If the body-shaming tactics allegedly employed by many NBA dance teams are troubling, the dancers’ stories suggest that the compensation is worse. Three women remembered getting paid $50 a game; one said she took home $65. Three others said they made just $25 a practice, and one said that she and her teammates weren’t paid for practice at all. To put all that in perspective, the average price of a single NBA ticket during the 2012-2013 season (the earliest year this salary was mentioned) was $50. – Yahoo News
Tag: 12.10.18
Easter Island’s Mayor Says That Giant Statue Might Really Be Better Off In British Museum
“Pedro Edmunds Paoa said Easter Island had a ‘thousand’ of its iconic statues, known as the Moai, ‘both buried, ignored and discarded’, and lacked the means to maintain them. “Those thousand are falling apart because they are made of a volcanic stone, because of the wind and the rain are. We need global technology for their conservation.” — Reuters
Queering Cambodian Classical Dance
Prumsodun Ok is a Cambodian-American who studied Khmer court dance in the US and ultimately in Phnom Penh. Now he’s the founding artistic director of Natyarasa, Cambodia’s first LGBTQ dance company, which performs traditional dances in (what’s the best word?) gender-fluid form as well as newly-created works. (video) — Atlas Obscura
Walmart Buys Art.com
Initially Art.com will operate independently as a standalone company, but the announcement states that soon Art.com’s collection of two million images ranging from posters to limited-edition prints on paper and canvas, as well as frames, wall décor and custom framing services for uploaded photographs, will be added to the Walmart.com, Jet.com and Hayneedle.com sites. – Forbes
Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre A Cautionary Tale For Regional Theatre?
Liverpool’s plight is a reminder of just how close to the edge many regional theatres are operating and how perilously near many are to breaching their NPO agreements. As one leading industry insider put it to me: “There are many canaries in cages coughing, if not yet falling off their perches.” As with Liverpool, it wouldn’t take all that much to knock them off, and when one tumbles – particularly one as big as Liverpool – the fear is that more may follow. – The Stage
What We Learned About Making Good Plays: “We Don’t Care If They’re Any Good” (At Least For Awhile)
“What we learned working on Sinan’s play, and several others at that time, completely changed our DNA. We learned that the pressure of rushing to production forced us to take safer approaches and to marginalise the most important visionary of all, the writer.” After Pera Palas, the Lark changed its approach. “We became what I like to call a ‘rehearsal company’. We would be a play lab, a think tank for theatre.” – The Stage
Literary Hoaxes: Why They Work, And Why They Make Readers Angry (And Some Onlookers Gleeful)
Louis Menand: “If we pick up a novel about life in the barrio, or a book by a Tibetan monk, or an avant-garde literary magazine, we know what we expect to find. We are complicit in the attempt to get us to believe because we already want to believe. Writing … has to rely on readers bringing a lot of preconceptions to the encounter, which is why it is so easily exploited. Does this mean it’s all a game? Yes, in a sense.” — The New Yorker
Motion Picture Academy Seriously Considers Letting Oscars Go Hostless
After the Kevin Hart debacle, which they had not expected, the Academy powers-that-be are having a hard time finding someone willing to host the Academy Awards ceremony, and that very much includes people who’ve already done it. — Variety
AI Will Make Humans Better But Cost Us Control
The experts predicted networked artificial intelligence will amplify human effectiveness but also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities. They spoke of the wide-ranging possibilities; that computers might match or even exceed human intelligence and capabilities on tasks such as complex decision-making, reasoning and learning, sophisticated analytics and pattern recognition, visual acuity, speech recognition and language translation. They said “smart” systems in communities, in vehicles, in buildings and utilities, on farms and in business processes will save time, money and lives and offer opportunities for individuals to enjoy a more-customized future. – Pew Research Center
What Arthur Mitchell Meant To Dance
“Because of him, ballet could not exclude us,” said Virginia Johnson, one of Mitchell’s first dancers and the current artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem. “We were his army, united in the love of an art form.” Dance Theatre of Harlem’s entrepreneurship and success became “the impetus for what we know as culturally specific dance companies” today. – The Guardian