Month: July 2018

How Popular Music Has (And Hasn’t) Responded To The Current Era Of Inequality

Scott Timberg: “During the Great Depression, which saw widespread homelessness and US unemployment reaching 25 percent, popular films showed the very rich drinking cocktails in formal dress; cheery songs like ‘Pennies From Heaven’ charted. And in the post-2008 decade of recession, instability, and income inequality, blockbuster acts spent a lot of time telling us the incredible time they were having. The real story of the past decade has been harder to hear.”

Dalouge Smith On How You Bring Back Music Education To Schools

The outgoing president of the San Diego Youth Symphony explains how he helped rebuild music ed in San Diego area schools: “We started with violins and cellos and violas and double bass. Actually we put third graders on double bass. We started that because we had asked the leaders in the community and the principals of the schools what instruments would be the right instruments to start with and the response we got was We have a tradition of string instruments in our community. We believe that there would be a strong response to string instruments. So when we first started this was 2010 we saw that kids were simply behaving better in their classes and as a result there was less disruption in the class. And that meant everybody was learning better in the class.”

How Does The Job Of Artistic Director For A Theatre Need To Change For Today’s World?

At its annual conference last month, Theatre Communications Group asked four leading figures – Howard Shalwitz, artistic director of Woolly Mammoth in D.C.; Lisa Portes, head of directing at DePaul University’s Theatre School; Jack Reuler, artistic director of Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis; and Mica Cole, repertory producer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival – to answer that question. Here are their responses.

What Are Intimacy Consultants? They Coach Actors In How (And How Not) To Kiss And Get Intimate Onstage

“Just as plays have used fight consultants for decades, both for the safety of the actors onstage and to ensure convincing portrayals, now the title of intimacy director, choreographer or consultant is appearing more often in the credits. ‘As an actor, I can’t tell you the number of times where I’ve been told by a director, ‘So, kiss there,’ without any further direction or insight on where a person’s hands go, who initiates, who stops, how long does it go?’ says Emily Sucher, [an] intimacy consultant.”

Mezzo Anne Sofie Von Otter Publicly Blames #MeToo For Husband’s Suicide

“Her husband, Benny Fredriksson, took his life after Sweden’s Aftonbladet printed anonymous accusations that he was a ‘little Hitler’ who bullied and terrorised staff during his 16 years as head of Stockholm’s Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, the city’s leading arts and culture centre. The newspaper interviewed 40 people who claimed he had turned the centre into his own personal ‘dictatorship’, forced women to rehearse naked and pressed a woman to either have an abortion or forfeit a role.”

Bill Loud, 97, Father Of The (Literal) First Family Of Reality TV

“An American Family, a PBS series created by filmmaker Craig Gilbert, chronicled the Loud family of Santa Barbara, Calif. — Bill, Pat and their five children — for seven tumultuous months. … In the course of the series, the family home almost burned down in a wildfire, the children, ranging in age from 13 to 20, tested their freedom, and Bill and Pat struggled with a marriage that unraveled to the breaking point — all in full view and judgment of the world.”

As MoMA Expands (Again), Fed-Up Staffers Consider Striking (Again)

“Legions of museum staff at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are racing to meet deadlines as the New York City institution undergoes a $450 million renovation and expansion, its second major overhaul in two decades. But due to stalled union negotiations over issues such as raises for longtime employees, healthcare costs, and job security for entry-level curators, more than 250 of them have been working without a contract since May 20th and are inching closer to going on strike for the first time since 2000, when the museum was about to close for its previous expansion project and significantly reduce its workforce with little guarantee that past employees would be hired back.”