Outsiders

Lincoln and Elise don't put Baby in a corner. 

Vulnerability, artificial flavoring, and in-depth analysis of Flashdance.

OUTSIDERS Interview: Brian Kiley
  Lincoln sits down with Emmy Award winning writer and stand-up Brian Kiley, who performed at ACB’s last show before the apocalypse. 

After discovering an incredible coincidence involving pampas grass, our hosts answer more listener questions: “Do you keep washing the same pair, or do you have a drawer full of tights?”, “Do you have to learn partnering in a ball pit?”, “How do you remember all the steps?”, and “Do dancers read sheet music?” Their answers are packed tighter than a drawer full of tights. 

Our hosts continue down the list of listener responses to “What don’t you get about ballet?”, including, “How do you define ballet?”, “Can ballet be danced to heavy metal or rock?”, “Why don’t dancers get paid more?”, and “Who’s in charge, the ballet director or the conductor?” Also discussed are soccer as pointe training and using a guy who barely graduated high school to get into college. 

OUTSIDERS Interview: Dr. Robert Gjerdingen
  It’s everything you never realized you always wanted to know about music. 

Having concluded their ten not-so-basic fundamental questions, Lincoln and Elise ask the audience “What don’t you get about ballet?”, and answer: “How do you interpret moves in a ballet?”, “I don’t get how ballerinas stand up after spinning around so much”, “I don’t understand how dancing on pointe is possible”, “Why haven’t they found a way to make pointe shoes more comfortable?”, and “How come dudes don’t do pointe shoes?” They also discuss whether or not art should be approached cynically, and why 19th century novels are so long. 

Lincoln discovers he likes producing…wait for it…live dance. Elise explains why it is easier to be a negative person than a positive person, which doesn’t explain Elise. Then, unbelievably, the ten not-so-basic fundamental questions finally come to a close with “Has ballet changed over time, or stayed the same?”, “How does ballet differ from other art forms in what it expresses?" and, “Why isn’t ballet more popular today?”

Our hosts finally return to the project they started in Episode 3: answering ten fundamental questions about ballet, and make some serious progress. Lincoln and Elise discuss ballet costumes, sets, steps, style, music, and ballet dancers' hair, and how these things are used to solve design problems within the art. They also discuss the trouble classical art has with convention, a 20th century theory on how pop music differs from classical music, and how hard it is to figure out what Elise looks like. 

In Episode 12, Lincoln and Elise asked, “What repulses you in art?” There was so much on Lincoln’s list that they had to continue it in this episode. In the course of answering, they discuss irony, tropes (on which Lincoln says something really dumb*, so listen to Episode 15 for a correction), musicality, and even the purpose of art in general.

*To be fair, he did say he was losing his mind at the top of the show.