Where are the women TV directors? A new study reports that “for the third consecutive year, white males directed more than 80% of episodes of the top 40 series. During the 2002-03 season, 13 of those shows did not hire any minority directors, 10 did not hire women directors and three series — CBS’ ‘CSI: Miami’ and ‘Yes Dear’ and Fox’s ’24’ — hired neither women nor minority directors, the study contends.”
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Sadler’s Wells: Reinvent Programming?
“For the past few years, Sadler’s Wells has been going about its task respectably, acting as a receiving house for international contemporary dance on tour, and hosting the odd bit of touring opera or musical theatre.” Sadler’s new chief Jean-Luc Choplin “is not content with this niche. “The history of the second half of the 20th century has been of attempts to create access to high arts for all. It’s been done by cheap tickets, education projects, access initiatives. But all these have worked only to an extent. I want to create a genuinely popular theatre. Ticket pricing and access is important – but you have to change the programming.”
West End’s First New Theatre In 70 Years
Cameron Mackintosh is building a new theatre. “The 500-seat Sondheim will be the first new theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue in more than 70 years. Not that you will be able to guess. The truly clever, if controversial design led by the husband-and-wife architect team of Nick Thompson and Clare Ferraby, of RHWL Architects’ Arts Team, will join the existing Gielgud and Queen’s theatres at their Edwardian hips.”
Money And The Literary House
A wealthy California woman “paid £1.25 million for a crumbling English country house and spent a further £10 million converting it into a library and study centre, equipped with all her beautiful, arcane books. Chawton House, Hampshire, once owned by Jane Austen’s brother and set in 275 acres, is about to open to the public after 11 years of toil, sweat and village politics.”
John Adams, Star
John Adams is the classical music’s star composer. “While working within classical conventions, Adams has done more than anyone to smudge the lines between rock, jazz and classical. His music used to be called crossover or minimalist – intended more as insult than as technical analysis. Now such epithets are outmoded, thanks in part to his own willingness to write music with direct appeal, not generally a habit among avant-garde composers in the late 1970s when he started. Tunes then were on a par with antimacassars or lace doilies: redundant and declasse, you simply didn’t. Adams reminded us: you could and did. Critics who sucked in their cheeks at the blatant melodies of his best-known work, the 1987 opera Nixon in China, now sheepishly concede that it is a modern masterpiece.”
Surprise – Chapmans Win A Prize
“The Chapman brothers, the most studiedly shocking of the rapidly ageing generation of young British artists, yesterday won the £25,000 Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy summer exhibition. The brothers were more genuinely shocked yesterday than any viewer of their works: despite their fame, and infamy, they have never before won a major art prize.”
Restorers Enlist Bacteria To Fix Frescoes
Art restorers in Pisa, Italy have discovered that bacteria applied to medieval frescoes that were covered in glue 50 years years can cut through the glue and reveal the painting. “Scientists from Milan University have shown that the bacterium Pseudomonas stutzeri, applied with water on cotton wool, can eat through 80% of the glue in about 10 hours. Chunks of the 14th- and 15th-century series of frescoes at the Camposanto (cemetery) were removed for repair and restoration in the 1950s” when they were covered in glue, and restorers have been trying to figure out how to remove the substance ever since.
What Makes A Music Festival Work?
The UK is overrun with music festivals. So “why do we have music festivals, what do they achieve and where can it all go wrong – or right? Essentially, a festival, even an early-music festival, must be about the new and the fresh as well as celebrating the established. If it seeks only to reinforce preconceptions and repeat the familiar, it has failed. It is all too easy to build a programme of nothing but popular classics and, certainly in financial terms, all too tempting. But while such a festival may deliver an audience, it does nothing to extend musical horizons, or to create a buzz.”
The Bad Bad Business Of Music
“I know that the British music industry is in crisis. You know that the British music industry is in crisis. My parents – whose interest in music is so profound that they have now owned a CD player for 15 years without ever learning how to use it – know that the British music industry is in crisis.” But sitting around whining about it solves nothing. The music industry is in crisis because of a series of bad business decisions and an inability to change with a changing world.
Music Industry – Steps Behind
The music recording industry is chasing consumers to punish them for downloading music. But perhaps it’s because the industry has not kept up with what consumers want. “The problem for the industry is: Who makes the money in the future? The people who are making the money now are much less interested in making these changes. It is not an industry that has had to change much. Traditionally the music industry has been about selling product on a piece of plastic. The industry has been clinging to CDs for too long.”