Make your voices typed
There’s a great discussion underway in the comments section of our post about Martha Mason and the end of Snappy Dance Theater, ranging from tributes to Snappy to the future of Boston’s dance scene to the virtues of dance as an art form. Check it out and join in.
Leslie K. Brown invites you to guess that photographic image.
Mirror up to Nature wants you to send in your pictures of theatre artists at work.
A Minnesota playwright asks for your definition of success as an artist.
West Coast literary agent Nathan Bransford wants writers to share the worst writing advice you’ve ever received.
Reports from the field
At Best American Poetry, Eleanor Goodman shares her experiences at the Simmons College Chinese Poetry Festival, starting here and continuing here.
At the local indie film blog Kino-Eye, David Tames offers a perceptive, two-part response to the DIY Days Boston conference: part 1 and part 2. The conference was designed to help filmmakers finds ways “to have a say in how their films were reaching audiences.”
A tech reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has high praise for Act/React at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which was curated by Boston Cyberarts Festival founder/director George Fifield and features Brian Knep (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ’07).
Do stuff
Film-makers and -appreciators in Central and Western Mass. have two upcoming festivals to hit: the Williamstown Film Festival October 17-26, and the Northampton Film Festival October 24-26.
This month in the Berkshires, a consortium of excellent arts groups presents two events in the Tricks of the Trade professional development series for individual artists. Events offer advice on selling handmade work online (October 14 in North Adams) and pricing artwork (October 15 in Pittsfield). Series flyer.
Big tubs of Gatorade poured on the heads of (i.e. congratulations to):
Massachusetts playwright Kirsten Greenidge, recently named a 2008 Time Warner Storytelling Fellow by the Sundance Institute. The fellowship “provides substantial support over four years to help fund the development and celebration of independent artists across the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film and Theatre Programs,” according to a press release quoted on the Filmmaker Magazine blog.
Massachusetts novelist Sue Miller, this year’s winner of the Kate Chopin Award, according to the Word Up blog from the Phoenix.
Americans for the Arts, who actually did what the debate moderators have yet to do: ask about the presidential candidates’ positions on the arts.
A parting question
In an ideas piece, Marjorie Garber asks: should universities become the ultimate patrons of the arts?
Art today is often collaborative, costly, and ambitious. Whether for an installation, a film, a theater or dance production, or some combination of these, art requires large and flexible spaces, and large and flexible budgets. There is more need than ever for connections, global and local, and for expensive, delicate, and complicated tools and equipment…
… Universities would create open spaces for art-making, with natural light, high ceilings, flexible flooring (for dance and other performance activities), and acoustic sophistication, furnished with state-of-the-art technology, staffed by skilled technicians, and providing spaces for encounters and improvisation across art practices. With augmented funding and a new vision of art’s centrality, universities might set up endowed centers that bring together international practitioners, begin directing major donations toward art centers, and recruit major working artists and give them a home during the prime of their careers.
Image: Still from String Beings. Premiered at the Virginia Wimberly Theater, June 2007. Image by MIT scientist and New Media artist, Jonathan Bachrach. Photo by Allison Evans.
Leave a Reply