The BBC plans to make all of its radio and TV library available free for downloading over the internet. “The BBC probably has the best television library in the world. Up until now this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn’t been an effective mechanism for distribution. But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that.”
Month: August 2003
Direct This!
“Willful directors can either enliven or distort. Enliven, if they accept the gulf between a playwright’s time and immediate intentions on the one hand and the sensibilities of today on the other, and set up a critical dialogue between past and present, text and audience. Distort, if they just lay a simple-minded, ideologically monolithic interpretation on a multi-faceted play. The temptation to distort is particularly powerful in a climate that discourages the new, like commercially cautious Broadway or the West End today.”
Direct Line – Now That Would Be A Revolution
Michael Feingold writes that it’s time for the role of director to be redefined. “I’m afraid it’s time for the theater to get rid of directing. Now don’t panic. I said directing, not directors. I’m talking about a specific kind of directing, fairly common these days, that functions only as an interference to the work being performed. It’s become a fashion in Europe, and in certain academic circles, where various theoretical excuses have been made up for it. And, as lovers of great theater music know to their dismay, it’s widely prevalent in opera—so much so that directors coming onstage for their curtain call at premieres are shocked when they don’t get booed.”
The Cult Of Directing
“That directing has, for a time, replaced writing or acting as the primary force in theater is only an understandable phase in stage history. Soon it will undoubtedly have run its course. While the phase lasts, we can relish its virtues and groan over its defects. But that the director should replace the performance as the object of interest is a physical impossibility, since that would make the whole occasion lose its point.”
The Risky, Obvious Choice That Is Calatrava
Choosing Santiago Calatrava to design the tranport hub under the World Trade Center site is both “obvious and more than a little risky,” writes Christopher Hawthorne. “Why obvious? Because no architect in the world can match Calatrava’s talent for investing complex transportation projects, which are often pretty bland architecturally, with the kind of eye-catching, high-design appeal the public is expecting at Ground Zero. His buildings are rigorously conceived and meticulously executed but also playful, airy, and imaginative—a perfect combination of right and left brain. Why risky? Because Calatrava’s work has a personality—a pristine, sometimes aloof perfectionism—that seems an odd fit for the constricted and politically charged Ground Zero site.”
The Greatest Rock Guitarists Of All Time?
Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman have been named to the top a Rolling Stone list of the top 100 guitarists of all time. “B.B. King, who turns 78 next month, came in at No. 3. ‘His string-bending and vibrato made his famous guitar, Lucille, weep like a woman,’ the magazine said.”
Demise Of The Record Store Clerk
“Like their counterparts at book and video stores, record clerks shape our experience of culture as decidedly as any critic, curator or culture-industry executive. They’re street-level tastemakers, part of a breed that’s entered pop mythology. But despite these glamorous associations, serious clerks have become an endangered species. The Internet, with outfits like book and CD merchant Amazon and DVD service Netflix, is put- ting stores, which offer the joy of browsing, serendipity and human contact, out of business.”
Euro-Meltdown At Euro Disney
“Europe’s ‘cultural Chernobyl’, as one French critic called Disneyland Paris, is in meltdown again. Falling attendance, overspending on a new movie-themed park and those cursed terrorists are to blame. This month, it announced it would have trouble repaying its banks and the doomsayers are predicting bankruptcy.”
Dancing On Schubert
A collaboration by choreographer Trisha Brown and baritone Simon Keenleyside reinterprets Schubert’s classic “Die Winterriese” song cycle. “The real revelation of the Winterreise experiment is the effect it has on Schubert’s music, which is flung into unusual and arresting contexts. Brown had feared that it might enrage musicologists: ‘I worried that it might be irreverent to Schubert. In the rehearsal room, when we first made it, I said to the dancers that I’m thinking of Simon, who is going to lie down now. He’s delusional and dreaming and you put your knees up and your hands up and catch him to stop him from falling off. On one level, it couldn’t be simpler. But on another level it’s so totally absurd and surreal and radical. In fact, the new setting, and the vocal effect it creates, paradoxically manages to serve the score in a way that a conventional performance never could.”
Feeding On The Fringe
New York’s Fringe Festival has become a theatre-feeder. “When the fringe began in 1996, it was a countercultural event. Now, it’s a risk-free development workshop for theater producers, not to mention development types in film and television. And in turn, a lot of shows have hired publicists to exploit their properties and build attention. ‘There’s a total new focus on exploring the fringe. It’s all about buzz – which shows are going to rise above the crowd.’ The New York press has a lot to do with that. And since the Fringe Festival operates during the dull, dog days of August (arts-wise), there are plenty of editorial holes to fill.”