A collection of Sydney-based performing arts organizations have spent AUS$2 million building a new “ticketing hub” which will allow groups using the Sydney Opera House to consolidate their sales departments, sell more tickets online and fix long-standing problems. “Previously, the various organisations were using different ticketing platforms and the ticket inventory was split, leaving the process prone to the double-selling of seats.”
Month: March 2006
When Downsizing Isn’t A Dirty Word
As the Cincinnati Symphony prepares to announce its 2006-07 season, music director Paavo Järvi is turning up the heat on one of the orchestra’s most pressing issues – its concert hall. “With 3,516 seats, it’s the largest concert hall in the U.S., and despite having an audience any orchestra in the country would be proud to own (the CSO has more long-term subscribers than any U.S. orchestra), the cavernous hall swallows them up… There has been considerable speculation about ‘downsizing’ Music Hall, which was never intended as a concert hall in the first place, the CSO having left its home in Emery Theatre in 1936 to give Music Hall an anchor tenant.”
SD Lawmakers Slash Public Broadcasting Budget
Earlier this month, the South Dakota legislature stripped $500,000 from South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s annual allocation as part of a last-minute round of cuts. Now, with the cut having been made public, lawmakers are passing the buck on whose fault it is. But what everyone seems to agree on is that there is little chance of the funding being restored this year.
Safire As Arts Champion
Americans for the Arts has pundit William Safire deliver its annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on the arts. “The surprise here is not that Safire, the self-proclaimed right-winger, has a mainstream view; rather it’s that large policy organizations, like Americans for the Arts, have gravitated so far away from the “left” position.”
Baldwin Testifies For Arts Funding
Alec Baldwin lobbied Congress for arts funding on National Arts Advocacy Day. “If you told me back in 1996, we would have a Republican president and Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress, and the NEA would be flourishing and would be safe, it wouldn’t be possible,”
The Barrier To Risky Theatre?
“Today’s playwrights are a motivated, opinionated, highly intelligent, politically aware group of angry young men and women. It’s not that we don’t want to write big, demanding plays. It’s that we’re so often frustrated in our ambitions. And why? One reason comes up time and again: money.”
A Grand Unifying Theory Of Everything
Seth Lloyd believes that “the universe is a gigantic quantum computer. When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you’re hacking existing systems. You’re hijacking the computation that’s already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else’s computer.”
Looking For An International Digital Movie Standard
Can the international film industry agree on technical standards for converting to digital? “There are about 35,000 screens in the U.S., while the international market has about 100,000 screens. … The transition to digital cinema is not only a U.S.-driven initiative, but more importantly, the international markets will make up the lion’s share of the world’s screens in order to achieve ultimate scale and global adoption of digital cinema.”
Corporate World Discovers Theatre
The corporate world has discovered acting school. Several acting schools around the world are dispensing tips from the typically more lively world of drama. “You have a unique way of seeing the world. In the business world, we try to help bring that to the workplace and have it be more than a job. It becomes a creative platform.”
The BBC’s New Goals
The UK government has outlined its plans for the BBC. “As well as the corporation’s traditional aims to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, the government has set it six new purposes: Sustaining citizenship and civil society; promoting education; stimulating creativity; reflecting the identity of the UK’s nations, regions and communities; bringing the world to the UK and the UK to the world; and building digital Britain.”