“A study of 2,000 18-to-30-year-olds found that 24% of respondents said they never attend theatre performances, with this figure higher among men than women.” (On the other hand, this means that 76% of the respondents do go to the theatre at least once a year.) — The Stage
Author: Matthew Westphal
The British Museum Thought This Was An Ancient Sumerian Vase. Turns Out It Was A Deadly Weapon
After years of displaying this 4,400-year-old object face-down, thinking it was a vessel for flowers, curators realized that was actually a vessel of grievous bodily harm: the head of a mace. — The Art Newspaper
Harpsichordist Blandine Verlet Dead At 76
Regarded as one of the best harpsichordists of her generation, with a repertoire covering four centuries, from William Byrd through Francis Poulenc, Verlet was especially known for her performances and recordings of Bach, Scarlatti, Rameau, and, above all, Couperin. (in French; for Google Translate version, click here) — Le Figaro
Gauguin. Spirituality and Max Hollein
Most Paul Gauguin exhibitions show him off as a sensualist who abandoned his family in France to canoodle with young Tahitian girls. So it was refreshing to see Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey last year at the de Young museum in San Francisco. The exhibit leaves out his most sensualist works and therefore presses visitors to see other aspects of his work. — Judith H. Dobrzynski
Reality Winner’s Interrogation By The FBI Becomes A Play — With Not One Word Changed
A 25-year-old Air Force vet and translator for a U.S. intelligence contractor, Winner was convicted of leaking a classified NSA report on Russian hacking of US voter databases. For The Intercept, the web site to which Winner gave the report, Alisa Solomon writes about how director Tina Satter found the transcript of the FBI’s questioning of Winner and knew she had to stage it verbatim. — The Intercept
Creating Ability-Positive Theatre for Children
“Stories that are ability-positive center around real or fictional characters with different ability statuses, not for dramatic reasons, like an abled character experiencing a new struggle, but simply to show humans, in all their complexities, who make up the fabric of our world.” Tim Collingwood, an actor-playwright-activist who identifies as having Asperger’s syndrome, writes about how he was inspired to meet the ability-positive ideal with an adaptation of The Ugly Duckling. — HowlRound
The Real Louis C.K. And Kevin Spacey Have Finally Emerged
Matt Zoller Seitz: “These types of guys thrive on attention, and if they can’t get the positive kind, they’ll settle for the negative. ‘Oh, sure, they’ve tried to separate us,’ Spaceywood said, inadvertently speaking for Louis C.K. as he emerged from his alt-right chrysalis and flapped his moth wings in Levittown. ‘But what we have is too strong. It’s too powerful.'” — Vulture
Howell Begle, Lawyer Who Fought To Get Early R&B Stars Properly Paid, Dead At 74
“During a years-long pro bono legal fight, Mr. Begle represented [Ruth] Brown and other R&B artists, helping them claim royalties from past sales, industry-standard royalty agreements going forward, and other benefits in what became known as the royalty reform movement.” — The Washington Post
To Understand The Future Of Post-Advertising Media, Look To The 19th Century
Derek Thompson points us back to the age of the “party press,” when newspapers were funded by political organizations that “treated readers as a group to engage and galvanize. … It was advertising that led to the demise of the party press … [and to] the modern standards of ‘objective’ journalism.” (Mustn’t make the advertisers nervous.) “As the news business shifts back from advertisers to patrons and readers (that is to say, subscribers), journalism might escape that ‘view from nowhere’ purgatory.” — The Atlantic
Here’s Another Cambodian Dance Form Brought Back From Brink Of Extinction
We’ve read about how Khmer royal court dance has been revived (and even queered). Less familiar is the masked dance-drama lakhon khol, which was nearly wiped out, along with the country’s other traditional art forms, by the Khmer Rouge. Sun Rithy, a 46-year-old whose father and grandfather performed in the genre and trained him in it, now has a company of young performers dedicated to preserving lakhon khol. — Reuters