“In a meeting on Tuesday evening at the academy’s Beverly Hills headquarters, the group’s 54-member board of governors, including such Hollywood luminaries as Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg, elected [cinematographer John] Bailey to succeed outgoing President Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who served four consecutive yearlong terms and steered the organization through one of the most transformative and sometimes turbulent periods in its long history.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Did They Just Discover The House Of Jesus’s Disciples? (Not Yet)
The headlines got ahead of the actual news in this case, but here’s what the archaeologists did find: the site of an ancient city on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee that they believe was Bethsaida, named in the Gospel of John as the hometown of the apostles Peter, Andrew, and Philip.
Even Sylvia Plath Is Involved In The American Health Care Debate
Plath’s whole family figured she’d return to the U.S. after her marriage to Ted Hughes fell apart. She didn’t. Her reasons were several: not disrupting her children’s lives, getting child support out of Hughes, the work she was getting in London. Above them all: the experiences (and expense) she had had with the American medical system versus Britain’s National Health Service.
The Opera Company That’s Remaking Itself – And Making Itself Cool – By Working The Data
“‘This isn’t some magic soup!’ says David Devan of the data-driven, meticulously engineered transformation of Opera Philadelphia. The once sleepy, old-school company has become one of the most progressive forces on the opera scene. Having spent more than $600,000 on market research over the past five years, the company is now poised to launch the most ambitious component of its master plan: ‘O17’ will be the first in a series of annual festivals designed to reinvent the urban opera experience. Spanning twelve days, from September 14 to 25, the festival will feature seven ‘operatic happenings’ at six venues across the city.
Kevin Puts Talks About His Brand-New Opera, ‘Elizabeth Cree’
“Elizabeth is a fascinating character, for one thing. She starts with nothing but a horrid upbringing and finds herself singing alongside the most famous music hall performer of the day. I loved the way the story moves around chronologically as well – not something often done in opera – and a particular challenge, especially since I could tell the pace of the piece needed to be very quick. Not to mention the quirky inclusion of historical characters like Karl Marx!”
Another Public Sculpture Criticized For Mucking With Native American Culture (And This One’s In A Rather Odd Spot)
This past spring, Sam Durant’s Scaffold at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis drew enough criticism that the piece was disassembled entirely. (At least they held off on burning it.) This month, the dispute is over Del Geist’s Bowfort Towers, a piece, meant to pay tribute to Blackfoot culture, that the city of Calgary has sited at an interchange on the Trans-Canada Highway.
This Is The *Real* Underground Art Scene In D.C.
An old Dupont Circle trolley station, unused for decades, has been turned into a subterranean art space called Dupont Underground that draws more than 3,000 visitors a month (so far).
Priceless Ancient Texts Found In Palimpsests At World’s Oldest Continuously Operating Library
Seventy-four parchments that had been scraped over and re-used by the monks of St. Catherine’s at Mt. Sinai during the Middle Ages are now being re-examined using cutting-edge spectrography. They’ve uncovered previously unknown Greek poems and treatises (including a pharmacological recipe by Hippocrates), some of the oldest Christian texts in Arabic, and writing in some ancient languages that had been thought unrecoverable.
An Urban Dance Form That Uses The Body As Both Percussion Instrument And Movement Medium
Gia Kourlas writes about step – ” a percussive-movement tradition that uses the entire body as well as the voice and is popular in African-American fraternities and sororities” – and a new documentary about The Lethal Ladies, the girls’ step team at a Baltimore high school.
Maybe Ballet Really Is Becoming More Diverse
In an article with the hopeful headline “The Future of Ballet Is Inclusive and Queer,” Trina Mannino surveys the strides (ahem) that are being made, both at mainstream companies and in new troupes.