Says a former theatre student of Baldwin Wallace University’s Victoria Bussert, “Theatres have shut down everywhere, and this woman is just like, ‘Fuck that! We’re doing a play, we’re doing theatre. Give me hoops—I will jump through them, but I will make it work.'” – American Theatre
Update: What Americans For The Arts Is Doing During COVID
The urgency of this vision has never been more apparent than in 2020—amid a global pandemic, heightened focus on social justice and racial equity, a huge economic downturn, and a contentious presidential election. These issues have impacted every community across the country and devastated artists, nonprofit and for-profit creative businesses, educational systems, healthcare, and trust in government. And because of long-term systemic inequities, these challenges have more severely affected people and communities of color. – Americans for the Arts
Booker Prize 2020 Goes To Douglas Stuart’s ‘Shuggie Bain’
The Scottish-American writer’s debut novel follows the title character, an impoverished boy in 1980s Glasgow, “as he attempts to care for his alcoholic mother, Agnes, whose descent into alcoholism coincides with her youngest son’s growing awareness of his sexuality. The novel is dedicated to Stuart’s mother, who died of alcoholism when he was 16.” – The Guardian
How To Sing Opera In Mandarin Chinese
Katherine Chu and Juliet Petrus, both alumnae of San Francisco Opera’s Merola/Adler young artists’ program, have written “the first book to introduce Mandarin as a language for singing, with a detailed explanation for the creation of sounds and a system for learning them. … Singing in Mandarin combines a brief study of linguistics, notes about the history of China and Taiwan, the development and significance of Pinyin …, a wealth of information about Mandarin pronunciation, and scores with multilingual text of Chinese [art] songs.” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Andrew White, Versatile Musician And Jazz Scholar, Dead At 78
“Mr. White, who played the oboe, saxophone, bass and other instruments, performed and recorded for more than five decades” in classical and rock as well as jazz. … “He self-produced more than 40 albums of his music, encompassing contemporary jazz, classical oboe, funk, and rhythm and blues. He self-published [an] autobiography … as well as treatises on music, educational manuals and his original compositions and transcriptions.” – The Washington Post
Why Our Brains Are Built To Forget
“We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains.” – Paris Review
How The Personal Productivity Revolution Backfired
The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. – The New Yorker
Donald Byrd On Making A Career As A Choreographer
“I think that caused me to be really clear for myself about why I was doing what I was doing. I could not take into consideration how people would respond. That included funders and audiences. Part of the risk, then, is that maybe nobody will show up. But when I tried to make things that I thought would please people, I thought those pieces were disasters.” – Dance Magazine
An Oral History Of Alex Trebek
“We talked to nearly 30 [Jeopardy!] contestants [from] over the past four decades — ranging from a player in the first episode to one whose winning moment went viral just earlier this month — about how Trebek became America’s most beloved game-show host.” – The Washington Post
Has Substack Created A New A New Medium For News?
In three years, Substack’s newsletters—covering almost every conceivable topic, from Australian Aboriginal rights to bread recipes to local Tennessee politics—have drawn more than two hundred fifty thousand paid subscribers. The top newsletter authors can earn six figures, an unheard-of amount for freelance journalists. – Columbia Journalism Review
UK Universities Want Probe Into Inflated E-Textbook Prices
Johanna Anderson said the situation had become so financially serious for university libraries that it was time for MPs and competition authorities to hold publishers to account. She cited the example of an economics book that costs £44 for a print copy but is £423 for a single e-book user and £500 for three users. An employment law book costs £50 for a hard copy, but is £1,600 for three users of the digital version. – BBC
French Authors Say They’ll Pay COVID Fines For Paris Book Shops That Stay Open
At the beginning of the lockdown more than two weeks ago, the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, pleaded – unsuccessfully – for bookshops to be allowed to remain open and asked the public not to use Amazon. The call has been echoed by the former president François Hollande. – The Guardian
Why The Arts Are Important In Times Of Crises
“Some people were willing to forego their meagre ration of food and forget their fatigue to attend the artistic performances in the concentration camp. For me this is a potent reminder to challenge crude approaches to ranking basic human needs and the components of a decent human life.” – Aeon
Political Theater Moves Into Nonfiction — Is It Drama Or Seminar?
Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me has become “the grandmother of [a] genre” that includes, just this fall, Kristina Wong for Public Office (about Wong’s run for a local commission in Los Angeles), Lessons in Survival (actors repeating, complete with pauses and tics, observations of prominent Black Americans about society), Denis O’Hare’s What the Hell Is a Republic, Anyway? (using the history of the Roman Republic to examine the American one), and Melissa Dunphy’s The Gonzales Cantata (an oratorio setting the 2007 testimony of George W. Bush’s Attorney General before the Senate Judiciary Committee). Jesse Green looks at these pieces and considers “what it means for performers to take public policy as their script at a time when policymakers seem to be taking public performance as theirs.” – The New York Times
Bruno Barbey, Famed War Photographer For Magnum, Dead At 79
He captured some of the most memorable journalistic images of key events of the late 20th century: the 1968 riots in Paris; the Troubles in Northern Ireland; the Biafran war in Nigeria; the Solidarity demonstrations in Poland; the first Gulf War and the burning of the Kuwait oil fields by retreating Iraqi troops. – The New York Times
The Art Of The Trump Goodbye
Is Trump like King Lear, raging naked on the heath and desperately hanging on to the increasingly diminished trappings of power even as they are stripped from him? Or is he more like Bartleby the Scrivener, the inscrutable model of passive resistance who one day declines to do any more work or indeed leave the building, declaring: “I would prefer not to?” – The New York Times
Assessing The Art World’s Performance During Trump
The arts exist as a smaller bubble within the larger bubble of liberal media culture. And doubling down on affirming the sense of enlightened cultural superiority has larger potential negative consequences. – Artnet
International Enrollment At US Universities Down 43 Percent
The survey provides a first look at how hard international enrollments have been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey found that one in five international students are studying online from outside the U.S. Ninety percent of responding institutions reported student deferrals, collectively reporting that nearly 40,000 international students have deferred their studies to a future term. – InsideHigherEd
A Theatre Student Researches How Theatre Has Coped With Lockdown. Here’s What She Found
It became evident to me that companies that had a strong relationship with their audience base before the pandemic had seen continued support. Theatres like Cape Fear Regional Theatre, which specializes in “edutainment” (a combination of performance and education), received an outpouring of verbal support from parents who were overjoyed that their child could go to a sanitized and physically distanced afterschool environment and have a sense of normalcy. – HowlRound
How Our World Has Changed In The Age Of Instant Information
The most radical change that instant information has made is the levelling of content. There is no longer a distinction between things that everyone knows, or could readily know, and things that only experts know. – The New Yorker
Fashion Is Fashion. Art Is Art. But…
“I don’t think you necessarily have to own it to appreciate couture. It’s like art. I don’t really like when people talk about fashion as art. Fashion is fashion. Art is art. But yes, I don’t think that you have to own art in order to appreciate art. You can go to a museum and you can appreciate paintings and whatever you like. So why not for couture? – Washington Post
Money Pit: The Case Of The Buried Anglo-Saxon Treasure And The Men It Sent To Prison
In June of 2015, a pair of hobbyists carrying metal detectors came upon a hoard of extremely rare gold coins and jewelry, in astonishingly good condition, that came from the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia and had almost certainly been buried by the marauding Vikings who plundered it. Great Britain has fair but strict laws governing the discovery of ancient treasure — laws that these gentlemen had skirted when they stumbled on the hoard and flouted after they found it. As Rebecca Mead reports, the men came to a predictably bad end, but much of the treasure is still missing. – The New Yorker