“Pointe spoke with these two young dancers” — Hortense Millet-Maurin and Vincent Vivet, both 15 — “to see what it’s like studying inside the world’s oldest ballet academy.” – Pointe Magazine
Can Music Be A-Cultural?
“A lucid example of the Western music aesthetic versus an indigenous one would be to consider the concert hall experience and that of a powwow. In the concert hall, the quality of the sound becomes the preeminent value, conceptually superseding the players and the audience. In a concert hall, the audience and orchestra are kept in separate spaces, and the flow of activity is directed from the orchestra to the audience, which remains seated, silent, and motionless. The performers all wear black to hide any individuality, and concerts are typically appraised on the “ugliness” or “beauty” of their collective sound.” – NewMusicBox
Who Actually Wrote, Or Wrote Down, The Epic Of Gilgamesh?
“The poem we call Gilgamesh is based on copies of a work assembled over a millennium after the earliest stories were written in Old Babylonian. … A specific scribe, editor, collator, poet is given credit for bringing it all together. He may also have been an exorcist, magician, diviner, priest or seer; or a combination of these not unrelated vocations. He was active between 1300 and 1000 BCE. … He goes by the name of Sin-leqi-unninni.” – Literary Hub
Every Society On Earth Has Music, Confirm Scientists, And It’s Used In ‘Strikingly Similar Ways’ Throughout The World
“To arrive at this conclusion, researchers spent five years painstakingly creating a database that features music created by people across the globe. They dubbed it the Natural History of Song.” – Newsweek
How artists are remembering Tamir Rice, 5 years after his death
“Five years ago, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed in a public park by a Cleveland police officer. The incident quickly became a rallying point for a growing national conversation about violence against black people at the hands of the police, and Rice continues to be a source of inspiration for artists.” – PBS NewsHour
Making Sculpture Out Of An Ubiquitous Material – Bullets
Freddy Tsimba uses all kinds of materials to respond in sculpture to his hometown of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. “In 2014 he took a house he had built from 999 machetes to one of Kinshasa’s busiest markets. He stood silently beside it and listened as people argued about what it meant. ‘The reaction was intense,’ he says. ‘People here are still traumatised by the Kulunas,’ a group of machete-wielding youths who rob and kill. Eventually, Mr Tsimba told the crowd he wanted to show that the machete was not just an instrument of death. It was invented for farmers to cut weeds and crops. It could become whatever you made of it—even a house.” – The Economist
Does Pay-What-You-Can Pricing Work?
Our analysis is revealing. It shows that typically, where PWYC tickets and performances are publicly available, they are taken up disproportionately by existing customers. One producing theatre found that while 48% of its regular tickets were purchased by new customers, only 26% of PWYC tickets were purchased by new customers. – Arts Professional
Would A Wealth Tax Would Hurt Non-Profits?
Tyler Cowen: “The effects of pushing wealth out of the for-profit sector would be far-ranging. Wealthy donors might be more likely to pressure nonprofits for luxury consumption experiences, for example.” – Bloomberg
There’s Now An Artist-In-Residence At The Philadelphia DA’s Office
“It makes perfect sense to DA Larry Krasner, who sees the arts as central to the criminal justice reform movement … ‘the connection between the reforms we’re trying to make in Philadelphia and the people in Philly who are part of that movement are best made in some ways through the arts,'” he said. The first artist in the position is James Hough, who spent years painting parts of murals for Mural Arts Philadelphia while in prison and is now finally seeing his finished work. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Leads New MFA Program For Artist-Activists
Patrisse Cullors, a performance artist who recently completed a master’s degree at USC with a concentration on performance and activism, designed the new two-year online program, called Social and Environmental Arts Practice, with and for Prescott College in Arizona. – Los Angeles Times
America’s Hottest Opera Director Heads To Long Beach (For A While)
“Yuval Sharon will serve as Long Beach Opera’s interim artistic director and dream up the 2021 season.” He would seem to be a good fit for a small company known for unusual work. “Any other opera company in America would be completely blindsided by the projects that I’m proposing,” he says, “Every other opera company would turn ghost white at the thought of this kind of season. I think it’ll be great.” – Los Angeles Times
Jeremy Corbyn Promises £1 Billion For Culture, £160 Million For Arts Education If Labour Wins UK Election
“The Labour Party election manifesto … pledges to establish a £1bn Cultural Capital Fund ‘to transform libraries, museums and galleries across the country’. … The manifesto [also] commits to an ‘arts pupil premium’ to fund arts education for every primary school child. This would provide a £160 million annual boost for schools to ensure that creative and arts education is embedded in the system.” – The Art Newspaper
The wealth tax and the museum
At Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen has a short post on some unintended consequences of a wealth tax, and his is (let’s say) an unusual take. – Michael Rushton
Monkman Mischief: How Kent’s “Miss Chief Eagle Testickle” May Prank the Met
For me, the most jaw-dropping instance of curatorial (and directorial) trend-chasing was the Met’s announcement that the Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman had been commissioned by the museum to create two monumental paintings for the museum’s Great Hall. – Lee Rosenbaum
‘This Is One Of The Best Times Ever To Be A Black Creative’ In Theatre, Says One Of UK’s Top Directors
Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director of the Young Vic in London (and former artistic director of Center Stage in Baltimore): “People are listening in a way they didn’t 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and history has taught us that they certainly didn’t listen any time before that.” – Backstage
MacArthur ‘Genius’ Tyshawn Sorey Is Opera Philadelphia’s Next Composer-In-Residence
“Although he has never written an opera, his appointment grew out of Cycles of My Being, a set of emotionally complex songs he composed for [tenor Lawrence Brownlee and] Opera Philadelphia exploring the African American male experience.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Formal ‘Directing Nudity And Simulated Sex’ Guidelines Created For British Filmmakers
“Launched by Directors UK, the professional association for screen directors, the guidelines were, according to the organization, ‘born of the need to set clear and shared professional expectations that apply to everyone involved in making sensitive content, with the aim that they will become standard working practice within the industry.'” – The Hollywood Reporter
‘Climate Emergency’ Is Oxford Dictionaries’ 2019 Word Of The Year
“Defined as ‘a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it’, Oxford said the words soared from ‘relative obscurity’ to ‘one of the most prominent – and prominently debated – terms of 2019.’ According to the dictionary’s data, usage of ‘climate emergency’ soared 10,796%.” (Similarly, Collins Dictionary chose “climate strike” as its Word of the Year.) – The Guardian
After Trauma, a Silenced Vocalist Sings Again
“The trauma of her assault is the subject of [soprano Lucy] Dhegrae’s four-concert Processing Series, which opens on Saturday at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. The series attempts to shed light on the complex relationship between mind and body. At the core of each concert is a new work written for Ms. Dhegrae that is intended to be both about healing and actively therapeutic for the performer.” – The New York Times
Zadie Smith: Art Of The Muse
“The Yoko Years. The Decade of Dora. Accounts of the muse–artist relation were anchored in the idea of male cultural production as a special category, one with particular needs—usually sexual—that the muse had been there to fulfill, perhaps even to the point of exploitation, but without whom we would have missed the opportunity to enjoy this or that beloved cultural artifact. The art wants what the art wants.” – New York Review of Books