Squonk Opera
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Squonk Opera
Squonk Opera is a group of interdisciplinary performing artists from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Led by artistic directors Jackie Dempsey and Steve O'Hearn, Squonk Opera formed in 1992 and has created fifteen distinct shows and performed in over 250 venues in 36 of the United States. Squonk Opera has been touring internationally since 2003 - to Scotland, Belgium, Germany and twice to South Korea, where they opened both the Busan International Performing Arts Festival and the World Music Theater Festival. In 2017, Squonk was one of the first western acts to perform at the Qingdao International Beer Festival in Qingdao, China. Over 1,000,000 people have seen Squonk around the world, and reviews include “a multimedia troupe of infinite jest with an imagination to match” from The New York Times, "insane majesty" from The Scotsman, and "...surreal and poetic" from USA Today. Squonk Opera's shows consist of music, visual art, and acting elements in an attempt to make a form of opera ac ...
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Squonk Performance, Three Rivers Arts Festival, 2023-06-10, 04
The squonk is a mythical creature that is reputed to live in the Tsuga, hemlock forests of northern Pennsylvania in the United States. Origins Although the earliest written account of the squonk was from the 1910 book ''Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods'', there are no records of the tale being told in Pennsylvania before the book's publication. The next written iteration, from the 1939 book ''Fearsome Critters'', suggested that the creatures had migrated from deserts to swamps to finally settle in Pennsylvania. As logging camps were continuously moving in the early 20th century, this could explain the "creature's" migration to Pennsylvania. Appearance and behavior Unlike many mythological creatures, the supposed physical characteristics of the squonk remain unchanged from the original written account, which states: Later retellings included that squonks were slowest on moonlit nights as they try to avoid seeing its ugly appearance in any illuminated bodies of water. In add ...
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The Pittsburgh Foundation
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pr ...
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Divine Comedy
The ''Divine Comedy'' ( it, Divina Commedia ) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun 1308 and completed in around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it existed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: ''Inferno'', ''Purgatorio'', and '' Paradiso''. The narrative takes as its literal subject the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward, and describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Allegorically, the poem represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin (''Inferno''), followed ...
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Dante
Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ''Commedia'') and later christened by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante is known for establishing the use of the vernacular in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin, which was accessible only to the most educated readers. His ''De vulgari eloquentia'' (''On Eloquence in the Vernacular'') was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Florentine dialect for works such as '' The New Life'' (1295) and ''Divine Comedy'' helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language. His work set a precedent that important Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would later ...
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Centralia, Pennsylvania
Centralia is a borough and near-ghost town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Its population has declined from 1,000 in 1980 to five residents in 2020 because a coal mine fire has been burning beneath the borough since 1962. Centralia, part of the Bloomsburg–Berwick metropolitan area, is the least-populated municipality in Pennsylvania. It is completely surrounded by Conyngham Township. All real estate in the borough was claimed under eminent domain in 1992 and condemned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Centralia's ZIP code was discontinued by the Postal Service in 2002. State and local officials reached an agreement with the seven remaining residents on October 29, 2013, allowing them to remain in Centralia until their deaths, after which the rights to their houses will be taken through eminent domain. History Early history Many of the Native American tribes in what is now Columbia County sold the land that makes ...
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Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory. Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. Aft ...
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Godzilla
is a fictional monster, or '' kaiju'', originating from a series of Japanese films. The character first appeared in the 1954 film ''Godzilla'' and became a worldwide pop culture icon, appearing in various media, including 32 films produced by Toho, four American films and numerous video games, novels, comic books and television shows. Godzilla has been dubbed the "King of the Monsters", a phrase first used in ''Godzilla, King of the Monsters!'' (1956)'','' the Americanized version of the original film. Godzilla is an enormous, destructive, prehistoric sea monster awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation. With the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the '' Lucky Dragon 5'' incident still fresh in the Japanese consciousness, Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for nuclear weapons. Others have suggested that Godzilla is a metaphor for the United States, a giant beast woken from its slumber which then takes terrible vengeance on Japan. As the film series expan ...
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Bessemer Process
The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. The key principle is steelmaking, removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raises the temperature of the iron mass and keeps it molten. Related Decarburization, decarburizing with air processes had been used outside Europe for hundreds of years, but not on an industrial scale. One such process (similar to puddling (metallurgy), puddling) was known in the 11th century in East Asia, where the scholar Shen Kuo of that era described its use in the Chinese iron and steel industry. In the 17th century, accounts by European travelers detailed its possible use by the Japanese. The modern process is named after its inventor, the Englishman Henry Bessemer, who took out a patent on the process in 1856. The process was said to be independently discover ...
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City Theatre (Pittsburgh)
City Theatre is a professional theater company located in Pittsburgh's South Side. It specializes in productions of new plays and has commissioned new works by playwrights on the national theatre scene, including Christopher Durang, Adam Rapp, and Jeffrey Hatcher. Established in 1975 as the City Players under the direction of Marjorie Walker, it was originally composed mainly of Carnegie Mellon graduates and was part of Pittsburgh's Department of Parks and Recreation, performing at schools, parks, and housing projects. Initially the group shared their performance space in the North Side's Allegheny Center with Pittsburgh Public Theater. In 1979, the group was offered a residency at the University of Pittsburgh and renamed itself City Theatre. “Homeless” for a brief period of time, the University of Pittsburgh theatre department offered to shelter the theater company in 1980. Attilo Favorini, head of the department, thought that, “The City Theater offered us ittthe oppor ...
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Night Of The Living Dead
''Night of the Living Dead'' is a 1968 American independent horror film directed, photographed, and edited by George A. Romero, with a screenplay by John Russo and Romero, and starring Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea. The story follows seven people who are trapped in a rural farmhouse in western Pennsylvania, which is under assault by an enlarging group of flesh-eating, undead ghouls. Having gained experience through directing television commercials and industrial films for their Pittsburgh-based production company The Latent Image, Romero and his friends Russo and Russell Streiner decided to fulfill their ambitions to make a feature film. Electing to make a horror film that would capitalize on contemporary commercial interest in the genre, they formed a partnership with Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman of Hardman Associates called Image Ten. After evolving through multiple drafts, Russo and Romero's final script primarily drew influence from Richard Matheson's 1954 novel '' I A ...
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Modern Dance
Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which included dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was considered to have been developed as a rejection of, or rebellion against, classical ballet, and also a way to express social concerns like socioeconomic and cultural factors. In the late 19th century, modern dance artists such as Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, and Loie Fuller were pioneering new forms and practices in what is now called aesthetic or free dance. These dancers disregarded ballet's strict movement vocabulary (the particular, limited set of movements that were considered proper to ballet) and stopped wearing corsets and pointe shoes in the search for greater freedom of movement. Throughout the 20th century, sociopolitical concerns, major historical events, and the development of other art forms contributed to ...
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The Opportunity Fund
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pr ...
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