Ronald K. Brown’s Grace and Mercy, performed by Ronald K. Brown/Evidence: A Dance Company at the 2019 SummerScape Festival at Bard College. – Deborah Jowitt
Author: Matthew Westphal
Transcending Toxic Times with street poetry & music
My DownBeat article about the compulsively listenable Last Poets album Transcending Toxic Times includes a lot of quotes from bassist/composer Jamaaladeen Tacuma and poet Abiudon Oyewale. But there’s more to tell. – Howard Mandel
How Exactly Do You Go About Translating The Words Of An Opera?
Writer Heather O’Donovan looks at the challenges of both translations for singing (fitting new words to the music) and supertitles (fitting the words onto that little screen). – WQXR (New York City)
Hungary’s Government Building Huge, Multi-Million-Euro Cultural Complex In Budapest Park
“The so-called Liget project, initiated in 2011, aims to transform Budapest’s city park (Városliget) into a cultural hub, including the new National Gallery, Museum of Ethnography and House of Hungarian Music, alongside the existing thermal baths and an expanded city zoo. The project hit a major milestone in May, as the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán opened one of Europe’s largest museum collections centres on the nearby site of a former hospital.” – The Art Newspaper
Vivian Perlis, Who Founded And Ran Who Founded Yale’s Oral History Of American Music, Dead At 91
“[Her] oral history project includes some 3,000 recordings of interviews with composers and other major musical figures, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Duke Ellington to John Adams. The eminent musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock described it as an ‘incomparable resource.'” – The New York Times
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa On The Challenge Of Creating New Story Ballets
“It’s actually very hard to keep the audience engaged in the development of a story. The struggle is figuring out how literal I can be, and how much I can use the abstract aesthetic of dance to enhance an emotion as opposed to just tell the story. … Storytelling is where ballet started, and then contemporary dance took over and it was all about movement and space and music. I want to revive it, and not feel it has to be an old-fashioned form.” – Pointe Magazine
Read An Unpublished Langston Hughes Essay About An Escaped Chain Gang Prisoner
The piece, a forward written for the Soviet edition of a novel by Georgia investigative journalist John L. Spivak, recounts an incident from the 1927 road trip Hughes took with Zora Neale Hurston in which they were flagged down on the road outside Savannah by a 15-year-old escapee. – Smithsonian Magazine
The Company That Tailors Broadway Musicals For School Productions Now Creates Versions For Seniors
“Into the Woods Sr. and other musicals tailored to older casts are the brainchild of Freddie Gershon, [Music Theater International’s] co-chairman, who first developed similarly shortened ‘Junior’ productions more than 20 years ago for elementary and middle schools, earning him a Tony Awards honor.” Reporter Nancy Coleman looks in on a production of the senior-ized Sondheim show. – The New York Times
Is The Director Who Turned The Indianapolis Museum Of Art Into Newfields Democratizing It Or Destroying It?
“Critics have accused [Charles] Venable of dumbing down the museum with his crowd-pleasing, cost-conscious changes. But his program has also touched a nerve as institutions around the country confront a tough new calculus.” Andrew Russeth visits Newfields and does a deep dive on the changes there. – ARTnews
Actor Rip Torn, 88
“[He] was equally at home in the comedy of the Men in Black film series or TV’s The Larry Sanders Show (for which he won his Emmy) and in the drama of Sweet Bird of Youth or Anna Christie, to name two of the numerous classic works of theater in which he appeared. … Successful onstage, in films and on television, the actor nevertheless carried a sense of persecution,” which was made worse by “his tendency toward erratic behavior.” – Variety