It’s actually the other way around: “If music makes you see colors and shapes, you might be more likely to pick up a guitar or sit at a piano in the first place … Ssynesthetes see the similar in the dissimilar (music and color; pain and color; syllables and shapes), and people who excel at making metaphors are generally more creative.
Month: July 2016
Eight Nearly Forgotten Female Composers Who Were Hits In Their Own Day
Not many of us remember Barbara Strozzi and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre; more of us know of Clara Schumann and Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn). Here’s an opportunity to get to know all four of them, as well as four more, a bit better.
Why Mike Daisey Implicates Democrats In His New Monologue About Trump
“People in the theater are the left. I’m always interested in skewering, examining and implicating the people in the room because they are the ones that showed up for the performance. Once you implicate them, then they actually start thinking about what their position is. I’m doing the monologue and if I’m telling you, ‘You agree with me, don’t you?’ and you say ‘I do,’ and I say ‘I do too, I feel so good about that,’ that’s not useful.”
To Prepare For This Play About Gun Violence, The Cast Went To A Gun Range And Learned To Shoot
“It was important we expose them to other points of view, but also the experience of shooting. So we took everyone to a gun range in South Philly,” said Ginger Dayle, author of the play Roseburg. “We had reserved the range in advance, but the day we showed up happened to be the day after the Orlando shootings. It made us realize just how important it is to talk about this issue.”
For The First Time, Two Major American Museums To Stage A Joint, Simultaneous Retrospective
“The 60-year career of Jasper Johns … will be the subject of an unprecedented simultaneous exhibition in the fall of 2020, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City jointly present a full retrospective covering every aspect of the 86-year-old artist’s career.”
Steinway’s Super-Skilled Craftspeople, At Work At The Mothership In Queens
“With Steinway’s blessing, [photographer Christopher] Payne spent time in virtually every corner of the large factory, from the foundry where the iron is poured to the mill where the lumber is cut. And though he came to possess a strong technical understanding of how these elements come together to form precision musical instruments, he said, the transformation never ceased to strike him as an act of magic.”
Bolshoi Ballet’s New Bosses Want More Dance, Less Drama – And Fewer Tours Abroad
Says the ballet’s new artistic director, Makhar Vaziev, “We think we are not just any dance company but a state institution that represents Russia.” Adds Bolshoi general director Vladimir Urin, “We often refuse offers to go and dance abroad. We want to dance in Russia, that is our objective, that is what the Russian state pays us to do.”
How To Keep Your Immersive Theater Piece From Feeling Like A Glorified Theme Party
“[Director/designer Michael Counts] prefers to throw his audience into the action cold, toying with their minds, blurring the line between the actual and the merely apparent. ‘Reality doesn’t give you a lot of information,’ he said. ‘Often you sit in a place of wonder and mystery, and you’re trying to figure it out. And that actually enhances your agency.’ In an escape room, it also enhances your fear factor, which is fine by him. He wants people to feel like the danger is real.”
Veteran Broadway Actor John McMartin Dead At 86
“He was a favorite of some of the most famous creators in modern theatre history, including Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince and Bob Fosse. Mr. McMartin’s most famous stage role was that of Benjamin Stone, the jaded, regretful titan of business in Stephen Sondheim’s multi-layered masterpiece of show-business melancholy, Follies. … A close second was the original Sweet Charity, in which he plays the meek Oscar Lindquist, with whom Gwen Verdon’s title character almost ends happily ever after. He recreated the role in the film version opposite Shirley MacLaine.”
Don Friedman, 81, Jazz Pianist Equally At Home In Modern Mainstream And Avant-Garde
“Mr. Friedman had a crisp, fluid technique and an adventurous approach to harmony, which made him a desirable sideman over a career that lasted more than 60 years. He worked for decades with the trumpeter Clark Terry, a popular emblem of swinging ebullience, and also commingled with pioneers of free jazz like the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman.”