“Similar to many sports, ballet involves discipline and physical demands, competitiveness, highly critical and perfectionistic attitudes of trainers, and acceptance of emotional and physical suffering.” It’s easy to see how that could inspire students to cut themselves off from negative emotions in the moment — a process that can allow fears to accumulate, and ultimately build into serious anxiety.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Our Human Evolution Has To Be Due To More Than Biology
Daniel Dennett and others argue, genetic evolution is not enough to explain the skills, power and versatility of the human mind. Over the past 10,000 years, human behaviour and our ability to manipulate the planet have changed too quickly for biological evolution to have been the driving force. In Dennett’s view, our brains turned into fully fledged modern minds thanks to cultural memes: ‘ways of behaving’ — pronouncing a word this way, dancing like so — that can be copied, remembered and passed on.
And Now… An Artist Who Doesn’t Understand How The NEA Works Argues Against The NEA… On NPR!
“Well, the basic problem with the government supporting the arts in the way that it does – through the NEA and through direct grants to producing organizations – is that it stands in the way of free market competition, which is really the best way for arts organizations to build new audiences…”
After More Than 30 Years At The Helm, Michael Kahn To Step Down From Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre
Kahn will leave having made Shakespeare a native language in the nation’s capital, and having done more to reshape and elevate D.C. theater than anyone since the late Arena Stage founder Zelda Fichandler.
Why The Shift From Owning Music To Streaming It Is Killing Music
“The music industry was built on the passions of record collectors. The album wasn’t just a physical object, but a lifestyle accessory, almost a fetish and talisman. People didn’t just listen to their records, they displayed them as quasi-holy relics. The album cover might seem irrelevant — a baby swimming after a dollar bill, a painting of a big banana, or even a blank white slate with only tiny text (The Beatles) emblazoned on it. But to the owners, these served as supercharged personal emblems. The image could change, but the message stayed the same: This is my music. This is who I am.”
The Grammys’ Fear Of Progress
“Black artists from Prince to Michael Jackson to Kanye West have been on the forefront of this sort of expansion of what pop music means. Maybe that fact has something to do with why they have mostly fared poorly in the Grammys general categories over the years even as they have served up exactly the kind of performances that make the Grammys worth watching at all. Or maybe it’s just a deeper sort of bias.”
Elon Musk: Humans And Machines Will Have To Converge
“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he also launched Tesla in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). “It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.”
It Turns Out Peter Pan’s Captain Hook Was An Afterthought
“When Jim Barrie took the original show to theatre he had to give stagehands more time to switch scenery. He created a scene that could be performed at the front of the stage. This scene featured a pirate ship and Captain Hook. The role soon expanded and the rest is history.”
Here Are All Of 2017’s Classical Music Grammy Winners
The Boston Symphony, Nashville Symphony and more…
Edmonton Theatre Cancels Production Of “Othello” After Outcry
“Listen, I love it when directors and actors make bold choices with Shakespeare, or play against him – and a lot of innovation begins in university or amateur theatres. But there’s a difference between subversive takes and regressive ones.”