“MoBBallet, an organization founded by Dance Magazine contributing editor Theresa Ruth Howard in 2015 to preserve and promote the legacy of black dancers in ballet, hosts its first symposium October 11–13 at Pennsylvania Ballet. Offering separate courses for intermediate to pre-professional students, dance educators and the greater Philadelphia dance community, the pilot aims to foster community and fortify the studio-to-company pipeline for black ballet students.” – Dance Magazine
San Antonio Gets Its First Contemporary Art Museum, Thanks To A Hot-Sauce Heiress
Shortly before she died in 2007, philanthropist Linda Pace had a dream in which she saw a shining red counterpart to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz which would hold her art collection and make it available to the public. A dozen years later, Ruby City has opened, with a building (yes, it’s red) designed by David Adjaye. – San Antonio Current
Should People Have The Legal Right to Change Their Age?
If chronological age doesn’t matter, as I have argued, then people should be allowed to change this ‘age’ in their IDs to match their biological rather than their chronological age. – Aeon
Are You One Of Those Who Has Strong Feelings About Semi-colons?
Punctuation – and especially semicolon use – is more art than science, in other words. – Times Literary Supplement
How Artists Are Dealing With Student Debt
In 2014, 60 percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 39 percent of all workers. The average cost of an arts education in 2010–11 was $40,000 per year after grants and scholarships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in 2014, 35 percent of recent art-school graduates said debt had a “major impact” on their educational and career decisions. – Artsy
Meet The Eton-Educated, Non-Binary British Iraqi Draq Queen
Amrou Al-Kadhi: “When I started doing drag, it felt like the ultimate rejection of everything I was taught in the Middle East. … I felt like I was lying. I was trying to live out things that I didn’t actually believe about myself. Everyone was looking to me as this voice of liberation. And I just wasn’t that … Whenever the drag came off, I would have a nervous breakdown.” – The Guardian
Who’s The Father Of Today’s Black Theater Renaissance? August Wilson? No, It’s Tyler Perry
Wesley Morris: “Maybe it’s not immediately obvious. But it makes sense. He’s the biggest black playwright in America. If you were a kid, teenager or barely an adult in the 2000s, living in a black city and attracted to the stage, it would be hard for Perry not to become someone to revere, reckon with or resist.” – The New York Times Magazine
‘I Wanted To Form An Orchestra Of People Like Me’: An Ensemble For Musicians With Mental Illness
“The [Me2/Orchestra’s] beginnings were humble — seven people showed up to the first rehearsal in Burlington, Vt., in 2011. Yet it has grown — almost entirely by word of mouth, [Ronald] Braunstein said proudly — to an extent that the Boston-based orchestra numbers some 60 people. In addition to the Boston and Burlington orchestras, affiliated ensembles also exist in Manchester, N.H., and Portland, Ore. ‘That’s what a need there is for people who live with mental illness and play instruments,’ Braunstein said.” – The Boston Globe
Welsh Arts Funder Sets Minimum Pay For Artists
“We won’t fund applications where you aren’t paying yourself or your co-workers at all, or are only paying a low/nominal fee,” the document says. – Arts Professional
What Is A Choreopoem?
Short answer: “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” The longer answer is movement set to and inspired by poetry. And it traces back to the 1970s and a writer who just had to move while she spoke her work. – The New York Times
Venice Will Begin Charging Admission For Tourists Next July
The tax will apply to tourists who arrive by coach, cruise ship, water taxi, plane or train. They will be able to pay the charge online with a credit card or from machines “installed in strategic points” around Venice, officials said. The council did not say what penalties would apply to tourists who fail to pay the charge, although in February authorities suggested they would be hit with a fine of up to €450. – The Telegraph (UK)
Bong Joon-Ho Returns Home From Hollywood And Makes His Masterpiece
“Bong’s last two films, 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja, were his first to be made in English: they weren’t exactly misfires, either critically or commercially, yet both clearly had designs on being bigger deals than they were. … A globally minded film-maker with big-dreaming genre nous, he spent the last few years making a bid for mainstream Hollywood clout, only to finally make an international phenomenon from his own doorstep.” – The Guardian
How Do You Translate The Life Of A Forgotten, Insane Swiss Novelist Into Dance Theater?
Marina Harss: “The material feels both so deeply literary and, at the same time, so utterly deflating. The subject is a solitary man” — Robert Walser — “whose writings tended to track the minutiae of his solitary life, and who died alone in the snow — this hardly sounds like something to dance about. But that is precisely what the choreographer John Heginbotham and the illustrator Maira Kalman have set out to do … [in] Herz Schmerz.” – The New Yorker
Surprise: For The First Time Since 1986, Vinyl Is About To Outsell CDs
Vinyl records earned $224.1 million (on 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019, closing in on the $247.9 million (on 18.6 million units) generated by CD sales. Vinyl revenue grew by 12.8% in the second half of 2018 and 12.9% in the first six months of 2019, while the revenue from CDs barely budged. If these trends hold, records will soon be generating more money than compact discs. – Rolling Stone
The Met Opera’s New “Porgy”: Restoring An American Masterpiece
Joseph Horowitz: “The modernist view of Gershwin the gifted dilettante is no longer heard. Concomitantly, American music historians, for whom Gershwin once barely existed, have flocked to Porgy and Rhapsody in Blue. A burgeoning interest in the interwar fate of black classical music will surely promote new understandings of Gershwin as a necessary interloper between “classical” and “popular” genres severed by 20th-century aesthetic currents.” – American Scholar
The Time I Played Chess Nude With Marcel Duchamp
Eve Babitz: “I took the smock off, letting it fall beside me, but Julian kicked it far across the slippery floor, out of the way in a corner. I sat down quickly at the chess set and wondered if we could just pose or did we actually have to play, but Marcel — whose obsession with chess made him give up not only art but girls — was waiting for me to make the first move.” – Literary Hub
They’ve Rediscovered The Naughty Bits From Europe’s Most Famous Medieval Romance
Fragments of a manuscript of Le Roman de la Rose — containing a double entendre-filled episode about a pilgrim at a shrine — were found in a centuries-old book binding in the public records office of the English city of Worcester. – Live Science
MoMA’s Expansion Is ‘Smart, Surgical, Sprawling And Slightly Soulless’: Michael Kimmelman
“For all its intelligence and skill and its obvious desire to make the place feel friendlier, the expansion seems to me not to have solved the problem of the Modern’s ambience. … You may feel like you’re entering an Apple store. Everything is crisp and coolly engineered.” – The New York Times
The Real Test Of MoMA’s Expansion Will Be Traffic Flow: Justin Davidson
“MoMA is a machine for viewing art, and the success of this latest incarnation will be gauged by how many visitors the facility can process in any given day. … The 2004 expansion created escalator bottlenecks, Pollock and Picasso choke points, and the slightly desperate atmosphere of a shopping mall on Black Friday morn. This time, the architects … calculated [everything] to smooth the passage of humanity.” – New York Magazine
B-Boy-Turned-Ballet Dancer Teaches His Moves To His Company
Diego Ramalho grew up breakdancing in a small city in Brazil and reluctantly started taking ballet lessons at age 18. Eight years later, he’s a full member of Ballet Edmonton, coaching his colleagues in break-style movement for a new work opening this month. – CBC
The Problem With Museums That Try To Tell The Story Of Classical Music
Classical music institutions have a built-in challenge in trying to arrange exhibits for the public: Their default archival documents tend to be just the kind of dusty memento the stereotype is describing. – Washington Post
Why “Porgy and Bess” and the Met Need One Another
More than its disappointing 1985 predecessor, the Met’s vigorous new staging of Gershwin’s opera manages to vindicate a controversial cultural landmark whose reputation, still unsettled, feeds on the fraught racial sensitivities of the current moment. – Joe Horowitz