Estelle Rubens, who died in January of 2018, was a popular guide at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for about 15 years, and she had told officials there that she’d leave the museum and school “a little something.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Author: Matthew Westphal
For First Time In UK, Deaf Actor Goes On As Understudy For Hearing Actor In Hearing Role
Charlotte Arrowsmith, who joined the Royal Shakespeare Company last year to play Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida, stepped in for a colleague last week and played Vincentia in the RSC production of The Taming of the Shrew. (She normally takes the role of Curtis in the staging.) – The Stage
We Can Bring Peace, Afghanistan’s First All-Female Orchestra Tells Taliban
Says Negin Khpelwak, the 22-year-old leader of the Zohra Orchestra, “We can bring freedom, peace and honor to Afghanistan. Women can’t go back to the dark days — they can break our instruments, they can ban the music, but they never take it from our hearts.” – Bloomberg
Italy’s State Broadcaster Proposes Separate Channels For Men And Women
“A source at RAI said the plan was about repositioning programmes to better target male and female audiences, rather than gender segregation, but the potential move has been lambasted by opposition MPs and women’s groups.” – The Guardian
New Orleans African American Museum Opens — For The Third Time
“Last week, in the historic (and historically black) Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, the city’s African American Museum officially opened its doors to the public after a six-year closure.” Well, part of it did. “So, what is behind the re-reopening — or more importantly, the repeated closures — of a nonprofit cultural institution that debuted in 1998 but has since been shuttered twice, in each instance for several years at a time?” – Nonprofit Quarterly
The Complexity Fetish
If you’ve been to any leadership development or organizational change workshop lately, you’ve heard about complexity quite a bit. But I’ve slowly (slowly) started to realize that I, and many in my crowd, love complexity just a bit too much. – Andrew Taylor
Tracing Bloodlines
The Stephen Petronio Company at NYU Skirball Center on April 12, 2019. – Deborah Jowitt
Colm Tóibín Faces Down Testicular Cancer
On “chemo brain”: “It was not merely that the chemo left me fully thoughtless so that as time went on I could not even read; the effect of the drug darkened the mind or filled it with something hard and severe and relentless. It was like pain or a sort of anguish, but those words don’t really cover it. Everything that normally kept the day going, and the mind, was reduced to almost zero.” – London Review of Books
The Choreographer Who Brought Barefoot Modern Dance To Broadway
That would be John Heginbotham, a Mark Morris alumnus who now has his own company. The show is director Daniel Fish’s revisionist Oklahoma! Gia Kourlas talks with the choreographer about what he did with the dream ballet, which is now (after a few other versions) a 13-minute solo. – The New York Times
What To Do With A Great Ballet Choreographer’s Turkeys?
“Modern dance companies dedicated to a single choreographer generally have audiences ready to invest in the artist — even when not successful — as much as the art,” but it’s not so simple for classical ballet companies. “What happens when a choreographer of stature misfires? Should the work remain in the repertory? And what about a work that fails on some levels but not others?” Hanna Rubin talks to the leaders of a couple prominent ballet companies about the issue. – Dance Magazine