“British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey … are elevating grass into something quite beautiful. They have been creating large-scale canvases of living grass, by tinkering with the natural growth process of this little plant in order to create impressive, photographic-like images.” (includes video)
New York Congresswoman Proposes Student Loan Relief For Arts Workers
“Under the American Arts Revival Act,” introduced by Nydia Velázquez, “arts workers would qualify for $10,000 of student loan forgiveness. The program would be open to ‘cultural workers, museum professionals, artistic professionals and certain arts and humanities professors’ who work full time to provide services to seniors, children, or adolescents.”
Having No Home Stage Liberated The National Theatre Of Scotland
“For little more than a decade, [the company] has been a theatre ‘without walls’. If you want to see an NTS show, you have to find it first. The idea takes a little getting used to, but the absence of a building is fundamental to how the organisation operates. Far from being a limitation, it can be artistically liberating. This company is shape-shifting. It can be what it wants.”
The Unsung Creator Of Modern Musical Choreography: Bob Fosse
What gives the dancing in modern musicals such athleticism and power? A style that can be traced back to Fosse. “The roots of Fosse’s signature style were actually in burlesque. As a young teenager … he had a tap act that he performed in burlesque houses. He translated that style to the screen in ways that directly foreshadow modern musicals and music videos.”
‘Lack Of Professional Attitude And Practices’ Causing Serious ‘Talent Drain’ From British Theatre: Study
“A damning review of workforce practices in commercial and not-for-profit theatre has painted a picture of a sector being undermined by low pay, a damaging culture of overwork, poor treatment of freelance workers and a lack of long-term strategic thinking.”
The Strange Story Of The New American Writers Museum
“An Irish former trade association head, a German lawyer and a native-born business executive, all residents of Washington and not an author among them, decide to create a museum dedicated to American writers. In Chicago, where two of them have never lived. … The American Writers Museum lacks a resident curator. And a permanent collection of artifacts, the stuff that generally creates a museum.” For that matter, it lacks a permanent building. Karen Heller meets the three people who founded this museum and finds out what on earth they’re thinking.
Star Of Central Park ‘Julius Caesar’ Tells What It Was Like
Corey Stoll, who played Brutus: “It felt as if we were acting in two plays simultaneously – the one we had rehearsed and the one thrust upon us. The protesters never shut us down, but we had to fight each night to make sure they did not distort the story we were telling. At that moment, watching my castmates hold their performances together, it occurred to me that this is resistance. … In this new world where art is willfully misinterpreted to score points and to distract, simply doing the work of an artist has become a political act.”
Why Is Yo-Yo Ma Devoting So Much Time To Outreach In Chicago?
“I love the city. There’s a lot of depth, a lot of pride in the way the city operates, and the institutions here are fabulous. … I am particularly interested in this third of the country because I think that third has a deep soul, and the soul of the country in many ways stems from what happens here.”
Hans Breder, Who Created First-Ever Interdisciplinary Arts Program, Dead At 81
“[His] minimalist sculptures were starting to attract attention in New York when his friend Ulfert Wilke, the director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, recommended him for a faculty position at the university. Mr. Breder accepted, and began teaching an experimental drawing course in 1966. Friends threw up their hands, warning him that he was leaving the center of the artistic universe for a cultural desert. He blithely replied, ‘I will bring New York to Iowa.'”
Will Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Renovation Undercut The Complex’s ‘Brutalist Truth’?
Where the brutalist designs of the 1960s meant to give the complex an aura of “high art,” the ethos of 2017 means opening up, warming up, inviting people in, including many people who don’t have tickets and never will have tickets to events inside. But Alex Bozikovic asks, “What if, 50 years from now, every public building is a glass pavilion with a humming espresso machine and slightly dated modern furniture? What if cloistered, dramatic public spaces are again in vogue”?
Arts Criticism Is Not A One-Way Street (Anymore)
Kris Vire: “What we have in this moment, I believe, is a theater community that feels newly empowered in the wake of last year’s explosive Profiles Theatre saga to root out bad behavior within its ranks, and a new generation of artists in the social-media age who believe criticism should be a back-and-forth conversation with many voices participating.” (Not that Hedy Weiss is planning to participate, of course.)
Good News: Google Will Stop Scanning All Of Your Gmail To Help With Ad Targeting
Why? Because they care? Because they’re not doing evil? Ha! No: Because, even though the practice is only for personal email and not corporate email, the scanning “has made it difficult for Google to find and retain corporate clients for its cloud services business … due to general confusion over Google’s business tactics and an overall apprehension to trust the company with sensitive data.”
How, In This Time Of Collapsing Theatre Coverage, Is London’s ‘Theatre Record’ Still Alive?
The guy who runs it works for free, and it takes its content from printed reviews. (But are there any printed theatre reviews anymore? Or will there be in the future?)
The Huge Price Someone – Maybe All Of Us – Pays For Empathy In ‘S-Town’
The podcast, originally a discussion between host Brian Reed and a man in the town he calls “S-Town,” is now a genuine phenomenon. But what are the ethics of so many of knowing so much about the life of someone we’ve never met? “None of this is easy. Or ethically clear. But it is moving in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time. One of the things a large and pluralistic society denies us is proximity. And with that denial, the lives of our fellow citizens are harder to imagine, creating a kind of empathetic poverty that erodes our shared life.”
The Making Of GLOW, Netflix’s New Women Wrestling Comedy
For one thing, all of the actors had to learn how to wrestle. “We knew from the beginning GLOW was a show about bodies and women using their bodies in different ways that they hadn’t used them before, and using bodies in ways that we as an audience haven’t seen before. It felt pretty important that, to honestly tell that story, we should show you the women’s real bodies going through this experience.”
The Slow And Semi-Secret Death Of The Electric Guitar
The industry (and music in general) needs more guitar heroes if it’s going to survive – or else technology, and the electronic music it produces, will take over.
The Walker Mounts A Show Of Jimmie Durham’s Art To A Lot More Criticism From Native American Communities
Cherokee artist America Meredith says the problem is that Durham has no documented links to actually being Cherokee, and yet, “Art historians have really latched onto him. And he represents us. He’s occupying a space. He’s written more about than any actual Cherokee artist in the literature.”
Philippe Auguin Is Leaving The Washington National Opera, But What Does It Mean When A Music Director Leaves?
Anne Midgette: “It’s important not to cling too tightly to tradition, but it remains unclear exactly what vision WNO, under Zambello, is offering to replace it.”
Why Bong Joon Ho’s New Girl-And-Her-Six-Ton-Pig Flick Isn’t With A Studio, But With Netflix
Why Netflix? Well, “plot points include a pignapping, Mija’s desperate pursuit, a bumbling Animal Liberation Front troop, an insecure corporate villainess (played with pitch-perfect iciness by Ms. Swinton) and a foray into the grisly mechanics of factory farming.” The last bit is where studios drew the line.
The World Might Be Going To Hell In A Handbasket, But These Designers Are Trying To Make It Look Pretty
For instance, at the London Design Biennale, “Guatemala, which ties for sixth place in the Global Emotions Report, will show an installation about the community action taking place in Santa Catarina Palopó. This town on the volcanic shores of Lake Atitlán is reinventing itself as a kind of conceptual art, using the paintbrush to boost civic pride and tourism. Its residents have become involved in a two-year scheme in which they are painting their houses in bold Mayan patterns, with a strict but vibrant palette of five colours sourced from local textiles.”
(Some Of) The Last 20 Years Of LGBT Literature
Of course, LGBT lit goes back way farther than 1997, but here’s a sampler from the NYT in honor of Pride Month.
This Composer Has Led The Way In Experimental Music For 50 Years, And He’s Not Stopping
Roscoe Mitchell: “I’ve always believed in studying music across the board. I’ve never been fascinated with putting myself in certain categories. Especially now that there’s a lot of folks out there that want to know how this improvisational thing works. And the way that I would describe that, of course, is like composition in real time.”
The Structure – And Meaning – Of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ Ballet
The story is purely about royal succession, which you’d think wouldn’t appeal to Americans. (And indeed, the ballet used to be reserved for touring European companies.) But there’s more:
“The fairy godmothers whom the monarchs invite to the heiress Aurora’s christening in the Prologue take the drama into a new, larger dimension: pure classicism. They make this a ballet about ballet itself — ballet as a language of harmonious idealism, in which radiant physical geometry keeps marrying music.”
The Tallest Building West Of The Mississippi Makes Its Debut In L.A.
The building “with a curling lobby skylight that looks like a ski jump reflects the resurgence of downtown Los Angeles as the city’s cultural center and economic engine” but also reflects the importance of Koreans and Korean Americans to, and in, the city.
Did The Producers And Writers Of The New Tupac Biopic Infringe On A Journalist’s Made-Up Character?
The journalist, Kevin Powell, is suing based on many similarities to his work, including that of a character who in his seris of 1990s Vibe articles was a “composite character.” In addition, he “argues that a bulk of the film appears to be based on his jailhouse interviews with [Tupac Shakur].”