“ENO is now a shell of the great and pioneering company it was when Peter Jonas was general director in the 1980s. Under Jonas, director of productions David Pountney and music director Mark Elder, ENO developed enormous self-confidence, great visual elan and an in-your-face aesthetic that combined high camp with raw violence.” Now the company lurches from crisis to crisis, runs fewer performances of duller productions, and rents out its house for half the year. Stephen Moss has a few suggestions for making ENO great again – including getting rid of its ‘white elephant’ of a theatre.
Month: July 2018
‘Rips, Tears, And Falls’ – The Nasty Injuries That Can End – Or Not – A Ballet Dancer’s Career
Lauren Post caught her foot in the hem of her costume and tore a knee ligament onstage. Michele Wiles was being lifter high over her partner’s head when he lost balanced and they crashed – onstage. Natalia Makarova famously has a piece of scenery crash onto her mid-performance. And there’s that dreaded pop! of the Achilles tendon rupturing. Sarah Kaufman tells tales of bodily disaster and recovery.
‘Ethnographic Choreography’ – Allison Orr Makes Dances On Sanitation Workers, Power Linemen, Cooks
“Using the movements of everyday workers, she crafts large-scale extravaganzas that have included more than 75 performers (and sometimes trucks), audiences of 2,000, and a deep research process that may involve her learning how to scale a power-line distribution pole or riding with a sanitation worker at 4 am. She recently spoke to Dance Magazine about her unique creative process.”
The First Feminist Comedy Club Is Now Open On Sunset Boulevard
“On Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard, a street bursting with comedy clubs and live acts, lies a small theater devoted to a new kind of entertainment: inclusive comedy. The Ruby is a self-described comedy theater and school ‘openly founded on the ideals of intersectional feminism.'” But is it funny? Rina Raphael pays a visit.
Theatre Producer Disrupts Taylor Mac’s ’24-Decade History Of Popular Music’ With ‘Feminist’ Outburst
Producer and curator Becky Burchall yelled several times at Taylor Mac during the performance at the Barbican in London and also tweeted out, “wondering why these men dressed as women are continuing to speak for the experience of women??” After taking a severe drubbing on social media, Burchall apologized the following morning, blaming “too much wine & not enough thought.”
ICA Boston Opens Huge New Satellite Museum Space In Working Shipyard
The Watershed, built in a then-condemned metal factory space that’s about a six-minute ferry ride from the Institute of Contemporary Art’s main building, opens to the public on July 4.
Gianandrea Noseda Of National Symphony Named Music Director Of Zurich Opera House
“Like many courtships, this one was sealed with a ring. The Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, had left an operatic post this spring at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy, amid administrative and political upheaval. The Zurich Opera House came calling. ‘I said, ‘Do you want to be my chief conductor?” Andreas Homoki, the artistic director in Zurich, recalled recently. Then he offered Mr. Noseda the icing on the cake: ‘I said, ‘Do you wanted to do the Ring with me?””
For Second Time, Wildenstein Family Of Art Dealers Cleared Of Tax Fraud Charges
“In fewer than five minutes in a Paris appeals courtroom on Friday, June 29, the surviving members of the art-dealing Wildenstein clan were cleared, for a second time, of defrauding French tax authorities out of millions of euros. The presiding judge in Paris’s court of appeals upheld the decision reached after a previous trial in January 2017.”
Vasily Petrenko Is Next Music Director Of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
The Russian conductor takes up the post at the beginning of the 2021-22 season, at which time he’ll step down from his current position at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, where he will have spent a successful 15 years. Petrenko succeeds Charles Dutoit, who resigned this year following accusations of sexual harassment and assault.
A Visit To Göbekli Tepe, The Oldest Known Temple On Earth
Yasmine Seale: “One morning in May I stood in a dark room in southern Turkey, watching blue-skinned early humans domesticate wheat between bouts of interpretive dance. They were holograms, and they swayed across the walls to a doomy arrangement of bells, drums, and spectral voices: the soundtrack to the dawn of time. The display was a concession to drama in an otherwise austere complex of new museums – low, tan, elliptical structures tucked into a dip in the Harran plain – built to ease visits to Göbekli Tepe.”