“The answer is complicated. Interviews with theater patrons, artists and leaders point to a battery of reasons why blacks have been staying away from shows that should draw them, including marketing opportunities missed, a perceived lack of welcome and the economy. All of these things have conspired to keep African-Americans away from the unprecedented surge of black writing, acting and directing talent that has been showcased at venues large and small in recent months.”
Tag: 04.12.09
A Focused Gloom – Theatre’s New Day
”Mid-size theaters are really feeling the pinch, and they’re so important to the ecology of new-play development. `Smaller theaters are used to operating in a super-scrappy way. Flagship institutions will downsize a bit, but they’ll be OK. People have to re-evaluate using resources in the smartest way and ask how much of the budget goes to making art vs. maintaining the institution.”
Peter Zumthor Wins Pritzker Prize
“He is not a celebrity architect — not one of the names that show up on short lists for museums and concert hall projects or known outside of architecture circles. He hasn’t designed many buildings; the one he’s best known for is a thermal spa in an Alpine commune. And he has toiled in relative obscurity for the last 30 years in a remote village in the Swiss mountains, out of the limelight and away from the crowd.”
Summing Up LA’s Esa-Pekka Salonen Years
“Salonen has put a spring in L.A.’s step that is likely to last. He has changed us meaningfully, and we have changed him meaningfully. A catalyst in the classic sense, he came to California as a foreign agent — a European Modernist from a country with one of the world’s most homogenous populations dropped down on Tinseltown, one of the most diverse places anywhere. People magazine thought him one of the 50 most beautiful people on the planet, but he resisted cheap celebrity. Instead, he made classical music sexy — and very important. But first he had to find himself.”
London’s Art-Squatting Culture
“Over the past few years an ‘art squat’ subculture has been quietly growing in the UK to include not just opportunists like Ed, but creative and ambitious groups for whom the decision to squat – for working or living or both – comes as much from an idealistic, DIY ethos as it does from financial expediency.”
The Success Gurus – Is It All Poppycock?
“At their most ambitious, these books purport to elevate the study of excellence to a science, its nuggets culled from exhaustive research and refined by painstaking analysis. Jim Collins, coauthor of Built to Last and author of Good to Great, likens what he does to physics. Readers of his books, he writes, have their eyes opened to the ‘immutable laws of organized human performance.’ But a few consultants and business school professors have begun to argue that much of this literature is, in fact, useless.”
Merce Cunningham At 90
“He was for many years a phenomenal dancer and has committed his whole career to virtuoso technical accomplishment. I sometimes think he was America’s Nijinsky, without the madness. Like Nijinsky he had an astounding jump, an extraordinary neck, an animal intensity, an actor’s changefulness. Like Nijinsky he does not mind offending his audience.”
Another Suicide Adds To The Plath/Hughes Saga
In the thriving community of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes scholars, the suicide of their 47-year-old son has been deeply felt through the prism of his parents’ writings. His birth was vividly chronicled in Ms. Plath’s journals. He was “the baby in the barn” in “Nick and the Candlestick,” from Ms. Plath’s best-known collection, “Ariel,” written in her final months.