‘The E.S. Dance Instrument,’ A Choreographic Flying Machine

“It really does feel like flying,’ says dancer Brian Solomon as he glides elegantly through the air, thanks to the inventive imagination of the Swedish-born aerial choreographer, Sven Borge Johansson.” Johansson’s device is “like a highly evolved teeter-totter, comprising a 6.5-metre boom, adjustable fulcrum and crossfoot support column.”

Jill Johnston, Cultural Critic and Lesbian Firebrand, Dead at 81

At The Village Voice in the early 1960s, she chronicled New York’s exploding avant-garde performance scene. A decade later, she became a standard-bearer of the lesbian separatist movement, with her book Lesbian Nation and such notorious events as the kiss-in she and friends staged during a Town Hall debate on feminism chaired by a sputtering Norman Mailer.

A Means to Measure Consciousness?

“Consciousness has long been the province of philosophers, and most doctors steer clear of their abstract speculations. After all, debating the finer points of what it is like to be a brain floating in a vat does not tell you how much anesthetic to give a patient.” But one researcher suggests that consciousness is just integrated information in the brain, and that we can measure it the way we measure data in, say, a cell phone call.

Dancing Machines at Lille’s Old Train Station

The French city’s Gare Saint-Sauveur, now a cultural center, is hosting an exhibition of installations “for anyone prepared to question their perception of movement.” There’s a cylinder where two people can dance amid “a storm of polystyrene pellets,” a set of dance films made with heat-sensitive cameras, and a sculpture “featuring arms and legs from tailor’s dummies executing a mechanical dance routine.”