His piece I don’t believe in outer space “includes slow-motion ping-pong playing – and movement derived from patterns created by dancers who were asked to memorize their apartments blindfolded.” Says Forsythe about the set, “Those little meteorites you’ll see on the stage floor? Those are pieces of tape that we save every time we tear up the floor.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Booker Prize Still Matters
“Say what you like about this prize – and most of the commentariat have done that pretty freely this year – Booker has a record of picking winners … And that brings up another thing: compared with all the other great literary prizes, even the Orange, the Booker is impressively global. This is why its choice matters, why so many readers around the world are exercised by it.”
Where Batman Will Meet Occupy Wall Street
“In just over a week, The Dark Knight Rises – a film featuring a fictional 1 percenter, [Bruce] Wayne, and his superhero alter ego, Batman – is scheduled to begin filming on Wall Street, only two blocks from Zuccotti Park, which the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been using as their home base for the last month.”
Calling All Musical Theater Mavens! Wikipedia Needs You
“Amateur digital archivists and musical theater devotees are invited to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on Saturday for a six-hour ‘editathon,’ an event meant to improve Wikipedia’s musical-theater-related entries using the library’s special collections.”
Missing The Hiss: Some Audiophiles Cling To Cassette Tapes
“The Oxford English Dictionary says it is removing the term ‘cassette player’ from its Concise dictionary. … But cassette devotees say that tapes are underappreciated. They see cassettes following in the shadows of their analog brethren, vinyl records, which are currently enjoying a renaissance.”
Theatre And The King James Bible – They Just Go Together
English theatre has hardly been cordial to religion in recent years, but stages all over the country are seeing tributes to the Good Book in its quadracentenary year. Why?
Chicago Symphony Posts First Deficit In Five Years
“Riccardo Muti’s first season as CSO music director saw a record level of fund-raising success. But his two extended absences for illness, and an unpre cedented number of cancellations by solo recitalists and an entire sold-out visit by the Cleveland Orchestra meant lost revenues that resulted in the CSO’s first deficit since 2006.”
Why Reinhold Niebuhr Is Liberals’ Favorite Theologian
“In Niebuhr’s hands, the myth of the Fall from the Garden of Eden and the doctrine of original sin were enduring insights about the imperfectability of mankind. Unlike Marxism, liberalism, and fascism, ‘prophetic Christianity’ contained internal checks on utopian aspirations. And yet, Niebuhr believed that even as man was fundamentally flawed, he was ‘called’ to seek justice – not in the hereafter, but in the temporal world.”
The Guardian Explains Lucinda Childs
“Look at a portrait of Lucinda Childs’s face … and you get a portrait of her choreography: a clear, no-frills beauty; sharp intelligence that’s a little unreadable; great underlying structure.”
Shaking The Dust Off The National Academy Museum
Renovating a museum can be a tricky business – repairing or fixing what is outmoded or no longer works, all while hanging on to the museum’s identity and mission. Such a project is still trickier for New York’s National Academy Museum, which was so conservative for so long that it didn’t even recognize abstract artists until 1980.