Directing the down-and-out Royal Shakespeare Company is called the toughest job in theatre. And Michael Boyd now has the job. Big changes are ahead he says. “At present, the RSC is ‘too big for anyone to run’ and ‘too big for people to identify us’. He presides over an antiquated corporate structure, with 30 governors, 12 of whom are on the board. It is imperative, according to at least one governor I spoke to, that the RSC reorganise itself structurally and that creative and commercial genius coincide. Arts Council support depends on the ability to generate income by other means. Boyd has taken this on board, telling me that he and Christopher Foy, the company’s managing director, will ‘work seamlessly together to try and close the cultural divide between art and management’.”
Tag: 04.13.03
Denver – More Interest In Arts Than Sports
A new study reports that in Denver “more people in the Denver area patronize the performing arts than professional sporting events, according to an unprecedented new study of attitudes and attendance patterns. It also shows that among the primary performing-arts disciplines, theater far outdraws dance, opera and the symphony.”
Iraq Museum Destroyed
Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad has been destroyed. “Once American troops entered Baghdad in sufficient force to topple Saddam Hussein’s government this week, it took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters. The full extent of the disaster that befell the museum came to light only today, as the frenzied looting that swept much of the capital over the previous three days began to ebb.”
Calls To Protect Iraqi Art
“Concerned archaeologists urged United States military leaders to take more forceful steps to protect Iraqi’s cultural treasures and to restore control of them to the local Department of Antiquities. For weeks before the war, archaeologists and other scholars had alerted military planners to the risks of combat, particularly postwar pillage of the country’s antiquities. These include 10,000 sites of ruins with such resonating names as Babylon, Nineveh, Nimrud and Ur.”
A New Music Label That Will Live On In Death
This month CRI, the recording company that has championed new music through more than 900 releases, is shutting down. Time for laments. But New World Records will take over CRI’s catalog and “digitize the master tapes of the complete CRI archive and keep each album available as a custom-made CD, burned to order and mailed to the buyer with the original liner notes. Not only that, New World is exploring the possibility of making CRI recordings available through digital downloads, as that technology becomes more viable. So what seems a simple act of one nonprofit’s salvaging another’s catalog could represent a bold step into the online future of recording.”
The Appeal Of Smaller Bites
“Some small and medium-size American troupes may be on to something artistically important. Without feeling it necessary to confine themselves to a standard repertory or to tailor all productions to opera-house proportions, they can present a rich mixture of one-act works, each a crowd pleaser in its own way.”
Dance As A Crutch (Or Is It The Other Way Around?)
Bill Shannon is a street and stage performer, sculptor and video artist, but he is widely recognized for his distinctive dance style. Known in the club-dance world as Crutchmaster, he uses his curved-bottomed crutches to extend his limbs in the way ballerinas use point shoes. The crutches enable him ‘to streamline methods of weight distribution’ and to make ‘level changes from floor work to standing.’ To describe what he calls the ‘Shannon technique,’ he uses terms taken from the worlds of skateboarding and the breakdancing of b-boys.”
When Ideas Overwhelm Art
Trickle-down festivalism, which is largely supported by institutions and foundations, is influencing artists and curators alike. It has generated a parallel art world inhabited foremost by curators who talk mostly to one another and look mostly at one another’s shows, always focusing on the same coterie of artists. The prevailing artistic strategy is to emphasize topical subject matter — the urban infrastructure, globalization, cultural identity — while relying on all-but-exhausted international styles, like Post-Minimal installation or Conceptual Art. The prevailing curatorial strategy is a big, catch-all idea about the present condition of life on earth approached with multidisciplinary intent. A result is the repeated substitution of good intentions for good art, unmanageable agendas for focus and shows that, between the art, the labels and the catalogs, are largely talk. For the most part, the viewer is left with next to nothing, other than a depressing hollowness.”
Your Show Of Shows – Does Anybody Care?
“All along the Broadway are shows about the miracle of shows, from “The Producers” (about a pair of feckless producers) to ’42nd Street’ (about some gutsy dancers), to the current revival of the classic musical ‘Gypsy’ (about vaudeville, stage mothers and the historical efficacy of gimmicks). While ‘Cabaret’ and ‘Chicago’ aren’t specifically about Broadway, they both celebrate the seedy glamour of song and dance. All this self-awareness does raise the question of whether the audience, a good percentage of which probably consists of tourists, are as entranced by show themes as show people are.”
The Dictator And The Opera
North Korean dictator Kim Jong II has written a book on opera. “You might assume the book is a socialist critique of La Traviata and Carmen. Unfortunately, it’s nothing so delicious, and isn’t even whacked-out enough to be fun. It’s just desperately prosaic and, for us, a creepy cautionary tale about what happens when someone whose favorite opera is titled ‘Sea of Blood’ (and whose favorite movie is Rocky III, according to another of his aesthetic tracts, ‘On the Art of the Cinema’) attempts to legislate the artistic process.”