ArtsJournal Classic (Text)

Indian classical dance proponent Sharmila Mukherjee says, “The graceful movements, elegant postures, sculpturesque poses and intricate footwork in the Russian ballet lends itself naturally into the fabric of Odissi. … The story of Swan Lake has a lot of strong emotions. These emotions work very well for Indian dance forms as well.”

Irina Gensler: “You see, it is not only your grace, flexible limbs, or your ability to lift your leg to 180 degrees that makes you a good ballet dancer. … It is very much your stoicism, your resilience.”

As the former Citie Ballet – now Ballet Edmonton – takes a name change the company will also start a new partnership with the Fine Arts & Communications Faculty at MacEwan University involving a performance space and other possible collaborations. Finally, Ballet Edmonton has announced that one of Canada’s most acclaimed choreographers Wen Wei Wang […]

“It’s an inevitability to keep dancing — a continuance of never questioning the passion and love for the art. What I do question is how to get the work out to others as the sharing of the work has become increasingly difficult.”

“American Ballet Theatre [has] announced a new initiative to foster the development of choreography by company members and freelance dancemakers. Aptly titled ABT Incubator, the program, directed by principal David Hallberg, will give selected choreographers the opportunity to spend two weeks workshopping new dances.” (This is not to be confused with ABT Women’s Movement, the […]

In the 18th- and 19th-centuries, cartographers dedicated themselves to mapping the invisible forces behind travel, trade and capitalism. For instance, there was apparently some hidden force that facilitated northeasterly travel between North America and Europe, and penalised North-Atlantic journeys toward the global south. But what was it, and how did it work?

Lyn Gardner is not having it: “Rather than being scandalised by the fact that those who are most creative – and the most creative thinkers – are likely to be paid less, the IFS draws the conclusion that students should consider later-life earnings when picking their subjects at GCSE and A level. This will allow […]

When Beyoncé and Jay-Z want to elevate something in culture, they do, and the image that they chose to publicize their joint world tour meant that the film Touki Bouki is back, perhaps for good. Why is it important? The movie “was radical in resisting the social realist tradition already sweeping through African cinema in […]

There’s a newly elected Gen-X leader, and he has no time for the culture wars of the past. “Greear has promised to lead the denomination down a different path, which, he has said, must include efforts both to repent of a ‘failure to listen to and honor women and racial minorities’ and ‘to include them […]

“A significant body of research suggests that gossip may in fact be healthy. It’s a good thing, too, since gossip is pretty pervasive. Children tend to be seasoned gossips by the age of 5, and gossip as most researchers understand it — talk between at least two people about absent others — accounts for about […]

He’s concerned, Ken Jennings is, about how something he loves — comedy — has transformed the way we live now. These days, he says, we collectively react to every stimulus through a lens of humor. In his view, the comedic “take” has become reflexive, unthinking and often, especially when abetted by social media, glib.

It will be used by Arts Council England (ACE) to guide investment via is Creative People and Places programme, which supports arts activity in areas with historically low levels of cultural engagement. ACE Chair Sir Nicholas Serota today announced £37m will be invested in a new round of the scheme between 2018-2022. Of this, £24m […]

Justification is always a mug’s game, for it involves a surrender to some measure or criterion external to the humanities. The person or persons who ask us as academic humanists to justify what we do is asking us to justify what we do in his terms, not ours. Once we pick up that challenge, we […]

“Medicine is often about hierarchy, where a first-year [resident] might feel intimidated by a second- or third-year resident, and attending physicians might not talk on a personal level to interns or residents. Suddenly, when you’re side by side, appreciating someone’s art skills, you’re appreciating a different dimension of them.”

Has the corporation turned into Dementors? Or something: “‘They are acting like the Dursleys,’ said [Sarah McIntyre,] a 34-year-old yoga teacher and bookkeeper. She said the company should be encouraging communities to bring Harry Potter to life. ‘Creating interest in the franchise would increase revenue.'”

Disney–Pixar’s “Incredibles 2” shattered box office expectations with its $180 million domestic debut — the eighth-best opening weekend of all time in North America and the biggest ever launch for an animated film. Overseas, it picked up an additional $51.5 million for a global start of $231.5 million.

Political edge isn’t a new addition to the art form by any means, but it’s difficult to imagine the recent deluge of videos exploring racial and sexual identity occurring in the MTV era. The phenomenon is in part the result of political trends like polarization and identity politics rising to the forefront of online conversation, and […]

Actress Chloe Dykstra posted a personal essay to Medium on Thursday in which, without naming comedian and Nerdist founder Chris Harwick, she said that “she had been in a three-year relationship with a man who repeatedly sexually assaulted her and enforced restrictive rules.”

Oh, excuse us: Dead, dying, or – and this is newish – in despair. Yikes: “No mother in this universe is more whole, complete or perfect than a dead one. The dead mothers of Disney don’t make mistakes and they can never disappoint you.”

The decision means that producer Paulo Branco owns the rights to the film, which premiered at Cannes. “Friday’s decision also demands Gilliam pay Branco’s Paris-based production house Alfama Films €10,000 ($11,600) towards the costs of launching the appeal.”

Concert Artists of Baltimore, a professional orchestra and chorus led by founding artistic director Edward Polochick, is folding after 31 years of performing a richly varied repertoire with distinction throughout the area. Barry F. Williams, president of Concert Artists, said Wednesday that financial struggles led to the move by the board of directors to shut […]

Krishna Thiagarajan is currently Royal Scottish National Orchestra Chief Executive. Thiagarajan has previously held executive positions in the U.S. with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and Symphony in C. He will begin his new post on September 1, 2018.

The pay gap in music wages is all too real. One member of the group Haim: “It’s scary out there and [messed] up not even to be paid half the same amount. But to be paid a tenth of that amount of money? It was insane.”

It’s at once a surprise and an utterly familiar ritual for fans of the couple, who are on tour together. “The sudden release immediately sent fans and the industry into a tizzy” – and sent non-TIDAL streaming services into a funk. “Spotify declined to comment and Apple Music did not immediately respond to requests for […]

The figures, compiled by the Donne – Women in Music project and Drama Musica, show that a total of 3,524 musical works will be performed at those concerts, and, of those, 3,442 (97.6%) were written by men and only 82 (2.3%) were written by women.

The Cleveland native came to Cincinnati in 1994 to be the theater critic for the Cincinnati Enquirer, working until her position was eliminated by the paper in 2013. She had come from upstate New York, where she was entertainment editor and theater critic for the Albany Times-Union. Describing her reviewing philosophy in 1998, she wrote that […]

Indeed, without him, Americana might not be worth nearly as much. “For nearly 40 years, from his treasure house of a by-appointment-only store on a quiet block in New Haven, Mr. Reese shaped tastes, cultivated collectors, advised museums and libraries, and made and moved markets.”

He fled Nazi Germany, and then “in 1947 and 1948, still in his 20s, Mr. Kalischer managed to embed himself with refugees uprooted by World War II as they arrived in New York by ship from Bremerhaven. He was able to do so because he had been one of them only six years before.”

Before Horner played in countless nightclubs and was made over by fashion icon Jean Paul Gaultier, “her considerable legend was rooted in the years she spent as a distinctive part of the grand caravan that accompanies the Tour de France, the sprawling French bicycle race. For more than a decade in the 1950s and ’60s […]

Rozhdestvensky “made his name by popularising music by composers who were all but banned by the Communist authorities in the USSR, including Poulenc and Hindemith.”

Tommie Muhammad, a 72-year-old actor and director, has been trying to find a home for African American theatre in Stockton since 1983. He “still wants to produce black plays, but it’s proving more and more difficult as time passes. Every so often, he gets the opportunity to put on a production, but not with the […]

May Adrales, who has been a director and collaborator with Qui Nguyen and his play Vietgone for several years, is just finishing up a season as an associate artistic director at the Milwaukee Rep. What has she learned? “It’s hard to initiate change, and it’s hard to start to reframe things differently.”

What happened? Only a few seasons ago, Broadway was celebrating powerful and urgent new US plays on Broadway such as Eclipsed, Sweat, Clybourne Park and August/Osage County. It had been the same with a renaissance of powerful, groundbreaking, original and diverse US musicals such as Hamilton and Dear Evan Hanson. In contrast, all of this year’s best musical […]

“The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is moving into theatre producing with a touring show about cuts to domestic violence funding. Refuge Women is a collaboration between journalists and performers, and is inspired by real stories uncovered through investigations into the state of government-funded services for women fleeing domestic violence.”

If we are to create more theatres in London, what business models are they going to operate on if no public money is available? There is an intrinsic problem. Property developers want to give over as little space as possible for cultural provision, but to make a theatre work commercially, you need a certain number […]

Rapid-response collecting was pioneered by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2014, it opened a gallery dedicated to objects acquired after they stirred public debate or looked likely to have historical impact. The museum says it hopes they provoke discussion about how objects are changing the way we live.

The sculpture’s footprint covers 1% of the artificial lake’s surface and rises 20 metres above the water. The sides of the barrels are painted red, with a white stripe circling their circumference, giving the side-view of the sculpture the appearance of relentless cartoon brickwork. The circular barrels’ ends are variously blue, a different red or […]

When a Kerry James Marshall piece sells at auction for almost $19 million, but the artist sees none of that money, the stark reality sets in: Artists have no direct stake in secondary sales of their works. And artists are getting poorer – they earn an average of $10,000 in the U.S. How can this […]

“Why did Beyoncé and Jay-Z decide to stage their reconciliation track at the world’s most visited museum? Swagger, for one thing: That first tracking shot of the couple in front of the Mona Lisa, wearing silk suits of complementary sea-foam green (him) and orchid pink (her), is a first-order power move that echoes their selfie […]

Spencer Tunick specializes in mass nude photography, but the supermarket giant in inner Melbourne wasn’t, at first, keen on letting the artist do his proposed shoot, which already had more than 10,000 people signed up. The company said it would disrupt weekend shoppers. So, “the organisers proposed to reschedule the shoot for a Monday morning […]

The highly anticipated “VIDA Count,” released Monday, has The New Yorker, The Nation and The Atlantic among those devoting less than 40 percent of their book coverage to women in 2017. Only two of 15 publications analyzed in the main VIDA count gave women 50 percent or more — Poetry magazine and Granta. Those between […]

I’ll cut to the chase: between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours. It would seem that reading in America has declined even further in the past decade. But statistics can be tricky, so […]

When tourists go through Britain’s castles and grand houses, they’ve started asking a lot more questions about the people who made those places run. As one curator points out, “there was a time when this wasn’t considered ‘proper’ history” – but that changed, in part because of some of the books she recommends, including those […]

Crass but necessary, perhaps? “A publisher choosing to fete authors during Book Expo — introducing them to the news media, readers and, most important, booksellers who attend the show — is a signal that the house is betting big on them. And for nonprofits both large and small, Instagram-ready parties are the best way to […]

The novelist and essayist says it’s not the job of a writer to be an activist – but that writers are always political, and now that is deeply necessary. “Individuals are being turned into micro-fascists by so many means. It is the mobs and vigilantes going and lynching people. So more than ever, the point […]