“Operation Car Wash” has rocked Brazil with its revelations of executives and politicians helping themselves to money from Petrobras, the country’s nationalized oil company. An exhibit of works confiscated from the alleged culprits has become a huge hit.
The Nonprofit Hunger Games, And How We Might Stop Them
“We all got to talking, and it turned out the two seniors [at our table] were major donors to Jane’s organization who also happened to like Vietnamese food. I said, ‘Hey, I know a great Vietnamese restaurant! I’d love to take you sometime. Maybe the four of us could get lunch together.’ There was a 20-second stare-down between Jane and me. … [Later,] I ran into her at another event, and she introduced me to others as ‘The guy who tried to poach my donors.'”
Meet The Last Living Link To The Bertolt Brecht Golden Age Of East German Theatre
“[Manfred] Karge, now 77, has been called ‘East Germany’s Orson Welles’ or ‘the Brandenburg Beckett’ – though those aren’t comparisons he is comfortable with. … ‘Beckett knew exactly how he wanted his plays to be performed. Mine don’t even have stage directions.'”
Why Calling Something “Children’s Theatre” Is Self-Limiting
“Identity-based representation practices that reinforce constructions of child/adult will generally limit the meanings of cultural codes, exploit children’s performative labors, promote ideological doctrines, exclude children from voice in production/representation, and reinforce acceptance of the idea that children are not fully people.”
Can Machines Help Us Understand How We Communicate?
“At its core, this enterprise is about using computers to understand how humans use language, including what that language means to people and how it persuades. Just down the road from Stanford is an enormous industry whose profitability depends on understanding this. Academia and Silicon Valley are converging in this territory: technology firms are eager to hire researchers who can help them turn large volumes of human-generated text into money and eager to collaborate with scholars in order to reap the practical benefit of academic knowledge. And an enormous surveillance apparatus, in the United States and abroad, is similarly interested in extracting meaning and predictions from volumes of text.”
As The Met Abandons Blackface, A Look At The Legacy Of African Americans In Opera
“Nineteenth-century Black singers like Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield and Sissieretta Jones sang opera but gave recitals, because the opera houses weren’t hiring them. Black churches were doing Verdi’s Requiem with all-Black casts and musicians.”
‘Athlètes Et Artistes’ – CNN Admires The Men Of The Paris Opera Ballet
“They are ‘les danseurs,’ the professional male ballet dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet. They are the epitome of strength, their bodies acting as machines of poetry with each and every point of their toes.”
The Melancholy Pop Idol Who Haunts China
“There’s another popular saying: Wherever there are Chinese people, there is Teresa Teng’s music. I never appreciated her symbolism as a child, back when her music seemed soft and ubiquitous. But it’s not hard to imagine how Teng’s songs about love and distance spoke to the various migrations and political estrangements throughout the Chinese-speaking world. For immigrants throughout the Chinese diaspora, her music was a reminder of their journeys, an excuse to indulge in nostalgia, three or four minutes at a time.
How To You Contextualize Theatre To The Audience It Wants To Serve?
“What quickly became apparent is that the local authority officers share our ambition to find ways of increasing the perceived “usefulness” of the arts and asking: if the regular audience to theatre comprises only 8% of the population, what might the other 92% be interested in?”
Lament Of The Anti-Social Writer (Does This Mean I Can’t Have A Career?)
“There’s my avoidance of readings, my fake enthusiasm as I swindle my own students out of their Friday nights to go to a lecture I won’t attend, my gag-triggering physical loathing of bookstores, my requirement that reading materials appear on my nightstand by benevolent conjury, without any consumer effort from me. There’s my acute failure as an educator to fill any tiny part of the role of writing-community steward that is assumed of me. There’s my own titanic hypocrisy most recently as I think about promoting a new book in the very community I can’t show love for. So here I am. In all my humility.”
The 20,000 Vinyl LPs Trapped In Guantanamo
“There’s a live Bob Marley concert and Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, John Coltrane recordings and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, part of a collection that for years the DJs wouldn’t discuss for fear that the bosses would order them to destroy them or ship the collection off the island, like other radio stations in the Defense Department broadcasting system.”
After A Year On The Job, Andris Nelsons Extends With Boston Symphony To (At Least) 2022
“On Monday, the orchestra announced it has extended its contract with Nelsons through the 2021-2022 season. The contract, which had previously run until 2019, also includes an evergreen provision allowing Nelsons and the orchestra to add additional years.”
An Open Letter From A Copy Editor To Hollywood Title-Makers
When you’re giving a movie its title – say, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, or The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, or Crazy, Stupid, Love. – punctuation is not your friend.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.03.15
Whether Quiet or Rowdy, It’s All About Making Meaning
AJBlog: We The Audience Published 2015-08-03
So Sue Me
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2015-08-03
Guinga And Maria João In Ystad
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-08-03
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There Are Plenty Of Reasons I Don’t Need The Theatre. And One Reason I Do That Trumps Them All
“I am a reporter on The One Show on BBC One, where we get audiences of up to six million. At Edinburgh, the space I play seats 350 people. I am 67, I have six grandchildren, I have been an MP and a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, I have books currently in print in 24 countries around the world; I don’t need this. But I’m doing it – for four weeks, with just one day off. Why? Because the Edinburgh Fringe changed my life.”
A New National Center For Choreography (But You Can’t See It)
“The importance of the center – a project spearheaded by DanceCleveland and funded by a five-year, $5 million pledge from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – is difficult to convey, given that it’s essentially an abstraction. Even when it’s fully up and running, the center, a standalone nonprofit, will basically amount to a network, a collection of diverse regional resources for choreographers to access as they conceive and create new dance.”
Cleveland Orchestra Picks A New Executive Director
“Andre Gremillet comes to Northeast Ohio by way of Australia, where he has served as managing director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since November 2012. The distance notwithstanding, the administrator brings from there experience doing much of what the Cleveland Orchestra is still in the midst of doing here: connecting more deeply with its hometown while simultaneously raising its profile worldwide.”
A Battle To Buy Up All The Music Festivals
“AEG and Live Nation [are] trying to buy every festival out there that can be bought. What you’re seeing now is a race to control the content of festivals. The competition shows how much the $6 billion North American concert industry—long focused on arenas, amphitheaters, and stadiums—is tilting toward music festivals, which offer dozens of artists, specialty foods and other amenities.”
Stage Fright – What Exactly Is It, And What’s Behind It?
“Stage fright has been aptly described as ‘self-poisoning by adrenaline'” – the fight-or-flight response. “But what Cro-Magnon man needed upon finding a bear in his cave is not what a modern person needs in order to play King Lear. Without the release of abrupt action, the hyperactivation becomes, basically, a panic attack.”