“Pointe spoke with these two young dancers” — Hortense Millet-Maurin and Vincent Vivet, both 15 — “to see what it’s like studying inside the world’s oldest ballet academy.” – Pointe Magazine
Tag: 11.21.19
Can Music Be A-Cultural?
“A lucid example of the Western music aesthetic versus an indigenous one would be to consider the concert hall experience and that of a powwow. In the concert hall, the quality of the sound becomes the preeminent value, conceptually superseding the players and the audience. In a concert hall, the audience and orchestra are kept in separate spaces, and the flow of activity is directed from the orchestra to the audience, which remains seated, silent, and motionless. The performers all wear black to hide any individuality, and concerts are typically appraised on the “ugliness” or “beauty” of their collective sound.” – NewMusicBox
Who Actually Wrote, Or Wrote Down, The Epic Of Gilgamesh?
“The poem we call Gilgamesh is based on copies of a work assembled over a millennium after the earliest stories were written in Old Babylonian. … A specific scribe, editor, collator, poet is given credit for bringing it all together. He may also have been an exorcist, magician, diviner, priest or seer; or a combination of these not unrelated vocations. He was active between 1300 and 1000 BCE. … He goes by the name of Sin-leqi-unninni.” – Literary Hub
Every Society On Earth Has Music, Confirm Scientists, And It’s Used In ‘Strikingly Similar Ways’ Throughout The World
“To arrive at this conclusion, researchers spent five years painstakingly creating a database that features music created by people across the globe. They dubbed it the Natural History of Song.” – Newsweek
Making Sculpture Out Of An Ubiquitous Material – Bullets
Freddy Tsimba uses all kinds of materials to respond in sculpture to his hometown of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. “In 2014 he took a house he had built from 999 machetes to one of Kinshasa’s busiest markets. He stood silently beside it and listened as people argued about what it meant. ‘The reaction was intense,’ he says. ‘People here are still traumatised by the Kulunas,’ a group of machete-wielding youths who rob and kill. Eventually, Mr Tsimba told the crowd he wanted to show that the machete was not just an instrument of death. It was invented for farmers to cut weeds and crops. It could become whatever you made of it—even a house.” – The Economist
Does Pay-What-You-Can Pricing Work?
Our analysis is revealing. It shows that typically, where PWYC tickets and performances are publicly available, they are taken up disproportionately by existing customers. One producing theatre found that while 48% of its regular tickets were purchased by new customers, only 26% of PWYC tickets were purchased by new customers. – Arts Professional
Would A Wealth Tax Would Hurt Non-Profits?
Tyler Cowen: “The effects of pushing wealth out of the for-profit sector would be far-ranging. Wealthy donors might be more likely to pressure nonprofits for luxury consumption experiences, for example.” – Bloomberg
There’s Now An Artist-In-Residence At The Philadelphia DA’s Office
“It makes perfect sense to DA Larry Krasner, who sees the arts as central to the criminal justice reform movement … ‘the connection between the reforms we’re trying to make in Philadelphia and the people in Philly who are part of that movement are best made in some ways through the arts,'” he said. The first artist in the position is James Hough, who spent years painting parts of murals for Mural Arts Philadelphia while in prison and is now finally seeing his finished work. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Leads New MFA Program For Artist-Activists
Patrisse Cullors, a performance artist who recently completed a master’s degree at USC with a concentration on performance and activism, designed the new two-year online program, called Social and Environmental Arts Practice, with and for Prescott College in Arizona. – Los Angeles Times
America’s Hottest Opera Director Heads To Long Beach (For A While)
“Yuval Sharon will serve as Long Beach Opera’s interim artistic director and dream up the 2021 season.” He would seem to be a good fit for a small company known for unusual work. “Any other opera company in America would be completely blindsided by the projects that I’m proposing,” he says, “Every other opera company would turn ghost white at the thought of this kind of season. I think it’ll be great.” – Los Angeles Times