The Oklahoma-born Native American “became the first 20th-century American ballerina to hold a leading place on the European stage” and went on to direct the ballet companies at La Scala and the Paris Opera and to found one of Europe’s top ballet schools.
Tag: 11.05.08
How The Tate Refused 30 Rothkos
“Mark Rothko, the late American painter whose work commands multimillion-pound prices, offered Tate Gallery a gift of 30 paintings which was not accepted because trustees feared he would expect to see them on permanent display. […] If the Tate had accepted the work, it would most likely be worth $1bn in the current art market.”
An Aphorism A Day Keeps The…
“The School of Life – a new offbeat shop-cum-philosphy school in London, selling books, courses and even meals filled with ‘intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life’ – has this week launched a website devoted to aphorisms. Each day for a month, thedailyaphorism.com will deliver an aphorism to ‘discuss, dispute or distribute’.”
Joan Miró, Assassinating Painting
“‘I imagine to attack every day more and more thoroughly,’ he wrote to a friend in 1928, using the violent language he had learned from Surrealist associates like André Breton,… “[to] make my victims die cleanly, without agonizing nerve spasm.”
Pop Arranger Ray Ellis, 85
“Ray Ellis, the versatile pop music arranger who wrote the charts for hits by the Four Lads, Bobby Darin, Connie Francis, Doris Day and Johnny Mathis, has died. He was 85.”
Shostakovich’s First Film Score, Restored
The premiere of the 1929 silent New Babylon, with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich performed live, didn’t exactly go according to plan: Soviet censors cut entire scenes from the movie, and nobody told the composer. The resulting fiasco led to the music being shelved for decades. Now a Russian film festival in Australia has resurrected the original version of New Babylon – with Shostakovich’s score.
Eyewitness Account Of Charge Of The Light Brigade For Auction
“A first-hand account of the Charge of the Light Brigade, by a trooper who lost an eye and part of his skull in the famous engagement, is to be sold, 120 years after the soldier wrote it to escape from begging on the streets.”
Six Words To Sum Up A Life
The problem with memoirs tends to be that they’re so darned long! (Does anyone really want to read 30 pages on your time in elementary school?) So a new collection of six-word memoirs by “writers famous and obscure” would seem to be just what the reading public ordered…
Starting From Scratch
Two former principal dancers at Pittsburgh Ballet Theater are making waves in their native China. “The husband and wife team were hired as ballet master and mistress for China’s latest ballet company, only the sixth in this land of 1.3 billion people.”
Canadian Opera Company Bucks Economic Gloom
“With the Ontario economy likely facing economic recession in coming months, COC president David Ferguson announced the sixth surplus year in a row at the organization’s annual general meeting… Box office revenue was the COC’s highest ever at $12.3 million, representing 41 per cent of total revenues. Private and corporate giving were also up over previous seasons.”