Alla Kovgan’s new film Cunningham not only shoots its dancers in three dimensions, but collages historic, two-dimensional black-and-white images in smaller sizes on the screen, often overlaid with print. This practice allows us to choose (or stumble upon) those visions most meaningful to us, or to accept multiplicity and not worry about what we didn’t see. – Deborah Jowitt
Blog
Furtwängler in Wartime
Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have auditioned Wilhelm Furtwängler’s wartime broadcasts with the Berlin Philharmonic. They should. – Joseph Horowitz
She was just a Miller’s daughter: ENO revives a middle-period Verdi
The English National Opera is having a tough old time, but the company is still capable of both daring and successful ventures, such as the new Luisa Miller, a Verdi rarity last staged in London in 1858. – Paul Levy
Neuroscientists Study Blind Pianist’s Brain And Discover How It Rewired Itself
“Pretty remarkable. His entire brain is stimulated by music. His visual cortex is activated throughout. It seems like his brain is taking that part of the tissue that’s not being stimulated by sight and using it or maybe helping him to perceive music with it. It’s sort of borrowing that part of the brain and rewiring it to help him hear music.” – People
When Filmmakers Make Films In Languages They Don’t Speak Well
“It is a truth universally acknowledged in world cinema that a celebrated auteur, making their first film outside their native tongue, must be preparing a dud.” But is it actually true? Well, there are a few success stories such as Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth and Alps in Greek, then The Lobster and Oscar-winner The Favourite in English), but only a few. – The Guardian
New Right Wing Director Of Warsaw’s Contemporary Art Center Cancels Shows, Cuts Funding
The Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art is now seen by many in Poland’s contemporary art community as a new front in the country’s culture wars, as the ruling Law and Justice party attempts to exert greater control over state-sponsored institutions and promote artists aligned with its patriotic, pro-family views. – The Art Newspaper
Which Language Is Most Difficult To Lipread?
“This last question, though seemingly simple, resists every attempt to answer it. Every theory runs into brick walls of evidence, the research is limited, and even the basic understanding of what lipreading is, how effective it is, and how it works is laden with conflicting points of view.” – Atlas Obscura
Steve Bannon Wants To Set Up National Bootcamp In Ancient Italian Monastery. The Ministry Of Culture Is Trying To Block Him
The Dignitatis Humanae Institute (DHI), a Catholic lobby group run by the British conservative Benjamin Harnwell, was granted a 19-year lease on the building by the ministry of culture two years ago as part of an initiative to involve the private sector in the management of abandoned or dilapidated cultural sites in Italy. But after Bannon and Harnwell announced plans to use the medieval monastery to establish an Academy for the Judeo-Christian West to teach budding nationalists subjects such as politics, theology, philosophy and history, the culture ministry changed its mind. – The Art Newspaper
Even Great Journalism Isn’t Enough To Fully Understand #MeToo. We Need Fiction.
“It’s a truism to say our society doesn’t do well when faced with competing stories about what happened; that’s what ‘he said/she said’ has become a shorthand for. … To overcome that reflex, … we need to practice on something with lower stakes than the literal lives of accusers and accused. We need Me Too fiction and metatexts that help us understand this problem outside of a news cycle. And recently, we’ve been getting them.” – Slate
Turns Out It’s Not So Tough To Go From Tragedy To Comedy
Jane Alexander, the 80-year-old actress who has starred in Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Chekhov, and, not incidentally, who was head of the NEA during the (first) culture wars, is onstage again, “eliciting raucous laughter” this time. – The New York Times