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DANCE
Technology Has Changed How Dance Gets Made And Preserved. But…
"I am trained in the classical Indian dance of Kathak, a tradition passed on through non-technological means, carried in the memory, the body and the mind. So each time we share it, it’s evolving. It’s like telling a story – no one ever tells it the same way twice. It changes each time you tell it, because you are human, because you are alive. By contrast, digital preservation of work and its perfect, infinite reproducibility – freed of context – potentially creates a more sterile transmission mechanism for ideas and art." … [Read More...]
Why It’s So Difficult For The Dance Field To Root Out Sexual Harassment
The cases of Peter Martins and Marcelo Gomes are the only ones from the dance world to have hit the national media in the #MeToo era, and the movement's momentum seems to have faded in the field seems to have dissipated. "[Yet] we've barely scratched the surface of the dance world's harassment problem. One reason why: The same culture that makes harassment possible in dance makes it uniquely difficult for artists to speak up," writes Lauren Wingenroth in an essay exploring the issue. … [Read More...]
What’s The Biggest Obstacle To Boys Studying Ballet? Often, It’s Dads
Scott Gormley, filmmaker and dance dad: "I've spent the last two years creating a documentary about the struggles that young men face when they choose to dance ballet ― when they choose to thumb their nose at what boys 'should do.' ... What I found the most upsetting were the attacks that came directly from family members: fathers, stepfathers, uncles, brothers, many of whom feared that ballet would 'turn' boys gay." … [Read More...]
Dissecting The Choreography In Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”
These are not dances with deep spiritual meanings, but rather they’re the most prolific forms of creative expression for young Africans right now. That has since evolved into a professionalization of these dances, as tutorial videos crop up on these very dances and professional choreographers increasingly incorporate them. … [Read More...]
Misty Copeland Says The Ballet World Still Has Race Issues
Copeland says she feels lucky, and like her success is almost unbelievable - but she wants some compatriots at the top. "She is adamant that a large part of her purpose as a public figure is to make sure up-and-coming black and brown dancers know they belong in the world of classical ballet - and feel welcome there." … [Read More...]
IDEAS
Reasons Why We Might Not Want To Find Intelligent Life Out In The Universe
Hidden civilizations offer one possible answer to the Fermi Paradox, which raises the question of why we haven’t found evidence of intelligent alien life if many such races exist out there. Rather than support Enrico Fermi’s theory that intelligent life is unique to Earth, Dark Forest Theory raises the possibility that alien life is too intelligent to be detected, either because it’s hiding and/or because it’s plotting another race’s destruction. … [Read More...]
The Two Sides Of Absurdity (Necessary For Insight)
Thomas Nagel argued that when we sense that something – or everything – in life is absurd, we’re experiencing the clash of two perspectives from which to view the world. One is that of the engaged agent, seeing her life from the inside, with her heart vibrating in her chest. The other is that of the detached spectator, watching human activity coolly, as if from the distance of another planet. … [Read More...]
The World Seems Noisier Than Ever. It Probably Isn’t, But…
What has changed is not so much the level of noise, which previous centuries also complained about, but the level of distraction, which occupies the space that silence might invade. There looms another paradox, because when it does invade—in the depths of a pine forest, in the naked desert, in a suddenly vacated room—it often proves unnerving rather than welcome. Dread creeps in; the ear instinctively fastens on anything, whether fire-hiss or bird call or susurrus of leaves, that will save it from this unknown emptiness. People want silence, but not that much. … [Read More...]
How The Tech World Is Disrupting The Fashion Industry
"These companies aren’t out to nail trends, as the fast fashion manufacturers of past decades did, but rather to sell an all-encompassing clothing system through which consumers are meant to live. In tech terms, the brands are platforms and the products must be scalable, aimed at as wide and profitable an audience as possible, whether those products are fabric sneakers or ethically manufactured underwear. It’s clothing as software, embracing an ethos of one-for-all uniformity." … [Read More...]
Catching Up With Apple’s Siri, The Google Assistant And Amazon Alexa *Finally* Have Male Voices
Why does that make a difference? "The vocal variety now offered by these companies minimizes the subservient female assistant vibe. And as these assistants are increasingly being adopted in households with children, bossing around not just a female-voiced assistant seems like a healthy step in teaching gender equality and eliminating traditional gender role expectations. For younger children anthropomorphizing the bot, a changing voice may also make it clear that this is a computer entity, not a person." … [Read More...]
ISSUES
Why Is “Design Thinking” Taking Over Education?
If design thinking (for short, let’s call it the DTs) merely involved bilking some deluded would-be entrepreneurs, well — no harm no foul. The problem is that faddists and cult-followers are pushing the DTs as a reform for all of higher education. … [Read More...]
World-Changing? Art Sputters In Protest, But Is It Really?
This brings up a problem that often arises in conversations about art: how can it participate in networks of power that its content willfully rejects? Often, so-called ‘political art’ simply aestheticises protest or resistance. Sometimes, it has the effect of moral licensing – instilling in its viewer a false sense of having accomplished something. Art and power have always been begrudging bedfellows. After all, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto from the comfort of La Maison du Cygne, a gilded restaurant in Brussels. … [Read More...]
Cultural Value – Is The Decades-Long Discussion About What The Arts Are Worth Actually Getting Anywhere?
"There is a sense that history's alleged tendency to repeat itself is particularly pronounced in the cultural value debate, and with respect to efforts to 'demonstrate' the value of arts and culture. Have we made progress in the past 30 years, or is it true that we have been going in circles? ... Patrycja Kaszynska, the lead on the Cultural Value Scoping Project, spoke to Ian David Moss, founder of Createquity, about ideas and emerging trends in cultural value research." … [Read More...]
Germany To Boost Arts Funding By $353 Million
Saying that the move would send "a strong signal that culture is the foundation for our open and democratic society," culture minister Monika Grütters announced that Angela Merkel's government plans to increase the arts budget by 23%. In the five years that Grütters has been in office, the national culture budget has grown by 38%, roughly $548 million. … [Read More...]
It’s Almost Impossible For An Artist To Make A Living In Philadelphia
"If you need an electrician, you hire somebody to do the work. That person invoices you, you pay. But when it comes to paying an artist or designer for a service that adds significant value — such as revitalizing neighborhoods, making venues attractive, providing entertainment, designing clothes — there are completely different expectations. … [Read More...]
MEDIA
At Cannes: Big Movies Do Fine, But Indie Film Market Declines…
Whichever way the 2018 Cannes Film Market is taken, heartening signs of continued market traction have to be placed in a context of a longer-term attrition in the independent theatrical market affecting both many mid-sized English-language movies and arthouse titles alike. The bottom hasn’t fallen out of either market. But their theatrical space, in domestic and international, looks decidedly smaller. … [Read More...]
‘The Sound Of Music’ – The First Critic-Proof Movie Musical?…
As beloved as the film was and is, The Sound of Music was not rapturously received by the critics back in 1965: Joan Didion despised "its suggestion that history need not happen to people ... Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind," and Pauline Kael called it a "sugar-coated lie that ... makes a critic feel that maybe it's all hopeless." Pamela Hutchinson explores how the critics lost that particular argument, paving the way for everything from Mamma Mia! to The Last Showman. … [Read More...]
Uh-Oh – There’s More Grey Gardens Footage On The Way…
In 1972, three years before Albert and David Maysles made their now-famous documentary about "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's aunt and cousin) and their rapidly decaying Long Island mansion, Lee Radziwill (Jackie's sister) hired the Maysles brothers to visit the Beale homestead, where "they shot an hour of Big Edie and Little Edie squabbling with each other and the health officials threatening eviction." That footage is now coming out in a documentary titled That Summer. … [Read More...]
Cannes Crowns A Winner. But Can The Festival Stay Relevant?…
The Grand Prix went to Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman,” an American racial drama that just about pops with relevance. From the lofty heights at the top of the carpet, Cannes carried on business as usual. Yet that didn’t stop a great many people, throughout the festival, from asking: Has Cannes lost its luster, its excitement, its relevance? Has its status as the world’s most prestigious and sexy and important film festival been dimmed? Has it been undermined by a perfect storm of elements, from the rise of Netflix to the power of awards season? To put it in the most blunt terms possible: Are the great films now playing somewhere else? … [Read More...]
Is The Wildly Popular MoviePass About To Go Bust?…
Eight months after slashing its price and expanding membership past 2 million users, MoviePass is now at risk of going bust. The parent company, Helios & Matheson Analytics Inc., which now owns 92 percent of MoviePass, said last week that it had just $15.5 million in cash at the end of April and $27.9 million on deposit with merchant processors. MoviePass has been burning through $21.7 million per month. … [Read More...]
MUSIC
The Complete Von Karajan – Does Anyone Care About This Deluge Of “Complete” Recordings?
It has long been considerably less expensive to spiff up and repackage an existing recording than to make a new one. The first stereo albums of Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, for example, sound as though they were recorded yesterday, although some of them are nearly sixty-five years old and every person associated with them is either dead or long retired. Brilliant young performers now have to compete not only with their contemporaries but also with a host of legendary ghosts. Through technology we have established a permanent pantheon of great performances, one that can be very difficult, perhaps impossible, for newcomers to crack. … [Read More...]
Sony Pays $2.3 Billion To Buy EMI Music Publishing
"The deal values EMI Music Publishing at $4.75 billion including debt, more than double the $2.2 billion value given in 2011 when a consortium led by Sony won bidding rights for the company. Sony, which has run the business since then, will buy a 60 percent stake owned by [UAE sovereign wealth fund] Mubadala Investment Company, lifting its ownership to around 90 percent from 30 percent currently." … [Read More...]
Protesters Disrupt Philadelphia Orchestra Concert Over Plans To Tour Israel
Two of the protesters that entered the hall led music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin to slam his baton on the podium and walk off the stage. Some musicians began to leave, too, before the protesters, who were loudly booed by the audience, were forcibly removed. After the 10-minute disruption, the orchestra’s interim co-president, Matthew Loden, told the audience: “We live in an age where dissent is important. It matters. It should be heard. But the sanctity of the concert hall should be respected.” … [Read More...]
When Classical Music Is A Weapon (Has It Really Come To This?)
Weaponized classical music is just the next step in the commodification of the genre. Today, most young people encounter classical music not as a popular art form but as a class signifier, a set of tropes in a larger system of encoded communication that commercial enterprises have exploited to remap our societal associations with orchestral sound. Decades of cultural conditioning have trained the public to identify the symphony as sonic shorthand for social status — and, by extension, exclusion from that status. The average American does not recognize the opening chords of The Four Seasons as the sound of spring but the sound of snobbery. … [Read More...]
How Homeless Youth Built A Score With (And For) The Seattle Symphony
Composer in residence Alexandra Garner worked with the youth over a few months. "The participants, she said, never wanted to talk much about whatever traumatic back stories they’d brought into the room. Instead, they wanted to make music about love and hope. 'In one way or another, they all said ‘just because we don’t fit into other people’s boxes doesn’t mean we’re not people — we have a lot of love to share.’' Once the musicians got the score, she added, 'some were surprised that it was very sweet and beautiful — not the angry, thorny experience they expected it to be.'" … [Read More...]
