In 2014, he was a genuine ballet celebrity, admired enough to become the first American ever invited to become a principal at the Bolshoi Ballet. Then he suffered a complex ankle injury, and a year later, he was ready to give up dancing entirely. (And he was already getting offers to direct companies.) But ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie convinced him not to abandon the stage just yet. Candice Thompson has the story of how Hallberg struggled through a surprisingly difficult recovery, reworked his technique and returned to performing.
Meet Christopher Wheeldon’s Right-Hand Man
“While still in the corps of New York City Ballet, Jason Fowler was drawn to the role of répétiteur. … So it comes as little surprise that 20 years later, Fowler is a primary stager of Christopher Wheeldon’s ballets around the globe.”
Claim: On The West Coast Women Are Getting More Visibility In Opera
“First and foremost, if you ask little girls what a scientist looks like, it’s Einstein. If you ask adults what does a composer look like, they would think of men – like Mozart. And if you look in the seasons of the major orchestras and opera houses, it’s not some big secret. There is music by women composers, but you have to ask the programmers, the people hiring, the commissioners: Why aren’t they seeking out more women? I don’t know why.”
Dense American Cities Are Becoming Denser. Less Dense Cities Are Becoming Less Dense
There’s a clear pattern in which metro areas are becoming more urban: Dense metros are getting denser. Meanwhile, sprawling metro areas are spreading out further. It’s another example of a polarized America, of places becoming more unlike each other: not only with respect to income inequality and politics, but also with growth patterns.
How A Colorado Arts Center Collapsed, As Warnings Were Ignored Or Deflected
Beginning two years ago, not long after a new executive director arrived, staffers and some board members at the Glenwood Springs Center for the Arts began discovering serious financial shenanigans: multiple bank accounts, paid-for items that had never been ordered or delivered, paychecks bouncing. The executive director kept saying things were under control; city officials, repeatedly warned, insisted they could do nothing. Now the exec is gone, the Center is broke and may close, and the police are involved. How did it get to this point? Ryan Summerlin reports.
Happiness Is All About Control
“Do you want to win that tennis match? It is outside of your control. But to play the best game you can is under your control. Do you want your partner to love you? It is outside of your control. But there are plenty of ways you can choose to show your love to your partner – and that is under your control. Do you want a particular political party to win the election? It is outside of your control (unless you’re Vladimir Putin!) But you can choose to engage in political activism, and you can vote.”
‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’ Was Not An Instant Classic
“Fifty years after the book’s publication, it may be tempting to believe its success was as inevitable as the fate of the Buendía family at the story’s center.” It wasn’t – it had many detractors in its first years, including some who dismissed it as traditionalist and anachronistic.
Why The ‘Conceptual Penis’ Hoax Is Pretty Much A Flop
Philosopher Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay clearly hoped that their fake gender-studies paper, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” would go down in history as an Alan Sokal-style triumph. Phil Torres explains why their hoax proves a lot less than they’d like to think it does (and proves one thing they’d probably rather it didn’t).
How Two Guys Built A Successful Opera Festival From Scratch In A London Park
“The essence, I think, is as little bullshit as possible – an emotional approach but with real seriousness. We agree that the audience comes first and that you carry them with you rather than forcing things down their throats.” Reporter George Hall talks to Michael Volpe and James Clutton about Opera Holland Park, which puts on up to half a dozen productions every summer.
Why TV Revivals Are Everywhere Now
“It has become glaringly obvious that mainstream TV is awash in reboots, remakes and revivals. The reasons for this trend are many and complex. It’s not that everybody in the TV racket has run out of ideas. There is a lot of new and original TV being made. One reason is simply business – in a time of so much TV, a familiar title and concept will get more attention than an entirely new story.”
The Mesmerizing Effect Of Haruki Murakami On Readers
“At this late stage — Murakami is 68 — critical reception has ceased to matter to Murakami’s international audience. In Japan his books are greeted with Harry Potter–like rabidity, and in the U.S. initial print runs are in the hundreds of thousands. Cribbing a remark John Irving once made to him in an interview, Murakami has compared his readers to heroin addicts, and that may be one reason why he’s consistently delivered an ever-purer-grade product. A Nobel Prize has long been thought to be looming, especially by British bookies. Few of his skeptics would deny that his early work, his self-declared project of importing Western tropes and styles to treat life in Japan and his reckoning with Japan’s history, put him in that hazily defined league. A cynic might say: After Dylan, all is permitted.”
The Enduring Allure Of Utopian Visions
Utopian visions are powerful precisely because, being nowhere, they aren’t constrained by present reality but rather point the way to a desirable future. “Utopia’s ‘nowhereness’ incites the search for it. Utopia describes a state of impossible perfection which nevertheless is in some genuine sense not beyond the reach of humanity. It is here if not now.”
How To Keep A Choreographer Alive? The Dancers
Merce Cunningham might be gone, but his work lives through his dancers. “It’s hard to overstate the brilliance of the dancers — Dylan Crossman, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, Melissa Toogood — who catapult Cunningham’s spirit into the present more than any tangible artifact possibly can. Their movement lives on a precipice, reads like a succession of narrow escapes: almost collapsing, almost colliding. Yet it springs from an unshakeable foundation, from knowing the rules deeply enough to transcend them.”
Theatre, Race, And The Albee Estate – Whose Wishes Should Rule?
News broke last week that Edward Albee’s estate had denied permission for the casting of a black actor as Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, reigniting yet again the debates on non-traditional casting. Alexis Soloski looks at the good-faith issues in the debate: “Part of the difficulty has to do with whether we perceive theater as a collaborative form in which a play is made new each time a director and actors put it on, or whether plays exist as blueprints for a single ideal staging that each production will realize to greater and lesser extent.”
Agnes Gund At 79: Thoughts On Today’s Art World
“I think the philanthropy will go up in that more people will see artists as part of a fabric of solving problems, or of addressing a problem. Before this interview, you asked me about what I was doing selling a painting [Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece], and it was because I’m really interested in getting money through that method that can be used for solving problems through art. I think that now artists are really going to come to the fore when it comes to political and social causes. I think art can make a difference. I think art can help.”
New York Gets Its First Museum Devoted To Contemporary Islamic Art
The Institute of Arab and Islamic Art opened earlier this month in Soho; “[it] has a gallery space and bookstore, and it aspires to organize quarterly exhibitions, travelling shows, artist residencies, and publications.” Vivek Gupta has a first look.
NEH Chairman Resigns
“William D. Adams, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be stepping down effective Tuesday, the endowment announced, ending a three-year tenure. Mr. Adams cited ‘personal reasons,’ as well as the Trump administration’s decision to appoint a new liaison to the endowment.”
Ratmansky To Reconstruct Petipa’s Original Version Of ‘Harlequinade’
“One of the 21st century’s greatest choreographers is taking another drink from the fount of classical ballet: Alexei Ratmansky plans to create a new Harlequinade next year for American Ballet Theater, a reconstruction of Marius Petipa’s ballet Les Millions d’Arlequin.”
Obie Awards Spread The Love Among (Almost) All The Tonys’ Best Play Nominees
Of the four nominees for the Tony Award for best new play, three had Off-Broadway runs, and each of them was honored by the Obie judges.
Dina Merrill, 93, Actress, Heiress, Philanthropist
“[She was] an actress whose aristocratic poise and willowy good looks earned her many film and TV roles as well-bred society women – parts that reflected her own life as a scion of two of America’s richest families.”
Can Protest Art Really Make Any Difference?
“Protest art is not going to stop a bullet, but it does stir the mind and the heart. Artists want to create something pleasing but that also gets a rise out of people. A still life is not going to make you change your voting pattern.” And the artists who create this kind of art often find the ways and the means to keep working, despite the dire circumstances they may find themselves in.
What Happened When An Artist Asked An AI To Name New Colors Of Paint
“The neural net has no concept of color space, and no way to see human-color perception,” she says. Instead, it processed colors by their RGB values: the combination of red, green, and blue that come together in each hue. “It’s really seeing [colors] not as a number at a time, but as a digit at a time. I think that’s why the neural net had a lot of trouble getting the colors right, why it’s naming pinks when there aren’t any pinks, or gray when it’s not gray.”
Mary Shelley Predicted The Future With ‘Frankenstein’ – And She Was Utterly Wrong, But That’s Not The Point
Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow: “The fact that a story captures the public imagination doesn’t mean that it will come true in the future, but it tells you something about the present. You learn something about the world when a vision of the future becomes a subject of controversy or delight.”
What Does A Composer Do After An Opera Premieres?
In this case, he has to bring himself back down to earth – and work. “No matter how well things turned out (or at least appeared to), it’s important for me not to believe my own ‘hype.’ What I’m really left with, in the end, is an opportunity.”
Alex Ross: A Tale Of Two (New German) Concert Halls
“Even if a mediocre hall had resulted, the avoidance of the usual cultural-political imbroglio would have been newsworthy. But Boulez Saal is a masterpiece of its kind. It consists of two elliptical-shaped seating areas, one on the ground level and one suspended above, each tilted on a different axis. The floor of the upper ellipse also curves up and down, giving the hall an unfixed, fluctuating profile. As in Disney Hall, bright wood tones—Douglas fir, cedar, and red oak—predominate. The capacity is six hundred and eighty-two. Listeners are never more than fifty feet from the musicians, who are often placed at the center of the auditorium. Those in the front row could turn pages, if asked. In all, the atmosphere is convivial and unshowy, despite the flamboyance of Gehry’s swooping lines.”