“The risk of serious injury from chilly theatre conditions has forced the Royal New Zealand Ballet to cancel two shows in its tour of China. The company was then locked out of the theatre and was unable to retrieve its sets and costumes until the New Zealand embassy in Beijing intervened.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Philadelphia Orchestra’s Financial Troubles Aren’t Over Yet
“More than nine months out of bankruptcy, it’s still a struggle to get past living hand-to-mouth. A few months ago, leaders believed they had only enough cash to get them comfortably through mid-April. Now the ‘pinch point,’ where cash dips below a safe margin of $1.9 million, is mid-August, chief financial officer Mario Mestichelli said.”
How Ada Louise Huxtable Transformed Her Profession
“By making the case for architecture criticism as an essential beat for a metropolitan newspaper, by turning buildings into news and serving on the Times’s editorial board, Huxtable enjoyed a career that epitomized the argument she would repeatedly make in print: architecture is ‘the art we cannot afford to ignore’.”
Tolstoy And The Boston Marathon Bombers
“On Friday, while CNN was making constant reference to the Tsarnaev brothers’ attempt ‘to go out in a blaze of glory,’ a micro-meme lit up social media: didn’t Leo Tolstoy have a novel about Chechnyan rebels, called Hadji Murad?” He did, and there are more (and sadder) parallels than one might think.
Why Are Humans So Obsessed With Cause And Effect?
“We like effects to have causes, and we detest incoherent randomness. Why else would the quintessential question of existence give rise to so many sleepless nights, endear billions to religion, or single-handedly fuel philosophy?”
Carlos Acosta Begins Easing Away From Ballet
“Acosta turns 40 this year, and he’s aware of what time, and the rigours of classical technique, do to a dancer’s body. … He does have concerns that the labels, and most especially the audience expectations that go with them, might prove a stumbling block to what he hopes to achieve with a programme [of non-ballet work].”
And The Next Director Of The Edinburgh International Festival Is –
– “Fergus Linehan, 43, a former artistic director of both the Sydney Festival in Australia and the Dublin Theatre Festival … [He] will succeed Jonathan Mills, whose final festival will be next year, and will run the festival until at least 2019.”
First-Ever International Opera Awards To Kaufmann, Stemme, Pappano, Frankfurt
“Frankfurt Opera was crowned the world’s best opera company on Monday at the inaugural International Opera Awards which were set up to promote opera to a wider audience as it comes under increasing financial pressure.” Top singer awards went to soprano Nina Stemme and tenor Jonas Kaufmann; Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano took best conductor honours.
The Next Power Couple Of Indie Film?
“[Noah] Baumbach has a wary gaze and speaks in careful loops of retraction and calibration; it’s hard to imagine that he spent years doing improvised comedy, during and after college. … [Greta] Gerwig, who is twenty-nine, also has a precise, literate mind, but she is more buoyant, and sometimes has the air, not uncommon among her contemporaries, of having swallowed a very low dose of LSD.”
Live Goats, Leis, Marching Bands, And Bongs: L.A. MoCA’s Very Strange Gala
“It seemed only fitting that the MOCA gala celebrating the opening of Urs Fischer’s new chaos-skirting show, organized under the ‘creative direction’ of the crazy-making artist Rob Pruitt, would have a Dada sort of anti-logic. In other words, it was one weird night, packed with preposterous events and odd gestures that never quite connected.”