Marcel Duchamp exhibition in London

This video from the USA says about itself:

Nov 21, 2012

‘Dancing around the Bride‘ is the first exhibition to explore the interwoven lives, works, and experimental spirit of Marcel Duchamp and four of the most important American postwar artists: composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and visual artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

By Christine Lindey in England:

The Bride And The Bachelors: Duchamp With Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg And Johns

Barbican, London EC2

Saturday 04 May 2013

A Marcel Duchamp exhibition shows his continuing influence in questioning exactly what ‘art’ is

Born into a notary’s family in provincial France, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) headed for Paris to study art in 1905. By 1912 he had challenged not only academic naturalism but also the orthodoxies of the avant-garde. Impatient with the latter’s obsession with formal innovations Duchamp gave up what he called “retinal painting” in favour of returning art to the realms of the mind.

His first love had been Symbolist art and poetry and elliptical, speculative appeals to the imagination continued to be the key to his life’s work. His irreverent, iconoclastic works and actions questioned the fundamental processes, techniques, materials and skills upon which Western art had rested since the Renaissance.

Duchamp redefined the artist’s social role from brilliant creator to provocateur. This had a major influence on Western art yet the validity of his legacy remains controversial.

In 1914 he bought a mass-produced bottle rack, inscribed it with a now forgotten title, signed it and called it a “ready-made,” thus questioning the traditional assumption that art consists of individual objects made by the artist.

The best known ready-made is the urinal which he titled Fountain. He signed it R Mutt and submitted it anonymously to an independent exhibition in 1917.

Defending it in his radical magazine Blindman, Duchamp wrote: “Whether R Mutt, with his own hands, made the fountain is of no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – creating a new thought for that object.”

In choosing commonly seen, industrially produced, non-emotive and “aesthetically neutral” objects, Duchamp questioned existing aesthetic criteria and heightened awareness of the everyday.

Equally radical was The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915 -1923), known as the Large Glass. Using non-traditional processes and material it consists of two panels of glass encased in a tall, free-standing aluminium stand.

Motifs are represented on its transparent surface with lead, silver foil, varnished dust and drilled holes – with some of their forms generated by chance rather than by aesthetic judgements.

Its complex content can only be decoded by referring to The Green Box, in which unpaginated notes name its various characters and describes the actions of the bride, alias “motor-desire,” the bachelors, the nine metallic moulds and the oculists’ witnesses.

Devoid of a single, linear narrative the Large Glass’s content nevertheless suggests tales of frustrated sexual desire. Its open-ended, allusive meaning leaves room for the spectator’s imagination to soar. Or to scoff.

So radical were his innovations and so indifferent was Duchamp to careerism that he only became influential when rediscovered by the 1950s avant garde. This Barbican exhibition considers his works along with those he inspired in the American vanguard – composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham and the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

In so doing, it explores the impact of several threads of Duchampian thought such as Cage and Cunningham’s use of chance and of “ready-made” sounds and human movement from everyday life in their music and ballets and Rauschenberg and Johns’s incorporation of mass-produced every-day objects and imagery into works to bridge the gap between art and life.

The exhibition also explores collaborations and interactions between the five artists such as Cage’s scores for Cunningham’s ballets and the references to Duchamp’s works in sets by Rauschenberg and Johns for Cunningham’s productions.

Created during WWI and its aftermath, the emotional disengagement of Duchamp’s work can be partly attributed to sociopolitical revulsion.

That it resonated for vanguard artists in the US of the 1950s can be understood in the context of their nation’s cold war denial of its 1930s socially engaged art. Theirs were creative responses to Duchamp’s legacy.

However, in the mid-1970s and 1980s his rebellion and iconoclasm became ossified by art educational institutions into academic orthodoxy. A misunderstanding of his ideas to mean that anything can be called art has led to an infestation of mindless and sniggering art in recent decades – an unwarranted legacy which has cast a shadow over Duchamp’s own work.

Curated by the contemporary artist Philippe Parreno, this celebratory exhibition becomes a creative soundscape/installation in its own right. It intertwines sound, light, live dance performances and art works. Relatively few and judiciously selected works by each of the five artists are presented with flair and imagination to appeal to the senses as much as to the mind.

Avoiding a stodgy trudge through endless works, the exhibition introduces complex ideas and creative cross-fertilisations carefully themed around key ideas in an elegant and palatable form.

Art in which ideas take precedence over skill and visual responses must be based on ideas with depth of meaning and purpose. Parreno’s exhibition may inspire yet a new generation to engage with Duchamp’s intelligent questioning of preconceived ideas which will bury the puerile and cynical use to which they have been made.

Runs until June 9. Box office: 0845 121-6823.

Related articles

• The Bride and the Bachelors (unified-magazine.com)
• Response to Introduction and Marcel Duchamp (britragan.wordpress.com)
• Week 1 // Thursday: “Introduction” & “Marcel Duchamp” (treeeeesaa.wordpress.com)
• Marcel Duchamp – Fountain (georgeknightsvase.wordpress.com)
• Introduction and Duchamp Response (hmoye.wordpress.com)

Why do young cranes dance?

This video is called Japan Red Crowned Cranes Dance.

From the BBC:

31 March 2013 Last updated at 00:57

Why do ‘single’ birds dance?

By Jeremy Coles, Reporter, BBC Nature

“Mesmerising and with a little bit of mystery about it.”

That is how aviculturist Amy King describes the graceful leaping, bowing, running, spinning and grass-tossing of dancing cranes.

This unique and spectacular behaviour has been imitated in various human cultures since the Stone Age and the purpose of such elaborate displays is widely understood to establish and reaffirm long-term pair bonds.

But on the occasion that young or single birds dance, for no clear social reasons, scientists become really intrigued.

Curiously, all species of crane dance throughout the year and at any age. The behaviour can appear random at times: sparked by a feather, stick or gust of wind.

Explanations for this peculiar propensity for dance have included socialisation and pair bonding in sub-adults, averting aggression and as a displacement activity when nervous.

But while these reasons could drive certain situations, they cannot explain everything.

Cranes dance most often when relaxed and at ease, often while not involved in any obvious social activity and when they are too young to form pairs; they will even dance alone.

According to a publication in The International Journal of Avian Science (IBIS) the answer could be that most crane dances, outside of courtship, are for play.

Five rules

“What came as a surprise was that nobody has figured it out before,” author Dr Vladimir Dinets from Louisiana State University, US told BBC Nature.

To better understand the behaviour, Dr Dinets compared non-courtship crane dances to five criteria for determining what exactly constitutes play.

These categories, widely accepted by scientists, were proposed by Professor Gordon Burghardt in 2005 in his book The Genesis of Animal Play.

According to Prof Burghardt, play is a repeated behaviour that should not contribute to survival, it is spontaneous and voluntary; performed when the animal is healthy and free from stress.

“They have become kind of a golden standard,” Dr Dinets said, “We know that play has evolved independently in many groups of animals, from mammals to octopuses, and that its occurrence correlates with complex and flexible behaviour.”

“[Play] could be a unique window into the evolution of complex behaviour, but so far we don’t know even the most basic things about it,” he said.

Serious playtime

Professor Burghardt describes play as a “behaviour that doesn’t seem to be very adaptive or functional in the context in which you see it.”

And for a long time it was thought that play was only found in mammals and a few birds.

“It is probably much more common than people think,” said Prof Burghardt.

So why do animals play? There is no simple answer according to the expert: “It’s a behaviour that has arisen evolutionarily many times for different reasons and many different functions.”

“Like practicing skills that [the young] will need in adulthood and helping them cognitively.”

For many species you only see play in young animals. There are exceptions: monkeys, apes, humans, wild dogs and turtles for example, where older animals play too.

Prof Burghardt explained that it is also more likely in animals where there is a period of parental care, where the young are protected from doing things seriously on their own to survive.

“That’s why you find play much more often in mammals and birds,” he said.

Keeping it interesting

Dancing cranes interested Prof Burghardt because adult birds, and not just chicks, exhibit this play behaviour.

“Maybe one of the functions in cranes is that it helps keep the [long-term] pair bond exciting and interesting,” he said.

For Dr Dinets, “it solves the old mystery of what crane dances are, but since play is so mysterious, it just replaces one riddle with another.”

Common cranes have now returned to parts of the UK, notably Norfolk, after a 400-year absence.

Other key places to see the spectacular performances are the Somerset levels and moors, where the Great Crane Project have been releasing captive bred birds since 2010.

If you are thinking about watching the dance of these distinctive birds then the project’s Amy King suggests dawn and dusk on a windy day when the birds “leap in the air and spin around, run and jump”.

“[It] looks like they are having fun,” she said.

Related articles

• French cranes and bullfinches, photos (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Cranes, cranes and red kites in France, photos (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Dancing Japanese Cranes – Hokkaido, Japan – Simone Sbaraglia (photobotos.com)
• Crane migration in France (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Greenfinch and cranes in France (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Cranes, migration and mating season (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Sandhill Crane (michiganswildlife.wordpress.com)
• Tagged crane from Bhutan landed in Tibet within two hours (thebhutanese.bt)
• Sandhill Cranes along the Platte (earlbrussell.wordpress.com)
• Common cranes build first nests in England for centuries (telegraph.co.uk)

Rumba dancing in Cuba

This music video is called Havana Rumba at Callejón de Hamel, Cuba.

By Elaine Correa:

Rumba beats stereotypes

Wednesday 06 March 2013

Spontaneous dance sessions on the streets of Havana which defy facile interpretation

The worlds of holiday dreamland and raw reality collide in the Callejon de Hamel in Havana on Sunday afternoons.

This is no ordinary alley. On those afternoons the whole place breathes rumba as the weekly Afro-Cuban cultural pena – social gathering – takes place and anyone can wander in and take part.

It’s a tight fit – musicians and their percussion instruments, singers throwing their hands up in the air and dancers moving fast as they flick their skirts and handkerchiefs with their pint-sized offspring trying to follow.

The audience is sandwiched around the invisible lines and spread out in all directions, especially where there’s a bit of shade. In the co-ordinated mayhem nobody shoves their elbow in their neighbour’s ribs. A young couple are dancing to an impossibly fast-paced piece. She’s wearing flip-flops and a pair of denim hotpants that don’t leave much to the imagination. He has a beer can in his hand, with which he gestures toward her crotch every once in a while as they dance, sweat dripping, tongues out and gold teeth gleaming.

Both are full of sexual energy. “That’s a bit vulgar, isn’t it?” says a foreign voice. Like many of the 2.5 million tourists that come to Cuba every year, the speaker is perhaps taken aback by the reality of some aspects of Cuban culture compared to what is often packaged and sold to tourists.

In the port city of Matanzas, one of Cuba’s main trade hubs in times of slavery, rumba was born from the secularisation of a whole range of rhythms taken from African and African-derived religions.

Imagine the sheer complexity of it. Men who worked in the docks began dancing to rumba competitively, as a display of their skills and attitude. This style became known as rumba columbia. Today there is also yambu – a slow dance for couples intended for the older generation – and guaguanco, a fast-paced dance full of sexual connotation and competitive tension between man and woman.

Cuba has changed since the 19th century, and spontaneous rumba sessions are becoming scarce as its official recognition increases. There’s a rumba module in the dance department of the University of the Arts, where it is dissected and choreographed, and going to a rumba often involves more watching a show than dancing. This may be the price to pay for rumba to shake off its “marginal” status in the eyes of many white Cubans.

Since the guidebooks began trumpeting the existence of this free Sunday rumba, it has almost been taken over by tourism. Almost. There is a bar that sells overpriced mojitos and a seating space under the shade of a canopy only for those ready to fork out hard currency. There’s a core of handsome young men fishing for foreign amigas and also a slightly pushy pass-the-hat policy. But there is no unintimidating and smiley presenter who takes the microphone before the show to explain the programme in three languages – “What you’re about to see, ladies and gentlemen…”

Plenty of Cubans from the neighbourhood go to the pena simply to enjoy the music and the vibe, graciously ignoring the tourist presence.

Anecdotes, love stories, confrontations, criticisms and much more are the many themes of rumba. But the one point in common is dignity and respect. Don’t talk behind people’s backs. Don’t even think of hitting a woman. Rumba teaches people values. Its rhythms are so complex they drive non-Cuban musicians up the walls. You won’t learn rumba at your local pub’s weekly salsa class, not to mention by watching Strictly Come Dancing.

Either you grow up in the right marinade or you can’t claim it. Unless you know what you’re watching, all you will see is the sweaty skin, tongues out, hips thrusting and gyrating.

Unless you know what you’re watching, remember not to judge.

Related articles

• Various Artists: Jukebox Mambo (Review) (popmatters.com)
• Cuba reveals the secrets of the saints (repeatingislands.com)
• Wild Wednesdays: La Rumba (duadmission.typepad.com)
• Report: Cuba gender equality good, but threatened (seattletimes.com)

Olympics, William Blake, suffragettes, punk, Bahrain

Yesterday evening, the London Olympics opening ceremony was on TV.

There are estimates of about a billion people worldwide watching it.

Before the athletes entered the stadium, there was a show, reminiscent of a giant musical.

The theme of the show was British history, from the age of William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I, till Queen Elizabeth II today.

One cannot blame the organizers for not showing in a show of just over one hour all the complex details of over four hundred years of history.

However, one should criticize their view of British history: basically one where conflicts between establishments and oppositional movements from below are airbrushed away.

At several moments in the show, frictions in British society could have been shown, and were not really shown. Maybe because the 2012 London Olympics are called “The People’s Games“, but are in fact disfigured by ugly touches of elitism. Even though the collective lighting of the Olympic flame was a welcome positive side.

I mean with those moments where frictions in British society might have been shown, and were not really shown: poet and visual artist William Blake; the industrial revolution and the working class; the suffragette movement; World War I; 1970s punk rock music; the National Health Service; and the athletes-torturing Bahraini Prince Nasser al-Khalifa, presumably present at the ceremony along with other anti-democratic despots.

This video says about itself:

William Blake despised the State, and believed it’s mission was to crush the soul of man.

Whether it be the state of Government, or the State-sanctioned Church, he believed that every man should create his own system, or be enslaved by another’s. As a child, he saw angels in the trees in London’s parks, and he conversed with angels for the whole of his life. But nothing enraged him more than the brutality of State toward the individual. How ironic then that the top private schools (where future leaders are shaped) should have adopted the lyrics of Blake’s Preface To Milton (now named ‘Jerusalem’) where they sing it as a nationalistic paen to a faux-conservative Britannia – and whose ancestors themselves forged the very ‘dark, Satanic mills’ that so offended Blake.

Blake was never recognised in his time, but anyone who values art and liberty should celebrate his eternal spirit!

Music by the Verve, recitations by Mark Rylance, Derek Jacobi, and some other guy I’ve forgotten the name of – animation from the 1970′s London Tate William Blake Exhibition. Oh, and some footage by that 1960′s documentary about hidden London, with James Mason.

At the ceremony, William Blake’s well-known poem “Jerusalem” was sung. That William Blake was a critic of the British monarchy and ruling class was not mentioned.

The industrial revolution was depicted, the transition from farms to factories, with big smokestacks going up, workers toiling, and gentlemen in top hats. However, the labour movement, Karl Marx writing Das Kapital in the British Library, the rise of trade unions and socialist organisations, was not shown in the Olympic stadium. Not even with a small red flag.

The movement for woman’s suffrage was indeed shown briefly, with women in early twentieth century clothes wearing signs. Not shown was the governmental violence against that movement.

World War I was shown by people remembering dead soldiers with poppies. Not shown (though the musical-like format might have done that) was how those soldiers had died horribly in their trenches. Let alone that later wars, like the present one in Afghanistan, were shown.

Several music styles from Britain were shown and played. Among them was 1970s punk rock, represented by best known punk band The Sex Pistols. However, they did not choose the two best-known Sex Pistols songs, the anti-monarchy God Save the Queen, or the anti-government Anarchy in the UK. They choose the less controversial lesser known Pretty Vacant.

Part of the show was hundreds of National Health Service employees dancing. That gave an impression of very many NHS employees doing excellent work. That is right; but the present attacks on the NHS by the Conservative government, the cuts and privatisations, went unmentioned.

After the “musical”, the national teams of athletes and officials marched in. Often, when a team came in, the TV cameras zoomed in on a royal family member, president or minister from the sport team’s country.

They did not do so when Bahrain marched in. Maybe the media were too embarrassed to show athletes-torturing Bahraini Prince Nasser al-Khalifa.

Occupy London writes:

We’ll be honest: we hadn’t expected an awful lot. The run-up promised little more than an advert to help sanitise the image of some of the Olympics’ grand sponsors. We saw bread and circuses for an austerity-wrought city that feels like it doesn’t have a great deal to celebrate, a city which the global corporations and financial instituitions have done their best to tear the heart out of.

We’re pleased that Danny Boyle produced an opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics that bore a closer resemblance to the country we recognise than most of us had expected. We’d like to thank him for placing collective action, dissent, humour and – above all – our public services at the heart of his story about what we can, very occasionally, feel proud of.

However, while the Olympic opening ceremony was watched by millions tonight, a very different spectacle was rivalling it for the attention of many on the streets of east London and Twitter users who were following the #criticalmass hashtag.

A peaceful good natured mass cycle that has happened on the last Friday of every month for the past eighteen years was met with police aggression, pepper spray, violence with truncheons used, kettling and multiple arrests. Red London buses full of confiscated bicycles present a very different image of what this city means to the people who live in it in 2012.

A very different type of Olympic spirit coursed through east London’s streets yesterday as demonstrators marched against the “corporate” Games: here.

Bahrain and the Olympics: here.

Chinese Cultural Revolution operas

This video from China is called Scene from Red Detachment of Women.

By Anna Chen in England:

In Madam Mao’s Golden Oldies

Monday 09 July 2012

In Madam Mao’s Golden Oldies, I revisit the Chinese Cultural Revolution model operas that I first heard as a child in the 1960s and ’70s and discover how they are, somewhat surprisingly, enjoying a new lease of life.

Growing up as a London-born red-nappy kid with Beatles and Bowie as my soundtrack, I was occasionally dragged by my parents to the Chinese legation in London’s Portland Place, which had lost its official embassy status due to the cold war ruckus, for screenings of the latest film spectacular to emerge from Chairman Mao’s wife, the arts commissar Jiang Qing.

These were the Yangbanxi – the eight model operas, films with titles such as The Red Detachment Of Women and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.

These state-sponsored works combined opera and ballet with simple plots about brave peasants uniting to defeat evil landlords, Japanese invaders and other enemies of the revolution.

Heroes looked like heroes with rouged faces, kohl-lined eyes and great hair while villains were easily identified by their sneaky demeanour and bad-porn moustaches.

My Hollywood sensibility found these crude melodramas puzzling and somewhat turgid.

But they weren’t made for relatively pampered East End kids like me but for the peasants and workers who had rarely if ever been represented in their own culture.

Within living memory, mass starvation, imperialist conquest and the horrors of the Japanese invasion had devastated the nation. Barely 20 years into its communist revolution, the population was struggling to get back on its feet.

Madam Mao not only banned the traditional Beijing opera and their stories about emperors and princesses but also cast out “decadent” Western music and films as being a corrupting influence on the masses.

Quelle surprise when it later transpired that the former actress was fond of indulging her tastes in the privacy of her own screening room.

But Jiang Qing was canny enough to harness the emotive power of these works with the help of the Chinese cultural intelligentsia who hadn’t fallen out of favour.

In the programme, a variety of people who were intimately involved in the model operas recount their experience.

Among them is Anchee Min, author of Red Azalea, who had been plucked from working in the fields because she was used to “carrying 300 pounds of manure.”

And Jingdong Cai is now a conductor with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra but learnt his trade in Madam Mao’s army of young musicians.

Madam Mao’s favourite films? The Sound of Music and Jane Eyre.

No, not the classic Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine version of the latter but the crappy George C Scott remake.

What does that tell you about arbiters of taste?

Madam Mao’s Golden Oldies will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Tuesday July 17, at 11.30am.

Anna Chen blogs at madammiaow.blogspot.com

Pro-polar bear dance party

This video is called Polar Bear Moms and Cubs.

From Associated Press:

Apr 28, 12:41 PM EDT

Polar bear dance party to protect Arctic Ocean

MIAMI — A polar bear dance party in Miami is aimed at raising awareness about the need to protect the Arctic Ocean.

The dancers are expected to dress as polar bears Saturday afternoon. The dance party will raise awareness of plans to start drilling this summer in the Arctic’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas, both home to polar bears.

The dance is being held by the Sierra Club, Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Oceana, Endangered Species Coalition, and Natural Resources Defense Council.

These dances are not just in Miami, but also elsewhere. See here.

Around 20 Greenpeace activists boarded a Shell-contracted icebreaker in Helsinki harbour today – locking themselves onto the vessel in a bid to prevent it setting sail for the Arctic: here.

Polar bears are evolutionarily older and genetically more distinct than believed. This largest Arctic carnivore evolved as early as 600,000 years ago, five times older than previously recognized: here.

Polar Bears Tracked on Long Swims in Ice-Free Waters: here.

Before It’s Too Late in the Arctic. Subhankar Banerjee, Climate Story Tellers: “What do Arctic drilling and drone killing have in common? They are both being decided by Barack Obama without public debate…. Obama got personally involved and fast-tracked Shell’s drilling permits. According to Foreign Policy magazine, ‘Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.’ The article makes this reference with regard to Obama’s drone killing, but perhaps a similar thing could be said about his Arctic drilling that we must condemn”: here.

Related articles

• The First Victims Of Climate Change (planetsave.com)
• Russian scientist: wild polar bears extinct within decades (icenews.is)
• North meets south in children’s book polar bear odyssey (metronews.ca)
• Polar Bear SOS – Take Action!: Thank You – Take Action!: NRDC’s Save BioGems (savetheepa.org)
• Polar Bears Are In Danger Of Losing Threatened Species Status (huffingtonpost.com)
• Drilling in the Polar Bear Seas? (sunsetdaily.wordpress.com)
• ‘Polar bears could be extinct in 25 years’ (thehindu.com)
• The polar bears den! (sunsetdaily.wordpress.com)
• How do you marinate a polar bear? Greenpeace protesters hi-jack Delia Smith online Q&A (independent.co.uk)
• Canada must explain polar bear policy: NAFTA (metronews.ca)

German religious dance bans under fire

This video is called Baby Dancing to Beyoncé – ORIGINAL!

From Der Spiegel weekly in Germany:

04/19/2012

Protecting Tradition

German Dance Bans Under Fire

Dancing can get you in trouble in Germany. Laws on the books prohibit the practice on certain religious holidays — and the bans are taken seriously. But this week Bavaria moved to weaken its law and a Cologne dance-in was allowed to go ahead on Good Friday. Religious leaders are concerned.

Some would argue that Bavaria is as backward as it gets. The German state is famous for its ongoing love affair with lederhosen and dirndls and even old grannies yell at pedestrians that dare to cross the street at a red light. In the rest of the country, Bavarians are looked down upon in much the same way that New Yorkers view the Deep South.

This week, however, the state took a step which seems tantamount to admitting that times just might have changed. Laws prohibiting dancing on certain Christian holidays are to be relaxed. Slightly. Instead of criminalizing dance club gyrations as of midnight on the eve of religious celebrations, the state said party-goers will now be allowed to boogie until 2 a.m.

Of course, many might be left wondering why Bavaria doesn’t just ditch the dance rules entirely. But far from being forgotten relicts of centuries past, dance bans reflect the state’s deep ties to tradition and, though weakening, the Catholic Church. Indeed, Munich Archbishop Reinhard Marx expressed his dissent on Wednesday, saying that easing laws protecting the sanctity of religious holidays is unacceptable.

Protest Events Banned

There are currently nine days on the Bavarian calendar when dancing is outlawed, including the four days from Ash Wednesday to the Saturday before Easter. The state’s neighbor to the west, Baden-Württemberg, is even more restrictive, banning bop during parts of 18 days — including from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. on New Year’s Day. Every other state in the country, including the famously debaucherous city-state of Berlin, has dance bans on their books too.

Germany’s upstart Pirate Party discovered this year just how serious those prohibitions are taken. The group chose this year’s Good Friday, a day on which dancing is forbidden in every single German state, to stage a series of dance-ins to protest the laws. One of the protests went ahead as planned, with scores of people gyrating to music coming out of their headphones in front of the Cologne Cathedral. But two other events — in Frankfurt and Giessen — were forbidden by the authorities. A legal complaint the Pirates filed with Germany’s high court was rejected.

cgh — with wire reports

New York religious fundamentalist education censorship

This video from the USA says about itself:

Headzup: Sarah Palin And Dinosaurs

Sarah Palin is asked about her belief that the earth is only 6000 years old and that man and dinosaurs co-existed.

Read more about it here.

New York City is not by any means the most Christian fundamentalist part of the USA [see also Most and Least Religious States in America].

So, this bit of today’s news makes one shudder about the situation in the United States Bible Belt …

From the New York Post:

PC student tests forbid dance, dinos & lots more

By YOAV GONEN, Education Reporter

Last Updated: 5:01 AM, March 26, 2012

In a bizarre case of political correctness run wild, educrats have banned references to “dinosaurs,” “birthdays,” “Halloween” and dozens of other topics on city-issued tests.

That’s because they fear such topics “could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students.”

Dinosaurs, for example, call to mind evolution, which might upset fundamentalists; birthdays aren’t celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses; and Halloween suggests paganism.

Even “dancing’’ is taboo, because some sects object. But the city did make an exception for ballet.

The forbidden topics were recently spelled out in a request for proposals provided to companies competing to revamp city English, math, science and social-studies tests given several times a year to measure student progress.

“Some of these topics may be perfectly acceptable in other contexts but do not belong in a city- or state-wide assessment,” the request reads.

Words that suggest wealth are excluded because they could make kids jealous. Poverty is likewise on the forbidden list.

Also banned are references to divorces and diseases, because kids taking the tests may have relatives who split from spouses or are ill.

Officials say such exclusions are normal procedure.

“This is standard language that has been used by test publishers for many years and allows our students to complete practice exams without distraction,” said a Department of Education spokeswoman, insisting it’s not censorship.

In fact, sensitivity guidelines recently published by a group of states creating new high-stakes exams also caution against mentioning luxuries, group dancing, junk food, homelessness or witches.

Yet a comparison shows the city’s list, at 50 topics, is nearly twice as long and has fewer exceptions.

The city asks test companies to exclude “creatures from outer space,” celebrities and excessive TV and video-game use — items that are OK elsewhere.

Homes with swimming pools and computers are also unmentionables here — because of economic sensitivities — while computers in the school or in libraries are acceptable.

City officials also specified that test makers shouldn’t include items that are potentially “disrespectful to authority or authority figures,” or give human characteristics to animals or inanimate objects.

Terrorism is deemed too scary. Slavery is also on the forbidden list.

“The intent is to avoid giving offense or disadvantage any test takers by privileging prior knowledge,” said Robert Pondiscio, a spokesman for the Core Knowledge Foundation, an education group.

“But the irony is they’re eliminating some subjects, like junk food, holidays and popular music, that the broadest number of kids are likely to know quite a lot about.”

Columbia University Teachers College professor Deanna Kuhn said, “If the goal is to assess higher-order thinking skills, controversial topics, for example, ones that are the subject of political debate, are exactly what students should be reasoning about.”

Ballet protest against BP pollution

By Zachary Shahan:

“Guerilla Ballet” Crashes BP-Sponsored Opera Event in Trafalgar Square, London

July 15, 2011 in Activism, Energy & Fuel, Oil

Friends of a fellow Important Media writer — 3 ballet dancers — made a statement this week in Trafalgar Square, London by interrupting BP’s 3rd Summer Screen there. The ballet dancers danced a short piece based on Swan Lake, “with the classic tale used as analogy for BP’s controversial investment in the Canadian tar sands,” the UK Tar Sands Network reports.

“The performance featured the White Swan being smeared by an oily substance and suffocated with a cloth.” The opera crowd respected and enjoyed the performance and gave the grand finale an applause and cheers.

Charlie Byers played the prince in the dance, Emily Coats played the White Swan Odette, and Will McCallum played the ‘BP’ villain Rothbart.

“The tar sands are one of the biggest threats to the future of our climate,” Byers said. “[T]hey are also destroying local communities and wildlife, trampling indigenous rights, and running Canada out of water and natural gas. It is a key time to pressure BP to withdraw, as the corporation has already substantially invested in the tar sands but will not start profiting for years to come.”

“Most people have never heard of tar sands, and BP would be happy to keep it that way,” UK Tar Sands campaigner Coats said. “We used classical dance – an unusual campaigning medium – to introduce the issue to a new audience. The performance was meant to be enjoyed, but also to shock, with a visible struggle between a vulnerable creature and a powerful oil giant.”

And McCallum, of the group Art of Activism, said:

“By sponsoring the Summer Screens, BP is bringing art to thousands of people, but it is also creating a false image which hides its dirty investments. Public pressure has in the past caused institutions to stop accepting sponsorship from destructive companies. Without being able to put its name by our beloved cultural institutions, BP would suffer a real blow to its public legitimacy.”

Great work by the trio and all who supported them. Indeed, much more attention needs to be put on the extremely harmful exploitation of the tar sands.

See also here. And here.

Canadian government accused of ‘unprecedented’ tar sands lobbying: here.

In marking the one year anniversary of the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I signed a letter of protest along with 165 other arts professionals and activists that appeared in the Guardian on April 20, 2011. Titled Tate should end its relationship with BP, the letter calls on the Tate Gallery of London “to demonstrate its commitment to a sustainable future by ending its sponsorship relationship with BP”: here.

Thousands of baby pelicans grunt and hiss at their parents in tightly packed nests on Gaillard Island, a feathered paradise situated off the coast of Alabama. The 1,300-acre, man-made island is hosting more than 50,000 birds this summer as nesting pairs gather to raise babies. That number would be considered high in any year, but it’s a particularly surprising sight a year after oil from the BP spill fouled surrounding waters. The Deepwater Horizon rig explosion spewed more than 168 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over three months, the largest spill in U.S. history. But so far, there is no evidence of deformities or ill health among the young on Gaillard Island. Scientists speculate that the baby boom probably results from an abundance of fish left undisturbed in waterways where the federal government banned commercial and recreational fishing last summer, providing a feast for shore birds: here.

Big Moroccan pro-democracy demonstration

This video from Morocco shows a pro-democracy protest by at least 20.000 demonstrators in Casablanca today.

Videos and updates from today’s protests in Morocco: here.

Morocco: Thousands Demonstrate Over Killing of Protester: here.

Join this Facebook page and Say NO to child sex tourism in Morocco! Here.

Poll: Egypt optimistic but worried about jobs: here.