Tag: 11.28.20

Building, Gradually, The National Ballet Of India

With the country having at least half a dozen thriving classical dance forms of its own, European-style ballet never caught on in a big way in India. Yet Yana Lewis, a veteran ballerina and teacher from England who settled in India in 1998, founded and runs the Lewis Foundation of Classical Ballet in Bangalore, where she’s training dancers and, crucially, dance instructors who can understand and respect Indian social mores in a way that most foreign ballet masters don’t. – The New Indian Express

If You’re Showing An Old ‘Nutcracker’ Online, What Do You Do About The Dances That Now Seem Racist?

Phil Chan, co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, has given advice to a number of companies on how to handle (in live performance) the ethnic-stereotype set pieces in the ballet’s second act. Here he offers three suggestions for providing access to the seasonal favorite for your community when the portrayals in your old production don’t look so good today. – Dance Magazine

Magazine Slammed For Performance Of Audio Narration

“The first line identifies the writer as a “southern Black woman who stands in the long shadow of the Civil Rights Movement.” The essay itself appeared in Fireside on Nov. 24 and an audio version was published alongside it. Despite the topic and its author, the person who narrated the audio recording was a young, White male voice actor who spoke in an accent that listeners interpreted as something that would appear in a minstrel show.” – Washington Post

America’s First Science-Fiction Novel Is Now 200 Years Old — But Who Wrote It?

Symzonia; Voyage of Discovery, published in 1820, follows a ship-captain/seal hunter to the South Pole (still undiscovered at the time), where there’s a portal to the interior of Earth (which is hollow), where lives a different race of beings. It’s a satire of colonialism and American self-regard, though a few newspaper writers at the time thought the book was non-fiction. But Symzonia was published anonymously — and here Paul Collins, with the help of JGAAP software, works out who the likely author was. – The New Yorker

Big Art Telling Big Stories

“The resurgence over the past two decades of artists working in the grand manner suggests that the energies inherent to this style didn’t disappear but were merely redirected: into cinema like that of Cecil B. DeMille; into cycles of narrative painting such as the African American history paintings of Jacob Lawrence; and even into political spectacle, lingering on in the rallies of President Trump. And now they are coalescing again into a coherent artistic form, with multiple offshoots and variations, including the works of Titus Kaphar and Kehinde Wiley.” – Washington Post

The Monolith Has Disappeared

And, just as quickly as we all learned about it, the monolith in the Utah desert is gone. “The Bureau of Land Management said it would not be investigating the disappearance because ‘crimes involving private property’ are managed by the local sheriff’s office. The San Juan and Grand County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment.” – The New York Times

How To Pandemic-Proof Our Griefstricken, Routine-Longing Brains And Hearts

It’s not easy, knowing familiar holidays are here and we just can’t expect to celebrate them the same way. “Our brains are literally overburdened with all the uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Not only is there the seeming capriciousness of the virus, but we no longer have the routines that served as the familiar scaffolding of our lives.” But now, knowing some things about our new lives, we have to create new routines. – The New York Times

And Yet, A Live Performance Truly Beats Livestreaming

Ireland is reopening in some ways, but arts venues are expecting a third wave of coronavirus infections and another shutdown after Christmas. How should they plan? “Covid-19 has profoundly changed parts of our world. Business travel has been killed by the Zoom call. The absurdity of the daily rush hour has been exposed by home working. Some of these changes may turn out to be permanent. But when it comes to art and culture, lockdown has revealed a contrary truth: live will always be better than livestream.” – Irish Times

A Century Of The Widening Gyre

One hundred years after the last massive, worldwide pandemic, Yeats’ poem feels close at hand. “I would scarcely call ‘The Second Coming’ a holiday poem. But it makes you feel that that a page of history is about to flip: one epoch is about to give birth to another.” – NPR