Fear of COVID, to be more precise. "Even before you realise what you have done, anxious sideways looks will have been exchanged, the seeds of doubt sown. Coughing has become the equivalent of randomly shouting 'fire' in a theatre – a gesture guaranteed to provoke fear." - The Guardian
So argues Joshua Barone about Jessie Montgomery, whose works are set to get a total of 400 performances this calendar year and who's just starting a term as the Chicago Symphony's composer-in-residence. - The New York Times
"It would be absurd to call for them to be abandoned entirely. But if they're going to be embedded in the fabric of musical theater forever, then we shouldn't shy from putting the ugly parts of them on display" the way that Daniel Fish's revisionist Oklahoma! did. - Slate
"Is there perhaps a clandestine pact to encourage audiences back out with some concerted cheerleading? If so, then the critics are doing us a disservice." - The Observer (UK)
Every One, a glass mosaic that's the first of three to be installed in the pedestrian tunnel for the 42nd Street Shuttle, depicts vividly colored anthropomorphic shapes inspired by the horse-costumed dancers Cave used in HEARD•NY at Grand Central Terminal in 2013. - The New York Times
"(He) was celebrated for delivering nuanced performances as swaggering street toughs, charming family men and smooth-talking gangsters," most famously as Omar Little, the stickup man with an ethical code, in The Wire, the HBO series about crime and corruption in Baltimore. - The Washington Post
"Belmondo, who embodied … a new type of male star characterized by pure virility rather than classic good looks," had his breakout role in Godard's Breathless and "went on to appear in more than 80 films with a variety of … directors, from Truffaut to Claude Lelouch." - AP
Poet Ghulam Mohammad Bhat: "In the last 30 years I have never seen this kind of suppression. ... There is silence everywhere, as if the silence is the best cure for our present crisis." - The New York Times
We were lucky to have access to livestreams from across the world in 2020. But: "Although the streamed productions I later saw live had flashes of revelation, those moments were few and far between in what was, on balance, limited by the medium: the subjective and inevitably narrow perspective of the camera, the engineered flattening of sound." - The...
"I't’s been a real grassroots, community-led effort,' Abdul Aziz, a photojournalist, told Hyperallergic. 'It’s overwhelming and beautiful, and I don’t want to say shocking, but it is incredible that we’ve been able to create this sort of de facto emergency response government.'" - Hyperallergic
In Spain, an archaeology team looking at ancient Roman cities "routinely uses technologies such as ground-penetrating radar, drones and magnetometers – devices that measure magnetic fields – and over the years it has become a leader in this non-destructive way to interpret a country’s archeological heritage." - El Pais (Spain)
In Arles, with thousands of pieces taken from the so-called House of the Harpist, "the fragments, some barely bigger than a fingernail, have been washed, labelled and placed into the cases to be examined one by one to see where they might fit into a bigger picture." - The Guardian (UK)
A new peer-reviewed study shows that "from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources." But what's the solution? - Washington Post
The British Mawa Theatre Company's "goal is to change the industry from within, creating more space for marginalized voices in a field that is all too often dominated by privileged white men." - Vogue
