Disney initially expects the 310-acre park – the company’s fifth – to draw at least 5.6 million visitors a year, one-third of them from the Chinese mainland. Attendance is expected to eventually reach 10 million annually. Disney head Michael Eisner: “This historic day brings with it the dawn of a new era in tourism for Hong Kong, and also marks a symbolic milestone in the partnership between Disney and China.”
Tag: 01.12.03
Bringing The University Into the Dance Studio
Dancers are often so busy working on their careers, they don’t get to university. After they retire, then what? A new program at Pacific Northwest Ballet brings the university in to dancers. The goal is to introduce dancers to college courses and help them slowly build university credit, be it a quarter at a time, for free. “What the class is designed to do is to give the students sort of a bridge between their life as dancers and their life as university students. They’re just protecting themselves in case they get hurt, or when they’re fortunate to retire. That’s a lot of life, after they retire.”
Sundance Festival Opens This Week
With the economy down, maybe it’s not such a good time for a film festival? Actually, hard times often make for great personal films, and that’s what the Sundance Festival is counting on when it opens this week. “Independent filmmaking is tough out there, and most of these films are works of creative passion, and are works that take a great deal of tenacity and, essentially, determination to get made. You see a lot of work that has a kind of idiosyncratic creativeness to it. That’s something that drives these works into existence, rather than saying they’re driven by commercial considerations.”
Why Is There So Little “American” Dance?
In the 40s, “Rodeo” took the dance world by storm. So what’s happened to dance with “American” themes? Some “observers might be puzzled that ballet repertories today do not have more works on American themes at a time when American companies and dancers are respected all over the world. Could it be that some dancers and dancegoers still secretly regard ballet as essentially foreign? For them, Americana may seem uncouth…”
Discovering Los Angeles – The New Avant Garde
While seemingly nobody was looking, Los Angeles has become fertile ground for cutting edge art. “Today, seemingly all of a sudden, theater, dance, music and strange hybrids thereof are cropping up all over the Los Angeles basin. Many of the attractions are well known at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and around the country, although their proliferation represents a decided plus for Southern California. What is really exciting, though, is the steady evolution of an arts sensibility distinctive to this part of the country.”
Getting A Handle On The Financial Choreography
Do dance company artistic directors need to know their ways around the balance sheets? Absolutely, says the new generation of AD’s. If not, you risk being under the thrall of the business side of the operation. “The infrastructure demands ballets that sell enough tickets to pay the salaries of the staff who sell the ballets. To break that cycle, an artistic director has to have a vision and a strategy. Otherwise, you’re trapped into doing 95 Romeo and Juliet’s to pay for one new work.”
Violent, Violenter, Violentest
A new genre of movie features extreme violence and gore. “The Big Disturbing Set-Piece Scene Of Violence has become its very own raison d’être, irrespective of its place in any supposed narrative order. It’s the one scene that will have them running for the exits, the one that will kick-start the controversy, and the one that will ultimately immortalise the movie. ‘We’ve reached a point where there is excessive pressure to show us what we haven’t seen before, with or without – but increasingly, without – dramatic or narrative support’.” What’s behind it?
The Right Sort Of Audience (How Absurd!)
National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner thanks the British government for its generous funding. But it’s time to stop asking artists to do the heavy lifting for social good, he writes. “There’s evidently a thing called the young audience and everybody accepts that it’s a good thing. And there’s also a white, middle class, middle-aged audience and it’s a very, very bad thing indeed. Until recently, the National Theatre’s audience was getting worse reviews than some of its shows. Then somebody noticed some kids in the house with studs through their noses, and the reviews looked up. We have to call a halt to this. There’s nothing inherently good about any particular audience. We mustn’t judge the success of an artistic enterprise by its ability to pull in an Officially Approved Crowd.”
Love Resigns From Dallas Theatre
Edith Love, credited with stabilizing the Dallas Theatre Center’s finances as the theatre’s managing director, has resigned. “Before the Theater Center hired Ms. Love, it faced a $1.75 million deficit. By the 1999-2000 season, the company was in the black. Though the recent economic slump has caused a drop in donations and cancellation of some productions, the Theater Center’s finances have remained stable as the annual budget has grown, from $3.9 million in 1996 to $5.5 million this year.”
Dallas Museum At 100
The Dallas Museum of Art is 100 years old. “The museum has grown enormously over the past century. From a tiny handful of paintings occupying one corner of a room in the Dallas Public Library, the collection has grown to 22,000 objects filling a building of 340,000 square feet.”