Fears over the spread of the COVID-19 virus have led more than 20,000 people (so far) to join in the request that organizers call off this year’s festival, which is still scheduled to run March 13-22. And even as the two tech giants withdraw from SXSW, a number of high-profile individuals say they’re still in, including Hillary Clinton and Rep. Adam Schiff. – Dallas Morning News
Author: Matthew Westphal
How The Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum Is Helping The Public Understand Pandemics
“Ebola was not a pandemic, but it created a panic rarely seen in the U.S. It was on the heels of the Ebola mania that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History developed Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World, a major exhibition proposed by Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease physician on the frontlines of the epidemic in West Africa. His idea came with the recognition that the public needed a better understanding of how outbreaks of unknown (or unfamiliar) infectious diseases start and spread.” – Smithsonian Magazine
Leaker Of AGMA Report On Plácido Domingo Reveals Himself (He Had His Reasons For Doing It)
“As a sexual assault survivor myself, my conscience would not allow me to be a party to an agreement than allowed the union to bury the details of Domingo’s decades-long abuse of female AGMA members,” wrote Samuel Schultz in his letter resigning from AGMA’s board and acknowledging that he gave the report to the AP. Schultz is the singer who accused countertenor David Daniels and his husband of drugging and raping him in 2010. – NPR
David Hallberg Will Be Artistic Director Of Australian Ballet
The ABT star, who credits the company and its physiotherapists with restoring his ability to dance following a severe injury in 2014, will take over from David McAllister at the beginning of 2021. – Sydney Morning Herald
Ulay, Audacious Performance Artist (And Marina’s Ex), Dead At 76
“Since the early 1970s, Ulay created performances and photographs that made frequent use of his own body. Having worked collaboratively for more than a decade with Marina Abramović, his former partner and currently the world’s most widely known performance artist, it was not until the later stages of his career that Ulay’s solo work achieved its own sort of notoriety.” – ARTnews
The latest news about Mrs. T
Mrs. T survived her double-lung transplant surgery and has been moved to the cardio-thoracic ICU. As her surgeon put it, “We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re moving in the right direction.” – Terry Teachout
Two New Albums From Rebecca Kilgore
In one, concentrating on songs with winter themes, she is accompanied by a distinguished European quartet. A second album finds her alone with the harmonically resourceful and swinging Chicago guitarist Andy Brown. – Doug Ramsey
She’s Been Dead For 45 Years And She’s Still The Arab World’s Favorite Star
“There is no western counterpart to Umm Kulthum, no artist as respected and beloved as she is in the Arab world.” She sang everything from the most complex classical Arabic music to nationalist hymns; her sold-out performances ran for five hours or more; her monthly live concert broadcasts had entire nations glued to their radios. (It was said that Umm Kulthum was the only thing that unified the Arab world.) You still hear her voice in cafes and taxis throughout the Middle East and the Arab diaspora. And she lived an extremely unusual life for a woman of her time and place. – The Guardian
Building Contemporary Dance In Botswana
The African nation is getting prosperous enough to begin (slowly) offering state funding to the performing arts. One beneficiary of this development is Mophato Dance Theatre, which combines traditional Botswanan dance with contemporary movement vocabulary. (video) – BBC
Reconsidering The 1980s Soap Opera Boom
“The shifts across the network era, magnified in the early 1980s, help us to see how variable the category of soap opera, and perhaps the ordering concept of genre itself, may be.” What’s more, that boom changed the acting profession. – Literary Hub