“In each country, the Concertgebouw will perform one opening work side by side with a local youth orchestra, and members will give masterclasses and tuition to young musicians. Daniele Gatti will conduct the first concerts of the tour.”
Archives for January 2016
How Cervantes Made His Characters Seem Real
“Underlying all his characters was his fascination with how different people might experience differently the same situation. … Where Tasso’s verses describe for Tasso and his readers the essence of war, Cervantes’ prose describes how his characters perceive and misperceive war. Tasso’s words paint heroes; Cervantes’ lines animate characters.”
Alice Walker And Colm Tóibín, Sittin’ Around And Talkin’
At Chez Panisse, no less. They talk about where in their lives their novels The Color Purple and Brooklyn came from and what it was like to see them made into movies.
I’m Female, Gay And Older, And You Want To Kick Me Out Of Oscar Voting?
“I happen to be female and I’m also gay, another underrepresented minority, and yet, because I haven’t been hired on a film in the last 10 years, I am to be booted into the “emeritus” status and replaced by younger members who are being asked to join in order to help you deal with a publicity nightmare.”
Take That, Borat! And Putin! Kazakhstan Creates Its Own ‘Game Of Thrones’
Spurred by a remark from the Russian president that “the Kazakhs had never had statehood” as well as ongoing chagrin that their nation is best known to much of the world for a fictional, dysfunctional journalist in a mankini, the country’s film industry is producing a lavish 10-part miniseries about the founding, amid the collapse of the Golden Horde, of the Kazakh Khanate in 1465.
Report: Arts Industries Contributed £5.4 billion To UK Economy In 2014
“Published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the report also shows that the creative industries as a whole grew at almost twice the rate of the wider economy last year.”
The Fantasy Coffins Of Ghana
Over the past 50 years, abebuu adekai – “proverb boxes,” fantastical caskets hand-carved from wood – “have become one of Ghana’s most unique cultural exports. The curious tradition of burying people in coffins shaped like everything from lobsters to busty women is primarily practiced in Accra and has spawned over 10 workshops in the capital city.”
Tap – Decline Of A Great American Dance Form
Tap dance today is as marginal to popular culture in America as it was in 1960. Why has so delightful and exhilarating a dance style as tap been so resistant to revival?
Experimental Theatremakers, Think Carefully Before You Take That Mainstream Gig
Lyn Gardner: “In a tight funding climate, it’s not surprising that independent theatre-makers are attracted to the opportunities and financial support that the mainstream can offer. But those opportunities sometimes come at a price … Sometimes it leads to a leeching of the very things that made an artist’s work most distinctive in the first place.”
How On Earth Is Robert Falls Putting Roberto Bolaño’s ‘2666’ On Stage?
“It would take 45 minutes just to explain what the novel is about,” said the director of Chicago’s Goodman Theater. “I became weirdly obsessed with this novel years ago, and I still don’t quite know why. The process of staging it is part of trying to figure out what it is I personally respond to. I still don’t quite know.”
Dudamel And His Kids To Play The SuperBowl
“Could anything be more natural than Dudamel and YOLA at the Super Bowl? The inspiring youth orchestra, which Dudamel initiated in 2009 when he assumed his post with the L.A. Phil, is composed of mainly African American, Asian and Latino inner city kids. And after seven years of instruction and rigorous practice, they now represent the best of who we are as a society and of our future.”
Art Gallery Of Ontario Picks A New Director
“Stephan Jost is the director of the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA), an institution that, while much smaller in scope and ambition than the AGO, has enjoyed significant growth and stabilized finances under his leadership over the past five years.”
The Massive, And Strange, New Cultural Center That Was The Kirchners’ Parting Gift To Argentina
Housed in the handsome (and enormous) old Buenos Aires central post office, with up to 50 performance spaces, a full modern art museum, a brand-new 1,800-seat concert hall called “the Blue Whale” and resting on concrete pillars, no signs, and way too many staffers, the Centro Cultural Kirchner has divided opinion as sharply as the couple themselves did.
Marvin Lipofsky, Who Raised Blown Glass To High Art, Dead At 77
He was in the first class of American art students to study glassblowing, and he went on to start programs at U.Cal. Berkeley and the California College of Arts. “In his own practice, he worked glass into small-scale biomorphic shapes with a dazzling array of surface textures produced by cutting, grinding, sandblasting, acid-washing or flocking.”
Can A Big Government Push Bring The Nobel Prize In Literature To South Korea?
It irks the South Korean establishment that a nation as large and wealthy as theirs has won only one Nobel (the 2000 Peace Prize, to President Kim Dae-jung). So a huge effort is being made to translate and distribute the country’s literature to the rest of the world (including the Nobel committee). even though Koreans themselves aren’t big lit readers. (And there’s only one clear candidate.)
How Five American Indian Dancers Transformed Ballet In The 20th Century
“Yvonne Chouteau, one of the ‘Five Moons,’ as they were anointed, died this past Sunday at the age of 86. Along with Moscelyne Larkin (Shawnee, 1925–2012), Rosella Hightower (Choctaw, 1920–2008), Marjorie Tallchief (Osage, b. 1926), and, most famously, Maria Tallchief (Osage, 1925–2013), she rose in the ranks of dance when ballet was still not widely appreciated in this country.”
Abolish The (So White) Oscars, Says Danny Glover. Just Let Them Fade Into Irrelevance, Says Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Who Nails The Real Problem.
Andrew O’Hehir: “So what we’re talking about here … is not so much a failure of representation as a failure of perception and vision and imagination. By invoking [Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man], Abdul-Jabbar suggests that Oscar voters literally cannot see certain kinds of non-white performers and certain kinds of films.”
Mattel Introduces ‘Curvy’ Barbie – And Little Girls’ Reactions Show Why We Need One
“‘Hello, I’m a fat person, fat, fat, fat.’ A 6-year-old girl giving voice for the first time to curvy Barbie sings in a testing room at Mattel’s headquarters. Her playmates erupt in laughter. When an adult comes into the room and asks her if she sees a difference between the dolls’ bodies, she modifies her language. ‘This one’s a little chubbier,’ she says.”
Talking to Christo About His Floating Piers
“The piers will connect the mainland to two islands in [northern Italy’s Lake Iseo]: Monte Isola, which Christo said was the tallest lake island in Italy, and the small, private Isola di San Paolo. The waters surrounding them are 300 feet deep; the 50-foot-wide piers, made of some 200,000 polyethylene cubes wrapped in yellow fabric, will barely rise above the surface.”
Netflix Banned By Indonesia’s State Telecom
“State-owned telecommunications and internet provider Telekomunikasi Indonesia has blocked Netflix from all of its platforms … because of a permit issue and its unfiltered contents.”
A Danger To ‘Moral Values And National Security’: Kenya’s Film Censor On Netflix
The chairman of the Kenya Film Classification Board cited the threat of terrorism alongside the usual sex, drugs and bad words as reasons that his body should be able to regulate Netflix. But the country’s infotech minister says the Board does not have that power.
Fabio Luisi Is Next Music Director Of Florence’s Opera House
The Genoa-born conductor “has been named as the new music director designate of Florence’s Opera di Firenze and its annual spring festival, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, in what appears to be something of a shakeup at the Tuscan company. The position of music director is a new one within Opera di Firenze, and an office that was reportedly created especially for Luisi.”
Violinist Leonidas Kavakos Wins Sonning Music Prize 2017
The award, worth DKK 600,000 (currently about $88,000), “is Denmark’s highest musical honour and has been given annually to an internationally recognised composer, instrumentalist, conductor or singer since 1959.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.28.16
Getty Abducts Another Gorgeous Woman: $30.5 Million for Danaë
When it comes to major acquisitions of drop-dead gorgeous women, no museum can compete with the deep-pocketed Getty. It has just abducted Danaë from the Metropolitan Museum, where she had been on loan from … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-01-28
Rondeau/Chicago: Veteran Curator Promoted to Art Institute’s Directorship
Once again, the Art Institute of Chicago has looked it its own staff to find its new president and director: James Rondeau, chair and curator of modern and contemporary art (departments that merged under his … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-01-28
Horace Silver In Antibes
Saxophonist Gary Foster sent a link to video from a Facebook post of a seldom seen or heard performance by Horace Silver. At the 1964 Antibes Jazz Festival in Juan les Pins, France, Silver … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-01-28
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“Hamilton” Shows Broadway Why Diversity Is The Best Business Plan
Broadway continues to have serious diversity problems in terms of audiences and artists. But what “Hamilton” and “Fun Home” spectacularly demonstrate is that making an investment in extremely talented artists from diverse backgrounds is still the best business plan for simultaneously growing prestige and revenue.