“I still get amazed when people don’t realise that these pieces are part of a rep, that we’re a proper dance company, we do class every day. They think it’s like a show, with no continuity.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The New Yorker In Praise Of Teen Dance Movies
Joan Acocella: “[In] my experience, all teen dance movies have serious messages. About the social hierarchy, for one thing.” And gender equality, too, and especially courage and perseverance. “But most of [that] is subtext, or pretext. The text is dance itself.”
Arab Animation Starts Growing Up
“[The] the demand for original Arabic content is fueling more investment in an industry once looked upon as a children’s play space, rather than a money-making, cross-generational, affordable Internet and cell phone genre. Online Arab creativity has also been galvanized by high Internet and mobile penetration … [as well as] censorship in traditional media outlets.”
‘Music for the Zombie Apocalypse’: Naxos’s Latest Attempt To Entice Newbies To Classical
“With digital compilations like ‘Bleeding Chunks of Wagner’ and ‘Music for the Zombie Apocalypse,’ Naxos is aiming to connect with listeners beyond the classical crowd.”
Pauline Kael Just Loved Those Precious Bodily Fluids
“Rhapsodizing about Robert Altman’s Nashville … Kael wrote that ‘Altman, from a Catholic background, has what Joyce had: a love of the supreme juices of everyday life.’ Those ‘supreme juices’ were what Kael went to the movies for as well. Praising Barbra Streisand’s vitality in Funny Girl, she noted approvingly, ‘She simply drips’.”
How The Joy Of Sex Was Illustrated
“Think of The Joy of Sex [the original 1971 version] and chances are your mind will drift to an image of a man with a bushy beard and a woman with hairy armpits. It’s not a photograph, but the nearest thing to it in pen and ink.” The story of how those drawings were created is more complicated, and more amusing, than one might guess.
Kansas City Built An Arts Center – Will The Creative Class Come?
“[B]eneath the noblesse oblige and civic boosterism is a more hard-edged wager: that the performing arts are a great way for companies to promote development and grow their own business.”
Benjamin Millepied Retires From New York City Ballet
The 34-year-old principal dancer “has retired and plans to focus on his choreography, the company announced on Wednesday.”
Matthew Bourne To Choreograph Sleeping Beauty
“After an all-male Swan Lake and the high-camp kitsch of his Nutcracker!, the choreographer Matthew Bourne is to complete his Tchaikovsky trilogy with a new version of one of the grandest ballets of them all – a modern-day Sleeping Beauty.”
James Wolcott On Being A Critic
“Being a critic isn’t anyone’s childhood dream, an occupation that schools set out a booth for on Career Day, a religious calling that glimmers in the goldenrod. It’s impossible to imagine George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt from All About Eve as anything other than a fully formed adult, issued from a printing press.”