MicroAd, Drone Ballet “Sky Magic,” Mount Fuji, Japan, 2016
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) … When I get home after work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo. This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Does Ballet, c. 1977
Off to Dallas for the weekend. Enjoy Arnold in my stead.
Four Famous Classical / Modern Dancers (via tabelnora)
- Anna Pavlova (1882-1931)
- Isadora Duncan (1878-1927)
- Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991)
- Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950)
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Nicholas Roerich, Set Design for The Rite of Spring, Part I's The Kiss of the Earth (The Oldest and Wisest One), 1913
Nicholas Roerich, Set Design for The Rite of Spring, Part I: Adoration of the Earth, 1913
Snøhetta, Opera House, Oslo, Norway, 2007 (via archdaily)
"The Norwegian Opera and Ballet are Norway’s largest music and theatrical institution. Their core purpose is to be the national producer of opera, ballet, music and dance theatre, and concerts. They intend to have approx. 300 shows and 250,000 visitors per year. Three diagrams, which were part of the entry, explain the building’s basic concept. THE WAVE WALL: Opera and ballet are young artforms in Norway. These artforms evolve in an international setting . The Bjørvika peninsula is part of a harbour city, which is historically the meeting point with the rest of the world.. The dividing line between the ground ‘here’ and the water ‘there’is both a real and a symbolic threshold. This threshold is realized as a large wall on the line of the meeting between land and sea, Norway and the world, art and everyday life. This is the threshold where the public meet the art. THE FACTORY: A detailed brief was developed as a basis for the competition. Snøhetta proposed that the production facilities of the operahouse should be realized as a self contained, rationally planned ‘factory’. This factory should be both functional and flexible during the planning phase as well as in later use. This flexibility has proved to be very important during the planning phase: a number of rooms and room groups have been adjusted in collaboration with the end user. These changes have improved the buildings functionality without affecting the architecture. THE CARPET: The competition brief stated that the opera house should be of high architectural quality and should be monumental in it’s expression. One idea stood out as a legitimation of this monumentality: The concept of togetherness, joint ownership, easy and open access for all. To achieve a monumentality based on these notions we wished to make the opera accessible in the widest possible sense, by laying out a ‘carpet’ of horizontal and sloping surfaces on top of the building. This carpet has been given an articulated form, related to the cityscape. Monumentality is achieved through horizontal extension and not verticality. The conceptual basis of the competition, and the final building, is a combination of these three elements – The wave wall, the factory and the carpet."