Tag: 03.30.20

COVID As Social Disease

COVID is a social disease, a pathological experiment on the nature of our social relations. It is experienced in our social life in four major ways, and our responses bear upon the nature of our society. There are the everyday forms of our social life; the divisions within society that shape our experiences and concerns; the attitudes toward social boundaries — who belongs and who does not; and the social forms available for reacting to threats. – Los Angeles Review of Books

The Dance World May Be Socially Liberal, But It’s Still Difficult For Gender-Nonconforming Dancers

The male-female binary is built into the formalized structures of dance at just about every level, from the very beginning of training through the conventions of professional-level choreography and even down to dancewear. As alienating as that can be, non-binary dancers find ways to make room for themselves. – Dance Spirit

Study Dance Online? Not So Fast…

“The internet may be exploding with resources for virtual classes, from top dancers teaching barre to free warm-ups courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Foundation, but in academia, teachers face many restraints. Copyright laws, federal privacy regulations, varying tech platforms and grading rubrics all make teaching dance online a challenge.” – Dance Magazine

What’s Missing While Looking At Art Online

It is increasingly common for people to buy art, like everything else, online. So online presence is obviously vital. Perhaps the Covid-19 emergency, while directing attention onto the virtual world, will also indicate its limitations. It has been argued by several commentators that, rather than bringing people together, digital technologies and social media contribute to the creation of a generation of disengaged narcissists under the spell of surveillance capitalism. Other people, places and things are reduced to the status of props in a theatre of selfhood. Yet it seems a little unlikely that the person who checks out galleries online fits that profile. – Irish Times

Is Smell Our Most Powerful Sense?

Increasingly, loss of the sense of smell is being treated as a serious harm in clinical settings. Besides, the sense of smell is key to flavour perception. Indeed, most of what you perceive as the taste of food and drink is actually smell, being caused by volatile chemicals travelling from the cavity of your mouth through the open space of the pharynx up to your nasal epithelium. And there’s no way around it: the spice trade, with its growth following the Silk Road, has shaped the modern global socioeconomic landscape as much as – if not more than – philosophical discussion on reason and morality. – Aeon

Edward Tarr, Master Of Trumpets New And Old And Of Their History, Dead At 83

“Mr. Tarr left his mark on every aspect of the trumpet world. As a player he set new standards of lyricism on an instrument long associated with military bravado. As a scholar he hunted for rarities in European archives and created performance editions of hundreds of newly discovered works.” He wrote the definitive history book on the instrument, and he led the revival of the 18th-century valveless trumpet played in period-instrument ensembles. – The New York Times