Moonlight is the first gay-themed film since Brokeback Mountain to have a real shot at a Best Picture Oscar – even Carol, with Todd Haynes behind the camera and Cate Blanchett in front of it, didn’t get a Best Picture nomination. And those films are all notably reticent about sex. Yet there are other places – other film industries – that aren’t so reticent.
Author: Matthew Westphal
What The New York Phil Does When It Needs An Accordion Player
Accordion? Yes, occasionally an orchestra has to find one, as when the Philharmonic did a Kurt Weill score last week. As it happens, there’s one guy who specializes in playing accordion with symphony orchestras.
How We Learned To Write Musicals – Seven Origin Stories
Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, Kirsten Childs, Nell Benjamin, Stew, Adam Gwon, and Kevin Del Aguila explain how they found their way into this specialized craft – one you can’t go get a degree in.
Yes, The Entertainment World Hates Trump – But What Exactly Should It Do About That?
Mark Harris, responding to Meryl at the Golden Globes: “I sympathize with anyone in showbiz currently trying to figure out whether the job is to make art for Trump’s America, or about Trump’s America, or about an America that Trump fails to see or to appreciate, or about an America that is not defined by the word ‘Trump’s’ or any other possessory modifier. In the first month of the Trump years, ‘Where do we go from here?’ feels like the right question for artists to ask.”
Classical Ballet And The Aesthetics Of Discrimination
Kat Richter, responding to Pennsylvania Ballet’s firing of principal Sara Michelle Murawski because she’s too tall, reminds us that “ballet is, in fact, an ethnic dance form. As such, it embodies the social, cultural and aesthetic values of the time and place in which it developed (16th-century France)” – so height and skin color are far from the only factors in which it discriminates.
Rare Medieval Manuscripts Of Sacred Music For Women Locked Away From Scholars By Hierarchy
In the fall of 2015, historians visiting the Altomünster Abbey outside Munich found in its library “at least 500 books, … including precious illuminated manuscripts from the 16th century, chants used by the uniquely women-led Bridgettine Order and processionals bursting with colorful religious and ornamental decoration in their margins.” Not long afterwards, the Vatican decided to close the convent, which has only one nun left, and put the entire collection on lockdown, and the Munich archdiocese refuses to let researchers near it.
Merce Cunningham’s Company May Be Dead, But His Dances Live On (And On)
“Since Cunningham revivals largely depend on dancers’ understanding of his style, the disbanding of the company [at the end of 2011] seemed like a farewell to Cunningham dance theater. The End. But … a Cunningham diaspora has now emerged. Former dancers teach his technique in America, Britain, France and elsewhere. Exciting young Cunningham dancers have surfaced. Important revivals of a large number of his works have occurred in several countries.”
With The New Administration, Art Loans Between U.S. And Russian Museums Could Resume
“All Russian loans to the US were halted in 2011 amid fears that they could be impounded after a US federal judge’s ruling that Russia must transfer a collection of books seized by the Bolsheviks to the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish community that fled the Soviet Union. Russia refused and, as a result, major US museums stopped lending to Russia.” But that deadlock seems to be about to break.
Big Plans For Broadway’s Littlest House
The Helen Hayes Theater has fewer than 600 seats (and had half that before a balcony was added). The Off-Broadway company Second Stage bought the venue in 2015 and is renovating it. “In the process, the theater company, which focuses on work by living American writers, is trying to figure out how best to use interior design to signal the organization’s decidedly contemporary bent in a decidedly noncontemporary building.”
A National History Museum For The Kurds
They’ve been called the world’s largest nation without a state: roughly 30 million or more souls in the mountains where modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran meet. And of course there’s not yet any official museum to document the Kurds’ long history. Architect Daniel Libeskind and journalist Gwynne Roberts are working with the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan to develop just such an institution – an even more challenging task than you’d think. (audio)