The company realized last November that, given the current funding climate, it would not be able to sustain itself beyond the coming year. State and private grant priorities were shifting, Avitabile said, and a few key donors were no longer in a position to give. Rather than go into debt, 20% Theatre will use its last season to celebrate accomplishments. – MPR
Blog
The Race To Collect The History We’re Living
There’s a lot going on right now. “Archivists, curators, and librarians nationwide are assembling the record of how the pandemic is impacting their communities in real time, collecting everything from makeshift masks to journal entries to protest signs. Their mandate is both urgent and sweeping.” – Wired
Stand-Up Comedians Aren’t Finding The Whole Situation Very Funny Right Now
Should stand-up comedians play drive-in gigs, participate in Zooming, try to start YouTube channels or wait, somehow, for live audiences to return? It’s a bit of a mess for them, and sitting down to tell stories on camera … well. “It’s not really stand up per se. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really good and people have recorded really funny stuff. [But] It’s not quite live comedy. It’s filling a gap until we can get back on stage.” – BBC
The Grim Silence Of The Present Makes For An Eerie Vacation
The NYT‘s classical music critic isn’t truly enjoying his time off because there hasn’t been very much time on. “The shutdowns have been devastating for American classical music, given its dependence on patronage — which has been eroding of late — and the lack of meaningful government support, which still props up institutions in Europe. It’s depressing to read all the social media posts by accomplished freelance artists who have been without work for months and can have a bleak view of the future.” – The New York Times
How Roman Holiday Took Audrey Hepburn And Catapulted Her Into The Stratosphere
Hepburn wasn’t well-known in the U.S. before William Wyler cast her against Gregory Peck in the bittersweet rom-com. But “her star rose so quickly after this movie. That is crazy. This movie comes out in the summer of ’53 and by September of that year, she’s on the cover of Time as this new discovery, she wins the Academy Award for this early in ’54. And three days after she picked up that Oscar, she picked up a Tony for a different role on Broadway. … So, you know, in a very short period of time, she really is launched into this kind of princesse stratosphere of stardom.” – Slate
State Universities Backed Themselves, With Legislative Help, Into Some Terrible Corners This Fall
As the pandemic exposes massive historical cracks in the U.S. along class and race lines, it also exposes what state universities have been dealing with for a few decades – and it’s causing serious crises. “How does one advertise an education, or the quality of a school’s faculty? Most students are, almost by definition, not in a position to assess a professor’s expertise. … What a school can advertise, through glossy pamphlets, professionally produced websites, and those iconic tours, are campus amenities: rock-climbing walls, state-of-the-art gyms, and ample dining options. University leadership, looking to compete for students, promises a fun student life, in place of an educational one.” And that’s not something one find on Zoom. – The Atlantic
The Ongoing Reckoning In The Publishing World
Publishing has rather a lot to do to catch up in the diversity, equity, and inclusion fronts. Lisa Lucas, the outgoing director of the National Book Foundation, who is Black, says, “What do you do with data that tells us we’re not diverse enough for the year 2020? We make the culture — we make books. If we are serving a whole country, then we need people within our publishing houses who reflect what our country looks like.” – GEN
Nina Popova, Dancer Who Fled Both Bolsheviks And Nazis, 97
Popova, who died of Covid-19, lived a dramatic early life and found stability, if not joy, on Broadway and TV before becoming a ballet teacher. – The New York Times
Can Reading Fight Racism?
The pandemic changed some things, and then came the murder of George Floyd – and the largest civil rights movement in U.S. history. “Anti-racist manuals have been cleaned out from virtual bookstore shelves and pushed to the top of bestseller lists. And often, these buyers don’t want to read alone. Enter the anti-racist book club.” – BuzzFeed
What Democracy Looked Like, In Ballot Form
Even before the colorful public ballots of the early United States, actually, “people used the viva voce system, rooted in ancient Greece, where voters announced their candidate to a clerk. In some US colonies, voters would use objects, like corn and beans, to vote yea or nay; and in other states, people would line up on opposite sides of a road to signal how they were voting.” – Hyperallergic