“Tough times are not always bad times, and so many factors are involved in the evolution of the arts that cause and effect are simply not quantifiable. Technology. Entrepreneurship. Audiences. The economy. You name it. All play ever-changing parts. Institutions die and new ones are born. Look around downtown L.A. and elsewhere. Young musicians have begun their own ensembles. To be an outlier is to be in. Composers have found the players they need. New music and new opera are thriving throughout the country like never before. What matters in the end is not money but priorities.”
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Openly Gay Male Ballet Dancers Are Creating A New Paradigm Of Masculinity
“If you didn’t know much about classical ballet, you might think it’s an obvious home for queer artists and narratives, but it’s more complicated than that.” The canon is small and its stories are very conventionally heterosexual; even today, openly gay male dancers can have trouble getting cast as leads. “[Now] a new generation of dancers who are collapsing the boundaries between queerness and maleness in ballet by challenging its, and the culture’s, preconceived ideas of masculinity.”
How International Arts Institutions Have Supported Saudi Arabia
Though commonly viewed as disparate, the arts establishment often works in parallel with political and corporate establishments. Despite Saudi’s well-documented involvement in 9/11, its deplorable human rights record, its support of militias in Iraq and Syria, and its war on Yemen, which has caused the most extreme, and preventable, humanitarian crisis of our time, a positive relationship with the Kingdom, and certainly MBS, has been pursued. Far from hidden prior to Khashoggi’s murder. It simply didn’t matter.
How The ‘House Of Cards’ Crew Rewrote The Entire Last Season Without Kevin Spacey
“[Spacey’s scandal] was a ‘gut punch,’ [co-showrunner Frank] Pugliese said, but the prospect of tossing out five months of work and having to rebuild the season without the show’s corrupt central figure actually emboldened him and his partner. ‘It felt so unfair to the story, in a way, we had to defend the world of the show,’ [co-showrunner Melissa James] Gibson said.” Here’s how they pulled it off.
We Seem To Be In Love With Miniatures. Why?
What can possibly be the appeal? The answer lies in our desire for mastery and elucidation. The ability to enhance a life by bringing scaled-down order and illumination to an otherwise chaotic world – a world over which we may otherwise feel we have little control – cannot be overvalued. The fascination of holding in our hands something completely realised at an impossibly reduced scale is a wholly fulfilling one, and the satisfactions of inquisitive observation will never tire. At its simplest, the miniature shows us how to see, learn and appreciate more with less.
New York Theatermakers Experiment With Ways To Help Colleagues With Young Children
“The question of how well — or poorly — the theater world accommodates child care has been talked about for years, and is closely bound up with the discussion of why women are so underrepresented as writers, directors, and designers at the industry’s highest, and highest-paying, levels. … The theater world is experimenting with a variety of small-scale solutions to make the juggling easier.”
Seeing Is Believing? With AI, Not Anymore
“Why did Stalin airbrush those people out of those photographs?” he asked. “Why go to the trouble? It’s because there is something very, very powerful about the visual image. If you change the image, you change history. We’re incredibly visual beings. We rely on vision—and, historically, it’s been very reliable. And so photos and videos still have this incredible resonance. How much longer will that be true?”
Bernard Bragg, 90, Pioneering Deaf Actor And Co-Founder Of National Theater For The Deaf
“After I saw [Marcel] Marceau’s performance, I said to myself, if he can do a two-hour show without saying a word, why can’t I?” Bragg once said. And he did: as The Washington Post once wrote, Bragg became “the man who invented theater as a professional career for the deaf.”
The 21st-Century Canon: What Are The Most Influential Books Of The Last 20 Years?
“We invited scholars from across the academy to tell us what they saw as the most influential book published in the past 20 years. (Some respondents named books slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.) We asked them to select books — academic or not, but written by scholars — from within or outside their own fields. It was up to our respondents to define ‘influential,’ but we asked them to explain why they chose the books they did. Here are their answers.”
Ex-San Antonio Ballet Dancer Found Not Guilty In Rape Trial
“A jury took less than three hours Friday to find a former Ballet San Antonio dancer not guilty in a sexual assault case brought by a ballerina in the company. The defense had argued that the accuser regretted having consensual sex as the two slept in her apartment bed in March 2017. Prosecutors said Hugo Ihosvany Rodriguez, 27, once a rising star with the dance company, never received a hint of approval yet forced himself on her.”