“A slew of award-winning and critically acclaimed plays with their roots in that continent is shaking up Britain’s theatre stages with vibrant tales of death, rebellion and escaped moose.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
New Director At Paris’s Quai Branly
“The Musée du quai Branly (Quai Branly Museum), which showcases indigenous art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, has named Karim Mouttalib as its new general director. … [He had] served as an adjunct delegated general director at the museum since early 2008.”
Abu Dhabi To Launch Its Own International Art Fair
“The art world has one more event to add to its fall calendar: This November will see the inaugural edition of Abu Dhabi Art, a new festival to take place annually in the United Arab Emirates’ capital city.”
Brüno Is Bad For The Gays
David Rakoff: “Baron Cohen’s Brüno is a gay minstrel, in the most literal sense of the word. Just as the characters of the burnt-cork vaudevillians had, bound up ineluctably with their dark complexions, traits like being shiftless, lazy, and ‘a-feared of spooks’ as their eyes bugged out in Neanderthal, superstitious terror, Brüno’s homosexuality comes bundled up with a lot of unattractive software.”
Actually, Brüno Is Not At All Bad For Gays
Dennis Lim: “Lost amid the dutiful hand-wringing about the movie’s capacity to offend is the rather remarkable fact that it takes on, with unprecedented purpose and directness, some of the most vexing and enduring bugbears surrounding on-screen homosexuality. Herewith, a few old themes and taboos that Brüno has its way with and that, if we’re lucky, will never be the same again.”
Kerfuffle In Edinburgh Over Handel Oratorio Deemed Anti-Scottish
“A piece of music celebrating the defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden should not have been chosen to open the Edinburgh International Festival, a prominent Scottish philanthropist has told The Scotsman. Sir Tom Farmer said Festival regulars were ‘quite disturbed’ by the choice of Handel’s Judas Maccabeus and that the oratorio should not have been included in the programme.”
Scientists Perpetrate Anti-Feline Slander
“And after 10,000 years of helping people keep down pests, their reward is to have their utility questioned in a new paper in the National Academy of Sciences’ journal. The researchers, led by Stephen J. O’Brien of the National Cancer Institute, an expert on cat genetics among other things, even call them ‘profiteers’.”
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui Makes His First U.S. Work
The 32-year-old Belgian choreographer “is a rising star of European dance, and the fact that he agreed to collaborate with Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet on his first piece for an American company, spending months on the process, is a major artistic coup for the bold young troupe.” The new dance, titled Orbo Novo, premieres this week at Jacob’s Pillow.
Computer Learns Sign Language By Watching TV
“It’s not only humans that can learn from watching television. Software developed in the UK has worked out the basics of sign language by absorbing TV shows that are both subtitled and signed.”
For Mortier’s Farewell To Paris, A New Opera By A Painter
For his final project as head of the Paris Opera, and to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Opéra-Bastille, Gérard Mortier commissioned a work from Anselm Kiefer, “who has made his art out of the destruction he saw as a child in southern Germany, when he played happily in the wreckage of his family’s bombed house.” Kiefer created Am Anfang (“In the Beginning”) with 36-year-old composer Jörg Widmann.