Soft power and the arts (3/3)
The rituals behind cultural diplomacy leave me wondering about its effects. That cultural diplomacy is a soft-power approach to achieve hard goals is known by all participants in this game. We “see through” attempts by a nation to use carefully chosen works of art to convey a particular message … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2017-11-21
Judith Smith: “[Thirty years ago,] there were people doing contact improvisation and including dancers with disabilities in that. But we didn’t know any other companies that were actually setting choreography. The first 10 years were really trying to convince the dance world that we were doing dance, and not dance therapy. “
Michael Ball uses bay rum for Sweeney Todd and a cheap old perfume of his mother’s for Edna Turnblad (Hairspray). Fenella Woolgar deployed Chanel No. 5 (with an extra spritz) for a 1950s snob. David Greig sniffed canned mackereal to put him in mind of the chilly mountains of Scotland. Before playing a homeless man, Arthur McBain sniffed a paper coffee cup after the coffee was finished. David Jays explores the use of aromas, and the emotions they trigger, with these and other actors as well as a ballet star and a perfumer.
Jori Finkel: “It turns out that half a minute is not enough time to experience the most powerful dynamic of these rooms: our shifting perceptions of what is far versus near, or personal versus universal, as one collapses into the other through the unending regression of mirrored images. … The Hirshhorn, The Broad and other venues have essentially decided to give twice as many people half as much art, with what you might call infinitely diminished returns.”
“The piece particularly draws on the experience of Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, who served 16 months of a two-year sentence for hooliganism … Recreating the humiliation, intimidation and forced labour of a Russian gulag might seem like the ultimate in misery porn – especially when it’s taking place in the Saatchi Gallery, just a stone’s throw from Sloane Square.”
“We fought to be on the stage. We should reclaim that word: I don’t know where it came from, this fucking notion that putting ‘ess’ on the end makes us weak. I would be no less afraid of a lioness than a lion.”
For years, artist Serkan Özkaya has been fascinated by Duchamp’s Etant données, the darkened room you view through peepholes in the closed door. He wanted to know exactly how it works, but the curators at the its home, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, aren’t allowed to go in and inspect its mechanisms themselves, let alone allowing a stranger access. So Özkaya did it Ikea-style.
“Found in Chandler’s archives at the Bodleian Library in Oxford …, the story, “It’s All Right – He Only Died,” opens as a ‘filthy figure on a stretcher’ arrives at a hospital.”
“From time to time when driving in the High Sierra I’ll see amateur gold miners, panning in a river that 150 years ago gave up the best of its treasure to the first prospectors,” says the composer, “and I’ll be tempted to wonder if the image of these latter-day panners, hoping only for a tiny nugget, isn’t an illustration of my own predicament as a composer.”
“Reared in gospel, Reese became a seductive, big-voiced secular music star with her No. 1 R&B and No. 2 pop hit ‘Don’t You Know’ in 1959. … She ranged through a series of releases that showed off her mastery of standards, jazz and contemporary pop through the early ’70s, and over the course of her career she received four Grammy Award nominations.” She went on to become an even bigger star on television, where she was the first black woman to host her own variety show and played major roles in Chico and the Man and Touched by an Angel.
