“Today, Kubota … [is] better remembered for her 1965 performance Vagina Painting, in which Kubota attached a paintbrush to her skirt, squatted, and moved around over a canvas.” More notable was her work, by herself and with husband Nam June Paik, developing the genre of video art in general and combining video and sculpture in particular.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Philadelphia’s Other Opera Company Reinvents Itself (Again)
After a two-year hiatus, the erstwhile Center City Opera has re-emerged with a new name (that doesn’t include the word opera) and mission, a four-shows-in-18-days summer festival format, a new home (the Prince Music Theater, itself recently brought back from the dead), a world premiere, two local premieres, and the musical version of Heathers.
Vic Firth, 85, The ‘Stradivari Of Drumsticks’
Besides spending four decades as the Boston Symphony’s principal tympanist (Seiji Ozawa called him “the single greatest percussionist anywhere in the world”), he decided in the 1960s to design and build his own sticks, feeling that what was on the market was inadequate for the subtleties of serious symphonic and ensemble music. Little did he know then that he was setting the gold standard for percussionists in all genres all over the world.
‘The Book Of Mormon’ Is Finally Playing Utah – Where They Seem To Love It
“The biting satirical musical that mocks Mormons has finally come to the heart of Mormonlandia, starting a sold-out, two-week run Tuesday at a Salt Lake City theater two blocks from the church’s flagship temple and headquarters.”
More Football Players Are Trying Ballet – And Liking It
Today’s exhibit: the Fighting Gamecocks of the University of South Carolina. (includes video)
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.29.15
AftA Thoughts 2015: Self-Perpetuating Boards
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2015-07-29
Now This, For A Big Museum, Would Be Experimental
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-07-29
Philbrook Museum Director Randall Suffolk Gets High (Museum, that is)
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-07-29
An Oxymoronically Postminimalist Improviser
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2015-07-29
An indefatigable operagoer
AJBlog: OperaSleuth Published 2015-07-29<
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National Gallery In London Faces All-Out Strike
“[The museum] has already been disrupted by more than 50 days of walkouts by staff since plans to [privatise] visitor services and security were first revealed. The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said it had served notice of four more separate days of industrial action, with a continuous, all-out strike starting on Aug. 17.”
Peter Brook Returns To Mahabharata For New Theatre Piece
The director and his colleagues who wrote and staged the nine-hour production that toured the world in the 1980s have returned to the ancient Indian epic for a work titled Battlefield. The four-actor staging opens in September at Brook’s longtime venue, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, and will tour to London, three cities in Italy, Amiens in France, Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.
Actress Natasha Parry, 84, Wife And Collaborator Of Peter Brook
“Her career was inescapably defined by her marriage, at the age of 20, to the director Peter Brook, with whom she worked many times in productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Anouilh and Beckett. She was also a vital part of Brook’s experimental, theatrical work in Paris, Persia (as Iran then was) and the villages of Africa. But Parry also had an independent career in films that marked her out as a fine screen actor.”
The Tragedy Of iTunes And Classical Music
“When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title. Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced.” Robinson Meyer explains why Apple’s music software is such a disaster at handling classical (and other kinds of) music.