“When legendary wordsmith Gwendolyn Brooks died in December 2000 after more than three decades as Illinois’ poet laureate, she left behind some mighty big shoes to fill. On Wednesday, following a three-year search, poet and teacher Kevin Stein replaced her. A longtime English professor at Bradley University in Peoria and the married father of two, he edged out co-finalist Rodney G. Jones of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.”
Blog
Telegraph: Iraq’s Orchestra Inspiring
The Washington Post may have dubbed it a “show concert,” but the audience in Washington, D.C. was clearly moved by the music-making of the Iraqi National Symphony in its American debut this week. “The mournful strains of the balaban (a distant cousin of the oboe) and the haunting screech of the oud (the forerunner of the lute), [made] a captivating premiere at the Kennedy Center,” says Alec Russell, and the Post failed to make mention of the hundreds of Iraqi expatriates who lined up all morning in the snow just to get tickets, or the rousing ovation of the (mostly) non-partisan crowd.
Funding The Arctic Arts
A new initiative from the Rasmuson Foundation will create a 10-year, $20 million arts funding program in Alaska, with money from the foundation going to develop a cultural scene as unique as America’s northernmost state. “Over the years, arts groups in Alaska have struggled for money. At the apex, 1982, the Alaska State Council on the Arts received nearly $5 million in state money, handing out more than $4 million in grants… for 2004, it is about $460,000.” Alaskan arts groups have relied mostly on private donations to survive, but it can be hard to solicit donations to cover day-to-day operations. That’s where the Rasmuson program comes in.
Christians Against Ridicule
Clive Hibbert is the president of Christians Against Ridicule. He writes that “over the last few decades there has been a shift in the way that Christianity is portrayed in the media that needs to be challenged. Rarely a day goes by today without underhand and insidious mockery of the Christian faith. It’s nothing specific or too damaging in its own right, but the cumulative effect is more harmful than any one-off headline grabber. It is as if Christians have become the convenient and silent whipping boy for the sound-bite generation.”
The Year That Was (And Not Any Better)
Why do annual reports always make things look as rosy a possible, asks Theatre Communications Group director Ben Cameron. So his assessment of the current year in theatre business: “Conceived in affluent times, the 2002 fiscal year was one redefined by the events of 9/11, by unanticipated new patterns of audience behavior and fears of terrorism, by a crumbling national economy and rapidly escalating unemployment. As our recently released TheatreFacts 2002 demonstrates, it was a year in which local and city funding fell by 44 percent, in which the number of corporate donors fell, in which foundation funding slipped and in which field expenses grew more quickly than earned revenues. It was a year in which 54 percent of theatres finished the year with a deficit—a shocking slide from the 71 percent that had achieved a surplus just two years earlier—and had not individual contributors rallied in unprecedented numbers, covering more than 20 percent of expenses, as opposed to the 9.6 percent covered five years ago—the results would have been far worse.”
TV Nation (On Stage)
Plays are starting to look too much like TV, complains playwright Joanna Laurens. “Where are the subtle plays, plays that address current social issues by sidling up to them, not by hitting you over the head with them? That is what I want to see. I don’t want the same experience from both television and theatre. The mediums don’t function in the same way – and yet, they are increasingly being used interchangeably. Let’s put this play on the screen; let’s put this film on the stage. Let’s clog up our theatres with naturalism.”
UK Theatre: Wanker Nation?
What can you tell about a country by the plays it produces? An American critic drops in to the London stage, and reports that British playwrights seem to have a dismal perception of today’s UK. “The organised, shimmering intelligence of contemporary British theatre contrasts, shockingly, with its vision of a hopelessly incompetent wanker nation. Is the Great Brittle of these 12 plays, a country where no one has any faith in anything, true to the life people are living outside the theatre? Or is the truer portrait of Britain in late 2003 that piece of street theatre enacted by thousands of well-behaved, jolly protesters in Trafalgar Square last month, toppling the papier-mché statue of George Bush?
Game On
Video games have fast become the recreation of choice. “Figures for the overall size of the industry in 2003 will not emerge until March but, in 2002, the UK leisure software market value topped £1bn for the first time, compared with cinema box-office income of £755m and video/DVD rental worth £500m.”
Hollywood’s Got Game(s)
Hollywood’s top movie producers are teaming up with computer gamer producers to collaborate on projects. Why? “Nothing grabs Hollywood’s attention more than money. And with video-game sales topping Hollywood box office receipts for the second year in a row (games raked in $30 billion in global sales versus the movie industry’s $20.4 billion in 2002), Hollywood agencies have gone virtual.”
“Angels” – Missing Out
“Angels in America” is such a creature of the theatre, that no matter how skilled the screen translation, it loses something on the TV. “For all its gorgeous writing, “Angels” doesn’t prove suited to film the way “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” did. Mr. Kushner’s plays are strict creatures of the theater in ways that many of his predecessors’ and most of his contemporaries’ are not. He is our foremost playwright of the imagination. I mean this partly in the sense that he can send characters darting off to Heaven or Antarctica without seeming foolish, but mostly in the sense that, on the stage, his plays demand that we engage our own imaginations.”