"We have a total commitment to live performance. That's what we do. We're not a film company," says the director of the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia. What's more, "we really wanted to maintain work for artists as much as possible, as well as our staff, … at a time when they really didn't have a lot of options." And...
Howard Sherman, author of a new book about the play: "It's a play that people think they know. People want to paint it as this old-fashioned love letter to the past. And that's not what it is at all." - NPR
Dear Gavin Newsom, this makes no sense at all. Signed, a lot of LACMA and other art-lovers in California. Weirdly: "LACMA can open its Resnick Pavilion gift shop but not the galleries within the same Resnick Pavilion — even though the two share a front door and a ventilation system. The same goes at the Huntington Library, Art Museum...
The cinema chain Malco has been doing this in six Southern states since November, and the South Korean chain CGV started it in January. With prices for a small group of players running around $100 for two hours, it's not close to making up for the lack of moviegoers, but it's at least a bit of income. And the...
Anthony Tommasini: " locks them into standard-issue, week-after-week programs loaded with the classics and sprinkled, at best, with unusual or new choices. … Why can't orchestras be nimble and respond to sudden inspiration, or current events? If the Pittsburgh Symphony has a hit with a premiere, why must audiences in other cities wait years to hear it?" - The...
Social distancing is easier outdoors and there's more air circulation, not to mention the fact that, as one director puts it, "Outdoor arts is more accessible because it's in democratic open spaces." So companies across the UK are getting ready to perform outside their buildings, many for the first time, as soon as weather and health regulations permit. -...
The Wallace Collection "is in internal consultation" about closing the library and archive that was left to the country in 1897. Is that even legal? Will anyone notice during the pandemic? (More than 10,000 people certainly have noticed.) - The Guardian (UK)
If Instagram is about selling your moves - and your clothing line, your toe shoe line, your skin care routine, etc. - then TikTok is about being yourself. Kind of. "Casual, confessional and playful, TikTok offers a release for ballet dancers, particularly students, who spend their days chasing impossible perfection. TikTok is a place to laugh about the impossibility,...
Are we really just pleasure-seeking audiences looking for that instant hit of media indulgence? As the effects of lockdown and zoom fatigue have exposed, society seems to be increasingly experiencing media fatigue. - The Conversation
"In rooms all over the internet, hospital dramas, first-responder shows, situation comedies and courtroom procedurals were having similar debates. To ignore the events of the spring and summer — the pandemic, America's belated racial reckoning — meant placing prime-time series outside (well, even more outside) observable reality. But to include them meant potentially exhausting already exhausted viewers and...
The short answer is that it couldn't work the way it did in the 1930s: the legal and theatrical landscape then was too different. (For a start, there was no such thing as not-for-profit theatre.) But there are certainly possibilities; here are a few of them. - American Theatre
Says classical music editor Zachary Woolfe (who came up with the idea in the shower), "It has doubled our audience for classical music. It's gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it." - The New York Times
"Over the course of the coming week, it will hold screenings in two urban venues for just one festival attendee. And it has also sent a single viewer to a tiny, barren island in the North Atlantic to watch the 70 films in competition — alone." - The New York Times
Of course, this feeling (and the lack of funding, and alarm about orchestras' survival) started long before the pandemic, and long before the assault on the Capitol Building. But: "The trials of the past year have brought forth many of the qualities we already admired about classical music: its resilience, resistance, persistence and endurance. But permanence? I’m not so sure...
The SETI Institute is ready to take music to Mars, or wherever. While it's a listening project, it's also now a beaming project. A founding astrophysicist and a musician "have devised the 'Earthling Project': a call to people everywhere to upload snippets of song that plans to meld into a collective human chorus. An initial composition will be...
