“When I got the job as artistic director if you’d told me that the centre I run would have bedrooms, a co-working space for 150 businesses and a family play room, I might not have believed you. But cultural venues are changing. And they need to change more.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
My Career As A Busker
The first day we busked in Manchester with the double bass, we broke £100. Part of the key to our financial success was having a “bottler” – someone who would walk around the crowd with a hat while the band were playing, ensuring that no pocket went unemptied. Legend has it that the word “bottler” came from a tradition whereby someone would go from table to table in pubs collecting money for the musicians, with a hat in one hand and a bottle in the other.
Berkeley Rep Theatre Chooses A New Artistic Director
Johanna Pfaelzer, who is currently the artistic director of New York Stage and Film, a nonprofit best known for its Powerhouse Theater summer program at Vassar College, will become the next artistic director of Berkeley Rep starting next fall. She will succeed Tony Taccone, who has been at Berkeley Rep for 33 years, 21 of them as artistic director.
Canadian Authors Are Having A Moment In Hollywood
“It’s an incredible time for Canadians in the industry and I think authors like Margaret Atwood who are so prolific and ahead of their time are making a difference. People outside Canada are noticing.”
Study: Disabled People Participating More In The Arts
While disabled people are still less likely to engage with the arts than others, 75.7% did so last year, the highest level since records began, and significantly above the average of 71.2% recorded between 2005/06 and 2016/17.
When Jazz Really Mattered (And Still Does)
“More people in the United States listen to and enjoy jazz or near-jazz than any other music. Jazz is of tremendous importance for its quantity alone.” That was Marshall Stearns, one of the founders of academic jazz studies, writing in 1956 to argue why his subject was worthy of serious scholarship. As Nate Chinen says in his fascinating and vital new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, that passage now sounds bizarre, like a report from “a vanished culture.” In fact, the music’s status today is the complete opposite: Most people vaguely recognize jazz’s cultural importance, but no one’s expected to get too excited about it
Hundreds Of Ancient Roman Coins Found In Theatre Basement
The coins, hundreds of them, date back to the late Roman imperial era and were found in a soapstone jar unearthed in the basement of the Cressoni Theater in Como, north of Milan.
Will NYCityBallet Dancer’s #MeToo Lawsuit Force Reforms?
With the company due to open its autumn programme on 18 September, one of its principal dancers has publicly declared that the NYCB needs “a moral and fair individual to lead us out of this darkness”. Signs also seemed to be emerging that the NYCB may face a boycott over Ms Waterbury’s claims that her ex-boyfriend Chase Finlay, while a principal dancer at the company, shared nude photos of her and joked about abusing ballerinas
Burning Man: Celebrating The Great Nothing
Routinely exposing a population of 80,000 to a perfect barren in relatively safe circumstances should be seen as an ingenious experiment. After all, philosophers from Edmund Burke to Arthur Schopenhauer have recognised that qualities in nature can be appreciated as sublime only if they fall just short of absolute threat.
Shakespeare And The Political Resistance
Two new books argue that Shakespeare wove oblique political critiques of the English establishment into his works, and that we can learn a thing or two from them in our own troubled times.