Ballet has all other artforms beat hands down, writes Charlotte Higgins. “There is no other art form that is so highly evolved, sophisticated, sublime, where absolute discipline of technique is allied with grace, beauty, sensuality and pure emotion. Ballet – ballet is another world. Ballet is about limbs and bones and muscle, about flesh and skin. It is visceral. Ballet is about what it means to be human while the blood pumps through our veins; about the things that are too strange, dense and delicate to be strangulated by human speech or song.”
Blog
The Canadian Movie Studio With The Boffo Business Model
“Lions Gate Entertainment Corp claims it doesn’t want to be the king of the Hollywood jungle. Instead, it wants to fill in the niche markets such as horror, urban and art-house genres. Considering its low production costs, the Vancouver based company’s strategy is a big time success.”
Colorado Loves Theatre (But Mostly One Theatre)
“Colorado theaters drew 1.7 million patrons and generated $54 million in ticket revenue in 2004, according to a first-of-its-kind survey by The Denver Post. Pretty good for a state of 4.6 million people. But then there’s the tragic frown: Nearly half of those who attended the theater anywhere in Colorado went to a show at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. That’s great news for the largest performing-arts center between Chicago and Los Angeles. It is not such good news for the nearly 100 other theater companies in Colorado fighting over the other half.”
Broadway – The Disney Years
“Broadway has never truly been owned by anyone, but its eras always have been defined by the proliferation of a particular producer or creative team. Forty years before Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein had five musicals running at the same time. Producer Manny Azenberg once had seven shows running simultaneously. “And how many shows did David Merrick have running at one time?” Schumacher asked. Still, this is unmistakably Disney’s time on Broadway – and all things Disney-like.”
Are Podcasters The New Rock Stars? (iTunes Can Do It)
The way to get famous in the podcasting world is to get a spot on iTunes new podcast subscription lists. But “the switch came suddenly and without warning, turning a long list of mom-and-pop online audiocasters into overnight sensations, crashing servers across the nation and minting new internet stars in a way not seen since the early days of blogging.”
Shakespeare In The Original English
London’s Globe Theatre is going to stage a production of Shakespeare in what is thought to be its original pronunciation. “Actors in Troilus and Cressida will recite their lines with accents believed to have been heard on the stage during Elizabethan times. It follows on from brief experiments with original pronunciation during the company’s run of Romeo and Juliet in June 2004.”
Is The 21st Century The Return Of Amateur Culture?
Professor Lawrence Lessig says he thinks so: “If you think of the 20th Century as this period of professionalising creativity – you’ve got the film and recording industries which become the professional creators, separating and stifling in many ways the popular culture. I do not think you are going to see the elimination of the professional creators but you are going to see it complemented by a much wider range of amateur culture in the original sense of the word amateur – in that people do it purely for the love of creating.”
Critical Conversation: What’s Wrong With Music Critics?
It’s a shrinking world for classical music critics and the artform they cover, writes Norman Lebrecht in AJ’s weeklong music critics’ blog: “I work with some outstanding music critics, brilliantly perceptive, dedicated to their craft. Just don’t ask most of them to think outside the box. Music critics, like the art they review, have turned timorously inwards, unable to fight their shrinking corner effectively because they have such little understanding of the pressures facing the editors who employ them.”
Where Are Britain’s Great New Buildings?
“Disgracefully, Britain can boast no buildings by most of the great modern architects. Where are the UK masterpieces by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe? Not on our mean-minded little islands, that’s for sure. London was once offered a distinguished late work by Mies, and Peter Palumbo struggled hard for permission to build it. But eventually, after an epic battle, the city fathers turned it down.”
Why So Few Women Conductors?
“In an era when women commonly run everything from universities to Fortune 500 companies to entire countries, why has it taken so long for a single leading orchestra to take the step? The fact is, classical music has been extraordinarily hidebound when it comes to gender issues. American orchestras have been far ahead of many of their European counterparts on this front, with women making up a third or more of the membership of several leading ensembles and regularly dominating the string section. But things have been just as hard for female conductors in the United States as they are across the Atlantic.”