Promising BC Choreographer, Saying He Can’t Get Funding, Quits Vancouver For New York

Joshua Beamish, now 24, founded his own company at age 17; the troupe has since performed in Toronto, Montreal and New York and represented Canada at the Shanghai World Expo. Yet Beamish says he has received only minimal funding from the BC Arts Council because it doesn’t see him as having a sufficient track record.

Toronto Passes Tax Credit To Lure Major Theatre From Chicago, Elsewhere

“In an effort to lure prestigious, big-budget productions such as these away from cities like Toronto to Chicago – and, particularly, the employment, tourism and hundreds of millions of dollars in economic spinoffs they bring – Illinois’s new Live Theater Production Tax Credit will offer a tax rebate up to $2-million (U.S.) for commercial producers of “pre-Broadway and long-run shows” beginning in July.”

End Of The TV-Industrial Complex?

“The mass media which has been used to sell mass products to the mass market no longer captures a mass audience. Instead, digital technology, the internet and social media have shattered the media and its audience into tens of thousands of specialised niches. Seth Godin’s argument is built on his belief that people do not naturally conform to the ideal of normality sold to us by the advertising industry, and free of its coercive influence millions of us will choose our own weird ways of living and working instead.”

New Appetite For Difficult New Music?

When Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann was a student 25 years ago, “if you had more than 30 people at a concert it was a failure because it was populist crap”. Today, there are growing signs that contemporary classical music is shrugging off its elitist reputation, with audiences flocking to work previously regarded as austere and impenetrable.