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Once Dance Was A Weapon In The Fight For Social Justice. Could It Be Again?

Gia Kourlas: “Back [in the 1930s], protests and social justice were part of the fabric of modern dance as it met the moment of the Great Depression and the rise of authoritarianism. ‘The Dance Is a Weapon.’ That was the title of the first recital of the New Dance Group, a socially minded collective formed in 1932. For me, that period of dance haunts the time we’re living in — the pandemic, the election, the uprisings against racial injustice — like a good, progressive ghost.” – The New York Times

How The Arts Deploy Fear In The Nerve-Wracking Year 2020

“[A package exploring] how fear informs the culture that we consume. … Chronicle classical music critic Joshua Kosman tells us how music can stoke terror in us with just a few notes. Chronicle theater critic Lily Janiak shows us how fear can be used to our advantage. And Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle explains how we’ve been living in a time of fear for 20 years, with a two-decade span of film that’s been reflecting the concerns around us.” – San Francisco Chronicle

Facing Closed Buildings And Budget Cuts, Schools Find Ways To Teach Kids Music Despite COVID

“For luckier, specialized schools, … planning for this unprecedented fall semester has boiled down to some common themes, including online vs. hybrid instruction, space constraints, and technological considerations. But for music education programs like the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and the Harmony Program, planning has hinged on a more urgent question: How can we continue to provide music education to kids whose schools can no longer afford it?” – WQXR (New York City)

Some Of Cinema’s Earliest Experiments, Preserved With The Simplest Of Technology, Are Now Restored

Moving picture clips by Georges Méliès and Alice Guy-Blaché from the 1890s, long thought lost, were discovered over the last decade in the form of flipbooks, originally produced for people who couldn’t get to or afford tickets for a picture show. Now researchers have gathered some of those books and restored their images to film. – The Guardian

Oh My But It’s Tempting To Hope Science Can Explain Life (Can It?)

By cracking the genetic code, we have become able to harness the machinery of living cells to do our bidding by assembling new macromolecules of our own devising. As we have gained an ever more accurate picture of how life’s tiniest and simplest building blocks fit together to form the whole, it has become increasingly tempting to imagine that biology’s toughest puzzles may only be solved once we figure out how to tackle them on physics’ terms. – Nautilus