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Oregon Shakespeare Festival Loses Top Leadership And Will Restructure

OSF has recently been trying to offset deficits from the pandemic’s impact, including reducing its number of shows each season, shortening its calendar for performances and diversifying the shows it offers. “OSF realizes it must invest in a strategy that will impact the long-term success of the organization.” - Oregon Public Broadcasting

Mellon Foundation Picks A New Arts Program Officer

Stephanie Ybarra joins Mellon following her tenure as Artistic Director of Baltimore Center Stage, where she broke ground as the country’s first Latina artistic director of a League of Resident Theaters (LORT) member theater. - Mellon Foundation

The Great Unheralded Wits Of Social Media? State Agencies

Washington State Dept. of Natural Resources: "Update: The Twitter wildfire is at 44 billion acres and 0% contained." NE Ohio Regional Sewer District: "now that sports betting is legal in ohio please remember we’ve been throwing your money down the drain for 50 years with much better returns" - The Guardian

What Daniel Barenboim Accomplished In Berlin

In Berlin, the former-musical-prodigy-turned-artistic-director increasingly became a cultural politician. In keeping with his self-image, he found his equals at the federal (rather than the state) level. - Van

The Funny Little Things About Franz Kafka That Max Brod Excised From His Diaries

Brod sanitized and polished quite a bit when he published his friend's journals (which Kafka had wanted burned), and a new, uncensored translation reveals a lot: the author's visits to brothels, his bi-curiosity, his crying at movies, his strong opinions about theater, his thing for noses. - The New York Times

The Meritocracy? It Doesn’t Exist. It’s All About Networking

The experience had clued him in to something: In elite circles, not all opportunities were advertised. There were rooms that the rest of us didn’t know existed, and those rooms came with possibilities never advertised by the career-services office. - The Atlantic

Wayne McGregor Looks Inside His Fellow Choreographers’ Notebooks

McGregor, who directed this year's Venice Biennale Danza, shares comments and images from the notebooks of 16 of the dance-makers he worked with, from Merce Cunningham to Azsure Barton to Sidi Larbi Charkaoui to the indigenous Australian troupe Marrugeku to flamenco iconoclast Rocío Molina. - AnOther Magazine

The Golden Globes Still Have A Long Way To Go To Redeem Themselves

In the end, the Globes had to make three arguments Tuesday: that it has survived its past scandals to become a better organization; that it still matters as an important benchmark in an awards season topped by The Oscars. And that it's still Hollywood's coolest party. - NPR

Spreading The Word: Fans Are Learning And Using The Na’vi Language From “Avatar”

Paul Frommer, the linguist who created from scratch the language spoken by the inhabitants of the planet Pandora in the hit films, talks about constructing a usable and credible vocabulary and grammar and about how a community (of Earthlings) has developed around teaching and communicating in Na'vi. - Salon

Tracking A Precipitous Decline In Innovation

Across broad landscapes of science and technology, the past is eating the present, progress is plunging, and truly disruptive work is hard to come by. Despite an enormous increase in scientists and papers since the middle of the 20th century, the number of highly disruptive studies each year hasn’t increased. - The Atlantic

Baltimore Center Stage’s Director To Depart, With Ousted Director Of Chicago’s Victory Gardens To Fill In

Stephanie Ybarra is resigning, effective March 31, to become a program officer at the Mellon Foundation. Taking over as interim artistic director is Ken-Matt Martin, whose firing by the Victory Gardens board last June, and the ensuing turmoil, was 2022's biggest story in US regional theater. - MSN (The Baltimore Sun)

Rebranding The Met: A Five-Point Plan To Make The Metropolitan Opera A Must-See

Observing the company's worrisome slump in ticket sales and Peter Gelb's announced plans to focus more on contemporary works and reduce the number of performances (especially of revivals), Parterre Box contributor Dawn Fatale suggests further ways to get the FOMO factor working in the Met's favor again. - Parterre Box

Leading Muslim Advocacy Group Says University Was Wrong To Fire Professor Who Showed Medieval Persian Images Of Muhammad

"The Muslim Public Affairs Council has published a statement urging reinstatement of an art history professor who was fired from Hamline University in Minnesota after showing her class Medieval paintings depicting the Prophet Muhammad." Indeed, MPAC said she should be thanked for "educating students … in a critically empathetic manner." - Artnet

Barry Grove, Who Helped Make Manhattan Theatre Club Into A Powerhouse, Will Step Down After 48 Years

He started with the then-fledgling Off-Off-Broadway company as managing director in 1975. Since then, with artistic director Lynne Meadow, Groves has led MTC to operate two theaters, on and off Broadway, producing works that have won a total of 28 Tonys and seven Pulitzers. - The New York Times

There Will Be No Deal To “Loan” The Parthenon Marbles Back To Greece, Says Prime Minister

Scuttling reports from last week of secret talks over a deal, premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis restated his nation's longstanding position that the ancient sculptures, having been stolen by Lord Elgin in the 19th century, are not Britain's to return and belong to Greece by right. - Reuters

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