“We have habituated our gaze toward a narrow set of proportions based on the kind of dance we watch and the expectations we bring to our viewing. Our eyes have grown lazy. We simply don’t see enough professional dance with a variety of bodies on stage.”
Tag: 03.01.11
Sight Gets Repurposed in Brains of the Blind
“In the brains of people blind from birth, structures used in sight are still put to work – but for a very different purpose. Rather than processing visual information, they appear to handle language. Linguistic processing is a task utterly unrelated to sight, yet the visual cortex performs it well.”
The Play That Enthralled the Pentagon
Director Nicolas Kent tells the story of how his company for The Great Game – a day-long, 12-play examination of foreign wars in Afghanistan – gave command performances for more than 1,200 Pentagon staffers, military officers and diplomats.
The Passion of D.H. Lawrence: Writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover While Ravaged by TB
“In the three years he worked on the book he suffered ghastly pulmonary hemorrhages … A friend who served as his masseur was terrified by ‘how emaciated and martyrized was his body’ near the end, like ‘one of the haggard, medieval, carved figures of the crucified Jesus’.”
China’s National History Museum Reopens, With Some Bits of History Missing
The modern history wing of the National Museum in Beijing has reopened after a three-year renovation, “but exhibits in the sprawling facility skip over some of the country’s most momentous – and sensitive – events.” (These include not just the Tienanmen Square uprising, but also Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.)
Advice to Writers: Skip the Scenery
Laura Miller on the danger: “no sooner does [a writer’s] narrative work up a little momentum or present a masterful scene than it hits a patch of long, dozy paragraphs filled with way too much detail about the scenery.”
Bolshoi Restoration Now ’90 Percent Complete’
The end is in sight for the long-delayed, notoriously expensive renovation of Moscow’s legendary ballet/opera house, which was said to be near collapse when it closed in 2005. The auditorium is being restored to its 19th-century condition, while modernized facilities include a dual revolving stage and an enlarged, movable orchestra pit.
Re-Gendered On a Clear Day You Can See Forever Headed to Broadway
The heroine of the 1965 original musical is “Daisy Gamble, who discovers with the help of [a] psychiatrist … that she was, in a past life, Melinda Wells, a woman who lived in 18th-century Britain.” The new version, starring Harry Connick Jr. and opening this fall, turns Daisy Gamble into David Gamble and Melinda Wells into a 1940s jazz singer.
Florida Grand Opera Names Music Director
“The company has hired Ramon Tebar as its new music director, filling a position that has been left vacant since Stewart Robertson departed in 2009. The Spanish conductor, 32, received critical accolades for his work in last season’s Lucia di Lammermoor and the Turandot that opened this season.”
Conservators Could Restore One of Destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas
“Researchers in Germany said today they believe it may be possible to reconstruct the smaller of the two 1,500-year-old Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban before the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.”