The Week in Light & Sound
- Details
Lip-Syncing - Rita Ora has been accused of lip-syncing during her performance at America's most famous Thanksgiving Day event. Organisers apologised to millions of viewers watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for "technical difficulties" during the holiday feature. Rita Ora appeared to be out of sync with the vocals viewers heard during her televised performance.
Macy's, the American department store chain that throws the parade, released a public apology. The company said "several recording artists experienced technical difficulties that negatively impacted their performance." It added: "We apologise and want fans to know these issues were out of the artist’s control."
Rock On - Queen musical We Will Rock You is to be re-imagined for a new UK and Ireland tour next year, it has been announced. The show, which is written by Ben Elton and features some of Queen’s biggest hits, will tour the UK for a fourth time, beginning in September next year. It will open at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley in September and will visit locations across the UK and Ireland part of the tour, which runs until May 2020.
False Hope - Further education colleges offering arts courses are knowingly giving young people “false hope” about their future because of poor job prospects in the sector, the head of Ofsted has claimed.
Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s chief inspector, told the Association of Colleges’ annual conference that rather than sell the value of skills learned on arts courses, adverts often list potential jobs that are unlikely to be available for the vast majority of students. She said: “Arts and media does stand out as the area where there is greatest mismatch between the numbers of students taking the courses and the employment prospects at the end. There is a point up to which courses that engage learners have value, but ultimately there have to be viable prospects at the end.”
Spielman said that despite the “relatively poor prospects” of arts and media courses, at least three further education colleges in a survey by Ofsted reported these courses as having the most applicants.
“This suggests that there are far more students taking these subjects than there are career opportunities. And, these colleges risk giving false hope to students. It raises the question: are they putting the financial imperative of headcount in the classroom ahead of the best interests of the young people taking up their courses? If that’s the case, this isn’t acceptable,” she said.
Unpaid Labour - More than 85% of internships in the arts are unpaid, new research has suggested. The finding is presented in the report Pay As You Go, which warns that failing to pay interns means young people from lower-income families cannot afford to access the “most desirable” sectors, including the arts.
The report is published by the Sutton Trust, a charity that aims to improve social mobility in the UK. Its research included responses from more than 2,600 graduates, of which 1,023 had previously undertaken an internship. It also surveyed a “representative sample of employers”. The arts was listed as the second biggest sector for interns, after education and research.
According to the research, 86% of internships in the arts, which includes theatre and music, are unpaid. Its definition of unpaid includes expenses-only placements, and those that offered rates below the minimum wage.
(Jim Evans)
27 November 2018
