When The Daily Show senior political correspondent Hasan Minhaj needed a dope illustrator to make pieces for his upcoming show Homecoming King, he called on his buddy Sam Spratt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4DORh3n9uE A Brooklyn-based digital painter—a classic oil technique used on computer tablets—Spratt graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010 and took to the... Continue Reading →
Inside Next Generation Ballet’s Nutcracker rehearsal Dance rehearsal smells like feet and moist leotards. There’s nothing elegant about it. When the dancers work hard, improvising corrections on-the-fly from choreographers and ballet mistresses, there is a locker-room funk suspended in the air from sweat-dampened dance clothes, breath and many bodies moving in one studio classroom. So... Continue Reading →
The story of America’s instrument The meek and pluck-twangy sidekick to guitar and fiddle didn’t get its propers before Deliverance ruined an entire generation on banjo music and canoe trips to rural Georgia. The lone ambassador of a spectacular and truly (colonial) American history, the banjo is considered by folk musicologists to be the only... Continue Reading →
How social media and television talent shows changed performing arts programming Some baby-faced tween covers a Chris Brown tune on YouTube. It goes viral. R&B superstar Usher sees the video. Signs the kid to his label. The kid’s name? Justin Bieber. Beliebe it: so much of our culture rapidly evolved and adapted once folks figured... Continue Reading →
The Straz Center official piano tuner Kevin Patterson on what it takes to keep the ivories in the pink. The average home piano needs a tune up about twice a year, but when your livelihood and music critics are on the line, a good concert piano gets its ivories tickled, twisted, polished and pricked before... Continue Reading →