The layoffs of 11 corps members of New York City Ballet “have produced a complicated set of responses among these dancers, who, since childhood, have endured grueling hours of cloistered study to achieve a remarkable level of artistry, a position at the pinnacle of the ballet world and then, suddenly, unemployment: anger mixed with grief but also a sense of new possibility and youthful optimism.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
What Advice Would You Give A Young Unemployed Dancer?
At the New York Times‘s ArtsBeat blog, readers answer the question, “There are, of course, many veterans in the performing arts who have faced and struggled with unemployment. If you are among them – or are among those who may be hiring them – what advice would you offer these young dancers [laid off from NY City Ballet]?”
Iran’s Most Important Novelist Makes His Debut In English
Suppose that the books of, say, Milan Kundera or Isabel Allende or Naguib Mahfouz had been unavailable in English until this year. So it is with Shahriar Mandanipour, whose new Censoring an Inranian Love Story is the first of his works to appear in English translation. Says David Mattin, “It will be for many, I suspect, a first encounter not just with Mandanipour but with Iranian fiction of any kind. … Quite a loss, given that these writers are the current voice of a literary tradition that stretches back 2,500 years.”
What’s Happened To Public Sculpture?
“Outdoor art isn’t what it used to be. Once it honored heroic individuals and upheld values that whole populations could embrace.” (Think of the Statue of Liberty, or the Grand Army Plazas in Manhattan and Brooklyn.) “Today, excepting memorials like the Vietnam veterans wall, outdoor art serves rather to divert, amuse and comfort. … The big problem for outdoor art is the absence of any consensus of values in our pluralistic, multicultural society. It’s hard to imagine a public sculpture of a hero today that would not be regarded by one faction or another as partisan.”
Insanity? You Have No Idea: On The Set Of Apocalypse Now
Author Robert Sellers revisits the scene, where Francis Ford Coppola was writing the script on the fly, cast and crew were dealing with tropical diseases and typhoons and heart attack and seizures, and Marlon Brando refused to work with Dennis Hopper. (Not to mention the dead bodies …)
Academics: Way More Conformist Than They’ll Admit
“‘Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists.’ So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart.” Why is this? “You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of ‘expert’ they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of ‘maverick,’ which is only a few stops short of ‘scapegoat’ or ‘pariah’.”
Walter Cronkite Interviews Gertrude Stein
The Daily Texan has unearthed a profile of The Quotable One which the late newscaster wrote while he was a student at the University of Texas. Among Miss Stein’s observations: “A writer isn’t anything but contemporary. The trouble is that the people are living Twentieth Century and thinking Nineteenth Century. … [At a school Stein had recently visited,] the girls of from fourteen to seventeen understood [her writing] perfectly, but their teachers did not.”
Alice in Maximum-Security Wonderland
“As a sound-system blasted a cha-cha-cha, the men began to dance. Wearing outlandish costumes with oversize hats and wigs, and boots with 15-centimeter heels from a Milanese store that caters to drag queens, they strutted and pranced.” It’s Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization, performed by a company that for 21 years has made theater with, and for, inmates at a maximum-security prison in Italy.
Artist Withdrawals Cascade At Skylight Opera Theater
So far, 22 artists have pulled out of the Milwaukee company’s 50th anniversary season in protest against the abrupt dismissals of artistic director Bill Theisen, company manager Diana Alioto, music director Jamie Johns and other staff members last month. Longtime supporters are beginning to sever their ties with Skylight as well.
Attendance At NY City Ballet In Saratoga: It’s Down, It’s Up
“The Saratoga Performing Arts Center announced today that it pulled in 24 percent more people on a per-performance basis for this summer’s residency of the New York City Ballet, which concluded Saturday night. Total attendance dropped by 18 percent, from about 42,000 people in 2008 to 35,000 this year, but because City Ballet’s stay was shortened to two weeks instead of three, the per-performance audience average climbed.”