“If someone doesn’t recognise the joke we’re making, then that’s a whole lot of labour lost. We aim never to trick people but rather to train them to see the world as we see it. In a world infested by ‘fake news’, the intention [and subsequent execution] is everything.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
No, Asking The Community Who Doesn’t Attend Your Theatre What You Should Do Isn’t The End Of Expertise
Of course dig deeper behind the headline and the York initiative is not quite the latest nail in the coffin for expertise that it might first appear. Rather it’s a smart move to broaden audiences and repertoire and involve the local community from a theatre that has already pioneered involving young people in every aspect of theatre production from programming through to producing and marketing with the annual excellent Takeover Festival.
How Tiny Eau Claire Wisconsin Became The Mid-West’s Hot New Town
The tipping point came in 2012: Arts advocates, the city, the state, and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (UWEC) joined forces on the $85 million Confluence Arts Center. Previous big projects proposed for downtown had failed to gain approval, but Confluence’s critical mass of partners overcame some mild opposition. When it’s completed next year, across from Phoenix Park, it’ll have two theaters, apartments, retail space, and a pedestrian plaza, along with artist and technical training facilities.
So Curiosity Is A Genetic Trait?
“There are many studies that have shown that there is a strong genetic component to curiosity,” he notes. “It is also the case that some people are more curious than others, in the same way that some people have talent for music and others don’t or some people are smarter than others … But all people are curious, with the possible exception of people who are very deeply depressed or have certain kinds of brain damage.” Humans exhibit two basic types of curiosity that show up in different parts of the brain during functional MRI scans.
How A Bell Labs Scientist Gave Us A Framework For Defining Information
“The information value of a message depends in part on the range of alternatives that were killed off in its choosing. Symbols chosen from a larger vocabulary of options carry more information than symbols chosen from a smaller vocabulary, because the choice eliminates a greater number of alternatives. This means that the amount of information transmitted is essentially a function of three things: the size of the set of possible symbols, the number of symbols sent per second, and the length of the message. The search for order, for structure and form in the wending catacombs of global communications had begun in earnest.”
A Tsunami Of Questions After The Oregon Bach Festival Fires Its Director
“Many, many questions remain. Considering how personality-driven the festival was during Helmut Rilling’s long tenure, will a significantly sized audience be willing to show up for a festival that changes direction year to year? Will the festival hold to its Bach roots, or consider them disposable? What is the “true story” behind what appears to be a divorce?”
NYT Bestseller For A Day – The Rise And Fall Of A Book Few Had Heard Of
Lani Sarem’s “Handbook for Mortals” improbably topped the NYT Bestseller list last week. Then booksellers called foul, and the book was removed from the list. When Sarem saw the tweets circulating about her book, “my first thought was to just ignore it. It was just a couple of — you know, in my mind — silly tweets.” But as the day stretched on, and as she says neither Stamper nor West reached out to her personally, she reached a different conclusion: “I’m being cyberbullied, basically.”
Why Ecological Art Has Largely Failed
“Looking for years for land art that utilizes the environment as complexly as artists have long done with their subjects through paint (even using paint as a subject), I’ve come up largely disappointed. Land artworks are typically aesthetic interventions forced onto the environment by artists with little to no deep understanding (geologic, ecologic, botanic, etc.) of the materials they are using. Instead, artists who make these works favor aesthetic, surface-level intervention, which documents well for exhibition and (hopefully) sale later, upon return to an art-world setting, be it via a gallery or a coffee table book. Where is the communion with the land’s complexity?”
We Still Have To Defend Free Speech? Here’s Why
“A 2015 Pew Research Center poll reported that 40 percent of millennials think the government should be able to suppress speech deemed offensive to minority groups, as compared to only 12 percent of those born between 1928 and 1945. Young people today voice far less faith in free speech than do their grandparents. And Europe, where racist speech is not protected, has shown that democracies can reasonably differ about this issue.”
Do Philadelphia’s Theatre Awards Need A Rethink?
Can an awards system recognize theatrical excellence and simultaneously accomplish something more? Friends responded to my post with suggestions including awards for community engagement and partnerships, physical or devised work, theater for young audiences, interdisciplinary collaboration, museum work, a rotating “surprise” category that changes every year, and even a category called “Anything that isn’t about or by dead white men.”