Dance superstar (and Cuban hero) Carlos Acosta, on the crowds the company drew: “Can you imagine? People are concentrating. And it’s ballet … ballet! It’s not a world cup, it’s ballet.” Another dancer speaks amazedly of strangers cheering her on the street: “‘Welcome Royal Ballet,’ people shout. ‘Welcome to Cuba.'”
Tag: 08.09.09
Bad-Boy Choreographer Back From The Brink: Michael Clark
“At one stage, in the mid-90s, he disappeared so completely that rumours swept around London that he had died, perhaps of Aids, perhaps of drugs.” It turned out that he was holed up in his mother’s house, battling addiction and demons. Clark “came back in the early Noughties … [and from] 2005-7 he was artistic associate at the Barbican and developed three new Stravinsky ballets.” Now he’s back at Edinburgh after 21 years.
Anna Netrebko Pulls Out Of Met’s New Traviata
The Russian soprano, one of the Met’s biggest box-office draws, “will not sing Violetta in New York during the 2010-2011 season.” The much anticipated new staging “was to be a version of the Willy Decker production the soprano did at Salzburg in 2005,” presumably imported by the Met for her sake. Netrebko said she has “a concern that she might not be as effective in the staging as she was in the well-known DVD release.”
Plagiarism Scandal Rocks Prison News Poetry Page
“The prisoners’ newspaper Inside Time has introduced strict checks on its poetry page because some contributors had copied out well-known poems and submitted them under their own names. In one case an inmate stole work by Robert Frost, the American poet, and another lifted song lyrics from James Brown, the soul and funk singer who died in 2006.” Poems compete for a monthly £25 prize.
Rule 1 Of Public Art: People Will Climb On It
“Once sleekly sculptural,” architect Ben Van Berkel’s Millennium Park pavilion “now resembles a beaten-up jungle gym.” Zaha Hadid’s pavilion is also showing wear and tear. “It’s easy to point fingers at Van Berkel and Hadid for creating dazzling pieces of sculpture that failed to anticipate how people would behave. Yet it is also true that star architects need tough clients to say no, when they come up with designs that are beautiful but impractical.”
Berlin Hotel Asks Artists To Pay In Art (No Locals, Please)
“A five-star hotel in Berlin has opened its doors to cash-strapped artists, asking them to pay for bed and board not with money but with a work of art. The offer from the Hotel Marienbad in Auguststrasse is open to painters, sculptors or conceptual artists willing to ‘subject the hotel to permanent change’ with their efforts.” The bad news: They do pick and choose their guests from a voluminous waiting list.
Why Sitting Down To Read Isn’t So Easy Anymore (Tweet!)
“We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. … In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted.”
Tv Networks Work To Reinvent Their Formula
“Profits are down. Programming is wildly uneven. Grappling with change, the TV industry is rewriting the rules it has played by for half a century, and viewers are already seeing the fruits of those changes.”
Show Biz Immune To Bad Economy? Don’t Believe It!
It’s a myth. “It remains a mystery how Broadway glommed onto the movie truism about the industry being immune to the economy’s woes. During recent recessions, Broadway has suffered, as evidenced by playing weeks — i.e., the number of shows multiplied by their weeks in performance, always a better indicator of economic health than inflation-jiggered B.O.”
Donors Step Forward To Help Save LA County Museum ‘s Film Program
“If people didn’t complain, we’d be in real trouble — it would mean people don’t value film at the museum. The stir … has already resulted in calls from people who can lend a hand.”