Matt Trueman’s list includes an Austrian who has actors lip-sync amid candy-colored stage designs, a Frenchman who stages marathon adaptations of great novels, an Austrian who creates devised theatre with ethnic minority and refugee casts, a Vietnamese-Frenchwoman who draws from both literature and post-colonial experience, and a Croatian whose ferociously confrontational work regularly attracts death threats.
Blog
How The Paul Taylor Dance Company Will Keep Going Without Taylor
The Paul Taylor Foundation’s new artistic director, Michael Novak, and executive director John Tomlinson tell reporter Colin Moynihan about some of the measures the choreographer took in the year before he died and some of the particular plans they have to preserve both Taylor’s dances and his company.
In China, Some Sold-Out Hit Movies Are Really Seen By Very Few People
Many investors reportedly put money into films as a stock-market manipulation scheme, buying up blocks of unsold tickets and even entire screenings so that the perception of success will push up a company’s share price. Film production is also used as a way to evade capital-flight controls and transfer large sums of money out of the country.
Debut Of Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ At Louvre Abu Dhabi Postponed
The world’s most expensive artwork, which was purchased for the Louvre’s UAE franchisee last fall at a price of $450 million, had been scheduled to go on view there on September 18. Now the Abu Dhabi government has called the occasion off, with no explanation and no new date yet given.
New Yorker Festival Announces, Then Drops, Steve Bannon As Headliner
“The announcement [disinviting Bannon] followed several scathing rebukes and high-profile dropouts after the festival’s lineup, with Mr. Bannon featured, was announced.” (One guest who withdrew, comedian Patton Oswalt, suggested Milo Yiannopoulos as his replacement.) Top New Yorker editor David Remnick also encountered stiff resistance from members of the public and the magazine’s staff.
Mezzo Emily D’Angelo Sweeps Plácido Domingo’s Operalia Competition
The 23-year-old Italian-Canadian won four of the five categories in which she was eligible: she took first place (women) in both the general competition and the zarzuela category and garnered the audience award and the Birgit Nilsson Prize (for Wagner and Strauss).
Israeli Public Radio Plays Wagner, Suffers Backlash, Apologizes
The station Kol HaMusica broadcast Act Three of Götterdämmerung in a 1991 Bayreuth performance led by Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim. Because of the composer’s anti-Semitic beliefs and the co-optation of his music by the Nazi regime, there has been an unofficial but sternly defended ban on performing or broadcasting Wagner in Israel for the country’s entire history.
Peter Frame, Former New York City Ballet Principal, Commits Suicide At 61
After dancing with the company for 14 years, he went on to become a beloved teacher at the School of American Ballet, where he developed a strength training class for male dancers to improve their lifts and partnering.
Australia’s Arts Funding Is Inadequate And Unfairly Given Out, Say Critics
The economy of “the Lucky Country” has been growing for 26 years without a recession or other break, and Australia is now second only to Switzerland in wealth per adult in the world. “Yet arts funding has not kept pace, … [and] worse in many ways, experts say, [it’s] running the same way it has for years — as an insiders’ game.”
Fire Destroys Brazil’s National Museum
“Founded in 1818 [in Rio de Janeiro], the museum is Brazil’s oldest scientific institution and one of the largest and most renowned museums in Latin America, amassing a collection of some 20 million scientifically and culturally invaluable artifacts.” Says one Brazilian scientist, “The importance of the collections that were lost couldn’t be overstated. They were unique as it gets: Many of them were irreplaceable, there’s no way to put a monetary value on it.”