Says the Head of Performance Health at Queensland Ballet in Brisbane, “They’ve been using everything from bench tops, to tables to ironing boards as well as ballet barres, and practicing on surfaces that can be slippery. Keeping 60 company dancers fit and injury-free is challenging at the best of times. At least now we know they have a small surface and barre which is closer to their normal situation, where they can practice safely.” – Limelight (Australia)
Bringing An Indigenous American Language Back From The Very Brink Of Extinction
Journalist Lorraine Boissoneault looks into the effort — using classroom lessons, software, and the memory of one of five native speakers left — to revive and teach the Menominee language of Wisconsin. – The Believer
Hungarian Strongman Uses Virus Emergency To Seize Control Of Museums, Theatres
As the undemocratic features of the Orbán regime became increasingly obvious, the cunning liberal directors would choose productions that, with even minimum sensibility, could be interpreted as critical of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal regime. Thus, these theaters became irritants to the Fidesz officeholders. And, after “Budapest fell” in October 2019, the government wanted to rein in “rogue” theaters. – Hungarian Spectrum
How Epidemics Of The Past Drove Innovation
As we are seeing with the coronavirus today, disease can profoundly impact a community—upending routines and rattling nerves as it spreads from person to person. But the effects of epidemics extend beyond the moments in which they occur. Disease can permanently alter society, and often for the best by creating better practices and habits. – Smithsonian
Inside This Season’s Most Controversial Book – The Woody Allen Memoir
I spoke to several industry professionals; almost all were reluctant to play Monday morning quarterback without the promise of anonymity—if you’re making a book deal in secret, perhaps it’s worth interrogating why. – The New Republic
Before There Was ‘The Onion’, There Was ‘Not The New York Times’
An April Fool’s story that’s actually true: back during the 1978 newspaper strike in New York City, a group of writers and editors that included some now-illustrious names — George Plimpton, Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein, Terry Southern, Frances FitzGerald — put together a parody newspaper and got it onto newsstands. Here’s the first-ever oral history of this proto-Onion from some of the folks involved. – The New York Times
Give This Woman A Pritzker Prize! Once Pakistan’s Starchitect, She Now Designs Mud-And-Bamboo Huts For Poor Villagers
Yasmeen Lari retired at 60 after making her career designing some of Pakistan’s glitziest modern buildings for government and corporate clients. Then, after a severe earthquake, she went to help with reconstruction — designing simple houses that survivors could build themselves, using the debris, that cost a tenth of what NGOs spent on prefab concrete homes. And she’s gone on from there, developing one innovative and inexpensive structure after another, creating jobs for impoverished women at the same time. – The Guardian
This Is A Transition From One Era To Another
The era of peak globalisation is over. An economic system that relied on worldwide production and long supply chains is morphing into one that will be less interconnected. A way of life driven by unceasing mobility is shuddering to a stop. Our lives are going to be more physically constrained and more virtual than they were. A more fragmented world is coming into being that in some ways may be more resilient. – New Statesman
How LACMA’s New Building Became A Referendum On Museums
How did this building, initially embraced as promising, if not visionary, come to ignite a scorched-earth debate in its final stages? The story of LACMA’s campus reconstruction—and the current opposition to it—reflects some of the thorniest questions at play in the operation of museums today: what they are meant to be, who gets to decide, and who is meant to pay for them. – Artnet
How To Maintain (Or Renew) Your Relationship With Shakespeare: Read Him
It’s certainly true that people have been reading Shakespeare’s plays for almost as long as they have been watching them. Within two or three years of his first, collaborative efforts on the London stage, Shakespeare’s first play in print was the gory tragedy Titus Andronicus (1594). Only one copy of this edition exists, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. That scarcity itself tells us something about reading: playbooks were small, consumable pamphlets often read into oblivion, not literary trophies to be venerated. – The Guardian
There’s Going To Still Be Theatre. But What Will It Be?
Said Chay Yew, “We’ve always complained about how the American theatre doesn’t work. I for one find the blank slate exciting. We either repeat what we did before or we don’t. The structure will have to come down.” Joe Haj conceded that if the crisis “ends in six weeks, we may be much like we were before. But if not, or there’s another spike in the virus, we may need to rethink our model entirely. There’s a huge role for leadership. We need to be able to dream ourselves forward.” – American Theatre
Bookstores Had Staged Something Of A Comeback. And Now This
In a 2016 study, the median small business had enough cash to last just 27 days, while a 2018 survey found that 21 percent would fail after a month without cash flow. Bookstores run on even slimmer margins than the typical mom-and-pop shop—but the ones that have survived in the Amazon era have made it for a reason. – Slate
COVID Response: Panic Buying Of Pianos?
“Many see the period of isolation as an opportunity to pursue passions that might have otherwise lain dormant. Music-learning apps and sheet music sites like nKoda have boomed, and, contrary to trends across the rest of the retail sector, so have instrument sales.” – Van
Canada Council Launches Emergency Funding Plan
The Canada Council for the Arts has announced $60M in advance funding to arts organizations that have approved funding from the 2019/20 season. This amounts to the equivalent to 35% of the annual grants held by all core funded organizations. The funding is designed to help arts not-for-profits meet short term financial commitments to the artists and cultural workers they employ. Ludwig Van
Theaters Across The U.S. Commission Ten-Minute Plays We Can All Perform While Sheltering In Place
“The [project], which is being called ‘Play at Home,’ is a website (playathome.org) featuring new plays, intended to take no more than 10 minutes to read, that are free so that anyone can read or perform them at home or by video conferencing. The commissioning theaters are providing a $500 stipend to the playwrights they select to write the works.” – The New York Times
Chicago Dance Companies On The Edge
Put simply, the state’s dance scene has taken a body blow. Indeed, industry leaders fear that some companies won’t recover from this crisis at all and others could come back in a weakened or reduced form. – Chicago Sun-Times
Assembling New Micro-Operas During Coronavirus Confinement
“Ella Marchment, stage director of the International Opera Awards, is behind the scheme, which is called #OperaHarmony. … The [project] will pair composers with librettists to create pieces on the theme of distance or community. The composers and librettists will then be matched with directors and singers to record their micro-opera, which will be shared online.” – The Stage
Brown Paper Tickets Systems Overwhelmed, Artists And Venues Can’t Get Their Money
“The 20-year-old BPT, which has grown from a local company to an international ticket broker, handles tens of thousands of events around the world each month. But in the past few weeks, an avalanche of pandemic-related pressures swamped the company, overwhelming its systems. In a flurry of confusing event cancellations and postponements, BPT founder and president William Scott Jordan said, the company and its bank lost control of their financial machinery — together, they decided to shut down the account that paid artists and organizations.” – Seattle Times
As The World Shuts Down, Yale School Of Music Takes Care Of Its Students
“In a March 31st letter to alumni, Dean Robert Blocker outlined an ambitious plan to provide aid, including ‘a one-time stipend of $500’ to all students to assist with travel and expenses; full pay, despite social distancing, for all student employees through May 1st, 2020; and relocation of all international students who could not return home to University housing.” – The Middleclass Artist
North American Movie Box Office Down $600 Million From Last Year
“Amid the far-reaching impact of the coronavirus pandemic, … domestic ticket sales turned in a combined $1.81 billion from Jan. 1 through March 19, the day when Comscore stopped reporting theater grosses. That compares to $2.41 billion for the first full three months of 2019.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Jazz Patriarch Ellis Marsalis Dead Of COVID At 85
“[A] pianist and educator, [he] became the guiding force behind a late-20th-century resurgence in jazz. … Photogenic, erudite and fabulously talented, Mr. Marsalis’s children and many other young jazz musicians he had taught — including Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison Jr., Harry Connick Jr. and Nicholas Payton — became the leaders in a burgeoning traditionalist movement, loosely referred to as the Young Lions.” – The New York Times
Edinburgh Festivals — All Of Them — Canceled
The Edinburgh International Festival, the Fringe, Book Festival, Art Festival, and Military Tattoo, which transform Scotland’s capital for the month of August, have been called off for 2020. No one knows what the coronavirus situation will be by late summer, but preparations are so large, lengthy and expensive that, the authorities agreed, the decision had to be made now. – The Guardian
Ask
I’ve also been watching with great interest the number of arts organizations making content available online, providing virtual experiences to help us get through this. At the same time, I wonder if a myopia inherent in our industry might get in the way of doing even greater good. – Doug Borwick
More on Shuttered NYC Institutions: A Brief Reprieve for Met’s Endangered Staff; A “Frick Breuer” Update
Faced with mounting pushback against its plan to consider cutbacks beginning Apr. 5, the Met has now postponed any such changes until May 2. The Frick’s plans, including a temporary move to the Breuer, have not changed. – Lee Rosenbaum