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DANCE
The Gender Gap At The Top Of US Ballet Companies
"The Dance Data Project … has published a report on leadership pay among the 50 biggest ballet companies in the U.S, broken down by gender. Here are some of the most interesting findings." - Dance Magazine … [Read More...]
A Daunting Task: Creating The First New, Full-Length Dance Piece For Pina Bausch’s Company Since She Died
"What’s most important for the company is the legacy, taking care of Pina’s works and then finding the best way to look forward," says director and choreographer Alan Lucien Øyen, whose Bon Voyage, Bob recently premiered in Bausch's home theatre and is now in London. - The Stage … [Read More...]
Watching Two New York City Ballet Dancers Get Ready To Star In ‘Sleeping Beauty’ For The First Time
Anthony Huxley (the Prince): "For me [the difficult thing] always is the acting and being a presence onstage … because I’m not a natural projector with my face." Indiana Woodward (Aurora): "The suitors are all rooting for you. They’re all like [whispers]: 'You can do it. You can do it.' I’m like, 'Help.'" - The New York Times … [Read More...]
You’re The Joffrey Ballet’s Head Of Wardrobe, And It’s Opening Night Of A Massive, Brand-New Story Ballet
Ellie Cotey offers a diary of last week's world premiere of choreographer Yuri Possokhov's Anna Karenina, which has 200 complete costumes and more than 800 individual pieces. - Dance Magazine … [Read More...]
Why Jessica Lang Decided To Shut Down Her Dance Company
"We didn't lose our funding. … It was something I did. I approached the board. I told them the last thing I felt I had time to do was create, to make ballets. They agreed. This kind of structure and organization — I know I am not the only one to say it — doesn't work for me now." - San Francisco Classical Voice … [Read More...]
IDEAS
Cultural Objects Versus Immigrants – A Disconnect
"Since the independence of West African countries throughout the late 1950s and early ’60s, the retention of objects and the simultaneous rejection of people has become ever more fraught. Young undocumented migrants from former French colonies stand metres away from the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a museum in Paris full of their inaccessible patrimony. The migrants are treated with contempt while the objects from their homelands are cared for in museums and treated with great reverence. The migrants will be deported but the objects will not be repatriated. The homeland is therefore only home to objects, not people." - Aeon … [Read More...]
The Inconveniences Of Truth In A Non-Objective Age
Scepticism about common-sense things has been on the agenda of philosophers for centuries, but only as a plaything confined to the study. It does not spill into everyday life. So, what on earth do people mean when they say we are living in a “post-truth” world? - New Statesman … [Read More...]
How Leaders Bend History For Their Own Purposes
The past is once more being bent to suit present purposes in the hope of ushering in something that may one day look as bizarre as anything in this history of “past futures”. - New Statesman … [Read More...]
The Challenges Of Trying To Define “Cool”
What exactly is ‘intellectual cool’? For a start, although it includes intellectual trends, or what we sometimes call ‘fashions,’ it obviously is not just this. And here we run up against a very difficult problem – what we call ‘cool’ never describes itself, never declares itself, and never advises who it will be visiting next. People who write about Spinoza will never say they’re doing so because he’s really cool at the moment. Equally, ask a hipster who they hate the most and they will say, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘Hipsters! I f*cking hate them!’ - Sydney Review of Books … [Read More...]
Being Lost Can Be Terrifying And Disorienting. Or It Can Open Your Mind
Lostness has always been an enigmatic and many-sided state, always riven with unexpected potencies. Across history, all varieties of artists, philosophers, and scientists have celebrated disorientation as an engine of discovery and creativity, both in the sense of straying from a physical path, but also in swerving away from the familiar, turning in to the unknown. - The Atlantic … [Read More...]
ISSUES
The Case Against The Obama Presidential Library
In the Obama center case, foes of the $500 million plan have centered their objections around the site location—a perch in an historic park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1871. Almost no one objects to the Obama Presidential Center coming to Chicago’s South Side, but some feel that it hoovers up an existing community asset instead of creating a new one. The question has lingered over the project since its introduction near the end of the president’s tenure in 2015. - CityLab … [Read More...]
UK Study: Young People Under-represented In Arts Organizations
Just 2% of the cultural sector is made up of people aged 16-19, despite these making up 3.2% of the working population – a representation gap of over a third. - Arts Professional … [Read More...]
Portland Loses An Arts Institution – And It Happened Out Of Sight Of The Community
"Closing the college and selling off the campus is the worst possible outcome for just about everybody. It ends a craft community and keeps anyone else from ever joining it. Sometimes, your community isn’t large or committed enough to go on, and then, yes, that’s the end of things. But asking your community to help you figure it all out should be the prior step." - Oregon Arts Watch … [Read More...]
The Campaign Against Sackler Family Cash In The Arts World May Have Reached A Turning Point
"The debate over how organizations should handle donations from members of the Sackler family has intensified in recent weeks after the revelation that specific individuals like Richard, former chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, played a far more extensive role in promoting OxyContin than previously known." - Inside Philanthropy … [Read More...]
Old Soviet-Style Cafeterias Are Becoming Popular In 21st-Century Moscow
The ingredients are more consistent in quality and the kitchens are cleaner than back then, but otherwise, the new stolovayas are remarkably like the old ones, with people waiting in long lines to get served mashed potatoes, stuffed cabbage, herring, and borscht by surly workers. Nostalgia for the superpower USSR? Not exactly: it's comfort food, and far more affordable than most restaurants in Moscow. - Atlas Obscura … [Read More...]
MEDIA
Social Platforms Want To Cut Down On Spreading Fake Conspiracy Theories. But There’s A Problem……
Part of the problem for platforms like YouTube and Facebook — which has also pledged to clean up misinformation that could lead to real-world harm — is that the definition of “harmful” misinformation is circular. There is no inherent reason that a video questioning the official 9/11 narrative is more dangerous than a video asserting the existence of U.F.O.s or Bigfoot. A conspiracy theory is harmful if it results in harm — at which point it’s often too late for platforms to act. - The New York Times … [Read More...]
Film Critic Carrie Rickey Talks About Weinstein, #MeToo And Movies…
"Naturally, as a woman and a mother, I am not for sexual predation of women in any industry. That kind of goes without saying. Before Nora Ephron died, she made a list of the things she wouldn’t miss. I think number one or two on that list of things I won’t miss are more panels about why there aren’t enough women in film. That’s kind of how I’m feeling now. We talk about it, and we talk about it, and nothing fucking changes. You can quote me on that." - The Smart Set … [Read More...]
Sofia Coppola Is An Auteur, And It’s Time We Give Her An Auteur’s Respect…
J. Hoberman: "Coppola is a true auteur — a filmmaker with a distinct worldview and sensibility and a personal set of quasi-autobiographical interests. … [And] it should be noted that on the basis of six features she’s directed since 1999, she’s also the most celebrated American filmmaker under 50." - The New York Times … [Read More...]
Ai Weiwei’s Segment For Anthology Film About Berlin Suppressed Out Of Fears Of Chinese Gov’t Reaction…
"A contribution by the Chinese artist, film-maker and activist Ai Weiwei to a film called Berlin, I Love You, was cut by the producers on concern it could block the movie from getting distribution in China and create difficulties for them with the Chinese authorities." - The Art Newspaper … [Read More...]
CBS Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Measure Viewers’ Emotional Reactions To Shows…
With Canvs Surveys, CBS can now field more open-ended surveys and also expand the set of questions it includes on each one. The tool measures and categorizes consumers’ responses to characters, plot lines and other topics (like related shows), using a standard set of emotional tags such as “love,” “excited,” “bored,” “sad” or “anxious.” - Variety … [Read More...]
MUSIC
In The 1930s, The Hammond Organ Took America By Storm, Setting A New Standard
The Federal Trade Commission held an entire hearing in 1937 to evaluate the Hammond’s sonority. The Commission sought to determine whether a series of advertising claims about the Hammond’s timbre were “deceptive, misleading and false.” Though many of the hearing’s participants believed their testimony would go down in history as an important reckoning of what constituted “real” and “good” musical sound, the affair is largely forgotten today. What the hearing does offer is an unusually detailed record of contemporaneous arguments over the quality and value of a new electronic sound. - New Music Box … [Read More...]
Louisville Orchestra Names Its Next CEO
Robert Massey comes to Louisville from the Jacksonville Symphony and previously held executive positions at Orchestra Iowa and the Washington Bach Consort. - Insider Louisville … [Read More...]
How Barber’s ‘Adagio For Strings’ Went From National Mourning Music To Dance Club Hit
It was played at the funerals of Einstein and FDR; TV and radio stations played it after JFK was shot; it's been used to signify sadness in numerous films; orchestras added it to their concerts after 9/11. Then the electronica DJs got hold of it, and the remixes went over surprisingly well on the dance floor. - NPR … [Read More...]
Classical Music Is Broken Online. What iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music And The Others Should Do About It
It's difficult to find music, hard to catalog, and just an overall pain in the neck to manage. The problem? "We’re treating around 300 years of music from various countries, forms, philosophies, and so on as one genre. As far as modern commercial music, we don’t group the past 50 years together" - Mac Rumors … [Read More...]
Heavy Metal Has A Nazi Problem. But What To Do About It?
“Should metal stay dangerous and controversial and offensive? Is it censorship to deny bands a platform for their genocidal views? Is it curtailing their free speech to make it harder for a band to get booked or get signed versus at what point does it become critical to keep these dangerous Fascist elements out of our scene? At what point is that record worth so much to you that you would buy it knowing that you were actively contributing to something that is harming other people?” - The New Yorker … [Read More...]