“This first cycle of funding, totaling $15,000, will go to Lexington Children’s Theatre, Target Margin Theater, and The TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment). The grants, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF), will focus on peer-to-peer and fieldwide learning as they relate to theatre for youth and multigenerational audiences.” – American Theatre
Arts Access Fund To Finance Accessible Tickets At 12 New York City Theatres
“The New York Community Trust and the Jerome L. Greene Foundation have established a fund to support accessible tickets at 12 New York City theatres. The one-year grants will gift each of the theatres amounts ranging from $100,000 to $250,000 to support community access programs, discounted ticket outreach, young member programs, and more. The fund aims to diversify audiences and reach potential theatregoers throughout all five boroughs.” – American Theatre
This Time, Can Santa Fe Get Affordable Housing For Artists Built?
Developer Daniel Werwath has been trying to get such housing built since 2005, and he’s already seen two projects get started and then stall out. But he thinks that 2019 may be the year his plan succeeds. – Next City
What Happened When Three Philosophers Put An ‘Ask A Philosopher’ Booth On A Manhattan Street Corner
Oh yes, people showed up, and they asked real questions. Lee McIntyre, author of Post-Truth and one of the three, offers a report. (The hardest part: the six-year-old girl who looked him in the eye and asked, in all seriousness, “How do I know I’m real?”) – The Conversation
A Sense Of Doom In The Air (What, Me Worry?)
“Since the financial crash of 2008, across Europe and in the United States, there has been (to borrow a phrase from Frank Kermode) a “sense of an ending”. Liberal orthodoxies have fallen into radical doubt. Populist movements are arrayed against the political and economic order that has stood in place for the past fifty years. Electorates have leaped into unknown futures. The grounds of civilization won’t break up under our feet so much as recede under melting ice caps and rising seas, while the indices of progress – life expectancy, equality, happiness and trust in political institutions – have gone into reverse in many parts of the world.” – Times Literary Supplement
Lost Soviet Art (Good Art, No Less) Keeps Turning Up In Kazakhstan’s Largest City
Mosaics, reliefs and sgraffiti from the days of the USSR are being found behind boards in Almaty and restored. Why did they escape being destroyed, as Soviet artworks were in so many other places? Most likely, because the capital of the newly independent country was moved somewhere else. – The Guardian
Stage Manager Sues Royal Opera House For £200,000 Over Falling Curtain
“Gary Crofts, 68, claims that he has been plagued by depression and anxiety since a half-tonne section of stage curtain fell down near him without warning. The incident happened during a 2016 production of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet, Anastasia.” – The Times (UK)
Criminalizing Drill Rappers For Performing Their Work Is Dangerous
“As a letter signed this week by human rights organisations, lawyers, academics and musicians argues, criminalising artists in this way is both unjust and ineffective. It is unjust because it denies the basic freedoms of those who are attempting to creatively, if distastefully, expose their experiences of subsistent life in the bleakest urban pockets of British society. And it will be ineffective at achieving any reduction in violence because it simply does nothing to address its root causes.” – The Guardian
Origami Ballet Costumes
Need we say any more? (We will: They’re real. The photographer: “There’s a wave of change that is happening in the dance world and it was important to me to push it forward.”) – CBC
‘MoviePass Does Still Exist. They’re Just A Little Harder To Find These Days.’
A reporter finds — after a lot of walking around, and behind a very inconspicuous door — the current offices of “one of the most glorious burnouts in corporate history.” The execs, he finds, are quite aware of their mistakes but determined to keep going, because they proved that “there is a massive group of people — into the millions — who are interested in moviegoing subscriptions.” — The Ringer
Theatre About The Brain
Ten years ago, theatre about neuro conditions or neuroscience was rare. Now it’s everywhere, and sparking all sorts of innovation. There is a new emphasis on neuroscience as opposed to specific neurological conditions. – Howlround
How A Book Gets The Cover You Judge It By
Three senior designers at publishing houses talk about the process of conceiving and trying out different designs, then choosing the one they think works best. — The New York Times
Global Pop Music 2.0 – A New Kind Of Star
There’s been a fundamental change to the idea that English is pop’s lingua franca. This development has been accompanied by a remarkable shift in the pop-star system itself. While bilingual artists surge into charts and playlists, joining the American rappers who have profoundly reshaped popular music in the last 20 years (the five most listened-to tracks on Spotify in 2018 were by US hip-hop acts), it’s a different story for the stars who emerged during the era we might call Pop 1.0. “The massive pop stars of yesteryear – Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake – are fading from the public consciousness. – The Guardian
Doctors: Families Should Ban Screens From Dinner Table, Bedtime
“We know that children notice if their parents are paying attention to them and we do know that one in five children wakes up at night to check their phone for social media messages and interrupted sleep decreases their quality of education the next day. So there isn’t a cause and effect, but there seems to be an association and that’s why we’ve been very cautious in making very bold statements about the harms.” – BBC
Claim: UK Is Facing A “Crisis” In Music Education
In short, music ed is disappearing from schools, parliament was told. The government “must act quickly to ensure music does not become the preserve of a privileged few”, the report claims and identifies a number of systemic challenges as a way of illustrating the scale of the crisis facing music education in England. – The Stage
Study: How Political Rap Music Has Influenced Feminist Attitudes
According to the authors, “Hip-hop feminists embrace rap music as a culturally relevant and generationally specific art form that elicits social justice, consciousness raising, and political and social activism” and the contradictions of being both feminists and hip-hop fans. Hip-hop feminism advances conversations about the portrayal of black womanhood, coalition building, black gender relations and black women’s empowerment through rap music. This perspective is distinctly different from the early academic writings on women and hip-hop that focused almost exclusively on male domination and misogyny, they wrote. – Georgia State University
Founding Director Mark Murphy To Leave LA’s REDCAT Theatre
REDCAT – located below Disney Hall, and operated by CalArts – is a center for contemporary performance. Murphy quickly established the interdisciplinary performance and multimedia arts center as one of Los Angeles’ most influential centers for contemporary and avant-garde work from around the globe, and an influential resource for local artists to develop new work. – Broadway World
A Visit To The Museum Of Failure
“To be displayed in this museum, objects have to have been an innovation, have to have failed and have to be interesting, explains the museum’s curator Samuel West. He defines failure as ‘a deviation from expected results’.” For example? “Sony Betamax, an electrocuting face mask and a Swedish alternative to marshmallows.” (video) — BBC
Messiaen in a crypt: New meaning to ‘the end of time’
The Crypt Sessions in Harlem, always a thoughtfully-curated series, offered a concert on Tuesday night with the kind of repertoire, venue, and penetrating performance that yielded fresh questions about the nature of, well, everything. — David Patrick Stearns
Daniel Barenboim Is Brilliant. But He’s Also An Egotistical Tyrant. Why?
Barenboim’s life work is awe-inspiring. But “in musical circles, Barenboim’s temper is legendary. He has thrown fits because a violist rolled his eyes, because a singer bowed in the wrong place, because a favored principal player was on vacation. He once berated a musician who lacked concentration because someone in their immediate family had died.” – Van Magazine
Foreign Policy Magazine’s List Of 100 Top Global Thinkers. Seriously?
Lists, of course, are always subjective, and of course you’re meant to quibble. That’s kind of the point. But really? Mohammed bin Salman? And get aload of the “artists and activists” category. Barely an artist to be found. And these are “the big ideas of those who shape our understanding of the world?” – Foreign Policy
Tanglewood To Go Year-Round With New Linde Center For Music And Learning
The new four-building, $33 million complex “will be the home to the Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI) … The schedule of 140 ticketed events includes four deep-immersion weekends, numerous special events, guest speakers, master classes. a seven-week Sunday evening film series in collaboration with the Berkshire International Film Festival, and a new 200-seat indoor/outdoor cafe open to the public for mingling with artists and students.” — The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA)
Spotify Buys Podcast Producer Gimlet Media
“In announcing its fourth-quarter earnings, the Stockholm company said it had acquired Gimlet Media, the studio behind the popular podcasts Crimetown, Reply All and StartUp, and Anchor, which makes tools for recording and distributing podcasts. Financial terms of the transactions were not disclosed.” — The New York Times
Guthrie Theatre, No Longer Headless, Gets New Managing Director And Two Senior Staffers
“James Haskins, managing director of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, will take the same title at the Guthrie,” and new development director Mollie Alexander Hogan comes from Kansas City Rep. “Both the development and managing director positions have been vacant since Danielle St. Germain-Gordon left the former job in May and Jennifer Bielstein left the latter position in June. Another member of the Guthrie leadership team, production director David Stewart, also resigned last summer. Rebecca Cribbin was hired to replace him in December.” — The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Venice Officially Institutes Entry Tax For Tourists
“The controversial initiative, which is due to launch on 1 May [at the rate of €3], applies to day-trippers … From early 2020, the fee will rise to between €6 and €10 depending on the time of year. The cost will be incorporated into tickets of tourists who arrive by cruise ship, in water taxis and by plane or train.” — The Art Newspaper