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rndyounghowze · 3 years

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And The Nominees Are… (Part 2/2)

#younghowzetheatreawards

By Ricky and Dana Young-Howze

Mays Landing, NJ

Venmo: @rndyounghowze

The nominations for the first ever Young-Howze Theatre Awards are finally here! We have been working hard since March of 2020 reviewing over a hundred and forty digital productions. We have been poring over them all since January to bring you these categories and the shows vying for them.

Let’s remind everyone what our criteria were: Because of the pandemic this year every show that we have reviewed was nominated for at least one category. We picked winners by a very specific set of criteria: What was this show attempting to do? Was it successful? Was it the most successful of all the shows that tried to do this? We apologize to anyone who thought that we would be announcing winners today. We decided that we wanted to save all of the spoilers for the live show on February 21st at 8PM EST. Please remember that even if you only get one nomination it is because we wanted to honor everyone who worked hard this year (every theatre artist who did a show this year deserves a medal). However we understand that specific nominations are useful for theatre creators in their resumes, grant applications etc.

All Nominees should receive a nomination email from us. If you haven’t gotten an email by Monday 11:59pm PST email is at [email protected]

Congratulations everyone! We are so proud of your accomplishments and amazing work. We’ve already seen shows this year that are award worthy. You all exceeded our expectations. Without further ado...

Solo Performance

“Chewie Award” For Team Behind A Solo Performance

“Blood/Sugar” by Diana Wyenn in Los Angeles, CA

“Kristina Wong For Public Office” by Kristina Wong in Los Angeles, CA

“Disenchanted: A Cabaret of Twisted Fairy Tales” by Eliane Morel at Melbourne Fringe

“All By Myself Award” For Solo Performance Of The Year

“The Bassoonist” by Sean P. Mette and Autumn Kaleidoscope at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Kristina Wong For Public Office” by Kristina Wong in Los Angeles, CA

“Sarah Palin: Rogue None” by Amanda Nicastro in NYC, NY

“What Would John Hughes Do?” by Telia Nevile at Melbourne Fringe

“Campfire Award” For Storyteller Of The Year

“Right Now” By Martin Dockery at Minnesota Fringe Minneapolis, Minnesota

“Life Underground” by Brad Lawrence at FRIGID NY in NYC, NY

“Pumpkin Pie Show” by Pumpkin Pie Show at FRIGID NY in NYC, NY

“UnterClub” by Juan Sebastian Peralta in Uruguay

“Full of Woe” by Genevieve Yosco and Sour Grapes Productions at FRIGID NY in NYC, NY

Seasons, Series and Festivals

“BIPOC HERO” For The BIPOC Creative Team Of The Year

TBA

“Worldwide Award” For Collaborative Work Of The Year

“The Art of Facing Fear Brazil” By Os Satyros in São Paulo, Brazil “The Art of Facing Fear US” Os Satyros and Company of Angels and Rob Lecrone, in co-production with Os Satyros and Darling Desperados. “The Art of Facing Fear Africa/Europe” Os Satyros and Cie Kaddu, Crown Troupe of Africa, Darling Desperados, Oddmanout Theatre Company, Portuguese Cultural Center of Mindelo, Tell-a-Tale, The Kwasha! Theatre Company, The Market Theatre Laboratory, Village Gossip Productions

“Macbeth #6” Os Satyros São Paulo, Brazil and the Center for Interdisciplinary Performance Art - Royal Birmingham Conservatoire

Enough Plays to End Gun Violence at Mile Square Theatre in Hoboken, NJ

“Down the Stream” For Digital Season of The Year

Frigid NY in NYC, NY

Combined Artform in Los Angeles, CA

“There’s No I in Theatre” For Non-Profit Theatre of The Year

Elm Street Cultural Arts Village in Woodstock, GA

Sour Grapes Productions in NYC, NY

Opal Theatre in Boise, Idaho

Know Theatre of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, OH

Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke, VA

“Deja Vu Award” Recurring Streaming Series Of The Year

“Tilted Frame” by Combined Artform in Los Angeles, CA

“Bingewatch and Friends” by Diana Brown and Dan Wilson in San Francisco, CA

“Reparations Show” by Kevin R Free at Frigid NY in NYC, NY

“Monologues For Us By Us” By Cincinnati Black Theatre Artists Collective in Cincinnati, Ohio

“Bard Brunch” by Sour Grapes Productions in NYC, NY

“On The Fringes” Fringe of the Year

Minnesota Fringe

Halifax Fringe

Melbourne Fringe

Montreal Fringe

Cincinnati Fringe

“The Shortie“ Short Form Festival Of The Year

“48 Hours in Harlem” By Harlem 9 in Harlem, NY

“Overnight Sensations” by Hollins Playwrights Lab in Roanoke, VA

Estrogenius Festival by FRIGID NY in NYC, NY

Fire This Time Festival at FRIGID NY in NYC, NY

Single Shows

“Weird and Worth It” For Experimental Production Of The Year

“Paul And Erika’s House Show” By Theatre Mobile at Cincinnati Fringe

“Hivemind” by Solasta Theatre at Cincinnati Fringe

“#TXT Show” by Brian Feldman at Minnesota Fringe and Melbourne Fringe

“Butterfly Effect” by Unnatural Disasters at Halifax Fringe

“New Normal” by Os Satyros in São Paulo, Brazil

“One Man Nutcracker” by Chris Davis in Philadelphia, PA

“Cabaret De Profundis” By Buntport Theatre in Denver, CO

“So Nice We Saw It Twice” Touring Show Of The Year

“Desperately Seeking The Exit” by Peter Michael Marino and PM2 at Cincinnati Fringe And Queerly Festival and Show Up, Kids! In NYC!

“Paul and Erika’s House Show” by Theatre Mobile at Cincinnati Fringe and Minnesota Fringe

“Love and Other Lures” by Dr. Dour and Peach at Cincinnati Fringe and Minnesota Fringe

“Killjoy, Ohio” by Queen City Flash at Cincinnati Fringe and Minnesota Fringe

“TXT Show By Brian Feldman at Minnesota Fringe and Melbourne Fringe

“Kristina Wong For Public Office” by Kristina Wong in Koreatown and Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, CA

“Before Times” For Pre-Pandemic Recording Of The Year

“Petunia and Chicken” by Animal Engine at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Unrepentant Necrophile” by The ColdHarts at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Knife Slingin’” By Motz at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Occupy This!” By Rev Nuge at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Stow You Baggage” By Alexx Rouse at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Butcher Holler” by Ad Hoc Economy at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Lady Macbeth and Her Pal Megan” by Megan Gogerty at Cincinnati Fringe Festival Cincinnati, OH

“Dammit, Jim!” by Polly Esther in Toronto, CA

“A Night With The Dead” by Martha Preve and Something From Abroad at Hartford Fringe in FRIGID NY in NYC, NY

“A Christmas Carol In Harlem” by Classical Theatre of Harlem in NYC, NY

“Forbidden City” by Martin Dockery at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Practical Game Changer” For Practical Effects Of The Year

“Killjoy, Ohio” by Queen City Flash at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Zoo Motel” By Thaddeus Phillips in Columbia, South America

“A Light Touch” by Mind of a Snail at Minnesota Fringe Minneapolis, Minnesota

“Digital Game Changer” For Digital Effects Of The Year

“M-O-U-S-E” by Rory Sheridan at the Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“King Lear” by SF Shakes in San Francisco, CA

“War Of The Worlds” by Ben Hernandez at Cal State in Los Angeles, CA

“Claws Out! A Holiday Drag Musical” by City Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA

“18+ Allowed” For Adult Variety Of The Year

“Disenchanted: A Cabaret of Twisted Fairy Tales” by Eliane Morel at Melbourne Fringe

“Creepy Boys” by Scantily Glad at Melbourne Fringe

Red Mill Revue at Melbourne Fringe

Queers On The Fringe at Melbourne Fringe

“Reach Out“ For Immersive Production Of The Year

“Feast” by Megan Gogerty at Know Theatre of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, OH

“In Lak’Ech” by No Peeking Theatre in Jersey City, NJ

“Twelfth Night”” by Food of Love Productions in NYC, NY

“Grace Notes” For Musical Production Of The Year

“Dream &” By Sarah Willis and The Queer Feminists Next Door at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Colony” by Psophonia and Aura at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“TV Tunes” by Leslie Vincent at Minnesota Fringe Minneapolis, Minnesota

“The In-Between Years” By The Champagne Drops in Minneapolis, Minnesota

“Love and Other Lures” By Dr. Dour and Peach at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Hollow” by David Kent at Edinburgh Fringe

“One Vote Won” by Nashville Opera in Nashville, TN

“Meet Me In St. Louis” By Irish Rep in NYC, NY

“Power” For Fifth-Wall Breaking Show Of The Year

“Matriarch” by Sandy Greenwood at Melbourne Fringe

Chanukahmunication by the Feldman Dynamic in Washington, DC

“Proof Of Love” By Chisa Hutchinson and BLBW in Chicago, IL

Individuals

“Magician” For Press Contact Of The Year

Emily Godfrey For FRIGID NY in NYC, NY

Liz Carman For Know Theatre of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, OH

“Tech Witch” For Tech Person Of The Year

David Svengalis for “Tilted Frame” by Combined Artform in Los Angeles, CA

Henry Bateman for Know Theatre of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, OH

“Extensions“ For Movement Artist Of The Year

“Proximity” by Pones at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Definition of Man” by DConstruction Arts at Halifax Fringe

Marina Calendar For Tree She at Estrogenius Festival NYC, NY

Nick Daniels For “Folk Dances of A Nucleic Village” at Pittsburgh Fringe Pittsburgh, PA

“You Oughta Be In Pictures” For Film Of The Year

“Proximity” by Pones at Cincinnati Fringe

“Opinions Of Men” by Ben Dudley at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Macbeth” by Gorilla Repertory Theatre in NYC, NY

“Black Emperor of Broadway” by Vision Films Inc and Egeli Productions in Provincetown, MA

“Concord Floral” by Jordan Tamanelli at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado

Zoom

“Pioneer” For Innovative Achievement Of The Year

Waiting for the Host” by Mark Palmieri in NYC, NY

“Desperately Seeking the Exit” by Peter Michael Marino in NYC, NY

“Long Zoomie” For Long-Form Zoom Play Of The Year

“3 Way Lovve” by Marcus Ma’at Atkins at Minnesota Fringe Minneapolis, Minnesota

“Im Ur Hamlet” By Genevieve Yosco and Sour Grapes Productions in NYC, NY

“Rideshare” by Reginald Edmund and BLBW in Chicago, Illinois

“Disrobed” by Steven Vlasak and Troy Peterson at Hollywood Fringe Hollywood, CA

“Sons of Liberty” by Cris Eli Blak in Louisville, KY

“Call For The Wailing Women” by Katrina D. RiChard and BLBW in Chicago, IL

“Jump!” By Charly Evon Simpson at TSU in Nashville, TN

“Short Zoomie” For Short-Form Zoom Play Of The Year

“Soup” by Rachel Carnez at Project Y Theatre in NYC, NY

“Missing Ingredient” by Colleen O’Doherty at Project Y Theatre in NYC, NY

“Pas De Deux” by Kevin Ferguson at Missouri S&T in St. Louis, Missouri

“Scaramouche and Pinochle” by Mike Moran Missouri S&T in St. Louis, Missouri

Screen Manager Of The Year

TBA

Stream Yard

“Duck“ For Streamyard Production Of The Year

“Infemous” by Infemous at the Queerly Festival and Montreal Fringe Festival

“Romeo and Juliet Virtually” By Miles Beyond Entertainment in Los Angeles, CA

“Day of the Dead Variety Show” by Something From Abroad at FRIGID NY in NYC, NY

“Latina Christmas Special Special” by Latina Christmas Special in Los Angeles, CA

Staged Production

“The Globe“ For Staged Production of The Year

“Quit While You’re Ahead” By Alexx Rouse and A-Z Productions at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Dreary Dearie” By Caitlyn Waltermire at Cincinnati Fringe Cincinnati, OH

“Hellish Reunion” by The Feral Theatre Company at Minnesota Fringe Minneapolis, Minnesota

“Polka Dots: The Cool Kids Musical” by Melvin Tunstall III at Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke, VA

“Titus Andronicus” by Shakespeare by the Sea in San Pedro, CA

“She Kills Monsters” by Qui Nguyen at Elm Street Arts Cultural Village in Woodstock, GA

Please Be Sure To Tune In To The Live Show on either our YouTube Channel, FRIGID NY’s YouTube, or you can go to Combined Artform’s Channel. Also follow their Facebook pages for live updates. Our social media will be taken over before and during the show by Saturday Lawson of Punchline Loading and Genevieve Yosco of Sour Grapes Productions! We can’t wait to see you there!

*****A Word From Our Sponsors*****

We have a YouTube Channel. We’re working furiously to get new videos up weekly.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0M6M04VtDpqFzVLxjfrRZA

We have official merch now! Keep us fed and get gifts for the family all at the same time!

https://teespring.com/rnd-younghowze?pid=972

Wanna be a sponsor? Email us for rates at [email protected]

Check out our Social Media

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#theatre #nj #theatrelives #nj travels #theatreawards #award show #nominees #part 2 #young howzd theatre awards

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emmajoonam-blog · 5 years

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I am so grateful for all the amazing strong women in my life! I have gotten to where I am today with the support and encouragement of so many lovely women, including friends, family, coaches, mentors, colleagues, and my awesome momma. Had an awesome silks practice today at @circusharmony with @hollaatyaboyers! So excited to be working on my monologue silks act for @stlfringe festival coming up soon on August 15th to 18th! I’m inspired by so many amazing women, including my coaches at @circusharmony, @hollaatyaboyers, @_elliana_grace_, @aeriallie, @jessicahentoff, my coaches at @stlaerial, @_indielou_, and incredible public figures, @theellenshow, @brenebrown, @ttwillet, and so many more. I’m also grateful to be working with @aerialist_champagnesupernova and @gretalorraine to bring an aerial show unlike any other I’ve seen to #stlouis. The show is called “When Women Were Birds: An Integration of Female Voice and Gravity Defying Movement”, inspired by author Terry Tempest Williams @ttwillet. We will be performing on a variety of aerial apparatuses, including trapeze, chains, straps, hammock, silks, lyra, and aerial cube, and will draw parallels between birds, female voice, and #womenempowerment. Tickets are limited so get your tickets in advance for the Late Night Headline Act at the 2019 St. Louis Fringe Festival at the link in my bio (www.stlouisfringe.com). #firstigpost #stl #stlouisarch #stlfringe #stlfringefestival #stlouisfringefestival #stlouisfringe #aerialarts #sheinspiresme #leanin #banbossy #womensmarch #thisisme (at Circus Harmony) https://www.instagram.com/p/B0xdZLfnFIA/?igshid=edgwt6dhrr5s

#stlouis #womenempowerment #firstigpost #stl #stlouisarch #stlfringe #stlfringefestival #stlouisfringefestival #stlouisfringe #aerialarts #sheinspiresme #leanin #banbossy #womensmarch #thisisme

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emilyaleea-blog · 5 years

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#stlouis #womenempowerment #firstigpost #stl #stlouisarch #stlfringe #stlfringefestival #stlouisfringefestival #stlouisfringe #aerialarts #sheinspiresme #leanin #banbossy #womensmarch #thisisme

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beatiewolfe · 4 years

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Cynthia Erivo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Beatie Wolfe, Baratunde Thurston & More Join SXSW Online 2021

Introducing the first programming announcement for SXSW Online 2021, an exclusive digital experience packed with powerful presentations from some of the world’s most inspired thinkers and diverse visionaries from the ever-evolving worlds of tech, film, music, and beyond.

“Spanning numerous industries, the Featured Speakers in today’s announcement strongly reflect the programming themes that will underscore our upcoming event,” said Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Officer. “As always, SXSW brings together the world’s most important thought leaders to address society’s most important challenges.”

From creating postcards for democracy to combating climate change with aquaculture, the initial Conference lineup explores our 2021 Themes including A New Urgency – a look at how business, non-profit, government, science, and tech communities are tackling global crises and what advancements are needed to create immediate and lasting progress. Dive into programming across all seven themes with a stellar roster of Featured Sessions and Featured Speakers including Dominique Crenn, Cynthia Erivo, Cherie Hu, Wyclef Jean, David E. Kelley, Michael Lewis, Mark Mothersbaugh, Cat Packer, Nonny de la Peña, Maria Sharapova, Baratunde Thurston, Logan Ury, Amy Webb, Beatie Wolfe, Andrew Zimmern, and more.

Looking for your next creative collaborator? Ready to elevate your career to the next level? In need of some inspiration? For SXSW Online, we’re offering one pass that covers the entire event, allowing attendees to take in programming and connect with others across the many industries that SX serves. Register to attend SXSW Online 2021 from March 16-20 early to save!

Get to know the initial round of Featured Speakers and Featured Sessions below. Stay tuned for more big announcements in January including Conference Keynotes and Featured Speakers, sessions accepted from PanelPicker® speaking proposals, Film Festival screenings, Music Festival showcases, and more. SXSW Comedy Festival content will be announced as we get closer to the March event.

Featured Speakers

Amy Webb – Quantitative futurist, professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and the Founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures. She is the best-selling, award-winning author of several books, including The Big Nine: how The Tech Titans And Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity and The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream. She serves as a technical, script and creative consultant for films and shows set in the future. All of her futures research, frameworks, and tools are open source and made freely available to the public.

Angela Benton – Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Streamlytics, a next generation data intelligence ecosystem which helps everyday people and companies ethically access consumer data streams. Prior to her role at Streamlytics, Angela Benton founded the first accelerator for minorities globally in 2011, NewME was acquired in December 2018. Benton has been featured on Goldman Sachs’ 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs; Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and their Most Influential Women In Technology; Business Insiders’ 25 Most Influential African-Americans in Technology, and many more.

Angela Roseboro – As Chief Diversity Officer for Riot Games, Angela Roseboro develops and implements initiatives to drive inclusion and cultural growth. Roseboro manages all activity relating to diversity and inclusion (D&I) while also leading the recruiting team in driving inclusivity in Riot’s hiring and talent sourcing processes. Prior to joining Riot, Roseboro was the Global Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Dropbox. Previously she provided human resource guidance to Fortune 500 companies including T. Rowe Price, Jones Lang LaSalle, Genworth Financial, Whirlpool Corporation, and Manpower International.

Ann Hiatt – During her 15 years as the Executive Business Partner for Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt, CEO/Executive Chairman of Google, Ann Hiatt received her initial business training and now consults with executives and companies across the globe to reverse engineer their moonshot goals. Hiatt is an international speaker and her first book, Bet On Yourself, will be published by HarperCollins in 2021.

Allison Murphy – In February 2019, Allison Murphy assumed the position of Senior Vice President, Ad Innovation at The New York Times Company. In this role, Murphy leads the development and delivery of The Times Company’s ad innovation strategy, directing cross-functional teams responsible for accelerating the Company’s development of market-leading ad platforms and products. She is also responsible for the Company’s advertising mission, a cross-functional team that spans product, tech and data to accelerate digital advertising.

Baratunde Thurston – Emmy-nominated host Baratunde Thurston has worked for The Onion, produced for The Daily Show, advised the Obama White House, and wrote the New York Times bestseller How To Be Black. He’s the executive producer and host of two podcasts: How To Citizen with Baratunde and We’re Having A Moment which CNET called “the most important podcast of 2020.” He’s also the creator and host of the weekly pandemic show, Live On Lockdown. In 2019, he delivered what MSNBC’s Brian Williams called “one of the greatest TED talks of all time”. Right now, the writer, activist, and comedian is using his powerful voice to help people understand this revolutionary moment with his unique blend of insight, humor, and empathy.

Benjamin Hubert – Award-winning British design entrepreneur Benjamin Hubert is the founder of the creative agency, LAYER. LAYER is focused on experience-driven design for both the physical and digital worlds. Led by Hubert and a growing creative team, LAYER is partnering with forward-thinking brands – including Nike, Google, Bang and Olufsen, Samsung, Braun, Fritz Hansen and Vitra – to create products that will help define the way we live, work and communicate in the future, from A.I. to smart wearables and furniture systems, to the next generation of media devices and mobile communication tools.

Bruce Mau – A brilliantly creative optimist, Bruce Mau’s love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for whole-system change. A serial entrepreneur since the age of 9, he became an international figure with the publication of his landmark S,M,L,XL, co-authored with Rem Koolhaas. He is the author of Massive Change and MC24. He is cofounder and CEO of Massive Change Network and Bruce Mau Studio, based in Chicago, and Chief Design Officer for Freeman.

Bryony Cole – Since launching the top-rated podcast, Future of Sex, Cole has been on stages across the world, defining the direction of sextech for governments, technology and entertainment companies. In 2020, she launched Sextech School, the first and only program empowering entrepreneurs in the pursuit of breakthrough sexual innovations in technology.

Cathy O’Neil – Having earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard and postdoc at the MIT math department, Cathy O’Neil was a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. After switching over to the private sector for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and RiskMetrics, she then left finance in 2011 to work as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks. She wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. O’Neil is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View and author of Weapons of Math Destruction. She recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company.

Cat Packer – Within her role as the first Executive Director and General Manager of the Department of Cannabis Regulation, Cat Packer leads the licensing and regulation of commercial cannabis activity within the City of Los Angeles and manages the implementation of the City’s cannabis related policies and programs. Packer previously served as California Policy Coordinator for the Drug Policy Alliance, where she worked to ensure the successful and equitable implementation of various cannabis policy reforms, as well as the Campaign Coordinator for Californians for Responsible Marijuana Reform, a social justice-centered campaign in support of the 2016 Adult Use of Marijuana Act.

Cherie Hu – Cherie Hu is the founder and publisher of Water & Music, a newsletter about music-industry innovation that reaches over 10,000 subscribers. She has written hundreds of articles on music, tech and finance for the likes of Billboard, Forbes, NPR Music, and Pitchfork. Hu currently teaches a course on music and gaming as an adjunct professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

Dr. Michael Watkins – Michael Watkins is the Director of Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), NASA’s lead center for robotic exploration of the solar system, including such legendary missions as Voyager, Cassini, and the Mars Curiosity rover, as well as the upcoming Mars Perseverance rover, Europa Clipper, and more. Watkins also serves as a Vice President of the California Institute of Technology, which staffs and manages JPL for NASA. He has led major science and engineering teams for JPL for 25 years.

Jim McKelvey – Cofounder of Square Jim McKelvey is a serial entrepreneur, glassblower, philanthropist, and Independent Director of the St. Louis Fed. McKelvey is also a master glass artist and author, having written the world’s most widely read text on the subject, The Art Of Fire. His industrial design work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and The Smithsonian in Washington DC. His glass studio, Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis, is one of the main US hubs for the glassblowing arts. He is also the founder of LaunchCode, a nonprofit making it possible for anyone to learn programming and land a full-time job in under six months, for free. McKelvey’s newest venture, Invisibly, is working to give people control of their online identities.

Joost van Dreunen – An academic and entrepreneur with an expertise in video games, Joost van Dreunen teaches at the NYU Stern School of Business. Previously he was co-founder and CEO of SuperData Research, a games market research firm, which he sold to Nielsen in 2018. He is an advisor and investor, author of One Up, and and writes a weekly newsletter on gaming, tech, and entertainment called SuperJoost Playlist.

Logan Ury – Behavioral scientist turned dating coach Logan Ury is an internationally recognized expert on modern love. As the Director of Relationship Science at the dating app Hinge, Ury leads a research team dedicated to helping people find love. After studying psychology at Harvard, she ran Google’s behavioral science team—the Irrational Lab. She recently published her first book, How To Not Die Alone.

Michael Lewis – New York Times bestselling author Michael Lewis’ most recent works are The Fifth Risk, The Undoing Project, Flash Boys, and The Big Short. The Blind Side, published in 2006, tells the story of Michael Oher, a poor, illiterate African-American kid living on the streets of Memphis whose life is transformed after he is adopted by white Evangelical Christians. Before that he wrote Moneyball, a book ostensibly about baseball but also about the way markets value people. Both of his books about sports became movies, nominated for Academy Awards, as did his book about the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short. His other works include Boomerang, The New New Thing, Coach, Losers, and Liar’s Poker.

Steve DeAngelo – A globally recognized cannabis leader, Steve DeAngelo was dubbed “the father of the legal industry” by former Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown. As a lifelong activist, author, educator, investor, and entrepreneur, he has spent more than four decades on the front lines of the cannabis reform movement. His most notable business achievements include cofounding Harborside, one of the first six dispensaries licensed in the US, a publicly-traded company on the Canadian Securities Exchange with five dispensary locations in California including one of the first to feature a drive-thru; Steep Hill Laboratory, the first cannabis analytics company; and Arcview Group, the first dedicated cannabis investment network.

Featured Sessions

AI and Great Power Competition – President Xi Jinping claims China will be the AI world leader by 2025. Russian President Vladimir Putin says whatever country leads in AI will be the ruler of the world. Google’s former Chairman Eric Schmidt warned there is a digital Berlin Wall being erected. The link between AI and great power competition will set the stage for the rest of this century. How will the private and public sector in western democracies work together to survive and thrive? More importantly, how can we create technologies that are authentic to our values? Join experts at the intersection of AI and national security who are on the frontlines of this fight – Lieutenant Colonel Alexander S. Vindman and CEO of Pryon Igor Jablokov. Gain insights on AI advancements and explore what role you can play in this challenge.

Aquaculture, Food Systems and Climate Change – Food is simply the biggest lever we have to combat climate change and improve the health and wellbeing of the planet’s growing population. Aquaculture, the farming of aquatic animals and plants, is vital as the planet’s fastest growing food production system. Seafood is one of the healthiest proteins to consume and one of the most efficient and sustainable to produce. Done well, aquaculture can be a powerful force for ecological and social good. The moderated panel of experts will discuss aquaculture’s key role. Join award-winning ocean activist Alexandra Cousteau; four-time James Beard Award-winning TV personality and chef Andrew Zimmern; multi award-winning writer and producer David E. Kelley; and organic seaweed farmer and entrepreneur Sarah Redmond to explore the context of the global climate crisis and aquaculture’s key role in transforming our food systems.

Can VR Create Real Change? – VR has gotten quite a reputation for creating impact. But does the hype really add up? We are at a pivotal moment in history, with socio-political division at an all-time high and less than a decade left to prevent climate crisis. Could creating virtual realities actually help move us towards a better tomorrow? Join AR/VR producer and director Fifer Garbesi; award-winning immersive artist and professor Gabo Arora; Director of EarthXR Tiffany Kieran; and founder of Emblematic Group Nonny de la Peña as they dig into the impacts of this medium, putting real change and direct action front and center.

Driving Action & Advocacy Through Online Community – Online communities are not new; but as the world has adapted to 2020, these digital spaces have proven their worth in a whole new way. Reddit has witnessed this first hand, as more people have joined its many thousands of communities for connection, distraction, and belonging in a time of unprecedented disconnection. While IRL experiences continue to evolve in unexpected ways, the communities on Reddit remain a constant source of conversation and companionship, as well as a valuable lens from which to examine human psychology, behavior, and sentiment. Join Reddit’s COO Jen Wong and CNN’s Kerry Flynn for a conversation about why online communities were made for this moment, their role in the digital ecosystem, and the value they bring to brands looking to build real connection, advocacy, and drive action.

How to Scale a Mission-Driven Brand – Join Supergoop! CEO and Founder Holly Thaggard and her early-stage investor, world-class tennis champion and entrepreneur Maria Sharapova, for an inspiring conversation sharing insights on how Thaggard scaled her company from a mission to end the skin cancer epidemic to a business with millions in revenue, all while innovating a category and changing consumer behavior. Hear from Sharapova first-hand about how she identified a promising investment opportunity in a young, but high-growth brand with an authentic mission as its north star, and advice for other emerging entrepreneurs prioritizing mission and doing good.

Inside GENIUS: ARETHA, the Story of the Queen of Soul – National Geographic’s GENIUS is an Emmy-winning anthology series that dramatizes the fascinating stories of the world’s most brilliant innovators, exploring their extraordinary achievements along with their volatile, passionate, and complex personal relationships. The third season will explore Aretha Franklin’s musical genius, incomparable career and the immeasurable impact and lasting influence she has had on music and culture around the world. She will be portrayed by Oscar-nominated Cynthia Erivo (Harriet, The Color Purple) and Emmy-winning Courtney B. Vance (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story) will play Aretha’s father, C.L. Franklin. Our acclaimed panelists including GENIUS: ARETHA executive producer and director Anthony Hemingway; multi award-winning producer and author Brian Grazer, multi award-winning actress and singer Cynthia Erivo; Broadway and television costume designer Jennifer Bryan; and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks will explore the craft and care that goes into honoring her legacy and bringing her story to life.

The New Marketplace of Music Royalties – The Music Modernization Act takes effect this year, mechanical streaming royalty rates are on the rise, and the newly formed MLC, along with BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, SoundExchange and others, is tracking music royalties using new technologies. These changes are empowering creatives and independent artists, especially in the wake of Covid-19. As music royalty rights grow in value, what do royalty holders need to know in order to maximize and leverage their royalty assets? This panel of global thought leaders will help royalty owners, managers and advisors make informed decisions regarding the potential value and versatility of royalty copyrights and licenses. Join Founder and CEO of Sound Royalties Alex Heiche; CMO of The Mechanical Licensing Collective Ellen Truley; entertainment lawyer Robert A. Celetsin, and Grammy award-winning musician and actor Wyclef Jean for a discussion on the democratization of the music industry is underway as the expansion of digital streaming transforms the landscape of music royalties.

Postcards for Democracy: A Collective Art Demo – Artistic visionaries DEVO cofounder Mark Mothersbaugh and self-proclaimed “musical weirdo” Beatie Wolfe share a love of tangible artforms, in and amongst their futuristic explorations. In light of the threat to our 225yr old postal service, at a time that could jeopardize the democracy of the country, Mothersbaugh and Wolfe joined forces for this collective postcard art demonstration. The aim of this campaign is to encourage as many people as possible to support USPS (if we don’t use it we’ll lose it!), our right to vote, and democracy as a whole via the power of art.

What is Taste? – Without taste, the experience of eating would be a routine and joyless chore. Taste is an almost magical part of our individual experience because everyone’s perceptions and preferences are so unique; but what IS taste, really, and what informs it? It is so much more than a chemical reaction on our taste buds. Taste is made up of shifting cultural norms, food science and technology, and the art of cooking, of bringing a dish to life through careful preparation and the right ingredients. And by better understanding how all of these elements work together, you can develop an even deeper appreciation for your favorite food experiences. Cofounder of So Vegan Ben Pook, three-Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn, CEO of Motif FoodWorks Jonathan McIntyre, Ph.D, author and scientist of senses and emotion Rachel Herz, Ph.D. will discuss how culture, science, and technology shape one of the most important aspects of our lives.

#Cynthia Erivo #Mark Mothersbaugh #Beatie Wolfe #Baratunde Thurston & More Join SXSW Online 2021 #Baratunde Thurston #SXSW #2021 #Online

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theqcollectivestl · 5 years

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Join us at the St. Louis Fringe festival this August! Tickets on sale through MetroTix soon. REVIVAL: A SOUTHERN GOTHIC GOSPEL CABARET is a storytelling adventure that blends candid storytelling with dynamic music. Revival is the theatrical unpacking of writer Bobby Britton Jr’s Texas upbringing, experience with the Southern Evangelical Church, and his time in conversion therapy. Revival began in late 2017, after Bobby’s first show, “Closed for Repairs,” returned from the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Since that time, Revival has featured the talents of many of Bobby’s friends and classmates from the Theatre Education Masters Program at Emerson College. Revival does not seek to preach or convert. “Our only goal is to be honest.” #MyFringeLife #StLouFringe #VoicesUnleashed #Fringe2019 https://www.facebook.com/events/332351727668793/?ti=as https://www.instagram.com/p/B0CgrBnD935/?igshid=ir9e2j4eosew

#myfringelife #stloufringe #voicesunleashed #fringe2019

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Go See a Play! What's Happening Aug. 15 - 21

Go See a Play! What’s Happening Aug. 15 – 21

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor For something really different, check out the St. Louis Fringe Festival, which is taking over Grand Center the next four days. Check out what’s happening with a list of shows here. More collaborations are on stage through the ‘Lou and up the river. SATE and ERA have joined forces, along with Prison Performing Arts and Saint Louis University, for a fresh take on…

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#A Man of No Importance #Antigone: Requiem per Patriarchus #Bluff City Theater #ERA #Glory Denied #Grease #Guys and Dolls #Madam!#Prison Performing Arts #R-S Theatrics #Saint Louis University Theatre #SATE #St. Louis Fringe Festival #Stages St. Louis #Stray Dog Theatre #Union Avenue Opera

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vileart · 7 years

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Common Dramaturgy: Elliot Douglas @ Edfringe 2017

Find love and heartbreak in a hotel room at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Duchess Theatre with Mermaids Performing Arts Fund presents

Commons

Debuting at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a newly devised theatre piece about the failed romance between an MP and his rent-boy, and the consequences they must face for acting upon their desires.

Show Listing Information

Venue: theSpace @ North Bridge (V36)

Tickets: £8 (£6), special 2 for 1 deal on the 7th and 8th of August

Preview: 4-5th August 2017

Dates: 7-19th August 2017 (not on the 13th)

Time: 17.10 (50 minutes)

Price: £8 (£6), special 2 for 1 deal on the 7th and 8th of August

What was the inspiration for this performance?

This performance was inspired by the current political situation in the UK. Concerning the relationship between an MP and his rent-boy, the idea is to look at the current divide in the UK political scene between the generations and between the political elite and ordinary people.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?

I think performance is one of the best spaces for the public discussion of ideas. We're experiencing huge cuts in the funding of the arts at the moment in this country but we're also seeing a whole lot of new performances that are getting people really involved in what is going on in the world.

It's amazing and so important that the same year that Donald Trump became President a show like Hamilton can become the most popular show on Broadway; people are protesting in their own little way by going to experiencing performance.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I always loved acting but writing and producing is relatively new to me. I think seeing how theatre is made from the other side is really interesting when you love watching it too. I love the possibilities that theatre gives to transport an audience anywhere.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

We are workshopping the production a little at the moment; I believe that theatre is a collaborative medium and that the say of every voice in the room is equally worthwhile.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

This is the first time that we've worked together with this exact group of people: but I like to think that I've taken the best of every other production I've been involved in. As a writer, the show is definitely a lot more personal to me than anything else I've been involved in.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

The most important thing to me is that the audience go away and have a conversation about what they have seen and the issues that have been raised. Nothing is worse than a silent audience or an audience who have no opinion about what they have seen.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

We are aiming to shock and interest people in equal amount through the fast-paced dialogue and unique staging.

Commons begins at the very end: when love is lost, families are destroyed, and individual lives are forever altered by the actions of two lonely men, Marcus and Sam. The story unfolds within one claustrophobic hotel room and moves in reverse chronology, taking the audience through the highs and lows of Marcus and Sam’s relationship, probing deep into the emotional and psychological workings of both men.

Humorous yet heartbreaking, this unique play offers its audience both the scandalous gossip and serious political discourse that one looks for in a modern political drama.

Author and producer Elliot Douglas began writing Commons shortly after the Brexit referendum: “The idea was to encapsulate the growing divide and sense of dissatisfaction between generations, those of different political beliefs and members of different social classes in a story that is both ubiquitous and yet specific… Despite the uniqueness of their relationship and circumstances, the intent is that we can all relate to the figures of Marcus and Sam and reflect on the status of UK politics in 2017.”

Duchess Theatre is comprised of current university students, and receives its funding from the University of St. Andrews’s Performing Arts Fund. This is the Fringe debut for well-received writer, Elliot Douglas, and acclaimed director Louis Catliff.

The show features an innovative set and lighting design from Golden Seashell winner Amy Seaman, whose work was featured in the award-nominated Delay Detach in 2016. Sarah Chamberlain is also returning to the Fringe after a role in the well-reviewed ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore last year.

Box Office: 0131 226 0000

Website: https://www.thespaceuk.com/shows/commons/

from the vileblog http://ift.tt/2tqIfBK

#Theatre #Blogger #visual art #Edinburgh Fringe #Experimental Critique

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jeramymobley · 7 years

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Drake Launches His Brand’s First Flagship Store in Toronto

vimeo

Drake took the limelight at the Budweiser Stage in Toronto on Monday for his annual OVO Fest, but first dropped this teaser for his OVO flagship store that opened at Toronto’s Yorkdale Shopping Centre on Saturday.

In the video for his song Gyalchester, Drake and crew stroll through the mall and drive a Cadillac Escalade inside.

The 1,600 square foot space features the rapper’s October’s Very Own apparel and other forthcoming collections, and the mall, Canada’s fourth largest, is about 10 minutes away from where Drake grew up in Forest Hill. Lines started early Friday morning reaching more than one thousand.

vimeo

Yorkdale publicist Adrienne Simic said, “People will be moved outside overnight and then back in at 5:30 a.m.”

Drake’s moves capitalized on Caribana Weekend in Toronto, as NBA and music stars came to town— including LeBron James, who hosted the Hennessy Daylight party August 4th at Cabana Pool Bar on Polson Street—a festival hotspot.

The Caribana Caribbean Carnival, started in 1967, draws more than one million tourists to the city.

Drake is the Global Ambassador for the Raptors, hosts of the annual OVO Festival, and Chris Bosh was a regular at James’ Caribana parties while a member of the team.

Performers this year include PartyNextDoor, DVSN, Majid Jordan, Roy Woods and surprise guests—in signature Drake style. Past Drake invites include Eminem, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Stevie Wonder and Kanye West.

Drake is credited with popularizing Toronto as “The 6” (or “The 6ix” or “The Six”) in numerous songs in a shoutout to the city’s 416 area code, as well as the city’s six boroughs after the 1998 amalgamation.

Drake’s songs, the King St. restaurant Fring’s, and his role as the Raptors’ global ambassador led three young girls to create a free Drizzy walking tour of Toronto this summer.

Soca fans were treated Saturday night to Soca king Machel Montano joining Drake on stage.

This year, Bunji Garlin joined the cast as he and Montano launch their Busshead tour that heads to Barbados Monday for the annual 1love concert.

In 2015, brandchannel noted what the Drake brand has done for Toronto. “Drake’s business is no small business. He’s a rapper who’s sold an estimated 10 million albums worldwide to date. He’s an entrepreneur with a clothing line, a restaurant and an annual music festival. He starred on a popular teen drama (Degrassi: The Next Generation), and is credited with the popularity of phrases like ‘YOLO’ and redefining Toronto as ‘The 6.'”

“His three-week-old music video Hotline Bling has spawned millions of gifs, Vines, memes and Halloween costumes—even a Christmas sweater. He’s the global ambassador for the only Canadian NBA basketball team, the Toronto Raptors (which hosts Drake Nights and has inspired a co-branded OVO clothing line with the artist) and a proud supporter of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball franchise.”

The Yorkdale mall opened in 1964, but has recently been renovated to house more than 270 shops including Chanel, Prada, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Versace, Jimmy Choo and Gucci.

Drake’s luxury streetwear brand, led by El-Khatib, includes T-shirts and tanks ($40-$88), ball caps ($48), keychains ($12-$15), track pants ($118), hoodies ($148-$158), and phone cases ($38)—most sporting his iconic gold owl.

For those older fans, Drake builds on other Toronto and Canadian artists including ‘60s folkies Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, ‘70s prog-rockers Rush, ‘80s bands Parachute Club, Martha and the Muffins and Shuffle Demons, ‘90s punk act Lowest of the Low, The Tragically Hip, and early rappers Maestro and Kardinal Offishall.

And the beat goes on…

The post Drake Launches His Brand’s First Flagship Store in Toronto appeared first on brandchannel:.

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topworldhistory · 5 years

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Santa kidnapping children and murderous mice were par for the course in the Victorian-era Christmas card tradition.

In the 19th century, before festive Christmas cards became the norm, Victorians put a darkly humorous and twisted spin on their seasonal greetings. Some of the more popular subjects included anthropomorphic frogs, bloodthirsty snowmen and dead birds.

“May yours be a joyful Christmas,” reads one card from the late 1800s, along with an illustration of a dead robin. Another card shows an elderly couple laughing maniacally as they lean out a second-story window and dump water onto a group of carolers below. “Wishing you a jolly Christmas,” it says beneath the image.

Morality and a strict code of social conduct embodied the time period of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901), but the Victorians still had their fair share of questionable practices. They thought nothing of posing with the dead or robbing graves and selling the bodies. Their holiday customs evolved with just as much curiosity. Clowns, insects and even the Devil himself had a place in early holiday fanfare.

“In the 19th century, the iconography of Christmas had not been fully developed as it is now,” says Penne Restad, a lecturer in American history at the University of Texas in Austin and the author of Christmas in America.

Printing and Postage Reforms Trigger Christmas Card Tradition

The first Christmas card, circa 1843.

Christmas didn’t gain momentum until the mid-1800s. In 1843, the same year that English author Charles Dickens created A Christmas Carol, prominent English educator and society member, Sir Henry Cole, commissioned the first Christmas card. Even with an impressive print run of 1,000 cards (of which 21 exist today), full-fledged manufacturing remained only a sideline to the more established trade in playing cards, notepaper and envelopes, needle-box and linen labels and valentines, explains Samantha Bradbeer, archivist and historian for Hallmark Cards, Inc. It took several decades for the exchange of holiday greetings to catch on, both in England and the United States.

“Several factors coincided to produce a broad acceptance of greeting cards as a popular commodity,” says Bradbeer, including a higher literacy rate and new consumerism stemming from increasing levels of discretionary income. But postal reform and advances in printing technologies were the two factors that really pushed Christmas cards into the mainstream.

The Postage Act of 1839 helped regulate British postage rates and democratize mail delivery. A year later, with the passage of the Uniform Penny Post law, anyone in England could send something in the mail for just one penny. Then, in October 1870, right before the holiday season, the British government introduced the halfpenny, making mail service affordable for nearly all levels of society. Standardized rates and delivery soon followed in America.

At the same time, wood cuts and other cumbersome printing processes gave way to the mass production of images. The first mass printing of Christmas cards occurred in the 1860s. By 1870, when printing could be done for as little as a few pennies per dozen, hundreds of European card manufacturers were producing cards to sell at home and to the American public. German immigrant Louis Prang is credited with popularizing the Christmas card in the United States through his Boston lithography business.

Fringe Cards Featured Dark and Bizarre Imagery

19th-century Victorians put a dark and twisted spin on their seasonal greetings. Some of the more popular cover models included anthropomorphic frogs and insects.

View the 8 images of this gallery on the original article

As the popularity of Christmas cards grew, Victorians demanded more novelty. “By 1885, unique and even bizarre cards with silk fringe, glittered attachments and mechanical movements were popular, but the more common Christmas card motifs related to flora and fauna, seasonal vignettes and landscapes,” Bradbeer says.

Among the bizarre were a large collection of dark and outlandish designs. An army of black ants is shown attacking an army of red ants on one holiday greeting with the caption, “The compliments of the season,” printed on a tiny flag. Sullen and brooding children, random lobsters and Christmas pudding with human elements made frequent appearances on Christmas cards printed in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

But why did Victorians exchange such eccentric holiday cards, and what do they mean?

“I think it’s important to understand that ‘festive’ cards as we know them now are very much a 20th-century phenomena,” says Katie Brown, assistant curator of social history at York Castle Museum. According to Brown, although some of the history is lost, designs were made to serve as conversation pieces as much as they were made to celebrate the season. Many Victorian Christmas cards became parlor art or people added them to their scrapbook collections.

Greeting cards, in general, are linked socially, economically and politically to the culture, period and place of their origin and use. “Sentiments and designs that may seem unusual today were often considered signs of good fortune, while others poked fun at superstitions,” says Bradbeer.

Folk customs influenced the design of many Victorian Christmas cards. In British folklore, for example, robins and wrens are considered sacred species. John Grossman, author of Christmas Curiosities: Old, Dark and Forgotten Christmas, writes that images of these dead birds on Christmas cards may have been “bound to elicit Victorian sympathy and may reference common stories of poor children freezing to death at Christmas.”

“I believe the cultural interest in fairies, secret places and strange creatures that developed, maybe beginning with seances, elves and so on, in the Victorian era may have something to do with some of the fantastical Christmas cards,” says Restad.

St. Nicholas Teams Up With the Devil

A German postcard reading "Gruss vom Krampus," meaning "Greetings from Krampus."

An English legend popular during the Victorian era said that St. Nicholas recruited the Devil to help with his deliveries. Together, they determined which children had been naughty or nice. The Devil, who appeared under various guises, kidnapped the disobedient kids and beat them with a stick. Santa is the creepy antihero on a variety of Victorian-era holiday cards, where he can be seen peeking through windows and spying on children. The Devil is disguised as Krampus on some, making off on sleds and in automobiles with the children deemed naughty.

READ MORE: Meet Krampus: The Christmas Devil Who Punishes the Naughty

Today, despite the rise of electronic communication and social media, billions of Christmas cards are bought and exchanged around the world each year.

“As artifacts of popular culture revealing graphic, literary and social trends, they provide both visual pleasure and important historic information,” says Bradbeer, even when that information is symbolized by dead birds.

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/2EpB2F2 December 16, 2019 at 09:38PM

#Worldhistory

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storystitchers · 5 years

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The Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artists Collective, a 501(c)(3) organization, is professional artists and inner-city youth grades ages 16-24, working together to create social change with a focus on gun violence prevention.

Stitchers collect local stories, reframe and retell them through art, writing and performance to promote understanding, civic pride, intergenerational relationships and literacy.

Story Stitchers are artists-in-residence at Kranzberg Arts Foundation in the vibrant Grand Center Arts District and run a Storefront Studio for publishing at 616 N Skinker Blvd. in the historic Loop District.

Meet Cali, a member of the Stitchers Youth Council…

Cali came to Story Stitchers in January 2018 as a high school senior. He is now 20 years old. Cali is a dancer and performed in five of the Story Stitchers Not Another One! high school performances about gun violence prevention in 2018/19. Cali completed high school with a GED. He likes to learn new things and at Story Stitchers he has been doing some amazing nature photography, learning to do graphic design and videography. He is in the premiere group of youth performers in the Stitchers Youth Council as a dancer. This group will be going to Seattle, Washington in November to perform to Unity Summit, sponsored by Missouri Foundation for Health and Change Philanthropy.

“I’ve been to Seattle before by myself but this time I’m going to be with family, my Story Stitchers family, so it’s going to be way more fun. And I’m excited about the performances we’re going to do and visiting the Pop Culture Museum. Three of my friends are going to be at my house the night before we go and then a taxi is going to pick us up and take us to the airport at 3:30 AM! So I’m going to be tired but excited.”

Cali has participated in a Story Stitchers radio interview at KDHX, many Story Stitchers performances, and joined his peers to write a youth grant to St. Louis Mental Health Board for a new school assembly program called, Good For Your Health. He is known for his fashion-forward style, his warm smile and welcoming demeanor. He is always ready to learn or to help another.

“I’m learning how to become a better role model because I get put in a lot of situations here where I have to have a leadership mentality. When I perform with the dancers we all know what to do but sometimes I help the group to sum up the whole performance before the show, like when we rehearse. When we perform for little kids at elementary schools the little kids go crazy because they like our dancing and they try to copy us. So we are careful about what we are modeling to them.”

“Right now I’m a STL Youth Jobs intern at Story Stitchers. My job coach is very hands on and she checks up on me a lot. At Story Stitchers I am working on creating beats for the dancers and curating and editing photographs for our upcoming show, To The Prairie, at The High Low in Grand Center next March. I also do graphic design and I just finished the cover art for our new song, ANTI, which is about bullying. It’s on iTunes and all the major music platforms.”

You can find links to the song on our website: storystitchers.org.

The goal for all Story Stitchers projects is to promote a better educated, more peaceful and caring region through storytelling. A core creative group of professional artists and African American youth generate original work through a unique form of “urban storytelling” that includes hip hop, spoken word, photography and videography and disseminate new works through public presentations and performances. The Collective’s body of work focuses on gun violence prevention and topics related to public health issues.

Story Stitchers’ programs are driven by the interests and concerns of low-income, black youth and as a result have focused on gun violence since 2014. Gun violence is a pressing public health crisis that consumes the attention of the engaged youth. Youth have the opportunity to work through their pain and loss and be a force multiplier, impacting families, schools and neighborhoods.

Stitchers is committed to placing youth at the center of the work both in identifying topics for exploration as well as the methods for engagement. This approach builds a community of youth and professional artists who respect one another. We are proud that our primary method for recruiting new youth is word of mouth from their peers.

Since 2013 Saint Louis Story Stitchers have gained support from or collaborated with: Washington University in St. Louis, Kranzberg Arts Foundation, Missouri Foundation for Health, Regional Arts Commission, Missouri Arts Council, Mid-America Arts Alliance, National Endowment for the Arts, Missouri Humanities Council, National Endowment for the Humanities, Youthbridge Community Foundation, Spirit of St. Louis Women’s Fund, Saigh Foundation, Cardinals Care, University of Missouri’s Extension Service’s St. Louis Storytelling Festival, KWMU’s We Live Here, Saint Louis Art Museum, Fringe Fest, St. Louis Mental Health Board, and more. The Collective meets with youth year-round and has presented publicly over 150 times, engaging a diverse audiences of over 15,000.

Together, we can do so much more for our at risk youth in Saint Louis. Please make a gift today to support Saint Louis Story Stitchers in the New Year—and beyond.

Thank you and Happy Holidays!

Stitchers Youth Council Spotlight: Cali The Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artists Collective, a 501(c)(3) organization, is professional artists and inner-city youth grades ages 16-24, working together to create social change with a focus on gun violence prevention.

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newyorktheater · 5 years

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At the 22nd annual New York International Fringe Festival, which is running through the end of October, there are 40 shows in six venues – plus more than 25 shows at The Nuyorican Poet’s Café created by some of the alumni of the 21 previous years of the festival.

To the novice, this might sound overwhelming. To veteran fringe-goers, it’s probably a shock.

Consider the 20th annual New York International Fringe Festival in 2016, when some 75,000 theatergoers attended more than 200 shows in 16 venues over two weeks in August. The shows were selected (“adjudicated” in Fringe lingo) out of double or triple the number of submissions.

None of the shows this year are adjudicated. And there are none in some of my favorite genres

There are none of the weird and wonderful site-specific experiments that have been a fixture of the festival since the very first one, when I had the pleasure of attending “Louis and David,” which was performed every twenty minutes in its entirety in an Oldsmobile parked on the Lower East Side, with an audience of four in the back seat and the cast of two in the front. Or “When We Were Idiots” at the 18thfestival, when Australian Xavier Toby, dressed as a penguin and carrying a megaphone, offered a walking tour of random landmarks in New York City as if we were visiting the city, newly excavated from under a mound of rubbish, one-hundred years later. Or “Makbet” last year, when an immersive musical version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play took place in a shipping container at a Brooklyn recycling center.

It is even hard to discern whether any of this year’s offerings fit into the genre of campy musicals, which was one of the most popular genres starting in the third year with “Urinetown,” the only Fringe show ever to make it to Broaday, a musical about a city very much like New York, except that a severe water shortage has led to the control of all toilets by a malevolent corporation.

What happened? The short answer is: They ran out of money. But it’s more complicated than that.

After the 20tth festival, the Present Theater Company, the producers of the festival, announced a year-long hiatus, to give them time to rethink the festival.

The festival came back in 2018, with lots of changes – the most consequential of which was a move from August to October. It was also split in half. The Fringe shows based in Manhattan were adjudicated, as they had been from the get-go. But there was now a Fringe BYOV (bring your own venue) in the other four boroughs. Anybody could put on a show, which is the practice established by many of the fringe festivals in the U.S. and throughout the world, including the largest and oldest fringe festival, the one in Edinburgh, Scotland, which has been around since 1947.

In the middle of that festival, the funding they were counting on fell through.

“We faced a situation where we needed to raise $100,000 by the end of 2018 or face closing entirely,” recounts Elena K. Holy, the artistic director.

They were able to raise half that amount, thanks largely to Fringe alumni. “So we’re able to do half the festival – the FringeBYOV part.”

Today, Holy has announced a new name for the 2019 FringeBYOV, “in light of the events of the past week” — FringePeachment

“Our indie community is helping keep the Fringe alive – possibly year-round, as we restructure and form the new festival. “

Meanwhile, as in the past, the best way to fringe is still to 1. use the Slice-o-matic on the FringeNYC website, where you can choose by venue, time, ethnicity, genre. And 2. Ask other fringe-goers for recommendations.

It’s much harder to make recommendations in advance when there is no jury you can consult who has read all the submissions (when anything goes.) But here are a handful of shows that sound intriguing to me, or at least feel worth mentioning, grouped into two genres that in my past years of fringe-going have resulted in some satisfying experiences.

Solo Shows

There are 14 solo shows this year in the festival. In the past, the solo shows have represented the most geographic and ethnic diversity; they’ve also tended to exhibit the most polish.

Chalk

Oct 5-25, Kraine

Alex Curtis plays a charismatic clown who discovers magic chalk that makes everything he draws come to life. Non-verbal physical comedy in the style of the silent-film era comedians

Blood and Water

Oct 4-15, Under St. Marks

Rachel Brill tells her story as a Jewish woman who fell in love with a Palestinian man.

Performance Art and the International Avant-Garde

Always a sparse but rewarding genre at the festival, the two most promising this year are both being presented at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn (the only venue this year outside Manhattan.)

Savana Glacial

October 23-24

Written by the most celebrated living contemporary Brazilian playwrights, Jô Bilac, and performed by an all-Brazilian cast, this dark comedy dives into a love triangle between a writer, his wife who suffers from short-term memory loss and their eccentric neighbor.

Update

October 25-26

Tech heavy (just take a look at their website), this show promises to bring the Internet on stage: “Become friends, tinder swipes, avatars of yourself in this improvisational performance.”

The 2019 New York International Fringe Festival: What Happened?! At the 22nd annual New York International Fringe Festival, which is running through the end of October, there are 40 shows in six venues – plus more than…

#Fringe Festival #Fringe NYC #New York Fringe Festival

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ismael37olson · 6 years

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Nothing's as Amazing as a Musical

I've written nine musicals -- book, music, and lyrics -- and all but one have been produced. My earlier shows are respectable efforts, but I wouldn't want anyone of them to be produced today. After all, I wrote my first show the summer before senior year in high school. It wasn't bad for a seventeen-year-old with no training, writing his first musical, but that's not really saying much. But I really like my later shows, particularly three of them (Attempting the Absurd, In the Blood, and Johnny Appleweed), and I've often thought what a shame it is that I spend a year or two writing a show, pour my soul into it, and then it runs for four weeks and disappears forever. After all that work. But I knew none of the theatrical publishers would publish my quirky little shows which have never run in New York. I've also been thinking a lot lately about how to augment my income. It's hard out there for a freelance artsy to pay the rent. I've been working on a new musical theatre analysis book (this will be my fifth of that kind), and I'm getting close to finishing, so I've begun thinking about getting it published. The publisher who put out my first four books isn't adding any more theatre titles for the foreseeable future. The publisher who put out my last book was a bit of a nightmare. And then someone pointed out to me that you can self-publish on Amazon. I looked into it, and found it's really easy and it's literally free! I also saw that you can choose from a dozen different sizes, which made me think... I could publish music books! So I sat down and went through my computer files, to see what there was that I had already written that was worth publishing, and that might make me some money. I ended up deciding to publish the script and music for three of my most recent musicals, two of my non-musical scripts, a collection of my songs from all my shows, and one novelty book that I've been wanting to get published for several years. But this was a bigger job than I thought. All those scripts were already in the computer, so I just had to reformat and clean them up. But only my last score was done on the computer -- all my earlier scores are in pencil on music manuscript paper. So for two shows I had to input the entire scores into the computer. It was time-consuming, but I'm so glad I did it. So here's what I've put up on Amazon lately, in addition to my four analysis books, my book about Hair, and my musical theatre history book. I can't describe the thrill of seeing my music in a published book!

Attempting the Absurd -- Meta before meta was cool. This is one of the first truly postmodern meta-musicals (written 1986-1992, debuted 1992), about a young man named Jason who has figured out that he's only a character in a musical and doesn’t actually exist; and his special knowledge has persuaded those around him that he's off his nut. Jason is a fictional character in the real world, but all the people around him are real people in a fictional world. So he sets off on a quest to find The Answers To It All, with his musical comedy sidekick, Chaz. Along the way the two find love (both gay and straight), community theatre friends, a little jail time, and ultimately irrefutable proof that Jason is right after all. Love and a copy of the script to Attempting the Absurd conquer all, and all ends as it should, with a happy, full company reprise. Songs include “I Love You,” “Being in a Musical,” “The City,” “Waltz for Chaz,” “Worse Things,” “The Optimistic Song,” “Old-Fashioned Musicals,” “The Big Finish,” and lots more. Both the script and the vocal selections are available on Amazon now!

In the Blood -- My 1995 vampire musical, part romance, part Gothic horror, part comedy. The show explores the unlikely romance between the vampire Zachary Church and Adam Graham, a hematologist with HIV, in the early years of the AIDS pandemic. If vampires are the only ones who can't be affected by the AIDS virus, do they have some responsibility to pass on their immunity? And for someone with AIDS, what price is too high for acquiring that immunity? When Adam asks Zach to turn him to vampirism so he won't die, Zach is torn. He has vowed never to make another vampire, never to subject anyone else to the horrific loneliness he has known for so long. Ultimately, Zach has to choose between condemning Adam to the tormented life of a vampire or watching him die, knowing he could've saved him. This was definitely the most serious show I've ever written, and the most sophisticated score. Both the script and the vocal selections are available on Amazon now!

Johnny Appleweed -- My 2006 stoner political satire, the first musical ever to make a serious case for the spiritual, existential, and psychological properties of marijuana. Through the lens of this pot-friendly worldview, the show takes aim at issues like American party politics, the War on Terror, the (undeclared) war on America's poor, the American culture of violence, gay marriage, the legalization of marijuana, sexual oppression, and increasingly rabid American religious fanaticism, all through the eyes of the laid-back, neo-mythic purveyor of pot, Johnny Appleweed, an itinerant philosopher-stoner, who argues that only through the mind-expanding properties of marijuana can we truly see the Larger Truths, so that we can finally solve our problems and move our civilization forward. A heady mix of Hair, The Daily Show, the films of Kevin Smith, Waiting for Godot, and The Wizard of Oz. Songs include “The Ballad of Johnny Appleweed,” “The Scheme of Things,” “Fucking Up America,” “Cannabis Dei,” “Weird Isn’t Weird,” “Jesus On the Tube,” “I Tapped That Ass,” “What Would Jesus Do?”, “A Great Big Cloud of Smoke,” and more. Both the script and the vocal selections are available on Amazon now!

Astro Turf -- This is a twenty-minute one-act musical I wrote as a special project for a history of astronomy class at Harvard University in 1984. Five major astronomers, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler, come together and present in song their views on the nature of motion and the creation of the heavens. Both my professors loved it. Owen Gingrich (professor emeritus of astronomy and the history of science, Harvard University), wrote, "This is really quite super! There is obviously a lot of research and thought here, and a lot of very subtle points! Bravo!" My other prof, D.W. Latham (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), wrote, "A magnificent survey of the history of astronomy, so detailed, so insightful. They’re all excellent, but the Kepler piece is simply brilliant!" All five songs are in the vocal selections, now available on Amazon!

Songs from the Musicals of Scott Miller -- Even though a lot of my early shows aren't strong enough to be produced again, some of the songs in those shows are pretty good! So here's a fun collection of songs from all nine of my musicals, Adam’s Apple (1981), Musical (1983), Topsiders (1984), Astro Turf (1984), The Line (1985), Attempting the Absurd (1992), Breaking Out in Harmony (1994), In the Blood (1995), and Johnny Appleweed (2006). Songs include “Give Me My Cap’n Crunch,” “The Children of Izod,” “Pushers and Dealers Are People Too,” “Zit,” “Cupcakes at Seven,” “Get Screwed,” “Aristotle,” “Married or Gay,” “Cannabis Dei,” “Fucking Up America,” “I Tapped That Ass,” “Crime is Beauty,” “The Christmas Tree Fell Over and Our House is Burning Down,” and lots more. This piano-vocal collection is now available on Amazon!

Head Games -- This was my first foray into writing a non-musical play, but it turned out pretty well. It's been produced here in St. Louis, in Los Angeles, in London, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. In the show, it’s Michael’s thirty-fifth birthday, and his friends are coming over to celebrate, for better or worse, as he grieves over his advancing age in a youth-obsessed culture, and also over his inability to find a smart gay comedy with nudity to fill his small theatre company’s bank account. And his late-arriving surprise birthday present will just make it all worse. Much worse. Head Games takes pot shots at pop culture at the turn of the new century and at itself, and it doubles back on itself structurally, playing the story out of chronology – so that as Act II opens, you realize that much of what you thought happened in Act I isn’t what it appeared... The script is available now on Amazon!

A Hot Cup of Murder -- Back in 2000, Harrah's Casino asked us to create a murder mystery show to perform in their banquet hall, as an extra incentive to get groups to come to the casino. I created a political family, the Seaborns, holding their first political fundraising dinner, when the candidate drops dead in his dinner about ten minutes into the show. And hilarity ensues. We ended up doing only one performance, for complicated reasons, but the audience loved it, and now I'm finally able to share my script, which is now on Amazon! It's so cool that all this stuff has now been published. I don't know that I'll make much money on this, but I love that it's out there. And who knows, maybe it will lead to further productions of one or more of these shows. Beyond all this, there was still one more project I had been thinking about for several years, a musical theatre novelty book -- something none of the established theatre publishers was interested in. Now, as part of my adventure in self-publishing, this project is finally real.

It's a Musical!: 400 Questions to Ponder, Discuss, and Fight About -- This quiz book is filled with 400 questions designed to make the serious musical theatre fan think about musicals, on Broadway and across the country, how they operate, how they interact with each other and with the Real World, how they are related, how they have and haven't changed over the years, what they have been and what they are becoming in this new Golden Age of the American Musical Theatre. Por ejemplo...

What theatre song always puts you in a good mood? Name a strong black leading character in a musical. Quote one dialogue line from a musical that totally encapsulates that show. What's your favorite Act II opener? Name a theatre song in which the singer is lying. What musical would be hardest to explain to someone who knew nothing about it? What's your favorite Kander & Ebb vamp?

You can flip through this book, land on any page, read a question, and test yourself on your knowledge, insights, and opinions about musicals. Or you can make it a game with your similarly obsessed friends. Or you can use it to humiliate posers who only pretend to know our beloved art form. Your choice. But wield your power carefully. The primary purpose here is just for serious, hardcore, musical theatre fans to have lots of musical theatre fun with other serious, hardcore, musical theatre fans. Or with themselves. But remember -- alone is alone, not alive. It has also occurred to me that this book would be a useful teaching aid for theatre teachers, to get their students thinking more substantively about our art form. It's a Musical! is now available on Amazon too! I can't tell you how satisfying it is to know my work won't die, that my songs will have some further life. It's a real gift Amazon has given me. They've taken away the gatekeepers, and they're allowing me to tap into a fast-growing market of musical theatre freaks, in a way that most regular publishers would consider not worth the risk. I realized a long time ago that the true joy of making theatre is the act of sharing, connecting to an audience and telling them a great story. Now my sharing can expand beyond the walls of the Marcelle Theater, and beyond the local fans of New Line Theatre. Amazon has super-charged my sharing power and I am very grateful. So stop my Author Page on Amazon (remember, go to smile.Amazon.com, and New Line gets donations off your purchases!) and take a look at all my books. If you love musicals, there's lots there you'll be happy you found... Long Live the Musical! (And Amazon!) Scott from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2018/07/nothings-as-amazing-as-musical.html

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instagramkilledcoachella · 6 years

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April 21st, 6:47 PM. VIP Rose Garden, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival

Stranger: “Let’s just go to Beyoncé!”

Stranger’s friend: “It’s at 11—it starts in 5 hours, bro!”

This is a verbatim, firsthand account of a conversation I witnessed between two festival-goers, the Saturday of Weekend Two of Coachella. In case it wasn’t already apparent, these two men were overtly, outwardly bored (and bad at math, to boot).

Bored—yes, bored, of all possible states of being–at an event dedicated to hours upon hours, days upon days of what many would consider the antithesis of boredom: witnessing excellence in musical performance. To clarify the extent of the sheer ridiculousness and unsubstantiated nature of their boredom, between 6:47 PM and 11PM, any person at the festival had the option of seeing music icon David Byrne (frontman of Talking Heads as well as music novelist), R&B starlets Alina Baraz and Jorja Smith, hip-hop stars Tyler, The Creator, Post Malone, blackbear, or DJ duo Louis The Child, to name a few. Forgot to mention alt-rock heroes alt-J, and indie act Fleet Foxes, but hey, who’s counting?

…I’m counting.

Given that there were approximately, from what I heard, 110,000 people at Coachella that weekend, it makes sense that I didn’t happen upon these two individuals again. However, I did see a sea of others in the Beyoncé crowd. And there, now making me incredulous, I witnessed even more staunchly held, complete and utter boredom. Don’t believe me? Just watch.

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Although, in a way, I have to write this for school, truthfully, overhearing this one interaction set a fire under me—regardless of whether I wrote this for class, or for its own sake, one way or another I needed for it to end up written by me and out there in the world. From my disappointing experience of Coachella 2018, and from the practically unanimous cacophony of opinion I hear from my friends and peers, it has become clear to me that, unfortunately, Coachella has become a hoax.

When I say “hoax”, I don’t mean to insinuate that the entire experience, or buying a ticket is a waste. In fact, I really enjoyed myself at some of the performances, but that’s because I genuinely wanted to go “for the music”—a phrase many people in my age group know, which itself is becoming a cliché; it’s some kind of necessary caveat to say “I’m not a total loser; I’m not a total follower”. Following the definition of a hoax: “a humorous or malicious deception”, there is a humorous, deceiving notion out there that going to Coachella is like going to some magic fountain—you get something from it that you don’t already have, and that you can’t get anywhere else. Legend has it, when you go to Coachella, you become christened by some magical, esoteric cool factor that drips down from the heavens and washes over you as soon as you walk through the gates.

Analyzing Coachella’s cool factor through all the years of its running is something that I don’t have the full capacity to do—I was three years old in 1999, its first year. That said, I have gone consecutively for the past five years, and I have gone in pretty much every way you can, with every kind of pass, backstage or GA, that you can have (practically the only thing I haven’t done is work there, but I have friends who have. That or camp, which I intend to do). For the record, my favorite year going was when I had a GA pass and crashed in my friend-of-friend’s hotel room that we invited ourselves to. In no way to brag, I’m a Coachella vet—all of this is just to establish to you, I know from experience and I have seen it over the years, Coachella is not what it used to be.

It’s not any secret that going to Coachella wasn’t always widely considered cool. In fact, for a time, it meant you were some kind of hippie-weirdo, which itself didn’t become cool or accepted into the mainstream for a while. For a time, the people who went to Coachella genuinely appreciated music enough to the point that they would haul themselves and all their crap out to the scorching desert, sleep in tents, not shower, etc…just so that they could have the chance to watch anyone from Prince to Bjork to Coldplay or Paul McCartney play. Certainly, there was a culture of escapism, as festival culture, travel, music, and drug use all tend to coexist. Clearly these former headliners are mainstream acts, but the appeal of the headliners isn’t actually the main concern here; it’s the act of actually going. I have sat in traffic longer than 7 hours getting home from Coachella (I have learned that the only way to do it is drive out Friday morning, miss a few acts, leave Sunday night after the headliner, otherwise you’re screwed), but, point being, the process of actually coming and going from Coachella is strenuous, at best.

The point I’m making here is not that the artists on the lineups of recent years are somehow worse, or that the people attending the festival are somehow worse, but rather, that the incentive to actually go to Coachella is not the same one that drew the initial Coachella-goers to the festival in earlier years. Somewhere along the line, being a hippie, smoking weed, wanting to re-create Woodstock, but in California (down to the fringe and feathers) became accepted, in fact sought-after, by mainstream culture, instead of ridiculed. Somewhere along the line, Coachella became the place to be, instead of the place to make fun of people for being at. And from my personal take, this year, Coachella has become a place (instead of one I used to beg my parents to let me go to in high school) I am unsure if I have the same love for, because the face of the festival has morphed into a caricature of itself: something I do not recognize, and not the event I fell in love with.

How did this happen?

In Malcolm Gladwell’s 1997 piece, “The Cool Hunt”, he writes about diffusion theory and how it relates to the proliferation and then eventual death of “cool” things; trends. Cool things make their way through five different groups of people: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards (Gladwell, 365). Innovators are the “handful” of innovative, creative-thinking people who start doing a certain thing, in spite of the fact that no one else is doing it, or it’s not widely considered cool (actually, perhaps for that very reason) (Gladwell, 365). Then, “early adopters” are “the slightly larger group that follow[s] them…the opinion leaders in the community, the respected, thoughtful people who watched and analyzed what those wild innovators were doing and did it themselves” (Gladwell, 365). Then comes the “early majority” and the “late majority”, “which is to say the deliberate and the skeptical masses, who would never try anything until the most respected [people] had tried it. Only after they had been converted [do] the ‘laggards’, the most traditional of all, follow suit” (Gladwell, 365).

Gladwell’s articulation of these five different groups has important relevance to the evolution of Coachella, following the story I just previously told. My argument would be that we are getting to the point where even the laggards are considering or attending Coachella, and at that point, the thing that is going through this cycle stops being cool. As Gladwell perfectly puts it:

“This is the first rule of cool: The quicker the chase, the quicker the flight. The act of discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on, which explains the triumphant circularity of coolhunting. Because of coolhunters…cool changes more quickly, and because cool changes more quickly, we need coolhunters” (Gladwell, 361)

This piece was written in 1997—that’s 21 years ago. The term “coolhunting” sounds a little anachronistic today. But if we put this formulation into 2018 terminology, a coolhunter would actually be not far off from what we have come to know as an influencer. And, with what application do we associate the term influencer?

Instagram.

Adorno and Horkheimer wrote: “real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies” (8). This was back in 1944, when movies, and television programs, were the only sources of visual media entertainment available to consumers. The screens that “the movies” were shown on—in theaters, or on television—were the only screensthat existed for accessing entertainment media. In 2018, screens are ubiquitous to the point that going through one’s day without looking at one or touching one is inconceivable. Due to the proliferation of social media, the line between what constitutes entertainment and what constitutes real life has blurred substantially—it is virtually non-existent. Instead of merely receiving a broadcast or a piece of content as one would in the days of Adorno and Horkheimer, people today are both sources and receivers: the mediation of the self and one’s experiences is truly for the sake of, if we are to break it down, entertaining oneself by subjecting oneself to the appraisal of the value of their experiences, physical appearance, and worldview. The entertainment value comes from playing this game of chance, turning other people’s approval into quantifiable “likes”. It is important to recognize that the slot machine, dopamine-hit psychology of Instagram has become “indistinguishable” from our interactions with others and our social worlds—it has become, in this postmodern way, the way to interact with others.

Getting back to the five groups Gladwell defined, and the cycling-through of “cool” things, he notes that “the critical thing about this sequence is that it is almost entirely interpersonal” (361). Given that social media has completely altered the ways in which people interact with one another, and also that it is image-driven, time-sensitive and in some ways espouses a culture of competition…if we look at Instagram as the main source of interpersonal connection for people today, it makes sense to argue that, through Instagram, we come to understand what is cool, and what is not. In fact, the cycle of cool, which is already inherently quick (i.e. as Gladwell said, “the quicker the chase, the quicker the flight”) is expedited by the nature of this application. If Kendall Jenner wears something one day, she won’t wear it the next month, because everyone else will be wearing it and it won’t be cool anymore (she might not even wear it the next day). Gladwell’s 1997 formulation and understanding of coolhunters can be seen, in 2018, as a version of itself on steroids, taking the form of influencers. Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1944 conception of life being “indistinguishable from the movies” is on steroids because of Instagram.

It is my contention that the experience of Coachella has been fundamentally altered in direct relationship and correlation with the way in which Instagram has fundamentally altered the human experience of reality. As Instagram grows, and blurs the line between entertainment and reality, between entertainment and socializing, it becomes more and more a way in which people self-identify, and seek to perform an identity of themselves which will give them social status and indicate that they have a certain kind of cultural capital. The effects of this influence are so profound that people would rather experience Coachella through their phones, for Instagram, standing still (because of course, that would ruin the videos they would make for their Insta story) than experience the excellence in music performance that is before them, through their own eyes.

It is worthwhile to note that Instagram has grown astronomically since its launch in 2010; in 2017, Instagram had “doubled its user base to nearly 700 million actives in two years” (Constine)

Image via TechCrunch

The first year I had attended Coachella was 2014. As you can see from the graph, in 2014 Instagram had only 200M active users versus last year’s 700M; in 2018 it’s an estimated 800M.

The effects of the proliferation of Instagram upon culture have been profound; this does not necessarily require to be demonstrated by research, as it is something people in today’s society can feel. In the same way, one can feel a difference in the culture of Coachella from attending it year-to-year.

The ways in which Coachella has evolved have been numerous, but most relevant to this analysis is that what draws people to Coachella is not the desire to experience an impressive collection of live music–clearly, as the leading quotation and video in this piece’s introduction serve to demonstrate–but the social and cultural capital that go along with being a Coachella-goer. Fitting with Gladwell’s argument, as the festival becomes bigger and bigger--increasing their ticket cap past 125,000 people; booking arguably the most mainstream headliners in the history of the festival, accepting endorsements from massive retailers--the “coolness” of the festival depletes, and the overall experience of going to the festival changes drastically. What once made Coachella cool was that it served as an escape from the outside world of capitalist commercial crap, but as soon as you plop an an H&M store, or a Sephora tent, or a Shake Shack into the middle of the festival, it really just creates the experience of walking through a mall. There is no escape from commercial reality, which was once a draw for attending this kind of festival.

However, no matter how pure the festival were to be in this way, escaping capitalism is impossible in America. Adorno and Horkheimer write, “under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce” (4-5). This relates to the evolution of Coachella into an arena for making profit and receiving major corporate sponsorship because it demonstrates (which is the central argument of Adorno and Horkheimer’s piece) that culture industries really are not as noble as they seem; any kind of cultural experience or product exists in a capitalist system, and thus the experience of escape is really a trap in and of itself.

Now that Coachella is not an escape it has become more so a destination or a photo-op, a shopping mall for social validation, which actually changes the entire culture of the festival. Though one would need to attend the festival to truly get a feel for how things are, the effects of the proliferation of Instagram can be measured through looking at the crowds and seeing the number of cell phones. This shift is easily observable through the photographs in Coachella’s archive of past festivals. Looking at the crowds at Coachella, rather than at the performers, one can observe clearly that the experience of Coachella was once very different than it has become.

Coachella 2012, images via Coachella.

Through looking through Coachella’s archives of photos on their official website, in the “history” section, I sought to contrast the earliest and the latest sets of photos they had available. In the two photos above from Coachella 2012, one can see the crowds are small; in the first photo no one has a phone or a camera up; in the second they do, however, you can also see handheld videocameras, indicating that the reason people are documenting their experiences is because they personally want to have a record of it, not because they need to instantly broadcast it. Referring again to the graph, Instagram had only 50M users at this point. At that time, Coachella had sold out in record time and in record numbers, and there were 80,000-85,000 people in attendance.

Coachella 2017, image via Coachella.

The contrast between the crowds and the culture of the festival five years later is clear even from just four photographs. In the first of this set, people’s phones are hanging out of their hands, there is a girl taking a selfie on someone’s shoulders, people are reaching to take photos even though they are already close to the front. In the second image, you can faintly see the glow of cell phones from hands reaching upward in the crowd. I actually went to this set and couldn't get in because it was so crowded; I remember seeing this. At this point, Instagram has 700M active users, which is fourteen times what it was in 2012. For context, 700M is two times the population of the U.S, and the population of the U.S. is 6.5 times bigger than the 50M users of 2012.

From both my experience and my analysis of these images, it is clear that documenting Coachella may once have been for the personal appreciation and memories that one would have, but keeping in mind the astronomical growth and influence of Instagram, it is clear that there is a relationship here that has caused huge change. People are going to Coachella not to say they went, but to show they went, or are there, in real time. But now, the late majority and laggards who are there don’t know what to do with themselves for the four hours before their über-mainstream headliner takes the stage. The festival’s culture has drastically changed as a result, and in my opinion, is no longer even “cool”. But as Gladwell demonstrates, this is how it goes.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” The Consumer Society Reader, The New Press, 2000, pp. 3–19.

Aslam, Salman. “Instagram by the Numbers (2018): Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts.” Omnicore, 11 Feb. 2018, www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/. Constine, Josh. “Instagram's Growth Speeds up as It Hits 700 Million Users.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 26 Apr. 2017, techcrunch.com/2017/04/26/instagram-700-million-users/.

Bain, Katie. “Has Coachella Gotten Too Crowded?” L.A. Weekly, 14 Sept. 2017, www.laweekly.com/music/coachella-2017-was-way-too-crowded-8138669.

Flynn, John, et al. “Coachella 2012 Sets Attendance Record.” Consequence of Sound, Consequence of Sound, 19 Apr. 2012, consequenceofsound.net/2012/04/coachella-2012-sets-attendance-record/.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “The Coolhunt.” The Consumer Society ReaderThe New Press, 2000, pp. 360–374.

“'Photo Gallery | Coachella 2018'.” Coachella, www.coachella.com/history/gallery/.

Rockwell, John. “David Byrne's 'How Music Works'.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Sept. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/books/review/david-byrnes-how-music-works.html.

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