Brooklyn-based choreographer Chris Elam and his company, Misnomer, are working to use the Web for dance the way music, film and video have. “Borrowing a page from indie-rock bands that have little means for marketing or distribution, he envisions Web sites with streaming video of rehearsals and viewer comments; live video chats with dancers and audiences; and user profiles that are maintained in a database.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Holocaust, Coming To A Theater/Bookstore/TV Near You This Christmas
“The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?” (Hint: It’s not just that Holocaust books and movies win awards.)
How We’re All Becoming ‘People Of The Screen’
Wired‘s Kevin Kelly: “The rich databases [Flickr, YouTube, 3D Warehouse] of component images form a new grammar for moving images. After all, this is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them… What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images.”
New Mexico SO Cuts $200K From This Season’s Budget
With corporate giving down by $100,000 and single ticket sales off by almost $50,000, the orchestra is economizing by replacing a program of Mahler’s Second Symphony with Orff’s Carmina Burana, not hiring substitute musicians for rehearsals, and cutting back on office supplies. No layoffs are planned for the time being.
Spike Milligan Memorabilia Earns £92K At Auction
Handwritten poems and cartoons, a matchbox with a snarky homemade label, Christmas cards and signed gifts from various Beatles (who were friends), and other miscellaneous stuff belonging to the comedian and founder of BBC radio’s legendary Goon Show went for surprisingly high prices at Bonham’s in London this week. (Oddly, a restored 1883 Broadwood grand piano, estimated at £2,000 to £3,000 and occasionally played by no less than Paul McCartney, went to a friend of the family for £400. Where were the period-instrument folks?)
Olfactory Masterpieces: Why Isn’t Perfume Taken Seriously As Art?
“I have yet to find a curatorial colleague who regularly beats a path to the fragrance counter in search of, say, Joy Parfum, the 1930 masterpiece by Henri Alméras for Jean Patou, which, if it were a painting, could hang beside Matisse’s nearly contemporary Yellow Odalisque in Philadelphia. And yet, the parallels between what ought to be more properly regarded as sister arts are undeniable. Artists and colourmen combine natural and, these days, synthetic pigments with media such as oils and resins, much as the perfumer carefully formulates natural and synthetic chemical compounds.”
Ballet BC’s Pain Not Spreading Through Canadian Dance (Yet)
“The Canadian ballet world sympathizes with Vancouver’s pain, but it can’t actually empathize: Ballet administrators across the country report only slight softening in tickets sales and none of the disastrous shortfalls experienced by Ballet British Columbia, which laid off all its staff this week.”
Busting Taboos, Four Saudi Students Form Kingdom’s First Girl Group
The rock band The Accolade can’t perform in public or even rehearse openly, but their song “Pinocchio” has been downloaded by hundreds of young Saudis and they’re looking to start playing private gigs (the only kind in Saudi Arabia).
Even Hollywood Gets Hit By Financial Breakdown
“It isn’t the terrible economy – yet. People are still going to movies. The big problem is Wall Street. Without money from private equity and big investment banks, which injected an estimated $10 to $18 billion into Hollywood in the last four years, studios have had to change the way they do business – fast.”
Conductor Fired In Germany Over Sexual Harassment Claim
“Conductor Jin Wang, 48, has been sacked from his post in Germany, municipal authorities said Tuesday, after an allegation that he sexually harassed a young woman musician. Chinese-born Wang, who was director of music at the Mainfranken Theatre and conducted the Wuerzburg Philharmonic Orchestra, had resisted pressure to resign after the city of Wuerzburg suspended him on full pay.”