A public art project – Prismatic Park – makes Madison Square Park an interactive dance experience. One of the choreographers: “I tell the dancers, ‘You’re going to be confronted by people, a squirrel is going to run by, you’re going to stop to say hello to your boyfriend — all of that is what we’re doing.'”
Tag: 06.29.17
Roger D. Abrahams, 84, Pioneering Folklorist Of African-American Street Culture
“Earlier folklorists had focused on black religious expression, the language of the church and pulpit. Mr. Abrahams described a new and vibrant verbal world, exuberant, profane and endlessly inventive. He explained the fine points of the dozens – a street-corner battle of wits in which participants traded insults … [as well as] jump-rope rhymes and counting rhymes.”
Mainstream Movie Culture Has Bowed Down To Fervent Fans – And Is All The Worse For It
Used to be, you could go to a movie without having to rifle back through books, check out Wikipedia entries, and maybe do a rewatch of the whole canon so far. Not so now. “Sequels and remakes have been around for more than a century, but the past decade has seen their takeover of the multiplex (in most of America, the only kind of theater around) — and a corresponding rise in the exclusionary nature of mainstream film culture.”
The Lost Medieval Arabic Poetry That Survives In Hebrew
The literary culture of al-Andalus, Arab-ruled Spain in the Middle Ages, was as splendid as its architecture – and much of the era’s poetry was destroyed when the Inquisition burned the library at Granada in 1499. But there were Jewish Andalusian writers in the 10th and 11th centuries who adopted the poetic forms and subjects used by their Arab colleagues, and much of that work survives. Benjamin Ramm tells us about the most admired of these writers and offers samples of their verse.
Colonial Williamsburg Is Beset By Money Woes And Plans To Outsource Its Commercial Operations
So the world’s largest living history museum is not doing well: “The foundation’s operating losses last year totaled $54 million, or $148,000 per day. It also borrowed heavily to improve its hospitality facilities and visitors center and ended 2016 with more than $300 million in debt, Reiss said.”
How Much Money Do Museum Workers Really Make?
The data is public for the first time, and not surprisingly, directors and COOs make a lot, while security guards and entry-level curators make barely enough to live on, much less pay off student loans.
Even Boys Who Study Dance When Young Tend To Drop Out In Their Teens – These Instructors Went To Find Out Why
Two staffers at London dance hub The Place write about what they learned when they asked young (and older) men why they stopped dancing – and how to keep the guys coming to class.
Charging Theatres To Get Reviewed Is A Bad Idea That Was Probably Bound To Happen
“If readers are no longer paying for criticism by buying newspapers or paywall subscriptions, the Bitter Lemons and Edinburgh initiatives were an attempt to find someone else to pay for the review, namely the recipient of the opinion.” So the alternative, writes Mark Shenton, is (for now) to mostly have critics who can afford to work for free, with all that implies.
Why American Performing Artists Have Been Becoming Activists (It Isn’t Just The Election)
Arena Stage artistic director Molly Smith, choreographer Kyle Abraham, Washington National Opera artistic director Francesca Zambello, playwright James Ijames, and others from classical music, dance, and theater talk to Nelson Pressley about how they do and don’t work politics into their art.
How A Video Artist’s 20-Year-Old Work Got Dragged Into Pizzagate
Maria Marshall, whose work incorporated her children and treated many of parents’ deepest fears, was somehow discovered by the guy who runs the #Pizzagate YouTube channel – so now she has a pack of conspiracy theorists convinced she’s involved with pedophilia. Philip Kennicott talks to Marshall about the real intentions behind her videos and looks at how they get misinterpreted: “Marshall’s art may have succeeded all too well, agitating an anonymous art-phobic audience in almost the same way they are meant to agitate their intended audience in the cosmopolitan art world.”