Tag: 06.27.19

Egypt’s New Capital Will Have A Major New Cultural Complex (But Will Anyone Come To It?)

New Cairo City, currently under construction on the edge of the metro area, about 25 miles from central Cairo, will become Egypt’s administrative center; the “city of arts and culture” within it, to be completed in 2022, will have a 2,000-seat opera house, two other theaters for music and drama, cinemas, museums, art galleries, and libraries. While Egyptian arts figures welcome the facilities, they’re warning that audiences won’t come from the old city unless the government makes sure there are things worth seeing. – Al-Monitor

Maverick Conductor Teodor Currentzis Stomps Away From His Russian Home Base

The Greek-born maestro, a naturalized Russian citizen, has been getting plenty of love-it-or-hate-it attention for recordings (particularly of Mozart operas) with his period-orchestra-and-chorus MusicAeterna. Since 2011, he and his ensemble have been in residence at the State Opera and Ballet in the Urals city of Perm. Now they’re leaving, with Currentzis complaining of lack of understanding and interference from local and regional politicians: “Without their complete lack of understanding, the absence of all reverence and sensitivity, I would never have summoned the strength to make the decision to abandon my heavenly kingdom [at the opera house].” (in German; Google Translate version here) – Musik Heute (Germany)

Why You Choke Under Pressure

“When we are performing our normal, practiced tasks everyday, we often are – counterintuitively — not paying attention to all the little details of what we are doing; our prefrontal cortex is running largely on autopilot. But in times of intense stress, like a playoff game, major presentation, or a job interview, your prefrontal cortex can go into overdrive. When the pressure is on, we often start focusing on the step-by-step details of our performance to try and ensure an optimal outcome and, as a result, we disrupt what would have otherwise been fluid and natural.” – Harvard Business Review

Ideas And Progress Flow From Chaos And Complexity Of Ideas – But We’re Retreating From That

Felipe Fernández-Armesto: ‘Confused by chaos, infantilized by ignorance, refugees from complexity flee to fanaticism and dogma.’ But something else is happening too. Human history was formerly all about divergence; now, as cultural differences are eroded, we are converging. The result, according to his hypothesis, will in the end be a slowing down of the imagination and ideas.” – Spectator

Let’s Talk About Contemporary Poetry’s Use Of The Exclamation Point

Obviously, perhaps, they used to be more common in poetry than they are now – think Wordsworth, Dickenson, and so many more. Now, “exclamation marks are not exactly rare in contemporary poetry—but they are occasional enough for us to take notice. For all their ubiquity in texts and emails, exclamation marks call attention toward themselves in poems: they stand straight up.” – The Millions

The Overlooked Work Of Ernie Barnes, The Athlete Turned Celebrity Artist

Barnes, a U.S. football player turned artist who did such things as “creating album covers for Marvin Gaye, receiving a commissioned by Kanye West and being named the official artist of the 1984 Olympics,” still isn’t really part of art history, curators of a new retrospective claim – and that’s what they’re trying to correct, of course. (But it’s not every day that the artist’s professional American football helmet is included in the artist’s show.)- The Guardian (UK)

Colson Whitehead Is The First Novelist On The Cover Of TIME Since 2010

As Emily Temple notes in LitHub, that 2010 cover was also the first in about 10 years – and as she also says, “Maybe in 2029 it will be a woman! (Just kidding, there definitely won’t be magazines by then.)” Not to take away from Whitehead, of course; as the profile says, “If greatness is excellence sustained over time, then without question, Whitehead is one of the greatest of his generation. In fact, figuring his age, acclaim, productivity and consistency, he is one of the greatest American writers alive.” – TIME Magazine

As Nataki Garrett Takes Over The Reins, She Talks To Bill Rauch About His Legacy At The Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Rauch, who came into the festival wanting to change the audience and the acting company demographics (and who has succeeded in the latter; the former is stickier, as he also acknowledges in the interview), says, “I have, throughout my career, been very concerned with how marginalized voices can be put at the center of the art and the discourse in our field, and throughout my years at OSF, … I have been challenged by colleagues, audiences, and guest artists.” – HowlRound

AMC Theatres Says It Wants To Make Sure Franchises Don’t Entirely Consume The Theatre Experience

Yes, yes, AMC has done plenty of gobbling of arts theatres, or so say the (former) owners of those theatres, but now they’re concerned about the films. Well, not just now: “This is not the first time AMC has sought to showcase its indie film bona fides, however. The company in 2010 launched something called AMC Independent in an effort to dedicate more screens to arty movies. That followed a similar 2006 initiative, AMC Select.” – Los Angeles Times