“In the play, a puppet starts to offer a cigarette to a friend but his cough gets the better of him, which makes his voice a bit funny-sounding – eliciting peals of laughter from a roomful of a hundred schoolchildren.” Didem Tali reports on puppeteers who have adapted the traditional Burmese puppet theater yoke thay to improve public health in modern Myammar.
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Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.22.18
Paul Taylor and His Cohort
Paul Taylor American Modern Dance at Lincoln Center through March 25th.
I think I finally got it straight: Paul Taylor American Modern Dance is … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2018-03-22
Catching Up (Well … Giving It A Good Try)
The John Coltrane project described in this post is completed and awaiting release by Concord Jazz. However,… in the next few posts we’ll call your attention to recent listening that may interest you. Some of the albums have been out a while. Others are quite new. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-03-22
Report: Small Galleries Struggle To Stay Open
Why are galleries that incubate emerging talent finding it so difficult to survive? Is it simply the pressure of rising rents in expensive cities like London and New York? Or is there a wider problem? “The collectors aren’t going to galleries any more, they’re going to art fairs,” said John Martin, a dealer in contemporary art who has a gallery in the Mayfair district of London. “They’re less intimidating, more social, more convenient, and they’re open in the evenings and at the weekend,” he added. “People are time-poor.”
Royal Philharmonic Manager: Let’s Just Call Classical Music Orchestral Music
“Gone are the days of classical repertoire standing alone and just being enough,” James Williams said. “This approach would cater for less than half the new audience that wants to learn more about the genre. Classical music for a modern British orchestra has a new name – it’s simply called orchestral music.”
A New Generation Of Self-Help Book Recommendation Columns
A field of advice columns that lob texts at people’s troubles has flowered recently, from the Times’ “Match Book” to Lit Hub’s “Dear Book Therapist” to the Paris Review Daily’s “Poetry Rx.” The series run the gamut from straightforward recommendation engines (ask for a thriller, receive a thriller) to columns that see books not as frigates or loaded gunsbut as medicine, selected from the canon’s well-lit pharmacy by a critic in a smock.
Why Fewer Galleries Are Opening Than Were Ten Years Ago
A new report from UBS and Art Basel, The Art Market | 2018, found that the rate of galleries opening has fallen dramatically over the past decade. In 2017, just 0.9 galleries opened for every one that shuttered, down from five openings to every closure 10 years prior, a sign the art market could be losing its dynamism as new entrants face increasingly high barriers to entry.
How Andrew Lloyd Webber Became Mr Musical
The first thing to say is that Lloyd Webber is a total theatre animal. He has a nose for what will work on a stage, whether it be an odd collection of TS Eliot poems (Cats), a mad 19th-century melodrama (The Phantom of the Opera) or the inspirational anarchy of a scruffy teacher (School of Rock). Sometimes, as with the superfluous Stephen Ward (about the man at the centre of the Profumo scandal), the nose seems badly blocked. But reading Lloyd Webber’s recently published mammoth memoir, Unmasked, you realise where this instinct comes from.
What Will Our Society Look Like When Artificial Intelligence Is Everywhere?
“Will robots become self-aware? Will they have rights? Will they be in charge?” Stephan Talty offers five potential scenarios from a future when AI surrounds us.
What Cities Designed By Women Might Look Like
What will cities be like when there are more women designing them? We are finally starting to find out. Women are scarce in the profession’s upper echelons, but they make up more than 40 percent of architecture-school graduates.
Back At The Very Beginning, Every Recording Of Music Had To Be Made From Scratch
“It is difficult to envisage a world in which every recording was practically unique: popular recordings are defined by their reproducibility.” Yet, in the early days of Edison’s phonograph and Eldridge Johnson’s gramophone, had become good enough to be sold for home entertainment, “no reliable and commercially viable method for duplicating recordings was developed. For about ten years, most recordings released commercially were one-off items.” Music historian Eva Moreda Rodríguez recounts some of the ingenious (and not) ways that record companies handled that limitation.