A Rigged System

LinkedIn: A long time ago, the live events industry did not have all the safety regulations in place that you see today. An audiovisual company could go into a hotel with truss and motors, and rig the equipment for the show. Regulations were lax, prices were reasonable, and companies were given freedom to put on events without many restrictions. Unfortunately, there are many potential hazards in live show environments, and minimal safety regulations can lead to accidents if an equipment provider is not properly trained. Ultimately, hotels realized that hoisting heavy equipment over people’s heads posed a serious safety and liability issue, and began to implement restrictions that gave them control over rigging in their venues. While added safety is critical, a new era of rigging was born where complete control by the venue opened the door for price gouging and exploitation of the system.

A Dragon Ate a Girl At the Kenzo Show

themuse.jezebel.com: In a welcome break from the fashion month norm, Kenzo, which was founded by Japanese designer Kenzo Takada and is now helmed by Opening Ceremony founders Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, presented its Paris runway show as an intermission within a traditional Japanese Kagura dance performance.

Dynamic Wire Art Sculpture of Fantastical Fairies by Robin Wight

mymodernmet.com: Artist Robin Wight, aka FantasyWire, uses design problem solving to create his fanciful collection of wire sculpture art. With a career in manufacturing, resolving practical issues is his forte, but the lyrical representation of fairies expresses his true artistic soul. “I try to apply design criteria,” he explains, “including a story, movement, some visual illusion, emotion and natural forces.” The results are enchanting pieces that add a playful touch to outdoor landscapes.

Become a Professional Designer in a Few Minutes With Canva

www.lifehack.org: No matter what jobs you do, a project will involve one or more of design-related tasks such as editing photos, creating special presentation slides, creating posters, wallpapers and unique imagery.

If you’re not a designer, you have a few basic options:

Hire one. It can be expensive; the average freelance designer rate is about $75-$150/hour now.1
Use tools like Photoshop or InDesign yourself. It’s often complicated and can take many steps to achieve something relatively basic.

In both situations, time, effort, money are expanded.

What if there was a simpler way?

How a 17th-Century Naval Engineer Revolutionized Set Design

Atlas Obscura: In 1660, the stage designer Gaspare Vigarani came into an unexpected windfall. The Louvre was expanding, and the Grande Salle du Petit-Bourbon—a massive theater that had housed operas, plays, and ballets for nearly a century—was being destroyed to make room. Vigarani was told to grab everything he could from backstage and move it to his own theater, the Salles de Machines, which was then under construction.

Find Your Tribe and Live Out Loud

Northlight Theatre: Yesterday marked the first day of rehearsal for our 2017-18 Season. Every theatre artist knows the feeling of the “first day.” Like the first day of school, it’s a giddy, excited, and nervous feeling that keeps us up the night before, anticipating the people we will meet and the play we are about to discover. Starting our process for The Legend of Georgia McBride was no different.

After 60 Years, This Musical Is Getting a Revival

Theatre Development Fund – TDF: Most theatre artists can point to the show that served as their gateway drug. For Broadway performer turned Harlem Repertory Theatre artistic director Keith Lee Grant, it was Finian's Rainbow. "You know that first thing you do in high school? I never forgot it," he says about appearing in the musical. "I'm African-American and from the South Side of Chicago. When I was 13, the theatre group did Finian's Rainbow with an all-black cast! That was the beginning of my love for Yip Harburg."

Women Film Directors Challenge Hollywood Sex Discrimination

WomenArts: Many women artists have wondered whether there were any laws they could use to fight the pervasive gender discrimination they have experienced. Study after study has shown that these women are not getting their fair share of opportunities. Why can’t they just bring a lawsuit to solve the problem?

Theatre Without Borders: Teaching Artists in 2017

THE INTERVAL: When lyricist Jenny Stafford was growing up, her father traveled around the world helping impoverished children in the poorest countries. She was drawn to theatre and grappled with her love of this art form while “growing up in a house where literally going around the world and helping people was happening.” Stafford used to spend a lot of time as a child trying “to justify what I am doing, why am I doing it, why does it matter.”

Australian Whitewashed Production of 'In the Heights' is Cancelled

OnStage Blog: Last week, we called out a "semi-professional" theatre company in Queensland, Australia for casting white and non-Latinx performers in Latinx roles in the musical In the Heights, despite having a number of Latinx performers audition. Given the fact that the article was shared on Facebook alone, over 13,000 times, there was intense backlash against Matt Ward Entertainment, the producing theatre group.

In response to the controversy, it was announced today that Matt Ward Entertainment has canceled their upcoming production of In the Heights. They have also deleted their Facebook account.

Company One Theatre & Unconventional Spaces

Breaking Character: Here at Company One Theatre we talk a lot about community outreach and engagement. As a self-identified “theatre for the people,” we constantly strive to cultivate new audiences and break the boundaries of what theatre can be. Oftentimes, this means thinking beyond the scope of traditional theatre spaces when staging plays, and our most recent season marked historic strides in cross-functional relationships between theatre and other cultural landmarks in Boston. Much of our programming took place beyond the walls of the theatre: In an art museum, for instance, or a gallery.

Royal Friendship’s Evolution in ‘Victoria & Abdul’ Revealed in Costumes

Variety: When a director and a costume designer have collaborated on as many films as Stephen Frears and Consolata Boyle have, they develop a shorthand and trust that serves their projects well.

In their case, Boyle has created costumes for films including “Mary Reilly” (1996), “The Queen” (2006) and “Philomena” (2013). But despite the duo’s comfort level, complacency never sets in, says Boyle. “Every project is so completely different, each to be rediscovered and imagined anew,” she notes.

Citing Threats, Guggenheim Pulls 3 Works Involving Animals From Exhibition

The Two-Way : NPR: The Guggenheim Museum in New York has announced it is pulling three works from an upcoming exhibit of contemporary Chinese art owing to "explicit and repeated threats of violence."

Branson Show Award nominees

Branson Tri-Lakes News Entertainment - Branson Show Award nominees: Entertainment: Late last week, the nominees for the 2017 Branson Show Awards were announced. For nearly a decade the Branson Show Awards, created by Gary R. Wackerly, has honored “outstanding entertainers in Branson.”

A "Sold-Out" Show on Ticketmaster Winds Up Filling Empty Seats for Free

www.ticketnews.com: One of the keys to the Live Nation/Ticketmaster model is the vertical integration of the company. From the parent company comes exclusivity ties to a huge percentage of the venues in the country. Ticketing flows through them for a huge number of acts. Then, when tickets are gone, they can simply filter people looking for them through to their secondary marketplace holdings.

Guggenheim Museum Is Criticized for Pulling Animal Artworks

The New York Times: Artists and museums are often in the thick of free speech debates — think of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s battle with the Brooklyn Museum over a Virgin Mary artwork with elephant dung and more recently a fight over an exhibit that evoked Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse. Typically the art world holds its ground, emerging bruised but resolute.

But in two recent controversies, the protesters seem to be winning.

5 Artistic Directors in Search of the Perfect Theatre Season

AMERICAN THEATRE: On Oct. 2, 2015, Vivienne Benesch got the offer to be the next artistic director of PlayMakers Repertory Company, a $2.8 million theatre in Chapel Hill, N.C. Though she would start in January 2016, in the midst of a season planned by her predecessor, Joseph Haj, she was given a Dec. 1 deadline to come up with the following 2016-17 season.

How did she do it? Benesch says she looked to another theatre leader for inspiration: David Dower, co-artistic director of ArtsEmerson in Boston. “My bible, I will say, was David’s article in HowlRound two seasons ago about season programming,” she explains. “One of the things he said was: There is no more important public statement of a theatre’s mission and value statement than the program itself. What is the work that you’re doing?”

After Years of Disrepair, Construction Begins on Presidio Theatre

Art Wire | KQED Arts: Twenty-three years after the lights dimmed for its final movie screening, the dormant Presidio Theatre is coming back to life as a state-of-the art multipurpose venue.

The Presidio Theatre officially broke ground on the renovation at a ceremony Wednesday morning, months after it was officially announced in June. The restoration will largely be funded by the Margaret E. Haas Fund.

RC4 Wireless Commander software makes debut

LightSoundJournal.com: RC4 Wireless has revolutionised the configuration of its expansive line of wireless DMX devices with its RC4 Commander software programme which debuted at PLASA 2017.
RC4 Commander allows users big and small to easily configure systems with the click of a button.

“Several years ago, we introduced RC4Magic PC, and it’s been a real workhorse,” said James Smith, RC4 founder and chief product developer. “But we’ve always known we needed OSX support, and for the interface to feel more user-friendly. We have achieved both with the RC4 Commander software.”

Dressed for ‘Undressed’

Pittsburgh Magazine - October 2017 - Pittsburgh, PA: Christian Dior once said: “Real elegance is everywhere, especially in the things that don’t show.”

In art, it’s basically all or nothing in one particular area: The human form is either dressed or undressed — as in nude.

During all of my years of covering art, I’ve really never had to deal with anything else. Until now.

Lookingglass Theatre Company Reflects on 30th Season

Stage Directions: As the Lookingglass Theatre Company prepares to open its 30th season they took some time to reflect on the 30 years of productions they've produced. Founded in 1988 by graduates of Northwestern University, Lookingglass Theatre Company is today one of the nation's leading companies, having staged 96 Productions, of which 64 were world premieres, including Mary Zimmerman’s Tony Award-winning Metamorphoses, The Arabian Nights, and The Odyssey, David Schwimmer’s adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Studs Terkel’s Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession, and David Catlin’s circus tribute to Lewis Carroll, Lookingglass Alice.

These 10 Artists Are Challenging Our Idea of What Street Art Can Be

www.artsy.net: Most people still think of spray paint, tags, and murals when they hear the term street art. But increasingly, the genre can encompass everything from miniature wooden sailors set afloat in a river of urban rainwater, to rainbow-colored origami radiating across the facade of a centuries-old French church. Here are 10 examples of artists whose creativity and unique vision pushes the boundaries of what we consider street art or, more broadly, the expanding field of “urban intervention.”

Television Academy Announces Recipients of the 69th Engineering Emmy Awards

Sound & Picture: The Television Academy today announced the recipients of the 69th Engineering Emmy® Awards honoring an individual, company or organization for developments in broadcast technology. Kirsten Vangsness, star of the critically acclaimed CBS drama Criminal Minds, will host the awards for the second consecutive year on Wednesday, October 25, at the Loews Hollywood Hotel.

Circus Couture Presents ‘PRYSM’ combining the circus with art and fashion at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino

www.axs.com: Circus Couture is presenting “PRYSM,” a circus, fashion and art show to be held at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas on Sept. 29.

The idea behind show is that when one looks at light, it appears colorless. But view the light with a filter and there will be an incredible spectrum and dimension of color. The theme incorporates the ordinary and makes it extraordinary.

Pretty Woman: The Musical Is Finally (?) Coming to Broadway

jezebel.com: Garry Marshall’s final project, Pretty Woman: The Musical, is finally coming to Broadway. Are you ready for that?

It doesn’t matter—it’s happening. Deadline reports that the show will make its way to the stage sometime next fall, after a five-week tryout in Chicago that starts March 13, 2018.

How to use Apple’s terrific document scanner in iOS 11

The Verge: One of the most useful tricks in Apple’s iOS 11 update is found inside the Notes app: it’s a document scanner. If there’s a business card, receipt, or any other document you want to save or mark up, this tool makes getting it on your iPhone or iPad dead simple. If you’ve been using a third-party app for this purpose until now — and there are several great ones — you can probably uninstall it in favor of Apple’s own solution. That’s what I did, anyway.

London’s Young Vic Names Kwame Kwei-Arhmah New Artistic Director

Backstage: The prestigious Young Vic theater in London has just named Kwame Kwei-Armah as its new artistic director. Kwei-Armah, a former actor and award-winning playwright, will assume the position next year, stepping down from his current role as director of Center Stage in Baltimore, which he’s held since 2011.

Arcada Theatre Headed For Renovations

Pollstar: Since Ron Onesti took over the Arcada Theatre in Saint Charles, Ill., in 2005, the historic venue has grown into a prominent role in the local entertainment scene. Now the theatre is due for some upgrades and Onesti was happy to talk about it.

AutoCAD Text Align: Tuesday Tips With Heidi

AutoCAD Blog | Autodesk: Simply select the text objects to align and then pick the text you want them to align with or select points to manually define the alignment line.

Ten Blocks on the Camino Real Review. Tennessee Williams as seen by National Theatre of Ghana

DC Theatre Scene: Adventurous DC theatre-goers, act now. You have but two more opportunities to see something unique and artistically gratifying: The National Theatre of Ghana performing its version of Tennessee Williams’ Ten Blocks on the Camino Real.

I saw it Monday night on the lawn outside the National Building Museum. Tuesday night, it will play at Georgetown University.

James Bundy: The Longest Run

AMERICAN THEATRE: The search for a new artistic director for Yale Repertory Theatre and dean for Yale School of Drama—a unique hyphenate in American theatre—was not a smooth one in 2001 for Richard C. Levin, then president of the Ivy League university in New Haven, Conn.

After a protracted process—several high-profile names passed on the job—James Bundy, artistic director of Great Lakes Theater of Cleveland, then 42, was chosen, becoming the fifth dean since Yale became a professional school, and only the fourth artistic director in Yale Rep’s 51-year history, following founder Robert Brustein, Lloyd Richards, and Stan Wojewodski Jr.

What made the appointment even more surprising was that just six years earlier, Bundy had been a student at the school.

Save Our Symphony Pittsburgh plans benefit concert

TribLIVE: Save Our Symphony Pittsburgh will team with members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra for a benefit concert at 7 p.m. Oct. 7 at Rodef Shalom Temple in Shadyside.

The program, which includes selections from Bolling's Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano, Dohnanyi's Rualia Hungarica and Vivaldi's Concerto No. 1 (Spring), features Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra musicians Lorna McGhee, Jennifer Orchard, Jeffrey Grubbs, Andrew Reimer and Marylene Gringas-Roy.

Alumnus Sound Editor Glenfield Payne Gives Master Class

Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama: School of Drama alumnus Glenfield Payne (A 1990) visited students in a new class on television and filmmaking called Through The Lens on Monday, Sept. 25, to share his experiences working as a supervising sound editor and designer in film and television.

Yearlong SAG-AFTRA + Video Game Strike Reaches Tentative End

Backstage: The longest strike in SAG-AFTRA’s history came to a close early Saturday morning with union negotiators reaching an agreement with 11 major video game companies over compensation, transparency, and vocal stress reduction.

In a statement released yesterday, SAG-AFTRA outlined the nature of the tentative agreement.

An Artist Explains What "Great Artists Steal" Really Means

lifehacker.com: “A good composer does not imitate; he steals,” Igor Stravinsky supposedly said. Faulkner allegedly phrased it as “Immature artists copy, great artists steal.” Steve Jobs put it most simply: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” The saying regularly inspires artists, thinkers, and dorm-room poster designers. But in practical terms, what does it mean?

A Virtual Tour of Japan's Inflatable Concert Hall

Open Culture: After the massive Fukushima earthquake in 2011, architect Arata Isozaki and artist Anish Kapoor created the Ark Nova, an inflatable mobile concert hall, designed to bring music to devastated parts of Japan. Made of a stretchy plastic membrane, the Ark Nova can be inflated within two hours. Add air in the afternoon. At night, enjoy a concert in a 500-seat performance hall. Afterwards, deflate, pack on truck, and move the gift of music to the next city.

Elusive Quests: What’s All The (System) Buzz About?

ProSoundWeb: If you’ve been in the live sound business for any time at all, or working in any field related to sound, you’re quite likely to agree that the most maddening technical anomaly of all is the elusive “hum” or “buzz.” These two terms can be related or separate, but they’re both nasty business just the same.

We’ve all set systems – large and small – only to power up and discover the beast within. Is it 60 Hz? 120? 240? A combination? Is it mains? Monitors? Backline? Lights?

Fabulous at 40 - PLASA Show celebrates successful return to West London

Event Industry News: The 40th anniversary of the PLASA Show saw its refocussed direction paying dividends, with an increase in visitor numbers, a sold-out show floor and a 25% increase in the number of audio companies exhibiting. Exhibitors reported continually busy stands and a high quality of visitor across all three days, with a particular increase in the number of international attendees, whilst visitors were pleased with the number of brand new products on show and the content rich seminar programme.

Where And How To Find Foreigner-Friendly Performances In Moscow’s Theaters

The Theatre Times: Moscow is an excellent venue for devoted drama connoisseurs, even if you don’t speak Russian. Here are five foreign-friendly performances (with subtitles) to quench your theatrical thirst.

How do you tell a story in a single image?

Creative Review: Primary school English classes always drummed it into us: A story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In literature, even non-linear narratives follow that format, albeit in a less simplistic way.

While that rule is all well and good for written or spoken tales, does it work when you’re telling a narrative visually? How do you tell a story in a single image?

A Step Forward: A Look Into The 2017 Cairo Intl. Festival For Contemporary And Experimental Theatre

The Theatre Times: The Cairo International Festival for Contemporary and Experimental Theatre (CIFCET) has just launched its 24th edition with a line-up revealing an interesting selection of Eastern European and Latin American plays.

Last year, CIFCET made its comeback after a five-year hiatus that lasted from 2011 to 2015. Upon its return, the word “contemporary” was added to the festival’s name, no longer limiting the shows to experimental works.

Accessing AutoCAD Sheets in Sheet Set Manager

AutoCAD Blog | Autodesk: Welcome to the fifth in a series of posts to lead you through the powerful Sheet Set functionality available in AutoCAD. In the previous post, I introduced you to some of the tools to help you organize your sheets. In this post, I step you through the process for creating a sheet list table in a drawing so that you can easily access relevant sheets directly from the title sheet.

The Sheet Set Manager (SSM) is a great way to organize your sheets and access them from a central location. But what if you want to include this sheet list as textual information in a drawing? Using the SSM, you can easily add a sheet list table to one of the sheets in the sheet set. You can even use the sheet list table to quickly open any of the sheets in the list.

Impacts of Raleigh’s Women’s Theatre Festival, One Year Later

HowlRound: Sometime in March of 2016, I got a Facebook invite to an organizational meeting to talk about the goals of the first annual North Carolina Women’s Theatre Festival (WTFNC). When I went to the meeting, I found myself in a room of over 200 women and men listening to Ashley Popio, the now artistic director of WTFNC, pitch a festival that would happen in August of that year.

Why The World Needs Maker Faire

Medium: Since Maker Faire Bay Area, I have had the privilege of participating in vibrant Maker Faires in Barcelona, Xi’an (in China), Singapore, Tokyo, and Moscow. Also, during that time, we did something of a test-run of a Maker Faire in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Maker Faires have spread around the world — over 200 this year in 40 countries. This weekend the World Maker Faire takes place in New York City for the eighth time.

For first time, CMU welcomes female-dominated freshman class

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: For two decades, educators at Carnegie Mellon University have pushed back against a stubborn mindset that computer science programs were the domain of keyboard-hugging males.

Enrolling more women, campus leaders said, was not just a matter of equity but of bringing fresh ideas to computing and ensuring a sufficient supply of workers for high-demand jobs.

These To-Do List Methods Will Help You Finally Get Organized

www.fastcompany.com: For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been on a mission to create the perfect to-do list. I’ve tested multiple apps from Evernote, Any.do, to Wunderlist. I’ve used physical and digital post-its. Earlier this year, I even attempted to keep a bullet journal. It didn’t last long–I stopped having the patience to draw symbols and make my pages colorful and pretty. Eventually, I realized that the thing that worked for me is The Ivy Lee Method–a very simple system where I write down no more than six things I want to get done that day, in the order I want to complete them.

Breaking boundaries and fighting racism are all in a day's work for pioneering ballerina Misty Copeland

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: At age 13, Misty Copeland was an anxious teen in stocking feet, shorts and a T-shirt taking her first ballet class on a basketball court at a Boys & Girls Club in San Pedro, Calif.

Twenty-two years later, she’s a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre — the first African-American woman to rise to such ranks in the history of the elite New York City company.

No One Understands This All-Female Lord of the Flies Remake

Vanity Fair: Gender-flipped remakes aren’t a new concept in Hollywood, but they have been popping up with surprising regularity. Last year brought us the Ghostbusters redux that made trolls cry crocodile tears. Next year will bring us the glamorous Ocean’s Eleven remake, starring Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling, Rihanna, and more. One hopeful day, Jillian Bell’s gender-swapped version of Splash, co-starring Channing Tatum, will hit our screens. All of these films make perfect sense, re-fitting modern classics to a female perspective and, frankly, giving actresses juicy roles that typically go to their male colleagues. But not every story makes sense to gender-flip. Particularly if that story is William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies, a vicious tale about a barbaric boy-made society.

The Rise and Fall of Cirque on Broadway

www.cirquefascination.com: The early success of Disney on Broadway led other entertainment companies to believe that conquering the Great White Way was possibly not that hard. But, as Warner Bros’ first foray into the lead producing game, LESTAT, proved, it’s not as easy as opening and tossing some money at marketing. And now, after a single Broadway show, PARAMOUR, Cirque du Soleil has essentially shuttered its theatrical division, Cirque du Soleil Theatrical.

PNWF 2017: Program D

Pittsburgh in the Round: For 27 seasons, the Pittsburgh New Works Festival has brought new one act shows to the stage from playwrights both local and from far away. Last weekend, I got to check out three non-local writers’ new shows during Program D of the PNWF’s four program run. As always, the shows are more focused on bringing the story to life, showcasing the acting and the words over staging and effects. I was pleased to see that all three of the shows I saw excelled in performing their scripts with limited sets and props.