“[Latyra] Blake and her collaborators made the artworks as part of Women in Reentry, a project of the People’s Paper Co-op. Together, they’ve spent months learning to make paper from their own shredded criminal records, coming up with sayings that reflect their experiences behind bars, and then collaborating with artists across the country to turn their words and images into art. And from art into action. Now, these works are on sale to raise money to bail out other Philadelphia area women for Mother’s Day.” – Next City
How Shakespeare By And For The Inebriated (Actors And Audience) Went From Fringe To Franchise
“Imagine Macbeth, but with a five-person cast that includes an inebriated actor in the title role. Add a prop dildo, an interpretive dance break and the president’s rousing speech from Independence Day. For the witches’ brew, stir together samples from the plentiful cocktails poured for audience members.” – The New York Times
Andrei Kramarevsky, One Of America’s Most Influential Ballet Teachers, Dead At 90
He had had a long and successful career as a character dancer at the Bolshoi (he danced for Stalin) when he up and left in 1975; the next year, he turned up at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York. Balanchine watched him teach a class and told him, “My dear, I’ve been waiting for you for 40 years.” – The New York Times
What have we learned from history? A musing on arts policies and practices in the public sector, clichés included
Hilary Amnah: “While working in the public sector for much of my arts administration career, I have been complicit in adhering to largely inequitable practices — especially when it comes to grant funding. And while my fellow public sector arts administrators and I get excited by moving the needle — even just a little — to make our policies and practices more equitable, we’re still not addressing the core structures that created these inequities in the first place. We focus our attention on moving the needle within these structures, but hasn’t history shown us that these structures don’t (and won’t) work to get us to a more equitable reality?” – Americans for the Arts
How Merce Cunningham Made The Judson Dance Theater Revolution Possible
Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, and Deborah Hay tell Alastair Macaulay what they learned from Cunningham that enabled them to transform modern dance. – The New York Times
Indianapolis Symphony Music Director Krzysztof Urbański To Step Down In 2021
“It was a mutual decision between Krzysztof and the ISO,” sais ISO CEO James Johnson. When he departs, Urbański, now 36, will have been on the ISO’s podium for 10 years, and he’s credited with improving the orchestra’s ticket sales and wider reputation. – The Indianapolis Star
‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ Is Now Top-Grossing American Play In Broadway History
Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel has passed the $40 million mark at the box office, with advance sales lifting the total to $55 million. There are still three British imports ahead of it: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ($68.3 million) and War Horse ($75 million), which Mockingbird will probably surpass, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ($118.7 million). – The Hollywood Reporter
Saudi Arabia Tries To Restart Its Effort To Build A Movie Industry (After That Little Khashoggi Unpleasantness)
“Seven months after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi derailed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plan to open up the country — and its $1 billion in potential box office — the kingdom is quietly mounting a comeback.” Reporter Alex Ritman visits the Saudi Film Festival in Dhahran. – The Hollywood Reporter
Venice Opens Its First Permanent Art District
Situated on the island of Giudecca, a traditionally industrial area away from the most heavily touristed spots, the Giudecca Art District was founded by curators Pier Paolo Scelsi and Valentina Gioia Levy and will present year-round shows of contemporary art as well as lectures and performances. – Artnet
Academia Is Addictive, Dysfunctional, And A Total Mess. Are We In End Days?
“Academe, as anyone knows who’s tried to leave it, is like a partner who is wrenchingly hard to quit. When it was good, it was amazing. God, the highs! The horizon of your happiness seemed unbounded. But the partner turned out to be a nut job who demanded nothing less than all of you. Move to a different city every year, they stipulated. Subsist on bread crumbs. Completely debase yourself. They constantly evaluated your “performance.” On a whim, they dressed you up in a sailor suit and beat you.” – Chronicle of Higher Education
Why People Were So Charmed By The Kid Who Exclaimed “Wow” After Mozart
“One of the oddities of this whole business is the unmistakable note of relief in so many discussions about it. In the odd cult of people who spend many nights sitting in front of symphony orchestras, there’s a lot of talk, sometimes amused and sometimes exasperated, about the more infrequent visitors who don’t know the rules.” – Maclean’s
Rising Threat: Museums Versus Authoritarian Governments
“So far the assaults have mostly been rhetorical rather than real. Universities and the press have fared somewhat worse. But straws in the wind include the rewriting of the narrative at the new Holocaust Museum in Budapest by Viktor Orban’s Fidesz government; and a similar intervention by Poland’s Law and Justice Party government at the new Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, whose director, Pawel Machcewicz, was dismissed when he sought to resist government intervention.” – The Art Newspaper
Fascinating: The Moral Of “Pinocchio” Was Not About Lying, But About Education
“The moral of the story, then, is not that children should always tell the truth, but that education is paramount, enabling both liberation from a life of brutal toil, and, more important, self-awareness and a sense of duty to others. The true message of “The Adventures” is that, until you open yourself to knowledge and your fellow human beings, you will remain a puppet forever — other people will continue to pull your strings.” – The New York Times
An Amazing Legacy: Susan Wadsworth Spent 58 Years Boosting The Careers Of Young Musicians. Now She’s Retiring
Wadsworth founded Young Concert Artists in 1961 with the aim of finding great young musicians and giving their careers a boost. “The results speak for themselves: Among the more than 270 alumni, most largely unknown when they won, are major artists like Ms. Bullock; the pianists Richard Goode, Emanuel Ax and Jeremy Denk; the violinist Pinchas Zukerman; the cellists Fred Sherry and Carter Brey; the soprano Dawn Upshaw; and the composers Andrew Norman and Kevin Puts.” – The New York Times
This Year’s Herb Alpert Award Winners
There are five, each of whom will get $75,000 to “push their art forward.” – Los Angeles Times
A Hair Salon Traded Its Mirrors For Contemporary Art, And Then Won Some Gallery Funding [VIDEO]
Truly not an exhibition space you see every day. – BBC
Oh, You Think The Marvel Universe Has A Lot Of Movies? Try The 1000-Story Comic Book Arc
And for the 1000th issue, the comic book team had to assemble its own creative superheroes. “While most comic books are created by one writer and one art team, Issue No. 1000 will have 80 — one team for each of its 80 pages.” – The New York Times
How To Become An Admired Playwright: First, Leave School Without Ever Having Been To The Theatre
That’s what worked for Katherine Chandler, “one of the most vital voices in Welsh theatre,” who took advantage of a Thatcher-era work for welfare opportunity, got placed at a theatre, fell for it, and eventually started writing plays. The award-winning playwright says Welsh theatre is “working class, strong, and in-yer-face. A lot of our work can be brutal and that’s because it reflects what’s happening in our country.” – The Stage (UK)
The Radical Act Of Writing
And then, the radical (as in, going to the root kind of radical) act of figuring out what’s OK to write about – and what’s a step too far. “To present ourselves as flawed is one thing, but to write about our children’s flaws? Or our grandchildren’s? That seems a betrayal. I had to scrap a whole essay on anger because to talk about the anger I’ve felt toward my son’s sons was too complicated.” – LitHub
Is There A ‘Chicken Soup For The Soul’ Book For Literally Every Person On The Planet?
The series became a juggernaut in the 1990s, but it’s not over by any means. As the years have gone on, “the books have continued to multiply, to such an extent that the titles are now, by necessity, quite specific” including, for instance, Chicken Soup for the Chiropractic Soul. – LitHub
How Should We Deal With Actors Who Appeared In Racist Movies?
Lillian Gish appeared in more than 100 movies, but one stands out as a dangerous, racist movie that inspired the spread of the Ku Klux Klan – The Birth of a Nation. And she never seemed to get what the problem was. So “the trustees of a student union in Ohio have voted unanimously to remove the name of Gish and her sister Dorothy from a university cinema” – with an explanatory display explaining the reasons for the change. – The Guardian (UK)
What To Read When You Want To Rethink Motherhood
Happy, or something, Mother’s Day, from The Rumpus. “Mother’s Day is a Hallmark holiday, and often the celebrations it inspires reinforce our static and outdated ideas of what it means to be a mother and to have a mother rather than pushing against those antiquated stereotypes.” – The Rumpus
Yes, We Should Dismantle Facebook – But That Might Not Be Enough
Yes, Chris Hughes’ argument that Facebook needs to be broken up is strong. But it may simply be too late. “In effect, all media lives downstream of a large attention river where Facebook has dammed the flow, only to sell your water back to you—water that you used to receive naturally.” – Wired
Are Sitcoms Doomed At The Networks?
Whew, Friday’s cancellation news was intense, so bad that Vulture called it a “bloodbath.” What’s left? Fresh Off the Boat got renewed – but star Constance Wu flat-out stated that was nothing to be happy about. So everything’s great right now in sitcom land. – Vulture
Broadband In The US Is Still Slow And Expensive, But Companies Are Racing To Change That – From Space
OK, from low orbit, anyway. Still, potentially cool (and creepy? All at once?): First of all, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has a plan for something called “Starlink,” and now, “government filings have indicated Amazon is preparing a constellation of 3,236 satellites as the backbone of its own planned service currently dubbed ‘Project Kuiper.'” – Vice