“I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should cease to celebrate, cherish and, indeed, support our rich theatre culture – and that includes what has gone before. But by playing it too safe, hunkering down and not shifting investment into grassroots, new forms and genuine risk-taking productions, there is a real possibility that you will destroy theatre’s many possible and as yet undreamed of futures.”
Archives for March 7, 2014
Stepping Out – Retirement Is Tough For Dancers
“The great majority of current dancers claim to be aware of the challenges that transition will pose (98 percent, 86 percent and 93 percent in the U.S., Switzerland and Australia, respectively), but many former dancers concede that they were in fact ill-prepared for this process.”
Does Getty’s New Free Image Policy Mean Others Will Follow?
“The change has been greeted like some kind of major capitulation. But that’s actually not quite true: This is merely the latest move in a slow shift toward a new and more realist take on digital monetization — a shift that’s been going on for years.”
Chairman Of The Sydney Biennale Steps Down Under Protest
Luca Belgiorno-Nettis “left as more artists said they would pull out of the event in protest over its main sponsor, his family’s construction company Transfield Holdings. The firm provides services for the Australian government’s controversial immigration detention centres.”
Study: Big Gender Gap In Pay For Museum Directors
“It found that female directors at museums with budgets of more than $15 million earn 71 cents for every $1 male directors earn. At the same time, women who run art museums with smaller budgets do earn more than their male counterparts – annually, they earn 2 cents more.”
The Densest Music Ever?
“Black MIDI,” a subculture of electronic music remixing that mutated into existence in Japan five years ago, is an aesthetic snapshot of the early 21st century if there ever was one. It’s digital, viral, and truly “multimedia”–because it’s music, data visualization, and software demonstration at once.
Arundhati Roy: Activist Fiction
“I got into trouble in the past for my nonfiction, and I swore, ‘I’m never going to write anything with a footnote again.’ “
Rising New York Rents Pushing Artists Out Of The City
Being studioless, some have put their art careers aside. Others have begun to ask: If they can’t afford gritty, unglamorous Industry City, then where?
“Inherent Dullness”: A Young Man Goes To An Orchestra Concert
“I had trouble enjoying myself. My brother did too. This by no means is to suggest that the orchestra itself was poor. Perhaps me and my bro are just uncultured, southern swine. More likely it was just not for us (and by extension a lot of people in my age range). I enjoy symphony music. I have a playlist of classical music on my Spotify. But I thought sitting and watching the orchestra play has an inherent dullness.”
Why Ravel Was An (Almost) Great Composer
“Everything in Ravel’s music is held at a distance, as it was in his life. Just think what iron discipline and self-denial it must have taken, to keep the messy intimacies of life at bay. There’s a similar denial in the music. You always know where the music’s heading; there’s no sense of discovery or risk.”
Oh… So You Thought You Were Supposed To Read Those Books On Your Shelf
“A survey has found that half of an average home’s 138 books go unread. I’m surprised it is as low as a half. Books aren’t meant to be read.”
How Science Is Trying To Look Inside Your Soul
If you think of your self as an essence—something you’d describe with adjectives like “unified,” “continuous,” and “unchanging”—well, science has some bad news for you.
The New World Trade Center – A Panoramic View From The Top Of The World
“No doubt the new building’s official dedication will open the way to a necessary debate over its merits as architecture and urbanism, its turbulent design history and the compromises made over the long years it took to get the thing built. But in one important respect, One World Trade Center has already succeeded. It has reclaimed the sky. And this is the view from there.”
The Art World’s Most Narcissistic Exercise Is About To Commence (Can’t Wait)
“The Biennial is the most purely narcissistic of all New York art world events, an orgy of navel-gazing that can leave a bad feeling—a sense of unease, if not disgust.”
Japan’s “Beethoven” Apologizes
“Ditching his trademark long hair and sunglasses, a clean-cut Mamoru Samuragochi repeatedly bowed in shame before a packed press conference in a Tokyo hotel, where some dubious reporters dragged along hearing-impairment experts to assess the mock maestro.”
Loss, Betrayal, and Inaccuracy: A Translator’s Handbook
“If this much loss comes with the translation of a single word, it’s hard to imagine the worlds that are lost with the rendering of an entire novel. But the crucial thing to remember – I often tell myself – is that it doesn’t matter. Loss is invisible; it is what makes it through the net that matters.”
Why Do We Find Some Languages More Beautiful Than Others?
Bernd Brunner (aggrieved): “People often describe German, my native language, as hard and aggressive. They relish criticizing its guttural sounds, long compound words, and the sentence structure … According to popular accounts, it was five hundred years ago when the apparently polyglot Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, declared ‘I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.'”
When James Met Jean-Jacques: How Rousseau Cured Boswell of Calvinism
“Boswell had been raised in the dour Church of Scotland, where the worst of Scottish weather and Scottish Calvinism met to form a perfect storm of fear and trembling.” And so, while on the Grand Tour, the young man turned to the author of Emile and The Social Contract, who had “succeeded in the redoubtable task of uniting, if only on the subject of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Catholics and Protestants, monarchic France and republican Geneva.”
Why Robert Ashley Was a Great Opera Composer (And Why So Few Americans Knew of Him)
For a start, it’s because his approach to writing opera was, as he wrote, “Put aside intelligibility, put aside urgency of plot. Put in embellishment. Put in Maria Callas and Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday.” Mark Swed explains.
Reports of Kiri Te Kanawa’s Retirement Are Greatly Exaggerated
While she did just make her last opera appearance, she says, “One door closes and another door opens but as to retiring, I’ve never ever had that word in my vocabulary. Only thing is that other people have got it in their vocabulary because they can’t think of anything else to say.”
Whatever Happened To Qatar’s Once-Budding Film Industry?
“In Doha, there was once a buzzing festival and schemes to nurture local talent, but now much of the the money in the Qatari film business goes to projects elsewhere.”
‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Coming to Broadway For Sixth Time
Bartlett Sher will direct the musical’s latest incarnation in the fall of 2015. No casting has been announced, though the director has reportedly talked informally with Broadway stalwart Danny Burstein about playing Tevye.
Ex-Orchestra CEO in Silicon Valley Indicted for Embezzlement
“Stephen Jay Carlton, the former executive director of the Los Altos-based Peninsula Symphony, is facing felony charges for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the nonprofit organization, prosecutors said Wednesday.”
See the Dance Films From the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle
“Thanks to a collaboration between Gaumont Pathé archives, La Cinémathèque Française, and sound-recording expert Henri Chamoux, 34 of the original films [shown at the Exposition’s newfangled Phono-Cinéma] have been beautifully restored.” (includes clips)
A Century of Dance in America, On Walls in Washington
Alastair Macaulay visits the “exuberantly diverse” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, “Dancing the Dream”, which features everyone from Vernon and Irene Castle to Rudolf Nureyev to Shirley Maclaine to Isadora Duncan to Mark Morris to Twyla Tharp to John Travolta to Gypsy Rose Lee.