Music & Dance: Musicians, Composers, Singers, Dancers, Choreographers, Performers Talk Art, Creativity & The Creative Process

"When I think about the most amazing things that humans can do, I can't help but think about high level jazz musicians. The amount of information that they're processing—harmonic, melodic, rhythmic information all on the spot—and the act of not only taking it all in and figuring out where they fit in it, but also responding to it and creating something with a certain form and meaningfulness to it...

Bruce Evan Barnhart is an associate professor of American literature and culture at the University of Oslo and co-director of the project Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. He is the author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture. His work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, and Novel. His latest publications are Temporal Exper...

"Well, I think if it's 'closer to the surface' as you so beautifully put it, it's usually that you see it through their personality a lot more. It's just not just their actions or the products that they create, but they somehow are sort of glowing with it, in a sense. And you usually see that when they essentially embody specific traits that we know to be very important for creativity. And one is...

Anna Abraham, Ph. D. is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia (USA). She investigates the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition...

“I think you need to be aware and see people be open to what can happen and get a feel, get an instinct. I think I've been blessed with instinct. I mean, I did not do well at school. I passed zero exams. I'm unemployable, but I've been blessed with having instincts. The instinct of U2 was seeing their determination, the fact that the music itself initially wasn't close to what most of my music was...

Chris Blackwell, an inductee of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, is widely considered responsible for turning the world on to reggae music. As the founder of Island Records, he helped forge the careers of Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, U2, Roxy Music, among many other high-profile acts, and produced records including Marley’s Catch a Fire and Uprising. Blackwell currently runs Island Outpo...

Florian Hoffmeister is a prolific director of photography. Recent works by Hoffmeister include his lensing on the Apple TV+ series Pachinko, the critically-acclaimed political thriller Official Secrets starring Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, and Matt Smith, and TÁR starring Cate Blanchett. Hoffmeister is well-known for his collaboration with Terence Davies on feature films The Deep Blue Sea, star...

"I enjoy dancing, but I would not call myself a dancer by any means compared to the people I'm working with here who are so wonderful at it. I worked with a lot of in this piece, especially immersive theater actors and dancers. So there's a show called Sleep No More in New York, which is like an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. It's immersive theater. You walk through the room and al...

Max Stossel is an Award-winning poet, filmmaker, and speaker, named by Forbes as one of the best storytellers of the year. His Stand-Up Poetry Special Words That Move takes the audience through a variety of different perspectives, inviting us to see the world through different eyes together. Taking on topics like heartbreak, consciousness, social media, politics, the emoti...

"For me, there is something about art, it's not a monologue. When I do a video dance for a Japanese audience or a sci-fi comedy for a French audience then I do try to think about if I want to shock the audience at a certain moment. I think that the same things that would shock a French person would not necessarily shock an Israeli or a Japanese person, you know? I think that what's funny is that f...

Author, Screenwriter, and Director Etgar Keret is a recipient of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Charles Bronfman Prize, and the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Jellyfish, which he directed with his wife Shira Geffen. Most recently, they created the TV mini series The Middleman (L’Agent Immobilier) starring Mathieu Amalric. His books include the short story collection...

"I've always thought that filmmaking rhymes with classical music, the process of making classical music that I observed as a child. When I discovered filmmaking, I thought these things, they're very similar. They rhyme with each other. I hope this doesn't sound pretentious, but what operating a camera does resemble the physicality of conducting an orchestra. I was in a certain proximity to my fath...

Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot France...

"I met the founders Alan and Joshua who started NeueHouse in 2013. They are lovely gentlemen, and they called me aside and said, 'We'd love to get you involved in our coworking space that we are doing.’ And we really curated an interesting community of people. And have had a lot of interesting people do talks, from Paul Smith to Salman Rushdie to Wu-Tang Clan, Tom Sachs, and Ariana...

Oberon Sinclair is the CEO and founder of the creative and branding agency, My Young Auntie. Since she founded the company in 1997, Oberon has collaborated with and managed an array of notable clients from the high luxury, art, fashion, food and lifestyle sectors, including Hermès, Vivienne Westwood, Fabergé, the Richemont Group, Jack Spade, ArtForum, Selfridges, Rizzoli Books, Island Records...

"Einstein on the Beach, it's a masterpiece. America, in 1976, was to be celebrating its 200th year of existence, and Michel Guy, the French Minister of Culture, came to New York to offer a commission to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson to write an opera. This was the gift that France would give for America's two-hundredth anniversary. That was the first time I met Robert Wilson." "My son had di...

For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city’s most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Keith Sonnier, Philip...

"It's because I  consider life a dance, really. A dance. Some dancers are clunky, and some dancers are graceful, but it's a dance, a compromise, a puzzle, kind of, and it just has a lot of elements that  I can draw comparisons with life. You know, the dance of the planets. There are so many dances all the time, all around us. And do you know what they're all saying? Yes, no, maybe...but...

Gloria Pacis is a painter dividing her time between New York City and Hoboken, where she has her studio. She received her BFA from the University of Washington in 1976. She credits her years working as a set designer and scene artist for the dramatic, character-based elements of her paintings. She has participated in exhibitions at public institutions and universities, including Wing Luke Museum,...

"Just open mind, open heart, that's it. I think the music speaks for itself, right? So when you start to trauma shape it, and this is how I want you to listen... And I think in the end, what our mission is, is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison. Of course, but what that means is that means that if somebody's been listening to Territorial. Like this album is freaking amazing! And...

Fury Young and BL Shirelle are the powerhouse team behind Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians. DJC Records’ mission is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in America by amplifying the voices of our artists.   As a pair, Fury Young and BL Shirelle form a perhaps unlike...

"I listened to something recently by Philip Glass. It was fantastic kind of symphonic stuff with dance and video and kind of theater in it, as well. And it's throwing all of this at you. And the hope, I think, of the artist is they're doing this kind of multisensory projection to try to grow in your mind the idea that Philip Glass had in his mind when he was writing this music. And just talking it...

Johnjoe McFadden is the author of Life is Simple, How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. He obtained his PhD at Imperial College London and went on to work on human genetic diseases and then infectious diseases, at the University of Surrey. Professor McFadden has specialised in examining the genetics of microbes such as the agents of tuberculosis and meningitis. His other book...

"Scott [aka Kid Cudi] sees music in color, so what the visuals of music meant to him. So he wanted to create a new experience and that alongside Kenya Barris and ideating what it could be led to Entergalactic, which essentially Scott wrote an original album, which is his 10th Studio album, and pieced those songs in before the creation of this love story, which runs 90 minutes from start to fi...

Karina Manashil is the President of Mad Solar Productions. She began her career in the mailroom at WME (William Morris Endeavor) where she became a talent agent. She represented notable clients including Scott Mescudi, known by his stage name, Kid Cudi, and built her career taking talent into new arenas. In 2020, she partnered with Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to launch Mad Solar, which is backed b...