“Culturally, Britain has always preferred, musically speaking, to trawl the back catalogue (Oliver! again, anyone?), than to push the form forward. How wonderful it would be if a competition could be devised that shone the spotlight on up-and-coming composers and lyricists, so that the material is a fresh as the talent singing it.”
Tag: 04.19.09
Why Should We Care About Nature?
“Few people need convincing that the destruction of rain forests, the mass extinction of species and the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland would all be very bad things. Do we really need to list the reasons? We do. After all, in many regards our species has already kissed nature goodbye, and we are better off for it.”
A Different Kind Of Money Mess At Texas Ballet Theater
The six-year-old Dallas/Fort Worth company has faced lots of financial trouble lately, though its board chair now says, “We have turned this ship around.” But serious questions have arisen about some of TBT’s past business practices, such as paying almost $700,000 to two board members and making a loan to artistic director Ben Stevenson for a down payment on a house.
Louisville’s Arts Orgs Face Down The Recession
“Approaches once considered sacrosanct, realities thought etched in concrete, are giving way to a host of novel strategies. Some are based on cutting back; others are grounded in giving patrons and contributors new reasons to attend and invest.” A look at the state of the city’s seven principal arts institutions.
J. G. Ballard, Science Fiction’s Bard Of Apocalypse, 78
“Pinteresque, Dickensian, Shakespearean. Not many writers are so distinctive and influential that their name becomes an adjective in its own right. J. G. Ballard, who died yesterday morning after a long battle with cancer at the age of 79 [sic], was one of them.” Among his prominent works are Empire of the Sun, High Rise, Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition.
The Thoreau You Didn’t Learn About In School
“It’s time to pack the old Thoreau – austere, high-minded, solitary – in mothballs and break out the new. This new model … is a wisecracking, subversive, entrepreneurial party boy, as likely to dance a jig and break into song as preach at you.”
After The Nightmare Comes True
Liu Yan was one of China’s very best classical dancers, and she had been given the only solo dance spot at the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Olympics. Just two weeks before the performance of a lifetime, she suffered a freak accident in rehearsal, with injuries that have left her paralyzed from the waist down.
Making Art ‘Across Barriers Few Could Imagine’
“Judith Scott couldn’t hear or speak, yet she found a language with which to describe her inner world. Hawkins Bolden couldn’t see, yet his statues stare at you with haunted eyes. And both Royal Robertson and Ike Morgan, isolated by mental illness, communicated through paintings what they couldn’t express any other way.”
Recovering Yeats The Playwright
A great poet? Sure, but “what Yeats really wanted to do was write plays.” Says Irish Rep director Charlotte Moore, “Most people have never seen a play by Yeats. And they are quite hard to do. His language is difficult, more difficult than Shakespeare. But the language is also beautiful. Every time through I hear something new.”
The Rapper Of Suburbia
“Whether they talk about it or not, plenty of rappers are from the suburbs, but not one has created an aesthetic around it until [Asher] Roth. […] He’s also facing a very long white shadow. Has the archetype of the white rapper mapped out by Eminem, the one-man category killer, left any room for Asher Roth?”