Over the past few years, and generally under the radar of the wider classical music world, there’s been a wave of new small-scale, inexpensive-to-produce operas composed for the same small and flexible theater spaces in which new plays are often developed.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Students And Friends Bring Ailing Experimental Theater Legend Home To New York
Playwright and director Maria Irene Fornes, 82, has been suffering from dementia for roughly a decade and has been moved around several facilities in New York state. Theater folk banded together and arranged a way for her to receive care in the city, where they can visit her.
Broadway Spider-Man To Offer Special Autism-Friendly Performances
“The first-ever autism-friendly performance of the Broadway hit Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark will take off this spring and tickets go on sale Thursday.”
Playing Classical Music For The Deaf
A set of concerts in later February by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales “will feature sign language and live subtitles, and will allow audience members to sit within the orchestra, in order to feel the vibrations from instruments as the musicians play.”
People Swap Genes More Readily Than They Do Folk Tales
“A new study of how it changed shows that people who came from different language groups – or who lived a few hundred kilometres apart – were more likely to have children with each other than to exchange their version of the story.”
Robert Wilson On Directing Theater Via Silence
“Today if I’m directing The Ring of Wagner, Shakespeare’s King Lear or The Threepenny Opera, I still start directing the work silently. … That means Brünnhilde will stand in one position for five minutes where she will later be singing, so she begins to understand what it’s like in terms of the physicality of doing the role and what the visual image is like. We begin to listen to the silences and how they are structured, and later I add text and music.”
Dancing With Philosophy At Lines Ballet
“Ask Alonzo King about the 170 ballets he has choreographed for the Alonzo King Lines Ballet over the past 30 years and he answers with philosophical questions.”
There’s No Such Thing As Everlasting Love (According To Science)
Instead, argues one research psychologist, love consists of “micro-moments of positivity resonance.”
Remember Roller Derby? It’s Back
“Roller derby, the tough as nails sport that emerged in the U.S. during the Depression of the 1930s,” became a mainstay of 1960s television, “and ultimately faded, is in the midst of an unlikely global resurgence that has seen it catch on everywhere from Dubai to Tasmania.”
The Hairdo Archaeologist
“By day, Janet Stephens is a hairdresser at a Baltimore salon, trimming bobs and wispy bangs. By night she dwells in a different world. At home in her basement, with a mannequin head, she meticulously re-creates the hairstyles of ancient Rome and Greece.”