Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

The NEA At 60, Through The Eyes Of Past Chairs

Butts In the Seats: Last week, the Arts Management program at American University released a series of video interviews with the former chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) on the occasion of the NEA’s 60th anniversary. These chairs are Jane Alexander, Bill Ivey, Dana Gioia, Jane Chu, Rocco Landesman, Maria Rosario Jackson.

 

OpenAI’s Sora Video App Is Jaw-Dropping (for Better and Worse)

The New York Times: The app we used was not TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, the current leaders of short-form video. It was Sora, a smartphone app made by OpenAI that lets people create such videos entirely from artificial intelligence. Sora’s underlying technology debuted last year, but its latest version — which is faster and more powerful and can incorporate your likeness if you upload images of your face — was released on an invitation-only basis this week.

 

Bread and Puppet Theater forges ahead in uncertain times

NPR: Generations of peacenik Americans first saw Bread and Puppet Theater during anti-war protests. Giant white birds on rods soared high over marchers against U.S. military actions in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq and Gaza. Performers milled on the street with bobbing paper mache heads of Uncle Sam and other caricatures.

 

Meet the Experimental Collective Reimagining Set Design for the Contemporary Stage

Architectural Digest: It’s hard to think of a more iconic exchange in the history of theater than the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet. Those legendary lines. That stolen kiss. It’s been performed countless times the world over. And it was for that reason that Andrew Moerdyk, Kimie Nishikawa, and Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, founders of the Brooklyn-based scenic design studio dots, hoped to reinvent it, when tapped by director Sam Gold for the Circle in the Square Theatre’s recent Broadway adaptation.

 

Malfunctioning drones rain fireballs on fleeing crowd

AV Magazine: A pyrodrone show went disastrously wrong when spectators were showered with fireballs. The incident, which took place in Liuyang, China, saw people flee for cover in panic as sparks rained down.