Blog

The New Guthrie

A week from today, Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater will inaugurate its massive new home on the Mississippi riverfront. It’s a big deal for the theater, of course, but the opening will also be a watershed moment for a city that has spent the last decade transforming a moribund downtown into one of the most vibrant urban areas in the country. “At 285,000 square feet, the new building is more than three times larger than the old Guthrie. Its bends, bows and cantilevered, 12-story-high ‘Endless Bridge’ render the architecture of Frenchman Jean Nouvel unmistakable along the riverfront. Three theaters within will draw thousands of people to the area, but the Guthrie also will be open day and night.”

Adjusting The Thrust

The new Guthrie complex sports no fewer than three performance spaces within its huge blue shell, each with its own theatrical mission. But the legacy of this company has always been predicated on its use of the “thrust” stage, which can make an audience feel like it’s in the middle of the action, but can also limit a director’s choices. In designing the new stages (one of which is a thrust,) the Guthrie’s artistic team is hoping to preserve most of what Twin Cities audiences are used to seeing, but open up a wider range of options for the future.

So, What’s Next?

The Guthrie is only the latest in a recent string of major arts initiatives in Minneapolis, and Dominic Papatola says that it would be a mistake to stop now. “It took upward of $350 million to complete the [Walker Art Center], Guthrie, [Children’s Theater Company] and [Minneapolis Institute of Arts] projects… But while it’s all over, we should also remember that it’s just beginning. The aftershocks of the first cultural building boom can already be felt.”

A Graves Disappointment

Much has been made of the cultural building boom going on in Minneapolis, but Blair Kamin says that not all the new stuff is worthy of attention. In particular, architect Michael Graves’ new addition to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is a major disappointment. “Some neighbors of the museum liken his addition to a mausoleum or a big-box store, a not-so-veiled shot at the wing’s chief sponsor, Minneapolis-based Target Corp.”

Functional But Flawed

Cesar Pelli’s newly opened Minneapolis Central Library cuts an imposing figure on the northern edge of the city’s downtown. Pelli designed the building to be adaptable well into the future, and to function as a public gathering space in the city center. “But the library falters as a public presence, owing to the aesthetic gulf between its expressionistic roof and its plain-Jane wings. Pelli’s attempts to elevate the mundane wings above the level of a suburban office building cannot overcome their banal geometry. [Still, the building is] light-filled and democratic in spirit, endeavoring to make people feel comfortable rather than intimidated.”

Hecht On Trial: A Victim of Changing Interpretations?

For a man accused of stealing millions of dollars worth of Italian antiquities, 88-year-old Robert Hecht doesn’t cut a very imposing figure. In fact, many in the art world say that the collector is being unfairly made an example of. “Hecht is a man who has seen the world pass him by. In the 1950s, shortly after his arrival in Italy, he bought antiquities on the streets of Rome. No one had a problem with it. The shops, Hecht said, would happily ship the ancient cups, coins and statues out of the country if you couldn’t take them home yourself. Now, Hecht finds himself on trial for allegedly doing the very things that were accepted practice half a century ago.”

Is American Dance As Good As Dead?

An increasing number of young American dancers are heading to Europe to seek work. Some hope to build a career that will someday lead to professional prospects back home; others don’t expect ever to return. “While many American dance companies scramble to stay afloat, Europe is stocked with stable and respected companies buoyed by state funds. And a generation of Americans has successfully come of age there… There is a sense, at Juilliard and elsewhere, that the era of great American dance has passed. Europe, in contrast, seems a fertile ground for new work, especially in contemporary ballet.”

Ligeti’s Unique Modernist Voice

Composer Gyorgi Ligeti, who died last week at 83, “could be mistaken for one of many atonal modernists, whose presence in traumatized post-World War II culture is explained by a global need to put emotions on hold. Ligeti no doubt used modernist musical systems popular among the cerebral musical inventors of the 1960s and ’70s. But his Holocaust experience shows his modernist stance to be anything but a means of emotional insulation. Quite the opposite… While other composers wrote music of disillusionment, Ligeti’s seemed to arrive from a time when illusions weren’t reasonable expectations.”

Organized Music

A majority of most orchestral audiences probably don’t even realize that the tuxedo-clad musicians in front of them are affiliated with organized labor, but American orchestras have been union shops since the turn of the 20th century. Well, most of them. The Boston Symphony, one of America’s top bands, furiously resisted all organizing efforts for nearly half a century before finally embracing the union in 1942. Since then, Boston’s musicians have become some of the most influential in the country.