“The recipients include the Alliance for the Arts, which will use the money to help create Web applications for the city’s cultural industry; The Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island, which wants to repurpose the North Shore waterfront as a creative sector incubator; and the Institute for Urban Design, to help launch Urban Design Week.”
Tag: 10.14.09
NY City Ballet, Joyce Theater Win Rockefeller Fdn. Grants
“City Ballet will use its grant to commission new ballets for a set designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava; the Joyce Theater Foundation will put its money toward residencies to support projects that combine theater and dance.”
New Digital Publisher For Old Books By Famed Writers
“Sixteen months after stepping down as president and chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, Jane Friedman has formed a new company that will republish old titles by big-name authors including William Styron, Iris Murdoch and Pat Conroy in electronic form.”
Protests Against Hearing Actor In Deaf Role Off-Broadway
A stage adaptation of the novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter begins and ends with speeches by a deaf-mute character – making it difficult for a deaf actor to perform the role. As the play arrives in New York, deaf actors are arguing that a “hearing actor playing a deaf character is tantamount to putting a white actor in blackface.”
Unfinished Miami Arts Ctr. Loses $2M In Funding
The South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center “squats on Southwest 211th Street in mid-construction with missing glass panels – more than two years after it was to open.” The county commission diverted the money from the complex’s operating budget: “Since there are no shows going on in the center, it doesn’t need the $2 million.”
Just What The World Needs: An Asian Eurovision Song Contest
“Speaking in Beijing, [Vladimir] Putin suggested the new song contest should be set up in the incongruous framework of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a six-nation defence bloc [made up of Russia, China and four formerly Soviet ‘-stans’] that is more accustomed to conducting joint military exercises than giving each others’ crooners nul points.”
The Real Reason Dallas’s New Opera House Has Only 2,200 Seats
The Winspear’s capacity is only two-thirds that of its predecessor, Fair Park Music Hall. Sure, Foster + Partners wanted to enhance sightlines and acoustics, but there’s another factor at work. Said lead project architect Spencer de Grey, “People want wider seats, as basically they have bigger bottoms.”
Can Music Subscriptions Save The Music Industry?
“As CD sales continue to plummet, and the music industry searches for a profitable future, entrepreneurs with various approaches say they believe they can finally make music subscriptions work.”
Artists Protest Proposed Milwaukee Arts Funding Cuts
“The budget would cut Arts Board funding by nearly 75%, because slicing city funding from $160,000 to $50,000 would also lead to the loss of a matching $25,000 state grant. That’s a tiny fraction of the $1.45 billion city budget, noted Christine Harris, of the Cultural Alliance of Greater Milwaukee.”
Milwaukee’s Skylight Opera Rehires Artistic Director
“Bill Theisen, whose dismissal for fiscal reasons launched the Skylight Opera Theatre’s summer of offstage drama, is back as the theater’s artistic director.”