“The bronze sculpture was one of 14 statues ransacked from the Archaeological Museum in Nalanda, eastern India, in 1961. It is believed it changed hands several times over the years before eventually being sent to a London antiques dealer for sale.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Giving New Meaning To The Term ‘Dinner Theater’ By Making The Meal The Performance
For more than a year, the Detroit-based experimental theater company The Hinterlands has been staging what they call “µTopian Dinners” – literally preparing and sharing a meal with guests. The company sees the project “as a kind of a laboratory to investigate the cultural values that are reinforced through eating, meals, and cooking. … Implementing this process of non-textual translation via food practices carries a kind of power in the fact of it being a non-verbal form of communication, but one that nonetheless is extremely culturally specific.”
John Luther Adams’s ‘In the Name of the Earth’: 600 singers make elemental music
“If you see 600 singers coming towards you, get out of the way.” That was lead conductor Simon Halsey’s advice to the capacity audience at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine for the world premiere of JLA’s latest piece.
An Orchestral Musician’s View of Community Engagement: II
A second guest post by Penny Brill, Pittsburgh Symphony violist and alumna of the Community Engagement Training offered by ArtsEngaged. Here she continues her advocacy for musicians to participate in community engagement efforts.
“In C” for performance on any laptop, thanks to LUTE
Terry Riley’s 1964 ingenious, joyful and warm composition In C can now be performed by anyone with a laptop, regardless of their previous musical or technological experience, thanks to the Loyola University Technology Ensemble (LUTE), which has created an In C app. LUTE gave a demonstration concert in New Orleans this past Sunday, and Howard Mandel took part.
Can We Irony-Saturated Smart-Asses Of 2018 Still Understand Ingmar Bergman?
“While the majority of Bergman’s movies are available for streaming (largely thanks to Criterion) and cinephiles will always be viewing and discussing them, most audiences today know about his work only through parodies of The Seventh Seal” — the one about the medieval knight who plays chess with Death.
Here’s A Theory Of Frank Oz – What Does Frank Oz Think Of It?
“It goes like this: More people on Earth have borne witness to Frank Oz’s characters, be it puppet or person, than any other artist in recorded human history. Between the Muppets (in all its forms), the Star Wars franchise, and Sesame Street, Oz has had a part of three of the biggest entertainment juggernauts of the last-half century.” Oz’s response? “My mind isn’t able to grasp that, it’s too large a concept.”
The Art Institute Of Chicago Is A Fundraising Powerhouse – How Do The Folks There Do It?
“Interviews with six of the museum’s 40-person development team reveal that it’s a mix of art, science and alchemy.”
Fakir Musafar, Pioneer Of ‘Body Play’ Art, Dead At 87
“Fakir Musafar first found pleasure in pain as a teenager named Roland Loomis in his family’s basement in the mid-1940s. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for piercing, branding, tattooing, suspension, corseting and other outré practices that he would come to call ‘body play.’ After years of conducting these activities in secret, away from society’s judgmental gaze, he changed his professional name and became a performance artist and passionate body-play advocate.”
Want To See The World’s Wildest New Church Architecture? Head To South India
There have been Christian churches in what is now the state of Kerala for at least 1,600 years, but the ones that have been built there in recent decades are a wild combination of Le Corbusier modernism, tropical Art Deco, SoCal commercial, and maybe even some Bollywood and Vegas thrown in. (slideshow)