Abidjan, Ivory Coast | The stakes are big, and so are the egos.
London, United Kingdom |London's West End has traditionally drawn people from all over the world to see its shows but theatres have been forced to reinvent themselves because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Fifteen million tickets are sold each year for performances including top attractions such as "The Phantom of the Opera", "Les Miserables" and Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap", a play that has been performed since 1952.
But the pandemic brought the curtain down on venues in March, leaving theatres facing an uncertain future where continued social distancing measures threaten their existence.
Louis Hartshorn and Brian Hook, co-founders of Hartshorn-Hook Productions, are among the first to adapt to the new reality, announcing the reopening of an immersive adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" to open in October.
"The show will be reimagined as a masquerade ball," Hook told AFP.
Spectators are invited to wear masks, which they can integrate into their disguise, and gloves if they wish.
The audience will also be reduced to 90, down from 240 previously, and the schedule has been changed to allow for thorough clean-ups.
The good news is that tickets are "selling and people want to come back", added Hook.
But Hartshorn admitted that "we have to do extremely well in order to break even because the numbers are against us".
- Tourist trouble -
Another immediate challenge is the lack of tourists, with hotels, restaurants and museums closed until at least early July.
The introduction on June 8 of a 14-day quarantine for most travellers arriving in the country has also tempered hopes of a swift recovery.
"Around a third of attendees in London theatres are overseas tourists... and for the moment of course there is very little prospect of having overseas visitors," Julian Bird, head of the UK Theatre lobby group, told a recent parliamentary committee.
Up to 70 percent of theatres could go bankrupt by the end of the year, he warned.
- Immersive experiences -
The current crisis has left a £3 billion ($3.7 billion, 3.3 billion euro) hole in theatre revenues this year, a fall of more than 60 percent, according to a study by Oxford Economics for the Creative Industries Federation.
This estimate does not take into account the possible reluctance of the public to return when allowed, with the federation warning of 200,000 job cuts without government intervention.
To survive, some theatres are offering alternative products.
At London's Old Vic Theatre, actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith, stars of the hit TV series "The Crown", will perform the play "Lungs" without an audience, while keeping their distance.
Each performance will be filmed and broadcast live to the 1,000 people who purchased tickets at the usual prices of between £10 and £65, although all will enjoy the same view.
It's a bold gamble when many other theatres, such as the National Theatre in London, have posted free online performances of plays filmed before the pandemic.
Shows that involve audience participation could be the big winners, according to Brian Hook.
"We were already on a boom for immersive theatre before this crisis... I think now might be a very positive time for that," he said.
One Night Records will launch one such project in early October, taking ticket-holders on a journey through musical genres from the 1920s to the 1950s in a secret location called "Lockdown Town".
"Because the venue is so large and because immersive has this special gift -- which is territory, you know, space. That's why we're able to do it," One Night Records general manager Tim Wilson told AFP.
But he, too, has had to adapt, selling tickets in groups of four and transforming the free stroll into a linear route.
- Performance anxiety -
In the traditional world of theatre, social distancing measures are a real headache.
With people having to remain two metres (six feet) apart, under current rules, the Royal Shakespeare Company said it can only accommodate 20 percent of its usual audience.
"With the furlough scheme changing in nature over the coming months and then coming to an end, that's a moment of extreme vulnerability," Catherine Mallyon, executive director of the Stratford-upon-Avon based company told AFP.
"And how would we do the performances with social distancing? 'Romeo and Juliet' two metres apart, it's quite hard to imagine," she said.
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Tokyo, Japan | Koji Ishii can't help himself: whenever he sees a lost glove on the streets of his hometown Tokyo, he just has to stop and document it.
Paris, France |Scientists believe Leonardo da Vinci's super-fast eye may have helped him catch the enigmatic magic of Mona Lisa's smile.
This superhuman trait, which top tennis and baseball players may also share, allowed the Renaissance master to capture accurately minute, fleeting expressions and even birds and dragonflies in flight.
Art historians have long talked of Leonardo's "quick eye", but David S Thaler of Switzerland's University of Basel has tried to gauge it in a new study published Thursday alongside another paper showing how he gave his drawings and paintings uncanny emotional depth.
Professor Thaler's research turns on how Leonardo's eye was so keen he managed to spot that the front and back wings of a dragonfly are out of synch -- a discovery which took slow-motion photography to prove four centuries later.
The artist, who lived from 1452 to 1519, sketched how when a dragonfly's front wings are raised, the hind ones are lowered, something that was a blur to Thaler and to his colleagues when they tried to observe the difference themselves.
Thaler told AFP that this gift to see what few humans can may be the secret of Leonardo's most famous painting.
"Mona Lisa's smile is so enigmatic because it represents the moment of breaking into a smile. And Leonardo's quick eye captured that and held it," he said.
- Freeze frame -
"So often our memories are of a fixed image, not a movement. Leonardo and perhaps other artists had that ability to pick up the point of breaking into a smile" or emotion.
Thaler suspects the Japanese painter Hokusai -- best known for "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" -- had the same ability.
The Edo master (1760-1849) also picked up the difference in dragonfly wings, which led Thaler to wonder if "he saw (in) the same freeze-frame way as Leonardo".
Thaler applied "flicker fusion frequency" (FFF) -- similar to a film's frames per second — to try to judge Leonardo's extraordinary visual acuity in the study for the Rockefeller University in the US as a part of a wider Leonardo DNA Project looking at the Renaissance polymath.
Because of our slower FFF, we construct a single 3D image of the world by jamming together many partially in-focus images, he said.
Leonardo realised he could freeze the separate snapshots with which we construct our perception, Thaler believes.
Thaler told AFP that he was fascinated by the case of Ted Williams, an American baseball legend who claimed to have trained himself to see the seams of a baseball as it flew towards him.
"It is said that elite batters can see the seams" even when the baseball is rotating 30 to 50 times per second, Thaler said.
In Leonardo's case, Thaler estimated that to see the difference in batting dragonfly wings clearly, the artist would have to have an FFF range of 50 to 100 frames per second.
The average person's is between 20 to 40 per second.
Thaler told AFP it was not clear if the gift was genetic or if it could be learned.
- Da Vinci's 'evening' portraits -
The researcher also described in another paper how Leonardo used psychophysics -- much of which still remains a mystery today -- to communicate beauty and emotion.
He said Leonardo's mastery of the sfumato technique -- which subtly blurs the edges of images and creates a 3D effect -- allowed him to render lifelike expressions and gave an intimate gaze to his portraits.
He believes that Leonardo achieved selective soft focus in portraits by painting in overcast or evening light, where the eyes' pupils enlarge to let in more light but have a narrow plane of sharp focus.
The enlarged pupils of his sitters -- also a sign of affection or attraction -- were a mark of beauty in Renaissance portraits.
It appears to confirm what the artist himself wrote in his notebook: "In the evening and when the weather is dull, what softness and delicacy you may perceive in the faces of men and women..."
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Amsterdam, Netherlands | A Dutch art detective revealed Thursday he has received two recent photographs of a Vincent Van Gogh painting stolen from a museum during the coronavirus lockdown.
Burglars snatched the 1884 painting "Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring", which is valued at up to six million euros ($6.6 million), from the Singer Laren Museum near Amsterdam on March 30.
Arthur Brand, dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the Art World" for tracing a series of high-profile lost artworks, said he was handed the photos a few days ago by a source he declined to identify.
The photographs, of which AFP was given two copies, show the painting, together with a front page of the New York Times newspaper of May 30 to prove when the photos were taken.
"After three months of intensive investigation, I was handed these pictures. This is the first 'proof of life' we have that the painting still exists," Brand said, adding that valuable pictures are often destroyed when the thieves realise they cannot be sold.
He added that the photos were "circulating in mafia circles".
In the photographs, a new scratch can be seen on the bottom of the painting, which Brand said he believed must have happened during the robbery.
The New York Times issue in the photographs of the painting featured an interview with Brand and Octave Durham, the notorious Dutch burglar who stole two paintings from Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum in 2002.
It also showed a copy of Durham's 2018 book "Master Thief", placed on a black plastic background.
Asked about the authenticity of the painting shown in the photos, Brand said one of them shows the back of the artwork featuring the so-called provenance -- the history of ownership -- which serves almost as a type of fingerprint for the artwork.
"There is no doubt in my mind that this is the genuine article," he said.
- 'Great number of tips' -
Brand, who declined to divulge how he obtained the photos, said he believed there could be a number of reasons the art thieves decided to circulate them.
"It could simply be that they are trying to find a buyer in the criminal underworld," he added.
The photographs "could also be a plan to try and cast suspicion on Durham, because they used his book in the pictures," he said.
Durham however was in hospital in Amsterdam at the time of the latest heist "and has a rock-solid alibi", the detective said.
However, the reasons could be even more personal said Brand, who has recovered stolen art including a Picasso painting and "Hitler's Horses", life-sized bronze sculptures that once stood outside the Nazi leader's Berlin chancellery.
"Perhaps they want to make a deal with prosecutors, using the painting as leverage," the Amsterdam-based detective said.
"Or perhaps they just want to toy with me, because they know I am investigating the case, and that I took it personally when they stole a Van Gogh right from my back yard," he said.
Dutch police video images released shortly after the burglary showed a burglar smashing through a glass door at the museum in the middle of the night, before running out with the painting tucked under his right arm.
Police in their latest statement said "we have received a great number of tips in this case."
Asked if he had passed on the information to the Dutch police, Brand said "he was following the usual channels".
"Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring" comes from relatively early on in Van Gogh's career, before the prolific artist embarked on his trademark post-impressionist paintings such as "Sunflowers" and his vivid self-portraits.
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Los Angeles, United States | Spotify has penned a podcast deal with DC Comics -- home to Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman -- bringing scripted superhero episodes to the audio streaming platform.
The deal announced Thursday follows a separate Spotify deal with Kim Kardashian West for a criminal justice podcast, as the Swedish platform continues to splurge on a raft of original content.
The multi-year deal with DC parent WarnerMedia for an "original slate of narrative scripted podcasts" will explore "new shows based on the vast universe of premier, iconic DC characters," the companies said in a statement.
It did not confirm which comic book characters would feature, or the cost of the deal, which will also include "new dramatic and comedic podcasts" based on other Warner Bros. titles.
But the deal comes as Spotify ramps up its podcast content, including a reported $100 million outlay last month on "The Joe Rogan Experience," the most downloaded podcast in the United States.
On Wednesday, it emerged Spotify had inked an exclusive deal with Kardashian West, the reality star turned criminal justice advocate.
The show will investigate the case of Kevin Keith, a convicted mass murderer who maintains his innocence for the 1994 deaths of three people including a four-year-old child, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Keith's death sentence was commuted to life in prison by Ohio's governor in 2010 due to unanswered questions in his case.
Several dozen former judges, lawyers and prosecutors believe he may have been wrongly convicted and had called for his execution to be halted.
Spotify confirmed the deal with Kardashian West to AFP, but declined to offer any further details.
For a little over a year, Spotify has slowly been moving into the podcast world.
In early 2019, it bought the podcasting company Gimlet Studios for around $230 million, as well as the production interface Anchor for more than $100 million.
And in February, Spotify acquired The Ringer, a sports and entertainment production studio, for between $141 million and $195 million, depending on several variables.
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