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Memory As A Product Of Theatre

“Theatre is ephemeral, we explain endlessly. Every time we raise five thousand dollars to put up a show in some under-lit black box, we find ourselves trying to justify the existence of a work of art that will vanish after one or sixteen performances. So we say that the product is the memory, not the show.” Howlround

The New U.S. Poet Laureate And Native American Memory

“[Joy] Harjo interrogates both one’s responsibility toward one’s culture and the fear of being buried under its weight. … This ‘trade language,’ as she later calls English, is weak, insufficient. It’s the language of the American story, and it comes freighted with all of that story’s history, atrocity, and false hope. How, she asks, can we escape its past?” – The New Yorker

A Linguist Makes The Case For The Use(fulness) Of The Word ‘Like’

Language acquisition professor Rebecca Woods assembled what linguists call a corpus (“a representative sample of language as used by certain speakers”) from a BBC show (the makeup competition Glow Up) that’s regularly complained about for its young participants’ constant use of like. Studying this corpus, she found that the word isn’t just filler: it’s actually governed by a sort of grammar and serves a real purpose. – The Conversation

A Young Breakdancer From Provincial Russia Dreams Of Olympic Gold

Sergey Chernyshev, 18, began learning breakdancing from his father, also named Sergey, who picked it up from VHS tapes that made it into newly de-Sovietized Russia in the 1990s. “In many ways, the story of the Chernyshevs … is the story of break dancing over the past three decades, with its unlikely journey from the streets of New York to every corner of the globe and to its surprising inclusion, pending a final vote in December, in the Olympics.” – The New York Times

Soprano Slams Critic Who Body-Shamed Her. Critic Makes Snotty Reply. Bad Idea.

Kathryn Lewek just finished a run as Eurydice in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld at the Salzburg Festival, one of her first performances since giving birth earlier this year. After a few German and Austrian critics, as she puts it, “[wrote about] postpartum mom-bod instead of reviewing the show,” Lewek took to Twitter to call them out (not by name). Manuel Brug of Die Welt (who had described Lewek and her colleagues as “fat women in tight corsets spreading their legs”) responded to Lewek’s complaint by writing, “If she is so sensitive why is she showing herself the whole time in this corset?” And the just wrath of the Twitterverse rained down upon him. – BBC

Why Are There So Few Women Running Classical Music Organizations, And What’s Happening To Change That

“In general, [new Seattle Opera general director Christina Schippelmann] and others say, the absence of women in top positions results more from systemic factors than intentional discrimination. Rising to the highest levels in the arts means pushing through a series of lower-status, lower-paid jobs, often bouncing all over the planet. Arts managers work long hours but may not earn enough to afford a nanny or to have the other parent stay at home.” – The Seattle Times

When The Meanings Of Words And Ideas Are Up For Grabs This Is What Happens

“In the decades since the 1980s, and after the victory of capitalism over communism in the cold war, we have lived, Chantal Mouffe told me, within a sense of the “normal” to which there has seemed no alternative. Words and concepts that had been so important for those struggling for freedom from authoritarian rule in the twentieth century Mouffe now saw as having been co-opted by purely economic interests: “choice,” for example, had become a way to justify relinquishing public control of schools and hospitals; “liberty” had migrated in meaning to bolster the selling-off of state assets.” – New York Review of Books