Erland Josephson, 88

Erland Josephson, Actor With Ingmar Bergman, Dies at 88
by Dennis Lim, The New York Times, February 27, 2012

Yoko, so true!

@yokoono tweeted: "Dance is a bodily mantra. It was once the way people reached godliness. And we still do.”

Act as if...you remember

What Actors Can Teach Us About Memory and Learning

The most effective memorization techniques draw on physical and emotional engagement as much as they do pure brain power

by Annie Murphy Paul, Time.com, February 22, 2012

When it comes to memorization, professional actors can claim bragging rights. They must reproduce their scripts exactly — no improvising allowed — night after night, under blinding lights, in front of a demanding audience. How do they do it?

Read more here.

Art Roundup: A Stein is a rose; radical cameras

Fans of Gertrude Stein, make your pilgrimage to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, an immersive introduction to the prophetic taste of Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael and her sister-in-law, Sarah. Picasso, Renoir, Manet...all of that's fine, but what really lifted me were the images of the writer herself--photos, paintings, sculpture infused with her presence and the energy of how she was perceived by her contemporaries. The Steins Collect opens to the public on Tuesday, February 28 and runs through June 3. For information, click here.

Detail, Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906
Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met will also host a Gallery Workshop on Art and Writing: Making Creative Connections, led by Claire E. Moore, assistant Museum educator on Friday, March 30, at 6:30pm.

Explore the synergies between the artists and writers who were part of famed collector Gertrude Stein's Paris as you listen to inspiring literary excerpts, view works in the exhibition The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, and respond through writing.

At the Met's Carson Family Hall, Uris Center for Education. Fee: $35. For more information or to purchase tickets, click here.

Also highly recommended:

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 at The Jewish Museum, an exhibition of documentary photography-- most often treating social issues and conditions--that can surprise and inspire today's viewers by its fine aesthetic vision. The Radical Camera continues through March 25. For complete information, click here.

Vernon Reid: Imagining Africa

As Black History Month winds down--where does the time go?--Danspace Project continues tracing the handsome spectrum of choreography by today's Black dance makers in its Parallels platform. Meanwhile Dixon Place is hosting Vernon Reid's Artificial Afrika: A Tale of Lost Cities, an hour-long, multimedia piece that could have been designated a Parallels outpost, one even farther downtown from the mainstream. The veteran guitarist/Living Colour founder/Black Rock Coalition co-founder combines forces with Zimbabwe-born dancer-choreographer Akim Funk Buddha and DJ Leon Lamont.

Artificial Afrika collages an Africa of memory, imagination and speculation (as opposed to reality), and one of its most striking props is a large-headed, caricatured sculpture of James Brown, presumably crafted somewhere on the continent. We all gaze at Africa through our particular filters, and Africa gazes right back.

When Reid opens the piece by recalling a visit to Sudan ("as foreign to me as Berlin, Germany") his unnecessary addition of "Germany" gives just the right note of formality and distancing to establish his sense of difference as an American and estrangement from the Motherland. Lamont goes one step further: He has absolutely no interest in visiting Africa. He's from St. Louis, he says, where simply holding a barbecue is the solution to every possible problem.

The evening opens, promisingly, in a swamp of sound and imagery--Reid working the guitar; Lamont working the computer; Reid's video splashing across the back wall. This swamp, one hopes, will eventually issue coherent form and focus. But that video itself--primordial delirium, silk dyed and moonstruck, a florid, inexhaustible acid trip--proves to be the only fully realized, satisfying element. Besides music and visuals, the work includes text written and delivered by Reid and Buddha and Buddha's performance. We all know that Buddha's dance expertise encompasses an unusual range of styles, but it's not clear why he has interjected a long passage of Balinese dance here.

Artificial Afrika's interesting premise deserves a fighting chance. The text might have helped to elucidate matters and hold things together, but Reid's words, in particular, were too often indistinct, hard to make out. And this is not the first time that vocal sound has been disappointing at Dixon Place.

Artificial Afrika had an early advocate in the dance artist Niles Ford, who passed away on January 14. Ford brought Reid's idea to Ellie Covan, Dixon Place founder/artistic director, and these performances, produced by Gabri Christa and directed by Christa and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, are dedicated in his memory.

Final show tonight at 7:30pm. For tickets, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey), Manhattan
(directions)

What a dancer can teach a business leader

Dancer-choreographer Darrell Jones--whose Hoo-ha (twister pump breakdown) is currently featured in the From the Streets, From the Clubs, From the Houses on the Parallels platform at Danspace Project--inspired some creative innovation at Tom Tresser's MBA class at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Read more:

What’s Dance Got To Do With Business?
by Tom Tresser, Entrepreneur The Arts, February 12, 2012

UK: arts and environmental sustainability

Speaking at the Tipping Point conference in Newcastle, Alan Davey, Chief Executive, Arts Council England has today announced that the Arts Council is the first arts funding body in the world to embed environmental sustainability into the funding agreements of its major programmes.

Read more:

Arts Council England to embed environmental sustainability into funding