Blog

Choreography For Business: Teaching The Corporate World Dance

After Rachel Cossar retired from Boston Ballet, she started a class called Choreography in the Kitchen to teach restaurant workers healthy ways to lift, bend and reach with poise. Then she was asked to create a similar program for the fundraising department at Harvard. Both classes became popular, with long waiting lists, and Cossar has now turned Choreography For Business into a thriving enterprise. – Dance Magazine

How Culture Was Used As A Weapon During The Cold War

Not only was literature politicised: sometimes it seems that any cultural initiative had the secret services of the US or the USSR behind it. We find the Soviet Union was backing the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, whose sponsors included Leonard Bernstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. The CIA, set up in 1947, had an equivalent faith in the potency of literary debates and publications. – The Guardian

How International Multi-Company Ballet Auditions Work

“For directors, they provide a way to evaluate dancers they might not otherwise see. For dancers, they expedite the cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming auditions process. But multi-company auditions don’t follow one recipe. As these three examples prove, they’re varied in their goals, demographics and pricing, so it helps to know what each offers.” – Pointe Magazine

French Protest Proliferation Of Street Advertising Everywhere

High tech video billboards are multiplying in city spaces across the world, woven into the fabric of everyday life, from ribbon videos down escalators on the London underground, to French metro corridors, New York taxis, bus-shelters, newspaper kiosks, and – increasingly – broadcast from shop windows onto the street. They are becoming more sophisticated and interactive, with the potential to collect data from passersby; increasingly bright and inescapable – impossible to click off or block like you can online. But in France, there is fresh debate on how urban planners and local councils should limit them in the public space for the sake of our overloaded eyes and brains. – The Guardian

It’s Time To Stop Limiting The Caldecott And Newbery Medals To Americans

“When the American Library Association introduced the Caldecott in 1938, the United States was an industrial giant but still a cultural stepchild of Europe. … So librarians wanted to jump-start American creativity by limiting Caldecott eligibility to American citizens and permanent residents just as they had done for their literature award, the Newbery, over a decade before.” Needless to say, the situation has changed. – The New York Times Book Review

A 19th-Century Opera That Flipped The Script On The Passive-Princess-Versus-Wicked-Queen Narrative

And that opera, Le Dernier Sorcier (The Last Sorcerer), was composed by a woman — Pauline Viardot, remembered mostly for being one of the century’s great mezzos. Amy Lorette Damron Kyle, a musicologist at the Sorbonne and a singer herself, compares Viardot’s Sorcier to one of opera’s classic passive princess/wicked queen stories, Mozart’s The Magic Flute. – The Conversation