"Rather than offering an escapist vision of a world unravaged by pandemic, I've taken reassurance from the way these shows offer an escapist vision of pandemic. They present quarantine conditions as a utopia in which creative laborers, isolated in a single space for an extended period of time, yield art validated through external adjudication. They have 'flourished,' instead of...
The facts just don't bear it out. "It’s questionable that there ever really was a ‘movement’ other than in the mind of 19th- and early 20th-century historians." Perhaps one conclusion is that classifications like "the Renaissance" are not great mechanisms for understanding the world of ideas, or the historical world either. - Aeon
With capacity restrictions, social distancing rules, other safety measures, and eager-but-nervous audiences and performers, venues from mighty Caroline's to tiny Stand Up NY have some difficult tricks to pull off. There are some good jokes, though. (Brian Scott McFadden: "I spoke with my agent and I can't get COVID because I have a deal with Ebola.") - Gothamist
Ehlert created 38 books for young children as an author and illustrator. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which she illustrated with her signature collages, has sold more than 12 million copies since its publication. She was a Caldecott winner for the 1997 board book Color Zoo. "Her workday, she said, was a never-ending series of paper cuts." - The New...
Five feet tall and born with a curved spine, he was a young journalist interviewing Pina Bausch when she asked him to work with her; after a decade, he began making pieces of his own. His solo work, whether for himself or colleagues, tended toward the political; his dances for larger ensembles mixed contemporary ballet with butoh and set...
The British choreographer, aged 35, died in April, one day after the Royal Danish Ballet announced it was cancelling its staging of his Frankenstein over #MeToo allegations against him; similar accusations led to his firing from London's Royal Ballet in 2020. The widespread assumption was that Scarlett committed suicide after the release of the news from Copenhagen; in fact,...
Here's the story of a set of seven comic strips, called "the Hagemeyer strips" after their main character, set in an office, with protagonists who seem an awful lot like grownup versions of Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt. (Poor Charlie Brown — the Lucy character is his boss.) - The Washington Post
"A huge burial mound holding the corpses of at least 30 warriors in Syria could be the oldest war memorial ever discovered, dating back at least 4,300 years at the now submerged site of Tell Banat, said a team of archaeologists. The memorial is also the first example of a particular type of monument described in ancient inscriptions from...
As a crowd marched in Bogotá against poverty and police violence, three twenty-something queer folks whose dance video had gone viral a couple of weeks earlier were urged by their fellow demonstrators to go right up to the riot police on the stairs at Plaza BolÃvar and work it. And they did. - The New York Times
"Hundreds of arts organisations that received grants in the Culture Recovery Fund's second round are still waiting for money to be paid out, causing damaging cashflow problems and delaying projects, … despite the second round of CRF being specifically designed to support companies during April to June." - The Stage
Or else it's something else. But it's no mere city. "Los Angeles fits the city-state frame well, certainly better than it does a lot of other possibilities—if we update the model a bit. In 2010, Forbes suggested that if the criteria for a place to be considered a city-state were modernized for the 21st century, certain global capitals might qualify thanks to...
The first, Mary E. Jones Parrish, was a relative newcomer to Tulsa when the events of May 31, 1921, went down. She was an educator, but "the massacre compelled her to become a journalist and author, writing down her own experiences and collecting the accounts of many others. Her book Events of the Tulsa Disaster, published in 1923, was the first...
The earliest decision-makers were not at all sure this was the direction to go. Ask then-newly installed interim director Shirley Serotsky at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca - proposing something "completely new, hugely ambitious, and hardly cost-neutral" to the board was a challenge. "It took some convincing ... But I did believe that it was the only way we...
Angelico specializes in trousers (or pants, in the US) roles. He says that one day, he finished a rehearsal at covent Garden and realized that he couldn't play the role of a woman offstage anymore. "The art of opera has always had an appreciation of gender fluidity – and it allowed Adrian to perform as a man onstage before...
