Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ career is rolling at high speed. Last year she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama for ‘Topdog/Underdog.’ On May 6, Random House will publish her first novel, ‘Getting Mother’s Body,’ about a family’s quest to dig up the jewelry supposedly buried in the grave of one of its members. The first printing is 100,000 copies.” And her new play? Her new play has a name that ensures no mainstream paper will ever publish the title.
Tag: 03.16.03
The Making Of John Adams
Composer John Adams, at 56, “is now old enough that the major works of his youth and early maturity are coming into focus as bright, certain lights from a confused and confusing time.” Lincoln Center is showcasing Adams with a festival – its first devoted to a living composer. “There will be concerts, films and ballets in four auditoriums as well as the first New York performances of Mr. Adams’s most recent dramatic score, the ebullient Christmas opera-oratorio ‘El Niño,’ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Forget about Mostly Mozart: this is Absolutely and Adamantly Adams. The festival should help listeners recognize what makes Mr. Adams’s music so special — and what made it so special right from the first.”
Real Dance On Virtual Music
Often live music is a preferable accompaniment for dance. But “most dance performances have no live accompaniment. For years, the not-for-profit dance industry has endured a battle between artistic ideals and financial practicality. The dance world has long been dealing with the same issues that were part of the recent Broadway strike. Budgets make recorded music a necessity.”
Chicago Symphony – Looking For Leadership
With American orchestras struggling to stay open and solve their finances, even big orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony are having to re-evaluate their positions. “Our moment of fiscal truth is fast approaching. There is a new labor contract to be negotiated next year, and many are expecting a dogfight. Whoever succeeds Henry Fogel as president and CEO of the CSO Association must satisfy the board’s mandate to trim costs while satisfying musicians that he or she is maintaining the CSO’s competitive edge among the Big Five U.S. orchestras. All this will place an unusually heavy burden on the CSO’s next top administrator.”
Next Year In Terra? Chicago Museum Embroiled In Turmoil Again
A few years ago trustees of Chicago’s Terra Museum, frustrated by what they perceived as the city’s lack of support, decided to move the m useum to New York. After a battle, a compromise settlement was reached in June 2001, “required that the Terra Foundation and a significant portion of the museum’s collection stay in the Chicago area for at least 50 years. It also called for the resignations of all board members and the installation of replacements last September.” But now Judith Terra, widow of museum founder Daniel Terra, “filed an appeal last month maintaining that some former board members were bullied into supporting a deal to settle the museum’s future.”
Virtually Yours – Shadow Over Broadway
Broadway’s making music again. But “most musicians employed by Broadway musicals thought the union settled too quickly, for too little. Producers felt demonized, and argue they weren’t trying to kill off live music on Broadway, even though Broadway tours in particular rely increasingly on virtual-orchestra ‘enhancement’ of increasingly tiny pit bands.” One thing’s sure – the virtual orchestra isn’t going away. “Ten years from now, they probably are going to be able to put us out of work.”
Singing Out Of Harlem
The Boys Choir of Harlem is an American success story. “The journey from church-basement dream to established institution with a $3.8 million annual budget is an astonishing achievement.Today there are 622 students, male and female (the Girls Choir of Harlem was founded in 1993). Each year, about 2,000 young people audition for about 150 places. All of the students take classes in music history, theory, voice, and an instrument, in addition to the full New York state-mandated curriculum; classes continue during tours – some teachers come along, some students keep up through the Internet. Ninety-eight percent of the graduates attend college. The academy has inspired similar schools in Chicago and Detroit.”
Dance In The Desert
Once again, Arizona State University’s dance program has been ranked in the top ten dance study programs in the US. “A student can concentrate in performance, choreography, dance education or what we call dance studies, which can be anything from ethnographic study of dance to a combination of dance and business.”
San Francisco’s New Asian Palace
This week the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco opens in a new home. “The building – the old Main Library in Civic Center – has been deftly restructured inside by Italian architect Gae Aulenti, famous for having transformed the 1900 Gare d’Orsay train station in Paris into the tremendously popular Musee d’Orsay. The overall cost will be $160.5 million, and it gives the Asian Art Museum the kind of prestige and stature to which it has aspired.”
Just What Is “Asian” Art Anyway?
“At its crudest, ‘Asia’ as a concept betokens the ‘orientalism’ that Edward Said famously redefined in terms of Western colonizers’ need to understand themselves by contrast with a mysterious – potentially dehumanized – other. The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has a collection deep and extensive enough to awaken glimmers of imagination for the complex material culture of Eastern societies across six millennia.”