Yaël Farber: “Directing is basically asking a bunch of people to run full speed at a wall with you, and to believe that you’ll all pass through. And sometimes you won’t. But you have to feel it’s still worth the injury.”
Tag: 08.24.17
One Of Edgar Degas’s Favorite Models Tells All (And Boy, Is He Busted)
“Degas, as seen by the model Pauline, is no stoic devotee of the Muses but a curmudgeon subject to sudden bouts of theatrical self-pity, always on the verge of collapsing into melancholy ruminations over his failing sight, his oncoming death. The artist famous for his deft public quips becomes, in private, a mealymouthed, repetitious prattler, retailing twenty-year-old anecdotes for the two-hundredth time.”
The Odd, Eclectic, Transcendental Music Of Alice Coltrane
Andrew Katzenstein listens to the devotional songs Coltrane created for her California ashram – “a complex and sometimes befuddling blend of gospel, pop, rock, and Indian religious music. … The unexpected combination of styles and influences are held together by the passion and devotion of the congregation. As unusual as the ashram recordings might sound to listeners, they contain the music of a religious community that viewed these performances as a sacrament.”
An Airbnb For Sublettting Or Swapping Art Studio Space
A pair of Berlin artists launched stusu (from “studio” and “sublet”) last year as “a website that culls together information on available studio spaces and ultimately makes it easier for artists to seek out inspiration abroad and create work in cities beyond their hometowns.”
Odd Music Jobs, No. 347: Calling The Cues For The Subtitles At The Opera
“[Lily Arbisser] hopes to someday sing center stage at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, but for now, she works there behind the scenes as a cue-caller: the person responsible for making sure an opera’s subtitles appear at exactly the moment when the performers onstage sing their lines. Each night’s performance is slightly different, and if the timing isn’t just right, it can ruin the punch line to a joke or give away major spoilers.” (audio)
‘The Lost Cause Of The Confederacy Meets Cirque Du Soleil’: Dolly Parton’s Civil War-Themed Dinner Theater Extravaganza
Aisha Harris travels to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to watch Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede – twice. (Audience members choose whether to sit with the North or the South; she wanted to see the show from, as it were, both sides.)
The Smithsonian Plans To Shut Its IMAX Theatre. It’s A Puzzling Decision
The Washington-based Smithsonian has decided to trim its fat by replacing its impressive facility with a restaurant. To little surprise, the decision to give priority to hot dogs over hot docs has not been popular in the educational-film world.
After A Century Of Puzzling, Researchers Have Cracked The Brilliant Code Of A 1000-Year-Old Tablet
“The team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney believe that the four columns and 15 rows of cuneiform – wedge shaped indentations made in the wet clay – represent the world’s oldest and most accurate working trigonometric table, a working tool which could have been used in surveying, and in calculating how to construct temples, palaces and pyramids.”
Yeah, That Big Trump White House Redesign? Basically Looks Like A Bad Hotel
For instance: “The plain old Obama brown carpet clearly wasn’t lustrous or glorious enough, but the new busier version looks like it has been lifted straight from a mid-range chain hotel. It’s clearly a look that the hotelier Trump is comfortable with: a surface of ornament, but ultimately bland, forgettable and good for hiding the stains.”
Top Visual Artists See New Possibilities In The Opera House
Artists, on the other hand, can benefit from the backing of a deep-pocketed establishment to make vast artistic productions that revolutionize not only how an audience responds to an opera, but how they respond to the art. The music, libretto, and elaborate trappings of the opera house provide the armature on which a total artwork can be created. Now it’s just a question of getting the right audience in the seats to witness it.