“At a time of mounting protests over sponsorship by fossil fuel companies, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and the Mauritshuis in The Hague both terminated arrangements with the country’s largest oil and gas firm this summer.”
Blog
When This Israeli Arab Choreographer Stopped Focusing On His Ethnicity In His Work, Here’s What Happened
Adi Boutros: “In my previous works, there was a text. But at some point I understood that I didn’t need to talk about it, but to experience and investigate it with the body. The body is a tool that has knowledge, and it also knows how to reflect this. All I had to do was investigate the body, and when I investigated it, my real identity got expressed.”
New Club In London Specifically For Black Theatre Audience
Says Black Theatre Club founder Steven Kavuma, “It’s a safe space environment where black people can freely talk about a play that is either about the black experience or is a classical play that has black bodies in it. We don’t have safe spaces where black people can freely talk about a play. Black people don’t feel comfortable being at theatres, because theatres are white spaces.”
Warning: UK Theatre Audiences Are Becoming More Middle Class As School Visits Decline
“The danger, or the sad thing for me, is that the wonderful audiences that come [to children’s theatre] on the whole are quite middle-class – they are the type of parents who want their children to go to the theatre. What we all desperately want is children who are not automatically going to come to the theatre because their parents wouldn’t take them, and the schools are the ones that are going to bring them.”
Science’s Reproducibility Problem
When scientists tried to reproduce the results of 100 psychology studies a few years ago, they came to an alarming conclusion: Fewer than half of the studies could be replicated, suggesting the field might be rife with flawed knowledge about human behavior. Now, a few of those same scientists—along with some new colleagues—have taken stock of the field again, by trying to reproduce 21 studies recently published in two of science’s top journals, Science and Nature.
Computers That Create Sonnets? So Perfect, And Yet…
The latest is a computer program that generates sonnets. Sonnets! Fancy! Computer scientists at IBM and the universities of Melbourne and Toronto have built a system that creates poems so metrically accomplished that the majority of readers in a study failed to distinguish them from the efforts of humans.
Toronto International Film Festival Picks A New Executive Director
Joana Vicente has impeccable credentials in the business side of the filmmaking business. As head of Independent Filmmaker Project, the largest and oldest not-for-profit body dedicated to the development, production and promotion of indie features and documentaries, Vicente helped grow IFP from a $1.9-million annual operation into a $9.7-million one, with 22 full-time employees. TIFF represents a major jump: it’s a $43-million annual operation with 205 full-time staffers.
The Hidden Queer History Of Paper Dolls
Sure, paper dolls were manufactured and marketed – to the parents who held the purse strings – as tools for teaching little girls obedience and conformity. (Well, until the ’70s – more on that later.) Yet, as Benjamin Frisch and Willa Paskin point out, “the conformity represented by paper dolls was easy to subvert, because it was so easy to ignore. The virtue of simple toys is that it’s simple to use them any way you please.” And that’s exactly what gay men did. (article and podcast)
How The Soul Of The West Transformed
Humans are born incomplete. The brain absorbs huge amounts of essential information throughout childhood and adolescence, which it uses to carry on building who we are. It’s as if the brain asks a single, vital question: Who do I have to be, in this place, to thrive? If it was a boastful hustler in ancient Greece and a humble team-player in ancient China, then who is it in the West today? The answer is a neoliberal.
Lots of Coffee
Recently, in a conversation about beginning relationships with new communities, one of our new ArtsEngaged trainers, Anne Cushing-Reid, commented that, especially where there is negative history to be overcome, “There’s a lot of coffee in our future.”