The Leeds-based troupe, which is presenting one opera a year in four cities, is offering an enhanced concert-style staging not unlike Bill Viola’s Tristan Project, with singers in modified concert-dress performing fully-staged movement and an elaborate video “commentary” shown on screens above the orchestra.
Author: Matthew Westphal
How Does Shirley MacLaine Prepare For Her Roles?
“Not at all. I read the script through once, and that’s it. … Because at the bottom of my heart I’m still a dancer: I can only learn my text along with the particular bodily movements and gestures.”
What American Book Publishing Was Like Only 80 Years Ago
“In the entire country, there were only some four thousand places where a book could be purchased, and most of these were gift shops and stationary stores that carried only a few popular novels. In reality, there were but five hundred or so legitimate bookstores … [and] most were refined, old-fashioned ‘carriage trade’ stores catering to an elite clientele in the nation’s twelve largest cities.”
Why Notes From Underground Isn’t Just A Literary Landmark, It’s A Kick In The Gut
David Denby: “The modern element in Notes From Underground is Dostoevsky’s exultation in human perversity. You can read this book as a meta-fiction about creating a voice, or as a case study, but you can’t escape reading it also as an accusation of human insufficiency rendered without the slightest trace of self-righteousness.”
Londoners, Do You Hate The Shard? Renzo Piano Has A Few Words For You
“This building is not made with the intention to be aggressive or powerful. It is not about priapismo. This building is telling a completely different story. It is celebrating a shift – in the idea that growth in a city should not happen by building more and more on the periphery. … I’m not an advocate of tall buildings, but I am an advocate of intensifying the city from the inside.”
Bringing MoMA’s Treasures To The World’s Most Isolated Big City
“Picasso to Warhol: 14 Modern Masters” is the first of half a dozen six-month exhibitions – all featuring pieces from the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art – at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. Among the other “modern masters” in the show: Matisse, Miró, Mondrian, Pollock, Calder and Bourgeois.
William Blake To B-Movies: Decoding The Cultural Influences In Ridley Scott’s Prometheus
“The striking images Ridley Scott devises … reference everything from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires. Scott also expands on the original Alien universe by creating a distinctly English mythology informed by Milton’s Paradise Lost and the symbolic drawings of William Blake.”
St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Facing Deficit, Considers Going Part-Time
“Details of the negotiations, which began in April, have dribbled out and reveal far-reaching proposals to trim the SPCO’s annual expenses, which totaled $10.9 million last year. The board’s initial proposal called for reducing guaranteed workweeks for most musicians [from 35] to 20 weeks per year, and in some cases to 15 weeks per year.”
Pina Bausch’s Dancers Keep The Flame Burning
Three years after the choreographer’s sudden death, the members of Tanztheater Wuppertal – with the ongoing support of the small German city they call home, and a boost from Wim Wenders’s acclaimed 3D documentary film about Pina – are working ferociously to keep her body of work intact.
Is Addiction A Disease, Or A Choice Made By The Addict? (Yes.)
“[The] question rests on a false dilemma. … If we think, however, of addiction as involving both choice and disease, our outlook is likely to become more nuanced. For instance, the progression of many medical diseases is affected by the choices that individuals make. … Linking choice and responsibility is right in many ways, so long as we acknowledge that choice can be constrained in ways other than by force or overt coercion.”