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Wednesday, November 13th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | The Virtual Choir: Watch a Choir Conductor Digitally Unite 3500 Singers from Around the World
For decades we've been hearing promises about how communication technology will one day eliminate distance itself, making everyone around the globe feel as if they might as well be in the same room. Such a future would have its downside as well as its upside, but even now, approaching the third decade of the 21st century, it hasn't quite arrived yet. Nevertheless, we've already grown so used to the idea of real-time global collaboration that it takes an extraordinarily ambitious project to let us step back and appreciate the technological reality that makes it possible. Take, for example, conductor Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir, whose performance of Whitacre's own piece "Lux Arumque" appears above.
"Virtual," here, is a bit of a misnomer, encouraging as it does Gibsonian visions of the 100-percent digital voices of synthetic singers resonating purely in cyberspace. And while Whitacre's project wouldn't have been possible without streaming digital audio and video technology — as well as the infrastructure of what we may as well still call cyberspace — it begins with the real voices of 100-percent analog humans. 185 such humans, to be precise, based in twelve countries, and all of them visible on their separate screens as Whitacre plays the role of conductor on his own. The much larger-scale performance of "Water Night," a piece composed for the poetry of Octavio Paz, brings together 3,746 videos from 73 countries, necessitating a credits sequence longer than the piece itself.
The Virtual Choir grew, as many such immense works do, from a small seed: "It all started with this one young girl who sent me this video of herself singing one of my choral pieces," says Whitacre in this video on the preparation for the Virtual Choir's "Sleep" video. "I was struck so hard by the beauty, the intimacy of it, the sweetness of it, and I thought, 'Boy, it would be amazing if we could get 100 people to do this and cut it all together." The experience of assembling this virtual choir, or even hearing it, shows that "singing together and making music together is a fundamental human experience," and on a scale hardly imaginable a generation or two ago. But on the most basic level, even this new way of making music is merely an expansion of the oldest way of making music: with one human voice, then another, and another. via Swiss Miss Related Content: 30 Fans Joyously Sing the Entirety of Bob Marley’s Legend Album in Unison 25 John Lennon Fans Sing His Album Working Class Hero Word for Word, and Note for Note Patti Smith Sings “People Have the Power” with a Choir of 250 Fellow Singers Watch David Byrne Lead a Massive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes” Watch Choirs Around the World Simulate the Rainstorm in Toto’s “Africa” Using Only Their Hands Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or Facebook. The Virtual Choir: Watch a Choir Conductor Digitally Unite 3500 Singers from Around the World is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 3:00p | Watch the Serpentine Dance, Created by the Pioneering Dancer Loie Fuller, Performed in an 1897 Film by the Lumière Brothers
Whatever their views on copyright, artists and inventors of all kinds can agree on one thing: all dread the horror of having one’s ideas stolen without so much as a footnote of credit. Such thefts have led to tanked careers, lifelong resentments, homicidal rivalries, and lawsuits to fill libraries. They have allowed many a thief to prosper and many an injured party to surrender. But not legendary modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller. “Short, plump, and thirty years old,” the dancer from Illinois arrived in Paris in 1892, fresh off the “mid-level vaudeville” circuit, writes Rhonda K. Garelick at Public Domain Review, and bent on proving herself to Édouard Marchand, director of the Folies-Bergère. She scored an interview within days of her arrival.
The imposter, an American named Maybelle Stewart, had seen Fuller perform in New York and had lifted her act and taken it to Paris. Rather than succumb to rage or despair, Fuller sat through the matinee performance and was moved from a cold sweat to renewed confidence. “The longer she danced,” she wrote, “the calmer I became.” After Stewart left the stage, Fuller ascended in her serpentine costume and auditioned for Marchand, who agreed to take her on and fire Stewart.
The story gets stranger. The show had been promoted with Stewart’s name, and so, to avoid bad publicity, Fuller agreed to perform the first two nights as Stewart, “dancing her own imitation of Stewart’s imitation of the serpentine dance,” a “triple-layer simulation,” Garelick writes, “worthy of an essay by Jean Baudrillard”—and emblematic of a career in dance marked by “self-replication, mirrored images, and identity play.” Thus did the woman named Loie Fuller (born Mary-Louise Fuller), begin “what was to become an unbroken thirty-year reign as one of Europe’s most wildly celebrated dancers.” Fuller was “the only female entertainer to have her own pavilion” at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, writes Natalie Lemie at Artsy. “Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec featured her in a number of prints; Auguste Rodin commissioned a series of photographs of the dancer with plans to sculpt her; and the Lumière brothers released a film about her in 1897.”
Fuller’s dance personified Art Nouveau, expressing its elegant, flowing lines in her billowing silk gowns, which she moved by means of bamboo sewn into her sleeves. As she danced “colored lights were projected onto the flowing fabric, and as she twirled, she seemed to metamorphose into elements from the natural world: a flower, a butterfly, a tongue of flame.” Everyone came to see her. The Folies, which “typically attracted working class patrons," now had aristocratic newcomers lining up outside. See the serpentine dance that launched her career at the top in the Lumière Brothers’ 1897 film and below it in a colorized excerpt, with the bewitching music of Sigur Ros added for effect. Other films and clips here from other early cinema pioneers show the medium's embrace of Fuller's choreography. Ironically, none of this footage, it seems, shows Fuller herself, but only her imitators. "Unfortunately none of the surviving films seem to contain a performance by the original dancer/choreographer," notes cinema history channel Magical Motion Museum, "despite some of them carrying her name in the title or otherwise crediting her as the dancer."
Her name carried a lot of weight. Fuller was not only a celebrated dancer, but also a manager, producer, and lighting designer with “over a dozen patents related to her costumes and innovations in stage lighting.” (She was so interested in the “luminous properties” of radium that she sought out and “befriended its discoverers, Pierre and Marie Curie.”) By 1908, however, she had left behind some of these elaborate stage effects to focus on “natural dancing’—dance inspired by nature, which was the forerunner of modern dance.” And she had taken on a young dancer in her company named Isadora Duncan, often referred to as the “Mother of Modern Dance." Fuller deserves credit, too, but she didn’t seem to care about this overmuch. She was, notes Oberlin College dance professor Ann Cooper Albright, “way more interested in making things happen than creating a name for herself.” Fame came as a byproduct of her creativity rather than its sought-after reward. She was still renowned after she left the stage, and given a retrospective at The Louvre in 1924.
Fuller continued to work behind the scenes after the Art Nouveau movement gave way to new modernisms and supported and inspired younger artists until her death in 1928. Her work deserves a prominent place in the history of modern dance, but Fuller herself “was—and remains—elusive,” Lemie writes, “something of a phantom." Others might have stolen, borrowed, or imitated the serpentine dance, but Lois Fuller became it, going beyond competition and into a realm of magic. Related Content: The Graceful Movements of Kung Fu & Modern Dance Revealed in Stunning Motion Visualizations Expressionist Dance Costumes from the 1920s, and the Tragic Story of Lavinia Schulz & Walter Holdt Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch the Serpentine Dance, Created by the Pioneering Dancer Loie Fuller, Performed in an 1897 Film by the Lumière Brothers is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 6:07p | A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game
"Over the roughly one and half millennia of its existence, chess has been known as a tool of military strategy, a metaphor for human affairs, and a benchmark of genius,” points out the TED-Ed animated history of the game by Alex Gendler, above. The first records of chess date to the 7th century, but it may have originated even a century earlier, in India, where we find mention of the first game to have different moves for different pieces, and “a single king piece, whose fate determined the outcome.” It was originally called “chaturanga,” a word that Yoga practitioners will recognize as the “four-limbed staff pose,” but which simply meant “four divisions” in this context. Once it spread to Persia, it became “chess,” meaning “Shah,” or king. It took root in the Arab world, and traveled the Silk Road to East and Southeast Asia, where it acquired different characteristics but used similar rules and strategies. The European form we play today became the standard, but it might have been a very different game had the Japanese version—which allowed players to put captured pieces into play—dominated. Chess found ready acceptance everywhere it went because its underlying principles seemed to tap into common models of contest and conquest among political and military elites. Though written over a thousand years before “chaturanga” arrived in China—where the game was called xiangqi, or “elephant game"—Sun Tzu’s Art of War may as well have been discussing the critical importance of pawns in declaring, “When the officers are valiant and the troops ineffective the army is in distress.” Chess also speaks to the hierarchies ancient civilizations sought to naturalize, and by 1000 AD, it had become a tool for teaching European noblemen the necessity of social classes performing their proper roles. This allegorical function gave to the pieces the roles we know today, with the piece called “the advisor” being replaced by the queen in the 15th century, “perhaps inspired by the recent surge of strong female leaders.” Early Modern chess, freed from the confines of the court and played in coffeehouses, also became a favorite pastime for philosophers, writers, and artists. Treatises were written by the hundreds. Chess became a tool for summoning inspiration, and performing theatrical, often Punic games for audiences—a trend that ebbed during the Cold War, when chessboards became proxy battlegrounds between world superpowers, and intense calculation ruled the day. The arrival of IBM’s Deep Blue computer, which defeated reigning champion Garry Kasparov in 1996, signaled a new evolution for the game, a chess singularity, as it were, after which computers routinely defeated the best players. Does this mean, according to Marcel Duchamp’s observation, that chess-playing computers should be considered artists? Chess’s earliest adopters could never have conceived of such a question. But the game they passed down through the centuries may have anticipated all of the possible outcomes of human versus machine. Related Content: Garry Kasparov Now Teaching an Online Course on Chess A Free 700-Page Chess Manual Explains 1,000 Chess Tactics in Plain English Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketches of Mind-Bending Chess Problems Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov Relives His Four Most Memorable Games Marcel Duchamp, Chess Enthusiast, Created an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Available via 3D Printer Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 10:00p | John Cleese’s Eulogy for Monty Python’s Graham Chapman: ‘Good Riddance, the Free-Loading Bastard, I Hope He Fries’
The British comedian Graham Chapman delighted in offending people. As a writer and actor with the legendary Monty Python troupe, he pushed against the boundaries of propriety and good taste. When his writing partner John Cleese proposed doing a sketch on a disgruntled man returning a defective toaster to a shop, Chapman thought: Broken toaster? Why not a dead parrot? And in one particularly outrageous sketch written by Chapman and Cleese in 1970, Chapman plays an undertaker and Cleese plays a customer who has just rung a bell at the front desk: "What can I do for you, squire?" says Chapman. "Um, well, I wonder if you can help me," says Cleese. "You see, my mother has just died." "Ah, well, we can 'elp you. We deal with stiffs," says Chapman. "There are three things we can do with your mother. We can burn her, bury her, or dump her." "Dump her?" "Dump her in the Thames." "What?" "Oh, did you like her?" "Yes!" "Oh well, we won't dump her, then," says Chapman. "Well, what do you think? We can bury her or burn her." "Which would you recommend?" "Well, they're both nasty." From there, Chapman goes on to explain in the most graphic detail the unpleasant aspects of either choice before offering another option: cannibalism. At that point (in keeping with the script) outraged members of the studio audience rush onto the stage and put a stop to the sketch.
Chapman and Cleese had been close friends since their student days at Cambridge University, and when Chapman died of cancer at the age of 48 on October 4, 1989, Cleese was at his bedside. Out of respect for Chapman's family, the members of Monty Python decided to stay away from his private funeral and avoid a media circus. Instead, they gathered for a memorial service on October 6, 1989 in the Great Hall at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. When Cleese delivered his eulogy for Chapman, he recalled his friend's irreverence: "Anything for him, but mindless good taste." So Cleese did his best to make his old friend proud. His off-color but heartfelt eulogy that evening has become a part of Monty Python lore, and you can watch it above. To see a longer clip, with moving words from Michael Palin and a sing-along of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" led by Eric Idle, watch below:
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in February 2013. Related Content: John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Anything You Think Is Really Good”
John Cleese’s Eulogy for Monty Python’s Graham Chapman: ‘Good Riddance, the Free-Loading Bastard, I Hope He Fries’ is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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