Ontario’s Stratford Festival (one of Canada’s largest arts organizations) has signed executive director Antoni Cimolino to a contract extension that runs until 1015. “Under Cimolino’s stewardship, ticket sales since 1998 have increased from 523,000 to more than 600,000 and the festival has been in a budget surplus in each year of his administration. The operating budget has increased from $34-million to $51-million annually.”
Tag: 12.16.03
Theatre U
Why should someone go to a university theatre program in Texas rather than work at a proper theatre? Greg Leaming, artistic director of Southern Methodist University’s theatre program says his program can do things other theatres can’t. “There’s no reason why a person can’t decide to go to the theater and say, ‘Let’s go to SMU.’We have the resources to do larger things than professional theaters can afford to tackle these days, and do them well. We just have to keep the bar raised good and high.”
Union Saves Music Program
Oakland Technical High School was going to lose its music program until America’s largest union came up with the money to save it. “The 1.6 million-member Service Employees International Union, which represents school employees and has strong ties in Oakland, donated more than $91,300 to the school at a ceremony last Wednesday in honor of International Human Rights Day. The money pays for the music director position and keeps several music programs afloat for one year, such as the pep squad band, piano classes and a choral program. The donation also sets up a student chorus called Voices of Justice.”
More On Conductor Judging
Last week New York Times critic John Rockwell posed the question: who can better judge a conductor – the audience or the players working for the conductor. Michelle Dulak disagrees with how Rockwell framed his question, as well as how he went about answering it. “There is, of course, a sense in which musicians are self-serving. They aren’t typically looking for comfort or ease, exactly; but they are looking for something, and it may not be exactly what the audience — or rather the critics — want. To read Rockwell, you’d think he was not merely a critic but the director of a critics’ PAC (Political Action Committee).”
Beck’s – Seeing The Future
“A sculptor, a singer, and a painter were shortlisted yesterday for the Beck’s Future Prize. For those who cherish the annual awards as the Where the Wild Things Are corner of the art world, it is some reassurance that Tonico Lemos Auad sculpts cuddly squirrels and lions out of carpet fluff and also draws on bananas; Susan Philipsz records songs and broadcasts them over public address systems; while Hayley Tompkins makes scribbled marks on scraps of school graph paper.”
World’s Most Endangered
This year’s list of 100 most endangered cultural monuments is out. “The 2004 list has some surprises. Antarctica appears for the first time. The polar caps may be melting, but surely protection can be found for Ernest Shackleton’s expedition hut. The hut is infested with microbes. I can testify that the ruins of Ephesus, the ancient pilgrimage city with the Temple of Artemis, now in Turkey, are infested with tourists. I felt like a total pest when I visited that site six years ago. The place was crawling with us. The list also features sites that straddle national boundaries.”
MoMA’s $40 Million Buying Spree
The Museum of Modern Art has bought $40 million worth of art as it builds its new $858 million home. “Most prominent among the acquisitions is “Diver,” a drawing by Jasper Johns that is widely considered to be one of the most important works on paper of the 20th century. The museum said it had also bought several other seminal works by modern masters like Picasso and Francis Bacon.”