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DANCE

  • What I’ve Learned Watching Dance Online For A Year

    Work filmed or streamed that is performed with a live audience present cannot replicate the exchange of energy, delight, sorrow, laughter, and tears of being physically present in the theater – yet it does satisfy somewhat my craving for watching dancing. – Oregon Arts Watch

  • The Great Depression’s Dance Marathons Were An Exploitative Craze

    They might sound like yet another fun thing for young people to have done back in the day, but no. They were even deadly, with reports of at least two dancers dying near the dance floor as others simply passed out. “Dance marathons, also called walkathons to avoid legal and moral scrutiny, were essentially the Netflix dating show of that era. As an emcee entertained the audience with dancers’ biographies over live music, the couples danced, stumbled and dragged each other for weeks on almost no sleep in the pursuit of money and glory.” – San Francisco Chronicle

  • Dancers Are Still Trying Everything To Make It Through The Pandemic

    Real talk: “Kathleen Tiernan, a trainee at Ballet Austin, fears that the pandemic will financially stunt the ballet industry for years to come. ‘I don’t know that I would wanna risk going to one of those small companies that could be very close to shutting down,’ said Tiernan, who is still in auditions season. ‘And I don’t know how they’re surviving because those types of companies were already struggling before the pandemic and already paid their dancers unlivable wages.'” – The Dispatch

  • Twyla Tharp Talks Dance With Terry Gross

    “This last year, with the pandemic and its disruptions in terms of routine, discipline, just ordinary day-to-day activities, the body doesn’t know itself at the moment. So I can’t tell you what I can ask it to do until I refamiliarize myself. And I’m in the process of doing that. … Whenever I’ve finished one of these big projects, I’m out of shape, and that’s just a given. So I’ve been in this position before, not at this age, but I know that it is a commitment to get back into shape. It’s not going to happen on its own accord.” – NPR

  • Dive Bars That Are Backbone Of Spain’s Flamenco Scene Are Getting Wiped Out By COVID

    “These small clubs, called tablaos, have acted as a springboard for generations of flamenco artists in Spain to launch professional careers. … But that intimate setup, designed to pack the audience close to the stage, has left most tablaos unable to reopen even after Spain lifted its most severe pandemic lockdown restrictions last summer. The situation has created an existential struggle for these cherished institutions at the heart of a national art form.” – The New York Times

IDEAS

ISSUES

  • How To Help Students Catch Up After Lockdown? The Arts

    Research confirms that arts education contributes significantly to social-emotional well-being as well as college, career and citizenship readiness. – San Diego Union-Tribune

  • Scott Rudin’s Abusive Behavior Was An Open Secret

    Why did the media not come out and treat it as the truly awful (and unacceptable) fact that it was? “Unlike past stories, The Hollywood Reporter’s offers, for the first time in Rudin’s almost 40 years as a producer, an unromanticized affirmation of the seemingly endless anecdotes about him as a manager. It details his alleged misbehavior as well as his influence, which has arguably made the industry and the journalists who report on it more likely to accept workplace aggression as a condition of great art.” – The Atlantic

  • A New Cache Of Money For Strapped Venues – If Only The Website Would Work

    The Small Business Association opened a grant portal for arts venues closed down by the pandemic – and, after a few hours of deep misery for every arts venue trying to apply, took it all offline, indefinitely. “Anyone who tried to log on to apply for grants when the portal first opened was met with different error messages at each step. The SBA clarified in a tweet that they did not accept any applications or distribute any funding.” – NPR

  • How To Draw More People Into Cities Again? Build More Culture Spaces

    “Culture has been a potent driver of Chicago for decades, of course, but this still is a unique moment, especially with the new availability of federal money. Hence it’s high time to develop some new cultural spaces and both the private and the public sectors will need to get involved. This change of emphasis, which seems to me inevitable, could be a win-win situation, creating jobs and restoring the vibrancy of the city.” – Yahoo! (Chicago Tribune)

  • Impromptu Arts Relief Funds That Sprang Up In Pandemic’s Early Days May Be Around Permanently

    As lockdowns arrived and spread, many mutual aid networks, mostly small-scale, were put together on the fly to help the many thousands of suddenly unemployed arts workers. Those funds had been planned, and expected, to be temporary measures lasting only a couple of months. But, as the pandemic ran on and shutdowns continued, furloughs became layoffs; even now, as more Americans are getting vaccinated, much of the arts world won’t restart operations fully for more months or even the end of the year. So a number of those mutual aid groups are reorganizing as permanent entities. – Artnet

MEDIA

MUSIC

  • After More Than A Year Apart, Singers Miss Collaborating

    Afro-Brazilian musician Luedji Luna: “It’s been a sad year for artists and for the three of us: What we love doing most is performing with each other.” But it hasn’t been all terrible. “When the pandemic started, we all reacted differently. Xenia is more of a meditative person, so she wasn’t online much. Larissa started to produce beats. And I became a mom.” – The New York Times

  • The Boston Symphony’s Lucia Lin Says Classical Music Is Not Eurocentric

    And she has the duet series to prove it. Lin, who commissioned duets before adding interviews to her presentation of new work: “In the beginning I just wanted to have these duos written. Then I decided, you know, part of the reason people are afraid of new music is they don’t understand it. What happens if people get to know the composers a little bit?” – Boston Globe

  • The Hollywood Bowl Is Back, With Celebration And Caution, For The Summer Of 2021

    Though the bowl will be limited to 4,000 in a venue that seats 17,500, the excitement is real. “The organization is still ramping up to tackle the complexities of reopening, but Smith said the L.A. Phil is planning 45 to 60 concerts.” – Los Angeles Times

  • Taylor Swift, Reclaiming Her Music With A New, Re-Recorded Release Of An Early Album

    The business side of music can be vicious for its musicians, and when a label owned by a man you loathe gets to profit off your music? Well. “The debut this week of the now 31-year-old Swift’s full rerecording of that album she made at 18, under the title Fearless (Taylor’s Version), is a reminder of how inextricably blurred the creative and the commercial always are in pop music. Rerecording the albums is a business strategy that, by its self-consciously meta-narrative nature, can’t help but also become a piece of conceptual art.” – Slate

  • One Of Philadelphia’s Leading Pianists Held For Trial On Sexual Assault Charge

    “[A] now-21-year-old Temple [University] student said that Mikhail Yanovitsky, 56, hugged, kissed, and fondled her while she practiced piano in a classroom at Temple’s Rock Hall in February 2020, then forced her to touch him sexually over his clothing while he spoke of ‘eroticism.'” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

PEOPLE

PEOPLE

THEATRE

  • Steven Leigh Morris On What Did In LA Stage Alliance

    “When members of the community say about LASA that they didn’t feel included or respected, my heart goes out to them. I ran the organization, and I often felt the same way.” – Stage Raw

  • Performers In South Africa Protest For More Government Help During The Pandemic

    For the performing arts community, the closure of Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre was something of a last straw. “In just a decade of existence the theatre, named after world-renowned playwright Athol Fugard, had become a much-loved venue that put on work by local writers as well as internationally known plays and musicals.” Artists are asking their government to do much, much more for them – and their strapped venues. – BBC

  • Where The World Of Comedy Throws Obstacles, These Women Have Forged Their Own Paths

    It’s not easy for a woman in comedy, and that’s doubly true for a Black woman. Ask Ziwe (who now has a series on Netflix). “You really have to create for yourself and create in that vacuum because you’re not going to get the instant gratification and validation.” – Variety

  • Back In The Theatre: “Necessity Is The Mother Of Devotion”

    I can report that once the rest of us were inside — 25 or so socially distanced in a black box theater that normally seats up to 99 — the evening unfolded exuberantly. It was the first of three live theatrical events I attended over the weekend, the first time in a year my schedule resembled something like the days before covid-19. I wore my mask throughout the shows, a feat that a year ago I had convinced myself would be too uncomfortable to tolerate. – Washington Post

  • How American Theatre Marginalizes Asians

    “Just as Asian shows are seen as exotic oddities rather than universal, Asian American theatres aren’t considered national theatres by funders, even though it is companies like Ma-Yi, Theater Mu, and East West Players that have historically nurtured Asian American artists when white theatres would not work with them, and told Asian American stories before there was a financial imperative.” – American Theatre

VISUAL

  • Artist Rachel Whiteread Has Changed Her Art, And Her Life

    Whiteread won the Turner Prize when she was 30, the first woman, and youngest artist, ever to win – and she id it for casting an entire house in London. She’s been casting objects and the spaces around objects for three decades. But now? Now, she’s building new things. – The Guardian (UK)

  • We Know Theo, But What About Vincent Van Gogh’s Sisters?

    He (and Theo) had three. From reading a book that includes some newly translated letters, we can learn that “Lies was frustrated that women didn’t have more professional options that were socially acceptable. We learn about how Wil often copied Vincent’s drawings and was his favorite model, and that the two wrote to each other about art and literature and inquired about one another’s mental health.” – Hyperallergic

  • Statues Are Living The High Life In Boris Johnson’s Britain

    Lucky statues! “Without themselves needing to organise, these historically neglected members of the inanimate community have within the last few months secured privileges, protections and high-level advocacy that, in addition to their existing plinth status, falls only narrowly short of full suffrage – and even that cannot confidently be ruled out.” – The Guardian (UK)

  • A Monument To Jefferson Davis In The Hands Of Anti-Racist Activists Becomes A Toilet

    The monument, stolen (or “liberated,” if you prefer) from a cemetery in Alabama, will now be returned to its former owners, United Daughters of the Confederacy. “‘Everything about the South is painfully polite, even the racism, that is, until it’s not. We don’t have the luxury of being polite,’ the activists said in a statement. ‘We aren’t doing this for parades, to dress up and relive the glory days.'” – Hyperallergic

  • A New Path Forward For Museums

    Art museums sometimes have difficulties responding to the current moment, by design. A new show in Louisville might change some of that. “Conventional encyclopedic museums like the Speed, the largest and oldest art museum in Kentucky, are glacial machines. Their major exhibitions are usually years in the planning. Borrowing objects from other museums can be a red tape tangle.” A new show about Breonna Taylor’s life changes the equations. “It speeds up exhibition production, focuses on the present, and in doing so reaches out to new audiences vital to the institutional future.” – The New York Times

WORDS

  • Poets Lost A Lot Of Readings, Series, And Opportunities During The Pandemic, So What Do They Think Is Next?

    “For readers still thawing from a year in isolation, two questions in [Sesshu Foster’s untitled] poem are especially prescient: ‘How to start again? How to wake up?'” – Los Angeles Times

  • The New Ascendance Of The Nature Memoir

    We’re all looking for something – solitude, connection to nature, an escape from our houses and apartments – and so, publishing is providing us with many (many) nature memoirs. But where to start? Check out this heavily annotated list. – LitHub

  • Dana Gioia On Being An “Information Billionaire”

    “I think poetry has a social function but it’s a relatively complicated and subtle one, which is to say, the reason that we have art is, in a sense, to increase human happiness. It does that, essentially, on an individual level. A work of art awakens you. It awakens you to the possibilities of your own potential. It takes that potential, it enlarges it, it refines it, and each art does it in different ways.” – Conversations with Tyler

  • Even Japanese Poetry Is Getting Messed Up By Climate Change

    The natural world has always been a key subject of Japanese verse, and there’s even an established body of words — kigo — that categorize various phenomena by season and thereby evoke particular emotions. For instance, referring to a typhoon in a poem is supposed to anchor it in the autumn. But Japan, like many other places, is now experiencing “season creep”: the cherry blossoms in Kyoto this year peaked earlier than ever in well over a millennium of recordkeeping, and typhoons may now hit anytime from May to December. Increasingly, the kigo system no longer makes sense. – The Economist

  • Granta’s New List Of The Best Young Writers Working In Spanish

    “Eleven years after publishing its first collection of the finest up-and-coming authors in Spanish, Granta magazine is releasing a second volume that brings together 25 writers aged under 35 and now at work on four continents. The list includes 11 female writers and 14 male writers from Spain, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, Chile, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and Ecuador.” – The Guardian

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