“It won’t quite be a play or a straight recitation … Excerpts and fragments will be read either solo or in groups by a cast that includes the actress Angela Bassett and the rappers Common and Black Thought. Projections visualizing Mr. Coates’s vivid imagery will tower behind them, and the jazz musician Jason Moran will perform a live score with a trio.” Kamilah Forbes, executive producer for the Apollo Theater, tells a reporter how she’s gone about adapting the award-winning book by Coates, a close friend from college.
Tag: 03.30.18
Why Choreographers Need Dramaturgs
“Clare Croft, a dance dramaturg and assistant professor of dance at University of Michigan, answers all our questions on what dramaturgs actually do, and how to best take advantage of one.”
How A Young Violin Prodigy Survived A Nervous Breakdown And Remade His Life
“In the 1960s, [Saul] Chandler was one of the most promising classical violin prodigies in New York. … But when Mr. Chandler turned 16, the pressures of producing excellence consumed him, and he had a nervous breakdown that derailed his career. He estranged himself from classical music and in an act of reinvention legally changed his name. He would lead a circuitous life that has since involved running a seedy hotel in Times Square, a successful career in mathematics and dramatic voyages at sea. Thirty years ago he started building boats on City Island, where he found peace on its waters.”
The Game Sensation “Fortnite” Is Also Becoming A Dance Sensation
The free-to-play Fortnite: Battle Royale has become a cultural sensation with a wide-ranging playerbase. How do we know? Because professional sports players won’t stop mimicking the game’s weird dances in real life. Maybe one day they’ll be doing one of your dances — because Epic Games just launched a contest for players to submit video of their smooth moves, with the best one making it into Fortnite.
London Theatres Up The Audience Experience
Across London, theaters have come to understand better than anywhere else that voracious consumers of the performing arts want something else to chew on, to be able to pair their love of drama with a pint or a glass of wine and, say, a burger and chips, or a cheese board. And so, at the Young Vic or the National Theatre near the Waterloo railway station, or the Royal Court in Sloan Square, or the brand-new Bridge Theatre, under the Tower Bridge, large, inviting and comfy spaces have been dedicated in the theaters to soaking up some alcohol and accommodating some serious schmoozing, to go with the cultural enrichment.
Do Cambridge Analytica’s Psychographic Targeting Algorithms Really Work?
By rewording the ads to appeal to the respondents’ underlying psychological disposition, the researchers were able to influence and change their opinions. According to Sumner, “Using psychographic targeting, we reached Facebook audiences with significantly different views on surveillance and demonstrated how targeting . . . affected return on marketing investment.” Psychological messaging, they said, worked.
The Banksy Jackpot
While known for mocking the powerful as they strive to become objects of mass appeal, many of Banksy’s illicit street artworks ultimately belong to private landlords, not the public. After a late-night visit from the anonymous artist, property owners often wake up to find they’ve won the Banksy lottery: He has “vandalized” one of their buildings by gifting it a work by a world-famous artist. And then it is up to them to decide the work’s fate.
Edie Falco Plays Tough Women On TV, But She’s The Self-Described ‘Buddhist Mom’ To Her Neighborhood
This is a fun interview with a true New York actor:
“What’s been the biggest surprise?
“Becoming a successful actress. Never in my wildest dreams. I waitressed for a gazillion years and then I’d get some little job, and either they would let me go or they would let me get my shifts back when I came back. My whole life was like that for the first 15 years in New York.”
High School English Is The Perfect Place For ‘The Odyssey’
The “world’s first novel” is an epic quest, full of monsters and trials by combat – and kids who grew up on Marvel, Star Wars, and video games really get it.
Writing Asian America Without Tiger Moms
In Mary H.K. Choi’s Emergency Contact, she writes about a young woman’s love for her mother, and the young woman’s falling in love, through texts, with a guy. “It’s a difficult balancing act — steering through the assimilation experience without contributing to clichéd narratives. … Choi’s novel blows up Asian female stereotypes and prods readers to question their own cultural biases about women of color.”