“Caption Awareness Week sees shows such as Mamma Mia and Les Miserables make use of live captions which give hearing impaired audiences greater enjoyment of the arts, with text displayed live throughout the performances. … There are calls for more venues to provide captions for around 11 million hearing impaired people in the UK, and a series of subtitled and captioned events is being held to promote greater accessibility.”
400 Years Of #MeToo: A Verbatim Play About The Renaissance’s Greatest Female Painter Could Easily Be Depicting 2018
Artemisia’s Intent, a one-woman show created by a group calling itself The Anthropologists, tells the story of Artemisia Gentileschi’s rape, and her prosecution of her rapist, “in her own words, which are eerily akin to those of modern women going through similar struggles. … The company, a New York City-based theatre troupe that aims to inspire social action with their work, uses a collaborative and research-based approach, focusing on creating theatre directly from source materials.”
Could This Be The Next Big Art Market Scandal?
“Third-party guarantees at auction — the art market’s hybrid of a risk hedge and a speculative gamble — are on track to hit an all-time high of around $2.5bn in 2018. … Such deals are now the norm for high-value Impressionist, Modern and contemporary works. But experts warn that third-party guarantees, if misused, may precipitate a crisis.”
An Argument Against The Concept Of Intellectual Property
The ubiquitous use of ‘intellectual property’ began in the digital era of production, reproduction and distribution of cultural and technical artifacts. As a new political economy appeared, so did a new commercial and legal rhetoric. ‘Intellectual property’, a central term in that new discourse, is a culturally damaging and easily weaponised notion. Its use should be resisted.
Research: Evidence That The Internet Isn’t Necessarily Polarizing Us
If the most polarized population uses the Internet and social media the least, to suddenly point a finger at technology says more about our anxieties about the rate of technological change than about what has actually happened to us. The fact is that this twenty-two-year-old dynamic of polarization can’t easily be associated with the Internet.
The “Irrelevant” Made Blindingly Relevant
Respect for children means respect for the adults that they will one day become; it means helping them to the knowledge, skills, and social graces that they will need if they are to be respected in that wider world where they will be on their own and no longer protected. For the teacher, respect for children means giving them whatever one has by way of knowledge, teaching them to distinguish real knowledge from mere opinion, and introducing them to the subjects that make the mind adaptable to the unforeseen. To dismiss Latin and Greek, for example, because they are not “relevant” is to imagine that one learns another language in order, as Matthew Arnold put it, “to fight the battles of life with the waiters in foreign hotels.”
How Will Students Know About Shakespeare If They Never Go To A Play?
If Shakespeare is the only named author on the national curriculum, how is it that 31% of those surveyed failed to recognise the playwright’s name? That only 53% had been on a school trip to a theatre is equally depressing, but the two stats might be related…After all, why should they know of him as a playwright if they have never experienced his plays as ‘play’?
Tales From Andy Warhol’s Factories: An Oral History (From Those Who Survived)
Fran Lebowitz: “When you walked in, there was a metal door. After that door opened, there was another metal door. On it, handwritten on a piece of paper torn from a legal pad, was a note that read, ‘Knock loudly and announce yourself.’ I knocked, and someone said, ‘Who’s there?’ I said, ‘Valerie Solanas.’ And Andy opened the door.”
The Show Must Go On? Really? Always?
Lyn Gardner: “Nobody thinks accountants should always put accountancy before everything else, so why is the ‘show must go on’ mentality, whatever the cost, so pervasive in theatre? In part, it is because jobs are hard to come by, and nobody wants to get a reputation for unreliability, but most of all I suspect it is because holding it together whatever the stress you are operating under is seen as a badge of honour, part of being a trouper. No wonder so many deal with the stress by self-medicating with alcohol.”
Sneaking Banned Iranian Writing Around Iran’s Censors
“[Azadeh] Parsapour is the founder of the London-based Nogaam Publishing, a press launched in 2012 to digitally produce Farsi writings that are censored in Iran. Nogaam makes them available free of charge under a Creative Commons license. Iranian readers can access more than 40 titles so far produced by Nogaam on topics controlled in Tehran including immigration, censorship, LGBT issues, underground music, women, relationships, war, and extremism.”
Why We’re Still Talking About Andy Warhol
Warhol didn’t make a mark on American culture. He became the instrument with which American culture designated itself. He was sincere. He could get away with practically anything because practically nobody believed in his sincerity: people haplessly projected cynicism onto his forthright will to surprise and beguile. The secret to his majesty is that he was a square citizen, untroubled by ambivalence and having no use for irony.
Ossie Davis And Ruby Dee — 60 Years Together Onstage, Onscreen, And At The Barricades
A reporter goes on a treasure hunt in the great African-American acting couple’s archives, newly acquired by the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
The Crowd-Sourced Novel That Became A Publishing Phenomenon
By the time Anna Todd wrote Chapter 90—of an eventual 295 chapters—her novel-in-progress had been read more than 1 million times. Multiple literary agents reached out to her, but she dismissed them as “crazy people,” figuring no legitimate professional would seek out One Direction fan fiction. Readers composed sequels starring After’s characters, uploaded video homages to the book, and—finally convincing Todd that she might have something big on her hands—chatted as Tessa and Harry on Twitter role-playing accounts.
The Belly Dancer As Philosopher
“Westerners often imagine the [“Oriental”] dancer as the femme fatale. But the dancer is not a femme fatale. She is a mother.” In an interview that cites a Lacanian psychoanalyst and an anthropologist, the dancer known as Malak, born and raised in Spain and now an established instructor in Cairo, talks about the power of belly dance and the relations (of several sorts) between dancer and viewer.
This Pair Roams The Globe, Restaging Revivals Of ‘A Chorus Line’
“[Bob] Avian, credited as the musical’s co-choreographer [with the late Michael Bennett], and [Baayork] Lee, the original Connie Wong, travel the world to stage virtually every major production of A Chorus Line, passing on the steps to new casts and identifying dancers who might be able to do the same in the future.”
Milwaukee Symphony’s Next Music Director Is Ken-David Masur
The 41-year-old maestro — and yes, he is Kurt Masur’s son — is currently the Boston Symphony’s associate conductor and principal guest conductor of the Munich Philharmonic. He’ll take over full-time for the 2019-2020 season, and the following September, he’ll help open the Milwaukee Symphony’s new concert hall.
YouTube Videos Are Getting Longer Because…
Not so long ago, YouTube videos resembled long-form Vines more than anything approaching a 22-minute sitcom. But as more people watch video via mobile, the lines between highly produced television show and a rough YouTube vlog have blurred. These days smartphone users spend a whopping 54 percent of their video-viewing time on videos over 20 minutes long—that’s up from just 29 percent in the beginning of 2016.
Stan Lee, Superhero Comics Pioneer, 95
Lee, who began in the business in 1939 and created or co-created Black Panther, Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Mighty Thor, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil and Ant-Man, among countless other characters, died early Monday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, a family representative told The Hollywood Reporter.
Lord Harry Gets Mixed Results (& hurls verbal missiles) at Sotheby’s Impressionist/Modern Sale
Auctioneer Harry Dalmeny (new to me) at Sotheby’s Impressionist/Modern sale tonight had a strange way of trying to entice bidders by pelting them with barbed wisecracks
The Tory Government Disappoints Writers And Activists About Libraries – Again
Library activists started a petition to get library funding “ringfenced” or safeguarded – but the government responded that local control is everything.