“Being on the road a lot, going across the country every two years to so many different places makes us unique in that there is a real kind of rugged quality – and I mean that in the best possible sense. … [My] dancers here deliver first-class performances in sometimes less-than-ideal conditions, and that’s something that makes me proud.”
Tag: 02.09.12
A Family Affair: Georgia’s National Folk Dance Troupe
“Founded nearly 70 years ago by the husband and wife team of Iliko Sukhishvili and Nino Ramishvili and initially named the Georgian State Dance Company, the troupe” – currently called the Georgian National Ballet and not to be confused with Nina Ananiashvili’s State Ballet of Georgia – “has travelled from the back offices of suspicious state and party officials in 1945 to some of the greatest stages in the world.”
Karma Bites: Mikhailovsky Ballet’s First Big Plans For Stars Poached From Bolshoi Get Blocked By ABT
“The Mikhailovsky Theater of St. Petersburg, Russia, scored a coup last fall by luring two of ballet’s biggest stars” – Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev – “from the Bolshoi, and it was to have brought them to the United States this summer for a run of shows at Lincoln Center. But those plans have been scrapped … because American Ballet Theater exercised a no-compete clause involving those very same dancers.”
James Joyce Children’s Story Published For First Time
“The Cats of Copenhagenis a ‘younger twin sister’ to his published children’s story The Cat and the Devil, which told of how the devil built a bridge over a French river in one night.” Both stories originated as letters from Joyce to his grandson.
Huntington’s New Director Of Art Collections Talks A Lot About Sex
Kevin Salatino, who has worked on the staffs of LACMA and the Getty and is currently director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, will be the next director of art collections at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. Among Salatino’s claims to fame: of all his (very popular) lectures and gallery talks, only one has not referred to sex in the title.
Opposition To Amazon Mounts Among Booksellers
“The cold war between north American booksellers and Amazon has hotted up this week, with the booksellers joining together to announce that they will not be selling any of the titles published by the online retailer.”
Why Is It Taking So Long For Women Composers To Be Heard?
“For some reason, it’s taking a lot longer than in literature and the visual arts to reach equilibrium. It was deemed (just about) acceptable by the 19th century for female writers to be published, yet it’s only in the last couple of decades that female composers have really emerged, blinking, out of their garrets and into publishing houses and record label offices; so, without a little helping hand, there might be a long way to go yet. So wherefore the imbalance?”
Pop Art – Just An Expensive Way Not To Think?
“When, then, did pop art become mind candy, bubblegum, an uncritical adoration of bright lights and synthetic colours? Probably when money got involved, and Warhol was shot, never again to be as brave as he was in the 60s, or when Jeff Koons gave Reaganomics its art, or when Damien Hirst made his tenth million. Who knows? The moment when pop art sank from radical criticism to bland adulation is impossible to pinpoint.”
Canadian Movie Box Office Down Slightly In 2011
“Gross box-office revenue in Canada for the year totalled $1.001-billion, a 3 per cent decline from 2010. Canadian films accounted for about 3 per cent of that, grossing $28.3-million in total, down 16 per cent from the $33.5-million tallied in 2010.”
Your Brain: Jolted Into Remembering
“Researchers have found that sending an electrical jolt to a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory improved people’s ability to learn — and remember — their way across an unfamiliar landscape.”