Stephen Mooallem, formerly of Harper’s Bazaar and Interview, “said he wanted to improve the paper’s digital side, re-establish its cultural coverage and investigative reporting, and embrace the paper’s inherent ‘New Yorkiness.'”
Tag: 12.05.16
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.05.16
Dave Brubeck, Gone Four Years
This is the fourth anniversary of Dave Brubeck’s death at age 91. Under the heading, “Always remembered, never forgotten,” … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-12-05
The Tempest-Tost Find a Home (at Stratford-upon-Avon)
Prospero with sturdy staff and Ariel with extreme D.A.. … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2016-12-05
Monday Recommendation: Wolfgang Muthspiel
Wolfgang Muthspiel, Rising Grace (ECM) The Austrian Guitarist Muthspiel is the leader, but he and his sidemen are so wrapped together in the music on Rising Grace that they might have been billed as a … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-12-05
Why Would A Performing Arts Center Raise Millions Of Dollars to Fund Other People’s Work?
Ottawa’s National Arts Center has spent the past eight years raising $23 million so it could give the money away. Why? The NAC is a performing arts center, a presenter and home to several of the Canadian capital’s biggest arts groups. But it hasn’t been a traditional funder. At a time when arts groups are scrambling to support their own operations, why raise money to fund other artists’ work, particularly when it might never see your own stages?
It’s a brilliant move, actually. There are many ways to have impact in your field. Certainly producing or presenting great work is one of them. But there’s also tremendous power in being a convener of ideas and people, a connector of resources or an investor in work that you like. Engaging in artistic conversations with other artists and institutions outside your own walls broadens and challenges your own work.
How do you build constituency for your aesthetic? The aesthetic you produce on your own stages might not travel much beyond your building, even if it gets critical acclaim. But funding artists and work beyond your own fingertips extends your influence and promotes your ideas. It’s a bold bid for artistic leadership that extends NAC’s reach well beyond Ottawa.
“We’re looking for bold, compelling works that have a strong artistic team, a strong producing partner and ambitions to be national or international,” said Heather Moore, the veteran NAC artistic producer who will run the NAC’s new National Creation Fund. “This is not about the germ of an idea that doesn’t yet have a potential life. We’re talking about filling in that mid-development stage of a project that’s brewing, and that already has somebody intent on putting it on the stage.”
The main idea,NAC president and CEO Peter Herrndorf said, is to put enough cash into the hands of artists to make an exponential difference in artistic outcomes. “We want to get as much of that money into artists’ hands as possible, as quickly as possible,” he said.
– Douglas McLennan
The Young Woman Who’s A Tap Dancer Like No Other
“Michelle Dorrance is a new kind of tapper. Classically, tap is a matter of a cool, contained upper body suspended over a huge clatter down below—a contrast that is supposed to be witty and, in a great or even good tapper, is. (“My feet are producing twenty taps a second, in alternating rhythms? Gee, I didn’t notice.”) Dorrance supplies plenty of action in the feet, but meanwhile the rest of the body is all over the place. Her elbows fly out; so do her knees, in great, lay-an-egg squats. She looks like a happy little tomboy vaulting around in a tree. Now and then, she’ll put on the mood-indigo, darkness-in-my-soul expression sometimes seen in tappers, or, alternatively, the Vegas-y let-me-entertain-you expression, but both of them fall off her face pretty fast, because she is fundamentally unaffected.”
How Cheryl Strayed’s Advice Book Became A Play At The Public
Even though Strayed hasn’t written “Dear Sugar” for years, people still ask her questions – one in particular right now being focused on a certain president-elect. Strayed: “I don’t have a crystal ball. … I think sometimes people ask questions not because they even believe there’s an answer but because they want to be heard.”
From Raunchy Farces To ‘Cinema Of Women’ To Thrillers (And Back Again): The Evolution Of Pedro Almodóvar
“Under the umbrella of [his production company] El Deseo, Pedro makes whatever movie he wants. A new one comes out every couple of years, as with Woody Allen, but no two Almodóvar movies are alike. His aesthetic has become harder and harder to pin down. Critics regularly announce that he has finally left behind his taste for gender games and melodramatic plots with murdered spouses, only to have his next movie prove them wrong.”