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Entertainment

On the Street With Ballet Theater. Who Wants Purple Velvet Seats.

On the Road With Ballet Theater. Who Needs Red Velvet Seats.

Most of the time, they got used to travel life enough to complain a little about equality. (In St. Louis, the distribution of touring swag upset them again.) Usually, touring dancers have to adjust to a different stage in each city, but since they brought their own this time, it was always familiar – bouncy, if sometimes hot.

It was more difficult to place this stage. At the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, where the changing room at the Bee and Pollinator Discovery Center was next to the red barn, the floor sloped away from the stage to block the view of the dancers’ feet. In St. Louis, placing the stage at the base of an amphitheater-like canyon avoided that problem, but it was a worryingly close shave to press it in place.

Despite the company’s desire for ABT Across America to mirror the troupe’s transcontinental touring in the 1940s and 50s, it was a much less strenuous proposition. During the war, in the 1943/44 season, the troupe performed in 73 cities, 48 ​​of which were one-night stands. The tour 10 years later was similar: four months, 20 states on buses and trains, mostly a different city every day.

But if ABT Across America was shorter and more comfortable, it was significantly smaller and cheaper than the company’s touring model of recent years. “Even before the pandemic,” McKenzie told me, “the moderators were left at the expense of 130 people and hiring an orchestra.” A new touring model similar to ABT Across America’s could “add another arm to our mission,” he said . “Dancers will register. That would be extra work. “

Certainly the tour opened up space for younger dancers. “It seems like we’re pretty evenly represented in every piece,” said Carlos Gonzalez, a corps member. “It’s a great opportunity to dance and be seen and have experiences that we normally don’t get.”

And it felt good, says Teuscher, to reach an audience that Ballet Theater normally does not reach: “We are America’s company, so it is important to bring ballet to America.”

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World News

Tokyo Olympics Open to a Sea of Empty Seats

Tokyo Olympics Open to a Sea of Empty Seats

TOKYO – The athletes marched into the arena masked and waving exuberantly. Dancers in pastel costumes and hats clapped and raised their arms in the air to create excitement. But there were no fans and no cheering audience – just row after row of mostly empty seats that stretched into the vastness of the huge Olympic Stadium in central Tokyo.

A year after initial planning, the opening ceremony of the 32nd Summer Olympics took place amid a persistent pandemic, with attendance limited to fewer than 1,000 dignitaries and other invited guests in a 68,000-seat stadium.

The Japanese public is exhausted from the pandemic and has widely spoken out against the Games. But the ceremony attempted to project a world that continued after more than a year of battling the virus when confetti pigeons fell from the sky and a rendition of “Imagine” on jumbotrons with performances by Angélique Kidjo, John. Legend and Keith Urban echoed through the huge stadium.

The organizers sprinkled traditional Japanese culture through the celebrations and staged a typical summer festival with lanterns and a taiko drum soundtrack as well as an excerpt from a famous kabuki piece.

In a different way, they took a more modern perspective, choosing Naomi Osaka, Japan’s most famous athlete to light the Olympic cauldron, and Rui Hachimura, the basketball star who plays for the Washington Wizards, as one of the standard bearers for Japan. They are just two of several mixed race athletes who represent a largely homogeneous Japan at the Olympics.

Although some competitions began earlier this week, the ceremony on Friday marked the official start of the Olympic Games. More than 11,000 athletes from 205 countries are expected to compete in 33 sports over the next two weeks.

Almost all events, such as the opening ceremony, take place without spectators and the athletes compete according to strict protocols that restrict their freedom of movement.

Usually it is the Olympians who face significant odds, but this time it was the organizers who fought an uphill battle to get that moment. What was intended as a showcase for Japan’s brilliant efficiency, superior service culture and attractiveness as a tourist destination has instead been inundated by fears of infection and scandals by the host committee.

The opening ceremony is often the host country’s chance to showcase itself – think Beijing’s regulated drummers in 2008 or London’s National Health Service dancing nurses four years later. But the Tokyo organizers put on a darker show.

In a moment of silence, a spokesman urged viewers around the world to remember the Covid-19 losers and athletes who died in previous Olympics, including the Israeli athletes who died in a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Games were killed.

Although it was first mentioned in the organizers’ speeches, the ceremony relied on the original version of Tokyo’s Olympic bid as a symbol of the country’s recovery from the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011. A single figure dressed in white and ghostly make-up danced on a platform in the middle of the field, while waves of light swept through the stadium.

And with illuminated drones over the stadium forming a giant spinning globe, the organizers were clearly trying to divert the Games’ message from the pandemic and scandals and towards the more anodyne issues of peace and global harmony.

But that message may have little resonance from the Japanese public as coronavirus infections in Tokyo have soared to a six-month high and domestic vaccine adoption is slow.

In quieter moments during the ceremony, demonstrators could be heard outside the stadium shouting “Stop the Olympics” through megaphones.

“I can’t really think of any real meaning or significance as to why we’re doing all of this,” said Kaori Hayashi, professor of sociology and media studies at Tokyo University. “We started recovering Fukushima, but that has been completely forgotten. And now we want to show the world that we have overcome Covid-19, but we have not yet overcome it. “

Updated

July 24, 2021, 8:42 p.m. ET

While the pandemic has presented the organizers of the Games with an unprecedented challenge, it was far from the only one.

Just a day before the opening ceremonies, the organizing committee sacked the ceremony’s creative director after it was discovered that he joked about the Holocaust during a television comedy years ago.

His discharge came just days after a composer resigned for the ceremony – and organizers withdrew a four-minute piece he had written – in response to a loud social media campaign criticizing him for being during had bullied severely disabled classmates during his school days.

And these were just the latest in a long line of setbacks.

Two years after the award, the government decided against an elegant stadium design by the famous architect Zaha Hadid for reasons of cost. The organizers had to abolish their first logo after allegations of plagiarism. The French public prosecutor’s office has charged the President of the Japanese Olympic Committee with allegations of corruption in connection with the application process. For fear of extreme heat in Tokyo, the International Olympic Committee moved the marathon to Sapporo on the North Island of Japan, 500 miles from the Olympic Stadium. And the president of the Tokyo Organizing Committee had to resign after sexist statements.

While the decision to move the Games forward amid a pandemic has drawn attention to the billions of dollars at stake for the International Olympic Committee, the international spotlight has been tough for Japan at times.

The year-long delay in the games exposed social issues such as sexism in a country where almost all top jobs are held by older men, as well as the conservative government’s opposition to gay and transgender rights.

But now that the Games are finally here, the sheer spectacle of the world’s greatest sporting event began to brush these issues aside.

Basics of the Summer Olympics

The night before the opening ceremony, Aya Kitamura, 37, a traditional Japanese musician, cycled to the Olympic Stadium to stake out the best vantage point from outside the venue.

“Of course, I understand that there are many opinions about the Olympics,” said Ms. Kitamura, who said her parents often shared stories about the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. “But as the games get closer, I think everyone gets a little more excited every day.”

The near absence of spectators disappointed some who said they did not understand why the Olympic Games are different from other recent sporting events with large crowds in Europe, where infection rates are still higher than in Japan.

“It’s kind of unfair that only a limited number of people can see the opening ceremony,” said Hinako Tamai, 19, an Olympic volunteer who took the media to the stadium on Friday night. “But there’s not much we can do about Covid.”

Among the hundreds of people seated in the $ 1.4 billion Olympic Stadium at the opening ceremony on Friday was Japan’s Emperor Naruhito, who officially opened the Games; the American first lady Jill Biden; President Emmanuel Macron of France, whose capital Paris will host the next Summer Games in 2024; and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization.

But several high profile potential attendees said they would not be in attendance, including Akio Toyoda, the executive director of Toyota, a prominent Olympic sponsor who had voted against Olympic television advertising in Japan. Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister who helped Tokyo secure the application for the Games, also decided to stay away.

Several foreign dignitaries, including Princess Anne of England and the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, chose not to come, citing coronavirus restrictions. South Korean President Moon Jae-in canceled a planned visit after being insulted by a Japanese diplomat.

Even if the Olympics doesn’t turn out to be a superspread event, it will be difficult for them to escape the shadow of the pandemic as the Delta variant spreads and the daily numbers of new cases in the Olympic Village add to the fear.

“I really feel that no matter what, the pandemic is creating the impression that money is putting money above public health,” said Jessamyn R. Abel, Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

And the fanfare of the games can only go so far with a cautious audience. Kentaro Tanaka, 28, an adviser in Tokyo who was walking his dog near the Olympic Stadium the night before it opened, said he likes football and plans to watch the Games but questioned authorities’ priorities.

“Aren’t there other things the government needs to work on?” said Mr Tanaka, before wondering aloud when he could finally get a vaccination appointment.

Hikari Hida contributed to the coverage.

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Health

Musical Chairs? Why Swapping Seats May Cut back Orchestra Aerosols.

Musical Chairs? Why Swapping Seats Could Reduce Orchestra Aerosols.

If musical instruments were people, trumpets would be super spreaders. When a trumpeter blows into the mouthpiece, tiny droplets of breath, so-called aerosols, come out of the musician’s mouth, whiz through the brass tube and spray into the air.

During a deadly pandemic, when a musician unknowingly exhales an infectious virus, it presents a potential problem for orchestras. And the trumpet isn’t the only musical health hazard.

“Wind instruments are like machines for aerosolizing breath droplets,” says Tony Saad, chemical engineer and expert in computational fluid dynamics at the University of Utah.

A simple but radical change – reorganizing the musicians – could significantly reduce aerosol formation on stage, reported Dr. Saad and his colleagues in a new study published in Science Advances on Wednesday.

Work began last summer when the Utah Symphony began to wonder if and how they could safely perform again.

“They were looking for people who could provide insights into mitigation strategies that people would believe in.” said James Sutherland, a chemical engineer at the University of Utah and co-author of the study.

Researchers created a detailed computer model of the symphony’s concert hall and noted the location of each vent and the rate of air flow through the HVAC system.

Then they mapped the typical position of every musician. The Utah Symphony, like most modern orchestras, positioned its musicians in a standard pattern, with the stringed instruments at the front of the stage, followed by several rows of wood and brass instruments – the flutes and oboes, then the bassoons and clarinets, and then the trumpets and French horns. The trombones and drums were positioned at the very back of the stage.

To model the spread of aerosols during a concert, they incorporated the latest research led by Jiarong Hong, a mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota. Working with the Minnesota Orchestra, Dr. Hong and his colleagues measured the concentration and size of aerosol particles emitted by various wind instruments. (Among their findings, trumpet, bass trombone, and oboe posed the greatest risk.)

With these parameters, Dr. Saad and Dr. Sutherland ran computational fluid dynamics simulations to model how the air and aerosols would flow through the Utah concert hall if all the musicians were playing.

The simulation revealed complex air flow patterns. In general, the air flowed down from the air vents in the ceiling to the air return vents in the floor at the back of the stage. But two different eddies also formed, in front and in the back of the stage, they found. “You see these big regions circulating like a big tornado,” said Dr. Saad.

Aerosols can get caught in these eddies, swirl around the stage, and build up over time.

Updated

June 24, 2021, 4:02 p.m. ET

The trumpets, which emitted large, concentrated clouds of aerosol, posed a particular problem. When the aerosol plumes from the instruments wandered to the ventilation slots in the back of the stage, they passed directly through the drummers’ breathing zone.

“We saw that and said, ‘Okay, this is a big problem, we have to fix it,'” said Dr. Sutherland. “And given the insight we had about how the river was moving, we said, ‘Well, let’s move some of these instruments.'”

They knew the idea could be controversial; For decades, orchestras have generally been arranged in the same way, for both acoustic and traditional reasons. “We asked them at the beginning of the project: ‘What restrictions do we have to work with? Can we move people? ‘”Said Dr. Sutherland. “And they said, ‘You are doing everything you think possible to reduce the risk.'”

They moved the trumpets all the way back to the stage, right next to the air return ducts. Then they relocated the other wind instruments from the center of the stage and moved them either closer to the rear vents or to the stage doors they suggested opening.

These movements, the team hoped, would allow the aerosols to flow straight out of the concert hall without passing through other musicians’ breathing zones or getting caught in a vortex on the stage. “You want the smoker to sit close to the window,” said Dr. Saad. “That’s exactly what we did here.”

Finally, they moved the instruments that don’t create aerosols at all – the piano and percussion section – into the center of the stage. Together, these optimizations reduced the average aerosol concentration in the musicians’ breathing zones by a factor of 100, the researchers calculated.

Although the exact airflow patterns will be different at each venue, the general principles should apply everywhere, the team said. Orchestras can reduce the risk of aerosol spread by placing the most risky instruments near open doors and air return ports. (Orchestras that can’t do their own computer modeling could put a fog machine on stage and watch the fog flow, the researchers suggested.)

Dr. Hong, who was not involved in the Utah study, praised the modeling work. “It’s not easy to simulate the flow in an orchestra hall,” he said. “You did a great job when it comes to characterizing the river.”

But he wondered if moving musicians was really a viable solution. “We work closely with musicians and they don’t like being rearranged,” he said. (He noted, however, that “I think that’s perfectly fine for a student band.”)

Instead, he suggested a different, albeit equally unconventional, solution: masks for the instruments. In a recent study, he found that covering the bell of a trumpet with a single layer of acoustic fabric can reduce particulate emissions by around 60 percent without compromising sound quality.

The Utah Symphony, on the other hand, was open to rethinking the seating. And when it took the stage last fall, it did so with the stage doors open and the wind instruments in the stern.

“That was a big challenge for the musicians,” said Steven Brosvik, President and CEO of the Utah Symphony and the Utah Opera. “But they all got into it and said, ‘Come on, let’s try.'”

It took the musicians a few weeks to familiarize themselves with the new arrangement, and they plan to revert to their traditional seating configuration in the fall, Brosvik said. But the simulations gave the musicians security and enabled them to get back on stage, he said: “For us it changed our lives.”

The researchers were pleased with the willingness of the musicians to embrace an unusual solution, although their findings may have hit some instrumentalists harder than others. Like Dr. Sutherland said, “We had to apologize to the trumpets in advance.”

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Health

Empty Center Seats on Planes Reduce Coronavirus Danger in Examine

Empty Middle Seats on Planes Cut Coronavirus Risk in Study

Leaving the center seats vacant during a flight could reduce passenger exposure to coronavirus in the air by 23 to 57 percent. This is what researchers reported in a new study that modeled how aerosolized virus particles spread in a simulated aircraft cabin.

“Next is always better in terms of exposure,” said Byron Jones, a mechanical engineer at Kansas Sate University and co-author of the study. “It’s true in airplanes, it’s true in cinemas, it’s true in restaurants, it’s true everywhere.”

However, the study may have overestimated the benefits of having empty center seats by ignoring the wearing of masks by passengers.

“It’s important for us to know how aerosols spread in airplanes,” said Joseph Allen, a ventilation expert at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the study. But he added, “I am surprised that this analysis is now being published and it makes a big statement that the center seats should be left open as a risk mitigation approach if the model does not take into account the effects of masking. We know that masking is the most effective measure to reduce emissions from inhalation aerosols. “

Although scientists have documented several cases of coronavirus transmission on airplanes, airplane cabins are generally low risk environments as they tend to have excellent ventilation and filtration.

Still, concerns about the risk of air travel have swirled since the pandemic began. Planes are tight environments, and full flights make social distancing impossible. As a precaution, some airlines have started keeping the center seats free.

The new paper, published Wednesday in the Weekly Report on Morbidity and Mortality, is based on data collected at Kansas State University in 2017. In this study, the researchers sprayed a harmless aerosol virus through two mock aircraft cabins. (One was a five-row section of an actual single-aisle aircraft, the other a model of a wide-bodied double-aisle aircraft.) The researchers then monitored how the virus spread in each cabin.

For the new study, researchers from the state of Kansas and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used the 2017 data to model how passenger exposure to a virus in the air would change if each middle seat was in one 20-row entrance cabin would remain open.

Depending on the specific modeling approach and the parameters used, keeping the middle seats empty reduced the overall load on the passengers in the simulation by 23 to 57 percent compared to a fully occupied flight.

“Some airlines have been working with a vacant seat policy and this study supports the effectiveness of this intervention in conjunction with other existing measures,” a CDC spokesman said in a statement emailed.

This reduction in risk resulted from increasing the distance between an infectious passenger and others, as well as reducing the total number of people in the cabin, reducing the likelihood that an infectious passenger would be on board at all.

The laboratory experiments on the spread of viruses in aircraft cabins were conducted several years before the current pandemic began and did not take into account any protection that wearing masks could provide.

Masking would reduce the amount of virus infectious passengers release into cabin air and would likely reduce the relative benefit of keeping the center seats open, said Dr. All.

Dr. Jones agreed. “In general, I would think that wearing a mask would make this effect a lot less pronounced,” he said. He also noted that mere exposure to the virus does not mean that anyone will be infected by it.

“To what extent a reduction in exposure could reduce the risk of transmission is not yet known,” said the CDC spokesman.

The cost-benefit analysis is difficult for airlines. However, from a purely health perspective, keeping the center seats open would be helpful to create a buffer between an infectious person and others nearby, according to Alex Huffman, an aerosol scientist at the University of Denver who was not involved in the study . “Removal is important, both for aerosols and for droplets,” he said.

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Health

Open center seats might cut back Covid publicity of maskless passengers

Open middle seats could reduce Covid exposure of maskless passengers

View of the cabin of a Delta flight between Minneapolis and Baltimore on April 25, 2020.

Sebastien Duval | AFP | Getty Images

Passenger exposure to the virus that causes Covid-19 could be reduced by more than half if the center seats on airplanes were left open, according to a new study published Wednesday.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kansas State University used laboratory models to find that passenger exposure to SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, could be reduced by between 23% in large and narrow-body aircraft and 57% when airlines leave middle seats open – Even if they don’t wear masks.

The study comes after airlines have spent much of the last year promoting increased on-board cleaning procedures and filtration to reassure travelers worried about flying during the pandemic. The demand for travel has recovered somewhat since then, as more people are vaccinated against Covid-19.

U.S. airlines, including JetBlue Airways and Southwest Airlines, limited the capacity on board their aircraft at the start of the pandemic, but have since abolished the policy, citing hospital-grade filtration and other safety measures to limit the risk of exposure on board. Delta Air Lines plans to end the lockdown of the center seats next month, the last U.S. carrier to make the change. However, capacity caps were halted over the Easter weekend as staff shortages resulted in dozens of flight cancellations.

The researchers’ study did not look at wearing masks on flights, which became an airline and federal government policy during the pandemic.

However, they cited a New Zealand case study which stated that “some of the virus aerosol is given off by an infectious masked passenger, so distancing might still be useful.”

They used a surrogate virus to stand up for SARS-CoV-2 in the air.