“Wafa Younis, a musician from northern Israel who founded a youth orchestra in the Jenin refugee camp, was arrested there on Tuesday by Fatah militants and sent back to Israel from the West Bank. Last week the orchestra played for Holocaust survivors and elderly Arabs in Holon, news that ignited passions in Jenin.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Being Poor Really Does Eat At Your Brain
“Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory. The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.”
Ohad Naharin To Receive ADF Lifetime Achievement Award
“The American Dance Festival will award distinguished dancer and choreographer Ohad Naharin with the 2009 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement,” which carries a $50,000 stipend. Naharin is artistic director of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company.
Cleveland’s Beck Center Launches Emergency Fund Drive
“Lakewood’s Beck Center for the Arts declared a financial emergency Tuesday, saying it might go out of business if it can’t raise $150,000 by the end of this month.” The Beck houses a theater company, the gallery of the Cleveland Artists Foundation, and a busy, highly-regarded arts school; the center’s annual budget is $2.3 million.
Opera Columbus Cuts Staff And Last Production Of Season
“Budget troubles for Opera Columbus have forced the group to cancel a planned June run of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, cut an employee and mandate unpaid days off for its remaining workers.” Ironically, the company’s February run of Turandot sold extremely well, but ticket revenue makes up only about one-fourth of the Opera Columbus budget.
Mr. Handel’s Infirmities Explain’d?
George Frideric Handel was well-known among his circle in London for suffering bouts of palsy, severe melancholy, gout, “Paraletick Disorder,” impaired vision and/or extreme ill temper. (Not to mention his notorious girth.) Was he simply a stressed-out, overfed, high-strung genius? One historian is suggesting another factor: lead poisoning.
Miami’s Arsht Center Asks County For ‘Maintenance Funds’
The requested $543,000 is meant “to repair wear and tear on the facility, replace technologically outdated equipment such as lighting boards, and bring the buildings up to standards for fire safety and accessibility. Miami-Dade [County] already subsidizes the center with about $7.5 million each year to pay for utilities, insurance, security and other occupancy costs.”
NY City Opera Pulls Together A Season
“In 2009-10 the company will present a tasting menu – just five productions – symbolic of its traditions: modern works (Hugo Weisgall’s Esther), new productions (Don Giovanni in a staging by Christopher Alden), the underperformed (Chabrier’s Étoile), war horses (Madama Butterfly) and Baroque works (Handel’s Partenope).”
France’s Equivalent Of The Scarlet Letter Becomes A Political Football
La Princesse de Clèves is a 17th-century novel “that most French people are force-fed at school and are happy never to read again.” President Nicolas Sarkozy has made a habit of mocking the book, and now his “personal vendetta – cloaked in anti-elitist demagoguery – has managed to turn The Princess of Cleves into an unlikely symbol of political resistance.”
A Playwright’s ‘Necessary Irresponsibility’
Stephen Brown, author of Future Me, a piece about pedophiles: “Writing a play about child abuse isn’t easy. But it helped when the [UK government’s] home office asked me to stop.”