Commentary
This is the first of a series of occasional essays where Fuse Dance Critic Debra Cash will reflect on dances made for camera and new technologies. As they used to say, don’t touch that dial!
As a long time arts critic for print, broadcast, and the Web, the potential for cultural coverage online strikes me then and now as exhilarating. The challenge for The Arts Fuse is to foster dialogue that articulates the value of the arts in our lives.
Read MoreEarly on I was given these words of wisdom by my friend, the late theater critic Arthur Friedman: “Criticism should not read as if it had been written by a publicist.
Read MoreGiven the flood of publications on early modern natural history over the last two decades, the detailed and strikingly illustrated Picturing the Book of Nature represents a herculean undertaking.
Read MoreI have read the Harvard Business School study about critics and it is clueless on so many levels about the craft and mechanics of reviewing that it is astonishing that major newspapers and magazines have taken it seriously.
Read MoreSimon Garfield’s tour of fonts, Just My Type, is a rollicking, sometimes snarky social history of the design decisions behind lettering from Gutenberg to the iPad.
Read MoreDramatist and director Wesley Savick faces a number of fascinating but formidable theatrical challenges, and the generally compelling Yesterday Happened (how could it not be, given its story?) takes an honorable, visually striking swipe at the problems.
Read MoreOver the past 6 weeks William Kentridge has shown the form of the lecture itself to be obsolete. But over the course of his returns to the podium, he has shown us that the lecture’s fate is not so dire as he had induced us —- for seventy minutes at a stretch -— to believe.
Read MoreMistranslation weaves through this lecture, for every translation is a mistranslation. But that is what makes them fruitful. As soon as we mis-hear or fail to understand, the brain constructs an instant bit of narrative to bridge the gap in understanding.
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Dance Commentary: In Short Order
None of the Boston Dances Made to Order submissions dodged dance-on-camera cliches. There was a lot random dancing outdoors, body parts — especially hands and feet — shot in close-up, and random objects (mirrors, food) revealed by camera pans.
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