“There is someone less than a foot away from me, just off of my right shoulder, observing the way I’m holding my hand strangely, but perhaps gracefully? I hope my nails are clean. My arm is starting to tremble. I’m not even sure how much time has gone by. I let my arm gently, almost imperceptibly, fall, allowing my shoulder to melt with it, and stop myself mid-breath. “I am…right here,” I say to myself with my director’s voice in my head. I am ON DISPLAY .” Victoria Dombroski of Heidi Latsky Dance describes the experience of being in Latsky’s ON DISPLAY, a “human sculpture court.” (includes video) — Dance Magazine
‘We Are A Country That Has Lost Our Narrative’: What Lynn Nottage Learned In Reading, Pa. When She Was Researching ‘Sweat’
“One of the first questions we asked was, how do you describe your city? People would respond by saying: ‘Reading was … ‘ They were incredibly nostalgic for this glorious imagined past. It nearly broke my heart. I thought this is a city that cannot conceive of itself in the present or future tense. It is a microcosm of what is happening in America today. We are a country that has lost our narrative. We can’t project our future because we don’t know where we are going.” — The Guardian
Historians Have Revered This Book For 30 Years. It’s Only Now Getting Published
“Over the years, it’s been passed around, first in photocopies and later as a PDF. … It’s made its way onto required-reading lists and been cited hundreds of times.” There has even been a scholarly conference devoted to it. Julius S. Scott completed The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution in 1987, and it’s only coming out in print this month. Reporter Tom Bartlett investigates why.
English National Opera To Project Ads Onto Its Stage’s Safety Curtain
“The company, based in the Coliseum in London, has submitted a proposal to Westminster City Council that would see its safety curtain repainted to incorporate a ‘plain white painted area’ … [which] would be ‘used as a projection surface pre-show and at the interval to project films showing the ENO forthcoming opera seasons’. It is not clear whether this could be extended to external advertisers in time.”
Do Swag Gifts To Donors Actually Help Raise More Money?
Some nonprofits insist that donors expect these “premiums”; some donors insist they want as much money and staff time as possible to be spent on the nonprofit’s actual mission. Jonathan Meer, an economist who studies altruism and philanthropy, looked at existing research and did an experiment of his own to find out of giving swag to donors is worth it. The answer? Well, …
Pennsylvania Backs Off Banning Book Donations For Prisoners
This past summer, the state Dept. of Corrections introduced a ban on giving books to individual inmates; the rule was part of a suite of measures taken to sten the flow of illegal drugs into prisons. After pushback from prisoners’ rights and book donation groups, the policy has been relaxed, though books will still have to be inspected at a separate location before being given to inmates.
London Dance Hub The Place Names New Artistic Director
“[Eddie] Nixon is a former associate director and more recently director of theatre and artist development at the Place. … He takes over from Richard Alston, who leaves the role this month after 24 years at the helm of the contemporary dance venue.” (Alston’s eponymous dance company, which has been headquartered at The Place, will be shut down.)
Interactive Theatre? Fine, As Long As I Don’t Need To Participate
“Let me just say that although I don’t mind watching other theatergoers getting into the act — as a longtime observer of how audiences behave, the psychology of these events intrigues me — I hate being compelled to be the show. I’m not shy or anti-social. I simply don’t want to be made to feel that I must cross the line, onto the actors’ playing field, or be a spoilsport if I don’t. “
Publishers Say TSA Detained And Harassed Them Because Agent Didn’t Like One Of Their Books
An art book publisher and his companion were about to fly out of LaGuardia after a fair when, following a routine search of the books they were traveling with, they were held in a room and questioned about a book whose content one of the TSA officers disliked, and that the officers damaged the book and berated them about it. (A TSA spokeswoman denied that the incident could have taken place.)
Art Basel Ends Its Move Into Regional Art Fairs
“In 2016, Art Basel’s parent company, the MCH Group, … announced it would debut Art SG, a new fair in Singapore; took a majority stake in the India Art Fair and a minority stake in Art Düsseldorf; and added Masterpiece London to its portfolio last December. But the experiment didn’t last long. According to a statement on Friday, MCH Group is undertaking a ‘profound transformation’ by dramatically downshifting its ambitions ‘for the necessary stabilization of the company.'”
As Crowds Become Unmanageable, Vatican Considers Limits On Visitor Numbers
“Tour guides claimed that at least 10 visitors fainted each day as slow-moving crowds filed through the long and narrow corridor that leads to the most popular attraction, the Sistine Chapel, while others have suffered injuries and panic attacks. … [There are even] fears among tour guides that overcrowding could provoke a stampede unless security policy is changed.”
Are The Days Of Stadium Rock Concerts Over?
After a decade of pop acts dominating the hallowed ground – the only artists to have headlined this year being Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran – is it too late? Has the era of stadium rock been unplugged and relegated to smaller venues?
Virtual Art – Seeing The World As Artists Imagine It Could Be
While virtual art has sometimes elicited eye rolling reactions from art critics and curators, projects like Nancy Baker Cahill’s 4th Wall show that the medium can apply the language of fine art to new media with subversive ends. The artist highlights that if VR/AR technology continues to enable “hyper-violent, militaristic, or pornographic [images], we allow it to be dominated by themes that don’t contribute thoughtfully to culture,”
The Singer And The Clumsy Critic, A Love Story
He tried to fix things by belatedly praising Mr. Fabiano’s performance, but the damage was done. “I said, ‘I’ll see you later,’ and I walked away,” Mr. Fabiano said. That might have been that, had a deus ex machina not intervened in the form of Ann Ziff, the chairwoman of the Met board. She invited them both to her table at dinner.
Studio Turns To AI To Analyze Movie Trailers To Figure Out What Audiences Will Like
Researchers from the company published a paper last month explaining how they’re analyzing the content of movie trailers using machine learning. Machine vision systems examine trailer footage frame by frame, labeling objects and events, and then compare this to data generated for other trailers. The idea is that movies with similar sets of labels will attract similar sets of people.
Many Literary Magazines Are Born To Die
There are so many factors that kill lit mags. “Radical passion often meets practical reality. Sometimes the fire behind great literary magazines is the exact thing that causes them to burn out. Other magazines lose institutional funding, fold because of scandal, or vanish along with their masthead.”
Wait, Why Isn’t Most Of The ‘A Star Is Born’ Music Eligible For The Grammys?
It’s the number one soundtrack everywhere, but filmmakers wouldn’t release the soundtrack before the movie – not even the five days before that would have made it eligible for the Grammys this year. Why not? “The soundtrack really is the story of the film. There are multiple tracks in there that are soundbites from the film and so it was really important that people experience them simultaneously.”
The Locked-Up Russian Opera Director, Working From House Arrest 1400 Miles Away
In Zurich, Kirill Serebrennikov directs Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, but not with ease. “Through a relay process that can seem closer to international espionage than traditional theater-making — involving files swapped on USB sticks, a lawyer acting as a courier, and extraordinary patience — the Zurich Opera has found a way for the director to retain artistic control from captivity, 1,400 miles away.”
How Did Los Angeles’ Arts Institutions Survive The Great Recession?
There’s no one way to answer that question. “Skeletons of skyscrapers have risen in city’s core, while unemployment rates have fallen. Occupy is gone from downtown, but homeless encampments have taken their place. When historians look back at Los Angeles cultural landscape in the years after the Great Recession — reflecting on the lives of cultural figures like Argote and the well-being of our city’s arts institutions — they’ll find a strange mix of obstacles and successes.”
People Who Own Apartments Across From The Tate Modern’s Expansion Are Taking The Museum To Court
They’d like to “stop ‘hundreds of thousands of visitors’ looking into their homes from the art gallery’s viewing platform.” The Tate, of course, responds that they should draw their blinds.
Exiled Chinese Writer Ma Jian Says That Those In Supposedly Free Countries Must Remain ‘Eternally Vigilant’
The author titled his new book after Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s slogan, almost daring him to have to censor his own key words. “The reality, Ma acknowledges, is that censorship is now so all-encompassing that the novel will very probably not be allowed to exist in Chinese, even in Hong Kong, which has historically provided a toehold for work by dissident authors banned on the mainland.”
How ‘Harry Potter And The Cursed Child’ Found Its Musical Backbone
The two-part show’s movement director was in rehearsals with the cast, using some Imogen Heap music as inspiration. Then he decided that he wanted more. “‘The first I heard about it was pushing my baby at the time in a very muddy field with a pram,’ Heap recalled. She got a call from Hoggett who said he was working on a project for which they had been temping her music in workshops; he wanted to know if he could keep using it.”
Jin Yong, Writer Of Chinese Martial Arts Epics, Has Died At 94
The Hong Kong-based author was so famous, as generations of Chinese read his novels, that there is a branch of academic study named for him: “Jin Yong, the pen name of Louis Cha, was one of the most widely read 20th-century writers in the Chinese language. The panoramic breadth and depth of the fictional universes he created have been compared to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and have been studied as a topic known as ‘Jinology.'”
The Way ‘House Of Cards’ Killed Off Kevin Spacey’s Character Was Typical Of The Show’s Twisty, Turny Ways
Spoiler alert! “When the actor Kevin Spacey, who played Frank, was accused of sexual assault in October 2017, production had already begun on Season 6. Production halted, restarting in January 2018 for a revised, eight-episode season that Netflix announced would also be its final.” Unlike another show that had to handle a disgraced fallen star – The Conners – Netflix’s writing team came up with a very normal, for House of Cards, way of dealing with the issue of how Spacey’s character died.
Weekend Extra: Kenny Werner’s New Solo Piano Album
“The listener who is fully who open to Werner’s playing is likely to also feel joy and delicious gratitude.”