Author: Matthew Westphal

Designing An Online Tool To Demystify Contemporary Dance For New Audiences

Audience engagement researcher Ben Walmsley writes about his project called Respond, “a responsive online platform … [which] attempted to break down cognitive barriers to dance by showing and explaining the rationale behind certain choreographic decisions and giving audiences demystifying insights into the rehearsal and development processes.”

Frank Rich Swears That ‘Veep’ Hasn’t Imitated, And Won’t Imitate, Real U.S. Politics Or Donald Trump

The longtime New York Times and New York magazine columnist, executive producer of HBO’s political cringe-comedy, says, “We really believe in the integrity of this alternative-reality version of Washington that we’ve created. It has its own internal laws and its own original characters. Journalists – including me – have all had to update our premises and our assumptions as a result of Trump’s victory, but [at Veep] we have our own world.”

How The Old Vic Has Reinvented Itself After The Kevin Spacey Era

“We needed to devise a way of working that didn’t rely on either a subsidy or the star power supplied by Spacey. What producing model would allow the Old Vic, a £13 million turnover break-even business, to continue generating its own work, and to stay solvent?” Old Vic executive director Kate Varah writes about how she, artistic director Matthew Warchus, and their colleagues found the way.

Now They’ve 3D-Printed A Stradivarius – And Here’s What It Sounds Like

Mind you, the instrument wasn’t spit out whole by the printer: individual parts of the instrument, carefully copied from the 1677 “Sunrise” Strad violin, were printed out and carefully assembled by hand. Here’s a video of the new copy being played, along with video of an original Strad (played by a different violinist with a different style) for comparison.

New Nonprofit That Owns Philadelphia Inquirer Has More Than Doubled Its Endowment – And Is On Track To Quadruple It

“The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, launched in January 2016 with an endowment of $20 million from philanthropist Gerry Lenfest, announced today it has raised $26.5 million in additional gifts from a variety of sources. Impressed by the response, Lenfest says he’s ponying up another $40 million, an amount that will have to be matched.”

‘Enough Is Enough’: Gustavo Dudamel Makes Strongest Statement Yet About Venezuelan Crisis

After years of strenuously avoiding any public statement about the ever more dire political situation in his homeland, the star conductor last week gave a strenuously evenhanded plea for both sides to settle their differences – whereupon both sides attacked him. Now, after a young musician was shot while protesting, Dudamel has directly called on “the President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen to the voice of the Venezuelan people. … Democracy cannot be built to fit the needs of a particular government or otherwise it would cease to be a democracy.”