Tag: 11.08.04

Checking Out The New (Old) Eliot Feld

“Eliot Feld’s latest company, Mandance Project—consisting of five men and a lone woman—recently made its debut in New York with a repertory of 11 dances, all but one of them brand new.  Astonishingly, the work looks like much that Feld, a huge but inexplicably stymied talent, has been doing for the last quarter-century. The very antithesis of early Feld works like Intermezzo and At Midnight, they say no to organic flow and depth of feeling, substituting aren’t-I-clever? gimmicks for the qualities that lie at the heart of expressive dancing.”

Georgia School Board Sued Over Creationism Stickers

A Georgia school board is being sued by a group of parents who believe stickers afixed to textbooks by the school district “push the teaching of creationism and discriminate against non-Christians and followers of a number of other religions.The stickers read: ‘This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered’.”

Ashland Attendance Falls

For the second season in a row, attendance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland has declined. “Attendance was 356,770 for the year, a drop of about 25,000 from 2003. The theater sold about 80 percent of its seats during the season, for ticket revenues of $12,854,751. The 2003 season finished at about 86 percent of capacity.”

La Scala Moves Back Home

“After a three-year exile on the city’s outskirts, the famed opera company is returning to its renovated 18th Century theater in the heart of Milan in time for its traditional Dec. 7 opening night. The contested renovation was completed a few weeks ahead of schedule, giving conductor Riccardo Muti time for rehearsals. Muti tested acoustics of the “new” La Scala with a 40-minute rehearsal last Friday, and theater officials reported that the maestro broke into applause at the end to express his satisfaction with the sound quality.”

Know Thyself – MoMA’s New Home

The new Museum of Modern Art building is essentially conservative. “This museum wouldn’t have wanted Bilbao if Frank Gehry had done it for nothing. The Modern has supported, collected, and celebrated architectural design more than any other museum in America, but it has never allowed its identity to be defined by any architecture of its own. It is one thing to display Frank Lloyd Wright models inside your galleries; it is quite another to have Rem Koolhaas design your building.”

John Updike Strolls Through MoMA

“Is more truly more? moma, which I first visited in the late nineteen-forties, was a relatively intimate collection of human-scale works in non-palatial rooms. You could hustle through it in an hour or two, on a one-way route. With the expansion of 1964, which added the great Picasso-Matisse room, some choices for ambulation were offered; but it was still, on the second floor, a single experience. Now four floors, plus soundproof galleries for video and media, beckon from all sides. One of the charms of a museum for modern art was that there wasn’t too much of it, just as a lifetime of history wasn’t too much. After seventy-five years, a life is a stretch and the cathedral may have too many chapels.”

Plans To Replace Nevada Poet Laureate Surprise Poet Laureate

Norman Kaye, 82, a “Las Vegas resident who’s written tunes for crooner Perry Como, is not happy the state wants a new promoter of the iambic pentameter. Kaye was torqued to learn the Nevada Arts Council recently sent out a press release seeking nominations for the post of poet laureate. The announcement does not mention the state has an existing poet laureate in Kaye, a grievous slight in my book.”