At the height of the disco craze in the late 1970s, Empire Rollerdrome, a rink in Brooklyn across the street from where the Brooklyn Dodgers once played baseball, was ground zero for what would become a major fad: dancing to glitzy pop music on eight wheels on a maplewood floor. At the center of it was Bill Butler, about whom New York magazine wrote, “He would do all these things that just looked impossible — spins and dips, and changing direction on a dime. It was like watching a whirling dervish. – The New York Times
The Return Of The (High School) Radio Play
The teen actors couldn’t perform outside because it was too cold, and they couldn’t film because their school went virtual partway through the term. So voice recording and mixing, original music writing, sound creation, and general learning about radio drama it was. One senior actress: “You really have to concentrate on how you use different pitches and tones to convey to the audience what the scene is about. And that takes a lot of focus.” – Colorado Public Radio
Painting In Apocalyptic Times
The Canadian artist painting 2020 for a spot across from Salvador Dalí’s Santiago El Grande, which includes a nuclear bomb going off: “I wanted the apocalypse I was creating to be different — different from traditional ending-of-the-world scenes where some people are being elevated and some people are being damned to hell.” – CBC
Theatremakers Want – And Need – A New New Deal
Hurray for the Save Our Stages money, but theatres need a lot more: “a new Federal Theatre Project (FTP), like the Depression-era government agency that directly employed artists to produce new work.” Save not just the stages, but all of the workers of the stage as well. – The Undefeated
Dancers Have To Learn New Tricks And Stretch New ‘Muscles’ During The Pandemic
That is, their business muscles. They became bakers, started resource centers, trained non-dancers, and gotten into fashion – among many, many other second, third, fourth, and fifth jobs in 2020. – Dance Magazine
US Arts Venues Are Finally Getting Some Relief
Is it too little, too late? “Unlike other business sectors that have been hit hard by the coronavirus, performance centres are in a uniquely challenged position due to thin profit margins that rely on large audiences.” – BBC
How Jewish Theatre Scrambled And Remade Itself For The Digital Year
As with every other kind of theatre, Jewish theaters and playwrights, actors and tech people, had a lot to figure out. The Jewish Playwriting Contest completely reimagined what it was asking, and to whom it was advertising – and got a huge bump in engagement. “It actually ended up being a really successful year for us.” – Forward
2020’s Best Visual Art
Andrea Scott: “For months, looking at art became staring at screens, and a new three-letter acronym entered the lexicon: O.V.R., for “online viewing room.” If that sounds like an enticement to see artists envision new forms with digital means, downgrade your expectations to “slideshow.” Still, the art world has been luckier than other cultural sectors of New York City.” – The New Yorker
What Mark Swed Learned About Listening This Year
“It soon dawned on me that I was no longer in the realm of how to listen but that of why we must listen. The central tenet in John Cage’s philosophy of art — and, for that matter, of life — is the essential need to pay attention. Listening really does matter. That message, moreover, was all around us.” – Los Angeles Times
2020 – A Year Of Ideas
In a year that felt like it changed everything, people also began contemplating how we might rebuild differently, with new ideas about how to fix the climate crisis, how we work, and how we live. – Fast Company
Using High Tech To Preserve Imagery Of India’s Ancient Cave Paintings
In the 1990s, art historian Benoy Behl developed his own low-light photography techniques to capture the famous Buddhist murals in the Ajanta caves. Since then, he’s been using digital technology to correct for the deterioration that time and the breath of visitors have caused in the paintings, so that we can see their imagery in something like its original state. – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
Hollywood Owes A Lot To Theatre. Should It Find Ways To Give Back?
If Hollywood is going to continue reaping the creative benefits of the theater — the actors’ training, the ambitious storytelling, the characters fleshed out over countless rewrites — it bears an obligation, artistic and moral, to assist the theater in its time of need. – Los Angeles Times
New York’s Grand New Train Station Is No Grand Central
Grand Central is inviting, harmonious, soothing even in moments of frenzy. Moynihan self-consciously tries to reconcile old-timey graciousness and contemporary cool, muted stone and garish screens. – Curbed
‘Frankenstein’: An Oral History of a Monstrous Broadway Flop, Exactly 40 Years Ago
“When the curtain went up at the Palace Theater on Jan. 4, 1981, the expectations — and the stakes — were high. Frankenstein, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, had cost a reported $2 million, at the time a record for a Broadway play. The screen legend John Carradine and a young Dianne Wiest were in the cast, and the unprecedented stage effects came courtesy of Bran Ferren, the wunderkind behind the mind-bending hallucinations in the film Altered States, released two weeks earlier.’ But the reviews were so awful that the producers closed the show the next morning, putting Frankenstein in an exclusive club: Broadway one-night wonders. – The New York Times
Important LA Jazz Club Closes For Good
Statistics can’t begin to describe the importance of The Blue Whale to the jazz ecology, in Los Angeles and beyond. On social media, testimonials have flowed freely from musicians and fans, along with expressions of sorrow. – WBGO
Tomorrow Is Public Domain Day – Here Is Some Of The Art Of 1925 That’s Now Available
These works include books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (in the original German), silent films featuring Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and music ranging from the jazz standard Sweet Georgia Brown to songs by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, W.C. Handy, and Fats Waller. – Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Where Writing Historical Novels Can Get You Thrown Into Prison For Life
Yes, there are a number of countries where this is the case. But one that has an ongoing history of jailing its most famous writers, even as it claims to be an elective democracy is Turkey, where Ahmet Altan is now living in a 13-foot-long cell in Europe’s largest prison complex. Fellow novelist Kaya Genç (himself free, at least for now) looks at Altan’s case and at his magnum opus, the Ottoman Quartet, whose last volume, if it’s written at all, will come from behind bars. – The New Republic
After A Very Rough 2020, Can The Philadelphia Museum Of Art Make The Changes It Needs?
On top of the COVID shutdown and the consequent loss of income and layoff and furloughs, the museum faced the public revelation of abusive behavior by two former managers — and senior administration’s far too slow dismissal of the offenders. As the long-underway interior expansion of the PMA’s main building opens to the public, will the policies and employment culture there be improved as well? The president and board chair say they’re working on it. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Europe’s Largest Movie Market Saw Business Down By 70% This Year
That would be France, where total box office receipts were more than $1 billion lower than in 2019. (For a year like 2020, those figures may not be so terrible.) Unusually, no French film was in the top five this year; equally unusual is that French movies had a higher share of domestic ticket sales than American titles for the first time in 14 years. – Variety
A Woman Comedian Made Jokes About Overconfident Men. No Big Deal? It Was Where She Performs.
“Yang Li … is a comedian in China, where homes and offices still hold fast to traditional gender roles and where a nascent #MeToo movement has been met with considerable political and social opposition. One of her lines in particular has set off fierce online debate: ‘How can he look so average and still have so much confidence?’ A lot of men didn’t find it funny. And that, said many of Ms. Yang’s defenders, is exactly the point.” – The New York Times
Despite New COVID Outbreak, Sydney Goes Ahead With Indoor Performances
What’s more, at two of the major ones — Rent and The Merry Widow at the Sydney Opera House — masks will not be mandatory. Audiences will be at 75% of capacity, with checkerboard seating and other distancing measures; masks are “strongly recommended.” Rules are similar for the presentations at the Sydney Festival’s main outdoor stage. Most other theatre companies in the city are performing as well, though they’re making the audience mask up. – The Guardian