“Search YouTube for the Harlem Shake and more than 200,000 results pop up … The thing is, this worldwide dance contagion is not the Harlem Shake. The real Harlem Shake, a much more raw, technical, fluid, frenetic dance, was born in New York City more than 30 years ago.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Russia’s Own Know-Nothing Movement Turns On Culture
“Ever since the wave of urban protest that hit the country in late 2011, Vladimir “Putin and his United Russia Party seem to have decided to cut their losses with the country’s finicky élites and focus on demonizing them as Western agents for the benefit of a poorer, older, more rural voter base. … Everything blunt, homespun, and orthodox is in. Everything multifaceted, foreign, avant-garde, or deviant is out.”
New – And Lower-Cost – Arts College In Barcelona Aims At Anglophones
“A new higher education performing arts school that will teach its courses in English is set to open in Barcelona this summer, claiming to be the first in continental Europe to offer both technical and entrepreneurial training. The Institute of the Arts Barcelona will offer one-year diploma courses in acting, dance and musical theatre from this September.”
Why Are Today’s Romantic Comedies So Bad? Because We’ve Changed
“Among the most fundamental obligations of romantic comedy is that there must be an obstacle to nuptial bliss for the budding couple to overcome. And, put simply, such obstacles are getting harder and harder to come by.”
No, Social Changes Aren’t The Reason Today’s Rom-Coms Are Bad
“Is it really more difficult now to imagine a protective father with an honor student daughter being leery of an intellectually and economically downmarket suitor? … [And] there’s another bit of evidence that undermines the thesis that society has rendered rom coms obsolete: rom coms themselves. Not Hollywood rom coms, but rom coms in other media.”
SF Oboist Dead Following Mid-Concerto Stroke
“William Bennett, the longtime San Francisco Symphony oboist who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on Saturday night while performing Richard Strauss’ Oboe Concerto with the orchestra in Davies Symphony Hall, died Thursday morning in a San Francisco hospital. He was 56.”
Top Baroque Oboist Washington McClain Dies Suddenly
After spending the 1990s in Toronto’s Tafelmusik, McClain became a professor at Indiana University’s Early Music Institute, principal oboe for period ensembles in Montreal (Ensemble Arion) and Cleveland (Apollo’s Fire), and one of the most personally beloved individuals in North America’s Baroque music community.
Giving Kenneth Tynan The Kenneth Tynan Treatment
“[He] covered theater in London and New York from 1952 to 1963, and throughout that time he was known as the most spectacularly savage of critics, a stiletto-toting wit who could coin a telling phrase and make it stick. … He was also a moral idiot, … a critic in whom talent and triviality were always at odds.”
A Cabaret Renaissance?
“Cabaret is a form that thrives on conspiratorial collaboration – and low overheads. … Fusing song, poetry, sketches, jazz, dance and theatre, cabaret demolished boundaries between high and low culture, artists and audience.”
Why We Still Love Puppets In The Age Of CGI
“Puppetry has been part of Britain’s cultural landscape for over 600 years and still uses many of its original techniques … but we’re still not bored by it. In fact, whether it’s Anthony Minghella’s sumptuous Madam Butterfly, or the multiple Tony award-winning stage adaptation of War Horse, we seem to love it now more than ever. Why so?”