Tag: 08.21.19

Why The Shakers Danced, And Why Their Dancing Scandalized Other American Protestants

“Shaker dance both embodied and performed a gender-egalitarian community, one whose primary method of reproduction was not sexual.” (They increased their numbers through recruitment, for which their singing and dancing were effective tools.) “But their worship practices were reviled as both promiscuous and racially aberrant.” – JSTOR Daily

Bolsonaro Gov’t Suspends Brazilian Film And TV Funding Program Rather Than Fund Queer-Themed Programming

“Ramping up the drive into censorship in Brazil, its Minister of Citizenship, Omar Terra, has suspended a call for applications for governmental TV funding … Terra’s announcement comes just days after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro lashed out at funding for LGBTQI series in an outburst during a scheduled state of the union-style address.” – Variety

Time Is Not A Fixed Idea

“Time, as it appears to us, is made of indivisible moments that are parts of succession… A single moment cannot have a duration. Something counts as a duration only if it is a temporal complex. We must perceive a change with respect to moments; otherwise we could not abstract the idea of time.” – Aeon

Spotify Sued For Doing Things Like Putting Eminem Under An ‘Unknown Author’ Level

Yes, that little-known songwriter Eminem … er. But it’s actually far bigger than the potential millions or billions Eight Mile Style claims Spotify owes. “Eminem’s publisher is doing more than merely questioning Spotify’s compliance with copyright law. The lawsuit also makes a pretty bold argument regarding a new law’s constitutionality.” – The Hollywood Reporter

The Joys Of Traveling From Small Town To Small Town Performing Shakespeare For High Schoolers For $225 A Week (A Reminiscence)

“As a recent graduate with a BFA in acting, I could have been stuck lip-synching to Buddy Holly at an amusement park or being cast as a Native American in a problematic outdoor drama in Chillicothe, Ohio. But here I was doing something respectable; noble, even.” Jeremy D. Larson recalls the three-hour load-ins for 8 a.m. shows. The flu passed from cast member to cast member when no one could sit out a show. The drink and drugs. The streaking. And the time they made the mistake of uttering the title of The Scottish Play out loud – The Outline

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves – And That’s Determined By Our Age

There’s a lot of research now that shows that in the teenage years we develop skills from what’s called autobiographical reasoning—which is the ability to derive personal meaning from your past—and that’s really the key to narrative identity. When you start doing that in your teenage years, then that kind of opens up a Pandora’s box that says “okay now you can actually create a story for your life that makes meaning about who you were and where you’re going. – Nautilus

Netflix India Has Its Own Version Of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

“It’s 2047, 100 years after India’s independence, and in the fictional nation of Aryavarta, water is scarce. The republic’s authoritarian rulers are seizing children of mixed parentage from their families, interning the mothers, and forcibly reprogramming them to serve the nation and to purify their defiled minds. … While it has drawn parallels with The Handmaid’s Tale thanks to its depiction of a draconian, patriarchal state suppressing women and restricting their reproductive rights, Leila‘s central themes also include climate change and a deeply hierarchical society organised according to religion, caste and wealth.” – BBC

Audience Talks And Talkbacks, And Keeping Them On Track

Says the former director of public programming at Lincoln Center, who has moved on to a new arts center in Abu Dhabi, “I’m someone who dreaded talkbacks and Q&As. While I was in New York, a lot of the time it was just audience members trying to show off how smart they were.” Journalist Zachary Whittenburg talks with presenters and artists about how they direct the focus of audience engagement events. – Dance Magazine

The Access Conundrum At The Heart Of Popular Music Journalism

There are more and more outlets, but they pay writers less and less; there are huge quantities of new music pouring out, but large bodies of readers are going to click on pieces about artists they’ve already heard of; those famous artists have less and less time to make themselves available to journalists, whom they no longer need to reach their fans. Jeremy Gordon looks at this conundrum and seeks a way beyond it. – Columbia Journalism Review