If recycling plastics isn’t making sense, remake the plastics

Ars Technica: A few years back, it looked like plastic recycling was set to become a key part of a sustainable future. Then, the price of fossil fuels plunged, making it cheaper to manufacture new plastics. Then China essentially stopped importing recycled plastics for use in manufacturing. With that, the bottom dropped out of plastic recycling, and the best thing you could say for most plastics is that they sequestered the carbon they were made of.

Getting Jobs Into Production by Eliminating Waste

Remodeling: When there is a surge in leads, sales and projects in design, remodeling companies are left with the challenge of getting projects through pre-production (estimating, design, material ordering and project planning) quickly and accurately to get jobs into production. Business owners that are facing this challenge can look to improvement of their pre-production processes.

Oriza Hirata's "In the Heart of a Forest": Mastering Multilingual Performance

The Theatre Times: Tokyo’s cozy 60-odd-seat Komaba Agora Theater isn’t perhaps where you would expect a cutting-edge multilingual drama experiment to be staged, but that’s just where Oriza Hirata has chosen to work his latest magic.

Have You Ever Seen a Show in a Bathtub?

Theatre Development Fund – TDF: Philip Santos Schaffer pulls back the curtain and introduces himself as "your server and savior" to me and the only other spectator. After chatting idly for a while, he asks if we're thirsty. "Tonight, we're serving only the finest NYC tap," he declares as he turns on the faucet and water comes pouring out. Forget the fourth wall -- there's not even a stage for this solo show because The End of the World Bar and Bathtub is performed in a real New York City bathroom. Interested audiences of two make an appointment and supply the tub; Schaffer shows up and delivers the hour-long experience.

Glitter Called A Global Hazard, Ban Urged By Scientists

CBS Philly: Arts and crafts enthusiasts have known for years that glitter tends to attach itself everywhere and never seems to come off. Scientists now say that the sticky decorations are also an ecological hazard that needs to be banned across the globe.

Glitter is not just annoying, it could be bad for the environment

CNN: Glitter is the ultimate supervillain of the craft and makeup world: Charming, but insidious. Use it once, and you'll be vacuuming it out of the carpet and picking it from under your nails until the day you die.

Glitter should be banned over environmental impact, scientists warn

The Independent: Glitter seems like a harmless bit of fun, but its environmental impact has led some scientists to call for it to be banned. Most glitter is made from plastic, and the small size of its particles makes it a potential ecological hazard, particularly in the oceans. “I think all glitter should be banned, because it’s microplastic,” said Dr Trisia Farrelly, an environmental anthropologist at Massey University.

From Trevor Paglen to Minerva Cuevas, What Artists Are Doing to Help the Environment

www.artsy.net: At an event in Nevada this past Friday, Trevor Paglen was reflecting on American attitudes toward spaceflight. “We think of space like we think of Nevada,” he said. When we dream of colonizing planets and mining asteroids, “we recapitulate the frontier,” extending it to outer space.

UAE’s Pivotal Role in Global Theme Park and Amusement Industry to Be Showcased at DEAL 2017

InPark Magazine: The UAE is set to play a pivotal role in the global billion dollar theme park and amusement industry, according to International Expo Consults, the organizers of the DEAL 2017 show. The UAE is set to trigger theme park revenue growth as it is set to increase by 78 per cent to US$837 million by 2019 as per reports.

In Virtual Reality, a Condemned LA Punk Venue Becomes Immortal

The Creators Project: Last summer, DIY music and art space The Smell received notice that the Downtown LA building it occupied since 1999 had been sold to developers and was slated to be demolished. It would have to find a new location. Music video director Vice Cooler, who played at the all-ages club many times in bands like XBXRX and Hawnay Troof, knew he might not be able to save the venue from eviction, but wanted to do something to help. He asked his friend, film director Gil Kenan, to help him make a virtual reality film to document a place that has been so important to them and countless others.

Purpose-built theatres are no match for cathedrals

WhatsOnStage.com: It all really began with a wedding. In 2008, two friends invited us to their civil partnership at Middle Temple Hall in London. From the moment we stepped inside the building, we were captivated by its beauty and sense of history. Over the preceding few years, we'd been staging theatre productions in unusual non-theatre spaces. We toured southwest France each summer, performing open-air Shakespeare in medieval town squares, gardens and castles, and had just finished a year long residency in an atmospheric but chilly derelict building in north London. We knew Middle Temple Hall's strong theatrical tradition, particularly as the location of the first performance of Twelfth Night in 1602, and so in 2011 – more in hope than expectation – we approached the hall about the possibility of staging a production.

Sweeney Todd Serves Up Meat Pies in Immersive Theater

Theme Park University: It’s been a while since we have covered any immersive theater projects here at TPU. Today I wanted to give you a heads up on a really cool project headed to New York City. An all new production of Sweeney Todd is headed from London and you won’t believe what you get to eat!

Can Performance Art Fight Climate Change?

Theater - The Stranger: On October 2, a civic-minded performance group called Coltura is holding a funeral for gasoline. Actors outfitted in white leotards will play "gasoline ghosts," ethereal beings addicted to Texas tea. During performances, the ghosts haunt gas stations, waft smog into their nostrils, carry around gas nozzles with severed hoses, and otherwise clown around with carbon. They remind us that our love of oil lasts long after our own deaths. For the funeral, they'll carry a casket from the Space Needle all the way to downtown.

Why there could be a drought of new material in theaters around the country, nope, world.

The Producer's Perspective: As I talked about last night in my webinar on licensing (which is now in the PRO archives if you want to hear it), the regional theaters, community theaters, and high school theaters around the world, mostly get their ideas for shows from what was most recently on Broadway.

I hate to use a politically charged phrase (especially during this time of year), but I call it, “The Trickle-Down of Titles.”

The Immersive Actor

HowlRound: As a young actor, I remember wanting nothing more than to be on any stage telling stories, examining humanity, and hearing that applause. I envisioned a life for myself in the theatre ever since I saw my first play in fourth grade, The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds at The Cleveland Playhouse. I saw myself reflected on that stage and for the first time in my life felt like a person who mattered. The stage made me feel alive, whether I was watching it or performing on it.

Immersive Theatre, Defined: Five Elements in Sleep No More, Then She Fell, and More

HowlRound: Immersive theatre has become so popular over the last several years that many theatrical companies claim the title for their shows, making it difficult for some theatregoers to identify what genuinely belongs in the genre. I have no such problem. Immersive theatre is theatre that makes me sneeze. This is not meant as a put-down; I’m simply stating a fact

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Play Takes a Bushwick Warehouse Back to the 70s

The Creators Project: There’s a lush, tropical paradise in a nondescript warehouse off the Jefferson Stop in Bushwick. Inside, beautiful people wait to welcome visitors with chili spiced sangria and flower garlands. There’s sand on the floor and sex in the air, but this is not Brooklyn’s newest surf-themed cocktail bar. This is The Grand Paradise, an immersive theater-dance experience from the fanciful and inventive artists of Third Rail Projects.

Supporting the Intersection of Art and Activism

HowlRound: In a February blog about writing and transgender characters, playwright MJ Kaufman asked, “How do I write the world I want to see? And how can I do this while also revealing the painful truths of the world I live in?” These two questions strike me as the fundamental challenges of any piece of theatre, or any art, that seeks to truly generate social change.

Avant-Home-and-Garden: Site-specific Theatre and the Politics of Public and Private Space

HowlRound: Approaching an unaddressed house at 10:00pm on a foggy Seattle night, I felt the same flailing thrill of stepping off a curb that I’d felt six months earlier at a community garden in Brooklyn. It’s a sense of griplessness I get in social situations with unfamiliar rules, but it’s unusual for me to feel it going to the theatre—a space in which, as Richard Schechner notes in Environmental Theater, the rules of behavior are usually well regulated and strict.

News: Pittsburg Benedum Center Explores New Dimensions with TSL Soundfield Microphone System

news.creativecow.net: The Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was constructed in 1928 as a “movie palace”. Over the years, it hosted legendary music performances from The Grateful Dead, to Bob Marley and more. Now known as the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts, it is home to the Pittsburgh Opera, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, and the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera.