ArtsJournal Classic (Text)

Even when fashion designers get outrageous for the Fall Gala, New York City Ballet’s costume shop knows what it’s doing. “They know how every fabric moves, they know what a seam does, what a hem does, what stretches, what doesn’t, what absorbs, what doesn’t, what can be lifted, what can move.”

“The provocative image of dancer Vanesa Garcia-Ribala Montoya striking a pose, covered in blood with a nail through her foot, was chosen to advertise [Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal’s] performance of Stabat Mater, set to a score by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi.”

Performances of the new biographical work were abruptly called off just a couple of days before the scheduled premiere on July 11 – allegedly, though not officially, because the piece would have violated Russia’s notorious anti-gay “propaganda” law. Meanwhile, the ballet’s creator, avant-garde stage director Kirill Serebrennikov, is under house arrest on unrelated charges, and […]

“A few months ago, I was sure that I was going to stop dancing to become a good actor. But then when I was by myself for a week, I asked myself, What are you doing? You have that talent. Use it to the fullest. And if I can use that talent as well as […]

“We’re highlighting some of the influential black women who came before, and have been changing the game in the downtown dance scene for almost four decades. They continue to thrive and survive, although in [one case], posthumously. As young dancemakers, we have to know the shoulders on which we stand.”

Traditionally, science fiction with spaceships has been about exploration and escaping Earth. But that escape is a pipe dream. “We experience our actual earthbound future as an incomprehensible betrayal. For humanity to flicker and die on Earth alone — and to leave no trace of itself save its garbage and the geological echo of incomprehensibly […]

“The idea that people have different styles of learning – that the visually inclined do best by seeing new information, for example, or others by hearing it – has been around since the 1950s, and recent research suggests it’s still widely believed by teachers and laypeople alike. But is there scientific evidence that learning styles […]

“Every worldly example of continued personal identity involves tremendous transformations – whether it is developing language, sociality or morals; discovering a hidden passion; coming out of our closets; changing careers; falling in or out of love; growing or finding a family. Such dynamism does not throw our identities into question; instead, these changes represent some of […]

“The news here is that the lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think. We’re flattering ourselves by believing that their existence was so grim and that our modern, civilized one is, by comparison, so great. Still, we are where we are, and we live the way we live, and it’s possible […]

No matter how radical these predictions are, they tend to take the long-term durability of capitalism utterly for granted: Responding to decades of stagnating wages and sliding labor force participation, the Institute for the Future’s report “10 Strategies for a Workable Future” (which is in many ways quite sharp and informative) acknowledges deep problems with […]

Davis and her husband, Julian Tennon, set up a production company in 2011 to do just that – but, Tennon says, “When I go to meetings, it’s generally not African Americans that I’m talking to about getting something greenlit. Folks at the top are going to have to make decisions about trying to make systemic […]

“Selected cities in 28 European Union (EU) countries plus Norway and Switzerland have been ranked in a new report and online tool called the Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor. It uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative studies to give a comparative assessment of the cities’ levels of engagement with culture and creativity.”

For decades, Seattle has been a good arts town, with theatres, dance, music and visual artists prospering in a healthy arts scene. But rising rents, a huge influx of new residents and a changing culture are changing the city’s culture.

We need a cultural plan matching the scale of the crisis, proposing bold, courageous action — but Mayor de Blasio’s “CreateNYC” Cultural Plan disappoints, with its cosmetic and feel-good narrative. Where’s the activist mayor who pledged to fight Albany so that New York City could collect higher income taxes? Where are the City Council members […]

“Here in the ‘City of Arts and Innovation,’ I’d like to see UNCSA lead the branding and development of a vibrant ‘Arts Quarter’ to complement what Wake Forest University has done so brilliantly and beautifully in the city’s Innovation Quarter,” he said.

Apparently, audiences will accept almost anything as long as it has to do with controlling women. See: Tom Cruise and Jim Carrey.

After the opening episode arrives over the usual airwaves, the show is only going to be available on CBS All Access – something that executives hope will get more people to sign up for the streaming service.

Now (just look at Girls’ Trip and Daphne) is the time for women who “are neither the victims of, nor inertly, Sleeping-Beauty-wise, waiting to be enlivened by, male desire.”

While “virtual multichannel video programming distributors” like Hulu, YouTube TV and Sling TV are poised to grow, they’ll significantly cannibalize the existing base of traditional pay-TV customers, according to RBC’s analysis. About 15% of the addressable market for “vMVPDs” will come from legacy cable and satellite subs, with 10% from “cord-never” broadband-only households.

Alyssa Rosenberg: “In & Out feels both like a slightly embarrassing artifact of its time and an ultimately correct argument for how (lots if not all of) America would change in the decades since its release.” On the other hand, “if [the movie] were released today, it would be drowned in an actual flood of […]

Carreras was on his way to the heights of opera stardom when he was struck by leukemia – but a comeback concert with friends and fellow tenors Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo turned him into a massive crossover star. Now he’s preparing to sing his final concert at Carnegie Hall.

That righting came at a cost – cutting the number of operas, losing a music director, dealing with a threatened strike by the chorus – but the young executive director leaves the ENO on a much more stable financial footing, with new artistic leadership coming in.

“Opera Philadelphia has been planning this for a couple of years: Now, the O17 festival has begun, turning the city into a giant opera stage for 12 days. The company is striking a huge blow for the idea that arts organizations do better to add new, exciting things than to tread with financial caution. The […]

“Creatively, VR felt like a natural progression for us, and I believe it’s a fantastic medium for orchestral music. 2D video and stereo audio can struggle to convey the complex dynamics and visceral energy of a live symphony orchestra. This could be why livestreaming orchestral performances to cinemas has not had the widespread success enjoyed […]

It is indeed a major step for Washington; Timothy O’Leary is one of opera’s leading lights. Having taken over in St. Louis when he was only 33, he has led that company — one of America’s best summer festivals — with notable strength, at once building its artistic profile with an interesting array of work […]

Bradley’s first album, on the ’60s sound revival label Daptone, was released when he was 62, and his James-Brown-evoking performances became legendary. Daptone’s Gabriel Roth: “Charles was somehow one of the meekest and strongest people I’ve ever known. His pain was a cry for universal love and humanity.”

She specialized in Odissi, a form of temple dance from the eastern Indian state of Odisha. “By the 1940s and ’50s, Odissi had fallen out of favor in India. But Ms. Devi, who began studying it in 1964, helped revive it through worldwide tours in the 1970s and as a professor in New York University’s […]

The former editor of Dance Magazine, Horosko “was the only dancer who carried an old-fashioned typewriter with her on tour.”

Not really, but he’s OK with that. “I come to make room for the ones coming after. Because these people coming after are going to deliver us something. We just need to watch out. Just look at the luscious, juicy deliciousness that is black art right now. I just feel like we’re only scratching the […]

“MoDo: You love embroidering rude cushions with bawdy language and giving them to your famous friends. JuDe: I used to do that a lot, but my eyesight doesn’t let me anymore. I found someone to make the cushions for me.”

Well: “Mr. Weinstein said that when arranging the charitable contributions that flowed to the theater he told some donors that the funds were to support the ‘Finding Neverland’ production. But, he said, it wasn’t his responsibility to further disclose that the money would be used to reimburse him and the other investors or otherwise cover […]

Playwright Yussef El Guindi: “Americans are so averse to politics in their entertainment that the simple act of including Arab or Muslim characters in a play exposes it to the charge of being overly political or didactic. And if the play is written by an Arab or a Muslim? The writer must surely then be […]

As it does every year, American Theatre magazine omits the Bard’s plays and A Christmas Carol adaptations (because they’d lead year in, year out). Yet the most-produced play of the coming season is … Shakespeare in Love. (Most of the rest of the list is higher-brow.)

Editor Diep Tran: “This year, when I finished calculating the … list for 2017-18, and saw who was at the top, I let out a laugh. ‘Of course!’ I exclaimed. I was not surprised by the name at the top; she had been on it last year, at No. 2, just under August Wilson. It […]

When Ben Brantley reviewed a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A (a take on The Scarlet Letter), he wrote, “since I am not a character in this work but an employee of The New York Times, I shall be referring to this play only as ‘A.’ (The full title places an Anglo-Saxon adjective before the […]

Many people see the artists as the first wave of development and gentrification, of course. “Tensions have simmered for much of the past decade between Bushwick’s longtime Latino and African American residents and artists who moved into the area. But as more people discover the neighborhood’s charms, investors pour money into projects that increase property […]

Think about this when you see artists on Instagram: “Artists always make spectacular choices in terms of what they are going to wear – it’s part of the gallery game, a game of seduction with the collectors. They are buying you as much as they are buying the work. It’s one of the rare occasions […]

The Huntington’s senior paintings conservator, Christina O’Connell, has a plan. “The Blue Boy will be reframed and returned to the portrait gallery on November 1. It will remain there for 10 months while O’Connell processes reams of data and formulates her treatment plan. Then the painting will come down for another several months of treatment. […]

Sure, if by that you mean where the world’s wealthy come to play. “At its media preview last Friday, two of the first questions from South African journalists raised awkward points about Cape Town’s reputation as an unequal and inaccessible playground for the wealthy. The city is arguably one of the least African cities on […]

One curator: “It’s as if taking a photo of a work in a museum means ‘seeing’ it to a viewer, even though someone like me worries that taking the photo replaces seeing it in the slow and thoughtful way I would ideally wish. … And the problem with all the photo-takers is that they make […]

“The good news for publishers, looking forward, is that much of the audience for digital is young. Almost half of those who say they listen to audiobooks were under 35. And it’s a hungry audience. While only 24 percent of Americans say they listened to at least one audio book in 2016, the average listener […]

Many journalists and media observers have sympathized with Grigoriadis, who appears to have suffered an authors’ worst nightmare—she spent years writing a book only to sustain an unfair skewering at the hands of a reviewer who didn’t appear to fully comprehend the work. But the review of Blurred Lines has itself set off a drama […]

Why is her new, 400-page historical novel a linear piece, complete with a heroine in the Brooklyn Navy Yards during WWII? The author says that’s just the way it worked, and her writing group agreed: “There’s nothing inherently exciting about any narrative move: it’s only exciting if it works, and if it couldn’t be done […]

Obviously they’ve all moved to cities, right? But for real: Does “the omission of gay voices in [the] rural canon gesture toward a more pointed claim, that the ‘moral glory’ of the American countryside somehow prevented, or at least denied, the existence of gay men and women”?

A high school teacher who does surveys and knows only 15 percent of any class ever reads the entire book thinks that “if reading were less of a spectator sport maybe we’d inhabit a world better informed, more critical—and critical in a reflective rather than a reactive sense—a world shaped more collectively by thoughtfulness, by […]