Jazz doesn’t want to stay home and chill, so members of the Jazz Journalists Association have launched JazzOnLockdown: Hear It Here, a series of curated v-logs featuring performance videos of musicians whose gigs have been postponed or cancelled due to coronavirus concerns. – Howard Mandel
Blog
We’ll be together again
I doubt it will surprise any of you to learn that I’d been growing increasingly worried about the inability of Mrs. T’s doctors to rouse her from the medically induced coma into which she was placed after her double-lung transplant surgery two weeks ago. – Terry Teachout
Denver Arts Funder Offers Money To Its Grantees To Help With COVID Effects
Bonfils-Stanton Foundation: “These Denver-based organizations offer ongoing public arts & culture programming and are at risk for earned revenue loss due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. The funding amount is based on 10% of their most recent grant, with a $6,000 cap. The total grant commitment is approximately $125,000. These grants will not require any sort of application or final report. The funding has already been released. Much has been written about how funders are taking this opportunity to shift their existing funding towards unrestricted support.” – Bonfils-Stanton Foundation
The Vexed Relationship Between Theatre And Disease
Alexis Soloski, who wrote a dissertation on the subject, reminds us that playwrights from Sophocles through Shaw to Kushner and Kramer have grappled with the subject. “It’s only a matter of time before the first COVID-19 plays emerge, and we can … be nudged toward compassion for the afflicted, be constituted as a community of support. Because that’s what theater can do: It can ask us to think and feel beyond the confines of our own experience and find fellow-feeling, immediately and intimately, with those around us.” – The New York Times
Universal Says It Will Make Its Current-Release Movies Available By Streaming
The company will also make movies that are currently in theatrical release available on-demand beginning as early as Friday, starting with the Elisabeth Moss horror film “The Invisible Man,” the satirical thriller “The Hunt” and Focus Features’ period comedy-drama “Emma.” – Los Angeles Times
‘It Felt Like A Parallel Universe’: Watching The Philadelphia Orchestra Stream Beethoven From An Empty Hall
“The few people present in the hall … were asked not to applaud because such meager clapping would sound pallid to listeners tuning in from elsewhere. But for those who were there, it was confounding to have the orchestra standing to receive phantom applause that wasn’t there,” reports David Patrick Stearns. “The atmosphere, though, was hardly grave.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Arts Organizations Take To Streaming. But Is There A Way Of Supporting It?
“We’re going make sure we protect our people, but we need to keep the arts and the music going. That’s what we’re going to do. That’s why we’re here.” – The Guardian
At A Ballet Company’s Last Dance Before The COVID Shutdown
Moira Macdonald was at Pacific Northwest Ballet’s final (in too many senses) dress rehearsal for a program the public won’t get to attend. “There was no one in the seat in front of me, no one next to me, no one across the aisle — just performance, filling up the empty spaces. You don’t usually think of McCaw Hall as a room, but it is; this was like a large version of a living-room entertainment. Were those people onstage, dancing with the fierce passion that comes when you only get one shot at something, performing only for me? It was easy to think so.” – The Seattle Times
The BioPhysicist Who Crunched The Virus Numbers And Made Some Accurate Predictions
Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist who teaches structural biology at Stanford University and spends much of his time in Tel Aviv, unexpectedly became a household name in China, offering the public reassurance during the peak of the country’s coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. Levitt did not discover a treatment or a cure, just did what he does best: crunched the numbers. The statistics led him to the conclusion that, contrary to the grim forecasts being branded about, the spread of the virus will come to a halt. – CTech
Closed By The Virus, The Art Business Is Moving Itself Online
“In 2017, having realized how much business the gallery did through online previews before art fairs, the dealer David Zwirner decided to develop virtual viewing rooms. Now, as art fairs are canceled, museums close and auction houses consider whether to call off their spring sales in response to the coronavirus, Mr. Zwirner seems prescient.” – The New York Times