Matthew Westphal – Page 849 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Pittsburgh Ballet Dancers Talk About The New Pieces They’ve Choreographed For The Company

Corps member William Moore on his Weighted Affair: “I wanted to create a simple narrative – a dinner party with friends – to try to show the sometimes conflicting nature between what someone thinks as opposed to what they choose to actually portray in reality.”

How British Theatre Is Starting To Address Its Class Problem

For all the attention that’s now being paid to correcting the longstanding obstacles that women and minorities face in the field, a number of British theater workers (both onstage and backstage) argue that the barriers against the working class in a thoroughly middle- and upper-middle-class industry are worse. Lyn Gardner talks to a number of those workers about the class problem – and about what they’re doing to fix it.

Paris’s Museum Of Decorative Arts, Tired Of Being Confused With Other Institutions, Rebrands

“The Musée des Arts Décoratifs has long had an identity crisis. It is in a 19th-century wing of the Louvre building … but it does not belong to the Louvre. It gets confused with the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, the elite national school for art and design on the other side of the Seine River, even though there is no connection between the two institutions. And it is not a museum dedicated to the early 20th-century Art Deco movement, even though ‘Art Deco’ is shorthand for ‘Arts Décoratifs.’ So in January, in an effort to reinvent itself, the museum changed its name.”

Hungary’s National Opera And Ballet To Make Their First-Ever Visit To U.S.

“The Hungarian State Opera and Hungarian National Ballet will make their US debut by sending 350 musicians and dancers to New York with support from Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government. The October 30-November 11 performances at Lincoln Center will highlight Hungarian works including Bánk Bán, a signature opera of national anthem composer Ferenc Erkel, and Bluebeard’s Castle, the only opera of early 20th-century giant Béla Bartók.”

This Nobel-Winning Doctor Was A Draftsman Up There With Michelangelo, Says Jerry Saltz

“Santiago Ramón y Cajal …, whose work in his field can be compared to Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur in theirs, is also among the best draftsmen of the 20th century. If his penciled linear, fractalizing networks and abstract webs were inserted into any art museum’s early-20th-century permanent collection they would stop people in their tracks and vie with the best the museum has to offer.”

When An Artist Gets A Big Prize, What To Do With The Money?

“Should they fund a current art project or pay down debt? Should they rent a studio or buy one? Should they sit on a beach and think of great ideas or get health insurance?” Ted Loos looks at the programs several foundations offer to help grantees figure all this out.

Once Upon A Time In Egypt, When Ballet Flourished

“This flowering of ballet in Egypt, an East-meets-West tale of Cold War cultural politics, happened long ago, in the 1960s and early ’70s. … The Egyptian ballerina Magda Saleh danced the dream role of Giselle in Moscow as a guest star with the mighty Bolshoi Ballet … and in the opera house in her hometown, Cairo – where to call a woman a ‘dancer’ was an insult – with a full troupe of Egyptians trained by Russians in an academy established by the Egyptian state.”

This 1932 Opera By An African-American Woman Was A Hit When It Premiered. Why Haven’t We Heard It Since?

“Composed by [Shirley] Graham, who had studied at Oberlin … and would later marry W.E.B. Du Bois, the opera” – titled Tom-Tom – “tells the diaspora story of African-Americans, beginning in an unnamed West African village, traveling to a Southern plantation, and ending amid the Harlem Renaissance.” Why did it disappear? Says scholar Lucy Caplan, who re-discovered the score and hopes to see it produced, “Opera companies also would have been hesitant to put on a work by a black female composer affiliated with the Communist Party.”

Is There A Short Story Renaissance? Not Really

“[This] isn’t to say 2017 wasn’t a good year for the short story – it was, but the ‘renaissance of the short story’ story is an old one that is rolled out year after year. Does that matter? I think it does. By getting caught up in this recurring phantom narrative” – because the genre never really faded – “and dwelling on press release froth rather than the work being produced, we spurn the opportunity to talk about short stories in a way that might actually deepen how they are understood and engaged with by readers.”

Author: Matthew Westphal