Category: Entertainment

Categories
Entertainment

Comedians Think about Malcolm and Marie’s Neighbors’ Reactions

Comedians Imagine Malcolm and Marie's Neighbors' Reactions

Just a few days later Malcolm & MarieBy the time it was released on Netflix, the movie’s argumentation scenes are already famous – for better or for worse. Zendaya and John David Washington’s performances received hard-earned applause, but there is also room for a bit of humor as the viewers imagine what life on the edge of this couple’s personal life would be like. For example, two comedians went the extra mile to imagine what Malcolm and Marie’s neighbors would think of their toxic differences of opinion.

“He’s still yelling about Barry Jenkins,” joked Ryan Ken on Twitter, mimicking the film’s typical black and white style. “All night! He did it all night!” His video hit nearly 1 million viewers in less than a day, including a response from Danielle Pinnock who you might recognize by her funny appearance Bridgerton Recap videos. Together, the cast are a fun force to be reckoned with and a refreshing comedic balance to the drama of Malcolm and Marie’s relationship. Have fun with the clips below.

Categories
Entertainment

Cuomo Declares Pop-Up Performances Throughout New York

Cuomo Announces Pop-Up Performances Across New York

New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, who has made it clear that he sees the return of arts and culture as key elements in the state’s economic revitalization, announced Monday that a series of more than 300 free pop-up performances will be held “NY PopsUp” would begin February 20th and run through Labor Day.

Mayor Bill de Blasio meanwhile announced details of the city’s Open Culture program, which will allow outdoor performances on designated streets of the city in the spring.

The state’s pop-up events are part of a public-private partnership, New York Arts Revival, and will feature more than 150 artists, including Amy Schumer, Chris Rock, Mandy Patinkin, Renée Fleming and Hugh Jackman.

Because the state does not want to attract large crowds to the pandemic, many of the events are not announced in advance.

“We’re trying to thread the needle,” said Mr. Cuomo. “We want the performances. We don’t want mass gatherings, we don’t want large crowds. “

The events, according to the state, will take place in parks, museums and parking lots, as well as on subway platforms and in transit stations. People can follow a new Twitter and Instagram account, @NYPopsUp, for details on upcoming gigs. Many are shown online.

The series is co-directed by producers Scott Rudin and Jane Rosenthal with the New York State Council for Art and Empire State Development. It’s part of an arts revival plan that the governor announced during a January address when he said the state would organize the pop-up performances from February 4th.

The series begins on February 20 at the Javits Center in New York City with a free performance for health care workers starring Jon Batiste, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and Ayodele Casel. Performers will travel across town in all five boroughs, performing in parks and street corners, as well as on the trail of Elmhurst Hospital and St. Barnabas Hospital.

Mr Cuomo said some of the events would use flexible venues with no fixed seating and could therefore be reconfigured to allow social distancing, including the Shed, Apollo Theater, Harlem Stage, La MaMa and the Alice Busch Opera Glimmerglass Festival Theater.

In June, the opening of Little Island, the park-like pier built by Barry Diller on the downtown Hudson River, and the 20th anniversary of the Tribeca Film Festival will add to the city’s growing arts program.

Little Island plans to have its own festival from August 11th to September 5th, coinciding with the final weeks of programming “NY PopsUp”.

Mr de Blasio announced on Monday that the city would start a new program to help some of the city’s cultural institutions apply for federal grants. The city’s effort, called Curtains Up NYC, will provide webinars and advice to businesses and nonprofits that are in some way related to live performances.

“We have to make sure that New York’s cultural institutions get the help they need,” said de Blasio at a press conference.

When asked if Broadway theaters could reopen while his plans to revive the arts continue, Mr Cuomo expressed hope.

“I think this is where we are going, right?” he said. “The overall effort is directed towards reopening with testing.”

He announced last week that the state intends to issue guidelines to allow wedding ceremonies for up to 150 guests if the participants are tested beforehand.

“Would I see a play and sit in a playhouse with 150 people?” he said. “If the 150 people were tested and they were all negative, I would do that. And the social distancing and ventilation system are right? Yes i would. “

Commercial producers have repeatedly said that Broadway’s economy precludes reopening at less than full capacity.

New York reported at least 177 new coronavirus deaths and 9,923 new cases on Sunday. While the number of new cases has fallen from a high after last month’s vacation, the average number of new daily cases and deaths is still well above the summer and fall levels.

Mr Cuomo said the government must take an active role in helping the city and state recover from the economic troubles of the pandemic. “It won’t be a situation where the economy will just return,” he said. “We have to make sure it comes back.”

“New York leads,” he added. “And we will bring the arts back.”

Michael Gold contributed to the coverage.

Categories
Entertainment

Filmmakers Take a look at Woody Allen Abuse Allegations in 4-Half Sequence

Filmmakers Look at Woody Allen Abuse Allegations in Four-Part Series

Documentary filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering have shed light on sexual abuse allegations in institutions such as the military for the past decade in The Invisible War (2012). Colleges, in “The Hunting Ground” (2015); and the music industry in “On the Record” (2020). Now they target Dylan Farrow’s decades of sexual abuse allegations against her adoptive father Woody Allen.

“Allen v. Farrow” is a four-part documentary that will be released later this month. It introduces viewers to Farrow’s public experience of accusing a famous and powerful man of abuse, but also includes details of the case that were not shared with the public.

At first, Farrow’s story didn’t fit in with the usual broad-based research by Dick and Ziering, but on closer inspection, the filmmakers found they had an opportunity to discuss family child abuse and incest, a topic that survivors consistently urged the two to address .

“I was haunted by these stories,” said Ziering. “That is the third track. Nobody talks about it. “

Everyone is talking about Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, however. The former Hollywood power couple were together for 12 years. They never married and had separate apartments, made 13 films together, adopted and had two children (Dylan and Moses) another (Satchel who changed his name to Ronan after his parents separated). They were the talk of the town until everything collapsed in 1992. Over the course of eight months, Farrow discovered nude photos of college-age daughter Soon-Yi Previn in Allen’s apartment. That summer, 7-year-old Dylan said Allen sexually assaulted her. These allegations resulted in an ugly custody battle and a permanently torn family apart. Allen has consistently denied the allegations and has not been charged with a crime following investigations in Connecticut and New York.

With the media fully focused on the scandal for so many years, Dick said he believed he knew the story and was initially reluctant to delve further. “It’s been covered so extensively and a lot of our work goes into new cases,” he said. “But when we got involved, we found that there was a lot more. We turned around finding that the whole story had never come out. “

The filmmakers, along with Amy Herdy, the producer who led the investigation, spent three years tracking down court documents and police reports, and conducting extensive interviews with many witnesses who had never spoken to the public before.

The series begins February 21 on HBO and includes a home video of Mia Farrow growing up in Connecticut, as well as audio recordings she secretly taped from some conversations with everyone. And for the first time, we see 7-year-old Dylan’s videotape, taped immediately after Farrow’s allegations. The ribbon has become a hot button over the past two decades. One side is evidence of her truthfulness and the other side is evidence that Farrow coached her daughter in her responses. The filmmakers also raise questions about an important report from the Yale Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital that found Dylan incredible after nine interviews within seven months.

Neither Allen, Soon-Yi Previn nor Moses Farrow participated in the documentary. (The majority of Farrow’s other living children did so.) They declined to comment on the series that they had not yet seen.

I asked Dick and Ziering why they decided to get involved. You will find edited excerpts from our conversation below.

For so long this story has been told the way he said – it told a family drama in which many people declared, “We will never know the truth.”

Amy Ziering If you dig closer you see he said it, he said, he said, he said, he said, he said, she said [whispered]he said, he said, he said, he said. But we didn’t know. Nobody knew. If you get this echo chamber from a certain perspective and narrative, you will not recognize the source. That was interesting when we unpacked it. And when we started listening to the “She Said” part and checking out the “He Said” part, it got extremely interesting.

Since the beginning of the #MeToo movement, Allen has been ostracized in a number of ways: Amazon has canceled its film contract for several pictures. His latest film has not yet found US distribution. The first editor of his memoirs resigned. Some actors have said that they will no longer work with him in the future. Why publish this documentary now?

ZIERING Our goal is never the perpetrator. It is more about us all understanding these crimes, how we all participate in these crimes, and I mean all of us, both funny and unknowing. It’s also about how to talk about something that happens all the time in America that no one is comfortable with. This is not the full exploration of it. It’s a way of getting people to think about it.

THICK As with “On the Record,” where people need to know what happens when a person decides to come forward and immediately afterwards, this is built into the experience of the people involved. So it’s not just about someone being accused.

Whether by the media or by everyone himself, Farrow has long been portrayed as unstable? Was that your perception of her and has that changed?

THICK I just want to say that the suspicion and criticism that mothers have in this society in general are just evidence of misogyny. People like to blame mothers for anything. From the beginning I was very suspicious of this narrative because it is a misogynist narrative – the idea of ​​the hysterical woman, the crazy woman. This is what not only happens with incest, which is done quite often, but also with sexual assault. Hearing that made me very, very suspicious.

ZIERING There are amazing wills [to Farrow] and people will see the home videos Mia has made of her children all her life. We have received a lot of love and praise from the people we interviewed about their qualities as mothers.

Wasn’t Dylan ready to give you the tape of her at the age of 7, the tape that has been at the center of this controversy for so long?

ZIERING It took Dylan a long time to feel comfortable and secure in sharing this video. And once she shared it, there were parameters about whether she’d be okay with us actually using it. It was incremental. We are not concerned with contributing to the pain of others.

At the end of the documentary, Mia says she’s still scared of Woody and is actually worried about what he’s going to do when he sees this series. Then why did she choose to participate? What was your goal?

ZIERING She didn’t want to be part of it. She did this for her daughter Dylan. In fact, in the interview you see her in, she’s in my shirt. I literally had to borrow someone else’s shirt and give her my shirt because when she showed up she didn’t want to do the interview, she was so unhappy. What did she wear? I don’t even remember.

She said, “My daughter came up to me and said it was important to me and you must do this for me.” And she said, “I stand by my children. I will take the incoming fire. I don’t know you, Amy. I don’t know Kirby. I know your work. I was angry because I didn’t do anything. ”

The series examines the Yale-New Haven clinic in depth. From the frequency with which the clinicians interviewed Dylan to the fact that any timely interview notes from those sessions were destroyed when the final report was published. In your previous sexual abuse research, have you ever seen a situation where such notes were destroyed?

THICK I had not. It’s really shocking that notes get destroyed, but that’s one of the reasons the whole story never came out. If everything had been transparent, we wouldn’t have made this series.

How actively did you try to reach out to Soon-Yi, Moses, and Woody? Have you ever got an answer from any of them?

THICK We have definitely achieved. We didn’t expect them to speak. If we were to make a movie about Woody Allen’s career, he probably wouldn’t be talking to us. It didn’t surprise us.

Were there any threats of lawsuits or anything else from the Allen camp when you put this together?

THICK No. We are always careful when verifying facts. We went to great lengths to ensure accuracy.

ZIERING As always. We never had to withdraw a fact. Legally, it would have been easier to adapt a book or write a story about someone who is already convicted. This way you won’t be in front of a moving train. But unfortunately we actually run in front of moving trains. The only thing that can save us is truth and extreme caution. We are not dead yet.

Categories
Entertainment

Glimpses of an Historic Hearth-Strolling Ritual in Northern Greece

Glimpses of an Ancient Fire-Walking Ritual in Northern Greece

The room was dimly lit and only lit by a faint yellow lightbulb and the fireplace flames. A small group of men and women, clutching the sacred icons of the Greek Orthodox saints, danced and whirled across the floor to the sound of instruments: a Thracian lyre, a gaida, a tambourine. The dancers who surrendered to the music had their eyes closed.

Everyone sang together:

Constantine the little, little Constantine,
His mother had him, she took care of him when he was very young,
A message came for him to go to war
He saddles and horseshoes his horse in the night,
He lays silver petals, gold nails and a pearl on the saddle.

Their voices carried out into the rainy streets. A while later they started walking barefoot on burning coals in a kind of ecstasy.

Every year on May 21st, the Greek Orthodox Church celebrates Saints Constantine and Helen. In the small village of Lagadas, about half an hour outside of Thessaloniki in northern Greece, the festivities last three days and include a spectacular fire walking ritual called Anastenaria, whose word is derived from the Greek “Anastasi” and means resurrection.

In 2016 I traveled to Northern Greece to meet some of the people who keep these traditions.

Anastasios Gaintatzis’ family and close friends are some of the last remaining participants. The 85-year-old Gaintatzis is one of the oldest fire fighters in the country. His family, who once lived in what is now the Bulgarian city of Kosti in eastern Thrace, came to Lagadas in 1923 after the mandatory population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

The people who gathered here were members of a club founded by the Gaintatzis family in 1994 to uphold local fire-walking traditions.

Ethnographers believe the ritual has its roots in the ancient Greek festivals of Dionysus – and that pagan traditions have merged with Orthodox rites over the years.

Others believe in a local legend that traces the ceremony back to the fact that the Church of Constantine and Helena caught fire in Kosti hundreds of years ago. According to tradition, the voices of the saints in the Church were asked for help. The villagers entered the burning building to rescue the icons of the saints, and when they came out, neither the rescuers nor the icons were injured. They had been protected from the fire by the saints.

The Anastenaria ritual begins at the Konaki, a special shrine dedicated to the saints, where the icons are placed between the amanets (red handkerchiefs considered sacred by the fire wanderers) and other honors.

Then the musicians come and the party begins.

The firewalking ceremony is usually held outdoors, but in 2016, heavy rain forced the event indoors.

One of the group members placed large pieces of wood on the fireplace and when the hot coals formed everyone was ready to begin. The celebrants removed the carpet, spread the burning coal on the floor and walked on it one by one barefoot with closed eyes, almost drunk with the feelings of the moment.

Some participants walked slowly, others faster. They followed the rhythm of the music. I tried to pay close attention to their faces. They showed no signs of pain or discomfort. In fact, they seemed rather calm and peaceful.

When the first batch of coal had cooled, a second batch was taken from the fireplace and the ceremony continued unabated.

Even as a spectator, I felt a surge of emotion as I watched the fire walkers – and maybe even the deep mystery and divinity of the moment.

The Anastenaria rituals in Lagadas usually attract dozens of people from the area, but on the first day the bad weather kept most of the visitors away. In the next two days after the rain stopped, many people came to watch – and this time the fire barrel pit was built in an outdoor area near the Konaki, which was made available to the celebrants by the community.

Metal barriers were arranged in a large circle to protect the audience, and in the center members of the group lit a large fire on a pile of wood. When night fell, people gathered to watch. When the firefighters and musicians left the Konaki, it was pitch black outside. All the lights in the area went out and the only thing you could see was the burning coal. The crowd stared in silence as the firefighters stormed the embers.

After the celebration, the group gathered again at the Konaki and ate hot soup bowls to ward off the cold weather. They also offered me a bowl. Soon everyone except Anastasios Gaintatzis had left.

Mr. Gaintatzis has long tried to keep the custom alive by adding new family members and close friends to the group whenever possible. But it’s not an easy task, he said.

“It’s something that can’t be taught,” he told me. “It is the saints who call you.”

Categories
Entertainment

Eugene Levy Seems So Proud Watching Son Dan Levy on SNL

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE -

Image source: NBC

Eugene Levy has a long list of prominent roles on his Hollywood resume, but on February 6th he played the role of Proud Father. His son Dan Levy was the host Saturday night live For the first time, and when Eugene didn’t make a surprise monologue cameo, he stood in the wings cheering Dan. Someone caught a glimpse of the sweet family moment and shared a snapshot on the show’s official Instagram account for fans to enjoy as if they were there.

Dan also had behind-the-scenes support from his mother, Deborah Divine. She tweeted a message to his childhood bullies, saying, “This goes to the bullies at Camp WTF who made life difficult for a certain roommate in the summer of 1996 – just because he was different. Well, after all these years, I just did 7 words to say, ‘Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!’ “Whether Dan is up Schitt’s Creek or in real life it is clear that his family will always be by his side. Get a glimpse of his father’s backstage support below.

Categories
Entertainment

Paris Hilton Has a Podcast, With a Twist

Paris Hilton Has a Podcast, With a Twist

Podcasting is a major draw for potential media distraughters and visionaries. In the medium that is still developing, they see moist clay that can be formed into an ideal vessel for long-form narrative journalism or fiction or game shows or musicals or memoirs.

Add Paris Hilton to their ranks. Hilton, master of an earlier era of mass communication in the early years of the tabloid, is stepping into a form with a new company, her own show, and an unusual spin that seeks to create an audio that matches social media.

“This Is Paris” will debut on February 22nd, in partnership with iHeartMedia, the radio giant that has grown to become one of the largest podcast distributors, with more than 750 shows that collect more than 250 million downloads per month. The new show is aimed at Hilton’s 40 million+ followers on social media platforms and features a mix of personal content and conversations with their family, friends and other celebrities. It will be the flagship of a planned list of seven shows produced by Hilton’s London Audio and iHeartPodcast Network. The other programs with different hosts will be released over the next three years.

“I’ve always been an innovator and a trailblazer when it comes to reality TV, social media and DJing, and now I really believe that language and audio are the next frontier,” she said in an interview.

A key feature of their podcast will be their use of a format that Hilton calls “podposts”: short (between one and three minutes), slimmed-down shows designed to mimic the cadence and tone of social media posts. The “This Is Paris” podcast feed will feature longer (around 45 minutes), more traditional episodes each week, with intermittent podposts filling the void several times a week.

“I really think it’s like another form of social media,” said Hilton. “I do so many things – as a DJ, businesswoman, designer, and writer – that I can talk about them a lot.”

Pre-planned categories of podposts are inspired by Hilton’s famous buzzwords, including “That’s Hot” for product recommendations, “Loves It” for cultural recommendations, and “This Is my Hotline,” in which Hilton responds to voicemail messages sent by listeners. Conal Byrne, president of the iHeartPodcast network, said the company is currently looking to partner with brands for sponsorship at various levels.

“Her ability to recommend products she believes in to her fans is almost unrivaled,” said Byrne.

Since the end of “The Simple Life,” her reality television series starring Nicole Richie, in 2007, Hilton, who turns 40 this month, has branched into a variety of industries through her company Paris Hilton Entertainment. The assets include 45 retail stores and 19 product lines in various categories such as fragrance, fashion and accessories. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Hilton was a sought-after DJ around the world, paying her $ 1 million per gig.

With this new deal, iHeartMedia will fully fund the list of shows produced in association with London Audio on a multi-million dollar budget. The two companies will be joint partners at every trade fair and will share all sources of income. After “This Is Paris,” the rest of the list is said to be focused on topics such as beauty, wellness, dating, philanthropy and technology, with Hilton and Bruce Gersh, President of London Audio serving as executive producers.

“This is a medium that has so many dimensions and it really allows you to connect with an audience in unique ways,” said Gersh. “Paris wanted to step in with all of its heart.”

Hilton, who named “Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions,” and Kate and Oliver Hudson’s “Sibling Revelry” as their favorite shows, immersed themselves in the medium during the pandemic at home in Los Angeles.

“I usually travel 250 days a year and work all the time,” she said. “During the whole year in quarantine, I had more free time than ever before in my career. I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts and I was really interested in them. When I cook or work or do my art, I always have it in the background. “

Podcasts have become a preferred medium for celebrities looking to delve deeper into fans than a typical post on Instagram or Twitter, while avoiding the control and vulnerability associated with speaking to the press. Name recognition is a huge perk on the platform – shows from celebrity podcasters like Dax Shepard, Jason Bateman, Anna Faris and Bill Burr regularly appear in the top 50 Apple Podcasts charts. (In addition to the Hilton deal, iHeartMedia has partnered with Will Ferrell and Shonda Rhimes to watch shows.) And podcast audiences tend to be relatively friendly: there are no comment areas highlighting uncomfortable behavior and podcasts The Nature requires a level of active engagement that will deter passing critics.

“I think once people understand that this is a platform where they can interact directly with their fans without any sort of middle person, it will be a very attractive proposition,” said Tom Webster, senior vice president from Edison Research, a media research company.

Webster added that Hilton’s podposts concept reminded him of the proto-podcast field of audio blogging, where writers published short audio diaries for sites like The Quiet American and The Greasy Skillet. “It enables them to engage with their personal interests in ways that they cannot achieve in their day-to-day work,” he said.

“This Is Paris” takes its name from Hilton’s YouTube documentary that was released last fall. In this film, which has nearly 20 million views, she distances herself from the carefree, ditsy person she has been identified with since she appeared in the glitz of paparazzi onions two decades ago. Hilton also says she was molested by administrators of a private boarding school she attended as a teenager, an experience that leaves her traumatized.

The podcast is supposed to follow in the same open direction. Hilton records it in a home studio (built for her music projects) and uses her much discussed natural voice (which to my ear is deeper than her girly trill, but no dramatic departure).

“She speaks in a way that is very relaxed and approachable, unlike someone doing a performance,” said Byrne. “Right away she felt like a one-on-one conversation and not a one-to-many media object.”

It was initially uncomfortable for Hilton to include the pilot for the show – unlike on social media, there were no glamorous photos or videos to hide behind. “It’s all about the knowledge you bring and what you say with your voice,” she said.

But soon she fell into a groove. After being the subject of interviews for a lifetime, she has enjoyed turning the tables when asking questions. Compared to their old jobs, the commute isn’t bad either.

“I love being a homebody,” she said, thinking about her new chapter. “I’ve worked so incredibly hard to build my empire – now I can finally enjoy it.”

Categories
Entertainment

Christopher Plummer, Actor From Shakespeare to ‘The Sound of Music,’ Dies at 91

Christopher Plummer, Actor From Shakespeare to ‘The Sound of Music,’ Dies at 91

He played Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Mark Antony, and others of Shakespeare’s towering protagonists on prominent stages, and he starred in “Hamlet at Helsingör,” a critically acclaimed 1964 television production directed by Philip Saville and set in Kronborg Castle The film was shot in Denmark, where (under the name Elsinore) the play is set.

But he also accepted roles in a whole series of clinkers, in which he brought some clichés to life – like the evil fanatic who hides behind religiosity in “Skeletons” (1997), for example in one of his more than 40 television films. or as the gloomy emperor of the galaxy, who appears as a hologram in “Starcrash”, a rip-off of “Star Wars” from 1978.

A measure of his stature were his leading actresses, which included Glenda Jackson as Lady Macbeth and Zoe Caldwell as Cleopatra. And even leaving Shakespeare aside, one measure of his reach was a list of the well-known characters he played fictional and non-fictional on television and in the films: Sherlock Holmes and Mike Wallace, John Barrymore and Leo Tolstoy, Aristotle and F. Lee Bailey, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alfred Stieglitz, Rudyard Kipling and Cyrano de Bergerac.

Mr. Plummer’s television work began in the 1950s, during the heyday of live drama, and lasted for half a century. He starred as archbishop in the popular 1983 miniseries “The Thorn Birds”, appeared regularly as an industrialist in the 1990s action-adventure series “Counterstrike” and won the Emmy Awards – 1977 for portraying a sensible banker in miniature Series “Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers” and in 1994 for the narration of “Madeline”, an animated series based on the children’s books.

In the films, his appearance in “The Sound of Music” as von Trapp, a strict widower and father whose heart was warmed and won over by the woman he hires as governess, triggered a parade of distinctive roles, more character changes than main roles across an impressive range of genres. These included a historical drama (“The Last Station” about Tolstoy and “The Day That Shook the World” about the beginning of the First World War); historical adventure (as Kipling in John Huston’s boisterous adaptation of The Man Who Would Be King, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine); romantic comedy (“Must Love Dogs” with John Cusack and Diane Lane); political epic (“Syriana”); Science Fiction (as Chang, the Klingon general, in Star Trek VI); and Crime Farce (“The Return of the Pink Panther,” in which he played a retired version of the Debonair jewel thief originally portrayed by David Niven to Peter Sellers’ incompetent Inspector Clouseau).

Mr. Plummer won a belated Oscar in 2012 for the role of Hal, a man who enthusiastically emerges as gay in the bittersweet father-son story “Beginners” after decades of marriage and the death of his wife.

Categories
Entertainment

On Ballet TikTok, a Place for Younger Dancers to Be Actual

On Ballet TikTok, a Place for Young Dancers to Be Real

“TikTok is so carefree, why not have some fun with it?” Said Watters. “Highlighting these comments also puts a little pressure on: talking to dancers this way is not okay, and maybe you could be exposed for this type of behavior as well.”

One of the reasons Watters is comfortable with everything hanging out on TikTok is because he doesn’t have to worry about his boss rolling by. “I would have a hard time finding an art director who really knew what TikTok is,” he said. But the “mom and dad aren’t home” atmosphere may not continue.

Professional ballet is making progress. The American Ballet Theater, one of the country’s leading companies, had its dancers take a TikTok course last spring. The company has been posting exploratory videos at @americanballettheatre since August and is expected to be the first major ballet company to officially open a TikTok account. Wherever the ballet theater goes, other troops are sure to follow, a change that could transform the app’s ballet ecosystem.

Or maybe not. Current residents of the TikTok ballet may simply ignore corporate offers, especially if corporate accounts end up as a showcase for tech. “When I scroll through TikTok, I really don’t want to see Isabella Boylston do six pirouettes,” McCloskey said, referring to a lead dancer at the Ballet Theater. “She’s obviously incredibly talented, but it’s kind of boring. It’s not the creative content that I go to TikTok for. “

Akamine also noted that some of the young stars of the TikTok ballet are not feeling the urge to seek institutional approval. “In this day and age, we have as much power and value on this platform as big companies,” she said.

Connor Holloway, 26, the gender-assault member of the Corps de Ballet who runs the Ballet Theater’s TikTok account, said the company wanted to present a version of itself that feels true to the culture of the TikTok ballet. Last year, Holloway successfully campaigned for the Ballet Theater to remove gender labels from its corporate classes. Content that challenges the gender binary representation of ballet will “absolutely” be part of the TikTok presence of ballet theater, Holloway said, mentioning the possibility that the company’s account could be a crowdsourced ballet with choreography and design by young creators like ” Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical “made possible. ”

Categories
Entertainment

Who Went Residence on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 13?

Who Went Home on RuPaul's Drag Race Season 13?

Though we saw the first major twist of season 13 of RuPaul’s Drag Race When we got there, we were still in shock that the lip-sync losers were sent to the “Porkchop Loading Dock” to await their fate. Surprisingly, we actually didn’t see anyone get the “pork chop” in the first episode. The queens learned that they would have to vote someone out at the beginning of the second episode, although their choice didn’t go home either. In fact, no one went home in episodes two or three – all of the queens were safe after performing separately on RuPaul’s classics “Condragulations” and “Phenomenon”. It wasn’t until the fourth episode of the Acting Challenge that the eliminations were finally implemented.

In the fifth episode, the queens appeared in “The Bag Ball”, while in the sixth episode choreography for a “Disco-Mentary” was shown. With such an unprecedented start to the season, there is no telling what other tricks and twists RuPaul might have up his sleeve in the further course of the season. However, we do know that at some point we have to say goodbye to each of the queens before one is crowned a “winner, baby”. See who’s knocked out ahead of time and check back every week to see who’s still in the running for the title of America’s next drag superstar.

Categories
Entertainment

The Music Misplaced to Coronavirus, Half 2

The Music Lost to Coronavirus, Part 2

The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed over 450,000 lives in the United States alone. there are well over two million worldwide. Many musicians and people who are an integral part of the music business are part of that terrible sum.

In this week’s popcast, the second part of a recurring series, a handful of memories of musicians lost to the coronavirus:

  • Cristina, a downtown New York haute post disco diva from the early 1980s who died at the age of 64.

  • Fred the Godson, a Bronx rap classic and mixtape star of the 2000s, died at the age of 41.

  • Adam Schlesinger, a member of the influential power pop band Fountains of Wayne and songwriter and composer for countless film and television projects, died at the age of 52.

Guests:

  • Kurt B. Reighley, DJ and author of the liner notes for Cristina’s 2004 reissues.

  • Shawn Setaro, reporter and writer at Complex.

  • Ben Sisario, music reporter for the New York Times.