Tag: 07.30.20

Even Out At The Beach, This NYC Dance Festival Couldn’t Go Ahead This Year. Here’s What Happened Instead

“Every August for the past five years, Beach Sessions Dance Series has been an exciting fixture on the sands of Rockaway Beach in Queens. The festival brings contemporary-dance luminaries to share their work through free, outdoor site-specific performances, all while raising environmental awareness through beach cleanups and other collaborative programming. But as coronavirus began to decimate the plans of other summertime dance festivals, it might have seemed inevitable that Beach Sessions would also be forced to take the year off. Enter TikTok.” – Dance Magazine

Reclaiming The Life Story Of America’s First Published Black Poet

In 1761, at roughly age 7, the girl who would become Phillis Wheatley was taken from Africa to Boston and sold to the wife of a local merchant who educated her. Within a dozen years, she had published a book of verse in London and become perhaps the most famous Black person in the British Empire as well as a symbol for anti-slavery campaigners. Until recently, though, we knew her life story only through a tendentious memoir, written well after her death, by a woman who claimed to be a relative of her mistress. – The New Yorker

This May Seem Like Basic Information, But Plays Written By Black Playwrights Don’t Have To Be About Trauma

Keenan Scott II explains: “We tend to be rewarded for depicting the harshest realities of the Black experience while ignoring its beauty. In art, our trauma is fetishized and romanticized while our joy is dismissed. The end result is a society that views the Black experience as a dreary monotone.” – American Theatre

Writing Against Publishing’s (Racist) ‘Common Sense’

Alyssa Cole, author of books about the Civil War and contemporary life, decided to write a thriller. One of the issues she has faced: “There are people who find the idea of Black people in love unbelievable, of Black people solving crime unbelievable, who seem to think people from marginalized groups are nonplayer characters who just wait around for something to happen to them.” – BuzzFeed

The Gauguin Detective

Born in Calais, France, Fabrice Fourmanoir, 63, might once have been dismissed as a crackpot, a wannabe who would never be welcomed into the sophisticated enclave of art scholarship. But since January he’s gained some standing in this forbidding world, after playing a leading role in a blush-inducing admission by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that a Gauguin sculpture, purchased in 2002 for a reported $3 million to $5 million, is not actually by Gauguin. – Washington Post

In Which A New York Times And Guardian Theater Critic Takes Online Theater Classes

Alexis Soloski: “As an undergraduate 20 years ago, I had majored in theater and back then, our training was exclusively and incontrovertibly face to face. Good acting happened in the moment, in the room, in the space between bodies and breath, action and intention. You couldn’t teach that online! … Or could you? For two humbling and sometimes humiliating weeks, I tried.” – The New York Times

Recreating The Sound Of Hagia Sophia

For a group of scholars, scientists and musicians, Hagia Sophia’s rededication as a Muslim place of worship threatens to cloak a less tangible treasure: its sound. Bissera Pentcheva, an art historian at Stanford University and an expert in the burgeoning field of acoustic archaeology, has spent the past decade studying the building’s extravagantly reverberant acoustics to reconstruct the sonic world of Byzantine cathedral music. – The New York Times

The Radio Audience Has Changed In The Pandemic. But Radio doesn’t Seem To Have Changed

When I pop around and listen to public radio streams from around the country, they almost universally sound like they did before the pandemic started. Same with the programs themselves. Things have changed topically, but not formatically. The audience dynamics have completely changed, so why hasn’t the stations’ sound? – Current