“All That Jack” talk a key element of Cole retrospective 2

Dance · Film · Ideas & Opinion
It is exciting to share ideas, feelings and observations with a savvy audience about a master of cinematic dance. That’s Jack Cole, whom I have been researching, writing and giving talks about for eight years. Where better place to pay tribute to this influential, mid-century American artist than The Museum of Modern Art? And that ...

Reading tap 1

Dance · Film · Ideas & Opinion · Reviews
by 
Dancing, like writing, is a craft before it is an art. Rare is the professional who excels at both; the thousands of hours of practice necessary to make an artist rarely allow time for rigorous training in another genre. Somewhere between the craft and the art, though, lie scholarship and criticism, and the world is ...

William Forsythe in conversation @ The Getty Center

Dance · Ideas & Opinion
Looking forward to a session of “Getty Perspectives” in which Alva Noё, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, will discuss his new book “Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature” with choreographer William Forsythe. The duo will ponder, in public, their take on the many connections between choreography and philosophical practices. Alva Noe & William Forsythe ...

Sit down and clap! 4

Ideas & Opinion
Is polite, even fervent, audience applause from a seated position a bygone social custom? This nicety has not completely disappeared; last month at the conclusion of  “Raymonda,” at Segerstrom Hall, it was a joy to regard the massive Mariinsky Ballet’s elegant bows in full view. The audience, perhaps still enthralled by the enormity of the ...

Sir Ken Robinson on the arts, at TedX Fulbright conference 4

Ideas & Opinion
Parrying as an event host with the estimable educational thought-leader Sir Ken Robinson at the recent TedXFulbright Conference at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica (Sept, 26, 2015), I so enjoyed Sir Ken’s thoughtful and inspiring words about the arts: I talk a lot about creativity, but I’m very keen not to conflate creativity with ...

Raymonda “likes” Jean de Brienne’s profile picture

Dance · Ideas & Opinion
In this image from Act I of the Mariinsky Ballet’s “Raymonda,” the heroine’s faraway beau, Jean de Brienne, sends his honey a Medieval version (a kind of tapestry that gets unfurled) of his Facebook profile picture. From her posture, don’t you think she seems to be giving it a “like”? I do.

Mat Gleason (still) putting us on edge

Ideas & Opinion · Visual arts
We’re fans, at arts·meme, of art critic-provocateur  and coagula art journal editor Mat Gleason, especially when Gleason, himself a monster of the internet, flatly pronounces, “Social media for artists is a time suck.” So we’re intrigued to hear Mat’s lastest ideas concerning the show he has just curated at Cypress College, near to Orange County. Fun ...

Meanwhile, in Milan, Virgilio Sieni’s “Atlas of Gesture”

Architecture & Design · Dance · Ideas & Opinion
Do you think about dance as a form of communication? Italian choreographer Virgilio Sieni does, and he presents his ideas in a rigorous examination of the human gesture that underpins our art form. A performance of Sieni’s work, ‘Atlante del gesto’ (Atlas of gesture) a commissioned work to soon spool in architect Rem Koolhaus‘s exceptional ...

Grover Dale’s Labor Day wish for dancers 1

Dance · Ideas & Opinion
It takes a dance legend with a resume as impressive as dancer/choreographer/dance educator Grover Dale to bring it down to what really matters. Yes, it’s work. Yes, you need the money. But, hey, dancer … do it because you have to. The above sketch was shared on this Labor Day weekend by Grover, the creative ...

Meet Marilyn Meme•roe

Dance · Film · Ideas & Opinion
From Wikipedia: Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from the popularization of Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. The choreographer Jack Cole, a creative genius, had the ability to perpetuate the meme ...