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Dance
Milwaukee Ballet Plans Return To Mainstage Performance In June
As it did with its abbreviated Nutcracker in December, the company will do its first two productions of 2021 before an in-person audience of 10 people, with all other ticketholders watching online. But the season’s final production will be back (local regulations permitting) at Milwaukee Ballet’s usual venue, the Marcus Performing Arts Center, June 10-13. – Milwaukee Business Journal
Scottish Gymnastics Told To Speed Up A Ballet School Abuse Investigation
“Several parents raised concerns with Scottish Gymnastics a year ago over dance classes for eight to 12-year-olds at the prestigious Ballet West school in Taynuilt, Argyll. Allegations were made that children at Ballet West’s lower school were shouted at by coaches and ‘body shamed,’ causing distress and anxiety.” – The Sunday Times (UK)
What It Took To Program Robots To Dance The Twist And The Mashed Potato
A video which became a viral hit last month “shows two of Boston Dynamics’ humanoid Atlas research robots doing the twist, the mashed potato and other classic moves, joined by Spot, a doglike robot, and Handle, a wheeled robot designed for lifting and moving boxes in a warehouse or truck. … [It took] almost a year and half of choreography, simulation, programming and upgrades that were capped by two days of filming to produce a video running at less than 3 minutes.” – AP
Black Dancer Sidelined At Berlin State Ballet Won’t Give Up Struggle
“Berlin [Staatsballett’s] first black dancer, Chloé Lopes Gomes, said she has been made to feel different because of her skin colour since she first donned ballet shoes as a child. But after she was again subjected to what she described as ‘racism’ at Germany’s largest dance company, she has launched a fightback that has forced the State Ballet to launch an internal investigation into her complaints.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
Remembering The Other Nijinsky — And How She Changed Dance
“The Nijinsky name, however, does not belong to [Vaslav] alone. In an era where static positions were the marrow of classical dance, [Bronislava] Nijinska envisioned a modernist ballet, one which saw focus shift towards the movement which connected these positions. Ultimately, she believed it was not the final posture that encapsulated the beauty of ballet, but the spaces in between.” – The Calvert Journal
Ideas
How Social Media Has Rewired Our Cultural/Political Discourse
This expanding cornucopia of tech and entertainment has served as a compensatory narrative of progress and advancement for an empire in decline. The future seems more and more constrained, materially, but, on the flip side, you are freer and freer to build your own virtual worlds and get lost in them. – Artnet
The Theatre Of Dreams
We are neurochemically predisposed to find our dreams meaningful, which may suggest that they do have a pedagogical function. Even the common advice to make an important decision only after you “sleep on it” might be worth revising, to “dream on it.” The fact that dreams often generate powerful emotions and deploy narrative structures further strengthens the notion that they perhaps represent a kind of theater of the unconscious, one not always intent on providing concrete solutions so much as making sense and meaning out of our experiences. – Washington Post
Could Amsterdam’s Radical Effort To Transform Itself Leave Capitalism Behind?
In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of “doughnut economics.” – Time
The Psychology Of Massive Multiplayer Online Games and The QAnon Delusions
“The art of creating the connections and building communities of others who also come to believe and amplify them is a virtuous circle that keeps growing and strengthening increasingly wacky beliefs.” – Post Alley
A Checklist For Happiness? It Doesn’t Work That Way
“Every cultural message we get is that happiness can be read off a scorecard of money, education, experiences, relationships, and prestige. Want the happiest life? Check the boxes of success and adventure, and do it as early as possible! Then move on to the next set of boxes. She who dies with the most checked boxes wins, right? Wrong. I don’t mean that accomplishment and ambition are bad, but that they are simply not the drivers of our happiness.” – The Atlantic
Issues
The New Elite: Those Who Have Been Vaccinated
“A leisure class of the newly vaccinated will mean that hotels, catering services and other businesses will be scrambling to employ bartenders, servers and other staff who are also vaccinated, the better to ensure the safety of all. A vaccination will begin to represent not only safety from the virus but also, for some, a leg up in the job market.” – The New York Times
The Case For Simpler Grant-Giving
“Are we giving to organizations that are actually doing the best work? Or are we giving to organizations that are giving us the best grants?” – WestWord
City Of Austin Announced Major Overhaul Of Its Arts Funding Program, And Local Arts Community Is Saying “Whoa!”
“Staff with the city’s Cultural Arts Division unveiled an entirely new funding system in mid-December that, among other changes, lowers the funding cap for all funding programs, drops organizational support in favor of funding events, and allows for-profit businesses to apply for city arts funding. The new funding system also places top priority on ‘proposals that directly enhance cultural experiences for tourists and convention delegates, including projects that highlight underrepresented histories and narratives.'” The worried response from Austin arts groups (including those based in minority communities) is that the middle of a pandemic is not the time to be making enormous changes. – Sightlines (Austin)
Bipartisan? Biden Should Think Arts
“It’s worth recalling that federal support for the arts throughout modern American history has been bipartisan. The Federal Art Project (1935–43) commissioned artworks by some 10,000 artists during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, while in 1969 Richard Nixon doubled what Lyndon Johnson had previously provided for the newly created NEA.” – Apollo
What Did CBS Do With, And In, Its Supposedly Thorough Investigation Into A Racist, Sexist Culture?
Some things have changed. But the news affiliates? Oof. The details of CBS Television Stations President Peter Dunn’s racism – saying of an anchor, “He’s not doing that ‘jive talking’ anymore? Sometimes, he’s just not speaking my language,” for instance – and sexism are damning. – Los Angeles Times
Media
Hollywood Waits With Its Blockbusters. Streaming Is Still A Risky Path
Even as the studio insists that its streaming strategy is a one-off response to the pandemic, it might not be able to rebuild those bridges. Seeing the backlash is just another reason the rest of the industry’s major players continue to hold off from anything so drastic. Patience is hard, but it’s Hollywood’s surest path to profitability. – The Atlantic
Cable TV Cord-Cutting Accelerates During Pandemic
In the interim, expect a flood of cable programming to start migrating over to streaming in anticipation for the day when cable is no longer a viable platform for networks to reach audiences. – Axios
Making Film That’s Both Political And Personal
Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero, who directed and wrote the new film Identifying Features, “don’t believe Mexican storytellers have the luxury of creating apolitically. Not at a moment in history when thousands disappear or are murdered as a consequence of drug-related violence and the widespread state complicity that enables it. Neither of them set out to make movies with a social justice angle, but coming of age as artists in this environment urged them to confront the appalling national trauma.” – Los Angeles Times
Spike Lee Gives Fiery Speech Comparing Trump To Hitler
Lee’s speech for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards was filmed on January 6 – the day when insurrectionists broke into the U.S. Capitol Building, hunting legislators and raiding offices. “We’re at the crossroads now. And everyone please be safe, this is not a game. These people have guns with ammunition. … This president, President Agent Orange, will go down in history with the likes of Hitler. These guys, all his boys, they are going down on the wrong side of history.” – USA Today
Totally Reimagining The Sundance Festival For Its Pandemic Year
Director Tabitha Jackson was lucky in 2020 – her hiring was big news at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Then, of course, a global pandemic hit. “To say her inaugural year heading the most influential film festival in America was rife with unpredictable challenges is an understatement.” – Los Angeles Times
Music
Andreas Delfs Named Music Director Of Rochester Philharmonic
The 61-year-old conductor spent a dozen years as music director of the Milwaukee Symphony (1997-2009). “Once reportedly accustomed to a few sellout audiences a year, the orchestra reportedly sold out 30 shows within a year of his arrival.” – WXXI (Rochester, NY)
Twenty-One Young Composers For 2021
Michael Andor Brodeur: “There is really no playlist to match this unstable, uncertain moment. And, honestly, right now I’m less interested in rummaging through the past for reference points. I’m just trying to find my way forward. In that spirit — and since we’re feeling all inaugural — please find below the first-ever class of 21 for ’21.” – The Washington Post
Metropolitan Opera Hires Harvard Law Dean As Chief Diversity Officer
“Marcia Sells — a former dancer who became an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn and the dean of students at Harvard Law School — has been hired as the first chief diversity officer of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States.” – The New York Times
Rare Violin Tests Germany’s Nazi Looting Restitution System
More than 80 years later, his 300-year-old violin — valued at around $185,000 — is at the center of a dispute that is threatening to undermine Germany’s commitment to return objects looted by the Nazis. – The New York Times
The Captain Of Sea Shanty TikTok Gets A Record Deal
You’ve heard “The Wellerman” by now, no doubt, since the Scottish postman who sang it a TikTok rendition of it went completely – ridiculously – viral. Now he’s quit his job and earned a record contract. But how’s that going to go? Viral stars and those who study them say “the hard part comes months later, when everyone has forgotten what they went viral for, and they attempt to maintain the momentum.” – BBC
People
Sculptor Barry Le Va Dead At 79
“[He] became part of the New York art scene during the late 1960s and went on to be associated with the Process art and Post-Minimalist movements. Unlike the best known adherents of those movements, including Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Morris, Le Va has remained a somewhat obscure figure, no doubt in part because his work is so formally rigorous and can be difficult to parse. But he has a set of devoted fans that include artists, critics, and historians spanning multiple generations.” – ARTnews
Judi Dench Is A Bit Bored In Lockdown
Someone hire her, quickly. “Lockdown, I fear, is not the life Dench was born to. She used to practically eat and drink on the stage, but the theatres have closed, who knows for how long. She used to bounce from one film set to the next, but now production is mothballed and the industry has gone to ground. All of which means that she is confined to the house, an 86-year-old actor shoved into what she hopes is a partial and temporary retirement. She gets up each morning determined to keep herself busy. She crawls back to bed with most of the tasks left undone. After a while, she admits, the time starts to drag.” – The Guardian (UK)
Bob Avian, Broadway Choreographer, 83
Avian co-choreographed A Chorus Line with Michael Bennett, and choreographed Miss Saigon and Sunset Boulevard. He “directed a 2006 revival of A Chorus Line that ran on Broadway for almost two years, as well as productions of that show in London in 2013 and at New York City Center in 2018. He shared Tony Awards for choreography with Mr. Bennett for A Chorus Line and Ballroom.” – The New York Times
Walter Bernstein, Blacklisted And Celebrated Filmmaker, 101
Bernstein’s “career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and decades later [he] turned that experience into one of his best-known films, The Front.” – The New York Times
Junior Mance, ‘One Of The Most Swinging And Utterly Delightful Pianists In Jazz,’ 92
Mance was “a buoyant, bluesy jazz pianist who worked with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley and Dinah Washington, before establishing himself as the leader of his own groups.” – The New York Times
Theatre
When Everything Is Seen Through A Screen, What Is Theatre?
“Digital performance has only exacerbated the definitional crises during this year of hard and soft quarantine. At a recent UCLA roundtable on the subject of the future of theater, I came to the conclusion that, even in this pioneering moment in which artists from different time zones can collaborate without ever coming into direct contact, place still matters.” – Los Angeles Times
The Playwright We Need To Snap Us Out Of The Past Four Years Is Brecht
“Telling a lie over and over can make it seem true. It can also remove agency from the viewer, ceding the individual’s judgement over to the expectations of the story being told. Brecht refused to let his audience lose themselves in the funhouse mirror of such representations. ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it,’ he wrote.” – Zócalo Public Square
André Gregory: What I Learned From Brecht (And His Wife)
“As I was at the beginning of my education as a young director, as well as a nervous, nerdy intellectual, I asked Helene Weigel about the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht’s famous ‘alienation effect’ theory. … Weigel laughed and said something like, ‘Don’t pay any attention to Bert’s bullshit and theoretical nonsense. Just look at the work. Look at the work, and see what you see.'” – American Theatre
Before Coming Back To Live Interior Performances, Theatre Audiences Want Vaccines And Masks
A survey of frequent theatregoers says that widespread vaccines are the only way most people will feel comfortable in the theatre – and, even with that, 94 percent of those surveyed said they still want mask requirement in place. – American Theatre
Pandemic Lockdowns Were Supposed To Be A Chance To Rethink The Ways Theatre Operates. Has That Happened?
To an extent, yes, it has. Reporter Natasha Tripney talks with theatremakers around Britain about the positive developments — the success of streaming, increased engagement with communities, more egalitarian casting, long-distance collaboration — that started to arise during this public health disaster. – The Stage
Visual
Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museums Ponders A Name Change
After reporting in the Kansas City Star turned up evidence that William Rockhill Nelson, the Nelson in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art was a segregationist, the museum is reassessing being named after the real estate and newspaper magnate who helped found the museum. – Artnet
Proposed: Why The Art World Needs Populism
“On closer inspection, there is an asymmetric battle between a grassroots struggle to redistribute power, and those who place institutional preservation at the center. Ironically, Trump, by dint of his very nastiness, gave the upper hand to institutional preservationists, and not just by threats to defund sanctuary cities, which cast institutions as victims.” – Hyperallergic
While Lockdown Keeps The Hordes Away, The Louvre Is Fixing Itself Up
“The world’s most visited museum — a record 10 million in 2019, mostly from overseas — is grappling with its longest closure since World War II, as pandemic restrictions keep its treasures under lock and key. But without crowds that can swell to as many as 40,000 people a day, museum officials are seizing a golden opportunity to finesse a grand refurbishment for when visitors return.” Said one senior curator, “For some projects, the lockdown has allowed us to do in five days what would have previously taken five weeks.” – The New York Times
Paris’s Pompidou Centre Will Close For Three-To-Four-Year Renovation
“‘We no longer have a choice, the building is in distress,’ Centre Pompidou president Serge Lasvignes told Le Figaro of the extensive upkeep needed for its Renzo Piano- and Richard Rogers-designed exterior of steel piping that was constructed in the 1970s.” The museum will close for the €200 million project at the end of 2023 and should reopen in 2027, its 50th anniversary year. – ARTnews
Students At The Glasgow School Of Art Protest School’s Pandemic Paralysis
“The pandemic will have caused frustration to students everywhere and it must have been difficult for university authorities to react to the ever-shifting situation. However, this last year has highlighted the extent to which universities are now dependent upon the money generated by the numbers of students they have, and the willingness of those students to go into debt, in a way which is prejudicial to the delivery of education.” – BellaCaledonia
Words
Native American Languages Could Become Another Casualty Of COVID
Jodi Archambault: “As COVID-19 takes a fearsome toll on our people, it also threatens the progress we have made to save our languages. The average age of our speakers — our treasured elders who have the greatest knowledge and depth of the language — is 70. They are also those who are at most risk of dying from COVID-19.” Three native speakers who taught the Lakota language on the Standing Rock Reservation have died in the pandemic so far — out of only 230 native speakers there in total; their average age is 70. – The New York Times
The Most Valuable Award In British Poetry Goes To Bhanu Kapil
Poet Lavinia Greenlaw, who chaired the committee for the T.S. Eliot prize, said of Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart, “This is a unique work that exemplifies how poetry can be tested and remade to accommodate uncomfortable and unresolvable truths. … It’s a book that one of the judges said, ‘Every time you start it, you have to finish it.’ There’s nothing like it.” – The Guardian (UK)
The Indie Bookstore That Categorizes Books By Emotion
There are shelves about “On the Troubles of Growing Up and Moving On” and “For Escaping Your Life,” among many others. “Oh Hello Again owner Kari Ferguson, who previously founded Dickens Children’s Books in Vancouver, Washington, was inspired to create Oh Hello Again by Ellen Berthoud and Susan Elderkin’s concept of bibliotherapy—the idea that reading the right book at the right time can help people heal and move on from emotional struggle.” – LitHub
Defining Southern Literature Is A Troubled, Troubling Task
For white Southern writers, especially, “the deconstruction and demolition of so many of the myths about Southern culture and identity has been ongoing in literature for a long time but seems to have accelerated at a stunning rate in the past four years, and especially at the start of this year. The combined effects of these historic circumstances are extra-literary, but they have nevertheless set off an appropriate reexamination of what truth means for fiction in the past, present, and future.” – LitHub
The Creativity, Therapy, And Writing Skill It Takes To Co-Create Celebrity Memoirs
Michelle Burford has co-written, or really, written after many hours of absorbing interviews, quite a few celebrity memoirs. She calls herself a “story architect,” and her name appears on the covers of the memoirs alongside the famous counterparts. But as a Black woman, she has to tell publishers not only to think of her for Black women’s memoirs: “I’ve learned to not just hint at that but to say it outright, to say, you know, consider me for, Adele and Taylor Swift as much as you would, say, Beyoncé.” – The New York Times