The founding mother of ballet in Cuba recalls her early training and career, convincing Fidel Castro to fund a professional national company, and convincing skeptical parents that ballet could be a career. (video)
Author: Matthew Westphal
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.28.15
The Whole World Is Awash in Art
Once you have successfully freed yourself from the Sinatra Imperative, you have taken the first major step toward artistic independence. Suddenly, all the world is available for your creativity, and all the world’s people as well. … read more
AJBlog: Creative Insubordination Published 2015-10-28
Making My Peace with Sales
Nearly four years ago, shortly after I started Engaging Matters, I published a post (What Is Arts Marketing?) in which I outlined a conceptual framework for nonprofit marketing in the arts. While I stand by much of it, it implies a dismissiveness about sales for which I repent. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2015-10-27
Recent Listening: Dee Dee Bridgewater
Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dee Dee’s Feathers (Okeh). Dee Dee Bridgewater is strong medicine, fully a match for the powerful New Orleans repertoire she performs here. Slinking and seducing her way through Harry Connick, Jr.’s “One Fine Thing,” … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-10-28
Exciting Young Singers
Over the past two weeks I had the good fortune to visit two extraordinary groups of aspiring and inspiring opera singers. I gave master classes, heard a lot of auditions, discussed how to get ahead in the business of classical music, and talked (probably too much) about my own experiences. All in all I heard more than forty singers, aged twenty-two to thirty, … read more
AJBlog: OperaSleuth Published 2015-10-28
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When Bar(n)-Storming Cellist Matt Haimovitz Colonized Columbia University Campus
“Students eating at Columbia University’s John Jay Dining Hall, an airy den reverberating with undergraduate chatter, were in for a surprise last Wednesday. When they walked in for dinner, they found Matt Haimovitz – the cellist who helped to start a trend by performing in places like an East Village punk club and a pizzeria in Jackson, Miss. – playing Bach.”
Bolshoi Ballet Gets New Director, Replacing Acid Atttack Victim Sergei Filin
“Bolshoi Theatre general director Vladimir Urin appointed Makhar Vaziev, who has led La Scala Ballet for seven years and, before that, spent 13 years at the helm of the Mariinsky Ballet. Many Russians are relieved that the choice is a former dancer with leadership experience and good taste. But questions surround this appointment.”
The Thorny Situation That The Bolshoi Ballet’s New Director Is Dancing Into
It’s by no means only the drama surrounding the acid attack on outgoing director Sergei Filin, as bad as that was. Ismene Brown explains.
More Female Producers And Directors Mean More Female Crew Members, Study Finds
“Data crunched by researchers … at San Diego State University found that on films with female directors, women accounted for slightly more than half of the films’ writers. On films with male directors, by contrast, women made up 8 percent of writers. The ripple effect extends to other jobs: across the board, having a female director greatly increased the number of women in editing and cinematographer positions.”
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Selects New Director
“[Peggy] Fogelman, who currently serves as the director of collections at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum, has broad experience on both the curatorial and educational sides of museums – knowledge that could well position her to expand the Gardner’s audience and further its multidisciplinary programming.”
Beirut’s Art Scene Remains Lively Despite The City’s Never-Ending Tumult
“The creative ferment is happening even as unrest in the region and domestic political instability have ground the economy and tourism to a near halt and threaten to embroil Lebanon in new conflicts. Beirut is also a city where luxury towers are redrawing the skyline while the arrival in recent years of an estimated 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Syria has strained the infrastructure of a country of 4 million. A crisis over garbage collection recently plagued the city, but seems to have subsided.”
What’s Up With The Lowline, The World’s First Underground Park
Meant in part as a counterpoint to New York’s wildly popular High Line, and conceived by architect and “urban archaeologist” James Ramsey, the Lowline (if it really does get built) will be a landscaped public space reclaimed out of a derelict three-block-long underground trolley terminal on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
What Libraries Can Still Do, Even As The World Becomes Digitalized
“The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world … In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest.”