Dancing Earth engages in Indigenous futurism — art that incorporates Indigenous perspectives of what the future could look like — by embodying interconnected communities and social change in the company’s story-like performances. In turn, the performances often function as both dance productions and contemporary rituals of transformation and healing for audience and dancers alike. – High Country News
Tag: 08.18.20
Collective Of Black Classical Musicians Takes To Social Media To Detail Issues
“Almost every aspect of classical music, as it is currently, cultivates a toxic and racist culture. That doesn’t mean that every participant in classical music is racist, obviously. The specific aspects that sustain institutional racism are: hero worship; classism and elitism; unbalanced power structures (like the relationship between students and private teachers; the fear-based mentality that your teacher can “make or break you”); access to quality education and opportunities, especially for lower socioeconomic students—classical music is cost prohibitive for many prospective practitioners; respectability politics and classical musician stereotypes that serve to flush out individuality (for example, the flak that Yuja Wang gets for wearing short skirts is endemic of classical music’s respectability politics rooted in the intersections of classical music and Christian worship—the altar, god-figures, etc.); the way classical music history is taught as a sanitized, sexist, queerphobic, whitewashed, and white supremacist version of history; lack of reporting protocols for racism; the way orchestras are funded and governed by “pay-to-play” boards;
“outreach programs” that are missionary-like PR campaigns. We could go on…and it is our page’s work to address all of these issues.” – Grammy.com
Advertisers And Media Outlets Are Fighting, With Billions Of Dollars At Stake, And Nobody Really Knows How To Fix It
“It’s easy to pin the current squabbles on the coronavirus. Look more closely, and you’ll see evidence of deeper frustrations at play that marketers and media outlets have known about for years but haven’t done enough to fix. … Since the industry agreed to changes in the way Nielsen measures TV ratings in 2007, viewership patterns have grown exponentially more complex — and everyone, it seems, has a different vision of how to calculate the number of people who watch a favorite comedy or drama; a sports event; and a newscast.” – Variety
More COVID Innovation: A Drive-Through Art Exhibition
Leave it to the ingenious Dutch. With both the Rotterdam Ahoy conference and exhibition center and the city’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen closed due to the pandemic, the two institutions got together to use the Ahoy’s large space to display video installations that visitors can view from vehicles. Electric cars only; if you don’t have one, you can borrow one on site. – Deutsche Welle
How Miami City Ballet Pivoted
So far, donors have been generous. Nearly 87 percent of those who bought tables for the canceled gala donated the sums to the company. Before scrapping their plans, the company had budgeted to spend $23.5 million this season. That’s been slashed to $11.5 million, largely by canceling in-person performances, postponing a $3 million production of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Swan Lake,” furloughing half the staff and reducing dancer contracts from 40 weeks to 27 weeks. The company’s $1.9 million federal Paycheck Protection Program loan ran out in June. – Palm Beach Daily News
How NPR Is Captive To Its Core Audience
How does framing stories for this audience shape how public radio stations tell stories? At every stage of story production—from the reporter’s “pitch” to their editor, through the process of reporting, editing, and airing—powerful figures within the newsroom invoke “the audience” and effectively restrict stories that challenge prevailing notions of racial progress. – American Prospect
How Newsweek Became A Zombie Magazine
These controversies hollowed out Newsweek’s staff and its brand. Its clickbait-heavy approach, aimed at gaming search engines, has declined since it was spun off from parent company IBT Media in 2018. But it remains a publication that privileges the interests of Google over those of its hypothetical readers. While other publications are abandoning the “scale” model pioneered by BuzzFeed and others in favor of building a loyal audience and raking in subscriptions, Newsweek is something of a throwback. – The New Republic
Berlin Medical Institute Study Says Concerts And Operas Could Safely Have Full Houses — Then Institute’s Board Disavows Study
“Earlier this week, leading German epidemiologists from the prestigious Clinic Charité published a revised study suggesting that the opera houses and concert halls should allow every seat in the audiences to be occupied. …
However, in a major twist, the Charité’s Board of Directors … stat[ed] that ‘the paper on the resumption of opera and concert operations under the COVID-19 conditions had not been coordinated and did not reflect the position of the board.'” – OperaWire
At Least One London Theatre Has Kept Busy Throughout The Pandemic
“The Bush Theatre in London [has] produced a series of timely Monday Monologues online, curated The Protest series of digital pieces inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and posted a number of Master Classes. It even became one of the first theatres in London to reopen its building — not for regular theatre performances, but for socially distanced community programs. … At the helm of it all is Lynette Linton, the young writer-director who took reins at the Bush just last year.” (podcast plus text) – Variety
Putting An Orchestra Onstage While Maintaining Social Distancing Is A Puzzle (In More Than One Sense)
First, there are the obvious issues of placement: how far apart the string players must be, how much farther apart for the winds and brass, placing the conductor where everyone can see. In Los Angeles, there’s been a complicating issue: the union for the L.A. Phil and L.A. Chamber Orchestra worked out one set of rules while the union for studio musicians (which has jurisdiction over some of the Phil’s and LACO’s work) had already worked out another. Jim Farber reports on how it all got solved. – San Francisco Classical Voice