“The lyrical dancing style Fokine requires in his neo-Romantic vein is almost a foreign language to dancers bred to thrill audiences with their dazzling technical accomplishment, not to beguile the public by means of subtle evocation. The combination of traditionally masculine and feminine elements in the main role makes a good chunk of the current audience uneasy, while an even larger chunk has trouble believing that anything created nearly a century ago can have the force, the significance, and the power to persuade the emotions as do the products of the present.”
Tag: 10.31.04
Theatre Of Politics
“No doubt that may be the feeling of some people who believe theater should be uplifting and inspiring rather than critical and political. They may believe theaters should focus on uncontroversial classics by dead playwrights rather than rabble-rousing by decidedly live and lively ones. But in this election season, there are some who like their theater on the hot side.”
Your Flop Of Flops
“While a West End contract would once have come with a steady pay cheque, those job-secure days have long gone. London has never suffered from the same “smash or flop” psychosis that drives Broadway (where stories abound of actors celebrating first nights at fashionable restaurants, only to have their champagne glasses wrestled from their grasp by waiters just seconds after a duff review has appeared in the first edition of The New York Times), but the indications are that we are rapidly heading down the same road. With rare exceptions, shows today are often either enormous hits or ‘snigger-at-it-while-it-lasts’ shockers.”
Cleveland’s Arts Problem
“While the arts and cultural base clearly falls among Cleveland’s top three comparative advantages, we haven’t adequately embraced this area in our region’s economic strategy. Arts and culture have an enormous impact on our economy, and yet our region has one of the lowest rates of public support for this sector in the country.”
Dancing In Chicago
“Dance Chicago began 10 years ago to showcase about 40 local dance companies and foster new audiences for dance. Still based at the Athenaeum but featuring more than 200 Chicago troupes in every imaginable genre, from ballet to hip-hop, the festival could easily be known as Choreography Chicago.”
LRB Turns 25
“For the uninitiated, the best way of describing the London Review of Books, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this week, is that it is to words what Slow Food is to cooking.”
Power Play – Making Fun Of Vettriano
Scottish painter Jack Vettriano made this year’s list of “most powerful” people in the art world. But “Vettriano, a former miner whose popular paintings have earned record-breaking prices at auction in recent years, is given a sarcastically critical entry which begins by claiming the 53-year-old first made his living by ‘copying Old Masters’ and ends by noting that no major public gallery had so far chosen to invest in his work, ‘thank Heaven’.”
Voigt Out Of Another Strauss Production
Deborah Voigt was supposed to sing her first-ever Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier at Vancouver Opera this month. “The diva arrived a week late for rehearsals but everyone understood. A resident of Florida, she had just come through some terrifying hurricanes. What everyone did not understand was her unpreparedness. It soon became apparent that she was not ready to sing what could become one of the most important roles of her career. And so, her management announced that she would be withdrawing from the production, stating in a news release that she had stretched herself too thin, a singularly unfortunate turn of phrase considering that she had been released from a production earlier in the year by London’s Royal Opera, Covent Garden for being too fat.”
Begging For Art
“Tate Modern, one of the most popular art galleries in the world, fears for the future. Last week the Tate organisation was forced to beg 23 artists, including David Hockney and Damien Hirst, to donate works it can no longer afford. The Tate is hopelessly outgunned by big spending foreign rivals in the acquisition of important work… The Tate estimates that, given the cuts or freezing of its government funds year after year, and inflation in market prices of as much as 1,000 per cent, the organisation’s buying power is now about 5 per cent of what it was 20 years ago.”
Shostakovich Looking For Home
A home is being sought for Shostakovich’s collections of thousands of recordings and manuscripts. “The collection was owned by conductor Roman Matsov, a close collaborator of Shostakovich. The recordings are stacked in the Estonian apartment where Matsov lived before his death in 2001, aged 84. Matsov’s son, Mark, is having trouble paying rent on the flat and fears the collection could lose its home.”