Recently, theatremakers in the United States are asking this question in droves, as they try to figure out their roles and responsibilities in today’s current political climate. The answers remain varied, but a common thread can be seen: theatre as activism is one of the only weapons they feel they have to challenge the rising tide of partisanship dividing the nation.
Tag: 08.08.18
The Time I Had A Heart Attack Onstage On Opening Night
Actor Stacy Keach writes about preparing for and performing the role of Ernest Hemingway in Jim McGrath’s one-man play Pamplona at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, where he’s resuming the run that abruptly ended last summer after 11 previews because of one very unfortunate event.
Why “Useful” Information Is Crowding Out The Contemplative Humanities
Ross Douthat: “The problem is the one that Auden identified seventy years ago: In an Apollonian culture, eager for “Useful Knowledge” and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts. And both the turn toward radical politics and the turn toward high theory are attempts by humanists in the academy to supply that justification — to rebrand the humanities as the seat of social justice and a font of political reform, or to assume a pseudoscientific mantle that lets academics claim to be interrogating literature with the rigor and precision of a lab tech doing dissection.”
How Books Let Us See Inside Others’ Brains
“There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them. And although it is a wonderful thing that movies and film can do some of this, too, there is a difference in the quality of immersion that is made possible by entering the articulated thoughts of others. What will happen to young readers who never meet and begin to understand the thoughts and feelings of someone totally different?”
How Musicians Make Money Today (Or Don’t)
By recent research estimates, U.S. musicians only take home one-tenth of national industry revenues. One reason for such a meager percentage is that streaming services — while reinvigorating the music industry at large — aren’t lucrative for artists unless they’re chart-topping names like Drake or Cardi B. According to one Spotify company filing, average per-stream payouts from the company are between $0.006 and $0.0084; numbers from Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer and other streaming services are comparable.
QAnon And Sacha Baron Cohen Are Giving America What It Craves Right Now: Masha Gessen
“Is there a way to explain what’s happening to us? Is there a theory, a secret, or a person capable of forcing our undulating reality to come into focus? Is there a way to feel stable on this careening ship of a country? But of course there is: two compelling options have emerged into the mainstream in the last few weeks … One is brought to us by Sacha Baron Cohen, the other by a person, or persons, known as Q. One claims to show that the people in charge are actually idiots; the other claims to know that the idiot-in-chief is actually in charge.”
How Mark Morris Subverts Hoary Romantic Clichés: Alastair Macaulay Analyzes ‘Love Song Waltzes’
“Even when they waltz, [the dancers] don’t have the lifted posture and arching polish of the best ballroom performers; they’re more ornery than that. … The men arch back — rapturous, trusting — in their women’s arms. Whereupon the women promptly drop them — splat! — to the floor.” (Face down, no less.) (includes video clips)
Improv Comedy With A Robot (It Doesn’t Always Work)
“A.L.Ex (which stands for Artificial Language Experiment) has been fed the subtitles from more than 100,000 films, from action movies like Deep Impact to the pornographic film Deep Throat. When someone talks to it, the system uses a tool called a neural network, vaguely modeled on the brain, to analyze similar exchanges in its database and compose its own response. [Creator Piotr] Mirowski made his stage debut with A.L.Ex in July 2016. It did not go to plan.”
Check Out The Major Public Art In San Francisco’s Brand-New Transit Center
The Transbay Transit Center (also known as the Salesforce Transit Center), opening this weekend, features a 20,000-square-foot terrazzo floor by Julie Chang, an oval-shaped rolling-text piece by (of course) Jenny Holzer, a ceiling light sculpture by James Carpenter, and a fountain by Ned Kahn in a 5.4-acre rooftop park.
Lumberyard, The New Dance Center In The Catskills, Announces Its First Season
“The center, 5,500 square feet of performance spaces and buildings along the Hudson River in upstate New York, had a soft opening this summer but is to officially open on Sept. 1 with [Alan] Cumming and [Savion] Glover, who will be joined by the jazz drummer Marcus Gilmore.” The highlight of the fall will be a new piece by Lucinda Childs, set to a score by Pulitzer winner David Lang.