In choreograher Mourad Merzouki’s Boxe Boxe, “as the protagonists come into the ring (complete with stripe-shirted umpire), boxing mitts turn into glove puppets, a dancer’s body curves in a feline swoop only to be caught in a firm headlock, and limbs jab, swipe and kick while a string quartet roams the stage.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
This Dance About Boxing Uses an Actual Ring and Bell
“The brainchild of Amsterdam-based, Italian-born choreographer Emio Greco and Dutch dramaturge Pieter C. Scholten, Rocco explores brotherhood, masculinity, and the mythology of boxing, while pushing its four male dancers to physical extremes.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.03.14
What did you do in the war, mummy?
AJBlog: Performance Monkey | Published 2014-04-03
San Francisco Museums Land A Great Gift
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-04-03
Are Strads really better than new violins? First report from the Paris Experiment
AJBlog: Slipped Disc | Published 2014-04-03
The Inventiveness of Brad Mehldau, and Another Bookstore Down
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-04-03
How Do We Feel About Killer Heels?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-04-04
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Stolen Gauguin and Bonnard Were in Sicilian Autoworker’s Kitchen
“A pair of paintings by French artists Paul Gauguin and Pierre Bonnard that had been missing for four decades has been recovered by Italian authorities who said that the works of art were hanging in a kitchen of a retired Sicilian autoworker who was unaware of their value.”
Latest Women-Shouldn’t-Be-Conductors Gaffe Comes From Legendary Conducting Teacher
Jorma Panula, the now-83-year-old professor who trained a flock of talented maestros that includes Esa-Pekka Salonen, Osmo Vänskä, Sakari Oramo, and (ahem) Susanna Mälkki, told a Finnish news broadcaster, “They can come [to my masterclasses] and try. It’s not a problem – if they … take more feminine music. Bruckner or Stravinsky will not do, but Debussy is OK. This is a purely biological question.”
Can High-Tech Speed-Reading Work? Should It?
The creators of the app Spritz argue that “only around 20% of your time is spent processing content. The remaining 80% is spent physically moving your eyes from word to word.” They mean to reverse those percentages. If they’re right, what does that mean for how we experience the written word?
How Amazon Plans to Take Over Our TV Sets
“Amazon has a vested interest in making sure it is present at every moment of possible consumption, which is all the time. It wants to get into that television screen and start to build a relationship.” The tool: Fire TV, a new set-top box.
Knoedler Forgery Lawsuit Adds Art Historian as Defendant
“A respected Swiss art historian and curator has been drawn into the legal tangle surrounding the sale of dozens of high-priced forgeries by the shuttered New York art gallery Knoedler & Company.”
What Makes Iraq Stories Different From Most War Literature
George Packer: “The essential scene of First World War writing is the mass slaughter of the trenches. In the archetypal Vietnam story, a grunt who can never find the enemy walks into physical and moral peril. In much of the writing about Iraq, the moment of truth is a reunion scene at an airport or a military base – families holding signs, troops looking for their loved ones, an unease sinking deep into everyone.”
We Still Need You, Monuments Men!
Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund, argues that the Middle East in particular – especially Syria – needs the help of those heroic men and women to save the region’s irreplaceable cultural heritage.