capitalizing on what he has referred to as its ‘multiple brand strategy.’ … During his tenure, the Boston Symphony may not have been as flashy as, say, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which has changed how orchestras think about programming and community engagement. But Boston has steadily expanded in ambition and reputation, and avoided the labor unrest that has hit some of its peers.” – The New York Times
People
PBS News Anchor Jim Lehrer Dead At 85
“While best known for his anchor work [as co-founder of what is now The PBS NewsHour], which he shared for two decades with his colleague Robert MacNeil, Mr. Lehrer moderated a dozen presidential debates and was the author of more than a score of novels, which often drew on his reporting experiences. He also wrote four plays and three memoirs.” – The New York Times
An Extraordinary Boots-On-The-Ground Arts Philanthropist In Atlanta
“My desire to give evolved from going to a lot of museums, art galleries and live performances,” he says. “It took years to develop my taste, but once I was on the ground, seeing what these entities could do, it was easy to want to step up and help. I actually wonder why more people don’t do it because I can’t imagine anything more satisfying.” – ArtsATL
One Of The Last Full-Length Interviews Of Monty Python’s Terry Jones
“The BBC came very close to erasing all of the original Python tapes, at least from the first season. What happened was that we got word from our editor that the BBC was about to wipe all the tapes to use for more ‘serious’ entertainment — ballet and opera and the like. So we smuggled out the tapes and recorded them onto a Philips VCR home system. For a long time, these were the only copies of Python‘s first season to exist anywhere. If these were lost, they were lost for good.” – Vulture
Frank Gehry And His Favorite Buildings, And How He Thinks About Buildings
“I don’t play music and I don’t paint, but I always thought architecture was an art and I try to practice it that way. Architecture is intuitive. It’s humanly expressive. You’re putting yourself on the line. You start out not being understood, and you keep going because you have to. And it’s harder to explain.” – New York Magazine
Gypsy Rose Lee’s Son Remembers Life On The Road With Mother
Erik Lee Preminger (his father was film director Otto Preminger) started traveling with his mother while still an infant, got his first jobs with her show before he was old enough to go to school, and was her dresser by the time he was a teenager. Of course he has stories — like the time when Gypsy was driving her first Rolls-Royce through Switzerland in winter and got stuck in the snow: “She tried to dig us out using a bidet she had stolen from a hotel. It was quite an adventure.” – American Theatre
Theatre
Smart Caption Glasses, A New Way To Make Theatre Accessible To Hearing-Impaired Audiences
“Worn by audience members during a performance, the glasses project dialogue directly onto the lens, allowing the wearer to follow the action without having to glance toward the sides of the stage, where caption screens are usually placed.” – American Theatre
How Two Belgian Avant-Gardists Rebuilt ‘West Side Story’ From Top To Bottom
Despite his success with revisionist productions of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller plays, Ivo van Hove seemed an unlikely choice to direct a major revival of the Bernstein-Laurents-Sondheim musical. Even less likely was the selection of austere formalist Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker to choreograph the first production whose dance wasn’t based on Jerome Robbins’s exuberant movement. Yet their participation was blessed by Stephen Sondheim, the only one of the show’s creators still living. Writer Sasha Weiss spent several months watching them cast and develop the production — and then rework their ideas (in one notable case, at the cast’s insistence). – The New York Times Magazine
Shows That Won’t Let You Back In If You Leave Make It Hard For Physically Challenged People
Sitting through a show of that length might seem manageable enough if you’re young and in good health, less so if you have a medical condition like Crohn’s disease or other hidden disability, you’re pregnant or you’re experiencing the menstrual equivalent of the elevator scene in The Shining. If someone leaves during a performance, it’s usually because they don’t have much of a choice. – The Stage
New Crop Of Plays Treats History Of Blacks In Britain
“From an African girl who was ‘gifted’ to Queen Victoria to a slave who took on his master in a British court, several little-known but remarkable chapters of black British history are being put in the spotlight on stage this year.” – BBC
The Hot-Button Issue In ‘Slave Play’ That People Aren’t Talking About
“I am also interested in consent, by far the least attended to aspect of the play, which we encounter in the especially difficult junction between sexuality and trauma. At this strained intersection, consent is revealed at its most impotent, impossible to help clearly adjudicate desire.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
Visual
There’s A Wave Of Forgeries Coming To The Print Market, Warn Art Experts
“Since the dawn of the internet, the problem of phony art being sold has only grown, experts say, and the primary coin of the forgery realm has long been the fake print, which is relatively easy to create, often difficult to detect and typically priced low enough to attract undiscriminating novice buyers. But now the problem seems to be escalating, according to law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe.” – The New York Times
Thomas Campbell’s Challenges At San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museums
It is not clear how Campbell will rebrand the museums, but he casts the de Young as a strong American arts institution and the Legion as a “treasure chest like the Frick, Kimbell or Neue Galerie, where we have an opportunity to double down on connoisseurship and scholarship of the European tradition with a nice vein of contemporary engagement spritzing things up”. – The Art Newspaper
Top Galleries Blast Art Basel In Letter Over Hong Kong Fair
The letter, addressed to Art Basel global director Marc Spiegler and Adeline Ooi, its director Asia, did not mince words when airing complaints about the state of the fair amid the Hong Kong protests, which have been going on for months. It claims that “many people who normally attend the fair have indicated that they will not attend this year” and that “many of our artists are unwilling to have their work shown at the fair” because participation in a territory under threat of increased Chinese control is not “consistent with their core belief in the freedom of expression.” – Artnet
Could The Dirt-Poor Alabama Hamlet Famous For Its Quilts Become An Art Destination Like Marfa?
“The thinking goes: If Marfa, the pint-size Texas town located a three-hour’s drive from the nearest airport, can become a site for pilgrims seeking to commune with Donald Judd’s Minimalist art, why can’t Gee’s Bend become a magnet for art historians, craft enthusiasts, and American history buffs who want to know more about the source of the world’s most acclaimed quilts?” – artnet
How A Pair Of English Policemen Helped Jump-Start The Movement To Repatriate The Benin Bronzes
In 2004, Steve Dunstone and Timothy Awoyemi, on a Police Expedition Society goodwill trip, were on a boat on the Niger River being greeted by the people of a southern Nigerian town. As the event was ending and the boat was about to leave, one man from the crowd reached out and passed Dunstone a note. It said, “Please help return the Benin Bronzes.” – The New York Times
Words
Examining The Arguments Over Jeanine Cummins’s ‘American Dirt’
The author got a seven-figure advance, the first print run is half a million copies, the book jacket features gushing blurbs by famous writers, and the book got loads of coverage in The New York Times. But then the Twitterverse came after it, observers called out plot points that strain credibility, and even Cummins herself said, “I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell this story.” And then Oprah got involved. – Vox
Knopf Names Sonny Mehta’s Successor As Publisher
Some three-and-a-half weeks after Mehta’s death, the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf has appointed Reagan Arthur, currently senior vice president and publisher at Little, Brown, to succeed him as president and editor in chief. While few people knew this before the announcement, Arthur was Mehta’s own choice for the job. – Los Angeles Times
Stories Are An Oral Tradition. They Work Differently When You Don’t Hear Them
Once upon a time, none of these stories had yet been fixed on a page (or a clay tablet), but were carried in the physical bodies of the people who committed them to memory. Long before Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press, and 1,000 years before cloistered monks and their illuminated manuscripts, the principal storage facility for history, poetry, and folktales was the human head. And the chief means of transmitting that cultural wealth, from generation to generation, was the human voice. – LitHub
Were Egyptian Hieroglyphs Basically Ancient Emoji?
On the surface, yes, of course they were — and there are some modern-day emoji that look surprisingly like their Pharaonic predecessors. The differences, though, are deep. – The New York Times
What Professional Book Critics Think About Amateur Reviewers And Academics
Philippa Chong asked them. “Critics were understandably ambivalent towards amateur reviewers despite their appreciation for general readers’ enthusiasm about books. … If the critics I interviewed were concerned that amateurs did not bring enough analysis to their reading or lacked credentials to speak to a book’s artistic merit, they had equal concern … that literary scholars couldn’t always ‘code-switch’ to make their specialist form of criticism accessible to general readers looking for a straightforward review.” – Literary Hub