Judith Gurewich, the publisher of Other Press. trained as a Lacanian analyst and still practices as one part-time. “She brings her intensity to her uniquely aural editing process, hosting authors at her home in Cambridge, Mass., for days at a time while they read their manuscripts aloud to her.” – The New York Times
Egypt’s New Capital Will Have A Major New Cultural Complex (But Will Anyone Come To It?)
New Cairo City, currently under construction on the edge of the metro area, about 25 miles from central Cairo, will become Egypt’s administrative center; the “city of arts and culture” within it, to be completed in 2022, will have a 2,000-seat opera house, two other theaters for music and drama, cinemas, museums, art galleries, and libraries. While Egyptian arts figures welcome the facilities, they’re warning that audiences won’t come from the old city unless the government makes sure there are things worth seeing. – Al-Monitor
Maverick Conductor Teodor Currentzis Stomps Away From His Russian Home Base
The Greek-born maestro, a naturalized Russian citizen, has been getting plenty of love-it-or-hate-it attention for recordings (particularly of Mozart operas) with his period-orchestra-and-chorus MusicAeterna. Since 2011, he and his ensemble have been in residence at the State Opera and Ballet in the Urals city of Perm. Now they’re leaving, with Currentzis complaining of lack of understanding and interference from local and regional politicians: “Without their complete lack of understanding, the absence of all reverence and sensitivity, I would never have summoned the strength to make the decision to abandon my heavenly kingdom [at the opera house].” (in German; Google Translate version here) – Musik Heute (Germany)
Why You Choke Under Pressure
“When we are performing our normal, practiced tasks everyday, we often are – counterintuitively — not paying attention to all the little details of what we are doing; our prefrontal cortex is running largely on autopilot. But in times of intense stress, like a playoff game, major presentation, or a job interview, your prefrontal cortex can go into overdrive. When the pressure is on, we often start focusing on the step-by-step details of our performance to try and ensure an optimal outcome and, as a result, we disrupt what would have otherwise been fluid and natural.” – Harvard Business Review
Ideas And Progress Flow From Chaos And Complexity Of Ideas – But We’re Retreating From That
Felipe Fernández-Armesto: ‘Confused by chaos, infantilized by ignorance, refugees from complexity flee to fanaticism and dogma.’ But something else is happening too. Human history was formerly all about divergence; now, as cultural differences are eroded, we are converging. The result, according to his hypothesis, will in the end be a slowing down of the imagination and ideas.” – Spectator
Let’s Talk About Contemporary Poetry’s Use Of The Exclamation Point
Obviously, perhaps, they used to be more common in poetry than they are now – think Wordsworth, Dickenson, and so many more. Now, “exclamation marks are not exactly rare in contemporary poetry—but they are occasional enough for us to take notice. For all their ubiquity in texts and emails, exclamation marks call attention toward themselves in poems: they stand straight up.” – The Millions
The Overlooked Work Of Ernie Barnes, The Athlete Turned Celebrity Artist
Barnes, a U.S. football player turned artist who did such things as “creating album covers for Marvin Gaye, receiving a commissioned by Kanye West and being named the official artist of the 1984 Olympics,” still isn’t really part of art history, curators of a new retrospective claim – and that’s what they’re trying to correct, of course. (But it’s not every day that the artist’s professional American football helmet is included in the artist’s show.)- The Guardian (UK)
Colson Whitehead Is The First Novelist On The Cover Of TIME Since 2010
As Emily Temple notes in LitHub, that 2010 cover was also the first in about 10 years – and as she also says, “Maybe in 2029 it will be a woman! (Just kidding, there definitely won’t be magazines by then.)” Not to take away from Whitehead, of course; as the profile says, “If greatness is excellence sustained over time, then without question, Whitehead is one of the greatest of his generation. In fact, figuring his age, acclaim, productivity and consistency, he is one of the greatest American writers alive.” – TIME Magazine
As Nataki Garrett Takes Over The Reins, She Talks To Bill Rauch About His Legacy At The Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Rauch, who came into the festival wanting to change the audience and the acting company demographics (and who has succeeded in the latter; the former is stickier, as he also acknowledges in the interview), says, “I have, throughout my career, been very concerned with how marginalized voices can be put at the center of the art and the discourse in our field, and throughout my years at OSF, … I have been challenged by colleagues, audiences, and guest artists.” – HowlRound
AMC Theatres Says It Wants To Make Sure Franchises Don’t Entirely Consume The Theatre Experience
Yes, yes, AMC has done plenty of gobbling of arts theatres, or so say the (former) owners of those theatres, but now they’re concerned about the films. Well, not just now: “This is not the first time AMC has sought to showcase its indie film bona fides, however. The company in 2010 launched something called AMC Independent in an effort to dedicate more screens to arty movies. That followed a similar 2006 initiative, AMC Select.” – Los Angeles Times
The So-Cal Native Who’s Giving Cambodian Classical Dance A Queer Twist
“[Prumsodun] Ok, a Long Beach, California, native whose parents were Cambodian refugees, not only restages traditional works of Khmer classical dance but also uses the stories and vocabulary of the ancient style to create new works that center LGBTQ+ characters and perspectives. In the process, he’s helped to revitalize and bring global attention to an art form that was nearly wiped out with the vast majority of its practitioners in the Khmer Rouge genocide of the late 1970s.” – Dance Magazine
An Oral History Of The Orgy Scene In Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (It Was Supposed To Be A Lot Better Than It Came Out)
Turns out Stanley Kubrick and colleagues worked on and rehearsed the scene for weeks, and it was highly (if not always clearly) thought out. Then Kubrick died, and the rest of the team had to figure out how to avoid an NC-17 rating without him. Journalist Bilge Ebiri talks to Kubrick’s assistant director and personal assistant, the choreographer (yes, there was one), composer, dancers, and actors involved (though not Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman). – New York Magazine
Yannick And Jaap Sitting Around Talking
Jaap van Zweden: “If you see Dallas, it’s a real sports town. If you see Hong Kong, it’s a real business town. And I think we are both very fortunate because New York is a real arts town. That is a big plus for us.”
Yannick Nézet-Séguin: “At the same time, in New York we should always — and I know this is true for the Met — we should always be listening and watching what’s going on elsewhere in the country, so we can represent it better.” – The New York Times
Baltimore Symphony Board Sets Date For End Of Lockout, Pays Health Insurance For Locked-Out Musicians
Contributions from board members and others will cover the cost of the health insurance for July and August, and management will end the lockout on Sept. 9 if no contract agreement has been reached by then. – The Baltimore Sun
Who Bought That Caravaggio That Was Found In An Attic? This Guy
“The American billionaire hedge fund manager and art collector J. Tomilson Hill is the mysterious buyer of an early 17th-century canvas billed as a rediscovered masterpiece by Caravaggio, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.” – The New York Times
London Specialist Dance Injury Clinic Abruptly Closes
The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital clinic had provided free specialist healthcare to more than 1300 dancers since 2012… RNOH’s plan to transfer care to other sports and exercise medicine centres sounded good in theory, “but we specifically chose them when we set up the clinic because of their expertise in orthopaedics”. – Arts Professional
Look At Art. Be A Critic. Get Paid
The initiative is a socially engaged art project that pays people who wouldn’t otherwise visit art museums to visit one as guest critics of the art and the institution, flipping the script between the institution and its public, the educator and the educated, the paying and the paid. – Hyperallergic
Canada Imposes $4.5 Million Fine On TicketMaster For Misleading Consumers
The bureau found Ticketmaster’s advertised prices did not reflect the true cost to the consumer as the online ticket service added mandatory fees later in the purchasing process that often added more than 20 per cent to the cost and in some cases over 65 per cent. – CBC
Designing For How People Experience Buildings Rather Than How Buildings Look
That idea of beginning with human experience rather than beauty, has applications beyond the deaf and blind communities. It’s a design philosophy that can be applied to tackling problems of sustainability as climate change worsens, and of an aging population, and of increasing urbanization. – The Atlantic
Propwatch: the lighter in ‘Venice Preserved’
In the opening scene of the Restoration tragedy Venice Preserved at the RSC, a rebel recruits a desperate friend to the cause. His indignation is scorching hot, so of course he pulls out a lighter, itching to burn the rotten state to the ground. – David Jays
UK Education Secretary Pushes Back: “We’re Not Cutting Arts Education”
Damien Hinds pushed back on references to the Fabian Society’s Primary Colours report, which was published earlier this year and concluded there had been a “dramatic” decline in arts education. – The Stage
Gender Equity Still Far Off In Orchestral Programming
The results of this year’s analysis of the 2019-2020 seasons of the world’s top orchestras by DONNE, Women in Music, which is founded and curated by soprano Gabriella Di Laccio, show that out of 3,997 works presented, only 142 were written by women composers, or 3.6 percent of the total works performed.” – Limelight