There’s a lot going on right now. “Archivists, curators, and librarians nationwide are assembling the record of how the pandemic is impacting their communities in real time, collecting everything from makeshift masks to journal entries to protest signs. Their mandate is both urgent and sweeping.” – Wired
The Ongoing Reckoning In The Publishing World
Publishing has rather a lot to do to catch up in the diversity, equity, and inclusion fronts. Lisa Lucas, the outgoing director of the National Book Foundation, who is Black, says, “What do you do with data that tells us we’re not diverse enough for the year 2020? We make the culture — we make books. If we are serving a whole country, then we need people within our publishing houses who reflect what our country looks like.” – GEN
What Democracy Looked Like, In Ballot Form
Even before the colorful public ballots of the early United States, actually, “people used the viva voce system, rooted in ancient Greece, where voters announced their candidate to a clerk. In some US colonies, voters would use objects, like corn and beans, to vote yea or nay; and in other states, people would line up on opposite sides of a road to signal how they were voting.” – Hyperallergic
Zoom Theatre After The Pandemic
Assuming that it ever ends – with a vaccine or some kind of terribly expensive, in human life terms, herd immunity – Covid-19 may leave a theatrical legacy that’s hard to shake, at least for a while. And there are some small advantages. “One benefit of staging productions on Zoom, Ridgely says, is the ability to reach a much larger audience than is generally possible with live theater.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
In France, Live Theatre Returns With Voiceovers And A Lot Of Acting In The Eyes
And then there are the outdoor performances, with masks: “When a performer speaks a lot onstage, … masks become damp and stick to the skin, so each cast member goes through four or five of them over a two-hour performance.” – The New York Times
Mass Layoffs Has US, UK Museums Rethinking Their Roles
The current crisis raises the question of what exactly a museum is. Is it a collection of objects, or the staff that bring those objects to life and makes them accessible to the public? ‘We need to think about museums not only as repositories for things […],’ Nicole Cook, a member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union organising committee, writes via email, ‘but rather as vital centers for scholarship, education, and community, all core activities that revolve around people – and more pointedly, activities that rely on fully staffed museums.’ – Apollo
Art Basel Goes Virtual, Charging Galleries For Virtual Booths
Art Basel organizers plan to present two new online viewing room initiatives in September and October, which they describe as “freestanding, thematic editions.” Unlike previous iterations of the Art Basel-branded viewing rooms, these will not be provided free of charge to exhibitors at the physical fairs. Instead, Art Basel will charge a flat fee of CHF 5,000 ($5,500) for each of the new editions. – Artnet
Theatre Reform: We Shouldn’t Work So Many Hours
“It’s this process that we have spent decades, centuries developing in theatre of how much time it takes to make the thing. In my experience, the process will expand to fill as much time as you give it. So we’ve put ourselves in a place where we say, it’s going to take this many weeks to rehearse and this many hours to tech, and we take that as gospel now.” – American Theatre
A Historical Disinclination To Theatre
One of the key facets of Jonas Barish’s argument is that, throughout history and across cultures, theatrical activity has almost always been met by vociferous opposition. From ancient Greece, when Plato wrote that acting and the theatre would be excluded from his ideal state, to the Soviet era in Russia, when strict governmental regulation dictated what type of work theatre artists were permitted to create, theatre has been subject to both philosophical criticism and material censorship. – Howlround
Is Resilience Overrated?
Here in New Orleans, for example, where I am a relative newcomer, my friends who are longtime residents and who survived Hurricane Katrina greet the word “resilience” with a fiery disdain. This is a city where people have been called resilient for years, and so many I talk to just seem exhausted by it. – The New York Times
Unexpected Dance: Alongside A London Canal
This free, Instagram-advertised event is DistDancing, one of the few opportunities to see live dance at the moment and its founder Chisato Katsura is a member of the Royal Ballet. Katsura, 23, moved to a new flat during lockdown and her landlord, Russell Gray, also owns Hoxton Docks, a former coal store turned performance venue. – The Guardian
Charge: Chicago Dance Support Organization Gives Little Support
“What they tell you they raise to help dance professionals and what they actually spend to help dance professionals is vastly different,” former executive director Kesha Pate wrote. When she calculated the philanthropic “return on investment” for Dance for Life, she told me, it was only about 26 percent. – Chicago Reader
Susan B. Anthony Museum Rejects Trump “Pardon” On Her Behalf
The National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House in Rochester, New York, explained in a lengthy Twitter thread Tuesday why it objected to Trump’s pardon for Anthony, who was arrested and charged in 1872 for voting illegally. It also suggested some other ways that Anthony could be honored. – AOL
Kenneth Bernard, Playwright Of The Ridiculous, Dead At 90
“By day Dr. Bernard was an English professor at Long Island University, a job he took in 1959 and held for more than 40 years. By night he was a central figure in the experimental theater movement that began bubbling up in the small performance spaces of Midtown and Downtown Manhattan in the 1960s. His works were a favorite of John Vaccaro, the director behind the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, whose assaultive, anarchic productions were part of the stew that gave rise to punk, queer theater and more.” – The New York Times
COVID Has Squashed In-Person Teaching. Some Performing Arts Students Question Whether It’s Still Worth It
“With the virus still on a rampage, many of the age-old, hands-on ways of training musicians, dancers and actors have had to be tossed out the window or, at the very least, drastically reshaped. How much this will affect the industry down the line — and what audiences may see and hear in years to come — is difficult to gauge. But to varying degrees, depending on the art form, professional groups and future performances rely on a pipeline of well-trained graduates of higher education. Which means there’s a lot of tension surrounding music, dance and theater programs.” – The Washington Post
Singers Can Reduce COVID Danger By Singing More Softly, Says Study (But There’s A Big Caveat)
Researchers at the University of Bristol used 25 professional singers of various genres as subjects, having them speak and sing at various levels, and found that singing at a conversational level produces only slightly more aerosols than speaking normally does — more volume of sound equals more volume of potentially virus-carrying droplets on the breath, basically. The caveat? The researchers are chemists, not virologists, and the study has not yet been peer-reviewed. – BBC
MGM Remakes One Of Its Divisions As Studio Run By And For BIPOC Moviemakers
As one of the authors of UCLA’s annual Hollywood Diversity Report put it, “There are almost no people of color in the film industry who have the power to say, ‘This movie is getting made and by this person.” Now MGM is taking a concrete step to address that: it’s turning its Orion Pictures division over to 36-year-old Alana Mayo (“a person who is a woman and Black and queer,” as she puts it) to produce films by, and about, underrepresented people and groups. – The New York Times
New Guide To Shooting COVID-Safe Sex Scenes Says To Go Back To Hays Code
Directors UK (the Brit equivalent of the Directors Guild) has published Intimacy in the Time of COVID-19, a new set of guidelines for the planning, staging and recording of sex scenes, starts with suggesting that “the director, writer and producer review the scenes together and decide if the intimate act needs to be shown.” And yes, the guide explicitly suggests looking to the Hays Code as a model. – Variety
Behind The Scenes Fights About Race On CBS Show Lead To Writers’ Departures
Now that work is underway for the second season of “All Rise,” which stars Simone Missick as an idealistic Los Angeles judge, five writers from the original staff of seven are gone. Among those who quit were the program’s three highest-ranking writers of color. – The New York Times
In Iran, Female Dancers (And Their Male Accompanists) Face Relentless Pressure And Danger
It’s not news that the Khomeinite doctrines that drive the Islamic Republic’s authorities are dead set against dance, music, and any other way that women might display themselves to the public. That applies not only to cultural imports from the West, but even to classical Persian art forms. What’s more, disapproval of public dance performance has a very long history in Iran. Reporter Rachel Spence talks to a classical dancer and a musician about the arrest, exile, and imprisonment they and their colleagues face for practicing and preserving their art. – Financial Times
Mask Tasks: How Texas Tinterow Pulled Off the Early Reopening of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
As New York City’s major museums prepare to reopen, the experience of the the first major U.S. art museum out of the re-starting gate — the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which intrepidly invited its public back three months ago — is an object lesson on how it might (or might not) work for others. – Lee Rosenbaum
Why Are There So Few Black Directors In The Criterion Collection?
“In such an expansive catalog, encompassing films from more than 40 countries, the relative absence of African-American filmmakers stands out. There are, for example, more directors in the Criterion Collection with the last name Anderson than there are African-Americans.” Criterion president Peter Becker acknowledges the problem: “There’s nothing I can say about it that will make it OK. The fact that things are missing, and specifically that Black voices are missing, is harmful, and that’s clear. We have to fix that.” – The New York Times
How Hollywood Reacted To Women Getting The Vote 100 Years Ago
This early promise of a more equitable industry didn’t last. Once the studio system kicked into gear, women were largely muscled out of positions of authority. There are exploding opportunities for women in TV and streaming today, but film writing and directing are still overwhelmingly dominated by men, and white men at that. – Variety
A Viral Video Puts Spotlight On Tiny Community Dance Company In Lagos, Nigeria
“In the beginning, people kept saying, ‘What are they doing?!’” Mr. Ajala said. “I had to convince them that ballet wasn’t a bad or indecent dance, but actually something that requires a lot of discipline that would have positive effects on the lives of their children outside the classroom. I always say, it’s not only about the dance itself — it’s about the value of dance education.” – The New York Times
Newspaper Newsrooms Are Shutting Down Across America. What That Means For News
Like office workers across the United States, journalists have been pushed by the coronavirus to retreat from communal spaces and into remote work. Now some are confronting the very real possibility that they may never again work in a physical newsroom — a touchstone of journalism — and what that could mean for the future of their profession. – Washington Post