Three years ago Scottish ballet was in disarray. The company was being moved forcibly from being a traditional company to going modern. Then Ashley Page came along. “The former Royal Ballet principal dancer and acclaimed postmodern choreographer took up the reins there just over three years ago. Since then, armed with the expertise gleaned over his 27 years with the Royal, and energy reserves worthy of Kazakhstan, he has not only created two full-length works for the company (Nutcracker and Cinderella, the latter of which he’s also taking south): he has turned it almost completely around.”
Tag: 03.12.06
The Cult Of Cool
we’ve wanted to be “cool” now for 50 years. “No other cultural phenomenon in the United States has lasted so long. None has determined so powerfully how we want to be thought of. And even the geekiest among us, the proudest and most combative of misfits, lepers with ulcerated noses forever pressed to the glass, have at one time or another allowed it to influence their decisions. It is that much an American standard.”
Micro-Niche TV Programming Finding An Audience Online
“In the last six months, major media companies have received much attention for starting to move their own programming online, whether downloads for video iPods or streaming programs that can be watched over high-speed Internet connections. Perhaps more interesting — and, arguably, more important — are the thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have very dedicated small audiences. It’s a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting.”
The Best Of The Not-Quites
The late 1960s and early ’70s were a period of major transition for Hollywood, and a large number of films which might have been hailed as classics in today’s watered-down movie landscape instead fell through the cracks. This week in LA, American Cinematheque is mounting a festival of films from the “New Hollywood” era that, for one reason or another, never quite made it into the filmmaking canon.
Inspired By… What, Exactly?
Every artist, actor, writer, and musician talks about it, but what is this mysterious thing called ‘inspiration’? “If you are a religious believer of any denomination you know, or at least you have words for, where your inspiration comes from, however mysterious it may seem… But for the more secular-minded there is not much language to talk about inspiration without beginning to sound a bit mystical, reliant on some powerful source or force that can’t quite be named but can’t quite be ignored.”
Seeing The Big Picture, And Showing It To The Rest Of Us
Gordon Parks, the photographer and filmmaker who died last week at 93, was a master at finding the inherent truth in any situation, and his photographs told stories far bigger than the events they captured. “In the end this could be the true source of Gordon Parks’ great appeal — his ability to find the universal significance in one person’s story, whether that of a boy in the barrios of Rio de Janeiro, or a gang leader from Harlem, and put that story in a form that the relentlessly mainstream middle class readers of Life could see and understand.”
Is Boston Ballet Back?
“With the world premiere Thursday of ‘Up and Down’ by Mark Morris, the Boston Ballet celebrates an important milestone in its relationship with the renowned choreographer — one that it could not have reached a few years ago, before artistic director Mikko Nissinen came to town.” Specifically, the company believes it has completed its comeback, and is again ready to rank with the top ballets in the country. The always-outspoken Morris appears to agree.
The Rise Of Physical Theater
Where does dance end and theater begin? And does it actually matter? John Rockwell has been sampling some of the UK’s wide-ranging dance scene recently, and “from an outsider’s perspective, it was surprising how ubiquitous ‘physical theater’ is in Britain today. The term means, in the most rudimentary terms, theatrical dance, or dance with implied theatrical elements, or theater expressed primarily through movement… But nearly all British choreographers seem to incorporate overt theatricality, sometimes so much so that they try to pretend that they aren’t doing dance anymore at all.”
Can Tijuana’s Slums Lure America Back From The Sprawl?
Mexico’s shantytowns might seem an unlikely inspiration for a high-statuts architect, but for one suburban California designer, the low-cost Tijuana communities born of necessity represent a possible antidote to Southern Cal’s plague of gated communities and endless sprawl. “It’s not that he romanticizes poverty: he recognizes the filth and clutter, the lack of light and air, that were the main targets of Modernism nearly a century ago. But by approaching Tijuana’s shantytowns with an open mind, he can extract a viable strategy for development that is rooted in local traditions.”
The Real Mozart
“Mozart has come not just to represent musical beauty but, in a way, to define it.” But what about in the composer’s own time? Certainly, many of the legends about poverty and despair have been overblown, but Mozart was a complicated figure in 18th-century Vienna, and his professional fortunes reflected that. Still, “the people in the streets never abandoned him.”