The DriveINSIDE theatre, which is approved for operating even under Britain’s Tier 3 pandemic restrictions, will have a four-week run in Manchester in March before touring the rest of the UK. Cars will be directed to a designated parking spot, the equivalent of an assigned seat, and passenger-viewers will be able to sit outside on the driver’s side. – Manchester Evening News
Blog
Finding Love (And Community) In Gaming
For many of us, virtual worlds are fertile ground for growing new friendships and romance. In online role-playing platforms, gamers may feel more confident in their social interactions than in real life because they can be seen exactly as they want to be seen, says Anthony Bean, a clinical psychologist in Fort Worth, Texas, and founder of Geek Therapeutics. – Wired
How Hollywood Studios Are Reinventing (Again) For The Streaming Age
“Amid the backdrop of the pandemic and the ongoing, years-long digestion of several mega-mergers, from Disney-Fox to ViacomCBS to AT&T’s WarnerMedia, pretty much every legacy entertainment house in town is in the process of maneuvering a massive ship-turning effort to better point their armadas in the direction of streaming.” – Variety
Secret To A Great Book? Mood
Horror is a mood, one of the most under-appreciated, under-discussed literary devices available to writers. And because horror is a mood, it’s subjective and transcends the limits of specific tropes or themes within a book—horror can be part and parcel of fantasy novels, mysteries or thrillers, literary fiction, and historical fiction. – Book Riot
How UK Theatres Are Changing During COVID
Theatres that normally function as places of gathering, storytelling and entertainment have found themselves playing a very different role in the age of coronavirus. – The Stage
The Arts’ COVID Losses By The Latest Numbers
How have things changed since the pandemic? A recent Brookings Institution report shows America’s arts and creative industries lost $150 billion in sales and 2.7 million jobs through July. The “fine and performing arts” alone (commercial and nonprofit) incurred losses of $42.5 billion and a whopping 50% of its workforce (-1.4 million jobs). – Americans for the Arts
Study: Hunger And Loneliness Activate Same Part Of The Brain
“[This study] provides empirical support for the idea that loneliness acts as a signal—just like hunger—that signals to an individual that something is lacking and that it needs to take action to repair that.” – Smithsonian
How COVID Turned One Of The Year’s Hottest Plays Into A Site-Specific Work
After the pandemic blew up the plans of every American stage company for this year, Blanka Zizka, director of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, got the idea to create a COVID bubble for cast and crew at a house in the Poconos, where they’d do a site-specific production for later viewing online. And one of the year’s most awarded scripts, Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, seemed like the perfect choice. Writer Jane M. Von Bergen reports on how Zizka and her colleagues made it happen, complete with actual screaming foxes. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Camilla Wicks: Towering talent found, lost, and found again
The clear, slipped voice at the other end of the phone was neither astonished nor impressed to learn that her recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto was a collector’s item whose original LP was then selling for $125. “It’s not that good,” she said, sounding mildly exasperated. Oh, but it is. – David Patrick Stearns
Spotify’s Most Streamed Tracks Of 2020
Bad Bunny was the biggest artist globally, amassing 8.3bn streams. The Puerto Rican star’s second album YHLQMDLG notched up 3.3 billion streams, followed by The Weeknd’s After Hours and Post Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding. – BBC