Helen Shaw: “To try to understand the complexity of a situation that was changing minute by minute — last Thursday, we still had a full theater calendar for April, for instance — I talked to members of one downtown company: Elevator Repair Service,” best known for Gatz, its eight-hour, word-for-word re-enactment of The Great Gatsby. – Vulture
What Does A Delayed Cannes Mean For World Cinema?
Er, maybe move online this year, film festivals? “Cannes organizers are looking at the possibility of postponing the event by about six weeks, until late June, in the optimistic hope that the contagion will have abated and that cinephiles will once again feel comfortable taking long flights and sitting in crowded theaters elbow to elbow with coughing strangers. Yes, that’s one of the many signatures of Cannes, infinitely less glamorous than the red-carpet premieres and black-tie dress code: Nearly every screening is accompanied by a surround-sound cacophony of wheezes and sniffles.” – Variety
The Art Of Culturally Relevant Crosswords
Crossword editors are strange arbiters of cultural relevance. Read tweets by Awkwafina or Olivia Wilde on learning that they’ve been immortalized in the black-and-white grid—it’s the bookish version of handprints on a slab outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. But any pub-trivia attendee—exposed to categories on craft beer or things that smell like sourdough or whatever the emcee is into—will tell you that personnel is policy. – The Atlantic
Thieves Steal Bronze Gates To Seattle Arboretum In The Middle Of The Night
They were made by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The theft was discovered Thursday morning when gardeners arrived for work and discovered the gates missing and bolt cutters on the ground, said Ray Larson, curator of living collections at the arboretum. Thieves also stole downspouts from the visitor’s center. Known as the Memorial Gates, the artwork was commissioned in 1971 by the University of Washington and the Arboretum Foundation as a memorial to all who have loved and cared for the arboretum. Considered a community treasure, the gates are an irreplaceable signature of the park. – Seattle Times
What Might The Arts Look Like After Corona?
Consider all the ways arts and cultural groups earn money: from ticket sales and admission fees; participation in educational programs; renting spaces for galas and gatherings; investments and endowments; and the largesse of public and private giving. Every one of those streams is now potentially shut off. – Washington Post
Alvin Ailey Dancers Do Part Of ‘Revelations’ On Instagram, Each From Their Own Home
“The idea came from the dancer Miranda Quinn: The opening sequence of The Brady Bunch popped into her head. ‘How they’re all in little squares,’ she said. ‘That made me think of how we’re all being quarantined and are supposed to stay separate, but this was a way for all of us to still be dancing together and creating together even though we’re apart.'” – The New York Times
Opportunity: Unplug, Pick Some Music And REALLY Listen
There was a time when listeners treated the mere existence of recorded sound as a miracle. A wonder, a kind of time travel. Priests warned of early wax cylinders being tools of the devil. Vintage images from the space age show couples seated around their high-fidelity systems as if being warmed by a fireplace. – Los Angeles Times
Hot Young Playwrights Are Now Teaching Workshops Online
Young Jean Lee, Lauren Gunderson, and Jaclyn Backhaus are among those who have begun leading playwriting lessons and seminars on the web since coronavirus sent almost everyone home. Gunderson’s first session had 900 people watching live; by the next night, 23,000 had watched. – Los Angeles Times
Washington Post’s New Classical Critic: What A Week To Start A Job!
Michael Brodeur: “The plan was to spend my first week … seeing concerts and shaking hands. (Just typing that makes me want to sanitize.) The goal was to go big,” with five performances in four days. “Then came the coronavirus, and the sudden lack of things for a critic to critique seemed the least of our problems.” – The Washington Post
Hope! As Movie Houses Everywhere Else Close, China Begins Moving Toward Reopening Them
A very few cinemas in far-flung cities are back in business already (though few customers are coming just yet), and the major cities are making plans. The big problem: nothing exciting to show, since the epidemic scuttled the Chinese New Year release of the new blockbusters. The solution: studios will re-release recent hits. – The Hollywood Reporter
Chicago Lyric’s Orchestra Gives Up Part Of Salary So Freelancers For Cancelled ‘Ring’ Can Be Paid
“The orchestra musicians voted [unanimously] to take a ’10 percent cut of our weekly salary for the next seven weeks that had been canceled,’ said [violist Amy] Hess. ‘Then the dollar amount of everyone’s cut will be distributed to the extra and stage band of musicians, to help make up for the work they wouldn’t have been paid for.'” – Chicago Tribune
Hay Literature Festival Cancelled, With Future In Doubt
“Organisers will struggle to recoup the large infrastructure costs they have already committed to, as 70% of the festival’s income comes from ticket and book sales on site. In a statement on Thursday, the festival said the not-for-profit event was now in ‘immediate financial jeopardy’ and would need to raise funds in 10 days to ‘plot a sustainable route forward’.” – The Guardian
Metropolitan Opera Cancels Rest Of Season And Furloughs All Musicians And Stagehands
The company will pay its chorus members, orchestral musicians, and unionized backstage staff through the end of March but maintain their health insurance. Upper-level administration employees will take pay cuts ranging from 10 to 50 percent, and general manager Peter Gelb is forgoing his salary entirely. – The New York Times
Why It Matters So Much That Cannes Was Postponed And Not Called Off
“To take Cannes out of the equation for even one year would have massive reverberations throughout the world of international cinema. It is, simply put, the most important film event of the year, from which distributors flesh out their art-film slates, festivals take their programming cues and countries make their Oscar selections. Films that launch in Cannes are virtually assured a healthy run at smaller fests around the globe for a year or more.” – Variety
Cannes Film Festival Postponed But Not Cancelled
“The festival made the news public on Thursday, saying that ‘several options are [being] considered in order to preserve its running’ – its preferred one being a shift of the festival to the end of June.” – The Guardian
Music Moves To Streaming Live – But First To Figure Out What Works
On an individual level, innumerable artists and bands have rearranged tours or scrapped them altogether. With streaming still offering low royalty rates for artists, most musicians rely on essential revenue from touring. So can a livestreamed show be a feasible replacement for the real thing? – The Guardian
Online Gaming Platforms Fail To Keep Up With Surge Of Players
Nintendo Online was unavailable for almost nine hours on Tuesday, preventing users from playing games such as Mario Kart 8 online or buying new titles on the console’s online shop. Steam, a popular platform for PC games, reported its all-time highest number of concurrent users over the weekend, with more than 20 million people logged in at the same time, and almost a third of those were actively playing a game. – The Guardian
Be The Curator. New Online Tool Lets You Create Your Own Show
The charity Art UK, which lists every publicly owned oil painting on its online database and is in the process of adding every sculpture, has announced details of a new curation tool. It will allow members of the public to curate their own online shows, choosing from more than 200,000 oil paintings and 16,000 sculptures in UK galleries from the Shetlands to Scilly. – The Guardian
What It’s Like Performing For An Empty Hall
“When you’re on stage and projecting to an audience they are relating in various ways to what you are doing on stage. When I perform I’m always trying to invite them to respond in any way they can. When you’re doing it just for your musicians, you have a different approach, delving into the intricacies so much deeper…you’re not trying to project something when you’re so intimate. I actually felt very intimate there.” – Van
120,000 Film Industry Workers Laid Off
The film and TV industry worldwide has experienced a near-total cessation of activity, with thousands of largely freelance crew laid off at short notice with little or no financial compensation. Scores of productions, ranging from studio shoots such as the Avatar sequels and Fantastic Beasts 3 to independent films such as Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, have been halted. – The Guardian