When the choreographer and her company debuted Bluebeard. While Listening to a Tape Recording of Béla Bartók’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”, audiences who’d never seen anything like it did not respond well, but the mixture of dance, spoken theater, stop-and-start music, and male-on-female violence became emblematic of Bausch’s style. But Bluebeard had been out of the repertory since 1994, and with Bausch having died a decade ago, no one was sure it could be revived. Brian Seibert reports on how the work was reconstructed. – The New York Times
Author: Matthew Westphal
Baltimore Symphony Can Switch Out Of Survival Mode Thanks To New Cash Gifts
“The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced Tuesday that it has been promised pivotal gifts totaling $7.25 million that officials say will allow the beleaguered organization to pay its outstanding bills, balance its budget this season for the first time in a decade — and start implementing a plan to stabilize its finances.” – The Baltimore Sun
Houston Is Nearly 50% Hispanic. Why Doesn’t The City Have A Major Hispanic Cultural Center?
“Some community leaders … wonder why a city with such a fierce appetite for new parks, public spaces, museums and theaters has not invested in a major facility that acknowledges their significance. Why doesn’t Houston have a Latino cultural center on the scale of, say, the Asia Society Texas Center?” – Houston Chronicle
This Writer May Have Been Russia’s Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Any man who’s ever killed a chicken knows that it’s best not to look it in the eye. [With his Sportsman’s Notebook, Ivan] Turgenev forced his fellow landowners to do that, look the serfs in the eye. Alexander II acknowledged the role these stories played in guiding him to issue the Emancipation Edict that freed the serfs in 1861.” – Literary Hub
Failures of imagination
As I watched Dolemite Is My Name on Netflix the other day, I realized that I never anticipated living to see the end of movies as a public and collective viewing experience. Yet it’s well on the way to happening. This led me to ask: what other things did I fail to envision taking place in my lifetime? – Terry Teachout
How Esther Perel Turns Couples Therapy Sessions Into Podcasts
“Perel, a famed Belgian cross-cultural psychologist and educator who has written numerous books and given countless talks on the subject of relationships and sexuality, conducts these sessions based on a structural conceit: couples who apply and get accepted are given only one session. There’s a functional purpose to the one-and-done format. The scarcity raises the stakes for the people going into them, incentivizing a need to get as much on the table as soon as they can. The result, when documented, is a concentrated capsule of human drama.” – Vulture
Broadway Sets Another Attendance Record; Nonwhite And International Audiences Growing
According to the Broadway League’s annual Demographics of the Broadway Audience report for 2018-19, admissions for the season hit an all-time high of 14.8 million, with attendees from outside the U.S. numbering 2.8 million and nonwhite audience members at 3.8 million (both records). – Playbill
Filmmaker Ivan Passer Dead at 86
Along with his classmate Miloš Forman, Passer was one of the key figures of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s, and after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets, the two escaped to the U.S. and resumed their careers in Hollywood. There Passer “directed a steady series of much-admired and often underappreciated films of economy, fidelity, humor and subtle beauty, among them Cutter’s Way, Stalin, Haunted Summer and Born to Win.” – Los Angeles Times
Five Years After Charlie Hebdo Shootings, France Plans Center For Satirical Cartoons
“In an announcement made on Tuesday, the French culture minister Franck Riester said the project was ‘conceived and wanted’ by Georges Wolinski — one of five caricaturists killed in the 2015 attacks, in which 12 people lost their lives. Its aim is to create ‘a place for meetings’ to enable the creation and promotion of satirical cartoons and support their creators, the statement says.” – The Art Newspaper
Ballet BC Names Emily Molnar’s Successor As Artistic Director
“French-born Nederlands Dans Theater alumnus Medhi Walerski has been named the troupe’s artistic director, starting officially in July 2020. … [He] replaces longtime artistic director Emily Molnar, who is taking the helm of the critically acclaimed NDT after the end of this season. She has steered Ballet BC for a decade, helping to bring it out of a financial crisis and taking it to a world stage, where it has won acclaim on tours to Europe and the U.S.” – The Georgia Straight (Vancouver)