“Royal Ballet dancer Miyako Yoshida has announced her retirement after 14 years of dancing with the company.” Her final performance will be “Romeo and Juliet in Tokyo as part of the Royal Ballet’s 2010 summer tour to Japan.”
Tag: 11.26.09
Brain Scanner Can Tell What You’re Looking At
“Patterns in brain activity can be used to determine whether someone is looking at a surrealist landscape by Salvador Dali or the cubist lines of Pablo Picasso.”
Why Is Theatre Photography So Bad?
“Here’s a question: when could you last tell what a theatre production actually looked like from its photograph alone? Theatre photography seems to have got into a bit of a rut.”
Michael Wolff: “Books Are Evil!”
If there are still good books, they are largely irrelevant to a form and business that is largely about the creation of the artifact–identifier, symbol, leave-behind, brand enhancer. Books are a sales tool. They’re propaganda. And they’re fake. A lie. So many are just simply not written by the people the publisher tells you they are written by. Somebody should sue.
Despite Tech Revolution, TV Still Rules
“Entertainment technology has been moving beyond television lately, leading some to suggest TV is in decline. Not true. TV screens live all around us now, on the walls, on our desks, in our cars, and, increasingly, in our pockets.”
BBC Chief Predicts Smaller BBC
He said there would be “reductions in some kinds of programmes and content”, including web services. However, he promised more money would be spent on original British content.
West End Theatre Try Handheld Language Translators
“The captions, received over wifi, scroll throughout live performances. The handsets have LED backlighting with a black background and orange text to minimise glare. They have a battery life of up to six hours.”
Canada Gets A National Theatre Company
“A theatre group billing itself as Canada’s new national theatre company has been launched at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The NAC 40th Anniversary English Theatre Acting Company is the first English theatre company formed at the centre in 25 years.”
A Case For LA As A Theatre Town
“According to an Actors’ Equity Assn. spokesperson, there are roughly 79 theaters in Los Angeles that use one form of equity contract or another, a number that doesn’t include any big sit-down productions or the 40 or so theaters that sometimes use an Equity member or a guest artist or special appearance contract. Nor does it include the huge number of 99-seat productions each year (verging around 1,000, was the estimate).”
Musicologist HC Robbins Landon, 83
“Though a serious and prolific scholar, Mr. Landon also had a knack for making musicology seem exciting to the general public. He was a founder (or “instigator,” as he put it) of the Haydn Society, which started in Boston in 1949 and later moved its center of activities to Vienna.”