“Dance may be a visual art form, but it’s tightly intertwined with sound. Even as the field strives to be more inclusive, learning to dance without two fully functioning ears remains a challenge. But today, dancers with full and partial hearing loss are becoming more visible, thanks to growing opportunities, high-profile role models and even Instagram.” – Dance Magazine
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Cultural ‘Canon’ Really Is Getting More Diverse
“It’s not so much that canons have been completely obliterated, as [Harold] Bloom and others feared — in any given collection, the old guard and their descendants have remained. But canons have continued to evolve, and new ones have sprung up alongside them.” Aisha Harris looks at some examples. – The New York Times
‘The Four Horsemen Of Asian-American Literature’
That was Ishmael Reed’s nickname for Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Shawn Wong, and Lawson Fusao Inada, who (on top of their own writing) put together the first major anthology of Asian-American fiction (titled Aiiieeeee!) and thereby began a canon. “The Four Horsemen had no interest in being loved,” writes Hua Hsu in this essay, “especially by white people. … When an editor asked [Chin] to tidy some grammatical errors, he called her the ‘great white bitch goddess priestess of the sacred white mouth.'” – The New Yorker
Jack Sheldon, Revered Jazz Trumpeter And ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ Star, Dead At 88
“While the charismatic and hilarious Sheldon boasted an impressive résumé that included serving as the music director and sidekick on The Merv Griffin Show for 18 years; releasing 23 albums as a bandleader between 1955 and 2007; heading his own 17-piece orchestra; … and acting in various movies and TV shows, he is also lovingly remembered as the affable, lackadaisical crooner from the Schoolhouse Rock! cartoons of the 1970s, including ‘Conjunction Junction’ and ‘I’m Just a Bill.'” – Yahoo!
Bach’s Own Church Vandalized On New Year’s Eve
An unknown attacker lobbed heavy stones at the windows of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig on Tuesday. No one was injured, but two 19th-century stained glass windows and nearly two dozen Art Nouveau panels were destroyed. – Deutsche Welle
For The First Time, The Most Influential Person In British Theatre Is An Actor: The Stage 100 For 2020
“Why? Actors are clearly a core part of theatre. But, while individual actors have certainly been influential – Mark Rylance has featured prominently in recent years – it is rare for them to truly wield influence on the whole of theatre. This is, to some degree, a sign of the times … Had we started this list in the 1950s or 1960s, Laurence Olivier would have been in with a fair shout of securing the top spot, probably repeatedly. But the era of the actor-manager has largely passed, meaning that … their influence is often limited in scope and scale.” But this year, the list is topped by an actor — an 80-year-old, no less. (For the complete list and further coverage, click here.) – The Stage
England’s Arts Funder Promises To Spend More On Early-Career Artists
Nicholas Serota: “It will be about giving more support to writers, artists, composers at an early stage in their career so that they can make a career and then flourish.” – The Guardian
Are The Arts To Blame For Donald Trump?
It’s a provocative claim, and I’ll admit my first reaction was to dismiss it out of hand. And yet … – Douglas McLennan
On The Edges Of A Huge South American Landfill, An Orchestra With Instruments Made Out Of Garbage
Most people who live near the Cateura dump outside Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, scratch out a living by digging out anything that can be resold, and buying a musical instrument would be an impossible dream. But local carpenter Nicolás Gómez and music teacher Favio Chávez decided that they could build musical instruments and give children there free music lessons — and so the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura was born. – Al Jazeera
What John Dos Passos’s ‘1919’ (And The Rest Of The ‘U.S.A.’ Trilogy) Got Right About 2019
“We’re often told, in hand-wringing tones, about the growing differences between red and blue states, and about our increasingly divisive political and social rhetoric. But, in Dos Passos’s view, division has been the rule in American life, not the exception; he considered it to be authentically American. The U.S.A. novels plumbed the depths of our rifts, and explored how they might be widened by a media-saturated age, and by the fragmentation of information and the latent social hysteria that come with it.” – The New Yorker