“A project to bring ballet to Birmingham’s suburbs is getting scores of the city’s teenagers pointing their toes. Professional dancers from Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB) are giving around 80 teenagers a crash course in dance, lighting, costume and set design.”
Tag: 08.18.10
Scandal – We’ve Gotta Have It
“Scandal has crucial functions to perform: If communities are enclaves of shared norms, then scandals are what consolidate a community. … We all have crucial roles to play. Scandal requires an audience: Not just any audience, but one that gets a little jolt from scenes of transgression and punishment.”
Are Computers Harming Our Eyesight?
“More people are showing up at eye appointments complaining of headaches, fatigue, blurred vision and neck pain–all symptoms of computer-vision syndrome (CVS), which affects some 90% of the people who spent three hours or more at day at a computer.”
Stephen Sondheim Is Not Amused at Series Based on His Life
“Everybody in the theater who’d heard about John Logan’s script for the new HBO series The Miraculous Year knew that the main character, a brilliant but self-destructive Broadway composer-lyricist named Terry Segal, was based on Stephen Sondheim. Everybody, that is, but the great man himself.”
San Fernando Valley Set to Open First Performing Arts Center (Like, Totally)
“The Valley Performing Arts Center at Cal State Northridge is about to fill a void in the San Fernando Valley, which heretofore has lacked a major hall for concerts, opera, dance and Broadway musicals. … The gala opening is Jan. 29, 2011, followed on Feb. 5 by the first regular performance.”
Dancing on Air, 200 Feet Up: Project Bandaloop
“The six performers climbed down ropes, and the rhythmic music blasted from speakers. While dangling sideways, several hundred feet in the air, they danced. They leaped across the skyscraper. They bounced off the glass, their arms and legs stretched out, almost doing jumping jacks in the air.”
How Ernst Lubitsch Loosened Up Hollywood
“What Lubitsch did, more than anything, was bring a sophisticated European sensibility to an American cinema that was essentially about Victorian values. … Here were films – dozens of them, both silent and with sound – that were all about flirtation, sex and sometimes love, but also biting and witty.”
“The Most Astonishing Place in Chicago”
The warehouse of Zap Props, the resource of choice for Chicago’s theater designers, is “more surprising than any skyscraper or monument, more overwhelming than any ballpark or body of water. … Because within this building, built in 1912 and resembling so many others, no less than everything is found.”
The Architecture of the Ordinary
Witold Rybczynski pays tribute to the design genius of our “vernacular landscape” – the garage, the ATM, the big-box store, the gas station, even the parking lot.
Google TV Worries Hollywood Execs
“The prospect of Google getting into television frightens many in Hollywood, who worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries.”