“A play based on Adolf Hitler’s youth is sparking controversy for an unusual opening-night deal: Audience members willing to wear a swastika (provided by the theater) during the performance get in free. Those who prefer to pay full price are asked to wear the Star of David. … Producers of the play at the theater in Konstanz, a picturesque city in the south of Germany, say the action is part of an attempt to reinvigorate the national conversation about the dangers of fascism.”
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Two Bolshoi Ballet Stars Denied Visas To Dance In US
Olga Smirnova, one of the Bolshoi’s biggest stars, and Jacopo Tissi, a La Scala Ballet alumnus who joined the Moscow company in 2016, were refused nonimmigrant worker visas to dance at a Youth America Grand Prix gala at Lincoln Center this week.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.18.18
The Future of Orchestras – Part Five: Kurt Weill, El Paso, and the National Mood
“Wherever I found decency and humanity in the world, it reminded me of America.” Kurt Weill wrote those words after returning from a visit to Germany in 1947. I read them aloud at least a dozen times during the Kurt Weill festival in El Paso last week. Every time I invited my listeners to consider whether or not they still apply. … read more
AJBlog: Unanswered Question Published 2018-04-18
La Salle Sales Shortfall: Two of Five 19th-Century Offerings Fail to Sell
Today’s auction at Christie’s of the first five of 46 deaccessions from the La Salle University Art Museum got off to an inauspicious start … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-04-18
Propwatch: the plastic bags in Macbeth
Rufus Norris’s bereft, survivalist production of Macbeth was the show that launched a thousand thinkpieces about his regime at the National Theatre. The reviews were overwhelmingly hostile, and this apparently misfired Shakespeare followed on … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2018-04-18
The Next Arms Race: Artificial Intelligence (And It’s Already Started)
Artificial intelligence is a very powerful technology, and there is an arms race going on. Fast forward 20 years into the future and one of the players could have won the race. China is more likely to win than Russia is, although Russia has a lot going on. So, we could end up in a world that China may not formally control, but they effectively do because they rule the cyberworld.
New EU Regulations On Lights Threaten £180 Million Cost For UK Theatres
Theatres across the UK face unexpected costs in excess of £180 million under “devastating” EU proposals to ban the vast majority of stage lighting by 2020. Costs in London alone are expected to reach £35 million as venues are forced to replace most of their lighting equipment, with experts warning that venues could go dark as a result.
What Kendrick Lamar’s Win Means For Hip Hop
“Lamar’s historic win figures in the grander, affected consecration of blackness within élite spaces—exemplified, I think, by the “thousand flowers of expectation” blooming in Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Barack Obama. It was Obama, with his caucuses of rappers in the White House, who accelerated the conclusion that hip-hop had earned a prestige as a great American art. In its long and perplexing lurch toward acclaim, did hip-hop sacrifice its edge? Lamar is a fascinating and brilliant non-answer.”
Kendrick Lamar Did The Pulitzer A Favor By Winning
The music Pulitzer was an obscure bauble coveted only by the people who cared about it, of which there were not many. Forget the big reporting and magazine awards; even the poetry Pulitzer mattered more than music. Grammys are the awards that count most in music, and given that Kendrick is already loaded with golden gramophones — though the Album of the Year continues, unconscionably, to elude him — the Pulitzer is just a feather in his Dodgers fitted cap.
So… Blame Humanities For Today’s Bad Politics?
“The midcentury ideal — of literature as an aesthetically and philosophically complex activity, and of criticism as its engaged and admiring decoding — is gone. In its place stands the idea that our capacity to shape our protean selves is the capacity most worth exercising, the thing to be defended at all costs, and the good that a literary inclination best serves. Democratizing the canon did not have to mean abdicating authority over it, but this was how it played out.”
The Internet Has Grown Toxic, Say The Guys Who Built It
“To understand what went wrong — how the Silicon Valley dream of building a networked utopia turned into a globalized strip-mall casino overrun by pop-up ads and cyberbullies and Vladimir Putin — we spoke to more than a dozen architects of our digital present. If the tech industry likes to assume the trappings of a religion, complete with a quasi-messianic story of progress, the Church of Tech is now giving rise to a new sect of apostates, feverishly confessing their own sins. And the internet’s original sin, as these programmers and investors and CEOs make clear, was its business model.”
MoviePass Is Growing Crazy Fast. But Can It Survive?
Since MoviePass slashed its monthly subscription costs last August from $50 to $9.95, its user base has exploded from roughly 20,000 to more than 2 million. In the process, it’s become the fastest-growing paid-entertainment subscription service in history, signing people at a greater clip than Netflix or Spotify. All that disruption in the movie theater business has created enemies and fueled skeptics, but whether MoviePass survives or dies, it has undeniably shaken up an industry that hasn’t changed much since the silent era.