Amy Wegener is the literary director for Actors Theatre of Louisville, and she’s the leader of the pack when it comes to finding scripts, reading plays, and getting everyone – artistic directors most definitely included – into conversations around what shows should run at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. As this year’s festival wraps up next weekend, she’s prepping for 2019 and thinking about how to support the playwrights, directors, actors, and everyone else involved. “I’m constantly reminded that every project and team is different — you’re embarking on exploring a brand-new world each time, even with beloved collaborators.”
Tag: 03.29.18
Musicians In Britain Have Been Hit Hard By A ‘Management Scam’
The firm Band Management Union charged artists up to £4,000 for services, did nothing for the artists – and has now closed its website and email addresses and canceled its phones. One artist who spoke out about BMU a couple of years ago said that “she received abusive messages attacking her looks and mental health, and received a number of targeted negative reviews after complaining about the company online.”
Why Are Movie Adaptations Of Popular Games Still So Terrible?
Yes, OK, part of it might be the source material. And yet even objectively terrible adaptations like 2016’s World of Warcraft show that “there’s clearly money to be made here, which explains why studios seem so obsessed with pursuing it despite the critical maulings.” Can this project be saved?
Los Angeles Gallery That Some Saw As A Sign (And Cause) Of Gentrification To Close
Whew: “Tensions over the role of galleries in the gentrification of the predominantly working-class Boyle Heights neighborhood have often swirled around 356 Mission, one of the district’s largest and most high-profile galleries.” The activists who are against gentrification posted a celebratory note to Instagram.
Musician Plays Flute While Surgeons Operate On Her Brain
During deep brain stimulation procedures, doctors implant electrodes in the brain to try and control tremors. The patient must be awake during surgery, so doctors can see the effects of the electrodes. “It is brain surgery, but it’s a way we can really improve a patient’s life, quality of life, where otherwise they’re going to be on medications that may have a modest effect on improving their tremor.”
Was This The Reason MoCA Fired Curator Helen Molesworth?
You can’t measure schmoozing skills in auction data—or, can you? Trustees and big-name art collectors, after all, tend to collect (and, therefore, want to see exhibited) the kind of expensive art, mostly by white men, that Molesworth explicitly tried to move away from. More generally, they like to see the value of their market-friendly collections ratified with prestigious museum shows. Once you’ve spent millions of dollars on a certain artist’s work, you generally want museums to reinforce what your art advisor and your dealer have been telling you, which is that the artist in question is a great genius worthy of being preserved for posterity.
Does Going To Concerts Improve Your Health?
To determine the results of the study, test subjects participated in “psychometric testing and heart rate tests” as they did activities that were positive for their health including attending concerts, doing yoga and dog-walking. Results showed that people who attended gigs had an increase of 25 percent in feelings of self worth and closeness to others and a 75 percent increase in mental stimulation. While the study found that Brits preferred going to concerts instead of listening to music at home, music in general has been found to increase happiness.
The Miles Davis/John Coltrane Tour That Changed Jazz
In a backstage interview with Coltrane during intermission at the Stockholm concert, a local jazz DJ noted that some critics were finding his new sound “unbeautiful” and “angry,” then asked, “Do you feel angry?” Coltrane replied, in a gentle, deliberative tone, “No, I don’t,” adding, “The reason I play so many sounds, maybe it sounds angry, it’s because I’m trying so many things at one time, you see? I haven’t sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I’m trying to work through and get the one essential.”
‘We Wanted To See If It Was Possible To Stage A Mind’ – Choreographer Crystal Pite On Her ‘Betroffenheit’
“We wanted … to figure out how to use the whole space of the stage to create an image of an injured mind. After that initial impulse, we tried to take a personal story of loss and trauma and make it universal, to zoom outwards and ask some big questions about what suffering is, what it means and how one survives something like that. … In German, the title means to be stopped or struck by something that leaves you in a kind of shock or speechlessness, an inability to respond or express anything in words. So that word became emblematic for us.”
Concerto For Cheesesteaks And Orchestra: Tod Machover’s New Score Captures The (Literal) Sounds Of Philadelphia
Philadelphia Voices is the eighth in a series of “crowd-sourced symphonies” – symphonic scores incorporating sounds recorded on the streets and submitted by residents – Machover has done for various cities from Detroit to Toronto to Perth. David Patrick Stearns met with the composer, both in Philadelphia and at his high-tech Boston-area studio, to talk about how Machover put together the piece, which will combine the sounds of the Philadelphia Orchestra and several choirs with such found sounds as Mummers at the New Year’s Day parade, birds at the Philadelphia Zoo, and (yes) sizzling cheesesteaks on the grill at Pat’s King of Steaks in South Philly.