Author: Matthew Westphal

Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.20.16

She thought
‘Could you tell these were by women choreographers?’ asked my neighbour during an interval of English National Ballet’s She Said. Good question. How would you know? Could you tell that the opera I saw … read more
>AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2016-04-20

Embodying The Erased Father
Nora Chipaumire premieres a new work,  portrait of myself as my father, at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-04-20

My reemergence
My concert, last Thursday. My reemergence as a composer. So great a success, more than I ever could have dreamed. So much so that after all the work, all the emotion about … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-04-20

Bill Holman And The SRJO
With his 89th birthday a month away, the master composer, arranger and bandleader Bill Holman is working as much as he cares to, which seems to be a lot. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-04-20

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A Decade Of Dances Gone Viral

“Thanks to social media, short videos of these dances – sometimes incidentally – spread quickly and inspire a rash of copycats. At once silly and profound, these dance phenomena demonstrate the speed at which something can unexpectedly go from being an inside joke among friends (often teen-agers in cities) to a universal dog whistle for joy.” (video)

Witches Are Back In Popular Culture – And This Could Be Why

The Crucible on Broadway, the film The Witch, the TV series Salem and The Devil You Know — “Just as Arthur Miller pulled McCarthyism from Early Modern American witch obsessions, the applications of witchcraft narratives to the current day are manifold. … So what’s the most globally pervasive contemporary witch hunt you can think of? What forms of radicalism has it helped catalyze?” (The questions are not just rhetorical.)

Are Humans Really Smarter Than Chimps? Not On Everything, And That Drives Some Humans Bananas

Frans de Waal: “We have trouble looking at animal intelligence by itself, always asking, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?’ Since there is only one answer that satisfies us, people watching [the chimp] Ayumu’s videotaped performance on the internet couldn’t believe it, saying it must be a hoax. … [Some] American scientists felt they had to go into special training to beat the chimp.” (They failed.)

Gauguin’s ‘Readymade’ Brooch Rediscovered

“An extraordinary brooch made by Paul Gauguin for his wife Mette has gone on display at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. … This bizarre creation [is] crafted from a piece of stovepipe scrap metal, a glass watch-dial case and a lock of hair. Arguably, this piece of jewellery is among the earliest ‘readymades” in art history.

Remember Black Light Posters?

“For a magical time in the 1960s and ’70s, your wood-paneled basement hideaway wasn’t worth its weight in cheap weed and questionable acid without a collection of psychedelic blacklight posters. Combining Art Nouveau, Surrealism, Pop Art, and countless other artistic styles with the relatively new (commercially anyway) phenomenon of fluorescence, these glow-in-the-dark posters became an icon of the Summer of Love and its youth culture. Here’s where they came from and how they worked.”

Shakespeare Did Not Sound Like Lawrence Olivier (For One Thing, The Rhymes Worked)

“David and Ben Crystal, a father and son team, have recreated what they say is Shakespeare’s original pronunciation, or OP, as they call it – how Shakespeare’s plays would have been sounded around 1600. … The OP accent that emerges from the Crystals’ research sounds closer to the Northern English or even some American accents.” (audio)