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DANCE
Spokane Tries For Its First Professional Dance Company In 25 Years
Since the Ballet Company of Spokane shut down in 1993, only amateur and student dance performances have been available in the city. Vincas Greene is trying to fill that gap with his Vytal Movement Dance Company. … [Read More...]
NYT Dance Critic Alastair Macaulay To Retire
For some time now, Alastair — who celebrated 40 years of reviewing this May — has wanted to spend more time in Britain, his home country; scale back on his daily reviewing responsibilities; and work on a variety of projects, including teaching and lecturing at Juilliard, the 92 Street Y and City Center, and a research fellowship with the Center for Ballet and the Arts. … [Read More...]
I’m Not Wearing Pink Tights Again, Says Black Dancer At English National Ballet
Says Precious Adams about her decision to wear brown tights henceforth, "It changes the aesthetic, you want there to be continuation between your upper and lower body and there's a big disconnect if I put pink tights on. ... I'm not colourblind and I think it ruins the line of my body." She's getting pushback from traditionalists, but her colleagues are entirely supportive. … [Read More...]
Choreographer Ralph Lemon Wins $250,000 Heinz Award
The dance-theater-visual artist won the prize in the Arts and Humanities category, one of six. "During more than four decades of performance-making, Lemon has explored race and memory, as well as experiences of grief and spirituality, through nonhierarchical movement and language." … [Read More...]
What’s In Agnes De Mille’s Unopened Letter? Choreographers Will Get To Speculate
The cover note accompanying this mysterious missive, sealed with wax and dated 12/02/1963, says, "Please file it unopened, with the date carefully noted. It is the outline for a play, and I have no means of copyrighting it except this way. The material is eminently stealable and I'm discussing the matter with people of similar ambitions." The current possessors of the letter, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, don't plan to open it just yet, but they are choosing five choreographers to create short pieces based on what they imagine the letter says. … [Read More...]
IDEAS
Social Media New? Nope – We’ve Had A Sharing Culture Forever
Long before mobile phones or even photography, diaries were kept as a way to understand oneself and the world one inhabits. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as secular diaries became more popular, middle-class New Englanders, particularly white women, wrote about their everyday lives and the world around them. These diaries were not a place into which they poured their innermost thoughts and desires, but rather a place to chronicle the social world around them – what’s going on around the house, what they did today, who came to visit, who was born or who died. … [Read More...]
IQ Scores Are Dropping? (It’s Complicated)
“We are becoming stupider. This is happening. It’s not going to go away, and we have to try to think about what we’re going to do about it.” … [Read More...]
The Problem With Time
Time can now be sliced into slivers as thin as one ten-trillionth of a second. But what is being sliced? Unlike mass and distance, time cannot be perceived by our physical senses. We don’t see, hear, smell, touch, or taste time. And yet we somehow measure it. As a cadre of theorists attempt to extend and refine the general theory of relativity, Einstein’s momentous law of gravitation, they have a problem with time. A big problem. … [Read More...]
Horror Is Having A Moment In The Arts
Our present era is one in which the heart of culture is blowing hard upon a coal of fear, and the fascination is everywhere. By popular consent, horror has been experiencing what critics feel obliged to label a ‘golden age’. In terms of ticket sales, 2017 was the biggest year in the history of horror cinema, and in 2018, Hereditary and A Quiet Place have been record-breaking successes. … [Read More...]
Reconciling A Need For History With The Necessity For Contemporary Skills
Fact-checkers know that in a digital medium, the web is a web. It’s not just a metaphor. You understand a particular node by its relationship in a web. So the smartest thing to do is to consult the web to understand any particular node. That is very different from reading Thucydides, where you look at internal criticism and consistency because there really isn’t a documentary record beyond Thucydides. … [Read More...]
ISSUES
Almost $10 Billion In New Cultural Facilities Opened Worldwide Last Year
New buildings including Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, for example, incorporate hotels, event spaces, and other uses, a reflection of the fact that arts infrastructure “has come to play an important part in the experiential economy.” … [Read More...]
Russian Authorities Shut Down Gulag Museum — But What’s The Real Reason?
The volunteer-run museum in the city of Yoshar-Ola (roughly 100 miles from Kazan) was located in the erstwhile local headquarters — including the torture chamber — of the OGPU, an early Soviet predecessor of the KGB. The founder claims that a new regional governor wants to appease the Kremlin; a group of Russian museum professionals who visited in June argued that the museum needed to be professionalized, with one describing it as "a grandmother's trunk." … [Read More...]
The Problem With Cultural Democracy (Or, At Least The Idea Of It)
Given the renewed interest in the ideas and practices of cultural democracy and their potential to address longstanding issues of cultural policy, it seems clear that, as Owen Kelly, a key figure from the community arts movement, has recently argued, arguments about cultural democracy still resonate. But for Arts Council England, they are not unproblematic. … [Read More...]
Orange County CA Demographics Have Radically Changed. But Its Arts Culture?
Profound demographic shifts have happened quickly. A place with a 78.6 percent white majority in 1990 has become more than half Hispanic and Asian, according to the 2010 census. But in one highly visible area Orange County still seems mired in the past: arts leadership. … [Read More...]
Facing Cuts, Austin Arts Groups Push For Revamp Of City’s Funding Process
"Local arts groups facing dramatic cuts in their funding levels from the city could get some relief this budget year, and possibly an earlier heads-up in future budget years if their funding allocations appear headed for a decrease. ... The cuts were brought about by a combination of more than 100 new applicants for funding, increased administrative costs and lack of reserves that are typically rolled over from the previous budget year." … [Read More...]
MEDIA
Has The Podcast Bubble Burst?…
So if one of the benefits of podcasting was that they made good money, why are companies like BuzzFeed shutting down or downsizing their operations? One obvious answer is a glut of supply—in 2015, a list of the “must listen” podcasts was 200 items long. At some point, even podcasting aficionados started to wonder who had time to to listen to all those podcasts. A similar thing happened with video, after everyone pivoted to short-form video because Facebook said it wanted as much as possible. … [Read More...]
Documentarian Breaks Still-Strong Taboo: Filming The Moment Of Death…
Steven Eastwood shot his feature film Island in a hospice on England's Isle of Wight, where four patients allowed him to capture their final days and (actual) final breaths. "What's interesting is there isn't an image. You can't see the dying. I think that's fascinating, because to talk about how the film shows you the moment of death, I don't know when that moment is. I've watched it over and over." … [Read More...]
The New EU Law That Would Fundamentally Break The Internet…
Copying just a few words might be a copyright breach, and merely putting TV sets in hotel rooms or spas requires a license. That is true also with regard to rights holders’ ability to object to or control certain acts of linking to their content. The law already requires any business that links to copyrighted content, including the website of a newspaper, to make sure the content linked to is and remains legal, in order to not be exposed to liability. However, the new article might require businesses to secure a license before displaying titles of news articles and relevant snippets. … [Read More...]
China Bans Foreign TV During Prime Time…
"According to a new set of draft rules released Thursday, Beijing regulators will outlaw the broadcast of foreign TV shows during prime time and limit the volume of imported content that streams on China's fast-growing video platforms. As justification for the rules, regulators cited the 'protection of social stability' and the need to guard against content that 'deviates from core socialist values.'" … [Read More...]
Are Bert And Ernie Gay? Er… No – They’re Puppets!…
“As we have always said, Bert and Ernie are best friends,” the company said in a statement Tuesday. “They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.” … [Read More...]
MUSIC
The Atlanta Symphony’s Turnaround
"I would describe us now as being in a relatively stable space but also a very creative space, where we have good relationships, a good contract in place, good operations and we’re in the midst of a strategic planning process that will help us drive the direction for the next five years." … [Read More...]
Meet The LA Philharmonic’s New Chief
“The challenge is to find an integrated approach that enlarges the number of people who are in our orbit,” he says. “As demographics change and people become more distracted, the notion of how you create compelling experiences on stage and how you build vast community around them is, I think, the next frontier. I don’t think we fully know how to do that yet.” … [Read More...]
Check Out The Weird And Wonderful Tradition Of Albanian Polyphonic Singing
"Set against a backdrop of the dreamy mountains of Labëria in southern Albania, Washed by the Moon, British/German filmmaker Dan Shutt's directorial debut, is a rich journey through the region's musical history. ... We invited the director to compile a mix that encapsulates the ancient Albanian tradition of isopolyphonic singing." … [Read More...]
Details Emerge Of Harassment Lawsuit Against Baltimore Symphony
Tim Smith reports on the lawsuit filed by principal oboist Katherine Needleman against the orchestra and concertmaster Jonathan Carney and on an attorney's investigation into sexual harassment and the workenvironment at the BSO. "The two documents brim with details of unprofessional behavior inside the orchestra, onstage and off – propositioning in a hotel room and a women’s restroom, discussion of 'pesones' (Spanish for nipples), making faces and mocking gestures during rehearsals or concerts." … [Read More...]
Glenn Gould Is Going To Be Turned Into A Hologram And Sent On Tour With Live Orchestra
"Eyellusion, the hologram entertainment company behind tours for Frank Zappa and Ronnie James Dio, is working with Gould's rights holder, Primary Wave Music Publishing, on a Glenn Gould Hologram Tour with dates expected to be announced in late 2019. " … [Read More...]
