“Located on the grounds of the Ayers Rock Resort in the Northern Territory, this remarkable exhibition” – titled Field of Light Uluru in English and Tili Wiru Tjuta Nyakutjaku (“looking at lots of beautiful lights”) in the language of the indigenous Pitjantjatjara people, to whom Uluru is sacred – “from artist Bruce Munro has already drawn some 120,000 visitors since it opened in 2016.”
Margaret Atwood: Science Fiction Isn’t Really About The Future At All
“All stories about the future are actually about the now. However, it’s also true that you generally look ahead of you to see where you’re going and that’s what those kinds of books are like. They’re like blueprints of the possible futures that help us to decide whether that is where we want to go. 1984 was actually about 1948 and looking down the road what might happen should England become like the Soviet Union of the now. So the Handmaid’s Tale was about trends that were already there in the now event, and what might happen if those trends continued on in that way. Would we like that? Is that where we want to live?”
The ‘Monkey-Selfie’ Copyright Case Is, At Long Last, Over
Six years after a macaque in Indonesia picked up photographer David Slater’s camera and took photos of herself, three years after the U.S. Copyright Office supposedly settled the matter, and two years after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claimed standing and filed a lawsuit, PETA and Slater have settled the case. Reporter Sudhin Thanawala explains the terms.
How We Staged ‘Merchant Of Venice’ In The Old Venice Ghetto
Director Karin Coonrod writes about the process, from getting set materials to the site by boat and hand-truck to the dilemma of casting Shylock (and her unconventional solution) to reworking the unsatisfying-to-us-in-2017 ending, all in the places where the story would have happened.
Where The Idea Of “White People” Came From
“Bolstered by a positivist language, the idea of race became so normalised that eventually the claim that anyone would have coined such an obvious phrase as ‘white people’ would begin to sound strange. But invented it was. With the reemergence today of openly racist political rhetoric, often using disingenuously sophisticated terminology, it’s crucial to remember what exactly it means to say that race isn’t real, and why the claims of racists aren’t just immoral, but also inaccurate.”
John Cleese Talks About Political Correctness And The Nature Of Comedy
“The thing about political correctness is that it starts as a good idea and then gets taken ad absurdum. And one of the reasons it gets taken ad absurdum is that a lot of the politically correct people have no sense of humor. … Because they have no sense of proportion, and a sense of humor is actually a sense of proportion. It’s the sense of knowing what’s important.” (He then edges into some rather iffy jokes.)
How Pina Bausch’s Company Keeps Thriving, Eight Years After Her Sudden Death
“Over the course of those years since 2009, the company’s future has become more clear. Crucially, there appears to be an undiminished appetite for Bausch’s emotionally driven style of tanztheater (or dance theater) … (Performances tend to sell out weeks in advance.) Part of that future is a product of continuity. There aren’t many dance troupes whose performers range in age from their 20s to 60s, but that is the situation in the company today. Many veterans are still there to pass on the knowledge embedded in their bodies and memories.” Marina Harss talks with three dancers from various stages Tanztheater Wuppertal’s history.
How Today’s Choreographers Are Inspired By Pina Bausch
Jen Peters talks to Annie-B Parsons, Aszure Barton, Susan Marshall, and others about the influence the late German choreographer had on their work on their outlook.
Documenta Runs €7 Million Deficit, Seeks City/State Bailout
“The local Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine newspaper said [the state of] Hesse and [the city of] Kassel had each agreed to take over loan guarantees of €3.5m. … The local newspaper said the cost overruns for the current edition of Documenta were partly owing to miscalculations by the management team” – particularly concerning the costs of running part of the event in Athens.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Prototypical Broke Freelancer
What most people don’t know is that, for his entire oeuvre—all his fiction, poetry, criticism, lectures—Poe earned only about $6,200 in his lifetime, or approximately $191,087 adjusted for inflation. Maybe $191,087 seems like a lot of money. And sure, as book advances go, that’d be a generous one, the kind that fellow writers would whisper about. But what if $191,087 was all you got for 20 years of work and the stuff you wrote happened to be among the most enduring literature ever produced by anyone anywhere?
Can A City Engineer A Great Music Scene Through Public Policy?
The arts often lose when budgets tighten, but even a little coordination by—and representation in—city government can help. “Offices of arts and culture are really about curating relationships and opportunities, and seeing all of the ways a municipality can partner. In order for that to happen, you have to have folks in the room who are specifically thinking about that as an issue area.”
Americorps For The Arts – A Philly Program Goes National
The grant is a first for AmeriCorps. “This is the first time there’s been a program that allows artists to dedicate a year of service to their country,” said AmeriCorps spokeswoman Samantha Jo Warfield, citing the innovative model as one criterion for the award.
Florida Museums Assess Damages – Perez Museum Unscathed
One historic site, the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Coconut Grove, did sustain some serious flooding to its basement, café and stores, although the main building and its collections remained safe. A truck arrived on Tuesday to begin pumping out the water from the lower levels. “The good news is there are no art collections stored [there].”
German Researchers: We Can Now Compose Music Using Only The Brain
“Twenty years ago, the idea of composing a piece of music using the power of the mind was unimaginable,” said Gernot Müller-Putz of the Graz University of Technology, a co-author of the study. “Now, we can do it.”
Peter Hall, A Director Who Animated Language
“Directors can’t simply let a play speak on its own, but they must put their ear to the ground. Meaning for Hall always returned to an intimate confrontation with the line. He didn’t believe that Shakespeare could be properly done without respecting the forms in which he wrote his plays. Verse, diction, rhetorical patterns — attention to these matters is what allowed a play to live again.”
Did Someone Really Just Figure Out How To Read The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript?
Last week, researcher Nicholas Gibbs announced in the Times Literary Supplement that he had cracked the medieval text’s long-uindecipherable code. (He says it’s a women’s health manual.) But other experts in the field aren’t convinced. Here Brigit Katz gives us some of the other (weird) theories about the Voynich and the six basic things to know about it.
How Florida Arts Institutions Girded Themselves For Hurricane Irma And Came Through Relatively Well
Michael Cooper and Robin Pogrebin report on the measures the organizations took – both when building their buildings and preparing for the storm in the preceding days – to keep their people and objects safe.
Meet The 2017 Dance Magazine Award Winners
In fact, you may already know two or three of them. They’re ballet star Diana Vishneva, hip-hop maestro Rennie Harris, Linda Celeste Sims of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and physical therapist/dance medicine pioneer Marika Molnar.
New Director Of Berlin’s Volksbühne Theater Has Been Getting An Ugly Introduction To His New Job
“The decision to appoint [Chris] Dercon, the former director of Tate Modern in London, to run the institution has spurred an angry debate, one that has
often conflated the issues surrounding his appointment with the larger challenges confronting Berlin, like gentrification, globalization and immigration. It has not always been a dignified debate. Along with the usual petition-signing, there have been ugly protests – some might call them a hazing – that even an avant-garde theater may find over the top.”
Houston Grand Opera Will Begin Its Season On Time – But Not At Its Home Theatre
“The Wortham [Theater Center] was more damaged than originally thought and although Managing Director Perryn Leech and Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers say they don’t know where they will land, they know they have to go.”
Peter Hall, 86, Founder Of Royal Shakespeare Company And Leading Stage Director
“Mr. Hall was long acknowledged as the leader and prime defender of a profession whose artistic health was often imperiled by financial cutbacks and political hostility in the second half of the 20th century. That the period was regarded as one of the theater’s greatest made his achievement all the more considerable. As a director, Mr. Hall introduced Samuel Beckett to English-speaking audiences, staged the premieres of eight of Harold Pinter’s plays, helped revolutionize the acting of Shakespeare and, as artistic director of the Glyndebourne Festival in England from 1984 to 1990, brought a new realism to the performing of classic opera.”
The Aesthetic Advantage: How beauty and business can intersect
Beauty is disruptive; it widens our focus beyond return on investment, allowing us to distinguish the ‘good’ from the ‘profitable’. That’s the basis for a new course at Banff Centre called The Aesthetic Advantage. Lead faculty Diane Ragsdale talks about about how beauty and business can intersect to create something new. Watch the video and register for the program today at banffcentre.ca/programs.
Baryshnikov, N’Dour, Nishat, Anatsui, Moneo Win 2017 Praemium Imperiale
Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour, sculptor El Anatsui, artist Shirin Neshat, and architect Raphael Moneo are this year’s recipients of this year’s ¥15 million ($137,000) award, given by the Japan Art Association to honor achievement in fields not covered by the Nobel Prizes.
Tamara Tchinarova, 98, Dancer With The Ballets Russes
“While she was still in her teens Tchinarova danced with companies that formed in Europe after the death of Diaghilev. She travelled with Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Les Ballets 1933, Colonel. W. de Basil’s Ballets Russes and finally to Australia in de Basil’s Monte Carlo Russian Ballet in 1936.” She settled there – and was married to actor Peter Finch when he was discovered by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (whose affair with Finch broke up his marriage to Tchinarova).