Says the Head of Performance Health at Queensland Ballet in Brisbane, “They’ve been using everything from bench tops, to tables to ironing boards as well as ballet barres, and practicing on surfaces that can be slippery. Keeping 60 company dancers fit and injury-free is challenging at the best of times. At least now we know they have a small surface and barre which is closer to their normal situation, where they can practice safely.” – Limelight (Australia)
Tag: 04.01.20
Bringing An Indigenous American Language Back From The Very Brink Of Extinction
Journalist Lorraine Boissoneault looks into the effort — using classroom lessons, software, and the memory of one of five native speakers left — to revive and teach the Menominee language of Wisconsin. – The Believer
Hungarian Strongman Uses Virus Emergency To Seize Control Of Museums, Theatres
As the undemocratic features of the Orbán regime became increasingly obvious, the cunning liberal directors would choose productions that, with even minimum sensibility, could be interpreted as critical of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal regime. Thus, these theaters became irritants to the Fidesz officeholders. And, after “Budapest fell” in October 2019, the government wanted to rein in “rogue” theaters. – Hungarian Spectrum
How Epidemics Of The Past Drove Innovation
As we are seeing with the coronavirus today, disease can profoundly impact a community—upending routines and rattling nerves as it spreads from person to person. But the effects of epidemics extend beyond the moments in which they occur. Disease can permanently alter society, and often for the best by creating better practices and habits. – Smithsonian
Inside This Season’s Most Controversial Book – The Woody Allen Memoir
I spoke to several industry professionals; almost all were reluctant to play Monday morning quarterback without the promise of anonymity—if you’re making a book deal in secret, perhaps it’s worth interrogating why. – The New Republic
Before There Was ‘The Onion’, There Was ‘Not The New York Times’
An April Fool’s story that’s actually true: back during the 1978 newspaper strike in New York City, a group of writers and editors that included some now-illustrious names — George Plimpton, Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein, Terry Southern, Frances FitzGerald — put together a parody newspaper and got it onto newsstands. Here’s the first-ever oral history of this proto-Onion from some of the folks involved. – The New York Times
Give This Woman A Pritzker Prize! Once Pakistan’s Starchitect, She Now Designs Mud-And-Bamboo Huts For Poor Villagers
Yasmeen Lari retired at 60 after making her career designing some of Pakistan’s glitziest modern buildings for government and corporate clients. Then, after a severe earthquake, she went to help with reconstruction — designing simple houses that survivors could build themselves, using the debris, that cost a tenth of what NGOs spent on prefab concrete homes. And she’s gone on from there, developing one innovative and inexpensive structure after another, creating jobs for impoverished women at the same time. – The Guardian
This Is A Transition From One Era To Another
The era of peak globalisation is over. An economic system that relied on worldwide production and long supply chains is morphing into one that will be less interconnected. A way of life driven by unceasing mobility is shuddering to a stop. Our lives are going to be more physically constrained and more virtual than they were. A more fragmented world is coming into being that in some ways may be more resilient. – New Statesman
How LACMA’s New Building Became A Referendum On Museums
How did this building, initially embraced as promising, if not visionary, come to ignite a scorched-earth debate in its final stages? The story of LACMA’s campus reconstruction—and the current opposition to it—reflects some of the thorniest questions at play in the operation of museums today: what they are meant to be, who gets to decide, and who is meant to pay for them. – Artnet
How To Maintain (Or Renew) Your Relationship With Shakespeare: Read Him
It’s certainly true that people have been reading Shakespeare’s plays for almost as long as they have been watching them. Within two or three years of his first, collaborative efforts on the London stage, Shakespeare’s first play in print was the gory tragedy Titus Andronicus (1594). Only one copy of this edition exists, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. That scarcity itself tells us something about reading: playbooks were small, consumable pamphlets often read into oblivion, not literary trophies to be venerated. – The Guardian