“Up to 60 students are pursuing the University of Sydney for ‘deceptive conduct- after it announced plans to merge its Sydney College of the Arts with the faculty of art and design at cross-town rival the University of [New South Wales].”
When An Artist Burns His Work, It’s A Violent Act, Meaning What, Exactly?
“There are numerous examples of governments and institutions putting books into bonfires, but they are still actions of external protest and censure. When writers burn their own manuscripts, they are destroying their own words. Cathartic, but also a bit sadistic. Burning is a slow, ritualistic death. Why not simply throw away a manuscript?”
The Playwright Wrote A Play About Her Mother, Peter Pan
“The first year we did it, the flying wasn’t very good. You passed across the stage a couple feet above the floor, and it was very painful. The harness cut into your legs, and they padded us with Kotex to try and make it feel better.”
What’s Going To Happen To The Twin Cities’ Floating Theatre Boat?
“In an arrangement with more twists than the melodramas U students stage on the showboat each summer, the 225-seat theater is owned by the U, attached to a dock and walkway owned by the city of St. Paul and managed by Padelford Riverboats, which operates tourist excursion boats nearby.”
How John Hughes Faked Us Into Thinking His Movies (And The Women In Them) Were Progressive
“Thirty years on, however, we’ve dropped the rose-coloured glasses, and our response to realizing he sold us out to suburbia echoes Molly Ringwald’s response in Vanity Fair when he dropped her once she grew out of it. ‘It was very hurtful and it still hurts.'”
Kids And Teenagers Can Make Startlingly Good Theatre – If Only They Have The Chance
“Like women on Reclaim the Night marches, the mere presence of these girls on stage reminds us that it is not women’s freedom (to be themselves, to dress as they want) that should be curtailed, but rather the prurient way that they are perceived. What’s required is a shift in perception: a piece of hair twirled or teeth biting a lip is not an invitation to something else.”
How Is Art Looted By The British Empire Different From Art Looted By Nazis?
“Museums, auction houses and collectors feel free to ignore non-European groups who ask for the repatriation of their artworks. Indeed, some commentators even attack such requests.”
The Deeply Sincere Performance Art Of Yankee Candle
“There’s a year-round Bavarian Christmas village (a village within the Village) that’s showered with fake snow every four minutes and has a toy shop with a resident Santa who refuses to break character. Yankee Candle Village is the epitome of sensory overload.”
Fifth-Century Mosaics Of Bible Scenes Found In Ancient Synagogue
“Archaeologists excavating a Roman-era synagogue at the site of Huqoq, Israel, have uncovered two new panels of a mosaic floor with instantly identifiable subjects – Noah’s ark, and the parting of the Red Sea during the Israelite exodus from Egypt.”
How William Shawn Built The New Yorker Into A Literary Institution
“The sheer proliferation of advertising demanded that Shawn scramble in search of more and more editorial matter. This, he found, had an inevitable drag on quality. There is, in this world, after all, only so much talent at a given time—only so much good writing. At a certain point, he found it necessary to limit the pages in a weekly issue to 248—as fat as a phone book in some towns. In his tenure as editor, Shawn made innumerable hires, tried out countless freelancers, and ran long, multipart series—some forgettable, some central to the literary and journalistic history of mid-century America.”
And Just Like That, Christo’s Floating Piers Are Gone
“As the local officials who approved the project pay tribute to the boost to international tourism in the region, it seems that Italy has learned to embrace Christo’s monumental, ephemeral brand of sculpture. But against the instincts of an artist who claims not to understand computers, the Floating Piers will have a digital afterlife. The selfie-friendly installation has generated 130,000 hashtags on social media, while Google is due to put 360-degree images of the work online through its Street View function.”
How Louisiana Killed Its Film Industry
“Louisiana’s once-booming film industry – dubbed “Hollywood South” – was off by as much as 90 per cent this past year, according to the Louisiana Film Entertainment Association. The drop is all attributed to the state’s decision to wind down its generous incentives last July, scaring off movie makers.”
Enrollment In UK Schools Arts Education Is Way Down. Here’s Why
Labour MP Catherine McKinnell, who tabled the debate, claimed that poorer children have been hit hardest by the introduction of the EBacc. She pointed to Creative Industries Federation figures showing that schools with a high number of disadvantaged children have been more than twice as likely to withdraw arts subjects than schools with low numbers.
What A Missouri Music Store Can Teach Theatres About Community-Building
For theatre to become a “front porch” space that welcomes diverse perspectives, we as theatre professionals must trust our communities to engage with challenging material, and we must trust ourselves to hear and act upon opinions that challenge our ideas.
Can You Build Communities Around E-Books? Here’s Emily Books
“In 2011, Emily Books caught the wave of electronic publication and molded it to fit the needs of their ideal reader. They brought out-of-print titles, or books by passed-over female authors, back to life. At first, Gould said, they had just wanted to solve a problem fomented by commercial publishing’s need to turn a profit.”
Study: Music Lessons Help Students Focus, Tune Out Distractions
Belgian researchers report 9- to 12-year-olds who had been taking regular music lessons displayed “enhanced cognitive inhibitory control” compared to a group of same-age peers. Their study, in the journal Musicae Scientiae, adds to the already large body of evidence showing cognitive benefits of musical training.
Talking With Your Hands Makes You Learn Things Faster (We Knew It!)
“Thanks to René Descartes and a pantheon of very serious dead white men, Western intellectual history has long maintained that thought is something that happens only in the kingdom of the brain; it’s just the body’s job, as educator Ken Robinson famously quipped, to bring the brain from meeting to meeting. But your hands suggest otherwise.”
How They Train Conductors At The World’s Best Conductor School
“The Sibelius Academy has some features that are unique in the world,” says Jasper Parrott, a leading artist agent in London who regularly visits leading conservatories to watch emerging talent. “It offers opportunities to work with an orchestra, its own very competent student orchestra. And thanks to Finland’s abundance of good orchestras, Sibelius Academy conducting students get professional opportunities even before they graduate.”
How Screen Culture Is Killing Dance (But Maybe Not)
“This new normal wherein everyone carries a small screen with them everywhere starts to have a grim, dystopic cast to it. It’s largely responsible for the loss of casual contact with the unfamiliar and the weird, with that which we did not choose, and—more to the point of my pet project—it doesn’t help bring anyone into contact with dance who wasn’t already interested in it. But then, surprisingly, it does; the screen also emerges as a vehicle that can introduce casual viewers to concert dance.”
Syrian Refugees’ Adaptation Of ‘The Trojan Women’ Arrives In Brexiting Britain
“The play Queens of Syria is a chance to put a human face on the worst humanitarian disaster since the second world war. … The play, directed by Zoe Lafferty, has changed over time as the cast has shrunk to 13 women” – from up to 50 during the original workshops in the Suyrian refugee community in Amman – “and personal circumstances have moved on.”
Remembering The Struggle To Desegregate America’s Public Libraries
“Long before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which included libraries as institutions where desegregation was mandated but did not name them specifically – the national NAACP and chapters had launched small campaigns that did everything from championing the cause of a Black librarian assistant’s promotion in the New York Public Library system or, in this case, investigating Violet Wallach’s allegations about her [New Jersey] hometown library.”
Louisville Orchestra’s New Music Director Wants To Make The Symphony Matter To People The Way Sports Does
“[Teddy] Abrams has been the music director of the Louisville Orchestra for two years and by his own measure has had real success engaging the local community. He’s relentlessly tried new things, both in the way he goes out into the community and in programming … He’s approached his ‘mission,’ with the conviction that in Louisville he’s got to start from scratch, he’s got to find a way to make the lifestyle of a classical musician echo the excitement of being a sports star.”
Baritone Collapses And Dies Mid-Performance
Bernard Imbert, 53 and for ten years a resident soloist at the Opéra de Nice, was taking part in a concert of Offenbach arias and ensembles at an open-air theatre near Cannes on Saturday when he passed out onstage. No cause of death has yet been determined. (in French; Google Translate version here)
Violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann’s Strad Got Repossessed; Now He Has It Back
Zimmermann had been performing on the “Lady Inchiquin” Stradivarius for 13 years; it was on permanent loan from a Düsseldorf bank, WestLB. But when that bank failed last year, its successor decided to auction off all of WestLB’s artworks, including this violin. Then a savior – perhaps an unlikely one – appeared.
London’s Royal Ballet Teams Up With University’s Sports Science Program
“Academics from St. Mary’s University … will provide strength and conditioning, and sports science support to Royal Ballet dancers, as well as design a bespoke programme on performance and injury recovery. … A fully funded academic position will also be available as part of the collaboration.”