Blog

Pioneers Of Post-Modern Dance Reflect On What Happened, 60 Years Later

Part of postmodern dance’s power lay in the fact that, for all of its foreignness, it was also familiar. Here were movements taken from the street or home and performed by able but merely human bodies in intimate settings — namely at downtown galleries, lofts or the freewheeling Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, either in the main sanctuary or upon the painted lines of the basement basketball court.  – The New York Times

New Yorkers Have Named The Vessel-Stairwell-Thingy At Hudson Yards

The developer of Hudson Yards temporarily christened Thomas Heatherwick’s big bronze stack of stairways The Vessel, but — just as 30 St Mary Axe in London is “the Gherkin” and Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park is “the Bean” (whether Norman Foster and Anish Kapoor like it or not) — New York’s new selfie-attraction is now “the Shawarma.” – Slate

My Particular Beef

One day, Edythe called me into the bedroom and said it was time for us to have a real meal, a roast beef. “You can do it, it’s easy.” That’s the first thing I cooked all by myself, a year or so before my bar mitzvah. And it’s what I cooked yesterday, for the second time in my life, 60 years later. – Jeff Weinstein

Where Chicago’s Candidates For Mayor Stand On The Arts

Both candidates exist on the progressive spectrum. Both candidates have problematic pasts and positive potential. Both appear to be arts-knowledgeable, but at February’s Mayoral Arts Forum, sponsored by Arts Alliance Illinois and the League of Chicago Theatres, they sat shoulder-to-shoulder with their fellow candidates in terms of their uncertainty around Chicago’s current arts policies. – Clyde Fitch Report

‘Affect Theory’ And How It Explains Living In 2019 America

So what is “affect theory”? “Under its influence, critics attended to affective charge [in society]. They saw our world as shaped not simply by narratives and arguments but also by nonlinguistic effects — by mood, by atmosphere, by feelings.” Writer Hua Hsu looks at the work of one of affect theory’s main proponents today: Lauren Berlant, co-founder of the Feel Tank (as opposed to think tank) Chicago, and her idea of the “cruel optimism” Americans hang on to. – The New Yorker

Developing New And Diverse Theatre Critics In A Town Without A Culture Of Criticism

The English city of Hull has a lively theatre scene for a town its size, but the local newspaper published only two theatre reviews in the whole of 2018, and the national critics rarely make it to Hull. Jamie Potter of the city’s Middle Child Theatre writes about how his company developed and launched a New Critics Programme to recruit and establish at least eight new critics over four years. (And they made a point of seeing that the writers they chose weren’t all, as Potter puts it, “male, pale, and stale.”) – HowlRound