Subversive Opera That Hooks You Without You Realizing It

“We created a show and pretended it was going to be a rock concert. Booked a rock venue and advertised it as an indie rock show. Made up the name Liederwolfe. Everyone in the Montreal scene was curious and it was packed. And then people came on stage and sang opera. People freaked out – it was a real happening – it was great. People were yelling, people walked out – but some people stayed. They brought their friends the next time. And they stayed with us and became our core audience for eight years.”

Zaha Hadid’s Firm Wins Its First Post-Zaha Commission

Zaha Hadid’s Firm Wins Its First Post-Zaha Commission
“Zaha Hadid Architects won an international design competition for the Sberbank Technopark building, which will be built at the Skolkovo Innovation Center near [Moscow]. The new science and technology park – designed to host emerging IT, biomedical, energy, nuclear and space innovation companies – is said to be Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley.

Why Do So Many Smart And Capable People Not Feel Happy? A ‘Scarcity Mindset’

“Most of us are the products of people who survived in what was for a very, very long time, in our evolution as a species, a scarcity-oriented universe. … So we do have a very hard-wired tendency to be scarcity-oriented. … It is now being shown in quite a lot of studies that you actually perform better if you don’t put yourself under the scarcity mindset, if you don’t worry about the outcomes and enjoy the process of doing something, rather than the goal.”

Esa-Pekka Salonen Nails A Big Problem With Classical Music Marketing

“We have been so apologetic in this, what we call classical music, that we say: ‘You don’t have to know anything, you don’t have to have any background, you don’t have to have any frame of reference, just come with an open mind, and you’ll love it. It doesn’t quite work like that. Because if I go to an American football game not knowing anything about the rules – as, I have to admit, I don’t – it’s totally meaningless.”

Freelance Arts Workers Occupy Ten Theatres In France, Including The Comédie-Française

Angry about impending changes to the country’s generous system of unemployment insurance for performers and backstage personnel between gigs, protesting intermittents du spectacle (as they’re called in France) have occupied the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris (where this set of protests began, and where performances of Racine’s Phèdre starring Isabelle Huppert have had to be cancelled). Demonstrators say they’ve also occupied the major state theatres in Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Rennes, Caen, Lille, Toulouse, Grenoble, and Montpellier. A disastrous string of protests over the same issue in the summer of 2003 devastated the nation’s summer festivals, causing cancellations even at Avignon and Aix-en-Provence. (in French; Google Translate version here)