Says the Spanish choreographer, artistic director of the Sydney Dance Company, “It’s terrible. I’m literally not even awake and the first thing I’m checking is Twitter.” He plans to live-tweet Tuesday’s premiere of his new work 2 One Another.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Forget The Joystick! Do Your Gaming With A Water Dish!
Developed in Belgium, “the Splash Controller is a wooden bowl with electrodes covering its inner surface. Filling the bowl with water completes the circuit and activates the electrodes, allowing a computer to detect the presence of liquid and interpret a variety of gestures including swirling the bowl or splashing water into the air.”
Interest In New Barnes Foundation Soars (And The Place Doesn’t Open For Two More Months)
“The $150 million gallery officially opens May 19, and tickets have been moving briskly to Barnes members since Feb. 1. … In March 2009, membership totaled 390; today, there are about 15,000 members.”
André Previn Berates Radio Interviewer On-Air
At several points during an interview on a Pittsburgh public radio station, the 82-year-old composer-conductor – who has grown visibly weaker over the past few years – “exclaimed that he didn’t understand [the interviewer’s] questions and later called them ‘ridiculous.’ It was rude plain and simple.”
Fistfight At Chicago Symphony Concert
“Just as the second movement [of Brahms’s Symphony no. 2] was drawing to a gentle close – with Music Director Riccardo Muti at the podium – a man in his 30s, according to police, started punching a 67-year-old man inside one of the boxes.”
Las Vegans Are Really Happy About Their New Arts Complex
“You can almost hear timpani rumbling and horns ablaze when the Smith Center for the Performing Arts is mentioned in the Valley. Clouds part. Angels sing. People who were lost are found. … Not even a multibillion-dollar casino, promising new jobs and more tourists, can elicit such emotion within locals who are pinning community hopes on Downtown’s stately limestone centerpiece.”
Movie Industry And Older Viewers Finally Find Each Other
“A quiet revolution is afoot: older people are flocking to cinemas. But they don’t care for special effects. They want big characters, grown-up dramas and tales of late-blooming love. And so Hollywood’s changing its game …”
Seiji Ozawa To Take Another Year-Long Hiatus
“The 76-year-old maestro, who underwent surgery for esophageal cancer in 2010 and was treated for a hernia last year, had planned to conduct four concerts in Japan from March 17 but had decided to cancel the performances.”
Tablet Computers Transform The Art World
“During the latest Art Basel [fair], a collector agreed to buy a $250,000 painting – while sitting in a hair salon in Los Angeles, looking at the work on her tablet. These days, anyone with an iPad can create their own Damien Hirst painting, thanks to an app from the Gagosian Gallery … Some museum and gallery apps allow visitors to zoom in on a work for a closer look than they would get with the naked eye.”
We Are Slaves To Metaphor, Episode 47: Evil Makes The World Look Dark
“In the latest example of the study of ’embodied cognition’ – the notion that metaphors don’t just help us express abstract ideas but can also shape basic perception – researchers had 40 students recall and describe either an ethical or unethical deed from their past. … [P]articipants in the unethical condition judged the room to be darker than did participants in the ethical condition.”