Month: March 2006

Conducting In The Highest City On Earth (And Dodging Dynamite)

David Handel has been rebuilding the Bolivian national Orchestra. He has “increased the number of performances to 50 a year from 12, recorded the group for the first time, enlarged the symphony to 65 musicians from 40, raised salaries and increased the yearly budget to $1 million from $100,000. He also has lowered ticket prices for students and raised the number of season ticket holders to 1,000 from none. Finally, he found the group its first-ever home in a one-time vaudeville theater and has taken the symphony to locales where it never had performed.” Now if only the bombs would stop going off outside the concert hall…

Johns Leads Museum Acquisitions List

The Art Newspaper’s annual museum acquisitions survey reveals latest trends in museum collecting. “In 2005, the overwhelming majority of museums chose to focus on established, mid-career and post-war artists, such as Ed Ruscha and Jasper Johns, whose artistic reputations are already secured. Leading the list of most sought-after artists in 2005 is modernist giant Jasper Johns, with five museums acquiring his work.”

Orange County PAC Embezzler Sentenced

A former accounting employee at the Orange County Performing Arts Center has been sentenced to ten years in prison after admitting she embezzled $1.85 million from the center. She “started working at the center in 1995 and from September 2000 to September 2005 pocketed cash that was supposed to be deposited into bank accounts. She then created false records to show that the money had been deposited, prosecutors said. She was ordered to pay back the money, plus 10 percent interest.”

Broadway Gets Back To Pre-9/11 Box Office

“During the 2004/5 season, 1,302,590 international visitors attended a Broadway show. That total is on a par with figures for 1999-2000 of 1,320,617. It marks a significant improvement on figures from 2000/1 to 2003/4, which were 1,106,284, 525,834, 651,093 and 1,241,786, respectively. Additionally, internet purchases of theatre tickets have drastically increased over the last five years, with 29% of those surveyed mentioned that as the preferred method of purchase, up from 7% in 1999-2000.”

Ballet Meets West African

Cincinnati Ballet is learning African dance. “Essentially, ballet is an attempt to reject gravity. Almost everything a ballet dancer does is trying to deny the existence of it. Leaps, pirouettes – even pointe shoes themselves. They’re about giving an appearance of weightlessness. In much African dance gravity is an ally, a force to work with, not against.”

A New Era For Dance Umbrella?

London’s Dance Umbrella is 25 years old, and now founder Val Bourne is close to retirement. “Not since Ninette de Valois founded the Royal Ballet has a British dance institution been so intimately identified with a single individual. From the early shoestring days to Umbrella’s current high profile, it has been Bourne’s own tastes that have governed the festival’s programming. It was Bourne who nurtured the London careers of American choreographers such as Trisha Brown and Morris, and Bourne who doggedly supported native talent such as Michael Clark.”

Brain Game That Makes You Smarter

“Next month, Nintendo is releasing Brain Age, a DS game based on the research of the Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima. Kawashima found that if you measured the brain activity of someone who was concentrating on a single, complex task — like studying quantum theory — several parts of that person’s brain would light up. But if you asked them to answer a rapid-fire slew of tiny, simple problems — like basic math questions — her or his brain would light up everywhere.”