“Listen, I love it when directors and actors make bold choices with Shakespeare, or play against him – and a lot of innovation begins in university or amateur theatres. But there’s a difference between subversive takes and regressive ones.”
Tag: 02.10.17
What, Exactly, Defines A Movie As “Canadian”?
“The issue of what, exactly, makes a film or TV show genuinely Canadian is suddenly gripping the industry, after a series of government moves to shake up long-standing regulations. Creators are worried the moves, which would allow even more American talent into our movies and shows in the name of making the content more likely to sell internationally, will water down the distinct Canadian perspective just when it is finally starting to gain real traction around the world.”
Why Aphorisms Seem So Powerful To Us
“The voices of Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker and Benjamin Franklin still feel electrically alive to us because they managed to bake their personas into their brief observations. While proverbs and adages (cousins of the aphorism, to be sure) often lose their authorship and become orphaned—think about how many times someone has mentioned “an old Irish saying” without knowing anything about its actual provenance—aphorisms stay tethered to their creators, dragging their voices along through history.”
Turns Out Einstein Was Right About Just How Spooky The Universe Is
Is quantum entanglement real, or is Einstein’s skepticism about quantum physics justified? Turns out that Einstein may be right. “The universe might be like a restaurant with 10 menu items, Friedman said. ‘You think you can order any of the 10, but then they tell you, ‘We’re out of chicken,’ and it turns out only five of the things are really on the menu. You still have the freedom to choose from the remaining five, but you were overcounting your degrees of freedom.'”
How Merce Cunningham Created A New Way Of Thinking About Movement
Cunningham, with John Cage, changed everything: “The dance marked a crucial turning point for both Cunningham and Cage, as it pivoted around the notion that time, rather than melody or narrative, should constitute the underlying relationship between dance and music. … Cunningham and Cage were free to create independently of one another, with their shared aesthetic only fully revealed in the performance itself.”
Nicolai Gedda, Swedish Singer Who Rose From Poverty To Become A Star Opera Tenor, Has Died At 91
Gedda’s career lasted well into his 70s, much longer than is usual for classical singers. “Over a quarter-century, he sang 367 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, from his debut in the title role of Gounod’s ‘Faust’ in 1957 to his final performance, as Alfredo in Verdi’s ‘La Traviata,’ in 1983.”
The Anti-Jock Who’s A Principal Dancer At City Ballet
Anthony Huxley is “a dancer of superlative refinement with the air of a silent-movie star, caught somehow between the world of the speaking and the world of dreams. In ballet, where dancers fight to show their best angle, Mr. Huxley is prized for his line and poetic sensibility.”
The Importance – And Necessity – Of Islamic Philosophers
Sure, many of them are religious – but so are the medieval Christian ‘philosophers’ we study, including Thomas Aquinas. They believed in the Quran, but also “engaged in detailed disputes over such central philosophical issues as free will, atomism and the sources of moral responsibility, and debated such technicalities as the inherence of properties in substances, or the status of non-existing objects.”
Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian Writer Whose Books Revealed The Lives Of Women Like Her, Has Died At 72
Emecheta always knew what she wanted to do: “One day she was beaten in front of her class when she announced that she wanted to be a writer. It was a cherished dream, born when she visited the family’s ancestral village, Ibuza, and listened to a blind aunt telling stories about their people, the Ibo.”
The Surprise – And Challenge – Of Suddenly Being Asked To Conduct The New York Phil
When conductor Semyon Bychkov fell ill halfway through an afternoon rehearsal, assistant conductor Joshua Gersen stepped in – and then got to lead the orchestra at that night’s performance as well, “leading impassioned and incisive accounts of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem ‘Francesca da Rimini,’ a piece he had never conducted, and the intense ‘Pathétique’ Symphony, a work he had previously led only in part.”