Arts news

• In The Middle Of Pride Month, Reflecting On A Queer Middle School 'Romeo And Juliet'

  18-06-2017 23:58 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Turns out 12-year-olds may be the best-kept secret in the business. "I believe that middle schoolers want to do good theatre. I believe that middle schoolers want to do theatre that reflects their sensibilities. I believe middle schoolers want to do fun theatre. When given the opportunity to do something that hasn’t been done, middle schoolers want to do important theatre."
  
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• Top AJBlog Posts From The Weekend Of 06.18.17

  18-06-2017 22:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  Jan Swafford and Classical Music
  YOUR humble blogger is a longtime fan of the classical music writer Jan Swafford, ever since friend gave me his lucid and wise Vintage guide. Swafford, who’s known for biographies of Beethoven, Brahms, and ... read more
  AJBlog: CultureCrashPublished 2017-06-18
  Uncle Vanya Meets Porgy and Bess
  What did the legendary Russian experimental theater director Yevgeny Vakhtangov (1883-1922) have in common with Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, and Carousel? The immigrant
  
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• New Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith Talks About Her Plans

  18-06-2017 21:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Despite the contentious political rhetoric of our now, Smith is looking forward to taking up the post in September. "Poetry gives us a vocabulary for the feelings that don't easily fit into language. And it's not a static vocabulary because we as beings are constantly changing and contradicting ourselves and growing and coming up against problems that feel completely new or happinesses that feel completely new."
  
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• Art Doesn't Have To Come From Tortured Genius, Despite Our Myths

  18-06-2017 21:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Actually, art is better when the artists are organized, or so say these two artists who have written a book about creativity.
  
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• Looks Like Car Hitler And Car Stalin Existed In Pixar's 'Cars' Universe

  18-06-2017 20:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The theory runs: "The Cars-verse includes a World War II–era Jeep named Sarge, who explicitly references events like the Battle of the Bulge. In the direct-to-DVD film Planes (made by Disney but not Pixar), there is an actual WWII flashback in which the plane Skipper recalls losing his entire squadron in the Pacific Theater. Assuming that Car WWII occurred, and that it contains the same contours as the actual WWII, we can assume that there were Car Axis powers, and thus a Car Hitler."
  
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• What Is Going On With The Met's 'Tosca'?

  18-06-2017 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Soprano Kristine Opolais, who was supposed to play the title role, has now withdrawn, a few months after star tenor Jonas Kaufmann withdrew. The show "is being closely watched in the opera world. Early in his tenure Mr. Gelb replaced an opulent, beloved old production by Franco Zeffirelli with a starker, more sexually charged one by Luc Bondy, alienating large swaths of the audience. So there is a lot riding on the new staging."
  
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• When A Novel Of Heroism - Now A Movie - Is Actually Based On Propaganda

  18-06-2017 19:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The new Brendan Gleeson/Emma Thompson movie is based on a book that was anti-Nazi propaganda for Communist East Germany. (But is that a problem?)
  
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• Finishing The Story Of The Barber Of Seville - On A Dark Note

  18-06-2017 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  In 'La Mère Coupable,' a lot more secrets come to light. "It takes these people everybody knows and transplants them to a Raymond Carver story."
  
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• So, Do We Have Free Will Or Not?

  18-06-2017 18:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  We're physical beings, so maybe we think our minds are more powerful than they are. "Is it possible that our experience of decision-making — the impression we have of making choices, indeed of having choices to make, sometimes hard ones — is entirely illusory? Is it possible that a chain of physical events in our bodies and brains must cause us to act in the way we do, whatever our experience of the process may be?"
  
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• Myrtle Blair obituary

  18-06-2017 18:06
  
  My wife, Myrtle Blair, who has died aged 90, was an African-American artist and community advocate living in Hertford in the UK. Her floral sketches and waterside scenes display her unique experience and reflect the town’s growing confidence as a cultural centre.In her most productive years, from 1980 to 1995, she gained awards and patrons for her paintings of the town’s hidden gardens. Myrtle’s cheery children’s book illustrations and Christmas cards show her caring spir
  
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• Translating Jokes When There Are Simply No Words

  18-06-2017 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Translator Jessica Cohen, who along with author David Grossman just won the Man Booker International Prize for A Horse Walks Into a Bar: "Obviously if you have to explain something, it’s not funny. There were some cases like that where I managed to come up with a kind of equivalent. Some things we just had to drop."
  
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• Now Many Theatres Bearing The Name 'Shakespeare' Are Getting Death Threats

  18-06-2017 17:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Well, people are still mad they didn't get to play Mercutio in their high school production of Romeo and Juliet ... but seriously, what? "For the summer festivals — often leafy affairs for families, picnics, and a bit of Shakespeare under the stars — the venting has been a jarring reminder of the country’s political divisions. And while company directors say that Shakespeare, whose works are wildly adaptable to a variety of social contexts, is no stranger to controversy, the cu
  
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• Social Media Is Killing, Or Is Going To Kill, The Novel

  18-06-2017 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Why? Because novels are about interiority. "One of the great fights of the 21st century will be the fight for privacy and self-ownership, which is also, to my mind, the struggle for literature as distinct from the dark babble of social media. Writers thrive on privacy, not on Twitter, and so do readers when the lights are low."
  
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• Basquiat Is Driving Sales At Art Basel

  18-06-2017 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Though some dealers think U.S. galleries are putting up prices too quickly, "others are reassured by relentlessly rising values — and by the cachet of buying blue-chip works from international 'brand' galleries."
  
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• Now Apple's Trying To Push Into Original Programming

  18-06-2017 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  And they snagged two high-level Sony executives to help them out, too. What does this mean for your Fire stick or Chromecast? Well, it might be time to snag an Apple TV.
  
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• How Do You Get The Best 20 Minutes Of Television In A Very Long Time?

  18-06-2017 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Hire women playwrights. "In the 'I Love Dick' writers’ room, staffed exclusively with women and those who don’t identify as male or female, writers were asked to share their own sexual experiences. After a week binge-watching films by artists such as Hito Steyerl, Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman, [playwright Annie] Baker and [playwright Heidi] Schreck assembled those stories into the four monologues."
  
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• Into the Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction review – almost all non-human life is here

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  Barbican, London
  From Mr Spock to dinosaurs, from comics to costumes, this ambitious sci-fi exhibition is big on content, but where is the context?The most brilliant definition of science fiction I know comes courtesy of the writer Brian Aldiss, who once described it as “hubris clobbered by nemesis”. At Into the Unknown, the Barbican’s ambitious new exploration of sci-fi’s vast realm, there is certainly hubris: the claims made for it – “unprecedented”, &
  
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