“What if all ballet dancers had agents and ballet companies had scouts? What if once a year there was a ballet combine, at which pre-professional dancers and ‘free agents’ could showcase their skills and be assessed by ballet companies across America like in a centralized audition?” – Dance Magazine
Learning As Observation (First From Afar) And Then Focusing On What Can Be Known
“As the conversation of the physical phenomenon under discussion grows more complex, language is revealed to be inadequate to the task of describing abstract thought. At this point, students resort to drawing on the chalkboard to more clearly demonstrate their questions and hypotheses and the process of emendation continues in pictures. What this reveals is that scientific investigation is primarily a matter of imagination since the realities being investigated are frequently invisible and incompletely understood.” – American Enterprise Institute
How One Teacher Uses Dance to Combat Memorial Day Weekend Gun Violence in Chicago
“Memorial Day is notoriously one of Chicago’s bloodiest weekends. Last year, 36 people were shot and seven died that weekend. In 2017 and 2016, the number of shootings was even higher. When Garley ‘GiGi Tonyé’ Briggs, a dance teacher and Chicago native, started noticing this pattern, she was preparing her second annual Memorial Day workshop for local youth. … So Briggs, who also has a master’s in health care administration, decided to refocus her workshop. Now called #Dance4OurLives, the expanded weekend of classes for dancers of all levels explores how movement can be used to address Chicago’s gun violence.” – Dance Magazine
Best-Selling Big-Idea Books Riddled With Errors – Should They Be Better Than Random Tweets?
“The time has come for those of us who work in book-length nonfiction to insist that professional fact-checking become as inalienable from publishing as publicity, marketing and jacket design — and at the publisher’s expense rather than as a cost passed on to the author, who, understandably, will often choose to spend her money on health care. In the age of tweets, it cannot be the fate of the book to become ever more tweetlike — maybe factual, maybe whatever. The book must stand apart, must stand above.” – The New York Times
Annette Benning Simply Will Not Tell You How She Gets To The Depths Of Her Characters
“She wished she could talk about it, she said in her barrel-aged voice. She likes to read actors’ interviews, scouring them for details of life and craft. … She wanted to be cooperative. She wanted to support the show. … Yet discussing how she prepared the role, how she plays it would mean intellectualizing it, distancing herself from it, violating something veiled, even sacred, at the core of what she does.” – The New York Times
A Brief History Of The Laugh Track — The Shame Of Sitcoms? Or The Sine Qua Non?
“TV and film star David Niven griped in 1955 that ‘the laugh track is the greatest single affront to public intelligence I know of.’ … But consider for a moment the unheralded achievements of the laugh track. It allowed directors to leave their live studio audiences behind and shoot scenes on location. It gave at-home viewers someone to laugh along with. And, if you believe the sparse scientific research and the anecdotal evidence from Hollywood, it made jokes funnier.” – Quartz
The ‘Gomorrah’ Housing Project In Naples Will Be Torn Down
“Just a few years ago, Le Vele – a sprawling housing estate in Scampia, on the outskirts of Naples – was both the fictional location for the hit crime film and Italian TV series Gomorrah and the real-life location for the biggest international drugs and arms supermarket in western Europe.” But no more. “Unusually, the effort to demolish the buildings has been led by the residents themselves.” – The Guardian
Why NBC Backed Out Of Airing ‘Hair Live!’
Turns out it wasn’t because of the ratings for Rent [kinda] Live! (the worst ever for a live TV musical) or even the naked hippies at the end of Act I (well, maybe a little). No, what killed Hair Live! was, one might say, a fire-breathing dragon. – Adweek
Mumbai’s Royal Opera House (Yes, It Has One), Restored To Splendor And Use As An Arts Venue
The theatre, completed in 1916, was built by British and Parsi businessmen and presented Western and Indian music and spoken theatre until the 1930s, when it became a cinema. The arrival of cable TV and VCRs killed its business, and it shut and went derelict until its owners, a former maharaja and maharani, had it restored in 2017. Once again, it hosts both Indian and Western classical music and dance as well as spoken theatre. – The Hindu BusinessLine (India)
Turning On Ourselves: Indictment Of Humanities In Higher Ed Can Be Ugly, Unfair
“It’s one thing to own the ugly feelings with which one is understandably and unjustly riddled after years of hanging on by the fingernails while applying for job after job, only to be ghosted by the search committees who pronounce judgment. But it’s quite another to wield those feelings as a weapon against people who are also marginalized.” – Chronicle of Higher Education
The Internet Can Connect Us To Unspeakable Horrors. Can That Be Good For Us?
“The idea that being a decent person involves controlling the kinds of thoughts you allow yourself to think can easily be met with resistance. If virtue depends on limits to what is thinkable, and a certain free-thought ideal celebrates no limits, then the potential conflict between freethinking and virtue is obvious.” – Aeon
A Playwright Says It’s Time To Dismantle Theatre’s Hierarchy
And, she says, it’s time to stop seeing playwrights as god. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm: “What I enjoy more as a creator is to be in a room with a bunch of people working it out together. … We need to think of a new structure for how we create things.” – The Stage (UK)
Elena Ferrante: Storytelling Has Been Wrested From Men, And Its Power Now Rests In Women’s Hands
Ferrante: “I chose to write out of a fear of handling more concrete and dangerous forms of power. And also perhaps out of a strong feeling of alienation from the techniques of domination, so that at times writing seemed to be the most congenial way for me to react to abuses of power.” – The New York Times
The Fruits Of Alexei Ratmansky’s 10-Year Partnership With American Ballet Theater
Ratmansky has been with ABT longer than anywhere else – and it shows. “By now, some Ballet Theater dancers have spent their entire careers performing his dances; the famously difficult choreography has shaped their technique and stage personas.” – The New York Times
Thomas Nozkowski, Who Changed The Course Of Abstract Art, Has Died At 75
Nozkowski’s “small, insistent, richly hued abstractions upended the heroic scale of postwar New York art and helped push painting in a more accessible, personal and wryly self-aware direction.” – The New York Times
Reaching out with love
It’s time to stop being angry about classical music’s place in the world, and move toward acceptance. – Greg Sandow
As U.S. States Strive To Make Abortion Illegal, Romance Novelists Pledge To Write About It
Why? Because of some not so great romance novel tropes. Novelist Liz Lincoln: “We need to start putting abortion in our books. … As an alternative to marrying virtual strangers after a surprise pregnancy. As a part of character backstory. As a thing lots of people experience. … It needs to be as regular in books as characters with dead parents or green eyes. As a normal part of life, not as a moral lesson where women are then punished for their choice.” – The Guardian (UK)
Knopf Fires A Longtime, Famous Editor Of Raymond Carver, Annie Dillard, And More
Longtime editor Gary Fisketjon, founder of Vintage Contemporary and a vice-president at the company, was asked to leave after a suspension and an investigation because of “a breach of company policy,” the company said. – The New York Times
Machiko Kyo, Star Of ‘Rashomon’ And Many Other Films, Has Died At 95
Kyo was discovered by a film scout in 1949 while she was performing in a dance revue. She worked with Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Teinosuke Kinugasa, and she continued to act until about 20 years ago. Kurosawa once said “he had been ‘left speechless’ by Ms. Kyo’s dedication to learning her craft.” – The New York Times
Google Has Been Tracking Just About Everything We Buy Online
You know how many vendors want us to leave email addresses when we buy online? Well, Google knows all about that. It says it doesn’t do anything with the data. Maybe! “Google offers users a compromise that involves trading products and web services in exchange for data that the company will collect through a variety of means you may not know about and have little to no control over. That data is then used to help Google target ads, a division of its business that’s largely responsible for it becoming one of the most valuable corporations on Earth.” – The Verge
What Happens When Site-Specific Art Can’t Be Site-Specific Any More?
“This purist notion of artwork inviolably tied to its context, once a subversive strike against tradition and the marketplace, seems almost quaint now, as artists, dealers, museums and patrons interpret “site-specificity” in ever more elastic ways. The phrase itself has been co-opted as marketing speak in recent years: “site-specific” might even steal the crown from “curated,” the reigning art-world term applied to everything from playlists to pop-up shops.” – New York Times Magazine
Why ‘Game Of Thrones’ Has Been Good For British Theatre
It’s the same reason that Law and Order is good for New York theater, only more so — GoT has arguably pulled some new audiences to see, for example, some Christopher Marlowe and Sam Shepard. – The Stage
Poor Batsheva Dance Company Can’t Go Anywhere Without Protests, Not Even To A New HQ In Its Hometown
In recent years, the Israeli contemporary dance troupe has faced petitions and demonstrations by BDS activists almost everywhere it has performed abroad. Back home in Tel Aviv, the company’s planned dance center and arts complex, co-designed by David Adjaye for the site of the city’s old central bus station, is being heavily criticized by anti-gentrification campaigners. – Haaretz (Israel)
Caught In The Middle Of #MeToo: When The Same Union Represents Accusers And Accused
The dismissal and subsequent reinstatement of dancer Amar Ramasar at New York City Ballet is the most high-profile of several recent cases where a performer was fired after a credible complaint of sexual misconduct and his union pressed for reinstatement and/or compensation — very much against the wishes of other union members, among whom were the objects of the misconduct. – The New York Times
As Australia’s Elections Approach, Here’s Where The Parties Stand On The Arts
Jane Howard: “I frame this as a serious question: what is the use of investment in the arts if climate change is continually ignored? … Or, to put it another way, if politicians won’t even face the looming catastrophe that is global extinction, how low must the arts then rate on their interest scale? But, as an arts journalist, I must consider: what is there in this election for the arts?” – The Guardian (Kill Your Darlings)