When choreographer My-Linh Le saw some turf dancers from Oakland on the BART train, “she wanted to take them off the train and put them on stage, with ballet dancers she recruited from the Alonzo King Lines School.” And she did. “But the creative process turned out to be more difficult than anyone anticipated.” (includes video)
Color-Blind Casting In Shakespeare: How Far Have We Really Come?
Lyn Gardner: “The uncomfortable fact [is] that while there is a significant amount of colour-blind casting in Shakespeare, black and Asian actors seldom get a chance to take the significant roles. … In the case of more substantial roles, some particularly appear to be earmarked for minority casting: the nurse in Romeo and Juliet being an obvious one.”
Festive, Transgressive, And Sometimes Offensive: Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade Is Ambulatory Outsider Art
Yes, this year’s parade had some unfortunate displays of bigotry – even as, in other ways, it’s become more inclusive. “The Mummers represent a wild, exuberant, and frankly bizarre tradition that deserves to continue; where else can you see your electrician dance down the street as a sequined cow carrying a miniature umbrella?”
We Need To Rethink The Role Of Sopranos
It so happens that a significant amount of our choral literature draws from an historical context in which women were not able to participate. The SATB voicing, as we know it today, belonged to all-male choruses, consisting of both pre- and post-pubescent male voices. Consider the language. Soprano is Latin and ends in “o.” Even in 2016, even when discussing female roles through centuries of opera and the highest voices in our vocal ensembles across the world, women are given the title of “boy.”
Cuts In UK Museum Funding Threaten Regional Museums Most
“As cultural heritage becomes one of the softest targets for financial brutalism, Derby’s three museums – Silk Mill, Derby Museum and Art Gallery and Pickford’s House – may be forced to reduce their opening hours or close altogether if the council withdraws funding to the trust that runs them. If you think this does not matter much – if you safely assume that all Britain’s real masterpieces are in places like the British Museum and that regional galleries are also-rans – think again.”
What Makes Alejandro Aravena’s Buildings Cool
Aravena practices what he calls “incremental design.” With this approach, he and the designers at Elemental, his studio, build housing structures that are deliberately unfinished.
Seven Months After Losing His Leg, Actor Takes Off On 15-City Tour
“From the beginning, the doctors and nurses agreed that this feat seemed a near-impossibility. There was just not enough time. Not enough time between the Center City hit and run that took [Michael] Toner’s left leg in June and the role awaiting him: a starring spot in the Walnut’s three-week, 15-city tour of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten.”
Why Do Actors Want To Act? Anthony Hopkins Explains
“Did I ever want to quit? Yes, several times. Every day I think about quitting, but they come and offer me a job, and I say okay, because I’m an actor. We are mad. All actors want to be loved – I think that’s something in all actors. We want more, more, more.”
Why The Young Helen Mirren Was Perfect For Playing A Rock Star (It Wasn’t Because She Could Sing)
David Hare, on his 1975 play Teeth ‘n’ Smiles: “Helen’s ways of not listening to direction were far more sophisticated than those of anyone I had previously encountered. Once she received me naked for a notes session in her dressing room. She discarded the Evening Standard, which had briefly obscured her, clearly with the aim of putting me off my stride. She succeeded.”
Why Sad Music Doesn’t Make Us Feel Worse
When given the choice, why wouldn’t people listen to uplifting music instead of songs that could depress them?
Tribes Everywhere In The World Wear Beads From This Little Czech Town
“Venture up the Amazon or into a Masai Mara village in Kenya, explore a jungle bazaar in southern India or even a roadside shop in Arizona selling Navajo knockoffs, and the chances are excellent that most of the beads you will see were produced in this unlikely mountain village a stone’s throw from the Polish frontier and a short drive to Germany.”
Why Big Media Companies Should Be Worried About Netflix
“What if Netflix is the Amazon of the entertainment industry — the embodiment of a slow, expensive, high-risk effort to consume the entirety of your business?”
Al Jazeera America Is Shutting Down
“[Network] brass said the channel’s business model was ‘no longer sustainable'” and that the decision “was not a reflection of the quality of their work. Employees also were told that Al Jazeera will pursue a new global online strategy online with content delivered from the U.S. later this year.”
Why Al Jazeera America Was Destined to Fail
“But if Al Jazeera America’s brand was a handicap, its philosophy was a death sentence. The channel was founded on the utterly ill-conceived idea that Americans were starving for sober, ‘unbiased’ hard news coverage. In other words, it made the mistake of offering viewers the programming they claimed to want, instead of the programming that all available evidence suggests they actually enjoy.”
Brian Bedford, 80, Stage Actor Who Thrilled In The Classics
“[He] trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, alongside such classmates as Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates and Albert Finney. He never attained the cinematic stardom of those three, but he arguably exceeding their achievements by leaps and bounds in the theatre, an art to which he devoted the lion’s share of his efforts” – most notably at Canada’s Stratford Festival, where he spend four decades playing everyone from Macbeth to Tartuffe to Trigorin to Lady Bracknell.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.13.16
Arts funding and peer review
At The Scotsman, Euan McColm writes about the controversy surrounding Creative Scotland’s grant to artist Ellie Harrison, who will live in Glasgow for a year without leaving, in order to personally document what is known in social science as the ‘Glasgow effect’ … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2016-01-13
Reasons for moving
One of the challenges of connecting aesthetics and “beauty” to arts organizations is that aesthetics and reason work on different terms. We all know the “reasons” to do things as a cultural manager … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2016-01-13
The Tales They Tell
Big Dance Theater and Noche Flamenca dissect and reconnect narratives. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-01-13
My world, and welcome to it
On Tuesday afternoon I was sitting in the auditorium of Chicago’s Court Theatre, watching Charlie Newell reblock the final scene of his production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which opens there on Saturday. Midway through… … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-01-13
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An Unconventional Chilean Has Won This Year’s Pritzker Prize
“Compared with those so-called “starchitects,” and their principally aesthetic set of concerns, Alejandro Aravena couldn’t be geographically or conceptually farther away: He is young, at 48; and almost all of his projects are in his native Chile. And, he is best-known for scrappy but effective social-housing projects, in which he leaves room for residents to invest their own work and resources to alter his designs.”
Christopher Hawthorne Chats With Pritzker Winner Alejandro Aravena
“I think that we architects too much tend to create exhibitions where the problems we are dealing with only interest other architects. The jargon that we use and the words that we use, nobody understands except other architects. So I wanted the starting point to be far away from architecture, in problems and challenges that every single citizen would like to see improved.”
Actor David Margulies Dead At 78
“[He was] a versatile character actor who performed in scores of supporting stage, film and television roles but was most conspicuous as the common-sense mayor in Ghostbusters and as Tony Soprano’s sleazy lawyer.”
Britain’s Strapped Regional Museums Are Starting To Charge Admission
“More than one in 10 museums intend to introduce entry charges this year, in moves that underline the vulnerability of cultural organisations to cuts in local authority funding. Since 2010, when the government embarked on widespread cuts as part of its efforts to reduce the deficit, some 44 museums have closed.”
Big Changes Coming To Philly’s Wilma Theater
“In an announcement late Monday, the Wilma Theater announced … a makeover, a name change, a fund-raising campaign, and the establishment of a permanent company.”
Choreographer Mats Ek: Rumors Of My Complete Withdrawal From Dance Are Exaggerated
Reports all over European media last week said that Ek, 70, would both stop creating new dances and withdraw rights to perform all his previous works. He says that the hiatus is only temporary.
Canada Crowdsourced The Design For A Logo For The Country’s 150th Birthday. Canada’s Designers Are Unhappy
“Design student Ariana Cuvin won the contest and the $3,500 prize, but her technicolor take on the maple leaf has its share of detractors, including Stuart Ash, who designed the maple leaf seen on Canada’s flag. Maybe because it looks like something made for the Winter Olympics?”
New York City Opera Reorganization Plan Gets Final Approval
“The group taking over the company, NYCO Renaissance, hopes to use the City Opera name by next week, when it plans to present Puccini’s Tosca on Jan. 20-24 at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. … The plan calls for putting on annual seasons.”
Picasso Bust At Center Of Custody Battle Between Gagosian And Qatar Royal Family
“The high-powered art dealer Larry Gagosian says he bought it. The royal family of Qatar says it bought the sculpture, too. And now they are facing off in court over who owns Picasso’s important plaster bust of his muse (and mistress) Marie-Thérèse Walter, a star of the Museum of Modern Art’s popular ‘Picasso Sculpture’ show.”