“With more crossover than ever, the line between the two once-distinct career paths feels increasingly blurred. Broadway shows now feature every style from hip hop to ballet to the work of contemporary choreographers like Sonya Tayeh and Camille A. Brown. In Los Angeles, still considered the hub of the commercial world, concert dancers seem in higher demand. … But why is this happening now, and what does it mean for the dance world as a whole?” – Dance Magazine
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Challenge Of Fundraising For Opera In The Time Of COVID
As one development exec for a major company puts it, “During a crisis, it’s not really the time to go out and ask for those five-year campaign pledges. It’s the time to say, ‘how are you’ and ‘how can we as an arts organization be of support during this time?’ ‘Is there anything you need from us?’ ‘What are your ideas and thoughts?’ And among the people we’re close to, that we’re asking those questions of, those who are able to do something are stepping up, in some ways unasked, to support us in meaningful ways.'” Observes another, “People who love opera really love it. You can raise a lot of money from people who love opera because it’s a secular religion.” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Movie Production Is A Global Affair, And Restarting It As The Pandemic Rages On Is A Tricky Matter
“A game of ‘international chess’ is how Maxime Cottray describes the current state of the global production business. ‘Right now, everyone’s moving their pieces around the board, trying to find a place to shoot — Australia, Iceland, wherever,’ says Cottray, a production executive with genre film specialists XYZ Films. ‘And you have to be ready, if COVID strikes, to be able to move fast to find somewhere else.'” – The Hollywood Reporter
Meet The ‘Dean Of African-American Composers’, Adolphus Hailstork
“I survived the gun-to-the-head modernism, back when I was a student — you know if you weren’t crunching elbows on the keys and counting up to 12 all the time, you weren’t being much of a composer. I decided I didn’t want to go that way. I came up as [an Episcopalian cathedral] singer and singers don’t often sing in 12-tone technique and things like that. I’ve used it, but it wasn’t a natural fit and so I’ve spent most of my career trying to be honest with myself. I call it ‘authenticism’ — that’s my ‘ism.'” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Nine Black Artists And Cultural Leaders On Seeing And Being Seen
“Whether it’s the artist Tschabalala Self discussing the fraught experience of seeing her paintings be sold, like her ancestors, at auction or the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson searching for his characters’ interiority, their perspectives distill what it means (and what it has meant) to be black in America.” – T — The New York Times Style Magazine
Why Did One Of Chicago’s Best For-Profit Theaters Have To Close?
When things shut down in March, Mercury Theater proprietor L. Walter Stearns — one of the few commercial theater producers in the city to own the real estate they operate on — thought he’d be out of business for a month or so. Now he says he can’t see any near-term end to the danger COVID poses to performers, staff and patrons — so the only way he can avoid foreclosure on the mortgage is to shutter the company and sell the buildings. – Chicago Tribune
Black-Owned Bookstores Are Suddenly Getting More Business Than They Ever Planned For
“As Americans grapple with the country’s history of racism, many of them have turned to books, propelling titles like How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo to the best-seller lists. … All that demand, however, is becoming a challenge for some Black-owned bookstores around the United States, as they attempt to manage the deluge of orders, a handful of titles that are out of stock, and occasionally, customers angered by the delays.” – The New York Times
Facebook Bans All Trade In Historical Artifacts After Rampant Selling Of Looted Antiquities Discovered
After an investigation by the BBC and a Syrian-American archaeologist found a network of groups trading in ancient objects stolen from Middle Eastern war zones — including loot-to-order offers to dig up and steal mosaics that were still in the ground — the social media colossus says it will block all sale and trading of antiquities on its flagship site and Instagram. – BBC
Met Museum Sets Reopening Date
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art plans to open its doors on Aug. 29, after more than five months of pandemic shutdown … If everything goes smoothly with New York’s phased reopening, museums would be allowed to open on July 20 — in the fourth and final phase of the plan. The Met has set its date for about a month after that, with some staff members returning to work a few weeks earlier to prepare.” – The New York Times
As America’s Orchestras Remain Closed, In Other Countries They’re Getting Back To Work
From Taiwan to Germany to Spain to Quebec, lockdowns are lifting and orchestras are figuring out ways to make music again. David Patrick Stearns looks into what they’re trying, from Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Beethoven symphony cycle with the (carefully spaced) Orchestre Métropolitain in a largely empty Montreal hall to Prague’s Collegium 1704 performing Baroque music with masks on (even the woodwinds and singers) to an opera in Salzburg where the characters all hate each other so much that they stay socially distanced anyway. – The Philadelphia Inquirer