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DANCE
What Do Young Ballet Dancers Need? More Interesting Ballets, Says Benjamin Millepied
"These ballet dancers are great and they're ready and what they need is more interesting work. I feel people are playing it safe a lot. If anything, I think it's the choreographers and the directors who need to make an effort for these dancers who have made this art form their passion, and to really be as daring or at least as relevant as some of our peers were when they were commissioning pieces a long time ago." … [Read More...]
When You Take Dance Out Of A Theatre, You Get… Lots Of Questions
"In taking dance out of the theatre, Is This a Waste Land? not only takes the theatre out of dance, but most of the dance too. We’re left with a kind of social choreography, and an open expanse of questions that can – like other projects that venture outside theatre’s contained space – revitalise our experience of performance, spectatorship, sometimes even the world itself. Like seeing a familiar landscape anew." … [Read More...]
Did Kenneth MacMillan Revolutionize British Ballet Or Ruin It?
"By reputation, Kenneth MacMillan was the dark genius of British ballet - its destroyer, if you listen to some. They think this country's classical ballet reached its pinnacle under the Apollonian hand of Frederick Ashton, before MacMillan stomped in with his working-class neuroses and rape simulations and took ballet down to the psychological underworld." Ismene Brown looks at his body of work - especially the little-performed short ballets - in this 25th anniversary year of his death. … [Read More...]
Chicago Launches A Citywide Dance Festival
"This weekend, Chicago dance artists and venues are opening their doors and inviting the public to stages all over the city to witness excerpts, works-in-progress and studio processes from our rich community of independent artists and small to midsize dance companies. Called Elevate Chicago Dance, the Chicago Dancemakers Forum (CDF) is the presenter of the multiday, multivenue, mostly free festival aimed at highlighting Chicago dance and increasing the visibility of established dance artists across a range of genres and disciplines." … [Read More...]
Charge: Sexual Abuse Of Bolshoi Dancers Is Rampant
"For as long as anyone can remember, theater and movie directors, rich sponsors of art, dancing masters and acting coaches here in Russia have demanded sex from young actresses, ballerinas, and students in exchange for a part in a movie, a role in a play, or promotion in the ballet." … [Read More...]
IDEAS
Google Is Building A Smart City – In Toronto
“Sidewalk Labs promises to embed all sorts of sensors everywhere possible, sucking up a constant stream of information about traffic flow, noise levels, air quality, energy usage, travel patterns, and waste output. Cameras will help the company nail down the more intangible: Are people enjoying this public furniture arrangement in that green space? Are residents using the popup clinic when flu season strikes? Is that corner the optimal spot for a grocery store? Are its shopper locals or people coming in from outside the neighborhood?” … [Read More...]
You Should “Know Yourself”? Um, Not Necessarily A Great Idea
This whole ‘knowing thyself’ business is not as simple as it seems. In fact, it might be a serious philosophical muddle – not to say bad advice. … [Read More...]
Why Common Sense Isn’t Always A Reliable Moral Guide
Why bother with moral philosophy when common sense serves most of us perfectly well? The simple answer is that, as history shows, commonsensical beliefs are very often wrong. Slavery, marital rape, and bans on interracial marriage were all widely accepted in the relatively recent past. Much like fish who, as the proverb goes, are the last to discover water, humans are so immersed in immorality that we can be entirely unaware of it. … [Read More...]
Will We Ever Get To The Point Where We Interact With Machines As We Do With Humans?
"Today, the technical ability to produce a robot that truly looks and moves and speaks like a human remains well beyond our reach. Even further beyond our grasp is the capacity to imbue such a machine with humanness—that ineffable presence the Japanese call sonzai-kan. Because to re-create human presence we need to know more about ourselves than we do—about the accumulation of cues and micromovements that trigger our empathy, put us at ease, and earn our trust. Someday we may crack the problem of creating artificial general intelligence—a machine brain that can intuitively perform any human intellectual task—but why would we choose to interact with it?" … [Read More...]
Google Says Its AI Machines Are Now Better At Design Than Its Human Engineers
Google has announced that AutoML has beaten the human AI engineers at their own game by building machine-learning software that's more efficient and powerful than the best human-designed systems. … [Read More...]
ISSUES
Art Galleries Move Into An LA Neighborhood And Residents Protest Gentrification (But It Isn’t Quite So Cut-And-Dried)
When a number of largely white-owned art galleries started opening here over the past few years, a familiar narrative began to emerge: new businesses and more affluent tenants moved in, followed by rent rises that forced out longtime residents. But while many young activists in Boyle Heights have loudly and aggressively protested the art galleries, Guadalupe Rosales – a successful artist and Boyle Heights native committed to preserving the history of her neighbourhood – doesn’t find the issues around gentrification to be quite so cut and dry. … [Read More...]
This Might Be The Most Appalling Thing Any Woman Has Yet Said About Harvey Weinstein
Russian actress Lyubov Tolkalina said in an interview, "Isn't it beautiful when a man of such great power sexually harasses you? ... What does it matter how you got the part? It's good for everyone: he feels good, they feel good, and most importantly the viewers feel good." … [Read More...]
When Philadelphia Eliminated Arts Programs From Its Schools, Here’s How Local Foundations Stepped Up
"Most obviously, the city's financial woes were so calamitous that, funders, most of whom already had extensive footprints in the city, had no choice but to respond en masse. Samuel Johnson's old adage applies here: 'When a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.' That being said, there's far more to Philadelphia's success than the threat of (figurative) imminent hanging." … [Read More...]
Harlem School Of The Arts, Back From The Dead And Growing
"Just seven years ago, the school, founded in 1964, was $2 million in debt and temporarily closed. Today, the school has not only recovered, but is pivoting from a place that primarily provided arts education for children to a full-fledged performing arts center." … [Read More...]
Creativity Versus The Arts
I think these creative endeavors resonate with people because they are grounded in each participant’s lived experience (rather than universal plots or a reflection of someone else’s perspective) and, as such, they cannot help but be authentic. Perhaps what we call “bad” or “amateur” art isn’t because of “aesthetics,” but because it feels derivative of some form that already exists rather than growing from this place of fearless, individual experience. But how then do we nurture this creative authenticity? … [Read More...]
MEDIA
Puerto Rico’s PBS Station Is Shut Down…
Sistema TV in San Juan has been taken off the air because, following Hurricane Maria, the university holding its license decided to cease all non-academic activities. … [Read More...]
Inside The Weinstein Company When The Stories About Harvey Broke…
"As they gathered, someone mentioned that The New Yorker story was up. The assembled employees read in silence. They listened to the tape. They knew that voice too well. Some began to shake, and many of them wept as they contemplated the roles they might have played as accomplices, unwitting or not." Dana Goodyear talks to current and former employees, many of whom insist that they knew Harvey Weinstein was "a bully, a screamer, a yeller, a thrower, a pig - not that he was a rapist." … [Read More...]
The Real Problem With Making Good Movies Today Isn’t “Rotten Tomatoes.” It’s The Audiences Hollywood Is Trying To Capture…
"The real problem is much bigger than Rotten Tomatoes—it’s that so much of Hollywood is now fixated on capturing the widest audience possible with every film. Blockbuster action movies, superhero franchises, jolty horror pictures, and animated family films that can draw large crowds are the order of the day. Even mother!, which was light on actual scares but heavy on mood and allegory, was marketed as a horror movie in an attempt to pull viewers; theatergoers who felt misled by the advertising may have contributed to the F CinemaScore rating." … [Read More...]
New Film ‘The Death of Stalin’ Is A Madcap Farce – But In Russia, They’re Not Amused…
The satire by Armando Ianucci (creator of Veep) is getting great early reviews in Britain (The Guardian's critic called it the movie of the year). The Russians beg to differ - even though no one there has seen it and the distributor hasn't even applied for a license for it yet. A pro-Kremlin newspaper pro-Kremlin newspaper called the film "a nasty sendup by outsiders who know nothing of our history"; one politician said it was a "planned provocation" and another described it as an "unfriendly act by the British intellectual class ... [part of an] anti-Russian information war." … [Read More...]
Historian Gives The Real Story Of The Death Of Stalin – And Argues That A Film Comedy About It Was A Bad Idea…
Richard Overy points out where Armando Ianucci's new The Death of Stalin gets the history wrong but allows that cinematic license could be legitimate. But the caricature, he writes, is just wrong, and not only because Stalin's victims deserve better: "The presentation of Stalin and his cronies as a collection of foul-mouthed misfits ... will certainly not help to understand the Russia of the 1950s while it mocks by implication the Russia of today, a country still shaped in some ways by the legacy of Stalin's modernisation drives and the operation of the Stalinist state." … [Read More...]
MUSIC
How Would You Explain Opera? Here’s One Attempt
One would think that in an era of immersive realities, opera would have tried to aim for higher levels of verisimilitude, would have become grittier and true to life, but in the age of cinema, the opposite happened. Twentieth-century opera became more amorphous, less plot-driven. Watch something like Nixon In China, with its listless, meandering scenes and droning, repetitive music, and you will start yearning for a king disguised as a peasant and a letter given to the wrong princess. Opera does not attempt real social commentary or naturalism well: it is a heightened reality, a dream. Opera is crazy and intense like dreaming, another heightened reality, and we often wake from dreams wishing we could enter them again. … [Read More...]
Important New Study Reveals Mental Health Toll On Musicians
Previous research showed that more than 70% of musicians have experienced anxiety and panic attacks. The “precariousness and insecurity” of a career in music can be psychologically damaging, the new report claims, resulting in many experiencing “constant stress” around finding work and being financially stable. … [Read More...]
Brown University’s New Orchestra Director ‘Relieved Of Duties’ Just Before His First Concert
"'Brandon Keith Brown is no longer serving in the role he took on this summer when he joined the university as visiting assistant professor of music and orchestra conductor,' said Brown spokesman Brian Clark. 'As for the reason, I am not at liberty to disclose details related to personnel, which we do not consider public.'" (That doesn't mean the students won't talk, though.) … [Read More...]
Classical Music Has Its Own Bunch Of Mini-Harvey Weinsteins
"One big problem is the mindless adulation bestowed on famous conductors and directors. Such sycophancy doesn't lead just to the tolerance of abuse, it mythologises the misdeeds so that they become part of the mystique surrounding 'the maestro'." (For example, Georg Solti, who'd seduce his way through the female choristers at the Royal Opera house and buy them white fur coats afterward.) And, writes Richard Morrison, "that was decades ago, but what has changed? In one acclaimed present-day ensemble female violinists rise up the ranks if they sleep with the conductor. It's as simple, and jaw-dropping, as that." … [Read More...]
Canadian Opera Co. Extends Alexander Neef’s Contract To 2026
"This means that by 2026, Neef will be the longest-serving General Director of the COC (18 years), after Richard Bradshaw." … [Read More...]