- “For decades, guides have directed countless tourists to a red-roofed, beamed cottage near Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon to pay homage at the place where his mother, Mary Arden, was thought to have been born in the early 16th century. Now it has emerged from new research that she was not born there at all, but in a house some 30 yards down the road in the same village.” – New York Times
Tag: 12.07.00
DISTRESS SALE
Margot Fonteyn’s personal effects, costumes and clothes are to be auctioned off next week, but her friends and the dance community are protesting. – Sydney Morning Herald
OF IMAGES MOVING AND STILL
Painting and cinema are still handcuffed together on a one-way ticket to the morgue. When artists appropriate images from film they always seem to be drawn to the melancholy underside of the tinsel factory. Painting and cinema both create fictional spaces, but the space of painting is static. So when a moment in a film is snatched and turned into a painting, it becomes deathly: you might call it painting noir.” – The Guardian
ROLLING AGAIN
Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” opened on Broadway in 1981 and lasted only 16 performances before the hostile reviews won out. So why is it being revived in London, when even the show’s creators acknowledged it wasn’t one of their best efforts? – The Telegraph (UK)
TRANSLATE THIS
Translations of plays into English can often sound fussy or academic. Now there is a “growing movement to take the job of translating foreign-language classics away from scholars and linguists and hand it over to dramatists – whether or not they speak the original language.” – The Globe & Mail (Canada)
BRITISH MUSEUM GREAT COURT OPENS
The Queen opens the British Museum’s new Great Court. “She hailed the £100m development, with its sweeping roof designed by Lord Foster, as a landmark of the millennium.” – BBC
- BIG SPACE: “The £100 million development has transformed the world-famous museum’s two-acre inner courtyard – hidden for 150 years – into Europe’s largest covered square, the size of Wembley football pitch.” – London Evening Standard
LESS REJECTION
Performance artists are moving out of the museums and performing arts centers and into nightclubs. These nightspots are far from the galleries, museums and other art spaces that historically hosted performance art, and they attract a different crowd. The clubs, in need of performers, are embracing the artists. – Los Angeles Times
ALL THAT JAZZ
“At least 50 books about jazz were published in the last few months or are scheduled to arrive in bookstores in the next several months.” Why now? – New York Times
RECORD ST. LOUIS GIFT
“The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will receive a record-breaking $40 million gift, it was announced Wednesday morning. The money, from the Jack Taylor family, owners of Enterprise Rent-a-Car, is in the form of a four-year challenge grant, and is the largest single personal contribution ever made to an American orchestra for its operations and endowment.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
OLDEST LOVE SONG
“Archaeologists excavating a 4,300 year-old Egyptian tomb at Abu Sir near Cairo have found what they believe is the world’s oldest known written music — a love song.” – Discovery.com