British directors seem to have taken over Broadway. “No fewer than eight major British directors have been gainfully employed this season on Broadway. And three of them — Jonathan Kent, David Leveaux and Sam Mendes — are reviving the kinds of time-honored Broadway musicals that were once the sole province of American creators. The transatlantic shift in directorial talent hasn’t happened overnight.”
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O’Neill Center Director Resigns
Howard Sherman resigned as executive director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut to become more involved in full-scale theatrical producing elsewhere
Arts Funding In Decline
Arts funding across America is declining – in some states being cut altogether. “Although national state arts funding for fiscal year 2004 won’t be known until current legislative sessions conclude, it is almost sure to be less than the $354 million in 2003, which was already 20.8 percent smaller than the high of $447 million in 2001.”
Was Degas The Transformer Of Modern Dance?
“The importance of photography for Degas, a decades-old theme in scholarship about the artist, pops up again here. So, more surprisingly, does the prospect of Degas as an unwitting forefather of experimental dance of the 1960s and `70s. Degas, a political reactionary, certainly would have disavowed any such kinship. But his dance pictures foreshadow the way the work of Yvonne Rainer, the young Twyla Tharp, and their New York contemporaries would blend formal and informal movement almost a century later.”
Acting Retreat Becomes Historical Center
Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne werre America’s greatest theatre couple. In the early 1900s the Lunts built an estate in Wisconsin as a retreat, “filling it with treasures of antiques and decorative arts, and luring such luminaries as Laurence Olivier and Noel Coward to rest here outside the spotlights’ glare. Now it has joined the ranks of Wisconsin’s historic home-museums. Upwards of 20,000 visitors a year are expected to tour the Lunts’ estate, which has been turned into a world-class center for theater history and arts.
The Barnes – Art Held Hostage
A new book chronicles the decline of the Barnes Collection’s fortunes. With a collection valued at $6 billion, the Barnes today finds itself broke and unable to pay its bills on its own. Here’s the story of how it finds itself in this predicament…
Music That Makes You Move
John Adams on why is music is good for dancing: “I feel that what makes my music different from a lot of contemporary or avant-garde work is that there is always a sense of the body in it. I think that was largely missing in so much of the cerebral contemporary music that started with Schoenberg and was so pervasive from the 60’s until the 80’s. I never had any interest in that kind of composition; I always conceived of music as something that comes from the physical being, from one’s body.”
Stolen: The “Mona Lisa of Sculpture”
A valuable sculpture was stolen from the Art History Museum in Vienna. “The 16th century ‘Saliera’ (salt cellar) is considered ‘the Mona Lisa of sculptures,’ the museum said. The 10-inch-tall piece was the only remaining authenticated example of Italian master sculptor Benvenuto Cellini’s work as a goldsmith. This is an art theft of gigantic proportions. The ‘Saliera’ was worth at the very least 50 million euros ($57 million).”
A Good Reason To Tour
“For most of the last two weeks, North Dakota’s major cities, and nooks and crannies all around, resonated to the strains of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington and its individual members. The visit was part of the orchestra’s American Residencies program, which has so far consisted of 11 tours to 12 different states over a dozen years.”
Monet, Giacometti – Artists Caught On Film
The Artists on Film Trust has collected rare films of famous artists at work. The collection “constitutes a virtually unknown body of art historical sources. These films are certainly a fascinating historical source for the techniques of artists.”